Not Marx, Freud, and _Darwin_?

Candice



--- Chris Jones <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> I perhaps need to apologise for having dipped out of
> the discussion when
> Frederick and all the other posts were making
> comments on which I would
> have liked to add a comment as well. Nearly, if not
> all the comments
> Frederick and other contributions made overlap with
> concerns I have even
> if I may come from a different angle and
> perspective. I am fascinated by
> the way such overlaps can be a unity despite very
> different backgrounds
> or theoretical investments or whatever. Perhaps what
> Frederick was
> arguing was not so much lyric against narrative but
> the way in which
> criticism seems to have been dropped or disavowed
> with recent Modernity
> (mid 20th and 21st century, here.) Modernism has at
> its hallmark
> criticism and three key theorists of Modernism;
> Marx, Freud and
> Nietzsche all have as an essential component
> critique. Romanticism as
> co-existing with Modernism also has a tradition of
> criticism, obviously
> with Kant as a key player. Anyways, what was really
> interesting with my
> reading of Frederick's posts, at least, was a
> historical perspective on
> critique which immediately seems to privilege
> narrative. However, I
> can't see that this would exclude lyric and
> especially since Hegel's
> attempt to make lyric also narrative through the
> dialectic not as a
> method but as the being of philosophy and hence
> thought. Modernism, of
> course, has a fundamental quarrel with Hegel's
> Romanticism but that
> seems another longish discussion in itself. (Recent
> historians also seem
> to have developed an interest in lyric.)
> 
> So onto Allison's question; I do agree that John
> Kinsella has important
> contributions and along with John Tranter in terms
> of the Romantic
> tradition of Australian pastoral poetics. However,
> it seems to me that
> this needs to be taken further, especially since
> there is an ongoing
> ideology which keeps the traditional ideology of a
> rural idyll alive and
> this can best be seen in recent environmental and
> green politics. Take
> for example residents in the Blue Mountains, just
> outside Sydney, who
> see themselves as somehow alternative and who claim
> to live in an
> environmentally sustainable world heritage
> conservation wilderness and
> who then look toward the rape of the environment
> carried out by farmers
> growing mono-cultural crops in the inland rural
> regions which they see
> as environmental vandals and who it is said are also
> disgustingly racist
> against the perceived majority aboriginal
> populations of these regional
> outposts. Now, aside from the myth that Aboriginal
> peoples are the
> numerical majority against the real and actual
> majority of white
> colonial settlers, there is a perceived
> environmental vandalism
> happening over there and not in my backyard which is
> environmentally
> good practise, when it is the cottage style gardens
> and horticultural
> practises of these so-called pro-environmental
> alternatives that has
> most contributed to the death of the Hawkesbury
> river system and made
> the Blue Mountains an environmental disaster zone.
> John Tranter was
> quite correct in saying that poetry needs to
> critique the coastal urban
> dwellers in Australia. Make no mistake about it,
> these so-called
> alternatives who claim to be non-racist are the very
> prototype of a
> growing Fascist movement in Australia. While
> sneering at white
> supremacists who champion the Australian flag and
> white Australia
> against Asian and Middle Eastern residents and
> citizens they remain
> blind to the racist ideologies and proto-fascist
> movements they are
> concretely supporting. After the death of God, which
> Hegel proclaims,
> comes many new human gods all waving a fascist flag.
> 
> Perhaps this goes toward the difficulty Alison
> expresses in terms of the
> Australian pastoral. The alliances which self
> proclaimed environmentally
> aware supporters of green politics have already
> formed with white
> supremacist neo-Nazis I find quite frightening. Talk
> about a horror
> novel.
> 
> 
> 
> On Mon, 2007-01-22 at 12:21 +1100, Alison Croggon
> wrote:
> 
> > Chris, isn't all that rather related to Kinsella's
> musings on the
> > pastoral? He's written at length about all this.
> I've finally finished
> > my own essay on this question, including that
> famous "split", which is
> > I think a misleading way of mapping Australian
> poetry. I'll probably
> > put it in the next Masthead (due midyear at this
> stage, I have this
> > novel to finish first). No, I don't think anybody
> is talking about
> > rural idylls; it seems to me much more interesting
> and complex than
> > that.
> > 
> > all the best
> > 
> > A
> 



 
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