Dear colleagues,
I would like to thank you all for your contributions to the thread on Timias which I started with my initial post on Friday. I am humbled by the fact that so many distinguished scholars have taken the time during this festive period to offer their thoughts to a mere doctoral researcher. Thank you very much indeed; it is greatly appreciated. Your comments have given me much to think about, and have certainly questioned some of my previous perceptions. To this end, I was wondering the extent I might be able to use some of the ideas exchanged. As a virgin poster on this list, I wasn't entirely sure of the ettiquette involved. Would colleagues mind if I cite some of their comments, or indeed quote from their exchanges in the body of my chapter? I realise that the discussion list is essentially a private one, and not in the public sphere. Therefore, colleagues might not wish for their comments, which might have been made in haste, to later appear in a thesis. However, I am eager to engage with some of the ideas expressed in the thread and don't wish to take credit for them myself.
I would be very grateful to hear the list's comments.
Thank you once again for your contributions. Have a happy and festive Christmas,
Stuart Hart
University of Birmingham.
________________________________________
From: Sidney-Spenser Discussion List [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of James C. Nohrnberg [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Monday, December 21, 2009 1:52 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: allegory and forced interpretations
As A. C. Hamilton observed, all
interpretations of The Faerie Queene
are “Procrustean: a matter of finding
several points common to the poem and
some other discourse, and then
aligning them, using whatever force is
needed to spin one’s own tale” (2001
edition, 17).
Jim Broaddus
--
Retired, Ind. State.Univ.
2487 KY 3245
Brodhead, KY 40409
jcn:
An allegory is an interpretation with
an agenda--its own (i.e., it is a
stringent or dubious construal or
re-construal of significance by means
of ideological retrofitting,
programatic misconstruction, and
ideational displacement):
Compare Heidegger:
Readers have taken constant offenseat
th eviolence of my interpretations.
Their allegations of violence can
indeed be supported by this [present]
text. Philosophicohistorical
research is always correctly subject
to this charge wherever itis directed
against atempts to set in motion a
thoughtful dialogue between thinkers.
In contrast to the
methods of historical philology,which
has its own agenda, a thoughtful
dialogue is bound by other laws--laws
which are more easily violated. (Kant
and the Problem of Metaphysics)
Compare Gordon Teskey:
The discharge of interiority
accomplished by torture bears more
than accidental resemblance to the
process of allegorical interpretation.
(Allegory and Violence)
Compare Pope, "A receipt to make an
Epic Poem":
For the Moral and ALLEGORY. These you
may extract out of the Fable
afterwards, at your leisure: Be sure
you _strain_ them sufficiently." (Peri
Bathos, chap. xv)
-- Jim N.
[log in to unmask]
James Nohrnberg
Dept. of English, Bryan Hall 219
Univ. of Virginia
P.O Box 400121
Charlottesville, VA 22904-4121
--
This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content
by Converged, and is believed to be clean.
|