I her & see, Dave, & tend to agree.
When you say, 'I'm not inclined to rubbish Sapir-Whorf as readily as
you are, Uche,' I also agree, if only to say, as Ive said before, that
it makes some metaphorical sense, at least to some poets. And, I also
remember George Steiner's brilliant 'The Hollow Miracle,' on the
damage done to the German language by the Nazis.
Doug
On 9-May-10, at 1:58 AM, David Bircumshaw wrote:
> Uche wrote:
>
>> As I've said before on this list, I think a lot of that comes from
>> the
> fallacy that linguistic constructs influence or reflect experiential
> realities, AKA the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. That hypothesis, dating
> from the
> early 20th century, caught the public imagination, especially in the
> days of
> modernism and post-modernism, and, for example, influenced Orwell's
> Newspeak
> nonsense. <
>
> I think Orwell's 'Newspeak nonsense' was somewhat influenced too by
> what
> both Stalinists and Nazis had done to language in their own domains,
> just as
> the German 'gruppe 47' was resolved about the need to confront the
> reality
> of the 'bloodied stumps of language' that the Nazis had left behind
> them.
> Celan's whole poetics can be seen as stemming from that.
> In the West nowadays the 'enemy' is the effect of Freemarket Fascism
> on
> language, something the Language poets seemed to have been exercised
> by in
> the beginning, but have become slightly fouled-up by in their
> development
> (it's a bit of a problem for US-Americans, living in a society where
> the
> state itself, and thereby the language of that state, 'America', and
> 'American', is a religion, a projection of capitalist heaven onto
> the rest
> of the Universe, whether the Universe wants it or not)
> I'm not inclined to rubbish Sapir-Whorf as readily as you are, Uche,
> although I admit that when talking of politicians it's obvious that
> language
> is not a reflection of experiential realities, a problem that
> exercised the
> European mind from at least Macchiavelli on.
Douglas Barbour
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The secret
I was immediately set upon by two or three
critics, who hurled sophistries and
maledictions at me that were astonishing
in their dimness.
Jorge Luis Borges
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