tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11295909.post113436992136817714..comments2024-02-23T03:28:33.435-05:00Comments on Culture Industry: War Poetry/Lit CritMark Scrogginshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01431113440875342809noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11295909.post-1134578149121779822005-12-14T11:35:00.000-05:002005-12-14T11:35:00.000-05:00Pursuing matters of taste *rigorously* -- as in mu...Pursuing matters of taste *rigorously* -- as in much of the recent "return to the beautiful" tendency burbling in the academy -- would be a good thing. And no, that terrain's not at all contaminated, is indeed a place where much of the time I'd like to situate myself. But Talbot's offhand remark acts to subsume everything literary studies does, these days a really remarkable panoply of provocative (and not-so-provocative) approaches to texts, under the tent of a simple "I-like-this-book" evaluative criticism. <BR/><BR/>Like any discourse, literary studies has changed over the past century, in good ways and bad. I simply find it much more interesting now than it was 100 years ago; which may simply reflect my situated prejudices. (For instance, I regret the absense these days of the sort of nuanced literary history that Taine or Brandes were writing.) I'd certainly be leery of calling what's happened an "advance" (with Hegelian overtones), but I do think that literary scholars & critics are thinking about a wider variety of things, and with a more compelling set of tools, than they were in at the turn of the 19/20th centuries.Mark Scrogginshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01431113440875342809noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11295909.post-1134576919480254022005-12-14T11:15:00.000-05:002005-12-14T11:15:00.000-05:00Without defending Talbot or the New Yorker target ...Without defending Talbot or the <I>New Yorker</I> target demographic (I've not read the article), I wonder, Mark, why pursuing questions of "taste" (<I>rigorously</I>, natch, and maybe this is what's lacking for you in Talbot) would "have the effect of setting literary studies back a century or more"? Is that terrain really so contaminated, so exhausted? Why would it not instead <I>advance</I> "literary studies"? What constitutes an "advance" in "literary studies," anyway--the imprint of a "prestigious" press? Dispelling "fuzziness"? Describing the "fuzziness" more precisely (and what would be the limits of this precision)? Generating "fuzziness"?Kevin Marzahlhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16666106031063809980noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11295909.post-1134398303340065262005-12-12T09:38:00.000-05:002005-12-12T09:38:00.000-05:00How funny, I was just looking up war poetry yester...How funny, I was just looking up war poetry yesterday. My search didn't yield anything fruitful, though quite by accident I did stumble upon rain poetry. Scary...egyptiansallyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05931878602048568024noreply@blogger.com