M.A. King wrote:
>I don't mean to pick on you, Yoshie, because, again, I'm not entirely sure
>what's motivating your comments here. But I'm becoming increasingly
>aggravated by the attitude (and again, this may not be yours, but it is
>certainly pervasive in academia) holding that the thing to do with writers
>is to point out their *failures*--an attitude which, of course, is
>fostered by the competitive nature of academia; the name of the game is to
>show why you succeed where everyone before you has failed (else why should
>anyone pay attention to *you*?). Or to latch onto one writer--Marx and
>Foucault being maybe the most popular--and show why everyone *else* fails
>where they succeed.
I was away for the weekend, and I'm just catching up - so I have no idea
where this thread went, but I've been struck on this list by the
predominant hagiographic tone, very much like that seen among orthodox
Marxists - the same scriptural, catechistic tendencies. Is this true of any
single-figure effort? It was true of the Wallace Stevens society when I
used to follow it.
Doug
>I don't mean to pick on you, Yoshie, because, again, I'm not entirely sure
>what's motivating your comments here. But I'm becoming increasingly
>aggravated by the attitude (and again, this may not be yours, but it is
>certainly pervasive in academia) holding that the thing to do with writers
>is to point out their *failures*--an attitude which, of course, is
>fostered by the competitive nature of academia; the name of the game is to
>show why you succeed where everyone before you has failed (else why should
>anyone pay attention to *you*?). Or to latch onto one writer--Marx and
>Foucault being maybe the most popular--and show why everyone *else* fails
>where they succeed.
I was away for the weekend, and I'm just catching up - so I have no idea
where this thread went, but I've been struck on this list by the
predominant hagiographic tone, very much like that seen among orthodox
Marxists - the same scriptural, catechistic tendencies. Is this true of any
single-figure effort? It was true of the Wallace Stevens society when I
used to follow it.
Doug