Holt PR

[Grant White]

At 15:00 3/12/96 -0700, Steelhead wrote:
>Grant White (who quotes one of the few great living poets--Seamus
>Heaney--who I know believes that the story is at least as important as the
>way it is told) chastizes me:

Chastize? Moi???

>I don't like Barth all that much, but the Sotweed Factor was hardly stale.
But that was my point.

>This attitude is precisely why we are living in the age of literary
>exhaustion. It's propounded as if it is some new notion, but it's as old as
>Boccaccio. Only Boccaccio told better stories than most of the writers who
>tout this nonsense.

What Barth was saying in the Literature of Exhaustion was that if the novel
is dead or if literature is exhausted, he can write books about that. 
Gosh, even Boccaccio got his stories from other sources, so'd Homer and all
those other guys. Even Heaney, resplendent on my sig, quotes from the
"annals".  You just can't escape the past.

Grant (tooting nonsensically)


Grant White
Multimedia & Special Collections Librarian/WWW Editor					
University of Newcastle
Central Coast Campus Information Resource Centre
ulgw at dewey.newcastle.edu.au
http://www.ccc.newcastle.edu.au
Ph: 043-484022
Fax: 043-484215

"......and the man climbed back
Out of the marvellous as he had known it."
Lightenings VIII
Seamus Heaney