death of the author

[Vaska Tumir]

Paul Mackin, semi-seriously [?]: 

>but just what if we were able to condition ourselves  to treat the 
>vituperation and other often provocative stuff we read here, full of sexual
>imagery and what have you, not as a personal encounter with anyone
>but for all the world as something we might be reading it in a book,
>say a book like Gravity's Rainbow only  not so well written naturally.,
>so that when we came to a place where one angry person says,
>"You're a bastard," and another replies, "And you're a bitch,"
>we wouldn't be so apt to think that we personally are being called a
>bastard or a bitch but that it's only characters in the story.  In other
>words nobody shouts back at Pynchon that he's not a nice man 
>(which he's probably not) when something offensive comes along 

Carolyn Heilbrun, teaching a modern poetry seminar some years ago, just
before taking an early retirement from Columbia:

"Oh, Tom, how could you!  You silly old sod, you!"

Referring to T.S. Eliot.

Vaska 
<who recalls that Heibrun, a well-respected old-time feminist in English
lit. crit. circles, went public about her reasons for taking that early
retirement from Columbia and her disgust with the sexism of its English
Dept. -- the New York Times Magazine carried a long and fairly instructive
story about it at the time....>