Tolerance and Allegory missing word

[Jan Risvig Henriksen]

I'm new to this list and seem to have arrived in the middle of a very interesting
discussion, so I thought I'd throw my preliminary bid (although I have no way of
knowing which subjects you've already dealt with)::
.
"M. Collette" wrote:

> In defining the "post-modern" as it is used in our various contexts, let us
> remind ourselves that the post-modern precedes the modern (it becomes modern
> with application and meta acceptance)....  The post-modern is away from a
> (universalist) mode, but toward a multiplicity of modes. It is an acceptance of
> the variety of meanings that
> can occur from the writer of the text and the reader of that particular
> text.

Assuming that there is indeed such a thing as pom, it may be said to precede the
modern. The concept of pom is notoriously fluid and plastic -- this seems to have
become the standard way to begin a discussion of pom. But is the modern really
characterised by universalism as such? Did the New Critics, for instance, really
claim that there was only one correct way to read, say, "Kubla Khan"? I realise
that it is crucial for those who believe in the postmodern to define it in
opposition to some other (the modern), but is the pom-description of the modern
really tenable?


"M. Collette" also wrote:

> I take issue with the assessment of Derrida and deconstruction as
> "banal"---Derrida is acknowledging the subjectivity of text (and removing
> the meta quality of it) from both the readers and writers perspective as
> well the multiplicity of meaning of text. He is removing text from the meta
> (or "master" as you refer to Lyotard's perspective") to liberate the reader
> and writer toward alternative meanings.  I think by using the term "banal"
> you may be demonizing a certain perspective

I must admit that I find Deconstruction equally banal and trite. I fail to see
what's so liberating about it: if it's the claim that a piece of text can be read
in different ways, it's a very uncontroversial claim, and not a claim necessarily
hostile to modernism (assuming that we are talking the same thing!); in other
words, it's banal! But if the claim entails the more extreme position that the
reader of a given text is free (now that she's liberated) to construct alternative
meanings whatever they may be, then it's a wrong postulate that's emphatically
counter-intuitive. V is not a novel about how bacteria reproduce themselves!
A given text, say GR, is inanimate, it has no subjectivity! If I leave my copy of
GR next to my bed when I go to sleep, it will be there in the morning. It won't
have altered, it won't have spawned an additional 100 pages, it will be the same
text. What does change, however, is the way people read GR.

jan