Meta-list: press delete now

[joeallonby]

on 5/27/03 9:51 AM, slothenvypride at slothenvypride7 at yahoo.com wrote:

You think anyone with an anonymous handle is Doug Millison, yet Rob accuses
me of being a paranoid conspiracy theorist ... I find it amusing, but I'll
bet Doug finds it insulting!

I "steadfastly refuse the point"?  What point?

Yet, Morris, do you address my point?  The fact that you attribute
interpretive value to extraneous matters, such as whether or not a post has
a proper name attached to it?  That interpretations, comments, questions,
etc. have value only if a "person" posts some significant number of times?

The notion of attributing an author name to a piece of writing and thus
granting it some sort of "authority" as a result of that name is a
relatively recent idea.  The Hebrew writers of the OT gave authority to a
piece of writing because it was text; very little in those ancient times was
ever valued for authorship, in fact anonymity was preferred, which is why
the design of many of the OT books have contradictions, strange assemblies
of fiction and biography and other cross-polinations of genre, etc.

Only in the last several hundred years in Western culture have works gained
"value" merely because we can call it the work of a Joyce or a Dostoyevsky
or a Pynchon.  Today, we (generally, as a culture? society? readership?)
value authorship over anonymity.

Kinda weird that the ancients laid the groundwork for New Criticism and
postmodernism.




Hear, hear!

Joe 


David Morris <fqmorris at yahoo.com> wrote:

Again you steadfastly refuse the point, Doug?

DM

__________________________________




Do you Yahoo!?
The New Yahoo! Search
<http://us.rd.yahoo.com/search/mailsig/*http://search.yahoo.com>  - Faster.
Easier. Bingo. 





-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20030527/3392d546/attachment.html>