Lit Crit 2007

[Mark Kohut]

YES! I echo as I can...I have read a fair amount of lit crit in my lifetime and the Academy
  stuff since I've been out---long time now---IS Unreadable....Most makes no connection to the real world; much makes little real connection to the text under discussion.....
   
  Close, loving, but critical reading.....with the real world refracted in the words...with some vision of 'things', with an attempt to suss out the writer's vision of "things", ultimately of LIFE........is what good lit crit is...

Lawrence Bryan <lebryan at speakeasy.org> wrote:
  
I tried reading a bit of the stuff and couldn't make heads or tails 
of it. Just seemed like mindless jibberish. I figured there must be 
something there with so many intellectuals going on about it, but I 
guess I was too dense to figure it out. Then I read an interview with 
Chomsky. He admitted he too couldn't figure out what they were 
saying. I felt somewhat vindicated in my gut feeling that it was 
really pretty much nonsense. Then there was that physics guy who made 
up a paper in the post modern style and vocabulary. That was it for 
me. I'd been hoodwinked.

Lawrence

On Sep 19, 2007, at 11:12 AM, David Morris wrote:

The home page apologizes for their site snags. It took a long time,
but it finally appeared for me. But don't complain about him before
you read him. This is his re-review of the state of contemporary
literature 25 years after his first review for this magazine.
Personally, what I've seen of PoMo LitCrit is unintelligible insider
lingo and useless. So I was not inclined to dislike him.

David Morris

On 9/19/07, Dave Monroe wrote:
> On 9/19/07, David Morris wrote:
>
>> http://newcriterion.com:81/archives/26/09/the-literary-life-at-25/
>>
>> "Theory in academic literary criticism seems to be playing itself out
>> by the sheer force of its deep inner uselessness. Not a single
>> significant book, nor any dazzling essays that I know of, have been
>> produced in American literary criticism that are owing to their
>> author's adaptation of one or another kind of critical theory,
>> imported or domestic, from deconstruction to queer theory. Such stuff
>> continues to be taught, as it was taught to the people now 
>> teaching it
>> and who themselves consequently know little else to teach. But one
>> senses that the day of the predominance of theory in English
>> departments is coming to a close: the fever has abated, the flame is
>> guttering. Derrida and Foucault are no longer fighting but
>> yawn-inducing words."
>
> The Old Crysmearion page won't come up for me, which cranky old man of
> letters is this there? And does he even bother to give examples, much
> less counterexamples?
>




       
---------------------------------
Don't let your dream ride pass you by.    Make it a reality with Yahoo! Autos. 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20070919/dd5939fb/attachment-0001.html>