NP? or Very P? -- Byronic Hero, Irony.

[Glenn Scheper]

As I chew on the vast anthropoetics web site, I found
a Lit Crit article beyond my immediate comprehension,
but having great similarities to OBA, in his reclusion,
dis'ing celebrity; and the mixed reaction of readers.

It mentions desire, victims and markets. Grist of OBA.

It might even inform some of the heros in ATD, such as
Kit, in his renunciation of desire. Many concepts I've
never thought are illuminated in this article. It's use
of performative and ostensive help me understand them.

http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap1302/1302dennis.htm
  Dennis - Irony in Don Juan

There are only a few brief mentions of Lord Byron in the foundational texts of
generative anthropology. Yet he is, surely, a person of considerable interest: 
his age’s greatest celebrity, a virtuoso of postures, the grandest early "heir of
Rousseau’s legacy of the victimary self."(1) He was also a considerable poet and
cultural critic, an astute and self-aware artist who discovered and exploited
productive new applications of the principle of nil admirari--demonstrating
indifference to desire as a means of attracting it--and then came to grasp the 
price, or ironies, of such strategies.

The "Byronic Hero" they present is sated, disgusted, disillusioned. He has 
suffered, beyond the capacity of his readers, and now views all desire--but 
theirs of course most particularly--with a cold eye. He scorns objects they 
would die for:

One is left, that is, with only the heroic self--a self unsatisfied but 
heroically capable of satisfaction, and thus still heroically indifferent to the 
satisfactions adequate to others, the lesser folk.

Explaining irony is like explaining a joke.

Irony concedes the interest of the author in his or her influence on the 
audience--at least the audience that "gets" and is intended to "get" the irony. 

Many readers, both at the time and since, have experienced the poem’s narrative 
persona not as a usurper or monopolist of victimary centrality, but as a boon 
companion.

In short, it seems that in Don Juan one finds explicitly thematized, and 
ironized, that which Gans calls "the constitutive hypocrisy of Romanticism," its 
self-interested opposition in principle to the market.

Yours truly,
Glenn Scheper
http://home.earthlink.net/~glenn_scheper/
glenn_scheper + at + earthlink.net
Copyleft(!) Forward freely.

P.S. I see the whole GA (generative anthropology)
thing as a humanist attempt to define the sacred
(or better, liturgical) as an evolutionary phenomena,
while in strong denial that there may actually exist a
transcendent sacred (suck as I represent is in AF.)
So they can only conceive renunciation of (worldly)
desire as the victimary posture of resentment, not
the preference of a hoped-for transcendent reward.

P.S.2: As I was about to abandon reading this page, a name was dropped:

The revered novelist Thomas Pynchon actually celebrated the Watts riots in the 
1966 New York Times Magazine.3 Here, Pynchon, from the privileged perspective of 
someone "hip" (an attitude often nurtured by trust funds and Ivy League 
educations) presented the violence of Watts as justified and authentic. Assuming 
the empathetic stance of one of the oppressed, Pynchon wrote,
(...more...)
  -- http://www.literatevalues.org/prae-2.1.htm
  Moral Reason and Literate Analysis Applied to Cultural Meltdown