Was Paul M's Eagleton tidbit on THE UNCONSCIOUS

[Markekohut]

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On Oct 20, 2012, at 6:03 AM, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:

> Nope. That is not what Wood says. What I am going to summarize here in
> a returns to the genre and literature distinction discussion because
> Wood's point on this is fairly obvious once we give him this
> distinction:
> 
> ...any long-live style, Flaubert, Hemingway, Isherwood, George Eliot,
> gets reproduced, is decomposed and flattened out into a genre, then
> becomes a set of mannerism and often pretty lifeless techniques. So,
> the efficient thriller genre takes just what it needs from the much
> less than efficient Flaubert or Isherwood, and throws away what made
> those writers truly alive (HFW.232).
> 
> We may agree with Wood or disagree with him on this point, but it's
> important to give him the distinction if we are to follow the rest of
> his argument.
> 
> He goes on to claim that most economically privileged genre of this
> kind of largely lifeless "realism" is commercial cinema, through which
> most people nowadays receive their idea of what constitutes a
> "realistic" narrative.
> 
> Our task, Wood says, what we need to do as writers, critics, and
> readers is to search for the style which cannot be easily reproduced
> and reduced.
> 
> So, I don't think Wood mentions Walter Benjamin's famous essay, "The
> Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction", but, and  we don't
> want to needlessly confuse things with Benjamin's idea of an "aura",
> or get all those Gaddis fans on the list stirred up...and
> anyway...Wood doesn't lump Gaddis in with Moody, Giles, Gass, Barthes,
> others...when he argues that these authors have confused two very
> different complaints about reproduction and reduction and have
> concluded that fictive convention can never convey anything real. Wood
> notes that this position is extreme and he quotes Barthes at length
> and then ties him to Plato's mimesis or an imitation of an imitation.
> That Pynchon appears on the Simpsons as a cartoon suggests that he
> agrees with Barthes and not Wood.
> 
> Pynchon & Co. are hostile to verisimilitude because they have confused
> convention with an inability to say anything truthful at all (236).
> 
> And so, to Aristotle, of course, we go....
> 
> The common reader has, of course, read Aristotle or knows about his
> poetic ideas.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
>> Maybe that touches bottom re Wood. After so many "critics" in his--our--world, I think of the Leavis's and many others---went after the deficiency of our culture's "mass" tastes, Wood wants to reestablished a--the--common reader. Plot, old-fashioned characterization just like the 19th Century novel as if everything gone could be new again.