Was Paul M's Eagleton tidbit on THE UNCONSCIOUS

[Markekohut]

I think that just because some writers on the metaphysical status of their work believe
It is just words (basically), we do not have to. they might be just bad philosophers.

Burke thought an ultimate reality was unknowable yet he thought the best fiction was true.
Writers don ' t usually write about ultimate reality but about psychologically real people
In a world. 

I think Pynchon  's appearance on The Simpsons does boy show what you say. 

Sent from my iPad

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,l 
> 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 genres just because  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.