Was Paul M's Eagleton tidbit on THE UNCONSCIOUS

[Markekohut]

That 's "does not show"....

Sent from my iPad

On Oct 20, 2012, at 8:04 AM, Markekohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:

> 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.