We all need to answer

[matthew cissell]

Well this just goes to show you that studying at Cambridge or Harvard,
or even being an author, doesn't mean you understand literature.

  Granted Mr. Parks is well read but he doesn't seem to have read very
well or widely. Without mentioning the word expressly he is really
talking about Taste and what constitutes an aesthetically rich product
according to the legitmate authority that consecrates and categorizes
a product as valuable and thus part of legitimate culture. His feeble
mention of prizes and the publishing industry only mark the weakness
of his study of the field of literature. Parks lacks the reflective
approach that tries to account for the conditions of the possibilities
that lead to one's relationship with other agents (e.g. readers,
authors, etc.) and one's objectification of the object of study. Allow
me to quote Richard Shusterman's "Surface and Depth" :
    “For even the most immediate experiences of aesthetic surface seem
conditioned by habits and categories of perception and by dispositions
of feeling that involve cultural mediation and social training. We
misunderstand aesthetic immediacy when we see it as entirely
unmediated”

   But of course Parks is only playing the game, demonstrating his
'illusio' as Bourdieu calls it. To truly begin to ask and then answer
questions about the subject of literary taste Mr. parks would have to
suspend his "relationship of complicity and connivance which ties
every cultured person to the cultural game" and begin to historicize
the conditions of his understanding.

However, I suspect that's not what the NY Review of Books is going
for. Parks somewhat polemical stance on Elena Ferrante is the kind of
thing that riles up the readership and/ or gets people to look at or
talk about the article (notice that we have now bounced it around and
as such it has a greater BLIP on the cultural radar screen of the
moment, and that also adds to the capital of the author and the
institution). Now, if only a minor exchange between Parks and either
James Wood or, better, Elena Ferrante would occur that would be
brilliant for all involved - an extention of the game into another
round, increasing the stakes of the exchange.

ciao
mc otis

On Wed, Nov 11, 2015 at 3:04 PM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:
> And to ask:
>
> http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2015/nov/10/how-could-you-like-that-book/
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l