One of the dichotomies present in A World Made New is that the Soviets and their client states and fellow travellers wanted the rights of states to trump the rights of individuals in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which they were preparing. Eleanor Roosevelt, although widely regarded as a socialist, wanted individual rights to trump the rights of states. This makes her a LIBERAL rather than a SOCIALIST (the two are commonly lumped in American discourse, but I don't know why, since they are polar opposites).
"The ultimate political question of the day, and thus the question for the Human Rights Commisssion, [Charles] Malik concluded, was whether the state was for the sake of the human person or the person for the sake of the state" (41).
In general Marxists claim that the state trumps the individual's rights.
It's not yet clear to me how and why Eleanor Roosevelt and the west were generally for individual rights (LIBERAL).
I read and contributed to Andrei Codrescu's Exquisite Corpse for decades, and he is another one who would put the individual rights of the author above the rights of the state (he came from communist Romania, where things were reversed).
In one of the Corpse anthologies I remember the wonderful essay by Carl Rakosi which was originally a letter to Eliot Weinberger, and which appears in Volume I of the E. Corpse Reader, 1988-1998, in which he says that he became a member of the communist party and it basically extinguished his poetry for a long period. The communists told him his poetry didn't mean anything to the larger society so he had to do something else. It took him a little long while to break the stranglehold.
"...what value does poetry have for society? I do not hold the view, passionately held by some, that its value depends in some way on the proportion of its value to the society. To believe this is to fall into the Communist trap. Trotsky himself, that fiery revolutionist, understood this. Literature, he said, was a different thing. It should be left alone to go its own way and not be expected to be another organ of the state. ... Writing poetry and reading it are ways of living, and like life itself need no other justification. Its value is therefore existential. This is not to say that poetry has no social value ... it often does, but not always and not necessarily" (39-40).
17 comments:
Problem in the book thus far:
She (Eleanor R.) wants individual rights for individual people, but not individual rights for countries (she's looking for universals for countries, while allowing lots of loopholes to individuals).
Not sure what this means, or if it's a mess or if there's a higher coherence that I'm not grokking at present.
can there be any universals that must hold for all countries, and to which all human beings aspire?
If yes, then why can't whole countries aspire to those same things?
Even such a simple thing as Thou shalt not kill is not seemingly universal. Marxists think it's ok for Cain to kill Abel on class considerations, or to in any way you can wipe out another whole class. Many adherents to Islam believe you can kill anyone who isn't Islamic, no problems. And even kill sub-sections within Islam. And you can kill any authors, like Salman Rushdie, who the Imams say is ok to kill. Any Muslim can do it.
Voodoo allows you to murder someone for no reason at all.
Just because you feel like it.
Are there are rules and principles that all the peoples of the world would hold sacred, as being NATURAL to each human person and each human culture?
Could I offer you a link?
http://www.cosmoetica.com/B263-DES203.htm
I think the author of this piece makes a strong case and provides a solid basis for officially shunning the object of his ire.
craig
i think you've pushed it just a littel too far here
i mean bring in the virtues or lack therof of writers like donald bartheleme and a tangible detraction is already made things just deteriorate from there into a quagmire of rhetorical meaninglessness and thinly veiled idiocy
and while it would appear that a blog such as this could withstand such harsh and overt attacks against the gentler sensibilities of men you my friend have pushed the envelope too far
now things are bound to get ugly
you just watch
first it's absurdity and literary presumption and then
all hell breaks loose
who knows who's on first anymore
most of the major hiking trails in america are strewn with litter anymore
too much plastic around
do not have a nice day
at all costs
j
Craig, I read the last paragraph, and didn't know what reason you sent me that link, or why you told us the fact about Nokia in the Philippines. I explored this in my thoughts this morning, and thought, who is Craig? Is he religious? Perhaps he is not, and is a lost soul.
The irreligious see life as a game without rules and without goals.
So I think that that is what applies to Barthelme's fictions. He's wasting time, instead of making much of time. I think for the irreligious, that is what there is to do.
Or am I missing something?
The link I posted was the first item returned on a Google search with the key words 'Kierkegaard Unfair To Schlegel'. I used that for the search because I quite frankly couldn't remember Don Barthelme's name, which I guess is odd considering that I spent three years "finding myself" in an English department at a school where his was the most prominent name on the faculty. Perhaps because I suspect he spent precious little time on campus. It appears, however, that he did have considerable influence with writers like Larry McMurtry and John Barth, who weren't on faculty but wandered in a little more often than he did. I attribute that in some respects to the troubled Catholic upbringing that led him to seek and find employment on a campus that enjoyed unrivaled Baptist hegemony. The best English class I took there was a course in science fiction, a genre that was then still struggling to find a place in the curriculum. It was an excellent foundation for reading some of Steven Shaviro's science fiction reviews. There may have been period literature courses available, but if there were I think it may have been on some kind of invitation only basis. I was fairly disgusted at the idea of becoming an English major then, so I dropped out, and resumed my education several years later in a part of the country where an essentially Lutheran sensibility was tolerated if undeclared and welcome if openly avowed. I studied with many of the same professors who were obvious influences on some of this blog's frequent commenters so I like to imagine I may have something to contribute. My wife works for the UN and while it's not quite a Hatch Act I'm a little reluctant to respond directly to some of the posts on this blog when I have reason to suppose that the Chinese are monitoring my keystrokes. There's not much doubt in my mind that Barthelme's aesthetic is surrealist and the kinds of individual versus community issues mentioned in the heading of your post, particularly with regard to universalizability, are a central concern in his work. While I certainly have lots of time on my hands, I don't regard spending time on this blog as a waste. My chief impression of my academic career is that I spent virtually all of it pinned down in a crossfire between the left and the right and I think this blog has potential to develop a habitable middle ground.
Craig, you never know what people are up to. I was mowing the yard this afternoon when the mower just stopped, and then the rope (cord) will only come out about six inches. If I tease it, it will come out three or four feet, but if I yank, it will only do the 6 to 12 inches. It being Saturday, I can't get it fixed, but the neighbor, an elderly man with a genteel aspect, told me it was fixable, and that there was a "dog" in there, that I needed to bend back into place. Popular mechanics is my least strong suite, but will attempt it just the same. The worst case scenario is that I buy a new mower on Monday.
At any rate, you're welcome here.
I hid in grad school in the French department in which theory was ablaze, and yet managed to get out of the place with an ENGLISH Ph.D., which is a lot more workable in terms of finding a place to teach where I don't have to just deal with the mechanics of French with kids who may or may not order one meal in their lives in Paris.
I suspect there is no right any longer in grad departments.
There is just the left.
Everybody else has left.
So of course now the schisms of the left become enormous, between the theory heads and the empathy heads.
But there are about 100 departments. Maybe two or three of them are still ok. There's just no way to know.
You only need four of five functional people to work with. I imagine it's still possible to scrape that many people together.
What are you doing with Barthelme?
I'm very fond of the minimalist sculpture from the period: Smithson, and Serra, in particular. I don't really know why. I just like the immensity of the work, and that it's nevertheless called minimalism.
Kirby:
Yeah, bro, since the U of Washington's English PhD programme is best described as "whatever," I ended up doin' a doctoral programme in comp lit, classics, and translation and gettin' the English Dept to award me the PhD in English for mostly doin' work far beyond the paltry expertise of most mere English profs.
Right again, Kirby, with your remarks about the black hole of waste that is so-called "theory." An Old English/Chaucer prof of mine, Christine Rose, thought these French "theorists" were just a bunch of nihilistic faggots writing to each other.
As I told that idiot Protevi, it's ironical that most English profs and students must rely on and trust TRANSLATIONS of so-called “theory” (especially from French, German, Russian, and Italian) to convey messages of radical linguistic indeterminacy--what a hoot!
The worthless rubbish of "theorrhoea," Marxism, feminism, and pop "culture" replaced literature in English departments especially during the 80s and after. English profs refused to be retrained as useful citizens and PhD schools continued to operate their seedy, cynical, and corrupt grad and doc programmes shakedown rackets by admitting far more students than there were post-doc positions for them. The doc-student writing “super” (who didn’t even have to teach courses)—L---- S------- wrote a diss so bad that Al Fisher (my diss adviser and a rare Latin-literate prince among so many rogues and roguesses) rejected it at first, calling it “scuzzy.” LS’s wife’s diss likewise was garbage--on some bs pop “culture” topic of no scholarly heft whatsoever (they both went to work for Microsoft I believe)-- stretched artificially with a 12 pt front and extra spacing between words (and double-spaced, bien sur). One of the first to get a position out of doc school was the cosseted “critical theorist” S---- H-----, who previously bombed the English subject GRE with a 65 percentile rating (mine was 98 on first try); he was the unctuous suck-up in the dept. and was well-paid by the dept for his fulsome toadying (twelve years out of doc school and still no book—what a brick!).
About a recent Nobel Prize winner who writes for readers, not tenure, and whose former friend, Paul Theroux, fancies he is “dissing” Sir Vidia Naipaul in this little piece:
“I think they’re fairly calamitous, these English courses,” Vidia said angrily. He shifted his chair, looking combative. “They’re actively destructive of civilization and thought. When I was at Oxford in 1950, I think we all knew that English was not a serious subject for study, not worth a physics degree. Now what has happened is that this NON-subject has been taken over by very politically motivated people. Universities have become places where free thinking is not allowed. Nowadays people read very, very little and they have elaborate theories. This has particularly damaged the newer countries, the lesser cultures, which at great cost have produced intellectuals. They send them to Oxford, Cambridge, they send them to American universities, and they come back parroting [“parroting!?” queries Bertie] dreadful political tripe. . . . They’re corrupt!”
What kept English an honest subject were the old required courses: Bibliography and research methods; Old and Middle English; French, Latin, and probably German (in addition to Italian and at least a little Greek for Renaissance and early mod lit); history of the English language and/or linguistics, a comprehensive grasp of all major and of many minor writers from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf, Great Books (they’ve even watered down the U of Chicago undergrad programme here).
Et quod illiberal esse ducam, artem pudere proloqui, quam factites (“And I think it an illiberal thing to be ashamed to speak out on the art you practice”).
Theory was very exciting to me at the time, and I loved my courses on Klossowski from Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen (taught in French) at the UW. I had another course on Derrida. I didn't like Derrida, finally, but I loved the course (also taught in French, by a guy who since went on to become the chair in French at Vanderbilt).
Because time flits so quickly in grad school, you barely have time to figure who's who and what's what, before you're done, and writing your dissertation (the whole thing took me 4 years), so that when you're looking for a job, you barely had time to think about how you packaged yourself.
Some were probably much more clever than I was, and some probably far less.
If I had it to do over, I think I would have focussed on Victorian Poetry. But there were no profs in that particular area, at least not at the UW.
I really enjoyed the Victorians, and wish I could have spent more time on them.
But the best profs, the most exciting ones, were in the theory areas. I really liked Shaviro, Mikkel B-J, Marc Froment-Meurice, and Hazard Adams, among others. They were all teaching theory.
Which is hard, and interesting, esp. when you dealt with the postmodern stuff.
I never liked identity politics, and thought it was too simple, and also not true.
Now I think that most postmodern theory is also not true, but it did get me thinking about what is true, which led me back to the church.
So in a strange backwards way, I came back to religion thanks to graduate school. This was certainly not its intention, I'm sure, but it was the effect.
I think many in the Soviet Union found their way back to religion via the Gulags.
I barely know all the people you describe, but do think it's very hard to master other languages. It's a lot of work.
There's a guy at Catholic University of America -- name escapes me at present -- who calls the so-called multiculturals, "monoglot multiculturals", which they largely are.
But the older English department profs were also largely monoglot. They just cheated on their knowledge of German or French.
Most of them can barely do that.
Now the languages you learn are politicized, too. Finnish isn't considered much of a second-language acquisition even though it's supposedly even harder than Chinese to learn.
But the people there are white, so they must have no Wisdom to impart, is how the logic goes.
Everything is kind of Carrollian. I think the Victorians already had a sense of which way the wind was blowing. But they had kept their sense of humor about it, and so should we.
Kirby: Here's Stephen Logan of Cambridge the Greater in the TLS on theory pedagogy:
"It is obvious that the manner in which post-modernist theory has generally been studied in the West is a recipe for colossal confusion. Take one French intellectual--say, Derrida-- and let certain of his writings be translated. Let these translations be read by people who in most cases are incapable of judging their accuracy. Let them be read, moreover, in academic and cultural contexts remote from those in which they emerged. And let them be read by students who are just beginning their training in the procedures of good scholarship. Then let these writings be lectured on and written about by such large numbers of people that an interest in theory becomes an indispensable passport to academic employment. Let the whole process be so all-engrossing as to occlude from all but the most determined view the very traditions which might provide a means of assessing its value. And finally, let many of the theorists claim that the concept of value is itself a tedious and tendentious historical irrelevance. Now imagine this process going on over a period of twenty years, when advanced literacy in the West is becoming rarer. And let it occur in respect of dozens of writers whose native language and culture are diversely different from those of their readers. The result does not have to be imagined. Any teacher in the humanities is living it.
The impulse to dismiss pyrrhonistic forms of literary theory, now that the tide is turning against them, does not stem from unbridled vengefulness, but from prudence. One reason why the huge, sprawling, endlessly variegated mass of theory has been so successful as a diversion from authentic learning is that its proponents have persuaded trustful enquirers to discriminate carefully between degrees of fatuousness. Obviously, Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, de Man, Althusser, Kristeva and others are people of high intellectual ability. Equally obviously, therefore, it stands to reason they have sometimes, in some contexts, refused to accept that these people have written intelligent things. But in academe as in politics there is a place for practicality. If the effort of extracting whatever is of value in their work feels to a reasonably industrious reader like putting Niagara through a sieve, then it may be fair to dismiss them until they learn to write more considerately..."
Stephen Logan continues:
"It is the first duty of teachers who believe in value to direct their students towards the more valuable work and help them not to waste too much of their precious time on the less valuable. It is impractical either to acquaint students with Derrida by the dram or to suggest that they spend three years scrupulously appraising the value of work which, on the evidence of the twenty years their teachers have spent wrangling about it, is unlikely to reward any but the most ingeniously selective. In these circumstances, warning them off deconstruction (and its unnumbered mutant forms) is a practical necessity. Postmodernist theory—except perhaps as a separate subject—is unmanageable as it is, in general tendency pernicious."
It was easy to find intellectuals of considerable heft like John Ellis (Germanics), Brian Vickers (Classical Rhetoric and English), Victor Davis Hanson, John Heath, Bruce Thorton (Classics and Comp Lit), Allan Bloom (French and Philosophy), Frederic Crews (American Lit), Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont (Physics), John Searle and Roger Scruton (Philosophy), Mary Lefkowitz (Classics), Roy Harris (Linguistics), George Watson (also of Cambridge the Greater; Lit Crit and Lit; his "Myth of a Theoretical Base" in the Virginia Quarterly Review is a humourous rub-their-noses-in-it polemic against d-cons), Thomas S Szasz (Psychiatry), et multi alii, and the amazing polymath Raymond Tallis MD (Philosophy, Lit Crit and Theory, Gerontology, et alia--his "Not Saussure" is a devastating line by line critique of the post-structuralist mainstays). Post-structuralism turned out to be a rather cheap rhetorical trick after all--une grande gaspillage de temps!--though it's an intellectual cult phenomenon of our time and deserves perhaps some slight attention.
Taken on their own terms, in French, with a lot of salt, Derrida and others were kind of fun. But then when you get under that level, and start to go back to Hume, or Berkeley, you realize shortly that they are far better thinkers, and that the postmodernists are just duffers.
Then you get to someone like Aquinas, and you start to see the real Tigers of the woods. Aquinas can hit a ball 600 yards without even trying.
Luther can't hit the long ball quite as well, but he was very good at short strokes, and chipping.
Derrida couldn't putt to save his life.
His balls nearly always went into the long grass or sand traps, or even into lakes, from which his hordes are continually trying to find the lost balls.
Stick with the greats, and holiness, in golf, as in philosophy, and you'll do far better.
Lacan coiuldn't even hit the ball, and wasn't even sure after a while if it existed, or if he existed.
I've recently translated three Civil War poems written in German by a poet who commanded a regiment and advanced from colonel to brigadier general during the War Between The States. Aside from posting the translations onto the internet, how does one go about finding an appreciative audience? Would I need to enroll in a translation program on the chance that I might be able to use the poems as part of my course work?
The poet-general wrote a few poems before he came to America, meriting a fatwa issued by the Prussian crown, so he is a notable historical and literary figure in certain circles in both Germany and America. My great great grandfather was, I believe, the last soldier to die serving under the poet's command. I filed a record request with NARA for my Civil War ancestor's papers and the week the packet arrived I also got an e-mail from a direct line descendant of the poet. I think I'd prefer a reviewer somewhat less judgmental than the King of Prussia.
Chronocentrism isn't all it's cracked up to be. I don't know anything about publishing poems. There's a zillion places, and nobody reads them. Most of us are about encoding. Few bother decoding.
Maybe send them to your family members, and then, see if they have any ideas.
It's important to have a few real readers who can get angry about what you write, or happy.
Writing is a purely amateur activity, I think, now.
There is no professional audience.
They've all shifted over to movies and bungee jumping.
Kirby:
On this--
"[t]here's a guy at Catholic University of America -- name escapes me at present -- who calls the so-called multiculturals, "monoglot multiculturals", which they largely are"--
could that be the Roumanian Virgil Nemoianu of their English Dept--he's a Romantics and Lit Crit specialist and is pretty sound as far as I can see.
Yes, that's him. Very likable guy. His deep sense of languages would appeal to you. He's Eastern Orthodox, I think.
hey craig perhaps you could give us a few pointers as to how to humour the chinese
i'd get into posting on your blog if i knew how to do that
j
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