Re: Lighting Some Flames: Towards conlang artistry

En réponse à Patrick Dunn <tb0pwd1@...>:

>
> Well said,
Thanks, though I was too angry to think about style :)) .

 but can I add, as a sometimes reader of Foucault and an
> occasional dabbler in Derrida that postmodernism is not a fallacy in
> any
> sense of the word.
>
Of course not! It just depends on how it's used.

> Perhaps, before one assays to present a school of criticism, one should
> do
> some professional criticism of art.  I do literary criticism more or
> less
> for a living (well, it's a condition of my teaching freshmen the use
> of
> semicolons) and we do nothing like what Jesse suggests, nor have we
> since
> around 1400.  Instead we interrogate a text for structure, meaning,
> and
> connections to the outside world.
>
> We certainly have no arbitrary standards of "good" and "bad" books.
> Although we do make such judgements (the decision of what to read
> implies
> some sort of value judgement) we make them on the basis of multiple
> criteria.  I don't write on Ginsberg because I think he's the best poet
> of
> the 20th C., or even ofthe Beat movement.  I write on Ginsberg because
> I
> think there are many interesting things he does in his poetry that can
> also be applied to other works by other authors, and I wish to
> elucidate
> them.
>
But all this is a work of analysis, not of criticism (though I know both words
are often mistaken). And if the decision of reading or not is stated as "this
must be read in that purpose" then we still have a work of analysis, not a
value judgement, because it gives place for another opinion, and states
the "why" of the decision, and a "why" which depends on a purpose, not on some
arbitrary criterion.

I really think what we lack here is not criticism, but analysis.

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

Take your life as a movie: do not let anybody else play the leading role.