Date: Mon, 29 Mar 1999 14:08:17 -0400 (AST) From: Stacey Maxine Armstrong <armstrsm-AT-is2.dal.ca> Subject: Re: blue how is it that a name can begin to to feel like a ground zero word? I have been reading (that isnt the right word actually) some more articles on satire and entrapment theory today which might be of interest in terms of seduction and the ironic character of Johannes that Kirkegaard *invents* in _the diary of a seducer_. I dont know if I think K is a satirist or not. I think ironist might work better. In his exploration of the dialectical movement (?) between the aesthetic and the ethical there is the same play of rhetoric that I see happening in the works of Swift. The machinations of the seducer or writer are juxtaposed to a kind of doctrinal consistancy/constancy (perhaps the ethical ?) The seducer is a rhetorical jumping jack who "exhorts, questions, begs, flatters, scorns, and consoles" the reader into an emotional and aesthetic response that nears (if not reaches) a kind of religious faith. The truly adept satirist is able to kindle the dullest reader into wit. (laughter) Writing which flatters the reader by making them *feel* more interesting and engaged...whether or not it actually *makes* the reader more interesting is a matter of interpretation. As we might argue in the case of Cordelia who remains pretty vacant to me. The keen thing about Swift for me is that his seduction does not end with flattery which tends to become boring after awhile. The pleasure I derive from reading him is turned inwards so that I become aware that I am the victim of my own pleasure because he makes me so aware of the moments in which I desire meaning and significance only to rip them away. Satirists (and perhaps ironists) do not only find pleasure in the play of words but they are connoisseurs of entrapment. (There is the underlying suggestion at times that the satirist is a sadist) _the diary of a seducer_ is not a work of entrapment but Johannes does entrap Cordelia. Works of entrapment illict responses painful and/or pleasurable by seeming way more intense than their perceived cause. In a sense content is kept to a minimum so that the reader becomes the subject of the text. The work will normally also cause contrary responses, both a repulsion and an attraction. (In the case of Swift there is almost never a middle term, the reader most be a sheep or a goat) David Veith writes: "literary entrapment does not differ essentially from entrapment in the legal sense ("Abscam," "sting" operations) or the sexual sense. It offers, not the poem as "well wrought urn" or "still unravish'd bride of quietness," but the poem as whore." (that stings a little) stacey
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