Date: Sat, 19 Oct 1996 07:17:14 -0700 (PDT)
From: LH Engelskirchen <lhengels-AT-igc.apc.org>
Subject: Re: Reply to Hans E...


tim --

I was just trying to clean up old files and read this post of yours for 
the first time.  I've read quite a lot of WCW, learned a lot from him 
about poetry, but the "retreat from the thirties" theme you identify 
never crossed my mind.  The minute you mentioned it I thought "Oh, 
yeah, of course!" and then thought of that nagging sense of something 
missing I often had in reading him, an absence absent to me until you 
put a finger on it -- I mean even the nagging sense of something 
missing as an absence to me.  Anyway, your remarks were only a sentence 
or two, but for me they did what criticism ought to do -- they made me 
a better reader, more alert to the experience.  

howard
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 > From owner-bhaskar-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU  Fri Sep 20 06:48:31 1996
 > Date: Fri, 20 Sep 1996 08:42:30 -0500 (CDT)
 > From: Timothy A Dayton <tadayton-AT-ksu.edu>
 > X-Sender: tadayton-AT-fox.ksu.ksu.edu
 > To: bhaskar-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU
 > cc: bhaskar-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU
 > Subject: Re: Reply to Hans E...
 > Sender: owner-bhaskar-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU
 > Reply-To: bhaskar-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU
 >
 > I am seriously burdened with paperwork at the moment, and thus unable to
 > jump into the discussion of aesthetics with both feet, but it is
 > encouraging to me to see that Gary is thinking along these lines and that
 > Hans felt moved to respond.  My sense is that the category of absence may
 > be deployed in a variety of ways in literary criticism and other forms of
 > art/cultural criticism, and eventually the task will be to see if these
 > uses add up to something coherent.  At the moment, I think the task is to
 > elaborate some models/methods and put them to work in actual analysis. 
 >
 > As evidence that absence may operate in a variety of ways, my own 
 > orientation "absence-wise" is toward Ernst Bloch.  The uses of Bloch's 
 > notion of absence yields something rather different from the semiotic 
 > model of Barthes or the liguistic/psychoanalytic model of Lacan. But an 
 > explanation of this will have to wait.
 >
 > The variable nature of absence might also be seen in the possibility of
 > reading Plath according to a different model: the overwhelming fact of
 > some of Plath's most powerful poetry is her desire to escape the
 > entaglements of the complex social world, and to arrive at a point which
 > would appear to be a combination of pure intensity of experience and, at
 > the same time, a sort of nullity ("Ariel" will serve as an illustration
 > here.) Absence operates in a couple of seneses in this aspect of Plath's
 > work.  In addition, this aspect of her work projects a model of desireable
 > (for her anyway) social being which is profoundly atomistic, and which
 > thus projects an informal sense of human being about which TMSA has
 > something to say.  Of course, all of this is at the thematic level, and
 > one would have to take a look at the formal level as well, but I would
 > guess that the "confessional"  mode itself might in part be caught up in
 > some of these problems or questions (William Carlos Williams in retreat 
 > from the socially and politically engaged 30s spawns the movement, which 
 > reproduces this retreat even in those writers too young to have had any 
 > real experience of the historical dynamics of the shift from the 30s to 
 > the 50s, a theory might run.). 
 >
 > Excuse the abstract and hurried nature of these comments, but I did want 
 > to make it clear that I found Gary's and Hans' posts very interesting, and 
 > would like to see this discussion move forward.
 >
 > Tim Dayton
 >
 >  
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