Subject: Re: ethics - Levinas
Date: Mon, 16 Jul 2001 15:08:58 +0800




G'day Eric/All,

>In his book "A Map of Misreading" and various other essays he suggests
>that a 'strong' poet arrives on the scene with a sense of belatedness.
>There is nothing for him (and with HB there is usually this androcentric
>implication) left to say.  It has all been said before and said better
>by his illustrious predecessors.
>What such a poet does is misread his forebears a way that appropriates
>them in a new way, making their work his own. The strong poet discovers
>his own voice by violently wresting it away from the inscribed voices of
>the others. (echoing Eliot's line about great art being theft.)

Hey that is really cool, I am going to use that in some of my fiction 
writing (Oh! The irony). I know this is going off on a tangent, but...

Is that what we face now, in the (re)production of creative works (eg the 
ensemble of forms that constitutes Moulin Rouge)? When does the theft become 
merely using cliche?




>Bloom thereby centers the Oedipal conflict at the heart of literary
>'creation' (This is his famous 'anxiety of influence') and, by doing so,
>points out the extent to which such misapprehension is actually a willed
>misapprehension.
>What this also suggests is that misreading is more than a merely
>phenomenological exercise taking place con-textually across a relational
>web of texts. It is also libidinal.  The reader/misreader is not merely
>conditioned by the Others, he/she is conditioned by his/her desires -
>pleasure, terror or both as the case might be. Reading, like eating, may
>be a matter of taste, but Kantian taste comes to us by way of Freud.

I know what you mean there. Sometimes I am practically tingling when I go to 
read my emails. I know I have written something that is going to generate an 
interesting reaction and I get scared (well, almost...;)

Glen.
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