Date: Sat, 11 Jul 1998 22:16:54 -0400 (EDT) From: David Langston <dlangsto-AT-mcla.mass.edu> Subject: Re: PLC: Literature and Space On Sat, 11 Jul 1998, deaun moulton wrote: > Me too. But I'm planning a wedding (my own!) and getting ready to move > to Canada.... My hearty congratulations, and best wishes on both ventures. > In what ways are you distinquishing Modern from Enlightenment? THAT distinction is a rather tangled story and would require a re-telling of about 150 years of intellectual and cultural history, but to resort to a thumbnail sketch, Modernism (Pound, Stein, Joyce, etc. and Co.) seems predicated on an alienation from history and temporality which is only a very minor theme among 18th Century defenders of Einleitung. "Time is the problem" Pound says in the Cantos. > > extension of meaningless time. > > I'm having a little trouble with this notion of 'meaningless time.' what > does it mean? The fear of history and the notion that temporality is a threat is a pervasive theme among Modernist writers. History, they keep saying, is all sound and fury, a collection of fragments "shored against our ruin" which must be transcended in a form which resists time even as it also endures it. I take it that is Pound's main idea in his notion that the essence of experience is like a crystal in flowing water. The stream of time and the transcendental essence are indistinguishable in any one given moment, but through time we come to recognize the enduring pattern which resists time. The main problem is whether it is legitimate to use the term, "space," to designate that enduring form. While I have some deep reservations, critics like Joseph Frank and Gaston Bachelard have confidently used the term, "space," to identify literary tropes and meanings which resist the mutability of history. > It also sounds like Manifest Destiny which projected the western North > American continent as "space" fit for conquering by the white American > agents of progress. I would say that the Puritan sense of "wilderness" probably suggests an alien space which needs redemption; however, by the nineteenth century, that notion had been reversed, had it not? The western space was considered to be a Promised Land in which the pioneers had a home awaiting their arrival (if those pesky Indians would just shut up about the fact that they already were at home and resented trespassers). Of course you are doing the research, and probably have a more interesting and nuanced reading. Up to now I would have said that the notion of "wilderness" as a pristine ideal landscape where human beings could never step without corrupting is a THIRD idea. Its antecedents are equally Romantic (Thoreau: "in wildness is the preservation of the world") but I have not -- up to now -- put it in the same register with Charles Kingsley, Horacy Greeley, or Fred'k Jackson Turner. One difference lies in how much of the western space could be commodified and made "useful." Thoreau and Muir and the Sierra Club see wilderness as "useful" only so long as it remains the reified Other, constantly reminding us of the ideals toward which we should strive; the party of Greely and Turner see wilderness as "useful" when it eventually becomes "civilized" and has been tamed to be productive. On a philosophical and critical plane, however, I have a number of reservations about too quickly collapsing an epistemological sense of space or spatiality in Kantian and post-Kantian thought into notions of either architecture or geography. Reading these two senses of "space" in terms of each other CAN reveal decisive cultural and political themes, but finally they are not identical because at some point the spaces of architecture and geography are only metaphorical elaborations, or perhaps loose analogies, of the phenomenological sense of spatiality as a necessary condition -- and counterpoint for temporality -- for all our experience. David Langston --- from list phillitcrit-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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