Date: Sun, 23 Jul 2000 09:44:31 -0400 (EDT)
From: Howard Hastings <hhasting-AT-osf1.gmu.edu>
Subject: Re: PLC: National Socialism and Truth


On Sun, 23 Jul 2000, David Langston wrote:

 The notion that the racial Other has qualities
> which are acquired naturally and which serve as either resources or
> challenges to the novel's Central Subject is, I submit, another form of
> racial thinking:  the Lone Ranger and Tonto meet The Bear. 

Well put, I think.

> In that respect, Faulkner is a little like James Fenimore Cooper: neither
> writer needs to exhibit hostility, condescension, or exclusion to use
> racial thinking;  in fact, some of the racial Other characters may be
> extolled for their virtues.  But even when those virtues are inborn traits
> unavailable to everyone who lies outside the gene pool, then I would say
> that those texts have a taproot in the stream American racism.  I suppose
> it is one step better than saying all their virtues are imperfect
> copies of European models.

Right on, man!

> This mode of analysis raises interesting problems for the pomo rejection
> of "humanism," but that has become part of the story too.

I am not sure pomo has rejected humanism, at lest in its currently popular
variations.  But even if it has, why would this mode of analysis raise
"problems" for such a rejections, as opposed to providing grounds for it?


hh
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