File spoon-archives/phillitcrit.archive/phillitcrit_2000/phillitcrit.0008, message 149


Date: Wed, 16 Aug 2000 09:06:27 -0500
From: "George Y. Trail" <gtrail-AT-UH.EDU>
Subject: Re: VS: PLC: odours, races etc. (was Fairness to Faulkner)


As a rhetorician I would want to say that the same tools are available
to virtue as to vice. When Grace Slick sang "two thousand years of your
goddamned glory" (referring to the cultural and artifactual productions
of Christendom), I sympathized completely.  This does not mean that she,
or I, need look at a Greek statue without recognizing its beauty in that
I know it was commissioned by a slave owner and made possible by huge
inequities among classes.  

Boris.Vidovic-AT-sea.fi wrote:
> 
> I am not trying to prove that there is no racism in Faulkner's books.
> And I do agree that issues of class, race, gender etc. all legitimate in
> phillitcrit at all levels (reading, criticism, theory, teaching). I just
> think that comparing Faulkner's novels and Mein Kampf in discussing
> racism in literature is too harsh. We have just finished the thread on
> communism/Nazism and most of us seem to agree that it is simply wrong to
> compare these two concepts/ideologies although both Hitler and Stalin
> killed a lot of people. Now se are starting this Faulkner/Hitler
> comaprison which is just as ridiculous.
> 
> Another issue (maybe more interesting and potentially more polemicly
> charged): how one can relate (or simply enjoy) to the works of art that
> are embedded in a unexeptable political attitude? Can we enjoy watching
> pyramides although we know that hundreds of slaves died building them?
> How to relate to Leni Riefenstahl's films, 'Birth of a Nation', Celine,
> Pound? I don't have ready answers but would appreciate others' thoughts
> on this issue.
> 
> Boris Vidovic
> Finnish Film Archive
> PL 177
> 00151 Helsinki
> tel.: +358 9 6154 0258
> boris.vidovic-AT-sea.fi
> 
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