Date: Wed, 16 Aug 2000 15:19:12 -0400 (EDT)
From: Howard Hastings <hhasting-AT-osf1.gmu.edu>
Subject: Re: PLC: Howard on Mein Kampf (was Fairness to Faulkner)


On Wed, 16 Aug 2000 Patsloane-AT-aol.com wrote:

> 1) I was defending the idea that one ought to read a book before expressing 
> opinions about it.  But I realize that if  people don't want to, they won't, 
> and I certainly take the point if you want to say that people have a right to 
> behave as they wish. It's just that for me, I'd rather talk about books with 
> people who've read them than with people who haven't.

You were not defending the idea that one ought read a book etc. because
someone was actually talking about books he or she had not read and you
do not express opinions about what you haven't read (as proved by your
comments on cultural studies). 

It has been a standard move on your part to attribute some basic
flaw to your opponents' arguments or person, shifting your response from
what they have actually said to your misconstruction of it.  Sometimes
this is followed by a polite statement granting your opponent his right to
believe what antisemites say or to discuss books he hasn't read.
(I have twice analyzed the structure of this move with regard to David's
Eliot discussion and once with reference to my posts as well. It is
formulaic.)

Realizing that others may talk about authors without having read them,
though you'd prefer not to, is a form of ad hominem argument, even when 
employed by someone who claims name calling and hominem are not
productive.

> 2) Certain texts are at issue in the Eliot lit on the question of his 
> attitude towards Jews. They aren't the texts Howard named. He says things are 
> done differently in cultural studies, and I think we left it at that.

One must ask here, at issue for whom and in what context?  So far as I can
tell, you are the only person who writes as if Eliot's essays and social
theories don't count when it comes to assessing his antisemitism.  
 
> Why are you assuming I'd write a book on Eliot and not do my homework? 

One reason George might assume that is from your insistence that only some
poems of Eliot are the locus of charges of antisemitism. 

  Is 
> that part of some agenda of yours?

This from a person who assumed I would discuss Eliot without having read
him. 




hh
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