File spoon-archives/phillitcrit.archive/phillitcrit_2000/phillitcrit.0008, message 242


Date: Fri, 18 Aug 2000 06:18:18 -0500
From: "George Y. Trail" <gtrail-AT-UH.EDU>
Subject: Re: PLC: Literary Saints


Are you sure? hh is, after all, a teacher, and teachers are, on occasion
devious. 

Two suggestions: 120 Days of Sodom is or is not a work of literature,
but in a sense that it beside the point that it constitutes a kind of
test case. What needs to be asked of it is _can_ such a work be a work
of literature. If our perspective is that literature constitutes a
laboratory, or at a closer focus, a crucible, in which we follow our
minds, explore our minds, follow the minds of projections of other minds
(I could easily have a sympathetic pederast as a character in a
story--try _Lolita_, for instance) then the question does not emerge in
quite the same way.

As I tried to suggest in talking about your making me a case that I
could not find "moral," morality is in itself a complex concept, not
subject, but _concept_. Permit me a provocative statement: No one ever
knowingly does what she thinks of as wrong without excusing it by some
mechanism, transforming it thereby into the right thing, at the time
_for her_.  

The surrealist, without recourse to the particular poem you presented,
embodies of view of what she sees as a valuable mode of "knowing" the
mind in the world.She is teaching us, in her view, a way to see the
world which she thinks important.This, I suggest, is moral.  
g  

zatavu-AT-excite.com wrote:
>  IS the fact that the story is about something morally
> reprehensible prevent it from being great literature, even if it is
> well-written enough? I think it is. HH doesn't. That was what was at issue.
> I'm afraid it is partially my fault if I have gotten away from that point.
> 
> Troy Camplin
> 
> _______________________________________________________
> Say Bye to Slow Internet!
> http://www.home.com/xinbox/signup.html
> 
>      --- from list phillitcrit-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---


     --- from list phillitcrit-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---

   

Driftline Main Page

 

Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005