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 ---
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