Date: Mon, 7 Aug 2000 03:33:13 -0400 (EDT)
From: Howard Hastings <hhasting-AT-osf1.gmu.edu>
Subject: Re: PLC: Fairness to Faulkner


On Sun, 6 Aug 2000 Patsloane-AT-aol.com wrote:

> > However, from my view, this business of discerning racism in authors is
> >  not just a looking for bad things to say about people who are dead
> >  anyway.  It is about how literature is studied in the present in relation
> >  to the past.  
> 
> If you want to make pronouncements on how literature is studied, you're going 
> to have to bite the bullet at some point and settle down to studying 
> literature yourself. 

Why wouldn't I have to settle down and study how literature is studied?  

 Right now, you're in the position of a person who has 
> all kinds of ideas about how driving ought to be taught, but doesn't know how 
> to drive a car himself. 

So you can tell I have never driven a car because I have all kinds of
ideas about how driving should be taught?

 As a general rule of thumb, anyone who seriously 
> thinks modern art and/or modernist literature "is just like" naziism simply 
> doesn't know very much about modern art or modernist literature...or for that 
> matter about nazaiism.  

That's good to know. But did someone participating in this thread say that
"modern art/and or modernist literature 'is just like' nazism"?  Or why
would you make the point?  Was this a guess as to what was originally at
issue between Troy and me?
 
> On the off-chance that Troy might know more about Faulkner than you do, or at 
> least may have thought about Faulkner's work in greater depth, I'm wondering 
> why you didn't ask him to explain why he feels as he does, rather than, by 
> your own account, reflexively rushing in to "contest." 

Didn't have to. Troy did that in adequate detail for an email discussion.
But if I have to provide you with this background, which of us is
reflexively rushing in to "contest"?

 Possibly part of it 
> is that Troy doesn't seem to agree with you, and therefore you aren't willing 
> to hear him out.

Again, you are guessing, aren't you?  You haven't followed the exchange
previous to your interevention.

More background:  The post you responded to was directed to George Barron,
who had taken up another issue regarding the degree to which characters
and their characterization could be said to reflect an author's
(in this case racist) beliefs.

 This is the polemicist's approach--shout the other guy down 
> and ward off any intellectual engagement. The problem in this strategy is 
> that you're depriving yourself of the kind of feedback that might stimulate 
> you to sharpen up or refine your own thinking. So you keep repeating the same 
> thing over and over, without ever refining the way you say it or developing 
> it so that it's more to the point. And of course the more you narrow down 
> your thinking in this way, the less prepared you are to deal with challenges 
> and the more you need to shout people down. 

Suppose I refine what I say and some reader  pretty much ignores
all that refinement and still claims I am just "repeating" myself.
Would it be worthwhile to point out what kind of support has been added or
rearranged in the supposedly repeated statement, or would that just seem
more repetition?

 I'd like to see you get off this 
> merry-go-round (or soap box) if you can, because it's a sure recipe for brain 
> rot.
> >  However, it is not useless to remember that lynchings occurred,
> >  that they were aided and abetted by law enforcement officers and even the
> >  federal government.  
> 
> I think people remember this.   I don't think it's necessary for you to preach 
> about it as incessantly as you do, as if it were a unique discovery of your 
> own of which the world is thus far unaware. 

My point was not that people don't "remember," was it?  Wasn't the
statement you evidently took as a conclusion really a premise leading to 
my main point?

Why ignore the context of my statements, the points and people they are
addressed to, their interconnection with one another, the substance of the
thread I am contributing to, and then preach to me about being preachy and
not listening to others? 

hh
.....................................................................




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