Date: Fri, 01 Sep 2000 06:34:20 -0500
From: "George Y. Trail" <gtrail-AT-UH.EDU>
Subject: Re: PLC: Poetry, prose, fiction as meaningful


You may remember that Pater refers to the soi-disant "Renaissance" as
the decadence of the medieval. You may call this writing "pre-classical"
as much as you like, but you will not that reality is still to be found
"out there," which is primary to the classical view. For romanticism the
locus of reality becomes first problematic and then undeniably within
the psyche.  Post-modernism as an acknowledgment of this sea-change.
When Barthe says "getting to know Nature" he may even mean it.
Wordsworth knew better. 
g

Fredrik Hertzberg LIT wrote:
> 
> Ron Silliman, in his essay "Disappearance of the Word, Appearance of the
> World" argues that up until the sixteenth century, "an ordering of the
> language by its physical characteristics" can still be perceived in the
> literature of the era. According to Silliman, capitalist modes of
> production brought about a "disappearance of the word, appearance of the
> world" effect: language as transparent description rather than enactment,
> realism as "optical illusion of reality". Roland Barthes, in
> Writing Degree Zero, argues that the bourgeois era created a demand for
> representation and definition which superseded all other literary uses of
> language. Before the French Classical era, literary writing was still
> investigatory, and the materiality of its language was meaningful because
> it was not yet tied to the representation (and expression) of bourgeois
> man. Barthes writes: "Aesthetically, the sixteenth and the beginning of
> the seventeenth centuries show a fairly lavish profusion of literary
> languages because men are still engaged in the task of getting to know
> Nature, and not yet in that of giving expression to man's essence. On
> these grounds, the encyclopedic writing of Rabelais, or the precious
> writing of Corneille - to take only such typical moments - have as a
> common form a language in which ornaments are not yet ritualistic but are
> in themselves a method of investigation applied to the whole surface of
> the world. This is what gives to this pre-classical writing the genuine
> appearance of many-sidedness, and the euphoria which comes from freedom."
> 
> On Thu, 31 Aug 2000, George Y. Trail wrote:
> 
> > I think not, especially in that Romanticism set itself against
> > Classicism, quite deliberately. Its strength was in the coherence of its
> > attack, not in the proposal to replace the attacked (Wordsworth, for
> > instance, completely failed to get "Nature" to fly, and both PBS and STC
> > saw that and worked on the imagination as alternative).
> >
> > g
> >
> > Fredrik Hertzberg LIT wrote:
> > >
> > > On Wed, 30 Aug 2000, George Y. Trail wrote:
> > >
> > > > The transcendent is precisely the creation of the classicist, not the
> > > > romantic. The timeless is a classical conception, as is the ideal. If
> > > > you think not you have written Socrates down as a romantic, which is a
> > > > real stretch.
> > >
> > > Good points. But historically, can't romanticism be seen as a
> > > continuation of classicism, in the sense that romanticism was a
> > > celebration of that (boourgeois) universality which classicism rhetorically
> > > strived for? (And thus, the rhetoricity of classicism was in many
> > > ways more apparent than romantic rhetoric which in many cases wanted to
> > > hide its artifice?)
> > >
> > > Fred
> > >
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> >
> >
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> >
> 
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