>Date: Thu, 26 May 2005 19:17:18 -0400
>From: Bryant Creel <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject: Re: De nuevo la alegoria y Cervantes (de Jesus G. Maestro)
>X-Sender: [log in to unmask]
>To: "A. Robert Lauer" <[log in to unmask]>
>Cc: [log in to unmask]
>
>I don't want to get into an argument (it's summer), Jesús, but speaking 
>from what will undoubtedly seem to be a limited perspective on my part, 
>since I neither recognize nor agree with a lot of what you say (although I 
>suspect that my ignorance or lack of sophistication has a lot to do with 
>it), I would venture to say that I don't discern what I always thought 
>post-modernism was in your use of that term.  I've never identified the 
>study of ethics with post-modernism; in fact, I don't know of anyone 
>besides myself who incorporates ethics into literary criticism (except for 
>Wayne Booth, who does it in way that I can't relate to).  Also, I think of 
>post-modernism (which I can tell you about as much about as about drug 
>connections in Knoxville) as actually preferring to subvert anything so 
>traditional as ethics, by importing pop art, queer theory, etc., anything 
>unconventional.  Isn't post-modernism related to post-structuralism and so 
>to deconstruction and the assertion of a universal relativism based on the 
>structuralist claim that everything is language, and so fiction -- 
>subjective idealism: a modern form of nominalism [which does have its 
>progressive dimensions, but also is, after all, medieval, scholastic, and 
>bookish]?  I ask in earnest because I don't cultivate an association with 
>such currents, since I find them to be pedantic and academic in the 
>vernacular sense.  I would appreciate being enlightened on this 
>subject.  Go ahead and embarrass me in front of everyone -- it doesn't matter.
>         As for "the moral," "moral" CAN just mean having to do with 
> behavior, i.e. "concerning human action," as Aristotle defines ethics 
> (hence "ethos" means [distinctive] "character" in the sense of what a 
> person characteristically does).  Now surely you didn't mean to object to 
> allegory on the grounds that it has to do with human behavior.  You had 
> to mean "moral"/"ethical" in the sense of concerning normative ethics -- 
> do this and don't do that [I don't study that kind of ethics, by the way, 
> but value theory (phenomenological ethics of value, value personalism -- 
> Scheler, N. Hartmann); Aristotle was a great precursor of 
> phenomenology].  Now you're shifting the ground.  Yet this all is 
> probably related to my total failure to understand how you can associate 
> post-modernism with "grounded in the study of ethics" (not your words, 
> but how I interpret your meaning).  Please enlighten me.
>         I don't know about you, but some of us have been working hard in 
> this terrain of gaining a grasp of fundamentals for 40-45 years (and 
> sought anonymity in the meantime) just to get our bearings to a 
> respectable degree (others of us gave up early), and I don't mean in 
> relation to post-modernism (which I really want to learn more about, 
> since now I consider it to be a "kitchen of technique" in creating 
> in-groups and out-groups and securing jobs  -- I prefer classicism of the 
> manneristic variety, which is very modern in my mind).
>         Diana, my parents met at Denver University.  I see your a patient 
> scholar, mesurada (I already knew it).
>
>Yours,
>Bryant