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)
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To: "A. Robert Lauer" <[log in to unmask]>
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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