Aeschylus's Oresteia is held up – again in spot-on fashion – as a template for an anti-humanist worldview: what matters is not the individual but the house, or oikos, from which he emerges and of which he forms no more than an iteration. It's an insight that helps us to understand (although Josipovici doesn't mention him) why that arch-modernist William Faulkner delves, in Attic style, through generations of the Compson family, trawling their dwindling estate for residues of buried history. From that other Greek unit of measure, the polis or city-state, Josipovici derives a modern aesthetic of interconnectedness, of man as a diminished agent operating within systems that exceed him.

...

Adopting the vocabulary of the middlebrow in order to legitimise the vanguard merely robs it of what animates it most. Rather than celebrate the subversive energies of Luigi Nono's opera Prometeo, for example, he tries to sell it to the Glyndebourne crowd by claiming that it leaves us "with a sense of sorrow and of wonder and, at an even deeper level, a sense of having bathed in the waters of life". The sentiment is just that: sentimental. While the impetus behind it is profound, it ends up sounding trite.

Tom McCarthy on Gabriel Josipovici's Whatever Happened to Modernism?

Terrific piece by Drew Johnson on O. Henry at the Rumpus. Much of interest re OH, but it's the drive-by shootings that cheer:

As a fake-memoir it can stand with anything our own era has produced but since the book is largely unconcerned with the inner life of Al Jennings, it’s considerably more bearable. Perhaps what gives Jennings and his book their bona fides is the nearly open sense of being on the make—contemporary memoirists take note.

[And who, you say, is Al Jennings? Exactly.]

But the Chekhov comparison strikes me a stretch no matter how generous I want to be to O. Henry. Much closer is another formerly famous now generally neglected 19^th century short story master, Guy de Maupassant, a writer whom Chekhov has supplanted for us in many ways, and whose reputation advocates are always trying to revive. When they make their case, it’s often cast in the terms of how Maupassant was moving away from his summarizing plots and toward a more modernist, psychological approach. When NYRB books brought out Richard Howard’s translation of Alien Hearts, this was the tenor of the reviews, “Look not at what he was, what made him famous, but where he was headed.”

[not sure I entirely understand the conjunction of modernism and psychology, but since M, as far as I can make out, can be applied both to Pound's personae & to stream of consciousness, and Ψ, as far as I can make out, has very little to do with the stuff of introspection [as Barthes says, 'je' ne peux parler de 'moi'], what I take from this is precisely that various texts that have little in common apart from their nextness can look motivated in their nextness if one throws a couple of blankets over them which leave something that came before exposed to the air]

[Could not contact Blogger.com. Saving and pubishing may fail. Retrying...]

[Could not contact Blogger.com. Saving and pubishing may fail. Retrying...]

[Could not contact Blogger.com. Saving and pubishing may fail. Retrying...]

[Could not contact Blogger.com. Saving and pubishing may fail. Retrying...]