Comments on: How deep is your psychology? Burrow on Boccaccio in The London Review of Books http://www.mutuallyoccluded.com/2009/03/how-deep-is-your-psychology-burrow-on-boccaccio-in-the-london-review-of-books/ media & film, design, philosophy, politics Sat, 11 Feb 2012 07:07:01 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.7.1 hourly 1 By: ITH http://www.mutuallyoccluded.com/2009/03/how-deep-is-your-psychology-burrow-on-boccaccio-in-the-london-review-of-books/comment-page-1/#comment-104 ITH Wed, 25 Mar 2009 16:24:32 +0000 http://www.mutuallyoccluded.com/?p=1190#comment-104 "When an historically distant text surprises or even disgusts us, that should be an opportunity to view some of our ethical and aesthetic assumptions in a new light, to challenge, to argue, to reconsider, to poke around. Estrangement–both from our ideas about human psychology and narrative–should be cultivated, not assimilated into a newer, more ingenious literary history."<br><br>Just out of curiosity, when exactly has this approach to literature ever been practiced? Perhaps the function of reading and talking about literature is to figure out just precisely what it is we actually do think about the world – aesthetically, ethically, politically, psychologically, etc. – right now, as we read and breathe. Moreover, most attempts to deal with "estrangement" have resulted in either drivel (see nearly all 20th century theory driven responses [Lacan, Derrida, et al.], which, by and large, have not been "challenges" or "reconsiderations," but rather onanistic exercises for other theoreticians which never really reach or intend to reach the sort of typical, non-academic reader who would buy a copy of Boccaccio out of curiosity and joy, and thus have very little if any effect on our ethical or aesthetic imaginations) or overly schematic and rigid apparatus (long u, 4th declension plural) for recapturing the ethical, historical, cultural and political world of the the original author''s original audience (see historicism, reader response theory and other such garbage, which has lead some poor Vergilian scholars, for example, to make Dido a villain whose abandonment and suicide Roman readers would have cheered, all for her Carthaginian provenance). <br><br>Perhaps, "cultivating estrangement" is also disingenuous: I think this might not appear in many writers' top ten lists of "what I am trying to accomplish by writing this poem/play/novel/etc." And perhaps, more pertinently, very few readers at any period of history or place, care much about literary history, or how ingenious it is.<br><br>Or perhaps I am just a crank.<br><br>[For full disclosure, as it happens, I also read Burrow's review, before I read this. I also was dubious of his claims concerning Boccaccio's psychological aims, etc., but I enjoyed reading it and left the piece having felt that I had read one human's very human engagement with a masterpiece of humanism. In that sense it was deeply satisfying, if too often rare. What more could I have asked for?] “When an historically distant text surprises or even disgusts us, that should be an opportunity to view some of our ethical and aesthetic assumptions in a new light, to challenge, to argue, to reconsider, to poke around. Estrangement–both from our ideas about human psychology and narrative–should be cultivated, not assimilated into a newer, more ingenious literary history.”

Just out of curiosity, when exactly has this approach to literature ever been practiced? Perhaps the function of reading and talking about literature is to figure out just precisely what it is we actually do think about the world – aesthetically, ethically, politically, psychologically, etc. – right now, as we read and breathe. Moreover, most attempts to deal with “estrangement” have resulted in either drivel (see nearly all 20th century theory driven responses [Lacan, Derrida, et al.], which, by and large, have not been “challenges” or “reconsiderations,” but rather onanistic exercises for other theoreticians which never really reach or intend to reach the sort of typical, non-academic reader who would buy a copy of Boccaccio out of curiosity and joy, and thus have very little if any effect on our ethical or aesthetic imaginations) or overly schematic and rigid apparatus (long u, 4th declension plural) for recapturing the ethical, historical, cultural and political world of the the original author''s original audience (see historicism, reader response theory and other such garbage, which has lead some poor Vergilian scholars, for example, to make Dido a villain whose abandonment and suicide Roman readers would have cheered, all for her Carthaginian provenance).

Perhaps, “cultivating estrangement” is also disingenuous: I think this might not appear in many writers' top ten lists of “what I am trying to accomplish by writing this poem/play/novel/etc.” And perhaps, more pertinently, very few readers at any period of history or place, care much about literary history, or how ingenious it is.

Or perhaps I am just a crank.

[For full disclosure, as it happens, I also read Burrow's review, before I read this. I also was dubious of his claims concerning Boccaccio's psychological aims, etc., but I enjoyed reading it and left the piece having felt that I had read one human's very human engagement with a masterpiece of humanism. In that sense it was deeply satisfying, if too often rare. What more could I have asked for?]

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