glossing the more than slightly demented foregoing posts

I need to read Farah Mendlesohn's Rhetorics of Fantasy closely...one of many books I own and am not reading more than sporadically. I was just now reading around in a discussion on theinferior4 regarding that other genre, speculative fiction, and its self-congratulatory rhetorics regarding what it does that mainstream fiction cannot, and that mainstream writers are likely to get wrong when they attempt to work within the genre. Here again, the internal discussions are sophisticated, and I do not wish to get enmeshed in them.

Using Grann's book about Fawcett's quest to get at basic questions of human behavior is, of course, quite a lunatic thing to do. And it may be only in America that so many theorists seem baffled by the transmission of ideas and what human beings do with those ideas once they have acquired them. I just see so many writers reinventing the wheel in this regard, or engaging in mystification because they are writing about emotionally exciting topics rather than, say, humdrum hobbies, that I felt impelled to engage in a misguided effort to clear the air, with the result, I'm sure, that the whole area is left more befogged than ever.