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The thought of having to read Moby-Dick again is sufficiently daunting (never mind the rest of Melville and the voluminous critical literature on the nineteenth-century context, of which I remember most fondly the book I now regularly mistitle The Power of Darkness because Harry Levin's original title The Power of Blackness came to suggest something other than the Hawthorne, Poe, and Melville of his subtitle) that I would prefer to wait for Sean D. Kelly's book and find out why I ought to do that.
It seems to be a season, though, for reinterpretations of the books about which critics were wild in the '60s. Item: Michael Azar's postcolonial rereading of Camus: http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2010-10-15-azar-en.html
The notion of Camus confronting a particular species of absurdity and writing his quintessential texts in 1942 appeals to me, even more than it did in college. (I have always loved the multiple spins of people in positions of powerlessness not quite confronting the situation around them but commenting on it with every remark they make about something else from their own past. Ideas are always historically embedded.)
Even though he came to embrace the French Resistance as an appropriate way of defending humane values in a world where there were no transcendent underpinnings for it, he never quite came down on one side or the other when it came to the alien Other of French Algeria: his assertion that in the end, "the Arabs" would be better off coming to accept Enlightenment values and living within a rational French commonwealth left him unable to come down unequivocally on either side of a post-1945 struggle in which both sides embraced irrational assertions and proceeded by shooting randomly into crowds or blowing up innocent bystanders. (One thinks of the line from a nineteenth-century anarchist's trial in France: "There are no innocent bourgeois." Camus was insufficiently convinced of the inevitability of historical reason and too skeptical of the motives of historical actors in an absurd universe to assign unequivocal guilt or innocence to anybody...as I suppose The Stranger might indicate, never mind the later parts of his oeuvre, which I wearily realize ought to be perused in a new context. As reflective regarding Camus' maternal fixations as on his attitude towards his French North African upbringing, Azar's essay is worth working through for the light it does [not] shed on Camus and on more recent discontents.)
I am probably the only person on earth to have gone from that essay to Ron Drummond's update on the wondrous Anniversary Edition of John Crowley's Little, Big, but Drummond's update on the first day of December contains links to marvelous artworks by Peter Milton that (a) set me to thinking inconclusively about the sheer range of the human imagination (and why and how we respond to that range) and (b) wanting to remind people that there is still time to order the book for holiday giving, this time in the hope that it will actually arrive before December 2011.
I don't like to be pushy about these things, however, so I have buried it at the bottom of this post.
Check out http://www.littlebig25.com/PR-101201.html for details.
It seems to be a season, though, for reinterpretations of the books about which critics were wild in the '60s. Item: Michael Azar's postcolonial rereading of Camus: http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2010-10-15-azar-en.html
The notion of Camus confronting a particular species of absurdity and writing his quintessential texts in 1942 appeals to me, even more than it did in college. (I have always loved the multiple spins of people in positions of powerlessness not quite confronting the situation around them but commenting on it with every remark they make about something else from their own past. Ideas are always historically embedded.)
Even though he came to embrace the French Resistance as an appropriate way of defending humane values in a world where there were no transcendent underpinnings for it, he never quite came down on one side or the other when it came to the alien Other of French Algeria: his assertion that in the end, "the Arabs" would be better off coming to accept Enlightenment values and living within a rational French commonwealth left him unable to come down unequivocally on either side of a post-1945 struggle in which both sides embraced irrational assertions and proceeded by shooting randomly into crowds or blowing up innocent bystanders. (One thinks of the line from a nineteenth-century anarchist's trial in France: "There are no innocent bourgeois." Camus was insufficiently convinced of the inevitability of historical reason and too skeptical of the motives of historical actors in an absurd universe to assign unequivocal guilt or innocence to anybody...as I suppose The Stranger might indicate, never mind the later parts of his oeuvre, which I wearily realize ought to be perused in a new context. As reflective regarding Camus' maternal fixations as on his attitude towards his French North African upbringing, Azar's essay is worth working through for the light it does [not] shed on Camus and on more recent discontents.)
I am probably the only person on earth to have gone from that essay to Ron Drummond's update on the wondrous Anniversary Edition of John Crowley's Little, Big, but Drummond's update on the first day of December contains links to marvelous artworks by Peter Milton that (a) set me to thinking inconclusively about the sheer range of the human imagination (and why and how we respond to that range) and (b) wanting to remind people that there is still time to order the book for holiday giving, this time in the hope that it will actually arrive before December 2011.
I don't like to be pushy about these things, however, so I have buried it at the bottom of this post.
Check out http://www.littlebig25.com/PR-101201.html for details.
