Miles Jackson wrote:
>
>
> And this is where Jerry's argument fails: he declares that X is
> "pointless" based on his own perspective, and then does not consider the
> possibility that X could have some positive social effects that he
> didn't anticipate. --Who knows what positive social effects the work of
> Foucault or Zizek or Derrida could have in our society? Jerry will no
> doubt say "none", but that's not an observation based on evidence;
> that's an assumption based on an a priori assessment of a particular
> form of writing.
Jerry admires Shelley. From 1947 to 2006 I virtually ignored Shelley. Once in a while I'd try to read him only to decide it really wasn't worth the struggle. Then early last summer, wandering the shelves of the ISU library, I pulled off the shelves a book entitled _The Supplement of Reading: Figures of Understanding in Romantic Theory and Practice_ -- and mostly as a whim checked it out and brought it home. Then mostly through orneryness kept reading it despite the fact that, knowing nothing myself of Kierkegaard, Schleiermacher, the later Blake, Hegel's Aesthetics, F.W.J. Schelling, much of it was pretty opaque to me. Then I got to the last section, chapters on Shelley: The Defense, Prometheus U., and the Triumph of Life. I didn't follow them very well, but even so for the first time in 50 years I got a bit interested in Shelley and went out and bought the Norton Poetry & Prose of Shelley. She discusses Alastor as introductory to PU, and I now have had the experience of reading that poem and remembering it for at least a week or two, which had never been the case before when I spent a few hours checking on whether Shelley might have an interest for me. I'm still not convinced, and I'll probably stick with Jonson & Rochester, Milton & Pope and Wordsworth, Browning & Moore and Pound, but she has gotten my attention.
So if Jerry thinks reading Shelley is a good thing, then he really ought to pause for a bit on whether T. Rajan is all that worthless or not. :-)
Carrol