Ted Winslow wrote:
>
> Carrol Cox wrote:
>
> > If I were to engage in such amateur mass psychologizing I would
> > think Thoreau's quiet desperation a more useful start, but I don't
> > have much evidence for that either. I think we would do best to
> > knock off on the amateur psychology.
>
> Is all "mass psychologizing" to be avoided as necessarily amateur?
> What about Marx's for instance?
Not at all. But the linkages of fear and anger in this thread were _wholly_ arbitrary and ungrounded; actually what they were were bad literary criticism applied to an non-literary question, thus doubly silly.
If you want to see what I mean here by bad literary criticism, subscribe to the Austen-L list and observe how posters there burble about this or that character in an Austen novel having this or that motive.
Carrol