I pretty much agree with this post as a whole, and in principle with this paragraph. But there are problems here, problems which perhaps in part explain the willingness/eagerness of some, including Chuck G, to find a way to dismiss the "postmoderns." (Incidentally, there are serious problems of reference with that term, as there are with almost all popular attempts to pigeonhole some large amorphous group. Surely someone is now writing a book or essay proving that postmodernism never existed.)
The problem is one I've been raising off and on for over 30 years since I first raised it in a paper for an English Department forum . At the time I was I the midst of a huge effort to read all the commentary on Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained that had been written from (rouglhly) 1945 to 1975. In the event, I didn't come close. I didn't get read even all the _important_ scholarship during that period. That's one little narrow field (criticism focused on two poems) within one fairly narrow field (Milton scholarship) within another not all that wide field (literary criticism and scholarship during the third-quarter of the 20th century). Then at one point I wasted two months wrestling with a mote in the dot in the I in in the Poster for Pepsi Cola. Milton has an extraordinary conversation between Adam and Eve at the beginning of Book IX in which Eve proposes that they work spearately (to get more done etc); Adam disagrees; the conversation becomes almost heated at times considering that these are two unfallen cratures. Finally Eve gains her point and off she goes to meet the serpent and eat the apple.
Well, there is a really large literature just on this one scene, and that commentary gets pretty heated at times. Eve was wrong to propose parting but Adam was right to o.k. it. Eve was right to popose parting, but Adam was wrong to allow it. Eve was wrong, but Adam's argument was the wrong argument to dissuadfe her. On & on. Well, I thought, I'll try to somehow categorize the various possibilities, trying various ways of constructing matrixes which would relate all the various complex readings of the seene in relation to each other. After two months and hundreds of 5x8 cards I gave it up. (I don't know what the hell Venn diagrams are, but from Rudy & ravi's conversation it sounds like they might have helped me, though they would have to have been more than 3d.)
That's one little tiny corner of a corner of a corner of the huge intellectual and artistic output of just writers in English in a period of a thrid of a century or so. Fifty yers ago G.B. Harrison, the Shakespeare scholar, in coffee-room chat at Michigan mentioned that while he still surveyed the bibliogrphies he had given up on reading the outpouring of Shakespeare scholarship that appeared month after month. Has anyone on this list read much of the marvelous writings of the 17th-c historian, Christopher Hill? Has anyone read much of Ruskin, whose writings I understand had a great influence on Proust. Bertrand Russell, _Human Knowledge_: a book that has a sort of epic wonder to it, and should be of interest to anyone who is interested in good writing and imaginative power (independently of what one things of the philsophical argument it makes). Susanne Langer's Feeling and Form is, I feel mistaken in its fundamental premises, but it was a titanic effort to crate a structure which would account for the various arts in their differences and in their fundamental likeness. So even if you disagree with almost every paragraph in it, it is still and exciting book. And I've mentione Kenneth Burke's _Grammar of Motives_ several times, a book that is probalby wrong headed but introduces the most amazing array of possibilities. (Marianne Moore in one of her poems mentions Burke's "acute raccon-like curiosity.") And in his _Rhetoric of Motives_ he has a long discussion of Castiglione's The Courtieer - how many on ths list have read that book. I bought it 50 years ago and never did get around to reading it. My loss.
The last time I raised this topic (not the information overload but the knowledge and wisdom overload) Andie tried t reduce the list of essetnial books, dismissing my interest in Pound as hard to understand. Perhaps, but one could make an index from the Poem of human experience, of directions the poem points, of questions it opens up, of fields of knowledge it just glances at in passing, which would provide a lifetime's reading for a whole colelctive of readers. And one of the last fragments he wrote for it (it is 'unfinished') contains the lines, "I could not make it cohere / It coheres alright / but ." Quoted from memory. That is, it registers the effort of one man of kooish temptations but nevertheless quite titanic talent over a lifetime to make a huge miscellaneou collection of materials (from China, Europe, Africa, North America, etc) cohere, and that 'failure' to make it choere is something one could spend a lifetime explorting the significance of.
Literacy steadily increases. The size of libraries grows. The population explodes. Eighty years ago I.A. Richards wailed that there was something wrong because on the basis of emographics the early 20th century should have 5 good poets for every one of their grandparents' age, and it didn't. But he was wrong. There was a huge outpouring of 'great' poetry during that and the following decade, and there is no way anyone but a freak can keep up with all of it. Johnson ended his biography of Milton by saying o fParadise Lost that it was the second greatest epic (after the Iliad) only because the Iliad had been written first. (Something like that.) I suspect that something similar could be said of Wordsworth's Prelude and Pound's Cantos.
Let me quote again shag's paragraph in case you've forgotten where I started:
>
> 3. wouldn't it be more interesting to ask what each individual thinker had
> in mind -- in terms of who/what they were hoping to influence.
Yes it would - but one can also begin an endless list of those books which should be so considered. Both Ian and shag have read far more widely than I have, but I suspect if they put their minds to it each could make a list as long as mine of books they should have read and haven't.
There are various dodges, conscious and unconscious, to get around this glut of writing. One is by classifying, then finding reasons to dismiss some of the categories. Postmodernism is one of such categories. Surrealism. Augustanism. Baroque. Analytic Philosophy. "Theory." And so forth. A most disreputable dodge, but really, almost a necessry one. Of course after not reading some category (like the literature on error theory) one should be honest enough in any arguments involving it, to acknowleddge that one has classified and disregarded it.
Carrol