[lbo-talk] media

socialismorbarbarism socialismorbarbarism at gmail.com
Tue Aug 3 13:22:13 PDT 2010


Me: "I can't, because Genet was born in 1910, and his seminal works were created before the invention of the word processor."

I realize this might sound flip. It isn’t meant to be. One can’t judge “literary style” as if the social and technical* parameters or literary production set at that historical level of development didn’t exist. In some writers this can be all but explicit, as in the case of Hemingway, whose style can’t be properly judged without some understanding of 1) the political economy of journalism, and 2) the technical limitations of the typewriter. But some sort of historically-determined limits exist for all writers, and one simply can’t divorce the work from these limits.

Of course, this does not exhaust the range of possible analyses of a text, which are infinite. But for the kind of analyses that are being carried out in this thread (the role of the historical development of literary technology on literary works), this can’t be ignored.

*Although properly speaking “the technical” should be understood as a subset of “the social.”

On Tue, Aug 3, 2010 at 9:54 AM, socialismorbarbarism <socialismorbarbarism at gmail.com> wrote:
> Dennis Claxton: "Can anyone imagine Jean Genet using a word processor?"
>
> I can't, because Genet was born in 1910, and his seminal works were
> created before the invention of the word processor.
>
> On Tue, Aug 3, 2010 at 9:44 AM, Dennis Claxton <ddclaxton at earthlink.net> wrote:
>> At 07:48 PM 8/2/2010, Doug Henwood wrote:
>>
>>
> ....
>



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