[lit-ideas] Re: Molesworth and The Feminine Technique
- From: David Ritchie <ritchierd@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 17 Mar 2005 10:43:14 -0800
on 3/17/05 9:42 AM, Mirembe Nantongo at nantongo@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
Rather than to the intellect, the central appeal is to
> emotion and to empathy and to the imagination. Conversations with Arab friends
> seem to point to their finding mainstream opinion pieces in the US style
> superficial, in the sense that nothing in them is left to interpretation,
> nothing provokes the imagination, there is no attempt to demonstrate
> or to inspire empathy.
>
> And the reason I was struck by Deborah Tannen's piece is that she seemed to be
> articulating this very difference, but, oddly enough, between male & female
> opinion writers in the US, rather than between Arab & US opinion writers!
Could this be a temporal rather than a gender split? To take a Marxist
view...could it be that Arab writers have the rhetoric that goes with a
certain stage of capitalism, some equivalent of the elaborate writing of
Victorian westerners? Perhaps they just haven't experienced the modernist
rupture?
Or, second possibility, perhaps the issue is geography, the rareness of
flowers making flowery language more valuable?
Third possibility, they know more about seduction than we do...
I'm throwing out notions like dandelion seeds or cabers today, because I
went to a talk this week about the latest in brain research. Most of what
was said concerned cerebral locations--vision inputs are processed here,
sound here and so on; findings from CAT scan research. But the fellow
talked throughout about "the" brain, so in question time I asked about
handedness and sex and so on. Given the recent fuss at Harvard, he was
predictably guarded in his answer, but the gist of what he said was that
current science, while acknowledging that there are some differences,
particularly in brain size--Einstein's was below average--shows that what we
have in common is much, much greater than what divides us.
>
> My two cents' worth for today. Those sick of hearing me whine about how tough
> Arabic is should circle May 31 on their calendar -- the day of my final exam!!
>
Good luck with the exam. Remember, "Je suis i am a pot of jam, tu es, thou
art a clot etc." Hold true to Molesworth and yule win through in the end.
David Ritchie
Portland, Oregon
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