In a message dated 3/17/2016 2:39:10 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx writes in "Withdrawing into the poems: "That
expression
may sound pretentious"
well it shouldn't, because it's like 'drawing' as per 'drawing-room', the
opposite of pretentiousness.
Helm:
"but I meant little more than what I previous proposed: that I intended to
devote ... to poetry; which hitherto had been just one of many interests.
But a little bit has changed recently. I mentioned that I intended to read
critics and biographers to keep me focused on poetry. Unfortunately the
more I learned about the various poets, the less I liked them (or their
poetry). So I just recently began seeking focus in literary history."
But isn't some overlap here: some lit.crit. is _historical_ in nature, no?
Helm:
"I decided to start with Curtius' European Literature and the Latin Middle
Ages. I barely got into the Introduction to the 2013 edition by Colin
Burrow, when I encountered something I resisted: Burrow wrote of Curtius,
"His principal thesis is that the classical tradition spread and sustained
itself through the study of rhetoric, and that the chief way in which that
continuity was manifested was through the recurrence of 'topoi,' or rhetorical
commonplaces."
Well, if you think of it, since Helm was mentioning this too, one theory
for the etymology of 'troubadour' is 'tropoi' -- which relates.
Of course 'tropos' and 'place' are one same thing. The addition of 'common'
is perhaps ironic, in that a virtue of the good rhetorician is to think
that he is NOT being common!
Helm goes on quoting from Burrow:
"These included notions that could be digested into a single phrase, such
as the puer senex . . . " --
Well I love rhetoric. "Flowers of rhetoric", they called them. And
according to Quintilianus, they go deep into the thought. Since there are
rhetorical figures of SPEECH (skhema lexeos) but also rhetorical figures of
THOUGHT. Turner, a modern 'cognitive scientist', has researched into how much
of
our idiomatic expressions are 'blends' of these two types of 'schemata'. What
I love about 'schemata' is that if you say, "The sky is blue", which
sounds literal and boring -- but of course it's very complicated
philosophically
-- that's still a schema or figure -- a literal schema or figure, but a
schema or figure nevertheless. So Burrow should not be sticking with
elaborated figures, since 'speaking and thinking straight' and literally is
ALSO a
'tropos' -- and perhaps one one of the most difficult ones!
Helm: "Earlier Burrow quotes Curtius as believing that "A community of
great authors throughout the centuries must be maintained if a kingdom of mind
is to exist at all." Will Curtius argue that writers ought to stick to
the traditional topoi? Would Harold Bloom agree that all of the writers in
The Western Canon stuck to traditional topoi?"
Well, apparently not even the classics did! They never agreed as to the
best taxonomy of 'topoi', and the names of the topoi tend to overlap, not to
mention their definitions, which are always varying!
Helm: "Burrow writes toward the end of his introduction, "The Middle Ages
described here are not at all dark. they are effectively a long series of
renaissances and enlightenments that run on until the eighteenth century,
after which the real dark ages begin." I wonder what Curtius has in mind.
Have the topoi been expanded into poetic themes, literary genres? And what
does he mean when he writes (assuming Burrow is accurate) that our
civilization entered the "real dark ages" after the eighteenth century?"
Well, the 'topos' "dark" as applied to the ages is confusing. If you are an
Anglo-Saxon, like Tolkien, you LOVE that darkness! The use of 'darkness'
may have been introduced to oppose to the Mediterranean midi of Graeco-Roman
culture? Goths and such!
Helm:
"Mathew Arnold's Philistines, Spengler's Decline of the West, Arnold
Toynbee's Civilizational suicide? All this is very provocative and I may be
straying further from poetry than I intend, but . . . "
One problem with the Latin Middle Ages is that they didn't have rhyme, did
they? The Anglo-Saxons did have rhyme, but head-rhyme, no end rhyme. And
Latin was developing so fast into Italian, French, and what have you, that
I'm never sure how _I_ would feel having that sort of 'bilingual' dichotomy
in my brain: to speak in the 'vulgar' to, say, my mother, and write in the
'learned' to say, my tutor. Never mind the tropoi! It may be argued that
some idiomatic expressions in French and Italian do NOT derive from
Graeco-Roman classical sources, and it may well be the case that some
'classical'
tropoi went over the vulgar speakers's head in "Latin-speaking Europe", which
seems to be the topic of Curtius's history.
Cheers,
Speranza
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