Daniel Pearlman wrote:

> I am afraid I do not agree with Carrol that all types of literary
> criticism are in effect reductionist.  This is to define the word
> "reductionism" in such a way as to render it meaningless.  In the
> same way, the word "political" is rendered meaningless by those
> naifs who subscribe to the doctrine that "everything is political."

I think I have to agree pretty much with this disagreement. One does not want to
leach all meaning from the term "reductionist." Pending further thought, let me
tentatively suggest, howver, that most of the really interesting (and lasting)
literary commentaries tend to be reductionist. That attempts to be too broad run
into the sort of thing that Pound skewers nicely in Canto 28:

            And Mr Lourpee sat on the floor of the pension dining-room
            Or perhaps it was in the alcove
            And about him lay a great mass of pastells,
            That is, stubbs and broken pencils of pastelll,
            In pale indeterminate colours.
            And he admired the Sage of Concord
                    "To broad ever to make up his mind."
.........................................................................................

                                                       . . .and il Gran Maestro
            Mr Lizst had come to the home of her parents
            And taken her on his prevalent knee and
            She held that a sonnet was a sonnet
            And ought never to be destroyed,
            And had taken a number of courses
            And continued with hopes of degrees and
            Ended in a Baptist learnery
                            Somewhere near the Rio Grande.

After all, the *Cantos* take a pretty reductionist view of human history -- "With
usura the line grows thick" -- ridiculous, but without that "insight" (horribly
inaccurate and wonderfully fruitful) there would have been no poem, nor any of the
thousand topics the poem throws up for contemplation. Part of the ordinary
person's thinking is adopting to "actual" conditions the brilliant errors of
various reductionists.

The physicists may or may not eventually come up with a TOE (Theory of EVerything)
that holds -- but if they do, it will be both a powerful reduction, *and* a
pointer to huge realms of undiscovered material which will both "explained" and
not explained at all by the TOE.

Carrol

P.S. "I am afraid I do not agree with Carrol" -- Why afraid, I'm a fairly harmless
character. :-)