In a message dated 01/18/2000 3:32:46 AM Eastern Standard Time,
[log in to unmask] writes:
 
<<
 I think I was mostly responding to Richard Kennedy's e-epistolary rationale
 for the eclipse of Thomas Wolfe's reputation -- that and Edward Said's
 complaint about computers, assuming Robert Kibler's paraphrase is accurate.
 ("Edward Said, in his address to the MLA at the recent convention in
 Chicago, suggested that computers are making students lazy lightweights.")
 The problem with such claims is that they aren't ideas, they're tropes.
 They have no factual basis; in fact, considered as sentences, they don't
 even have subjects. In the sentence "Computers are making students lazy
 lightweights," for instance, the real thematic work is done by the verb
 phrase "are making students lazy lightweights." By contrast, the noun
 "computers" is just a placeholder. Substitute "Women" and the only real
 change is a change in venue: from the MLA convention hotel to the lawn of
 The Citadel.
 
 Of course Pound himself sometimes succumbed to that grand fatuity, the
 notion of tradition. But after all, what is the first real piece of
 hypertext? The Cantos!
 
 Jonathan Morse
 
  >>
of course, the Cantos are no such thing, a silly remark, actually, and more
applicable to Jonathan's fatuous notion of "trope" than Edward Said's remark
-- as if being a trope somehow invalidates whatever truth it might contain.
but most amusing is his suggestion that if one changes "computers" to "women"
all that changes is the venue!  let's see -- women are making students lazy
lightweights -- if Said had said such a thing, I guarantee that the subject
would not be viewed as a mere placeholder.  instead of dismissing Said's
observation out of hand, intellectual honesty requires one search for it's
possible meaning -- it's truth.  I think it's safe to assume that Said had
something in mind; to ignore this obligation suggests to me that Jonathan has
an agenda that he's keeping under his verb phrases.
 
joe brennan