Dirk,
It was, of course, Garrick's word, not mine, but I didn't find it as
troublesome as others found it.  The word suggested, I thought, a literary
work without topical references or self-conscious "intertextual" allusions.
Tim Romano

At 09:35 AM 12/24/01 -0800, you wrote:
>Your point is well-taken, but why use a term like "self-sufficient", which
>implies so much more?  The terminology itself seems to have been invented in
>order to raise a certain type of work above others by imbuing these works
>with an ontological superiority. Why not just call them "straight-forward"
>or "accessible" or something like that?  Could it be that, though
>accessibility is their touchstone, critics of this ilk wish to retain the
>mystery of the mantle of scholarship and to create an elitism of the
>anti-intellectual?
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Tim Romano [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
>Sent: Saturday, December 22, 2001 6:19 AM
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: "self-sufficient work of art"
>
>
>Not that I agree with the critical stance taken by Garrick Davis ... but I
>think he had in mind the kind of work that makes no recondite or arcane
>allusions, when he used the term "self-sufficient". Take Hemingway's _ The
>Old Man and the Sea _, for example; it alludes broadly to baseball in a way
>that "everybody" would understand, not to its obscure statistics or to a
>particularly dazzling double-play in the bottom of the 8th inning of some
>game that has achieved legendary status among baseball fans, but in the
>form of beloved teams.
>
>To understand Hemingway's allusions requires a deep acculturation. To
>understand Pound's allusions, on the other hand, requires extensive
>book-learning and a cross-cultural, anthropological perspective.  As I
>understood Garrick's question, it might be paraphrased so:  for an epic to
>be a successful epic, doesn't it have to play to the deep acculturation of
>a People, not the to book-learning and polyglot abilities of the elites?
>The cross-cultural and the Epic don't seem to mix, do they?
>
>My reply to that question would be this: the fair critic must ask how the
>Cantos seeks to _transcend_ the epic genre with respect to  Place, Time,
>People, Language, and the task set for its Hero.
>
>Tim Romano