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