Been reading all the discussions about ep & fascism for the last six months and watched the flareup the past month or so. Now that the flame's dying down again I'd like to throw on a little kerosene. Though the topic matters to me greatly, I don't get anything from most of the discussions on this list. Seems to me they suffer from too much categorical thinking, much of it moralizing in the sanctimonious american way. First the scholar places Pound in the vice of the category, then s/he hammers him. What in the sainted devil's name is the point? What i would like to hear, and don't hear, is: 1. Interrogation of the categories, Fascist (big -f or little), anti-Semite, etc. 2. Contextualization. What is the ongoing discourse which give rise to P's words and to which they respond? Redman in <EP & Italian Fascism> showed us how this could be done. 3. And historicization that links the present to the past. A proposal: A few years ago --1996?--there were some fine pieces on P & Fascism/anti-Semitism by Chalres Bernstein, Marjorie Perloff, and others. I think the items are still out there on the Buffalo poetics list. Would it be ok for me to download a few of these articles and send them to our p-list in the hopes that they would improve our discussions? Some will have already read them. Many others, i think, will have not. Otherwise, we continue to go round the same muddy track, beating the same dead horse--pick your metaphor-- with no sense of what is the live issue and what is the dead. We don't approach the level of discussion of the Buffalo list in 1996. Isn't scholarship supposed to be cumulative? When i ask would it be ok, i mean would it be w/in web protocol to borrow from Peter to instruct Paul? Wayne ===== Via Betti, 289E/2 16035 Rapallo (GE) Italy pho: 0185-234-140 __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Bid and sell for free at http://auctions.yahoo.com