The Kay Ryan poem sounds tongue-in-cheek to me. It's the kind of thing that means what it's saying, but also simultaneously laughing at itself for meaning it.

Curtis, your discussion of the "fossil poetry" aspect of language is right on the money.

Epigone, you write,

For example, I think your claim that Derrida insists that words have "an immutable self-identity" is what a deconstructions would call an "overdetermined, strong misreading."

But I quoted Derrida to back up this point. His own words indicated that he thought words had a recognizable self-identity. You're right, though, about how he and Hofstadter agree in a sense on the relationality of words.

Tom, I agree with Rhina on the Ryan poem. I think she's talking about folk art, art that is REALLY outside the mainstream and will unlikely ever be part of it. Your list of outsider artists almost all experienced great success in their lifetime. But some roadside rural arts and craft shop full of matchstick scupture and nail polish paintings might indeed please us in ways we didn't think we'd be pleased in.

Dear Paul,

Are you the smartest guy around, or what? A deeply impressive essay.

And yet--oh, Paul, I don't know. I feel something wrong in someone of your intelligence bothering with a lot of this stuff. You've drawn your sword against a painted corpse and triumphed over a whited sepulcher.

The Good Lord knows I'm in no position to complain. Even while I was taking courses from Gadamer, I spent my graduate-school years reading Foucault and Derrida as though there were an answer there.

But a lot of time has passed since then. (Remember that the old Sartre dismissed the postmodernists as "young conservatives" for their failure to see, as he declared in the Critique of Dialectical Reason, that it all boils down to socialist economics.)

But now it's been--what, thirty years?--since "Of Grammatology" appeared on the bookshelves of Paris, and most of this stuff has the smell of death about it.

Once upon a time, I even tried to imagine that postmodernism offered serious possibilities for escaping from the iron logic of modernity's iron age. Read this essay, if you want a true blast of datedness and wishful thinking: http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft9402/bottum.html (the first thing I ever published, and remember your own first publications, Paul, before you put me too sharply to mockery).

But postmodernism has swallowed itself, and who now of any moral or intellectual seriousness actually believes this stuff? Let the dead bury the dead. You shouldn't bother while you have so much to say about what comes next.

Jody

Well Paul, it may be that you are reading text and I am reading the subtext--whether tongue-in-cheek or not, I still find her attitude condescending. So don't include me in her "We." And I basically like Kay Ryan's work (I have two books: Elephant Rocks and Say Uncle).

And yes, Mr. Bottum, there are people who find things of use in some postmodern literary criticism. Like any body of critical thought, it has its absurdities, but to dismiss it wholesale? Well so be it. I do hope you will cut some slack to people who think metrical poetry is, without exception, worthless boring shit. The impulse behind both actions seems, to me, to be far more alike than not.

Jody, you're right about the smell of death clinging to postmodernism. At the end of an as yet unpublished essay I make a bad play on words with post modern and post mortem. The essay was finished three or four years ago when I still cared about such stuff. No more. I can't even bring myself to complete the last of the set of essays I had in mind, though given a large swatch of time, I may yet get around to it.

Soon as I get a minute, I'll link to and read your essay. As to my own early efforts, I can't even THINK of them, much less read them without cringing.