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nevinator's review
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced
3.0
Eliot’s challenge to non-believers is to write more “moral fiction”. He sees this as a necessity for good literature as it shows people as “moral wrestlers” and not glorifying the wonderful messes we make as a form of entertainment.
His biggest claim of media being “traditional-less” in the ways we engage with authors feels hallow. He wants literature to be a catalyst of divine norms, and yet believes this only done through literature. Eliot tried to make an “orthodoxy” so he can warns on what he views, critically, as “heresy”. Yet, his narrowing shows an indifference towards the world, the experience, that everyone brings to literature. The fact that literature is not building its own tradition leaves it to the culture and the times to decipher it and literature can’t be the embodiment of norms beyond those tradition, is the heart of Eliot’s concern.
This is the a different take on the “death of the author”, it is a hallowing out of the body for a divine tradition. This is what made Eliot hard to read for me here: It was disheartening for me to see embodied living as just another tool to for a “greater good”, instead of the state of being we all are.
His biggest claim of media being “traditional-less” in the ways we engage with authors feels hallow. He wants literature to be a catalyst of divine norms, and yet believes this only done through literature. Eliot tried to make an “orthodoxy” so he can warns on what he views, critically, as “heresy”. Yet, his narrowing shows an indifference towards the world, the experience, that everyone brings to literature. The fact that literature is not building its own tradition leaves it to the culture and the times to decipher it and literature can’t be the embodiment of norms beyond those tradition, is the heart of Eliot’s concern.
This is the a different take on the “death of the author”, it is a hallowing out of the body for a divine tradition. This is what made Eliot hard to read for me here: It was disheartening for me to see embodied living as just another tool to for a “greater good”, instead of the state of being we all are.
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