Thanks for the following reply. I did not mean to be unfair to Owen, I
think his book iss wonderful, but in some ways limited.
>I would like to come to the defense of Owen by shifting the analogy,
>which I do not think is apt. A better, although still imperfect
>metaphor, would be that Owen is treating Parker's style as a language,
>that is a set of rules that generates utterances. In attempting to
>isolate the "morphological" elements of Parker's tongue, and the syntax
>of their use, he is doing what a lingguist would do who was describing a
>hitherto undescribed, or even undeciphered language. In doing so, one
>hardly does violence to semantics (which would also have to be studied)
>or poetics; it is just a preliminary description for the understanding
>of one part of the language. Structuralists such as Roman Jakobson even
>analyzed poetry in a similar manner and it may be that Owen, at the time
>that he was writing his dissertation, was influenced by this kind of
>analysis, which was very much in the air in US universities in the
>sixties. He may also have been influenced by the work of Millman Parry
>and Alfred Lord on oral improvised poetry, or even by the work of the
>Russian scholar Vladimir Propp. Lord's book, The Singer of Tales, which
>was quite popular, shows how Serbian bards would improvise long epic
>poems using stock phrases. Lord then attempted to show that here were
>such oral formulae in Homer, and that this was the kind of oral poetry
>that was als present in ancient Greece. In any case, no one would claim
>that this kind of analysis exhausts a text, or that it should be
>considered without reference to aethetics; it is simply one part of the
>style of an artist, which is as much craft as soul. The syntax of
>colors of a Cezanne, Matisse or Klee is as much part of their style as
>anything else.Just a few randon thoughts-Piotr
>
That is precisely why I drew my analogy, rather crudely, I apologise, with
Dickens, it could have been many other more recent writers, e.g., John
Ashbery, Thomas Mann, etc. It is also precisely why I have my reservations
regarding the value or worth of linguistics, or poststructuralist thinking,
sorry analysis. I see that you, to some extent agree with my conclusion;
that the approach is not completely adequate, it has short-comings. Yes,
the palette of colours used is important; equally as Matisse so masterfully
pointed out; when you place the colour, say blue, on the canvass it is
striking, but if the colour vermilion is placed next to it there is some
kind of impact on the original colour, diminishing or increasing its
effect, for example; it also possible to moderate that by describing the
shade of the colours used with adjectives. Similarly with music.
a few random thoughts also, your reply was most interesting and stimulated
my thoughts. I repeat, I do like, and have used Owen's book frequently.
It is Saturday morning, unfortuantely I must go and teach in an hour or so.
Thank you for your thoughts.
Allan.