wright's book

Sam Keyes · 29 Jul 2003, 16:05 · from urth-v0307.mbox · original

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: "Sam Keyes" <skeyes at richmond.edu>
Subject: (urth) wright's book
Date: Tue, 29 Jul 2003 11:05:04 -0500 (CDT)
Message-ID: <urth-v0307-3817 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0307/3817.txt.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

> In other news, Peter Wright's book-length study of GW,
> Attending Daedalus, is due out in a few months, and
> I've put up pre-order links through Ultan's Library's
> association with Amazon UK at www.ultan.co.uk....

Interesting.  After searching through the archives of this list, it seems
to me that it's been a while since anyone talked much about the thesis of
Peter Wright's "God-games" articles (though I suspect it is in the
background).  Of course, I'm still quite new to all this--and, at the
moment, interrupting all sorts of other things--but I figured I'd ask:=20
any new thoughts about it?

I, as would many others, appreciate many of the things Wright says, but
what bothers me in the Foundation articles (and I presume, the book) is
the idea that he is somehow demythologizing Urth, Severian, etc.  It seems
to me that this is largely a good thing to do (removing masks, etc.), but
the problem is that there appears to be the assumption (still) that,
having done all this deconstructing, we have finally arrived and can
understand that all the mythic, religious metaphor was only artifice.  And
that seems to me fundamentally opposed to the assumptions of the very
method used to remove these masks in the first place--there is no end to
interpretation, "nothing" (hello Derrida) "outside the text," which means
that though Wright might have removed one layer of mythology, he has only
succeeded in replacing it with another (his own?).

Remember, in relation to all of that, Master Ash's statement about
religion and science.

snk

--=20

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net