Ryan Ruby would say that after literally writing a novel about a wide-eyed young searcher who falls under the spell of a dark, brilliant, charismatic peer.
I remember liking Siddhartha (an older woman saw me reading it at the job I had at the time said “I read that when I was your age! Of course I was smoking pot at the time!”), I’ll have to check out Demian. Mostly agree about orientalism, you wouldn’t want to go back, but yes what’s developed is destructive. Interesting anecdote about Class of 2000-I get the impression you could probably get it published somewhere minor/middling today, but depending on when it was written you probably made the right call.
Demian's very short, with very clear prose, no Mann-like heaviness, and can be read in a day or two. I'm working up to The Glass Bead Game! The Class of 2000 probably could be published today, at least by a small press like Clash or Expat. But in 2016-2020? More doubtful. The problem with Said, and I think he came to understand this actually, is that he and especially his followers over-generalized from a specific topic (imperialist power politics in primarily Arab lands, backed by an older culturally Christian aversion to Islam) to a much more totalizing condemnation of any aesthetic exoticism at all or of the usually fairly respectful and mutual artistic interchange between Western Europe and East Asia, etc.
Yes, I’ve got a half-written and decade+ out of date essay sitting around somewhere that argues that the multiculturalism of early vampire weekend is as transgressive as the pining for the aesthetics of the segregation era in early Lana Del Rey for roughly this reason.
To the extent that many of the modernists including Eliot, Joyce, Hesse, Mann, Borges, and others had the ambition of synthesizing different cultures and traditions, then yes, though obviously the impulse is older (Dante, Cervantes, Spenser, Milton, Goethe) even if not formally ecumenical in the religious sense and sometimes even guised as its opposite. Why recommended? Because we don't have much of a choice, given the information environment. It's essentially not even possible at this point to develop in a single tradition.
Ryan Ruby would say that after literally writing a novel about a wide-eyed young searcher who falls under the spell of a dark, brilliant, charismatic peer.
The synopsis is a bit Demian-ish. I guess the archetypes win again.
I remember liking Siddhartha (an older woman saw me reading it at the job I had at the time said “I read that when I was your age! Of course I was smoking pot at the time!”), I’ll have to check out Demian. Mostly agree about orientalism, you wouldn’t want to go back, but yes what’s developed is destructive. Interesting anecdote about Class of 2000-I get the impression you could probably get it published somewhere minor/middling today, but depending on when it was written you probably made the right call.
Demian's very short, with very clear prose, no Mann-like heaviness, and can be read in a day or two. I'm working up to The Glass Bead Game! The Class of 2000 probably could be published today, at least by a small press like Clash or Expat. But in 2016-2020? More doubtful. The problem with Said, and I think he came to understand this actually, is that he and especially his followers over-generalized from a specific topic (imperialist power politics in primarily Arab lands, backed by an older culturally Christian aversion to Islam) to a much more totalizing condemnation of any aesthetic exoticism at all or of the usually fairly respectful and mutual artistic interchange between Western Europe and East Asia, etc.
Yes, I’ve got a half-written and decade+ out of date essay sitting around somewhere that argues that the multiculturalism of early vampire weekend is as transgressive as the pining for the aesthetics of the segregation era in early Lana Del Rey for roughly this reason.
Is it the ecumenism itself that you’re identifying as modernist? And, if it is, why is it being recommended so firmly?
To the extent that many of the modernists including Eliot, Joyce, Hesse, Mann, Borges, and others had the ambition of synthesizing different cultures and traditions, then yes, though obviously the impulse is older (Dante, Cervantes, Spenser, Milton, Goethe) even if not formally ecumenical in the religious sense and sometimes even guised as its opposite. Why recommended? Because we don't have much of a choice, given the information environment. It's essentially not even possible at this point to develop in a single tradition.