Correspondence

Written in response to: Textures of Language and Thought There are some definitions in Luke Fischer’s ‘Textures of Language and Thought’…

I am writing in response to Ben Etherington’s latest Critic Watch piece.

Sneja Gunew responds to Simon Patton.

I thoroughly enjoyed the first round of the Emerging Critics reviews. Thanks for creating a space for this type of work to flourish. Although Ali Jane Smith and Ben Brooker’s had great merits, particularly Brooker as an inheritor of the Critic Watch series that serves the SRB so well, I found James Halford’s ‘Such Loneliness in that Gold’ particularly worthwhile.

I’m writing in response to Peter Holbrook to question the ideas that knowing things means being able to recall them, that knowledge is the necessary first step to thought, and that information is anywhere near as important as thinking.

‘The three terrifically sensitive lady novelists signing our names below are startled and offended by your reviewer Beth Driscoll’s collective dismissal of any discriminating powers of intellectual application to our respective works.’ Novelists Stephanie Bishop, Antonia Hayes, and Susan Johnson respond to ‘Could Not Put It Down’.

It is interesting to reflect further on the reasons for the short life span of most literary journals. One contributing factor, which I want to highlight, is the economic difficulty. Funding is hard to come by in literature, especially when we compare it to other artforms.

To suggest as Weaver does that Day has in some way rendered the central female character without agency or voice is to miss the point of the narrative. Both characters, Wes and Leonie, share a motherless and inarticulate grief that is gradually and carefully released and given shape and place in their eventual coming together.

Luke Carman evokes poor old Gilles Deleuze as he sets out on his ‘what are writers festivals for?’ inquiry. He at least has the grace then to say we should ‘put aside’ what Deleuze meant when he said, ‘To write is to become something other than a writer’: indeed, that ‘something other’ is a beguiling and strange idea, a lifetime’s contemplation really. As for suggesting that ‘nowhere is Deleuze’s complex of “unbecoming” more evident than in the proliferation of the literary festival’, while that’s an amusing misuse of the French translation, it’s a furphy

It seems to me that Simone Weil’s essay says more about her desire to identify with the powerless, and about her wish to reconcile her love of the Greeks and of the Gospel, than about the Iliad. This is not to say that it is not worth careful consideration, but that one should read it warily, and perhaps after a recent reading of the Iliad.