5 Matching Annotations
  1. Mar 2017
    1. That summer was the first time he rented an inexpensive cottage on Gotts, a remote island off the coast of Maine; it lacked running water and electricity but was covered in pine forests and romantic mists. There, he wrote Levin, he was “reading nothing more frivolous than Plotinus and Husserl,” and Harry was welcome to join him “if Wellfleet becomes too worldly.”

      Paul de Man is buried on Gotts

  2. Feb 2017
    1. To determine these points belongs to good sense;

      "Good Sense" being defined as "the sense not to be Inappropriate." "Inappropriate" being defined as "working within the boundaries established by Good Sense."

      It's politeness all the way down!

    2. follow the crowd blindly

      Polite Literature is all about following the crowd and inclining towards the comfort of the majority, so there's a bit of a question loaded in this.

      It goes to the heart of the question of taste: surely we've all had foods we don't love, but still eat because the weird culture of St. Louis demands we, politely, eat it.

  3. Jan 2017
    1. Obscurity, verbosity, and pretentiousness arc to be avoided; unusuul words are to be used only when they aid clarity and prevent the aforementioned faults

      That's Scudery's influence, I'll bet. Salon rhetoric really discouraged showing off, and preferred a social contract of inclining to the majority's ability when it came to stylistic elements. I believe there's an interesting feminist reading of this--female rhetoric has to walk a finer line for fear of threatening social norms of power.

  4. Jun 2015
    1. the social media narrative recalled Cold War ideas that capitalist technology would triumph over communist inefficiency, as if people in the Middle East couldn’t have rebelled on their own without the gifts of American entrepreneurs. In the end, whatever was tweeted, there was no Twitter revolution in Iran.

      Would like to know more about the Cold War ideas referenced above.