Cult of Dan Brown: Foucault's Pendulum

Roger Shattuck, died recently. Shattuck "became an opponent of postmodern trends in the study and teaching of literature, including deconstructionism and semiotics, which he contended stripped literature of its intellectual, moral and human environment. In particular, he lamented that the literary world increasingly failed to celebrate the works of classic writers"-- from NYTimes obit.

Eco is a professor of semiotics and the late Shattuck, a professor at Boston University, disrespected that line of research apparently. That would make for some boring writing, as you can imagine

""One of the great reductionist hermeneutical schemes, however, which is still influential--indeed in many quarters of the academy and elsewhere it enjoys the status of an unquestioned assumption--is the idea developed by one of Nietzsche's most acute students, Michel Foucault, who has followed up on his master's insistence that all cultural expressions, however represented, have to be reduced to a basic fundament, namely, the conflict of powers. The methodology employed by Foucault's latter-day disciples is startlingly simple: look for evidence of oppression. All other questions of style, content, beauty, and truth are not only irrelevant, but probably camouflage. The core issue is power; nothing else really exists. Frank Kermode writes witheringly of the "Foucauldian" school: "It is held to be axiomatic that all knowledge, being socially constructed, has no objective validity--though the knowledge on which this belief is founded is silently excluded from the censure. Professors who are willing to admit that they care very little for literature (it is now quite usual for some of them to do so) will seek in it the one thing that interests them, a political content of which the significance is predetermined, thus committing what Ellis calls "the fallacy of the single factor." They take away from the object of study only what they bring to it....

This said, the problems faced by literary study today as articulated above, are real ones, which I have not exaggerated. The pendulum has swung to an extreme position and the situation has been exacerbated, not ameliorated, by the "hermeneutics of suspicion." In the time remaining to me, I would like to suggest that Christian scholars of literature are in a unique position not only to observe the impasse, but to point to solutions that are distinctively Christian.""

from "The Hermeneutics of Innocence:
Literary Criticism from a Christian Perspective"
Carl P.E. Springer PhD
http://www.leaderu.com/aip/docs/springer.html

Foucalt's pendulum, indeed, has swung. But back to my conspiratorial mind...isn't Boston University where Shattuck taught a Catholic school ? Oh, darn, poor Shattuck wouldn't have wanted THAT information tied to Springer's article ! Egad !

Hermeneutics defined "the theory of interpretation and understanding of a text through empirical means"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermeneutics and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empirical

The conflict between the Templars real secret vs. what the Jesuits wish to keep 'control' of...to my researched 'empirical' testing reveals to me to be the necessity for a Third Temple according to Jesuit-contrived eschatology done in the 1500's by Francisco Ribera, in order to protect the Papacy.

More on Michel Foucault

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Foucault
who, attended a Jesuit school "the Jesuit College Saint-Stanislaus" for what it's worth...

Edited by EVDebs (12/11/05 10:57 AM)