On Feb 26, 2010, at 5:22 PM, [email protected] wrote: > I'm inclined to want to believe that cerebral text is almost a deterrent to > exciting an a.e., but the evidence rebuts me: the fates of Hamlet, Willy > Loman, Blanche DuBois, depend on a cerebral grasp of their plight. In > Dickinson's poetry, an essential part of the effect derives from the notions behind > her diction. Yet, the cerebral Wallace Steven leaves me cold. At the other > exreme, mere verbal stunting does nothing for me. (E.g. Browning's "How They > Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix": "I SPRANG to the stirrup, and > Joris, and he; I galloped, Dirck galloped, we galloped all three" etc. )
I think you are offering us a false distinction. The "cerebral" experience should be just as open to an emotional dimension as any other experience. Hell, all of representations are so complex and "cerebral" that merely to grasp the unique character or aspect of a picture (i.e., e.g., it's a representation of something else) or theatrical dialogue (i.e., that the language, an incredibly abstract construct to begin with, is offered to us by people "pretending" to be other people) requires a vast exercise in cerebral activity. A dumb sit-com is incredibly cerebral to begin with, and the distance from a sit-com to Shakespeare is not as far as it is from non-language to the sit-com.
