5.0277 Responses: Westerns; Dendrology (2/37)
Elaine Brennan & Allen Renear (EDITORS@BROWNVM.BITNET)
Mon, 12 Aug 1991 18:36:54 EDT
Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 5, No. 0277. Monday, 12 Aug 1991.
(1) Date: Sun, 11 Aug 91 18:51:55 CST (21 lines)
From: (James Marchand) <marchand@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>
Subject: westerns
(2) Date: Mon, 12 Aug 91 15:55:34 EDT (16 lines)
From: dthel@conncoll.bitnet
Subject: dendrology
(1) --------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Sun, 11 Aug 91 18:51:55 CST
From: (James Marchand) <marchand@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>
Subject: westerns
I have wiped my slate clean, so I do not have a record of what was posted,
but someone was searching for an author of Westerns, and I haven't seen an
answer. As someone who cut his teeth on Zane Gray and those other Writers
of the Purple Sage, an avid reader of and researcher on Westerns, I do not
want to leave a fellow in the lurch. Westerns are well-bibliographied and
discussed. You cannot beat The Reader's Encyclopedia of the American West,
ed. Howard R. Lamar (NY: Harper & Row, 1977), over 1300 pages of info. The
granddaddy of them all is J. Frank Dobie, Guide to Life and Literature of
the Southwest, rev. and enl. in both knowledge and wisdom (Dallas: Southern
Methodist Press, 1952). This can be brought closer with Richard W. Etulain,
A Bibliographical Guide to the Study of Western American Literature, 2d ed.,
1982. This can be brought then up-to-date by consulting the yearly bibs
in Western American Literature, a great journal published in Logan. I should
also mention a number of bibliographies from the hand of Ramon Frederick
Adams, also one of the good ones, published by the University of Oklahoma
Press.
Jim Marchand
(2) --------------------------------------------------------------20----
Date: Mon, 12 Aug 91 15:55:34 EDT
From: dthel@conncoll.bitnet
Subject: dendrology
In regard to James Marchand's comment that the tendence to think in "trees" may
be hard-wired into our brains, we can contrast the opinion of Martin Bernal in§
Black Athena. He says on p. 226 that this is a tendency of Romanticism that
assumes an essentialist and progressivist view, and occasionally a teleological
one to boot. According to him it fed the belief that languages have an inherent
nature that persists through its later ramifications. This by his thesis was the
influence of non-Indo-European factors on Western culture. Specifically of cours
classical Greek, but that the tree metaphor, as well as the family metaphor,
was used by philologists to preserve the purity of classical Greek from such
external influnces.Bernal acknowledges that his is a polemical argument, but it
might be worth discussing here both the history of the metaphor and whether it
is beign unfairly castigated. Dirk Held, Classics, Connecticut College..