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ORIGINAL_SOURCES

                                             December 9, 2021

  Kawame Anthony Appiah,
  from "The Key to All Myths",           LEVI-STRAUSS
  on Claude Lévi-Strauss:


   Appiah observes, quite rightly:

   "When the landmarks of science succeed in advancing
   their subject, they need no longer be consulted:
   physicists don't study Newton; chemists don't pore
   over Lavoisier.  Their publications are subsumed and    SLOW_JUNG 
   supplanted by later installments of scientific
   inquiry."

   He continues:

   "By contrast, cultural objects-- innervated by the
   literary or musical imagination-- ask to be
   experienced as themselves and for themselves."

                                                      
        It occurs to me: they can ask for this, but        
        they can't really get it.  Any understanding       
        a modern reader develops is necessarily based      
        on the modern context-- you can't read a work      
        like _Moby Dick_ in the same way it was read      MOBY_DICK
        when it was published (to the extent that it       
        *was* read, which wasn't much).                    
                                                           
        Arguably people would not still read novels       
        a century old, except for the press-agentry
        of literary studies departments where an
        article of faith is that it's worthwhile          (Isn't there a movie 
        to return to the original texts.                   version of this?)
                                                           



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