My heights don't particularly wuther. Why is that? I suppose I should be grateful I do not live on a moor in a time before electricity, especially if there were no Secret Garden Dickons around to keep one sane.

For the life of me, I can't remember a single thing about deconstruction that I learned in college, except that it didn't get an "ism" at the end because "it wasn't a philosophy".

Dead puppies aren't much fun.

Cathy in the beginning haunts that lame-ass tenant narrator. One of the best (and most disturbing) scenes ever written.

But then you read the last line: "I lingered round them, under that benign sky: watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells, listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass, and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth."

I.e. "There are no ghosts, reader! Sucker! Ha-ha!"

I like that.

But that's just what the narrator thinks, and he's very fallible. Earlier they say that the shepherds around there see the ghosts of Cathy and Heathcliff wandering the moors. It's left to the reader to decide.

Cindy --

I have no poly-sci theory under my belt, and I took Philosophy 101 in the Fall of '85 (and mostly paid attention to cute!boy), so most of me is pretty convinced I'm over my head already, Strega.

Oh, gosh, I'm not speaking from any great font of knowledge. Especially about poli-sci. It's entirely possible I'm talking nonsense that sounded convincing to me at 2 AM. Wouldn't be the first time.

Doesn't pluralism presuppose relativism? Also, I am unconvinced that pluralism is the opposite of absolutism.

I think they're on different levels. Pluralism and absolutism are both about how we should receive and evaluate new ideas. Absolutism says that everything should be judged against the One True Idea, and if there's a contradiction, the new idea is heresy. We do still evaluate ideas in a pluralistic society -- new ideas are incorporated into old ones, or thrown out, or the old idea is replaced. Pluralism doesn't mean "all ideas are equally good," it means "all ideas deserve an equal hearing."

Relativism isn't really opposed to either of those things; it's questioning the basis of evaluation, and says that we can't judge because it's all subjective. We're in a pluralistic society where relativism has been a fairly successful idea. And in some academic circles, it has reached authoritarian status -- saying "I think Shakespeare is inherently better than Toni Morrison" can cause a pretty huge backlash.

How would you have categorized those two statements by Solomon? To you, do they seem odd, proposed side by side?

They made sense to me, though I agree he was being a little too pithy to make his point very well. I think the argument was that books are pluralistic; they allow people to share new ideas and points of view very easily. Relativism isn't all bad, but taken to extremes, it demeans any statement about why one thing is better than another. So that has a bad effect on pluralism, if we can't judge ideas (or books) and say some are better than others. And that in turn makes it hard to counter authoritarian arguments; if all points of view are equally valid, who are we to say theirs is wrong?

Thank you.

So relativism doesn't mean "you can't judge things without a common standard", it means "there is no standard, and can't be one"? Didn't know that.

I always figured it meant "Well, it depends on where you're standing," but that's mostly from physics.

Me, too, ita.

I think that a lot of the problems that arise from the use of post-structuralism and relativism come from the fact that while both are very useful intellectual tools, the vast majority of the people who use them in public really aren't qualified to do so, and are in fact using the mental equivalents of a very complex surgical machine (read: post-structuralism) and a set of finely machined calipers (relativism) as essentially a pair of hammers to beat their daft ideas into students' heads.

And, to leap back a bit more in the conversation, I think one of the major reasons why reading is on such a steep decline in Amurikah is because of the way it's presented in school. Outside of the tireless efforts of a few heroic individuals, most of the teachers I had presented reading as a chore, something to be done because they were required to assign books to us, rather than as something to be done for the joy of it. My best teachers approached reading assignments as an opportunity to introduce us to neat things that would also teach us what we needed to know, but they were few and far between. Fortunately, I was raised in a bookish household, and came to reading outside the scholastic environment. That's where I caught the bug, not in class.

most of the teachers I had presented reading as a chore, something to be done because they were required to assign books to us, rather than as something to be done for the joy of it.

Oh, God, YES. I can't tell you how many reading contests my kids' schools have had, where you read so many books and get a prize, so many more books and get a bigger prize....

Reading IS the prize. Paying somebody to read tells them it's something that they wouldn't want to do otherwise.