From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Mon Sep 02 2002 - 20:20:10 MDT
At 04:10 PM 9/2/02 -0700, Lee wrote:
>Bruno
>Latour, notorious arch-post-modernist, while discussing the
>to him ridiculous contention of French scientists in 1976
>that Ramses II died of tuberculosis, "How could Ramses II
>die in 1213 B.C. from a bacillus discovered by Robert Koch
>in 1882?". Post-modernism really can mess up some people's
>thinking.
I'd like to see the precise context of Bruno's comment; it certainly would
not have been intended to imply that the bug didn't exist until a 19th C
white guy gave it a name. But if he did (inexplicably), people were making
that kind of stupid remark long before modernism was posted. In a second or
third year English essay I submitted back at the dawn of history, I
analyzed WUTHERING HEIGHTS in parlor Freudian terms. (We weren't taught
that dirty sex stuff back then, of course, not in prim, realistic
Orstrylya.) Heathcliff as rampant Id, that sort of thing. My prim,
realistic tutor marked this piece of cod hermeneutics with bold red,
explaining that this was impossible since Freud had not made his
discoveries at the time the book was written. I screamed and ran around my
room. But maybe she was telling me that Freud had made it all up and there
was no such Thing in the real world as an Id, and so Bronte could not have
been describing it out of her own self-knowledge, as I had implied.
Damien Broderick
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