#and it makes me sad that there are so many barriers to studying ancient greek and roman texts because like. it's literally fun!

[classicslesbianopinions]

Does one need to be smart to read classic literature by writers such as Homer or Virgil? I follow various people studying the classics because it's fascinating but half the time I don't understand what they are saying. Whenever I try to read any of the epic poems, for example, it just makes me feel very unintelligent because I have a vey hard time understanding what I'm reading.

i don't think you have to be smart-- you just have to be patient.

i'm about to do a wall of text, so here's the tl;dr: it's very common to feel unintelligent, but it makes sense to struggle when reading something so old, and you should not be afraid to use outside resources to help you understand the context of what you're reading. also, it might help if you start with shorter or abridged works.

"classics" is a really broad field, and even a highly educated classicist will have areas they don't know as much about. like, i also don't understand what other classics bloggers are saying a lot of the time. most of the people i follow have dedicated a lot of time to their specific interests, and if my own interests don't overlap, i'm not going to understand everything they say. but it's very easy to feel like you aren't as smart as others because you haven't read the same stuff or because you struggle to keep up. i feel this way often, even after years of study.

the other thing is that if you're studying classics in college/university, the standards are absurdly high. you're expected to learn both latin and greek, and you're expected to read a lot on top of that. it's very hard to keep up with, and there's often a sense that you are the only one struggling to keep up (even though that's not true). it's also hard to enter into if you haven't already learned some latin or greek, which are not often taught in public schools (in the us at least). so the field is genuinely difficult to enter into, especially if you are not wealthy, white, able-bodied, neurotypical, etc.

to the specific point of trying to read epic poetry-- it makes sense that you would have a hard time understanding. it is hard to understand! and there's a lot of context that you might be missing: it's a work from another time and place, and some of it might be completely unfamiliar to you. that's okay. it is unfamiliar to everyone, no matter how smart they seem. go slowly, and don't be afraid to use summaries and study guides to figure out what's going on. like, literally just read the sparknotes if that helps. (you can probably google "[title] sparknotes" or "[title] study guide" or "[title] summary" and find stuff that will help you understand. i also will sometimes just go to the wikipedia page for a work if i need to know or remember what happened in it. and you can google specific references, too, or lines. if you have a question about something, chances are someone has had the same question at some point in the last ~3000 years.) you might also try reading abridged versions of the texts to get an idea for what's going on, and then when you go back and read the actual text it will be easier to understand.

you might also benefit from starting with some shorter works. the iliad and the odyssey are really interesting, but they're also long and can be hard to get into. personally, i recommend plays, mostly because they tend to be short, and i find them more accessible. sometimes you can even find performances online, which can also help a lot with understanding. i also would recommend hesiod's theogony as an intro to epic; it's much, much shorter than the iliad or the odyssey, and it covers a lot of basic myth. ("theogony" literally means "god origin"-- it gives you the godly family tree.)

translation also makes a huge difference. if you're struggling to read something, you might want a different translation. there are a lot of translations free online, but they tend to be pretty old. if you have access to a library, see what they have to offer; if you want advice on specific translations, you can send another ask and we'll answer and/or publish it and get followers to recommend their favorites.

also, if you post a question to tumblr and tag it #tagamemnon, there's a really good chance people on here will help you answer it. a lot of us really love helping other people understand the stuff we're interested in! it's really fun to share information. (if you're wondering, "#tagamemnon" is a pun on agamemnon, a character from the iliad-- it's the tag classics tumblr uses because #classics has a bunch of other stuff in it.) or if you have a question about something someone posts, you absolutely can go into their ask box and ask for clarification. most people really really want to talk about their interests and are happy to give a basic explanation.

most importantly, though, don't let yourself be intimidated. i have been studying classics for years and i still feel not good enough or not intelligent a lot of the time-- the field has a long history of gatekeeping and elitism, and it's really hard to break out of that. but it's okay and normal to need outside resources to understand a text, or to need to read an abridged version before you read the original. there is no shame in not knowing stuff! and it's okay if it's hard to learn.

anyway i hope this helps. i promise you are not alone in feeling unintelligent. but if you're interested in classics i absolutely believe you can find ways to understand the texts you want to read. good luck! <3 our ask box is always open if you have questions or want to start a conversation about what you're reading-- we can't answer everything but we can publish the ask and see if followers can answer it. and of course if anyone reading this has any input or advice for anon, please reply or reblog!

[zucca101]

Did you just insult all people with degrees to make your life seem better? That's low, even for you.

Why yes, I DO insult them because they have degrees!

It’s all part of my master plan to annoy! Muahahaha!

Heh.

Actually, if you have a degree and you’re insulted by my pointing out that there are jobs that require no degree that pay extremely well, then maybe you need to thicken your skin a little, champ.

After all, you’ve got a degree! So there shouldn’t be any barriers between you and your goals, right?

(If you don’t count a bare minimum of 10.4% unemployment rates if you don’t have a STEM degree)

Tell me... apart from a teaching position yourself (Which will only open up when someone who already teaches it dies or retires), about how much mileage will a degree in Gender Studies, Dance, William Shakespear, Peace Studies, Biblical Studies, Philosophy, Disruption, Theater Studies (Unless there is a study-to-work theater troupe handy), Religious studies, Cooperative Management, Fine Art, English Literature, Creative Writing (Ask how many bestselling authors had this degree. It’s a tiny ratio), French Food, Golf Management, Library Science, Fashion Design (Ask the above question of famous designers), Art History, History of Rock and Roll, African American Studies, Women’s Studies, Renaissance Studies, Anthropology, Ancient Greek....?

I could go on, but I think I’ve made my point.

A degree is not a guarantee. It’s sad, but true.

Sad, because so many students go in thinking that the forty to fifty thousand dollars they spent to get that degree will be easily paid off, when in fact it becomes impossible to on a burger flipper’s budget.

No, I’m not insulting everyone with a degree and you and I both know that. For you to make the accusation is both petty and incorrect.

What I’m saying is that there are alternatives to degrees that don’t involve selling your soul to a bank or the government in order to afford an education that, in this oversaturated environment that has turned an asset (College educated people) into just another commodity, will prove as valuable as the paper it’s printed on.

If someone can get a degree and find work more or less in their chosen soon after graduation, power to them!

But college is not the end all, be all of enabling your future. There’s Trade Schools, there’s Apprenticeships and much, much more! Those without a college degree who work jobs that will always be needed will never go hungry.or homeless.

[ethan1220world-blog]

Audience Studies (3P18) Blog Post #1 - Ethan Limsana

During the introduction of our text, we learn many different ways to describe the concept of an audience and how a particular audience has and can function over time. A critical piece in learning about where we are now, is to examine how they began and evolved overtime based on popularity of politics and social needs. In order to relate to these teachings, I will apply them to my modern life with a form of entertainment that I access daily in many different ways and social settings depending on context: music. Whether it be walking through the supermarket with a pair of headphones on, or at a live concert surrounded by crowds of rowdy young adults, music demonstrates a multitude of ways an audience can be affected. I listen to music daily on my phone with the goal of finding melodies that are addicting, and artists that write lyrics that heighten my emotions either by making me feel excited when I’m energized, or depressed when I’m sad. Once I’ve found the right song, I can listen to it many times before I get bored, and look at other works the author has to offer through streaming platforms like Spotify and YouTube to choose what else I do and don’t like. This work that I’m doing to curate my music tastes are demonstrating an information based audience by simply listening to the artist and what they have to say about a given topic. It also demonstrates a meaning based view because by choosing I like and don’t like, the artist will see those tracks and adapt future works based on the reviews. Although, these messages would be much different face-to-face by exact knowledge given to one another, I am a part of the mass audience and communicate through my views, likes, and shares. This is my role in obtaining music for low cost, often free, for the large profit organizations that provide me music. Like any other job, I perform these roles when I am the audience member, and when I stop listening, I am no longer an audience member. Although I enjoy listening to 1980s music, my music taste has changed due to shifts in society and me as a demographic. As streaming services kept offering me to listen to rap music for being a young adult male, I eventually tried it, giving into Drake, Young Thug, Tupac, and more. Here, my shift in music taste was a result of the audience-as-outcome model because the media altered my taste. As mentioned before, I filter into the grand scheme of advertising and ratings as an individual on my phone, without a public space to listen or review the music, where most others are listening too. Since this experience is primarily alone, and I have no connection with other listeners, I am part of the audience-as-mass model. Not to say I have no power in this situation, I demonstrate audience-as-agent too by telling social media, and the entertainment providers what I think and ultimately making the final decisions of my interests on my own; in this case I happened to not enjoy older rap music, but enjoy modern rap music because it heightened my excitement. I chose to keep what I enjoyed because it fits me and my lifestyle, as an act of my free will. 

A small percentage of the time I spend with music is live because it costs more money, often requires travel, and isn’t nice for time management, but it's the most engaging and memorable musical experiences I’ve ever had because of the nature of crowds. As a practice dating back to ancient Greek and Roman audiences, concerts are the same in essence; hundreds or thousands of people leave their homes to gather in one specific location to listen to a select few. Here, it is entirely dependent on the people on stage to determine the energy of the crowd. At rap concerts, loud music is played, and messages of substance abuse, and violence are in the lyrics. The crowd responds to this content by showing up to the concert dressed in fashionable clothes, drinking, getting high, and most of all, being rowdy by pushing, shoving, crying, and sometimes even fighting. As feared by the end of the 19th century, live concerts often display the potentially destructive qualities of crowds. As an individual listening to music alone, the reality is relatively unchanged from regular society, but when a crowd gets together, it is a temporary change in that particular society as a collective because individual actions have less consequences associated with them and immediate emotions can freely be demonstrated by all. The positives of the crowd are also unchanged; they create a physical setting for me to go, and create a memorable experience for me to worship someone who was already in power, to reinstate my value in enjoying their music, and keep them in power. 

This power opens up new opportunities for record labels and artists to scheme new ways to alter our decision making process to make choices that continue their revenue flow and keep them in power for as long as possible. For example, Drake and his label OVO, use advertising and multimedia to keep us thinking about his music and persona even when we’re not listening. The money made from live events and music sales, goes into buying and selling merchandise, buying restaurants, maintaining an entertaining Instagram page, and utilizing television and film for documentary and selling the idea of his rich lifestyle. Although it is our own agency and free will to choose what we enjoy, these power moves are made to trigger appeal and to trick us into a cycle of worship.

It is the complete truth that modern rap music is a gold mine for those in power: it is repetitive, subject matter is relatively the same throughout different artists, and it is insanely popular among young viewers who make up most of the internet’s usage in North America. It can be tough for myself to take a moment to realize all that I see online is not real, but I’m one of millions, with many that don’t have the education to consider that. The effects perspective is a lens I can use to think about how I am affected by these powers in media that influence me now, and over time. In order to be informed, and understand why I’ll be advertised certain types of content in the future, is to study why my demographic reacts so positively to rap music. 

As part of mass society, I and others are listening to this music alone, with little to no exposure of the themes suggested aside from movies and tv shows. Mixed with being a young adult, male and naive, this ignorance to the rapper lifestyle is exactly what advertisers capitalize on to gain and keep my attention. We live in a progressive time where racial equality, specifically black, is at the forefront of all media concerns and therefore, our concerns. The issue is that I have no first hand idea what is different in their culture as opposed to mine. There are few popular media that demonstrates African American’s as regular people who do regular daily things; instead the popular discourse uses selective exposure to say they grew up on the street and have become rich and surpassed whites. When music videos and lyrics suggest their lifestyles include endless amounts of money, having sex with multiple women, and killing people they don’t like, there’s actually very little I can actually do to disprove that even though its highly unlikely. Early concerns with mass persuasion worry that even though I have the critical ability to deem what is true and what isn’t, my brain wants to imagine something before it experiences it. I’m only shown stereotypes, so that's all I have the capacity to imagine for the time being. The artists acts as a barrier between me and their affairs; they only let me imagine how rich their lifestyle is for their specific interest of me believing that listening to what they have to say will elevate my life in some way, or keep me racially diverse. 

I keep listening to these fake notions of black culture because, well, it's addicting for me. The Payne studies showed some important facts: intense violence and action scenes were more memorable for boys, the more exposure of similar themes created pronounced beliefs within children, and the interest in sexual themes became more engaging in children as they grew older. The themes I’m exposed to represent delinquencies that parents and teachers have taught me to stay away from, so they are exciting for me to see and fantasize about. It is an over-saturated market also, so I have more pronounced internal feelings about the content. Also, it is at a point in my life that I am more gullible to what is shown to me online. If these reasons weren’t enough to argue why I don’t stop listening, the presence of opinion leaders and emotional contagion make it increasingly difficult to leave the genre. Opinion leaders rise within my friend group, and reviewers I find online. Being so close to Toronto, most of my friends fall into the same demographic trap and see Toronto rappers as something to take pride in and constantly keep up with celebrities’ internal drama. Online reviewers, although they have more credibility, often promote the popular opinion in order to keep fans happy, sharing, and make their program more popular, and they might even be incentivised by outside sources to create and artificial opinion. Seemingly everywhere wants me to keep listening to this music, and when it consistently keeps my friends and I in an energized mood through emotional contagion, it at least feels like it's doing more good than bad in the moment.

As an audience member, mass media has treated me like an object whose attention can be persuaded, changed, and sold, but it's too early for me to see long term detrimental effects. I spend about 6-8 hours looking at screens everyday with heights of around 12-14 hours. Some of this is because of work, but more than half is for consuming entertainment and social media. It often gives me a fictionalized perspective of different topics which is why I’ve worked hard in the last two years to improve my lifestyle and create more unique experiences. Most of this leisure time is worse spent than when the media originally pulled me into addiction at the beginning of high-school. I was recommended to watch things I’ve already seen, or are so similar, it offers no unique ideas, so constantly being offered what I already like has put me in a rut. Also, I am weary of gaining emotions because of my viewing habits. Since most of my interests in entertainment are associated with delinquent themes, I recognize that when I’m out, I am not outgoing with strangers because I don’t trust them. Commonly in mob related movies, they give the feeling that you can’t trust anyone, and those feelings lie somewhere within me.

Public opinion is the most powerful information a company use to always have the upper-hand over the consumer when it comes to buying and selling. The information can be private or public depending on if it is beneficial to the company. It can be used to gain honest opinions about what the population thinks about a product, or a survey can be made specifically to trick the public into conforming to a certain ideal by use of question-wording-effects. The information can be used to alienate consumers into bandwagoning onto a perceived public opinion. The potential to mix and match these uses seems like a modern day superpower to me. To examine the ways public opinion is measured and used by large corporations for profit, I’ll relate to myself working in sales at Best Buy and Virgin Mobile to compare and contrast by looking at what I do to earn an individuals’ opinion on a much smaller scale. 

When working with a customer, I want to ensure my commission is made whether or not it is in the buyers’ best interests when they walk in. First, I want to find out why they’re in the store. I ask about what issues they have with a current device, and move further to find out important things about their lifestyle: if they have kids, are they in school, where they live, and what hobbies they have. At this stage, I am giving my customer a person-to-person interview where I establish rapport, and my most advantageous position as a salesperson to both learn about the client, and earn a degree of trust so I can be given true answers to my questions. Here, I avoid leading questions because the answers wouldn’t accurately depict the information I want to offer a product that is relevant. The tactics of my survey change depending on what part of the sale we’re at for my benefit. Once we find the right phone for the user, we talk about the price which is where response effects are wildly useful. If the first thing I say is the actual price per month, the customer would be unsatisfied with the number and feel entitled to bargain, or wait for another sale, or go to a different company entirely. Instead, I show the original price for the phone, and their mobile plan separately which is always high, then show them what I can save them by signing up with a new contract; the response is almost always positive. This is because the original price has nothing to contrast except for some kind of number they’ve had before, or seen in a flyer which isn’t obtainable for me. In the second example, I’ve given a realistic, yet unfavourable example for them to contrast instead to get rid of any pre-existing notions of price. Once the customer has decided to buy the service or product, they will be less likely to buy anything else because they either don’t have enough money, or are weary of me taking advantage of them. When defenses are high, question-wording-effects can be used to make the customer think they want more. The last thing I have to sell is extra insurance for your phone, which everyone is accustomed to say no to because of negative connotations of other insurances like car, or life. Once they tell me they don’t want insurance, I proceed with the process and move on to the next topic, but realistically, I’m using this time to include specific words and body language to make them feel unsafe about their new product. I will begin using words in our conversation that have to do with the length of their contract, the price of the phone, specific words like fragile, stuck, lost, regret. My body language also changes to be more loose and clumsy, and often I place my drink uncomfortably close to the new device. When I ask again later in the process, the customer feels they have made the decision for themselves, drop their defense and buy. 

Sometimes, other means of gathering opinion are beneficial as well. Although a personal interview offers me the most advantages, a telephone interview is a cheaper and time efficient way of gathering information. There is a possibility I could employ the same tactics into this interview, but that poses a couple problems. I cannot establish rapport as well, so if I ask too many personal questions, the customer will feel uncomfortable and hang up. I generally need to avoid leading questions, and keep the call strictly about the sale. This is a good way to earn information to use in the future, not the present. I can filter their answers to find out what may be a successful offer for the future. For use of large companies, this type of information could be used to find out where and when to sell things, but not as precise to find out what type of product to make. The final type of survey I look for is an email survey. These help me to gain a higher personal rating to gain recognition within my company, but as the text suggests, these are borderline useless way of gathering and asking for information. Just about all ways of surveying have some kind of flaw which skews the data gathered with varied impact, but email has to be the most negative impact. It requires the customer to actively do it during their leisure time, and it holds no benefit to themselves. Out of every ten customers I offer the online survey to, one may actually do it. This means they would have an outstanding reason to do it; either they really liked, or really hated the service. The numbers of completions are low, and the sources are not credible.

After information is acquired, the Government and large corporations use qualitative and quantitative data to use audiences in ways that far exceed the possibilities of an individual. They use this information to operationalize their audience; keep their viewing habits the same, and constantly sell their time to advertisers without suspicion. In order to find examples of political economy today, I will examine myself as an audience member of advertisements specifically through my phone on social media platforms and entertainment streaming services. Now that I can identify how advertisers obtain my personal habits and information, I can assume who is buying it based on what advertisements, or entertainment I’m offered. 

As a consumer, I actually pay for many of the streaming services I use which I know isn’t the norm for post-millenials. I pay monthly to access Netflix, Spotify, and YouTube, which means I don’t receive advertisements through these entertainment services, which is great for some of my leisure time, but I do not escape advertisements altogether. In fact, each of these streaming services, including the phone I bought, have a mandatory a lengthy multi-page terms of service agreement which states that they are services which I use while I pay for them, and during this time, they can gather as much information about my viewing habits as they want to improve their services. In exchange for signing this contract, I am given thousands of choices of the most popular movies, TV shows, and music of today with a service that knows what I want to watch even before I know what its about. In the meantime, however, all information of my demographic including how much I am paying for streaming is being sold to google, to then sell to advertisers in similar markets. I’m still not rid of the blindspot that advertisers use to steal my leisure time. Often while watching a show, I browse on my phone, and during that time I get ads for tv shows and movies on subscription services I have yet to pay for. The luxury of using Netflix services is paid for by me enduring ads for other similar subscription-based websites, which I am then working for free to review by looking at them and seeing whether or not they are worthwhile, just for it to be advertised again when there's a new incentive for me to consider again. This same operation happens to everyone who uses streaming services, as the audience is a commodity to be bought and sold by advertisers. 

I’m treated very well as a subscriber of these services; the servers send the program are reliable with few buffers, the websites don’t have malware or bugs that slow down the speed of my computer, and I even get special features such as the option for subtitles on any show, and even an automatic option to skip opening credits. The same can’t be said for those who can’t afford to pay monthly, or who are using ad blockers. For example, my girlfriend is the daughter of Asain immigrants and she watches Korean TV, but she doesn’t pay for streaming services, and there are no channels for her to watch them for free. She streams these shows from free servers she finds online. These are often filled with malware, regular ads, and pop-up ads that ruin the viewing experience as well as poor servers from outside of the country which buffer and crash often. I am labelled as a priority customer because my viewing consists of popular American TV and I pay for the service, meaning I will most likely respond well to the advertisements that are sent to me and have a higher chance of purchasing, so my leisure time is improved to keep me as a customer. My girlfriend is exactly what advertisers will ignore, she enjoys foreign shows and doesn’t pay for her streaming service, so her leisure time is not cared for or valued, so is less important. This is a slightly different take on what the text has to explains, but it is a similar issue. Racial formation is causing someone close to me to not enjoy their leisure time as much as me because of their background and taste. 

Adding market value to certain demographics does show signs of massive potential in new technologies though. Our viewership is measured on any platform we visit through server logs, and cookies. Even now with Google assistant and Google Home and smart home devices and surveillance systems, our voices are being monitored too. I had a conversation with my mother about what Halloween costume I am going to wear this year, and Google offered me advertisements for Halloween costumes the next day. This is the evolution of peoplemeters that tracked TV viewing habits, but on a much smarter and efficient scale that people meters couldn't achieve. Because of psychographics, we are not purely treated as a mass audience in this situation. I am not being offered to listen to Drake because Drake is popular with men my age, I am being offered curated advertisements that are relevant to me based on my demographics, psychology, and my actual web searches and needs described through conversation. This conclusion is very controversial because devices that listen to your voice at all times is creepy, but it is the peak of what target marketing strives to be in its most efficient form. When this form of information gathering and target marketing is perfected, it is hard to say whether our thoughts are truly our own because of the power of suggestion.

[der-unverantwortliche]

This time-structure — by its very nature — is nothing new. A futuristic recapitulation of archaic forms was already integral to Art Deco, Shanghai’s signature high-modernist style, which adopted archaeological and ethnographic discoveries — most vividly exemplified by Howard Carter’s 1922 Tutankhamun expedition — as sources of avant-garde architectural inspiration. The exposed secrets of buried crypts were metamorphosed into urban design.

Anna Greenspan & Nick Land

Yet his [Milton’s] institutional radicalism was driven by a cultural traditionalism that will never again be equaled. Milton comprehensively, minutely, and unreservedly affirms the foundations of Occidental civilization down to their biblical and classical roots, studied with supreme capability in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, and vigorously re-animated through modulations in the grammar, vocabulary, and thematics of modernity’s rough emerging tongue. His devotion to all original authorities stretches thought and language to the point of delirium, where poetry and metaphysics find common purpose in the excavation of utter primordiality and the limits of sense.

Designed in compliance with “Eternal Providence” to “justify the ways of God to men” (I:25-6), the linguistic modernity of Paradise Lost soon required its own justification, in the form of a short prefatory remark entitled The Verse. Here, Milton characteristically insists that radicalism is restoration, breaking from a shallow past in order to re-connect with deeper antiquity.

“… true musical delight … consists only in apt numbers, fit quantity of syllables, and the sense variously drawn out from one verse into another, not in the jingling sound of like endings — a fault avoided by the learned ancients both in poetry and in all good oratory. The neglect then of rhyme so little is to be taken for a defect, though it may seem so perhaps to vulgar readers, that it rather is to be esteemed an example set — the first in English — of ancient liberty recovered to heroic poem from the troublesome and modern bondage of riming.”

English passes through a revolutionary catastrophe to recall things long lost. The rusted keys which still open the near future of the Cathedral also access dread spaces forgotten since the beginning of the world.

Nick Land

Apparently the Zeitgeist doesn't just work in one direction. What is this Zeitgeist, anyway? […] If we adopt a slightly more literal translation, we could call our mysterious phenomenon the Spirit of Time. And if we ignore the even more mysterious backward lurch from 1871 to 1913, and simply accept Professor Dawkins' interpretation of our Spirit's actions, we see that the Zeitgeist is a basically optimistic force. Its goal appears to be that history turns out for the better (again, defining better in terms of Universalist ethics).

Mecius Moldbug

No man can pretend that the wild, barbarous, and capricious superstitions of Africa, or of savage tribes elsewhere, affect him in the way that he is affected by the ancient, monumental, cruel, and elaborate religions of Indostan, &c. The mere antiquity of Asiatic things, of their institutions, histories, modes of faith, &c. is so impressive, that to me the cast age of the race and name overpowers the sense of youth in the individual. […] In China, over and above what it has in common with the rest of southern Asia, I am terrified by the modes of life, by the manners, and the barrier of utter abhorrence, and want of sympathy, placed between us by feelings deeper than I can analyze. I could sooner live with lunatics, or brute animals.

Thomas de Quincey

It is certainly a curious fact that so many of the voices of what is called our modern religion have come from countries which are not only simple, but may even be called barbaric. A nation like Norway has a great realistic drama without having ever had either a great classical drama or a great romantic drama. A nation like Russia makes us feel its modern fiction when we have never felt its ancient fiction. It has produced its Gissing without producing its Scott. Everything that is most sad and scientific, everything that is most grim and analytical, everything that can truly be called most modern, everything that can without unreasonableness be called most morbid, comes from these fresh and untried and unexhausted nationalities. Out of these infant peoples come the oldest voices of the earth.

G.K. Chesterton

Europa […] liegt heute in der großen Zange zwischen Rußland auf der einen und Amerika auf der anderen Seite. Rußland und Amerika sind beide, metaphysisch gesehen, dasselbe; dieselbe trostlose Raserei der entfesselten Technik und der bodenlosen Organisation des Normalmenschen. […] Unser Volk erfährt als in der Mitte stehend den schärfsten Zangendruck, das nachbarreichste Volk und so das gefährdetste Volk und in all dem das metaphysische Volk.

Martin Heidegger (1935)

In what follows I suggest that foundational notions of literature’s relationship to time and to politics are at stake in this ideological nexus developing around Poe and decadence in mid-twentieth century America. The uncertain possibility of literary progress and development within time which vexed decadent aesthetics was still (perhaps most?) in evidence in this period, haunting the remnants of the modernist project.

Yvor Winters, with whom Nabokov socialized several times in the early 1940s , wrote an essay entitled ‘Edgar Allan Poe: A Crisis in the History of American Obscurantism’ for American Literature in 1937, which constituted a sustained attack on the very idea of taking Poe seriously. The discourse of security and breach is immediately apparent in the essay, as Winters worries that the American literary establishment has failed in its job to safeguard the purity of the canon:

“Poe has long passed casually with me and with most of my friends as a bad writer accidentally and temporarily popular; the fact of the matter is, of course, that that he has been pretty effectually established as a great writer while we have been sleeping.”

The fear here is of a leak in time, which has permitted Poe to escape the supposedly safe confines of his historically-specific popularity to infiltrate the present.

Will Norman