Peter Singer on when life ends

Listen Bear if people don't behave I will quote them the nonsense from my seminar coming up on Thursday about the 'Riddle of Literary Value'.

I am the only working-class doctoral candidate in the group and there is a part of me that is echoing the thoughts of my father and late uncles who would be likely going, 'What is all this old bollocks?' The word transformative gets used a very large number of times in a day on such seminars.

This is copied from a PDF below and I can't be arsed to tidy it up too much as copying and pasting from PDFs is always messy. However, it should give you an idea...

Expanding Modernism
IN OUR INTRODUCTION TO BAD MODERNISMS, WE TRACED THE EMER
GENCE OF THE NEW MODERNIST STUDIES, WHICH WAS BORN ON OR
about 1999 with the invention of the Modernist Studies Association (MSA) and its annual conferences; with the provision of exciting new forums for exchange in the journals Modernism/Modernity
and (later) Modernist Cultures; and with the publication of books,
anthologies, and articles that took modernist scholarship in new
methodological directions. When we offered that survey, one of our
principal interests was to situate these events in a longer critical his
tory of modernism in the arts. In the present report, we want to at
tend more closely to one or two recent developments that may be
suggestive about the present and the immediate future of the study
of modernist literature. Part of the empirical, though certainly far
from scientific, basis of our considerations lies in our recent service
on the MSA Book Prize committee (Walkowitz in 2005, Mao in
2006), through which we became acquainted with dozens of

I'll just go and get a super big cup of coffee before I attempt that task...

See you didn't know when things were going well and now you've started me off and I shall produce more verbal waves of nonsense. Here's a few more post-modernist writers to consider.

Margaret Attwood

Samuel Beckett

Angela Carter

That's three to start with and they have varying interests. Honestly, I have a real dislike of these terms and view them as arbitrary constructs people use to sort out 'literature'. I tend to be more fond of people who dislike being labelled this way and honestly, I think a lot of authors hate it. I think the most honest authors are people like Chandler and Terry Pratchett who admitted they had a pecuniary reason to write ultimately. Of course, Pratchett is regarded as 'populist'. Which is literary speak meaning, 'he sells a lot of books'. Sir Terry never endeared himself to the literary powers that be because he was prone to ripping apart critical theories and exposing their pretentious nature.

"Pharmacopornographic" sounds like something out of Tom Wolfe crossed with a Scrabble triple word score

I think you might this a bit more interesting Bear:

www.historiamag.com/lady-constance-lytton-suffragette/

It's fascinating that Lady Lytton chose to disguise herself as a suffragette who was ostensibly lower class. Given the whole issue of force-feeding with Irish prisoners in the same era she lived as well I was horrified (but not surprised) by her experiences.

Foucault is a darling of literary academics. Personally, I find him a right pain in the bum and if I never hear the voice of my MA supervisor going on about, 'as Foucault says' ever again I'll be overjoyed. He loved the man. I am more of a mixture of Sam Gamgee and Frodo Baggins and this stuff doesn't appeal to me.