4.0652 Qs: Theory of Taste; Word for a Vice (2/54)

Elaine Brennan & Allen Renear (EDITORS@BROWNVM.BITNET)
Mon, 29 Oct 90 21:00:53 EDT

Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 4, No. 0652. Monday, 29 Oct 1990.


(1) Date: Fri, 26 Oct 90 13:35:22 -0500 (36 lines)
From: vyc@mace.cc.purdue.edu (Alan T. McKenzie)
Subject: taste

(2) Date: Sun, 28 Oct 90 23:23:35 EST (18 lines)
From: Willard McCarty <MCCARTY@vm.epas.utoronto.ca>
Subject: new word, please

(1) --------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Fri, 26 Oct 90 13:35:22 -0500
From: vyc@mace.cc.purdue.edu (Alan T. McKenzie)
Subject: taste

I have proposed a graduate seminar in theories of taste from Addison to
Bourdieu for next semester. Part of the description is as
follows:

The seminar will consider the aesthetics and politics
of taste in conjunction with the certainties of the neo-
classicists, the desires of the Romantics, the pieties of
the Victorians, the doubts of the moderns, and the
dismissals of the post-structuralists. We will work with
central texts by Addison, Burke, Hume, Coleridge, Arnold,
Eliot, Hernstein Smith, and Bourdieu. Members of the
seminar will explore other primary texts of their own
choosing and as many secondary texts as they find
convenient.

I will be grateful to any HUMANISTS who send me references to
out-of-the-way materials, primary or secondary, and well-
considered thoughts or hunches, their own or those of others,
on the topic.

Some of the things I have begun to wonder about:
Is taste separable from specific commodities or performances?
Is there invariably an element of class in it?
Are all analogies to it physiological?

Send brief comments of general interest via HUMANIST; send
long documents, diatribes, and trivia via Internet to:
vyc@mace.cc.purdue.edu

Many thanks.
Alan T. McKenzie
English, Purdue
(2) --------------------------------------------------------------28----
Date: Sun, 28 Oct 90 23:23:35 EST
From: Willard McCarty <MCCARTY@vm.epas.utoronto.ca>
Subject: new word, please

I need a word, which I suspect someone cleverer than I will have to
coin, that denotes the pathological need for information -- what to
hunger is gluttony, what to sexual desire is lust. `Infomange' is the
best I have been able to come up with, but (I need not say it) that's
rather poor. I want the word to suggest not an amoral force
that gets one into trouble within the limits of society, rather an
imaginative failure or intellectual cowardice. I am trying to understand
"information overload" and am supposing that one cause could be this
pathological need. The term should be obvious enough not to require
recondite knowledge, or what passes for it.

Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated.

Willard McCarty