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May 9Liked by Danny Anderson

I wonder if your students are too young to be sufficiently horrified. I'm quite sure I wasn't sufficiently horrified by anything in arts until I was sufficiently horrified by certain events in life.

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That's certainly a possibility. I also think that it may be their anxieties have been burned out by social media. I do appreciate the insight, Drazen.

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Dec 4, 2023Liked by Danny Anderson

No surprise we’re on the same page here, Danny. Yes, there’s a world of difference between entering a story and analysing a text. The former necessitates humility and patience, and the latter a set of assumptions and techniques that are often simply delusions of superiority. For my money, the best deconstruction self-deconstructs eg Beckett, O’Brien.

Violence (more per Flannery than McCarthy) shouldn’t be about shock for shock’s sake but rather a preternatural illumination - a light on Cain. This will always be appropriately unnerving and worthy of perennial attention.

I remember being forced to analyse Dulce et Decorum est in English aged fourteen. The sense of tedium was like a bradawl to the skull yet at the same time my whole being thrilled to hear familiar words rendered so sublime they’ve stayed with me and survived the desecration. I’ll never dull to the transfiguring violence of those ‘froth-corrupted lungs’.

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Adrian, thanks so much for the poem recommendation. I'm sad to say that one had missed me and I'm glad you caught me up. And you're right; we are on the same page here. Subversion has its moral purposes, but it gets sticky if we normalize it.

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