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Interesting in a very sad kind of way Lou. Academics are the pits really. The way she assaulted your paper is a typical instance of someone who cannot ignore the allure of the will to power. Having said that I have a Bhaskarian take on reality and you would appear to be working with something like a Kantian model. Now that would be a useful place to begin a dialogue. What especially interests me though is the case where a fictional text is truer than a non-fiction text. The example I use is Sebastian Barry's great novel on the Irish troops in WW1- *It's a long way.* The point I make here is that if one wants to understand what it would be like to be a soldier on the Western Front then one reads Barry's book and not the histories which he references at the back of his novel. In some way Barry's book is truer. The answer maybe lies in the role of imagination. If you take Toibin's great book *Lady Gregory's Toothbrush,* its success is due I think to Toibin's ability to imagine what it would have been like to have been part of Gregory's coterie and to have seen the starving peasants dying quietly by the wall of the Gregory mansion during the Great Famine, while Lord Gregory was pushing through the legislation to take their land of them if they got public relief. Toibin's book takes us below the surface of what happened to show us the underlying reality of the social relations that dominated Ireland in the 19th and 20th century. All that makes Toibin's book a very true text and one worth reading. All very interesting and worth exploring in a dialogic manner. As for the mockumentary thing, that is really a very insignificant moment. Just like lies proves there is something known as the truth, mockumentaries prove there is something called a documentary. comradely Gary ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
