Actually it was Rick Froman. I was not addressing the veracity
of the claim that Dickens did nothing positive. I just thought it
ironic,
if it was true, that Orwell, who wrote 1984 without a happy ending,
would criticize another author of writing a fictional work criticizing
society without suggesting a fix.
Sorry, Rick! I believe that's called banalization -- the substituting
of a more familiar word/name for a less familiar one. See Sebastiano
Timpanaro's *The Freudian Slip: Psychoanalysis and Textual Criticism*
(1976), a superb book by a philologist who shows that many slips of the
tongue do not require psychoanalytic explanations in terms of
unconscious motivations. It deserves to be far better known.
Rick, I wasn't intending my posting to be a direct response to yours. I
was using yours as a kind of lead-in enabling me to make a further
response to Gladwell! Sorry if I gave the wrong impression.
Allen Esterson
Former lecturer, Science Department
Southwark College, London
http://www.esterson.org
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