kaitlyn’s Reviews > Gossip > Status Update

“Like Kierkegaard, Dr. Johnson assumes that subject determines meaning. …To contemplate an attractive character who apparently sleeps with his mother will not automatically encourage the reader to go and do likewise.”

lol. amazing. page 19 slaps.

“Characters who mingled virtue and vice might endanger the reader's powers of moral discrimination, suggesting that vice could be condoned for the sake of the virtue that accompanied it. Fiction, like other literary forms, must aspire to please and to instruct, with emphasis on the latter function.”

hot damn. think about what this MEANS to consider how then consuming fictional works were dinner discussed.

“Heidegger's distaste for gossip, and Kierkegaard's, deny the moral possibilities of trivia. The realistic novel depends for its existence on the assumed importance of the concrete personal particular in all its revelatory power. So does gossip.”

yes this is what i came to this book not expecting but so glad to find. been watching a lot of 80s movies and excited to read this discussion taking place then too.

“Dr. Johnson, for instance, argued that novels, as imitations of life, should confine themselves to models of virtue. ‘If the world be promiscuously described, I cannot see of what use it can be to read the account.’”

DANG. look at this striving to stifle anything which is “promiscuous” which is to say, empathizing or promoting any person which is not of the elite polite expected alignment

“I am claiming an inadvertent moralistic narrowness in these treatments of discourse -a narrowness which oddly (and, I think, significantly) corresponds to that in certain eighteenth-century responses to the novel as genre.
Many early commentators expressed anxiety about the novel's potential for contaminating particularly such vulnerable readers as women and adolescents.”

“Both philosophers supply moral grounds for their condemnation of frivolous and trivial talk. … Both obviously wish to condemn a mode of chatter more inclusive than even my large category of ‘gossip’: all talk that constitutes avoidance rather than engagement.“

“Kierkegaard's objections to gossip … focus even more emphatically on avowed subject matter. He opposes gossip to ‘real talk’ and identifies it with ‘talkativeness … afraid of the silence which reveals its emptiness.’“

i think here the emptiness we’re talking no about is a spiritual or intellectual emptiness? misogyny and suprematism involved in who has access to these intellectual conversations

“The "average understanding," in Heidegger's view, merits contempt because of its inability to discriminate between the trivial and the profound and its reluctance to struggle for its own profundities. … Abundant talk, then, tends to trivialize; silence, on the other hand, can be profound.”

interesting but how is this upholding supremacy? is the thought silence is profound working to uphold the status quo

“Anyone can gosip.
People like to do so because they thus achieve an effortless illusion of us-derstanding.
Heidegger hardly distinguishes between speech and writing as far as "idle talk' is concerned. "This idle talk," he says, "is not confined to vocal gosip. but even spreads to what we write, where it takes the form of 'scribbling"
(212).”

“Heidegger and Kierkegaard can help define the peculiar moral status of gossip. Although both condemn "idle talk," they inadvertently clarify the possibility of claiming for gossip a special kind of moral penetration.”