Word: commoner
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...course of his slim book--For Common Things runs to 207 pages--Purdy spends altogether too much time on what he openly admits are his pet issues: the miasma of confusion that is eastern European public life after 1989, and the ecological disaster of strip-mining in West Virginia. And Purdy admits, too, that his notions of the direction in which public life should move are highly derivative--although his chapter on the pervasive effects of irony and its corrosion of popular culture is original, very sophisticated, and compelling. But if you can cut through the occasional tediousness, what...
...truism of the psychologizing age that a book tells us as much about its author as about its subject. And the authentic power of For Common Things resides not in the originality of Purdy's thesis but rather in the not-at-all-incidental portrait of Jedidiah Purdy. The book is filled with autobiographical detail, and with confessions that spring from a mind uninterested in artifice and concealment: it is the example of Purdy's love of common things, rather than his sometimes boring case studies in the downfall of public culture, that proves effective...
Hodge has not read Purdy carefully enough to express himself coherently on the topic, but one senses that Hodge's criticism is built upon umbrage at the fact that For Common Things, at its heart, is not about intellectual arguments but rather about Jedediah Purdy's passionate hopes. The instance of an idealist is offensive and risible to the ironic mind that can not stand to see ideals expressed or fulfilled: "our being human," writes Purdy, "has become a strong argument against cleaving to demanding values, or respecting them in others." One can sense in Hodge the resentfulness born...
...think any such judgments must be preceeded by an attempt to understand where this book comes from. For Common Things is remarkable for, among other things, its fidelity to the tradition of American environmentalist writing in particular. Since its beginnings, American writing has been infused with the conviction that the personal must somehow stand for the nation. It is characteristic of what has been called the American Self that the particular events of the individual life are understood to somehow trend towards universality...
...implication that his set of unusual experiences are unique but that somehow they partake of the universally shared history of the relationship between man and Nature. The naturalists resolve the paradox between the necessary subjectivity of experience and the importance of nurturing a public that believes commonly in the good of environmentalism--a public that can never share the precise set of experiences that led the naturalist himself to his environmentalist beliefs--through the figure of the representative individual, not self-absorbed but rather allowing the self to absorb into the fabric of the common...