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134 THEMINNESOTA REVIEW books in brief Gary Snyder, Lew Welch A Phiüp Whalen, On Bread and Poetry: A Panel Discussion. Bolinas, CaUfornia: Grey Fox Press, 1977. 47pp. $2.50. This printing of a 1964 radio broadcast is a pleasant reminder of the high hopes once entertained by the members of the Beat generation and the San Francisco Renaissance . It was a year before the fuU-scale escalation in Viet Nam and only eight years beyond the pubUcation ofHowl. At the time, Snyder, Welch and Whalen were stiU excited by what was happening or by what seemed possible. As Snyder said, . . . one of the things that really turned us on about 1956 when we started reading poetry aloud around San Francisco, was that it reminded everybody that the excitement of poetry is a communal, social, human thing, and that poems aren't meant to be read in the quiet of your Uttle room aU by yourself with a dictionary at hand. . . . The "bread" of the title is less the money one Uves on than a symbol for the communal and social ethic these poets spoke for. Not only is poetry supposed to be communal rather than individual, but it is also supposed to be popular rather than elitist or specialized, inspired rather than thought, native (i.e., American, usually in speech) rather than AngUfied, based on experience rather than learning. The most identifiable enemy is the academy. Again, Snyder: There's an academic style and an academic language, which is Uterary, poetic, and so forth, and it doesn't come from the way anybody around here speaks, and it doesn't have much to do with the way anybody is Uving. The argument had vaUdity then, and, to an extent, it stUl does. But, as much as we owe these poets for their Bohemian courage, we should see these issues better than they saw them. Their argument makes too much of the university. Snyder may know better now, but thenhe and the others thought that the cultural problem originated in the university. The complexities of cultural production are reduced to a false intramural argument, three wild happy boys from Reed sticking their tongues out at John Crowe Ransome. R.M. Lucien Goldmann, Lukacs and Heidegger: Towards a New Philosophy. Tr. William Q. Boelhower. London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978. 112 pp. $7.50. When Goldmann died in 1970, he had completed only the introductory section of his projected study of the relationship between the thinking of Lukacs and Heidegger. BOOKS IN BRIEF 135 The bulk of this posthumously pubUshed volume consists of transcripts of lectures deUvered at the Ecole pratique des Hautes Etudes during the winter of 1967-8. Consequently , Lukacs and Heidegger is not a tightly unified work, but rather a series of related (inevitably repetitious) investigations. Goldmann's central premise is simple enough: both Lukacs and Heidegger belong to the same Une of historical development. This development began, roughly, with Hegel, extended to the "south-west German philosophical 'müieu' " of the early twentieth century, and from there branched into the paraUel, though opposed, Unes of modern existentialism and contemporary dialectical materiaUsm. Goldmann appUes his method of genetic structuraUsm in order to demonstrate the affinities between the two radicaUy different thinkers, placing both within the context of the movement away from the separation of subject and object and the positivism resulting from that separation. Along the way, he offers several valuable insights into the philosophies of both men, as weU as into the problematics of subject and object, praxis, historicity, and reification. Goldmann's perceptiveness is evident in his analysis of language differences between the two men. Refusing to simply echo the by now commonplace criticisms of existentiaUsm 's tendency toward terminological entanglements, he clearly deUneates the similarities between Lukacs and Heidegger's terms, as weU as explaining why and where they are opposed. It is, of course, his methodology that aUows him to do this. However, since the book was never completed, his attempt to correlate paradigmatic and historical elements is not fuUy reaüzed. In fact, the reader who is unfamiliar with genetic structuraUsm might weU perceive the book as a hodge-podge of...

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