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25 Some Remarks on Narrative and Technology or: Poetry and Truth 1. Science and Poetry are my concerns here. I do not mean the poetry of science. Still less do I mean some mistily envisioned science of poetry. Poetry and Science. But we must approach the topics cautiously,evencircuitously. It is customary to say, in a presentation such as this, that the following remarks are not systematic. They are not. But I would like to specify here—and narrativize— the nature of their asystematicity: I suspect many readers will see all sorts of relationships among them, some interesting , some troubling. But the status of many of those relationships is— I feel, as someone who has considered them at length and with some care—highly problematic. 2. When this essay waspublished originally, my university press publisher informed me (I paraphrase): "It's our house style not to use i.e. (for id est), or indeed to use any other abbreviations of Latin phrases, such aset al (for et alia), e.g. (for exempli gratia), viz. (for videlicet), id. (for idem), ibid, (for ibidem), cf. (for conferre), or n.b. (for nota bene). Our only exceptions is etc.—which we don't italicize—for et cetera." The lack of italics indicates , presumably, that it has been absorbed into English and is now considered an English term. "But what,"I asked, "if the writer wantsto use them?" "We explain to him—or her—that it violates house style. As far as we're concerned, using them in scholarly writing is no longer correct." "Do you know where this house style comes from?" I asked. "I imagine it's just that we don't want to appear too pedantic and court lots of people not knowingwhat the writer is talking about." Some Remarks on Narrative and Technology 409 "But you know what those Latin phrases mean," I said. "And so do I. And most large dictionaries will give you a list of such frequently used phrases and many more besides—should one of them escape you. And there's always Mary-ClaireVan Leunen's Handbook for Scholars. "They don't present any practical stumbling blocks. Besides, your acknowledged audience for the sorts of worksin which such abbreviations might appear is overwhelmingly academic. That means—at least in the humanities—these works will be read by people used to researching in scholarly texts written before World War II, which means they have to know such Latin tags as a matter of course." There wasa moment's silence. "Well," said the voice from the editorial office, that, whatever else one might say of it, was certainly from someone ten to fifteen yearsyounger than I, "that'sjust not the way we do it." "I suspect you do it," I said (I paraphrase freely), "asa holdover from the resurgence in the movement just after World War II to remove ancient languages, Latin and Greek, from high-school and college curriculums in order to accommodate the returning soldiers, for whom itwas clearly a barrier to graduation—that whole movement itself was a revitalization of the movement just after World War I to democratize higher education bymaking Latin and Greek take a back seat to the studyof English language texts, such as the English novel, which, for the first time had been brought into the purview of universitystudies viathe academic establishment of such then-new disciplines as English Literature. All of this, including, in many ways, the Great War itself, was a response to the rising population and to the growing amount of printed matter that began in the i88os, when people began to take seriouslythe recommendations of Matthew Arnold and other educational reformers to bring 'sweetness and light' to the common man. "But that same rise in printed matter—" (I now paraphrase wildly—) "while certainly Latin and Greek literacy has not kept up with it, has also obviated the need for such retro-pedantic gestures as forbidding scholarly abbreviations in scholarlytexts." My friend on the other end of the phone laughed. "In other words," she said, "it's not very modern at all." "It's quite modern," I said, "for 1888, the year Arnold died, the year the New York Tribune first began using the linotype, and the year the English decided to make their spelling look more sophisticated and up-todate by Francophizing it, while leaving the earlier and older spelling forms in the first editions of such authors as Dickensand George Eliot to the barbaric, backwardsUnited States...

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