Jules Bean on French Literary Theory

``The problem with this stuff is not that it's bad Philosophy*; the problem is that it is bad Poetry.''

*tho' it is that too.

Jules Bean was a Trinity Mathmo whom i supervised for Third Year Logic.

I think Jules has put his finger on something. FLT (and that's French Literary Theory not Fermat's Last Theorem by the way) does spend a lot of time speaking in riddles. This annoys me greatly — perhaps more than it should. For my part I don't write in riddles — the stuff i try to do is quite difficult enuff as it is without my taking steps to step to make the readers' experience any worse. Speaking in riddles seems to me to be self-indulgent, to be irresponsible . . . . unprofessional. It makes it very difficult for me to regard these people as colleagues. And that's even before you start worrying about the content. (content..?)

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