Negatrons past

Perhaps the negatrons have ineffectuated. I haven't posted in a while.

I was reading Ben's blog and came across the following humble quote in an old post:

The point is that creative agenda is often overlooked as a cause of unhappy play, not that differing creative agenda is always the cause of unhappy play.

For some reason I really liked that.

I really really really have to go back and read the Big Ron Essays sometime and get my head around them or not. I have a feeling I have some issues with the ideas behind the concept of "Narrativism" -- to wit, that in order to speak clearly about Narrativism one has to believe that we understand exactly why literature is literature -- what makes a good story a good story. My belief, as a former grad student in (admittedly ancient Greek and Latin) literature, was that the jury was still out on that point.

Oh, sure, you have individuals like Lajos Egri who have their ideas about what makes good literature good, but I didn't know that anybody considered it a closed issue. It's an open question what makes good literature good.

And if it's an open question, and we're using the answer to define one of the categories of our theory, where does that leave the theory?

Like I said, I don't know if I've ever made it through those essays so maybe this is not really relevant. I won't be able to intelligently frame it till I do more homework than maybe I am willing to. We'll see.