What book are you reading?

[Nowake]

Oh boy, you’re opening yourself so much that I find myself feeling in the mood for a handful of very biting remarks pertaining to your style and reasoning, yet at the same time I cannot, in good conscience, do that when I believe we simply started on the wrong foot somehow.

The point I should have made is that this guy restricts his analysis to a very specific subgenre of fantasy, as demonstrated by what he quotes.
I'd love to pick on some of his lines, as they are, standing alone, but I'd also rather not belabor this (too much).

I mean, look at this It is the core of our disagreement.
Moorcock criticizes Tolkien and the ones who subsequently copy him. He never confused this “subgenre” with fantasy on the whole, and for every author he comments on negatively in his essay, he mentions another fantasy writer which in his opinion treats the genre with the respect he thinks should be given to it.
What he does assert at one point, and which may have confused you into thinking the above, is that this subgenre had gained such a following that it was, at the time of his writing, the most visible.
I also know a score of Tolkien readers, a few of them Brits, who would very much disagree with Tolkien being read as a “hack-n-slash”, and these chaps are really hardcore, they read The Hobbit every year. They are actually very much rejoicing in the cosy miasma (I may be using the term unrelated to the concept which you expressed) of the book. Certainly Tolkien’s apologists disagree with you, I am sorry to say, “hack-n-slash” are really not the virtues they extol in his works.
It was my opinion, expressed in this thread in passing, that most fantasy literature of not very long ago was dominated and defined by the epigones of Tolkien, or at least they were the most commercially successful; through their tripe they suffocated quality prose within the genre until a few, like Martin, finally obtained wide accolades from the public. That doesn't mean quality fantasy was not being written in the period, yet it simply didn't survive commercially near the former - in most cases. Moorcock cites more than a handful of writers who did just that in his essay.
I can’t honestly say you made a dent in this conclusion, and I am really not writing this to provoke you.
EDIT: Oh and "picking on his lines", as you put, is exactly how you should always argument your positions, as opposed to generic judgements.



As to the essay you linked, it was the smartest piece I read today by far (and I read it whole; more than ten hours ago; it simply did not contradict any of my arguments), and I thank you for introducing me to its author and I thank its author for introducing me to Koselleck, I’ve enjoyed it so much reading it over lunch today that I ordered both
The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts (Cultural Memory in the Present) and
Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought.) without even researching his biography – if you’d know me in life, you’d know why this is a big deal, I’m the type of neat freak who doesn’t even download a movie without reading its reviews for two hours. Wish I had read him six years ago during my Semiotics and Imagology courses.