"Complicate" = "elucidate the complexity of"

[Jonathan Lighter]

Isn't Lepore the author of that postmodern look at Puritan savagery?

If so....

JL

On Wed, Mar 23, 2011 at 12:48 PM, Joel S. Berson <Berson at att.net> wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Joel S. Berson" <Berson at ATT.NET>
> Subject:      Re: "Complicate" = "elucidate the complexity of"
>
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>
> I didn't know there were conservatives and
> liberals among the modern historians of the 18th
> and 19th centuries.  (Yes I did, but that's
> another story.)  Or "light humorists."
>
> Victor, this "complicate" came from an invitation
> to a Newberry Library Eighteenth-Century Seminar,
> the abstract for which follows my signature.  I
> doubt that the presentation is aimed at "modern
> republicans" (even though it will "bear on" the French Revolution).
>
> But for a book that *is* aimed at -- well, she
> calls them "historical fundamentalists", see Jill
> Lepore's _The Whites of their Eyes: The Tea
> Party's Revolution and the Battle over American
> History_ (Princeton Univ. Press, 2010), esp. p. 16.
>
> Joel
>
> >Professor Goodman seeks to complicate the picture of nineteenth-century
> >reactionary aristocrats and modern republicans by bringing an
> >eighteenth-century perspective to bear on French revolutionary and
> >post-revolutionary culture and society. Her paper will trace the life and
> >career of a boy born less than a decade before the start of the French
> >Revolution and asks how he became a man—and what kind of a man he
> >became—through the successive upheavals of French history, from the
> >Revolution and the Terror through the restoration of the monarchy and the
> >regimes that followed. She argues that he became a "new man" of the
> >nineteenth century only by drawing on family ties and patronage networks
> >deeply embedded in the ancien regime of the seventeenth and eighteenth
> >century.
>
>
> At 3/23/2011 01:08 AM, Victor Steinbok wrote:
> >You, guys, must have missed the research notice from a couple of months
> >ago that claimed that conservatives tend to see things in much more
> >simple terms than liberals. To put it simply, they avoid complications.
> >So, my guess is, this was attempt at light humor at the expense of
> >"modern republicans" who tend to have a very simplistic, one-dimensional
> >view of the "Founding Fathers" (and of the French Revolution). As such,
> >the reading would have been literal--making things more complicated.
> >
> >     VS-)
> >
> >On 3/22/2011 10:26 PM, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
> >>Einstein was sooooooo twentieth century.
> >>
> >>Besides which, he was a scientist - not a cultural theorist.
> >>
> >>JL
> >>
> >>On Tue, Mar 22, 2011 at 10:22 PM, Laurence Horn<laurence.horn at yale.edu
> >wrote:
> >>
> >>>At 10:03 PM -0400 3/22/11, Joel S. Berson wrote:
> >>> > From an announcement of a forthcoming Newberry Library
> >>>>Eighteenth-Century Seminar presentation by PROFESSOR DENA GOODMAN:
> >>>>
> >>>>Professor Goodman seeks to complicate the picture of
> >>>>nineteenth-century reactionary aristocrats and modern republicans by
> >>>>bringing an eighteenth-century perspective to bear on French
> >>>>revolutionary and post-revolutionary culture and society.
> >>>>
> >>>>I think I'll skip this -- historical life is complicated enough as it
> is.
> >>>>
> >>>>Joel
> >>>Isn't this what used to be called (in the good old days)
> >>>"problematizing" an issue rather than complicating it?  Maybe, since
> >>>"complicate" has another, somewhat less complicated, use, the term of
> >>>art should be "complexitize".  Or "compleximatize".
> >>>
> >>>Perhaps Professor Goodman follows the old adage, not quite due to
> >>>Einstein, dictating that everything should be as complex as it can
> >>>be, but not more so.
> >>>
> >>>LH
> >
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