"Complicate" = "elucidate the complexity of"

[Joel S. Berson]

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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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org