To the Editor:
I was somewhat unsure as to whether or not Ethan Ostrow was joking in his column "A Magazine in Need of a New Direction" (The Dartmouth, Wednesday, Jan.13, 1994). In the first paragraph, he labels a printing press 'unwitting' and a town 'guiltless'- interesting personifications that locate the authorial voice into a clearly rhetorical position. Begging the question, has Ostrow adopted an Amirian or Barkesdale-esque persona, identifying and parodying a commonly-heard voice on campus? After all, there is a wonderful irony in essentially deriding a magazine as useless in an intellectual environment, when this magazine inspires debate.
A more interesting question this persona brings up is exactly what informs the 'objective' or 'dispassionate' dialogue. What exactly is perceived as the grounded universal on which all debaters must firmly plant their feet? Is it one in which loaded terms or rhetorical devices used to create a subtle effect (or not so subtle effect) are dismissable as emotionally-informed? Are they therefore secondary to clear, rational 'good sense' sentences - like 'Now we must endure her literary swill repugnant to an institution honed to liberal sensitivity and intellectual progress'? One wonders.
After all, surely the type of honest, academic dialogue the persona would encourage would rely on 'fact' and the colliding of factual syllogisms, where the primary assumption can always be taken for a granted truth. So one can only assume that factual errors in this piece (Inner Bitch was photocopied, not printed; and a writer criticized - in my opinion, unfairly - Jane Campion's "The Piano," rather than "fail[ing] to discover one piece of feminist or lesbian film or literature which was poorly done") form a vision of the blindness this type of purely 'factual' debate relies on.
If the 'attitude' and 'shears' were removed from Inner Bitch, she would no longer be on the cutting edge; she would not be a danger to the status quo of male-dominated assumption or male-oriented paradigms.
SCHUYLER HENDERSON '94
