[MD] Dissertation re/Pirisig and Postmodernity

[ARLO JAMES BENSINGER JR]

[DMB]
You're probably right, Andre. I starting reading on page 140 and it only took about two pages to see that the author misconstrues some very basic points. For example, about the classic-romantic split she says, "What Pirsig’s narrator suggests in Zen is the categorical disjunction of these modes of understanding reality in the everyday world." That is the opposite of Pirsig's point, the misconception he's trying to overcome, the very disjunction that we do NOT find in the artful mechanic.

In that respect, apparently, she is way off the mark right from the start.

But it's still pretty cool that Pirsig's work increasingly appears in academic literature. Nothing will advance the MOQ like a good debate in that arena.

[Arlo]
Hmm... I went back and re-read this, because I had initially read it in the context of setting up the argument, not a statement of conclusions. Two pages later she writes, for example, "Yet, the ardent opposition of the two dimensions in the beginning of the narration makes the achievement generated through their combination appear all the more valuable."

So I'd read her comment as being proclaiming that the classic-romantic had become two categorically disjunct ways of thinking, which was the impetus to write ZMM and offer a resolution, not that Pirsig himself was arguing that the classic and romantic should be, or are ipso facto, categorially disjunct.