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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   10011 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 30, 2026

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It's a meta story: the story itself is framed as being a lost manuscript.

Some of the earliest novels were epistolary novels, framed as a series of letters written by a fictional person. This would make it more premodern than postmodern.

Postmodernism is a historical attitude more than a rigid set of textual features, even if textual features point towards or away from a book being written in a postmodern spirit. The Voynich Manuscript is weird as hell, but it's not postmodern, and good luck drawing a line between modernism and postmodernism (and some even argue that we are now in a post-postmodern era, so good luck drawing that line too).

Hoofprints in the snow might not tell you something is a horse. But then you see a tuft of shoulder-high fur caught in the brush, then a stirrup, and then, hey, it's Brunellus.

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Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

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