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LactoseO.D.'d posted:Sorry if this has already been asked: I always thought it was because if a teacher said what they actually wanted - "Your paper should be as long as it needs to be to state and explore your topic/thesis." - they would get a huge amount of two page papers and piss off way more students when they get bad grades. I never had a professor who would significantly mark down for a paper that was under the page minimum if they felt I had properly done what I set out to do. And also, in my experience, the thought of communication in the business world being clear and concise is pretty funny.
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Jun 29, 2009 00:59
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z0331 posted:I always thought it was because if a teacher said what they actually wanted - "Your paper should be as long as it needs to be to state and explore your topic/thesis." - they would get a huge amount of two page papers and piss off way more students when they get bad grades. Something like this. There are basically two kinds of requirements you need to include in any kind of assignment (and, for that matter, any situation where you're giving instructions). The first kind of requirement is strictly imperative -- you know, "do this," "do that." Tell me how Milton understood Shakespeare's influence on 17th century poetry. Tell me where and how Fight Club riffs on Hemingway. The second kind of requirement has to do with self-evaluation. If you're giving someone directions to your house, you might say "if you see a McDonald's near some train tracks, you've gone too far." It keeps them out of undermountain tunnels festering with gas-pump wielding mutants. Page counts provide a range from which deviations are symptomatic. Sort of like body temperature. If you're running a four degree fever or have a bathwater-range temperature, you know something's wrong. And you also know that the solution isn't to ice your forehead or climb in the oven. Its to dig through whatever you've got and look for causal problems. So if I say a paper should be eight to ten pages and you can only write three, that's symptomatic. Same goes if you're on page twenty with no end in sight. Either case suggests one of us has screwed up something, and that thing, not the page count, needs turned counterclockwise. Brainworm fucked around with this message at 02:25 on Jun 29, 2009 |
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Jun 29, 2009 02:23
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Hey, you mentioned you watched breaking bad. What'd you think of the ending to the last season?
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Jun 29, 2009 08:54
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I never quite understood this. In Paradise Lost when God sees Satan entering Eden he pretty much does nothing. He ends up immediately looking for someone to sacrifice instead of interfering and doing something about it. It drives me insane that he goes from seeing Satan entering Eden to asking Jesus to sacrifice himself. He does nothing about it even though its pretty clear that God thinks Satan entering Eden is a bad thing. I mean, I guess I can understand the character not interfering but I don’t understand why he doesn’t receive more blame for the entire fall because of this. When I was taking British Lit my professor asked us to write an essay about who we blame most for the fall and when I said God he blew a fuse and gave me a C-. Fucker.
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Jun 29, 2009 09:50
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j8910 posted:Hey, you mentioned you watched breaking bad. What'd you think of the ending to the last season? I'm not there yet. Two episodes to go. So far, I think the show started fantastically, but has since been a bit uneven -- that started with a bag of fulminated mercury blowing up a psychotic drug dealer's office. Since then, we've seen Walter turning into some kind of mythological hero, a hooker with a heart of gold, and an artist who's willing to take romantic risks in the face of her father's disapproval. These character aspects don't break the story irreparably, but they look like lazy writing. That is, these characters fit into any story, since they (or their personalities) don't emerge as a consequence of the particular story Breaking Bad is trying to tell. Walter is a good counterexample (at least before he starts blowing poo poo up) but minor characters work, too. Think Bob Odinkirk's Saul. So I haven't watched the last couple episodes because I'm afraid they'll spoil the series. I figure the odds of a good finale are maybe one in three, which means there's something like a two in three chance I'm going to decide I've wasted my time watching. Those black and white teaser sequences where they fish the teddy bear out of the pool, they're not building my confidence.
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Jun 29, 2009 12:58
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Pyroblaze posted:I never quite understood this. In Paradise Lost when God sees Satan entering Eden he pretty much does nothing. He ends up immediately looking for someone to sacrifice instead of interfering and doing something about it. It drives me insane that he goes from seeing Satan entering Eden to asking Jesus to sacrifice himself. He does nothing about it even though its pretty clear that God thinks Satan entering Eden is a bad thing. Yeah. The thing about Paradise Lost is that God comes across as an insufferable prick -- at best, He's boring, and at worst He's a little sadistic. You know, turns out I hosed up, kid, so let's bamph you up on the cross for a passion or so. There's no way around that one, although there are obviously byzantine theological issues that inflect both God's textual actions and how we're supposed to understand them. Mostly these add up to never blaming God for anything, because nothing is ever really His fault. Satan's rebellion? That's not justified anger at having the boss's son promoted over him. That's pride. The fall of Man? That's not a divinely-sanctioned and desperately uneven match between unprepared innocents and the most manipulative and persuasive being in the history of the known universe. That's Adam not keeping his bitch in line. And so on. But those are the reading rules that the text and its culture play by. You can't blame God in Paradise Lost any more than you can, say, blame Hamlet for not having a jetpack or blame Achilles for having concubines. These all bring in interpretive mechanisms external to the world the text builds for itself. That said, Paradise Lost abuses these rules more than most, especially with God's character. And that's sort of the point. God isn't God because He deserves to be. He's not God because people like Him. And he's certainly not God because His motivations are compassionate or even fathomable. He's still that Old Testament "lets send bears to eat the kids who mocked our prophet's baldness" guy, a.k.a. "I am that I am" -- in other words, shut the gently caress up, Moses. That's the long way 'round to saying that a capacity for blame is outside the logic of God's character. You might as well blame gravity or sunlight or thermodynamics.
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Jun 29, 2009 13:27
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Brainworm posted:I'm not there yet. Two episodes to go. Based on what you wrote, I'd give it a 99.9% chance you won't like the finale. Interesting that you won't watch the finale for fear that it will ruin what you've seen so far, though.
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Jun 29, 2009 18:24
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j8910 posted:Based on what you wrote, I'd give it a 99.9% chance you won't like the finale. Interesting that you won't watch the finale for fear that it will ruin what you've seen so far, though. That is interesting. I blame George Lucas. Somehow, Rocky V doesn't make the original Rocky any worse. But Lucas continues to unleash horrors that suck the blood out of his early work (which, to be fair, was slightly anemic to begin with). So now there's an entire generation of media consumers skittish about somehow polluting good viewings through their association with bad ones. Or maybe that's just me. EDIT: Watched the last two episodes and liked the finale. Nostradamus I'm not. Brainworm fucked around with this message at 06:18 on Jun 30, 2009 |
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Jun 29, 2009 20:18
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Hey Brainworm you mentioned that you were an AP Reader. Having gone through an extraordinarily hellish AP English class (where 3 books were covered the entire year and 2 of them were assigned for summer reading). What do you feel about the AP English curriculum? Have any memories of some simply terrible AP essays? Any thoughts of great insights from high school students under a time crunch?
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Jun 29, 2009 20:27
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tennisjump posted:Hey Brainworm you mentioned that you were an AP Reader. Having gone through an extraordinarily hellish AP English class (where 3 books were covered the entire year and 2 of them were assigned for summer reading). What do you feel about the AP English curriculum? Never went to high school, so the whole thing baffles me. As far as I can tell, AP curricula vary wildly at either the discretion of the instructor or his or her superiors. What I've heard seems soul-killing, though. This is all part of a sort of my complex bigotry against High School English teachers, though. I admit I'm a player hater, and I admit I met a few High School teachers at ETS who seemed on the ball. But some of them, I mean, holy poo poo. I hear them talk about what they're doing in the classroom, or how they'd teach a particular text, and I want to eat a poisonous loving cactus. It's like they all went to some class where they learned than any piece of literature has two levels: one of them is where all the words happen, and that's basically a distraction. The other, "real" level, where all the meaning happens, is populated by "symbols" and "themes," terms which can apparently mean absolutely loving anything. Also, did you know that "death" is a symbol and/or a theme in Hamlet? I know it now, because I heard it from almost every High School English teacher I spoke to. What the gently caress does this mean? How is it useful? I'm not venting here. I seriously want to know. Because I cannot understand what this analysis means or why it matters. I might as well have heard them say "pancake hatbox Troilus and Cressida, n'est-ce pas?" quote:Have any memories of some simply terrible AP essays? Any thoughts of great insights from high school students under a time crunch? Oh God. I kept a list of the best phrases I found, but don't have it to hand. The absolute best one was a response to the first five paragraphs of The Street, which asked students to describe the relationship between Lutie Johnson and her environment. Some AP Test Taker posted:Lutie Johnson was raped by the wind. Why would she look for an apartment in that neighborhood, knowing how the wind could do that to you? That's right. Those two sentences, followed by a sketch of a turnip. I thought it both enigmatic and charming. You also may be interested in knowing that the AP reading ends with an interminable series of sketches where the readers parade the worst of the things they've read that week. But advice? Follow the prompt. You'll get at least a 6 (on the 0-9 scale we use to grade the essays). I can't tell you how many essays I read that summarized the passage, detailed how the wind was personified, or did anything other than the one thing the prompt asked, which was to describe the relationship between Lutie Johnson and her environment. Also, really bad essays have a few signature moves. They praise the author or the text (e.g. The unforgettable Lutie Johnson, in the pants-crappingly good novel The Street), contextualize the novel when the context is irrelevant (e.g. The Street is set immediately following World War II, after Hitler invaded Mesopotamia), or talk about how the details in the text work on the reader -- I call these "you are there" passages. An alarming number of essays do this last thing exclusively. There is such-and-such detail and you are there. The wind is is personified and you are there. The sign has a rust spot that looks like blood and you are there. It really is incredible that someone can sustain that kind of writing for pages and pages and pages. There were apparently some very good essays, though I only saw a couple. As a rule, these did something other than reassemble the prompt and the text into something stitched together with a naming of parts (like personification, symbol, etc), and the 9s were generally well-written, if not polished-sounding. In fact is was the quality of writing, not the quality of observation, that separated the 8s and 9s from the 6s and 7s.
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Jun 29, 2009 21:23
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In your opinion are there any texts that academia holds to be classics that don't deserve it? I honestly can't remember if that has been asked or not, so feel free to ignore it if it has. I'd love to hear what you think about Catch-22. I could never tell whether Yossarian was really sane or not. Sometimes he seemed like the only sane one around, but he did some strange things when he was in the hospital.
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Jun 30, 2009 03:57
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I think I might have enjoyed my English classes more if you were teaching them. If only because everything I remember hating about them, you seem to hate too. This was my high school English experience:quote:It's like they all went to some class where they learned than any piece of literature has two levels: one of them is where all the words happen, and that's basically a distraction. The other, "real" level, where all the meaning happens, is populated by "symbols" and "themes," terms which can apparently mean absolutely loving anything. I think I was so conditioned to expect this crap in English classes that I never even gave my college English classes a chance.
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Jun 30, 2009 06:08
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modig posted:I think I was so conditioned to expect this crap in English classes that I never even gave my college English classes a chance.
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Jun 30, 2009 13:33
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OctaviusBeaver posted:In your opinion are there any texts that academia holds to be classics that don't deserve it? I honestly can't remember if that has been asked or not, so feel free to ignore it if it has. I am eternally confused by John Updike and Maya Angelou's places in the canon. People act like "A & P" is an exceptionally well-crafted short story, which I just don't see. I mean, it's not bad, but you don't have to look far for better short story writers. Juniot Diaz is a textbook example of how a modern author can work the form. But this also might be because -- at least from here -- it seems like HSE teachers have some kind of aversion to teaching anything written after about 1970. And that leads to some crackrock choices. Arthur Miller is an able playwright, but his moment of political and social relevance has passed. The same is true of HS staples like Animal Farm. It's not that these are bad texts. It's that they work by engaging a Cold War culture that ended well before High School students -- and even some of their teachers -- were born. So I don't see why, when a teacher can only do a few books a year, these make the cut. And there are others like this. Heart of Darkness seems popular in High School classrooms, and I honestly don't understand why. It's a century-old indictment of British Imperialism. Why this is relevant in an American High School classroom, or at least relevant enough to replace distinctly American novels like McTeague or Silas Lapham, I don't know. quote:I'd love to hear what you think about Catch-22. I could never tell whether Yossarian was really sane or not. Sometimes he seemed like the only sane one around, but he did some strange things when he was in the hospital. I think that's exactly the point. That is, Catch is basically a topsy-turvy world where Yossarian's singular insanity is a perfect representation of institutional insanity in miniature, and so he's singularly adapted to success in a wartime environment that rewards his madcap schemes over deliberate rationality.
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Jun 30, 2009 16:51
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Brainworm posted:And there are others like this. Heart of Darkness seems popular in High School classrooms, and I honestly don't understand why. It's a century-old indictment of British Imperialism. Why this is relevant in an American High School classroom, or at least relevant enough to replace distinctly American novels like McTeague or Silas Lapham, I don't know. Isn't it more of an indictment of Belgian Imperialism? (and a fairly specific incident of it, at that)
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Jun 30, 2009 18:21
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Jeb Bush 2012 posted:Isn't it more of an indictment of Belgian Imperialism? (and a fairly specific incident of it, at that) Ah yes, it was a greenstick fracture, not a comminuted fracture. Never mind that the Belgian Congo exported rubber and not ivory and that the river is never named and that it's told by an Englishman by a (Polish-born) Englishman, in English, with all the main characters being English. Greenstick, yes...
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Jun 30, 2009 19:35
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This is one of the best threads I've ever read. Thank you. I'm not sure I have anything to contribute. I have an undergrad BA in English and Anthropology, but my English focus was not on lit. I went to Purdue, and they had a professional writing focus. I thought about grad school a lot, and still do. After a few years of technical writing I ended up in the non-profit environmental sector, doing some writing but mostly organization and biological research. Still, that niggling part of me wants to return to the classics -- even Shakespeare, which I nearly flunked out of due to a terrible teacher (I know, that's not a great excuse, but I'm using it since I did well in all my other lit courses). I noticed earlier in the thread you mentioned "Slings and Arrows." I enjoyed this series and still have a few episodes to finish watching on DVD. Coming from a family that had a couple semi-faces theater types, I got to enjoy a lot of summer Shakespeare in the Park. But the "Slings and Arrows" show put a new spin on things. You mentioned Ginsberg basing some of "Howl" on "Lycidia". Do you give most beat poets credibility? I know that lumping some of these guys together is not good. Gregory Corso is far different than say Gary Snyder. What are your thoughts -- say on these guys I mentioned, plus Philip Whalen and Lawrence Ferlinghetti? I actually did some research a few years ago into what universities were teaching classes on the beats, and had some e-mail chains with some professors who were breaking ground in this type of non-traditional lit teaching. Also, what do you think of Gabriel Garcia Marquez?
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Jun 30, 2009 20:31
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billion dollar bitch posted:Ah yes, it was a greenstick fracture, not a comminuted fracture. Never mind that the Belgian Congo exported rubber and not ivory and that the river is never named and that it's told by an Englishman by a (Polish-born) Englishman, in English, with all the main characters being English. Greenstick, yes... You mean like the actual trip that Conrad made through the Congo Free State? The site of one of the greatest atrocities of the age of imperialism? Which Conrad was personally acquainted with through his journeys and knowing one of the main campaigners against it? But ivory!!! (which the congo free state also exported, by the way)
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Jun 30, 2009 23:00
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I do research on schizophrenia, and just had the thought that that the mentality required to analyze literature is kind of like what a schizophrenic feels all the time. Seeing meaning to everything they notice, creating connections between unrelated objects and generally "magical" thinking. Any thoughts?
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Jul 1, 2009 00:54
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PrinceofLowLight posted:I do research on schizophrenia, and just had the thought that that the mentality required to analyze literature is kind of like what a schizophrenic feels all the time. Seeing meaning to everything they notice, creating connections between unrelated objects and generally "magical" thinking. Any thoughts? Not only are you an idiot, you betray a fundamental misconception about what literary critics do.
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Jul 1, 2009 01:23
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While I do regret the tone of my previous post (it was, frankly, just plain rude, and I apologize), I think you would have a hard time saying that Heart of Darkness was written solely to indict the Belgian Congo. Firstly, because the atrocities committed in the Belgian Congo don't crop up in Heart of Darkness (no amputations, no kidnapping of wives, etc). Secondly, because Heart of Darkness is sketched in such inclusive terms (French destroyers, British expedition, Belgian company), it's hard not to see it as a commentary on all of European imperialism. I think that it focuses a lot on the British mindset, as the main characters are British, the narration happens in Britain, et cetera, but Conrad said, "All Europe had a hand in the making of Kurtz" (or something to that effect).
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Jul 1, 2009 01:27
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Mr. Spooky posted:Not only are you an idiot, you betray a fundamental misconception about what literary critics do. You disagree with the idea that fictional characters exist in a world where minor details are usually put there intentionally in order to convey a certain message?
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Jul 1, 2009 01:46
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PrinceofLowLight posted:You disagree with the idea that fictional characters exist in a world where minor details are usually put there intentionally in order to convey a certain message? Does this mean that you think that interpreting things in anything other than only their most literal sense means someone shows signs of schizophrenia? Edit: Or does it mean that you took too many undergrad-level lit courses where the professor entertained any and all textual interpretations from students without requiring sufficient thought and evidence to back them up? z0331 fucked around with this message at 05:26 on Jul 1, 2009 |
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Jul 1, 2009 05:24
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PrinceofLowLight posted:You disagree with the idea that fictional characters exist in a world where minor details are usually put there intentionally in order to convey a certain message? You disagree that attention to character and detail have any real purpose?
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Jul 1, 2009 06:16
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It would be a pleasure to hear some of your thoughts on this aphorism written by Nietzsche in The Gay Science.quote:98. In praise of Shakespeare.— I could not say anything more beautiful in praise of Shakespeare as a human being than this: he believed in Brutus and did not cast one speck of suspicion upon this type of virtue! It was to him that he devoted his best tragedy—it is still called by the wrong name—to him and to the most awesome quintessence of a lofty morality. Independence of the soul!—that is at stake here! No sacrifice can be too great for that: one must be capable of sacrificing one’s dearest friend for it, and even if he should also be the most glorious human being, an ornament of the world, a genius without peer—if one loves freedom as the freedom of great souls and he threatens this kind of freedom:—that is what Shakespeare must have felt!. The height at which he places Caesar is the finest honor that he could bestow on Brutus: that is how he raises beyond measure Brutus’ inner problem as well as the spiritual strength that was able to cut this knot!
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Jul 1, 2009 07:25
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Brainworm posted:And there are others like this. Heart of Darkness seems popular in High School classrooms, and I honestly don't understand why. It's a century-old indictment of British Imperialism. Why this is relevant in an American High School classroom, or at least relevant enough to replace distinctly American novels like McTeague or Silas Lapham, I don't know. You don't see how an indictment of imperialism is relevant to Americans today? There might be a more modern novels or a novel more relevant w/r/t Americans with a similar message, but the message itself is pretty important for Americans to take home.
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Jul 1, 2009 14:05
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joha87eurasian posted:You don't see how an indictment of imperialism is relevant to Americans today? There might be a more modern novels or a novel more relevant w/r/t Americans with a similar message, but the message itself is pretty important for Americans to take home. Well, of course it's important for HS students to learn something about both European and American imperialisms, but I'm not sure that either an English classroom or a century-old novel are the best tools for the job -- I mean, the species of imperial practice Conrad hits in HOD have been over and done with for sixty years at least, though their effects are still with us, and of course there are different, post-imperial, politics at work today. So my point is that HOD is a poor choice for the classroom if you want some kind of political relevance. Better to bring in Naipaul, Dangarembga, Achebe -- hell, even Salmon Rushdie -- if you want literatures of colonial politics in the classroom. More to the point: of course colonialism is important. It's as important as any system of social organization that steps us into the modern world. But the idea that the literature of European colonialism is somehow more relevant or more useful in American classrooms that either treatments of American imperialism or postcolonial literature, well, that doesn't hold for me. In fact, it seems symptomatic of a larger HSE tendency to avoid literary and political currency.
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Jul 1, 2009 15:36
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Jeb Bush 2012 posted:Isn't it more of an indictment of Belgian Imperialism? (and a fairly specific incident of it, at that) Yeah, but I was arguing from the politics of reception -- maybe not the clearest move, I know. You've got an indictment of imperial practice being presented to an Anglophone audience in ~1900, which seems more like a shot to the British crotch than criticism of the Belgians. I mean, if I write a fictional piece about the French misadventure in Vietnam, it's always possible that people will read it as being about the French. More likely, readers will manufacture some connection between the French experience and America's current position in Iraq (even in the unlikely event I didn't intend or foresee that connection in the first place).
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Jul 1, 2009 15:42
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lili von shtupp posted:[...] I think you can say the same thing about the Beats that you can say about any group of poets: most of them are bad jokes. That's not an indictment of beat poetry, since you can say the same thing about the Angry Young Men or the Modernists. And I'm not about to guess which Beats, if any, will stand the test of time. Ferlinghetti is deceptively complicated, and so might be able to stand on his craft alone. Ginsberg also seems like a good bet, since as far as I can tell he's the only Beat who was a consistently strong reader of earlier poetry. But I wouldn't call teaching the Beats non-traditional. I mean, they're anthologized in e.g. the Norton. quote:Also, what do you think of Gabriel Garcia Marquez? I love Gabo. It's worth learning Spanish to read 100 Years. EDIT: Sorry, that was vapid. I mean, it's impossible to overestimate Gabo's influence in Hispanic Literature especially, though pretty much any Postmodern novelist is responding to Marquez in one way or another. Delillo's probably the best example of a modern novelist trying to crawl out of Gabo's shadow. Brainworm fucked around with this message at 15:59 on Jul 1, 2009 |
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Jul 1, 2009 15:51
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PrinceofLowLight posted:I do research on schizophrenia, and just had the thought that that the mentality required to analyze literature is kind of like what a schizophrenic feels all the time. Seeing meaning to everything they notice, creating connections between unrelated objects and generally "magical" thinking. Any thoughts? I can see where this comes from, but the big difference is that literary criticism operates according to well-defined rule sets; which rule set you choose of course depends on what kind of critic you are, but there are some constants. Just for instance, one rule for reading prose is that lineation doesn't matter, so if you find something spelled in an acrostic style it's not interpretively significant (where it might be in poetry). And aside from a few rare and well-defined conventions involving the excavation of details from early texts, the book as an artifact (hardback, softback, font choices, etc.) aren't interpretively significant, either. So I'd hesitate to call literary criticism "magical" thinking for the same basic reasons I wouldn't call the events of e.g. a football game "random." Both play out inside a set of clearly defined rules, although those rules can give rise to unanticipated complexitites.
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Jul 1, 2009 16:40
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Brainworm posted:But I wouldn't call teaching the Beats non-traditional. I mean, they're anthologized in e.g. the Norton.
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Jul 1, 2009 20:30
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From Underground posted:It would be a pleasure to hear some of your thoughts on this aphorism written by Nietzsche in The Gay Science. Nietzsche posted:98. In praise of Shakespeare.— I could not say anything more beautiful in praise of Shakespeare as a human being than this: he believed in Brutus and did not cast one speck of suspicion upon this type of virtue! It was to him that he devoted his best tragedy—it is still called by the wrong name—to him and to the most awesome quintessence of a lofty morality. Independence of the soul!—that is at stake here! No sacrifice can be too great for that: one must be capable of sacrificing one’s dearest friend for it, and even if he should also be the most glorious human being, an ornament of the world, a genius without peer—if one loves freedom as the freedom of great souls and he threatens this kind of freedom:—that is what Shakespeare must have felt!. The height at which he places Caesar is the finest honor that he could bestow on Brutus: that is how he raises beyond measure Brutus’ inner problem as well as the spiritual strength that was able to cut this knot! Whenever I read Nietzsche on Shakespeare I'm reminded of one of my favorite lines from Götzen-Dämmerung (Twilight of the Idols): "Wofür wir Worte haben, darüber sind wir auch schon hinaus. In allem Reden liegt ein Gran Verachtung." My English edition of Twilight, if I remember correctly, translates this as "we have already gone beyond whatever we have words for. In all talk there is a grain of contempt." My German's terrible, but I prefer "those things for which we have words are already dead in our hearts. There is always a kind of contempt in the act of speaking." Speech, in other words, is always a kind of lying. The only feelings it can express are the one's we've killed. I don't prefer this second version because it's a more accurate translation -- I wouldn't know -- but because it locates this "contempt" for speaking in the speaker rather than the material of his words. That is, it suggests that speakers always know that their words fall some distance from the truth. Regardless of whether this comes from a good reading of Nietzsche, it's a good reading of Brutus. The way I read this bit you've quoted, Nietzsche's litmus test for an honorable character is whether he has a "contempt for the act of speaking." Brutus, of course, does -- he doesn't need to unpack his heart with words when, say, he hears of his wife's death, because he knows that words will somehow wrong his grief. That silence is how we know Brutus loved his wife. The Antonys and Cinnas of Caesar, on the other hand, are all about talk. In Nietzsche's reading of Caesar, Antony's funeral speech is straight treachery. Antony can't possibly mean what he's saying, because if he loved Caesar like Brutus did his grief would strike him mute, not spur his eloquence. His speech proves his insincerity. More interesting, though, is what Nietzsche does with Shakespeare using this division. He reads Shakespeare as a Brutus, as someone who recognized what Nietzsche himself recognized: the act of speech is always a sort of debasement, a categorical insincerity. After all, speech is for those things already dead in our hearts, not for the vital kinds of truth that Shakespeare must have wanted to represent on the stage. So Nietzsche reads Shakespeare as conflicted, a self-hating poet, who writes a wholly admirable character like Brutus into being using a tool (language) about which he feels deeply ambivalent. All this said, I like Nietzche's reading of Brutus; the more common approach to this character sees him as constantly compromised or polluted by his work in the conspiracy and his military failures. But I think that misses the point. Brutus is the center of the tragedy in Caesar because he's split between two mutually exclusive and equally valid duties: duty to the state, and duty to the emperor. In that sense, Caesar is something close to a Hegelian tragedy, since this conflict between equally valid and competing loyalties dooms Brutus because he's honorable. Were he morally flexible enough to entirely abandon his loyalty to either Caesar or the state, this play would be about the tragic murder of Caesar, not its tragic consequences for Brutus.
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Jul 1, 2009 22:16
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Brainworm posted:I can see where this comes from, but the big difference is that literary criticism operates according to well-defined rule sets; which rule set you choose of course depends on what kind of critic you are, but there are some constants. Perhaps I expressed this in a jackassed kind of way. What I'm basically saying is that fictional characters exist in a world that actually does operate the way a schizophrenic thinks it does. So, in a way, to understand these self-consistent worlds, you have to develop a similar kind of thinking. For instance, part of schizophrenia is assigning significance to any event that stands out. Which is the way you kind of have to approach fiction. So, when one of the detectives on Law & Order is questioning Gary Busey, it's pretty easy to jump to the conclusion that he was actually the murderer. The capacity to think that way exists in everyone, I'm just putting forward the idea that literary analysis is a controlled example of it.
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Jul 1, 2009 22:30
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PrinceofLowLight posted:I'm just putting forward the idea that literary analysis is a controlled example of it. Yet you refuse to even read what anybody says in defense of literary analysis, display no aptitude towards it on your own, and have taken no initiative towards exemplifying your narrow oversimplification of the discipline. Either try harder, add some content, or go home. Brainworm: you do economic readings of early modern lit, right? How far have you gone with history of the book stuff in that area. I've been rereading notes lately in preparation for my renaissance comp from a class I took with Donald Beecher on renaissance prose fiction, and I'm curious whether anybody's been able to effectively correlate the economic factors between Shakespeare and his sources when his sources were popular protonovels (like "The Winter's Tale" and "As You Like It"). I know that most people stop at "Shakespeare cribbed X," but I'm curious about what you have to say about both the quality of the source material and reciprocal reading.
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Jul 2, 2009 00:44
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Brainworm posted:Yeah, but I was arguing from the politics of reception -- maybe not the clearest move, I know. You've got an indictment of imperial practice being presented to an Anglophone audience in ~1900, which seems more like a shot to the British crotch than criticism of the Belgians. Well the thing is that the atrocities in the Congo actually did get a lot of attention in Britain eventually, and Conrad was involved in that. It's more analogous to writing fiction about human rights abuses in China - sure, some people will see parallels to American "enhanced interrogation" and Guantanamo, but that doesn't mean it wouldn't be understood as primarily criticising China.
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Jul 2, 2009 01:19
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Mr. Spooky posted:Brainworm: you do economic readings of early modern lit, right? How far have you gone with history of the book stuff in that area. I've been rereading notes lately in preparation for my renaissance comp from a class I took with Donald Beecher on renaissance prose fiction, and I'm curious whether anybody's been able to effectively correlate the economic factors between Shakespeare and his sources when his sources were popular protonovels (like "The Winter's Tale" and "As You Like It"). I know that most people stop at "Shakespeare cribbed X," but I'm curious about what you have to say about both the quality of the source material and reciprocal reading. This is a huge question -- actually larger than it sounds -- because it can include both source texts for Shakespearean drama as well as the economics of Shakepsearean theater. This second matters more than it seems like it would at first glance, because changes in stage practices and the economics of theater arguably have a huge influence on what gets written. Shakespeare's writing for a theatrical marketplace, after all. Point is, you can locate "source material" both in antecedent texts and in performance traditions, and in theatrical economy more generally. What I'm saying is, economic criticism has basically broadened the texts and practices admissible as Shakespearean source material rather than elucidating the relationships between Shakespearean texts and conventional sources in new ways. A few people have done this, though: Don Hendrick has been doing this since the mid-80s -- his breakout piece talked about satirical texts as sources for Hamlet, but also speculates on the content of Kyd's Hamlet based on the content of these satires. David Landreth has also done some work on this (or was when he was at NYU), but I couldn't tell you where this has made it in to print. My own work, though, has basically done that source broadening work, though in a more New Historicist way. A good example is Coriolanus, which you'll remember begins with a food riot. Most conventional source text discussions here would point to Sidney's Defense where he talks about how Meninius's speech calmed the food rioters. My work has discussed the significance of this food riot by pointing to contemporary pamphlets that talk about food riots as the consequences of political mismanagement, since the emerging thought about food shortages during Shakespeare's lifetime was that they were politically preventable rather than wrath-of-God kinds of things. The upshot of this is that this discussion about famine's political significance admits all kinds of new sources to discussion of Coriolanus. Most of these are topical pamphlets, though, and not prose narratives. So it sounds like you've got a good opening for some research if you want to follow up the economic contexts of emerging prose narratives, since I can't think of anyone who's staked a claim there.
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Jul 2, 2009 01:46
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Brainworm posted:Juniot Diaz is a textbook example of how a modern author can work the form.
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Jul 2, 2009 03:44
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Brainworm posted:So it sounds like you've got a good opening for some research if you want to follow up the economic contexts of emerging prose narratives, since I can't think of anyone who's staked a claim there. That's a good way of thinking of it. Unfortunately (well, for you at least), my dissertation project is thoroughly medieval, and will probably only focus on economics as a matter of fact rather than as a matter of content. I do find it very strange, however, that book history and history of the novel people so willfully blind themselves to pretty much anything written before the interregnum, and the renaissance is currently a critical dead zone for non-cannonical or non-aristrocratic texts in a way that analyses of anything either before or after it isn't. If you've got time, though, I'd strongly recommend looking at some of the Jacobean stuff like Ornatus and Artesia or A Marguerite of America (which ought to be available on EEBO). They're short, they're funny, they read as cleanly as Chaucer, and they're common. If your project still involves pressing on economics, this sort of thing can actually help give you the comforting sense of a 'reading public' that tends to be sorely lacking in early modern historicism.
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Jul 2, 2009 05:01
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Brainworm posted:This is a liberal arts school. Leg shaving is optional if not cause for expulsion. That is not a "no". Your wily engrish does not fool me.
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Jul 2, 2009 07:20
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Defenestration posted:Having just finished Oscar Wao I agree with this wholeheartedly. That was good writing but it only got a pulitzer because it was multicultural and had footnotes. I didn't even think Oscar was that great of a "nerd" character - maybe I've been spoiled by the forums Yeah, everybody seems to like Wao. I'd call it strong but flawed, which is about as high praise as anyone's likely to get from me. And I'm not sure I can think of a better candidate for the Pulitzer -- I'm not sure last year yielded a bumper crop. Chabon, maybe. But the way Diaz does the short story in Drown, well, the man's got some chops. More to the point, the man wrote a collection of short stories that actually sold even though he wasn't a name author. That's a huge accomplishment. The short story is as close to a dying form as I'm likely to see in my lifetime.
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Jul 2, 2009 13:18
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