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Wolfgang Pauli posted:How much of the St John's Reading List have you read? I can remember doing about two-thirds of it, though I suspect I've read more of the early stuff than I remember. quote:I've been considering giving this a shot, starting with Aristotle and Plato and the playwrights (should be appropriate, since I have an Ancient Phil class on top of a shitload of Theatre next semester). That seems like a fine goal, but I think context and discussion are what's going to make or break your experience with that list. Frankly, I find the selections baffling. I suppose that, since this is St. John's, the over-representation of medieval thought and theology makes some sense. But I'm not sure I see the point of reading Descartes's Geometry or Pascal on conic sections. I mean, these are historically significant texts, but I'm not sure what you gain from them as a college Sophomore. You might as well read a period text on how to make perfume from whale brains.* Also, there's nearly nothing from the past seven decades. This is a Catholic College, but C.S. Lewis, the most influential theologian since Augustine, doesn't make the reading list? Derrida, Althusser, the Frankfurt School, Bertrand Russell, Wittgenstein, Whitehead, Saussere, Levi-Strauss, Baudrillard, Lyotard, Barthes, Richard Rorty, Michel motherfucking Foucault -- the people who, in short, are perhaps responsible for the most conspicuous features of modern intellectual life -- don't even get essays? Are they granting BAs from 1955? * Um. Not to rant, but this is also a pretty white, pretty guy-heavy list. I'm sure there are women worth reading who aren't Virginia Woolf or Jane Austen. MLK, Malcolm X, you might expect a short glance at them in the education of a 21st century American college graduate. A textual history of geometry and algebra might also include something Islamic or Indian, on the off chance those cultures contributed anything significant.
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Aug 7, 2009 23:36
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Could you talk a bit about Milton? What are your readings of PL and Lycidas? I find his biography fascinating as well. Could you have ever been a Miltonist?
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Aug 8, 2009 04:34
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I don't know, Brainworm. You're being a bit hard on St. John's. (It's actually not a Catholic college by the way. The name's a bit of a misnomer.) It's hard to judge which 20th century intellectuals will have real staying power. Isn't it better to focus on the stuff we know people will still care about and think about in a hundred years?
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Aug 8, 2009 16:14
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Halisnacks posted:Having gone through grad school, would you say that the awkward, unattractive academic is that way to begin? Or is it a sort of 'badge of honour' that one earns through their PhD studies? e.g. 'Now that I know so much about critical theory x, I'm above smelling good.' 'I'm so busy working on my dissertation that I can't learn how to manage my newfound baldness in a becoming way. And gently caress if I'll give a poo poo.' When it comes to looks, grad school seems to be the great destroyer. People go in as fresh faced 22 year olds, and come out six or seven or eight years later with acne, bizarre weight issues, pattern baldness, and cats. Always cats. quote:Also I know you were generalizing, and it could have to do with samples, but the faculty at my alma mater were a decent-looking bunch. And most of my TAs (MA or PhD students) were downright hot. But yeah, that's just as anecdotal as your experience. Oh, I'm generalizing tremendously. And I've been to programs -- UW Madison, Columbia, Princeton, UC Davis -- where this simply does not hold. It's amazing. But I think people implicitly judge academics by a slightly different standards of appearance. It's easier to be good looking, at least to some people, and I'm not sure why. So consider the following scoring system: One Point Each For: * Fitness (basic). Men have no visible guts or unsightly deposits of fat. Women's bellies project from the body no further than the midpoint of the breasts. For both genders, shoulders/chest describe widest point on body. * Fitness (advanced). This person has a body type normal people aspire to, e.g. have something that could be unironically called a "physique." On women, jiggling is both confined and attention-getting. * Hygiene (basic). For men, clean shaven or well-groomed facial hair. Fingernails are trimmed. For women, no facial hair. Hair is clean, combed, and not overgrown. Visible body parts are nicely scrubbed, teeth are clean, orderly, and white, and body odors are detectable only to dogs. Acne, dandruff, or other skin conditions are absent or well-managed. * Hygiene (advanced). For men and women, hair is "styled" -- that is, cut, colored, and/or combed in a way that compliments e.g. face shape and coloration. Teeth are all clean, white, and straight. For men, facial hair enhances appearance because of its relationship to e.g. face shape. For women, cosmetics are well-applied and tastefully chosen. * Clothing (basic). Clothes fit well, are generally of natural fibers, and could be unironically described as either "timeless classics" or "recent, tasteful, age-appropriate trends." Shoes are appropriate for civilization: sandals, crocs, cowboy boots, Ugg boots, footwear endorsed by a celebrity or bearing a logo: no. * Clothing (advanced). Clothes are chosen with close attention to build, coloration, and fit. As a rule, they appear to have been to a tailor. Glasses, if present, are not just quirky or expensive, but compliment face shape and color. Jewelry (including watches) is minimal and well chosen. Men wear no more than one ring, and it is never on the little finger or thumb. Shoes do not have "comfort" or rubber soles, and would otherwise meet the professional standards set in, say, Manhattan. * God Given Whatever. This person has a collection of physical features free from what we might commonly call "defect." This person has good skin, is not overweight, has a pronounced jaw and neckline, an absence of pronounced asymmetries, goiters, wens, warts, and has what a plastic surgeon or aesthetician would call "balanced" features. Litmus test: this person could model clothing in, say, a JC Penney catalog. I haven't taken a formal survey, but at my College, the people scoring more than two points on this scale would be a distinct minority -- something less that a fifth of the professors, certainly. I could count the number of fives on one hand, I think. There might be a six or two. In the real world, I'd guess that the similarly professional (doctors, lawyers) would score somewhat higher. Actually, I'm getting groceries in a few. I think I might walk through Wal-Mart and take some scores. Develop a baseline.
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Aug 8, 2009 17:26
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emys posted:I don't know, Brainworm. You're being a bit hard on St. John's. (It's actually not a Catholic college by the way. The name's a bit of a misnomer.) It's hard to judge which 20th century intellectuals will have real staying power. Isn't it better to focus on the stuff we know people will still care about and think about in a hundred years?  Seriously, I'm as much a classics fangirl as anyone else but c'mon, just because it was written after 1915 doesn't mean it's not important enough. Time is moving a lot faster now, and that list has very little anything that prepares you to think about a postmodern, postcolonial world also have you ever seen Charmides post? he went to st. john's and that's what that kind of education produces.
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Aug 8, 2009 17:49
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emys posted:I don't know, Brainworm. You're being a bit hard on St. John's. (It's actually not a Catholic college by the way. The name's a bit of a misnomer.) It's hard to judge which 20th century intellectuals will have real staying power. Isn't it better to focus on the stuff we know people will still care about and think about in a hundred years? I doubt my students will be caring or thinking about anything in 2109. I mean, "what will people be reading and talking about in a century?" and "what should we include in our curriculum?" are unrelated questions. If we're going to use textual durability as a razor, a better one might be "what are people (a) reading and talking about now that they will (b) continue to read and talk about for the next decade?" That's my problem with the St. John's reading list. A healthy number of those texts fail on (a), in the sense that they are not widely read or discussed either popularly or by field experts. I'm not in a position to check right now, but I'd bet that trawling for scholarship on Pascal's Generation of Conic Sections won't net much chatter. And (b) brings recent scholarship into more focus. Of that list of what St. John's is missing, most of those authors' anchor texts are like forty or fifty years old. Most of those scholars were dead well before any of my students were born. That's not current scholarship. That's some of the most durable and influential matter from, say, the last two generations of Western intellectual life. It's good for ten more years. That doesn't mean that you don't read Aristotle's Poetics, but that you also necessarily read, say, Kenneth Burke, Northrop Frye, Hayden White, Harold Bloom, or anyone else who describes the construction of non-ancient narratives using a variety of non-ancient techniques. poo poo. I don't mind if my surgeon's read Galen, but his schooling drat well ought to focus on what's gone on since the Kennedy assassination.
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Aug 8, 2009 18:18
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Brainworm posted:Hilarity re: academics, attractiveness. Brainworm posted:Um. Not to rant, but this is also a pretty white, pretty guy-heavy list. I'm sure there are women worth reading who aren't Virginia Woolf or Jane Austen. MLK, Malcolm X, you might expect a short glance at them in the education of a 21st century American college graduate. A textual history of geometry and algebra might also include something Islamic or Indian, on the off chance those cultures contributed anything significant. Care to share your thoughts on Euro-, Cauca-, Homo-, Anglo*-centrism in the cannon and English education? *I understand that that English literature as a field is bound to be anglo-centric. But I don't really understand why. Don't you think there is a huge difference between teaching English grammar and style, and teaching literature? Just as an example, couldn't a programme that taught Shakespeare and Molière be more coherent than, say, a programme that focussed solely on the Anglo tradition in which a student could take courses on Shakespeare and, I dunno, Vonnegut? Why as soon as we get to works from different languages do we need to cross faculties, or do comp. lit? I can't see reading the original texts as being the issue, or else everyone who covered Chaucer at college would be able to read Middle English. I should probably edit this for clarity later, but I guess what I'm asking is if most universities have History departments, why not Literature departments?
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Aug 8, 2009 19:42
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Brainworm posted:That's my problem with the St. John's reading list. A healthy number of those texts fail on (a), in the sense that they are not widely read or discussed either popularly or by field experts. I'm not in a position to check right now, but I'd bet that trawling for scholarship on Pascal's Generation of Conic Sections won't net much chatter. I definitely wouldn't want it as a curriculum. As a crash course on classics and early modern thought, however... Halisnacks posted:I wonder who do worse on this, academics or SA forum members. Though I like to think I reach most 'basic' levels on your criteria.
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Aug 8, 2009 23:03
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Grouco posted:Could you have ever been a Miltonist? I'm actually a Miltonist by training -- my major area was the so-called "long 17th century" (about 1580-1725), but I call myself a Shakespearean because that's what I teach most often. That's where most of my new thinking goes. quote:Could you talk a bit about Milton? What are your readings of PL and Lycidas? I find his biography fascinating as well. That's a lot to cover, and I think I talked about a bit of it earlier. But here we go. Milton's Biography You can get the basic details from, say, the Oxford DNB. But the big deal with Milton is his legacy -- in all seriousness, Milton's influence on the modern world is at least as great as Newton's. Forget Paradise Lost for a moment. Every element of Enlightenment political thought you can name -- including the principles expressed in the American Constitution and Declaration of Independence -- is a footnote to Milton's writing for Cromwell's Protectorate. We're talking about freedom of the press, freedom of religious expression, the idea that rulers have an obligation to the ruled (and the corollary idea that the ruled have the right to dispose of rulers who don't live up to their obligations), and the idea that every individual inherently has free will and inalienable rights. All Milton. Lycidas Still forgetting Paradise Lost, "Lycidas" is probably the single most influential poem in the history of English letters. As I've said before now, this poem casts a long loving shadow. I'm not going to close read "Lycidas" here -- there's too much of it for anything less than an article to make sense. But I'll lay out the structure of the poem in enough detail to get things started. The thing about "Lycidas" is that it brings a totally unprecedented level of emotional complexity to English poetry. Lycidas is dead, and the first thing we find out is that nobody -- god, human, or force of nature -- knows exactly how or why it happened. The next thing we learn is that Lycidas was destined to be the best of his kind -- he's a shepherd, like the speaker, and the poem takes the traditional approach to the "guiding humanity through its spiritual perils" aspect of this well-worn metaphor. That's, say, the first part of the poem. You've got humanity in spiritual peril because of a death that's senseless in the deepest possible sense -- not even the gods can explain why it happened or what it means. The second part's where things get interesting, since that's where the speaker has to emotionally interpret everything he's learned about Lycidas's death. So he tries on a few ideas: Lycidas is in a better place, Lycidas has escaped the pain of regular human life, and so forth. But as the speaker goes through these emotional possibilities, he realizes none of them work. Obviously they don't bring back Lycidas or lessen the spiritual peril his death's introduced. But, more important, they're not sufficient for the senselessness of Lycidas's death or the depth of the loss it represents. So he makes a decision. He's going to pretend that they are. He's going to act as though the stories he can tell himself about Lycidas's death work, even though they don't, since that's the only option he has that makes sense of the world. And, carrying the weight of that grief and responsibility, he moves on. Milton writes his way out from under Shakespeare with this one. The Sonnets are emotionally sophisticated, but they're mostly reversals, inversions, or parody of earlier sonneteering convention. But "Lycidas." I mean, holy poo poo. This isn't an incremental improvement on earlier poems' treatments of grief. This is a total rethinking, and a frighteningly honest rethinking, of what it means to deal with loss. And its basic insight -- that you can lose something of such value that you'll never emotionally recover from it, or even make sense of it -- seems so obvious to us now that the revolution in thinking and feeling it represents is actually easy for us to miss. That's how deeply influential this poem has been. So later poets, when they write about loss, are always writing against "Lycidas." This includes, basically, all the Romantics. Also, all the Modernists. I may have already mentioned that Ginsberg's "Howl" is basically a rewriting of "Lycidas," though of course Gins doesn't get out from under Milton the way Milton gets out from under Shakespeare. So let me wrap this bit up: even if we bracket Paradise Lost, Milton's basically author of the founding principles of every modern Republic and Democracy on Earth. Also, his first published poem -- in his college's literary magazine, no less -- informs just about everything written about loss or grief over the last few centuries. I'd include Freud's treatment of melancholy in this, though Freud would point to Hamlet before Lycidas. And that's just the stuff Milton's not famous for.
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Aug 9, 2009 03:28
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Defenestration posted:also have you ever seen Charmides post? he went to st. john's and that's what that kind of education produces. I went to St. John's and I'd like to think I'm half decent at both academia and web posting. (Break it to me real gentle if I'm wrong.) And anyone who doesn't care about this particular derail should skip right on here. Going through the St. John's program means buying into, however temporarily, the Eliot/Adler notion that reading and discussing these works is of itself a good thing, both for the students and for the professors (there called tutors). Expecting that sort of curriculum to prepare students for immediate contributions to contemporary scholarship is an exercise in missing the point. What it does is not teach you how to think (whatever the school's pamphlets say), but rather investigate how quite a few of the most influential thinkers across many fields have constructed their arguments, as a guide toward constructing your own. What you do with it from that point is up to you: among my good friends from those days are a doctor, a nurse, a journalist, a farmer, a barfly, and a bassist. None of them have been hampered in their fields by the great books education, just like I haven't been held back in English lit academia--though I certainly have crash coursed in theory. But it's not like I couldn't have done that at SJC either; half the faculty either graduated from or taught at The New School, and while there I had tutors who were students of Arendt, Adorno, Derrida, Kristeva, and pretty much any American academic you'd care to name. There was an independent study group in post-struct theory, there were study groups in pretty much everything; the students do a lot of gap-filling on their own. Also there are lectures every Friday night that bring in scholars and other luminaries from around the country and occasionally the globe both for a formal talk and a vigorous question period afterwards, often continuing well after midnight. At which point the conversation spills out onto the quad, and carries on--it's the only place I think you can still walk out of a dorm at 3am on any given night and find a group with a jug of wine and a lively discussion of Plato, or Hegel, or Kierkegaard, or all of them together. It's a weird place, no doubt, and it is incredibly intellectual, at times oppressively so. There are students who are politically engaged, but you'd barely know it from reading the bulletin boards, which are filled with more ads for the aforementioned study groups then for political causes. The question of dead white male oversaturation is continually discussed, officially and unofficially, but you run into the problem of what, exactly, you're going to kick off the list to make room.* I miss it terribly, and thinking about it makes me wish I could go back through it all over again, knowing what I do now--and in a sense I am doing that now, by concentrating on 20th-century and in particular postmodern literature, I'm picking up roughly where the program left off. But this is overlong already; the one thing I'm left to wonder is, in a thread where close reading has been so prominent and so appreciated, why are people so quick to dismiss the last bastion of the New Critical approach? Is it mostly the lack of reading in contemporary scholarship? Because so far as I can tell, that's best done during the MA years anyway. *Bear in mind here that the Kepler sorts of things take place in the mathematics tutorial, which you're in all four years. You also get four years of language--Greek, French, English poetry; three years of practical and theoretical science [yes, the Einstein works up to the special theory, and yes, it's heavily mediated by that point]; and two years of music. Anything getting booted is coming out of the catch-all twice-weekly seminars, where you get philosophy, literature, theology, or political science, depending on the schedule. The one exception is the "preceptorial" in junior and senior years when you take a break from seminar and join smaller groups on more concentrated subjects. (I did extra Dante one year and Vico the other.) elentar fucked around with this message at 06:48 on Aug 9, 2009 |
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Aug 9, 2009 06:41
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And Paradise Lost Honestly, I don't even know where to start with this. If it's tough to frame a discussion of Milton's political life or the influence of "Lycidas," talking Paradise Lost in a forum post, that's like trying to write someone's biography with three hairs and a blood sample. I think we've all heard the story about Satan eventually becoming pretty much every antihero in the western canon -- his sense of injured merit, his mix of bravado and real, but misdirected, courage -- these evoke complex, if now well-worn, emotional and intellectual responses. They're the center of the mythos surrounding "mad, bad, and dangerous to know" Byron and all his imitators. And we've all heard the story about how Milton's Satan is a rewriting of Shakespeare's Iago and, I think, a successful one. That's worth remembering, too. Iago's one of Shakespeare's greatest achievements, so (to make about the understatement of the century) rewriting Iago in a way that does justice to -- much less surpasses -- the original is a rare loving piece of work. It's also worth noting that Milton is the first to do this, and that writing himself out from under Shakespeare was something like a lifelong obsession; his poem "On Shakespeare" is excellent if you want to get inside the head of an author trying to build a relationship with his predecessors. So I'd like to briefly point to another, non-Satanic, legacy of Paradise Lost: the story of human arrogance and frailty marring the act of creation, like you'd see in Jurassic Park. Except we get it through Frankenstein, which is of course a rewriting of Paradise Lost. This terms of this textual relationship are clouded by our concentration on Satan, which might be one reason Mary Shelley makes it so explicit. You'll remember that Frankenstein's creature learns to speak by reading Paradise Lost while he's secretly living in that shed, and that, because he can speak, he can tell his story to Victor Frankenstein, who in turn tells it to the captain, who writes it in the letters that we actually read as part of the novel. So Paradise Lost is the first link in a chain of storytelling that leads to Frankenstein the book. Get it? Get it? Second, we need to talk a bit about Adam's constantly misread and underweighted role in Paradise Lost. We get a lot of Satan, and the usual story is that Eve falls because Satan appeals to her vanity, and that Adam falls because of his love for Eve. Adam's is consequently read as the most sympathetic of the three falls. At the same time, readers generally recognize that Adam falls deliberately, unlike Eve. He's not tricked. And, unlike Satan, he's not wronged -- or, to be more orthodox, he's not under the mistaken impression that he's been wronged. Adam, in short, is the only one of the three who falls without being deceived or mistreated. So the usual reading of Adam -- that he falls for love of Eve, and that this is somehow better -- is a little misplaced. He's in love with Eve, sure, but he still has a duty to God. Like Satan, Adam knows that God has a hard right hand. But he can't accept it. He can't accept that his station isn't to do what he wants, but to serve God regardless of how painful that service will be. It's a sin of pride, but unlike Satan's and Eve's, it's entirely self-driven. That he wraps it up in his love for Eve makes it worse -- it shows that he's not only putting that relationship above his relationship to God, but that he tells the story of his sin in exclusively worldly terms. This isn't about my relationship with God, he says, it's about my relationship with Eve. I mean, Satan and Eve might disobey God, but Adam's the only one who can pretend God doesn't matter. Victor Frankenstein, in that sense, is just another Adam -- the difference is that he makes his own Satan. But Victor still thinks and talks like Adam. Unlike Satan, he never accuses the world of having wronged him. Instead, when he tells his story, it's essentially Adam's story of worldly love forcing his concentration from the divinely sanctioned order of things. He never thinks he's sinning against that order while he's doing it. It's only later, once he sees how terribly things have gone wrong, that he can appreciate the nature or quality of his transgression. I think we see this story -- Adam's story -- all over the place. Mostly in cautionary tales and (unfortunately) not in good ones. More interesting is the diversity you see in Adam characters. They pop up where you'd never expect them, and they're incredibly direct where you think they'd have to be radically twisted to fit their setting. I mean, Darth Vader is about as straightforward an Adam as you can get -- except that George Lucas makes the therapy-inducing move of splitting Eve's role in the story between Padme and Anakin's mom.
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Aug 9, 2009 07:01
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Who are your favourite short story writers? What was your favourite undergrad/grad course?
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Aug 9, 2009 07:41
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Brainworm posted:I'm actually a Miltonist by training -- my major area was the so-called "long 17th century" (about 1580-1725), but I call myself a Shakespearean because that's what I teach most often. That's where most of my new thinking goes. You wouldn't happen to be familiar with/have an opinion on the work of Victoria Silver, would you? I think she would qualify as a Miltonist as well, and was one of my favorite professors when I was an undergrad.
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Aug 9, 2009 07:54
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elentar posted:I went to St. John's and I'd like to think I'm half decent at both academia and web posting. I don't want to derail this into whether St. John's is good or bad or misguided or the last ray of divine light. But I do want to hit some things: quote:None of them have been hampered in their fields by the great books education, just like I haven't been held back in English lit academia--though I certainly have crash coursed in theory. This is exactly the point, though. This isn't a "great books" education, excepting the sense that all of these books are old, and a fair number of them are well-known. Ideally, a "great books" education makes a deliberate and sustained effort to include significant contributions to ongoing intellectual conversations, generally using a set of elastic, but relatively consistent, criteria. The criteria used to make the St. John's list, applied today, would yield a substantially different set of texts. I say this lovingly, and from a college with a culture eerily like SJC's -- we're not a Great Books college, but we're both part of HEDS, neither of us do national rankings garbage, we admit similar students, etc. so I've met SJC faculty as part of our information-sharing and co-assessment relationships. This isn't the first time I've had this conversation about the reading list, and you should know that there's been some talk about adopting a formal and more frequent review process for the list (modeled on the process at e.g. Shimer), since the gaps between the current list and grad school expectations stress the preceptorials; as I'm sure you know, SJC attends its relationships to grad schools very, very closely. quote:
Newer criticism includes cultural studies approaches, but lots of newer criticisms are deeply formalist. I mean, take two examples of Deconstruction -- Derrida and Bloom. About the only thing they can agree on is that the absolute primacy of close reading. On one side, we've got Derrida's "there is nothing outside the text." On the other, we've got Bloom's "there is no text; only relationships between texts." Mutually exclusive, or at least opposing, and fine starting points for brilliant close readings. To these two, we could add everyone else who contributed to Deconstruction and Criticism: Paul de Man, Geoff Hartman, J. Hillis Miller, etc. Ruthless close readers to the man. And even cultural studies critics can build on kickass close readings. Marc Shell and Jonathan Goldberg are great examples -- in fact, if you wanted to see fantastic close reading, you could do worse than look at Sodometries and Economy of Literature. Hell, Stanley Fish does nothing but close read in Self-Consuming Artifacts and Surprised by Sin. Point is, it's tempting to confuse close reading with New Criticism and its historical moment, but I think you'll find that there's a pile of new, well-crafted, and deeply interesting tools for close reading out there.
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Aug 9, 2009 08:39
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Brainworm posted:Every element of Enlightenment political thought you can name -- including the principles expressed in the American Constitution and Declaration of Independence -- is a footnote to Milton's writing for Cromwell's Protectorate. We're talking about freedom of the press, freedom of religious expression, the idea that rulers have an obligation to the ruled (and the corollary idea that the ruled have the right to dispose of rulers who don't live up to their obligations), and the idea that every individual inherently has free will and inalienable rights. All Milton. Since this is something that, as you note, no one seems to know (I'd certainly never heard anything like it before you said it), could you talk a bit more about it? How does Milton fit into the history of political theory, exactly (besides 'in a big way')? How was he perceived at the time? Who influenced him, and who was directly influenced by him?
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Aug 9, 2009 15:12
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Brainworm posted:
Fair enough, and as I noted I've moved on from it myself and have had plenty of Miller, Derrida, HBloom, et al. in the years since; I'll pick up Shell and Goldberg when I'm back near a real library again. I do think there's a place for a conversation on the place of a program-style primary-source curriculum in contemporary academia, and this thread is not that place. SJC is a deeply conservative institution that (apart from a small percentage of the student body) comprises no conservatives, so I'll be interested to see how and if the developments you mentioned play out. Moving back to Milton, has there been any recent digging on his trip to Rome and proto-Grand Tour? It's another way that he prefigures the Romantics, but I've had a hard time figuring out just how much trouble he found. Also, it's an example of the continual oddities of scholarship that Milton wrote what has basically come to be the 9/11 work, viz. Samson Agonistes. "Is Samson a terrorist" is great fuel for the classroom fire, especially for assigning roles as you were talking about many pages ago. elentar fucked around with this message at 17:52 on Aug 9, 2009 |
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Aug 9, 2009 16:07
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Halisnacks posted:I wonder who do worse on this, academics or SA forum members. Though I like to think I reach most 'basic' levels on your criteria. Yeah. If my trip to Wal-Mart yesterday taught me anything, it's that "0" covers a lot of ground. That scale needs negatives. Because, sweet Jesus. Wal-Mart. It's like a county fair at Chernobyl. quote:Care to share your thoughts on Euro-, Cauca-, Homo-, Anglo*-centrism in the cannon and English education? [...]I guess what I'm asking is if most universities have History departments, why not Literature departments? Centrisms The place I should start with this is that there's nothing inherently wrong with Euro- Anglo- Afro- (or any other) centrism, since any focused curriculum -- either in or outside a discipline -- needs some criteria for inclusion and exclusion. And that necessarily gets you a centrism. African Studies is going to be Afrocentric. European History will be Eurocentric. English will be Anglocentric. But just because there's nothing inherently wrong with a centrism doesn't mean it can't be symptomatic. That is, there's nothing inherently wrong with a Eurocentric History department, at least so long as it doesn't assume that European History and World History are interchangeable terms. But of course that's generally what happened, and why X-centrism became a contentious term through the '80s and '90s. Departments The traditional solution to these problems has been redepartmentalization -- building Asian, African, Latin American History/Studies programs and so forth. So as far as teaching writing and literature goes, the job's likewise long since fallen to Spanish, French, German, and other of what used to be called "foreign language" departments. They're now "Language and Literature" departments, where service courses are about language instruction, and upper-level courses have the kinds of Cultural Studies and Literature focus you'd see in English. So English courses generally don't teach, say, Proust, for the same basic reasons Asian Studies departments don't teach Proust. The scope of the program, and the major or minor, is bounded by geography or language. And all those programs are overlaid with something interdisciplinary -- say, Comparative Literature -- so anyone who'd rather read Shakespeare against Proust has the option. That's not a great system -- unless you're at a college large enough to have well developed Language and Literature departments, Comparative Lit. risks being an understaffed and unfocused major, and the common confusion of "English" with "Literature" constantly drives people in, say, Spanish departments nuts. And it also means that, even though L&L departments have grown, actual foreign language instruction has sometimes suffered. A typical Spanish department has a Literature major to maintain and (probably) contributes to a Latin American or Hispanic Studies program, so actual language instruction is done in comparatively large classes and by adjuncts, part timers, or contract workers.
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Aug 9, 2009 17:40
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Wolfgang Pauli posted:I'm pretty sure that's just there for a lead-in to Principia. There just isn't a way you can drop Principia on someone without some kind of algebra beforehand. It discounts the students getting that algebra in high school, but it isn't exactly an institute of science either. That makes sense. SJC and my college admit students largely based on their enthusiasm for learning rather than their actual academic accomplishments. I know we bring in students who aren't algebraically fluent, but I forget that whenever it seems to matter. quote:Watch and Weight posters should be disqualified in this assessment. They generally know how to dress themselves there. I smell a game coming out of this. Goon or Academic. It's like Constellation or ThunderCat, but with pictures instead of names.
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Aug 9, 2009 17:53
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Brainworm posted:Yeah. If my trip to Wal-Mart yesterday taught me anything, it's that "0" covers a lot of ground. That scale needs negatives. Because, sweet Jesus. Wal-Mart. It's like a county fair at Chernobyl. I was going to point out earlier that for as unfortunate-looking/dressing as some academics can be, maybe you've been in the Ivory Tower too long if you think that's as bad as it gets. quote:Centrisms Thanks for that. Unfortunately, I think at least in the case of history, Eurocentric histories often do claim to be world histories. Never mind that the current world-system is 5000, not 500 years old. But this thread is not the appropriate place to tackle that. quote:African Studies is going to be Afrocentric. European History will be Eurocentric. Are the bolded always as interchangeable as they seem here? I feel they aren't, but I can't articulate why not (or, who knows, why).
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Aug 9, 2009 20:45
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This is pretty broad, but could you talk about the tradition of criticism directed toward the English clergy? I was just rereading Lycidas with the idea of Milton writing himself from under Shakespeare in mind, and couldn't help but thinking that Chaucer was accusing the clergy of being "Blind mouths!" 300 years earlier. Aren't most long 17th century writers writing against Chaucer? I know protestantism vs catholicism is a definitive feature of English literature in general, but I'd love to see you trace and elucidate the tradition. What's your favourite part of the Canterbury Tales? Who did Faust better, Marlowe or Goethe?
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Aug 9, 2009 21:24
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Grouco posted:Who are your favourite short story writers? I'ma slip past the big names here. Before last year, I'd have said Juniot Diaz, because Drown was (and still is) a terrifyingly good short story sequence. I think Aleksander Hemon's collections (Nowhere Man, Love and Obstacles) are just as good, even though he's sometimes like Nabakov without the humor. But if I could buy stock in underappreciated short story writers: David Ebenbach and Ander Monson. OK. Monson calls what he writes "essays." I don't believe him. If you get The Believer he had a piece in there a few months ago that was so good I wanted to lick it. quote:What was your favourite undergrad/grad course? This is tough. I had a seminar on the Faust myth, run by David Hawkes, back in 2000. The man's scholarship is fantastic, but the course was great because he was in the early stages of a book on it. So the class ran in a deeply information-dense and pointed way. It's one of the few times I've seen an academic research agenda really compliment a class. A second time was a Modernism survey with Seth Moglen -- he's the younger brother of Eben Moglen, the FSF guy -- and one of the best classroom personalities I've ever seen. He's at Princeton now, and it's worth braving New Jersey to see the guy teach. And I'll throw out a third: One of the best mentor relationships I've ever had was with James Frakes -- father of Jonathan Frakes, as in Will Riker. He ran a hard-edged criticism that I still aspire to. Anyway. That mentor/mentee relationship taught me almost every good critical habit I still have: building relationships between texts, thinking from the words on the page instead of a theoretical apparatus, reaching for a text through the character and not the other way around, and so on. Brainworm fucked around with this message at 23:58 on Aug 9, 2009 |
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Aug 9, 2009 23:54
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Gregor Samsa posted:You wouldn't happen to be familiar with/have an opinion on the work of Victoria Silver, would you? I think she would qualify as a Miltonist as well, and was one of my favorite professors when I was an undergrad. I'm sorry but I don't. I vaguely remember when Imperfect Sense came out, and I ordered it for the library here when I took this job but haven't yet had cause to read it. I've heard it's a fantastic piece of Milton scholarship, though.
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Aug 9, 2009 23:58
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halesuhtem posted:Since this is something that, as you note, no one seems to know (I'd certainly never heard anything like it before you said it), could you talk a bit more about it? How does Milton fit into the history of political theory, exactly (besides 'in a big way')? How was he perceived at the time? Who influenced him, and who was directly influenced by him? This is a larger matter than I can handle in a single post, at least in any detail -- I think you'll see why in a moment. So I'm going to start by bracketing things. Milton's Influence on the American Revolution has been pretty well documented, and the tradition of recent scholarship on exactly how influential he was begins with Sir George Otto Trevelyan's 1905 American Revolution, which describes a sort of two-pronged effect that Milton had in the colonies. As a political thinker, Milton was a reference for the Founders. That, I'll follow up on. Suffice to say that Milton was the chief writer for the last group of people who'd successfully rebelled against the crown, and so set a precedent for the wise to imitate. But as a religious thinker he also crystallized colonial thought on the intersections between religious ethics and political action -- in short, he was also a figure that preachers could invoke in order to take a natural-sounding political stance. There was one particular colonial preacher, name of Mayhew, who was especially famous for invoking Milton in highly politicized sermons as early as 1750. Probably the best barometer of Milton's popularity with the revolutionaries and their supporters was the 1777 colonial publication of Paradise Lost. The colonies were not, at that time, heavy book publishers -- they did pamphlets, but (to totally bastardize the history), the market for books was really limited to short, cheap morality stories like Charlotte Temple and terrible rhyming Bibles. Paradise Lost was a step in a different direction. But there was a demand for a specifically colonial version since the colonials (like some modern critics) read Paradise Lost as largely anti-monarchical, mostly in light of Milton's work for Cromwell. The particulars of their reading seem lost to history, though. I don't imagine the colonials saw themselves in sympathy with Milton's Satan, though people have accessed texts in more cognitively dissonant ways than that. For the intellectual relationship between Milton and the Founders, I'ma keep things as brief as I can. There's a fuller account of about everything I'll point to in Bailyn's Ideological Origins of the American Revolution . It is a short and excellent book. I wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone interested in Milton's political legacy, since it does a delightful job of correcting the age-old misapprehension that Locke was somehow the principal intellectual architect of the American Revolution. Most of the relationship between Milton and the Founders, you can get from the basics of Milton's political biography. Milton was the best of the propagandists fro Oliver Cromwell's Protectorate, a military government that had, under the auspices of establishing a republic, overthrown and executed Charles I and then, when its soldiers went unpaid thanks to parlimentary infighting, made their general a dictator. This would have been another story of king-replaces-king had Oliver Cromwell not been an extraordinary and unusual man. His family had been both noble and in royal service for generations, so he could have done what most people in his situation had done for centuries: fashion some tenuous claim to the royal bloodline, crown himself king, and sharpen the headsman's axe. But he didn't. Instead, he made himself "Lord Protector," which was a salaried position that carried no regalia (e.g. crown, throne, scepter) and was bound by a constitution, the "Instrument of Government," which among other things made his decisions subject to ratification by a majority vote of a Council of State and, in some cases, by Parliament. The Lord Protector retained executive control of the army. Also, through a complex rearrangement of zoning laws, Cromwell for the first time established a state in which citizens had an individual, legal choice among religions. This is, for instance, when Judaism became practically legal in England. It was Milton's job to justify this outlandish system of governance both to the English people and to the monarchs of continental Europe, who were nervous about the Protectorate's beheading of Charles setting a royalty-depopulating precedent. So in a variety tracts defending the Protectorate's right to exist, Milton combined ideas from his own Puritanical practice, Cromwell's system of government, and a hodgepodge of flexibly-interpreted contemporary legal documents. The most famous of these are the First and Second Defenses of the English People, the Ready and Easy Way to establish a Free Commonwealth, and Tenure of Kings and Magistrates. These, coupled with Milton's political writing from immediately before and during the English Civil War (most notably Aeropagitica) lay out the basic and familiar ideas I posted on earlier: freedom of worship, freedom of the press, the obligation of rulers to their subjects (and of subjects to replace bad rulers), the importance of republican principles, and so on. To my knowledge, Milton was the first person to argue for many of these things in a politically significant way. Locke, who's often credited with developing the social contract theory, owes the basis for this idea to Milton and Hobbes (who, politically, Milton was writing against). Milton also adapted Grotius's idea of individual rights -- he made this less incendiary by suggesting that individual rights come from God, which is the line the Founders took as well. Freedom of the press and freedom of worship, though, seem to be almost entirely Milton's own. Of course, when Parliament invited Charles II to the throne, Milton found himself in line for the chopping block. It was widespread popular intervention, Milton's reputation as a poet, and his rapidly worsening blindness that kept him alive to write Paradise Lost.
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Aug 10, 2009 01:37
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Samuel Rutherford needs to be in there somewhere, Cromwell and Co. derived a lot of their Biblical justifications from his Lex, Rex.
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Aug 10, 2009 03:45
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elentar posted:Samuel Rutherford needs to be in there somewhere, Cromwell and Co. derived a lot of their Biblical justifications from his Lex, Rex. Yeah, I've left out Rutherford because his vision of limited monarchy is at loggerheads with Milton's generally consistent republicanism. And I'm not even bringing in e.g. Hobbes. This is the back cover blurb, not the book.
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Aug 10, 2009 05:38
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elentar posted:Moving back to Milton, has there been any recent digging on his trip to Rome and proto-Grand Tour? It's another way that he prefigures the Romantics, but I've had a hard time figuring out just how much trouble he found. Depends on what you mean by recent. Back in the '90s there was some debate over whether Milton's meetings with Grotius and (especially) Galileo were overdetermining readings of some books of Paradise Lost (e.g. the moments where Raphael explains celestial motion to Adam), which led to an ultimately inconclusive reappraisal of the conventional story of Milton's travels. You'll obviously see a tremendous range on this, but I think that the trouble Milton found was slight danger to his reputation. Hanging out with Grotius wouldn't win him any friends, sure, but there's been much made of the heat Galileo's heresy would have brought down on Milton. Which is a bit silly. For one, Galileo had long recanted by the time JM met him. For another, I doubt anyone in England gave a poo poo what the Inquisition thought of Galileo, and I doubt the continental Europeans -- or even most of the English -- gave a poo poo about John Milton in 1638/9. They didn't know he'd be a (admittedly distant) party to regicide, a propagandist, or the greatest poet in the English language. He was just another student. The Grand Tour wasn't running like it later would, but young Englishmen running through Italy and France were still dead common. quote:Also, it's an example of the continual oddities of scholarship that Milton wrote what has basically come to be the 9/11 work, viz. Samson Agonistes. "Is Samson a terrorist" is great fuel for the classroom fire, especially for assigning roles as you were talking about many pages ago. I've always thought Kid A was the 9/11 work. But the one thing it has in common with Agonistes is that it allegorizes so easily. Samson could be a terrorist. He could be a dedicated journalist who breaks one of the bajillion stories on Blackwater and turns public opinion against the Iraq War. If Palin wins in the presidency in 2012, she could be Samson. And if Trig takes her fatally out at the knees, maybe while she's jogging, he could be Samson, too. That's one reason I love that text so, so much.
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Aug 10, 2009 06:09
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Halisnacks posted:
They are different, I think, though it took me some time to sort this out. The construction "is going to _______" suggests a logical (causal) relationship between a certain present event and its later consequences. I'd say "he's going to sell his car" to suggest an inference. Maybe I saw him waxing it and soaping a price on the window. "He will sell his car" is more certain, though it seems to be the more natural phrasing if there's a conditional, e.g. "he'll sell his car if he finds a buyer before next weekend," not "he is going to sell his car if he finds a buyer before next weekend." This point -- the conditional taking "will" -- I'd stake a bet on. I was initially going to say that "will" also expresses volition, but "is going to" does also. Again, the difference seems to hinge on certainty. Everybody asks me when I'm "going to" get married or get tenure, and I think that phrasing suggests it's possible neither may happen. If someone asks "when will you get married?" I think they're shutting that window -- they're implying that the correct answer is a date or a condition, not "I won't." Again, I think "will" seems to be the preferred phrasing if there's a conditional involved, e.g. "will you get married if you can't afford the abortion?" I'm uncertain on most of this, though. It's a knee jerk response based on Googling for real world usage. The book to check, though, is probably Quirk and Greenbaum's Grammar of Contemporary English, which covers exactly these kinds of soft issues in awesome detail. But I don't have it.
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Aug 10, 2009 21:09
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Brainworm posted:If you want to read novels or plays, I'd start by choosing pairs that respond to one another. You can do this with poetry, too, but influence there is more of a tangle. I'ma suggest Paradise Lost and Frankenstein, Robinson Crusoe and The Hobbit, Macbeth and American Psycho, or Gatsby and Less Than Zero/Rules of Attraction. I'm curious as to what your reasoning is for suggesting Less Than Zero/Rules of Attraction with The Great Gatsby. It's one of my favorite books and I'm always looking for a fresh perspective for when I re-read it.
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Aug 10, 2009 23:16
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OK. Because this whole process has really helped me sharpen my thinking, I'm starting a blog where I do about the same thing I do here. It, like this, seems like a good place to keep ideas and readings that aren't article-length, and throw discussion open to other academics who aren't part of the forums. Point is, I'm planning to post some revisions of the longer responses I've written so I can get some broader feedback, argument, abuse, or whatever. I won't post any other material from the thread. But if anyone has a reason I shouldn't do this, or doesn't want my response to their question posted, please let me know.
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Aug 11, 2009 18:47
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Requesting you broadcast updates to the blog on twitter.
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Aug 11, 2009 19:24
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Grouco posted:This is pretty broad, but could you talk about the tradition of criticism directed toward the English clergy? I was just rereading Lycidas with the idea of Milton writing himself from under Shakespeare in mind, and couldn't help but thinking that Chaucer was accusing the clergy of being "Blind mouths!" 300 years earlier. Aren't most long 17th century writers writing against Chaucer? I know protestantism vs catholicism is a definitive feature of English literature in general, but I'd love to see you trace and elucidate the tradition. Awesome. I guess the first distinction to make is that anti-clericalism and anti-Catholicism are two separate traditions in England, and that anti-clericalism has a longer and essentially trans-European heritage. Making Chaucer a dividing line in this tradition makes about as much sense as anything else. So: Pre-Chaucerian Anti-clericalism is probably best read as a sometimes principled but staggeringly diverse resistance to the personalities and practices of Church officials high and low. I'm defining it this way because I want to bracket any discussion of essentially doctrinal issues, or what the Catholic church used to call "heresies," since that's in most ways an entirely different history. I mean, the two overlap: doctrinal differences sometimes crystallized around a widespread dislike of individual church officials or doctrine-independent church practice -- think Luther and Tetzel -- but anti-clerical movements, including literature, don't necessarily touch on doctrinal matters. Anyway. I think the earliest Chaucer-relevant examples of anti-clericalism come from 12th century French fabliaux, which are basically dirty jokes set to brisk octo- or decasyllabic verse, and in which friars and bishops are often principal characters (though not always -- the Miller's Tale reworks a fabliau that, if I remember it right, is basically secular).* A typical fabliau goes something like this: Magic Keyhole posted:A friar stops by some guy's house -- we'll call the guy Guy -- and tells Guy that the his front door has a magic keyhole. So Guy asks him how it's magic, and the friar tells him that, if he looks through the keyhole, he sees an illusion. The anticlerical content is pretty straightforward here. Guy's the butt of the joke, but the fabliau also depends on the idea that friars generally take advantage of the gullible. And you see all kinds of similar structures in fabliaux -- there's a great one about a bishop who finds a magic, boner-inducing ring. Subtext abounds. Fabliaux, didn't come from nowhere, though. Both fabliaux and Middle English anticlerical literature pull from Latin writings on the Investiture Controversy (11th-12th c.) and from other movements toward clerical reform. In the Latin, you've got Peter Damian, Benzo of Alba, Serlo of Wilton, Bernard of Morval, Walter Map, Hugo of Orleans, Walter of Chatillon, Gerald of Wales, Nigel Wireker, and whoever wrote Apocalypse of Golias. So, in short, we've got two working anti-clerical traditions in Europe, including England, before Chaucer starts writing: fabliaux and this Latin tradition. The fabliaux are basically dirty and the Latin writing is basically principled, but you can see some cross-pollination. "Magic Keyhole" is both a dirty joke and a substantive criticism of how friars relate to common folk. Chaucerian anti-clericalism is actually not so different, except that it distinctly integrates both the wit of the fabliaux and the principled criticism of the Latin tradition. This might be more about Chaucer than about his times though -- one durable piece of Chaucerian biography is that he was fined for beating a Franciscan friar in Fleet street. That comes from a late 16th century biography, so it might not be strictly reliable, but it tells a kind of truth: Chaucer's especially brutal with the lower orders of the clergy. I'm not a Chaucer scholar by habit, but I think that, excepting the Prioress, the clergy Chaucer criticizes get it from both ends -- they're wrapped up in demeaning dirty jokes and criticized on principle. Actually, this might apply to the Prioress, too. She just gets the volume turned down. She's not "undergrown," which is another way of calling her fat, and Chaucer tells us that she only knows French by book -- she's too snobbish to mix with the Parisians and learn how French is really spoken. There are some complicating factors I'ma overwrite here: this period sees a rapid expansion of the lower orders of the clergy and greater popular resentment of the Church's institutional wealth, for starters. It's also part of a longer trend of emerging English nationalism that saw a sort of fundamental incompatibility between the Church's governance by the Pope and the nation's governance by the Crown -- this last, though, seems more like a set of flare ups than someone constantly turning up the heat. Post-Chaucerian Anti-clericalism is of course complicated by Henry's reformation and the ensuing politics of aligning the Anglican church with Catholic or Protestant practice, but I think there are two ways to take its pulse during the 16th century. The first, I've already briefly mentioned: in the 16th Century, Chaucer's the father of English Literature, and so his reputation gets pressed into service in the popular and media negotiations over the right nature of the Anglican Church. It's no coincidence that the story of Chaucer's friar beating surfaces in 1598 (in Speght's "Life"), and it's probably no coincidence that Thynne, another biographer who thought the friar-beating story apocryphal (in Animadversions) still read Tales as a promoting religious reform. The second is the life of John Skelton (the poet). Skelton was of the clergy, a figure in the court of Henry VIII, and political opponent (and ruthless parodist) of Cardinal Wolsey. Of course he was likely a corrupt clergyman himself -- the line, so far as is verifiable, is that he kept a "fair wench in the rectory" and fathered at least one bastard child. But during the later 16th century, Skelton became a sort of literary folk here; there are all kinds of pamphlets and jest books that attribute to him all manner of witty jokes and outlandish escapades -- justifying his bastard child to his congregation by showing them how pretty it is, scoring rhetorical points of bishops and nobles, and so on. I think these two things together point to an interesting move on the part of English texts. On one hand, there's a traditional anticlerical condemnation that seems to apply exclusively to Catholic figures. On the other, there's a sort of "boys will be boys" style carnivaleque celebration of Skelton. I don't mean by this that there's some agreement that Anglican clergy, or Catholic's opponents, can do no wrong -- that's not even close to what the literature suggests, and English religious politics weren't neatly split between Protestants and Catholics. There are Puritans in there, too, and famous sects among them (e.g. the Ranters, the Levellers, the Fifth Monarchists, Quakers) who complicate religious politics tremendously. But I do mean that there's a really complex reformation of anti-clericalism. Catholics, of course, are basically always still bad, though they're often bad in a different way -- bloodthirsty and threatening rather than fabliaux-flavored farces. That's what you see with the wolves in "Lycidas." There's not what you'd see in Chaucer, like a sex joke followed up by principled criticism. They're predatory, insidious. Not at all like the fabliaux friars and bishops. On the other hand, Puritans get the fabliaux treatment. A good example is Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair, which ends with a Puritan being bested in debate by a puppet and another, Win, being half-tricked into prostitution. That's how I'd outline English anticlericalism in brief. The books on this -- at least from my perspective -- are Piers Plowman and the New Anticlericalism and Literature and Complaint in England, both by Wendy Scase. quote:What's your favourite part of the Canterbury Tales? Hate to say it, but I like the Reeve's Tale. I think the best part is where the two students set themselves up to bang the miller's wife and daughter -- I mean, she's fat and ugly, but the Reeve goes out of his way to say she has really nice hair. Also, the sex is really revenge over like a half cake of stolen wheat. Because, you know, college students love their wheat. quote:Who did Faust better, Marlowe or Goethe? Marlowe. Goethe intellectualizes the whole thing in a way that's really cool if you want to strip mine the text for economic metaphors, but not nearly as fun as Marlowe's sell-his-soul-to-the-devil-to-punch-the-pope version. * A good collection of these, if you're interested, is Duval's now out of print Fabliaux Fair and Foul. Brainworm fucked around with this message at 20:47 on Aug 11, 2009 |
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Aug 11, 2009 20:43
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Laudanom fucked around with this message at 00:08 on Aug 12, 2009 |
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Aug 11, 2009 21:08
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Brainworm posted:OK. Because this whole process has really helped me sharpen my thinking, I'm starting a blog where I do about the same thing I do here. It, like this, seems like a good place to keep ideas and readings that aren't article-length, and throw discussion open to other academics who aren't part of the forums. Great idea. Also Brainworm, I was wondering if I could send you an email -- or the other way around-- regarding grad school questions that may be a wee bit lengthy and me-heavy for this thread. Only if you have both the time and willingness, of course. I can't PM.
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Aug 11, 2009 23:22
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Christ Pseudoscientist posted:I'm curious as to what your reasoning is for suggesting Less Than Zero/Rules of Attraction with The Great Gatsby. It's one of my favorite books and I'm always looking for a fresh perspective for when I re-read it. The basic relationship between these texts is that they're all part of a signature narrative in American Literature that was popularized by Fitzgerald in Gatsby but (sort of) pioneered by Hawthorne in Young Goodman Brown. It's totally possible the story goes back further than that -- you'll see in a second why I think it sounds both Romantic and Puritanical -- but I'm far enough out of my expertise there that I don't have much light to steer by. First: the pattern of this story is pretty simple. You've got an innocent, wide-eyed character who's brought, by fate or chance, into a circle of decadence. And that introduction changes him in an ultimately intangible but deeply significant way. Second: the chief threat to our ingenue isn't physical or financial or intellectual. It's moral. That's the Puritanical part. Young Goodman Brown is a sort of morality tale. Goodman tromps off into the woods to meet the Devil, who leads him to an orgiastic witches' sabbath in which his wife, Faith, is involved. The point of the story, if I can be totally reductive, is that Goodman's exposure to decadence poisons him in an existential or spiritual sort of way. It introduces doubts about his wife (Faith) that he's ultimately unable to overcome -- as the story ends, "they carved no hopeful verse upon his tombstone, for his dying hour was gloom." Now Hawthorne is back and forth on this -- you never really know whether Goodman's discovery of man's true nature is licit (and justified) or a sort of puritanical paranoia. But that ambiguity just affirms the story's puritanical roots -- it suggests that you can see something so spiritually abhorrent that you'll be completely unable to get around it. It's like PTSD for the morally sensitive, and Goodman never recovers. I read this pretty simply: regardless of whether Goodman is right about Faith and the witches' sabbath, he messed things up when he went looking for it in the first place. Gatsby operates on the same basic premise, but the elements of the story's ending are slightly rearranged. Jay Gatsby and his society are the witches' sabbath, more or less. They present a moral danger to Nick. But it turns out that a straight-edge guy like Nick can be exposed to this kind of decadence -- even sympathize with the elements of it that Jay Gatsby represents -- and still get out alive. And mostly unharmed. His reflections on Gatsby and his circle aren't Goodman's crippling late-life obsession with the witches' sabbath. They're more detached, philosophical, and (as I understand them) intellectually and spiritually useful. In Gatsby, in other words, decadence is dangerous only to the decadent. In YGB, it's dangerous to the straight-edger. Less Than Zero basically responds to Gatsby by complicating this straight-edge character. He's not straight, and he's not innocent. Clay's coming back to the decadent circle after having left for college and, either because his college experience has changed him or because the scene itself has changed, he finds himself in a position similar to Goodman's or Nick's. So Ellis is following a trajectory; Goodman wanted no part of the witches' sabbath. He maybe just let the Devil into his head a bit. Nick goes into the sabbath willingly, but (so to speak) doesn't get involved in the orgy. Clay's cool with the orgy, but not the snuff films. Like both Goodman and Nick, Clay leaves the scene behind. But Ellis changes the story another way, I think. Goodman has that moral PTSD that kills the rest of his life, and that makes him sort of human. It just doesn't make him a good human. Nick sympathizes with Jay, and that makes him sort of human. But Clay decides he's leaving LA. And that's it. There's no obsession or reflection. He just pulls the plug. If Clay has any humanity left to him, it's only a sliver. So what you've got here are three variations on more or less the same story, and it's essentially a story of the moral or spiritual hazard presented by decadence and temptation. But you get three different conclusions, I think. Or maybe only two. If Goodman's an example of how not to deal with decadence, Hawthorne's saying you've got to blind yourself to it. Fitzgerald, on the other hand, thinks that exposure to decadence leads to some kind of spiritual, emotional, or intellectual development -- Nick sees the world differently after Gatsby dies, and I think that difference is at least necessary if not, on the balance, positive. But Ellis might be getting back to Hawthorne. For Clay, the only way to negotiate the moral risks of decadence is to do what Goodman Brown should have: leave it behind. Forget about it. You can read these conclusions differently, of course. But I think it's clear that all three texts are variations on a theme. That's why I'd have someone read them against each other -- you get to see how one author talks to another across the canon. Seeing that conversation, that's like half of reading the text.
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Aug 11, 2009 23:44
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FightingMongoose posted:Requesting you broadcast updates to the blog on twitter. Will do. I'll post whatever information once I've got Twitter and Twitterfeed ready to go (because I live in a grass hut and haven't started twittering). EDIT: Blog is up, and staffed with long posts.* And you can follow it on Twitter. * Nothing sadder than an empty blog. Brainworm fucked around with this message at 01:20 on Aug 12, 2009 |
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Aug 11, 2009 23:48
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Halisnacks posted:Great idea. No problem. You (or anyone else) can email me at Shakebag AT gmail.com.
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Aug 11, 2009 23:54
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Do you have any major gaps in your reading that are embarrassing considering your profession? A student magazine asked a few of my professors this question and the answers were pretty funny (the head of the Philosophy department admitted that he had just read Plato's Republic only a few years ago)
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Aug 12, 2009 01:01
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Laudanom posted:I keep thinking I saw this post, then it's gone. Like I've got a haunted Macbook. EDIT: What I meant is, go ahead and ask. Nobody's going to deep fry you. I mean, I started this thread so I could answer questions, not get off on telling people they're asking bad ones. Brainworm fucked around with this message at 15:56 on Aug 12, 2009 |
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Aug 12, 2009 02:25
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The blog is a great idea! I've already caught myself reading a text and thinking, "drat, I think Brainworm touched on this somewhere in that thread....". Who do you think is the best British novelist after Waugh? Does anyone in American institutions give a drat about Canadian Lit? Rochester or Darcy? Oh yea, how much do you Squat and Deadlift? Grouco fucked around with this message at 02:55 on Aug 12, 2009 |
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Aug 12, 2009 02:42
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Danny Cadaver posted:Do you have any major gaps in your reading that are embarrassing considering your profession? A student magazine asked a few of my professors this question and the answers were pretty funny (the head of the Philosophy department admitted that he had just read Plato's Republic only a few years ago) Oh poo poo yes. I mean, let's start with my major areas. I've never finished Piers Plowman, which I was supposed to read for my qualifying exams like five years ago. And you name an important piece of Medieval criticism and I'll guarantee I haven't read it. There's Shakespeare I've only read once, and years ago -- "Phoenix and the Turtle" and "Venus and Adonis" were for my exams, and I doubt I'd recognize them if anyone quoted them to me. And there's at least one play I've only listened to and never read (Henry VII). And once we get out of Shakespeare it's a crapshoot. There are all kinds of early Renaissance drama that everyone's supposed to have cold: Gorboduc, Ralph Roister Doister, Gammar Garton's Needle and the like. Again, read them but don't know them. And outside my area I've got little. The only Dickens I've read is Bleak House. Thomas Hardy, I've never picked up. William Godwin, Thomas Walpole, and the B-list-but-still-important guys, ditto. I've read almost no PB Shelley or Byron. And major American authors? My coverage of America from the 18th c. to WWII is spotty at best. I read Billy Budd once and about half of Moby Dick. Never read Sawyer. I've read one D.H. Lawrence short story and nothing else. The only Steinbeck I've read is Grapes. Other than that, I've read Fitzgerald and Hemingway and Faulkner, plus the odd bit of pulp fiction, poetry, or American Naturalism. Never read Proust. Bit of an oversight. That's just off the top of my head. I've sure I've got a super glaring oversight I'm hiding from myself to preserve my ego. Brainworm fucked around with this message at 02:48 on Aug 12, 2009 |
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Aug 12, 2009 02:46
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