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Brainworm posted:I'm going to try to go this year, but I don't think I'll be presenting. So I'm totally up for figuring that out. I was in Louisville over the Summer for a while. Absolutely worth the trip, conference or no. Sweet. I think my panel is at noon on the first day of panels, so I'll be done early and can relax. I'll PM you when things get closer.
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Sep 14, 2009 02:29
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Question: postmodernity makes sense to me, but is postmodernism really moving past modernists or is it just evaluation of modernist works? I mean, you could say Joyce was striking the same nerves as Pynchon and other later authors (a sense of humor, metafiction galore), and lots of modernist literature is less than solipsistic or ahistorical. Is there anything all that revelatory about postmodern theory's multicultural emphasis?
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Sep 14, 2009 07:14
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Laudanom posted:Question: postmodernity makes sense to me, but is postmodernism really moving past modernists or is it just evaluation of modernist works? I mean, you could say Joyce was striking the same nerves as Pynchon and other later authors (a sense of humor, metafiction galore), and lots of modernist literature is less than solipsistic or ahistorical. Is there anything all that revelatory about postmodern theory's multicultural emphasis? This brings up a question I had too. To what extent is the way people read and critique literature (or whatever characterization you want to give to what english professors and their ilk do) similar to the way authors interact with each other. It looks a lot to me like there is a "how you read and what you get out of it" canon that's developing over time and that each iteration is a response to a prior iteration.
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Sep 14, 2009 15:09
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Brainworm, would you have any interest in sharing your thoughts on Dracula (if any) in the Book Barn?
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Sep 14, 2009 18:13
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It's been a while since I've checked up on this thread, and the catching up took a while. Talk about staying power.Laudanom posted:I mean, you could say Joyce was striking the same nerves as Pynchon... Funny, I was just going to ask Brainworm's thoughts on Pynchon. Has he come up in this thread yet? Where does a novel like Gravity's Rainbow fit in the canon? What is it responding to? On an entirely unrelated note: earlier their was some discussion about your reading speed, and you seem to be able to plow through books. I would love to have this skill for instances wherein books are stores of knowledge/sources of information. But what about for when books are pieces of art? Shouldn't dialogue be read at a natural speed?* I imagine this concern could apply to much of Shakespeare. *I don't think I'm articulating this all that clearly, but I think you'll be able to get the idea.
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Sep 14, 2009 18:45
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Halisnacks posted:earlier their was some discussion about your reading speed, and you seem to be able to plow through books. I would love to have this skill for instances wherein books are stores of knowledge/sources of information. But what about for when books are pieces of art? Shouldn't dialogue be read at a natural speed?*. For this, it really works to read fast, read twice/thrice. The first time you can hit on text, data, and content. The second time the writer, style, and feeling will lend itself to you a lot easier. Then you can break down your response to the text, the meaning, and how it's assisted by the structure. Edit: This doesn't always work. Literature used to trend to a cohesive whole that had every part of itself present in some degree throughout the text. A lot of present-day writers are really anecdotal and explanatory (Palahniuk, Robbins, Danielewski) and they don't even try to shoot for subtext, so you might as well just read it and pick out the stuff you like. I know when I'm reading 'House Of Leaves' I just skip right to the footnotes and ignore the plot entirely. And I just hate Tom Robbins' writing style period. He has admitted that he never revises...he just starts writing something and tries to build off of it from there, not that he cares about what he writes, apparently. "Reality is contradictory. And it's paradoxical. If there's any one word -- if you had to pick one word to describe the nature of the universe -- I think that word would be paradox. That's true at the subatomic level, right through sociological, psychological, philosophical levels on up to cosmic levels." LITERATURE LOL RANDOM. Laudanom fucked around with this message at 21:50 on Sep 14, 2009 |
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Sep 14, 2009 21:27
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Mr. Wonderful posted:I'm looking for some recommendations on good children's books. My oldest (daughter) is seven, and I've a couple boys that are still peeing in their pants. I'ma third Phantom Tollbooth, but I've got a soft spot for John Christopher's Tripods series. I read them as a kid, and I've got some cousins (4-10) who absolutely love them. And going back to them as an adult, they strike a nice balance between kid-level sophistication and accessibility.
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Sep 15, 2009 00:14
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Laudanom posted:Question: postmodernity makes sense to me, but is postmodernism really moving past modernists or is it just evaluation of modernist works? I mean, you could say Joyce was striking the same nerves as Pynchon and other later authors (a sense of humor, metafiction galore), and lots of modernist literature is less than solipsistic or ahistorical. Is there anything all that revelatory about postmodern theory's multicultural emphasis? The thing is, "postmodern" refers to at least three or four different things that people talk about almost interchangeably: 1) A Western time period after about 1968. 2) A philosophical movement characterized by the celebratory "decentering" of social and narrative structures. 2b) An artistic response to Modernism that reclaims human possibility in the aftermath of the widely-understood decline, fall, and partial resurrection of Western artistic and social traditions that (from a Postmodern vantage) is the story of Modernism. 3) A popular cultural movement in which decontextualizing images (as in pastiche) is a recognized and well-developed intermediary artistic form. What complicates this is that almost all of these elements (except (1), of course) are present to some extent in some of the works written during what we'd call the Modernist period -- say, 1911-1968 -- just as they are present in works from other time periods. You can go to John Skelton or Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy and find them there, too. And Tristram Shandy, I mean, forget it. That has just about every single formal signature of a deeply postmodern text like House of Leaves. So what distinguishes Postmodern texts from Modern texts? I think most people would say it's the ascent, or the intensity and structural centrality, of 2 & 3 in that list. That doesn't allow you to make categorical statements about how Modernism and Postmodernism are different, like "Modernism is like X and Postmodernism is like Y," but you can't really do that with any set of texts separated by four or five decades. I mean, what's the difference between the Cavalier poets and the Libertines, formally speaking? Wilmot and, say, Herrick are from different periods and have totally different reputations, but take an epigram like this: Herrick? Wilmot? posted:Seal'd up with Night-gum, Loach each morning lyes, I'd bet serious money, or my Nth organ, that I could toss that in front of a few dozen Renaissance and Restoration scholars, and even some Herrick and Wilmot experts, and get a bunch of cases for either Herrick or Wilmot's authorship that would be well and knowledgeably reasoned but absolutely wrong.* And we're talking about two very different authors from two very different periods, who by contemporary critical reckoning have little in common stylistically or otherwise. My point with that is that (a) you can find elements of Postmodern literature just about anywhere, and certainly in Modernism and (b) the distinction between the works of different historical periods is largely constructed in hindsight for the sake of critical convenience. That's why Herrick is a Cavalier and we read his "To the Virgins," while Wilmot is a Libertine and we read his "Signor Dildo." So based on that, we've got a few options: 1) We can change the story of Modernism, so that it's less rooted in mourning and melancholy about the state of human affairs and more rooted in a set of definable formal signatures. This would create a formal continuity between what we now think of as Modernism and Postmodernism. 2) We can keep the story of Modernism the same as it is now, and posit a Postmodern literary period defined less by those formal signatures and more by a set of global cultural and economic relationships (as in Jameson). 3) We can do (2), and revise the Modernist canon to emphasize the now gradual and complex transition away from the formal signatures of Modernism and into something else, so that this transition appears somewhat starker and more sudden than it was in reality. If our work with past historical periods is any judge, we'll actually do all three of these, but mostly (3). So is Postmodernism a new thing, or is it a continuation of Modernism? Yes. On one hand, Postmodernism tells a story about Modernism that differentiates itself from it, and while that story might not be absolutely correct or a deeply nuanced reading of many Modernist texts, it does have some explanatory power. On the other, there's a deal of (especially formal) continuity between the periods. But -- and this is a big "but" -- I don't think this kind of two-fisted relationship is terribly unusual. I mean, even people who are radically different from their parents are still very like them. That doesn't mean it's not useful to talk about widespread generational change, even though generalizations about that change catch some dolphins in our critical tuna net. * This is Herrick's Hesperides 816, if that matters.
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Sep 15, 2009 01:20
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builds character posted:This brings up a question I had too. To what extent is the way people read and critique literature (or whatever characterization you want to give to what english professors and their ilk do) similar to the way authors interact with each other. It looks a lot to me like there is a "how you read and what you get out of it" canon that's developing over time and that each iteration is a response to a prior iteration. I think you're exactly right about this, though the sequence of responses is clearer if you look at particular schools or fields of criticism, or criticism of a confined field (e.g. readings of Hamlet) than at literary criticism as sort of a generic or general whole. On that generic or general whole level, though, you get some interesting stuff. The 20th century started with a negotiation over what kinds of literary evidence were admissible into literary criticism -- this is Chicago, New Criticism, and so on. And this eventually collapses into New Critics and Formalists as the century wears on. Wimsatt's Verbal Icon is like the Bible for that trend, and Cleanth Brooks is like the apocrypha. Back of them, you've got a second bunch of critics of literary tradition and language -- Geoff Hartman, Paul De Man, and so on -- really working as part of a separate tradition, following up in IA Richards and the "how does metaphor work?" group from the early 20th. In other words, you've got one group of critics arguing what kinds of evidence matter in literary interpretation, and how that evidence should be used. And you've got a second group asking what a metaphor is and how it works, cooling time between heated discussions over tropic structure by talking about literary tradition. Fast forward to the end of the century, and it's exactly the same debates, just on different terms. The first part, the matter of evidence, is now a critical throw down between New Historicists and Cultural Materialists, complimented by irreconcilable differences in interpretive methods and preferences between Feminist, Marxist, and other ideologically-driven scholarship. But it's still absolutely about which evidence counts, for what, and on what terms. Meantime, the IA Richards / TS Eliot / Paul De Man line of criticism discovered Derrida, hated the gently caress out of him, and accidentally built their own version of deconstruction in response (now known as the Yale School). This is where you get your Harold Blooms, some of your New Economic critics (e.g. Marc Shell), and so on. But they're still asking the same questions they were a hundred years ago: What's a metaphor and how does it work? What's a literary tradition and how do you know it when you see it? So there's a set of responses, a tradition from critic to critic, but the constants are also really pronounced. I don't know what to say about that or why it happens, but there it is all the same.
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Sep 15, 2009 03:12
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Angry Midwesterner posted:Brainworm, would you have any interest in sharing your thoughts on Dracula (if any) in the Book Barn? I'ma re-read it and post something. I've had my Hulk Hands on with conversations lately, though, so I'll be careful.
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Sep 15, 2009 03:15
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Brainworm, this is a fantastic thread, and I find myself coming back to it almost every day to absorb all the nice insights and mini-essays you're posting here. English is only my minor (I'm majoring in German literature), and I haven't really done enough reading to comprehend all the interesting things that are being discussed here, but this thread motivates me to delve deeper into literary theory. Now, I have a rather straightforward question I've been struggling with for some time, and I would be delighted if you could help me with this: this semester, I am helping a lecturer at the German department conduct a seminar on "scientific writing" (I'm probably what you in the States would call a "Teacher's Assistant"). Basically, this seminar is meant for freshmen who haven't written any academic papers yet. It's supposed to introduce them to the basics of academic writing, i.e. how do you research books and articles on your topic, how do you even find a topic, what register should you employ when writing a paper, how do you quote, and so on. As part of the seminar, the lecturer and I are planning to let the students write a short practice paper in which they should try to hone the skills we teach them. As for the subject of these mini-papers, we've decided that they should basically deal with sonnets or simply "the sonnet" and that we would assign them to students, since they will probably not be able to find a suitable topic on their own and formulate basic research questions yet. The problem with this approach is that we'll have to come up with about fifteen to twenty different topics based on sonnets, and the lecturer has asked me to help him with this. Frankly, I can't think of too many sonnet-centric topics that would be challenging yet fun to investigate in a short practice paper. Well, I've recently purchased Stefan George's masterful translations of Shakespeare's sonnets which would make for an interesting subject, but it's pretty much the only thing I can think of. Can you think of any suitable topics for these freshmen? Something involving Shakespeare or Petrarch would be great, for example - basic stuff that is not too demanding to research for first-year students, but still sort of challenging. I would be incredibly grateful 
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Sep 15, 2009 18:45
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Halisnacks posted:It's been a while since I've checked up on this thread, and the catching up took a while. Talk about staying power. That's been a surprise. Not a bad one, but full of unexpected possibility. Like finding out your date has a second vagina. quote:Where does a novel like Gravity's Rainbow fit in the canon? What is it responding to? I think this came up a couple pages ago, but I might have thought it did or cut it out of whatever I posted. I'd put Gravity's Rainbow in a tradition of farcical war novels that seem to mostly emerge after WWII -- think Catch 22, The Things They Carried, and some slice of Vonnegut (I'd throw Mother Night in with these before Slaughterhouse Five). My knee jerk reaction on this is that, in hindsight, we read this tradition as starting with Hemingway in Sun Also Rises, but I think we read Sun as part of this tradition because it's such a strong tradition now, not because Sun is inherently farcical. If you look at an earlier attempt to rewrite it, e.g. Hunter S. Thompson's Rum Diary, you don't see a farcical element registering in that rewriting. Which is odd. You'd expect Thompson to really turn up the volume on any absurdity he sees in Sun, which suggests to me that, when he wrote Rum Diary, that absurdity wasn't a commonly understood element of Hemingway's text. quote:On an entirely unrelated note: earlier their was some discussion about your reading speed, and you seem to be able to plow through books. I would love to have this skill for instances wherein books are stores of knowledge/sources of information. But what about for when books are pieces of art? Shouldn't dialogue be read at a natural speed?* I imagine this concern could apply to much of Shakespeare. I think playtexts really need close attention -- at least as much as poetry -- so when I read them (especially for the first time) I do a lot of crude mental blocking, think through interactions between the characters, and so on. So, if anything, I move somewhat slower than the speaking pace of the dialogue. That's not as much about comprehension as it is about plain fun. But by this point on Shakespeare, I've got clear mental stagings of just about every play. So when I'm re-re-re-reading a play to prep a class, I gun through it. I'm really just refreshing my memory on act/scene/line moments, checking how whatever edition edits such-a-line, and so on.
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Sep 16, 2009 21:08
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Laudanom posted:For this, it really works to read fast, read twice/thrice. The first time you can hit on text, data, and content. The second time the writer, style, and feeling will lend itself to you a lot easier. I forgot to include this, but exactly yes. If you're reading a piece where process (e.g. plot twists) isn't a factor, read iteratively. Bust through to get an idea of how the piece is put together, bust through again to flag points you'll know you're not going to understand right away, and bust through a third time to pick up the easy stuff. That'll arm you well for the text's leftover difficulties.
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Sep 16, 2009 21:11
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Parkettpolitur posted:[...] I've recently purchased Stefan George's masterful translations of Shakespeare's sonnets which would make for an interesting subject, but it's pretty much the only thing I can think of. Can you think of any suitable topics for these freshmen? Something involving Shakespeare or Petrarch would be great, for example - basic stuff that is not too demanding to research for first-year students, but still sort of challenging. I would be incredibly grateful I can think of at least two related classes of projects that could generate a pile of different individual assignments. The first -- and maybe the better of them -- involves researching a single sonnet's tradition of editing and translation. What you'd want them to do is make some claim about (a) how editing / translation traditions of a single sonnet have changed over time (which involves tracking down older editions of the sonnets, which you can get either in print or, for much older editions, in databases) and (b) why the tradition has changed the way it has (which involves developing a sort of crude causal theory about editing traditions -- editors and translators respond to other editors and translators, to market conditions, to political and social events, etc.). I like this because giving each student a different sonnet means that they can still share substantive information on (b), but need to have conversations about research methods on (a). I've used variations on this for my Shakespeare classes, and it works well for Shakespeare's sonnets especially, since they've become part of conversations about racial and sexual politics more than, say, Petrarch's have. The second involves asking students to edit (or translate) a sonnet, and to provide some justification for editing it as they do. This works well for older texts because the rules governing both the writer's use and the reader's interpretation of punctuation (not to mention spelling) has changed substantially since the 17th c. So this assignment involves some of the same kinds of research as the first -- finding and contextualizing different editions/translations of the sonnet -- but the evaluative part of the assignment spins quite differently. Of the two, I think the second is more forgiving. But you could tighten it up by asking students to document their research processes on it, or by throwing in additional research requirements (e.g. they need to consult at least four different versions of their particular sonnet in making their case for their editing or translation).
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Sep 16, 2009 21:30
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Fantastic ideas, thank you so much I'm sure I'll be able to distil a few neat and interesting topics from your post!
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Sep 18, 2009 12:54
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Brainworm, you may have been hoping this thread would die for a while, but no such luck. You should ask for commission. I was one of the cocksure narrow minded Lehigh Engineering students you were complaining about, so if you got roped into teaching freshman English 002 in Spring '02 (if you were even at Lehigh at that point) and themed the class around madness in women, or something along those lines, sorry I skipped class so much. But the things I didn't know when I was 18 could fill a book... What would you recommend to someone looking to expand his literary horizons without any academic goal in mind? These conversations of dead authors through the centuries and poetry analyses seem, frankly, a bit intimidating to someone whose reading mostly consists of non-fiction and the kind of books you can buy in a supermarket. It seems like it would take tens of thousands of pages of reading to be able to put everything in context and I don't have that much free time. Is there a place that's easier to break in to, so to speak? Also, McGradys or the Ho?
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Sep 23, 2009 04:26
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Okay, so for my first Shakespeare & Contemporaries essay I have to read either Two Gentlemen of Verona or All's Well That Ends Well and analyze a speech from it. Which play would you recommend reading?
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Sep 23, 2009 08:09
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Hopefully this hasn't been asked... You mentioned Lost, did you watch the whole series? I often hear it described as an "english major's favorite show", I was wondering your thoughts on the show, and if you've watched a fair deal, what it's trying to explore and what makes it such a great show.
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Sep 23, 2009 21:49
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misplaced axon posted:Brainworm, you may have been hoping this thread would die for a while, but no such luck. You should ask for commission. Oh, I'm not hoping it dies. I've just been amazed it's lived so long. I'm afraid I'll break it. It's sort of like how I feel about my great grandmother. quote:I was one of the cocksure narrow minded Lehigh Engineering students you were complaining about, so if you got roped into teaching freshman English 002 in Spring '02 (if you were even at Lehigh at that point) and themed the class around madness in women, or something along those lines, sorry I skipped class so much. But the things I didn't know when I was 18 could fill a book... No poo poo -- I mean, about being at Lehigh. I started teaching there in 2000/01, and that madness and women course sounds a lot like one my then-officemate, Nicole Batchelor, would have run. And even if you'd had me in the classroom back then, I couldn't blame you for skipping. You wouldn't have missed too much. Lehigh does this thing that lots of schools do and that I can never understand: they put their least-skilled and least-experienced teachers with the students who need the most guidance.* quote:What would you recommend to someone looking to expand his literary horizons without any academic goal in mind? These conversations of dead authors through the centuries and poetry analyses seem, frankly, a bit intimidating to someone whose reading mostly consists of non-fiction and the kind of books you can buy in a supermarket. It seems like it would take tens of thousands of pages of reading to be able to put everything in context and I don't have that much free time. Is there a place that's easier to break in to, so to speak? Sure. Read the back end -- that is, the late end -- of these conversations. And talk to people about what you read. That's how you develop a taste for something, and how you find your way to things you're likely to like better. So if I could only recommend one author for you to start with, it'd be Bret Easton Ellis -- he's got some dogs, like Glamorama, but Less Than Zero, Rules of Attraction, or American Psycho, check them out before reading Lunar Park, and you'll have about the best gateway to the wide world of literature that there is. And if I were going to recommend two authors, I'd add Chuck Klosterman, maybe Chuck Palahniuk. If you like short stories, T.C. Boyle's great. And you can't go wrong with any Vonnegut novel that isn't Player Piano or Slapstick. You read any of them, and like any of them, there are a million ways to follow them up. And you can use them to read more difficult or more intimidating texts. I've driven this example as far into the ground as it'll go, but if you like Lunar Park, you'll like Hamlet, and you can use Ellis to see things in Hamlet that you'd otherwise miss. And read what you enjoy. Reading should be something that makes your life better, in the sense that it helps you enjoy your life more. It's not some race to learning, or about having the biggest bookpile. quote:Also, McGradys or the Ho? Four years ago, it was the Tally Ho, hands down. And therein lies a tale. I used to go to the Ho for dinner about every night, actually. The food was about the best you could get on the South side, and the beer was Yuengling and cheap. Like, I could go in at six, get a veggie burger and a Yuengling Lager, talk to people or play pool with the locals or whatever, and it'd cost like five or six bucks, plus tip. And -- more important -- my students wouldn't show up until later. Like, after I was gone. There's a sort of cautionary tale that goes out among the English Department grad students about a friend of mine, John Lennon. He teaches at St. Francis now.** He stayed at the Tally Ho too late and ended up making out with one of his students in that back booth -- the one that seats like ten people -- and I had to drag his drunk rear end home, uphill, in the snow. And then he married her. The moral of this story is that you don't drink around your students. That's what made the Ho a better bet than McGrady's, which relied (and still relies) on cheap appetizers to bring in undergrads from early afternoon on. I couldn't drink there without running into former and current students left and right. And drat if I was going to follow the trail that John Lennon blazed. Lehigh has some things going for it, but it's not my society. Now, though, the bar world in Bethlehem's topsy-turvy. The Tally Ho's changed ownership, and the prices are higher, the food's terrible, and the beer is just pathetic. A million national-brand hipster "microbrews" and four bucks for a bottle of Yuengling. Second, McGrady's expanded. There's more room to sit and talk, and the waitresses they hired are nice and cute and accommodating. And I've been out long enough that most of the students I taught have moved on; if I've got my math right, the last batch are now seniors. So when I go back to Bethlehem, it's McGrady's. * In case you missed it, that's me blaming the University for my fuckups. ** And -- holy living gently caress -- I just Googled him and found this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_TDS4m2bmB8 That's him. Monkeyboy.
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Sep 24, 2009 03:02
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Food Court Druid posted:Okay, so for my first Shakespeare & Contemporaries essay I have to read either Two Gentlemen of Verona or All's Well That Ends Well and analyze a speech from it. Which play would you recommend reading? No contest. You want All's Well. The relationship between Helena and Bertram is so hosed up it's almost true to life. I've been meaning to re-read Of Human Bondage -- I haven't read it since I was like twelve -- because Philip and Mildred's relationship is, in my memory, deeply Shakespearean. Like Helena and Bertram, or the Antonio/Bassanio/Portia triangle in Merchant. What I'm saying is, if you want some complex and disturbing characters doing complex and disturbing things in the service of complex and disturbing romance, All's Well is where you go.
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Sep 24, 2009 03:10
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millertime3250 posted:Hopefully this hasn't been asked... I've been watching Lost steadily since June, so I've gotten through somewhere around 4 1/2 episodes. With a show like that, where continuity's important, I usually wait for it to end, hear whether people were disappointed, before I commit to watching four or five seasons of continuous story. I don't have much time for TV, really, so I get frustrated when a show goes all Battlestar Galactica -- where the writers make promises they know they can't keep. Yes, yes, yes. I know God brought Kara Thrace back from the dead as an angel, or something. But an omnipotent God who takes significant actions for no discernible reason, that's a bit too much like real life. In real life, any event of any significance can happen for any number of reasons. But stories have an order, dammit. There are rules. I mean, a writer can do anything, so the whole point of good writing is not allowing yourself to do any thing you drat well please. I mean, show me a murder mystery where God did it, and I'll show you a writer who's a complete loving rear end in a top hat. So, um, here's what this has to do with Lost. I think, after watching something less than four hours of it, that there's an order to things. And that's good. A sense of barely-perceptible order is a great engine for suspense. It says that the writers actually know the things they're not telling you which, as a reader or a viewer, is exactly where you want to be. To make this more tangible: I play this game with some of my classes that I call Implication. What we do is come up with a fact, put that fact in a framework, and use that structure to generate details that don't reveal, but are signatures of, the original fact. (I've spoilered the fact so you can see whether I've done this well for yourself.) E.g.: Fact: Joe is a cannibal. Framework: Joe's kitchen. Fact+Framework: Describe Joe's kitchen in a way that is consistent with our fact, but keeps this fact hidden. So Joe's kitchen: * Has stainless-steel countertops. * Smells like bleach. * Has a map on one wall with red and white thumbtacks stuck in it. * Has a rack with those soda bottle sized spice jars in it (coriander, cumin, rosemary, sage, fennel, thyme). Also, several cloves of garlic and an especially large jar of cinnamon. * Has a bookshelf: ACI's The Professional Chef, McGee's On Food and Cooking, Page's Flavor Bible, Dornenberg's Culinary Artistry, etc. * Has one of those magnetic knife-holding strips right by the sink. On it is a long, fine-toothed knife with a curved handle. Point is, even if you don't what our fact is, these details should have a sense of order. At least if I've done my job. We might get the sense that Joe is a sort of specialized chef, what with the large quantities of a select few spices, cookbooks with lots of theories but few recipes usable by the home chef, and at least one specialized tool. Also, someone who uses bleach in the kitchen is hiding something. So if I've done my job right, this exercise does in brief what Lost (I hope) does well -- builds some suspense by gradually revealing details about a situation that is (a) interesting and (b) known to the writers. That is, if I'm playing this game fairly, you should be able to guess what's going on with Joe and have every last one of these details make some sense.
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Sep 24, 2009 20:36
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Poor contribution to this great thread: My English major friend told me he came up with this joke: What did the sonnet say to the limerick? You may be funny, but iamb better. Did he actually come up with this or have you heard this one before?
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Sep 25, 2009 16:17
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Halisnacks posted:My English major friend told me he came up with this joke: What did the sonnet say to the limerick? You may be funny, but iamb better. I haven't heard it before, so you could very well blame your friend for this. But a quick Google suggests a bunch of similar jokes. Trawling through them would probably yield something similar. Eventually. But invention is often parallel, like evolution. Just for instance, I used the phase "as one-sided as a mobius strip" earlier in the thread someplace, and a quick Google turns up hundreds of identical uses of the term. That doesn't mean I didn't invent it. I just wasn't the first inventor. Same goes on my blog, where I reprinted a five year old rejection letter for a piece that was just Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, except with the word "wang" replacing the word "wand." Again, Google tells me that literally more than ten thousand people beat me to the punch on this -- in this case, I think it's because one of the text files of that book I downloaded had this typo in a few different places, so either God or OCR deserve the credit for that one.
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Sep 25, 2009 20:59
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Why don't you like Player Piano? 
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Sep 26, 2009 10:06
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Brainworm posted:To make this more tangible: I play this game with some of my classes that I call Implication. What we do is come up with a fact, put that fact in a framework, and use that structure to generate details that don't reveal, but are signatures of, the original fact. This game is genius. Did you come up with it yourself or did you pick it up from someone else? It must be entertaining to play with an auditorium of students contributing their ideas. SynthesizerKaiser fucked around with this message at 10:38 on Sep 26, 2009 |
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Sep 26, 2009 10:35
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FightingMongoose posted:Why don't you like Player Piano? Piano isn't bad, really. But Vonnegut has this style he develops with Slaughterhouse Five -- you know: the short sectional narrative, the author's reflection on his own position, structural irony, and so on. To the extent Piano has these, they're buried under a bunch of stuff Vonnegut either abandons or reworks later in his career. So I wouldn't introduce someone to Vonnegut with Player Piano for the same reasons I wouldn't introduce someone to Shakespeare with "Phoenix and the Turtle." It's not bad, but it's not where you start when you're trying to get a feel for the author.
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Sep 26, 2009 20:49
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SynthesizerKaiser posted:This game is genius. Did you come up with it yourself or did you pick it up from someone else? It must be entertaining to play with an auditorium of students contributing their ideas. This one is all mine. I came up with it earlier this semester as a way of getting at how drama works -- it doesn't put descriptions in characters' mouths, and it doesn't put what's in their heads in their mouths, either. Characters, like regular people, only speak because they want something, and what they say suggests the strategies they're using to get it. So you start with a person who wants to, say, eat a delicious baby. He's not just going to run up to some woman pushing a stroller, knock her down, scoop up the kid, and say "finally! A baby to eat! I prefer them above other foods!" In fact, someone who does exactly that wants something else entirely -- attention, maybe. But not person-style nuggets. So maybe he makes friends with a mortician or goes dumpster diving behind Planned Parenthood. And yeah, students are great on this. The interesting thing is that the younger ones seem better at it. Maybe their imagination's less trained, or maybe college is new enough that thinking like a cannibal's not yet an outrigger activity.
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Sep 27, 2009 00:41
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Thanks for this thread. Most of your posts are really interesting reading. You convinced me to read Watership Down again and pick up The Stand, which I'm working through now. At the risk of importing Book Barn drama: was Lovecraft an objectively bad writer? Can you prove it?
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Sep 27, 2009 10:32
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Fuschia tude posted:At the risk of importing Book Barn drama: was Lovecraft an objectively bad writer? Can you prove it? Didn't we solve this in the Book Barn as well? Stylistically he's so terrible even someone without any formal training (i.e. me) can see it, but that doesn't change anything about how awesomely imaginative his stories are, nor how skilled he is at creating atmospheres of despair and hopelessness.
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Sep 27, 2009 11:00
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Fuschia tude posted:At the risk of importing Book Barn drama: was Lovecraft an objectively bad writer? Can you prove it? Objectivity makes the standards of "proof" for anything -- literary or otherwise -- so high as to be practically impossible. So, no, I can't objectively "prove" that Lovecraft is a bad writer any more than a physicist can "prove" that gravity exists. All I, or anyone, can do is develop a well-informed opinion. Now, speaking from the depths of my expertise and experience: Lovecraft has some serious weaknesses as a prose stylist. On that, I think I'm agreeing either with reflir or with the Book Barn discussions s/he's paraphrasing. I mean, Lovecraft writes dialogue like George Lucas. Take this bit from The Color Out of Space: Lovecraft posted:Thad an' Merwin an' Zenas... everything alive... suckin' the life out of everything... in that stone... it must a' come in that stone pizened the whole place... dun't know what it wants... that round thing them men from the college dug outen the stone... they smashed it... it was the same colour... jest the same, like the flowers an' plants... must a' ben more of 'em... seeds... seeds... they growed... I can't tell you exactly why this is bad. Part of it's that this is maybe a third of Nahum's speech, so the whole thing's terrifyingly wordy for a dying man. (And this is coming from a Shakespearean.) And another part is that the speech is totally expository, like "must... tell you... what... happened... so story... can... continue." But the real problem is that, well, I don't think a dying man talks like this. The issue here isn't whether this is true to life -- men, for all I know, may routinely choke out exposition on their deathbeds. But it's not true to convention, right? And convention's important. This dialogue, it's like cutting a hole in the crotch of your jeans and wearing them as a shirt. There's no reason you can't, and it might even be useful. But it ain't handsome. For what it's worth, I think Lovecraft knew his dialogue sucked. He did about everything he could to keep it out of his stories, and that's to his credit. I mean, I'm not going to count, but I'd be amazed if there were more than maybe five thousand lines of dialogue in the Lovecraft corpus. And then there's plain old prose. Lovecraft has some successes here -- maybe more than he gets credit for. Take the opening from The Call of Cthulhu: Lovecraft posted:The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. There are things I'd change about this, and that I think most writers would change. The first sentence is terrible, really. "Correlate all of its contents" is both awkward and unclear, and were I editing this I'd cut the sentence in its entirety. But overall, the passage is clear, relatively concise, and ends on exactly the point that it should (i.e. the most important). This is the kind of prose in which Lovecraft is clearly most at home. Call is a prose of ideas, or "framing" prose -- writing that defines the metaphysical context in which the actions of a story occur. This changes when he describes something tangible, though. Check this passage from Color: Lovecraft posted:In the open spaces, mostly along the line of the old road, there were little hillside farms; sometimes with all the buildings standing, sometimes with only one or two, and sometimes with only a lone chimney or fast-filling cellar. Weeds and briers reigned, and furtive wild things rustled in the undergrowth. Upon everything was a haze of restlessness and oppression; a touch of the unreal and the grotesque, as if some vital element of perspective or chiaroscuro were awry. I did not wonder that the foreigners would not stay, for this was no region to sleep in. It was too much like a landscape of Salvator Rosa; too much like some forbidden woodcut in a tale of terror. This starts off OK, but gets pretty bad pretty quick -- once the wild things start rustling in the undergrowth you're getting a lot of HERE IS WHAT THIS MEANS and not much of what it actually is. It's like giving a character "intelligent eyes" or a "haughty chin." I mean, writing is a game of implication. Just saying what you think the point is takes all the fun out of it. It's like the pregnancy without the sex. There's a utility to it, but it's not much fun. All that said, we obviously don't judge the quality of a writer just by where he or she fucks up. Even really great writers -- think Shakespeare here -- spend more time getting it wrong than getting it right. What I think Lovecraft does well is work with a horror of ideas. That is, every Lovecraft story is essentially the same in that the horror comes from characters acting in a universe where human beings are terrifyingly insignificant. But apart from that particular metaphysical setting -- and it's a fine one -- I can't find much that's praiseworthy.
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Sep 27, 2009 16:19
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Two quick questions. Have you gotten around to Pnin yet? And you mentioned Battlestar, so what'd you think of it?
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Sep 28, 2009 03:13
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Pontius Pilate posted:Two quick questions. Have you gotten around to Pnin yet? I just started it this morning. I'll post something once I finish. quote:And you mentioned Battlestar, so what'd you think of it? Battlestar Galactica was dreadfully inconsistent, and started a long decline in or around the end of the second season that it never really reversed. Part of that's the writing; early on, the writers started raising questions for which they didn't have good answers. So when it came time to cash those checks, well, let's say the deus ex machina started clanking loud and steadily. In writing, as in life, "God did it" is rarely an acceptable answer. Not because it's not true, but because it's not interesting. It's a way of breaking a question instead of answering it. That would be bad by itself, except that the show had a bunch of outstanding questions as it headed into the second half of the fourth season. And, unfortunately, those last ten episodes were an exercise in writing so bafflingly retarded that reading a episode's script aloud in its entirety might actually summon Kevin Federline from whichever circle of hell has an above-ground pool of burning sulfur. In all seriousness, better the series had ended with everyone arriving on Earth and finding it a wasteland. Because the decay of the writing at that point -- divine intervention left and right, pointless flashbacks, technophobic cliche after cliche, and increasingly lame "surprises" -- was just tragic. And the whole religious valence of the show came off as half-baked syncretism. I mean, it went from being occasionally irritating to outright clumsy and oppressive. But for the good points: Gaius Baltar was a nicely imagined character, and his relationship with Six was constantly interesting. And Cavil made a great, if often misused, villain.
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Sep 28, 2009 14:47
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I have a question or two about how canon works. I think I have a general idea of what it is, something like an accepted set of literature that seems to reinvent what came before it in new terms, or something like that. My questions arise with how these pan-historical conversations are carried out. Is there a general canon which is just subdivided? How about canons for different countries, and how do you deal with cross pollination, for example, an English writer riffing off of Don Quixote, or a Bollywood remake of Pride and Prejudice? How is it subdivided, if at all, like where does something like Catch-22 go in the canon compared to something like Slaughterhouse Five? Not really related, but have you ever read the Illuminatus Trilogy? If so, I'd be interested in your opinion. I enjoyed, not really as I would enjoy any other piece of good reading, but more as a look into how almost psychedelic a book could be.
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Sep 29, 2009 02:58
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Captain Frigate posted:I have a question or two about how canon works. I think I have a general idea of what it is, something like an accepted set of literature that seems to reinvent what came before it in new terms, or something like that. My questions arise with how these pan-historical conversations are carried out. Is there a general canon which is just subdivided? How about canons for different countries, and how do you deal with cross pollination, for example, an English writer riffing off of Don Quixote, or a Bollywood remake of Pride and Prejudice? How is it subdivided, if at all, like where does something like Catch-22 go in the canon compared to something like Slaughterhouse Five? I'm not Brainworm, but I just asked the Canadian government to give me 30k/year for four years to get into the nitty gritty of this question. I think it can be generally agreed that boiling down "the canon" to X number of books with Shakespeare at the top, Milton slightly below him, and then a bunch of other people below is pretty silly. I'm basically looking to explore some of the relationships between works within the canon by looking at the critical receptions of Dickens and Eliot, because they're both "Victorian realists" but the paths they took to get into the canon, and the roles their novels serve within the canon, are pretty darn different. In terms of world literature, academia, I guess, has started calling the generic "literary canon" the "Western canon," and acknowledging that for the past couple hundred years our idea of the world's best literature was pretty much Europe's best literature, or England's best literature, or even the best literature produced by a bunch of dead white guys in England. A lot of postcolonial writers and critics have attacked the canon for its Eurocentricity, and of course, for its colonial leanings. When a writer does attack the canon, though, it's pretty neat. A Season of Migration to the North, for example, is like Heart of Darkness backwards, going from the Sudan to London. However, in a twist of irony, though postcolonial writers often repudiate the idea of a canon, there's now a specifically a postcolonial canon (think Achebe, Carpentier, Marquez, et al) that privileges things like Magical Realism. Canons tend to just form and it's hard to stop. There has been a bit of a debate about "opening up" the canon because of its historical Eurocentrism, and you'll find scholars on both sides of the issue. Harold Bloom, for example, would argue that people who want to do this are members of the "School of Resentment." A good introduction to the Western Canon is Harold Bloom's The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages. You may or may not agree with his thoughts on the so-called School of Resentment and such. Another good book, which goes more into the issues around canons, is John Guillory's Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation. It's free on Google Books. I wish I could give you more than that but I basically researched enough to propose a dissertation. I'm, uh, a few years away from any real answers. Brainworm might very well have some different ideas. He's a prof. I'm just an MA.
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Sep 29, 2009 15:55
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I have a similar question that I keep starting to type up and then stop because I'm not sure how to word it. Basically I'm wondering if, within academia, what sort of movement there's been towards an internationalization of literature programs. That is, a de-dead white guy-ification of what people study. To give an example that may help explain what I mean, I graduated undergrad with an English degree and am now looking at graduate school for Japanese literature. I'm currently trying to write my statement of purpose, and one argument I had for why I was interested in Japanese lit. was that I felt it was grossly underappreciated in the west and that western students aren't exposed to Japanese - or East Asian in general - authors despite there being an enormous body of work over there. When I wrote it out, though, the thought occurred to me that I'm not sure if that's even correct. Is there really such a lack of study of this kind of literature, or is it just that the study of regional work is compartmentalized to each literature department? If that's the case, do you see a necessity or move towards less departmental insularity and greater exposure to each other's study and research? Is this the job of something like Comparative Literature or do you think there needs to be a change of how we organize literature departments in general (or maybe not?)? Hopefully that made sense. For some reason I was having trouble actually wording my question.
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Sep 30, 2009 01:35
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Captain Frigate posted:I have a question or two about how canon works. I think I have a general idea of what it is, something like an accepted set of literature that seems to reinvent what came before it in new terms, or something like that. My questions arise with how these pan-historical conversations are carried out. Is there a general canon which is just subdivided? How about canons for different countries, and how do you deal with cross pollination, for example, an English writer riffing off of Don Quixote, or a Bollywood remake of Pride and Prejudice? How is it subdivided, if at all, like where does something like Catch-22 go in the canon compared to something like Slaughterhouse Five? I should open this by saying that everything canon-related that DirtyRobot said is true. This "opening up the canon" conversation has been both durable and complicated. But a second thing: the canon is a practice, not a document. What I mean by that is that what people call the (or a) "canon" doesn't emerge from a consensus among individuals or groups. It emerges from practices of criticism and teaching that don't have any locatable consistency from school to school or from person to person. How Canons Happen Basically, someone has some idea of which texts people should read as part of, say, a survey of Renaissance Literature. Add up those texts, take the most common or the most frequent, and you've got a canon of Renaissance Literature. Take them from other periods, do the same, and you've got a Canon of British Literature. And so on. So that's how the "canon" works. There aren't meetings at, say, MLA where groups of academics decide what's canonical and what isn't. And the corollary to this is that, even though this is how the canon works, there's not really a determining logic to it. That is, whatever logic the canon has is imposed by an inductive process. Nobody sits down and agrees to principles of canon craftsmanship that find wide execution. This is the context that the debates Robot was talking about occur in. When people talk about widening the canon, they're talking about teaching more or different texts, but not really talking about changing the logic by which canonical texts are "chosen." There isn't one logic, or one rationale. There are as many as there are professors and critics and academic readers. What This Means So when I say that the canon is about conversations between authors, I really mean two things: 1) That you can account for the presence of many texts in the canon (that is, in the collection of books that people routinely teach and criticize) by looking at how they engage with earlier texts. I think the overwhelming majority of canonical texts are rewritings of earlier texts, and that this is not so extensively true for non-canonical texts. 2) That reading canonical texts as rewritings of other texts is interpretively useful. When you pair texts, you get a reading method that is particularly versatile, and that allows you to see things in both texts that were earlier easy to miss or underread. This is, again, not as useful for non-canonical texts, which tend to either not be rewrites or not be very interesting rewrites. 2b) Consequently, my canon -- the books I teach, and how I teach them -- takes these relationships between texts as a guiding principle. When I put together a course, I think about relationships between texts when I think about what to include. Representing issues in a period (antisemitism or racism or sexism or classism) or representing a breadth of movements within a period (revenge tragedies, sonnets, satire, etc) are secondary considerations if they're considerations at all. Obviously (but the point is worth repeating) many other professors would disagree with me on this. Like, say, everyone who does Cultural Studies. One example: for another professor in my department, who I'll call JJ, the story of American Literature is one facet of an American History that is entirely explicable in terms of racial conflict. So JJ's decisions about what to teach (and how) are guided by this picture of the canon. Consequently, JJ's Shakespeare canon would focus on Merchant, Othello, Tempest, and Titus but have little use for Hamlet, since for her the value of a piece of literature is largely a function of how it can be used to explain the complexities of race. In a highly abstract sense, I think that JJ's approach to canonization is just as valid as mine. In a less-abstract sense, I think she's totally wrong. And I think she'd say the same about me. We've chosen different approaches for actual reasons, right? So when you ask how a canon is subdivided, that's part of your answer. Apart from the traditional divisions by period, I'd subdivide the canon according to what I read as chains of influence; Bend Sinister, Catch-22, Slaughterhouse-five, The Things They Carried, and a bunch of others would be part of a tradition of war stories (that would include e.g. Red Badge), and part of a narrower and more recent tradition of farcical war stories (that would maybe include Sun Also Rises). But someone else might divide these totally differently. JJ would throw Bend Sinister and Things They Carried together based on the ways they theorize foreign subjectivity (Nabokov writing in English, O'Brien going to Vietnam), and would probably group them with e.g. Heart of Darkness according to a similar logic. Discipline and Discipline One complication your question brought up is that if I let my canonizing process run wild, it hits disciplinary walls. Quixote, for instance, is really outside the bounds of a conventional English program, since English works with Anglophone literature and Cervantes wasn't an Anglophoner. There are ways to get around this -- maybe saying that translations are literary works distinct from what they translate (which has the benefit of being true). But that still doesn't hit Bollywood or Kurosawa when they rework Shakespeare, which of course they do all the time. And it doesn't net classical influences on a writer like Jonson, who wasn't reading Horace in translation. The thing is, I don't have a good solution to this. There's a limit to how much Bollywood I can reasonably throw into a Renaissance Lit. survey, for instance. So I do my best to work with the people in Classics, and our Film Studies folks, to bring coherence across classes. I see a relationship between Horace and Jonson, bring it up to whoever's teaching Latin Poetry, and we find a way to articulate our classes so that the Latin students will recognize Horace in Jonson when they get to my Renaissance Lit. class (or see Jonson in Horace if they go the other direction). There's a practical limit to that, too. So I'm building some Comparative Lit. courses here that focus on exactly this kind of cross-cultural influence (I'm spending May/June in China, for instance, to ramp up my understanding of Chinese Shakespeare productions -- Chinese Shakespeare, like Egyptian Shakespeare, was first introduced as something like opera, and so looks quite different). I'm lucky to be at a college that allows that kind of interdisciplinary work, but there are still some hard limits to what I can bring to the classroom. I can't just run a course on Chinese Shakespeare adaptations whenever I feel like it. quote:Not really related, but have you ever read the Illuminatus Trilogy? If so, I'd be interested in your opinion. I enjoyed, not really as I would enjoy any other piece of good reading, but more as a look into how almost psychedelic a book could be. I haven't read it. Right now, the most psychedelic thing I'm reading is Michael Swanwick's Dragons of Babel. It's deeply comforting to think that some heavy, heavy drugs are behind dragon lines like "you try my patience and, worse, you drain my batteries." Brainworm fucked around with this message at 02:01 on Sep 30, 2009 |
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Sep 30, 2009 01:38
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It's always worth keeping in mind the musical idea of a canon: a piece in which a single melodic phrase reappears again and again, often after going through various modifications and permutations. Many canons were created as musical puzzles--similar in a way to chess problems, to come back to many pages ago--designed so that later composers and performers could have the dual pleasures of playing the piece and figuring out what sort of canonical devices the earlier composer is employing. Puzzling out these "canonical" relationships between texts remains one of the major preoccupations of academics--as Brainworm mentioned, reading texts against each other is a great way to pick up a theme running through both of them that might, in turn, reveal a similar theme in a third (albeit in a different permutation, or reversed, like the postcolonials mentioned above). & on & on.
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Sep 30, 2009 03:15
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I need to be asleep about three hours ago, but I had to get through this thread first so forgive me if this is a little disjointed. First, I know this sort of comment has to be losing its impact by now, but thanks for this thread; it's been tremendously inspirational on a variety of levels. Okay, specifics! Have you seen Julie Taymor's film adaptation of Titus? I've watched this thing at least three times now with a good faith effort to evaluate it as an adaptation of the play, but I always end up getting lost in the cinematography; visually it is one of my favorite films of all time, but I'm always sort of frustrated by my inability to pin it down relative to the source material. And yeah, I know this is way more attention than a reasonable man would probably give to the thing at all, but I can't help it. It's pretty. Have you read Nick Cave's And the rear end Saw the Angel? I love the thing; I don't think it's perfect by any means, though, and I'd be interested in a critical opinion by someone who doesn't have quite as much fanboy bias in place. There's no way I'm looking at it as objectively as I would a book by someone who hadn't made so much amazing music. One of the biggest things I've gotten out of this thread is a desire to read more plays and more poetry; I've never gone through Hamlet before, and I'm interested in changing that. It's pretty easy to find starting points here, though; poetry is a more daunting prospect. I loved poetry up until about fifth grade when for reasons I don't at all recall my interest just completely died. The only poet I've read and enjoyed since then is Blake, who I love dearly. Well, okay, I liked Inferno too, but I didn't read it very carefully and I don't think it really made any sort of lasting impression on me. My first inclination is to pick up some Milton (Paradise Lost and Lycidas, probably) but I have no idea where to go from there and a little direction would be greatly appreciated. How do you feel about reading translations? Do you always make an effort to track down the originals of works in languages you have any proficiency with, or are you sometimes content to let someone else do the work when you know you'd be cracking a dictionary every third word? Can you recall any specific instances where you've revisited a work in the original language after acquiring proficiency and come away with a substantially different reading than you got from someone else's translation? Finally, on a related note, I just got back from a lecture by Dr. Stephen Krashen (which was fantastic but tangential to this thread) and one of the things he talked about was called the "din in the head" hypothesis; a phase of second language acquisition when you'll hear bits of the language you're picking up in the voices of the people you've been hearing speak it. He described a similar effect from intensive periods of reading a single author, where bits of their style tend to infiltrate anything you write for a while. I've certainly felt this any time I spend more than a few days with Dostoevsky; it alters my word choice and pacing for weeks. Is this something you've noticed with your own writing, or in your students? Thanks, and sorry this post went so long; it would be fair to say that I sometimes have issues with brevity, and questions have been building up for 24 pages now.
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Sep 30, 2009 09:56
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elentar posted:a piece in which a single melodic phrase reappears again and again, often after going through various modifications and permutations. Not to be nitpicky*, but this definition fits almost any piece of common practice music, and seems better suited for sonata form than for canons specifically. The defining trait of a canon is a melody that harmonizes with itself, similar to "Row, Row, Row Your Boat." But the variations and permutations thing works. Still enjoying the thread by the way. *Ok so this is a lie. pyknosis fucked around with this message at 22:53 on Sep 30, 2009 |
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Sep 30, 2009 22:51
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Boner Logistics posted:Not to be nitpicky*, but this definition fits almost any piece of common practice music, and seems better suited for sonata form than for canons specifically. The defining trait of a canon is a melody that harmonizes with itself, similar to "Row, Row, Row Your Boat." Yeah, I realized I'd been pretty lax with that and was too lazy till now to come back and fix it. Comparing literary and musical forms is interesting to a point (enough that there are gobs of studies on it) but being too casual is always a risk. I mean, e.g., "leitmotif"--that's almost always going to be the wrong word when applied to literature.
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Oct 1, 2009 00:28
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