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z0331 posted:I have a similar question that I keep starting to type up and then stop because I'm not sure how to word it. There's been a movement towards this since the end of the First World War, more or less. One thing Modernists were deeply interested in was world literature and world culture -- think TS Eliot's "shantih shantih shantih" in "The Waste Land." In hindsight, this global reach looks more like global tourism or soft imperialism, but I'm not sure that matters when you're talking about what people read (although it might touch how they read). At most colleges, Japanese, Spanish, and so forth are Language and Literature departments. Some are of course stronger than others and, generally, any such department that offers a major generally offers a selection of Literature courses, while non-major programs don't. So Japanese literature does get taught, but it's really only taught to Japanese majors. Ditto German and French and so on. So students' exposure to those literatures is limited. I mean, the Literature courses require fluency in another language as a prerequisite, and a critical mass of student interest beyond that. So in practice, course offerings in non-Anglophone literature are scarce even at large research universities -- this is especially true for uncommon second languages or languages that use a non-roman alphabet (e.g. Russian, Cantonese). That's a long way of saying that your intuition's spot on -- most students in the US aren't exposed to Japanese Literature and don't have a real opportunity for that exposure. It'd be nice if everyone had six or eight courses to burn for the sake of an academic interest in non-Anglophone literature, but that's not where most of us live. All that said, I don't think there's anything terribly or inherently wrong with confining the study of literatures to departments that teach their correlate languages. That's generally where the expertise is, and where the interested students reside. And in cases where you've got enough fluent students with enough interest in studying literature from two or more traditions, you get a Comparative Languages and Literatures department. At all but the largest universities, these are staffed by people in English and the other Languages, plus the occasional Linguist. So CLL is really where people do the kind of interdisciplinary work you're thinking about.
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Oct 1, 2009 02:30
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Thanks for the answer. I don't know how many other undergraduate programs operate, but mine had no non-anglo literature requirement. It based it's requirements on time periods of English literature and had a minority or post-colonial requirement, but that was basically something like Asian-American, African-American, etc. It also had a miscellaneous requirement that could be filled with a foreign language literature class, in translation or not. Would you see any value in universities adding requirements for non-English literature courses (either in translation or not)? So, for example, a student might have 2-3 required courses and could take a Russian literature course, a South American course, and an Asian literature course all taught by their respective departments. Or do you think this would only worsen already muddy GenEd requirements? (And perhaps piss off those foreign language departments by giving them an influx of English majors they may not be able to fit into their classes.) Edit: I think my thought process has basically gone from 'students studying literature should be exposed to works from non-Anglo cultures', to 'if we can barely solidify a canon of Anglo works how could we hope to throw in stuff from the rest of the world,' to 'there should still be an effort at greater exposure but hopefully not at the risk of just confusing everything even more'. z0331 fucked around with this message at 05:30 on Oct 1, 2009 |
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Oct 1, 2009 05:26
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elentar posted:(enough that there are gobs of studies on it) If you're familiar with those studies, think you could point me towards one or two good ones? It's vaguely relevant to what I'm doing nowadays...
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Oct 1, 2009 14:42
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Have you read the Man Who Was Thursday, and if so, what are your thoughts on it? I picked it up the other day and read through it quickly, and I really enjoyed it up until the end. I'm guessing the weird ending has a lot to do with G.K. Chesterton's Christian upbringing but I'm still not totally sure what occurred. The book reminded me of the Jungle in that everything was going really well until the author couldn't end the book right. It was like one of those painful SNL skits where they continue the joke for too long because they can't figure out how to end it. Except in this case, Sunday's head grows, he quotes Jesus, his head explodes and then Thursday wakes up mid-conversation? Was it really all just a dream? I can't believe that lame device existed prior to the advent of lovely movies and TV shows. cosmic gumbo fucked around with this message at 08:00 on Oct 2, 2009 |
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Oct 2, 2009 07:58
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Oh, this thread.  Regarding the Nabokov discussion a couple of pages ago, I would say it's an issue of density. I can't imagine trying to force a class of high school students through one of his novels. Brainworm, where would you place Aleksandr Pushkin in the Russian (or even Western) canon? I had a World Lit course (cataloged as a survey) a couple of years ago that ended up being entirely focused on his short prose fiction and it pissed me off to no end. The instructor seemed competent, but we didn't even touch any verse. It seems like a huge waste of resources to devote an entire semester to only a portion of one writer's work. Also, Upton Sinclair is kind of like The Aristocrats: he can get there any way he wants, but the punchline has to be 'SOCIALISM'.
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Oct 2, 2009 10:06
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RNG posted:Oh, this thread. I would be interested to see where he fits into the academic canon of Western literature. I'm majoring in both English and Slavic Languages & Literatures, so I know of the ridiculous impact that Pushkin has had in Slavic literature, but not so much in Anglophone literature. For further investigation of Pushkin, I would first and foremost recommend Eugene Onegin -- it's the Hamlet of Russian literature and eternally etched into the culture. It's breathtaking in Russian, but I would say the best English translation is James Falen's. It comes as close as you're going to get, as it keeps the incredible wit of Pushkin and makes a pretty clever and inventive rhyming scheme to keep the verse. From there, read "The Bronze Horseman." Pushkin's relationship with St. Petersburg, and the eternally-linked Peter the Great, is incredibly fascinating and complex. It starts off as a traditional creation myth, but transforms into a very complex and torn story of the impact of this creation on the common Russian. For fun, compare the word choice of Pushkin in the opening "creation" part of the poem and the language used in Genesis, the Epic of Gilgamesh, etc -- especially concerning the role of water, in the most easy to spot example. If you are feeling very adventurous and curious from this poem, then hunt down Andrei Bely's Petersburg. It's a rewriting of The Bronze Horseman in the pre-Revolution period of early 20th century Russia, but with the added intrigue of spies, conspiracy, and "gently caress YOU DAD!" In less words, Pushkin is absolutely inseparable from the Russian canon to a degree that no one -- not Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Gogol, Chekhov, nor Akhmatova -- can match.
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Oct 2, 2009 10:28
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Irony.or.Death posted: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. Not at all. I mean, there are lots of things that want to have a first mortgage on my time, so it's good to come back to this and know that people are getting something out of it. quote: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. I have, and I think it's actually pretty good. But I had the same reaction to it at first, or at least a similar one. Meaning, I was a little confused. I first thought, and I still think, that five minutes of cuts would have done the film fifty pounds of good -- basically bamph out any scene with flames and tigers, and you've got a hell of a movie. But that's all me, right? But one thing I think is really interesting about Taymor's adaptation is how close it sticks to the source text. Apart from some fiddling with I.i, and cutting the clown who delivers the pigeons to Saturninus, the only other cuts that come to mind are single line pieces that would be sensibly excised from any film version -- the kinds of lines that let the audience know what an actor's doing, for instance. "Oh. A book. And it's called To Serve Man. I wonder what that means." Taymor's adaptation also convinced me that what I thought was my fringe reading of Titus is maybe a bit more plausible. It's not really a tragedy or a comedy as much as it's a nearly farcical, and therefore unsettling, excess of violence. And -- last thing on Taymor -- she's a good reader of Titus, which is a more complex piece of drama than it seems. The characters are schemers, like they are in Hamlet. Saturninus thinks that alliance with the Goths means Rome doesn't need Titus, and so his political faction can be safely attacked. Tamora (and Aaron) knows that Titus doesn't particularly mind dead sons, so they point Demetrius and Chiron against Lavinia. Aaron feels betrayed by Tamora's order to kill their child, so he hikes it out to the Goths thinking he can use it to re-invade Rome and set his revenge against Tamora in motion. You get the idea. The characters don't just do, they think. They plan. And seeing them as planners makes the play (and Taymor's film) much more interesting. quote: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. I haven't, but I like his music. So I should probably pick it up to feed my inner consumer whore/artist. quote: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. Start with Shakespeare's Sonnets. And go slowly. They're portraits of an emotionally complex set of romantic relationships, and they're a good primer for the kinds of emotional depth and complexity you'll later see in something like "Lycidas." There's another poem that works well for this -- I may have quoted it earlier in the thread. It's Wakeman's "Love in Brooklyn." It's a good starter poem for the same reasons Shakespeare's Sonnets are good starter poems. Reading it means attending to a complex relationship between two people, and that relationship is framed by a really detailed understanding of place. Wakeman knew the kinds of people he was writing about, what they did and how they acted when they felt a certain way. And since Brooklyn's closer to most of us that Renaissance London, Wakeman's work is somewhat easier to see. quote: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? I think of translations as completely independent works. It's not always a great strategy, but it's the only one I can apply with any consistency across the body of translations I've read. I decided this when I was reading Borges and Cervantes in Spenish for the first time. This is totally reductive, but they have very different voices. Sit them down, have them describe a pear, and you could tell whose description is whose. It's like Hemingway and Faulkner. But the English translations I had, you couldn't tell. The prose was muddied. Sort of soft, unclear, like it couldn't change direction on a single word. That's also why I learned Anglo-Saxon. "Beowulf" makes no sense in translation. I don't think much epic poetry does. It needs a kind of cadence, something that hustles you through the poem so you're not like "wait. Grendel seems more cranky than out-and-out evil." quote: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? Oh hell yes. I used to do this all the time, and I count on my students to do it, too. Of course some styles create more head-noise than others. Chuck Palahniuk, for example. I actually still catch myself writing sentences like "that thing I did, I really liked it." You know -- a sort of loose, conversational sentence that has a weak break in the middle built on a pronoun/antecedent relationship. quote: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. I'm glad it's gotten you somewhere. Again, I'm genuinely shocked it's gone on so long. And it's not like I'm Captain Pith.
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Oct 3, 2009 03:05
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z0331 posted:Would you see any value in universities adding requirements for non-English literature courses (either in translation or not)? So, for example, a student might have 2-3 required courses and could take a Russian literature course, a South American course, and an Asian literature course all taught by their respective departments. There's absolutely value in such a requirement, and I'd make it native language, not translation. I doubt there's a place for something like this in most Gen Ed. programs, but Earlham or Kalamazoo or Colorado College could probably get away with it -- those are places where nearly all of the non-international students study abroad, so they already have Gen Eds that play close to these particular tracks. But at most colleges, you could build this kind of requirement into many of the Humanities and Social Science majors; most students have their languages down by the end of their sophomore year, so requiring an in-major class on e.g. South American, Russian, or Japanese texts shouldn't be terribly difficult. In English (read: "Literature"), these could be literature classes, but I think there's an equal and obvious benefit to similar courses in, say, History, Politics, American Studies, Popular Culture, Music, and so on.
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Oct 4, 2009 22:07
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Christ Pseudoscientist posted:Have you read the Man Who Was Thursday, and if so, what are your thoughts on it? I picked it up the other day and read through it quickly, and I really enjoyed it up until the end. I'm guessing the weird ending has a lot to do with G.K. Chesterton's Christian upbringing but I'm still not totally sure what occurred. I haven't read Thursday yet. But for the "it was all jut a dream" turn, I think we can blame Charles Dickens. Either him or Chuang Tzu, since I think we've all seen this gem: Tzu posted:Once I, Chuang Tzu, dreamed I was a butterfly and was happy as a butterfly. I was conscious that I was quite pleased with myself, but I did not know that I was Tzu. Suddenly I awoke, and there was I, visibly Tzu. I do not know whether it was Tzu dreaming that he was a butterfly or the butterfly dreaming that he was Tzu. Yeah, he didn't know whether he was a man or a butterfly. I get it. Granted, this was like 2300 years before The Matrix, but I'd like to think that the idea that we might not be really living in the real world was idiocy even then. Or in Plato's cave. But I still blame Dickens. I think -- and this is just based on my really limited reading -- that his short story "The Chimes" is the first time that both (a) a character wakes from an experience to discover that he's been dreaming and (b) this is a plot twist or a surprise ending. There is a similar Shakespearean moment, though, in Taming of the Shrew. So you could blame Shakespeare for this if you had a mind to. In what's often called the "induction" to the play, a nobleman plants a sleeping beggar in his bed, with servants, etc. surrounding him, and they all convince him that his life as a beggar and a drunk was a fever dream, and that he's really a nobleman who's just awakened into reality. What we think of as the "plot" of Taming of the Shrew is just the show this beggar-turned-nobleman asks be put on for his entertainment. We never get the other half of this story, though -- there's no moment at the end of the play where someone tells the beggar that he's actually really a beggar and throws him out of the house. Why that is, I don't know.
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Oct 5, 2009 16:37
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Christ Pseudoscientist posted:Have you read the Man Who Was Thursday, and if so, what are your thoughts on it? I picked it up the other day and read through it quickly, and I really enjoyed it up until the end. I'm guessing the weird ending has a lot to do with G.K. Chesterton's Christian upbringing but I'm still not totally sure what occurred. I might be able to help here, at least a little. Of course, the moral of Thursday is a religious one in accordance with Chesterton's own beliefs, but it's a little more complex than "It was all a dream!" (though perhaps not by much, depending on how you reckon it). Spoilered because people should read this book. I like to think of Thursday having a very simple, if anachronistic, premise: What if God were a Bond villain? The theological and philosophical logistics of this can be argued about all day, but if we just accept that God is in fact a Bond villain, then what happens is this: Thursday and the other "anarchists" are led to believe they are fighting against an insidious encroaching evil by infiltrating a secret society. This evil is seemingly represented by Sunday himself, who ludicrously is the man who hired them all to fight the anarchists to begin with. This is all devious, Bond villain-like planning on Sunday's part, since he's the obvious stand-in for God (hence the name, hence why he quotes Christ) and one way of reading the story is to see that God is at the fundamental level responsible for everything that happens in the world, even the things that seem bad. The supreme irony of the story is that the characters think they are on some grand crusading adventure, fighting evil and anarchism, when in fact they are just good people chasing each other in circles. The closest a character gets to actually being evil is Lucian Gregory, who is a "real" anarchist (not in the political sense but in the philosophical sense) and not really taken seriously by a lot of the characters, but as a poet he still wields something like a social influence. The end of the novel, with Syme and Gregory and Rosamund, seems to imply that the real battle against evil isn't some epic crusade, but is in fact as simple as being kind to a friend who feels misunderstood or mistreated, to stem the feelings of nihilism or anarchism before they bear fruit. Chesterton makes a point about saying that the way in which Syme awakes from his vision is different from the way "men in books" usually do, so that implies that maybe in a bit of literal deus ex machina Sunday/God has fiddled around to put Gabriel into a situation where he has learned his lesson and he can now apply it. After all, there's not a very clear point in the earlier part of the novel where Syme could have just dozed off while walking along a path with Gregory. At the same time you can make the argument that entire epiphany came to Syme in the manner of a revelation. But the dreaminess is intentional -- recall that the full title of the novel is The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare. The ending is definitely supposed to feel like "waking up." Of course this is all a personal reading and can be disputed however you want. I actually haven't read as much GKC scholarship as I'd like, but this is at least my current way of making sense of the book. H.P. Shivcraft fucked around with this message at 18:31 on Oct 5, 2009 |
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Oct 5, 2009 18:26
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Hey, I really appreciate all of the information you're dispensing here, Brainworm (I'm a PhD candidate pursuing Early Modern/Renaissance/what-have-you studies, as well). I wanted to know if you knew about the petition for Prof. Patrica Parker (here: http://www.reinstatepatparker.com/Home.html) and what your take on it is. If you agree with it, could you endorse it here to your growing fanbase? As the Arden Shakespeare is now under a different publisher, the petition might go a long way toward letting the parties involved bury the past and just move on with the new (highly anticipated) edition of Dream.
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Oct 7, 2009 19:40
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RNG posted:Brainworm, where would you place Aleksandr Pushkin in the Russian (or even Western) canon? I had a World Lit course (cataloged as a survey) a couple of years ago that ended up being entirely focused on his short prose fiction and it pissed me off to no end. The instructor seemed competent, but we didn't even touch any verse. It seems like a huge waste of resources to devote an entire semester to only a portion of one writer's work. Well, I can agree with vegaji that Pushkin is about as foundational a writer as you'll find in Russian literature. That said, I've read only a little of him, and that was back when I was still a competent reader of Russian (think fifteen years ago). So I shouldn't dig myself into a hole with whatever I misremember about him. The issue I see with your class, though, is transparency. Classes should be partly governed by some truth in advertising. If a class is advertised out as small and discussion based, that's what it should be. If it's supposed to be a World Literature survey, it should have a breadth of texts. That's a pet peeve, I guess, but I think it has standing. quote:Also, Upton Sinclair is kind of like The Aristocrats: he can get there any way he wants, but the punchline has to be 'SOCIALISM'. Vonnegut's the same way, as are many of the canonical authors of the early 20th c. I think I mentioned Dos Passos earlier in the thread; he's about the apex of that movement.
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Oct 8, 2009 01:02
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newcircuitry posted:Hey, I really appreciate all of the information you're dispensing here, Brainworm (I'm a PhD candidate pursuing Early Modern/Renaissance/what-have-you studies, as well). Thanks. And that's excellent -- I mean, the Early Modern/Renaissance thing. Any chance you'll be at GEMCS later this month? quote:I wanted to know if you knew about the petition for Prof. Patrica Parker (here: http://www.reinstatepatparker.com/Home.html) and what your take on it is. I hadn't heard this. Publisher changes are a bitch, though, and this kind of this is all too common -- it's one of the nine million things that delayed Gary Stringer's Donne Varorium, along with a complete Ben Jonson that was supposed to be coming out of Oxford. My guess is that the new publisher dropped the Arden because it's traditionally been poorly positioned in the academic market. It's a relatively expensive edition, for starters, and while it's excellently edited it seems to always fall short of being a definitive edition (like, say, Booth's edition of the Sonnets). So that a publisher would stomp some of the Ardens doesn't surprise me at all. I mean, you can get a Folger or a Signet for next to nothing, and for five bucks more than a single-edition Arden play, you can get Arden's complete Shakespeare or a gently-used Riverside. So while the single edition Ardens are nice, I can't imagine they'll continue without either a price cut or a step up in editorial quality. quote:If you agree with it, could you endorse it here? It seems like a worthwhile petition, especially if you like the Ardens -- and there's a deal to like about them. And it may encourage the publisher to put out wither a less expensive or more editorially-intense edition, both of which would be all to the good. And even if you don't like the Ardens, like maybe you tried to eat one as a child, I think we can all agree that the Shakespearean world benefits from having a diversity of editions in print, since Shakespeare requires heavy editing (like the reconciliation of different play versions) and some serious, research-intensive editorial writing (introductions, performance histories, and so forth). quote:to your growing fanbase? That seems hopelessly optimistic. I mean, both the idea that (a) there is a fanbase and (b) that it's growing. If someone said this to me in person, I think I'd just cough politely.
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Oct 9, 2009 14:51
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Pontius Pilate posted:Have you gotten around to Pnin yet? At the risk of bumping a thread that's gone dark (or at least gray), I just finished Pnin. Apart from the plotting and characterization plot, which is largely academic farce -- and really good academic farce -- the thing that hits me most about Pnin is Nabokov's style. Just for instance: Nabokov posted:[...] and after an early dinner at The Egg and We, a recently inaugurated and not very successful little restaurant which Pnin frequented from sheer sympathy with failure [...] It's constantly like this. Totally brutal and absolutely hilarious. The thing I'm still trying to figure out is how it works, because unrelenting authorial cruelty usually looks more like Jack London.
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Oct 16, 2009 15:52
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I say bump bump away. Even if you're just posting about your bowl of Kashi in the morning. I'm always keeping an eye on this thread.
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Oct 16, 2009 16:21
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Yeah, I still have it bookmarked. I had just figured you forgot about poor ol' Pnin and was debating about whether to remind you. But you came through!
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Oct 16, 2009 17:30
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Pontius Pilate posted:Yeah, I still have it bookmarked. I had just figured you forgot about poor ol' Pnin and was debating about whether to remind you. But you came through! me too! I love this thread!
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Oct 16, 2009 17:44
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Barto posted:me too! I love this thread! Agreed. I've also really been enjoying the blog, and I'm glad you're updating it fairly regularly
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Oct 16, 2009 18:22
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Wow, this thread has really slowed down. Since I'm slowly going through his works, I wonder what your thoughts are on Maugham?
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Oct 17, 2009 12:06
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I'm somewhat sure you've talked about it before, but seeing as I'm studying it and anything you say/quote is insightful, what general thoughts do you have about Twelfth Night? Especially the ideas of 'The Masks,' if possible.
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Oct 17, 2009 16:59
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Brainworm, have done any reading on Mihály Csíkszentmihályi's concept of "flow"? If so, what are your thoughts on it?
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Oct 17, 2009 17:19
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Since the thread was bumped, just so you know, Alumni weekend is a washout so far, the Lehigh Pub (Bridgeworks) now has good wings but that's about it, and The Ho is still a shithole.
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Oct 17, 2009 18:31
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Quantify! posted:Wow, this thread has really slowed down. Since I'm slowly going through his works, I wonder what your thoughts are on Maugham? Yeah, the thread seems to go in fits and starts. All I've read of Maugham is Of Human Bondage and Ashenden. I think everyone knows OHB, but the thing that always struck me about Ashenden is the James Bond legacy. Whenever anyone talks about Ian Flaming, they always seem to talk about him as the first real espionage writer. And maybe he was, but Maugham deserves much credit here and gets too little. And there's a lot to say about Of Human Bondage, even if, like me, you'd normally confine the discussion to his antecedents in Shakespeare. One thing Maugham borrows, and does well with, is Shakespeare's use of romantic asymmetry to drive a story -- you know, an A loves B but B doesn't love A stasis that's interrupted by whatever starts the story along. The most straightforward example of this in Shakespeare is All's Well That Ends Well; Helena's obsession with the worthless Bertram looks much like Philip's obsession with Mildred. But you also get this kind of relationship between Demetrius and Helena in Midsummer and, I think more tellingly, between Antonio and Bassanio in Merchant. It's probably a stretch to guess that Maugham would have been particularly attentive to the subtleties of that relationship, but I've gotten away with worse readings. So whatever else I'd call Maugham, I'd call him a good reader. But overall, Maugham seems like a writer of a particular place and time -- one of those guys who spoke to an age very well but whose voice hasn't carried much past. And that's a shame. He's one of only a few writers of his time that I think actually writes decent women (which, judging by others' work, must have been difficult). And he has a less directive voice than other writers, too; where they moralize, he sensibly holds his tongue. Also, biographically, he's like Marlowe plus Shakespeare. There's spying, investing, a Cirque de Soleil sex life, and writing, writing, writing.
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Oct 17, 2009 19:21
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I just wanted to say that your analysis in your blog of Antonio as a villain in Merchant of Venice was absolutely fascinating. I'm taking a class on Allen Ginsberg/Jack Kerouac next semester. What do you think their places are in literature today? I think you've made a few comments on the beatniks before, such as that Ginsberg places himself in classical tradition at times (i.e. one of my favorite poems ever, A Supermarket in California). But, Kerouac might be in a completely different mold and might not survive in the "canon" as Ginsberg will. Or maybe I'm completely misguided. Thoughts?
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Oct 17, 2009 20:28
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What are your thoughts on this article?
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Oct 20, 2009 01:06
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Pandachops posted:I'm somewhat sure you've talked about it before, but seeing as I'm studying it and anything you say/quote is insightful, what general thoughts do you have about Twelfth Night? Especially the ideas of 'The Masks,' if possible. Ah, masks in Twelfth Night. A running joke at Shakespeare Association is that "masks in Twelfth Night" is like a seasonal essay topic. You know, it's Fall, the leaves are changing, National Car Care Month is here again, trick-or-treaters will be out shortly, and Shakespeareans everywhere will get hundreds of essays on masks in Twelfth Night. This comes from a now infamous article, inventively titled "The Masks of Twelfth Night," Joseph Summers published in Modern Essays in (I think) the mid 1950s. It's not bad -- in fact its quite useful -- but it's been repeated in so many Shakespeare anthologies and high school classrooms that students sometimes think that's the thing they need to "get" about the play. Like, once you know that Twelfth Night is really about masks, you can safely go back to reading Michael Swanwick or watching Sportscenter.* Summers's "masks" line of thinking in Twelfth goes something like this: plays choose winners and losers according to some clear criteria, and the chief criterion in Twelfth is characters' acumen for deception. The winning characters realize they're wearing masks (i.e. pretending to be something or someone else), or stumble into wearing them, and use this to their advantage. Think Viola (who pretends to be Cesario) or Sebastian (who takes advantage of being mistaken for Cesario). Losing characters aren't able to wrangle their mask wearing to some advantage. Think Malvolio, Toby, or Andrew. Malvolio's a twisted little bitch (more on this later), but he never quite realizes that his affectations hamstring his personal life. Likewise, Toby and Andrew pretend to bravery, but -- maybe because nobody believes them -- this pretending just earns them rear end whippings. Summers's overarching reading, though, is that masks are really about romantic love. That is, characters' abilities to navigate romance have everything to do with their abilities to pretend to be something else, and to choose that "something else" wisely. This is a fine reading, but it misses a sort of central point about romance in Twelfth Night; for that matter, this is a point that other readings often miss, and how this can be totally boggles my mind. Twelfth Night is a comedy of sexual dysfunction. I mean serious, hilarious, sexual dysfunction and misdirection. I mean, the title of the play is Twelfth Night, or What You Will -- sort of like Anything That Moves, right? So talking about all the characters' disguises as though they're somehow equivalent misses the point. In a romantic context, a woman pretending to be a boy is qualitatively different from a cowardly knight pretending to bravery. Consider Orsino and Olivia. One running complexity in the play is that Orsino is at first in love with Olivia, but falls in love with Viola; Olivia, who Viola is supposed to be wooing on Orsino's behalf, also falls for her. Of course Orsino and Olivia only know Viola as Cesario. This complicates things. Not because Cesario's supposed to be a man -- he's not, though this is a common misreading (as in the Wikipedia article on Twelfth). Cesario is not a man. He's a boy -- both Orsino and Olivia address him this way. Also, Cesario's a eunuch. I mean, someone falling in love with a cross-dressed woman? Okay. The cross-dressing is the significant element there, no question. Someone falling in love with what they think is a nutless man-boy? Even if it's just a disguise, this raises an entirely different set of questions. And then there's Malvolio. Take the scene where he's fantasizing about having married his boss, Olivia: Malvolio posted:Having been three months married to her, sitting in So, in other words, Malvilio, in his fantasy, has just finished banging Olivia and calls for Toby Belch. Once Toby shows up, Malvolio thinks he'll "play with my--some rich jewel." I think the direction to the actor there is pretty clear. Malvolio forgets himself for a moment. Then Toby "courtesies" or "curtseys." It's worth noting that only women "curtsey." Men sometimes "make a curtsey," meaning that they bow, but even during this time period, plain old "curtseying" is strictly for women. Again, this might seem like a trifling difference, but in context of a sexually-charged power fantasy with some questionable handplay, I think the difference was meant to be noticed. What I'm saying is, this whole "masks" vocabulary has a way of drawing attention to disguise and romance in Twelfth Night, but also overwrites some of the play's romantic and sexual complexities. If you think of the characters' actions in Twelfth as disguises, it's easy to miss what Malvolio has on his mind when he's pretending (fantasizing), because it starts to look like pretending (dreaming of social ascent). And I think it leads to sloppy readings -- chief among them readings that assume that the "truth" about Viola (Orsino loves her as an adult woman) is somehow more important than the lies (Orsino and Olivia love her as an underage eunuch). * Is that still on? I used to have a roommate who watched it, seriously, like four times a day. I mean, the exact same show.
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Oct 20, 2009 23:58
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Hey Brainworm, Have you read any of the "high fantasy" novels that have come out i.e Wheel Of Time, Song of Fire and Ice etc. if so, what do you think of them?
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Oct 21, 2009 04:57
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DirtyRobot posted:Brainworm, have done any reading on Mihály Csíkszentmihályi's concept of "flow"? If so, what are your thoughts on it? I read Beyond Boredom and Anxiety a little while ago, and the nine points MC lays out there are useful ways of thinking through projects' focuses, staffing, and schedules. Some of them (say, that an activity should have clear goals) seem obvious. And others (that an activity should be intrinsically rewarding) seem outside the reach of the classroom. I mean, what students find intrinsically rewarding is largely outside of my ability to change. At the same time, I think MC's list is still good. It at least give me a manageable number of things to pay attention to when I'm designing a project; probably the most useful insight I've taken away from it is that you get better results by matching personnel abilities with project demands, instead of choosing the most technically skilled people you can. I mean, when I'm consulting, I hire people who'll find the work challenging and interesting because it's just at the limit of their competence. They do way better work than somebody who thinks it's easy: they give a poo poo, for one, and they're generally more willing to ask other people for advice and admit their mistakes. That's basic, right? But the interesting thing is how those practices get you a more cohesive and useful team.
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Oct 21, 2009 16:37
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Fhqwhgads posted:Since the thread was bumped, just so you know, Alumni weekend is a washout so far, the Lehigh Pub (Bridgeworks) now has good wings but that's about it, and The Ho is still a shithole. It hurts me to hear that about the Ho. For the rest of the world, the Tally-Ho was about the best pub I've ever seen. The food and beer were cheap and good, there was a healthy mix of interesting locals, and it didn't turn into a meat market until comparatively late. All to the good.
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Oct 21, 2009 17:01
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Brainworm posted:This comes from a now infamous article, inventively titled "The Masks of Twelfth Night," Joseph Summers published in Modern Essays in (I think) the mid 1950s. It's not bad -- in fact its quite useful -- but it's been repeated in so many Shakespeare anthologies and high school classrooms that students sometimes think that's the thing they need to "get" about the play. Like, once you know that Twelfth Night is really about masks, you can safely go back to reading Michael Swanwick or watching Sportscenter.* ...drat, you got me. I guess it's good luck it hasn't been an actual essay question then!
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Oct 21, 2009 18:14
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vegaji posted:I just wanted to say that your analysis in your blog of Antonio as a villain in Merchant of Venice was absolutely fascinating. Thanks. I wish I were joking, but every time I bring this reading up at a conference, there are always people who are like "Oh. Right. That makes sense." And there are equal numbers of people who call me antisemitic for diminishing Shylock's role in the play. quote:I'm taking a class on Allen Ginsberg/Jack Kerouac next semester. What do you think their places are in literature today? I think you've made a few comments on the beatniks before, such as that Ginsberg places himself in classical tradition at times (i.e. one of my favorite poems ever, A Supermarket in California). But, Kerouac might be in a completely different mold and might not survive in the "canon" as Ginsberg will. Or maybe I'm completely misguided. I think your reading is right on target. As we get further away from the beats, Ginsberg seems to be the one who's taking a clear canonical place. Whether that'll be a durable place, I don't know -- that largely depends on what other poets see in him down the line. Point is, Ginsberg (unlike Kerouac, at least as far as I can tell) went to considerable effort to respond to, and improve on, earlier poets. A good example is "Howl," which is partly a reworking of Milton's "Lycidas." I'm not speaking from the depths of expertise here. I haven't read many of the beats. But Kerouac, Burroughs, etc. seem to have taken the anti-academic aspect of their writing to a place that pulls them out of dialogue not just with academic writers, but writers in general. Ginsberg's the only one I've read who walked that line. And -- not to lay down too much judgment -- the one thing that strikes me about reading the beats is how bad they are. Not always, but consistently. Cassady and Corso loving suck, and Kerouac isn't often much better; on cranky days, I think of him as 1957's Stephanie Meyer. You know, speaking to a generation of youth who, as a whole, need a cleverer messiah.
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Oct 22, 2009 15:56
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tennisjump posted:Hey Brainworm, After I finally finish this thread, and am getting ready to ask my own question of Brainworm, you take the one that I would be most interested in! My own question: Have you read any of Malcolm Gladwell's work? I find it fascinating, but perhaps you and your (excellent) critical thinking skills have a different opinion.
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Oct 23, 2009 20:17
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For collaborative student projects that are relatively short term, is there any software you would recommend? Right now I have a private Facebook group set up for a debate I'm working on with some other students, but was wondering if you knew any other free, easy-to-use software that works well for these types of things? You mentioned wikis in the past. Is there particular wiki software you'd recommend? I was thinking of one I could set up on my own hosting. If I figured out how to do it once it would probably be pretty easy to just set up several, one for each project. Also, once again, this thread is great, and thank you for it.
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Oct 24, 2009 14:22
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Brainworm posted:I'm not speaking from the depths of expertise here. I haven't read many of the beats. But Kerouac, Burroughs, etc. seem to have taken the anti-academic aspect of their writing to a place that pulls them out of dialogue not just with academic writers, but writers in general. Ginsberg's the only one I've read who walked that line. Err? This is probably a media theory/postmodernist thing again, but I can hardly turn around in the library without hitting Burroughs these days--Frederic Jameson in particular flings him around. You have a point with him edging out of dialogue with "writers in general," but I think mostly because his dialogue with other media was so persistently rewarding, and goes on through Ballard, Pynchon, McLuhan, Baudrillard, Moore... I also agree about how bad the beats were in general, but absolutely not Burroughs: his coinages are all over the last half-century. Plus even apart from the wit he can make you laugh, which by itself would be enough to put him in a class beyond the others.
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Oct 24, 2009 21:11
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boner school posted:What are your thoughts on this article? So I had a longer response to this, and then -- for the first time in however long -- I had a browser crash. Awesome. Basically, I think Chace gets things about half right. That's pretty good for a college president, especially since that means he and I are half in agreement. What I mean is, I don't know whether I agree with the right half or the wrong one. That's a disclaimer for everything I'ma write here. I think the thing Chace doesn't concentrate on nearly enough are demographic changes. Basically, the boomers' movement through American colleges in the 1960s and '70s partly coincided with a series of policy changes designed to preserve an American economy in labor crisis. This is such a huge thing -- the crisis, not the Boomers -- that not accounting for is makes me skeptical of Chace's thinking. We're talking basic American history here. The Postwar American Economy in, Like, Twenty Seconds But to recap, so we're all in the same place: The economic story of postwar America is an economic boom driven by being the largest developed economy intact after the second World War. I mean, Europe needs rebuilding, and the US is the only manufacturing game in town and the only economy capable of doing any serious global lending. The short story on the American economy during this period, in other words, is that it buoyed by (a) lending money to bombed out cities who use it to (b) rebuild using American manufactured goods. This can't last, and by the early 1960s most of this rebuilding is done, and the US started experiencing real manufacturing competition. This has a huge effect on the average American, who for almost two decades had enjoyed some really high-paying factory jobs courtesy of a few postwar monopolies. So the policy context for American higher education in the 1960s and '70s is one answer to what was then the question of the day: how do you employ a huge generation of young men and women (the Boomers) in an economy that's unlikely to grow the kinds of plum manufacturing jobs their parents (or -- let's face it -- their fathers) had? Answer: train more scientists (to develop products), engineers (to design them), and businessmen (to sell and finance them); that (hopefully) gets you more factories to employ more unskilled workers. This is why State University curricula still look like snapshots of 1970; they were 1970's solutions to 1970's problems. Of course this doesn't solve the problem, even though I think it was a better policy decision than most. So the golden age of American labor ends, the Boomers' parents pension out, and there aren't enough manufacturing jobs to accommodate the next generation of workers (and the jobs left aren't good enough to accommodate their expectations). Result? Groups of unemployed, disillusioned malcontents roaming the US.* And that's where hippies come from. Wait. I mean, that's where you get part of what Chace is describing, and where I disagree with him. It wasn't rising college costs that forced students to be more economy-minded and follow the dollars to business and engineering majors. It was policy responses to economic problems that both made new students and pushed them into educational tracks designed to revive American manufacturing. OK. So The English Department Does What? So that's where I disagree with Chace. Where I agree with him, at least partly, is his indictment of English departments. This is actually an indictment of the Humanities as a whole, which have generally moved towards cultural studies / interdisciplinary content at the expense of discipline-specific ways of thinking. This is really a problem. English isn't a way of doing History or Philosophy with fiction; it's a particularly powerful way of interpreting the world by considering its elements either as texts or as relationships between texts. That is, it's a way of accounting for, and explaining, the whole of human experience in a consistent way, using a consistent methodology that yields consistently useful conclusions. Hamstringing that, for whatever reason, I think cannot come to good. * And riots. This is where you get modern policing and the modern prison system, too. The LEAA -- the legislation that makes this happen -- gets passed through Congress, where you could have seen Watts burning.
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Oct 25, 2009 03:33
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tennisjump posted:Hey Brainworm, I haven't read much of them -- I think the first couple books in Wheel of Time. What I've read reminds me of a sort of problem I've talked about before regarding comics as literature: one huge obstacle to these forms' development is their insularity. Part of this means that there isn't a meaningful critical dialogue -- Wheel of time doesn't so much have readers as fans, and I think this is typical of fantasy writing. This is a problem because fans are not generally good ambassadors for whatever they're fans of. A second problem, which seems almost unique to self-described "epic" fantasy, is a staggering failure to innovate. That Robert Jordan follows a complex mythologies/chosen one/end of the world/final battle structure with Wheel of Time -- a structure that, in fantasy has remained basically unchanged since Tolkien -- says a deal about what the fantasy marketplace is willing to accept, and the kinds of writing it venerates. Granted, Ice and Fire gets somewhat away from this, but only because it adopts an almost-equally-typical "political" fantasy storyline -- you know, squabbles over thrones, epic warfare, and the last scion of a nearly-forgotten family moving from penury to greatness with something like supernatural aid. This doesn't mean that these books aren't fun and worthwhile reading. But as long as fantasy fans reward formula writing, that's what they'll get. And (not to pick on the genre too much), fantasy/sf/comic writers have this tendency to epic -- sf maybe less than others. One problem with this is that it rewards writers who write checks they'll never be able to cash. Book after book, storylines get more involved, the minutia of whatever fictional world is endlessly developed; this promises, but rarely delivers, an ending that satisfying or even functional. Tolkien got around some of this with the scouring of the shire and the Gray Havens, but that's a card a genre only gets to play once, right? The first time, it's interesting. The second, it's a cop out. Again, on reading this I think I come across maybe too critically. On the other, I have real trouble with genres that seem content not to innovate, or want to hear five thousand versions of the same story. I mean, if I wanted that, I'd just watch porn.
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Oct 27, 2009 23:47
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I had seen a couple of other posts about this, but I thought it worth bringing up again. I'm finishing my MA in Theatre at the end of next semester, and I'm taking some time off before I begin an MFA (a MFA?). I'll have two years experience teaching introductory theatre, and three or four years worth of script writing workshops, so I feel comfortable teaching introductory script analysis as well. What does the adjunct/community college circuit look like, as far as job placement? Is that even an avenue worth looking down? I'd be interested in seeing if I could find a course or two to teach at a community college once I get settled (depending on where we decide to move), and I was wondering if this something to look into.
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Oct 28, 2009 19:18
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Lawnie posted:My own question: Have you read any of Malcolm Gladwell's work? I find it fascinating, but perhaps you and your (excellent) critical thinking skills have a different opinion. If you like Gladwell, Amartya Sen's a good example of how an academic does similar work on weightier issues and with somewhat more rigor. But if anything really bothers me about Gladwell, it's his bait-and-switch approach to argument. Take Blink. I want to do this responsibly, so I'm going to quote from Gladwell's website: MG posted:1. What is "Blink" about? OK. So we're talking about coming to "instant" conclusions about things, and how those instantaneous conclusions can be useful. So let's take an example about how this can demonstrably work well: MG posted:2. How can thinking that takes place so quickly be at all useful? Don't we make the best decisions when we take the time to carefully evaluate all available and relevant information? So wait a second. The doctors do this in an instant? And something like "intuitively"? Well, no. What he's talking about here is the application of a deliberate diagnostic process. The result of this process is that doctors can gather information using a few key tests in order to make a diagnosis more quickly and accurately than they could using their older, slower method. There's nothing "instant" or "intuitive" about it -- and, in fact, developing this process clearly involved "carefully evaluating all the available and relevant information." In other words, Gladwell's claim in (1) is that people can make good judgments reflexively. His claim in (2) is that a decade of painstaking and deliberate research can lead to processes by which people can make decisions based on information they know is relevant. Those ideas don't even rhyme with one another, but he's trying to pass the second off as the first.
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Oct 28, 2009 21:43
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I think the point he's making is that, evolutionarily speaking, the best 'diagnosis' is one which relies on the clearest key pieces of information to result in some given behavior. For example, the idea that female baboons like male baboons with the largest, brightest asses. Possibly because good blood flow means that the male baboon is healthy, possibly because a large rear end is only possible when a male baboon is well fed or physically strong (probably amounting to the same thing), and therefore, the decision they make, which can be made quickly, is one which relies on a small number of variables; is that swollen and red or not? Our intellect and symbolic language allow us to practice evolution on an external basis in our daily lives. The discipline of english is, itself, an example of this--recognizing a heritage of stories told and understanding them in social context to ultimately determine, through their level of practical interest in the realm of English, their survival rate into future generations, and what, if any, mutations they will undergo as they are rewritten. But human beings are actually really bad at measuring statistical probability (I don't know if The Drunkard's Walk has already been mentioned in this thread, but I'm not remembering the post, if it was) on an intellectual level. Our intellect serves us best as a method of determining what something *is*, not what we should do about it. In the case of a doctor, the potential 'is' for human being is the entire world of medicine. This person could have a virus, or a hereditary defect, or maybe they're poisoned. Those are all rich details that lead to any number of follow up visits. However, to make a useful decision about whether their heart will explode like a cat in a microwave some time in the next 20 minutes, none of the endless ream of facts that provide potential clues to reality end up mattering from an evolutionary perspective--the doctors are encouraged to make the quickest decision they can based on how red and swollen their patient's rear end is. The post earlier where you talked about an exercise in writing inference or allusion to the fact that someone's a cannibal the literary perspective has a kind of relevance here for me, at least. When I read those descriptions without spoiling the premise, I thought he was either a chef or an obsessive compulsive. Then I started to try to combine the two into an image of someone who traveled, and in the end, none of that was relevant for something very straight-forward, that bleach means he has something to hide. For whatever reason, in this case, bleach is the lynch pin, since everything else could be an incomplete description or, at the very least, innocent. Why does he have jars of spices? I assumed because he could get a deal at costco on them and had some sort of mental block against buying smaller 'rip off' bottles. Why a stainless steel counter top? Maybe they last longer. It's not that I'm not trained to think of cannibals all the time--I love thinking about cannibals and assuming people are cannibals, and what's more, I like pork. But, assuming my goal is to partake in passive communication with you, by understanding what you're talking about based on the clues you've left, deliberately, to allow that to happen, I should have focused on the smaller set of anomalous facts. This is true of writing, I find. I think things like Lost and the early stages of BSG (examples you cited) or Green Mansions (which I'm citing, because it bored me) have too much opportunity for me to wildly theorize, and, as a reader, I can daydream all the wild theories I care to theorize and never spend a dime on any art. I want an artist to direct my attention to something specific, because they think it's worth knowing, and while it doesn't hurt for a sea of facts to exist for the sake of giving characters and events a medium in which to dissolve, I'm not crazy about bullshit guessing games--probably because I think too much time spent guessing about the Shyamalan possibilities of a story is replacement for telling a story worth hearing. Your comments about comics and fantasy (which I consider qualitatively different than scifi for these reasons) being tiresome because of their same-old-poo poo epic storylines are a symptom of approaching the problem of a patient fresh, each time, rather than practicing some evolution, and arriving at the simple, straight forward and quick decision that can get you somewhere with the least exposition about Ents. Per pecoparsecs a watt. TheCosmicMuffet fucked around with this message at 01:12 on Oct 29, 2009 |
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Oct 29, 2009 01:09
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DirtyRobot posted:For collaborative student projects that are relatively short term, is there any software you would recommend? Right now I have a private Facebook group set up for a debate I'm working on with some other students, but was wondering if you knew any other free, easy-to-use software that works well for these types of things? It depends on the student project. I think Google Docs, at least for light writing collaboration, is a great tool; for more robust collaboration, AbiWord/AbiCollab is just awesome. I've been looking to use it for a larger collaborative writing project myself. For those of you who don't use it, AbiWord/AbiCollab allows document sharing and collaborative document drafting and editing by XMPP (Jabber) and, simply put, it works wonderfully. quote:You mentioned wikis in the past. Is there particular wiki software you'd recommend? I was thinking of one I could set up on my own hosting. If I figured out how to do it once it would probably be pretty easy to just set up several, one for each project. It depends. I use Moodle for course management, so the OU (Open University) Wiki module is great. (In fact, I think almost all the Open University stuff is impressive.) I'm lucky enough to have IT people who'll set up Moodle, OpenJournal etc. to help support my research or co-curricular stuff, too. And, on reflection, I've never dealt with a librarian and/or IT person who didn't look like a puppy in a slaughterhouse* when I asked whether there was software that would help me do XYZ. That's another way of saying that the best wiki software for your project is the one that your college installs, hosts, and supports. For a class, I'd never even dream of home rolling software solutions, even if that sounded less like a nightmare. If a tool's being used in the classroom or for your research, its support and implementation are the college's responsibility, not yours. I mean, I don't bring in my own document camera or printer. quote:Also, once again, this thread is great, and thank you for it. Hell, thank you. Almost a thousand posts now. Wow. * Excited. Brainworm fucked around with this message at 03:32 on Nov 3, 2009 |
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Nov 2, 2009 20:26
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