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My school contributes up to $40 towards a book and embosses it with the seal and stuff (so there's both monetary and sentimental value!) for sophomores who got good grades freshman year. What book would you choose in that situation? Bonus question: If you were me and your main interests were Western painting from Impressionism to the present, 20th century English-language literature, and basically any German lit (I am a comp lit major mostly because it is the only department where this conditional makes any sense), how would that affect your choice? (Unfortunately, I made that decision before thinking to post in this thread, so your answer to this bonus question will have absolutely no bearing on anything except sating my curiosity.) And thank you for this thread. Reading it makes me feel much less unsure about demoting astrophysics to a minor (but much more unsure about my intelligence and abilities). It also provides much-needed procrastination material. k stone fucked around with this message at 00:29 on Nov 18, 2010 |
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Nov 17, 2010 23:34
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I feel at this point like I need to post something in this thread, because it really is loving amazing, but I feel like a douche saying something like '[subject]. Elaborate.' So, not the best question, but what about Shakespeare is everyone wrong about? His output, his reputation, whatever -- what pervasive misunderstandings and/or misinterpretations bug you? Fun(?) question: A couple of pages back we talked about depictions of boorish/stupid/inept male characters. What thoughts do you have on how depictions of masculinity have changed in action blockbusters between the 80s -- Arnold, Sly, Van Damme, etc. -- and now?
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Nov 18, 2010 02:18
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Can you explain what literary criticism is? I asked this before in reference to some other thread that died before you got around to it. I'll try to elaborate on what I am actually trying to get at. --- What do you, and also what do the college administrators want to achieve by having an English department. My guess is that for non-majors they want a way to improve their writing and communication skills, and maybe to make them have a wider knowledge base. For majors its probably to improve their writing and communication skills, and also become familiar with a wide range of literature, styles, and introduce them to the sorts of things that the professors do. Please correct me if any of this is wrong. Now my impression is that professors in English departments at research universities publish in peer reviewed journals having to do with literary criticism. I'm still not really clear on what this is, but from this thread it seems to consist of trying to see what a work says or implies about certain things. Like you might ask does racism appear in the text, implicitly or explicitly. And you also seem to suggest that at least one motivation for this is to find ways of enjoying the text more, by thinking of it in new ways. So assuming what I've described isn't totally off the mark, my question is really why do we hire the people I've described in the second paragraph to do the things in the first paragraph? Is there a different sort of people we could or should hire to do the things in the first paragraph? And does literary criticism exist just as a way to differentiate people enough to decide who to hire for these jobs? I know I sound condescending and dismissive. I haven't decided yet if I think that tone is deserved. But, I don't know how to get and what I'm asking without sounding that way. So I'm sorry about that. modig fucked around with this message at 06:24 on Nov 23, 2010 |
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Nov 23, 2010 06:22
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I have a question about some half-remembered thing from an early modern English class a long time ago. I remember a professor talking about one of the possible reasons for the revolution in the arts during the renaissance. I think he mentioned some classic piece of criticism that basically argues that people weren't able to produce full characters in literature because they didn't understand humanity the same way we do today. Or maybe people just didn't think the same way. I want to say it's related to humanism, but I have only the faintest idea of what that word means. Is this a real idea or is it just a figment of my memory? If only I was still a student, I could take this to a professor's office hours...
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Nov 23, 2010 06:56
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k stone posted:My school contributes up to $40 towards a book and embosses it with the seal and stuff (so there's both monetary and sentimental value!) for sophomores who got good grades freshman year. What book would you choose in that situation? Out of curiosity, what school does this?
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Nov 23, 2010 08:51
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k stone posted:My school contributes up to $40 towards a book and embosses it with the seal and stuff (so there's both monetary and sentimental value!) for sophomores who got good grades freshman year. What book would you choose in that situation? I am also interested in what school does this so I can be sure to apply there.
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Nov 23, 2010 22:06
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Umbriago posted:Hey thanks for the answers so far. I watched a film version tonight (Branagh's; I thought it was incredible) and it's definitely made the difference in my understanding of the play and in my appreciation of certain characters. In particular Ophelia -- I don't know how I failed to notice just how tragic her own story was within the play. I've a couple more questions now, though: Yeah. Watching a good film or stage version does that. Branagh's is really good, but I think Hamlet wants some serious cuts. Everyone just cuts the wrong stuff. quote:Do you think Hamlet knew Ophelia was in the room/within earshot when he gives his 'to be or not to be' soliloquy? Is this part of his early feigned madness? I think he does, yes. Hamlet seems to figure out pretty quickly (by II.i) that Ophelia is Polonius's puppet, and Claudius isn't convinced that Hamlet's actually insane, so the most stable reading for me is that Hamlet sees Ophelia, infers Polonius's presence, and feigns madness in an unconvincing way. quote:Why does the dying Hamlet elect Young Fontinbras King of Denmark? You'd think he would be pretty pissed off that Fontinbras lied about invading Poland and invaded Denmark instead. Were the alternative choices of King really that bad? Perhaps Hamlet's comments on the futility of the death of soldiers as he passed the Norweigen army made him reluctant to leave Denmark in a civil war over the kingship. I can see a few reasons. Denmark, or at least some of it, was originally Fortinbras's father's. Also, Fortinbras has already successfully invaded, so it seems a bit daft to vote for someone else. Last, Fortinbras has shown what a good king might look like: tricky when he needs to be (by fooling Claudius into letting him march into Denmark), and brave, too (since he has an army with him). I think has particular resonance for Hamlet because of the differences between Old Hamlet and Claudius. quote:I read Macbeth yesterday, too, and have some questions about that. I think it depends on how you read his character. A High School answer would be something like "Macbeth infers that Banquo will either kill or betray him to put his children on the throne." I think a character-based answer would have to account for Macbeth's deep insecurities. Macbeth's insecurity is one reason Duncan is able to hurt Macbeth so so badly, why Lady Macbeth is able to drive Macbeth to murdering Duncan, and why Macbeth is so dependent on the witches' prophecies. He can't make any kind of meaningful decision for himself. He's an accomplished soldier, but completely without confidence in his own political and social abilities. And that insecurity, coupled with his capacity for violence, is what makes him so dangerous. He sees everyone and everything as a threat, and only knows how deal with threats by swinging a sword. So when Macbeth hears that Banquo's heirs will one day be kings, he sees this as both a personal threat and a verdict against his ability to rule. A more secure and stable king might have thought the matter out of his hands (after all, Macbeth can's secure the throne for his great grandchildren) or come to the common-sense conclusion that he might not have any children and so leave the kingdom to his best friend's kids. (Of course, this last is ruled out if you think Macbeth already has children.) Or he might have realized that fate isn't some crazy trap you can stab yourself out of. quote:Does Macbeth have children? Macduff has a line when he finds out that his wife and children have been murdered that is ambiguous. I don't think he does in the version of the play handed down to us. If I remember right, some of the source material says Lady Macbeth has kids by a previous marriage. But for a bunch of reasons I think it's possible that an early version of the play cast kids for Lady M. and Macbeth, and that the kids were revised out later on. quote:If the Weird Sisters were correct in all of their predictions, why wasn't Fleance made King after Macbeth was killed? If we assume the prophecy is correct, we don't have a problem. I mean, Fleance isn't king at the end of the play, but that doesn't mean he'll never be king, right?
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Nov 30, 2010 15:54
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chinchilla posted:So did you ever find a way to work this thread into your CV? You mentioned that offhand, months back. I'd be impressed if you did. Ha! I did, actually. It's in the "Interviews" section. That's not exactly right, but it's as close a fit as I'm going to get.
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Nov 30, 2010 15:55
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Raimundus posted:Did you know what you were going to do with your bachelor's when you first graduated? Like, did you have a rigid plan of action to go by from the start that got you to where you are now, teaching at a college with a fancy doctorate? That's a good and deceptively tough question. I had no idea, really. I applied to graduate school thinking that I'd get a Ph.D. and teach, but the matter was never really settled in my mind. I spent the first couple years of graduate school doing some other things -- working for Verizon and ETS, for instance (which I later turned into a consulting deal), being a landlord and investing in real estate, and so on. That said, the Ph.D. and teaching is what I stuck with, and I couldn't tell you precisely when I decided it would be my first priority. It wasn't until late in the game, though. Also, I wouldn't spend a second feeling bad about not knowing what you want to do. I think the most anyone can expect of themselves when they're 21 or 22 is that they know what they want to do next, which is a totally different -- and less significant -- matter than what you want to do for the rest of your working life.
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Nov 30, 2010 16:04
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Rick posted:I have a really hard time workshopping essays. I'm supposed to write a page with about a quarter of a page about what I like and 3/4 of what can improve the essay. I like almost everything I read though and I don't know what to say most of the time. Any tips for giving people tips about their essays? The class is creative non-fiction but I have trouble with this in general. Style. I'm telling you, man. Style. You can like what someone writes about (or not). You can like the structure they use to write about it -- how they approach it, when they reveal which details, and so on. I think those things are largely judgment calls, and in the real world most of them are constrained by which interesting things you happen across, and what kinds of information you can find out about them. These are not areas where criticism often helps. But you can always talk about style, and I think you can always talk about it in a useful way. There is no writer so strong that he needs every word he uses, avoids unneeded complexities, and emphasizes every last, important detail. So were I you, I'd pick up my Strunk and White and get pedantic for a few hundred words.
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Nov 30, 2010 16:10
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the balloon hoax posted:This is maybe not the correct thread but I didn't want to create a whole new one -- What you describe, in terms of plot and character, seems like a subtype or variant of revenge tragedy. Certainly there are early "antihero" revengers who are at once socially necessary but socially excluded, and driven to their revenge by the loss (murder) of their families. Orestes, for instance, or Hieronymo in Kyd's Spanish Tragedy, or even Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus. In the last two cases, the mode and motive for revenge also seems semioccupational, as it does with Seth Jones the Indian Fighter. The big difference I see is that Seth Jones, Conan, and Batman live through the end of their revenge fantasies. OK. That's a bit of a ramble. One book you might want is Kerrigan's Revenge Tragedy, which should point you to either some earlier types of your Seth Jones character, or at least describe his ancestry.
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Nov 30, 2010 16:18
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Wow, finally finished reading this thread! I've noticed that much of the fodder for discussion is people asking you why exactly certain authors and their works occupy the place they do in the literary canon. I thought I might take a different approach though. It occurred to me that in order to understand why poets such as John Milton and Edmund Spenser are considered great, we should take a look at stuff that is utter crap by comparison. I've read William McGonagall's infamous "The Tay Bridge Disaster," a number of times, and while I get a general sense that it's awful, I couldn't really explain to you exactly why that is. I was wondering if you could elaborate on why it's such a dreadful poem.
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Dec 1, 2010 03:19
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What are some authors you would recommend on the whole idea of tradition in literature? I've read some of the staples, like "Tradition and the Individual Talent," but I'd like to be well-versed because it's a fascinating idea to me. Not just a small part due to this thread! What are your thoughts on conceptual metaphor theory in literature study, going mostly from Lakoff/Johnson and Kovecses? Does it have a real, tangible place in literature and do you see it really rising, or is it in the realm of linguistics and should be spoken of in the same breath as Jakobson/Saussure more often than Pound/Joyce? There's the obvious "Well, of course poets use metaphor. Why make an entire -ism out of it?" argument, but there is clearly much more to it than that. I think you previously briefly mentioned that you knew some Russian, and I just did a really long, boring paper about how the grammatical category of directionality in Russian verbs of motion (i.e. "idti/xodit," or the difference between round-trip/nondirectional motion and unidirectional/goal-oriented motion) and how it shapes the metaphors of some Russian prose/poetry. That's just a super-specific, boring example that will dull you if I'm overestimating the amount of Russian you know, but metaphor seems to be an infinitely fertile field (metaphor!) for comparative literature, not to mention boring old English literature. I typed a lot more than I expected, but I've been overtaken by Lakoff/Johnson/Kovecses/et al for the last 6 months and it's completely changed the way I read literature. That seems to be the whole point of literary criticism in the first place, so I'm interested in how you see it progressing. This can help me direct my Personal Statement for grad school that I'm writing now too in seeing if this stuff is worthwhile and marketable 
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Dec 1, 2010 05:13
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k stone posted:My school contributes up to $40 towards a book and embosses it with the seal and stuff (so there's both monetary and sentimental value!) for sophomores who got good grades freshman year. What book would you choose in that situation? That's a good question, but I also want to step aside for a moment and say that this is good practice, too. I've been trying to get our department to make a similar commitment to students when they declare an English major -- maybe we get them a book with a seal, a journal, or whatever. Anyway. I think given your interests a fun choice would be Marc Shell's Art and Money, since it touches at least Art History, German literature, and English lit -- though not in your periods of choice, unfortunately. I think a writing reference, like Fowler's Modern English Usage, might also be useful. But the memorabilia man in me thinks that you should choose whatever your favorite book is at present. It's not always going to be your favorite. But you choose it because when you're thirty or forty it's worth reminding yourself how you thought about things when you were twenty. quote:And thank you for this thread. Reading it makes me feel much less unsure about demoting astrophysics to a minor (but much more unsure about my intelligence and abilities). It also provides much-needed procrastination material. Thanks. Anything that keeps you learning instead of working is a win.
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Dec 1, 2010 15:14
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Brainworm posted:Ha! I did, actually. It's in the "Interviews" section. That's not exactly right, but it's as close a fit as I'm going to get. Crazy. Would you be willing to copy/paste it for us? I'd like to see how you phrase that. Also I'd love to see your reaction to this Slate article: "MFA vs. NYC: America now has two distinct literary cultures. Which one will last?" (The first page is a bit weak, but it picks up on the second.)
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Dec 2, 2010 04:08
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Less English, more post-grad in general: do you think it's possible to go after a Masters/Doctorate while working? I'd love to persue them (the former I'm not far from, though I'm on hiatus due to getting a job) but with the economy how it is, my bank account the way it is and my impending engagement/moving out of mom's house, I'm not sure how realistic it is in the coming years. Do you think they're something that can be achieved in baby steps over a lengthy period of time or would you highly recommend waiting and dropping everything to focus on them?
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Dec 2, 2010 17:34
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Kieselguhr Kid posted:I feel at this point like I need to post something in this thread, because it really is loving amazing, but I feel like a douche saying something like '[subject]. Elaborate.' So, not the best question, but what about Shakespeare is everyone wrong about? His output, his reputation, whatever -- what pervasive misunderstandings and/or misinterpretations bug you? Well thanks. I'm glad the thread's working for you. I think the misunderstanding that bothers me the most is that Shakespeare is a kind of high art. I don't mean that people think Shakespeare is art and that they're wrong, exactly. I mean that people think that high art is about strip mining a text for "transcendent" truths and symbols, like thinking that Hamlet is worthwhile because it says something special about death. Don't get me wrong. Hamlet does say some things about death, I think, and I think that some of those things are interesting. It's even possible that some of those things have influenced the way people have since thought about death and dying. But Hamlet is a great play because it's a great play -- you've got all kinds of suspense, plot twists, characters with complex motives, and so on. It's drama, not a philosophical treatise in five acts. A close second to this is the "issue" readings that pervade people's understandings of, say, Othello or Merchant. That a character is Jewish or Muslim does not automatically mean that his faith is central to the play. I mean, Shylock is a minor character. The major characters in Merchant are Antonio, Portia, and Bassanio. And though Othello is a Muslim and probably black, those are not issues that drive the play. Iago's relationship with Othello, their relationships with Desdemona and Cassio, those are what let the events in the play unfold as they do. quote:Fun(?) question: A couple of pages back we talked about depictions of boorish/stupid/inept male characters. What thoughts do you have on how depictions of masculinity have changed in action blockbusters between the 80s -- Arnold, Sly, Van Damme, etc. -- and now? There's a lot less beefcake. And I think that's interesting. What I mean is, an Arnold/Sly/Van Damme vehicle from the late '80s or early '90s included about fifty gallons of oil and some shirts from the Baby Gap. And I think most action movies from the period followed that trend -- you know, you've got Dolph Lundgren and Chuck Norris, even Mike Dudikoff from the American Ninja films all doing the same thing. Even Robocop had pecs. So you still get shirtless heroes in action movies. But I don't think you get nearly as many, and there's certainly not that 1980s concentration on the bodybuilder physique. And if you think I'm joking here, go ahead and watch Predator. Then watch whatever the latest sequel is. I don't even know, but I'm willing to bet that the original spent way more on body oil, even in 1980s dollars. I have no idea what this means, really. Our models of masculinity and our sexual context have certainly changed over the past, say, thirty years. Maybe that's an aging population, maybe the novelty of bodybuilding has worn off and our aesthetic sense of the male body has become more "natural," or maybe we're less into thinly-veiled homoeroticism.
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Dec 3, 2010 15:40
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Thanks for this amazing thread, it's truly inspiring. I spent the better part of my free time this week reading through it. The thing I wanted to ask you about is from somewhere in the middle, where someone asked you to provide a list of works that you'd consider essential for students leaving college to know intimately. I'll cut right to the chase, I did Beowulf in grad school and I have a pretty huge boner for it so was surprised to not see it anywhere on your list. I think I get why you didn't put it there and it's probably because it (and OE lit in general) only became influential when people started studying it again earnestly in the 17-1800s, but I'm not sure so I thought I'd ask for some clarification. I can also see why you would start with Chaucer and not any further back from a translation point of view, since OE really is another language and you really do need to learn it to understand it properly. But then it's not in your translation section either so I dunno. I can think of a few reasons why I'd at least put in a translation of Beowulf and possibly some other stuff, but I'd rather hear what you have to say about it first! Many thanks in advance!
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Dec 3, 2010 19:29
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the balloon hoax posted:Seth Jones A bit late on this as I just revisited the thread after a long time away, but have you considered that this archetype became well known because there were a lot of real life people who fit the profile living at the time? Your surface level description of Seth Jones seems quite similar to Liver Eating Johnson, whose exploits would have been known by the mid-1800s.
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Dec 4, 2010 11:30
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Brainworm posted:There's a lot less beefcake. And I think that's interesting. On the other hand, we have 300. I think it might just be that the action movie as a genre is losing steam, being replaced by movies with more fantasy, adventure, or drama elements.
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Dec 4, 2010 22:07
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I didn't see anything in a quick skim of the thread about homework help, so I thought I'd ask. If this sort of thing is frowned upon, I apologize and you should feel free to skip over it. It's a pretty basic question, so if anyone reading this thinks they know the answer, go ahead give it a shot. I'm working on a research essay for my introductory english course, and MLA citations are giving me a bit of trouble. My prof wants scholarly/academic sources, so obviously no wikipedia or anything of the like. I was wondering if http://www.hko.gov.hk/contente.htm would be considered an academic resource, and if it is, how would I go about creating an in-text citation, and a bibliography citation, for information such as the average temperature in South Africa retrieved from the site. I've seen some MLA citation generators online, but I don't really know how to classify this source for use in one of them. Furthermore, would I even need to cite such a fact, or would it be considered common knowledge?
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Dec 5, 2010 04:25
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Use the Purdue OWL for all your MLA citation needs. For your question: http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/747/08/
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Dec 5, 2010 06:55
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Word 2007 has a citation generator also where you input various fields and it'll make it for you.
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Dec 5, 2010 10:13
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So you're this stellar teacher who taught during every year of grad school and, presumably, worked hard during school to distinguish yourself as a good teacher. How do you do that? What can people do in grad school to distinguish themselves as excellent teachers and groom themselves for the kind of teaching-centered position you have?
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Dec 7, 2010 21:46
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modig posted:Can you explain what literary criticism is? [...] I'm not going to spend a lot of time talking about criticism here, because your follow-up questions suggest that criticism's not really the central issue. For our purposes, I think literary criticism is any system of thought that can be deliberately applied to the interpretation of a text. That covers a lot of ground, for sure, and doesn't make a nice distinction between good and bad criticism, but it's a start. quote:What do you, and also what do the college administrators want to achieve by having an English department. My guess is that for non-majors they want a way to improve their writing and communication skills, and maybe to make them have a wider knowledge base. For majors its probably to improve their writing and communication skills, and also become familiar with a wide range of literature, styles, and introduce them to the sorts of things that the professors do. [...] This has bothered me for some time. On one hand, colleges and universities do not hire the same people to teach writing as they do to teach literature -- writing, in the form of a Freshman sequence of (usually) two courses, is mostly taught by adjuncts and graduate students, while literature courses are mostly taught by tenured or tenure track faculty. Also, most tenure track faculty taught comp courses as grad students, so if they are called on to teach writing they have maybe seven or eight years' experience to draw on. So there's not necessarily a destructive skills gap in the rare event you have a tenure track English professor in the writing classroom. On the other hand, Freshman writing courses are not generally taught by experienced, dedicated, well-trained professionals. The graduate students and adjuncts heading those courses are BA or MA holders (though some adjuncts are PhDs), and they have maybe three or four years' classroom experience on average. In terms of education, experience, and training, they're basically High School teachers. A good college has no business putting such people in the classroom on any regular basis. If writing is an important skill distinct from literary study (which I think it is), we should be creating discrete writing programs and staffing them with real professionals. And this isn't a fringe opinion. A "writing" program is exactly what e.g. Rhetoric and Composition PhD programs are supposed to help colleges staff, and exactly what Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) positions and personnel are supposed to design and implement. quote:And does literary criticism exist just as a way to differentiate people enough to decide who to hire for these jobs? As far as criticism and expertise go, I think English departments would love it if different critical approaches could create demand by implicitly claiming that departments need experts in X, Y, and Z criticism. But that's really not the case. Hiring in literature is still driven by historical period rather than critical approach, and only a very large, backwards, and theory-driven department would hire, say, a Feminist Medievalist over a Marxist Medievalist on the basis of his or her critical expertise. quote:I know I sound condescending and dismissive. I haven't decided yet if I think that tone is deserved. But, I don't know how to get and what I'm asking without sounding that way. So I'm sorry about that. Don't worry about that. You've asked a good question.
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Dec 8, 2010 15:27
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I've got some exams this week, one for Renaissance literature and one for American. Both two hours, both closed book, one is basically choose two questions, write two essays about books studied on the course, one (American) is one close analysis of unseen text, one essay question about texts studied. Any exams tips? edit; more specifically (if you want to be more specific); going to write on The Tempest, probably John Donne and Shakespeare's sonnets, possibly Jonson's Volpone, and Faulkner's Light in August, Larsen's Passing, possibly Toomer's Cane. theunderwaterbear fucked around with this message at 20:26 on Dec 13, 2010 |
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Dec 13, 2010 20:17
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Brainworm posted:
I'm an English Ph.D. student (also an early modernist!) who teaches Freshman Writing Seminars in an "in the discipline"-style program. Basically it involves teaching a course in your field that you design and which then has a large writing component. So there are FWS courses here on biology, normative ethics, and so on - even math - that teach how to write in that field at the same time. I've taught courses on film theory and theoretical approaches to martial arts cinema. It can be an awkward fit because there's no doubt that my real interest is in the primary and secondary texts we're watching and reading. Unfortunately I have to assign five or six essays, which doesn't sound like much but really adds up when it comes to drafting, revising and so on. My approach - which is really an approach to the discipline of English, which is what this program is all about - is that they have to learn how to think about these texts before (and as a pathway to) writing about them, so that's what I concentrate on. We work through progressively more complex essays throughout the semester by fine-tuning questions, negotiating new problems and putting elbow grease into critical thinking instead of the rules and models of argument gone over in a standard comp course. This isn't a perfect system and I have a number of issues with it, but it's an interesting balance between, in my case, teaching a humanities course and also helping students become better writers and thinkers. The philosophy is that writing is best learned in a dynamic format grounded in exciting primary texts, and ultimately I can't disagree. I can definitely say my students have gotten more out of writing about texts like Blade Runner, Fist of Legend, Antigone, selections from Foucault, etc. than they would have out of a vanilla composition environment. They come out of my classes better writers but also better thinkers, and I always get a couple of English or film studies converts. I would definitely have rather had something like this than the comp courses I took as an undergrad. I think it's not fair to say graduate instructors are akin to overblown high school teachers - I'm an advanced Ph.D. student with a lot of specialized knowledge and a dedication to university-level instruction and scholarship. My job as their teacher is to prepare them for thinking, writing and participating in a discourse at a college level, and I bring a lot of energy and a certain expertise to that goal. Having a graduate student as your teacher doesn't necessarily mean a lesser experience, especially for a freshman writing class. My funding allows me to teach only one class a semester, so I have a lot of time to dedicate, and I certainly realize that isn't a luxury shared across the profession, but I don't think graduate teaching should be (unless a department is abusing and underpaying their graduate staff) quite so denigrated.
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Dec 15, 2010 23:41
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swimgus posted:I have a question about some half-remembered thing from an early modern English class a long time ago. I remember a professor talking about one of the possible reasons for the revolution in the arts during the renaissance. I think he mentioned some classic piece of criticism that basically argues that people weren't able to produce full characters in literature because they didn't understand humanity the same way we do today. Or maybe people just didn't think the same way. I want to say it's related to humanism, but I have only the faintest idea of what that word means. Is this a real idea or is it just a figment of my memory? There are lots of critics who claim that the ways Renaissance subjects thought about humanity or human-ness is fundamentally different from the ways we do. Stephen Greenblatt is probably the most famous, but Margreta de Grazia and -- to a lesser extent -- Harold Bloom have both addressed this matter at length. And I'm sure if you dug back through 20th century criticism, you'd find the matter raised in one form or another during the periods when historicism was fashionable (maybe 1915-1940, and again with the decline in New Criticism). There may well be a canonical piece of criticism that frames this issue or starts the debate, but I can't imeidiately think of a candidate. If you want to read some accessible work on this, Bloom's Shakespeare and the Invention of the Human is a good place to start, as are Greenblatt's Renaissance Self-Fashioning and de Grazia's (less accessible) collection, Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture.
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Dec 16, 2010 14:45
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Obidy posted:[...] I've read William McGonagall's infamous "The Tay Bridge Disaster," a number of times, and while I get a general sense that it's awful, I couldn't really explain to you exactly why that is. I was wondering if you could elaborate on why it's such a dreadful poem. I have never read this before. My goodness. Let's start here, with the last stanza: Wiliam McGonagall posted:It must have been an awful sight, I think anyone reading this would, like you, get the sense that it's generally awful. The worst I can imagine is that someone without much poetic literacy would not like it for the same reasons he or she might not like "Lycidas." But I think this stanza could be usefully compared with some of my favorite (and thematically similar) lines from Hopkins's "No Worst..." Hopkins isn't a Shakespeare or a Milton or an Eliot -- I think most classes would treat him as a footnote, the guy who invented the curtal sonnet and sprung rhythm, so he seems a fair comparison. I mean, who wouldn't look bad next to Milton, right? Anyway: Gerard Hopkins posted:O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall Maybe the best way to talk about what McG. does badly is to look at it beside what Hopkins does well. Rhythm Neither of these verses are rigidly metrical -- say, in iambic pentameter or something more complex, like rhyme royal -- but neither are they in free verse. Rhythm is used by both poets, but to different effect. In Hopkins, as in much good poetry, the rhythm is unobtrusive, and the verse seems to mimic the patterns of natural speech; there isn't a moment where a line seems clearly forced to fit some pattern (though "Here!, creep / Wretch" may come close). A good litmus test? Read one of the grammatical sentences out loud and see how it sounds. "All life death does end and each day dies with sleep," well, that sounds loving impressive. It doesn't sound like it came out of a nursery rhyme or like it's been pounded into some unnatural shape by the dictates of meter. Compare that to "It must have been an awful sight, to witness in the dusky moonlight, while the Storm Fiend did laugh, and angry did bray, along the Railway Bridge of the Silv'ry Tay, Oh!" Wording, Unnecessary Whatever else we can say about that sentence, it sounds unnatural, and if not like bad poetry than surely like bad prose. There are, for instance, some unneeded words or, to speak more precisely, words that have no clear function in terms of grammar or meaning. You could rewrite this sentence as "It [the disaster] must have been awful to witness, in the dusky moonlight, while the storm fiend angrily laughed and brayed, along the railway bridge of the Silvery Tay." That's a long an inelegant sentence, but saves a considerable number of words -- five, in fact, of the original sentence's 32. In a form that prizes verbal economy, and the principle that each word have clear purpose or meaning, a reader's going to balk at one of every six words being totally unnecessary. And that's best case. I think there's a wealth of unneeded detail and off-target wording preserved in my paraphrase. If you must have a Storm Fiend, he might cackle. Cackling sounds fiendish. Laughter? No. Too imprecise, though middle-class prose might pull that out of a ditch with an adverb, e.g. "laughed malevolently." Braying? Never. Donkeys bray. A preteen girl with unsteady, coltish legs and enormous yellowing teeth fenced in by knuckle-sized braces, she might bray. But braying does not fit the dignity accorded a malevolent spirit whose wrath ends in human tragedy. Modifiers, Away! McG.'s moonlight is "dusky," his Tay is "Silv'ry," his sight "awful," and so on. And in my mind, adjectives and adverbs are the boy bands of prose. If you were tapping through my iPod* and saw the Backstreet Boys' "I'll Never Break Your Heart" among dozens of other songs, you might be like "OK. This kind of thing happens. I don't respect him more for this, but everyone has something that ought to be a guilty pleasure." One, or a few, boy bands' songs among hundreds is notable but not devastating. You might reasonably borrow my iPod and listen to it for an hour without praying for death's sweet release. But say you saw a Backstreet Boys' discography and similarly extensive collections of, say, 98 Degrees, *NSYNC, O-Zone, O-Town, The Click Five, and the Jonas Brothers. These might be among thousands of other albums and tens of thousands of other songs. But you would tell me that my taste in music sucks and puncture my eardrums for the sake of my sanity. Why? Because boy bands have a pollutant effect, like crude oil in ocean water or rust on a car. Adjectives and adverbs do the same thing to prose. Anything more than very few, especially badly used (as they often are), ruins an otherwise serviceable collection of words. There are rare exceptions -- some pickups gain character with body rust, just as I suppose some music collection might be more admirable for including the Arashi corpus -- but I think the rule stands firmly here. Modifiers should be used sparingly, like salt, and I dislike anyone who serves me a half pound of sea salt when I expect a hamburger. Anyway. There are other problems with word choice in McG.: "telling the world fearlessly without the least dismay" is typically redundant, for instance. But I think it's also worth concentrating on another quality of poetry, which I sometimes call "perception." Perception One expects a poet to see things. These don't need to be sublime truths about the nature of death or the purpose of life, but good poetry has a quality of precise observation all the same. I sometimes illustrate this to my classes by dropping our poetry anthology (usually the Norton) on the floor, spine-first, after asking the students what sound they expect it to make. What they expect is a thump. What they hear, if they listen closely, is a thump followed by a sort of susurration of the pages as the book opens on the floor. If you have such an anthology (or maybe a phone book) handy, you can try it and see what I mean. A poet would say something about that sound. Maybe call it a "splash," as I think Fitzgerald did when he described a phone book hitting the floor in Gatsby. With the Norton, the sound is more of a fast, wet, slither.** In Hopkins, there is a quality of observation. Men who have not climbed those steep cliffs of the mind might hold that climbing cheap; as the sun sets on each day, so each of us will die. These are not new insights, but wise, and the tropes that package them are at least refreshing. McG. gives us "For the stronger we our houses do build, / The less chance we have of being killed," which is patently obvious under any conditions where it is also technically true. That's another way of saying that the statement is neither wrong nor wise, which is actually sort of an accomplishment. It is very difficult to write about death in a non-technical sense and still not inspire the reader to even momentarily reflect on his mortality, the fragility of human life, the senselessness of tragedy, and so on. So I think that's some of what's going on in "Tay Bridge." Thanks for pointing me to it. * Note: I do not own an iPod. This is totally hypothetical. ** Like pulling out of a RealDoll.
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Dec 16, 2010 17:14
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What's your opinion of the "Dramatica" theory of storytelling that appears to be all the rage at the California Institute of Arts? It's supposedly the "most profoundly original and complete paradigm of story since Aristotle wrote Poetics"! The theory's website and hyperbolic statements like that, plus the fact that the idea was used to sell writing software, makes me feel like there's something hokey about this. But I'm interested in what your take is on the basic ideas: The Dramatica Theory of Story Structure is built around an idea called “The Story Mind.” According to this notion, every story has a mind of its own – its psychology is built by the story’s structure and its personality is determined by the storytelling. The theory suggests that this model of the mind was developed unintentionally over centuries of storytelling as a by-product of the attempt to communicate information and emotions across a medium from an author to an audience. In this light a story is seen as an argument in which the author, hoping to convince the audience of a point of view, suggests that a particular approach to problem solving is (or is not) better than all others that might reasonably be tried in a given situation.
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Dec 16, 2010 20:07
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radiolarian posted:What's your opinion of the "Dramatica" theory of storytelling that appears to be all the rage at the California Institute of Arts? It's supposedly the "most profoundly original and complete paradigm of story since Aristotle wrote Poetics"! I really wanna hear Brainworm's opinion on this, of course, but I just gotta pop in and say it sounds kind of dumb! I mean it is not dumb in and of itself, I guess, but it is pretty clearly a marketing strategy more than anything truly revolutionary. Honestly with language like that I would be surprised if they weren't trying to sell me writing software. Maybe if I read through their book I would see that isn't true, but with what I can gather from your quotes and other places online, there's nothing here in terms of theory that Wayne C. Booth wasn't saying back in the day. They've just applied a lacquer of vaguely and gratingly New Age rhetoric to some of Booth's later Neo-Aristotlean stuff and mixed in a bunch of the old saws from countless other craft-oriented books. EDIT: I just noticed this chestnut in the copyright section of their website. quote:The Dramatica Theory was developed by Melanie Anne Phillips and Chris Huntley and was not researched nor based upon any other theories of story design or analysis. I guess you might claim to be entirely original in order to avoid legal problems, but seriously? To entirely divorce your method from tradition and field strikes me as particularly weird and shady and makes me wonder exactly how this theory was developed to begin with. H.P. Shivcraft fucked around with this message at 20:41 on Dec 16, 2010 |
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Dec 16, 2010 20:34
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Brainworm posted:** Like pulling out of a RealDoll.  McGonagall gained some mild reputation, as far as I understand, amoung Mark Twain and his buds who read it to one another for shits and giggles. I'm just staggered by how bone-headedly literal it is: There was a bridge and then some wind and then people on the train were like 'oh poo poo I hope we'll be okay' and then it fell down and people in the town were like 'oh poo poo the bride fell down' and that people were pretty sad and hopefully they'll build better constructed bridges in the future so they don't fall down. I mean, I could read a newspaper and get the first bit and the rest I could infer myself. The crazy part is this is not the only poem he wrote about that bridge (and its rebuilding). What did this man find so compelling about it? You certainly won't find out from his poetry. It's like being trapped at a party by some middle-aged dude obsessed with model trainsets or crotcheting or something who just needs to tell you all about it. Granted this is not your field, Brain, but am I missing something with a lot of the postmodernists? Don't get me wrong I love Pynchon and Barthelme and so forth, but so much of the output of, for example, Joyce Carol Oates and Dom Delillo is just smug contempt put to paper -- think David Foster Wallace's description of going to a supermaket from This is Water, where he's deeply and personally upset that everyone's so stupid and doe-eyed and unconcious and they're in his way* -- that I find them extremely distasteful to read. Huge loving tomes full of how X habit, patronage, class identifier, etc. makes huge swarthes of people inferior to them. So much of it seems like a bunch of shallow self congratulation for people who shop in the same shops, live in the same isolate places, watch the same TV shows as the doe-eyed, sleepwalking masses but do it safe with the knowledge that they're not polluted by them in the same way other people are. They don't believe in them, not Really. * Or anything Delillo ever wrote about a supermarket, which is that but unironic. He never realised that other people are just as stressed and unhappy about the experience as he is, or cared. Kieselguhr Kid fucked around with this message at 22:18 on Dec 16, 2010 |
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Dec 16, 2010 21:59
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Kieselguhr Kid posted:think David Foster Wallace's description of going to a supermaket from This is Water, where he's deeply and personally upset that everyone's so stupid and doe-eyed and unconcious and they're in his way What? That's not the point of the speech at all. If I choose to think this way, fine, lots of us do - except that thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic it doesn't have to be a choice. Thinking this way is my natural default setting. It's the automatic, unconscious way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I'm operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the centre of the world and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world's priorities. The thing is that there are obviously different ways to think about these kinds of situations.
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Dec 16, 2010 22:18
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That's exactly what I said, dude. DFW identified that way of thinking as problematic and just as unconcious as the unconciousness he unconciously assumed other shoppers spend their entire lives in. Hence Delillo writes that but unironically. DFW deliberately laboured the smug, self-centred thinking to the point of parody, but I've seen plenty of books that straight-up sound like that (albeit with a few references to Tibetan funerary rites or whatever), and not all of them by some guy named Chuck Palunuik; some of them supposedly by insightful, edgy, confronting, acclaimed authours.
Kieselguhr Kid fucked around with this message at 22:35 on Dec 16, 2010 |
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Dec 16, 2010 22:31
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So I just re-read Romeo and Juliet and I have a question that might just be a stupid thing I glossed over. Why did Balthasar go to Mantua to tell Romeo about Juliet's death? Didn't Romeo keep the relationship a secret from everybody? e: Okay, I think I found the answer. When Nurse is talking about Romeo climbing the cloth rope to boink Juliet she asks if his "man" can keep a secret, I assume this is Balths? weekly font fucked around with this message at 14:10 on Dec 22, 2010 |
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Dec 22, 2010 14:04
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I didn't mean to ask a 'hey do my homework' question, but I guess I should have been more explicit. I'm a second year of an English lit undergrad degree (in the UK); do you have any advice explaining what you think most students miss out or do badly on in exams?
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Jan 4, 2011 14:23
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What would you rather see in an essay, a paper with little to no original thought but written with excellent grammar and structure, or a paper that's insightful/brilliant, but is poorly structured and that has sloppy (but still comprehensible) grammar. What are your thoughts on Middlemarch?
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Jan 4, 2011 14:57
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vegaji posted:What are some authors you would recommend on the whole idea of tradition in literature? I've read some of the staples, like "Tradition and the Individual Talent," but I'd like to be well-versed because it's a fascinating idea to me. Not just a small part due to this thread! The man to read on this is Harold Bloom. Bloom, Bloom, Bloom. I'd start with Anxiety of Influence, since it gets you looking at literary tradition from what I can only call a peculiar angle. After that, it's a strange road. I think that after Bloom I'd move back to some of the titan critics. If you're interested in Shakespeare, Jonson's introduction to his Shakespeare is remarkable for its sensitivity to the plays and to their place in Rensaissance and earlier dramas. You could also look at E.K. Chambers, who was really the last critic to treat entire literary periods. There's an inexpensive edition of his Medieval Stage available through Dover, and The Elizabethan Stage is an absolutely staggering piece of criticism. Seriously. If you want to see what a good critic can do with his research, I can think of no better example. Anyway. Both of Chambers's texts do a lot well, but one thing they do exceptionally well is document the spectrum of influences that work through a period's drama. quote:What are your thoughts on conceptual metaphor theory in literature study, going mostly from Lakoff/Johnson and Kovecses? Does it have a real, tangible place in literature and do you see it really rising, or is it in the realm of linguistics and should be spoken of in the same breath as Jakobson/Saussure more often than Pound/Joyce? [...] I really don't know. On one hand, I think Lakoff and Johnson belong someplace in linguistics, since what they articulate in Metaphors We Live By describes a peculiar intersection between language, culture, and thought in almost impossibly broad terms. On the other hand, this doesn't bar it from literary study; similarly positioned theorists (e.g. Foucault) have made their way into mainstream literary criticism, too. What I think might be missing in conceptual metaphor theory is history. The most significant pieces of literary criticism published over the past four decades have almost categorically discovered new and interesting ways of historicizing texts. There's no reason one couldn't build a historical context using conceptual metaphor theory by, say, locating an interesting historically and culturally bounded metaphor -- maybe the 17th c. "come with meat in the mouth" (meaning something like "to earn money") -- and so describe an interesting and counterintuitive connection between texts and cultures that employ it. But I've never seen this done in a way that's clearly grounded in Lakoff and Johnson.
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Jan 4, 2011 17:36
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This past semester I took an "Intro to Physics" course, which as part of the course required me to write a seven to eight page report on a physics topic. In the rubric for the report one of the categories was "over all style" with the description ranging from "college graduate" to "elementary school student", each with their own deduction or addition of points associated with it. I did not expect to get higher than a rating of "high school student", mainly because I struggle with the nuances of grammar, but much to my surprise I obtained the rating of "middle school student". Brainworm, as an English professor, how would you describe the writing habits of a person at each stage in education?
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Jan 4, 2011 17:38
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There was an article in the news today that a new version of 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' has been published for use in schools that gets rid of five instances of the word 'friend of the family'. What is your opinion on altering classic texts in general or this one in particular to avoid controversial topics. Does it allow the text to be studied without being meaninglessly derailed by thorny topics or does any alteration of the text in such a manner mean that important context about the work is lost for the reader?
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Jan 5, 2011 20:17
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