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Oh hey, I finally reached the end of this thread. It's been a really interesting read - and at several points I've come up with questions I wanted to pose, but I'll limit myself to two. 1. You talk a lot about how a text's relationship to previous texts is crucial. Without access to a literature department or a university library, how would I go about finding those connections? For example, I enjoyed Tess of the D'urbervilles and I'd be interested to read anything it was responding to, or which responded to it. I can think of a few of those by myself (Adam Bede leapt to mind but I haven't read it in nearly a decade) but I'm sure there are more that I've just not heard of or don't know enough about to make the connection. Besides asking you, what can I do? 2. How do you organise your books? Excluding the ones in piles on the floor, I guess. Alphabetically by author? By year?
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Jan 23, 2013 22:47
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Maud Moonshine posted:Oh hey, I finally reached the end of this thread. It's been a really interesting read [...] Thanks. I was going to write something about how this thread's been helpful to me (because it has), but that's not really the point of it. quote:1. You talk a lot about how a text's relationship to previous texts is crucial. Without access to a literature department or a university library, how would I go about finding those connections? For example, I enjoyed Tess of the D'urbervilles and I'd be interested to read anything it was responding to, or which responded to it. I can think of a few of those by myself (Adam Bede leapt to mind but I haven't read it in nearly a decade) but I'm sure there are more that I've just not heard of or don't know enough about to make the connection. Besides asking you, what can I do? I'd like there to be an easier answer to this question. It seems like there ought to be a sort of encyclopedia or reference that lists books and plays and poems that are influenced by or rewrite others, but one thing that constantly baffles me is that there isn't. And I don't know why this is, even though I can guess from my own experience: Putting together this kind of collection needs people who consider themselves to be, and aspire to be, generalists. And there aren't many. As far as I know there's not a PhD program that continues to train generalists, and the jobs for which generalists are best suited are (wrongly) some of the lowest paid, least tenurable, and least accommodating of research and writing. Anyway. The long and the short of it is that I don't know that being near a college or university matters much. Where you're likely to find guidance is in an unfashionable form of criticism known as the "genre study," that is, a piece of criticism that describes a category or subcategory of texts that meet specific criteria (e.g. the "revisionist western" or "gothic novel"). And you might find some books by e.g. Harold Bloom useful -- Anxiety of Influence is a good start. But for the most part, seeing connections between texts is something you have to do yourself. And that relies on a few basic skills (meaning, I'm about to list and describe the skills that I think I use when I make this kind of connection): Listening to What's Central: This is deceptively complicated. If you ask different people what's at the center of a play like Hamlet, they'll give you a bunch of different answers. The kind of answer that I find most useful involves what a friend and co-teacher of mine calls a "tension," -- that is, a certain conflict of abstract priorities. In Hamlet one tension might involve Hamlet choosing between two different father figures (Old Hamlet and Claudius) who represent two different forms of, say, masculinity, governance, or (more generally) "looking at the world." Another might be something I call the "moment of adulthood," or the way a character resists the responsibilities placed on him by his or her station rather than his or her actions (in this case, the ones placed on Hamlet by the ghost). It's deceptive to call this "listening," really, because that makes it seem like the text tells you this directly. And of course it doesn't. At the same time, some central tensions are clearly more persuasive, perceptive, and useful than others. I once saw a presentation in which a teacher claimed that Hamlet was "about" death.[1] And on one hand it's hard to argue that death isn't central to the play. It is the subject of and reason for some of Hamlet's most famous moments. At the same time, I don't see how that claim is useful, because it doesn't meaningfully differentiate Hamlet from some other significant body of literature in a non-obvious way. What you need is a tension that at once makes sense of several properties of a text but that is also not universal -- maybe, off the top of your head, you can think of four or five other pieces that deal with roughly the same thing. There are tons of pieces "about" death, but fewer tons of them that are "about" a young man choosing between two different father figures who represent two different ways of looking at the world, or "about" negotiating the moment at which responsibilities become a function of your station rather than your actions. So when you see a similar tension in a couple different texts, I think it's as good a sign as any that you're working with an intelligible tradition. I haven't seen the original Star Wars trilogy in probably a decade, but the next time I watch it I'm going to be looking for nods to Hamlet specifically. That's based entirely on the idea that they share with Hamlet the two tensions I just described,[2] which in turn explains some of what I thought was puzzling when I saw the movies as a kid: Luke was impossibly whiny and evasive of even his most basic and obvious responsibilities, and there are so many ghosts. Well, more than I was accustomed to seeing in science fiction. Discerning Similarity and Difference: I hit this pretty hard in the opening weeks of every class I teach: When you see similarities between texts, look at the differences inside those similarities. When you see differences between texts, look at the similarities within those differences. So a quick piece of classroom banter might look like this: Me: How are these poems alike Someone: All of the poems are about love. Me: Fantastic. How are the loves in these poems different? Someone: They're different types of love. Some are romantic and some are intellectual or platonic, and some are to people and some are to things like cities. Me: Awesome. What do these different types of love have in common? Someone: Dysfunction. Every one of these loves presents a major problem for the narrator. Me: Great. How are these problems or dysfunctions different? Someone: Some of them point to problems that the narrator is aware of, and some of them present a narrator who is blind to problems that are obvious to the poem's reader. And so on. Each one of these similarity/difference moves roughly defines a subgenre or sub-subgenre or sub-sub-subgenre, and that kind of categorization is useful when you think about relationships between texts. Every piece in a genre or subgenre, etc. is going to have a certain set of things in common with other texts in the same category, and that (sooner or later) gets you to aspects of each text that smack of influence or rewriting. Likewise, as you get into more fiddly similarities and differences, you can talk about specific and isolated differences between poems with greater confidence that such differences are, if not intentional, then at least significant. If I make a movie that, for the first 90 minutes, is identical to one of the Twilight series and then, in the last minute, have all the characters shoot themselves, it's a strong bet that the similarities between them are intentional and that the differences carry correspondingly significant weight. Look for References: This probably seems obvious by now, but when an author rewrites an earlier work, or wants his or her work to be read in dialogue with another text, he or she will be pretty direct. In poetry, you see this with common images and titles: Rich's "Valediction Forbidding Mourning" is in dialogue with Donne's poem of the same name; Sandburg's "Grass" is in dialogue with Whitman's Leaves of Grass project generally and with section 6 of "Song of Myself" in particular; Rosenberg's "Louse Hunting" deliberately contrasts Donne's "Flea," and so on. In novels, you see this when characters read or think about another text. In Frankenstein, for instance, the monster explains what he learned by reading Paradise Lost to Victor in considerable detail. In The Stand, Stu Redman spends some time thinking about Watership Down. In Slaughterhouse Five, Vonnegut (I think) makes Red Badge of Courage the bedside reading of Billy Pilgrim's Bully hospital roommate.[3] You get the idea. There are also times when writers tell you exactly what they're doing or claim to be doing. When Stephen King gives interviews, for instance, or writes about writing, he's pretty upfront about what he sees at the center of his books -- what inspired them, and what he reads. Milton does as much in "On Shakespeare," where he literally talks about Shakespeare's works as a sort of weight a writer has to lift in order to be a great poet. And Zadie Smith, for instance, just would not shut up about how On Beauty was a reworking of Howard's End. Of course writers have their own agendas and blind spots, but these moments are worth attention. quote:2. How do you organise your books? Excluding the ones in piles on the floor, I guess. Alphabetically by author? By year? By size, whenever this is possible. One reason is that this makes the most of limited shelf space. Ideally, books go on shelves closest to their height and depth, so that high and deep shelves can be reserved for the books that actually need them. Another is that it makes it easy to properly reshelve a book quickly -- a book can go anywhere in the set of books of the same size, which for most books describes a pretty wide set of areas in several different rooms. And once someone knows that your books are sorted by size, it makes it easy for him or her to put it back where it belongs. Not, he passive-aggressively added, that his wife has ever done this. Last, the reality is that I'm the only person who ever has to find one of my books. Alphabetizing makes sense if anyone needs to walk in off the street and find something, but that's not really the situation. It's easy to remember what books look like, and whether a book I've read is a trade paperback or a pocket paperback, or a hardback of such-and-such a size, so tracking down a book is generally easy. Constant problems, though, include knowing whether a book is at home or in my office, and remembering when and whether I've lent a book to someone (and, if I have, to whom). That second problem is frustrating because solving it is so simple. And I haven't, and haven't really tried. [1] A friend of mine was applying for a teaching job at an exclusive, private high school and as part of her interview needed to teach a sample class on Hamlet, so she came to me to talk about it. As part of this process,the school furnished her with the materials the class had so far used for Hamlet, which included PowerPoints the teacher had created for his class lectures. This sounds smug as all hell, but these things were just insipid. And I don't mean that in the sense that they pitched Hamlet at a basic level -- I mean that they taught the text like it was something you strip mine for themes, and they did even that job in ways that were so bafflingly terrible that I thought they were some kind of joke, and then maybe that some formatting problem was corrupting the PowerPoint slides. [2] They share others, too -- most notably the resistance of an individual (who believes he is somehow exceptional) to the idea that his fate has already been determined. In Hamlet, this resolves when Hamlet himself finally comes to accept and act according to what he sees as divine provenance ("The readiness is all..."). In Star Wars, I think the conflict is intentionally reshaped to preserve something like free will on Luke's part -- the Force is as deeply paradoxical as God is, setting down destiny on one hand and somehow allowing free individual choice on the other -- but the terms in which this is couched are laced with certain forms of skepticism and uncertainty, and follow what I think of as modern religious priorities, since "acceptance" of the Force's existence is independent of whether characters are good or evil. [3] I don't have a copy of Slaughterhouse handy and haven't looked at it since I wrote about it in this forum a few years ago, so I'm not 100% on this one. Red Badge is in there, but I'm not completely sure that's where it is.
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Jan 24, 2013 15:54
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Brainworm posted:This is a tough one, and it's hard to think through without knowing some of the particulars -- like which class (or level of class) this is, and exactly where the student seems to run into difficulty. Thanks a lot Brainworm: this is really useful for me.
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Jan 24, 2013 17:16
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In your OP you say that you're both a Shakespeare person and a Milton person and since there's been so much discussion in this thread on the former I thought I'd ask you about the latter. I'm working through Paradise Lost right now and it's my first readthrough. I'm on book 5 and I'm really enjoying it. I think it might be the most beautiful thing I've ever read. I do have a few questions though. 1. Why doesn't Milton use quotation marks for the soliloquies? The other epic poetry I'm used to is Homer and Vergil in translation so I'm sure those quotation marks are added for the benefit of modern day readers. Did writers in Milton's time not use quotation marks or is there some other reason? 2. How did Milton have the stones to write lines for God and Jesus? I can understand writing for Lucifer and Adam but putting words in the mouth of the man upstairs seems blasphemous as hell. 3. For what reasons did Milton write this? He says in the first few lines that he wrote it to explain the ways of God to man but there are far better ways to do this than an epic poem. Plus he makes Lucifer so sympathetic that you can't help but root for the king of all evil. It seems like he's being as critical about religion as he is explanatory. 4. Any other tips for a first time reader? Anything to look out for that will help me appreciate it more? 5. Where should I go from here? In the past year I've been on an epic kick and I went through Homer, The Aeneid, Danto's Inferno and now Paradise Lost. The connections between them made sense and helped me move through them in the order I did but what comes after Milton? Thanks for keeping up with this thread. It's such a great read that I might go back through it, as it's been a few years since I started.
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Jan 24, 2013 21:20
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Skrill.exe posted:I'm working through Paradise Lost right now and it's my first readthrough. I'm on book 5 and I'm really enjoying it. I think it might be the most beautiful thing I've ever read. I do have a few questions though. Yes. I know I'm light about Lost sometimes, but holy poo poo does Milton lay down thunder. Critics used to talk about his "organ" voice -- the idea being that Milton has a range of volumes and tones as expansive and impressive as, well, an organ. And one thing that gets me every time I read Lost is how quickly and seamlessly Milton moves from language that sounds basically intimate and conversational to language that has the dignity and balance suited to epic. And, for that matter, how well this language works. If you read especially fantasy novels or take a sharp ear to the dialogue in any heroes and monsters movie, it's easy to appreciate how hard it is to write and sustain inspiring epic language.* quote:1. Why doesn't Milton use quotation marks for the soliloquies? The other epic poetry I'm used to is Homer and Vergil in translation so I'm sure those quotation marks are added for the benefit of modern day readers. Did writers in Milton's time not use quotation marks or is there some other reason? It's just too early, really. You might expect to see quotation marks in the 1720 printing, if the editor or printer had thought they were useful. But for the most part the only quotation marks you'd be likely to see in the 17th c. are the marginal sort (the ones that run in a column next to a long quote). One better reason is that Paradise Lost, as both an artifact and a text, pretends to an older style -- Milton uses the long-archaic "y-[verb]" to create the past participle, for instance, and the first few printings themselves carry stylistic flourishes (e.g. elaborate illuminated capitals, etc.) characteristic of a somewhat earlier generation of collector-class texts. Quotation marks, being a relatively recent innovation, would have been out of place. quote:2. How did Milton have the stones to write lines for God and Jesus? I can understand writing for Lucifer and Adam but putting words in the mouth of the man upstairs seems blasphemous as hell. You would think so. Part of what allows this is what I call the "epic gambit." From Milton's perspective, speaking for God is a gamble more likely to succeed if the text carries a certain gravity. That is, Milton's counting on the idea that speaking for God isn't blasphemy as long as you do it well. quote:3. For what reasons did Milton write this? He says in the first few lines that he wrote it to explain the ways of God to man but there are far better ways to do this than an epic poem. Plus he makes Lucifer so sympathetic that you can't help but root for the king of all evil. It seems like he's being as critical about religion as he is explanatory. Well, I think they key phrase is "justify the ways of God to men." Justify is they key word here, and how I read it depends on how sly I think Milton's being. This changes from day to day. First, "justify" doesn't necessarily mean "explain." One way of looking at Lost is that, by the end, God's actions will seem better warranted even if the exact logic by which they are warranted remains unclear. At a more tangible level, I could in this sense "justify" the execution of a murderer by describing his murders in grisly detail or showing pictures of the murder victims as children. These things make an execution seem appropriate even though they don't explain why execution beats alternatives like imprisonment, fine, exile, or whatever else. Second -- and this is the sly part -- "justify" also has a specific theological meaning: to make righteous through the infusion of grace. That is, Milton may be claiming that the excellence of his poetry is something like divine grace in reverse. In divine grace, of course, the flawed thoughts and actions of human beings are forgiven by God (the ways of men are "justified" to God through divine grace). In Milton, the implication is that Paradise Lost is the vehicle by which God's potentially flawed thoughts and actions will be likewise "justified" to men -- that is, the poem is the means by which God's actions might be forgiven or differently understood, not because they're righteous and rational in themselves, but because the poem's art, like God's grace, carries with it a certain bottomless capacity for redemption. That's a lot of ego, obviously, but there are times I think that kind of stance is necessary when you're making a case for yourself as the langauge's greatest poet. quote:4. Any other tips for a first time reader? Anything to look out for that will help me appreciate it more? Reading it out loud if you aren't already. Even at its most dogged moments and during what seem like unfathomably boring moments of plot, Lost is just impossibly skillful poetry. Also, Milton's sense of humor. There's a current of absurdity in Lost that's easy to miss -- Adam and Eve's bickering, for instance. But you can see it in the devils and angels especially, who at their best are only selectively competent. quote:5. Where should I go from here? In the past year I've been on an epic kick and I went through Homer, The Aeneid, Danto's Inferno and now Paradise Lost. The connections between them made sense and helped me move through them in the order I did but what comes after Milton? I don't know what comes after Milton chronologically in terms of epic -- the Romantics had some stuff that gets close, but the next (earlier) English epic I'd recommend is Spenser's Faerie Queene. [*] For the most part, the first scent of epic language usually leaves me feeling both embarrassed for the form and afraid there's more and worse embarrassment to come. You know, "this must you do..." or any sentence with words like "whence" or "thee/thine/thou" leaves me feeling like I'm a teenager watching a movie with my parents when a love scene starts.
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Jan 28, 2013 21:47
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On a visceral level the first few books in Paradise Lost are so exciting. The imagery of Satan's ascent from hell, as well as the incomprehensible size of the events that take place, blew my mind in ways I didn't think a seventeenth-century text would be capable. And Satan is just a badass.
snoremac fucked around with this message at 04:16 on Jan 30, 2013 |
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Jan 30, 2013 04:07
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Thanks again for the thread. I've read through at least twice and found it very interesting. I was just wondering if you had any recommendations on the best texts to read to learn about literary theory. I was English Undergrad but never got as good of a grasp on literary theory as I would have liked.
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Jan 30, 2013 06:22
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I'm hoping this hasn't been asked before - is it perfectly grammatical to use "likely" instead of "probably?" It's always sounded wrong to me when people do this. For example, this sentence: "This is likely my best work." As a native speaker I don't really know the rules and just go by sound, so I'm not sure, but I would think that it's supposed to be either "This is likely to be my best work" or "This is probably my best work."
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Jan 31, 2013 21:14
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Thanks for your response! I knew about looking for tensions in a text, my English Lit degree covered that, but the similarity / difference example you gave was great stuff. I'm just coming to the end of 'The Scarlet Letter' now and realising that it's the oldest American novel I've ever read. It's a bit surreal. Earlier in the thread you mentioned writing your thoughts about a book down on an index card once you've finished it and I was thinking it would be an interesting habit to pick up — but what kinds of things do you write? I like having an example to work off. I know you don't go in for the whole themes and motifs thing, so I'm just wondering what you do write.
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Feb 1, 2013 10:10
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Goatse Master posted:I'm hoping this hasn't been asked before - is it perfectly grammatical to use "likely" instead of "probably?" It's always sounded wrong to me when people do this. For example, this sentence: "This is likely my best work." As a native speaker I don't really know the rules and just go by sound, so I'm not sure, but I would think that it's supposed to be either "This is likely to be my best work" or "This is probably my best work." Ah I've found it, it was from an Economist blog: http://www.economist.com/blogs/johnson/2011/11/degrees-confidence quote:The Oxford English Dictionary has an entry for "likely" as an adverb, with the caveat that this usage is now most common in North America. The Economist, however, declines to do so, and in a conflict between the OED and The Economist, I typically side with my incredibly erudite boss. As it happens, though, while writing the post, I had considered and rejected "possibly" or "probably." My reasoning was that "possibly" was too weedy. Anything's possible. One could say, with just as much accuracy, "The next senator from Texas will possibly be either Chuck Norris or a ham sandwich." And "probably" would have been a bit too strong. There is a third Republican candidate in the Senate race, former Dallas mayor Tom Leppert, who has a credible shot. So I arrived at "likely" as the midpoint between "possibly" and "probably", with Economist style going out the window along the way.
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Feb 1, 2013 14:08
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jeeves1215 posted:I was just wondering if you had any recommendations on the best texts to read to learn about literary theory. I was English Undergrad but never got as good of a grasp on literary theory as I would have liked. Weird. I thought I replied to this yesterday but it didn't happen. If what you're looking for is an anthology of what most people talk about when they talk about literary theory, the go-to is Rivkin and Ryan's Literary Theory: An Anthology. There's a companion volume, Ryan's Literaty Theory: A Practical Introduction, which may also be useful. I'm putting Rivkin and Ryan forward because some edition has been the usual anchor text for literary theory survey courses since I took mine back in the late 90s. The book I've found most useful, though, has been Cuddon's Dictionary; this may be a good choice if you get your reading time in smaller chunks or you're more interested in things like e.g. genre studies (which is extensively treated in Cuddon but entirely absent from R&R).
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Feb 1, 2013 18:29
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Brainworm posted:
Those are great techniques, especially the recursive similar/different questions. I’m stealing that. Another technique is to ask students to look separately for the craft, content, and bigger concerns of a text before they come into class. You will have some students that can easily talk about concrete specifics. Then you ask, what effect does that have? Why does that matter? They can use their notes to make connections, and then the conversation’s rolling and they're finding new things for themselves. I'm working with a different population, though. It seems as if a lot of my freshmen were only taught reading comprehension, metaphors, and alliteration when they were in high school. The C/C/C method is a graspable, flexible tool for finding more. Separate note--I’d like to put forward another idea about what is central to Hamlet: surveillance and deception, as opposed to forthright honesty. I think almost all the tragic elements spring from some sort of spying or concealing reality. Think about it. Polonius gets killed, damages Ophelia, and slanders Laertes through spying. There's Horatio vs. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. In fact, if Hamlet had acted as forthrightly as Laertes almost did, most of the deaths would have been averted and Denmark saved. Arguably. (This was a paper I almost wrote before I became fascinated by Measure for Measure. My apologies for posting it here.)
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Feb 3, 2013 02:12
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Maud Moonshine posted:[...] Earlier in the thread you mentioned writing your thoughts about a book down on an index card once you've finished it and I was thinking it would be an interesting habit to pick up — but what kinds of things do you write? I like having an example to work off. I know you don't go in for the whole themes and motifs thing, so I'm just wondering what you do write. I've changed the says I do this over time, and I still don't have great guidance about what's generally useful, if only because what I use different books for varies. The most important bit is that I remember what I write down on the card much better than I remember anything else. So now, what I write on the card is more a function of what I want to remember than of what I want to be able to look up later. A second thing I've learned is that these cards are more useful as short-term tools than long-term ones. When I go through old enough cards it's like going through old class notes; there's an occasional piece of useful information that I either already know or could look up in less than a minute, but much of the rest seems obvious, underthought, or wrongheaded. Every once in a while there's something useful -- a reference to a book or article that I'd forgotten about, for instance -- but these are so rare that hunting them down isn't time well spent. So now I write down what I want to remember, what might be useful for whatever projects I have in the pipe, and what might be worth thinking about the next time I read the book. I'm teaching Marlowe's Jew of Malta now, and found a card for it in the copy I brought to class this morning. Here's what's on it: quote:Moves slower than you'd think in Acts I and II; Acts IV and V are most of the memorable moments. First reading assignments should include at least Act III if the madcap/farcical elements of the play ought to be apparent to FTs [first-time readers]. B's CL [Barabas's Character Line] includes Roger the Alien: revenge plot is especially circuitous and theatrical & character abilities are elastic (e.g. Act V carpentry). Other Cs [characters] follow horror movie victim logic of sin factor (Ferneze) anonymity (exploded soldiers) or morality of privilege (Abigail, Kate?). The only thing worth glossing there is probably "morality of privilege," which is a sort of house term I use for a common, but specific and complex character situation that's usually (but not always) gendered female. In that situation, you get a character whose individual decisions work according to an acceptable moral logic -- that is, the character (both by the standards of the text and the audience it defines), consistently does the (or "a") right thing. This character is also situated such that these moral decisions ought to be difficult and ought to have complex consequences, but these difficulties and complexities are reduced or evacuated by the text. In other words, it's not just that this character maintains a kind of moral integrity because he or she has never been tested; these characters are tested, but on terms that are so contrived, artificial, or slanted that it places greater emphasis on his or her privilege than his or her merits or capacities. If this has you thinking about "first world problems," you're in about the right place; a problem, like a moral test, is differently meaningful in the context of impossibly rare privileges, so rhetorically framing it as a problem like other problems (or a moral test like other moral tests) introduces a tension; that tension can be funny (when it's recognized) or earn some contempt (when it isn't). This is an easy concept, but I like writing about it. One of the interesting things it does, just in terms of audience dynamic, is create an in-group and an out-group who both have an interest in the Morality of Privilege character. So (spoiler alert?) when Barabas poisons Abigail and her fellow nuns, the audience who admires Abigail's moral integrity is going to keep watching to see Barabas get his comeuppance, while the audience who sees her as an MoP character is going to keep watching to see either what crazy poo poo Barabas does next, or whether he'll be able to get away with Abigail's murder -- and all this while the entire audience agrees both that Abigail is a "good" character and Barabas is an "evil" one. Of course any individual can end up holding both ends of the rope, and that's where things can get really interesting -- on one hand, I can cheer when Jason Vorhees machetes a too-goody-by-half camp counselor, and on the other I can buy into the suspense that comes from whatever contrivance sends him back to the grave. Or something very like that.
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Feb 4, 2013 20:36
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What kind of a rep do Canadian English departments have in American ones? For the most part, it seems that Canadian English departments are rather congenial to other Canadian English departments (particularly the big ones, like McGill, U of T, UBC, Dal), but I wonder how much of a name some of those same universities have down in the States. If I go to a conference, for example, will people see that I'm affiliated with the University of Ottawa and basically go, "oh yeah, nice little school you got going on there  ", or is university affiliation not A Thing To Worry About(tm)?(First year Ph.D student here)
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Feb 4, 2013 21:57
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HappyKitty posted:What kind of a rep do Canadian English departments have in American ones? For the most part, it seems that Canadian English departments are rather congenial to other Canadian English departments (particularly the big ones, like McGill, U of T, UBC, Dal), but I wonder how much of a name some of those same universities have down in the States. Definitely not a thing to worry about. If there's any perception about Canadian universities as a class or group, it's that their graduate programs are more competitive than academically similar programs in the US, and that -- either because of or along with this -- they attract a highly desirable slice of international (and often American) student. Basically, for prospective students who sharpen their pencils, Canadian graduate programs compare favorably to their academically-similar US counterparts. There are a lot of reasons for this, but the effect is that Canadian programs have lower annual withdrawl rates.* This means that (at least among the people I talk to about these kinds of things) Canadian programs have a possibly-exaggerated reputation for attracting a certain and highly-desirable type of student -- one who is aware that graduate school is a long-term and often difficult commitment, and approaches this fact with a certain deliberate attention to detail. And this is where I go off the reservation: A purely conjectural corollary is that students concerned with this same statistic probably don't have an irritating and exaggerated sense of their own importance and abilities. That might sound like a trivial matter, but it isn't. It's wrapped up in the most terrifying failure modes you're likely to see in academia. You just can't hire these people. It's like hiring a land mine. This impossibly thin conjecture's only worth mentioning because it's a segue to conference etiquette: do not, under any circumstances, exhibit this personality trait. Other people will, but do not take them as a model for your behavior. If you can conference without pretension, and do it consistently, you'll stand out more distinctly and memorably than whoever gives the most impressive paper or sets up the most interesting panel. [*] I'm pulling this from the MLA Guide to Doctoral Programs in English and Other Modern Languages, which is available here. One revealing stat is that 10 of the 20 Canadian universities represented by MLA had a withdrawl rate of 0%, as compared to 67 of the 214 represented US programs. Likewise, only one Canadian program had a withdrawl rate of more than 10%, as compared to 38 in the US. The materials we distribute to our majors who are interested in graduate school also note that average times to completion are about seven months shorter for Canadian programs than US ones; while that paints a picture consistent with the difference in withdrawl rates, I don't have a better source at hand. These particular data come from a self-study of our graduate student outcomes, so there are a million reasons why this might look different for graduates from other programs.
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Feb 5, 2013 15:47
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Do you have any thoughts about Garcia Marquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude? I really love the book, but it seems a lot of people focus too much on the magical realism part of it.
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Feb 5, 2013 20:42
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How do you feel about retellings as introductions to literature? Like someone reading Taming after watching 10 Things I Hate About You or getting into fairy tales and folklore because of shows like Once Upon a Time or Grimm? Are there any books you would recommend for someone who loves to read poetry but can't write it worth a drat? Most importantly, am I insufferably pretentious because I use "whom" in casual conversation? 
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Feb 6, 2013 22:58
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The Erland posted:Do you have any thoughts about Garcia Marquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude? I really love the book, but it seems a lot of people focus too much on the magical realism part of it. It's been a long time since I read Solitude, so my head for fiddly bits for it isn't great. But I can see where you're coming from: "magical realism" seem to be the first and only thing people associate with Marquez, as though he were its inventor and as though the birth of magical realism represented a complete break with a tradition of earlier novels.* So, first off, I think of Solitude as part of a tradition or genre that I call "chronicle biographies." These really start developing in the 20th century but go back as far as Tristam Shandy; a more recent example is Middlesex. In these chronicle biographies, a peculiar family's or subculture's history is related over several generations in terms of a single consistent and historically embedded story arc; in Solitude, this arc is described by the cipher. In Shandy and Middlesex, the arc is putatively the narrator's biography (as it is in Orlando, though Woolf dumps the family history in favor of a single character who lives several hundred years). In all of these, the history of the family is embedded in a particular historical and geographical narrative. Think Forrest Gump (where Forrest is conspicuous witness to what the mid-1990s considered the most significant political and social moments of the American Boomers' ascent) except that the chronicle biography discovers history in more geographically-specific ways; you've got the Greek immigrants to (I think) Detroit in Middlesex, while Orlando and Shandy are as deeply rooted in a certain type of English countryside as Faulkner is in Yoknapatawpha. Likewise, the chronicle biography's arc also necessarily describes some coherent relationship between the present and the past, and here there are only a few choices. You can ubi sunt that relationship, and make the present a moment where some element of the past is understood to be irrecoverably lost; you can cycle it, and make the present a systematic repetition of the past; you can "ghost" it, and make the present an overdetermined effect of the past; you can revelation it, and make the present the culmination or endpoint of some long-simmering cosmic or cultural development; or (of course) you can do any combination of these. All but the first are typical of chronicle biographies, and more often than not I think you get a combination of the last three (cycles, ghosts, and revelations), with an emphasis on the "cosmic" side of revelations -- that is, the chronicle biography paints history as a series of developments apparently guided toward a coherent endpoint by some cosmic force, evidenced by the idea that the past guides the present with a remarkably heavy hand. Within this, there's also a certain and conspicuous thematic repetition. A footnote here: chronicle biographies are, for some reason, also generally sexually unusual. Shandy is its own neutered and asexual creature there (sort of like Forrest Gump), but the incest in Solitude and Middlesex and the spontaneuous gender-changing in Middlesex and Orlando all do something with the kind of story they tell, but damned if I have a good idea what. Anyway. For me, Solitude makes sense as a major text in that chronicle biography genre. The aspect of it that most people call "magical realism" is really more a conspicuous and deliberate technique used to create a coherent multi-generational story arc according to a deeply-romanticized and ultimately revelatory notion of history, where day-to-day events and tragedies are ultimately invested with a sort of transcendental significance. A sort of Revelation according to Oprah, where instead of the kingdom of God on Earth you get the enlightenment-flavored sense of self-satisfaction that comes with being a significant player in a sensible universe.** * And I've got a bigger problem with the term, too. Many discussions of magical realism implicitly assume it can only be written in Spanish, and therefore talk about Marquez and Allende and Borges. The ever-snide teenager I carry with me also notes that Salmon Rushdie's of a more magically-realist complexion than Toni Morrison or Franz Kafka, which goes a long way to explaining Rushdie's occasional inclusion in the genre and the criticism's somewhat rarer nods to Morrison and Kafka. Also, there's a popular discussion I don't particularly enjoy which begins with a claim that's something like "magical realism is just fantasy/science fiction with credibility." And that misses the point a bit -- fantasy and science fiction have their own distinctive iconographies (elves, orcs, and magic swords on one hand, and lasers, time machines, and robots on the other) and their own distinctive audience cultures. Nobody goes to MLA dressed as Jose Buendia. ** Which, it goes without saying, is something we all deserve.
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Feb 7, 2013 15:25
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What exactly is deconstruction meant to mean in the literary world? It's one of those words that gets thrown around a lot but I can't make heads or tails of it on my own.
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Feb 7, 2013 15:42
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DerLeo posted:What exactly is deconstruction meant to mean in the literary world? It's one of those words that gets thrown around a lot but I can't make heads or tails of it on my own. I'm not Brainworm, but here's Derrida himself answering the question, as well as it can be answered: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgwOjjoYtco Here's the citation that the documentary narrates: Derrida movie narrator posted:"The very condition of a deconstruction may be at work in the work, within the system to be deconstructed. It may already be located there, already at work. Not at the center, but in an eccentric center, in a corner whose eccentricity assures the solid concentration of the system, participating in the construction of what it, at the same time, threatens to deconstruct. One might then be inclined to reach this conclusion: deconstruction is not an operation that supervenes afterwards, from the outside, one fine day. It is always already at work in the work. Since the destructive force of Deconstruction is always already contained within the very architecture of the work, all one would finally have to do to be able to deconstruct, given this always already, is to do memory work. Yet since I want neither to accept nor to reject a conclusion formulated in precisely these terms, let us leave this question suspended for the moment." I always tend to think of it like Godel's incompleteness theorem: Wikipedia on Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach posted:GEB contains many instances of recursion and self-reference, where objects and ideas speak about or refer back to themselves. For instance, there is a phonograph that destroys itself by playing a record titled "I Cannot Be Played on Record Player X" (an analogy to Gödel's incompleteness theorems), an examination of canon form in music, and a discussion of Escher's lithograph of two hands drawing each other. That is, just as a certain set of sound waves will shatter a wine glass, you can create a record that, when it is played by its corresponding record player, it will destroy that record player. And this is true of every record player. For Godel, a system "cannot be both consistent and complete." Likewise, as Derrida says above, the very condition of the deconstruction of a system may be located "in a corner [of this system] whose eccentricity assures the solid concentration of the system, participating in the construction of what it, at the same time, threatens to deconstruct." The very thing that makes the system consistent is the thing that also make it such that certain manifestations or articulations of the system (e.g., playing that certain record) will bring the whole thing down, bring about its deconstruction. I typed all this because I'm mostly trying to answer this question, or articulate that answer, for myself.
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Feb 7, 2013 19:51
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DirtyRobot posted:I'm not Brainworm, but here's Derrida himself answering the question, as well as it can be answered: So what, in most cases, is the record and what is the record player. A novel is the record, the cultural construct the record player?
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Feb 7, 2013 20:15
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the JJ posted:So what, in most cases, is the record and what is the record player. A novel is the record, the cultural construct the record player? It seems to me "language" in a very broad sense is the system (or the record player) that is subject to deconstruction. "Semiotic system" might be a better term, since it conveniently has the word "system," and became Derrida, when he talks about language, isn't just pointing to little black marks on a page (and indeed he points to the fact that there is nothing "natural" about those little black marks on a page being representations of words). It might also be worth noting that Derrida came to hate the way the word deconstruction started being used, since the word "deconstruction" is itself prone to deconstruction. And, of course, the word is just plain used in really dumb ways. When some people use it I think they just seem to mean "take a thing apart and see how it works," the way a curious child takes a radio apart, without actually considering how the "thing," while constructed together and running perfectly well, was also already self-deconstructing. You can deconstruct individual words in a language, which can be more or less obviously cultural constructs[1], or you can also deconstruct a novel... whether it is an individual novel (i.e. a group of words) or the decidedly unnatural form of the novel itself, in which case you are, in a way, deconstructing the word "novel," or the cultural construct of the novel form. But the latter -- the deconstruction of the form itself -- also happens very openly in novels themselves, like Tristram Shandy, which obviously came hundreds of years before Derrida. Is a novel that is almost explicitly "about" deconstructing the form of the novel still a novel? Similarly, Roman Jakobson considered the "poetic" function of language to be that part of the message which is oriented towards the message. That is, the poetic function is that part of the message which is totally self-conscious about the problems of language. And this, for him, is the thing that makes poetry poetry. So isn't all poetry already semi self-deconstructing? (I think so.) [1] Roger Fowler, in Linguistic Criticism, looks at the word "pet" as a fairly obvious cultural construct. I like the idea in Foucault's History of Sexuality that before the nineteenth century, there was no such thing as being a homosexual, in the sense of sexual identity that we have now, because there was only the act of sodomy. In a more general way, Foucault's whole point is that "sexuality" as we think about it isn't natural, but is itself a construct, with a history. As an example of a deconstruction of an individual novel, J. Hillis Miller has this great deconstructive analysis of Middlemarch by George Eliot, which is like, I dunno, the novelest novel that ever noveled, the most real realist novel ever. It's the anti Tristram Shandy, almost, insofar as Eliot is totally aware of all the problems of vision, representation, language, and narrative that Laurence Sterne is, and probably ten times more aware than many postmodernists, but gosh darnit she's still going to at least try to write a linear narrative with a third-person omniscient narrator that presents a realistic, totalizing picture of nineteenth-century English provincial life. Sure, there will be a few very self-conscious moves ("But why always Dorothea?" the narrator asks the reader at one point), but on the whole, the aim for Eliot is realism and linearity. All J. Hillis Miller does in his "deconstructive" analysis of the novel is point out the way the novel deploys about three different "sets" of ongoing metaphors relating to Eliot's realist project that, on the one hand, are brilliant and are what make Eliot's project so damned good and successful, but, in a weird way, also totally contradict one another and, if you really think about it, kinda bring the whole thing crashing down. I think the answer to your original question is "both can be both," since both a novel and a cultural construct are products of language. A novel can be deconstructed, but it can also use language to deconstruct some other cultural construct. EDIT: I think one of the main differences between those who use the term poorly and those who use the term, if not correctly, at least rigorously, is that people who use it poorly will say something like "I'm doing a deconstruction of X," or "I am deconstructing X." By contrast, someone using the term rigorously will deny their involvement in the deconstruction. At some point they'll make this rhetorical move where they say, "I'm not the one doing the deconstruction. I'm just pointing at some things that show how the text is always-already deconstructing itself!" DirtyRobot fucked around with this message at 22:45 on Feb 7, 2013 |
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Feb 7, 2013 22:19
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HappyKitty posted:What kind of a rep do Canadian English departments have in American ones? For the most part, it seems that Canadian English departments are rather congenial to other Canadian English departments (particularly the big ones, like McGill, U of T, UBC, Dal), but I wonder how much of a name some of those same universities have down in the States. Are you actually *at* uOttawa? Because I am, too, and this is a thing I've been very much concerned about as I finish up my diss.
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Feb 9, 2013 07:49
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How would the sentence below be properly punctuated? I'm editing a book for a college tutoring company; clearly I should not be. This is the original punctuation. The parenthetical phrase doesn't seem right to me with that "etc." in there.quote:Everything may look perfect on paper (in marketing brochures, on posters, at college fairs, etc.) yet when you meet in person, you know that this is the absolutely worst fit that you can imagine.
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Feb 9, 2013 19:19
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Mr. Spooky posted:Are you actually *at* uOttawa? Because I am, too, and this is a thing I've been very much concerned about as I finish up my diss. Yes, I am. In the English department?
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Feb 9, 2013 19:51
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HappyKitty posted:Yes, I am. In the English department? Yup.
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Feb 10, 2013 10:13
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Hit me up at csamp074 at you know the rest. Now I'm curious. (I'd send a PM, but I don't have plat. Please don't make me go around asking everyone in the department if they have stairs in their house.)
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Feb 10, 2013 18:09
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HappyKitty posted:Hit me up at csamp074 at you know the rest. Now I'm curious. done. If you didn't get it, my email is in my profile. Mr. Spooky fucked around with this message at 20:59 on Feb 11, 2013 |
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Feb 11, 2013 20:57
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ChakAttack posted:How would the sentence below be properly punctuated? I'm editing a book for a college tutoring company; clearly I should not be. This is the original punctuation. The parenthetical phrase doesn't seem right to me with that "etc." in there. I am neither Brainworm nor an English professor, but I did get a lot of prescriptive grammar instruction as a kid (apparently this is a result of having gone to Catholic school). The comma before "etc." is fine as long as you're using Oxford commas (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_comma) in the rest of the text. "Etc." is short for "et cetera," which is Latin for "and the rest," and it's at the end of a list, so the comma there is fine. However, there is a different issue: there should be a comma after the parenthetical phrase. "Yet" is a coordinating conjunction (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinating_conjunction#Coordinating_conjunctions); it connects two clauses that could stand alone as sentences (these are called independent clauses). In English, coordinating conjunctions used to connect independent clauses are generally preceded by a comma.
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Feb 11, 2013 22:51
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I'm a grad student in the English Department at Carleton. 'sup, fellow Ottawa goons.
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Feb 12, 2013 04:28
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Food Court Druid posted:I'm a grad student in the English Department at Carleton. 'sup, fellow Ottawa goons. I did my MA there. I really miss the atmosphere. It invigorated me very much.
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Feb 12, 2013 16:42
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k stone posted:I am neither Brainworm nor an English professor, but I did get a lot of prescriptive grammar instruction as a kid (apparently this is a result of having gone to Catholic school). The comma before "etc." is fine as long as you're using Oxford commas (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_comma) in the rest of the text. "Etc." is short for "et cetera," which is Latin for "and the rest," and it's at the end of a list, so the comma there is fine. However, there is a different issue: there should be a comma after the parenthetical phrase. "Yet" is a coordinating conjunction (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinating_conjunction#Coordinating_conjunctions); it connects two clauses that could stand alone as sentences (these are called independent clauses). In English, coordinating conjunctions used to connect independent clauses are generally preceded by a comma. Yeah, 13 years of Catholic school over here too... That's why I'm so disappointed in myself for not being knowing how to handle this sentence, haha. Thanks for the advice. That's how I would have edited it too, but I didn't to publish a mistake. 
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Feb 12, 2013 17:04
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Just chiming in with the crowd about how thankful I am that this thread is still alive.Brainworm posted:what most people talk about when they talk about literary theory, Speaking of this sentence construction, I would be interested to hear your thoughts on Raymond Carver! I've started reading him on the recommendation of Roberto Bolano (who, to paraphrase, calls him and Poe the most important short story writers in recent memory) and I can't get enough of him. What We Talk About when We Talk About Love is so good it's crippling. If you have time, I would also love to hear your thoughts on the short story genre, however you choose to answer. I have a long-time love of short fiction and I think its a vastly underrated medium. What, to you, makes a good short story, for instance? Sorry for the ranty questions, but thanks for any reply!
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Feb 17, 2013 19:43
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DerLeo posted:What exactly is deconstruction meant to mean in the literary world? It's one of those words that gets thrown around a lot but I can't make heads or tails of it on my own. This is an odd one. In the first place, "deconstruction" is both a sort of synecdoche for lines of thinking that are generally considered postmodern or critical. A friend of mine used to (and for all I know still does) talk about the ways certain comics of the late 1990s "deconstructed" their central heroic characters. In that usage, he meant something like "rewrote the character in ways that were conscious of that character's history as a textual element." So that use of "deconstruct" can mean everything from "rewrite" to "critique" to "parody," so long as these are done in a sophisticated way (and, generally, in a way that undercuts or revises the broad assumptions or master narratives affiliated with the deconstructed text). I'll call that "deconstruction." Lowercase d. In the second place, one fair criticism of Derrida as a critic and of Deconstruction as a method is that Derrida was himself never terribly specific or consistent about Deconstructive practice or its theoretical tenets. Another is that Derrida oversold Deconstruction as something like a school of philosophy when it was (or is) more like a grammar for the social and textual function of language. I think there's a great deal of truth in that first criticism, and a considerable amount in the second. That doesn't make deconstruction a non-useful approach, but it does make it very, very hard to make specific claims about the ways of thinking it includes and excludes, or to, say, point to systematic vulnerabilities in Deconstructive thinking. This is part of what drove Foucault nutty in his response to Derrida's critique of an early piece ("History of Madness"). It's also earned Deconstruction a reputation for changing the course of 20th-century thought that probably isn't wholly warranted, has been revised somewhat downward since the 1980s, and which will likely end with Deconstruction being seen as something like a school of literary criticism that was minor in itself but remarkable in the ways it influenced other thinkers -- something like the way critics now read e.g. Bakhtin. Anyway. Deconstruction is really three things. It's a method of reading and interpretation in which one looks for "constructed" binary oppositions between categories (such as "man/woman" or "spoken written"), and also looks for those places where or mechanisms by which a text complicates these oppositions. A subordinate idea here is that these oppositions always have a privileged term (such as "man" or "written"), and that the process by which these oppositions are complicated is therefore politically, socially, or textually revolutionary. There's a tension between that last idea and the idea that there is "nothing outside the text," which is simultaneously Derrida's most oft-quoted and vaguest idea. The way I read it is something more like "all things are texts," (read: "there is nothing outside of text/there is nothing that is not a text"), rather than "any particular text contains within it every interpretive logic to which it is subject," (read: there is nothing relevant outside this text). I think there's some consensus that Derrida's own writing allows both these ways of thinking, and somewhat less consensus that it uses them interchangeably and without acknowledging the differences between them. There are some critics, part of a sort of die-hard "Deconstruction is a complicated and unfathomable mystery" cohort, who allow only that second way of thinking (that a text contains its entire corpus of interpretive logic). They produce ingenious readings of baffling complexity which are sometimes interesting, but are also practically impossible to usefully extend or critique because their method is at once exacting and convoluted. On my grumpier days, I think this is a grown-up version of a junior-high epiphany in which one realizes that (a) every word in the dictionary is also defined in the dictionary, (b) words are defined by usage, (c) every text that uses a word therefore necessarily defines that word, so (d) every text is therefore, functionally, a dictionary and consequently (e) as a function of language, a text must necessarily define every term it uses.* But when it comes to understanding Deconstruction and its legacy, that first interpretation ("everything is a text") is really what American Deconstructionists (read: the Yale school minus Derrida) have picked up and run with. And most of what people talk about when they talk about deconstruction in the specific sense, I think, has to do with these combined matters: binary opposition, the culturally effective qualities of these binary oppositions, and the logical and theoretical implications of "nothing outside the text" forms of thinking. The second and third things people sometimes mean when they talk about "Deconstruction" are extensions of Saussurean (read: structuralist) models of language and meaning. The most common example is his distinction between difference and differance. The first, difference, is a noun that designates the formal distinction between words such as "pin" or "pen" -- something like the tenor of a simile or mataphor, but applied ot the formal qualities of literal words and phrases; this is actually a Saussurean concept, but takes on different significance for Derrida because of its relationship to differance. Differance (with an a, but an accent over the e), is the process a listener or reader goes through as a consequence of difference -- hearing the beginning of a word or phrase and experiencing a sort of collapse or refinement of possible meanings as either the word itself is entirely revealed through language or text. A good example is when wonder whether you've significantly misheard "bitch" for "pitch" or misread "penis" when the word was "pens." According to Derrida, this is an inherent function of language/meaning, which is inescapably rooted in time (this, again, is a Saussurean concept taken to what Derrida would have considered its logical implication). * And while you're at it, pass me those copies of Atlas Shrugged and Birth of Tragedy. I'm going to unbind them, shuffle the pages together into a five-inch stack, then read it aloud to the tune of Schumann's Carnaval while you blow this air horn whenever I say "Dagney." That's what a long-form sound poem really ought to be about, you know?
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Feb 19, 2013 16:56
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Brainworm posted:There are some critics, part of a sort of die-hard "Deconstruction is a complicated and unfathomable mystery" cohort, who allow only that second way of thinking (that a text contains its entire corpus of interpretive logic). They produce ingenious readings of baffling complexity which are sometimes interesting, but are also practically impossible to usefully extend or critique because their method is at once exacting and convoluted. Do you have any good demonstrative examples of that? I both find the concept interesting and hard to fully picture.
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Feb 20, 2013 02:57
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Kickshaw posted:How do you feel about retellings as introductions to literature? Like someone reading Taming after watching 10 Things I Hate About You or getting into fairy tales and folklore because of shows like Once Upon a Time or Grimm? Well, I like it. I favor working chronologically because I focus on the early end of textual relationships -- that is, I use more accessible and newer texts to make older ones easier to understand, which means that the newer texts don't generally get equal weight. We might use quick exposure to half a dozen 20th c. texts to work through Othello. But one thing I can say about introducing the newer text first is that it fits problem-based learning models more neatly: "where did this function of the text come from?" is bounded differently and more amenable to research than "how was this function of the text adapted in later texts?" Criticism on a late text X is more likely to note the influence of early text Y than criticism of Y is likely to note its evolution into X. quote:Are there any books you would recommend for someone who loves to read poetry but can't write it worth a drat? I think Mary Oliver's Poetry Handbook is a good read for an aspiring writer who wants to both learn more careful reading and eventually bring that reading into his or her own writing. And Bloom's Anxiety of Influence is great read, too, if for no other reason than Bloom reads poetry with a remarkable attentiveness and clarity of thought that both avoids the worst kinds of pedantry and -- more important -- is still focused on reading and understanding poetry as a way of building an enriching and meaningful relationship with the kinds of profound artistic excellence you get in the best poetry of the last five centuries or so. quote:Most importantly, am I insufferably pretentious because I use "whom" in casual conversation? I get a little harsh with people who use "whom" in regular conversation, and part of that's because I see it as a sort of conspicuous demonstration of supposedly superior taste. That kind of demonstration, especially when it's insecurity driven, is something I've got some contempt for because (a) I run different plays for the same reasons, and don't like it when I do because (b) it invites ways of thinking about academic culture and learning that, from where I stand, are real problems. When you use language to create in-groups and out-groups -- using "whom" or other grammar or language that seems affected to your listeners or readers -- you risk playing into the idea that certain kinds of education are an effete and impractical hobby. There are all kinds of reasons that this has become a problem, but the guide I have for my own behavior is that any language I use that creates an in-group and an out-group, whether it does this by flourishing grammar or trivia, has got to make a case for itself. It's got to be perceptive, not just clever or controversial. Education in the fine arts and humanities carries with it some obligation to whatever positive human qualities that art, history, religion, philosophy and literature nourish. So if that's your education, you've got to be wise. You've got to be insightful. Those are qualities people expect from art and humanities education for the same reasons they expect attention to detail from an accountant or mechanical aptitude from an engineer. When an education doesn't develop those qualities, it's just trivia. And trivia's a piss-poor basis for social distinction. So for "whom" and like matters, it's all about the politics of reception. Whether what you're doing is pretentious isn't a function of what you do as much as a function of how it's received, so that probably ought to be where you focus your thinking.
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Feb 21, 2013 15:17
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I wasn't expecting such a thought-out reply to the "whom" question, since I was mostly joking. As a kid I suffered through a lot of grammar drills, correct usage of "whom" stuck, and most people don't seem to notice when I use it. In writing I avoid it though, because I don't think there's any way to write it without it seeming affected, archaic, pretentious, or all three. Thanks for the book recs, my library doesn't have either but I may be able to get them from amazon. As things currently stand I lack both the funds and the mental stability for post-secondary education so I'm doing a lot of reading and self-teaching right now, with my main areas of interest being poetry and fairy tales/folklore.
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Feb 22, 2013 16:03
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I read all of your posts about Milton, and they really expanded my understanding and context for PL, Lycidas, and his other poetry. Right now, I'm in a Milton undergrad class and I'm wrestling with Areopagitica and his idea of Truth's body being torn into "a thousand pieces." I'm fascinated by this passage: “They are the troublers, they are the dividers of unity, who neglect and permit not others to unite those dissevered pieces which are yet wanting to the body of Truth. To be still searching what we know not by what we know, still closing up truth to truth as we find it...this is the golden rule in theology as well as in arithmetic, and makes up the best harmony in a church, not the forced and outward union of cold and neutral and inwardly divided minds." I kind of understand this as Milton is arguing that the individual should be allowed to read and assemble all literature, no matter how blasphemous or indecent, to be able to assemble the greater capital-T Truth. This argument seems to appear in "Comus" as well. I frequently see this passage used as an argument for free speech, but wasn't he a radical Puritan and an iconoclast that opposed anything Catholic? I also sensed some tones of his elite intelligent super-humans from "On Education," and the ability to assemble Truth should be bestowed on those chosen few. Was he arguing for censorship for the lesser-intelligent, lower class? Or just censoring some things? Wasn't he even a censor at one point? Basically, I feel like Milton is a gigantic hypocrite and I'm confused.
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Feb 25, 2013 19:33
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Wicked! I just got accepted to give a conference paper at NASSR! This is going to be my first big-leagues conference paper, and I'm not quite sure what to expect. It's also a bit intimidating since one of the plenary speakers (Miranda Burgess, UBC) is also the author of a paper I plan to talk about in my presentation. What are some of the pitfalls I need to watch out for when giving my first big conference paper? (I gave one before at a children's literature conference hosted by my own university, but the atmosphere was a bit more laid-back; mostly I just don't want to make a fool out of myself in front of people who might someday be on a hiring committee.)
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Mar 7, 2013 08:18
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Tig Ol Bitties posted:I read all of your posts about Milton, and they really expanded my understanding and context for PL, Lycidas, and his other poetry. Right now, I'm in a Milton undergrad class and I'm wrestling with Areopagitica and his idea of Truth's body being torn into "a thousand pieces." I'm fascinated by this passage: I guess the place to start here is that reasoning from Milton's religious positions to his political and social ones is complicated. For one thing, Milton's religion was complex and idiosyncratic. For another, his religious thinking seems to have changed over time. Most important, Milton never really undertook a direct, honest, and public explanation of his religious thinking or its evolution. If anything, he (a) obfuscated his personal religious beliefs and (b) employed mainstream religious ideas in his political writing according to various expediencies. So whenever I hear a statement about Milton's religion, I'm suspicious. And I'm doubly suspicious when that statement isn't qualified to hell and back. That's another way of saying that quote:[...] wasn't he a radical Puritan and an iconoclast that opposed anything Catholic? isn't a useful way of thinking about Milton. Milton was religious, in the sense that religion and spirituality were tremendous forces in his life, as well as grammars though which he expressed certain thinking, but that's different from his being doctrinaire. Anyway. Whenever I'm trying to figure out a tension in Milton, I come back to his understanding of "goodness," which is more a process of human development than an aggregation of good deeds, right opinions, and conspicuous virtues. That usually helps me sort out the tension, which is more often than not an effect of thinking about a problem in modern terms instead of in Milton's. So just to disambiguate: Milton's bottom line on "goodness" is that good people (or beings) become good by drawing wisdom from failure.* This makes being a good person different from having good intentions, doing good deeds, or living according to good rules; the definition I use for this is Paradise Lost's "Knowledge of good, bought dear by knowing ill," which is as specific a short definition as you're likely to get. In application, this means that (for instance) babies are not and cannot be "good." They're innocent, and even though both "goodness" and "innocence" are positive moral qualities, they're not like terms any more than "red" and "round" are like terms because they both describe an apple. This also means that (for instance) law abiding, churchgoing, and rightly-religious citizens are not necessarily "good." They're obedient, and if their obedience is internally motivated they may be virtuous, but (again) those are different from being good. Just FYI, Paradise Lost makes these distinctions pretty rigorously. After Adam and Eve eat the apple, they move from being innocent to being capable of good (or evil). Likewise, I think Milton meant for many of Satan's qualities (bravery, etc.) to be entirely positive; it's Satan's inability to come to terms with his failure, and use that failure to come to some revised sense of self, that makes him evil. In other words: For Milton, the whole point of being human is moving toward this "goodness." And this means that people both have to (a) fail and (b) have some opportunity of coming to wisdom through failure. If you take that idea as central to how Milton thinks about censorship, I think you can see how a free press is necessary in a just society. Let's just suppose censorship works as intended: censors are completely correct in what they choose to censor, and every available text is completely wise and truthful in every conceivable respect, and as a consequence, every person in your model society holds and believes every Truthful position on every imaginable topic in the realm of human experience. In other words, every person learns the real, objective, capital-T-truth about everything there is to know. That society, in Milton's eyes, is the worst of all possible crimes against humanity. If you deny people the chance to fail, or to hold "wrong" opinions and learn from their deficiencies, you create a society in which people cannot by definition become "good." The best they can do is innocent and virtuous. A leader who engineered this society would be evil (in the modern sense of "intensely morally wrong") for abandoning his responsibility to his subjects' spiritual development. So, to re-read to that quote from Aeropagitica: quote:They are the troublers, they are the dividers of unity, who neglect and permit not others to unite those dissevered pieces which are yet wanting to the body of Truth. The emphasis here isn't on right or wrong opinion -- that is, the "troublers" aren't people who hold or promote wrong opinions; they're people who would deny an individual the chance to discern Truth for him or herself. "Unity" here means something like "all people being good," with the understanding that people become good through a sort of internal, individual process, and not through either superficial or intense conformity of moral opinion. That is, you can't expect people in e.g. a church to be "good" if you make their decisions for them, even if all the decisions you make on their behalf are correct. Note the use of "neglect," which suggests that allowing individuals to piece together Truth is a duty of leaders, not simply (as we would think of it today) an area leaders have no business regulating. quote:To be still searching what we know not by what we know, still closing up truth to truth as we find it...this is the golden rule in theology as well as in arithmetic, and makes up the best harmony in a church, not the forced and outward union of cold and neutral and inwardly divided minds. Again, note the word choice. We have "cold" and "neutral" and "inwardly divided" minds; to me, that sounds like the condition of these minds is the important matter. If the important matter were e.g. agreement of opinion, the emphasis would be there, and the last bit would read something like "the forced and outward union of disagreeing opinions." * Incidentally, I completely agree with Milton on this point, so I probably overuse it.
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Mar 12, 2013 21:12
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