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Clever Gamma posted:[...] I have a disappointingly narrow background because of the time constraints of my education thus far. Would you say understanding the shapes of the characters/relationships and the general elements of the plot are more important in appreciating these plays? I'm lacking a specific example of a place where missing a cultural cue could lead to a shallower understanding or misunderstanding altogether, but that's what I'm worried about now. Oh my yes. For some reason, a lot of modern criticism thinks about literature as a sort of cultural artifact. This means teaching literature sometimes assumes (or pretends) that knowing something about culture is the same thing as being a good reader, probably because of the idea that the value of literature has something to do with exposure to other cultures and ways of thinking. There's some logic to that. If you're, say, an anthropologist, it makes perfect sense to say "the inscriptions from the North wall of this ziggurat (the text) can tell us something about the Aztecs who carved them (culture)," and likewise assume that someone needs to know something about the Aztecs in order to understand their inscriptions. After all, the operating assumption there is that the text had a (complex) fixed meaning (or set of meanings) as part of that culture. Duh. So if I look at these Aztec inscriptions" and say "hm. Looks like R. Crumb redesigned the Faenza icon set," that's not a really legit. I'm not being a good anthropologist.* But I might be a good reader. And not in the "what does the poem mean to you" way that doughy, middle-aged, white, bearded English teachers bringing to the classroom in an after-school special about the dangers of not majoring in STEM fields. Because what I'm doing is picking up on a whole bunch of purely formal elements of those Aztec inscriptions. Just for instance, those Aztec inscriptions" and R. Crumb's probably most famous cartoon have some formal elements in common. They're represented as black and white ink drawings with cross-hatch shading, irregular stroke width and geometry, and a sort of "cram systematically disordered legible details into significant elements" aesthetic you see from Geof Darrow and not so much from Pablo Picasso. They're also, like the Faenza icons a collection of variously-abstract pictograms arranged in discrete, identically-sized tiles. Point is, in what I think of as the "literature" was of reading, that kind of observation is not only valid but valuable. This doesn't mean that contextual and cultural knowledge is irrelevant -- it just means that "knowledge of context" and "reading skill" are two completely different things, and that "literature" and "anthropology" are two different ways of knowing with two different sets of priorities attached to them. This extends, I think, to characters and relationships in a text. There are places where understanding the relationships between two characters looks like it depends on a body of cultural knowledge. Merchant's Antonio and Bassanio are one of those cases, and students trying to decide whether Antonio's feelings toward Bassanio are basically friendship or basically romantic are probably going to start reading about Renaissance England, what it thought of Venice, and so on and so on. And even though I think that risks doing something more like "cultural studies" and less like "reading," there's some sense in it. But at the same time, the meaning of the text isn't fixed. It emerges from the relationship between the text and the reader, and in that sense a "good" reading isn't one that "discovers" meaning in the text the same way you "discover" a finger in your chili. Instead, a good reading develops a persuasive interpretation of the text that makes the text itself worthwhile. So a thought experiement: If someone raises Shakespeare from the dead tomorrow, and he says "Antonio and Bassanio are definitely not lovers or aspiring lovers. Never wrote that, never meant it, and someone had to explain what that even meant to me because I never heard of it and nobody else I know has, either," that's interesting. But it doesn't necessarily change that, for 21st-century Americans, a reading that foregrounds Antonio's romantic interest in Bassanio is persuasive (meaning: it explains the actions of the characters in a way that makes their interactions compelling) and therefore good (meaning: engaging and accorded some artistic status). On one hand, that makes some things complicated. Because, on that hand, it's very hard to find some rational basis for saying a reading of a text is "wrong." The worst criticism it lets you bring to a reading is "non-persuasive," and that's not nearly a strong enough word for, I don't know, a furry who reads The Secret of NIMH as a masterpiece of erotic cinema.** But, in my heart of hearts, I also feel that if that particular reading's persuasive in that particular community, it's a "good" reading. In that community. On the other hand, it means that what you get out of reading -- and out of good reading -- isn't a sort of neatly-packaged meaning delivered from the author to you in a nice little, um, package. It's a creative exercise, or a process, that's active and rewarding in a way that's different from sort of passively letting someone else's vision of the world wash over you. Or from doing whatever Michael Bay (probably) expects from someone who sees a giant robot blow up a dinosaur just as it's flash-frozen by a civilization-ending cold front. * Note: Actual anthropologists probably don't think this way at all. ** Then again, maybe the right tool for that job is less like a word and more like a claw hammer. *** And writing that, I'm going to look in the mirror tomorrow morning and ask "oh monster. Why did I create you?"
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Jul 24, 2013 16:17
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ghableska posted:Hi Brainworm, thanks for this thread -- it's super insightful and going through it has been a total delight. I just saw Joss Whedon's adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing and loved it. First of all, have you seen it? I appreciated how smooth and effortless the whole production was. As much as I have enjoyed the various plays that Kenneth Branagh has put to screen, the period sets and costumes and lines enunciated with such gravitas can sometimes make them seem heavy. I'd love to, but I haven't seen it yet. I'm probably going to have to wait for it to make it to Netflix before I can.
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Jul 24, 2013 16:38
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I recently read Don Quixote, and when I reached the Cardenio bit, I couldn't stop thinking about how amazingly good an adaption by Shakespeare might have been. (If there really ever was one.) There are just so many elements that he could have worked with. Someone asked you about Cardenio as a lost play back in 2009, and at the time you thought that there was probably never any such play by Shakespeare, but if there was, it still wasn't The Second Maiden's Tragedy. Since then, there's been all this activity around Double Falsehood - an Arden Shakespeare edition, plus an RSC adaptation. Do you have any thoughts on the attribution, and the play itself? For what little it's worth, I don't see how Theobald in 1727 could have had access to a Shakespearean source that is otherwise completely unknown. Plus, although there are bits of the play that seem Shakespeare-y, there's a big difference between someone trying to sound like him, and actually being him.
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Jul 24, 2013 18:31
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Do you have any advice for someone who wants to break into the exciting world of Literature professoring?
Smoking Crow fucked around with this message at 06:41 on Jul 28, 2013 |
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Jul 28, 2013 06:18
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What are the career options for a someone with just a MA in English? I'm currently in a free-standing program with funding, and my original intention was to use that to get a foot up on going into PHD programs. But I'm beginning to realize I really love the area I live in and I do not feel like moving away to get a PHD (which I would be required to do since the nearest program is still a good few hours drive). So I'm considering just finishing the MA and leaving it at that. But are there any jobs I'll be qualified for that I wouldn't have been without the MA?
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Jul 28, 2013 23:30
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Hey Brainworm, I remember someone asking you a reallllly long time ago about your thoughts on Infinite Jest, and if I remember correctly, you were somewhat unimpressed by it as an overly long farce. So I imagine you might not have much (positive) to say, but having just reread both it and Hamlet, I was wondering if you had any more specific thoughts on it as a tragicomic rewriting of Hamlet where the essential tragedy is not inaction but a breakdown of communication. There's both Hamlet's/Hal's inability to communicate anything earnest about himself because of his preoccupation with pleasing his mother and wowing everyone around him with his smart-guy act and the (at least I think) clever reversal of the problem in the play where Hamlet/Hal's father's ghost never even shows up until the final act, and even then he never even manages to speak to Hamlet/Hal. I guess my general question is, do you think Infinite Jest is a decent reading of Shakespeare? Off the mark? Something else? It's an aspect of the novel I haven't really seen much discussion of (whether because it's underdeveloped or because it doesn't fit into the interests of most DFW readers, I'm not really sure), and I thought you might have some insight. Also, thank you once again for this thread. I'm taking some time off post-graduation to try out other things and earn a supra-grad-student salary for a while before applying for a PhD, and every time I wonder if it's worth it to keep thinking about grad school, this thread makes me answer myself in the affirmative.
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Jul 30, 2013 05:18
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wshngmchn posted:This is not at all hermeneutical, so I apologize, but it's something that has been bothering me. I don't know how common this is, but I have some experience with it. My uninformed guess is that the problem's either bullshit or vision, and I think bullshit sounds more likely. Bullshit I've run into bullshit-driven reading problems (or at least serious ones) twice. Both times, I couldn't sit down and read anything for more than about ten minutes, let alone finish a book. The first time, I'd just started reading for my doctoral exams. I was about 26, had just bought a house that I was fixing up, and had basically end-gamed myself into a long-distance relationship where I was pretty unhappy for reasons that were completely my fault. The second time, I'd just taken the job I have now. I was about 30, had just bought a house that I was fixing up, and had basically end-gamed myself into a long-distance relationship where I was pretty unhappy for reasons that were completely my fault. You can see where I'm going with this. For me, not being able to sit down and read (or do whatever work you care to name -- writing to refinishing a hardwood floor) is all about unresolved bullshit. And that's because, for me, reading is part of a certain class of activities. To do them, I need my whole head in the game, for one, and can feel like I'm accomplishing something, for another. So I can't distract myself with reading the same way I can distract myself by, say, reading Slashdot or gooning my way through anything else that burns a lot of time and doesn't actually get anything done. Maybe just installing some labor-intensive linux distributions over and over again, or seeing if I can finally find the right combination of kernel patches and display driver tweaks that'll give my T42p a usable, full-featured desktop.* You get the idea. Of course I don't know you and what you're about, but this situation -- and that you seem to be unhappy about it -- just screams "unresolved bullshit" to me. Not that your problems are "bullshit" in the sense that they don't matter. They're probably just of the "severe but easily addressed through some introspection" class, at least if my experience is any judge. And it may not be. Here's a litmus test. Take fifteen minutes and write down every problem you think you have. And then read over the list. If you couldn't do it or do it right, like there are problems you know you have but that you didn't write down, or if you wrote them down in a bullshit way -- phrasing them as virtues ("I work too hard"), or laying them at the feet of other people ("my lab partner is annoying") -- I'd just about guarantee that bullshit's your problem. So keep on that list until you get it right. Then either use it to set some goals or, I don't know, burn it or wipe your rear end with it. Then decide what to do next. If it's reading, great. See if you can get it done. But it might not be, and that's fine. The reading will find a place and probably go a lot better. Vision On the off chance you're not exactly like me (as in, you try that list and bullshit's a non-issue): get your eyes checked, or wear your glasses. I work with a particular group of students most years -- incoming freshmen who are usually intelligent, usually poor, and usually have a combination of ennui and what sometimes looks like serious reading/writing problems. For a few every year, they've either never had an eye exam or know they need glasses or never got them or aren't wearing them. Either way, glasses/contacts/vision voodoo improve things dramatically. The smarter these students are are, the less this looks like anything you'd think of when you think of bad eyesight. What I think happens is they unconsciously find ways to compensate for it, and those ways of compensating cause other problems that look fifty kinds of strange. They panic or get carsick when they drive (and sometimes wrap it up in anti-car eco-whatever), avoid looking at people while they're talking, or have to follow other students when they leave the classroom because they're too spatially confused to easily find a building's exit on their own. But one of the more common strange ones is a peculiar half-impatience with reading that leaves them totally baffled, and that sounds a lot like what you're doing. So here's a second litmus test, in case you don't want to drop forty bucks on an honest-to-goodness eye exam. First, think of a passage of maybe fifty words you know really well. Could be song lyrics, could be the preamble to the U.S. Constitution. Record yourself reciting it as quickly and clearly as you can. Second, find a text -- any text -- that you haven't read or encountered before. A novel you haven't read works fine, as long as it's not House of Leaves. Start recording, crack the book to a random page, and read it as quickly and clearly as you can. Do not give yourself time to silently scan the page. The reading you record should be your first time reading the text (either aloud or to yourself) and there should be no gap between the time you open the book and the time you start reading. That last bit is important. So the first test: If thinking about recording a live reading this way makes you feel anxious, or if your thoughts about it include a word or concept like "unfair," the odds of a vision problem are pretty high. That you used to enjoy reading makes most other candidate problems unlikely, since they don't generally emerge in adults.*** And the second: Listen to your recordings. If your reading isn't as fluent as your recitation from memory -- or extremely close -- there's something going on. Again, that you're an adult who used to enjoy reading means that we can cut the list of "somethings" down pretty far. I'd put a vision problem close to the top of my list. * Just FYI, that's a Thinkpad T42p, circa 2004 (i.e, pre-Lenovo). It's my preferred working machine, mostly because it's a non-widescreen and has one of those great old thinkpad keyboards. And a what-was-at-the-time-and-still-sadly-is a high resolution display. So a man can fit a lot of type on the screen. The problem is that while it can run a compositing WM like compiz (0.8x) fine, KWin, Mutter/Gnome-Shell, and other mainstream, stable OpenGL compositors (e.g. Compiz/Unity) are unusably slow. I know what you're thinking. I could run MATE or similar on top of a modern distribution like Debian Wheezy or Ubuntu. Tried that, and they're buggy. MATE, for all its improvements since release, doesn't play nicely with current versions of compiz unless you hack the bastards together (you run into dconf/gconf issues). And there are still gnome-settings-daemon/mate-settings-daemon conflicts all over the place. Don't ask me how that happens. It shouldn't. It does.** Or I could run a lightweight distro, like Crunchbang or Xubuntu. But you know what? This is 2013. I had things like vsync, and I've had them for the better part of a decade. I'm not switching out to some janky-looking XRender-driven compositing that's going to tear like wet toilet paper every time I move a window. If I wanted that kind of bullshit I'd be a real man and run Plan9. So I switched to Scientific Linux (a RHEL clone), which uses the old Gnome 2/compiz desktop and is as stable as you'd expect. Great, except the enterprise linux world has yet to create mutually-compatible software repositories. Which is apparently pretty hard. Because the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study can't manage to compile a complete set of up-to-date LaTeX packages that don't unresolvably conflict with one another. Lord only knows how the non-Ivy-Leaguer volunteers behind Debian manage a job that's, you know, a million ties as complicated. Or how a Minnesota State grad like Patrick Volkerding can do it in while he's between homebrews. Which is fine. Whatever. I can compile poo poo myself and write the occasional SPEC file. I'm not a toddler, Princeton. I just (allegedly) want to spend more time doing work than I spend fixing the tools I need to get my work done. ** And while Ubuntu has an otherwise well-done "gnome classic" mode, driven by compiz, etc, something about the way the menus and occasional other widgets render in it makes them really, really slow. I know everyone complains about Gnome3/Unity and whatever else, but that's kinda justified. I think the designs of each of them are fine, but in terms of actual usability -- as in "speed at which widgets render onscreen" -- they're a pretty big step backwards. At least on a decade-old thinkpad. *** What's happening here, in case you're curious: One of the ways people respond to reading difficulties is by hiding them, sometimes without realizing it. This sometimes means either entirely avoiding reading aloud, or trying to memorize or survey the text beforehand so that their reading sounds more fluent than it actually is. One thing this means -- at least for the people who don't realize they're doing this -- is that they'll have an intense, defensive, and emotional response to being asked to read a text aloud without previewing it. Even when nobody else (including me) will hear them reading. The only time I've ever had someone over fifty tell me to gently caress myself was when I asked her to do this recording bit when she got home. And once I asked why my asking got her angry, she was as surprised by the whole thing as I was.
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Jul 31, 2013 14:20
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As a supplement to the above, bullshit in the arena of context/fear of missing something has kept me from reading several things. Thanks for the deep response.
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Jul 31, 2013 22:03
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Hipster Occultist posted:Great thread Brainworm. Well, part of an answer to this depends on which type of grammar you're talking about. That sounds smartass, but I'm serious. And if you want some interesting reading on what I'm aboutt o lay out, the place to start is Hartwell's Grammar, Grammars, and the Teaching of Grammar, which is the starting point for most modern thinking on the uses of grammar for fields outside of actual linguistics. Basically, "improving your grammar" could mean improving (or changing) your use or knowledge of one or more of at least five things:
So how you "brush up" on your grammar has a lot to do with which grammar you're talking about. If what you want to do is speak and write in a way that most academics consider clear and expressive, then you need to become a native speaker and writer of something like "Standard Written English." That means reading a great deal of it and writing to imitate it. Like it or not, the stylistic touchstone for most academic Standard Written English remains Strunk and White's Elements of Style, and if you write to imitate that book's prose it will seldom lead you wrong. The rules are also helpful.* If what you want to do is talk about correcting grammatical errors -- that is, if you want to have a ready answer when someone asks "should I use a conjunction after a comma that joins two independent clauses?" -- then you want a writing handbook that has extensive chapters on a traditional eight-part English grammar. For that, I recommend the Scott, Foresman or Allyn and Bacon handbooks. The older the better, and in hardcover for durability's sake. Newer editions rightly omit long chapters on traditional grammar. Students rarely read them, knowing the content doesn't make student writing any more grammatical, and printed references of public-domain information are basically a slow, expensive, and inconvenient version of the internet. If what you want are labels for different stylistic devices, that same old clunker handbook ought to serve you well. But if you really want to swim in the deep end, you could also pick up Corbett and Connors's Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student. I know I've seen less expensive used copies than these. And, if what you want is something like an "instructive" grammar -- that is, you want to be able to talk about uncommon matters such as whether to use "preventive" or "preventative," the book you want is Fowler's Modern English Usage. Any late 20th-century edition should be fine. If you're not completely sure what you want, my guess is that you're best served by becoming a native writer of Standard Written English. That means reading and imitating especially clear and engaging prose. That, in turn, probably means reading essays. I'd look at nonfiction by Chuck Klosterman, Sarah Vowell, George Orwell, David Foster Wallace (especially Consider the Lobster), Chuck Palahniuk (as in Stranger than Fiction), Mary Roach, and Toni Morrison (as collected in What Moves at the Margin). That's a range of styles, but they're all "Strunkian" (or "Cornell School") in the sense that they value being stylistically clear, engaging, and minimal. * Just FYI, I did this in grad. school. All through undergrad and for the first year or so of my grad. work, I imitated the articles I was reading. Everything I wrote sounded like badly-translated Foucault. And then I crashed. One of the professors I asked to supervise my Master's Thesis turned me down. Sometimes I think I can remember his exact words, which were something like this: "you're a smart guy, Brainworm, but your writing is terrible. I get the sense of a good idea in this piece you wrote [the piece I wanted to revise into the thesis], but it is close to incomprehensible. I wish you the best, but I'd rather spend my time working on something more promising." I was rattled, since I was used to being at the top of every academic pile I'd ever climbed into. But I trusted this guy's judgment enough not to write him off as a dick or an idiot, and spent the afternoon re-reading everything I'd written over the last two years. And he was right. It was horrible. It was stilted and pretentious and that bastard combination of vague and jargony that even now makes me think "state college English student aspiring to a career where non-military berets are eccentric rather than ridiculous." Or "I am excited about literary theory because it explains everything I will ever care to think about." So I leaped into something like action. At the time, I was working as a consultant in the college writing center. That meant I had a couple hours of nominal work every day, during which students would occasionally register (and less occasionally show up for) writing center appointments. I used that time solely for reading writing handbooks. And since I was already getting up at 4:00 every morning to write my thesis, I could get a solid six hours of real work done every day before noon. So I usually spent the hour or so after lunch doing the same thing. About two weeks into that, I settled on Strunk and White, because what I really needed was guidance on matters of style (as opposed to grammar or citation), and S&W struck me not just as a collection of useful stylistic rules, but as a well-written one at that. It was funny, for one, in its own understated and theatrically elitist way. And for some reason (maybe just because it was short), it was easy to commit to memory and therefore easy to imitate. Even now, writing this footnote, I can feel myself imitating S&W and I think the effect is largely positive. My writing has gotten flabby over the past few years. I was helping ex-Mrs. Brainworm revise a memo last night, and was amazed by how deliberatly I had to work to keep the prose simple, precise, and clear. I imagine that would have gone more easily a few years ago, when I was spending more time thinking about teaching style and writing stylish prose for audiences to whom style mattered a great deal.
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Aug 1, 2013 14:23
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helopticor posted:Now I'm curious, how does the OP (or anyone else teaching English courses) feel about the criticisms of The Elements of Style, as written in things like this piece. I haven't read it myself in a long time, so I don't have a personal opinion. I'm going to keep this to that Pullum Article. First, I think some of his criticism is justified. Some of his criticism is manufactured though, and some of it is misdirected. That last point touches a pet peeve of mine -- one that I think came out when I posted about book reviews -- so there's prolly a rant in the chamber. Just fair warning. Justified Criticism It's a common observation that the left-column/right-column examples in Strunk and White don't always illustrate the grammatical principle described in the rule sections under which they are included. For instance, Pullum's example ("There were a great number of dead leaves lying on the ground") is not passive. It just uses an unnecessary auxiliary verb ("were") and an unnecessary modifier ("a great number of"). So it (and its revision to "Dead leaves covered the ground") is probably better placed under II.17 ("Omit Needless Words") or V.4 ("Write With Nouns and Verbs"). Either that or the rule should be amended to Quiller-Crouch's from Art of Writing: quote:Generally, use transitive verbs, that strike their object; and use them in the active voice, eschewing the stationary passive, with its little auxiliary its’s and was’s, and its participles getting into the light of your adjectives, which should be few. For, as a rough law, by his use of the straight verb and by his economy of adjectives you can tell a man’s style, if it be masculine or neuter, writing or 'composition'. Or just "Prefer transitive verbs to intransitive verbs, and the active voice to the passive." This happens in other places, too. Depending on what you use the book for, it's anything from a niggle to a backbreaker. More important, there's no reason that a bestselling book on writing, in its fifth or sixth edition, ought to be so categorically wrong about a clear-cut grammatical and stylistic issue in the very examples it uses to illustrate it. A second problem (and one that the book's aware of*) is that it makes little distinction between what are probably pieces of sound, widely-applicable advice and what are basically William Strunk's more eccentric stylistic preferences. Pullum makes an example of "With none, use the singular verb when the word means 'no one' or 'not one." And that's well done. I don't think I've ever seen "none" used with the singular the way this rule dictates, and while there's nothing wrong with "none is perfect" or "none fits in this case," both are unconventional enough to draw attention to themselves. Again, there's no good reason for these kinds of problems in whatever the current edition is.** It's easy to write new passive-voice examples, and easy to either cut or flag Strunk's oddities. Maybe, maybe, that's a couple afternoons work for a copywriter, done to insulate a perennial and popular bestseller from damage to its credibility. How loving hard is that? Manufactured Criticism But not all Pullum's criticism is that perceptive. For one, he repeats a crackrock complaint I heard from a lot of comp-teaching grad students back when I was a comp-teaching grad student: that many of the rules in S&W are tautologies, or that they are not useful because they are obvious. He singles out "Be Clear" (obvious), "Do Not Explain Too Much" (tautology), and "Omit Needless Words" (both obvious and a tautology). And I don't know what to make of that line of criticism. For the most part, it comes from (a) smart people who have (b) taught writing, and for at least those reasons ought to know better. First, S&W is advice for novice writers. Back when I was a teenage writer, the idea that a piece of writing was good because it didn't have unnecessary words would have run against most of my classroom experience. In school, the writing I was asked to read seemed full of words that didn't do anything. Academic sentences were long and confusing, and took forever to the point (if they did it at all). And because that was the writing I was given, I assumed it was what good academic writing ought to sound like. I think that's pretty common. Think about what students go through when they read an article. If it's really difficult, none of them will understand it completely. The good ones will work through it systematically and figure out which questions they need to ask about it in class. The less good ones get frustrated right away, give up, and then try to either hide their ignorance or downplay its importance. Either way, when they do get it -- meaning, when they understand the central idea of the reading well enough to condense it into a single sentence -- the usual response is "why didn't he just say that?" That experience sends a powerful message to students: Academic writing is supposed to be hard to read. It's supposed to be complicated. It works best when it has a good idea that could be clearly and directly stated but, for mysterious reasons of its own, makes the reader work harder than is strictly necessary. In other words: It's not obvious to new college-level writers that clarity is important, that a sentence should include only necessary words, and that it is possible to over-explain something. If anything, their classroom experience sends something like the opposite message: good academic is wordy and complicated, and ought to explain everything in exhaustive detail. Second, the idea that rules like "Omit Needless Words" or "Do Not Explain Too Much" are tautologies hopelessly confuses rules and their application. It's a completely manufactured criticism. If I were writing a guide for, say, dieters, nobody would call "Do Not Eat Too Much" a tautology. They wouldn't say, as Pullum does, "[Eating] too much means [eating] more than you should, so of course you shouldn't," and then suggest that (for instance) the advice about eating too much be cut. Why? Because "Don't X Too Much" is another way of saying that doing X too much is a common problem. And that kind of advice can range in application from the non-obvious ("Don't Exercise Too Much") to the brilliant ("Don't Add Too Many Features") to the counterintuitive ("Don't Give Your Kids Too Many Toys"). Granted, "Omit Needless Words" and "Do Not Eat Too Much" are of limited use if our writing/diet guide doesn't explain how to tell the difference between "too much" and "the right amount." But S&W's "rules" don't stand on their own. Functionally, they're headings for short essays and groups of examples about specific writing topics. I can't imagine someone saying "I read the section on 'Omit Needless Words,' and after reading it and looking through the examples, I still don't have a clear idea of which types of words or phrases are actually 'needless,' since if I didn't need them I wouldn't have included them in my writing in the first place." So, yeah. I think that those criticisms are all straw man, like going all cable-news/stand-up comic outrage on a "Man Bites Dog" newspaper headline: quote:That's the problem with newspapers! I saw pictures of this guy biting his dog on Reddit yesterday, so how is this news to me this morning? And this headline doesn't have any news in it! It's just three words! How can there be any real information in three words? The guy's name is at least two words, and the dog's it at least one! Misdirected Criticism or Theatrical Outrage I would shoot a man for misdirecting criticism before I'd shoot him for raping a toddler, because I'll leap to conclusions about the misdirector's motives before I leap to conclusions about the toddler rapist's.*** Maybe misdirected criticism is an emotional pressure point, and maybe I'm just the first person in the history of the internet to be deeply angered by an issue that most people consider inconsequential, and then write about it at length. So let me start by claiming some moral high ground. Brainworm's Moral High Ground There are a few basic things about not being a dickhole, and some people never seem to learn them. For instance: Don't yell at people who didn't sign up for it: If you're a football coach yelling at players, a drill sergeant yelling at recruits, or an actor playing a role that requires you to yell at another actor, yell away. Yelling because you're really angry or because you really want someone to do something, that's just thinking about your needs and feelings as problems that someone else is supposed to solve for you. That's being a dickhole. Responsibilities trump preferences: You hit someone's car? Hand over your insurance info and make sure the bill gets paid. Full stop. It might not be fair that your insurance will go up, that your own car just got hit by someone who left the scene, that the car you hit is some European antique that needs a fender flown in from a Sicilian museum, and that the driver parked it at the bottom of an icy hill. But responsibility has jack poo poo to do with fairness or what you think of it. So saying "I know a guy who can take that dent out for you," that's no good. Fixing the other car isn't your responsibility. Probably, your responsibility is more like paying to have the other car fixed by a well-vetted professional of the owner's choosing. If that means you don't have the money to take little Sally to the doctor and she dies of hepatitis, that means you're a bad parent and that life is also unfair. But more to Sally than to you. Um. Anyway. Dodging responsibilities, whatever the reason, that's also being a dickhole. If you want to have X, you need to be Y: If you want to have more freedom at work, you need to be a more responsible, capable, and productively self-directed worker. If you want to have a happy marriage, you need to be a positive, constant, and empathetic partner. If you want to have a good education, you need to be an engaged, curious, and diligent student. If you think you deserve to have something you don't already have without learning to be something you don't yet know how to be, that's also being a dickhole. Those are heavy timber, right? So let me lay down one that, by comparison, is pretty loving easy: Don't make problems. Solve problems: I don't mean "don't cause problems" in the "do what you're told and keep your head down" way. I mean that whenever you see a problem, you have a choice about what to do next. One choice is stay quiet, which is rarely the right thing to do. But another popular choice is what most people call "criticism," and what I call "misdirected criticism." What it involves, basically, is making the problem known in a way (or to an audience) that makes the problem more complicated for anyone who tries to solve it, usually by creating a whole mess of different and complicated problems in the process. There's often a lot of moral high ground involved (not mine). Also narcissism (not mine). One thing I talked about a few pages ago was how this works in book reviews. The short version is that someone who finds a research problem in a book might slam the book for that problem in the review. And I know some academics who would call that "criticism," say it's their job, and call it a job well done. I call it "misdirected criticism" because I think the reason for criticism (that is, describing problems) is solving problems. So there's some obligation on the critic's part to not just describe a problem, but also to describe it in a way that doesn't make things worse. Say we've got this book with research problems. Slapping it around in the review creates new problems. Probably, you just damaged or ended the author's or researcher's career, along with his or her relationship with the book publisher. Probably, you damaged your own publisher's relationship with that book publisher, too. Probably, you also cost the book publisher a bunch of money, because you put them in a position where they can't go ahead with the book and are going to have to take the loss. And, probably, you just caused problems for other researchers. They won't have the use of whatever parts of the book were OK, and some will have their fields, research, institutions, or careers tainted by the now-sorta-public scandal. In other words, the best case here is that you're right. If you're right, you solved one problem and created a bunch of others that might be worse. Yeah, the authors/researchers might deserve whatever falls on them, but depending on how things went wrong it's hard to say. The same is probably true for the book publisher. But your own publisher and other researchers, they're definitely collateral damage. And being right doesn't make this OK. In fact, it could be that the problems you created were worse than the ones you solved. And if that's how you worked with most things, the best that anyone could honestly say for you at your funeral is that the world would have been a slightly better place if you'd never been born. People disagree with me about this. One reason is that they think of integrity as redemptive -- that is, what really matters is whether you're right, not what you do. Another is that people love to couch dilemmas like the book review in dramatic, artificial terms. You either publish the review that calls out the research (which is good) or you don't (which isn't). As though real moral dilemmas ever look like this, where you exercise a single principle through an isolated, multiple-choice decision, and with a sense of momentous occasion. Really, I think moral dilemmas and choices look more like complex accretions of everyday decisions and perfectly ordinary events, where anything that feels dramatic is actually highly artificial. Usually, it means someone's trying to force the situation to fit a comfortable, self-serving principle, and that my life would get a whole lot simpler if they were struck by lightning in the next thirty seconds. Never happens. Anyway. Doing the right thing (like asking your publisher to delay the review so that the book publisher and the researchers can sort out the problems you found) just doesn't have much dramatic power. It causes depressingly little damage to anyone, and nobody gets a well-deserved comeuppance. It doesn't help you feel important, it doesn't help you feel righteous, and it doesn't help you feel vindicated. It just feels like you're doing an awful lot of work that most people don;t see. But that's what makes criticism well-directed. At the end of the day, it's helpful. And Back to Strunk and White What does this have to do with Strunk and White? For starters, Pullum's right about things, and the things he's right about matter. But his criticism is totally misdirected. It's in the Chronicle, and the first place it should have gone is Allyn/Bacon/Longman (or whoever still publishes S&W). It's kind of like our book review situation, but a little different. Why? S&W isn't just a style guide. It's a book that many people admire, that represents an educational experience they remember fondly, and that some people actually treasure. This is why it has a 50th Anniversary Edition. Seriously, how many other college textbooks can you think of that have anything like this kind of following? Is Stewart's Single Variable Calculus going to roll out a collector's edition where the sample problems get decorative watercolors? That's not a great environment in which to launch public criticism, unless your agenda includes needlessly butting heads with a whole bunch of people who think you just called them stupid. And that's a problem because it puts A/B/L in a position where the normally completely inoffensive matter of fixing problems with a book becomes sadly political. If you make changes, you're siding with Pullum and against your loyal Strunkers. If you don't make changes, you're siding the other way. No blood's going to be spilled here, but you get the point. S&W is in use, and it's probably going to stay in use for a while. It's one of precious few inexpensive, readable college textbooks, and one of very few to which any significant number of non-academics feel any particular loyalty. So the world is an ever-so-slightly better place if problems with it get fixed. I've been writing this for too long, so here's the upshot: Is Pullum right about some of the problems with Strunk and White? Yeah, absolutely. And I can understand why he's frustrated with those problems (if he is), because there's no excuse for them. But Pullum's is bad criticism. He's right, but being right is easy. Solving problems is hard. First, being right only makes criticism good if you think that being right matters more than making the world a better place. Or (worse yet) think that once you're right about something, someone else is supposed to clean up whatever mess you've decided to make by doing your criticism however you did it. That's not being a good critic. That's being a dickhole. Second, criticism that makes problems harder to solve is bad criticism even if it's also right. Solving problems is the point of just about everything, and being right isn't the same thing as solving problems. Sometimes, you can solve a problem and be totally wrong (like if I think evil spirits cause infections and eating bread mold chases them out). And you can be right and still create other (potentially more serious) problems in the process, like the reviewer who goes public with a book's bad research. Or maybe Ed. Snowden. Enough said. * White's introduction notes that Strunk "had a number of likes and dislikes that were almost as whimsical as the choice of necktie, yet he made them seem utterly convincing." And then goes on to catalog some of these: preferring forcible to forceful, and studentry to the more conventional student body. ** I have the Fourth Edition, which is Strunk revised by White, and with an introduction by Charles Osgood. As far as I can tell, the subsequent editions are some weird kind of novelty act -- there's an illustrated one, for instance, and a 50th anniversary "commemorative" one. I don't know how those are different from the fourth edition, or whether there's a fifth buried someplace. *** Maybe they're just playing "gym teacher."
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Aug 2, 2013 21:13
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Brainworm posted:What does this have to do with Strunk and White? For starters, Pullum's right about things, and the things he's right about matter. But his criticism is totally misdirected. It's in the Chronicle, and the first place it should have gone is Allyn/Bacon/Longman (or whoever still publishes S&W). I disagree. The problem S&W criticism addresses is that the guide's advice is deified despite its poor justification of that advice. You seem to be arguing that criticism ought to be aimed at making that justification less poor, but I think there's a valid reason to target readers and criticize the deification itself. Language Log, for example, is critical of S&W because its authoritative tone and reputation combined with its poor explanation of its principles make good writing seem needlessly arcane. People who read S&W (in Language Log's view) become paranoid about things like avoiding passive voice without understanding what passive voice is. This confusion's so pervasive that New York Times writers and professional novelists have no clue what "passive voice" means but dogmatically try to avoid it, and I think it's fair to, in part, blame S&W. There's no way to argue that this confusion and paranoia doesn't lead to less confidence, and a guide like S&W ought to give writers more confidence and command of the language, not less. Because this is the status quo, I think it's extremely appropriate to target not just the publishers, with the aim of clarifying the advice, but also the millions of people taught to take the guide as gospel. Reading criticism like this helps average people break away from their deification of the guide and realize where it may be leading them astray. I can easily see this type of outspoken criticism leading people who are paranoid about e.g. avoiding the passive to look elsewhere for a proper explanation. Furthermore, I think exposing people to these problems may be a better solution than making silent revisions to edition 6 but leaving millions of copies on bookshelves unchanged. Breaking down the myth that poorly justified advice must be followed even when not understood is, in my view, an admirable critical goal. I agree, however, that Pullum's critique of "tautological" advice is idiotic, and I think your manufactured criticism point is spot-on.
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Aug 2, 2013 22:35
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Quovak posted:I disagree. The problem S&W criticism addresses is that the guide's advice is deified despite its poor justification of that advice. You seem to be arguing that criticism ought to be aimed at making that justification less poor, but I think there's a valid reason to target readers and criticize the deification itself. I think we might actually agree here. What I meant to say was that Pullum points out some things about S&W that are more "errors" than "problems," and that the place for those errors to go is the publisher. That doesn't mean they don't also go in the article. But from a couple different perspectives, I think going to the publisher first is the right move. One, I think it's good order -- these errors are an easy fix, and even if you have other long-term goals, you try to fix what you can. I don't think anyone should shoot heroin, but let's set up some needle exchanges anyway. The second is that it makes persuasive criticism. It's ethos all over the place. One hazard a piece of criticism faces -- especially if it's an op/ed in the Chronicle, for God's sake -- is that it sounds like it's written by somebody who gets some deep, personal satisfaction out of explaining why he is right and other people are not. One of the best ways you can insulate against this is by playing the "I care about this issue" card early in the game, and the best way to play that card is usually "I have done actual work to fix this." It is much better than "I am an expert" or "I am not possessed of the personality flaw to which you might attribute some aspect of my argument."* * That's why I giggle quietly to myself when I hear some version of "I have a black friend." It's not just that I'm waiting for whatever comes next. It's that I can imagine whoever says it having worked it out in a flash of inspiration -- like Iago saying "it is engendered!" quote:Iago: [Aside] Hm. Let me see now.
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Aug 5, 2013 18:43
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I have a language question. It is not correct to put "or" at end of a sentence, is it? This is something that is acceptable in the Swedish language but as far as I know you don't do it in the English language. For example, is it correct that if you want to add something to "Are you coming?" you would have to do for example "Are you coming, or what?" not just "Are you coming, or?"? Because in Swedish you can say "Kommer du, eller?" and in German you can say "Kommst du, oder?" (at least I think you can). But saying "Are you coming, or?" is not correct, is it?
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Aug 12, 2013 19:47
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I have an English essay question. I'm in an English class now and as part of our essay revision process the professor gave us a list of things to make sure we don't do in our paper. Some are things like not using 1st or 2nd person which are pretty much no brainers but some of the other stuff seems pretty restrictive. For example we're apparently not allowed to use the word "it" anywhere in our essay, which is making -Blackadder- fucked around with this message at 04:16 on Aug 16, 2013 |
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Aug 16, 2013 03:56
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-Blackadder- posted:I have an English essay question. I'm not Brainworm, but I'm going to try to answer your question anyway. From what I can tell, your professor has created this rule to force students to avoid confusing reference structures and promote clear antecedent usage. Pronouns such as it can be used so broadly, readers may have difficulty figuring out what the pronoun is referencing. Here's an example from Rebecca Moore Howard's Writing Matters: A Handbook for Writing and Research: quote:Who owns Antartica? Several countries--including Argentina, Australia, Chile, France, New Zealand, Norway, the United Kingdom, and the United States--all claim or reserve the right to claim all or part of the continent. This makes it difficult to answer. The bolded section is confusing. What are this and it referring to? A suitable replacement might look something like this: quote:These competing claims make the question of ownership difficult to answer. This revision specifies what information the writer meant by this and it. For the record, I'm of the general opinion that broad-stroke rules like "don't use it in your essays" are obnoxious at best and lazy at worst. What good is a rule without a rationale, and shouldn't a good professor provide said rationale? Then again, that's my option. EDITED TO ADD: I've heard this rule before, by the way, though I don't use it (ha ha) myself. Seems quite popular among high-school teachers in my geographic area right now. Louisiana Van Van fucked around with this message at 04:44 on Aug 16, 2013 |
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Aug 16, 2013 04:41
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Claeaus posted:I have a language question. I don't know from "correct," but that usage is uncommon enough that I'd avoid it if I wanted to be widely understood. Especially in writing. Verbally, I can see context or inflection making the nature of the uncertainty clearer. You know. "Are we still getting pork chops, or...?" [gestures vaguely at meat counter]. That splits the difference between "are we still getting pork chops?" (which can sound wishy-washy) and "are we still getting pork chops or not?" (which sounds brusque). But does it in a way that's not terrifically sophisticated. It's what I'd use if I were, say, writing a character who was too scared to let someone know he wanted something and too socially inept to either lay that fear on the table or negotiate it with greater savvy. Um. I guess that means don't use it unless you're trying to strategically represent yourself as both timid and socially uncertain. But that's a matter of ear on my part, and I could be really, really wrong there.
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Aug 19, 2013 14:49
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-Blackadder- posted:I have an English essay question. I'ma follow Louisiana Van Van on this -- that rule sounds like HS English at its worst. The only way it makes sense to me is if: (a) it's intended to reduce the number of vague or ambiguous antecedents a grader is asked to identify, (b) the mindbending usage problems the application of this rule causes are a non-issue, (c) (a) and (b) are more important than helping students learn to revise and proofread, and (d) the criteria by which class writing is evaluated should have little basis in either the practical necessities of everyday life or in the practices of skilled, professional writers. I guess (d) is a good lesson, given (a), (b), and (c). Which is depressing. Regardless. That "don't use it" rule so profoundly, impossibly wrongheaded that I don't even know where to start. It's like telling people to poo poo in the microwave instead of the toilet so their poop is easier to sterilize. An easy, process-focused version of this rule (the "it" rule, not the "microwave dookie" rule) would just sanity check every use of "it" triage any problems a given student couldn't solve. Something like: quote:For every use of "it," (a) identify what you intend "it" to refer to and (b) what a hasty, first-time reader might think "it" refers to. Revise so that (a) matches (b) as closely as possible, and flag any use of "it" you think remains unclear. Of course that sounds like a lot of work, and some students probably won't want to do that. But that's true for the "avoid 'it'" rule, too -- it's just that the "avoid 'it'" rule doesn't provide a student any clear way to estimate how much time he'll need to revise his paper into compliance (a lot).* And that, in turn, makes me think that whoever wrote the rule hasn't thought about what, exactly, he wants his students to learn from the assignment and how he can expect them to learn it. And that's bad. That, right there, is basically the bar for competence. I know I'm generalizing from a single assignment criterion, and Lord knows I've probably written worse. But the rule basically expects that a student should spend some of a limited amount of time on this aspect of revision above others; I just can't see an assignment design process that starts by asking what students need to learn, how they'll learn it, and what resources (such as time) they can commit to learning it, uses answers to those questions to set clear priorities, and ends with "revise out all uses of 'it'" somewhere on the list. Forget that the rule itself is crackrock. Forget that it makes no sense. When I read it and do my best to pretend its getting at p/a relationships, I still feel like I'm hearing "forget the bombs! Hell or high water, that B-52 lifts off in ten minutes with a full complement of silverware!" * Or at least "a lot" given the lack of clear rationale.
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Aug 19, 2013 18:11
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Dear Brainworm, I just finished reading The Importance of Being Earnest, and honestly, I didn't get much out of it. I'm curious as to why this is a classic, both popularly and critically. I'm not saying it was bad, just that I don't understand the praise, I guess. I would love to hear what you think about the play, so I could get a larger picture of it.
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Aug 20, 2013 19:39
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ceaselessfuture posted:Dear Brainworm, I just taught this play last winter, so if it's alright, I'll jump in here a little bit. There are, I think, two good (and unrelated) reasons why this is a classic play. The first is formal. Although the play is clearly a satire, it's also clearly *funny*. Unlike eg. Shakespeare, most of the jokes in the play don't need to be explained. Moreover, The Importance of Being Earnest is a very strong demonstration of Wilde's Aestheticism without any of the homoeroticism of The Picture of Dorian Gray, so for some audiences it's a little bit more approachable. Finally, as a three-act play, Earnest has a really solid structure of problem-complication-resolution, which makes it a solid text to teach dramatic tension and plot structure as part of literary form. More importantly, though, I think the value of the text is moral. As a rule, Wilde tends to gesture towards the existence of moral questions in his writing before he goes off to do something really witty. In The Importance of Being Earnest, though, you've got this development of a really interesting, and *really* ambiguous, social situation where literally every main character lies through their teeth. All the time. This is most evident in the two sets of male-female pairs. Jack and Algie are both liars, but as Algie discovers in Act 1, Jack is a "Bunburyist" who, critically, refuses to admit it, even to himself. Likewise, Cecily is so absurdly romantic that she knows she deludes herself, while Gwendolyn's outrageous pontifications suggest that her self-awareness, like Jack's, is suspect. We get a sense that deception is common to everyone in 'society' with Lady Bracknell, but even she seems to be aware that society's masks are used to to divert attention from very real social problems (as when she says that if education had any social effects at all, "it would prove a serious danger to the upper classes, and probably lead to acts of violence in Grosvenor Square"). We can see one example of how this works out in a practical sense when we find out at the very end of the play that Miss Prism, Cecily's tutor, once stuffed an infant in a handbag and left it in a railway station. For me, the point of the play isn't that all its characters engage in some form of deception, but rather that some kinds of deception are crueller than others. Algie and Cecily are very aware of what they do to manipulate others, and consequently they tend to be manipulative in ways that let them navigate society according to their own rules. Jack, however (and to a lesser extent Gwendolyn), tends to deceive and manipulate others in ways that cause genuine distress. When Jack arrives at his country house, for example, having decided to 'kill' Earnest, he takes things so far that the entire cast is about to go change into mourning clothes before Algie shows up. Gwendolyn, likewise, is so selfishly bossy that Jack actually goes to the vicar to schedule a christening for himself in order to render himself marrigeable to her. So, what I think is one of the really interesting questions that comes from this play is "to what extent is earnestness important?" Victorian culture was *all about* earnestness (in pretty much everything), but we find that the most earnest characters in this play are actually the most morally suspect just as we find that the characters who are most superficial are actually much more harmless than they appear to be. Couple this moral ambiguity with a mild subtext suggesting that the values of the idle rich are deeply pernicious, and you have a play that provides the impetus for a lot of discussion.
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Aug 21, 2013 22:11
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Also, seeing it performed helps. Watching a man consume something like 20 cucumber sandwiches in about five minutes is pretty funny.
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Aug 22, 2013 08:41
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big business sloth posted:Also, seeing it performed helps. Watching a man consume something like 20 cucumber sandwiches in about five minutes is pretty funny. Yes it is!
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Aug 22, 2013 20:21
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Awesome, thanks a lot guys! The reassessment helped. I have problems connecting with the Victorian era in general, but I think I'm getting the hang of it. 
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Aug 29, 2013 07:39
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Hey Brainworm, just coming back to my favorite thread and this time with a quick request: I'm re-reading Hamlet for the first time a long while. I'm a creative writing grad student but also kind of a theory nerd, and just because I trust yr judgement I'm wondering where you'd tell someone (me) to start if one was interested in reading some unmissable commentary. Do you have favorite critical approaches to the play? Any direction you're willing to offer would be really appreciated. As a curious aside: what's hot in the world of Shakespeare right now? Thanks for being so awesome.
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Sep 4, 2013 04:16
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ceaselessfuture posted:Awesome, thanks a lot guys! The reassessment helped. I have problems connecting with the Victorian era in general, but I think I'm getting the hang of it. OK. With the start of classes here I'm pretty late to the party. The only thing I can think of adding is that Victorian comedy (like some Restoration comedies and comedies by e.g. Ben Jonson) relies on timing to an extent that I, at least, find it difficult to read straight from the page. I've only taught Importance once, and were I to do it again I'd use approaches that explicitly and exclusively interpret the play as a staged thing. That is, you can (if you're so inclined) close read a passage from Shakespeare and get to an interpretation that feels complete, even though that's technically bad order. For Wilde (and Jonson, etc.), you need to close read the text to produce something like a performance (or a set of performance possibilities) in order to get anywhere. That's not a value judgment or ranking. It's just that some plays -- or parts of some plays -- aren't approachable directly from the page. You know: sight gags and slapstick, different things happening on the stage simultaneously, moments that rely on precise timing, sounds, effects, [they fight], etc. That's why I sometimes think it's fun to imagine the script for whatever it is I'm watching. A lot of times, the things that makes a scene great wouldn't find any scripted representation. And even at the level of scripted dialogue, some styles or logics rely on e.g. pacing, pauses, or interruptions in order to accomplish whatever it is they accomplish. Relationships between Mamet's characters or the vehicles for Oscar Wilde's jokes are consequently "some assembly required" kinds of reading.
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Sep 4, 2013 18:56
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dream owl posted:Hey Brainworm, just coming back to my favorite thread and this time with a quick request: I'm re-reading Hamlet for the first time a long while. I'm a creative writing grad student but also kind of a theory nerd, and just because I trust yr judgement I'm wondering where you'd tell someone (me) to start if one was interested in reading some unmissable commentary. Do you have favorite critical approaches to the play? Any direction you're willing to offer would be really appreciated. First, thanks for the front-loaded compliment. Seriously. There are times that little bits and pieces like that absolutely make my day, and this is one of them. Anyway. My knee-jerk here was gonna be to point to some highly theorized approaches to Hamlet, but the only way into that scholarship that I can really recommend is the way in that I found, which started with a guy named Donald Hedrick. Basically, I met him at a conference (I think GEMCS) back when I was a grad. student, and we spent some time talking Hamlet. It turned into a long conversation. And when I look back on it, I think two things. One is that the way he approached heavily-theorized readings made no bones about putting the text way, way, way ahead of the theory. At the time, that was a new one to me, since it seemed like using texts to develop a theory was increasingly the way scholarship was going. The other is that the guy was a model of curiosity. He's probably retired or close to it now, since however long ago this was (maybe 2005/6) he was already talking about it as the next thing. Context: up to that point, most of the academics I'd worked with had some kind of focus, model, or project that gave them one set of ideas they used for everything, and it was really clear that (a) they wanted everyone around them to appreciate how brilliant those ideas were and (b) they were more interested in those ideas than in whatever else they were working with. But Hedrick was different. His pattern was more like he'd listen to everyone, make some set of mental notes about all the approaches they were using, and somehow turn the entire set of everything he'd ever heard into a massively eclectic set of basically unlabeled tools. It was criticism, and I think it was good criticism in the sense that it improved his/my relationships to the text. It was also at once highly theoretically literate and what I've heard called "undertheorized,"* in the sense that you couldn't call any moment of it "Marxist" or "New Economic" or "New Historicist" or whatever else in any useful way. So I've got three points here. The first one is that I'd recommend reading Hedrick's "It is no Novelty for a Prince to be a Prince" (which should be on JSTOR) not just because of the claims he makes about Hamlet, but as a sort of model for how theoretically-informed criticism can work. The second is that criticism is really only good if and when you develop a relationship to it that improves your relationship to whatever you're interested in. And in that sense, badly-executed criticism can be really great if you engage it well. In other words, criticism is not entirely a written thing; it's a collaboration between you (as a reader) and the article you're reading, and what you bring to that collaboration largely determines its quality. The third -- which has nothing to do with Don Hedrick -- is that high theory is only useful when it's built on top of truly incredible format literacy. So if I were going to recommend reading one text that would help you crack open Hamlet, it'd be David Ball's Backwards and Forwards which (apart from being a great guide to scriptreading) uses Hamlet as a perennial example. quote:As a curious aside: what's hot in the world of Shakespeare right now? This is hard to say. I think "English" as a whole and literary criticism specifically has been waiting for the "next big thing" for at least a decade now, and during that time there's been a sort of steady percolation of new and interesting theoretical approaches that are actually more like "methods" (i.e. functionally more like Cleanth Brooks's claim that the "language of poetry is the language of paradox" than like "Postcolonial Theory"). New Economic Criticism, Ecocriticism, and a particular (kind of New Historicist) line of inquiry called "anti-geography" have been making themselves known there, I think. In terms of larger shifts, there's something like a renegotiation of the place and importance of "high" theory in the discipline, and that goes along with all kinds of other renegotiation of basic things like "canon" and "period." That's not much in evidence in the scholarship as much as it's implicit in redesigns of English graduate and undergraduate programs, which have been moving away from older models of periodization for a long time (and with increasing regularity and boldness), but also haven't yet developed a new and widely-accepted primary method of dividing the discipline into manageable chunks. That all, I think, drives studies of Shakespeare. On one hand, there's a kind of endless wait for the next revolutionary approach that downplays some really interesting evolutionary developments. On the other, that's clearly separate from the ways that most people experience the text in the classroom or the plays in performance. quote:Thanks for being so awesome. That warms the cockles of my heart. * In reviews of my own work.
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Sep 5, 2013 15:19
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I really enjoyed reading this thread. Really identified with you in parts (as an undergrad I was a Computer Science/English double very close to dedicating his life to Althusser), and not so much in others (I followed that up with a solid half-decade of abject failure, would never ever point unsuspecting people to read Bloom), but the thread is great and I admire the rhetoric, the rigor, and the dedication to pedagogy. I dodged out of applying to grad school at the last second back then, but have recently been taking courses towards a Master's in a very bad program (I work at the university as staff, am not doing the Graduate Assistantship thing)for the sake of spending some time talking about interesting things every week, but the quality of more or less everyone involved borders on depressing. I do really regret not spending more effort as an undergraduate learning how to write. I was definitely skating by on more "interesting" ideas than average, and to this day my papers are just awful.
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Sep 5, 2013 23:27
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This is a tad random, but I was glancing through the archives and found a place years ago where you complained about "Filming Othello" being hard to find. Just wanted to say it's since been put up on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fvqeQt8aLnU
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Sep 8, 2013 18:39
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Stagger_Lee posted:I really enjoyed reading this thread [...] but have recently been taking courses towards a Master's in a very bad program (I work at the university as staff, am not doing the Graduate Assistantship thing)for the sake of spending some time talking about interesting things every week, but the quality of more or less everyone involved borders on depressing. That's really, really interesting. I noticed the same kind of thing in the first program where I took graduate classes, and I just can't get it to square with the way I look at the world. It's like this: if you're taking graduate classes in English Literature, you're doing it out of some kind of intrinsic motivation. And I say that because I honestly can't think of extrinsic motives that make any sense. This is not a high-earning or prestige field. Kids don't get tiger-mommed into an English Literature when they really want to be accountants. That matters because I used to think that people were either smart or dumb. Now I think that intelligence is more like endurance or strength than, say, height -- that is, what most people think of as intelligence isn't something you're born with. Instead, you develop intelligence in response to certain kinds of challenges. And in that model, intrinsic motives really, really, really matter. I don't know if you've noticed this, but your local meth lab is, in its own admittedly narrow field, doing graduate-level chemistry. I don't think there's a conspiracy of MENSA members or PhDs turned to lives of crime behind this. It's just typical human ingenuity. If you don't buy that, watch some NFL pre/post-game analysis. In all seriousness, it's the most cognitively demanding thing on television by a country mile and -- and -- it has to be that way. Why? Because for football fans talking about football, complex data-driven analysis is the lowest common denominator. The average fans, they watch the game with their tablets and laptops out because, you know, they've developed some predictive statistical models and want to see how they check against reality. Anyway. So in Brainworm's world, intrinsic motivation inevitably creates challenges that demand certain kinds of ingenuity or creativity, and all in the name of fun. And that's completely in line with my lived and observed experience except for what I've seen in more than a few graduate and undergraduate lit. classes; you've got people who, as far as I can tell, aren't bringing much in the way of native curiosity and seem impossibly averse to challenge. Once upon a time, I'd have tossed them in the "interested but stupid" bucket, but the other side of my experience suggests that bucket either doesn't exist or is really, really small. And the idea that they're work-averse doesn't make sense to me either -- if they were, they'd just stay home. quote:I do really regret not spending more effort as an undergraduate learning how to write. I was definitely skating by on more "interesting" ideas than average, and to this day my papers are just awful. Yeah. If it helps, my writing wasn't worth much until about the time I finished my MA. Part of the problem was that my ideas about "good writing" were completely off-base. Another was that I hadn't started to think of writing as communication yet, and so I ended up using formulas and workarounds to solve problems I could have more easily solved by asking what my reader would find clearest or most engaging.
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Sep 9, 2013 21:15
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Yeah, I'm definitely on board with the inclusion of work and effort in a conception of intelligence. If I had to hazard a guess as to a factor we're not accounting for it'd be community, though I haven't really thought through a convincing model for why that'd be more impactful for English Literature than other fields of academia. I'm just consistently surprised by how little is asked of our graduate students in terms of both pure workload and a standard of quality of output, and I feel like this must have developed over a long time period of relatively unimpressive students. I have heard reports of faculty remarking among themselves about the general uninspiring quality of said grad students, but there doesn't seem to be any drive to mold them into something stronger. And I don't think that's entirely a result of like an intrinsic low quality of faculty, either (although I think they're definitely not helping the situation), as the competitiveness of the field means that they almost all have pretty impressive graduate and undergraduate educations themselves, and were presumably at some point pretty interesting. But living in a sort of nowhere town without anything resembling a public intellectual or artistic scene, and also an institution without a strong identity or much of a community presence, I can definitely feel how it's more difficult to remain academically engaged than when I've lived in places with a denser kind of academic interest. All of which I guess is a long-winded way of positing that maybe one of the most important "challenges" isn't necessarily a problem to be overcome, but just the necessity for engaged thought that comes from daily involvement with a similarly engaged community, and that that kind of situation runs a risk of withering away if your department becomes too small/isolated/unambitious.
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Sep 11, 2013 14:19
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Stagger_Lee posted:Yeah, I'm definitely on board with the inclusion of work and effort in a conception of intelligence. Ugh. I read this a while ago, kind of silently nodding to myself. And then last night I went to a poetry reading that put it in a whole new perspective. The punchline is that I used to think that the area I was in didn't have much of an arts scene. And for the most part it doesn't. But what that translates into isn't the absence of an arts scene as much as an arts scene made up entirely of self-proclaimed artists who don't know enough about what they're doing to understand that they're not very good at it.* And that's the thing. I have no problem with bad poetry that knows it's bad. People don't take themselves too seriously and they want to learn, and so a reading turns into something like the literary version of a pick-up football game. It's fun. But when everyone reads in what they think of as a poet voice (i.e. slowly, with an intonation that suggests that every word is some kind of untarnished gem), it's like the literary version of a pick-up game where some dude benches his ten-year-old nephew because he's not running the right kind of crossing route. It's not fun. You see everyone getting embarrassed, and you know that the right thing to do is walk up to whoever's taking things too seriously and tell him he sucks. Not because you want to put him down or make him feel bad -- although, if you're me, a little part of you actually does -- but because if he understands that he's not good at what he's doing, and that nobody needs him to be, then maybe -- just maybe -- he can get over himself enough to get better, and to make helping him get better seem worthwhile. * Back when, I played in a band and the local music scene was basically the same way -- that is, everyone thought they were technically-virtuous visionaries, me included. But I was like 16, so I had an excuse. I'm talking about honest-to-god adults here. Beer guts, grandma cleavage and everything.
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Sep 20, 2013 15:54
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I have a question about classroom decorum, if you have a minute (or ten) to answer. To begin with full disclosure, I'm teaching my fifth semester of freshman composition, and the pedagogy and preparation classes I had were vaguely helpful at best and painfully confusing at worst (there's nothing like e.g. reading a lot of Lad Tobin or trying to parse the Elbow/Bartholomae to make me not understand a practical goddamned thing about teaching composition). Because of that, this thread, in addition to a number of teachers I liked back in undergrad, became the basis of my own absurd sense of classroom decorum. I'm teaching composition to a bunch of engineers who would never take this class otherwise, and I feel like I have to entertain as well as instruct--nobody learns if they're bored out of their tits--but I'm afraid I'm being vaguely unprofessional, if not sometimes offensive. As an example, I was trying to demonstrate ethos using advertisements--comp classes here are couched in rhetoric--and I compared Michael Jordan to Tiger Woods, explaining how the former still has credibility while the latter (quoting myself here) "started tapping honeys on the side and lost all his ethos." Now my students laughed at that, all of them, and laughed hard. And on one hand I feel like the example was so absurd that none of them will forget what ethos means (and from our discussions and the papers I've graded, none of them have), so I feel like it was effective. But on the other hand, I feel like it was vaguely offensive and unprofessional--or might have been considered that, had some uptight prude from administration been there. In any class period, I do four or five similar things--the kind that would get me fired from any job that wasn't being a college teacher. But at the same time, my students are engaged, they're entertained, and they're learning. So I guess my question is this: am I right in my approach, or offensively wrong? Is a teaching style like this detrimental to my chances of getting hired as a professor? Asbury fucked around with this message at 23:42 on Sep 23, 2013 |
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Sep 23, 2013 23:36
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3Romeo posted:I have a question about classroom decorum, if you have a minute (or ten) to answer. Well, I've been there before. While I don't think it ever hurt me, it also turned into a kind of crutch. This specific case -- Tiger Woods "tapping honeys" -- is maybe more of a problem than some. The ability of students and random passerby to read racial/gender insensitivity into word choice is legendary, and gets to be more of a problem as the grapevine grows Second, and probably more important, whenever you tell a joke you make yourself the center of the room. Sometimes you need to do that, and when you need to do it you'd best do it well. But you're better off engineering a situation where your students are the ones making the jokes, they feel safe making them, and that adds to everyone's engagement and learning. Last, there are also better ways to interest students. You can help them discover their own intrinsic motivators, and make connections between what's going on in class and what's important to them, and help them translate their learning to other areas. You can bring an enthusiastic, childlike curiosity to your own learning and show them how to do the same. That's a hard thing to do under the best conditions, and harder when you're stuck with someone else's course design. But, again, we're talking tools of first resort here. So. Are you right? I think you are if whatever better tools you have for maintaining student interest somehow don't work. And you're more right than the guy who doesn't give a poo poo whether they're interested or not. But you're less right than the guy who doesn't need to be at the center of the room to keep the kids engaged, interested, motivated, and learning. Whether that style ends up being a detriment depends, I think, on the same terms. Crack a joke to helps students learn that cracking jokes is OK, and then step back. Make an observation to show them how it's done, then step back. Curse once (not in anger) to let them see the boundary, then step back. And remember that it's not about what they hear from you, or what they repeat, it's what they learn and understand. If they can tell you about ethos, awesome. Obviously, that matters a lot less than whether they can cultivate it in a piece of persuasive writing.
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Sep 24, 2013 21:52
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Brainworm posted:
Thank you for the thought-out answer. Finding that balance--that stepping-back moment--is much, much harder than I ever thought it would be.
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Sep 25, 2013 02:43
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3Romeo posted:Thank you for the thought-out answer. Finding that balance--that stepping-back moment--is much, much harder than I ever thought it would be. I hear you. And the more I do something like plan from the top down -- start a course with specific learning goals, for instance -- the harder it gets. I see something I want to accomplish, and I just charge right at it like an idiot. And this after something like six or seven years of trying very hard not to. What makes this difficult, I think, are a lot of old ideas about teaching that I learned in the classroom as a student and that my students have also learned -- basically, that because responsibility for creating a learning environments rests with the professor or teacher, direct control must also. But, like with most things, responsibility means making some distinction between what you want to happen and how you make it happen. If you want a student to talk more, you can call on him. But if the reason you want him to talk more is because you really want him to learn how to hazard his own ideas for discussion, that obviously doesn't work. He'll talk, and he might realize that he enjoys it and it's not so bad. But that would be a happy accident. More likely, he'll just talk in class and remain risk-averse in the same basic ways and for the same basic reasons. In wider application, in other words, calling on that student doesn't intentionally develop a useful set of his knowledge, skills, or qualities. So you need to help him attach some intrinsic motivation or value to bringing ideas to the class, right? Help him see that, if an idea's interesting or important to him, he has everything to gain by putting it out to everyone else, so they can help improve it. That's a useful quality, and one that's portable outside the classroom. Anyway. There wasn't much precedent for that kind of approach in my education, or in the education of most of my students. So we end up in a position where, even if everyone has great intentions in the classroom, most of our knee-jerk reflexes are basically mis-trained. That makes some things really difficult when it seems like they ought to be really easy.
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Sep 26, 2013 14:07
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You've mentioned that you like Stephen King and The Stand especially, although maybe that's changed since 2009 (I'm only on page 18 of the thread). What are your thoughts on Misery? Having read the The Stand and a few other works of his, Misery is still my favorite book (in general). And what do you think of Under the Dome and 11/22/63?
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Oct 16, 2013 04:48
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Brainworm posted:Yes, I'm picking this up. I like writing and I don't get to do nearly enough of it. Thanks for all this, which I finally saw just now, yeesh. (At least it didn't quite a full year to notice... Anyway, dissertation has been mostly on track, finishing up a chapter now, etc. Have a mostly steady review group, but that will need some shaking up soon. Also I've taken on an entirely different book project in addition to the diss because a) it's the book I got into academia to write; b) I couldn't write it for this good of a press or situation at literally any other time; and c) I'm apparently a glutton for punishment beyond even the average academic. Juggling all right so far. Hope all your projects have stayed successfully aloft as well.
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Oct 16, 2013 04:54
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Farecoal posted:You've mentioned that you like Stephen King and The Stand especially, although maybe that's changed since 2009 (I'm only on page 18 of the thread). What are your thoughts on Misery? Having read the The Stand and a few other works of his, Misery is still my favorite book (in general). And what do you think of Under the Dome and 11/22/63? Well, I like The Stand more as a book that has specific callout moments (like the references to Watership Down) more than I like it as a regular book-type book. It does some really great things, but it also suffers from the same typically-Stephen King problem that I think Under The Dome does*: The ending doesn't live up to the expectations the book sets. That's a complicated thing for me, because on one hand I don't think the ending of a book is necessarily a verdict on whether it's good. On the other hand, a bad ending can absolutely ruin a book -- especially if the story makes promises that the ending doesn't keep. Where this kills (kills!) me with The Stand is "The Hand of God," also known as the nuclear bomb that goes off because God for some reasons chooses the moment of Larry and Ralph's execution to unambiguously intervene in human affairs. It reads like a hasty way to move the plot forward so King can sort out the actual human drama that makes other parts of the book so damned compelling. The same basically goes for Under the Dome, where the whole mes gets sorted out at the end by teaching alien children something about love/mercy. And that's fine, even though it's a cop-out. But the end of a character-driven story needs to revolve around character, and -- basically -- there isn't much of a relationship between the solution to the "dome" problem and the solution to the kinds of character-based internal problems that make for a good character-centered ending. This isn't a hard and fast rule, but I think that the longer a King book is, the more severe this problem seems to be. Cujo, for instance, handles its ending well. So do Carrie, Misery, and every King book I can immediately think of that's less than about two inches thick.** But the long books -- with at least IT as an exception -- sometimes either develop a problem external the characters and see it solved in an unsatisfying way (i.e. God intervenes), or develop a problem internal to the characters that finds an unsatisfying, external solution (i.e. some version of "I killed the monster and am therefore at peace with my childhood trauma"). And I feel bad saying that, because good character-focused endings are really, really, really hard to write. I don't say that from writing experience as much as I say it out of seeing good writers fail it consistently -- think Sopranos or any number of other pieces of long-form character-focused storytelling. * I haven't read 11/22/63 ** Even Cycle of the Werewolf does it. I'm sure I'm missing some important ones, though.
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Oct 16, 2013 16:43
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elentar posted:[...] It sounds like you're taking on a lot, but I also think that -- sometimes -- it's easier to handle multiple writing projects at once than to handle them serially. When the first gets stuck you can hop to the second and give the back end of your brain time to sort out whatever the problem with the first is. What I'm running into now, though, is administrative work. I was warned this would happen once I was tenured, but I just had no idea. Today, I have a total of two hours between 9:00 and 6:00 that aren't either a class or a meeting. That's been lately typical, though most days end at 5:00. Scheduling like that makes it difficult to do much actual work. And you can probably guess that (because I'm writing this instead of e.g. grading or jumping on another project) I have a hard time bringing myself around to using those little windows of time well. I can get a lot done before 9:00, but when things are busy I find I'm better off using those little windows as breaks.
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Oct 16, 2013 16:53
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Brainworm posted:[...] Peter Brooks posted:"[W]hat we seek in narrative fictions is that knowledge of death which is denied to us in our own lives: the death that writes finis to the life and therefore confers on it its meaning. ‘Death,’ says Benjamin, ‘is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell.’ Benjamin thus advances the ultimate argument for the necessary retrospectivity of narrative: that only the end can finally determine meaning, close the sentence as a signifying totality” (22). Peter Brooks posted:“To imagine one’s self-composed obituary read at the Judgment Day constitutes the farthest reach in the anticipation of retrospective narrative understanding. It is one that all narratives no doubt would wish to make: all narrative posits, if not the Sovereign Judge, at least a Sherlock Holmes capable of going back over the ground, and thereby realizing the meaning of the cipher left by a life” (24). DirtyRobot fucked around with this message at 18:51 on Oct 16, 2013 |
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Oct 16, 2013 18:44
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Brainworm, a few years ago (goddrat) you mentioned watching Breaking Bad and being pleasantly surprised about the ending of season two. Now that the show is over (and, as I believe, hit its stride near the end of season three and went balls deep to the end), I'm curious: did you watch the rest of the series, and if so, what did you think? (In case you missed it, this is me looking for an absurdly insightful post along the lines of your Hobbit-contract law/Red Badge-Slaughterhouse Five analysis.)
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Oct 20, 2013 06:18
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