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chernobyl kinsman posted:gaining a greater understanding of any text as a cultural and historical *opens mouth* quote:(dont start mel) *closes mouth* *kicks pebble at feet*
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Mar 14, 2018 12:23
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hackbunny posted:What is literary criticism for, though? Why should anyone read it? I think authors should read it so they know what work and what doesn't work when they write their own stories. For example reading criticisms of Rothfuss or Ernest Cline's books gives me a sense of all the pitfalls that successful writers fall into that weaken their characters, world, sense of narrative tension, ease of reading, etc. etc. And also so they learn what is successful but done to death, so maybe they try to bring something new to the table. It also brings to light books that you might never have known about. I wouldn't be reading Lud in the Mist right now if it weren't for this thread.
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Mar 14, 2018 21:44
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Ccs posted:I think authors should read it so they know what work and what doesn't work when they write their own stories. For example reading criticisms of Rothfuss or Ernest Cline's books gives me a sense of all the pitfalls that successful writers fall into that weaken their characters, world, sense of narrative tension, ease of reading, etc. etc. And also so they learn what is successful but done to death, so maybe they try to bring something new to the table. Those are reviews though, not literary criticism
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Mar 14, 2018 21:53
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hackbunny posted:What is literary criticism for, though? Why should anyone read it? justifying tenure If we're talking critical theory, then the purpose varies with the theory The "lens" metaphor is one I find useful. If each different critical approach is a lens made from a different colored glass, then by slotting multiple different such lenses into our microscope, we can obtain a more accurate view of . .wait . . .this metaphor somehow got turned backwards, hepl in short read https://www.amazon.com/Literary-Theory-Introduction-Terry-Eagleton/dp/0816654476 and https://www.amazon.com/Pooh-Perplex-Freshman-Casebook/dp/0226120589
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Mar 14, 2018 22:06
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Eagleton is such a poo poo introduction to Literary Theory and the only reason people use it is because he was the one who realized people would gobble up a book that summarizes every literary theory
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Mar 14, 2018 22:13
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Mel Mudkiper posted:Eagleton is such a poo poo introduction to Literary Theory and the only reason people use it is because he was the one who realized people would gobble up a book that summarizes every literary theory That's why I linked the second one (which predates Eagleton)! benefit of Eagleton is he clearly answers the posed question: the purpose of Literary Theory is, ultimately, to prove why Marxist thought is correct thought, and all other approaches are flawed.
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Mar 14, 2018 22:16
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:benefit of Eagleton is he clearly answers the posed question: the purpose of Literary Theory is, ultimately, to prove why Marxist thought is correct thought, and all other approaches are flawed. Yeah this argument would hold a lot more water if Eagleton wasn't a Marxist. The whole thing is "nuh uh, gently caress you" the book. I feel like the best intro to critical theory is Mythologies by Barthes. Its short, funny, readable, and demonstrates how critical analysis can expose the way mundane thing creates significance.
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Mar 14, 2018 22:20
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Mel Mudkiper posted:Yeah this argument would hold a lot more water if Eagleton wasn't a Marxist. The whole thing is "nuh uh, gently caress you" the book. Exactly The proper study of mankind is man, says man
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Mar 14, 2018 22:22
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ITT: a bunch of goons who skipped intro to crit in college and interpret 'criticism' as 'saying mean things about'
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Mar 14, 2018 23:12
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that's not even really snark; half of the people in here don't know what the other half is talking about. we can't have a debate or even a good discussion if we don't have clear terms, clearly understood by everybody, and since a lot of the people trying to participate don't know the difference between what a review does and what a work of literary criticism does i'm not really sure where there is to go from here
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Mar 14, 2018 23:16
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BotL is the only actually posting critiques in this thread and his posts are a mix of literary criticism and review. When I'm talking about critique in this context I'm talking about the type of critiques that the thread originator is posting. Even if you look for definitions of literacy criticism, a lot draw no distinction between it and review. The biggest difference is that reviews are of one book at a time, while criticism can encompass an author's whole oeuvre. "More strictly construed, the term covers only what has been called “practical criticism,” the interpretation of meaning and the judgment of quality. " "The functions of literary criticism vary widely, ranging from the reviewing of books as they are published to systematic theoretical discussion. " https://www.britannica.com/art/literary-criticism Ccs fucked around with this message at 23:51 on Mar 14, 2018 |
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Mar 14, 2018 23:40
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chernobyl kinsman posted:a lot of the people trying to participate don't know the difference between what a review does and what a work of literary criticism does i'm not really sure where there is to go from here Harsh I see my "actually, there is no difference between reviews and critical analysis" hot take is not gaining any traction edit: thesis: In Literary Theory, Eagleton is ultimately reviewing all then-current schools of literary criticism and finding them lacking as insufficiently marxist Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 23:49 on Mar 14, 2018 |
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Mar 14, 2018 23:45
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Mel Mudkiper posted:You are completely fabricating a wholly imaginary conflict No I think I'm just overfitting based on a limited sample Hieronymous Alloy posted:in short read https://www.amazon.com/Literary-Theory-Introduction-Terry-Eagleton/dp/0816654476 and https://www.amazon.com/Pooh-Perplex-Freshman-Casebook/dp/0226120589 OK, I'll give it a try. This is the kind of answer I hoped for I think I remember Nabokov was mentioned elsewhere as a great critic, too. I love him as a writer so I'd love to read his criticism. Yay/Nay and what should I look for?
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Mar 14, 2018 23:51
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hackbunny posted:No I think I'm just overfitting based on a limited sample To be clear, those were both semi-joke answers. The first is a common textbook that introduces all schools of lit crit and then ends with "actually, those are all dumb, except Marxism, which is awesome. Also, I'm a Marxist." But it does give *an* answer. The second book is really funny but it's a parody and an outdated one. Mel's recommendation is probably superior if you want a real answer. As to Nabokov, he had a famously fractious relationship with critics; when one critic panned his poems, he published new poems he knew that critic would like under a pseudonym, after that critic glowingly reviewed them, he published a short story where a character by the name of his psuedonym appears and vanishes over the course of the story. He did give a really good series of analytical lectures but they're formalist and not really the sort of "literary theory" analysis Mel is referencing: https://www.amazon.com/Lectures-Literature-Vladimir-Nabokov/dp/0156027755 excellent reads though
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Mar 14, 2018 23:56
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Addenda: revised theorem: The purpose of a review is to tell someone whether or not they would like a book The purpose of a critical analysis is to tell them whether or not they *should* like said book The value of learning critical analysis is that it gives you new approaches through which you *could* like a book
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Mar 15, 2018 00:03
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That sounds like a good shorthand to me. Also that Pooh's Perplex book looks hilarious. My toughest professor in college was a big proponent of New Criticism. His rage at how people were interpreting TS Eliot wrong with their silly post-colonial and gendered lenses was the subject of a lot of lectures. A Postmodern Pooh also looks good. Ccs fucked around with this message at 00:53 on Mar 15, 2018 |
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Mar 15, 2018 00:51
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chernobyl kinsman posted:that's not even really snark; half of the people in here don't know what the other half is talking about. we can't have a debate or even a good discussion if we don't have clear terms, clearly understood by everybody, and since a lot of the people trying to participate don't know the difference between what a review does and what a work of literary criticism does i'm not really sure where there is to go from here I know we disagree about the specifics, but I am glad to have another dude in this who agree about the general merit and form of Critical Theory Hieronymous Alloy posted:Addenda: revised theorem: You need to get away from this idea of the text as product to understand Critical Theory. It has nothing to do with qualifying the book as something to be consumed.
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Mar 15, 2018 02:12
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here's what BotL is doing with this thread:BotL posted:This is a thread mostly for looking at why your favourite sci-fi and fantasy is bad, in other words. This is not out of simple desire to mock, but because genre fiction is overwhelmingly bad, and I'm going to review its big names through a pretentious literary lens. some of the confusion over the last few pages has, i think, arisen from people not knowing what the differences are between criticism as most people understand the word, literary criticism, literary reviews, and critical theory. they are all different things. i'll briefly try to explain what the differences are as best i can: 1) criticism as most people understand the word: "this is bad, and here is why" 2) literary criticism: this is slightly more difficult to pin down. it usually involves some element of theory (see below), and can be evaluative like a review: pointing out where a text is muddled, where a poem's meter stumbles, etc. it does not need to explicitly evaluate a text according to a clearly defined literary theory, and it treats the text as a form of art rather than a product. i might write an article, say, on the motif of blood in macbeth. if i were to do so, i would look at every time the word 'blood' appears in the text, and examine what role it plays. maybe i find it's linked to insanity or guilt, and every time blood appears one or both of those themes appears with it. what i'm doing, then, is trying to trace out a pattern in the text. discernible patterns emerge in every text, from Ulysses to the furry diaper fetish roleplay you act out online, whether or not you intend for them to be there. understanding them grants new insight into the text, mind, human culture, self-knowledge, etc etc *jack off motion* 3) literary review: "you should or should not buy this book, and here's why" 4) critical theory: any one of a number of clearly systematized, organized schools of thought which can be applied to any text. these are models to which you compare your text and through which you attempt to understand it. there are a number of different distinct bodies of literary theory (with a lot of cross-pollination), and they all look at different things within the text. feminist theory is going to mostly look at how gender roles work within the text. marxist theory is going to do the same for class. and so on. think for a moment about evolutionary theory. if i were to 'interpret' a whale through an evolutionary 'lens', what i'm really doing is bringing a number of preconceived ideas (about homology vs. analogy, developmental biology, phylogenetics, etc.) and seeing how those ideas help me understand the whale and how the whale helps me understand and refine those ideas. i can look at the whale's fin and see bones which are clearly more similar to those of the human hand and of the forefeet of other land mammals than they are to fish, and so i can understand the whale better - it is probably, i would conclude, descended from land animals. my theory has helped me make better sense of my subject, partly by helping me choose what patterns/elements to focus on and by giving me tools to interpret them. BotL is mostly doing #1, 2, and 3. he often applies techniques of literary criticism (like close reading and elements drawn from different theories) to the texts he evaluates, and that tends to elevate it above just "review" - that and the fact that he's treating them as artworks which can be critiqued, first and foremost, rather than as products to be consumed. granted, his goal is to point out why these texts suck and why you people desperately, desperately need to read something that isn't genre fiction rather than gaining a more nuanced understanding of the text, but that's really fine - all interpreters have agendas, and he's made his very clear. chernobyl kinsman fucked around with this message at 02:48 on Mar 15, 2018 |
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Mar 15, 2018 02:46
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Do any branches of Critical Theory concentrate on whether the text works in a dramatic sense? Like how effectively it manages tension, or develops characters, or establishes themes? Viewing the text as a piece of art, not a product. But using those metrics to determine of what quality the art is.
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Mar 15, 2018 03:27
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The distinction between #2 and #4 is helpful I guess. I probably would have wrapped them up into one category.
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Mar 15, 2018 03:55
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Ccs posted:Do any branches of Critical Theory concentrate on whether the text works in a dramatic sense? Like how effectively it manages tension, or develops characters, or establishes themes? Viewing the text as a piece of art, not a product. But using those metrics to determine of what quality the art is. No, because those are questions for people interested in either a recommendation or in replicating the effect (Save the cat, or other screen writing guides). The quality of a work of art is largely immaterial to Critical Theory, as Critical Theory's many sub-disciplines are interested in how a work reflects or is reflected by the broader contexts of existence. Diaper fur fan fiction says a lot about the kind of society that would produce diaper fur fan fiction, giving your reasons why diaper fur fan fiction is badly written mainly illustrates your opinions on diaper fur fan fiction, it's a dead end in terms of Critical Theory. (You can make moral and ethical judgements and arguments about a text using Critical Theory, but that's not your question). There's a reason why hard core Russian Formalism and Structuralism died out as critical avenues. It's very hard to objectively prove that what you're talking about as immutable truths, in creating tension for example, are actual truths rather than preferences held by a culture or an individual. (Humor is a classic example of this, joke structures change all the time and are very rarely funny after the generation that made them has died out). With the advent of modernism, you get artists exploding preconceived notions of aesthetic structure, achieving similar or superior results with radically different methods, and with post-modernism, the alternatives proliferate to the extent that any literary critique of the effectiveness of form is almost impossible to prove conclusively, there may be scientific/neurological truths to discover but they're not easy to research adequately.
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Mar 15, 2018 04:56
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Ccs posted:BotL is the only actually posting critiques in this thread and his posts are a mix of literary criticism and review. When I'm talking about critique in this context I'm talking about the type of critiques that the thread originator is posting. That's not true, I have a Weber rant on I think page 3? I've been tempted to try a few more reviews but this seems more like BotL's show.
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Mar 15, 2018 05:12
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Mel Mudkiper posted:I know we disagree about the specifics, but I am glad to have another dude in this who agree about the general merit and form of Critical Theory I haven't read much literary critical theory but still hate it on the following logic Critical theory spawned critical legal studies Critical legal studies writers are second rate American legal realists with an ideological axe to grind Therefore critical theory can eat a dick
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Mar 15, 2018 05:43
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Critical theory sounds like a big game of obsessively nerdy confirmation bias, especially when death of the author is in play. Like college lit class where everyone has to come up with an interpretation of the symbolism hidden in the text when most likely none was ever intended.
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Mar 15, 2018 06:26
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BananaNutkins posted:Critical theory sounds like a big game of obsessively nerdy confirmation bias, especially when death of the author is in play. Like college lit class where everyone has to come up with an interpretation of the symbolism hidden in the text when most likely none was ever intended. you have paid attention to nothing
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Mar 15, 2018 06:44
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chernobyl kinsman posted:you have paid attention to nothing That's just YOUR interpretation.
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Mar 15, 2018 06:48
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BananaNutkins posted:Critical theory sounds like a big game of obsessively nerdy confirmation bias, especially when death of the author is in play. Like college lit class where everyone has to come up with an interpretation of the symbolism hidden in the text when most likely none was ever intended. "intended" lol
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Mar 15, 2018 12:07
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BananaNutkins posted:Critical theory sounds like a big game of obsessively nerdy confirmation bias, especially when death of the author is in play. Like college lit class where everyone has to come up with an interpretation of the symbolism hidden in the text when most likely none was ever intended. here's the real answer to this very dumb post literature is not a puzzle to be solved. the study of it is not a game wherein the author hides clues and riddles and the critic spends five hundred years figuring them all out.* it is about the recognition of meaningful patterns and textually-supported interpretations. if i write that article about macbeth, and i 'prove' (i.e. put forth a strong argument which is rooted in the text) that blood and guilt are interrelated themes, it doesn't matter whether or not shakespeare intended for them to be interrelated themes. there are two other important reasons why we don't look for shakespeare's intent when we read a play. firstly because you can't ask shakespeare if he put it there on purpose, because he's dead. so it's an unanswerable question - we can't argue over whether or not shakespeare intended for hamlet to really be insane or just faking it, because barring major advances in necromantic technology you'll never know what was in his mind. what we can argue about is what the text itself says - whether it supports one interpretation over the other. that has potential to be a meaningful discussion.** secondly, because the author's intention and interpretation are both subject to change, and are not stable. for example, Tolstoy's interpretation of Anna Karenina changed radically over the course of his life as his religious and moral views shifted. so if i were to ask Tolstoy what he intended by putting something in the novel, the answer would be very different depending on whether i ask him in 1873 (when he was writing the book) or in 1909. which of Tolstoy's interpretations do I take as the 'true' one? another key word is textually-supported. the idea of subjectivity in art has totally ruined people's minds. not all interpretations are equally valid. i cannot write an article arguing that Macbeth is secretly an orangutan, even if it's my firm interpretation that it is, because that's not supported by the text and is insane. i'm sorry that you had a lovely college lit class, because that isn't what reading literature should be, or how the study of it properly works. *except for james joyce **fwiw i think the answer is both, he starts out faking but actually goes insane around the time he mercs polonius chernobyl kinsman fucked around with this message at 18:23 on Mar 15, 2018 |
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Mar 15, 2018 17:40
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What he said
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Mar 15, 2018 17:43
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Mel Mudkiper posted:What he said 
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Mar 15, 2018 18:14
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Speaking of textual support in criticism, reader-response, and authorial intent, one of my favorite movies ever is only good despite the creator. Basically because the film fails to include certain establishing parts of the plot, those gaps allow the film to take on an unintended significance far more interesting than what the filmmaker had clearly intended for the film. Like, if he had been a better director, the film would be far less significant. Basically, what this means is that the final actual product is better than the author's intent because the product is open to more interpretations than the author meant for
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Mar 15, 2018 18:22
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:That's not true, I have a Weber rant on I think page 3? Ah cool, you should do more. BotL's reviews are rare, especially when he gets probated for weeks.
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Mar 16, 2018 00:17
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I found Paul Fry's lectures on Theory of Literature to be informative and accessible enough. As for intent, from my layman's point of view, it's more interesting to analyze what an author has written rather then what he intended to write. Ccs posted:Do any branches of Critical Theory concentrate on whether the text works in a dramatic sense? Like how effectively it manages tension, or develops characters, or establishes themes? Viewing the text as a piece of art, not a product. But using those metrics to determine of what quality the art is. Actually, "interesting" is one of the categories of contemporary aestetics, which should include managing tension and similar concepts. I'm not too familiar with it, but that's probably the direction you should dig in if you're interested in the subject. rvm fucked around with this message at 21:02 on Mar 16, 2018 |
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Mar 16, 2018 20:52
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rvm posted:I found Paul Fry's lectures on Theory of Literature to be informative and accessible enough. this is good, thanks
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Mar 16, 2018 21:01
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http://www.writersdigest.com/editor-blogs/questions-and-quandaries/reviews/how-to-get-five-star-book-reviews I think this is a good system for general review, but not critical analysis by the definition established in this thread. Critical analysis doesnt contain value judgements, which BotL often makes.
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Mar 18, 2018 23:04
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BananaNutkins posted:http://www.writersdigest.com/editor-blogs/questions-and-quandaries/reviews/how-to-get-five-star-book-reviews Lol The secret to a five star review!!! *write good*
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Mar 18, 2018 23:19
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BananaNutkins posted:http://www.writersdigest.com/editor-blogs/questions-and-quandaries/reviews/how-to-get-five-star-book-reviews this article is dumb and also, as I posted above, critical analysis can absolutely contain 'value judgments', however you're interpreting that. it's normal to say that something doesn't work in a text. chernobyl kinsman posted:2) literary criticism: this is slightly more difficult to pin down. it usually involves some element of theory (see below), and can be evaluative like a review: pointing out where a text is muddled, where a poem's meter stumbles, etc. it does not need to explicitly evaluate a text according to a clearly defined literary theory, and it treats the text as a form of art rather than a product. e: for an example, i'm working through an edited edition of a text by a major scholar in my field, and at one point he writes this: Derek Pearsall posted:The allegory has little vitality, and it was an error of judgment on the poet's part to suppose that interest could be sustained through nine separate and generally similar petitions of complaint summarily presented (582-707). What he's saying is "this is boring and it goes on for too long". Hard not to read that as a value judgment. And he's right, it is boring and it does go on for too long. And that's in the context of critical analysis, not a book review. chernobyl kinsman fucked around with this message at 23:29 on Mar 18, 2018 |
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Mar 18, 2018 23:23
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BananaNutkins posted:http://www.writersdigest.com/editor-blogs/questions-and-quandaries/reviews/how-to-get-five-star-book-reviews First criteria: readability First decision in my article: reverse the numbering of the sections in my chart and my article
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Mar 18, 2018 23:24
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"World Building" is not only deprived of its rightful place at #1 but also not even mentioned, a shameful article
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Mar 18, 2018 23:25
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Where are the likeable characters and the subversion of tropes?
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Mar 18, 2018 23:26
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