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It's getting extremely brutal. I've done pretty much everything the guidebooks told me to when I was heading to grad school: my PhD is from a top 10 program (top 5 in my field), I've got a sheaf of articles including a couple top-tier journal placements, a book under contract and another under review, and I'm now on the tail end of my second VAP at a top 25 liberal arts school ... and I'm still scratching and clawing for postdocs and one-year appointments, and hardly ever even getting into the room for initial TT interviews. My published work would make a decent tenure file at a lot of schools, and I'm getting buried under people who are on the market for entry-level assistant positions with the resume of an mid-level associate prof. Obviously I'm going to have to recalibrate the packaging and presentation but it's about as extreme a buyer's market as you'll ever see right now. edit: oh, and my PhD essentially "expires" in a couple years, unless I'm coming off a really major postdoc or fellowship. all I can do right now is try to publish a whole bunch more in between teaching, but it's very difficult to find that research or writing time when you have to spend so many hours applying for other stuff. elentar fucked around with this message at 21:11 on Mar 11, 2018 |
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Mar 11, 2018 21:06
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I've gotten back into blogging recently, and yet again I feel like my writing style just sucks. I find myself inadvertently using very similar sentence structures over and over again. Or at least that's how it feels to me. Is there one weird trick to get out of the habit? I read plenty and even have some specific authors/writers whose style I wish I could emulate. But for some reason, when I write something, it just feels quite forced. Even this very post!
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Mar 12, 2018 08:19
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How often do you publish your first draft? The "one weird trick" I use and that I used to teach my students is just "revise." Write your first draft with enough time before you intend to publish it that you have time to let it sit for a day or two, then come back, read it closely, and don't be afraid to rewrite sections that aren't working. It's less likely that you'll notice when you use repetitive sentence structures until you give your writing a little time to sit somewhere outside of your brain and return to it. If you find that your written voice feels "forced," you might just be noticing your attempts to emulate a specific writer or style in ways other readers wouldn't, or you might be trying too hard to emulate those styles in the first place. Given that you're blogging, you're free to be more informal in your writing, so you could try just writing things down the way you'd say them out loud. That applies in a wider range of writing scenarios than you'd think, really. You're used to speaking in your own voice, but you might not be used to translating that into writing yet, if that makes sense. So it could help to just establish a direct pipeline between your spoken and written voice, at least until you start to get more comfortable with how you want to write and branch off.
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Mar 12, 2018 14:10
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I have another one, since we're in the active part of the thread's lifecycle again! Like nine years back you did a great writeup on the difference between modernism and postmodernism using a McDonald's Philly Cheesesteak. What's your take on metamodernism?
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Mar 13, 2018 02:17
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3Romeo posted:I have another one, since we're in the active part of the thread's lifecycle again! That sounds like a good time. I’m on vacation with the family so it’ll be a few days. And eight years. Mother of God.
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Mar 15, 2018 12:03
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elentar posted:[...] It's differently bad at higher ranks. I run our Teaching and Learning Center, and just turned down an offer to do that same job at a competitor. The pay was a joke. That's not because there's an abundance of candidates who've bootstrapped Faculty Development programs in the last decade or so (there are like three), but because there's a lot of noise in the hiring pool. That's due to a wave of Religion and English and Philosophy PhDs pivoting to administrative work -- a move that makes total sense given the condition of the market. The problem is that it's easy to credential yourself as e.g. a potential Writing Center director by publishing half a dozen articles. But that's not the same thing as managing people, budgeting responsibly, or landing grants -- which is most of the job. From the search side, that means it's really hard to hire a great e.g. Writing Center director. You've got to sift them out of four hundred or so applicants, then beat Administration into understanding that four hundred applicants isn't the same thing as four hundred good ones, and that you can't hire a talented, experienced manager of anything for $65K a year. After that, you've got to convince a conga line of academics that published articles aren't the same thing as professional accomplishments, and that a good candidate for a management position should demonstrate things like interpersonal skills and management experience and financial literacy. The end result -- usually -- is that a Medieval Lit. PhD who's never read a spreadsheet gets pressed into service as a Dean (or Director, or Administrator), and you end up sandbagged by whatever program they're under-managing. It's the ordinary academic problem of shared governance (i.e. a committee of PhDs charged with cutting a Facilities budget, i.e. bake-sale levels of professional competence) leaking into the hiring of actual administrators. So -- long term -- I suspect we'll see all of today's problems compounded by higher levels of ineptitude at the Dean/Director/Administrator level as the market makes it more and more difficult to hire good people.
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Mar 18, 2018 15:48
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Every morning I wake and lift my hands in thanks to the universe for deciding to leave my English PhD program with the MA rather than soldiering on towards the abyss while continuing to repress those nagging doubts. 
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Mar 19, 2018 19:21
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Farrier Theaks posted:I have another one, since we're in the active part of the thread's lifecycle again! So I'ma start with a hard distinction: Postmodernism (and Modernism) are about authenticity. Metamodernism is about sincerity. A second, distinction: Metamodernism is an aesthetic. Postmodernism is a philosophy, or a set of assertions about the nature of reality. Metamodernism doesn't make its own claims about the nature of reality -- at least not the way Postmodernism does. To the extent that Metamodernism makes claims, those claims are about artistic effectiveness, and amount to two lines: 1) Postmodernism, as a movement, makes authenticity really complicated if not actually impossible. The problem with this is that non-abstract art relies on authenticity (i.e. fidelity to provenance-based values and capital-T Truth) to make sense of itself, and abstract art -- especially intentionally-Postmodern abstract art -- is the worst. 2) It is possible to create coherent, meaningful art through fidelity to subjective human experience (i.e. by being sincere and capturing the lowercase-t truth -- truth the way it seemed) while leaving arguments over the nature of symbols and reality to philosophers who deserve to suffer through them. Postmodern Aesthetics When I wrote about the differences between Modernism and Postmodernism, I did it this way: quote:The thing that makes a chronology of Postmodernism difficult is that Postmodernism is a way of looking at the world which, right now, coexists and competes with Modernism. That is, both Modernism and Postmodernism are available vocabularies for interpreting culture and media. If anyone says "we live in a Postmodern era" he or she must mean that "we live in an era where Postmodernism is intellectually available," not "we live in an era where Postmodernism has entirely displaced Modernism." If we're talking Philly Cheesesteaks -- because why not? -- what makes an "authentic" Philly Cheesesteak is matter for contention. For a Modernist, "authenticity" is about provenance. It matters if you're in Philadelphia, and whether the cook went all Journey to the West to Pat's King of Steaks to get the recipe. For a Postmodernist, "authenticity" is mostly about form. Anything that looks, tastes, and smells like a Philly Cheesesteak is a Philly Cheesesteak, whether it's made with frizzled beef or -- God forbid -- tempeh. Postmodernists also downplay authenticity because it doesn't address the aesthetic and technical innovations they value. For a Postmodernist, it's an aesthetic achievement to remix the Philly Cheesesteak experience -- turn it into a salad, or (better yet) a WD-50 entree built out of meat foam and freeze-dried cheddar flakes. In the same way, and for the same basic reasons, it's also an aesthetic achievement to reduce (or abstract) paintings into to colors and shapes, or reduce (or abstract) poetry to sounds and symbols. Cutting provenance out of your values system makes a lot of things possible. Because of that, Postmodern art takes a few conspicuous forms: (a) Clever but mindlessly-celebrated free play of erudite symbols (high-concept Shakespeare productions). (b) Collections of unrelated allusions that add up to (i) "look how silly our culture is" or (ii) "we both remember this thing!" (c) Intellectually rigorous explorations of symbolic systems ("this series of paintings explores the uses of the color red"). (d) Any of the above married to a political or social thesis, (e.g. Banksy). They don't have to be that way. They just end up there when artists insist that art is about a set of specific philosophical tenets, or a set of claims about the nature of reality, and that good art involves demonstrating those claims. You end up with paintings that are about shape and color, poems about words and sounds, movies about composition and lighting and cinematic form, and so on and so on and so on. Metamodern Responses The obvious-once-you've-thought-of-it problem with Postmodernism's marriage of art with philosophy is that art is art -- or at least good art -- because it (a) acknowledges the complexity of human experience and (b) helps the audience make sense of that experience. In other words, good art helps people discover (or develop) a quality that we used to call wisdom by compressing and heightening the emotionally and psychologically salient characteristics of their lives. However you value abstract art -- whether it's poetry or painting or sculpture -- it is bad at doing this even when it is also well-crafted and intellectually astute. Like, Banksy has a well-defined aesthetic built on a distinctly Postmodern style of symbolic free play, but he's an insufferable artist because he simplifies human experience to the point of moral cliche.* That's not necessarily a problem for artists -- lord knows there are hordes of MFA-holders who're happy to remix e e cummings as long as their grants hold out. But it is a problem for the subset of artists who both think that Postmodern thought captures something meaningful about human existence and who also want to do the artist's traditional job of creating emotionally and psychologically meaningful work. The Metamodern solution to that problem is to focus on the subjective experience of living in a Postmodern world, and to do that with a degree of emotional fidelity that captures its complexity and significance. So if we're talking Philly Cheesesteaks, a Modern/Postmodern/Metamodern conversation goes something like this: quote:Modern Brainworm: This isn't a Philly Cheesesteak. It's made in Vermont. At McDonald's. Nothing authentic about it. Metamodern Brainworm sounds confessional and wordy because actual Brainworm isn't great at the sincerity that makes the Metamodern aesthetic work. But you get the idea: Metamodernism creates (or tries to create) artistic significance by grounding a specific kind of artistic meaning in the subjective (but recognizable) emotional experience of otherwise Postmodern conditions. Everybody points to David Foster Wallace (and especially Infinite Jest) when they talk about this aspect of Metamodernism; it's really in essays like "View from Mrs. Thompson's" and "Consider the Lobster," where you can see all these parts moving. In both those essays he runs the same play, which is: (1) Describe a set of irreducibly complex and contradictory experiences, and (2) Recount them as a contiguous, meaningful journey from emotional simplicity to emotional complexity, while (3) Cataloguing the ways that even sophisticated intellectual categories are inadequate to understanding ordinary events. You can really see those strategies at work in what I'll call Metamodernism light, which is basically Postmodern media salted with people mentioning that they have emotions (think Rick & Morty, Bojack Horseman, or any of the adult cartoons that have lately tried to improve on the Seth McFarland strategy of stringing in-jokes together). There, you can see intentional artistic value placed on something that sounds like emotional sincerity, but is really just a set of cliches about depression that also tries to be upbeat. * Just like John loving Lennon. Love should be all you need, but art helps people figure out how to live in a world where it isn't.
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Mar 27, 2018 21:26
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That post is cool and good, and makes me want to ask a follow-up question: Where do you believe Literature is headed in terms of themes/philosophies/form/however you want to answer this? What about Art as a whole?
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Apr 8, 2018 04:01
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ceaselessfuture posted:That post is cool and good, and makes me want to ask a follow-up question: Thanks. The short answer is that I don't know. The longer version of that answer is that I don't read enough contemporary literature to talk about broad-based or recent trends. I can talk about criticism and how it's taught, though. My prediction starts here: Creative Writing continues to grow. There are economic drivers for this. You can credibly staff a CW program with MFA-holding visiting writers (read: three or five-year term positions) rather than PhD-holding tenure-trackers. Over time, that represents an enormous cost savings without most of the hassles that come with an adjunct-dependent program. (Those are all statements about the status quo.) Here's the prediction: that staffing will change the way that reading and interpretation get taught, as Creative Writers (rather than Lit. PhDs) take on the bulk of departments' literature teaching. Creative Writers -- or at least good Creative Writing instructors* -- are basically Formalists. They like to talk about character webs, the structure of stories, and the conventions associated with different forms of poetry. They mostly do this with literature from the 20th c. and later, although some of them will reach back to Dickens and Austen. The more Creative Writers colleges hire, the more that's what students' experience of Literature will look like. That's probably a net good. The cultural turn of Literary Criticism over the last 60 years hasn't been a great benefit, and -- generally -- the more distance English departments can put between themselves and __________ Studies departments, the better off they're going to be. All that said, I don't have a prediction about the future of art. But I can close with a broad aesthetic position: art is art -- or at least good art -- because it makes sense of human experiences without robbing them of their complexity. * The bad ones just run Iowa-style workshops, which are only as good as the student population. That's great at Iowa but not so great at an open-admissions University. Brainworm fucked around with this message at 14:59 on Apr 9, 2018 |
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Apr 9, 2018 12:47
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Why do you think English departments should distance themselves from _______ Studies departments?
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Apr 13, 2018 02:38
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So I was talking to my girlfriend about how much I loved Milton. She asked me about how long I've been a fan and I said "Oh I dunno, probably a decade or so." Then I realized that this thread's been around for that long too and I started reading it when you posted it, so uh thanks for making me love Milton I guess. On that note, have there been any poets, say, in the past 200 years or so who try to compose in a similar (content/form/precision/genius/etc) mode? It seems that the only thing that scratches the Milton itch is Milton, but I guess that only makes sense. Also I remember you talking about Lycidas ten years ago. Any fresh thoughts on the world's best poem from an aged Brainworm?
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Apr 15, 2018 05:14
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Vegetable posted:Why do you think English departments should distance themselves from _______ Studies departments? I'ma start by saying something that I think I've said in the last two posts: life is complicated, and art helps people make sense of it. Literature is a specific kind of art. Poetry aside, you can talk about most Literature in terms of characters who identify, and change in response to, their own moral and psychological shortcomings.* That ability to change, which I'll call self-revelation, is the difference between Adam and Satan in Paradise Lost, for instance. If we're going to trot out the old "what does it mean to be human?" question, self-revelation is a big chunk of the answer. So when I say Literature is art, I mean that studying Literature means studying the variety of ways that we tell the uniquely human story of self-revelation. That study, when done well, teaches a kind of emotional intelligence that used to be called wisdom. Wise people are good at self-revelation, and they're good at inducing self-revelations in others.** You can't articulate wisdom in a course learning goal, but you should expect it to emerge from a student's relationship to the discipline in the same way -- and for the same reasons -- you expect precision from an accountant. When people debate the value of Literature -- and, by extension, English programs -- the nature and value of wisdom is more or less what they're debating. I can't go to bat for Shakespeare by saying that today's students need to know iambic pentameter. I've got to make a kind of moral case: that reading Shakespeare helps people become better people, somehow, even though Shakespeare doesn't make pronouncements about how society ought to be organized, or mandate how people ought to act toward one another. Cultural Studies is different. On paper, Cultural Studies presents itself as an interdisciplinary examination of texts and contexts. When it is actually that thing, you get quantitatively-rigorous and interesting answers to questions like "why was there a famine in 1980s Ethiopia/1840s Ireland/etc. at the same time those countries were net exporters of food?" That's cool and good, but it's also Social Science + History. When Cultural Studies is not that thing, it's often a pile of bizarro theories about how the world works applied in service of vague moral claims. A good example is racism is prejudice plus institutional power. It can be. It's one rule for adjudicating what ought and ought not be called "racist." But it's neither true nor false. You can't toss it up against reality and see if it sticks. That's one thing if you're talking about why Hamlet and Ophelia are a couple. It's another if you mean to hold actual human beings accountable to some standard of behavior. That process, run that way, courts controversy, alienates the public, and -- so far as I can tell -- doesn't teach much of value. *** So I keep my distance. * The big difference between Comedy and Tragedy is whether they do this soon enough to avoid catastrophe. ** Literature doesn't try to keep this a secret, either. Your wise characters, your Yodas and Gandalfs and Merlins, they all exist to guide their Lukes and Frodos and Arthurs to meaningful self-revelations. They're not technical educators. Yoda helps Luke figure out who he is, not how to work a light saber. *** The guidance I give my students is that any claim about how a culture works needs to be (a) falsifiable, (b) statistically supportable, and (c) confined to its statistical basis. Without that, you're bullshitting.
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Apr 17, 2018 16:35
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ceaselessfuture posted:So I was talking to my girlfriend about how much I loved Milton. She asked me about how long I've been a fan and I said "Oh I dunno, probably a decade or so." Then I realized that this thread's been around for that long too and I started reading it when you posted it, so uh thanks for making me love Milton I guess. Glad to help another Milton lover into the world. Milton's one of a few older poets really worth loving because nobody -- nobody -- has ever had anything like his combo platter of technical poetic competence and actual human perceptiveness. Montaigne, DFW, Atwood, they're all up to speed on the perceptiveness end, but I wouldn't trust any of them with a sonnet. There are a few poems similar in scope to Paradise Lost -- in terms of their attempts at insight, anyway. The one most deliberately modeled on PL is Pope's Essay on Man. Witness the second half of the first stanza: quote:...Together let us beat this ample field, In other words, Pope's gonna pull a Milton and use his poem to explain how the world works. I don't know if his answer is as good as Milton's. I like it less. Anybody writing in romantic couplets is gonna tie stuff up too neatly. Another good one is Samuel Johnson's "Vanity of Human Wishes." It nice because it attempts the same broad survey of human experience, and because Johnson's eye for people is sharper than most poets'. But if you want someone who approaches Milton's technical competence and who also has an eye for experience, Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" might scratch the itch. Tennyson's "Ulysses" also has some meat to it, but if you want something with the epic scope of Paradise Lost you'd do better with Idylls of the King. Nobody reads it anymore, outside of classes about Arthurian legend. That's a shame because Idylls is a more introspective and subtle set of moral allegories than (for instance) Faerie Queen, even if it doesn't have FQ's rough charm. I think F.R Leavis took it (Idylls) to task for being too polished and for drawing Arthur as less a man than a symbol. What I'm saying is, if you don't dig on the Idylls, you're not alone. But -- again -- Milton's his own original. Pope and Johnson and Wordsworth and Tennyson don't play Milton's game, let alone play it better, so while there's a lot to like in them it may not all be the right stuff. quote:Also I remember you talking about Lycidas ten years ago. Any fresh thoughts on the world's best poem from an aged Brainworm? I wish I had some. I'm sure I talked about "Howl" as a rewriting of "Lycidas" back then, and the only thing I'd revise about what I probably said is that Ginsberg is a better student of poetry than a poet. Like, reading over the poems I just mentioned in this answer, Ginsberg at his best is maybe playing against Tennyson at his worst. It could also be that I don't like the Beats.
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Apr 17, 2018 20:21
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Brainworm posted:Cultural Studies is different. On paper, Cultural Studies presents itself as an interdisciplinary examination of texts and contexts. When it is actually that thing, you get quantitatively-rigorous and interesting answers to questions like "why was there a famine in 1980s Ethiopia/1840s Ireland/etc. at the same time those countries were net exporters of food?" That's cool and good, but it's also Social Science + History. How would you prefer English departments be organized? I agree with you that the cultural studies angle isn't a fruitful approach to literature—my experience is that literature classes in that vein deteriorate into an inverted version of high-school symbolism bingo, where instead of attempting to assign arbitrary symbolic value to every feature of a text, the game is instead to find a way to relate every feature to a single moral/historical/cultural theme—but English professors seem to be embracing cultural studies wholeheartedly. I was recently sifting through documents from an internal review of the English curriculum at a large public university from a few years ago: as part of the review, comments were solicited from the department's professors, and they were all asked to participate in a series of surveys. I wasn't surprised to find that the professors were in favor of leaning harder into cultural studies, since that's exactly what the review had resulted in, but I was (perhaps naively) surprised to find that there was broad support for making room for that change by cutting down on instruction in fundamental skills like composition and analysis. My impression is that the professors were far more interested in teaching classes focused on their literary period or critical theory of choice. Is that less of a problem outside of research universities? It's always seemed bizarre to me that English academia (spare rhetoricians and MFA programs) is organized around categorizing literature instead of its salient features—as if Biologists divvied up specializations based on what color animals were—but that seems to be the way things are, and I haven't seen anyone propose any alternatives.
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Apr 17, 2018 23:32
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Wallet posted:How would you prefer English departments be organized? I agree with you that the cultural studies angle isn't a fruitful approach to literature—my experience is that literature classes in that vein deteriorate into an inverted version of high-school symbolism bingo, where instead of attempting to assign arbitrary symbolic value to every feature of a text, the game is instead to find a way to relate every feature to a single moral/historical/cultural theme—but English professors seem to be embracing cultural studies wholeheartedly. I'ma work with this in pieces, since I'm using like ten-minute gaps between meetings. Our program is built around genre, with the requirement that every genre course cover at least two literary periods. Some, like Poetry and Drama, cover more.* Others -- like Romances, Epics, and Quests -- are consecutive periods (Medieval and Early Modern) bolted together. We also have three Seminars (First-year, Junior, and Senior) where we focus on developing analytical, research, and writing techniques. On top of that, we have Topics courses that focus on various literary theories, specific periods, or movements (think "Intertextual Theory" or "American Naturalism"). For a typical student, that means the eleven-course major includes three "fundamental skill" courses, six multi-period genre courses, and two topics courses. I like that basic design. (I helped design it.) We get good teaching because of the back end, though. One problem with conventional, period-based programs is that you divide departmental teaching into service courses (100/200-level intros with high enrollment) and expert courses (300/400-level periods with low enrollment). That leads to stratification (faculty paying dues in service courses before they get to teach the upper-level, low-enrollment period course), and territorialism -- that is, specific faculty "own" the courses in their field. Stratification means your department loads up its least-experinced teachers with high-enrollment service courses -- usually while rewarding publications over quality teaching. And a territorial-ized department can't cut anything. If "ENG 486: Ecofeminist Testimonies in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poetry" only enrolls like three students, you have to steamroll whichever Full Professor owns it in order to slot something new into the curriculum. So the only ways you get real curricular change (read: improvement) in a territorial program are (a) vacancies and (b) net growth. The usual result of the stratification/territorialism combo platter is hot garbage at the 100/200 level, supporting a 300/400-level curriculum that's just grab bag of faculty research interests. You're deep in the poo poo when your period courses have a colon in the title, like "Early Modern Literature: Tragedies by South London Collaborators, 1586-92." That means whichever faculty member "owns" what's supposed to be a period survey just decided to teach their research project instead. In our genre-based system, basically any faculty member can teach any course. That gets you better load balancing; it's easier to make sure everybody hits (for instance) 100 student contacts every year when you can design any faculty member's schedule around course size instead of period expertise. It also makes for better hiring. We can advertise a position in a couple periods, instead of period+subfield+theory (e.g. "applicant should be a Medievalist or Early Modernist," instead of "applicant should specialize in Early Modern Poetry with strengths in Ecocritical or New Economic Theory"). That means we get a larger applicant pool, and better odds of e.g. finding a ringer who's in a short-term appointment at some other college.** The TL;DR on this is that good teaching is the product of good program design. While curriculum should help students talk about e.g. continuities and changes in specific genres, relationships between periods and movements, and so on, it also needs to be designed so that the back end -- searches, workload, and curriculum development -- actually works. Otherwise, bad hires, mismanagement, and political dysfunction will kneecap whatever learning's supposed to go on in the classroom. * I usually give those coherence by focusing on the development of a single element over time (like the evolution of dramatic villains, beginning with medieval Vice characters, then the "plotter" villains in Marlowe and Shakespeare, etc.). ** Incidentally: if you want good, diverse hires, broad pools plus inviting applications from short-term appointments at similar colleges is the way to go. Brainworm fucked around with this message at 15:14 on Apr 18, 2018 |
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Apr 18, 2018 13:07
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Brainworm posted:Our program is built around genre, with the requirement that every genre course cover at least two literary periods. Some, like Poetry and Drama, cover more.* Others -- like Romances, Epics, and Quests -- are consecutive periods (Medieval and Early Modern) bolted together. I wish that approach prevailed elsewhere. A few months ago I attended a discussion between a team of outside reviewers and a bunch of English undergrads about their experiences in the major, and a predominant complaint was that a great deal of time was being spent discussing specific texts, but none was being spent addressing the elements that comprised them. Brainworm posted:One problem with conventional, period-based programs is that you divide departmental teaching into service courses (100/200-level intros with high enrollment) and expert courses (300/400-level periods with low enrollment). That leads to stratification (faculty paying dues in service courses before they get to teach the upper-level, low-enrollment period course), and territorialism -- that is, specific faculty "own" the courses in their field. Having faculty of any sort teaching the 100/200 level intro courses would be a marked improvement around here; that responsibility falls upon grad students. Brainworm posted:We also have three Seminars (First-year, Junior, and Senior) where we focus on developing analytical, research, and writing techniques. On top of that, we have Topics courses that focus on various literary theories, specific periods, or movements (think "Intertextual Theory" or "American Naturalism"). For a typical student, that means the eleven-course major includes three "fundamental skill" courses, six multi-period genre courses, and two topics courses. If you don't mind my prying, would you be willing to say a little more about how you've structured the learning objectives in those seminars? It's something I've worked on and done a lot of research into, and most programs I've looked at have a weird focus upon expository research-based writing, particularly in their introductory composition courses, with very little specific instruction in analysis and not a hint of synthesis writing to be found. I've seen a few attempts at using progressions of formal (that is, relating to different forms of writing) exercises, including efforts to revive systems like the progymnasmata*, but I've also seen a lot of seminars that are little more than literature courses with a few extra papers tacked on. *It's an old set of exercises from rhetorical instruction, if you're unfamiliar with it.
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Apr 18, 2018 16:13
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Wallet posted:If you don't mind my prying, would you be willing to say a little more about how you've structured the learning objectives in those seminars? It's something I've worked on and done a lot of research into, and most programs I've looked at have a weird focus upon expository research-based writing, particularly in their introductory composition courses, with very little specific instruction in analysis and not a hint of synthesis writing to be found. I've got a curricular map somewhere, but here's the upshot: * The First-Year English Major seminar is separate from the college's comp sequence. Students in the Major seminar focus on close reading techniques and brief coverage of the periods, forms, genres, and movements on the comprehensive exams (which are taken Senior year). This is generally in the context of reading poetry, short stories, novels, and plays that represent some subset of these terms. The writing is basically short, bi-weekly essays that use close reading to situate texts in their periodic or generic traditions. I do that with category/differentiation essays (use close reading to differentiate an aspect of this text from another representative of its period or genre). * The Junior Seminar is research-focused. There, students write something that could potentially be a journal article (it's of that length and research density, and contributes to some ongoing academic conversation). It's advanced They Say, I Say. * The Senior Seminar is really two seven-week classes bolted together. The first is an intensive review for Comprehensive Exams (where students write short essays that describe continuities and changes in rhetorical, generic, and poetic terms across multiple periods; list terms include stuff like "heroic couplets" and "sonnet"). The second is a sprint project, where students write and present a piece similar in scope to the one in Junior Seminar, but focused on something more appropriate to whatever they plan on doing after graduation. The genre courses can be taken in any order (usually evenly split between the FY and Junior Seminars), and are usually built with 4-5 projects that emphasize close reading, genre and period literacy, and allow (but don't require) use of literary theory. There's a lot of emphasis on continuity and change and A/B texts ("How do Spenser and Milton approach epic conventions differently?") That's also where we hit non-academic writing; a lot of assignments have a/b/c options that are more relevant for aspiring writers, teachers, and editors.
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Apr 18, 2018 21:58
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Brainworm posted:I've got a curricular map somewhere, but here's the upshot: It sounds like a lovely program. I'm happy to know that there are institutions out there approaching English in a thoughtful and coherent fashion. Brainworm posted:Students in the Major seminar focus on close reading techniques and brief coverage of the periods, forms, genres, and movements on the comprehensive exams (which are taken Senior year). I don't mean to pepper you with a million questions, but if you're so inclined I'd be fascinated to know what comprehensive exams for an English major cover and what shape that takes. Short answer questions? Some sort of Scantron monstrosity? Is it mostly testing knowledge or are there skills you're assessing as well? Wallet fucked around with this message at 12:58 on Apr 19, 2018 |
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Apr 19, 2018 12:38
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Wallet posted:I don't mean to pepper you with a million questions, but if you're so inclined I'd be fascinated to know what comprehensive exams for an English major cover and what shape that takes. Short answer questions? Some sort of Scantron monstrosity? Is it mostly testing knowledge or are there skills you're assessing as well? Totally good. Our current comps have two sections. Both are short essay. In the first, we ask students to close read two of (usually) five poems included in the exam, focusing on the ways that the poem's meaning is determined (or inflected) by its form. The most illustrative piece of the instructions are: quote:show[...] how the poem’s form structures and contributes to its overall meaning. Remember that poetic form includes a wide array of characteristics—not only rhyme scheme and meter, but other formal properties such as stanza, line breaks, sound, syntax, tone, figures of speech, the kinds of words used, and the overall way in which the poem is constructed (to name a few). These are poems our students are unlikely to have seen before, and that haven't been taught since their matriculation. We usually seed their choices with an unusual (or curtal) sonnet, and maybe a pantoum or sestina or ode to check their memory of forms. In the second section, we ask students to write essays on three of five terms selected from a master list. These essays should: quote:[...] define the term as fully as possible and should also apply the term to at least three different literary periods, engaging with at least one specific literary text in each of those periods [...] . Answers should not just be checklists of periods and definitions, but should demonstrate how the significance of the term develops and changes across periods, including lines of literary or other influence [...] Our master list has about ninety terms. Some of them are periods or movements (e.g. "Romanticism"), some are genres or forms (e.g. "Sonnet"), and others are devices (e.g. "Heroic couplet").
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Apr 19, 2018 15:28
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Brainworm posted:The usual result of the stratification/territorialism combo platter is hot garbage at the 100/200 level, supporting a 300/400-level curriculum that's just grab bag of faculty research interests. You're deep in the poo poo when your period courses have a colon in the title, like "Early Modern Literature: Tragedies by South London Collaborators, 1586-92." That means whichever faculty member "owns" what's supposed to be a period survey just decided to teach their research project instead. This meeting just reminded me: a good program puts your best faculty in GenEd courses -- even (and especially) first year composition courses. Never staff those with adjuncts. You can get away with adjuncts at 100/200 in STEM or business. Computer Science and Accounting have more majors than they can handle, so it hardly matters how many they lose. But in Humanities, comp courses and GenEds are where you recruit. Adjunct staffing there is a loser. It's not because Adjuncts are bad in the classroom.* It's that they don't have the resources to advise or mentor their students, or bring them into research projects, conferences, and so on. Even assuming adjuncts who teach great classes, students can't follow them up the course chain through the major. Programs forget how important that is. Put a good professor in English 100 and she'll have great enrollments her next 200 (and 300 and 400). It's the same story at almost every program I review: they complain about too few majors, but don't staff the lower levels like they want any. * Although they do grade more leniently, and to the extent that course evaluations indicate student satisfaction, that's a problem. All other things being equal, easy graders rate lower.
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Apr 19, 2018 21:49
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Brainworm posted:These are poems our students are unlikely to have seen before, and that haven't been taught since their matriculation. We usually seed their choices with an unusual (or curtal) sonnet, and maybe a pantoum or sestina or ode to check their memory of forms. Brainworm posted:It's the same story at almost every program I review: they complain about too few majors, but don't staff the lower levels like they want any. I think many English programs are having a bit of an identity crisis deciding what they're supposed to be and how they're supposed to stay relevant (every time I hear an English professor voice this I can't help but think they've confused the major with the canon). Some of them have become disjointed as their indecision has led them to remove structure from their programs that now can't be replaced because they can't decide on how to replace it. Even when they manage to draw in students with introductory courses staffed by TA's and Adjuncts, there's no path to set those students on. The most recent program I was looking at has an institution-wide introductory composition course, a major specific composition course junior year, and that's it. Just take whatever disorganized smattering of Literature/Poetry courses you want as long as you take at least one course in world (non-Western) lit, one in early British, and one in modern Western. Their catalog is a weird mixture of broad periodic or cultural stuff (Romantic poetry, Afro-Am lit) and esoteric upper level courses (Environmentalism in Joyce or Diasporic Culture in Modern Caribbean Fiction or whatever). Wallet fucked around with this message at 22:40 on Apr 19, 2018 |
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Apr 19, 2018 22:35
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Wallet posted:I'm not a poetry guy, but I couldn't have told you what a pantoum was twenty minutes ago. It seems like you're expecting students to develop a technical vocabulary that many programs don't care to address: is that material mostly carried by the seminars, or is that significantly integrated in genre courses? That's all in the genre courses. One upon a time, we required all students to take the "Poetry" genre course, so the comps represent that more heavily than they probably ought to. On the other hand, the Juniors and Seniors usually form comps study groups specifically because they know that there's material on comps that might not have been represented in their Genre courses, and I wouldn't want to see that end. And yeah, we emphasize working with a technical vocabulary more than other programs I've seen. Our outside reviewers have noted (and sometimes ding us on) that, on the comprehensive exams, and on our focus on Anglophone literature (we don't do lit. not originally written in English, which excludes the Greeks but also e.g. Utopia and Candide). quote:I think many English programs are having a bit of an identity crisis deciding what they're supposed to be and how they're supposed to stay relevant (every time I hear an English professor voice this I can't help but think they've confused the major with the canon). Some of them have become disjointed as their indecision has led them to remove structure from their programs that now can't be replaced because they can't decide on how to replace it. Even when they manage to draw in students with introductory courses staffed by TA's and Adjuncts, there's no path to set those students on. That's also true. The more programs I review, the more I think that's less a function of academic values and more a function of programs not knowing which students they're serving. For instance: Our students become Middle and High-School English teachers (generally but not always in this region), librarians, editors, and (occasionally) PhD literature students, in something like that order of popularity. Once you've decided that the largest aspect of your departmental mission is training (mostly) low-income, high ability students to be great High School teachers, that drives your curriculum. They need to know Shakespeare, and they need to know terms (for instance). They also need to be able to finish their BA in three years so they can do an MAT program the fourth, intern at a regional Middle or High School, carry a double major (or strong minor) sufficient to give them a secondary field, take a suite of courses that allow them to be promoted into administration, and so on and so on. In other words: programs sometimes think that curriculum structure is value or principle-driven, but it actually emerges from recognizing your students' needs. If your major's supposed to prepare students for everything, it's gonna be a Swiss Army Knife -- full of unrelated tools you've design-hosed for the sole purposes of fitting them into the curriculum. It also damages advising and recruitment. When someone asks "what can I do with an English Major?" your answer had better not be "anything!"
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Apr 20, 2018 15:27
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Brainworm posted:In other words: programs sometimes think that curriculum structure is value or principle-driven, but it actually emerges from recognizing your students' needs. If your major's supposed to prepare students for everything, it's gonna be a Swiss Army Knife -- full of unrelated tools you've design-hosed for the sole purposes of fitting them into the curriculum. It also damages advising and recruitment. When someone asks "what can I do with an English Major?" your answer had better not be "anything!" What counts as an "anything!" answer? A large number of the Humanities and Social Science courses at my uni market themselves on a set of generic seeming skills. It's not quite "anything!" but they pretty much all claim to enable some combination of 'critical thinking', 'multiple approaches to problem solving', 'making reasoned arguments', 'skills that are useful in a wide range of careers' etc. Mainly the established humanities, like Philosophy, English, History, do so. The ones that don't are the more specific disciplines, like Criminology, International Relations, and Media and Culture, which mention that their graduates can work in specific places in society. One the one hand, those are written out as specific skills and attributes. On the other, they're all variations on the theme of 'can read, think, and research'. It all seems very vauge now that I think about it.
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Apr 20, 2018 18:37
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Brainworm posted:And yeah, we emphasize working with a technical vocabulary more than other programs I've seen. Our outside reviewers have noted (and sometimes ding us on) that, on the comprehensive exams, and on our focus on Anglophone literature (we don't do lit. not originally written in English, which excludes the Greeks but also e.g. Utopia and Candide). That seems a bit silly; I'm not sure I see anything to be gained by ignoring technical vocabulary, and there's far more literature to be taught than there are hours in which to teach it. There is a lot of Greek material that is foundational for Rhetoric and Philosophy though; Rhetorical training/vocabulary is part of getting an educational license here (for English, anyway), but I don't know how common that is. Brainworm posted:That's also true. The more programs I review, the more I think that's less a function of academic values and more a function of programs not knowing which students they're serving. I suspect you're right. I think the idealistic aim is to let students direct their own learning, but when you go too far down that path you end up graduating students who have learned nothing except how to write vague essays about theme in Dickens novels. Stabbatical posted:One the one hand, those are written out as specific skills and attributes. On the other, they're all variations on the theme of 'can read, think, and research'. It all seems very vauge now that I think about it. Wallet fucked around with this message at 23:51 on Apr 20, 2018 |
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Apr 20, 2018 23:39
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Brainworm posted:In other words: programs sometimes think that curriculum structure is value or principle-driven, but it actually emerges from recognizing your students' needs. If your major's supposed to prepare students for everything, it's gonna be a Swiss Army Knife -- full of unrelated tools you've design-hosed for the sole purposes of fitting them into the curriculum. It also damages advising and recruitment. When someone asks "what can I do with an English Major?" your answer had better not be "anything!" This is an interesting thought. I'm a graduate of St. John's College currently working in software, so not at all a typical field for graduates of that school. In my darker moments, "full of unrelated tools you've design-hosed for the sole purposes of fitting them into the curriculum" is pretty close to how I feel about the program there. Do you have any thoughts on the program at St. John's in particular or "Great Books" education more generally?
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Apr 20, 2018 23:42
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Stabbatical posted:What counts as an "anything!" answer? A large number of the Humanities and Social Science courses at my uni market themselves on a set of generic seeming skills. It's not quite "anything!" but they pretty much all claim to enable some combination of 'critical thinking', 'multiple approaches to problem solving', 'making reasoned arguments', 'skills that are useful in a wide range of careers' etc. Mainly the established humanities, like Philosophy, English, History, do so. [...] It all seems very vauge now that I think about it. Let me start here: a good program isn't a collection of learning outcomes; it's a community of students and faculty. I like to say that more depends on the students than the school, but I mean that a good education largely depends on (a) the quality and quality of a student's individual academic effort and (b) the quality and quantity of students' academic interactions with their peers and faculty.* Most of the other stuff is footnotes. So when students and parents ask me what they can do with an English degree, I talk about our graduates. The ones eight years out will be finishing PhDs or making big career moves (since they're about 30). The ones sixteen or eighteen years out will be at their next big professional inflection point (since they're almost 40).** The point of that answer isn't just that we have an academic community. It's that the only real measure of program quality is the success of its graduates. So you've got an "anything!" answer from your college, or at least from those Humanities programs. I hope you have it because the Faculty don't think too much about departmental messaging, and not because they're (a) ignorant of what their graduates do with their lives, or (b) afraid the details of the program sound so irrelevant that hearing them will chase you someplace else. But that's also not where to pay attention. If you're wondering about those programs' quality, look at what happens to the graduates. * For research on this, check Pascarella and Terenzini's How College Affects Students. ** We're a small program, and graduate about a dozen majors a year. It's easy to account for everyone.
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Apr 21, 2018 03:31
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Wallet posted:A well developed ability to research, read, analyze, and communicate is useful (and potentially marketable), but most programs touting that sort of thing haven't actually constructed a curriculum around it because they've worked it the other way 'round: they've looked at what they were already teaching and tried to come up with a list of things that students might be learning from it. It's trivial to justify virtually any educational exercise by claiming that it serves a nebulous goal like helping students develop critical thinking skills. Frame that. Better yet, print it on a business card and hand it to every kid who makes a campus visit.
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Apr 21, 2018 03:33
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fantastic in plastic posted:This is an interesting thought. I'm a graduate of St. John's College currently working in software, so not at all a typical field for graduates of that school. In my darker moments, "full of unrelated tools you've design-hosed for the sole purposes of fitting them into the curriculum" is pretty close to how I feel about the program there. All other things being equal, common experiences build academic community, and academic community matters. It especially matters to vulnerable student populations -- think underrepresented groups and first-generation students. I'd bet the Great Books curriculum does crazy things for students' academic relationships with one another, and that St. John's enjoys improved retention of vulnerable student populations as a direct result of it. That said, the curricular structure of Great Books is distinctive, but I'll bet that the content itself represents a series of political compromises that make it nearly impossible to change. I also suspect the curriculum's not diverse enough. I don't see anything like Economics or Business or Biology represented in the Faculty, and from what I can tell there are few places where students do e.g. field work. A small college should have students writing books, starting businesses and nonprofits, running experiments, and so on. Like, students learn by reflecting on experience, and there are all kinds of experiences you can't take out of discussion-based seminars.
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Apr 21, 2018 04:26
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This might be more about film language, but why does the No Place Like Home scene work even though it's bullshit that violates all the rules of storytelling.
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May 1, 2018 06:02
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Baron Porkface posted:This might be more about film language, but why does the No Place Like Home scene work even though it's bullshit that violates all the rules of storytelling. Does it actually work, or do we just accept it because we grew up with it as a classic piece of film? I remember that as a child I got really annoyed when I read some of the books and realized that Oz was a very real place in them. I'm pretty sure Dorothy brings her family to Oz from Kansas because it was clearly the better place to be. Hollywood moguls didn't want to deal with more people Grapes of Wrath-ing their way into California though so even depression-era escapism has to go "OH well back to the dustbowl for you."
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May 1, 2018 11:16
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Baron Porkface posted:This might be more about film language, but why does the No Place Like Home scene work even though it's bullshit that violates all the rules of storytelling. Well, maybe. As a rule, the "it was all a dream" ending stinks like a pug's butthole. I've talked about stories making (and breaking) promises before, and pointed to e.g. Battlestar Galactica as a promise-breaker. Basically, basically, storytelling makes a whole bunch of promises to the reader. There's the huge, implicit promise that we'll see character self-revelaton in response to a combination of internal and external obstacles. There's also the promise that the story will answer the questions it raises, and that those answers will be genuine and unforced extensions of the story's characters and setting. Put another way, our implicit expectations for an ending are a combo platter of self-revelation and resolutions to established forwards. And while the destination matters, the journey does, too. Richard III has a self-revelation after the ghosts of everyone he's killed parade through his nightmares, and it's probably the worst scene in the play -- Harold Bloom called it the worst in all of Shakespeare). It's not bad because it's badly-written (although it's kinda clunky -- after the fifth ghost you're like "okay! I get it"). It's bad because it's forced. Richard is a sociopath. Whatever he discovers, or whatever he changes about himself, needs to happen within that established framework.* Good and Bad Endings The "it was all a dream" ending ranks up there with "God did it" or "...and then the world explodes" or "...and then he pulls out a gun" because it's used by lazy or inept storytellers to get out of delivering on the promises they've made to the reader (or viewer). They're not necessarily bad. They're just a frequent feature of bad writing. Take "...and then he pulls out a gun." It shows up in student fiction all the time, because they don't know how to write (or end) their little versions of Waiting for Godot.** But there are lots of good stories that essentially end with "...and then he pulls out a gun." True Grit spends 300 pages building up to Rooster Cogburn charging the Ned Pepper gang, and that moment is a motherfucker. And there are others: In Star Wars, the entire arc of character development describes Luke discovering his abilities as a warrior ("...and then he pulls out a lightsaber"). Hamlet is much the same (..."and then he pulls out a sword"). It's all about whether the ending represents an unforced episode in the character's journey to self-revelation (although in True Grit Rooster's charge is a pivotal moment in Mattie's journey, not Rooster's). And there are lots of good (or at least competent) stories that end with "it was all a dream." "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" is probably the most famous, but -- in terms of storytelling -- Vanilla Sky, Inception, Mulholland Drive, Jacob's Ladder, and even The Twilight Zone ("Midnight Sun") or Black Mirror ("San Junipero") -- hell, even The Matrix -- land the "dream" plane without crashing it. I'm not saying all of these are great; just that their use of the "dream" isn't a promise-breaker. It has a sane place in the arc of characters' self-revelations, and answers the questions that the narrative has raised in a satisfying (if not elegant) way. Hell, Inception gets away with "it was all a dream...or was it?" I mean, regardless of whether you like the movie (I don't), the ending feels like a natural extension of the story. The Wizard of Oz So in terms of Wizard of Oz, the real question is whether Dorothy's dream plays a sensible place in the arc of her character's development (or self-revelation), or whether it's a sort of shortcut on her journey to self-revelation. I haven't see Oz since I was in college (and even then it was some weed philosopher syncing it up with Dark Side of the Moon), but if I remember right it goes like this: Before the tornado, Toto bites Mrs. Gulch, who is bent on having Toto put down. But on the way to wherever they kill dogs in Dirt Farm, Kansas, Toto escapes Mrs. Gulch and returns to Dorothy. Afraid Mrs. Gulch will return, Dorothy and Toto run away. That's why Dorothy's outside when the tornado hits. That's a class on storytelling, right there. You've got a protagonist with a well-defined desire (to keep Toto alive) and weakness (fear of direct confrontation); that weakness leads her to run away, which harms Dorothy and other people (Auntie Em, who I presume frets to no end when she and Uncle flee to the storm cellar without Dorothy). If it helps, think of Dorothy's weaknesses as another version of Luke Skywalker's: she knows what's right, but needs to learn how to confront evil people directly in order to achieve it.*** So what we should expect from that story goes like this: Dorothy, like Luke, needs to learn how to confront people instead of whining and running away. The question -- again -- is what role Dorothy's dreaming plays in the arc of her self-realization. My first thought is that it's actually pretty important. Dorothy doesn't just need to get home like, mechanically -- say, in the Wizard's balloon. Her actual self-realization requires that she understand that she could have gone back home at any time; her problem isn't that she's trapped in Oz, or that there was a tornado, or that some witch is out to get her. It's that being an adult means it's her responsibility (and not e.g. Auntie Em's) to defend the things she loves (like Toto). Whether you go for that reading or not, I think the broader point stands: the dream piece is there for a reason, because Wizard of Oz is -- like most good storytelling -- dependent on Dorothy achieving a specific revelation about her own weaknesses and changing as a result. The dream might not be the only way to achieve that, or even the best one, but it seems to get the job done. *Battlestar Galactica's Gaius Baltar is an example of the same thing; they literally kill the character and bring him back as an angel to avoid having writing anything like development. ** The template: two characters talk about how they are differently unhappy. One of the characters is often a writer. There is no structured conflict or tension. The story or play ends when one character shoots either himself or the other character for no apparent reason. *** She and Luke are also examples of how to handle the extraordinarily difficult problem of writing a protagonist who hurts other, decent people (i.e. their guardian aunt and uncle) while also being morally good.
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May 1, 2018 17:05
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U R a badass Brainwom Edit: I want to remind everyone how METAL someone who dresses like a suffragette can be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AldxVQ8z5FQ Baron Porkface fucked around with this message at 02:58 on May 2, 2018 |
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May 2, 2018 02:22
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Brainworm posted:
Since it came up, this just clicked with me - is this what The breakfast club does, essentially? Stick 4 teenagers in a room, they all talk wbout why they unhappy, and go home (being teenagers, getting with each other at the end).
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May 2, 2018 14:50
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Nothingtoseehere posted:Since it came up, this just clicked with me - is this what The breakfast club does, essentially? Stick 4 teenagers in a room, they all talk wbout why they unhappy, and go home (being teenagers, getting with each other at the end). Yeah, it's a tricky form and Breakfast Club does it well. Bad examples of it are usually bad because they (a) don't understand conflict or (b) don't have a compelling moral vision. Conflict I like to think about conflict in terms of protagonists and opponents. When conflict works, it's for two reasons: (a) the protagonist and opponent both want the same thing, and (b) the protagonist has a well-defined weakness that the opponent can attack. Wanting the Same Thing So in simple conflict, Han Solo and Luke Skywalker both want to get with Princess Leia. The laws of romance say only one of them can. As a consequence, they name and attack each other's weaknesses. Most conflict is more complicated and (frankly) less well-written. In a badly written detective or cop story, it looks like the detective wants to catch the criminal, and the criminal wants to escape. In a good one, like Chinatown, the detective and the criminal actually both want the same thing: for the world to believe their version of events. The laws of belief say only one story can be true, just like the rules of romance say Leia can only get with one dude. I sometimes call Hamlet a detective story for that reason. The conflict between Hamlet and Claudius is ultimately over whose story about Old Hamlet's death becomes The Truth. This is why Hamlet ends with Hamlet asking Horatio to write everything down. Weakness, Opponents, and Moral Vision I talked about weakness and opponents in that last post, on Wizard of Oz. There it's pretty simple: Dorothy's weakness is aversion to conflict. Mrs. Gulch (her opponent) attacks that weakness, bullying Dorothy by taking Toto hostage. But their conflict would be pretty feeble if it were just about Toto, right? Otherwise, Dorothy could compromise with Mrs. Gulch by getting her a less-likable dog to kill. If you check the clip that Baron Porkface posted, it should be clear that the conflict between Dorothy, Em, Henry, and Mrs. Gulch is about something bigger. The don't talk about the dog at all, once the conflict is in motion. Instead, they talk about principles. In the same way that the detective and the criminal are actually in conflict over whose version of events is going to be the Truth, Dorothy and Mrs. Gulch are actually in conflict about which set of rules or principles will govern how the people in their community will act toward one another. They're in conflict over what's Right. I like to call that a conflict of moral vision. Dorothy (and Auntie Em and Uncle Henry) fundamentally disagree with Mrs. Gulch about how people ought to act. That becomes an actual conflict when Toto's biting Mrs. Gulch forces the community to decide whose rules they're going to follow. The laws of community say there can only be one guiding vision. I think it's fair to say that the rest of The Wizard of Oz delivers some consistent message about which rules make sense: help people get what they need, and shun (or kill) people who abuse their power and privilege. Those rules are the ones that govern Dorothy's behavior after her self-revelation. She discovers them on her journey through Oz, and she acts on them when she confronts and (accidentally) kills the Wicked Witch. Multi-Point Conflict and Multiple Revelations So imagine you take Toto out of the equation. It's technically possible to have characters in conflict over a moral vision, and for that conflict to play out in conversation. Like, Dorothy and Auntie Em and Uncle Henry and Mrs. Gulch could sit down at the table and negotiate their differences. And there are a lot of them: it's not Dorothy and Em and Henry against Mrs. Gulch. It's every character in conflict with every other one. That's multi-point conflict. You can see that if you watch Baron's clip. Uncle Henry thinks people ought to obey the law: as soon as Gulch shows him the Sheriff's order, he pops Toto into Mrs'. Gulch's basket. Auntie Em thinks that people ought be governed by some version of her Christian morality: it's wrong for Mrs' Gulch's wealth to be able to pervert the law. And so on. In buddy movies (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid) or fiction (every Sherlock Holmes story), most of the conflict is actually between people who are on nominally the same side. George Lucas might have a tin ear for dialogue, but Star Wars is a great example of this. Luke, Leia, Obi Wan, and Han Solo are always in conflict with each other, even though they're all allied against the Empire. The neat thing about that, if you watch Star Wars carefully, is that each one of those characters follows the protagonist arc: they each have a weakness that gets attacked by at least one opponent, and the resulting conflict gives each one of them a self-revelation. Han Solo abandons his self-interest in order to join the assault on the Death Star. Obi Wan ends his self-imposed exile. Leia learns that she can depend on other people. I like to call that technique multiple revelation (although you'll sometimes hear it called reversal), and George Lucas was great at it (at least in Episodes IV, V, and VI). It's a common feature of Shakepearean comedies, and it is really, really, really hard to write into movies and plays. In a novel like The Stand, you can spend 200 pages inside each of Fran and Larry and Stu's heads. That's plenty of time to define a character.* In a play or movie, you get maybe one scene to establish each character's weakness and the desire that drives them into conflict with everybody else.** The Breakfast Club So obviously(?) Breakfast Club is of a type: multi-point (five-point) conflict with multiple revelations (i.e. self-revelations for each of the five kids in detention). Each character arrives in detention with an individual moral vision that is defined by their own weakness, and we watch the movie in order to see how each one will experience self-revelation, overcome that weakness, and reach consensus on a new moral vision articulated in the letter they write to the Principal at the end.*** The letter is important; it changes Breakfast Club from a story about what people did into a story about what they learned. What they learned (their new moral vision) isn't genius -- it's about the same level of intellectual and emotional complexity as "help other people, but stand up to bullies" -- but it's at least a recognizable statement about how people ought to behave toward one another, informed by at least some emotional perceptiveness on the part of the writer. Good stories will always have something like that. Even action movies like Die Hard. I suspect -- suspect -- that what happens in most students' minds is that movies like The Breakfast Club seem notable because the characters sound both authentic and unhappy, and so they try to imitate those qualities in their own writing. But because there's no conflict, and no moral vision, they don't know how to end the story. So they basically run out the clock by choosing an ending they think ought to be profound because it's serious or tragic. That is, they think serious topics like death are inherently meaningful when -- at least in good storytelling -- their meaning emerges from a writer's intentional development of things like characters and conflicts and symbols, all working to articulate some perceptive thesis about how people ought to act toward one another. * And one reason King's longer books translate poorly to film. IT (the book) runs two self-revelation arcs for each of the characters in the Losers' Gang, in the form of a 1985 "plot" and a 1958 "subplot," where the beats in each character's "subplot" arc of self-revelation contrast with or define the elements in the "plot" arc. That's aided by King's use of e.g. past and present versions of the same settings and the (plot) deployment and (subplot) redeployment of specific symbols (e.g. "silver," the library's glass bridge / BBC tower, etc). There are a lot of those, since IT's structure is so goddamn intricate. That's another way of saying that you can divide the story of IT into two or three or fifteen parts, but the structure doesn't naturally cleave at the same points. Part of what makes IT effective storytelling is that its moral vision is built on the uncanny relationships between childhood and adulthood, and you lose that when you break the novel's plot/subplot structure into pieces. ** Seriously: next time you watch Star Wars, look at how economically it does this. *** That is some advanced writing, especially if each character's self-revelation is going to feel unforced. Although if you wonder why Shakespaere's worth reading from a purely technical perspective, check out Midsummer. There, you get a sustained four-point conflict (the Athenian Lovers), a three-point conflict (Titania, Oberon, and Puck), a two-point conflict (Theseus and Hippolyta), and a five-point conflict (the Rude Mechanicals) with at least seven arcs of self-revelation. That's all in a play that can be cut down to 90 minutes and still has room for a farce at the end. Edit: Fixed a heading. Brainworm fucked around with this message at 19:59 on May 2, 2018 |
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May 2, 2018 16:47
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Baron Porkface posted:U R a badass Brainwom Glad that reading of Oz works for you. Writing's helped me really work out those principles of conflict and character development. I'm getting to the point where they're (a) teachable and (b) well-thought-out enough that I can use them in my own work.
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May 2, 2018 19:55
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A few more for you, Brainworm: With all the variety in critical analysis techniques, what would you say are the techniques that most inform your personal insights? To rephrase: what process(es) (if any) do you use to analyze a text? What are your opinions on contemporary literary criticism?
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May 17, 2018 06:19
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ceaselessfuture posted:A few more for you, Brainworm: I stick to the basics. Most of the time, a close reading that attends to generic and formal conventions will get me someplace. Just for instance, the last two readings I did for this thread (Wizard of Oz and Breakfast Club) were straight-up genre-driven. All I did was point out how each movie adheres to the conventions of protagonist-centered, conflict-driven drama, a.k.a. "story," and name some recognizable parts (like multi-point conflict). If I were going to take that reading a step further, I might have situated each reading in its own generic tradition -- talked about how it replies to another, earlier example of its own form in the same way that (for instance) Slaughterhouse-Five replies to Red Badge of Courage. That's mostly what I do. Technically, that's Structuralist, but I don't know that I make extensive enough use of e.g. Genette in most of my readings to really claim the label. There's a difference between being a guitarist and just owning a guitar. quote:What are your opinions on contemporary literary criticism? I'm a sound like a cranky old man when I write what I'm about to write: it sucks. It really, really does. Obviously not all of it, but holy poo poo. I could happily live the rest of my life without hearing a critic legislate morality from behind the cover of a book. I think it's Bret Easton Ellis whose slogan is "aesthetics over ideology." If that's a useful rule for writing literature it goes double for writing criticism. Implicitly, that's really just a rephrasing of Harold Bloom's axiom that criticism isn't an act of judgment; it's an act of deciding -- and what it tries to decide is meaning. In other words: if human experience is complicated, and the role of art is to help people make sense of it, then a critic ought to be a kind of expert in connecting art to human experience in ways that people find meaningful. So I don't see a lot of that. Academic criticism is mostly written for an audience of zero. Everybody wants to publish in ELH, but who actually reads it? I've never heard anybody say "I just don't get Macbeth. Time for me to dig through some back issues of Shakespeare Quarterly to find out what Art has to say about the nature of human evil." That's half of what sucks. The other half is the widespread adoption of insular, pseudoscientific jargon all bolted to inane, structurally irrefutable theories about how civilization works. That said, there's a whole lot of good criticism being written by Creative Writers who mean to introduce their students to the basics of forms like poetry or the short story. That "how stuff works" criticism might (or might not) help students become better writers, but it does a nice job of naming the formal and generic conventions that lit. students really need to know.
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May 18, 2018 19:39
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Brainworm posted:That's half of what sucks. The other half is the widespread adoption of insular, pseudoscientific jargon all bolted to inane, structurally irrefutable theories about how civilization works. This is rather tangential, but I'm wondering if you have an opinion on what motivates academics to write convoluted nonsense like this. I recently finished writing up some research I had been working on for the past year relating to the apparent preference in Wallet fucked around with this message at 12:49 on May 19, 2018 |
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May 19, 2018 12:44
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Would Harry Potter have been better if Harry was credibly tempted by the darkside at least a little (exempting a few outbursts, like attempting crucio on Bellatrix)? Edit: he gets a Ring of Gyges and the story is eh whatever about it. Baron Porkface fucked around with this message at 20:15 on May 21, 2018 |
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May 20, 2018 18:40
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