|
Thank you for doing this. I should have thought about posting it here myself. It just seems like people would be more intrigued by A&C. Rome is a mainstay of history textbooks and has a lot of poo poo people find interesting, especially the fall of the Republic.
|
#
?
May 13, 2016 20:56
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 28, 2024 06:05 |
|
|
We can see what Brainworm says but my guess is that young love weighs more heavily in the popular imagination than late midlife crisis love. I mean, also high schoolers are probably gonna relate to the former more than the latter.
|
|
#
?
May 14, 2016 04:18
|
|
|
Tao Jones posted:In the ancient history thread, we've been talking about Marc Antony, and this question came up: This is a good question, and I've been thinking about it for a couple days. I don't have a whole answer, but I do have a few partial ones. Shakespeare's Rome is weird. Not least because it's formulaic in ways that border on parody. Just for instance: there are only two kinds of women in Shakespeare's Rome: the chaste and the insane. For the most part, the chaste get raped (see Lucrece, Lavinia, and Octavia if forcible marriage counts). The insane ones get married (see Tamora, Portia, Cleopatra).* For their part, Shakespeare's Roman protagonists are borderline autistic and incongruously fussy war heroes. The upshot is that most Roman couples look like Brutus and Portia -- like, she cuts herself to get his attention and he's like "yeah, that makes her the best wife." Also, Shakespeare's Romans are categorically terrible parents and Roman graves occasionally barf out zombies. Point is, Shakespeare's Rome isn't a wedding destination. It's the only place in Shakespeare where women pull knives.** If you're looking for a reason that Antony and Cleopatra isn't popular reading, it's because their relationship is of that same type as, say, Brutus and Portia's or Saturninus's and Tamora's. It's hard to see how they're in love with one another because Cleopatra's so outrageous and Antony is so reserved. Yeah, Antony want to break his cock off in Cleo. She wants to get ridden like a pony. That's not the kind of noble-sounding romantic sentiment for which Romeo and Juliet's become a shorthand. The second thing is that Antony and Cleo aren't romantic ideals. The best example is the adultery -- the most positive thing most plays can do with adultery is work it for laughs. So while we can all get that Antony's marriage to Octavia is totally political, he'd probably be more likable if he either (a) refused to marry Octavia for love of Cleo or (b) stuck with Octavia and accepted *sniff* that he and Cleo could never be together. That's contrary to how people actually behave, but in line with longstanding romantic tradition. Along those lines, Shakespeare invents (or popularizes) two conventions of romantic love in Romeo and Juliet that he sticks with for most of his career, and that we still see today. They're that love is (a) motiveless and (b) transformative. There's no reason for Romeo to fall for Juliet over Rosalind, or for Juliet to fall for Romeo over Paris. All four of them are catches, and one thing we hear from e.g. the Nurse is that both Romeo and Paris are hot and rich enough to make good husbands. But that's the point. Love is love precisely because it doesn't work according to criteria. I think that's still true today. The more we don't understand what Alice sees in Bob (or Barbara) the more love's supposed to be involved. It's part of our cultural logic. Love blinds people to others' faults and invents differences between, say, Romeo and Paris where there clearly aren't any. And the more we can point to why A might be attracted to B -- say, B is wealthy or good looking -- the more likely we are to think of the relationship as mercenary rather than emotionally legitimate. The second bit is that, in most Shakespeare, falling in love changes who people are and ultimately makes them better. That's more often true for Shakespeare's men than his women. For instance, love changes Romeo from a perpetual sadbrain to passionate revenge murderer -- something like the final form for the young Shakespearean male. Orlando gets schooled into likable sophistication. Demetrius goes form being a skeezy bride-buyer to a clever and devoted partner. Bertram's still an rear end in a top hat at the end of All's Well, but he at least puts less effort into it. You don't really get this kind of motiveless, transformative love in Antony and Cleopatra. The play takes great pains to show us just how much A&C love loving, and as adults we all know that's more than enough to sustain an otherwise horrible relationship.*** Moreover, neither Antony nor Cleopatra improve each other. If anything, they make each other worse. Like, half this play is someone telling Antony to act more like Antony. The other half is Cleopatra shadow boxing with her insecurities. So that's the upshot, I think. Antony and Cleo are a typical couple in Shakespeare's Rome, and that makes them hard to admire. They don't seem to obey the conventions of Shakespearean romantic love, and that makes their relationship a bit too realistic for comfort. I can't say you'll never meet a Romeo and Juliet couple. You might. I never have. But I've met plenty of Antonys and Cleopatras (and sometimes the accompanying Octavias), and there's not much romantic about them. * The connection's probably not worth exploring, but Shakespeare's Roman relationships look a lot like modern military ones. Like, your officer corps is a lot of Brutuses and Antonys, each one married to a standard-issue Tamora/Portia/Octavia. The Cleopatra side piece and Volumnia mother are common options. ** I think. But boy howdy, do they. Sometimes it's in the name of self-harm (Portia, Lucrece). Other times, it's old-fashioned threats and murder (Tamora, Cleopatra). There are times I want to mess with the chronology of the plays just to make the most of an in-joke: Lavinia stabs Demetrius and Chiron and she doesn't even have any hands. After twenty years of togas, bitches, and knives, that's like some kind of weird punchline. *** A lease will do it.
|
|
#
?
May 18, 2016 19:10
|
|
|
I love that this thread's gone on long enough as a document to path a relationship's arc from budding romance to wilting footnote.
|
|
#
?
May 18, 2016 19:21
|
|
|
And all of it has been insightful and informative. EDIT: going back over old posts, I came across this from 2009 Brainworm 7 years ago posted:Well, I think the bits that I said about Gen Ed. earlier are probably close to party line for my school -- others might have tweaks here and there, but I don't think anyone would be in downright opposition. Did this redesign happen in the end? If it did, what were outcomes? And what are the new gripes? Nothingtoseehere fucked around with this message at 09:08 on May 22, 2016 |
|
#
?
May 22, 2016 08:11
|
|
|
I'm going to give a presentation based on my M.A thesis draft in a few days. Is there a way to tacitly encourage the audience to ask the sort of questions / raise the sort of issues the people evaluating the final thesis paper might?
|
|
#
?
May 22, 2016 12:44
|
|
|
Brainworm posted:This is a good question, and I've been thinking about it for a couple days. I don't have a whole answer, but I do have a few partial ones. To be fair, I think this is pretty much how the Romans wrote about women, too 
|
|
#
?
May 23, 2016 04:37
|
|
|
nothing to seehere posted:And all of it has been insightful and informative. Your timing's spooky. We just approved the new General Education sequence for rollout in the Fall. It took almost exactly seven years. The process ended up looking about like I'd imagined, but was colored by a lot of other changes: enrollment problems, deficits, a new strategic plan, faculty reallocation, and student protests. Basically -- basically -- redesigning General Education is complicated because some departments see it as a way to boost enrollment. Nobody taking Religion classes? Add an Ethics requirement. Nobody taking History? Add a bunch of Diversity requirements. In that sense, the system we started with was a political compromise that ended in a massive tangle of requirements. Cut one, and the whichever department it fed would hassle it until you gave up. Along the way, I ended up in charge of the first-year seminars. I spread them out across the college -- where previously they'd lived in English and in Social Sciences -- so we could move positions out of those departments and into places with more demand (we don't hire adjuncts, so you get a situation where one tenure-track instructor teaches a 16 student first-year seminar and a total of like five others). That meant taking a couple lines out of my own department. We're all still friends. The rest of General Education got punted to a committee. Their plan -- which picked up where my old one left off -- was pretty ambitious. Instead of General Education being a checklist of courses, it was a set of thematically-linked experiences: highly-focused FY seminars, an internship or research experience, and an off-campus program. These were built around common threads, so a student could take a couple FY seminars on non-proliferation, intern at Sandia, and then do advanced research in non-proliferation with a professor, think tank, or policy institute. Those experiences didn't have to be thematically sequenced -- a student could start off with a seminar on Shakespeare and then intern with a policy institute instead of a theater company -- but those threads would be an intentional part of the curriculum, with emphasis on where our students are most interested: health, entrepreneurship, and education. One point of that courseless Gen Ed. program was to keep departments from using it as a proxy negotiation about staffing. That didn't happen. Like most campuses, we had BLM protests last year, and one of the protest mandates was Gen. Ed. requirements in domestic diversity. So that went back into Gen Ed. and opened the floodgates. So now we have a Diversity requirement, a Language requirement, plus a requirement of two courses in each division (Humanities, Fine Arts, Social Sciences, and Natural Sciences). If that sounds like a lot, it is. But it's not nearly as horrible as what we had before. It's unsatisfying, though. First, the idea that students are going to become better at recognizing and working across differences because they've taken a course in African-American History is fundamentally misguided. It's a way of paying lip service to the value of diversity without anyone learning how to work with it or why it matters. That's not the protesters' fault, exactly -- their endgame is faculty diversity, so they want to bump enrollments in areas most likely to see nonwhite hires -- but I think they chose a bad way to do it. Second, we had a chance to do something bold and different. The original system would have gotten us press, if not donors, and had us more intentionally work things like faculty-student research and internships into the curriculum. So right now, we have two lines of faculty griping. One of them's mine -- that is, we missed an opportunity. Another is that the new requirements choose a different set of enrollment winners and losers, so we have complaints from faculty who'll have to design courses that students actually want to take.
|
|
#
?
May 24, 2016 16:34
|
|
|
I have two questions, one very specifically English related, the other more general. Firstly - how does satire work? How can we judge satire if we're unable to define what is/isn't satirical? I constantly come up against this when discussing works that may or may not be satire. Candide, Gulliver's Travels, Starship Troopers, Judge Dredd, Sokal, - these are all self-evidently absurd in my mind, and the satire is therefore unmistakable. But with works where this isn't so clear (I genuinely struggle with Sucker Punch) I don't see how we can actually argue if it's satire or not. From my understanding, satire needs some element of absurdity to make fun of whatever dreadful attitudes (facism, Liebnizian optimism) the work is portraying - but it's entirely a value judgement as to whether a work is suitably absurd, or if it's genuinely supporting the attitudes it shows. How do we draw the line between parodying something that's dumb as poo poo, or actually being dumb as poo poo? Secondly, and more generally - how do you teach your students to go about organising their thoughts in order to form opinions or construct an argument? What always stuns me about your writing is how you manage such precision and clarity of thought, which speaks to the depths of your understanding of the subject.. My university education was Biochem with a sudden swerve into philosophy of science, and even now I still feel like I never properly managed to transition my thinking style. I find I have two modes of thinking; the exegesis - where I'll take a piece of writing or an argument and break down every little piece of it that I can to look at the different ways bits of can be interpreted, which naturally is incredibly long winded, technical writing; and the slapdash - once I slip into more casual or brief language I feel like I struggle to get my point across, even though the explanation I've given *feels* like it should be very complete and understandable, which would suggest that I haven't actually understood the thing half so well as I think I have.
|
|
#
?
Jun 5, 2016 13:31
|
|
|
Strom Cuzewon posted:Firstly - how does satire work? How can we judge satire if we're unable to define what is/isn't satirical? I constantly come up against this when discussing works that may or may not be satire. Candide, Gulliver's Travels, Starship Troopers, Judge Dredd, Sokal, - these are all self-evidently absurd in my mind, and the satire is therefore unmistakable. But with works where this isn't so clear (I genuinely struggle with Sucker Punch) I don't see how we can actually argue if it's satire or not. From my understanding, satire needs some element of absurdity to make fun of whatever dreadful attitudes (facism, Liebnizian optimism) the work is portraying - but it's entirely a value judgement as to whether a work is suitably absurd, or if it's genuinely supporting the attitudes it shows. How do we draw the line between parodying something that's dumb as poo poo, or actually being dumb as poo poo? I think I want to answer this with a sidestep: Genre definitions are really labels for relationships between reader and text. Suppose I read Candide and I don't know a thing about 18th century history or the cliches in which Candide traffics. Instead, I see it as a straightforward story about a young man's movement from innocence to experience. I think it's perfectly reasonable to say that Candide is a Bildungsroman to me but a satire to more informed readers. It's also a satire to those who read it as a satire. Maybe they start with the assumption that every action in Candide pillories some political, social, or philosophical situation because their professor has told them that's what happens, or maybe the footnotes to their edition point them in that direction. Or maybe they pick up on something else -- some other set of cues -- that suggest the idea to them. It's sort of like watching The Simpsons with girlfriend. She gets that the show has parodic elements even when she doesn't know the original media they parody, so she'll as "what's that from?" about every minute because she's prepared to.* That's what I mean by reading the book as a satire. Some texts are satires (or comedies or tragedies) if you read them that way, the same way a river's a sewer if you poo poo in it enough. So I think the question probably shouldn't be "is X text a satire/comedy/tragedy/etc.?" It's more like "on what terms, or under what conditions, can a reader relate to this text as a satire/comedy/tragedy?" That accounts for some of the complexities that come with satire, anyway -- some Modest Proposal readers might see it as a case for cannibalism while others see it as a satire indicting English imperial politics. A condition that determines which might be, say, how privy a given reader is to Anglo-Scottish relations during Swift's lifetime quote:Secondly, and more generally - how do you teach your students to go about organising their thoughts in order to form opinions or construct an argument? What always stuns me about your writing is how you manage such precision and clarity of thought, which speaks to the depths of your understanding of the subject.. My university education was Biochem with a sudden swerve into philosophy of science, and even now I still feel like I never properly managed to transition my thinking style. I find I have two modes of thinking; the exegesis - where I'll take a piece of writing or an argument and break down every little piece of it that I can to look at the different ways bits of can be interpreted, which naturally is incredibly long winded, technical writing; and the slapdash - once I slip into more casual or brief language I feel like I struggle to get my point across, even though the explanation I've given *feels* like it should be very complete and understandable, which would suggest that I haven't actually understood the thing half so well as I think I have. I think clarity is a matter of being precise about the right things and of managing the relative importance of ideas. I don't know that those tools are as well suited to developing an opinion as they are to the act of communication, but I do know that a good deal of both my thinking and writing involves figuring out which differences matter and which ones round down to zero. I come back to that lesson with students over and over again: figure out what doesn't matter and don't write about it. That's harder than you'd think and the way most people do it is by writing a lot of what doesn't matter. Then they cut, cut, cut. Source enough lumber for a McMansion and you'll have enough straight two-by-fours for a dog house, I guess. That may not be helpful, so here's an example: if you ask someone to describe the layout of their house, they'll almost always start with "well, you walk in the front door and..." Everything else will be a mess. You'll walk in the front door and take a left to the hallway that leads to the bedrooms and then teleport back tot he center of the house to take a right into the living room that leads into the kitchen and the garage. How you approach the description of the house depends on what matters. If it's the floor plan, that's one thing. If it's how many people can live there without sharing a bedroom, that's another. Those descriptions won't share many common details, even though they're descriptions of the same house: 1) The house is shaped like a Snicker's bar and divided into thirds. The northern third is bedrooms, the middle third is a living room, and the southern third's divided between the kitchen and the garage. 2) The house has four bedrooms clustered around a hallway that connects to a full bathroom, which two people can use simultaneously. I don't know if that gets to an answer for you, so I'll frame it differently. There are two ways to get clarity and precision. The first, which I prefer, is selectivity. The second is jargon. So when I find myself using jargon, I step back from my writing and figure out what to cut. * Which is why we don't watch TV together.
|
|
#
?
Jun 8, 2016 04:24
|
|
|
Hi. First, I love the thread. I read through it the first time during April and I've gone back to certain .txts I've made from it repeatedly, as well as keeping the big .txt collection of all the posts that 3Romeo made. (By the way, thanks for that 3Romeo!) As dozens of goons have said by now, you write finely, precisely, and humourously. The stuff in this thread may be the best non-fiction writing I've encountered on the internet. I've no English lit training but basically everything you wrote about reading feels really right and intuitive to me, even though I've never read anyone expressing those ideas before. Maybe that's damning with faint praise. Your views on other topics seem very insightful too. Reading your posts definitely enthused me about the idea of frequently reading fiction again and made Shakespeare (and other classics and that old stuff) actually look like fun romps rather than vitamin supplements for the soul. Like many others, I went off the stuff when they tried to teach it to me. I've added a bunch of books you're mentioned to my to-read list. I do look forward to whatever book or books you assemble out of all of the things you've responded to. Anyway, I've got many questions that I'd like to ask and it's taken me a bit of time to narrow them down to just a few for now. Here's an apologia before I start: I'm a product of the English state school and university education system. My range of subjects narrowed out English lit very early and my degrees contained none of that core curriculum/general education stuff that American college students seem to hate so intensely.* Most of what I've read for since my teens has been non-fiction, some history, more philosophy, and a lot of internet.** So if I ask questions which are remedial, come from a weird angle, or fundamentally misbegotten, that'll be why. 1) When you're talking about texts, what do you mean exactly? What counts as a text? What are the necessary and sufficient conditions of something being a 'text' or something that can be 'read' as opposed to just understood? Is it just ideas that are written down? I ask because I often see people writing about their 'reading' of something which doesn't consist solely of words, like a film, a song, or a computer game. Is anything with a plot a 'text' or is it just anything that is written? Is it both? (I'm going to ignore that I've asked for that definition for the next two questions as I don't have a word to replace 'text' in the meantime.) 2) How does one actually prove that a text is related to another, when one doesn't cite the other? A lot of the stuff you wrote on the idea of the meanings of texts was very new to me. Reading texts in relation to other texts to get their meaning***, 'The Canon' (which is something I only ever see discussed online and almost always by Americans) as a conversation between texts, and canons happening just as the result of what one person (or a a few dozen) think is good/important/want to talk about and decide to teach. All that stuff, very interesting. But how do you know when a text is related to another? I know that I can tell that Kant's Critique relates to Hume's work or that Berkeley's Principles relate to Locke's Essay because Kant and Berkeley explicitly mentioned that they were responding to Hume and Locke. The same goes for any other writing that cites its sources. But how do you prove that in literature? You've said before that a good start is if the story mentions another text or author but what if there isn't an explicit mention like that? For example, what if I think there's a relationship between Dracula and Sheckley's Status Civilisation? Or say (considering you've talked about Always Sunny before) that I think the Mac/Dennis flat pairing is a re-write of the Mark/Jez flat pairing in Peep Show? How does someone prove that? 3) What is 'depth'? I see it thrown around a lot as a term with a positive connotation and a vague denotation. Texts, stories, or characters with depth are supposed to be inherently better than ones which are said to be shallow or two dimensional. But why is something being deep better than it being shallow or simple? How can I tell if I'm seeing depth in something that's actually there and isn't just being made up or put into the piece by myself? EDIT: Just cutting this whole bit. I feel I need to read more before approaching this kind of area. Leaving it up like this has nagged at me too much. I'm going to cut this off here as I'm starting to ramble and I've asked too much already. I appreciate your thoughts.  * To elaborate, my education specialised/narrowed such that I've not studied English language or literature as a pupil since I was 15. Nor have I really done any sustained creative writing. I tried to keep a diary once and found that hard enough. I'm in my early 20s, and in April I was accepted into a fully funded PhD in Philosophy staring in October. Wise or not, I've taken a route straight through education without stopping. ** Not to say that I've not experienced fiction and storytelling through other mediums (film, TV, music, some plays, comics, computer games). I just haven't done much actual sitting down with a story and reading it. And there's always the awkward place of heavily serialised accounts of things, like Jon Ronson's work. Last fiction books I read and absolutely loved were Lem's Cyberiad (translated into English) and Toole's Confederacy. Could you recommend anything similar? *** Maybe that shouldn't have been such a surprise. I know that philosophical texts relate to each other, I know that 90s sitcoms like The Simpsons or Seinfeld were reactions to previous US sitcoms, and it's pretty obvious how computer games shamelessly borrow visuals, mechanics, and settings from each other and blockbuster Hollywood action films. Although, I suppose even then I wouldn't be trying to understand their meanings from the fact that I know what influenced them. Stabbatical fucked around with this message at 15:40 on Jun 22, 2016 |
|
#
?
Jun 10, 2016 02:06
|
|
|
When you can, Brainworm, I'd love your reactions and thoughts to Wallace Stevens in general -- I'm finding him fantastic reading lately. If you'd rather a specific direction, I'm really into The Auroras of Autumn and Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird right now.
|
|
#
?
Jun 10, 2016 02:21
|
|
|
Brainworm posted:So I think the question probably shouldn't be "is X text a satire/comedy/tragedy/etc.?" It's more like "on what terms, or under what conditions, can a reader relate to this text as a satire/comedy/tragedy?" That accounts for some of the complexities that come with satire, anyway -- some Modest Proposal readers might see it as a case for cannibalism while others see it as a satire indicting English imperial politics. A condition that determines which might be, say, how privy a given reader is to Anglo-Scottish relations during Swift's lifetime. Just gonna drop in this case in point here:
|
|
#
?
Jun 10, 2016 05:15
|
|
|
I had to find a new thesis supervisor - the old one took a leave of absence due to the state of her health. I got this question point blank: "Supposing I don't care about Sam Shepard, nor about the Gothic influence in his works, why should I care about reading this?" I've never quite seen that particular question posed like that - "what are you trying to say", sure, "why is what you're saying of interest to the potential reader" obviously, but not quite the above. Not entirely sure what answer I could possibly give. What could be the intent of the question and what should I be looking for in my work by way of an answer?
|
|
#
?
Jun 16, 2016 10:56
|
|
|
My totally uninformed opinion is that you don't need a good answer to that question as an academic. Nobody would ask that about a thesis on the migration habits of fruit bats or whatever.
|
|
#
?
Jun 16, 2016 15:33
|
|
|
uninverted posted:My totally uninformed opinion is that you don't need a good answer to that question as an academic. Nobody would ask that about a thesis on the migration habits of fruit bats or whatever. Untrue, you could definitely get the question in exactly this form in a job interview where one interviewer has been assigned to play Bad Cop or is just naturally an rear end in a top hat. Also a lot of your future grant applications are going to require you to make a wider case for your specific subject in order to show why they should fund you and not some other broader topic.
|
|
#
?
Jun 21, 2016 00:28
|
|
|
Stabbatical posted:Hi. First, I love the thread. I read through it the first time during April and I've gone back to certain .txts I've made from it repeatedly, as well as keeping the big .txt collection of all the posts that 3Romeo made. (By the way, thanks for that 3Romeo!) As dozens of goons have said by now, you write finely, precisely, and humourously. The stuff in this thread may be the best non-fiction writing I've encountered on the internet. I've no English lit training but basically everything you wrote about reading feels really right and intuitive to me, even though I've never read anyone expressing those ideas before. Maybe that's damning with faint praise. Your views on other topics seem very insightful too. Thanks for this, and sorry it's taken me so long to reply. I just got married again, we have a kid on the way, this year's Shakespeare Festival just ended, and I've spent what writing time I've made on book rewrites. quote:1) When you're talking about texts, what do you mean exactly? Like a lot of other things, I think "text" is something like a relational term rather than an out-and-out definition. That is, if I call something a "text" I'm not describing what it inherently is as much as I'm describing how I've chosen to relate to it. And the tenor of that textual relationship is interpretive. If I call something a text, I'm really claiming that (a) I can identify and interpret its components and that (b) their situation in whatever context means something non-obvious. So, for instance, a mechanical engineer could have a textual relationship to a set of bearings. For him or her, they'd be full of readable elements that say something about their purpose, materials, methods of manufacture and (probably) the intent of their designers. IT doesn;t necessarily matter whether every bit of the engineer's conjectures are factually correct; only that he or she employs some system of interpretation. quote:2) How does one actually prove that a text is related to another, when one doesn't cite the other? I think standards of evidence come into play here. In some fields, proof means something like "objective reproducibility," or that any claim needs to be (at least hypothetically) falsifiable. In others -- and I think most literary study qualifies -- there are also simple persuasive claims that are accountable to evidence but ultimately rest on whether some nature or quantity of evidence adds up to something persuasive. Sometimes that evidence is in the text and is really straightforward, like one text mentions another. Sometimes it's a little more oblique, like the way Shakespeare's villain Aaron (from Titus) gives a speech that basically one-ups every deed in a similar speech made by a similar villain in an earlier play (Marlowe's Barabas from Jew of Malta; the example is Harold Bloom's). And sometimes the evidence is contextual; Marlowe/Shakespeare influence is only plausible because both writers lived in London in the late 16th c., and (more than that) both worked in theater and probably therefore knew (or knew of) one another. Where relationships are less particular or specific, people come up with words like zeitgeist to account for relationships between texts that seem unlikely to be coincidental but can't be neatly traced from one point to another. Anyway. I think the question is really less "how does one prove that...?" and more "how does one convince someone that...?" and that leads us down a different road. Convincing people is about perceptive and interesting uses of evidence, rather than arranging it according to a set of more particular rules. If we go back to the engineer and their bearings: imagine the engineer finds a set of bearings washed up on the beach, examines them carefully, and concludes that they've come from a wrecked submarine. That's going to involve some amount of proof(like demonstrating that the bearings are in fact used in submarines), and some amount of persuasion (that a submarine wreck is more plausible than the bearings being washed off a cargo ship, falling out of a plane, or being left on the beach by a bearing-hoarding drifter). So, in other words, you don't prove that Mac/Dennis is a rewrite of Mark/Jez. You prove that both relationships have some set of qualities, and that those qualities have intelligible relationships to one another. Based on those and other things, you can persuade people that one relationship rewriting the other is a plausible way of accounting for what you can prove. quote:3) What is 'depth'? I think "depth" is really a synonym for "perceptiveness," and that -- for the most part -- this means perceptiveness related to human behavior. I think the test for this is something like "convincing, compelling complexity." That is, a "deep" text will feature characters acting in psychologically complicated ways that both (a) square with our understandings of what people do and (b) create engaging psychological conflicts. So let me try three different versions of the same basic passage. Hamlet: Revenge posted:Hamlet aligned the crosshairs to a point just over Fortinbras' head and exhaled. The crosshairs sank. There. Right there. Fortinbras was in his sights. Hamlet would breathe again, squeeze the trigger, and it would all be over. Ophelia squinted at him. There's no attempt at depth there because there's no complexity. I suppose you could postulate that Hamlet is lying to himself here and shooting Fortinbras for other reasons, but that's meeting the text more than halfway. Here's another version: Hamlet: Revenge posted:Hamlet aligned the crosshairs to a point just over Fortinbras' head and exhaled. The crosshairs sank. There. Right there. Fortinbras was in his sights. Hamlet would breathe again, squeeze the trigger, and it would all be over. Ophelia squinted at him. That's more complicated: Hamlet lies to Ophelia, and we get some hints about why. But I don't think it's convincing or compelling. For one, if Hamlet was molested by Fortinbras (or something like that) he doesn't seem affected by it. He'd act the same way if he were shooting Fortinbras over a slice of pizza. For another, there's nothing more at stake in this passage than in the last one. It's a straightforward revenge plot and Hamlet will either kill Fortinbras or be forced to stop trying. In other words, this has backstory and complexity but little depth. And here's a third: Hamlet: Revenge posted:Hamlet aligned the crosshairs to a point just over Fortinbras' head and exhaled. The crosshairs sank. There. Right there. Fortinbras was in his sights. Hamlet would breathe again, squeeze the trigger, and it would all be over. Ophelia squinted at him. This is where you can tell I'm not a writer, but you get the point. There's complexity in the sense that Hamlet doesn't fully understand his own motives. That's convincing -- at least to anyone who's consciously done something without knowing why, and it's compelling because it opens up a set of narrative possibilities where there's something at stake. Will Hamlet discover his own motives? When he does, will he regret killing Fortinbras (or Polonius)? You get the idea. I think that's depth in a nutshell. It's complex, convincing character behavior that creates compelling situations -- ones where there are enough definite questions to keep things interesting for a reader, but not so many that it's impossible to tell what's happening.
|
|
#
?
Jul 1, 2016 15:49
|
|
|
ceaselessfuture posted:When you can, Brainworm, I'd love your reactions and thoughts to Wallace Stevens in general -- I'm finding him fantastic reading lately. I don't have a great handle on Stevens, or at least not the kind that I could use to line him up against a tradition of earlier poets. Really, the most important thing that everybody overlooks about him is his age. If you take a look at a year in high modernism -- say, 1915 -- T.S. Eliot has just published "Prufrock." He's 26. E.E. Cummings is a student at Harvard and won't publish anything anybody cares about for another ten years. Edna St. Vincent Millay hasn't even gotten her fingers wet at Vassar. W.H. Auden is eight. Ezra Pound, Eliot's miglior fabbro and the old man of high modernist poetry, is working on Hugh Welwyn Mauberly (he best thing he'll ever write) and the Cantos (which he'll never finish). James Joyce has just published Dubliners. Meanwhile, Wallace Stevens is a a middle-aged executive who dabbles in poetry. It will be nearly ten years before he publishes his first collection, though, and forty until he wins the Pulitzer. He's like five years older than Ezra Pound, but his career as a poet doesn't even start until Ezra Pound's well into his pro-Hitler/Dancing with the Stars/inglorious sunset phase. So that's two things about Stevens. One, he's late to the Modernist Poetry party. Two, he's old enough to be everybody's dad. Both of those things show up in his work. First, Stevens isn't formally experimental the way that other modernists are. By the time he publishes the stuff most people read, the conventions of modernist poetry have been pretty firmly established. Second, he's not rattled by change. His poems are full of things that are probably changing but might not be, or that appear to be the same thing even though they really aren't but then again might be after all. I make that sound like he's obsessed with the idea, and he might be. But if he's obsessed with it he also don't subject it to a lot of lost-in-his-own-head intellectual wankery the way you'd expect a younger poet to. I don't know if Stevens ever wrote anything about World War One -- I don't think he did -- but that's probably emblematic. When I first learned about the Modernist experience in college, what I learned about was really Pound's experience, right? The unprecedented violence of mechanized warfare led to a sense of disconnection from a society that was damaged in some deep way. And that's sort of a college-student way of looking at your first global catastrophe.* I mean, you get global catastrophes every once in a while, and they're not because of capitalism or imperialism or systematic injustice or God's wrath or whatever. They're mostly because people are a lot better at accidentally creating problems than intentionally solving them. That's just a condition of human experience that plays out over and over again, whether you're talking about a person or a family or a country, and while it puts on a different outfit every morning it never really goes away. That's sort of a middle-aged executive way of looking at the world, right? And I think it -- and the perspective on change that comes with it -- is as central to Stevens's poetry as the whole "the world is broken in a way it's never been broken before" thing is to Pound, Eliot, and the sort of textbook treatment of high Modernism. So that's what I've got on Stevens, I think. He's really great if you like the formal innovations of Modernism but you don't like adolescent angst or brokebrain mysticism. * "Everything's different and bad now and (a) it's all because of __________ or (b) I'm disowning it" is like 80% of my Facebook feed.
|
|
#
?
Jul 29, 2016 16:14
|
|
|
Great post, thanks It actually got me thinking about another question: how relevant (to criticism or to a general understanding of a writer's work) is knowing their personal life? I always figured what is on the page is most important, but your post about Stevens made me reconsider a bit.
|
|
#
?
Aug 1, 2016 07:05
|
|
|
Why is there an insomnia plague in One Hundred Years of Solitude?
|
|
#
?
Aug 1, 2016 17:18
|
|
|
uninverted posted:My totally uninformed opinion is that you don't need a good answer to that question as an academic. Nobody would ask that about a thesis on the migration habits of fruit bats or whatever. I'll second elentar here. Granting agencies will ask this, and the more money you want the better an answer they'll expect. A lot of academics take "how is your research useful?" as some kind of affront. That's especially true of high-minded graduate students and career narcissists who don't understand that the whole point of a job is doing things that help other people. Sometimes you'll get bad answers, too. They amount to "all research is inherently valuable" or "my research makes an indefinite contribution to the ways that people think about [topic]." A better answer, and probably a more honest one, it that most academic research matters to an audience that numbers in the dozens or maybe the hundreds. Anything addressed to specialists in any field is going to be similarly narrow, and our society is massively successful because specialists collaborate, directly and indirectly, on incremental improvements to enterprises of dizzying complexity that gradually yield massive social benefits. Studying the migration patterns of fruit bats lets, I don't know, fruit farmers know what to plant where so that they can either avoid having bats eat their fruit or intentionally allow the bats to spread the fruit seeds in a particular direction. And if you drop the price of apples by one cent per ton that way you end up saving millions of dollars -- not for any one person, but across hundreds of millions of members of an apple-buying population, across the apple-selling industry, or wherever. But an academic ought to have a definite idea of how his or her research fits into that broader context. That's not about being answerable to the capitalist machine. It's just giving a poo poo, either about other people or about whether your work is actually valuable. So a good answer to the "how's your research useful?" question involves making a definite contribution to a specific and useful project. For instance, my research on 16th century food scarcity gives particular meanings to several words and phrases used in the opening scene of Coriolanus, and in the process opens up some moments that have given directors fits and produced lackluster stagings. My work makes it easier to stage a compelling version of Coriolanus. That's a small contribution to a small market, right? But I know what it is, which means that I can call theaters that are putting on Coriolanus, find out which ones are interested in my dramaturging for them, and then demonstrate a specific demand that I can use to get grant money. It won't be much -- enough to pay my time for a Skype call or travel -- but at the end of the day the granting agency, the theater, and I can all point to a way we made something slightly better. That's what I think people are looking for when they ask the "value" question. Some people frame it as value to an academic community -- like "why would another scholar read this?" -- and that's fine. The real question is something like "who would pay you, specifically, to write about this, specifically, because it's valuable to them?" That's important because it shapes everything you do with your research after you publish it. And having a plan for what to do with your research after it gets published is one thing that separates people who accumulate credentials from the ones who build actual careers.
|
|
#
?
Aug 4, 2016 17:47
|
|
|
Brainworm posted:I'll second elentar here. Granting agencies will ask this, and the more money you want the better an answer they'll expect. So what if you're work is about something inherently problematic due to the horrid structure of academic publishing? I.E. I want to focus on how the labor movement and social movements can work together, but what's the point if my research isn't available to labor organizers?
|
|
#
?
Aug 6, 2016 04:05
|
|
|
What Mortley would've posted:I did a search before I asked this question, and it seems Brainworm hasn't typed the name "Bukowski" in the 7 years he's been writing in this thread, which is probably telling enough. I was going to post what's above, then I remembered that my last post here was also about an author I didn't like (Kipling). Then I challenged myself to instead post about some literary fiction that I liked, and I drew a huge blank. (I remembered after-the-fact a narrative poem that I like: https://books.google.com/books?id=HHxIAwAAQBAJ&pg=PT443) Then I realized that most of what I read is social scientific non-fiction (I just finished "How to Do Things with Words" by Austin, which is philosophy and linguistics, not actually how-to), how-to (e.g. books on writing comedy, which I perform as a hobby), or self-help ("F*ck Feelings" by the Bennets). I read some memoirs (Tig Notaro's "I'm Just a Person") and I'm always embarrassed to admit that I've read and re-read all of the Harry Potter books in Spanish, which is also an enjoyable self-improvement task for me, since I value maintaining the level of Spanish I have now. I remember a quote from Marc Maron (also read his memoir "Attempting Normal") saying that everything he reads is self-help now, at least to a degree, and I relate to that a lot. I am in recovery from alcoholism - I don't drink at all now - in part because of my willingness to read a lot of fairly dry books and try to fix myself. But I like books and I value literature. Still, is it OK to not like literary fiction anymore? I feel like I don't get enough out of it. On some level, I'd rather read someone talking about the importance or take-home message that a novel (or better yet, an author) transmits than read it myself and try to figure it out. Got any tricks to kick-start that desire in myself? Edit: VV thanks
Mortley fucked around with this message at 06:00 on Aug 10, 2016 |
|
#
?
Aug 8, 2016 22:50
|
|
|
Mortley posted:But I like books and I value literature. Still, is it OK to not like literary fiction anymore? I feel like I don't get enough out of it. On some level, I'd rather read someone talking about the importance or take-home message that a novel (or better yet, an author) transmits than read it myself and try to figure it out. Got any tricks to kick-start that desire in myself? I'm not the OP, but as someone who did a degree in philosophy and literature and was really burnt out on reading literary fiction afterwards, I feel moderately qualified to answer. The first thing to understand is that the distinction between 'literary' fiction and other types of fiction is largely created by what academics like to read. This is something that has frustrated 'genre' authors who try to incorporate philosophical themes like Iain M Banks, Philip K Dick, Kurt Vonnegut, etc. for decades. In many cases, work which was originally considered popular fiction (Dickens) or even just erotic rubbish (De Sade) has been rediscovered by later generations of academics and re-evaluated as literary or of cultural significance. Then it gets taught in universities and makes it into the literary canon somehow; De Sade's re-evaluation is almost entirely down to the work of Deleuze and Foucault on reading him as an analyst of the origins of pleasure. One consequence of this is that reading any fiction with a critical eye will give you something more than what you get from reading it uncritically. This is exactly the same process people who re-evaluate 'popular' fiction will be going through. The only difference between different works of fiction is that some might be richer to evaluate for philosophical themes than others, and for fairly obvious reasons fiction which has been self-consciously crafted to be literary will tend to structure themes, symbolism, etc in a more organised way: James Joyce said about Ulysses that "I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of ensuring one's immortality." Read whatever you like in fiction terms; so long as you read and think about it critically, you can get a surprising amount out of almost any work. One great example of this is something like The Iron Dream, which parodies the tropes of pulp fantasy literature and points out their similarities to Third Reich ideology while itself being a pulp fantasy novel. But it's just as valid to do a literary reading of say, Roald Dahl short stories as it is to stick to traditional fare. Once I understood that, I felt free to go beyond 'literary' fare and just read whatever I liked. If you want to read 'literary fiction' nonetheless, then understanding that these works present a particular view of the world which led to them being recognised as literary by a particular set of educated people (academics / journalists / artists), often only at a particular time, is important. A great example of this is The Stranger by Camus and The Meursault Investigation by Daoud. The former was recognised as literary and a 'great work' for freedom by Western academics in a particular era; but the project of the latter, written much later, is to explore the ways that The Stranger is a form of colonial novel. Likewise, dozens of novels have been considered literary sensations in their time, but have largely been passed over by history because they serve only to reinforce a particular form of thought typical to that given time. The ones which tend to survive are those which challenge the status quo or introduce some interesting new technique, and therefore become themselves a driver of literary or broader social change. Les Miserables is a great novel because it represents an attempt at a 19th-century epic, just as the epic form is becoming untenable, but also because it represents a particular plea for socialism based on deep moral sentiment which still has appeal to the present day. So in summary; don't get too hung up on the 'literary' label. Read what you like, criticism is what's interesting, not any particular canon of work. If your interest is in developing yourself, the critical process is definitely valuable to that end. Purple Prince fucked around with this message at 13:04 on Aug 9, 2016 |
|
#
?
Aug 9, 2016 12:54
|
|
|
Purple Prince posted:I'm not the OP, but as someone who did a degree in philosophy and literature and was really burnt out on reading literary fiction afterwards, I feel moderately qualified to answer. If you don't mind, could I ask you (and Brainworm too) a question then? I'm thinking of Hume's 'Of the Standard of Taste' here, where he says claiming that Ogilby and Milton are equally 'elegant' and have equal 'genius' is like saying a mole-hill is as tall as a mountain with the idea being that it's meant to be clear to one of Hume's contemporary educated readers that Milton is a much greater writer than Ogilby. (I've read neither so I've no idea how true that is. However, I know that some claim that Ogilby's reputation had been unfairly tarnished by the commercial interests of his contemporaries which would make Hume's example supremely ironic if true.) He proposes that people can tell which works are superior by an appeal to common sense, as in you just know when something is really good. By analysing those works, the critic can figure out what the standard of taste is, and through that practice become a more refined critic and have a clearer vision of the tastefulness/quality/goodness/etc. of an artwork. He then goes on to say that great works of art are what are agreed to be great by refined critics and their agreement sets the standard of taste. But he also acknowledges that individual critics will have variations in their own tastes and preferences based on a whole set of factors, like their backgrounds or just natural inclinations. (Or at least, this is how I remember the essay going when I read it. I've probably butchered it in the re-telling.) I remember it seeming to be a circular as hell justification, because it seems either good critics set the terms of good art or good art sets the terms of good critics and Hume seems to predetermine that only someone with wealth, education and leisure will ever possess good taste. The circularity does seem, unintentionally, like an accurate observation about how actual criticism works in practice (outside of contemporary academia, at least). And this appears to me to be how the 'literary' status of works is established. That is, the right people (refined or at least those that appear to be) say that x work is literary and a consensus is established. And, it's not as if a number of authors and other writers don't have something to gain from being labelled with that. I'm remembering here some extracts from Schiller's letters that I read in Martha Woodmansee's 'The Author, Art, and the Market' where he makes both claim that his works are artistically superior to the common-man's reading habits and also complains that virtually none of the reading public are reading his stuff which is somehow a failing of the reading public's. (Or he complained until he got a comfortable academic position and his financial needs were met, anyway. Honestly, I got serious Ignatius J. Reilly vibes from those extracts, they're hilarious.) Woodmansee goes on to argue (unless I've misunderstood her) that creation of the idea of authorship and literary/artistic merit (or the idea of Capital-A Art, if you get my meaning) are grounded in these kinds of material concerns. Ensuring your work a place in the market as being the product for the discriminating reader.So, my question is are all defences of one text as being 'better' or of a 'higher quality' than another just an expression of the background of the person making that claim? Are there any good arguments for that which aren't marred by the either the economic or social self-interests of the persons making them? Stabbatical fucked around with this message at 00:28 on Aug 10, 2016 |
|
#
?
Aug 10, 2016 00:19
|
|
|
Stabbatical posted:So, my question is are all defences of one text as being 'better' or of a 'higher quality' than another just an expression of the background of the person making that claim? Are there any good arguments for that which aren't marred by the either the economic or social self-interests of the persons making them? Often I'm pretty stumped by these sorts of statements as well. I don't think they're necessarily unjustified, only that they rely on more background knowledge than I have. I can imagine that if a particular critic spends most of his public life arguing that "quality" means rigorously metrical, allusive, and traditional, and furthermore that Milton in particular is the "most wonderfully sublime poet in any language," then he would feel comfortable referring to him offhand as "higher quality" than Ogilby in an essay that isn't concerned directly with either poet. Hume assumes that his readers are familiar enough with his position to pick up on the irony. For example, if Mike Stolaska said "Interstellar is the best science fiction movie since The Phantom Menace," then I would realize that he is actually insulting Interstellar—not because I myself dislike Interstellar, but because I know that Stolaska founded his career on mocking the Star Wars prequels. Hume is definitely NOT appealing to any critical consensus on Milton, since at that time none existed. Remember, Milton in the 1700s is still a pretty controversial figure because of his republicanism. So no, it's not a circular justification, it just requires that to understand it you read either (A) a lot more Hume than this one essay or (B) the helpful footnotes that tell you what he means.
|
|
#
?
Aug 10, 2016 01:18
|
|
|
at the date posted:Often I'm pretty stumped by these sorts of statements as well. I don't think they're necessarily unjustified, only that they rely on more background knowledge than I have. I can imagine that if a particular critic spends most of his public life arguing that "quality" means rigorously metrical, allusive, and traditional, and furthermore that Milton in particular is the "most wonderfully sublime poet in any language," then he would feel comfortable referring to him offhand as "higher quality" than Ogilby in an essay that isn't concerned directly with either poet. Hume assumes that his readers are familiar enough with his position to pick up on the irony. For example, if Mike Stolaska said "Interstellar is the best science fiction movie since The Phantom Menace," then I would realize that he is actually insulting Interstellar—not because I myself dislike Interstellar, but because I know that Stolaska founded his career on mocking the Star Wars prequels. Hume is definitely NOT appealing to any critical consensus on Milton, since at that time none existed. Remember, Milton in the 1700s is still a pretty controversial figure because of his republicanism. My copy doesn't have a footnote to explain Milton and Ogilby's critical standing at the time. Maybe that's a key oversight for the contemporary reader. In that essay Hume refers to the difference in kind between matters of fact and pronouncements of sentiment. I understood the term 'matters of fact' as being used in the same way as in Hume's Essay Concerning Human Understanding - that is that matters of fact have a truth value while pronouncements of sentiment do not. Hume does make reference to judges with more "refined" tastes responding to the “universal” appeal of superior art. But the claim that x art-work is just obviously better (or more appropriately for this thread more 'literary') than another is one that many people, not just "refined" critics make. So I suppose I'm more trying to ask if there have been arguments for that sort of claim that aren't either biased towards the social group of the author making them or if such arguments are even possible. (Kant gave it a stab in Critique of the Power of Judgement but I don't think it addresses my concern because he says that judgements of the beautiful and the sublime are subjective universal judgements - that is they're subjective to me but I think everyone ought to agree with my judgement. The backing of this ought a is supposed to come from reference to a sensus communis, by which he means the community of taste, communal sense of taste, or common faculty of taste. But, flattening it all out here, that kind of argument easily leads us back to relativism once we start asking if such a thing actually exists.) Although I guess you might be saying that I need to be way more familiar with Hume's own aesthetic criticisms of particular works of art, like I am with Mike Stolaska's. All I can say is I do respect Mike's taste and judgement in films, so maybe it is just a matter of getting familiar with the views of people you generally agree with.
|
|
#
?
Aug 10, 2016 11:28
|
|
|
Couple years back I combined all Brainworm's replies into a notepad file but it was a real hack job. Last little while I had some slow days at work so I remade the document into something much more Kindle-friendly. It's updated to this page. http://www.mediafire.com/download/j98dt0dww0a56jd/brainworm.docx
|
|
#
?
Aug 16, 2016 01:11
|
|
|
Why the crazy hype for Shakespeare? Sure he was a good playwright but was he really so good that there hasn't been a better one since the last 600 years? Or is there just a mad cult of personality around him that we would continue teaching Shakespeare regardless if better, if less well known works get produced?
|
|
#
?
Aug 16, 2016 05:21
|
|
|
BattleMoose posted:Why the crazy hype for Shakespeare? Brainworm I'm sure can give a much more thorough and well-worded answer, but one quick answer to this: Totally apart from objective issues of quality, Shakespeare is historically a foundational figure in the history of English. Basically anyone writing in the English language since his day read has read him. Because of that, problems, themes, vocabulary, images, etc. from his texts appear again and again in future texts. Studying him is therefore pretty much critical to understanding the future development of English-language literature. Even when writers are explicitly trying to resist the English-language canon -- in, say, some post-colonial literature -- it becomes relevant through its absence, as something being resisted. Basically, we're always gonna have to read him to understand the English-language canon at this point because even other writers we might find "better" or "more interesting" probably read him, too. See also: classical literature, the Bible, Goethe, etc. Even those strictly opposed to the idea of a canon are going to appreciate these types of texts as a common language that future texts work with (or against). k stone fucked around with this message at 08:56 on Aug 16, 2016 |
|
#
?
Aug 16, 2016 08:54
|
|
|
Stabbatical posted:So, my question is are all defences of one text as being 'better' or of a 'higher quality' than another just an expression of the background of the person making that claim? Are there any good arguments for that which aren't marred by the either the economic or social self-interests of the persons making them? I'd say no. From my experience in literary studies, which admittedly reflects my background in internationally-oriented, left-wing UK universities, most academics aren't interested in establishing the 'quality' of a text so much as situating it in a particular context and studying how it relates to its context. A popular angle of attack seems to be reinterpreting 'classic' work such as the 19th-century Romantic canon (Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth, etc) through the use of, say, modern feminist theory to look at how notions of masculinity were constructed in the early 19th century. Or doing something like arguing that the Romantic movement never existed and the traditional lines of connection are invalid for reasons A, B, and C. Being in the UK, the academics who defend judgements of quality seem to fall into one of two camps: High Tories and aestheticians. In the former case, they're (explicitly) interested in defending traditional elite culture against the encroachment of the 'masses', and so resist any effort to democratise literary studies. The analyses of quality they provide serve a political goal. In the latter case, they're interested in legitimising their theories by holding that they match up to some sort of commonly-agreed notion of quality; the problem is that, being academics, the consensus used tends to be elite. Lest we forget, Edmund Burke, founder of Conservativism, was an aesthetician. BattleMoose posted:Why the crazy hype for Shakespeare? Shakespeare falls into the category of influential playwrights who innovated on the conventions of drama. Among other things he invented dozens of new words in English, possibly invented the tragicomedy in Romeo and Juliet, and definitely built the first specially-designed playhouse. As a playwright he's also one of the first English dramatists to introduce detailed psychological struggle in his work; prior to Shakespeare English plays commonly focused on stock characters, which Shakespeare self-consciously uses, parodies, and subverts in works like The Merchant of Venice, where the Jew character is humanised rather than demonised, or Othello, where the racism of the time is explored and used as a plot device. In critical theory we often consider Shakespeare's work to be an early sign of the transition from a pre-Modern to a Modern mode of thought; in the former, people are marked out by position or role (Jew, Moor, Fool, King) and given characteristics based on those, while in the latter people become individuals with specific personalities and motivations. Shakespeare's drama thus marks the beginning of the modern idea of the self-contained subject. Someone who's an expert in Shakespeare could say more; early modern drama is pretty far from my specialty (critical theory and contemporary literature). Purple Prince fucked around with this message at 19:13 on Aug 16, 2016 |
|
#
?
Aug 16, 2016 12:42
|
|
|
With all of the intelligent treatment of cultural canonization in this thread, I'd be interested to hear folks' take on Chuck Klosterman's latest book.
|
|
#
?
Aug 18, 2016 05:20
|
|
|
Speaking of Shylock, I've heard it claimed that the portrayal wasn't originally meant to be positive, but rather a sort of base, materialistic, animal-like being who points to his flesh instead of his soul. Is there any base to this?
|
|
#
?
Aug 18, 2016 05:44
|
|
|
Oh, and what's your hot take on the 2016 Trump zeitgeist? 
|
|
#
?
Sep 22, 2016 01:10
|
|
|
Twerkteam Pizza posted:So what if you're work is about something inherently problematic due to the horrid structure of academic publishing? That's a really good question. I don't want to sound flip, but my first answer is make it available. Most of the journals I work with get rights of first publication and don't give a hairy poo poo what you do with your piece afterward. You can publish it open access, turn it into a book chapter, or whatever else. I don't know if making research available rises to the level of what you want to accomplish socially, since making something available in an age of cheap information is about the same as tossing it into a bonfire. You need to make it discoverable, too, and that's harder to do when your audience doesn't have access to journals or is unaccustomed to using them. What happens next is up to you and depends on the details of what you're doing but, but, my next move, after publishing my research, would be to get on the phone with a labor or movement organizer whose situation seems in sync with your research, and let them know what you've got. That's an elevator speech pitch for academic research, and it's hard to do, but my usual bottom line is that if I can't describe the takeaway from my research in about thirty seconds, it doesn't have a takeaway. But if you can say, "I just ran a study that says you've got untapped support in X community, do you want more details?" I think you've got a good shot of making it work.
|
|
#
?
Sep 29, 2016 16:00
|
|
|
Mortley posted:[...] I am in recovery from alcoholism - I don't drink at all now - in part because of my willingness to read a lot of fairly dry books and try to fix myself. First, congratulations on recovery. Second, it's always OK not to like something. As long as you don't turn your preferences into prejudices I think you and the rest of the world will get along fine. I mean, there are lots of books I don't like that I probably should. The only Delillo book I can stand is White Noise, for instance (but it's really good). Also, I think Invisible Man is funny and Ellison himself doesn't get enough credit as a satirist. I could go on. But the great mystery of reading, if there is such a thing, is that every writer you ever read is writing to you, and your relationship with their writing either works or it doesn't. It's like dating. You can have bad relationships with good people and good relationships with bad people, and the reasons why are wrapped up in a lot of fiddly details that you can sometimes make sense of individually but together form some inscrutable Voltron of nonsense. So if a book speaks to you, great. If not, that's fine. I'll add this, if it helps: most of the self-styled literary fiction I've read is horrible. It's bad just as surely as fan fiction is bad, and in ways that are just as predictable (i.e. it caters to the tastes of an insular and inherently obnoxious subculture). That doesn't mean it's all bad, but I wouldn't trust an academic's taste in fiction any more than I'd trust a stripper's taste in wedding rings.
|
|
#
?
Sep 29, 2016 16:39
|
|
|
Stabbatical posted:If you don't mind, could I ask you (and Brainworm too) a question then? If the standard is that general, yeah. Quality and superiority -- if they mean anything at all -- are multidimensional, and at least some of their dimensions are subjective. That doesn't mean you can't have widespread agreement on inherently subjective criteria. In fact you'd expect it, since agreement on deeply subjective or hopelessly arbitrary points are part of what makes a community a community. So of course you can appeal to common sense inside a community, and of course the rationalizations of that common sense are going to be saturated with recognized and unrecognized interests. At the same time, those interests (or hopelessly subjective and arbitrary standards) don't make the fact that communities value some books above others any less real. There's no magical non-community-owned hilltop you can sit on to hash out whether, say, John Milton is better than Mercedes Lackey, but that doesn't (and shouldn't?) stop Tumblr from drumming you out of their circle for praising something written by a dead white guy. But you can work with non-subjective criteria. That tells you something, even if your choice of criteria is ultimately just as arbitrary and interested. I haven't counted, but I'm willing to bet that more writers have referenced or adapted Paradise Lost than Wing Commander: Freedom Flight, and I'm equally willing to bet that a higher percentage of readers rank Paradise Lost than Freedom Flight as a "life-changing experience." That would tell us something no matter what community we're in, although what it would tell us (like "Paradise Lost is more influential than Freedom Flight" or "people get brainwashed into overvaluing the works of dead white men") is probably culturally overdetermined. Really, what people are up to when they use terms like "better" is cultural, not critical. It's jockeying for position or manipulating people. Point is, I think the measure of a book's "quality" in a community is necessarily something past common sense agreement: it's what coin the community chooses to back the affirmation of the book's value. Suppose I'm really good at speaking a community's language about how it thinks a text is really great. What happens next? Some communities will give me money to do that. Some will give me secret prestige points. There might be a cult someplace that'll give me a child bride and first dibs on bomb shelters. If there's any standard, it's not what people say they agree on; it's also how a community rewards you for the ritual performance of saying the right thing is good for the right reasons. For example: sad observation tells me that a middle aged professor quoting "Dover Beach" to impressionable grad students will, for some inexplicable reason, get laid by one of them; I'm willing to bet that this practical valuation of "Dover Beach" is out of line with it's avowed, consensus, or common sense value in the same community.
|
|
#
?
Sep 29, 2016 17:28
|
|
|
Purple Prince posted:
I don't want to jump down your throat here, but this stuff isn't right. There's no evidence Shakespeare was a great coiner of new words. He's put down as the first recorded user of a large number of words because he's writing at a time the language was changing, and because his work was well known. The tragicomedy as a concept originates in Greek ideas of form, was named by the Romans, and formalised as a distinct genre by sixteenth century Italians. According to that strict Italian definiton, which is basically a story with tragic themes that ends happily, Romeo and Juliet wouldn't count as one (but Winters Tale, or Measure for Measure for example) would. That's not to say that you cant term Romeo and Juliet as a tragicomedy if you want, but it's hard to see what makes it distinctive from other plays that came before it. Shakespeare didn't build the first specially designed playhouse. He was a minority shareholder in the Globe Theatre, built several decades after the first custom built playhouses. It's certainly true that he was at the vanguard of English drama in the period, because non-religious plays only started to be performed in the 1550s, but Kyd and Marlowe weren't just using stock characters. I'm not sure you could argue that Shylock is obviously a more complex depiction of a Jewish villain than Barabas in the Jew of Malta, for example. He's more sympathetic, and arguably better written, but there's no great chasm between the two modes of depiction. Likewise there's no objective way to say Don Hieronimo is somehow a less "modern" character than Hamlet, even if you think the latter is the product of a better writer.
|
|
#
?
Sep 29, 2016 17:53
|
|
|
BattleMoose posted:Why the crazy hype for Shakespeare? I'd say it this way: Shakespeare:Literature::Plato:Philosophy I don't know if the SATs still do that, but you get the idea. It's not that Shakespeare's better, and it's not that the veneration of Shakespeare is totally baseless. It's that, in hindsight, Shakespeare began a tradition of Anglophone literature that coherently continues into the present day. That kind of claim about the beginning of something is always complicated. There are always blind spots and other contenders. It's like saying Columbus discovered America or Bell invented the telephone: the past is complicated, and telling a coherent story about it -- even (or especially) a long and detailed one -- requires a starting point that's also a workable heuristic through which you can interpret every important thing that happened afterward. Not all starting points are equally suited to that task, although what makes one work better than another I'll never know. I just know that I can talk about Star Wars as a Hamlet adaptation, but I've never found, say, a reimagining of the Second Shephard's Play or the Sejanus His Fall. Even breaking a myth doesn't always unseat it from the beginning of the story. You just start the story in the same place you always did and then refine it with the ways the myth gets broken. You know, "we used to say Columbus discovered America, and that's a great representation of the way that colonial truthmaking operated through the middle of the 20th century."
|
|
#
?
Sep 29, 2016 17:55
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 28, 2024 06:05 |
|
|
What's your take on this article from a Yale professor of English? http://www.chronicle.com/article/On-Refusing-to-Read/237717 There's a good amount of critique about how the existing canon is too narrow, scholars feel compelled teach the long books they've wasted their time reading, and professional advancement perversely incentivizes reading those long canonical books. But the big argument, to me, is that literary scholars need to take up "a distinctly nonscholarly form of reasoning: One must decide, without reading a work, whether it is worth the time to read it or not." This means, for example, that scholars need to convince themselves that Virginia Woolf isn't worth reading without actually reading her works. I guess this does take some wrestling against academic instincts. We do pride ourselves on being open-minded and actively instill in our students some form of "don't diss it till you try it." It's cool if there isn't much radical about the piece; just wondering if you might have thoughts about it on the whole.
|
|
#
?
Sep 29, 2016 19:24
|
|
