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3Romeo posted:Style question I've somehow never come across before (and as a bonus, my grammar nomenclature is about three years rusted, so this might come out like a freshman trying to sound cool but eating poo poo): is it kosher to use a pronoun if the antecedent is inside an em dash clause? Like, You mean the antecedent to her? My grammar terminology is also rusty, but that sentence is using dashes to set off an appositive phrase—they could just as easily be replaced with parentheses or commas depending on how you want the sentence to read. In that use case, they mark the phrase as non-restrictive, which it isn't. If you remove the phrase, the sentence no longer makes any sense: "Cuba Libre is about [a] man named Ben Tyler and his struggle to take back money stolen by her ex-lover." Wallet fucked around with this message at 23:24 on Feb 23, 2018 |
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Feb 23, 2018 23:21
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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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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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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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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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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: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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Brainworm posted:(1) (the bullshit thesis) happens. I've seen it. There are fields and situations where it's common -- like "apply this theory to the reading" scholarship. But, like (2) (the irreducible complexity thesis), it's easy to pretend that it accounts for more academic writing than it actually does. There are lovely journals that are totally capable of publishing content-free articles, but that's not the majority. And few topics are so complex that they can't be clearly explained to a non-expert. I couldn't agree more with you on these two. 1) I find fairly compelling in some cases, but it doesn't seem sufficient to explain the sheer quantity of bad writing. In the case of 2), while complex subject matter makes expositional clarity harder to achieve, it doesn't make it impossible. 5), 6), and 7) also have some nugget of truth in them but, much like 1) and 2), they strike me as excellent explanations for why particular pieces of academic writing are so terrible and very poor explanations for the sheer scope of the problem. Brainworm posted:3) Academic writing following a template, much as a recipe does in a cookbook. This template includes irritating conventions: endless hedging, useless metadiscourse, and opaque nominalizations. (Steven Pinker writes about this one). Brainworm posted:4) There are few practical or professional incentives for writing clearly or stylishly. I'm familiar with the explanations you suggest (the Pinker article happens to make an appearance in my lit review), but 4) is the one that I find the most pernicious, and the one that I particularly did research into and performed a study to better understand. I imagine that it is more satisfying to imagine that perverse incentives are driving one's fellow scholars to write like animals than it is to imagine that they are all just narcissistic†, myopic shits; Academics seem to largely take it for granted that perverse incentives exist, but I think they're wrong. There's a long chain of research into the relationship between the readability and the reception (as measured in a variety of ways, but often using citation counts) of academic writing that originates in the early '80s, with a guy named Armstrong. Armstrong advanced the theory that “[a]n unintelligible communication from a legitimate source,” or an apparently legitimate source, “in the recipient’s area of expertise will increase the recipient’s rating of the author’s competence.” There have been a whole bunch of studies that have followed up on Armstrong's work (some published as recently as 2016), almost all of which have found that less readable prose is better received by academics or that readability makes no difference in either direction. Academics seem to have internalized those findings, but all of those studies share a glaring methodological flaw‡; the few studies that don't share that flaw have all found that, as all sane people would imagine, people (academics being a subset of people despite evidence to the contrary) receive prose that is easier to read and comprehend more favorably. That is, there is evidence to suggest that there are in fact professional incentives for writing clearly (if not stylishly), but academics seem to have been convinced that this isn't the case, or even that the incentives operate in the opposite direction. *I don't have a link for this one, but anyone with access to academic databases can probably find it: Bauerly, R. J., Johnson, D. T., & Singh, M. (2005). Readability and the impact of marketing. Journal of Marketing, 69, 19-20. †Unfortunately, there is evidence to suggest that being a narcissistic poo poo does lead to greater success within academia, at least according to a study from 2015 which found that (alongside a variety of other interesting findings) authors who self-cite with greater regularity are, in turn, cited more regularly by other scholars. ‡This relates to the way that they are all measuring readability. I'm happy to explain further if there is any interest, but it's a bit esoteric. Wallet fucked around with this message at 13:04 on May 23, 2018 |
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May 23, 2018 12:53
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a_good_username posted:I'm very curious about this. It seems like the overwhelming pressure when you have a strict word count and need to communicate your findings efficiently to reviewers is to use jargon and sacrifice clarity for brevity. It seems like when I try to include an example to make things more concrete or clear it will usually get cut. (e: My examples could just be terrible, in fairness to my editors) Not all jargon is created equal. Jargon, or technical vocabulary, or whatever you want to call it, is useful because it enables concision, but a lot of it is lossy (or gets used so indiscriminately that it becomes so): at some point everyone started calling anything that has the potential to be interpreted as socially regressive from a modern perspective "problematic," which takes what could be an interesting argument about, for example, Shylock*, and turns it into a vague indication that the speaker thinks that there is something potentially objectionable somewhere within The Merchant of Venice. If I say that a poem is written in anapestic tetrameter, someone unfamiliar with poetry might have to look up what exactly that means, but no information has been lost. As Pinker has written, and Brainworm gestured towards, the difficulty of imagining what it would be like to not know what we know makes dealing with readability complicated. Your editors are probably academics who work in your field or one proximate to it, and so when they see an example that clarifies something they are already familiar with, it just looks like needless words to be omitted, because the example isn't there for them. The way that the vast majority of the studies I was talking about measure readability ignores all of those complexities, and the many other complexities, that go into determining how readable a particular person will find a particular piece of writing. Because dealing with human study participants is a pain in the rear end, authors have made use of a variety of readability formulas—most popularly Flesch reading ease and Flesch-Kincaid grade level, which happen to be the two formulas implemented in Microsoft Word—that invariably attempt to assess readability based on two or three very simple metrics, such as the average number of words per sentence in a text, the average number of syllables per word, or the percentage of words that are polysyllabic. Those metrics happen to be particularly bad at assessing the readability of academic texts. If various forms of the word "autotroph" make twenty appearances on a single page of a sixth-grade science textbook, It's probably safe to assume that by the fourth instance, the additional occurrences aren't making it any harder to read. It also (unsurprisingly) turns out that people who are familiar with the subject matter of a piece of writing, if not the particular content, tend to find it substantially easier to read—the degree to which academics specialize in particular fields of knowledge creates an ever increasing gap between what they believe to be readable and what everyone else does. *As I recall, Brainworm doesn't view that particular argument with much favor, but it was the first thing that came to mind.
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May 26, 2018 23:44
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Brainworm posted:[*] It seems academically possible that playing video games could help people better make sense of their experiences. This whole debate is a thing I think is generally pretty silly, given how broadly people define "art," but I do sort of wonder about this piece of it in particular. I'm 100% with you on the storytelling in games being infantile for the most part (or, I guess, adolescent), but is that the right place to look? Novels and films have the capacity to cultivate wisdom through storytelling (and there's no particular reason games can't accomplish that as well), but visual art, particularly abstract visual art, seems to at least theoretically have the same capacity even when it isn't engaging in comprehensible storytelling; do you think it's possible for games to accomplish the same thing through player interaction and the rules governing player interaction in the absence of direct storytelling?
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Jul 6, 2018 13:12
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Brainworm posted:Some people are going to be in an intellectual or emotional place where they can watch Netflix's Voltron reboot and have the same insight. Either way, that insight only means anything if it helps you understand individual, complex instances of what people do or think or feel. Like, maybe it helps you get why your aging mother cries when she can't find her car keys. This may seem like a wild non-sequitur, but I recall you mentioning not having any taste for Ulysses, and this particular discussion made me wonder if you have any particular feelings about Finnegans Wake?
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Jul 6, 2018 22:55
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Brainworm posted:I wish I had something good for you. What I remember about Finnegan's Wake is that Campbell's Skeleton Key to Finnegan's Wake has overdetermined a lot of Wake criticism. Long story short, Key finds typically Campbellian ways to impose a kind of root-myth order and structure on Wake, and I've yet to see a reading of Wake that convinced me this search for some higher-order consistency wasn't a fool's errand. Wake criticism does have a tendency to get channeled into one of a few fairly simplistic schemes for unifying it, which seems misguided. Wake strikes me as a moderately insane response to Ulysses, at least if you want to read Ulysses as being about literature as much as it's about anything else, which I'm inclined to: Stephen's search for some resolution to his angst regarding the capacity of literature to transcend the lifeless fixity of history—causality begins to look like fate when you examine it post-hoc—through the sort of referential response that often shapes academic conceptions of the literary is matched up with that of Bloom, who searches for answers to his own angst in sifting through his emotional experience and accumulated wisdom. Then there's some bizarre business where the two of them become spiritually consubstantial, or whatever the gently caress becoming "mirrors of the reciprocal flesh" refers to (U 17.1184). Joyce spends twenty or so years stewing in syphilis, and then follows up Ulysses with a work that forces the reader to redefine it in the reading; as weird as it is, Wake seems a creditable attempt at answering Stephen's concerns about literary works being 'resolved' and little more than history as well as Bloom's regarding legacy and self perpetuation. That is all to say, attempting to solve Finnegans Wake seems a futile fight against its nature, at least to me. Anyway, sorry for the faff, what you were saying about the things people pull from texts having "their fingerprints all over [them]" is what brought it to mind. Wallet fucked around with this message at 01:38 on Jul 16, 2018 |
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Jul 16, 2018 01:31
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Brainworm posted:Let's not call it successful. Really, this was a successful thread for about five years and has been on something like life support since then. Which is fine. Lord knows there are goons who don't look up from the keyboard when their kids are born, but I'm not that guy. Kind of ironic in a post talking about capping faculty to forty hours a week that you consider the thread no longer successful because now you post brief essays monthly instead of bi-weekly or whatever. It's still a successful thread, just one with a more adult (encumbered) production schedule.
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Jun 24, 2019 00:41
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Brainworm posted:I think the only other thing I can add is that I was for revoking tenure in all three of these cases. I'm the only person I know who was, although there are a few people in the two-out-of-thee club. Based on what I know of the Oberlin case, I'd be for it there, too. No surprise. I'm a hangin' judge. You wrote the person's name in number 3. I don't know if that's their real name or not. I'm kind of interested in which two out of three and, if you can say, if tenure was actually revoked in these cases. I can imagine a number of professors I know doing something stupid of a similar character to number two. Protesting by barricading people into their offices is a particularly idiotic way to stage a protest whether there are any combat veterans involved or not, but I can see an argument for lenience. The first professor shouldn't remain in a position with power over others. I found myself wondering for a moment if that was disqualifying before remembering that students exist. The third just seems like fraud.
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Jun 24, 2019 14:18
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Brainworm posted:Definitely not. Somehow my brain broke there for a minute and missed that there were fake names in the other two as well.
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Jun 24, 2019 22:27
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Brainworm posted:OK. I compiled an ePub here. Obviously this is pre-publication so, you know, don't share it. Palgrave could lose tens of dollars. I don't have any meaningful criticism to contribute but it saddens me that readers under 30 will not appreciate the Ross Perot burn on page 17.
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Apr 11, 2020 16:03
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I've finished reading most of the book now because it seemed like a better thing to do than work these last couple of afternoons: It's better in content than most Chapter six is a little out of joint with what comes before it for me. It feels like the taxonomy you've been developing is supposed to reach towards some kind of climax that clarifies why using these elements in this particular way makes a collection of words into a story, but instead we get a sort of perfunctory unpacking of genre. While I'm entirely sympathetic to the message—there is almost nothing* worse than listening to academics argue about genre categorizations as if the abstraction was the point—it seems misplaced. Could just be me, though. Also you've got what looks like a sentence trapped between two versions in editing on page 73: "Imagine that I want to a Tropical Island card for my Magic: The Gathering deck." * Listening to them argue about what constitutes literature may be worse.
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Apr 14, 2020 22:43
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Brainworm posted:Awesome. It's good when a reader can pinpoint the exact moment in the manuscript when you had a baby. If the clearance readers bounce this MS back to me, it'll be on Chapter 6, which was originally supposed to be a short reference and got bumped up to a standalone chapter. Sorry  . If you do end up messing with it I think you could sort it out without spilling much ink by cutting the coverage of genre (or turning it back into a short reference) and reframing the introduction to the application section as more of a "and here's how it works when you put it all together" which would also make the applications feel more integral and less like bonus content. Probably fine as it is, though. I'm not sure I've ever seen a course actually get to the end of a textbook.
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Apr 15, 2020 23:59
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Brainworm posted:Right. That's (obviously) 1983 and (not obviously) comic shop. Yeesh. I saw the coffee shop thing and thought "that's a little weird" but it didn't even occur to me that it was an error. Those are going to be fun to find!
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Apr 17, 2020 20:31
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Brainworm posted:When you say "The contract ends soon," you're implying that this is by prior arrangement. I agree with all of this I think (with all of the non-existent value my agreement offers). To me the future continuous has additional implications because the contract being in a state of ending is not the same as the contract having ended. The contract might be ending for an entire month while things are adjusted to account for its actual end date in the same sense that "he will be dying soon" means something different from "he will be dead soon".
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Nov 5, 2020 18:59
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Brainworm posted:The only other thing I have to add is that teaching literature really suffers when you don't know, or can't reasonably value, what students are supposed to learn. One of the things that really blew my mind taking literature courses in college was that the same preoccupations that high school English teachers have with cataloguing the features of literature instead of actually analysing how they work and what they accomplish persists into higher education. There were a few delightful exceptions, but even at a university with a solid English department I feel confident that three quarters of the professors would feed you some nonsense about "the eternal affirmation of the spirit of man in literature" if you asked them why it's worth studying. Wallet fucked around with this message at 13:59 on Feb 8, 2021 |
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Feb 8, 2021 03:27
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Eugene V. Dubstep posted:This is basically right... Sort of. There's a lot going on in Ulysses, including some engagement with the thing we're talking about. Stephen is terrified that he might be a sellout, that writing just to entertain is failing to live up to the potential of literature—Bloom daydreams about being a sellout while he's on the shitter and then wipes his rear end with the newspaper he's daydreaming about submitting to. Eugene V. Dubstep posted:Literature professors are positioned well to guide students to an understanding of it that they would never achieve without a much broader and more involved independent reading of the whole canon before Joyce, not to mention Irish history. Some of them are. Some of them just want to provide a list of the animals symbolically associated with different characters in Ulysses as if that somehow gives it deeper meaning.
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Feb 8, 2021 14:34
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Brainworm posted:EDIT: I still can't see well enough to read, so I'ma start a Dad Books thread. I think I have a different kind of Dad than you do. Five or six years ago I found a thin Teddy Bear brown jacketless hardcover copy of Willard and His Bowling Trophies trawling through a shelf in a rarely used guest room at 2 AM. It was a surreal thirty minutes. I stole it after I finished and now it's on a bookshelf in my hallway.
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Mar 5, 2021 22:01
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Brainworm posted:My dad spent the '70s selling insurance and was about as counterculture as Bob Haldeman. Most of his reading is straight out of the airport bookstore. I have never heard of Willard but as soon as I can see again I'm reading the gently caress out of it. It sounds like a post-hippie social-novel sex comedy like Engel's Bear. I believe it's intended as a parody of self-serious tragic literature but that does sound like the right vibe. I'm not sure you'll get the same thing out of it that I did going into it blind but I'd be interested to hear what you make of it if/when you do read it. Wallet fucked around with this message at 00:48 on Mar 6, 2021 |
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Mar 6, 2021 00:34
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Brainworm posted:Audiobook narrators don’t get enough credit. The best of them are genius. I wish I could enjoy audio books. My brain can't focus on two things at once so I can't listen in the background if I want to not constantly be lost, and they take so loving long compared to reading that I can't stand to listen to them without doing something else. Maybe I just need to pick books I don't care about missing half of.
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Mar 7, 2021 20:21
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Brainworm posted:character webs This is maybe a stupid question, but what do you mean by this? Google seems to think it's a chart you assign school children to demonstrate reading comprehension.
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Aug 2, 2021 21:44
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Silver2195 posted:Brainworm wrote a whole book about all of this called something like Shakespeare's Storytelling. I actually read (a draft of) the book a while ago whenever it was that he was finishing it but I don't remember what he was calling character webs  .
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Aug 2, 2021 23:46
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Brainworm posted:Whether you buy the whole "Shakespeare was the first modern storyteller" argument, I think we can all agree that Shakespeare's reputation rests on his influence and not on the fact that nobody's ever written a better RomCom than Much Ado. I think a significant part of Shakespeare's broad reputation comes from his work having penetrated into English pedagogy in a way that no other playwright has. His isn't the only influence laundered by enough generations to have become part of the fabric of storytelling as we understand it, but it might be the only one virtually everyone in English speaking countries has direct experience with. Whoever his influences were no one has ever heard of them. Brainworm posted:The book is here, or on Amazon. If anybody is tight I'll happily send them a copy. Based on my post history it was just over a year ago—maybe I'll give it another read. Before I had a job I used to remember things.
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Aug 3, 2021 14:54
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Brainworm posted:I forget whether I sent you a copy of the book, but I'm happy to. The pre-production manuscripts I sent around were pretty messy. And if this was a year ago, I think they went trough one more major set of revisions. No worries, I'm happy to buy a copy. I think you were waiting on a last round of edits when I read it and it was in pretty decent shape. The fact that there isn't a more or less universal terminology for (now) fundamental components of storytelling like abstract relationships between characters being used to define them in the context of a shared work or that thing what you do when you put scenes in a particular order to express something beyond their literal content is probably my least favorite part of literary scholarship; it's like everyone has Sapir-Whorfed themselves into talking about symbolism until the end of time.
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Aug 3, 2021 16:19
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NikkolasKing posted:I'm not even sure exactly what I'm asking apart from expressing exasperation at being a layman trying to find answers when there are so many answers. Maybe an expert such as yourself would know where exactly to look for just some basic understanding. Taxonomy is rarely well fixed in my experience. Even for things that seem simple and clear you can go down a rabbit hole; there's at least three different things that people call alliteration, there's probably at least twenty distinct structures people call some form of rhyme. Context counts—how people interpret the same words in an academic context are different from a casual one. If you dig into that academic context and expect it to provide you with some kind of clarity about the terms you should use in casual conversation you will be disappointed (and probably confused) because the academic discourse is usually arguing about taxonomy instead of trying to clarify it. Calling someone a Byronic Hero is just a shorthand to say that they share some characteristics with Byron/his characters. Unless you're talking to people who are into Byron, I don't really know what the utility of that is even if you can find some equivalent that feels like it applies. Wallet fucked around with this message at 16:30 on Aug 26, 2022 |
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Aug 26, 2022 16:27
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Brainworm posted:But satire is all about connections that an audience makes between the thing they're seeing or reading and the larger world in which they live [...] Not to stick my nose in, but I feel like it's slightly more than that. Something can be funny unintentionally, but as you point out re: Starship Troopers, I'm not sure it can be satire unintentionally. If you recontextualize most satire as direct expression it's aversive; in the other direction you can create found satire out of a work that wasn't intended to be one (The F Plus is the first example that comes to mind). To me satire doesn't just come down to the work and how it interacts with the audience's broader experience, it's also inherently tied to their relationship to the satire's source or presenter.
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Oct 12, 2022 14:40
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Brainworm posted:1) Being comfortable with uncertainty. It's OK to read something and not get it. That true at the level of any individual sentence, chapter, paragraph, or entire text. In a lot of novels, artsy and not, confusion is part of the process a writer means to produce. it's a way of raising questions that you (the writer) promise to answer. My favorite texts are all like this, and this is what makes it work for me. I just accept that there are things I don't understand and file them away for later. The questions can be their own plot, where a more standard plot isn't obvious (or comprehensible).
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Nov 3, 2022 15:08
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Brainworm posted:It's like people who think in words. As in, I'm told that some people's actual thoughts take the form of an inner monologue. Like an episode of Scrubs I guess. If it's any comfort I find the alternative incomprehensible. What else would I think in?
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Nov 8, 2022 02:29
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