How do you make a Swiss roll? (Push him down a hill.)
October 16, 2006 10:03 AM Subscribe
"Over the last few weeks I have been introducing you to eight schools of criticism – Biographical, New Critical, Marxist, Structural, Jungian, Psychoanalytical, Feminist, and Post-Colonial – giving a little history behind each, and showing how they can be used to critique the video game Katamari Damacy for the PlayStation 2." [Part One | Part Two | Part Three]
including a good deal of serious critical articles in the vein of those suggested.
links plz?
posted by juv3nal at 10:17 AM on October 16, 2006
links plz?
posted by juv3nal at 10:17 AM on October 16, 2006
What, no deconstruction? If there was ever a thing that cried out for deconstruction, it's a giant pile of garbage that everything sticks to.
posted by justkevin at 10:36 AM on October 16, 2006
posted by justkevin at 10:36 AM on October 16, 2006
1. Marxist analysis is not reductionist; while Marxists look at things in terms of (economic) base and (non-economic) superstructure, we don't reduce things to these categories. (That is, not everything is about class; it is simply the primary category in Marxism. Modern Marxists talk quite a lot about oppressed nationalities and imperialism.)
2. Claiming to give a Marxist analysis of a game about accumulating stuff while avoiding the inevitable concept of accumulation, which Marx wrote on at some length, shows that whoever taught the author about Marxist analysis was not very good.
posted by graymouser at 10:40 AM on October 16, 2006
2. Claiming to give a Marxist analysis of a game about accumulating stuff while avoiding the inevitable concept of accumulation, which Marx wrote on at some length, shows that whoever taught the author about Marxist analysis was not very good.
posted by graymouser at 10:40 AM on October 16, 2006
It's kind of cute - but it just reads like a 16 year old writing a school essay and trying to sound like a grown up. I certainly agree with the writer that the state of video game criticism is absolutely dire - to the point that in 1997 I organised a conference of game designers, critics, philosophers and artists to try to talk about the problem. It's really, really hard because there's no vocabulary to describe interaction, or to think about why something "feels good". While it's undoubtedly valid to try to critique games from the established schools of criticism, the tools that these approaches bring are much more suited to talking about the plot, visuals or premise of a game - in other words all the things that a game shares with classical media - and not the interaction that makes it a game. We found the some ideas from performance theory started to get closer to being able to describe the nature of gameplay - but it's just a start. Video games really, really need decent criticism, but there's better stuff around than this.
posted by silence at 10:44 AM on October 16, 2006
posted by silence at 10:44 AM on October 16, 2006
It is pitch black in the Guggenheim Museum. You are likely to be eaten by Clement Greenberg
posted by matteo at 10:51 AM on October 16, 2006 [10 favorites]
posted by matteo at 10:51 AM on October 16, 2006 [10 favorites]
These critiques are a great idea, poorly executed. But I'm heartened at least that the tenor of the comments here on Metafilter isn't as stupid as it was on Slashdot (where most people's response was "critiquing video games?! what's the point d00d!!!" as if no one had ever obtained a deeper understanding or greater appreciation of art through reading a good critique)
posted by jcruelty at 11:01 AM on October 16, 2006
posted by jcruelty at 11:01 AM on October 16, 2006
When I was doing my BA in literature the current "hot theory" of criticism consisted of postulating theories about whether the author was gay or not. Inevitably if the author was found to be (plausibly) gay his work was pretty much uncriticizeable in negative terms, but works by straight authors were unfailingly combed over for any trace of "heterosexism", and evidence would be found, even when it made absolutely no sense. Otherwise sensible students would forget about usage and ascribe twentieth-century meanings to sixteenth-century words in their heroic quest to unearth double-entendres... it was really pathetic.
Not coincidentally I decided that pursuing an MA in that sort of environment was going to be a fucking waste of time. Glad I took that road too... but the main point is that criticism, like, say, religion or the smile on a dog, is nearly completely in the mind of the reviewer.
posted by clevershark at 11:11 AM on October 16, 2006
Not coincidentally I decided that pursuing an MA in that sort of environment was going to be a fucking waste of time. Glad I took that road too... but the main point is that criticism, like, say, religion or the smile on a dog, is nearly completely in the mind of the reviewer.
posted by clevershark at 11:11 AM on October 16, 2006
Jcruelty, that's true, but there's also the other extreme - the one where it becomes passe to deal with something like Chaucer as poetry anymore, because critical trends decree that it should be interpreted through the lens of some vogue politics or pop-sociology. I can see how people who actually produce art, games, or other media would resent being lectured on their art by a career psychologist, feminist, sociologist, historian, what have you. Since many Slashdotters are programmers, I'd bet that this factors somewhere into their thinking.
posted by kid ichorous at 11:22 AM on October 16, 2006
posted by kid ichorous at 11:22 AM on October 16, 2006
Why in the living fuck can't you just fucking "think" about something and then "write" about it? Not a single one of the "eight schools of criticism" listed is anything more than bluster, big words, and pretentiousness disguised as seriousness.
Which is too bad, because Katamari Damacy is an interesting game, and deserves some real thought.
A hint: real thought won't be achieved by imitating the current crop of emptyheaded "literary critics."
posted by koeselitz at 11:48 AM on October 16, 2006
Which is too bad, because Katamari Damacy is an interesting game, and deserves some real thought.
A hint: real thought won't be achieved by imitating the current crop of emptyheaded "literary critics."
posted by koeselitz at 11:48 AM on October 16, 2006
Why in the living fuck can't you just fucking "think" about something and then "write" about it?
Well, you're "thinking" about it using some type of framework for what you're thinking about. Just because you don't know that your framework has a name doesn't mean it doesn't exist or that you're not using it.
Exercises like this critique are exactly that... exercises. Your literature professor makes you do them so that you understand that A.) a "text" can be thought and written about in numerous unique ways B.) you get some practice with the tools and methods each form of criticism requires. It could also be used to show others the same thing.
posted by pokermonk at 12:16 PM on October 16, 2006
Well, you're "thinking" about it using some type of framework for what you're thinking about. Just because you don't know that your framework has a name doesn't mean it doesn't exist or that you're not using it.
Exercises like this critique are exactly that... exercises. Your literature professor makes you do them so that you understand that A.) a "text" can be thought and written about in numerous unique ways B.) you get some practice with the tools and methods each form of criticism requires. It could also be used to show others the same thing.
posted by pokermonk at 12:16 PM on October 16, 2006
That critique seems critique-ish. Not that we know what critique-ish means.
posted by dr_dank at 12:48 PM on October 16, 2006 [2 favorites]
posted by dr_dank at 12:48 PM on October 16, 2006 [2 favorites]
pokermonk: "Well, you're "thinking" about it using some type of framework for what you're thinking about. Just because you don't know that your framework has a name doesn't mean it doesn't exist or that you're not using it."
If it's really thinking, then the only framework is rationality. The pretense that there are different varieties of rationality serves two purposes: (a) to project an impression of great intelligence, which is called pretentiousness, and (b) to protect discussants from the painful possibility of being wrong, which is called cowardice.
This isn't to say that we don't have presuppositions. But we can't just accept them and move on; we have to remain conscious of them, and try to narrow them down, if we want to really be thinking at all, rather than parroting things that we've read. Things like 'Marxist criticism' and 'post-critical criticism' are far too laden with unthought presuppositions to be useful in any way for thinking. That's why most stuff written in those languages generally ends up being a form of parroting. Preconceptions are meant to be eliminated, not celebrated.
posted by koeselitz at 12:52 PM on October 16, 2006
If it's really thinking, then the only framework is rationality. The pretense that there are different varieties of rationality serves two purposes: (a) to project an impression of great intelligence, which is called pretentiousness, and (b) to protect discussants from the painful possibility of being wrong, which is called cowardice.
This isn't to say that we don't have presuppositions. But we can't just accept them and move on; we have to remain conscious of them, and try to narrow them down, if we want to really be thinking at all, rather than parroting things that we've read. Things like 'Marxist criticism' and 'post-critical criticism' are far too laden with unthought presuppositions to be useful in any way for thinking. That's why most stuff written in those languages generally ends up being a form of parroting. Preconceptions are meant to be eliminated, not celebrated.
posted by koeselitz at 12:52 PM on October 16, 2006
By the way, one of the pleasing byproducts of trying to think about things more directly is the gradual disappearance of pretension. Most 'criticism' is the very paragon of pretension.
posted by koeselitz at 12:54 PM on October 16, 2006
posted by koeselitz at 12:54 PM on October 16, 2006
Why in the living fuck can't you just fucking "think" about something and then "write" about it?
Because people who "just fucking think" about things, without thinking about how they think about things, tend to recycle the common wisdom and not actually make any significant insight on the topic at hand. It's pretty much why the "common man" philosophers and critics tend to be a bit banal when you come right down to it.
posted by graymouser at 12:55 PM on October 16, 2006
Because people who "just fucking think" about things, without thinking about how they think about things, tend to recycle the common wisdom and not actually make any significant insight on the topic at hand. It's pretty much why the "common man" philosophers and critics tend to be a bit banal when you come right down to it.
posted by graymouser at 12:55 PM on October 16, 2006
I can see how people who actually produce art, games, or other media would resent being lectured on their art by a career psychologist, feminist, sociologist, historian, what have you.
Of course they do, but not half as much as they would resent being reviewed by the sort of unthinking illiterate juvenile that is resposible for most game criticism ("the explosions were really kool, but the tits weren't as good as in Titty Fighter 3").
posted by silence at 1:03 PM on October 16, 2006
Of course they do, but not half as much as they would resent being reviewed by the sort of unthinking illiterate juvenile that is resposible for most game criticism ("the explosions were really kool, but the tits weren't as good as in Titty Fighter 3").
posted by silence at 1:03 PM on October 16, 2006
on preview:
Things like 'Marxist criticism' and 'post-critical criticism' are far too laden with unthought presuppositions to be useful in any way for thinking. That's why most stuff written in those languages generally ends up being a form of parroting. Preconceptions are meant to be eliminated, not celebrated.
Well, that isn't true. The point is that you have a worldview whether you like it or not, and you can either just go with the prevailing worldview of your time, which is the "just fucking think" position, or you can be explicit to yourself and your audience about what your worldview is. The basic point -- that worldviews other than the current hegemonic ideology are valid -- is a good one, and the pretense of an ideology-free viewpoint is nonsense. If you assume that there is a way of looking at the world that is "objective" and free of ideology, you're just automatically surrendering to whatever the current prevailing ideology is.
posted by graymouser at 1:04 PM on October 16, 2006
Things like 'Marxist criticism' and 'post-critical criticism' are far too laden with unthought presuppositions to be useful in any way for thinking. That's why most stuff written in those languages generally ends up being a form of parroting. Preconceptions are meant to be eliminated, not celebrated.
Well, that isn't true. The point is that you have a worldview whether you like it or not, and you can either just go with the prevailing worldview of your time, which is the "just fucking think" position, or you can be explicit to yourself and your audience about what your worldview is. The basic point -- that worldviews other than the current hegemonic ideology are valid -- is a good one, and the pretense of an ideology-free viewpoint is nonsense. If you assume that there is a way of looking at the world that is "objective" and free of ideology, you're just automatically surrendering to whatever the current prevailing ideology is.
posted by graymouser at 1:04 PM on October 16, 2006
graymouser : "If you assume that there is a way of looking at the world that is 'objective' and free of ideology, you're just automatically surrendering to whatever the current prevailing ideology is."
I think the argument (not one I'm making, but as I read it) is that by "just thinking", you are trying to avoid ideology and coloring of worldview (yes, you'll likely fail), but by assigning yourself to a school of criticism, you are knowingly and willingly taking on ideology and coloring your worldview.
posted by Bugbread at 1:08 PM on October 16, 2006
I think the argument (not one I'm making, but as I read it) is that by "just thinking", you are trying to avoid ideology and coloring of worldview (yes, you'll likely fail), but by assigning yourself to a school of criticism, you are knowingly and willingly taking on ideology and coloring your worldview.
posted by Bugbread at 1:08 PM on October 16, 2006
Of course, I can see the counterargument that "It's impossible, no matter how you try, to remove yourself from ideology and colored worldview, so by picking a school of critique you are at least choosing an alternate to the default, and being upfront about it".
posted by Bugbread at 1:11 PM on October 16, 2006
posted by Bugbread at 1:11 PM on October 16, 2006
bugbread:
Of course, I can see the counterargument that "It's impossible, no matter how you try, to remove yourself from ideology and colored worldview, so by picking a school of critique you are at least choosing an alternate to the default, and being upfront about it".
That is pretty much my position here; and I understand the pro- argument you offer, but I find it without merit. The ideology of the age is like water to a fish, and it permeates peoples' ideas without their thinking about it. Declaring your worldview is, in my view, fundamentally a very important step, because it is when you become critical about ideas and start to have actual insights of your own, rather than just repeating what the common wisdom happens to be. That's why academics, even when I think they're talking out of their asses, tend to say things that shock conventional opinion: because they are looking at things through a nonconventional light. (Of course, the point is not to interpret the world, but to change it.)
posted by graymouser at 1:25 PM on October 16, 2006
Of course, I can see the counterargument that "It's impossible, no matter how you try, to remove yourself from ideology and colored worldview, so by picking a school of critique you are at least choosing an alternate to the default, and being upfront about it".
That is pretty much my position here; and I understand the pro- argument you offer, but I find it without merit. The ideology of the age is like water to a fish, and it permeates peoples' ideas without their thinking about it. Declaring your worldview is, in my view, fundamentally a very important step, because it is when you become critical about ideas and start to have actual insights of your own, rather than just repeating what the common wisdom happens to be. That's why academics, even when I think they're talking out of their asses, tend to say things that shock conventional opinion: because they are looking at things through a nonconventional light. (Of course, the point is not to interpret the world, but to change it.)
posted by graymouser at 1:25 PM on October 16, 2006
graymouser : "Declaring your worldview is, in my view, fundamentally a very important step, because it is when you become critical about ideas and start to have actual insights of your own, rather than just repeating what the common wisdom happens to be."
Out of curiosity, what do you do if your ideology is not the pervasive one, nor one of the defined alternatives, but your interest is not in establishing and popularizing your ideology? Do you just do a quick treatise of it, and put a note in the introduction of articles you write saying "please refer to XYZ for an overview of the assumptions made herein", or do you have to restate them every time?
posted by Bugbread at 1:56 PM on October 16, 2006
Out of curiosity, what do you do if your ideology is not the pervasive one, nor one of the defined alternatives, but your interest is not in establishing and popularizing your ideology? Do you just do a quick treatise of it, and put a note in the introduction of articles you write saying "please refer to XYZ for an overview of the assumptions made herein", or do you have to restate them every time?
posted by Bugbread at 1:56 PM on October 16, 2006
graymouser: "Declaring your worldview is, in my view, fundamentally a very important step, because it is when you become critical about ideas and start to have actual insights of your own, rather than just repeating what the common wisdom happens to be."
First of all, I want to point out that the literary critics are most definitely not doing that. They emphatically do not declare a world-view. They act, rather, as though every world-view were equally true, and assume various positions as if they were trying on clothing. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, though it has nothing to do with rational thought, but for the fact that they usually do it out of a fear of offending some party or another, or out of some percieved duty to give everyone a fair say.
Second, careful thought about a thing means trying to approach the thing itself. It doesn't mean assuming all kinds of interesting things beforehand and seeing what comes out; it means trying to think about the thing itself, and attempting to subtract anything and everything your world-view has added to your perception.
You mispercieve what I'm saying if you think I'm arguing for some sort of "common-man" philosophy. It's isn't necessarily democratic to suggest that literary critics ought to use fewer made-up words. Would that people wrote as simply and clearly as Aquinas or Aristotle today. It seems to me, rather, that taking these things slowly and carefully is the only way to think things correctly. My disgust with pretention stems mostly from the fact that nearly everyone you're liable to meet in academia today, even in philosophy, isn't likely to be in their field because they care about truth, but rather because they care about being known as someone who sounds smart.
posted by koeselitz at 2:02 PM on October 16, 2006
First of all, I want to point out that the literary critics are most definitely not doing that. They emphatically do not declare a world-view. They act, rather, as though every world-view were equally true, and assume various positions as if they were trying on clothing. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, though it has nothing to do with rational thought, but for the fact that they usually do it out of a fear of offending some party or another, or out of some percieved duty to give everyone a fair say.
Second, careful thought about a thing means trying to approach the thing itself. It doesn't mean assuming all kinds of interesting things beforehand and seeing what comes out; it means trying to think about the thing itself, and attempting to subtract anything and everything your world-view has added to your perception.
You mispercieve what I'm saying if you think I'm arguing for some sort of "common-man" philosophy. It's isn't necessarily democratic to suggest that literary critics ought to use fewer made-up words. Would that people wrote as simply and clearly as Aquinas or Aristotle today. It seems to me, rather, that taking these things slowly and carefully is the only way to think things correctly. My disgust with pretention stems mostly from the fact that nearly everyone you're liable to meet in academia today, even in philosophy, isn't likely to be in their field because they care about truth, but rather because they care about being known as someone who sounds smart.
posted by koeselitz at 2:02 PM on October 16, 2006
Out of curiosity, what do you do if your ideology is not the pervasive one, nor one of the defined alternatives, but your interest is not in establishing and popularizing your ideology? Do you just do a quick treatise of it, and put a note in the introduction of articles you write saying "please refer to XYZ for an overview of the assumptions made herein", or do you have to restate them every time?
I think, in an academic setting, that you would wind up citing your more controversial idea sources; for instance, when I read something that is a Marxist critique meant for a general audience (and I read a lot of it), it usually has references to some of the Marxist usual suspects -- Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg, Antonio Gramsci, etc. Usually they tend to present the relevant points of the basic texts by quoting from them, with the assumption that the reader can pursue them further if curious. (For instance, if this thread were an academic discussion, I might cite the Marx/Engels The German Ideology on the role of ideology and Gramsci's Prison Notebooks on his related notion of hegemony.)
posted by graymouser at 2:03 PM on October 16, 2006
I think, in an academic setting, that you would wind up citing your more controversial idea sources; for instance, when I read something that is a Marxist critique meant for a general audience (and I read a lot of it), it usually has references to some of the Marxist usual suspects -- Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg, Antonio Gramsci, etc. Usually they tend to present the relevant points of the basic texts by quoting from them, with the assumption that the reader can pursue them further if curious. (For instance, if this thread were an academic discussion, I might cite the Marx/Engels The German Ideology on the role of ideology and Gramsci's Prison Notebooks on his related notion of hegemony.)
posted by graymouser at 2:03 PM on October 16, 2006
koeselitz, I respectfully disagree with your contention that frames necessarily equal pretension. Of course, there are certainly those whose practice does not seek to transcend preconceptions. Rather, though, these schools of criticism help communicate possible interpretations of texts. Of course they can be argued for and against. Of course some are simplistic.
But, just as 30 eye-witnesses will give 30 distinct accounts of an event, 30 schools of criticism will give 30 interpretations of a text. To analyze a text with no frame of reference except "just thinking about it" is a naive and unfulfillable task. In any way you "just think about" something, you will be referring the object under study to some other object through analogy, metonomy, or some other referrent. As pokermonk pointed out above, these systems of critique generally have names. You can refuse to name them, but they still have names.
I can agree with the message I perceive in your comments; that, too often, criticism is used to display obtuse and obscure "insider" language designed to make the writer look as if s/he knows more than the reader and that the reader must subscribe to that filed of criticism to "get" it. But before I understood post-structuralism I had to go back and read up on structuralism.
Reading V. Propp taught me a lot--and not that I couldn't think before that, but rather that I could express my ideas in a way that helped others more easily draw connections when I wrote or spoke about topics that brought together seemingly disparate fields of artistic endeavor.
Reading Bakhtin is not only enjoyable (for me) but also helped me understand how to express "common" art in terms of resistance to the dominant culture.
The point is, I don't read these to parrot a point of view, but to test their contentions and engage in dialogic thought. To do so without any frame results in, as graymouser indicates, a hodgepodge of random expressions that often reify common tropes that really offer no point of rational discussion.
That brings up another point. You say the only valid standpoint is rationality. That there is a "god" word that is supposed to mean something, but is as vague as any of the schools of thought you flatly reject. Whose rationality? Descartes? Bacon? Rational scientism resulted in theories such as polygenism and monogenism, both "invented" to justify attitudes toward the treatment of the Negro race in antebellum America. Both ultimately found to be false, both "objectively" provable if you don't mind fitting your facts to your hypotheses.
Michel Foucault helped expose weaknesses in rational scientism, but the careful thinker cannot reject that science does provide repeatable and sound solutions to some problems.
Perhaps you and I agree that reliance on only one, or only a couple of, hand-picked theories leads to a narrow view and that your "just thinking about things" really means what some here also construe: that considering an issue from multiple standpoints provides the most complete description of an object under study. That, I think, is the underpinning of your definition of "rationalism." If I misinterpret you, it is not with malice but with charity.
And for some really, really good video game theory, may I recommend:
Gee, James. What Video Games Have to Tell Us About Learning and Literacy. New York: Palgrave, 2001.
Salen, Katie and Eric Zimmerman. Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003.
The online gaming journal Game Studies
an edited collection: Video Game Theory
and, especially,
Espen Aarseth's Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature, which examines connections between video gaming and cybertexts (ergodic or extranoemic texts) such as The I Ching, Nabokov's Pale Fire, and Queneau's Cent Mille Milliards de Poèmes or Hundred Thousand Billion Poems (1961).
posted by beelzbubba at 2:10 PM on October 16, 2006 [4 favorites]
But, just as 30 eye-witnesses will give 30 distinct accounts of an event, 30 schools of criticism will give 30 interpretations of a text. To analyze a text with no frame of reference except "just thinking about it" is a naive and unfulfillable task. In any way you "just think about" something, you will be referring the object under study to some other object through analogy, metonomy, or some other referrent. As pokermonk pointed out above, these systems of critique generally have names. You can refuse to name them, but they still have names.
I can agree with the message I perceive in your comments; that, too often, criticism is used to display obtuse and obscure "insider" language designed to make the writer look as if s/he knows more than the reader and that the reader must subscribe to that filed of criticism to "get" it. But before I understood post-structuralism I had to go back and read up on structuralism.
Reading V. Propp taught me a lot--and not that I couldn't think before that, but rather that I could express my ideas in a way that helped others more easily draw connections when I wrote or spoke about topics that brought together seemingly disparate fields of artistic endeavor.
Reading Bakhtin is not only enjoyable (for me) but also helped me understand how to express "common" art in terms of resistance to the dominant culture.
The point is, I don't read these to parrot a point of view, but to test their contentions and engage in dialogic thought. To do so without any frame results in, as graymouser indicates, a hodgepodge of random expressions that often reify common tropes that really offer no point of rational discussion.
That brings up another point. You say the only valid standpoint is rationality. That there is a "god" word that is supposed to mean something, but is as vague as any of the schools of thought you flatly reject. Whose rationality? Descartes? Bacon? Rational scientism resulted in theories such as polygenism and monogenism, both "invented" to justify attitudes toward the treatment of the Negro race in antebellum America. Both ultimately found to be false, both "objectively" provable if you don't mind fitting your facts to your hypotheses.
Michel Foucault helped expose weaknesses in rational scientism, but the careful thinker cannot reject that science does provide repeatable and sound solutions to some problems.
Perhaps you and I agree that reliance on only one, or only a couple of, hand-picked theories leads to a narrow view and that your "just thinking about things" really means what some here also construe: that considering an issue from multiple standpoints provides the most complete description of an object under study. That, I think, is the underpinning of your definition of "rationalism." If I misinterpret you, it is not with malice but with charity.
And for some really, really good video game theory, may I recommend:
Gee, James. What Video Games Have to Tell Us About Learning and Literacy. New York: Palgrave, 2001.
Salen, Katie and Eric Zimmerman. Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003.
The online gaming journal Game Studies
an edited collection: Video Game Theory
and, especially,
Espen Aarseth's Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature, which examines connections between video gaming and cybertexts (ergodic or extranoemic texts) such as The I Ching, Nabokov's Pale Fire, and Queneau's Cent Mille Milliards de Poèmes or Hundred Thousand Billion Poems (1961).
posted by beelzbubba at 2:10 PM on October 16, 2006 [4 favorites]
On p/review: First of all, I want to point out that the literary critics are most definitely not doing that. They emphatically do not declare a world-view. They act, rather, as though every world-view were equally true, and assume various positions as if they were trying on clothing. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, though it has nothing to do with rational thought, but for the fact that they usually do it out of a fear of offending some party or another, or out of some percieved duty to give everyone a fair say.
I guess I'd like to see some examples of that. Are we confusing NYT lit-crit with academic lit-crit? Because most academic lit-crit I have read instead assumes a point of view and acts as if theirs is The Only Way to approach something and that they possess The One and Only Truth. Can you provide some examples of these "fear of offending" critics? Surely not Spivak, Bhabha, Jameson, LaTour, Booth (although Booth was probably the most concilliatory of any of these towards others point of view).
Again, I don't say this to start an argument, just to say that I think, as others have also said, that the "start with a block of marble then chip away anything that doesn't look like an elephant" is a naive view of "rationalism."
posted by beelzbubba at 2:26 PM on October 16, 2006
I guess I'd like to see some examples of that. Are we confusing NYT lit-crit with academic lit-crit? Because most academic lit-crit I have read instead assumes a point of view and acts as if theirs is The Only Way to approach something and that they possess The One and Only Truth. Can you provide some examples of these "fear of offending" critics? Surely not Spivak, Bhabha, Jameson, LaTour, Booth (although Booth was probably the most concilliatory of any of these towards others point of view).
Again, I don't say this to start an argument, just to say that I think, as others have also said, that the "start with a block of marble then chip away anything that doesn't look like an elephant" is a naive view of "rationalism."
posted by beelzbubba at 2:26 PM on October 16, 2006
beelzbubba: "You say the only valid standpoint is rationality. That there is a "god" word that is supposed to mean something, but is as vague as any of the schools of thought you flatly reject. Whose rationality? Descartes? Bacon? Rational scientism resulted in theories such as polygenism and monogenism, both "invented" to justify attitudes toward the treatment of the Negro race in antebellum America. Both ultimately found to be false, both "objectively" provable if you don't mind fitting your facts to your hypotheses."
I don't deny that it's difficult to know what rationality really is. But as the existence of a rationality which we have in common is presupposed by dialogue and by art, it would seem that we ought to spend some time trying to discover what that true rationality is.
Furthermore:
What if there is such a thing as a true interpretation? Wouldn't that render all other "possible interpretations" unimportant?
posted by koeselitz at 2:32 PM on October 16, 2006
I don't deny that it's difficult to know what rationality really is. But as the existence of a rationality which we have in common is presupposed by dialogue and by art, it would seem that we ought to spend some time trying to discover what that true rationality is.
Furthermore:
What if there is such a thing as a true interpretation? Wouldn't that render all other "possible interpretations" unimportant?
posted by koeselitz at 2:32 PM on October 16, 2006
On p/review:
beelzbubba: "I don't say this to start an argument..."
Why not? Really, why not? There's absolutely nothing wrong with argument. Tell me if I'm wrong, and I'll do you the same respect.
As far as literary criticism is concerned, I'm really most familiar with it in terms of how I encountered it in philosophy departments, where it is fast becoming the rule in most continental-leaning faculties. I intend my argument for the modern stream of 'continental' philosophy, from Foucault to Baudrillard and the rest along the way. (Perhaps I'm wrong in sensing that the continental stream of philosophy has been the major influence on major literary criticism.)
Secondarily, since I admit that I haven't read the specific authors you're talking about here, maybe you can explain to me: if they've declared their world-view, and have stated in which ways Marx, Jung, Freud, the feminists, the postcolonialists, and the rest are wrong, and in which ways they're right, then why do they even begin to consider what those people would think if they read, say, William Faulkner, or played a video game? Why do they not rather think about what William Faulkner, or the author of the video game, really meant when creating that work of art?
posted by koeselitz at 2:43 PM on October 16, 2006
beelzbubba: "I don't say this to start an argument..."
Why not? Really, why not? There's absolutely nothing wrong with argument. Tell me if I'm wrong, and I'll do you the same respect.
As far as literary criticism is concerned, I'm really most familiar with it in terms of how I encountered it in philosophy departments, where it is fast becoming the rule in most continental-leaning faculties. I intend my argument for the modern stream of 'continental' philosophy, from Foucault to Baudrillard and the rest along the way. (Perhaps I'm wrong in sensing that the continental stream of philosophy has been the major influence on major literary criticism.)
Secondarily, since I admit that I haven't read the specific authors you're talking about here, maybe you can explain to me: if they've declared their world-view, and have stated in which ways Marx, Jung, Freud, the feminists, the postcolonialists, and the rest are wrong, and in which ways they're right, then why do they even begin to consider what those people would think if they read, say, William Faulkner, or played a video game? Why do they not rather think about what William Faulkner, or the author of the video game, really meant when creating that work of art?
posted by koeselitz at 2:43 PM on October 16, 2006
Oh, and sorry; one more thing that I've forgotten to mention:
beelzbubba: "... I think, as others have also said, that the 'start with a block of marble then chip away anything that doesn't look like an elephant' is a naive view of 'rationalism.'"
I don't mean it as an argument from authority when I point out that Aristotle, Kant, and several other fairly important thinkers seem to have thought this. It's Aristotle I have in mind (specifically "On the Soul," book 2, chapter 6) when I say this; if perception can be direct at all, the perciever must subtract everything that he has added. Doesn't that make sense? As I've been saying, doesn't it make sense to read Faulkner first, rather than some critic, if your goal is to interpret Faulkner?
posted by koeselitz at 2:55 PM on October 16, 2006
beelzbubba: "... I think, as others have also said, that the 'start with a block of marble then chip away anything that doesn't look like an elephant' is a naive view of 'rationalism.'"
I don't mean it as an argument from authority when I point out that Aristotle, Kant, and several other fairly important thinkers seem to have thought this. It's Aristotle I have in mind (specifically "On the Soul," book 2, chapter 6) when I say this; if perception can be direct at all, the perciever must subtract everything that he has added. Doesn't that make sense? As I've been saying, doesn't it make sense to read Faulkner first, rather than some critic, if your goal is to interpret Faulkner?
posted by koeselitz at 2:55 PM on October 16, 2006
zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
posted by Falconetti at 2:59 PM on October 16, 2006
posted by Falconetti at 2:59 PM on October 16, 2006
Just would like to chime in, I suppose uselessly at this point, with everyone who has said nice idea, horrible job of actually doing it. He should have hired someone else to critique Katamari. Or something, anything other than saying "this is how someone who just learned about [blah school of critique] might write about it, but I'm not going to, but you could, but, you know, anyway, I'm in first year English, let's move on to the next page, I'm getting a D aren't I."
I'm glad Metafilter's picking up the slack, though, this is a neat thread.
posted by blacklite at 3:20 PM on October 16, 2006
I'm glad Metafilter's picking up the slack, though, this is a neat thread.
posted by blacklite at 3:20 PM on October 16, 2006
D00d. Seriously. Beelzbubba and koeselitz and whomever else is contributing to the discussion of various philosophers that I know I need to read but haven't; can you send me a list of some good books to start down the road to better understanding my own ideas and, well, all the shit you guys are talking about? Seriously? Please? My e-mail account should be in my profile. I'll be forever your BFF. Forever.
posted by Bageena at 3:22 PM on October 16, 2006
posted by Bageena at 3:22 PM on October 16, 2006
graymouser : "I think, in an academic setting, that you would wind up citing your more controversial idea sources"
Sorry, I should have clarified that the question is about when you are the controversial idea source. Of course, you may have been influenced by others, and should cite them, but people talk about "Marxist theory" instead of "people who inspired Marx's theories" because, presumably, Marx had some sort of new thoughts of his own. So if the biggest factor in your theory isn't Marx or Derrida, but yourself, what do you do?
koeselitz : "Why not? Really, why not? There's absolutely nothing wrong with argument."
Debate is good. Angry lobbing of invective is bad. The word "argument" can refer to both, and when he said "I'm not saying this to start an argument", I think he was referring to the latter definition.
posted by Bugbread at 3:40 PM on October 16, 2006
Sorry, I should have clarified that the question is about when you are the controversial idea source. Of course, you may have been influenced by others, and should cite them, but people talk about "Marxist theory" instead of "people who inspired Marx's theories" because, presumably, Marx had some sort of new thoughts of his own. So if the biggest factor in your theory isn't Marx or Derrida, but yourself, what do you do?
koeselitz : "Why not? Really, why not? There's absolutely nothing wrong with argument."
Debate is good. Angry lobbing of invective is bad. The word "argument" can refer to both, and when he said "I'm not saying this to start an argument", I think he was referring to the latter definition.
posted by Bugbread at 3:40 PM on October 16, 2006
koeselitz, I agree that one should read the primary text (Faulkner or GTA: San Andreas, for example) in order to critique it. But here I think is also where we have a misunderstanding. I read you as saying that rather than read Faulkner, one would read an analysis of Faulkner by a literary critic to begin to understand Faulkner.
Reading Faulkner's Light in August will give us both the opportunity to interpret his writing through the lens of everything we have experienced and learned up to this point, as well as having an idea of Faulkner's historical context, and so on, and so on.
on preview: bugbread, you are correct. I encourage the former
(Falconetti, by all means stay sleeping. You won't learn anything here)
But that can only get us so far, no matter how original a thinker either of us may be. I am no Wittgenstein. In fact, I would never pretend to be a philosopher or critic. But I do know enough about text interpretation to understand that criticism offers other lenses.
Criticism, whether it is New Criticism (which of course is no longer new), Frankfurt School, Marxist, poststructuralist, whatever, offers frameworks by which to uncover and propose meanings that Faulkner may or may not have intended--but his intention can only go so far; the reader also brings the sum of his/her experiences to the reading as well.
To simplify: Structuralism tries to fit everything into a matrix that traces each protagonist and each situation into an ur-Type that is then explained by the originating tale. This can be done with sit-coms and TV dramas as well as novels, plays, and other texts, regardless of what their authors intended. After all, players and "authors" of WoW scenarios don't have to have read Norse mythology in order to have subconscious preconceptions of Valkyries or thunder gods manifest in their personas.
Post-structuralism looks for the moments of rupture in the matrix--those interstitial areas where the dominant trope does not and can not cover all contingencies. Structuralism throws out what doesn't fit. Poststructuralism looks at that uncompliant manifestation and uses the exception to learn more about the rule. And Lacanian psychoanalytic theory will look for the subconcious desire that is not expressed.
Is one of them true to the exclusion of the others? No. Do they all partially describe the object of study? Yes. Aristotle, as you quote him, is correct to a point. But Aristotle also used comparison to divide and classify the "real" world. And that is what critics, do, too.
You are also right in your assumptions about the continental philosophers who dominate most discussion in cultural studies these days. But a lot of the application of their theories to western literary criticism is, as you suspect, suspect. That is, Derrida is put in service to explain a particular work, and Derrida would not agree with the critic's understanding of the Derridean theory--so blaming the theory for its application is understandable but not always the fault of the philosopher.
on preview: bugbread, you are correct. I encourage the former and was making clear that I was not trying to start the latter.
posted by beelzbubba at 5:47 PM on October 16, 2006
Reading Faulkner's Light in August will give us both the opportunity to interpret his writing through the lens of everything we have experienced and learned up to this point, as well as having an idea of Faulkner's historical context, and so on, and so on.
on preview: bugbread, you are correct. I encourage the former
(Falconetti, by all means stay sleeping. You won't learn anything here)
But that can only get us so far, no matter how original a thinker either of us may be. I am no Wittgenstein. In fact, I would never pretend to be a philosopher or critic. But I do know enough about text interpretation to understand that criticism offers other lenses.
Criticism, whether it is New Criticism (which of course is no longer new), Frankfurt School, Marxist, poststructuralist, whatever, offers frameworks by which to uncover and propose meanings that Faulkner may or may not have intended--but his intention can only go so far; the reader also brings the sum of his/her experiences to the reading as well.
To simplify: Structuralism tries to fit everything into a matrix that traces each protagonist and each situation into an ur-Type that is then explained by the originating tale. This can be done with sit-coms and TV dramas as well as novels, plays, and other texts, regardless of what their authors intended. After all, players and "authors" of WoW scenarios don't have to have read Norse mythology in order to have subconscious preconceptions of Valkyries or thunder gods manifest in their personas.
Post-structuralism looks for the moments of rupture in the matrix--those interstitial areas where the dominant trope does not and can not cover all contingencies. Structuralism throws out what doesn't fit. Poststructuralism looks at that uncompliant manifestation and uses the exception to learn more about the rule. And Lacanian psychoanalytic theory will look for the subconcious desire that is not expressed.
Is one of them true to the exclusion of the others? No. Do they all partially describe the object of study? Yes. Aristotle, as you quote him, is correct to a point. But Aristotle also used comparison to divide and classify the "real" world. And that is what critics, do, too.
You are also right in your assumptions about the continental philosophers who dominate most discussion in cultural studies these days. But a lot of the application of their theories to western literary criticism is, as you suspect, suspect. That is, Derrida is put in service to explain a particular work, and Derrida would not agree with the critic's understanding of the Derridean theory--so blaming the theory for its application is understandable but not always the fault of the philosopher.
on preview: bugbread, you are correct. I encourage the former and was making clear that I was not trying to start the latter.
posted by beelzbubba at 5:47 PM on October 16, 2006
koeselitz: If it's really thinking, then the only framework is rationality. The pretense that there are different varieties of rationality serves two purposes [etc]
The thing is that many, most, or all of these critical theories dispute your notion of neutral rationality.
For example, Marxism would argue that cultural expressions like "rationality" simply serve to mask economic relations. On another hand, Feminism would argue that "phallogocentrism" masks gender relations. On another hand, a Psychoanalitic approach would argue that rationality itself is a facade, and that the unconscious really rules the show. On yet another hand, a Structuralist, Post-Structuralist or Deconstructive approach would look to the structures of discourse to see what kinds of things can or cannot be said, according to the frames in use, and often the power that supports some frames over others.
That was a massive oversimplification, and probably wrong in many ways, but the point is that we are not talking about "different varieties of rationality", but different angles from which the very concept of a perfectly neutral, value-free, universally-applicable rationality is itself called into question.
posted by UbuRoivas at 6:38 PM on October 16, 2006
The thing is that many, most, or all of these critical theories dispute your notion of neutral rationality.
For example, Marxism would argue that cultural expressions like "rationality" simply serve to mask economic relations. On another hand, Feminism would argue that "phallogocentrism" masks gender relations. On another hand, a Psychoanalitic approach would argue that rationality itself is a facade, and that the unconscious really rules the show. On yet another hand, a Structuralist, Post-Structuralist or Deconstructive approach would look to the structures of discourse to see what kinds of things can or cannot be said, according to the frames in use, and often the power that supports some frames over others.
That was a massive oversimplification, and probably wrong in many ways, but the point is that we are not talking about "different varieties of rationality", but different angles from which the very concept of a perfectly neutral, value-free, universally-applicable rationality is itself called into question.
posted by UbuRoivas at 6:38 PM on October 16, 2006
koeselitz: Why do they not rather think about what William Faulkner, or the author of the video game, really meant when creating that work of art?
Very introllectual. I am assuming you know about the "death of the author" - ie the theory that the meaning of a work is actually produced by its reader & that the intention of the author lies somewhere on the spectrum between near-irrelevant & impossible-to-know...?
A question in response - why do you seem to think that what the author "really meant" should be the objective of study, let alone criticism? Also, what do you think are the possibilities that an author was even fully aware of "what they really meant", if, arguably, we are all blind to our own blinkers...?
posted by UbuRoivas at 6:53 PM on October 16, 2006
Very introllectual. I am assuming you know about the "death of the author" - ie the theory that the meaning of a work is actually produced by its reader & that the intention of the author lies somewhere on the spectrum between near-irrelevant & impossible-to-know...?
A question in response - why do you seem to think that what the author "really meant" should be the objective of study, let alone criticism? Also, what do you think are the possibilities that an author was even fully aware of "what they really meant", if, arguably, we are all blind to our own blinkers...?
posted by UbuRoivas at 6:53 PM on October 16, 2006
And Lacanian psychoanalytic theory will look for the subconcious desire that is not expressed.
Unconscious, please. L'inconscient, le ça.
posted by Wolof at 8:03 PM on October 16, 2006
Unconscious, please. L'inconscient, le ça.
posted by Wolof at 8:03 PM on October 16, 2006
I'm just kind of jumping in to this thread and I haven't had time to read everything yet, but I wanted to make some points, starting with what koeselitz said: Why do they not rather think about what William Faulkner, or the author of the video game, really meant when creating that work of art?
This is kind of following up on UbuRoivas... anyway...
Biographical criticism is a theory itself, positing that the author has some sort of godlike control over his/her creation. I, as an author, am 100% aware of what is going into my text. I am completely conscious of every allusion, every other text that I have read or been exposed to that might enter into my work. I am in control of all the possible nuances and connotations of the words I put to paper (or the images projected on screen, etc. etc.) Furthermore, this text is in no way conditioned by the dictates of the marketplace, the editor of the publishing house, my desire to impress that sexy woman at the party, what I ate that morning, my experience as a gay/straight/bi/etc. man/woman/whatever in a society that does/does not accept me, the wealthy patron paying me to write this piece of music, etc. etc. I could go on, but you can see where I'm going here. This is all patently impossible.
And, as UbuRoivas pointed out, figuring out authorial intention is impossible. Is it a worthless exercise? No, not at all, and any good critic these days will consider the historical context of the text and the author and the author's biography, to some greater or lesser degree. But because of the multitude of possible factors that go into conditioning every part of a text, the question, "What *exactly* did Faulkner mean here?" can never be answered with a simple right or wrong answer.
A critic (I think Hirsch, but I don't have my notebook handy, so it might be someone else) was very interested in this question. He admitted that it was impossible to every get a completely satisfactory answer, but proposed certain methods to try to approach a solution to the question of authorial intention. This included (in part) trying to recreate as much as possible the intellectual influences upon the artist. Boiled down to its simplest state, this means reading everything that artist read (or seeing everything they saw, etc. etc.). In other words, replicating the contents of their mind when intepreting their texts. Now, this is also impossible, but we can get ever nearer this situation through study.
This critic was a scholar of a particular poet (Keats, I think, but again, I don't have handy my notes). After years of work, one of the major theses he proposed about this poet was that his work and his worldview was essentially pessimistic, for a variety of reasons.
Another critic and scholar of this poet became famous for essentially following the plan outlined above: she read everything that the poet was known to have read. What was her ultimate statement on the author's ouvre? Optimistic. The exact opposite of the former.
I give this rather simplified example to point out that the supposed answer the question of art ("what the creator intended") is itself just one possible question that does not necessarily have any more value than another question. What literary and critical theory does is to set up an exploratory framework and pose questions from within that framework. Each theory has a different set of questions that it finds interesting. Some cross over, some do not; some agree with questions in other theories, some contradict.
When a theory is new, those questions are often simple, both in their outlook and in their language (such as clevershark's "Was X gay?" comment... although, I think s/he may be simplifying or misunderstanding what was actually being asked). As they mature, the questions become more sophisticated ("what does it mean to be "gay"? is that an appropriate term to apply to this historical period? how does the text express or repress desires outside the norm? what are normal desires?" etc etc). As the questions become more sophisticated, they become more interesting and productive, but they also become more esoteric and specialized, thus leading to misperceptions on the part of those not involved ("literature professors think everyone is gay/just try to find the giant symbolic penis/etc").
Of course, any theory is only as good as its practitioners. Any good theorist DOES foreground his or her assumptions, at least implicitly (and yes, there are a lot of bad lit critics, just as there are a lot of bad everythings). The questions they ask do that for them, really. And they critique what has come before them. As to koeselitz's question as to why someone would bother even reading a Marxist interpretation (for example) if you've found fault with it... well, you have to start somewhere. And while there are certainly interpretations that are blatantly wrong ("Shakespeare wrote about nuclear war"), there are other interpretations that may have insights but are flawed or simplistic ("Hamlet had some mother issues"). You find what's in there that's worth using and complicating and you go from there.
Many theorists do have a tendency to sound pretentious, and their vocabularies can be jargon-laden and obscure, perhaps intentionally so. And some can be just plain bad writers. But, they can be good thinkers all the same. For Example, what I've read of Spivak is brilliant and insightful, but its dense, jargon-riddled, obscure, and sometimes there are just plain old mistakes of grammar that you have to slog through. But slogging through it is half the fun (if that's your idea of fun, that is). It's just like any specialized discipline: the language reads like nonsense to those outside of it.
For some reason, literary studies seems to arouse a lot more ire in the non-specialist than, say, theoretical physics. There are probably a number of reasons for this, but one of them is probably because of the proximity of literature to our daily lives and experiences (and thus, the relative proximity of literary critics). Some physicist working on string theory is a little more remote to our lives than a deconstructionist critic writing about Zadie Smith.
Anyway, I think I got a little off topic and rambled, but hopefully some of you will find this interesting, and I'd love to engage you in any sort of dialogue about this.
posted by papakwanz at 8:52 PM on October 16, 2006
This is kind of following up on UbuRoivas... anyway...
Biographical criticism is a theory itself, positing that the author has some sort of godlike control over his/her creation. I, as an author, am 100% aware of what is going into my text. I am completely conscious of every allusion, every other text that I have read or been exposed to that might enter into my work. I am in control of all the possible nuances and connotations of the words I put to paper (or the images projected on screen, etc. etc.) Furthermore, this text is in no way conditioned by the dictates of the marketplace, the editor of the publishing house, my desire to impress that sexy woman at the party, what I ate that morning, my experience as a gay/straight/bi/etc. man/woman/whatever in a society that does/does not accept me, the wealthy patron paying me to write this piece of music, etc. etc. I could go on, but you can see where I'm going here. This is all patently impossible.
And, as UbuRoivas pointed out, figuring out authorial intention is impossible. Is it a worthless exercise? No, not at all, and any good critic these days will consider the historical context of the text and the author and the author's biography, to some greater or lesser degree. But because of the multitude of possible factors that go into conditioning every part of a text, the question, "What *exactly* did Faulkner mean here?" can never be answered with a simple right or wrong answer.
A critic (I think Hirsch, but I don't have my notebook handy, so it might be someone else) was very interested in this question. He admitted that it was impossible to every get a completely satisfactory answer, but proposed certain methods to try to approach a solution to the question of authorial intention. This included (in part) trying to recreate as much as possible the intellectual influences upon the artist. Boiled down to its simplest state, this means reading everything that artist read (or seeing everything they saw, etc. etc.). In other words, replicating the contents of their mind when intepreting their texts. Now, this is also impossible, but we can get ever nearer this situation through study.
This critic was a scholar of a particular poet (Keats, I think, but again, I don't have handy my notes). After years of work, one of the major theses he proposed about this poet was that his work and his worldview was essentially pessimistic, for a variety of reasons.
Another critic and scholar of this poet became famous for essentially following the plan outlined above: she read everything that the poet was known to have read. What was her ultimate statement on the author's ouvre? Optimistic. The exact opposite of the former.
I give this rather simplified example to point out that the supposed answer the question of art ("what the creator intended") is itself just one possible question that does not necessarily have any more value than another question. What literary and critical theory does is to set up an exploratory framework and pose questions from within that framework. Each theory has a different set of questions that it finds interesting. Some cross over, some do not; some agree with questions in other theories, some contradict.
When a theory is new, those questions are often simple, both in their outlook and in their language (such as clevershark's "Was X gay?" comment... although, I think s/he may be simplifying or misunderstanding what was actually being asked). As they mature, the questions become more sophisticated ("what does it mean to be "gay"? is that an appropriate term to apply to this historical period? how does the text express or repress desires outside the norm? what are normal desires?" etc etc). As the questions become more sophisticated, they become more interesting and productive, but they also become more esoteric and specialized, thus leading to misperceptions on the part of those not involved ("literature professors think everyone is gay/just try to find the giant symbolic penis/etc").
Of course, any theory is only as good as its practitioners. Any good theorist DOES foreground his or her assumptions, at least implicitly (and yes, there are a lot of bad lit critics, just as there are a lot of bad everythings). The questions they ask do that for them, really. And they critique what has come before them. As to koeselitz's question as to why someone would bother even reading a Marxist interpretation (for example) if you've found fault with it... well, you have to start somewhere. And while there are certainly interpretations that are blatantly wrong ("Shakespeare wrote about nuclear war"), there are other interpretations that may have insights but are flawed or simplistic ("Hamlet had some mother issues"). You find what's in there that's worth using and complicating and you go from there.
Many theorists do have a tendency to sound pretentious, and their vocabularies can be jargon-laden and obscure, perhaps intentionally so. And some can be just plain bad writers. But, they can be good thinkers all the same. For Example, what I've read of Spivak is brilliant and insightful, but its dense, jargon-riddled, obscure, and sometimes there are just plain old mistakes of grammar that you have to slog through. But slogging through it is half the fun (if that's your idea of fun, that is). It's just like any specialized discipline: the language reads like nonsense to those outside of it.
For some reason, literary studies seems to arouse a lot more ire in the non-specialist than, say, theoretical physics. There are probably a number of reasons for this, but one of them is probably because of the proximity of literature to our daily lives and experiences (and thus, the relative proximity of literary critics). Some physicist working on string theory is a little more remote to our lives than a deconstructionist critic writing about Zadie Smith.
Anyway, I think I got a little off topic and rambled, but hopefully some of you will find this interesting, and I'd love to engage you in any sort of dialogue about this.
posted by papakwanz at 8:52 PM on October 16, 2006
beelzbubba:
Thank you for your patience. We're finally getting to the thing that really initiated my first comment, and that I feel is the heart of the matter. I'll try to do it justice, and to give a true picture of where I'm coming from on this.
You should understand, first, that you're speaking to someone to whom the ancient things are very close. I'm trying to begin to piece together a thesis on Homer's Odyssey and the lessons it presents us today; as I mentioned, I'm close to Aristotle, as well. The Medievals, furthermore, are dear to me; I'm also a fellow-traveller with the three major strands of monotheism. This is the diversity of time: thousands of years of thought, of consideration, of careful attempts to discover what the nature of the universe is. It's remarkable what a wealth all that presents us.
It seems to me that that wealth is on the verge of becoming extinct. This is because we are today extraordinarily lazy about how we approach the old books. It's important to note that, although we feel the sensation today of having all knowledge readily available to us, we also feel, more than ever before, completely disconnected from the past. There is not space here for me to explain why I come to that conclusion; I therefore only pause to note one example of our alienation from our past. A kind of regime (theocracy) which even four hundred years ago (which is not that long in human history) would have seemed to most of us Westerners to be the only important kind of regime, the only one worth choosing, is now so utterly foreign to us that when we find ourselves confronted with a civilization that looks to that regime, we are baffled.
If we lack even the ability to really confront our former selves, then it can be imagined how we manage to confront others. And this in an era when it is perhaps more important than ever before that we meet other peoples, that we confront them and learn from them and try to learn to live with them.
I hope it doesn't sound like some kind of arrogance, then, when I say that I simply don't care what experience the reader goes through when reading a text, or what other interpretations are possible besides the ones that the author intended. Communication, communion, the meeting of ours with other minds, as well-nigh impossible as it may seem, is vital.
It is very easy now (and I've seen it done more than once) to talk about "Marxist critiques of the Koran," to take a salient example. It is, however, hopeless distraction. When we do this, we're dancing around the real issue: what does the Koran say? Is it just? Is it true? We might think a little about those things when we apply Marxist critiques to it, we aren't really aiming at that. And, so long as we're busy talking about whatever new interpretations we might invent around it, we're missing the point: many claim that the Koran is truth. Are they right? The only way to know is to determine what the Koran intends to communicate.
This is what my perspective on texts comes down to: if we are to begin to understand them, we must meet them on their own terms. Nothing more, nothing less. This means much, much more hard work than reading about interpretations; it means peeling away all the interpretations to get at the truth, and shooting down our own arbitrary experiences to try to see what is actually communicated. This is a painful process, and it is difficult, because it means reevaluating everything about who we are and where we come from, but it is the only rewarding way to read. There are no short-cuts.
UbiRoivas: "Very introllectual."
I'm not ashamed to say that I don't know what that word means.
"I am assuming you know about the "death of the author" - ie the theory that the meaning of a work is actually produced by its reader & that the intention of the author lies somewhere on the spectrum between near-irrelevant & impossible-to-know...?"
Yes. I've spent too much of my time dealing with it, in fact. I guess it's obvious that I think that that faddish new theory is dead wrong. It's laziness and cowardice, I think, to dismiss a difficult project so quickly.
Or... let me say it a different way. You can believe that, and you can live accordingly. But living accordingly would not look like human life does: it would mean putting as much value and interest into things that have no discernable author as you do into things that do. To be a reader indifferent to authorial intention, you would have to be as interested in mud as you are in Jameson. Again, to live in such a way as to be completely indifferent to human contact would not be wrong, per se. But I believe it wouldn't be characteristically human.
I don't mean that as an argument against it, really. It's interesting to think of it that way.
"A question in response - why do you seem to think that what the author "really meant" should be the objective of study, let alone criticism? Also, what do you think are the possibilities that an author was even fully aware of "what they really meant", if, arguably, we are all blind to our own blinkers...?"
In an age when "friendship" is generally reduced to an option on an automated internet application, I don't expect it to be popular with the "thinkers of the day," but I still think it's one of the very few essential features of human life. The touch of another human being, and the sensation of looking into their eyes and beginning to share their thought, is the sublimest pleasure allowed us on earth. Art is a function of friendship: it is meant to connect people. This is why Plato's Socrates argued against writing: because writing deadens the word, and removes the part where two people are looking at each other and sharing. Every great writer has tried to overcome this, and to bridge that gap, meeting every other human being who reads her/his text face to face.
posted by koeselitz at 9:14 PM on October 16, 2006
Thank you for your patience. We're finally getting to the thing that really initiated my first comment, and that I feel is the heart of the matter. I'll try to do it justice, and to give a true picture of where I'm coming from on this.
You should understand, first, that you're speaking to someone to whom the ancient things are very close. I'm trying to begin to piece together a thesis on Homer's Odyssey and the lessons it presents us today; as I mentioned, I'm close to Aristotle, as well. The Medievals, furthermore, are dear to me; I'm also a fellow-traveller with the three major strands of monotheism. This is the diversity of time: thousands of years of thought, of consideration, of careful attempts to discover what the nature of the universe is. It's remarkable what a wealth all that presents us.
It seems to me that that wealth is on the verge of becoming extinct. This is because we are today extraordinarily lazy about how we approach the old books. It's important to note that, although we feel the sensation today of having all knowledge readily available to us, we also feel, more than ever before, completely disconnected from the past. There is not space here for me to explain why I come to that conclusion; I therefore only pause to note one example of our alienation from our past. A kind of regime (theocracy) which even four hundred years ago (which is not that long in human history) would have seemed to most of us Westerners to be the only important kind of regime, the only one worth choosing, is now so utterly foreign to us that when we find ourselves confronted with a civilization that looks to that regime, we are baffled.
If we lack even the ability to really confront our former selves, then it can be imagined how we manage to confront others. And this in an era when it is perhaps more important than ever before that we meet other peoples, that we confront them and learn from them and try to learn to live with them.
I hope it doesn't sound like some kind of arrogance, then, when I say that I simply don't care what experience the reader goes through when reading a text, or what other interpretations are possible besides the ones that the author intended. Communication, communion, the meeting of ours with other minds, as well-nigh impossible as it may seem, is vital.
It is very easy now (and I've seen it done more than once) to talk about "Marxist critiques of the Koran," to take a salient example. It is, however, hopeless distraction. When we do this, we're dancing around the real issue: what does the Koran say? Is it just? Is it true? We might think a little about those things when we apply Marxist critiques to it, we aren't really aiming at that. And, so long as we're busy talking about whatever new interpretations we might invent around it, we're missing the point: many claim that the Koran is truth. Are they right? The only way to know is to determine what the Koran intends to communicate.
This is what my perspective on texts comes down to: if we are to begin to understand them, we must meet them on their own terms. Nothing more, nothing less. This means much, much more hard work than reading about interpretations; it means peeling away all the interpretations to get at the truth, and shooting down our own arbitrary experiences to try to see what is actually communicated. This is a painful process, and it is difficult, because it means reevaluating everything about who we are and where we come from, but it is the only rewarding way to read. There are no short-cuts.
UbiRoivas: "Very introllectual."
I'm not ashamed to say that I don't know what that word means.
Yes. I've spent too much of my time dealing with it, in fact. I guess it's obvious that I think that that faddish new theory is dead wrong. It's laziness and cowardice, I think, to dismiss a difficult project so quickly.
Or... let me say it a different way. You can believe that, and you can live accordingly. But living accordingly would not look like human life does: it would mean putting as much value and interest into things that have no discernable author as you do into things that do. To be a reader indifferent to authorial intention, you would have to be as interested in mud as you are in Jameson. Again, to live in such a way as to be completely indifferent to human contact would not be wrong, per se. But I believe it wouldn't be characteristically human.
I don't mean that as an argument against it, really. It's interesting to think of it that way.
"A question in response - why do you seem to think that what the author "really meant" should be the objective of study, let alone criticism? Also, what do you think are the possibilities that an author was even fully aware of "what they really meant", if, arguably, we are all blind to our own blinkers...?"
In an age when "friendship" is generally reduced to an option on an automated internet application, I don't expect it to be popular with the "thinkers of the day," but I still think it's one of the very few essential features of human life. The touch of another human being, and the sensation of looking into their eyes and beginning to share their thought, is the sublimest pleasure allowed us on earth. Art is a function of friendship: it is meant to connect people. This is why Plato's Socrates argued against writing: because writing deadens the word, and removes the part where two people are looking at each other and sharing. Every great writer has tried to overcome this, and to bridge that gap, meeting every other human being who reads her/his text face to face.
posted by koeselitz at 9:14 PM on October 16, 2006
By the way, I picked Faulkner up there because I'm fairly certain he would've hated literary theory. Reading Absalom, Absalom!, anyhow, convinces me that he saw reading as an attempt to recreate and rediscover the true past. As he said, and quite well: the past isn't dead. It isn't even past.
posted by koeselitz at 9:20 PM on October 16, 2006
posted by koeselitz at 9:20 PM on October 16, 2006
koeselitz:
If you "simply don't care what experience the reader goes through when reading a text, or what other interpretations are possible besides the ones that the author intended" how can you possibly claim to want to "meet other peoples... confront them and learn from them and try to learn to live with them"?
Wouldn't understanding, say, how a Muslim in Saudia Arabia *today* understands the Koran and the ways their understanding of the Koran is conditioned by various other forces be more important to you (or at least a different question) than trying to figure out exactly what Mohammed and his immediate followers meant 1300+ years ago when the text was being composed?
(Note: I'm not saying that the latter question is unimportant or that it is unrelated to understanding today's readers of the Koran, just that the two are different questions and involve different things.)
Oh, and wouldn't, say, understanding the economic, historical, psychological, political, etc. conditions under which the Koran was composed help you to understand the "truth" of what it says, if that is the question that you're interested in?
posted by papakwanz at 9:37 PM on October 16, 2006
If you "simply don't care what experience the reader goes through when reading a text, or what other interpretations are possible besides the ones that the author intended" how can you possibly claim to want to "meet other peoples... confront them and learn from them and try to learn to live with them"?
Wouldn't understanding, say, how a Muslim in Saudia Arabia *today* understands the Koran and the ways their understanding of the Koran is conditioned by various other forces be more important to you (or at least a different question) than trying to figure out exactly what Mohammed and his immediate followers meant 1300+ years ago when the text was being composed?
(Note: I'm not saying that the latter question is unimportant or that it is unrelated to understanding today's readers of the Koran, just that the two are different questions and involve different things.)
Oh, and wouldn't, say, understanding the economic, historical, psychological, political, etc. conditions under which the Koran was composed help you to understand the "truth" of what it says, if that is the question that you're interested in?
posted by papakwanz at 9:37 PM on October 16, 2006
"Very introllectual."
I'm not ashamed to say that I don't know what that word means.
Well, my true intention of author of that lighthearted jibe, and as coiner of the neologism, "introllectual", was that you seemed to be disingenuously referring, in a very casual way, to such heavily-debated concepts as the true meaning of a text, or authors' true intentions. This should have been clear from my reference to the so-called death of the author. In short, you seemed to be trolling in an intellectual way.
Having read your recent post, that was apparently off-mark. You seem to be earnest in your faith in the hermeneutical approach to textual analysis.
posted by UbuRoivas at 10:32 PM on October 16, 2006
I'm not ashamed to say that I don't know what that word means.
Well, my true intention of author of that lighthearted jibe, and as coiner of the neologism, "introllectual", was that you seemed to be disingenuously referring, in a very casual way, to such heavily-debated concepts as the true meaning of a text, or authors' true intentions. This should have been clear from my reference to the so-called death of the author. In short, you seemed to be trolling in an intellectual way.
Having read your recent post, that was apparently off-mark. You seem to be earnest in your faith in the hermeneutical approach to textual analysis.
posted by UbuRoivas at 10:32 PM on October 16, 2006
it would mean putting as much value and interest into things that have no discernable author as you do into things that do. To be a reader indifferent to authorial intention, you would have to be as interested in mud as you are in Jameson.
I don't see how that follows. It means putting as much value and interest into whatever you happen to find of value & interest, which, for most people, will be some kinds of human, cultural artefacts.
It also happens to mean that you recognise that you bring your own experiences, history, worldview, culture, etc into your reading, and that in such a situation, discerning the author's intention is a difficult, if not impossible task. The only way you might come close is through years of dedicated study, and hell, I certainly don't want to get stuck on any book or author or period or genre for that bloody long!
Every great writer has tried to overcome this, and to bridge that gap, meeting every other human being who reads her/his text face to face.
Nice. I quite like Henry Miller, writing in The Books in my Life, "They were alive and they spoke to me!" over & again.
posted by UbuRoivas at 10:44 PM on October 16, 2006
I don't see how that follows. It means putting as much value and interest into whatever you happen to find of value & interest, which, for most people, will be some kinds of human, cultural artefacts.
It also happens to mean that you recognise that you bring your own experiences, history, worldview, culture, etc into your reading, and that in such a situation, discerning the author's intention is a difficult, if not impossible task. The only way you might come close is through years of dedicated study, and hell, I certainly don't want to get stuck on any book or author or period or genre for that bloody long!
Every great writer has tried to overcome this, and to bridge that gap, meeting every other human being who reads her/his text face to face.
Nice. I quite like Henry Miller, writing in The Books in my Life, "They were alive and they spoke to me!" over & again.
posted by UbuRoivas at 10:44 PM on October 16, 2006
I do wish theoretical physicists would stop using all those made-up words, though.
posted by signal at 4:35 AM on October 17, 2006
posted by signal at 4:35 AM on October 17, 2006
a quick aside on the subject of Homer.
You know, of course, that the Odyssey & the Iliad were not written by Homer, but by another blind poet with the same name.
Ah, the wit of Classics departments. I'll be back to the main topic later, but now off to work.
posted by beelzbubba at 6:20 AM on October 17, 2006
You know, of course, that the Odyssey & the Iliad were not written by Homer, but by another blind poet with the same name.
Ah, the wit of Classics departments. I'll be back to the main topic later, but now off to work.
posted by beelzbubba at 6:20 AM on October 17, 2006
As much as I want to understand what the eff you guys are talking about... I don't. So I'm just gunna roll my katamari around too.
posted by Bageena at 10:17 AM on October 17, 2006
posted by Bageena at 10:17 AM on October 17, 2006
I should just clarify that I loves me some katamari rollin'.
posted by papakwanz at 10:53 AM on October 17, 2006
posted by papakwanz at 10:53 AM on October 17, 2006
This Katamari keeps getting bigger. There are a lot of things that it's picked up that I don't really understand. I also feel like I've been talking too much, but I'll make a few responses to what's been said.
Bageena: "As much as I want to understand what the eff you guys are talking about... I don't. So I'm just gunna roll my katamari around too."
If you really want a book recommendation, I heartily urge you to read Allan Bloom's book of some years ago entitled The Closing of the American Mind. I don't necessarily agree with every jot of it, but it's the only book I know that carefully and boldly details what's wrong with western education nowadays. It details the position I'm coming from here, and it's not a hard read.
papakwanz: "Wouldn't understanding, say, how a Muslim in Saudia Arabia *today* understands the Koran and the ways their understanding of the Koran is conditioned by various other forces be more important to you (or at least a different question) than trying to figure out exactly what Mohammed and his immediate followers meant 1300+ years ago when the text was being composed?"
The two are inextricably linked. Difficult, but true.
"Oh, and wouldn't, say, understanding the economic, historical, psychological, political, etc. conditions under which the Koran was composed help you to understand the "truth" of what it says, if that is the question that you're interested in?"
If you mean that understanding the eternal space in the heart of God where the Koran has existed since before the beginning of time might shed light on whether the Koran is true, then I agree. That's a little jarring, though, isn't it? Is there a kind of Literary Criticism that relates to revelation? I think you indicated before that we would call that Biographical Criticism. Or would that be insane? Does Literary Criticism make assumptions about the nature and source of texts that are unwarranted?
I am, again, no expert in literary criticism, but, so far as I can tell, modern critical theory began with Spinoza's Theologico-Political Treatise, where he founded the study of Biblical criticism. This study is common nowadays. While the purpose of that study appeared to be to understand a text by examining its historical circumstances, I think that a careful reading of Spinoza shows that it was actually a rhetorical tool which attempted to convince its audience of the ridiculousness of Biblical claims by flatly denying them.
UbuRoivas: "[Ascribing to the death of the author] means putting as much value and interest into whatever you happen to find of value & interest, which, for most people, will be some kinds of human, cultural artefacts."
Value and interest aren't arbitrary, Pere Ubu.
"It also happens to mean that you recognise that you bring your own experiences, history, worldview, culture, etc into your reading, and that in such a situation, discerning the author's intention is a difficult, if not impossible task."
It is possible, I believe, though difficult, to at least begin to understand one's own experiences, history, worldview, culture, etc. And if it's possible begin to understand those, then it's possible to begin to see what an author intends to say to us beyond what we have added to the text. It is not necessary to believe that the authorship is irrevocably lost to believe that it is hard to discern it.
Reading and listening are identical on this point. It is sometimes very difficult to understand what your closest friend is saying to you in conversation, because it requires taking into account the differences between your own and her/his perspectives. However, we do it every day. In fact, it's probably the most rewarding thing we can do. Why must that possibility be dismissed when we pick up the old books?
"The only way you might come close is through years of dedicated study, and hell, I certainly don't want to get stuck on any book or author or period or genre for that bloody long!"
The price of understanding and friendship is high, I'll agree with that. But it's worth it. (Although, since you seem to know a bit about literary theory, I imagine you're kidding when you indicate that you dislike the tedium of long study.)
posted by koeselitz at 12:30 PM on October 17, 2006
Bageena: "As much as I want to understand what the eff you guys are talking about... I don't. So I'm just gunna roll my katamari around too."
If you really want a book recommendation, I heartily urge you to read Allan Bloom's book of some years ago entitled The Closing of the American Mind. I don't necessarily agree with every jot of it, but it's the only book I know that carefully and boldly details what's wrong with western education nowadays. It details the position I'm coming from here, and it's not a hard read.
papakwanz: "Wouldn't understanding, say, how a Muslim in Saudia Arabia *today* understands the Koran and the ways their understanding of the Koran is conditioned by various other forces be more important to you (or at least a different question) than trying to figure out exactly what Mohammed and his immediate followers meant 1300+ years ago when the text was being composed?"
The two are inextricably linked. Difficult, but true.
"Oh, and wouldn't, say, understanding the economic, historical, psychological, political, etc. conditions under which the Koran was composed help you to understand the "truth" of what it says, if that is the question that you're interested in?"
If you mean that understanding the eternal space in the heart of God where the Koran has existed since before the beginning of time might shed light on whether the Koran is true, then I agree. That's a little jarring, though, isn't it? Is there a kind of Literary Criticism that relates to revelation? I think you indicated before that we would call that Biographical Criticism. Or would that be insane? Does Literary Criticism make assumptions about the nature and source of texts that are unwarranted?
I am, again, no expert in literary criticism, but, so far as I can tell, modern critical theory began with Spinoza's Theologico-Political Treatise, where he founded the study of Biblical criticism. This study is common nowadays. While the purpose of that study appeared to be to understand a text by examining its historical circumstances, I think that a careful reading of Spinoza shows that it was actually a rhetorical tool which attempted to convince its audience of the ridiculousness of Biblical claims by flatly denying them.
UbuRoivas: "[Ascribing to the death of the author] means putting as much value and interest into whatever you happen to find of value & interest, which, for most people, will be some kinds of human, cultural artefacts."
Value and interest aren't arbitrary, Pere Ubu.
"It also happens to mean that you recognise that you bring your own experiences, history, worldview, culture, etc into your reading, and that in such a situation, discerning the author's intention is a difficult, if not impossible task."
It is possible, I believe, though difficult, to at least begin to understand one's own experiences, history, worldview, culture, etc. And if it's possible begin to understand those, then it's possible to begin to see what an author intends to say to us beyond what we have added to the text. It is not necessary to believe that the authorship is irrevocably lost to believe that it is hard to discern it.
Reading and listening are identical on this point. It is sometimes very difficult to understand what your closest friend is saying to you in conversation, because it requires taking into account the differences between your own and her/his perspectives. However, we do it every day. In fact, it's probably the most rewarding thing we can do. Why must that possibility be dismissed when we pick up the old books?
"The only way you might come close is through years of dedicated study, and hell, I certainly don't want to get stuck on any book or author or period or genre for that bloody long!"
The price of understanding and friendship is high, I'll agree with that. But it's worth it. (Although, since you seem to know a bit about literary theory, I imagine you're kidding when you indicate that you dislike the tedium of long study.)
posted by koeselitz at 12:30 PM on October 17, 2006
If you mean that understanding the eternal space in the heart of God where the Koran has existed since before the beginning of time might shed light on whether the Koran is true, then I agree.
How does that square with "the only framework is rationality"?
I don't see how any of what you said was a rational response to anything I said.
posted by papakwanz at 2:15 PM on October 17, 2006
How does that square with "the only framework is rationality"?
I don't see how any of what you said was a rational response to anything I said.
posted by papakwanz at 2:15 PM on October 17, 2006
Of course, maybe you were more responding to UbuRoivas, so whatever.
It seems to me, though, that if anyone is not being conscious of their presuppositions, its you (koeselitz). You're coming from a certain framework that assumes there is some sort of platonic essence in these texts. This essence you're calling "the heart of God." Well, that's an assumption, and not a rational one at that. Your framework of rational thinking will never get you to a form that exists outside of that rationality.
And you also seem to contradict yourself repeatedly. You first state that literary criticism is bluster and literary critics are empty-headed, then later you admit to not knowing much about literary theory or having read many literary critics.
I might be misreading you, but that's the meaning that I'm interpreting from your text.
For interests of full disclosure, I'm coming from the position of a literature PhD student. My presuppositions are that 1) one must read literature and read it closely; 2) one must have a close personal relationship with literature and truly love it; 3) historical, economic, biographical, psychoanalytic, etc. contexts are important, in different ways, to understanding literature; and 4) critical theories provide a powerful and important framework for deepening our connection to and comprehension of literature, and culture in general.
posted by papakwanz at 2:30 PM on October 17, 2006
It seems to me, though, that if anyone is not being conscious of their presuppositions, its you (koeselitz). You're coming from a certain framework that assumes there is some sort of platonic essence in these texts. This essence you're calling "the heart of God." Well, that's an assumption, and not a rational one at that. Your framework of rational thinking will never get you to a form that exists outside of that rationality.
And you also seem to contradict yourself repeatedly. You first state that literary criticism is bluster and literary critics are empty-headed, then later you admit to not knowing much about literary theory or having read many literary critics.
I might be misreading you, but that's the meaning that I'm interpreting from your text.
For interests of full disclosure, I'm coming from the position of a literature PhD student. My presuppositions are that 1) one must read literature and read it closely; 2) one must have a close personal relationship with literature and truly love it; 3) historical, economic, biographical, psychoanalytic, etc. contexts are important, in different ways, to understanding literature; and 4) critical theories provide a powerful and important framework for deepening our connection to and comprehension of literature, and culture in general.
posted by papakwanz at 2:30 PM on October 17, 2006
papakwanz: sorry if I'm being difficult. But if, as you say, the claim that "the Koran exists eternally within the heart of God, and has no historical source" is simply illogical and irrational, then there's no point in reading the Koran, since that's what the Koran itself claims. That was my only point.
posted by koeselitz at 2:51 PM on October 17, 2006
posted by koeselitz at 2:51 PM on October 17, 2006
It is sometimes very difficult to understand what your closest friend is saying to you in conversation, because it requires taking into account the differences between your own and her/his perspectives. However, we do it every day.
I don't really have a horse in this race, but I think those who believe authorial intent ultimately unknowable would say you think you do it every day, but you don't, not really. You convince yourself that you do because behavior based on what you think your friend means is close enough that it gets reinforced by their consequent responses to you etc. I'd posit that friendship, even worthwhile/close friendship, can be forged out of enough these "close enough" understandings.
posted by juv3nal at 3:54 PM on October 17, 2006
I don't really have a horse in this race, but I think those who believe authorial intent ultimately unknowable would say you think you do it every day, but you don't, not really. You convince yourself that you do because behavior based on what you think your friend means is close enough that it gets reinforced by their consequent responses to you etc. I'd posit that friendship, even worthwhile/close friendship, can be forged out of enough these "close enough" understandings.
posted by juv3nal at 3:54 PM on October 17, 2006
Value and interest aren't arbitrary, Pere Ubu
Oh, yes they are. Unless you are pushing some sort of determinist line, you have to concede that what you find valuable & interesting is at least semi-arbitrary, ie subjective. Part of this subjectivity is that you needn't give a flying fuck what an author is "really trying to say" to find something of interest. Has anybody discovered yet the truth of what Shakespeare was "trying to say" in Hamlet, for example? How many Shakespeare scholars even concern themselves with this question, do you think?
It is possible, I believe, though difficult, to at least begin to understand one's own experiences, history, worldview, culture, etc. And if it's possible begin to understand those, then it's possible to begin to see what an author intends to say to us beyond what we have added to the text.
Yes, it would be necessary to understand the filters that one uses (without necessarily conceding here that there is some sort of neutral, filterless state). A pretty good way to get started on this might be to examine one's own experiences, history, worldview, culture, etc from various historically fruitful analytical approaches with some pedigree, rather than just setting out blindly from an arbitrary starting point, with "pure rationality".
Some useful filters to examine might be economic/class (Marxism), gender (Feminism), psychoanalytical, linguistic framing (structuralist), and so on. But since you are not really examining yourself, as if you were some kind of essential, static object, but rather, examining yourself in the process of interpreting a text, then your task would be to apply those analytical frameworks to your interpretation of the text, no?
posted by UbuRoivas at 4:16 PM on October 17, 2006
Oh, yes they are. Unless you are pushing some sort of determinist line, you have to concede that what you find valuable & interesting is at least semi-arbitrary, ie subjective. Part of this subjectivity is that you needn't give a flying fuck what an author is "really trying to say" to find something of interest. Has anybody discovered yet the truth of what Shakespeare was "trying to say" in Hamlet, for example? How many Shakespeare scholars even concern themselves with this question, do you think?
It is possible, I believe, though difficult, to at least begin to understand one's own experiences, history, worldview, culture, etc. And if it's possible begin to understand those, then it's possible to begin to see what an author intends to say to us beyond what we have added to the text.
Yes, it would be necessary to understand the filters that one uses (without necessarily conceding here that there is some sort of neutral, filterless state). A pretty good way to get started on this might be to examine one's own experiences, history, worldview, culture, etc from various historically fruitful analytical approaches with some pedigree, rather than just setting out blindly from an arbitrary starting point, with "pure rationality".
Some useful filters to examine might be economic/class (Marxism), gender (Feminism), psychoanalytical, linguistic framing (structuralist), and so on. But since you are not really examining yourself, as if you were some kind of essential, static object, but rather, examining yourself in the process of interpreting a text, then your task would be to apply those analytical frameworks to your interpretation of the text, no?
posted by UbuRoivas at 4:16 PM on October 17, 2006
But if, as you say, the claim that "the Koran exists eternally within the heart of God, and has no historical source" is simply illogical and irrational, then there's no point in reading the Koran, since that's what the Koran itself claims.
Huh?
First off, I didn't say that it was irrational. It is arational, I guess I might say. What's in the "heart of God" is a category outside the boundaries of human reason, and so applying labels about its rationality is essentially meaningless.
But I'm more curious about this "no point in reading" it claim. So is what you're saying that unless a book is verifiably TRUE, there's no point in reading it?
Since Robinson Crusoe claims to be the story of a man lost on an island for 28 years, but it's not, so we should chuck it?
I really don't understand what that's supposed to mean.
posted by papakwanz at 7:25 PM on October 17, 2006
Huh?
First off, I didn't say that it was irrational. It is arational, I guess I might say. What's in the "heart of God" is a category outside the boundaries of human reason, and so applying labels about its rationality is essentially meaningless.
But I'm more curious about this "no point in reading" it claim. So is what you're saying that unless a book is verifiably TRUE, there's no point in reading it?
Since Robinson Crusoe claims to be the story of a man lost on an island for 28 years, but it's not, so we should chuck it?
I really don't understand what that's supposed to mean.
posted by papakwanz at 7:25 PM on October 17, 2006
koeselitz:I guess I would agree that it is a worthwhile read, but I cannot endorse Bloom's solutions, such as they are (I felt he never completely defines his solutions). Read the Great Books, sure. But his reliance on what is "true and fixed" requires agreement on what is "true and fixed," and that is the place where Bloom and I part.
If you really want a book recommendation, I heartily urge you to read Allan Bloom's book of some years ago entitled The Closing of the American Mind. I don't necessarily agree with every jot of it, but it's the only book I know that carefully and boldly details what's wrong with western education nowadays. It details the position I'm coming from here, and it's not a hard read.
So, I've read Bloom, and as a university educator-to-be (I too am in a PhD program, but in rhetoric and composition--but with 25 years experience in management in the industrial-corporate world) I come away unsatisfied with his call for a return to Plato's Republic.
A book I recommend--though it does not purport to solve higher educational problems, but rather outlines ways to conduct ethical research in the humanities--is Methodology of the Oppressed by Chela Sandoval.
Perhaps you'll find it quotes to often from Barthes or Fanon, but she also thoroughly takes Jameson to task for his equally (to Bloom's) wistful longing for the good old days, which for most of us, were never really all that good.
posted by beelzbubba at 8:16 AM on October 18, 2006
koeselitz, I am not at all opposed to incorporating the classics, even in my first-year writing classes (not that you argued that I wouldn't). I mention this to show that Bloom's ideas of what goes in in education were skewed by the context of where he was teaching and what was going on in that city at the time he formulated many of these opinions.
My school is probably painted as a liberal bastion, as one of the nation's first Land Grant schools, but we take seriously the John Cardinal Newman sense of "liberal" education and the idea that in part we are educating students to employ the critical thought we teach throughout the rest of their lives, as they will form the civitas for the next thirty to forty years.
Rather than look to Allan Bloom for guidance on how to inculcate values, I look to learner-centered models similar to those outlined by Lee Shulman of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.
If I may suggest, Bloom's main point can be summarized by indicting moral relativism as the downfall of American education. His solution is to teach the Great Books in, I assume (I'm not pulling out my copy of Closing to confirm) a Socratic manner. Read, lecture, question and response. Bloom's mentor at Chicago, Leo Strauss founded this method at St. John's College in Annapolis and Santa Fe, if I recall. As it turns out, an elite education for the elite.
I don't say that with sarcasm, but honestly, that is what I feel Bloom's solution boils down to--that the masses of unwashed just aren't worth educating.
Now, Ann Colby and Thomas Ehrlich, who are Fellows at Carnegie, can't be painted as wooly-thinking, wild-eyed lefties (I probably could be, but that's a different story). Here is their solution as understood by a PhD student somewhere in the American Midwest:Colby, Anne, et al. "Pedagogical Strategies for Educating Citizens." Educating Citizens: Preparing America's Undergraduates for Lives of Moral and Civic Responsibility. 1st ed. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2003.
In "Pedagogical Strategies for Educating Citizens," Colby et al. examine curricular methods meant to break the inertia of moral relativism, and to move beyond the “naive theories” that students bring with them to class and leave with after graduating. They cite studies by Clement (1982), Perkins and Simmons (1988), Perkins and Martin (1986) and Gardiner (1991), which conclude that even after “learning” interpretations of difficult concepts that conflict with their “naive theories” they emerge with their core beliefs unchanged, because they “learn them in the narrow context of the classroom and on a superficial level” (133). The information-dissemination pedagogical model is indicted in this result, as the authors cite at least six studies that show that the lecture/textbook method of instruction leaves students with “fragile and superficial understanding,” able to recall facts when prompted, but unable to apply or transfer their knowledge to extra-curricular situations (133).
If the conventional information-dissemination model is instructor-centered, then, the authors propose, student-centered pedagogies of engagement offer an alternative mode of instruction that might better “support deep understanding, usable knowledge and skills, and personal connection and meaning” (134). They limit their discussion to four pedagogies “particularly appropriate to moral and civic education,” stressing that they often overlap and, as was evident in the Campus Compact toolkit, carry different definitions for different people. These pedagogies or modes of education include service-learning, or community-based learning, for which they adopt Zlotkowski’s definition. They then group a set of loosely related strategies under the rubric “experiential education,” namely “simulations, role playing, internships and other fieldwork, and action research” (135). Students are directly supervised in their fieldwork and are encouraged to interrogate the borders of theory and practice. Next they consider problem-based learning, where students as a class, in groups, or individually work on “rich, complex, and relatively unstructured problems” (135). The teacher is a facilitator, offering resources or guidance, as the students research and propose solutions. While the problems may be drawn from the real world, no authentic connection between students and community is necessary in this model. The final model reviewed is collaborative learning, where the class divides into teams to work on projects, research, and other activities designed to integrate skills-learning with complex issues requiring critical thinking and evaluative decisions for which groups take collective responsibility, even though the final submitted work may be group or individual. The balance of the chapter provides connections to research that support the efficacy of action-based learning, supporting the contentions that: students gain “real understanding” when they “actively struggle” to discover relationships between what they already know and the problem at hand; students gain “genuine and enduring learning” when they are “interested in, even enthusiastic about” their subject matter; “thinking and learning are not only active but also social processes”—that is, solutions are likely to be created through interaction among people as they discuss each other’s approaches and are able to build off each other’s ideas; learning is shaped by local context and making the learning context as much like the “real-world” context supports transfer of that knowledge to new situations. Colby et al. caution that teaching the ethical concepts that promote the goals of moral and civic discourse are essential to move beyond “moral relativism” and to effectively “support transfer of learning” into the community (142).
posted by beelzbubba at 8:52 AM on October 18, 2006
My school is probably painted as a liberal bastion, as one of the nation's first Land Grant schools, but we take seriously the John Cardinal Newman sense of "liberal" education and the idea that in part we are educating students to employ the critical thought we teach throughout the rest of their lives, as they will form the civitas for the next thirty to forty years.
Rather than look to Allan Bloom for guidance on how to inculcate values, I look to learner-centered models similar to those outlined by Lee Shulman of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.
If I may suggest, Bloom's main point can be summarized by indicting moral relativism as the downfall of American education. His solution is to teach the Great Books in, I assume (I'm not pulling out my copy of Closing to confirm) a Socratic manner. Read, lecture, question and response. Bloom's mentor at Chicago, Leo Strauss founded this method at St. John's College in Annapolis and Santa Fe, if I recall. As it turns out, an elite education for the elite.
I don't say that with sarcasm, but honestly, that is what I feel Bloom's solution boils down to--that the masses of unwashed just aren't worth educating.
Now, Ann Colby and Thomas Ehrlich, who are Fellows at Carnegie, can't be painted as wooly-thinking, wild-eyed lefties (I probably could be, but that's a different story). Here is their solution as understood by a PhD student somewhere in the American Midwest:Colby, Anne, et al. "Pedagogical Strategies for Educating Citizens." Educating Citizens: Preparing America's Undergraduates for Lives of Moral and Civic Responsibility. 1st ed. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2003.
In "Pedagogical Strategies for Educating Citizens," Colby et al. examine curricular methods meant to break the inertia of moral relativism, and to move beyond the “naive theories” that students bring with them to class and leave with after graduating. They cite studies by Clement (1982), Perkins and Simmons (1988), Perkins and Martin (1986) and Gardiner (1991), which conclude that even after “learning” interpretations of difficult concepts that conflict with their “naive theories” they emerge with their core beliefs unchanged, because they “learn them in the narrow context of the classroom and on a superficial level” (133). The information-dissemination pedagogical model is indicted in this result, as the authors cite at least six studies that show that the lecture/textbook method of instruction leaves students with “fragile and superficial understanding,” able to recall facts when prompted, but unable to apply or transfer their knowledge to extra-curricular situations (133).
If the conventional information-dissemination model is instructor-centered, then, the authors propose, student-centered pedagogies of engagement offer an alternative mode of instruction that might better “support deep understanding, usable knowledge and skills, and personal connection and meaning” (134). They limit their discussion to four pedagogies “particularly appropriate to moral and civic education,” stressing that they often overlap and, as was evident in the Campus Compact toolkit, carry different definitions for different people. These pedagogies or modes of education include service-learning, or community-based learning, for which they adopt Zlotkowski’s definition. They then group a set of loosely related strategies under the rubric “experiential education,” namely “simulations, role playing, internships and other fieldwork, and action research” (135). Students are directly supervised in their fieldwork and are encouraged to interrogate the borders of theory and practice. Next they consider problem-based learning, where students as a class, in groups, or individually work on “rich, complex, and relatively unstructured problems” (135). The teacher is a facilitator, offering resources or guidance, as the students research and propose solutions. While the problems may be drawn from the real world, no authentic connection between students and community is necessary in this model. The final model reviewed is collaborative learning, where the class divides into teams to work on projects, research, and other activities designed to integrate skills-learning with complex issues requiring critical thinking and evaluative decisions for which groups take collective responsibility, even though the final submitted work may be group or individual. The balance of the chapter provides connections to research that support the efficacy of action-based learning, supporting the contentions that: students gain “real understanding” when they “actively struggle” to discover relationships between what they already know and the problem at hand; students gain “genuine and enduring learning” when they are “interested in, even enthusiastic about” their subject matter; “thinking and learning are not only active but also social processes”—that is, solutions are likely to be created through interaction among people as they discuss each other’s approaches and are able to build off each other’s ideas; learning is shaped by local context and making the learning context as much like the “real-world” context supports transfer of that knowledge to new situations. Colby et al. caution that teaching the ethical concepts that promote the goals of moral and civic discourse are essential to move beyond “moral relativism” and to effectively “support transfer of learning” into the community (142).
posted by beelzbubba at 8:52 AM on October 18, 2006
And I apologize to all the Katamari Damacy fans whose thread got hijacked. Let me simply say that I think there is good game theory out there, and good literary criticism of games, but the one offered by Ryan Stancl on gamecareerguide.com isn't one of them. Or eight of them.
posted by beelzbubba at 9:01 AM on October 18, 2006
posted by beelzbubba at 9:01 AM on October 18, 2006
Perhaps, then, in this high-minded educational spirit, you could teach your students the fundamental principle of not bullshitting and upselling your way through stuff which is outside your competence. It is perfectly clear that what you know about Lacan and the Lacanian project would fit on the back of a teaspoon.
posted by Wolof at 1:50 AM on October 19, 2006
posted by Wolof at 1:50 AM on October 19, 2006
Y'know, wolof, I looked for my earlier post that included my bungled reference to Lacanian analysis to apologize for my error. Thank you for offering me the opportunity to do so here. I struggled with Lacan. Ultimately didn't understand very much of it. What I know might fit in the bowl of a teaspoon, but I'll accept your version.
Obviously, you thought that was a major problem and not just a side point. I bow to your massive intellect.
posted by beelzbubba at 6:58 AM on October 19, 2006
Obviously, you thought that was a major problem and not just a side point. I bow to your massive intellect.
posted by beelzbubba at 6:58 AM on October 19, 2006
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