If the author is dead, why is the english teacher alive?


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Look, I sold all the ratty old first editions in the library of Manse Dice and replaced them with leather bound, gilt edge books of blank pages, for a fraction of the price. Lady Dice complains about it, but they look lots better!


Well, at least you throw swingin' parties.


Kirth Gersen wrote:
Doodlebug Anklebiter wrote:
Chances are, most people aren't going to read William Shakespeare, The Great Gatsby or Moby Dick unless an English teacher assigns them in class
I must be a really weird dude, then.

You are. According to recent surveys, roughly a third of Americans have not read a book in the past year. Roughly half have not read a book "for pleasure" in the past year.

And, of course, simply reading "a book" usually means reading The Fault in Our Stars instead of Moby Dick, as Amazon sales figure suggest.


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[Thinks about Doug Hart earnestly talking about his rapt enjoyment of The Firm and starts crying again]

The Exchange

So, this might be slightly tangential to the whole subject of the thread, but reading through it did get me thinking on something that I think is interesting.

The academic study of literature is unique.

I believe it is the only occupation that is considered academic that is focused on researching something that is entirely a human creation. Science is perhaps the most deserving to be an academic field - so far it's the best way we have to study our universe. Philosophy deals with some of the less tangible aspects of the same thing. Then there's a host of "sciences" (more like research fields, really) that focus on humans - archaeology, sociology, psychology, etc. What's common to all of those is that they research humans, and human behavior, as a natural phenomena. Even in the academic study of music a lot of attention is dedicated to how sounds work or something.

But in literature, it's a group of people reacting to what amounts to the creations of another group of people. "Research" is maybe not the best word to describe the process of studying a book - given that it's a man made creation.

I wonder how this fact reflects on literature studies. I have no idea, as I'd never even consider walking into a literature course, let alone get a degree in it. Still, I'm curious.

The Exchange

Orfamay Quest wrote:
Kirth Gersen wrote:
Doodlebug Anklebiter wrote:
Chances are, most people aren't going to read William Shakespeare, The Great Gatsby or Moby Dick unless an English teacher assigns them in class
I must be a really weird dude, then.

You are. According to recent surveys, roughly a third of Americans have not read a book in the past year. Roughly half have not read a book "for pleasure" in the past year.

And, of course, simply reading "a book" usually means reading The Fault in Our Stars instead of Moby Dick, as Amazon sales figure suggest.

I'm not even convinced there's a strong correlation between buying "A Fault in Our Stars" and reading it.


Doodlebug Anklebiter wrote:
[Thinks about Doug Hart earnestly talking about his rapt enjoyment of The Firm and starts crying again]

Hey, Doodle, you're always asking me to recommend books that I hated.

Add that one to the list. (I almost couldn't finish it, it was so bad.) That goes for its retro-clone Da Vinci Code, too.


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Lord Snow wrote:

So, this might be slightly tangential to the whole subject of the thread, but reading through it did get me thinking on something that I think is interesting.

The academic study of literature is unique.

I believe it is the only occupation that is considered academic that is focused on researching something that is entirely a human creation. Science is perhaps the most deserving to be an academic field - so far it's the best way we have to study our universe. Philosophy deals with some of the less tangible aspects of the same thing. Then there's a host of "sciences" (more like research fields, really) that focus on humans - archaeology, sociology, psychology, etc. What's common to all of those is that they research humans, and human behavior, as a natural phenomena. Even in the academic study of music a lot of attention is dedicated to how sounds work or something.

But in literature, it's a group of people reacting to what amounts to the creations of another group of people. "Research" is maybe not the best word to describe the process of studying a book - given that it's a man made creation.

I wonder how this fact reflects on literature studies. I have no idea, as I'd never even consider walking into a literature course, let alone get a degree in it. Still, I'm curious.

There are various courses available in being an art critic, a film critic, a sports pundit, etc, etc. Literature is by no means the only field of human creation or endeavour that has experts who endlessly pick over other people's achievements and give forth their own opinions on.


Orfamay Quest wrote:
Doodlebug Anklebiter wrote:


Why BeeNee chose something for the title that John Green specifically distanced himself from seems a bit odd, but, there you go.

I don't see it as odd at all. It's an old rhetorical technique. He wishes to prove (largely to himself) that humanities are worthless and misguided. Because he can't actually do that with the humanities as they are actually practiced, so he creates an imaginary straw version of the humanities into which he can pour his contempt.

It's the same reason creationists -- who he strongly resembles in his "debating" tactics -- are so fond of quoting out of context.

Your insight to insult ratio is approaching zero.

You brought in the word theory, and then disingenuously accused me of acting like a creationist for daring to copy your wording.

You can't show me the difference between what was said above and the author is dead.

You accuse me of ignoring evidence... that you don't provide.

You make blatantly circular arguments and expect me to disprove them.

Your level of derision is not remotely supported by any argument other than an appeal to the authority of the great and glorious you. If the argument for your position was half as good as it should be to heap these levels of scorn on me you should be able to articulate a decent argument for your position.

And you can't.

Put up or leave over.


Lord Snow wrote:

So, this might be slightly tangential to the whole subject of the thread, but reading through it did get me thinking on something that I think is interesting.

The academic study of literature is unique.

I believe it is the only occupation that is considered academic that is focused on researching something that is entirely a human creation.

Archeology?

Sociology?

Political Science?

Linguistics?

Computer Science?


Lord Snow wrote:


I'm not even convinced there's a strong correlation between buying "A Fault in Our Stars" and reading it.

You don't think that you're more likely to read a book to which you have access than one to which you do not?


Political science studies the influence of hell on earth, so not entirely of human creation.


Orfamay Quest wrote:
Lord Snow wrote:
I believe it is the only occupation that is considered academic that is focused on researching something that is entirely a human creation.

Archeology?

Sociology?

Political Science?

Linguistics?

Computer Science?

Engineering, history, art history, applied science, film studies, etc.


Lord Snow wrote:


But in literature, it's a group of people reacting to what amounts to the creations of another group of people. "Research" is maybe not the best word to describe the process of studying a book - given that it's a man made creation.

I think the important word in the paragraph above is "reacting."

Most of the literature study that you are familiar with probably is "reactive" in that sense, but that's partly because of the nature of academic status and prestige. It's much more fun to read works closely and analyze them for content than it is merely to catalogue them. The effect is that most scholars would prefer not to engage in the grunt-work of, for example, preparing a scholarly edition.

One of the great works of Classical scholarship, for example, is Liddell and Scott's A Greek-English Lexicon, which is more or less self-descriptive. It's a massive compilation of all the words in the entire body of Ancient Greek with their corresponding English translations. And by entire body I do mean entire; there was a major supplemental update with the Ventris decipherment of Linear B, when the editors (who were no longer Drs. Liddell and Scott) finally considered Ventris to be sufficiently well-confirmed by scholarly consensus.

I rather doubt we'll see another similar effort within our lifetimes. First of all, it's been done -- and what's the point of reinventing the wheel? Second of all, it was a massive and expensive undertaking and few universities or funding agencies would be willing to fund fifty years of work on a single project of this nature.

On the other hand, it's no less necessary to compile compendia of Greek words than museums of nails or atlases of dialects. But it's much harder to find someone able and willing to do the work.


Yep. This thread turned out about how I expected it to.

I will say I had said earlier that Shakespeare doesn't have deep symbolism; that's because it doesn't. When properly translated, almost the entirety of the symbolism is on the surface.

That doesn't mean that it lacks symbolism or is not a good work; it just means most people are confusing complexity of language for depth of symbolism.

And could I get link to the letters on Moby Dick?


Link


Orfamay Quest wrote:
Lord Snow wrote:


But in literature, it's a group of people reacting to what amounts to the creations of another group of people. "Research" is maybe not the best word to describe the process of studying a book - given that it's a man made creation.

I think the important word in the paragraph above is "reacting."

Most of the literature study that you are familiar with probably is "reactive" in that sense, but that's partly because of the nature of academic status and prestige. It's much more fun to read works closely and analyze them for content than it is merely to catalogue them. The effect is that most scholars would prefer not to engage in the grunt-work of, for example, preparing a scholarly edition.

One of the great works of Classical scholarship, for example, is Liddell and Scott's A Greek-English Lexicon, which is more or less self-descriptive. It's a massive compilation of all the words in the entire body of Ancient Greek with their corresponding English translations. And by entire body I do mean entire; there was a major supplemental update with the Ventris decipherment of Linear B, when the editors (who were no longer Drs. Liddell and Scott) finally considered Ventris to be sufficiently well-confirmed by scholarly consensus.

I rather doubt we'll see another similar effort within our lifetimes. First of all, it's been done -- and what's the point of reinventing the wheel? Second of all, it was a massive and expensive undertaking and few universities or funding agencies would be willing to fund fifty years of work on a single project of this nature.

On the other hand, it's no less necessary to compile compendia of Greek words than museums of nails or atlases of dialects. But it's much harder to find someone able and willing to do the work.

Orf, I think I want to marry you just for mentioning Linear B; It's cool if you're a dude, I'm American and we can do that in my state. :P


Orfamay Quest wrote:
I think the important word in the paragraph above is "reacting."

Chemistry?

The Exchange

Orfamay Quest wrote:
Lord Snow wrote:

So, this might be slightly tangential to the whole subject of the thread, but reading through it did get me thinking on something that I think is interesting.

The academic study of literature is unique.

I believe it is the only occupation that is considered academic that is focused on researching something that is entirely a human creation.

Archeology?

Sociology?

Political Science?

Linguistics?

Computer Science?

While other fields that were mentioned I agree are similar to literature, these I think are inherently different. I tried to explain so in my post - archaeology, sociology, etc. treat humans as phenomena - a natural occurrence. As such, they research facts and details - an archaeologist would attempt to figure out how people of a lost civilization made their food. A sociologist would attempt an analysis of the way Americans vote, in a similar way to a biologist attempting to understand why birds migrate. Linguists study the development of a language and of communication - there's an attempt to understand what a language is and how we humans build and understand a language.

In all those cases, while the fields of study are human-centric, the humans are the objects to be studied. They exist within a larger natural world and are explained as part of it. They're an attempt to figure out who we are and how we work. In the study of literature, though, the "world" is only composed of creations other humans wrote. It's less about understanding the mechanisms of something that exists, and more about constructing yet more elaborate imaginary structures on top of ones that authors create. It's human making up things about things other human made up. In that way, it's different.

As an aside, computer science is the most jarring inclusion in that list. The study of Computer Science is in large part mathematical, because the justification behind many of the ways you do things with computers are very mathematical and sometimes not trivial. You might argue that Mathematics might also be a human invention, but that's a far more complicated argument that will require it's own thread. Let's not go down THAT rabbit hole.


Hey now... Most of the sociology, psychology and similar fields have been too thoroughly politicized to bring useful results these days. Meaning, you start with an ideological point, then you make a study only qualitatively (deep interview with four people and the like), then if this goes where you want it, you publish this without ever testing it quantitatively. And for some odd reason, the journals in these fields lap it up and never demand more. In many ways, BNW is right, but it's not the author who is dead, it's a large chunk of the humanities that are dead as sciences. That isn't to say there aren't people who try, just that most of those do not get published by people who got their positions as professors and teachers because of their political faithfulness and are not eager to see their fields change and their ideology become obsolete. Psychology is slowly recovering from decades of useless Freud crap with the advent of CBT and similar types of non-religious types of therapy.

Still, though, it is not a reasonable position that what the author intended is meaningless.

The Exchange

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Sissyl wrote:

Psychology is slowly recovering from decades of useless Freud crap with the advent of CBT and similar types of non-religious types of therapy.

You could say it had a traumatic childhood.


Long one too. Must have been an elf to be young for so long and yet not learn a thing...

The Exchange

Orfamay Quest wrote:


Most of the literature study that you are familiar with probably is "reactive" in that sense, but that's partly because of the nature of academic status and prestige. It's much more fun to read works closely and analyze them for content than it is merely to catalogue them. The effect is that most scholars would prefer not to engage in the grunt-work of, for example, preparing a scholarly edition.

[golf clap] This jives with my XP as both an English major and LIS student. I can say that there is nothing more satisfying than a good, annotated, scholarly edition of Robinson Crusoe with a great big index at the back, for undergraduate reading (or just pleasure reading!) but that I chose not to go into English for grad school because it did not seem focused on providing that kind of work.

I would say the one exception is the Shakespeare industry; never seems to be a dearth of professors working on their umpteenth scholarly edition of "Richard III."

[has flashback to the off-topic Richard III thread and considers quitting the internet]


MagusJanus wrote:


And could I get link to the letters on Moby Dick?

Look up the Hawthorne/Melville letters. Start with the one that discusses the "secret motto."


Lord Snow wrote:


While other fields that were mentioned I agree are similar to literature, these I think are inherently different. I tried to explain so in my post - archaeology, sociology, etc. treat humans as phenomena - a natural occurrence. As such, they research facts and details - an archaeologist would attempt to figure out how people of a lost civilization made their food.

The problem is that the same archeologists and sociologists who study what people did also study what people thought and believed, for example, in the study of religious beliefs.

You're making a distinction without a difference.

As a simple example, one of things that archeologists have learned about the failed Norse colonies on Greenland is that they didn't eat fish. This is a simple fact -- there aren't fish bones in the middens, even when the colony itself was on the verge of starvation and there are dog bones in the midden, with human tooth marks on them.

Why were the Norse colonists willing to eat their dogs before they were willing to eat salmon?

It's an open question right now, but one of the major theories is some sort of religious or cultural taboo. [They certainly knew about fish and had even seen the Greenlandic Inuit eating them.] Which is to say, it's a story that they told to each other. And that brings us back to the study of human creations. What kind of a story could be told that would make a hunter kill his dog before he went spear-fishing? Who would have told it, and why?

Another famous example is Ruth Benedict's wartime study of Japanese culture, done at the invitation of the War Department to understand and predict the behavior of the Japanese. Because there was a war on, it was an example of a "culture at a distance" study, focusing almost exclusively on things that people created such as stories, literature, newspaper clippings, films and recordings. (This work, by the way, also illustrates the practical importance of the humanities. It was Benedict's recommendation, based on the cultural role of the Emperor, that the Americans should back down on their demand for unconditional surrender and allow the Emperor to retain his throne. Roosevelt accepted this recommendation and adjusted the surrender terms appropriately. As a result, Operation Downfall, the invasion of the Japanese home islands, never happened, which saved roughly a million US casualties -- that number coming from General Curtis LaMay. Secretary of State Stimson's staff suggested closer to 4 million US casualties and seven million Japanese.)

I recommend it, by the way. The US State Department still issued this book in the 1990s as required reading for people being sent to Japan. It's called The Chrysanthemum and the Sword.


Orfamay Quest wrote:

...Another famous example is Ruth Benedict's wartime study of Japanese culture, done at the invitation of the War Department to understand and predict the behavior of the Japanese. Because there was a war on, it was an example of a "culture at a distance" study, focusing almost exclusively on things that people created such as stories, literature, newspaper clippings, films and recordings. (This work, by the way, also illustrates the practical importance of the humanities. It was Benedict's recommendation, based on the cultural role of the Emperor, that the Americans should back down on their demand for unconditional surrender and allow the Emperor to retain his throne. Roosevelt accepted this recommendation and adjusted the surrender terms appropriately. As a result, Operation Downfall, the invasion of the Japanese home islands, never happened, which saved roughly a million US casualties -- that number coming from General Curtis LaMay. Secretary of State Stimson's staff suggested closer to 4 million US casualties and seven million Japanese.)

I recommend it, by the way. The US State Department still issued this book in the 1990s as required reading for people being sent to Japan. It's called The Chrysanthemum and the Sword.

Regarding any impact Ruth Benedict may or may not have had on Roosevelt, it was of limited effect because Roosevelt died on April 12th, 1945 (and was succeeded by Truman), and the Japanese surrender terms were finalised at the Potsdam conference in July, 1945. The current version (22nd June, 2014) of the Wikipedia article on the Surrender of Japan says that in fact at Potsdam the Amercian government took a line that they wanted to get rid of the Emperor and it was the British who wanted the Emperor retained. If Wikipedia is correct, at Potsdam the Americans went into the conference with a position the opposite of what you say Ruth Benedict had recommended to Roosevelt.


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As a writer, it matters to me what I think the meaning is behind what I write. What matters in my writing might be different for somebody else, just as they may get something totally different from it than I do, or than I intended. And yet something different may appear for a more critical mind.

So it all matters. Somebody saying only one perspective counts is like saying other people aren't real people or don't matter, which is ridiculous. This is why critics, by and large, suck. Their job, in a rather roundabout way, is basically to imagine a hierarchy of importance for human beings and the things they like, with their own lame opinions at the very top.

Gross.


Charles Evans 25 wrote:


Regarding any impact Ruth Benedict may or may not have had on Roosevelt, it was of limited effect because Roosevelt died on April 12th, 1945 (and was succeeded by Truman), and the Japanese surrender terms were finalised at the Potsdam conference in July, 1945. The current version (22nd June, 2014) of the Wikipedia article on the Surrender of Japan says that in fact at Potsdam the Amercian government took a line that they wanted to get rid of the Emperor and it was the British who wanted the Emperor retained. If Wikipedia is correct, at Potsdam the Americans went into the conference with a position the opposite of what you say Ruth Benedict had recommended to Roosevelt.

I'm not sure that Wikipedia is entirely correct in this instance. One of the sources I've been able to find suggests that while Truman himself was an outlier and that the views of the American government as a whole were much softer.

Quote:


To mitigate American casualties in Japan, the civilian leaders of the War
Department recommended removing demands for unconditional surrender. The
United States could accomplish "everything we want to accomplish in regard to
Japan without the use of the term," which would only inflict a humiliating "stigma"
and "loss of face" on Japan's ruling bodies. They advised Truman to settle for
"the equivalent of unconditional surrender," by which America could still fulfill its
"vital war objective of preventing Japan front again becoming a menace to world
peace." This was reminiscent of Roosevelt in 1943. lt also meant the
transformation and retention of the emperor as "a constitutional monarch," in the
words of Henry Stimson, "a kindly minded Christian gentleman" who was the
secretary of war. Like most other people in the government who did not want a
fight to the finish, Stimson believed that Emperor Hirohito was a silent partner
and a passive witness in a political system "under the complete dominance of the
Japanese Army," which allegedly ruled in the name of the "Emperor-God."

Note that this discussion is more or less exactly in the terms used by Benedict. While it's of course true that Benedict didn't have a copyright on the phrase "loss of face," the facts remain that this argument is a cultural one, not a military one, that Benedict was the leading specialist on Japanese culture, and that much of our knowledge of the centrality of "face" in "shame cultures" derives directly from her work. In fact, Benedict is generally the one considered to have identified the concept of a "shame culture" to Western anthropology, to have identified Japan specifically as a shame culture, and to have drawn attention to this difference with US "guilt culture."

This quotation also specifically identifies two key proponents of the softer view as Stimson, whom I already mentioned, and Roosevelt himself. Although Roosevelt couldn't be represented at the conference, his views definitely were, because most of functionaries were his people:

Quote:


Leahy would later claim that the effort to state terms that could nullify the need
for the invasion was consistent with Roosevelt's political objectives. Most career
diplomats and East Asia experts would probably agree. Led by Under Secretary
of State Joseph C. Grew, a former ambassador to Japan, they opposed what
they called "a strict" or "rigid interpretation" of unconditional surrender and bad
"no idea of interfering with the form of the government of Japan." They wanted to
state specific demands and retain the emperor as the "de jure sovereign." Then,
the Japanese people and office holders could be "induced to cooperate" with
those specifications and obey the emperor's directive to disarm.

Basically, don't read too much into Truman's personal opinions, since Potsdam (like any other high-level government conference) was as much or more the product of the staff as of the leaders.

The Exchange

Orfamay Quest wrote:


The problem is that the same archeologists and sociologists who study what people did also study what people thought and believed, for example, in the study of religious beliefs.

You're making a distinction without a difference.

I want to make sure I understand what you mean here, because the relevence of your examples was, I admit, lost on me. Couldn't figure out what I was supposed to understand from them.

Are you ruling out the possibility that there might be an inherent difference between the study of books - 100% creations of other humans, written with the intent of being read and studied by others - and the study of ancient cultures, which are more like a fact that you try to figure out?

In your example about the fishing village, you described exactly what I was trying to convey - archaeology, in that case, attempt to understand an ancient human society in a similar way that one would attempt to understand behavioral patterns in, say, a pack of lions. They attempt to learn as much as they can about how those people lived, and then connect the dots with a satisfactory explanation of the society they had. It's all very grounded in reality - an attempt to collect data about once instance of human existence. Unlike it, in literature books - a human creation - are studied in a vacuum. You are not studying part of the natural world, but rather working with a fictional structure composed by another human. You are trying, as it were, to solve a very elaborate riddle proposed by another human, rather than attempting to gather information about the natural world.

Your second example confuses me farther as it seems that what you described is more of a sociological study done through reading an alien culture's books (not an uncommon anthropological tool), and less of a literature study. The task that Benedict was handling was not to understand the deeper meaning of some book or another, but to reflect from Japan's books to the Japanese. So, not exactly what you'll find in the halls of an average literature faculty in a typical university.

I can understand having a serious debate about the issue and deciding that there is no inherent difference, but you seem to have instantly reached the conclusion that no only is there no difference, it should also be fairly obvious that there isn't. I'm confused, because normally I agree with you completely, but this time I just can't figure out where you're coming from. You really see no difference at all?


Lord Snow wrote:
Orfamay Quest wrote:


The problem is that the same archeologists and sociologists who study what people did also study what people thought and believed, for example, in the study of religious beliefs.

You're making a distinction without a difference.

Are you ruling out the possibility that there might be an inherent difference between the study of books - 100% creations of other humans, written with the intent of being read and studied by others - and the study of ancient cultures, which are more like a fact that you try to figure out?

No, but you've not suggested to me anything that suggests there is such a difference, either. I'm not ruling out teapots orbiting Pluto, either, but I'm not taking your unsupported word that they're out there.

Quote:

Your second example confuses me farther as it seems that what you described is more of a sociological study done through reading an alien culture's books (not an uncommon anthropological tool), and less of a literature study.

... and you've yet to explain in any way how those two are fundamentally different. Right now, what I'm reading is a claim by you that studying books is fundamentally different than studying books.

Quote:


The task that Benedict was handling was not to understand the deeper meaning of some book or another, but to reflect from Japan's books to the Japanese.

Except that to reflect from the book to the reader is exactly what Benedict was asked to do, and also a traditional task of the literature scholar.

You make the claim that "in literature books - a human creation - are studied in a vacuum." I think this is your mistake.


Lord Snow wrote:


Are you ruling out the possibility that there might be an inherent difference between the study of books - 100% creations of other humans, written with the intent of being read and studied by others - and the study of ancient cultures, which are more like a fact that you try to figure out?

Further to above,.... I think you're not taking seriously the possibility that literature scholars might be trying to figure things out as well.

I'll riff for a bit on the Gatsby example, precisely because it's so ludicrous. The person who proposed this theory suggests that this is not only a possible reading, but a deliberate one: "Fitzgerald litters his novel with signifiers that suggest Gatsby to be black, although he "passes" as white.[...] Fitzgerald is also playing with the symbolic status of the car and with stereotypical images of blackness. Why does he do this? Why are there so many clues?"

Aside from the fact that those questions are based on false premises, those are, in fact, important questions. Why does the author do what he does? What is the author's intended reading, and how does that affect the literary discourse of the time? Is this intended to be a transgressive statement, or a realistic one?

Basically,.... can we infer anything about Fitzgerald from his treatment of race in Gatsby? That's a fact that literature scholars would like to figure out, because learning about Fitzgerald in one context will help us understand him in others.

Beyond that,... can we infer anything about the culture of the American 1920s from Fitzgerald's treatment of race in Gatsby? Can we infer about how Americans in the 1920s would behave towards a secretive black person? This is another useful fact, that would help us not only understand Fitzgerald but also other people -- historians and sociologists would be interested in knowing this, too. (This is partly what I meant by "transgressive" -- if Fitzgerald is simply representing how people thought, that means something different that if he was proposing a new behavioral and thought standard.)

Now, the answer to both questions is pretty obviously "no, we can't." At least, not on the lines outlined in this study, because this study is based on spurious data derived from a spurious reading.

But this is basically what Benedict had to do. From cultural data -- e.g., films and books -- she had to learn about expected values in Japanese culture in order to predict how they would behave. And Benedict did a pretty good job of making predictions about how Japanese can and do react to things, to the point where the book is still a useful predictive and explanatory tool for Westerners heading to Japan for the first time.


Lord Snow wrote:
You are trying, as it were, to solve a very elaborate riddle proposed by another human, rather than attempting to gather information about the natural world.

A third example. Do you think you could get any useful information either about slavery or about Stowe's opinion on slavery by reading Uncle Tom's Cabin?


Down with Simon Legree!

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Orfmay Quest-

I agree that I presented no real basis to support my claim. I merely remarked that the entire discussion earlier in the thread got me thinking about this idea, that there's this fundamental difference. I did not attempt to say that there is a difference, or if there is one, what exactly is it and in which way does it manifest itself. It's a half baked idea, really, and I just tossed it out there, intending to give thought to the matter when I'll be inclined to do so.

However... I still maintain that there's a good reason to think there might be a difference. Literature studies might have areas where they intersect with other fields (your example about Benedict, or about learning something about the 1920's cultural status of America by reading Gatsby). However, that's true for all the academic fields - they interweave and interject because that's how reality works. However, I wouldn't say sociology is about understanding the human mind, just because sometimes sociological findings could be a useful data point in psychological research. Or, I wouldn't call Physics a study of art because of the way it attempts to understand symmetry.
The fact that you CAN use information in books to learn about real things does not mean that that is the reason literature studies exist. As a matter of fact I'll go ahead and say that from what I know, learning real things is mostly a tangential side effect to literature academics. It's really mostly about the books themselves.

There's no way around it, really. Literature is about books first and everything else second. That's basically the whole point. And, as a field that mostly concerns itself with the creations of other humans, unlike most other academic fields, I say there might be a difference between literature and it's fellow schools of thought. might. The idea is worth consideration, because like it or not, there's at least a grain of truth in the idea that studying something completely man-made is not exactly the same as figuring out the workings of our natural surroundings.


Lord Snow wrote:
...There's no way around it, really. Literature is about books first and everything else second. That's basically the whole point. And, as a field that mostly concerns itself with the creations of other humans, unlike most other academic fields, I say there might be a difference between literature and it's fellow schools of thought. might. The idea is worth consideration, because like it or not, there's at least a grain of truth in the idea that studying something completely man-made is not exactly the same as figuring out the workings of our natural surroundings.

Is Literature always about books though? It seems to me that with regard to at least some practitioners in the field, Literature is more about them giving their own opinions and analysis than about what they profess to study. It doesn't matter to such practitioners what the works that they study are, because as far as they're concerned propounding their own opinions is the most important thing about the subject. They might as well critique an office health & safety code as a seventeenth century play or a nineteenth century novel.


Lord Snow wrote:


The fact that you CAN use information in books to learn about real things does not mean that that is the reason literature studies exist. As a matter of fact I'll go ahead and say that from what I know, learning real things is mostly a tangential side effect to literature academics. It's really mostly about the books themselves.

I disagree. Literature studies are rarely about the books themselves -- study about the books themselves is the boring scholarly-edition stuff, making concordances and correcting scribal errors, that few people want to do and even fewer take seriously when it comes time for promotion and tenure.

Literature study is mostly about minds, specifically the author's mind and the reader's. And both of those are real things.

The author has put a set of words on the page that create a particular implication or reaction in the reader's mind. The key question for most high-level literature discussion is what those implications/reactions are, and to what extent they're intended by the author -- or merely inferred by the reader.

Did Fitzgerald intend us to read Gatsby as a novel about race and "passing"? (I say no, but you may have a different opinion?) That's a question about Fitzgerald's mind.

If you force such a reading on the book, what are its implications? That's a question about the reader's mind.

What are the elements supporting such a reading? That's a question jointly about the book and about the reader -- the reader can, for example, interpret "yellow" as "a great signifier in Afro-American discourse to suggest miscegenation and racial passing" (signifiers themselves are real things; they're an aspect of culture), which in turn enables them to interpret a description of a car as " a rich cream colour" appropriately. The words "a rich cream colour" are of course part of the book, but the interpretation again is the reader's.


Mind you, I'm not sure to what extent it matters whether a practitioner in the field of literature is more interested in what they're studying or in the act of giving their opinion - either way they end up saying something about what they've been looking at.


Charles Evans 25 wrote:

Mind you, I'm not sure to what extent it matters whether a practitioner in the field of literature is more interested in what they're studying or in the act of giving their opinion - either way they end up saying something about what they've been looking at.

Of course, in this regard literature professors are no different than any other experts. I'd be surprised if a testifying medical expert, when asked about a cause of death, were instead to give a recipe for French Bread from the stand.

In fact, I'd be surprised if a testifying toxicologist were to start talking about blunt force trauma to the skull.


Orfamay Quest wrote:


The author has put a set of words on the page that create a particular implication or reaction in the reader's mind. The key question for most high-level literature discussion is what those implications/reactions are, and to what extent they're intended by the author -- or merely inferred by the reader.

Did Fitzgerald intend us to read Gatsby as a novel about race and "passing"? (I say no, but you may have a different opinion?) That's a question about Fitzgerald's mind.

If you force such a reading on the book, what are its implications? That's a question about the reader's mind.

What are the elements supporting such a reading? That's a question jointly about the book and about the reader -- the reader can, for example, interpret "yellow" as "a great signifier in Afro-American discourse to suggest miscegenation and racial passing" (signifiers themselves are real things; they're an aspect of culture), which in turn enables them to interpret a description of a car as " a rich cream colour" appropriately. The words "a rich cream colour" are of course part of the book, but the interpretation again is the reader's.

I suspect that most authors are more interested in entertaining sufficient readers to guarantee themselves a regular pay-cheque than in trying to make any kind of point. For example see the publishers 'Mills & Boon' and most of their output (one of the UK's market leaders in 'romance and fiction').


Charles Evans 25 wrote:


I suspect that most authors are more interested in entertaining sufficient readers to guarantee themselves a regular pay-cheque than in trying to make any kind of point.

Well, that's certainly a theory, although given the economics of book publishing in the 1920s and, in particular, the amount of money that Scott Fitzgerald had between himself and Zelda (the royalties from This Side of Paradise alone were enough to put him in the top 2% of US tax returns), I'm not sure that this applies to Fitzgerald, and particularly Fitzgerald in 1925, five years after Paradise.

Similarly, I'd be very skeptical of the notion that J.K. Rowling tried to publish The Cuckoo's Calling because she needed to give herself a regular stipend.

In my experience, most authors don't write to make money. The ones who are already successful don't need to, and the ones who aren't successful know that it's extremely unlikely they will become so. But if you have any specific work by any specific author in mind, I'd be happy to look at the evidence you choose to present.

The Exchange

But isn't "only trying to make a buck" associating the author's intentions with his/her writing?

If we do a materialist reading of "the novel" then every single novel in the Western canon, at a fundamental level, is firstly about the price of cotton-based vs. pulp-based paper and the savings on inputs to be gained by newer designs of printing machines and typefaces.


Orfamay Quest wrote:
Charles Evans 25 wrote:


I suspect that most authors are more interested in entertaining sufficient readers to guarantee themselves a regular pay-cheque than in trying to make any kind of point.

Well, that's certainly a theory, although given the economics of book publishing in the 1920s and, in particular, the amount of money that Scott Fitzgerald had between himself and Zelda (the royalties from This Side of Paradise alone were enough to put him in the top 2% of US tax returns), I'm not sure that this applies to Fitzgerald, and particularly Fitzgerald in 1925, five years after Paradise.

Similarly, I'd be very skeptical of the notion that J.K. Rowling tried to publish The Cuckoo's Calling because she needed to give herself a regular stipend.

In my experience, most authors don't write to make money. The ones who are already successful don't need to, and the ones who aren't successful know that it's extremely unlikely they will become so. But if you have any specific work by any specific author in mind, I'd be happy to look at the evidence you choose to present.

Well, Winston Churchill for a start. I quote Wikipedia:

"...Despite his lifelong fame and upper-class origins, Churchill always struggled to keep his income at a level which would fund his extravagant lifestyle. MPs before 1946 received only a nominal salary (and in fact did not receive anything at all until the Parliament Act 1911) so many had secondary professions from which to earn a living. From his first book in 1898 until his second stint as Prime Minister, Churchill's income was almost entirely made from writing books and opinion pieces for newspapers and magazines. The most famous of his newspaper articles are those that appeared in the Evening Standard from 1936 warning of the rise of Hitler and the danger of the policy of appeasement..."

The Exchange

Not to mention Newgate Prison makes its appearance in "Moll Flanders" probably in no small part due to Daniel Defoe's continuing fears about his debts. It's possible Defoe wouldn't have become a novelist if he hadn't gone broke.


Jeffrey Archer (another politician!) may well have embarked on his literary career with Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less, as far as I can determine, because he was in something of a financial hole in the wake of being amongst the victims of a fraud scheme.


Charles Evans 25 wrote:
Orfamay Quest wrote:
Charles Evans 25 wrote:


I suspect that most authors are more interested in entertaining sufficient readers to guarantee themselves a regular pay-cheque than in trying to make any kind of point.

Well, that's certainly a theory, although given the economics of book publishing in the 1920s and, in particular, the amount of money that Scott Fitzgerald had between himself and Zelda (the royalties from This Side of Paradise alone were enough to put him in the top 2% of US tax returns), I'm not sure that this applies to Fitzgerald, and particularly Fitzgerald in 1925, five years after Paradise.

Similarly, I'd be very skeptical of the notion that J.K. Rowling tried to publish The Cuckoo's Calling because she needed to give herself a regular stipend.

In my experience, most authors don't write to make money. The ones who are already successful don't need to, and the ones who aren't successful know that it's extremely unlikely they will become so. But if you have any specific work by any specific author in mind, I'd be happy to look at the evidence you choose to present.

Well, Winston Churchill for a start. I quote Wikipedia:

So, you base your analysis of F. Scott Fitzgerald on the basis of a Wikipedia article about Winston Churchill that makes unsourced statements about his income. Great scholarship there.

Or are you basing an analysis of Winston Churchill on the basis of unsourced secondary scholarship in the form of a Wikipedia article?


I find the Wikipedia article on Charles Dickens a bit unclear, but it appears to me possible he may have come to writing fiction as an aspect of a day-job as a journalist.


Orfamay Quest wrote:
Charles Evans 25 wrote:
Orfamay Quest wrote:
Charles Evans 25 wrote:


I suspect that most authors are more interested in entertaining sufficient readers to guarantee themselves a regular pay-cheque than in trying to make any kind of point.

Well, that's certainly a theory, although given the economics of book publishing in the 1920s and, in particular, the amount of money that Scott Fitzgerald had between himself and Zelda (the royalties from This Side of Paradise alone were enough to put him in the top 2% of US tax returns), I'm not sure that this applies to Fitzgerald, and particularly Fitzgerald in 1925, five years after Paradise.

Similarly, I'd be very skeptical of the notion that J.K. Rowling tried to publish The Cuckoo's Calling because she needed to give herself a regular stipend.

In my experience, most authors don't write to make money. The ones who are already successful don't need to, and the ones who aren't successful know that it's extremely unlikely they will become so. But if you have any specific work by any specific author in mind, I'd be happy to look at the evidence you choose to present.

Well, Winston Churchill for a start. I quote Wikipedia:

So, you base your analysis of F. Scott Fitzgerald on the basis of a Wikipedia article about Winston Churchill that makes unsourced statements about his income. Great scholarship there.

Or are you basing an analysis of Winston Churchill on the basis of unsourced secondary scholarship in the form of a Wikipedia article?

I wasn't commenting on F. Scott Fitzgerald. I was supplying the name of a well-known writer for whom making money was a primary consideration in writing. In addition to Wikipedia, I've also found a book review of a biography of Churchill which review mentions Churchill being in financial difficulties and writing to extract himself from it: *Link*

However, since I don't have a copy of said biography immediately to hand, and I rather suspect that you're looking for extensive quotes from such a work, I'll bow out of this discussion.

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Literary criticism has several purposes. One is to illuminate how the art of literature develops and changes over time. It also speaks to the historical context of works. How does Shakespeare change the way the human personality is portrayed, for example. Or how James Joyce's stream of consciousness arises from within the context of post-Fruedian, 20th century ideas of the unconscious and relativity. Also, how does, say Christopher Marlowe influence Shakespeare. How are both play writes interacting with and developing upon morality plays. For that matter, a topic could be how Quentin Tarantino fits into the tradition of the revenge tragedy.

Another purpose of academic literary criticism is to examine what it is that makes excellent works of literature excellent. Why is Casablanca such an awesome movie? Why is Conan such a friggin cool character? Why has Hamlet inspired almost 500 years of praise, questions, and interpretation?

Yet another purpose is to enhance our appreciation of a piece of art. Learning about the symbolic resonances that another reader finds will make your own reading more thoughtful.

So what a writer intended *is* interesting to the critic, especially with regards the the purpose of seeing how literature develops and understanding a work of art's historic context, but there are other aspects to the study of literature where it is less important.


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Allegedly, Honore Balzac changed his name to Honore de Balzac because he got paid by the word.

I only kinda skimmed the last bunch, so I'm not really sure what's under contention, but the interplay of artistic genius and hackdom has provided a wondrous array of fabulous results in the world of literature, as every fan of sci-fi and fantasy novels should know.


Orfamay Quest wrote:
Literature studies are rarely about the books themselves

And that's a shame.

Charles Evans 25 wrote:
I find the Wikipedia article on Charles Dickens a bit unclear, but it appears to me possible he may have come to writing fiction as an aspect of a day-job as a journalist.
Charles Evans 25 wrote:
I suspect that most authors are more interested in entertaining sufficient readers to guarantee themselves a regular pay-cheque than in trying to make any kind of point. For example see the publishers 'Mills & Boon' and most of their output (one of the UK's market leaders in 'romance and fiction').

This highlights an issue I have with academic fiction - let me see if I can explicate it properly. If you look around, you will probably find that the academic study for Dickens is a little thin. The reason for this, at least with the professors I spoke with, is that he was a little too popular to merit scholarly attention, his ability to capture and explicate the human condition of his time notwithstanding. The same "stink" adheres to almost any writer who has the audacity to use their talent to try and make a living off of it (e.g. writing popular fiction). In the end, the only people who can write and try to be "great" (i.e. for academic plaudits) are those who can afford to, because they don't have to care if their work sells or not, with the exception of the academic community.

Who can afford to not care if their work appeals to anyone but the academic community? Those who are independently wealthy (or at least well off enough that do what the rest of us do without having to worry about the proceeds of their writing), or those being sponsored to do so (academics). So whose viewpoint gets into academic discussion? The wealthy. Those who have to "work" for a living (e.g. Dickens, Tolkein, King) are shut out, regardless of what they might have to say.

Now, before anyone says that King (for example) has more money than God now and can write whatever he wants (a true enough statement), he has publicly stated that over his career, he has gained a distaste for the academic community, largely because he is constantly told that because he is so popular, he can't possibly be take seriously in a critical context. (I don't have an exact reference for this, but I will try to pin it down if anyone insists). And I see his point; why should he write to please a group who has disdained him his whole career?

I know there are those who will disagree with me, or who can find an exception to the general climate I have described here, but when you have a literature professor (any literature professor, and I did have one) who says he or she believes Shakespeare (IMO, one of the greatest writers in the English language) should be removed from the literary canon because "he wrote for the popular media of his time", there is a problem.

Don't get me wrong; I've read and enjoyed William Styron, Joan Didion, and others in the discussion with modern academics. I don't dislike academics because it's academic. But we could stand to democratize it a bit.

[EDIT] I just realized I've gotten a little off the beaten path of the thread here; not trying to threadjack, the topic just struck me after a few of the recent posts...

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