Doodlebug Anklebiter |
1 person marked this as a favorite. |
My own experiences in the academy (well, state university) were pretty boring. No postmodernists, no idiot professors, nobody who wanted to junk Shakespeare, nobody who wanted to replace the canon with feminist slave narratives by transgendered people with mobility impediments. Although, come to think of it, I never was assigned any Dickens. But I did have one guy make us read The Canterbury Tales and The Time Machine in the same class, so that's gotta be worth something.
Readerbreeder |
I remember an essay by Gore Vidal (hence my Gore Vidal face) where he mentioned that there were very few academic discussions of Oscar Wilde, because what would be the point?
Well, from what I understand, Wilde was pretty full of himself to begin with, so he really didn't need any encouragement.
Zeugma |
1 person marked this as a favorite. |
My own experiences in the academy (well, state university) were pretty boring. No postmodernists, no idiot professors, nobody who wanted to junk Shakespeare, nobody who wanted to replace the canon with feminist slave narratives by transgendered people with mobility impediments. Although, come to think of it, I never was assigned any Dickens. But I did have one guy make us read The Canterbury Tales and The Time Machine in the same class, so that's gotta be worth something.
I wouldn't mind having Canterbury Tales and The Time Machine in the same class at all. My undergrad didn't spend enough time on Chaucer, IMO. But what I couldn't stand was having Frankenstein and Wordsworth in the same Eng Lit class. There is only so much elaborate description of nature that one mind can endure. If I never read about a Swiss alp or an English hilltop again, it'll be too soon.
Zeugma |
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.
I'd say a big exception to this dichotomy of writers are "the good die young" school, or those who intend for their work to "die young." E.g. Emily Dickinson, Franz Kafka, Keats, et al. These aren't WEALTHY people I've just mentioned (though Keats probably wasn't too bad off), but they didn't make a living off their writing, and probably never would have. Some of them never wanted their works to be read widely at all.
Also, some popular writers are also covered extensively in academia: e.g. Ernest Hemingway, Toni Morrison (but they won Nobel prizes, so maybe the people in Stockholm know better than the academics after all).Zeugma |
It also depends on what kind of analysis you're doing. If you aren't keeping strictly to literary criticism but branch out into that mix of cultural-studies/criticism, lets say, like Walter Benjamin, then the thesis that started this thread isn't far off but you DO get to ask questions that are closer to "Could the Hulk beat up Superman, and why?" and get away with it in academia.
Lord Snow |
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.
Well, OK, the book is about the author's mind. But... the author is a single person. Usually, having so much academic attention be given to figuring out one person would sound ludicrous. Further, it would seem like, in the case of works written by people alive at the time, there wouldn't be much of a question, would there? contact the author and ask.
Can't you see that there's an inherint difference between studying the human mind(psychology) and studying a human's mind?
I think what you think I'm trying to do is imply that the study of literature is lesser in some way to the other academic fields. To clarify, I am not. While I have a strong gut feeling, backed with some solid looking big-picture evidence (I think - you obviously disagree about the validity of that evidence) that literature isdifferent, I have yet to resolve how, exactly.
I am also not attempting any sort of attack against the methodology of literature studies - it's clear to me that the intelligent people who busy themselves with that came up with actual ways of reading into a text, unlike my high school literature teacher.
Really I'm not attacking anything from any angle. Just musing that, purely on a factual level, there IS some sort of difference between studying nature and studying a man's work. Or between studying humans as a natural occurrence and studying the artistic work of very few humans.
Zeugma |
Hasn't this whole discussion already been addressed by Aristotle in his Poetics? ...
Lord Snow, a thought I just had in reply to your post: if Aristotle categorizes poetics (which, if he were alive, would likely include the novel as a form of "epic") as a form of imitation, then there's not some necessarily fundamental difference between studying literature and, say, cultural anthropology, because it is all a question of looking at how we, as homo sapiens, imitate our surroundings and each other...
How is studying one person's story different from one psychologist writing a case study about a single analysand, for example? [is analysand a word? the person being analyzed]
There is more of a continuum between the study of literature and other fields than differences, perhaps. Plato would disagree with me, but if we look at modern scientific methods, the rise of empiricism, etc., how is that less imitative and artificial than the way we study literature? It's more standardized, and objective for a given amount of "object," but look at something "directly tied to the study of nature" like Linnaeus' taxonomy, and that's about as man-made and artificial as you can get. Once we start classifying things in science we're no better nor worse than Plato and his "ideal forms."
Orfamay Quest |
Well, OK, the book is about the author's mind. But... the author is a single person. Usually, having so much academic attention be given to figuring out one person would sound ludicrous. Further, it would seem like, in the case of works written by people alive at the time, there wouldn't be much of a question, would there? contact the author and ask.
Can't you see that there's an inherint difference between studying the human mind(psychology) and studying a human's mind?
Not really. The tradition of the case study has a long history in psychology, and in medicine as well, for that matter. Indeed, there are a number of professional types who believe (incorrectly, I might add) that case studies are actually the only proper way to do medicine, because that's the only way to deal with the individual variation that these placebo-controlled randomized double-blind clinical trials deliberately airbrush away. (There's an element of truth in that, though. A drug that cures 50% of the patients but kills 5% is probably too dangerous to use unless you can figure out who that 5% is and why.)
Similarly, there are large numbers of overrepresented and overstudied type specimens. We have something like 30 T. rex skeletons, but everyone studies Sue or Samson.
Partly that's because of availability -- we have more information about Charles Dickens' mind than we do about the mind of Catherine Hogarth Dickens. And partly it's because scholarship begets scholarship; once there's one theory about Charles Dickens' mind, I can easily critique that theory and offer a revised, second, theory. Then someone else can create a third, and so on, until we have an entire journal devoted to him (Dickens Quarterly, q.v. There's also the Dickensian, Dickens Studies Annual, and Dickens Studies Newsletter. I'm not sure why Readerbreeder considers Dickens scholarship to be absent. As far as I know, Emily Dickinson has one journal devoted to her work, while Dickens has at least four.)
As far as asking people who are still alive,... that's trickier than you think. Some writers are not very cooperative with the scholarly press, or are simply too busy. More generally, if what you're interested in is a scholar's unconscious bias ("Is Stephen King anti-Semitic? Treatment of Judaism in King's horror fiction," to appear soon in MLA), that's not the sort of question you can expect an answer too. Even if he were inclined to answer truthfully, almost by definition he doesn't have access to his own unconscious biases, or they'd not be unconscious....
Gore Vidal |
Gore Vidal wrote:I remember an essay by Gore Vidal (hence my Gore Vidal face) where he mentioned that there were very few academic discussions of Oscar Wilde, because what would be the point?Well, from what I understand, Wilde was pretty full of himself to begin with, so he really didn't need any encouragement.
Mostly, it was because what would you do, write a book explaining the jokes? (In retrospect, he may have said there weren't many discussions of his comedies, I don't recall.)
Zeugma |
Readerbreeder wrote:Mostly, it was because what would you do, write a book explaining the jokes? (In retrospect, he may have said there weren't many discussions of his comedies, I don't recall.)Gore Vidal wrote:I remember an essay by Gore Vidal (hence my Gore Vidal face) where he mentioned that there were very few academic discussions of Oscar Wilde, because what would be the point?Well, from what I understand, Wilde was pretty full of himself to begin with, so he really didn't need any encouragement.
Few academic discussions of Wilde? On what planet? Maybe, if you can't find it under Literary Criticism, try Queer Studies. I doubt there's anything he wrote on, short of a bar napkin, that hasn't been studied by some academics. I'm sure you'll find PLENTY there...and they will also have stuff about Gore Vidal, too (e.g. his The City and the Pillar).
Hitdice |
About fifteen years ago, my roommate who was majoring in Modern Culture and Media at Brown University noticed that I was read The Madman by Samuel R. Delany. Delany, as a black gay science fiction writer whose life spans the various revolutions of the 60s, and the AIDS epidemic, is a darling of the academic intellectual set, but The Madman not for the timid. Like, at all. The main character's into watersports, and watersports are the most user friendly of the sexual acts you read about in that book.
My poor roommate borrowed the book only to return it the next morning, saying, "...And then I got to the park where they're in the park, drinking out of the milk carton, and that was just gross."
I was all, "Take that, Modern Culture and Media, my aesthetic sensibility is too real for you squares!"
Gore Vidal |
Gore Vidal wrote:Few academic discussions of Wilde? On what planet? Maybe, if you can't find it under Literary Criticism, try Queer Studies. I doubt there's anything he wrote on, short of a bar napkin, that hasn't been studied by some academics. I'm sure you'll find PLENTY there...and they will also have stuff about Gore Vidal, too (e.g. his The City and the Pillar).Readerbreeder wrote:Mostly, it was because what would you do, write a book explaining the jokes? (In retrospect, he may have said there weren't many discussions of his comedies, I don't recall.)Gore Vidal wrote:I remember an essay by Gore Vidal (hence my Gore Vidal face) where he mentioned that there were very few academic discussions of Oscar Wilde, because what would be the point?Well, from what I understand, Wilde was pretty full of himself to begin with, so he really didn't need any encouragement.
[Shrugs]
The essay was probably from before the advent of Queer Studies.
I was a f~~*ing trailblazer, I was.
Gore Vidal |
1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Alright, fine, I didn't write that at all. What I did write was:
from "Oscar Wilde: On the Skids Again" (1987)
Since [Richard] Ellmann [author of Four Dubliners] had already written magisterial works on two of the four, symmetry and sympathy plainly drew him to a third; hence, this latest biography of Wilde, this last biography of Ellman, our time's best academic biographer. Although Ellmann was unusually intelligent, a quality seldom found in academe or, indeed, on Parnassus itself, Wilde does not quite suit his schema or his talent. Aside from the fact that the four Dubliners [Yeats, Wilde, Joyce and Beckett], as he acknowledges, "were chary of acknowledging their connection," I suspect that the controlling adjective here is "academic." To an academic of Ellmann's generation, explication is all.
The problem with Wilde is that he does not need explication or interpretation. He needs only to be read, or listened to. He plays no word games other than that most mechanical of verbal tricks: the paradox. When he rises to the sublime in poetry or prose there is so much purple all over the place that one longs for the clean astringencies of Swinburne.
On those occasions when Wilde is true master, the inventor of a perfect play about nothing and everything, we don't need to have the jokes explained. One simply laughs and wonders why no one else has ever been able to sustain for so long so flawlessly elegant a verbal riff. I would not like to rise in the academic world with a dissertation on Wilde's masterpieces and I suspect (but do not know) that hardly anyone has tried, particularly now that ever-easy Beckett's clamorous silences await, so temptingly, tenure seekers.
---
Now that I'm dead, my memory ain't what it used to be. Sue me.
Readerbreeder |
I'm not sure why Readerbreeder considers Dickens scholarship to be absent. As far as I know, Emily Dickinson has one journal devoted to her work, while Dickens has at least four.
I was going off of personal experience. I tried to begin discussions about Dickens several times during my scholarly studies, and was always brushed off each time, mostly because (as I understood it) Dickens was too popular in his own time. If there is actually some good Dickens scholarship out there, I happily stand corrected; he deserves it.
@Zeugma - You're right, the "posthumously published" (e.g. Dickinson) are an exception to the dichotomy I presented. I just wish it could somehow change what the living have to deal with.
Archpaladin Zousha |
Most incomprehensible book that I've ever read without the benefit of a literature professor:
What's yours?
Actually, that's it. I have a grudging respect for that book after spending an entire course basically just on it. It's the perfect book to practice literary criticism on as you can read it in so many ways: straight through, skipping between the poem and commentary, or reading the intro and commentary first and reading the poem with them in mind, and the story can appear very different each time. Had I not had a professor guide me through Pale Fire, I probably never would have even HEARD of it, let alone read it.
I also took an entire course on Tolkien, but honestly I found that course to be fairly easy. Tolkien's fun, but I don't think enough scholarship's been done on him to really present the same multiple levels of interpretation. That, and he's got the same problem that Dickens has, in that he can be easily dismissed as a popular hack.
Zeugma |
LazarX |
Huzzah!
Titus Alone, of course, is very unsatisfying because poor Mervyn never finished it due to Parkinson's (?--something).
:(
As opposed to Mount Analogue which is unfinished because of the Renee Daumal's sudden death.
Doodlebug Anklebiter |
Article from The Paris Review which I had to stop reading because of Cider House spoilers.
Doodlebug Anklebiter |
I'm halfway through The Cider House Rules. I haven't read all of The Paris Review article, but I did skim a bunch.
I have always known about Irving's affinity for Dickens. I remeber some essay he wrote for some intro to Chuck's. I think I have subconsciously avoided Dickens because I figured I could just read Irving, which would be like Dickens, but have a bunch of perverts ("sexual outsiders," I believe he calls them) thrown in, which, I, of course, highly appreciate.
I remember highly enjoying The Tale of Two Cities, rooting for Madame Debarge and cheering when Sydney was led away in the tumbril. Other than that, I have a hard time remembering whether I've read a particular Dickens book or seen the David Lean film adaptation. (Have I ever read Great Expectations? Yeah, Obi-wan Kenobi was in it!) The challenge thrown down by Irving to read Little Dorrit (nobody in The Cider House can get past the first couple of chapters--most give up by the end of the first page) is pretty irresistible.
I was pretty disappointed to discover, however, that Irving's books are pretty much Dickens + Vonnegut (minus the sci-fi) + Gunter Grass.* Probably explains why his standing in the academy isn't very high, but I still think he's the shiznit.
I believe Friend Gruumash. used to have him as a wrestling coach? Or wrestled against his team? Or something?
---
*I was most embarrassed to realize that I had never made the (obvious) connection between A Prayer for Owen Meany and The Tin Drum. In my defense, I read Owen back when I was in eighth grade, I think.
Gruumash . |
Actually both my friend. His son Brenden wrestled at my primary school and then went on to another high school so I had the privilege to wrestle for him and against his teams at Vermont Academy. He is a good person and I think a great author. he does manage to have some fantasy in some of his books at least in a Prayer for Owen Meany.
I will admit I am not biased in an way shape or form because of my personal connection to him. But I did not start reading him until after I no longer was in touch with him.
I myself have never read any Gunter Grass let alone the Tin Drum so I guess I never saw the connection either.
Doodlebug Anklebiter |
Gruumash . |
Okay I see the similarities now that I wikied it.
So I was not aware John Irving did not have a good standing in academia he seems like he would ... but what do I know.
I like what I have read about this Paris review interview you posted it is a good insight into the man at that time.
I agree with more than a few things he talks about and says.