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GabrielAisling posted:What are some of the challenges you face as an instructor getting students motivated about whatever work you're focusing on? This is a really good question. Back when, I used to ask myself how I could get every student in the room interested in what I thought our class was focusing on. And that amounts to about the same thing. But a few years ago, I realized I was asking myself the wrong question -- and, actually a whole wrong category of quetions. The key to motivating students isn't getting them interested in whatever the focus of a class happens to be. It's in helping them make connections between (a) the knowledge, skills, and qualities a course is supposed to develop and (b) their own individual areas of curiosity, concern, or value. I think this gets to the second part of your post. quote:I get so angry at research papers because they're always invariably about something that I only marginally care about or even downright hate. I can spend hours reading scholarly articles and essays and analyses of topics I find interesting, but I never get the chance to do so for a class. This is an all-too-common experience and a symptom of truly mediocre course and assignment design. I sometimes run workshops for new instructors, and when I'm feeling slogany I'll say things like "a good course/assignment doesn't require, it inspires." And I die a little bit inside every time, like I do every time I drop a rhyme like Roadblock from G.I Joe, but I'll stand by that statement even though I think the bumper sticker version is repellent. Basically, what I mean by this is that courses and assignments need to be deeply intellectually engaging. This means that every student, no matter their background, spends a shocking amount of time and energy working out whatever needs working out because he or she is intrinsically motivated to do so. Maybe that motivation amounts to wide-ranging curiosity. Maybe it involves solving something the student sees as an important, complex, real-world problem. Or maybe it's fun. Point is, I used to think that rigorous assignments couldn't; also be assignments students enjoyed doing. And now I think the truth is almost the exact opposite: if an assignment doesn't carry some kind of intrinsic motivation for a student, if it's not rewarding in a really specific and intellectual way, then it can't be rigorous. It can be difficult, but what you'll get are students completing difficult assignments rather than engaging directly in anything that looks like learning. And that's a sad waste of time. So here's how this works: In my most recent Renaissance Literature class, I asked students to write an article for an existing magazine or website in which they explained how, and on what basis, to choose a Renaissance sonnet to be read for an event (such as a wedding). There were fiddly bits on the rubric (for instance, one category rated how well they demonstrated a knowledge of sonneteering convention, and another rated how well their article was informed by sonnet-specific close reading strategies), but I'm not sure those ultimately made much difference. On the face of it, the quality of the work I got is hard to compare to the quality of work I'd gotten from other assignment forms (like essays). But I did see was a serious change in commitment to the assignment: on average, students more than doubled its Academic Learning Time. And a lot of that improvement happened in the low- and mid-range of the curve -- that is, the students who were really interested in Renaissance literature would likely have been interested in writing essays, and so saw marginally greater ALT. But the ones who used the assignment to do something they thought was interesting -- even if it was writing a snarky article for The Knot -- saw a lot more ALT. At the very bottom, the amount of time the least-dedicated students spent on the assignment went from about one hour (read: certain failure) to about seven (read: likely pass). That matters, I think, because ALT is probably a more reliable (and easily measurable) concomitant of student learning than either the perceived difficulty of an assignment or the degree to which it represents traditional academic forms of writing or research. There are a lot of reasons for that, but they're a bit outside the ballpark here. Anyway. This means that the big challenge I face whenever I need to get students motivated is really about fiddly bits of assignment design and assessment. It's difficult to write things like standardized rubrics for assignments that involve articles instead of essays, and it's likewise difficult to write assignments that catch everybody's interest. Anyone can get half of any class invested in anything, but catching each half of the remainder seems to take twice the ingenuity.
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Feb 3, 2014 22:19
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Really dumb question but I've been trying to figure this out for a while now. When does the contemporary period begin for American Lit? I've been trying to figure this out for a while now and haven't been able to finger it correctly. Most sources that I've read say the 1970s, but I think that it's the late 50s-early 60s.
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Feb 4, 2014 03:57
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screenwritersblues posted:Really dumb question but I've been trying to figure this out for a while now. When does the contemporary period begin for American Lit? I've been trying to figure this out for a while now and haven't been able to finger it correctly. Most sources that I've read say the 1970s, but I think that it's the late 50s-early 60s. That's an interesting question that relies on a couple different distinctions. The first is a kind of formal distinction that's usually made between "Modern" and "Postmodern." This is tricky because "Modern" is used to designate both a time period (roughly 1903-1968) and a style ("Modernism"). "Postmodern" does much the same thing (designating ~1968 to the present day and a style known as "Postmodernism"). And people often use "contemporary" and "Postmodern" interchangeably to mean something like "recently written." So I want to unravel this with some clear-cut definitions. Contemporary I rolled my own idiosyncratic definition of "contemporary" a while ago: a piece is "contemporary" if the author is still alive and active (or would be, in the case of accidents and suicides). In that sense, "contemporary" refers to something like a time period, but actually refers to a text by a (or the?) current generation of working authors. Stephen King, David Foster Wallace, Don DeLillo, Chimamanda Adichie, and Maya Angelou's work is all "contemporary." In practice, this says that "contemporary" literature definitely includes Joyce Carol Oates's With Shuddering Fall and definitely excludes Faulkner's Reivers, even though they were written at about the same time. If this were 2009, it would also include Catcher in the Rye, even though that book was written a full decade earlier than Faulkner's (excluded) Reivers. And even though my definition is clear-cut on those points, it doesn't provide much guidance about when David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest will stop being contemporary. But whatever. A man's got to live with a little complexity. Postmodern(ism) The relationship between "contemporary" and "Postmodernism" is consequently one of sometimes-overlapping categories, since "contemporary" designates a period and "postmodernism" designates a style (or a confederation of styles) characteristic of (but not limited to) the period. So Toni Morrison, Don DeLillo, and David Foster Wallace are arguably "Postmodern" in the sense that they've produced some body of work that carries the stylistic signatures of postmodernity. Likewise, James Joyce wrote pieces that carry similar signatures, even though (stylistically) his work is generally Modernist and Joyce is not a contemporary writer. Confusion One reason you'll see Goofuses throw around such a huge range of dates when they talk about Postmodernism (and, consequently, "contemporary" literature) is that they want to draw boundaries around both a period and a style. I don't know what they mean to accomplish by this, but in the process I've seen people go back as early as 1941 (with the deaths of Woolf and Joyce) and as late as the 1990s (with the rise of hypertext). But you can see where I'm going here: if you're talking about style, dates don't matter much. Gallants say a sonnet is one of several forms of fourteen-line poems and that a number of them were written during the English Renaissance. They then avoid calling the Early Modern period the "Sonnet" period or calling sonneteering "Renaissanceism" because that would generate a bunch of hairsplitting arguments about what are ultimately stupid, confusing claims. I mean, nobody says that Edna St. Vincent Millay's "If I Should Learn..." isn't a sonnet because it was written four hundred years too late (or, alternately, that Henry Howard couldn't have written sonnets because he called them "ballets" and he published them twenty years too early). At the same time, I've heard Goofuses say that Tristam Shandy can't be "postmodern" because it was published in the 1760s. A Gallant claim might be that Shandy is a serial novel (1759-67) that exhibits some stylistically postmodern qualities. Anyway. This kind of confusion isn't limited to the "contemporary/Postmodern" kerfuffle. Just for instance, Burroughs's Tarzan of the Apes was published in 1914 -- right after D.H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers and right before The Rainbow -- so it's hard to claim that both authors weren't (chronologically) Modernists. But as a matter of form, Lawrence wrote something like Modernist novels (and stories) while Burroughs wrote something like speculative fiction; in that sense, Lawrence is a "Modernist" and Burroughs isn't.
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Feb 4, 2014 21:02
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Is there any way to read Nabokov's Lolita without feeling dirty?
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Feb 5, 2014 00:48
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Brainworm posted:But as a matter of form, Lawrence wrote something like Modernist novels (and stories) while Burroughs wrote something like speculative fiction; in that sense, Lawrence is a "Modernist" and Burroughs isn't. Ooh, the pulp lit/lowbrow modernist folks would have you over the spit for that one. That aside, though, the definition of "modern" and its associated forms is very much an open question in the field. Depending on who you follow, the date keeps getting pushed farther back into the 19th century (1870s at the very latest) and deeper into the contemporary period, often right up to the present day. Obviously this is complicated by "modernism" hitting various cultural fields at various times—after all, many would argue that modernism didn't really hit cooking until maybe a decade ago. It's also complicated by no one except maybe Fred Jameson really having a firm idea of what "postmodern" means. Or, more often, what it meant, given the debate about post-postmodernism, new sincerity, blah blah etc. Since I'm a "modern and contemporary" person, I try to get around it by saying I work on "the texts and media of the last hundred years"—not exact, but the questions that follow up on that are a lot less awkward than those about defining any of the other terms.
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Feb 5, 2014 04:49
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GabrielAisling posted:Is there any way to read Nabokov's Lolita without feeling dirty? Lolita has the Clockwork Orange thing going on: If you're not uncomfortable with a bit o' ultra-violence, you've probably got some issues to work out. I imagine the key to avoiding the skeevy feeling is to write a thesis about Lolita. Then you'll be so frustrated that you'll just feel disgusted with yourself, not the novel!  elentar posted:Since I'm a "modern and contemporary" person, I try to get around it by saying I work on "the texts and media of the last hundred years"—not exact, but the questions that follow up on that are a lot less awkward than those about defining any of the other terms. Brainworm posted:Confusion Would you guys take a stab at a tenuous beginning date for the theoretical canon of modernism? Perhaps start with Berman, Williams, Anderson, and Jameson? They do a great job of encapsulating that "Intro to Modernism" and using the term "modern." Or do we need to return to Nietzsche, Eliot, and Foucault?
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Feb 5, 2014 05:44
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GabrielAisling posted:Is there any way to read Nabokov's Lolita without feeling dirty? I'd kind of imagine that feeling filthy is an intentional effect of the novel, since one lasting strength of it is making the reader emotionally associate with Humbert Humbert. I'd worry more if you don't feel dirty after you finish.
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Feb 5, 2014 05:50
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elentar posted:Ooh, the pulp lit/lowbrow modernist folks would have you over the spit for that one. [...] That they would. I should know better than to use "Modernist" and "High Modernist" interchangeably. It's sort of like saying "proctologist" every time you mean "doctor."
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Feb 5, 2014 16:20
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I'm an American Lit guy, and we generally use 1945 as a demarcation point for the "contemporary" period, mainly because of all the cultural and historical changes that took place around that time. Obviously some novels published in the 1950s are not going to be particularly contemporary any more, but it seems like a better cut-off than author death.
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Feb 5, 2014 18:05
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I've occasionally been pretty interested in Dr Henry Jenkins' writings on modern pop culture, fandom, and fanfiction from an academic sociology perspective. (It helps that he's an engaging writer at that) He said something interesting about Shakespeare studies. Before I repeat it, first you need to understand that his claim is that a work is at its most alive when its community of appreciators takes it in, integrates it into their lives, and then reinterpret it in vastly different ways that represent how they personally relate to the work-- and that this is what fanfiction is really about. That horrifying and poorly written slash-fic becomes a way for its author to relate personal struggles and/or thoughts of sexuality through a 3rd medium of the work, and that good works in particular allow this kind of personal expression. And that in reinterpreting works through a multitude of eyes in this sort of manner deepens how you can understand that work itself. His complaint is that while Shakespearian studies used to do this, more recently it seems to him that academics just rehash the exact same interpretations without breaking out into new territory. Or more succinctly, there's less Shakespeare fanfiction than used to be created. Are you familiar with his argument? And as a Professor of Shakespeare, do you agree with it in any way? ... And for a slightly more weeaboo question, have you seen the anime "Romeo x Juliet"? I recently started watching it with my wife and I've been intensely entertained by what seems to be a major crossover of several plays mashed together into a weird fantasy setting, and reversing gender roles and mixing in more general Shakespearian tropes (like the woman dressed as a man dressed as a woman and then falling in love with someone in the various different states thereof).
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Feb 6, 2014 20:20
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What reasons are there to discourage a student from writing major papers on a recent (past 25 years) work? From what others I've talked to have said, it's because unless it was written in an already literary tradition, there might not be enough supporting materials for a large assignment.
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Feb 7, 2014 02:36
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Since you mentioned them, can you give us your readings of "Watership Down" and "The Once and Future King?"
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Feb 10, 2014 04:41
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GabrielAisling posted:What reasons are there to discourage a student from writing major papers on a recent (past 25 years) work? From what others I've talked to have said, it's because unless it was written in an already literary tradition, there might not be enough supporting materials for a large assignment. I don't much like that reasoning. If a student is working on any piece -- recent or not -- he or she should probably be focusing on the last decade of scholarship. Of course the last decade is a lot thicker for Hamlet than for Oryx and Crake, but that's not generally a problem as long as there's something out there to work off of. I mean, you can write a good, major piece with some perceptive reading and a careful attention to context alone. You don't need more than one actual article or text-specific criticism to make things work, and (unless someone's writing a book), more than a handful of them would be overkill. That's another way of saying that I can't think of a good reason to set a "recent" boundary. I can think of reasons to enforce other, more complicated, and overlapping boundaries, though. Just for instance, I want clear boundaries about what are admissible texts for any project, and saying "nothing from the last 25 years" basically excludes websites, youtube videos, anime, slash fiction, and whatever other inconvenient weeaboo/fandom things my students are sometimes really enthusiastic about working with. And that can present a problem if they're a bad fit for the class, the assignment, and so forth. Of course, I think the right way to handle that issue is with a process that helps students understand what's likely to help them learn what the assignment's supposed to help them learn, and choose their texts accordingly. But that's a lot more time-consuming than throwing down an easily-understood boundary. But people with a lot of students might need to compromise there in order to buy time for something they think is more important.
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Feb 18, 2014 20:31
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Who are some of your favorite literary critics? I'm never sure who to read - I've read a bit of Bloom and hated it, while I enjoyed reading Pound's writing even if I didn't agree with some of it. I just don't know how to separate the wheat from the chaff in terms of legitimate, thought-provoking criticism. edit: Also, my professor made a comment in passing about Romeo and Juliet essentially being anti-Italian propaganda, and since he didn't go into any detail I'm curious about your opinion on this. I guess I could see it partially as a critical social commentary on Italian code duello, but that seems like a weak argument for calling the entire play propaganda. I really need to reread R+J again sometime, because maybe I'm totally blanking on some other things that would back that assertion up, but I'd love to hear some opinions on that. Honey Badger fucked around with this message at 04:31 on Feb 24, 2014 |
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Feb 24, 2014 01:11
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Back to the front page of this subforum, thread! Thanks for running this thread, Brainworm, and more thanks to all those who have contributed. It's been a great exercise in collaborative learning and re-awakened my enjoyment of real literature as opposed to only reading textbooks and lit reviews. I went through Hamlet in a week and devoured Lunar Park in the space of a day. That book is powerfully structured with long, meandering paragraphs that seem like they're meant to simulate the boredom of the authorial character punctuated by one-line rapid action sequences. LUNAR PARK SPOILERS BELOW THIS POINT So in reference to Hamlet, I felt like the story was a pretty close retelling except from the POV of Claudius. Lots of drinking, new father figure. Ellis insinuates multiple times that absence of a father is preferable to an actual father that lets his children down, which casts some interesting light into Hamlet. And the ghosts haunting Robby/Ellis seem mainly interested in pushing Ellis out of the picture, similar to Hamlet's dad's ghost/goblin damned (Ellis also implies it was definitely the latter in Hamlet). Does this seem like a cohesive reading? Because I'm still left with some unanswered questions. What was the significance of the dog and its awful demise? Is Ellis supposed to be an unreliable, possibly hallucinating narrator throughout the book? And what does Lunar Park actually mean?
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Mar 3, 2014 03:22
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Just finished reading the thread. Awesome, awesome thoughts and ideas Brainworm. Thank you for doing this!Butt Bidness posted:
I'm interested in this also, because when I read it, I was thoroughly unimpressed. I'd loved most of Ellis' previous work (some of the short stories in The Informers I could do without, and Glamorama needed some editing to make it a stronger work), but after an awesome set of opening chapters, LP seemed to meander into a tired game of "spot the reference" before losing steam and just getting tired. Because I found it hard to care about Bret the character, it was difficult to care about his self-created problems; his wife and children were far more sympathetic, and they were shoved to the side for most of the narrative. Almost every twist and clever bit of metafiction I had seen somewhere else before, and the Hamlet references didn't add much to my experience. The Hamlet sadness was only reinforced because I had just finished Updike's Gertrude and Claudius, so I was really primed and ready for more, and they weren't delivered in what I felt was a satisfying way. That said, it seemed like such an out of character misfire for an author responsible for so many books I had really enjoyed, that I'd really like to hear what others have seen and gotten from it that I didn't. Is it much better on a 2nd read, perhaps? Couple questions of my own: Can you recommend a good reading guide to Spenser's The Faerie Queene? I've just finished it, and while I enjoyed it a lot, I feel like I didn't really get a lot of the poem. The end notes in the Penguin edition helped some, but I feel like in some cases I was either too distracted by translating the archaic spelling or keeping the rhyme and rhythm to get more than e.g. awesome lady knights beating the tar out of dopes convinced they'll get laid if they beat her up and thereby saving A friend of mine just posted this to Twitter: quote:It occurs to me that "deus ex machina" endings get a bad rap. They were perfectly fine for hundreds of years, why did that change? My gut feeling wants to respond with something about the importance of religion in day-to-day life now vs. then, but another part of me wants to point the finger at the greater emphasis placed on endings in today's media. I'm thinking about people who e.g. get really angry when their television show of choice has an episode that doesn't advance the season long metaplot, or novels like Sarah's Key, where the whole book hinges on the ending, and once you know it, you could probably skip reading the whole thing because the novel is just build up towards it (note that this may not be an entirely fair characterization of the novel; it was actually a pretty satisfying ending, but it was a twist. The films of M. Night Shyamalan might be a better example). Or is it simply that we're not going to judge an older work as harshly? This is all me spitballing. What do you think?
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Mar 4, 2014 02:19
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Are department politics really a huge thing where you teach? I have a friend that's terrified he'll get fired or something if anyone says anything unflattering about the English department while in his office or standing near him. It's bizarre, especially because he freaked out the most when I compared the door to the department to the gates of hell, which all other faculty members I asked thought was hilarious. I don't understand professionalism, I guess? EDIT: And in "that work's not notable enough" news, I have in my hands 10 potential sources. 3 more have been requested through ILL. I'm not even in the class for this paper yet. I haven't started tracing back through sources in any of the articles I've obtained. There is plenty of material on this work. It was published in 1986, it's old enough.   I can do this. (Howl's Moving Castle, in case I haven't mentioned it. The book. Focusing on the fairy tale elements. The movie will be mentioned because it's significant, but not discussed.)
GabrielAisling fucked around with this message at 05:14 on Mar 10, 2014 |
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Mar 8, 2014 20:53
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Honey Badger posted:Who are some of your favorite literary critics? I'm never sure who to read - I've read a bit of Bloom and hated it, while I enjoyed reading Pound's writing even if I didn't agree with some of it. I just don't know how to separate the wheat from the chaff in terms of legitimate, thought-provoking criticism. Usually, the further back a critic is the more fun he or she is to read. That's triply true when you get into Jonson, Pope, Coleridge, and the rest of the Eighteenth-century crowd, since their writing is both really perceptive and, on rare occasions, impossibly bitchy. It's pretty great. So I like them. And as far as 20th and 21st-century critics go, my most readable favorites are Kenneth Burke (Grammar of Motives, Rhetoric of Motives, and Philosophy of Literary Form), Allan Bloom (anything on Shakespeare -- he's a strong reader and something like a political lunatic), Stephen Booth (most famous for his edition of the Sonnets, and Terry Eagleton (whose Literary Theory: An Introduction is a great starting point both for Eagleton and for theory). Of course all of these critics wrote on Shakespeare, and of course all of them are old and or dead white men. Just pointing it out. quote:edit: Also, my professor made a comment in passing about Romeo and Juliet essentially being anti-Italian propaganda, and since he didn't go into any detail I'm curious about your opinion on this. I guess I could see it partially as a critical social commentary on Italian code duello, but that seems like a weak argument for calling the entire play propaganda. I really need to reread R+J again sometime, because maybe I'm totally blanking on some other things that would back that assertion up, but I'd love to hear some opinions on that. I don't know if R&J is an indictment of code duello as much as an indictment of political corruption on one hand and indifferent parenting on the other. Let's start here. There are three equally important families in R&J: The Prince's (the "House of Escalus," which includes Paris and Mercutio), the Montagues (Romeo and Benvolio), and the Capulets (Juliet and Tybalt). And while the duel or vendetta is between the Montagues and Capulets, there are death threats and murders flying three ways: after the opening scuffle between Montague and Capulet retainers, the Prince threatens both Old Montague and Old Capulet like so: quote:If ever you disturb our streets again, Whether the Prince means it to or not, this threat is an opening Paris exploits in his courtship of Juliet. Right after it's made, he visits Old Capulet for the umpteenth time and asks to marry her; Capulet refuses, saying Juliet is still too young. But after the fight that ends in the deaths of Mercutio and Tybalt -- and presumably at the point where both Old Montague and Old Capulet are likely to be executed in accordance with the Prince's earlier decree -- Paris visits again. And Old Capulet, probably seeking to curry some favor with the Prince's family and save his own life, agrees to the match. This is the mid-play even that sends everything to hell. Before this point, Romeo and Juliet are secretly married but each of them has some kind of support or trust relationship to fall back on. Romeo is exiled, but his family has his support and looks likely to lobby for his readmission to Verona -- a prospect that seems like it'll become more palatable to the Capulets when his marriage to Juliet becomes public (especially since the most aggressive prosecutor of the feud, Tybalt, is dead). But the situation becomes politically hopeless once Juliet is betrothed to Paris: she loses her family's support, and Capulet is unknowingly put in the position of offensively forswearing himself to the Prince's family. (He's promised Juliet to Paris, but she's already married. So, one way or another, Paris isn't going to get her). And we all know how things go from there: Juliet's disagreement with her family over her marriage to Paris forces her to resort to more secrecy and deception (rather than just revealing her secret marriage), which leads to her fake death, the rumors of that death reaching Romeo, and so on. The point, again, is that the feud between the Montagues and Capulets is only half the story here. The other half is the death threat that the Prince levels at Capulet and Montague, since that threat's what allows Paris to leverage Capulet into marrying off Juliet against what seem to be either (a) her wishes and (b) age-sensitive decorum. More specifically, it's not the feud that causes the problems; it's the combination of the feud and the fact that Paris (either with the Prince's encouragement or tacit permission) can use the Prince's edict as a lever against Old Capulet. Without that force at work, the play ends with the execution of Montague and Capulet, (probably) the end of the feud, and Romeo and Juliet alive, married, and inheriting a massive amount of family wealth (i.e. happily). So if Shakespeare's criticizing something in R&J, it doesn't look to be the feud. That -- I think -- is just an occasion on which a certain political and social structure fails in a surprisingly intimate way.
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Mar 10, 2014 22:22
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Butt Bidness posted:Back to the front page of this subforum, thread! That's all I've ever wanted. quote:So in reference to Hamlet, I felt like the story [Lunar Park] was a pretty close retelling except from the POV of Claudius. Lots of drinking, new father figure. Ellis insinuates multiple times that absence of a father is preferable to an actual father that lets his children down, which casts some interesting light into Hamlet. And the ghosts haunting Robby/Ellis seem mainly interested in pushing Ellis out of the picture, similar to Hamlet's dad's ghost/goblin damned (Ellis also implies it was definitely the latter in Hamlet). Let me start where I'm vaguest: "Lunar Park" could probably mean anything. The furthest I can take it is that there's a (real or imagined) connection between Robby and Bret that Bret thinks he can evoke or allude to with a secret or intimate message. And, to me, that magnifies the ambiguity central to the end of the book: how you read it depends on how much of Bret's relationship to Robby is completely imaginary. And Victor? No idea. Honestly, I think you're asking a lot of a reader if you want him or her to assign a high-literature meaning to a vulture demon ripping its way out of a golden retriever's rear end in a top hat. Some things are just relentlessly literal. On the ghost/father front, I think you've got a coherent reading. There's a pretty tidy mapping of the stepfather/father/son relationships from Hamlet onto Lunar Park, at least if you want to get flexible with the idea that Claudius might be Hamlet's biological father. In both cases, you have a ghost/natural father setting up obstacles between the relationship between a stepfather and his son. That's about when're I understand you coming down, and I think it totally works. But, in both texts, this gets more complicated: In Hamlet, obviously, there's some ambiguity about who Hamlet's actual biological father is. In Lunar Park, the ghost/natural father sets up obstacles by working on the stepfather figure (Bret) rather than the son (Robby). So I think a good reading of Lunar Park against Hamlet should do something with those differences. I don't know what that is, exactly. But it's too interesting to leave on the table. The only other thing I'd add to this is that there's some difference between the personal happiness of the Hamlet/Robby/Bret character and the extent to which those characters live up to their responsibilities. You can get a happy ending -- or at least a mitigated tragedy -- in either text if any one of these characters does either. Hamlet, for instance, meets the responsibilities incumbent on his revenge, even though it's not something that makes him happy in a "building a happy domestic life with Ophelia" sense. The interesting thing about Lunar Park's ending is how thoroughly it leaves this up in the air.
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Mar 11, 2014 17:49
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Spoilers Below posted:Can you recommend a good reading guide to Spenser's The Faerie Queene? I've just finished it, and while I enjoyed it a lot, I feel like I didn't really get a lot of the poem. I should have a great guide at hand, but I don't. The best guide-like material I've found is unfortunately the notes, glossary, and introductions to the Hackett Editions of Faerie Queene. I'd love it if they'd work those into a guide, but that seems unlikely to happen. quote:You've mentioned throughout the thread about works falling into traditions and being read as responses to other works. Where does FQ fall onto that timeline? What inspired it, and what did it inspire? FQ has a bunch of influences, but the biggest set of them are probably the editions (and translations) of Orlando Furioso and other continental romances (e.g. Tasso's Gerusalemme liberate) that started appearing in England during the early 16th century.* There's also a tradition of medieval allegory (the Roman de la Rose and of course the Divine Comedy) that leave their stamp on FQ. And, of course, there are the classical epics. Those are important largely in the sense that FQ looks, walks, and quacks like a Romance, but Spenser seemed to think he was writing an epic and therefore imports things like Homeric similes.** But the influence of FQ extends to just about every subsequent English epic (not that this is a long list -- really, it means Paradise Lost and, to a much lesser extent, Gondibert), and on 19th-century writers prone to hallucinatory visions. So you'll see FQ's stamp on the off chance you pick up Blake's Milton, any of Southy's long poems, or any modern self-styled fantasy "epic" (i.e. anything that includes magic, spans several novels, and/or unironically calls itself a "song"). quote:It occurs to me that "deus ex machina" endings get a bad rap. They were perfectly fine for hundreds of years, why did that change? quote:What do you think? Well. On one hand, it's easy to argue that "deus ex machina" (DExM) endings are perfectly fine now. They -- or the closest possible modern equivalent -- worked for Harry Potter (practically too many times to count), along with Battlestar Galactica (as the "plan"), The Stand (as the hand of god/nuclear bomb), and Tolkien (every time the loving eagles show up). So maybe they drive me nuts, because maybe they seem to me like lazy storytelling, but it's hard to argue that they're not commonly employed and widely accepted in high-quality and popular literature, television, and film. On the other, there's something about a DExM that seems really out of place in character-driven literature. Or that seems more appropriate to literature that isn't character focused. The first example that comes to mind is the Oresteia, which isn't so much the story of Orestes as a kind of complicated fable about the invention of jurisprudence. There, the fact that the problems of revenge and justice become so complex that they can't be solved by any of the play's mortal characters presents a perfect opportunity for a great DExM -- the gods literally show up, tell mankind that they (mankind) are incapable of solving their own problems, and deliver the gift of jury trials. Which are apparently a gently caress of a lot better than being ridden by the furies. And so the Oresteia is really a story about a need for justice and the way that need can best be met. And the fact that the need is so severe that it requires divine intervention adds to, rather than detracts from, the severity of the need. But if the Oresteia were character driven -- that is, if it were about Orestes' development as a human being -- that ending would be totally unsatisfying. After all, characters develop by either (a) solving problems after a protracted struggle or (b) giving up on solving problems after a protracted struggle, and engaging in a subsequent struggle in which they try to come to terms with their failure. And the DExM cuts off that struggle at the point where (usually) it's gotten most interesting, and (often) when the audience expects a writer to deliver some real insight or perceptiveness. I guess what I'm saying here is that: (a) Writers use DExM all the time, and so I'm not sold on the premise that they get a bad rap. Granted, I hate them. But I don't see them tanking Harry Potter. What probably does get a bad rap are really bad moments of DExM; in that sense I don't see how DExM is different from, say, dialogue. (b) It may be that DExM is, structurally, a bad fit for character-driven storytelling because of the expectation that characters develop by, say, drawing on their inner resources in response to interesting challenges. * Um. Just to clarify, OF is published in the early 16th c., but English translations don't show up until the late 16th. ** To be fair, Furioso and Gerusalemme do the same thing.
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Mar 11, 2014 19:29
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Taking my first college english class, and a point our GSI brought up made me curious, how do you think the qualifications for making a work part of the literary canon has changed over the years? Edit: Realized this might be a bit vague. I mean what makes one novel/poem/etc. worth putting into the literary canon, and how have these standards changed over the years? More specifically from the 60s or so until now. Rent-a-Bot fucked around with this message at 00:51 on Mar 17, 2014 |
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Mar 16, 2014 18:57
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GabrielAisling posted:Are department politics really a huge thing where you teach? I have a friend that's terrified he'll get fired or something if anyone says anything unflattering about the English department while in his office or standing near him. It's bizarre, especially because he freaked out the most when I compared the door to the department to the gates of hell, which all other faculty members I asked thought was hilarious. I don't understand professionalism, I guess? What you don't understand is paranoia, son. And I don't understand it either. The paranoia I'm talking about is a pervasive fear on the part of new faculty (and sometimes graduate students) that they'll be punished for something that's (a) ridiculous and (b) completely beyond their control. It's common enough to be a definite thing. The reason I'm calling it paranoia is that, while I've seen some weird departmental and university politics, I've never seen anything that justifies the kind of widespread, overreactive, crackrock behavior carried out in its name. The best example I have of this comes from a friend of mine -- not in English, and not at my college -- who's now looking for a job. Basically, she decided to end a long-term relationship with her department chair, and then spent the pre-tenure sabbatical she'd originally dedicated to finishing her book banging around Europe. The book didn't get done, and when she was offered an extra year to finish it before her (delayed) tenure review, she decided not to go up for review at all (i.e. quit). So after a one-year appointment at a nearby university, she's short on prospects, and the best case scenario is that she she immediately lands a tenure-track position at another R1 and starts the review process from something like square one. At 38. She says she's in this situation because of "departmental politics." There's a string of bad decisions at work here, obviously. Relationship with a co-worker/boss? Go for it. Break contract with a publisher take a vag-slamming tour of Europe's major cities? An understandable response to a combination of stress, midlife crisis, and a sunset relationship. Quit a job at a research university where your tenure is virtually guaranteed so long as you finish a book you're capable of writing? Meh. Plenty of fish in that sea. What really matters is that you walk away from anything less than a completely perfect job. That said, I think all these decisions are understandable. People make bad decisions all the time. And the departmental/university response was, I think, about as good as a person could expect. At the same time, I can see how (from her perspective) this might feel like being forced out. Staying in a department where you've been involved with the chair is going to be awkward and might be completely untenable (depending on how well you can work together), and the consequences of that (whatever they are) are going to feel political. At the same time (again), the worst-case scenario that any kind of departmental politics could produce is that my friend would go up for tenure after a year's delay, and be blocked at either the department or college level. In which case she'd have at least two years of steady, reliable employment she could use to hunt for another job. Quitting for fear of departmental politics, in other words, managed to produce a situation quite a bit worse than those politics could have produced on their own. The reason I'm bringing this up is because it seems typical of the system of relationships people seem to talk about when they say "departmental politics." It's usually a personal catastrophe driven 10% by departmental action and 90% by individual reaction, and passed off entirely as a set of complicated, hostile acts by a network of external parties with impossibly shadowy motives. Paranoia. Academia's not the only place I've seen this, but it's definitely where I've seen it most often. One of a thousand saving graces here (where I work) is that this whole dynamic seems rarer and less pronounced than at other colleges.
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Mar 18, 2014 20:51
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How do you feel about digital humanities? I am taking a course on it this semester and everything we have done so far has been related to authorship attribution. Each class session basically ends with, "As we can see by this graph, the computer says this text is probably by Henry James." Have you ever encountered digital humanities practices used in a productive manner to address something separate from questions of authorship?
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Mar 20, 2014 07:57
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Brainworm posted:One of a thousand saving graces here (where I work) is that this whole dynamic seems rarer and less pronounced than at other colleges. So who do I have to screw to go to your institution? But seriously every time you talk about it I go "that's what freshman me wanted to do with his life..." Do you do much Nietzsche? I had an undergrad prof with what I assume was a pretty weird reading of him, but if you can talk about Zarathustra and/or what you think he in general did (or didn't do) for your field I'd be pretty interested.
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Mar 20, 2014 08:19
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Goofus Giraffe posted:How do you feel about digital humanities? I am taking a course on it this semester and everything we have done so far has been related to authorship attribution. [...] Have you ever encountered digital humanities practices used in a productive manner to address something separate from questions of authorship? Well, I have mixed feelings on "digital humanities," at least as a term. What it does, I think, is pretends that most humanities research doesn't make significant use of digital technology. It also plays into what I think is an ultimately counterproductive and even damaging myth: that the chief value of digital technology is that it revolutionizes an experience, rather than allowing for (say) huge evolutionary improvements in it. So. Digitizing a research library's holdings is exactly the kind of hugely important evolutionary improvement that "digital humanities," as a term, generally excludes. So are creating an open-access peer reviewed journal, creating academic subject wikis (for e.g. collaborating on and coordinating research projects), or even allowing free international calling through e.g. Skype or Hangouts.* Point is, all of that is "digital humanities," but doesn't get much credit because (I think) it amounts to a sort of evolutionary improvement in existing methods. Of course the overall effect is revolutionary; I (and my students) have access to a volume of articles and manuscripts that would have been frankly unthinkable twenty years ago, not to mention a set of locating and indexing tools that would have been similarly unthinkable. And this is where I get my panties in a loving bunch. First: Granting agencies that approach "digital humanities" understandably take moon shots. But the kinds of moon shots they take seem completely crackrock -- what they seem to want is for someone to define a direction for future digital humanities projects. And I don't think academia (or many other systems) work that way. Instead, my experience says you're better off making people's grunt work easier, and trusting that real innovation will come out of their resulting ability to do things better, faster, and cheaper. Do that enough, an an accrual of resources of one kind or another will give you your next big thing. I was just a able to make this argument successfully with a small grant (think $100K, and I was a supporting player at best), but the effort-to-money ratio involved just underscored how pervasive this kind of thinking is. Second: "digital humanities" education has, as far as I can tell, avoided the difficult and necessary job of helping students become advanced users of necessary tools (think Zotero) and instead focused on extremely narrow applications of tools that, frankly, not every academic needs to know how to use. Textual attribution is a great example: obviously, it's good to have a critical mass of scholars who can do attributive work, and for scholars generally to have some idea of how attributive systems work. So a course dedicated to surveying a potpourri of narrow applications, and at the expense of working with what I'm going to call productivity-increasing tools, just seems poorly conceived. So that's lately where I'm at with Digital Humanities: Most real humanities work is already inescapably "digital" in every meaningful way, and so the term's a problem in the first place. Second, that distinction between "digital" humanities projects and "regular" ones leads to what (I think) is unfocused thinking on the parts of (at least) granting agencies and individual scholars. * Laugh all you want at this last one, but try co-authoring an article or a book with, say, five international partners using 1990's best technology. Forget that every phone call would cost a dollar a minute, and that faxing a 200-page manuscript to London would have been both similarly expensive and time consuming. Each of your five would probably need a travel budget to hit whichever library's holdings were relevant to the project (since not every R1 library is going to carry the Journal of Gypsy Lore), not to mention the release time it'd take each of you to do that traveling in the first place. And that's especially limiting if you want to do e.g. manuscript work, since unless your university happens to have the exact Quarto or Folio you need on hand, you'd be jetting to DC or California to get a look at it.
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Mar 20, 2014 20:18
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the JJ posted:So who do I have to screw to go to your institution? I wish I could say it was me. Since my divorce, I'm starting to miss the workmanlike lovemaking and soul-corroding compromises that give sexual barters their charm. But I've got nothing. My most valuable professional skill? It's been capitalizing on an oversized share of improbable luck. And I don't know how to translate that into advice. quote:Do you do much Nietzsche? I had an undergrad prof with what I assume was a pretty weird reading of him, but if you can talk about Zarathustra and/or what you think he in general did (or didn't do) for your field I'd be pretty interested. I don't. Nietzsche's quotable, but I count on other people to do the work of finding striking Nietzsche quotes. Then I use theirs.
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Mar 20, 2014 20:35
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Brainworm, What's good way to learn about the structure of novels and short stories? There's a lot of stuff out there about the theoretical/thematic structure of the things, but I rarely see anyone get into the nitty gritty of it. Over the last few years, I've started paying more attention to story structure in general (movies, novels, TV shows), and I've learned a fair bit about how things work that way. But the actual process of putting together the structure of some huge book is fascinating to me- and it appears this isn't a very big focus for researchers, or at least I haven't seen anything much yet. Looking at a novel like War and Peace or Lolita, I find myself really curious how the intricately designed sentences turn into paragraphs that aggregate into chapters that form a coherent whole. It almost seems too large to hold in the conscious mind at once! Another thing I've been thinking a lot about lately is the relationship between image and word. I sometimes wonder: when good novelists write, do they work from a complex mental image or from a sort of stew of verbal concepts? I'm not sure if I'm expressing myself correctly, but it seems that doing it one way or the other would yield very different results.
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Mar 21, 2014 06:17
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If your still watching the thread, Brainworm, have you read/see Steinbeck's A view from a bridge? You've mentioned some his other work, so wondering if you had any view on this piece, as I just started studying.
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Mar 29, 2014 12:43
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Barto posted:What's good way to learn about the structure of novels and short stories? That is a really great question. What I'd love to be able to say is that there's a book or article that lays out some agreeable method for charting out plots' structures and provides a whole bunch of useful terms in service of that method. But as far as I can tell, there's nothing of the sort. The article that I think lays out the best starting method, though, is Vladimir Propp's "Morphology of the Folktale" -- it's heavily anthologized and usually easy to find. Also, when writers write criticism they tend to do a lot of abstracting that can be really helpful. Think of what Stephen King does in Danse Macabre, for instance. And the New Critics did this kind of thing all the time, so if you can find an early 20th-century piece of criticism on whatever you're working with, the odds are good that it'll map out something like plot structure in service of genre criticism. quote:Another thing I've been thinking a lot about lately is the relationship between image and word. I sometimes wonder: when good novelists write, do they work from a complex mental image or from a sort of stew of verbal concepts? I'm not sure if I'm expressing myself correctly, but it seems that doing it one way or the other would yield very different results. This is a horrible answer, but if my experience talking to writers is any gauge, the process is sometimes specific to the writer and sometimes specific to the passage. And it may be none of the above. I can remember J.M. Coetzee talking about how he thought of some books (like Michael K) as a set of character responses to the visual and sensual, and of some (like Waiting for the Barbarians) as a set of character responses to the intellectual and abstract. In that case, things like visual and linguistic concepts are really subordinate to a deep concept of character. That might be an outlier -- Coetzee spends more time in his characters' heads than, say, Dickens does. But it could very well be that the things that strike us most as readers (rich description, linguistic style) aren't actually identifiable players in a writer's process. That last point is sometimes why I still love "The Intentional Fallacy." It forces a critic (whatever his or her motives) to think of the relationship between reader and writer as deeply complicated.
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Apr 2, 2014 22:01
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nothing to seehere posted:If your still watching the thread, Brainworm, have you read/see Steinbeck's A view from a bridge? You've mentioned some his other work, so wondering if you had any view on this piece, as I just started studying. I haven't, or at least I don't remember having read it. I was going to add "unfortunately" to that, but I'm not totally sure I need to. Also: I'm still watching the thread. Well, obviously, since I'm posting. But I've got a couple things going on: 1) I'm moving (out of the house I bought with the ex, and into a new closer-to-work house), so things like packing boxes and taking unidentifiable, cat-hair-matted clothing to Goodwill are burning up time that'd be better spent reading View From a Bridge. 2) I'm on the board of a new Shakespeare festival, where I'm also dramaturging productions of Romeo and Juliet and Much Ado. If anyone has any question's about what that's like, I'm glad to talk about it. One piece of it or another is burning up a few hours a day, so it's constantly on my mind.
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Apr 2, 2014 22:08
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Have you read, and do you have any comments on http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/07/a-readers-manifesto/302270/? It's probably my favorite piece of (recent) literary criticism. I've read a few books by DeLillo and each one was a slog, and it felt like the writer was constantly trying to show how intelligent he was. Comparing it to something like Nabokov, whose writing is much, much nicer while being a lot less pretentious is eye opening. iFederico fucked around with this message at 14:12 on Apr 3, 2014 |
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Apr 3, 2014 14:03
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Brainworm posted:That is a really great question. This is really useful, thanks. I'm going to spend the weekend reading up on this.
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Apr 3, 2014 14:19
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iFederico posted:Have you read, and do you have any comments on http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/07/a-readers-manifesto/302270/? I gave up on the article before the end so forgive me for that. Myers seems to be asserting something that I don't think is true: that nowadays authors have to write in very dense prose in order to be considered serious and anything else is written off as genre fiction ('thrillers' and 'romances'). I think there are plenty of authors who are considered literary whose works are very accessible (Coetzee springs to mind, even some of McCarthy's stuff like The Road is pretty accessible). And there's plenty of recent books that are definitely in no way genre fiction but I wouldn't have thought would be considered 'literary', as Myers defines it, e.g. The Beach. Really, I think it boils down to the fact that Myers doesn't like fiction with dense prose that's not easy to understand straight away. And that's fine, if you don't like it don't read it. But obviously there is a group of people out there who appreciates it and why shouldn't they?
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Apr 3, 2014 15:46
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As a complete layman, the thing that always struck me with high school theatre level productions of Shakespeare is that the actors didn't always know what they were saying- there were clearly words they didn't know the meaning or significance of that badly damaged their ability to speak convincingly. I'm specifically remembering a confident but very confused delivery of that very first Act 1 Scene 1 coal/colliers exchange of wordplay by a pair of teenagers who had of course never heard the word collier in their life, and their audience wasn't any more informed. It's a different audience and actors for you, but is it a concern as a dramaturg that your general audience won't pick up on the wordplay in the script, or certain lines will lose their impact to an unfamiliar listener? How do you keep your audience from getting lost in Shakesperean English? e: or are festivals of this type pretty much geared toward audiences familiar with the text? Kellsterik fucked around with this message at 05:02 on Apr 4, 2014 |
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Apr 4, 2014 05:00
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William Bear posted:[...]I'm just curious: what's the earliest someone has ever said words to the effect of "Of course X, it's the year Y!"[...] Brainworm posted:I dug around on this for a while, and the bottom line is that it's really, really difficult to find phrases by meaning rather than syntax. Sorry to reanimate a dead post, but I came across the quote you were probably thinking of, Brainworm, and thought I would share it. Bram Stoker posted:A year ago which of us would have received such a possibility, in the midst of our scientific, sceptical, matter-of-fact nineteenth century?
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Apr 4, 2014 14:28
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I think that idea, depending on how specific you get, is significantly older. The attitude "this is still going on?" shows up in abolitionist writings ~50 years earlier. I wouldn't be surprised at all to find "in our modern, rational age" sentiments from the Enlightenment. Unfortunately direct quotes aren't coming to mind at the moment. I don't think Uncle Tom's Cabin has much of it. Louisa May Alcott uses a lot of "look what kids are doing nowadays!" if that's something you're interested in too -- to me it seems all part of this sense of modernity. e: This is getting farther afield, but what the hell. One of my personal favorites is Mary at the Farm. A modern city career woman has to travel back to her great-aunt and -uncle's farm to learn all the old domestic skills that are forgotten today. We of course are supposed to be learning along with her, and reading plenty of editorials about how kids today are focusing on all this trivial stuff and book learning, and nobody is keeping the old, important skills alive anymore. And it was published in 1915. I would love to know about the heart attack the author must have had in 1920. Anne Whateley fucked around with this message at 15:29 on Apr 4, 2014 |
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Apr 4, 2014 15:19
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i like nice words
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I would suggest that "Look at what kids are doing these days" is a different concept, and one that certainly goes back to at LEAST Plato, if not all the way back to the dawn of mankind. "Look at what kids are doing these days" expresses the idea that the next generation is worse than the previous generation, not that this generation is better (or even just plain different) than previous generations. The two ideas are very, very, very different.
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Apr 4, 2014 15:27
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I don't think you've read any Louisa May Alcott. It's definitely "check out what the kids are doing these days" in a pretty positive way and not so much "kids today are the worst." Mary at the Farm is the latter, and yes, there are tons of examples (although that Plato/Socrates/Aristotle quote is super fake).
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Apr 4, 2014 15:33
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Anne Whateley posted:(although that Plato/Socrates/Aristotle quote is super fake). Huh. Looking into it, it is. Didn't know that, it had always been conveyed to me as true. Thank you. I wonder what the earliest recorded expression of "kids these days..." is?
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Apr 7, 2014 16:02
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FightingMongoose posted:Sorry to reanimate a dead post, but I came across the quote you were probably thinking of, Brainworm, and thought I would share it. Bram Stoker posted:A year ago which of us would have received such a possibility, in the midst of our scientific, sceptical, matter-of-fact nineteenth century? Thank you. I spent a frightening amount of time and frustration trying to track this down.
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Apr 9, 2014 15:00
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