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Also what do you think Rowlings intentions were in creating a slave race that legit want to be enslaved and have a subplot mocking Hermione for trying to Social Justice it? And then give me the Death Of The Author version.
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May 22, 2018 02:59
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Wallet posted:This is rather tangential, but I'm wondering if you have an opinion on what motivates academics to write convoluted nonsense like this. I recently finished writing up some research I had been working on for the past year relating to the apparent preference in I can think of seven (incomplete) explanations: 1) Jargon-rich academic writing is a choice; jargon dresses up bad content. 2) Jargon-rich writing is unavoidable because the subject matter is inherently complex. 3) Academic writing following a template, much as a recipe does in a cookbook. This template includes irritating conventions: endless hedging, useless metadiscourse, and opaque nominalizations. (Steven Pinker writes about this one). 4) There are few practical or professional incentives for writing clearly or stylishly. 5) International writing (for or by ESL audiences, for translation, etc.) promotes use of specific, technical terms over ordinary ones. 6) Academic writing is an exercise in professional narcissism -- academics accounting for what they and other academic have done, rather than describing the substance of their work. 7) Academics are beep-boops incapable of straightforward communication in any form, including research papers, because they don't understand (or don't routinely consider) how their speakers and listeners are different from them. (1) (the bullshit thesis) happens. I've seen it. There are fields and situations where it's common -- like "apply this theory to the reading" scholarship. But, like (2) (the irreducible complexity thesis), it's easy to pretend that it accounts for more academic writing than it actually does. There are lovely journals that are totally capable of publishing content-free articles, but that's not the majority. And few topics are so complex that they can't be clearly explained to a non-expert. Steven Pinker argues for (3) (the template thesis), and I think there's a lot to it. Most people learn to write and speak by following conventions, and -- in most cases -- breaking from convention introduces more costs than benefits. That's really another way of saying (4) -- that there are few rewards for writing well or clearly. I've never seen an academic journal whose guidelines mentioned style in terms of clarity. There's also something to (5) (the international thesis). For instance, International Business English (meaning the subset of the English Language intelligible to second-language speaking accountants) doesn't follow many conventions of graceful writing. It's technical, and barren of idiom, out of necessity. But there's a whole lot of bad writing that (5) doesn't explain. Take Steven Pinker's example: quote:I have serious doubts that trying to amend the Constitution ... would work on an actual level. ... On the aspirational level, however, a constitutional amendment strategy may be more valuable* In paraphrase, this sentence means something like "I don't think amending the Constitution would be successful, but it might be useful to try." The words level and strategy make it both more difficult to understand and to translate because they don't actually mean anything. That leads me to (6) and (7) (academics are self-centered beep-boops): Academics are bad writers because they (we) are bad communicators. We don't understand how other people, or non-academic worlds, work. In that sense, an academic paper has a lot in common with your average MAN page or code comments: they're written for someone who is exactly like the writer, save for a single instance of isolable ignorance. The reader is just the version of me who didn't know this thing. I've sat in on enough lectures to think that (6) and (7) are caricatures, not myths. That's my hot take, anyway. * See this essay
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May 22, 2018 16:43
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Brainworm posted:I've sat in on enough lectures to think that (6) and (7) are caricatures, not myths. Mathematics academic here. I've known enough mathematicians / computer scientists / physicists to think that (6) and (7) are far, far too common. Not the only reason, but so, so sadly common.
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May 22, 2018 17:04
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Baron Porkface posted:Would Harry Potter have been better if Harry was credibly tempted by the darkside at least a little (exempting a few outbursts, like attempting crucio on Bellatrix)? I don't know if it would have been better, but I'd have liked it more. Like, one thing that makes for good storytelling is having a protagonist who hurts other (undeserving) people. Usually, that happens because the protagonist has a weakness or flaw, and the story opens by demonstrating what it is and how it plays out. Lear goes off on Cordelia, Hamlet manipulates Ophelia, or Othello marries Desdemona in secret. But it's hard to have your protagonist hurt people when they're basically morally good. In a coming-of-age story, writers sometimes do this by having the protagonist's weakness lead to the death of his or her guardian figures. For instance, Peter Parker's cashing in on his powers leads to Uncle Ben's murder. His progression into unguarded adulthood happens at the same time that he discovers who the world needs him to be. So, like, if I could rewrite some part of Harry Potter it would be what happens to the Dursleys. If Harry has a flaw, it's that he doesn't consider the well-being of the non-magical world at all. He (and the other Hogwartsers) are pretty elitist that way, what with their huge dining hall of unlimited food, and private trains, and steadfast refusal to cure ebola and HIV and poverty. So what if (say, during the Battle of Hogwarts) the Death Eaters nuked the Dursleys from orbit -- the way the Empire does to Owen and Beru? That would remind Harry that the whole world -- and not just his in-group of magicians -- needs protecting from evil. That seems like a good lesson for him to learn, and it would give his post-conflict character a sense of purpose and direction.
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May 22, 2018 17:26
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Baron Porkface posted:Also what do you think Rowlings intentions were in creating a slave race that legit want to be enslaved and have a subplot mocking Hermione for trying to Social Justice it? I think J.K. Rowling is British, and so probably doesn't think about servants as slaves. For most of American history, "freedom" has been synonymous with "freedom to choose your vocation," and I think that we're incapable of conceiving of it any other way. But -- in British history -- there's a lot of daylight between being literally owned as chattel and being born into a caste system. Like, in case you haven't noticed, Harry Potter is all about legitimate caste systems. You're born a wizard. You're born a house elf. You're born a goblin and so you have a big nose and you're good with money. That's reality and you've just gotta deal with it. The thing that separates Harry Potter's good characters from the evil ones isn't that they're for (or against) that caste system. It's that the evil characters equate castes with bloodlines.* That is, like, a super-British distinction -- basically a disagreement over the legitimacy of Morganatic marriage. It's always seemed weird to me that Americans are so amenable to stories where the British caste system turns out to be cool and good. We fought a war to get out from under it. quote:And then give me the Death Of The Author version. The Death of the Author version is that your reading of House Elves says more about you than about Rowling. * Which distinction applies only to the human characters. Goblins and house elves don't tango outside the ballroom, apparently.
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May 22, 2018 18:40
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Brainworm posted:If Harry has a flaw, it's that he doesn't consider the well-being of the non-magical world at all. He (and the other Hogwartsers) are pretty elitist that way, what with their huge dining hall of unlimited food, and private trains, and steadfast refusal to cure ebola and HIV and poverty. That's something Umberto Eco writes about. Superheroes never lift a finger to change the status quo by addressing the world's real problems. Instead their role is to defend the status quo against extraordinary threats.
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May 23, 2018 11:11
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Brainworm posted:(1) (the bullshit thesis) happens. I've seen it. There are fields and situations where it's common -- like "apply this theory to the reading" scholarship. But, like (2) (the irreducible complexity thesis), it's easy to pretend that it accounts for more academic writing than it actually does. There are lovely journals that are totally capable of publishing content-free articles, but that's not the majority. And few topics are so complex that they can't be clearly explained to a non-expert. I couldn't agree more with you on these two. 1) I find fairly compelling in some cases, but it doesn't seem sufficient to explain the sheer quantity of bad writing. In the case of 2), while complex subject matter makes expositional clarity harder to achieve, it doesn't make it impossible. 5), 6), and 7) also have some nugget of truth in them but, much like 1) and 2), they strike me as excellent explanations for why particular pieces of academic writing are so terrible and very poor explanations for the sheer scope of the problem. Brainworm posted:3) Academic writing following a template, much as a recipe does in a cookbook. This template includes irritating conventions: endless hedging, useless metadiscourse, and opaque nominalizations. (Steven Pinker writes about this one). Brainworm posted:4) There are few practical or professional incentives for writing clearly or stylishly. I'm familiar with the explanations you suggest (the Pinker article happens to make an appearance in my lit review), but 4) is the one that I find the most pernicious, and the one that I particularly did research into and performed a study to better understand. I imagine that it is more satisfying to imagine that perverse incentives are driving one's fellow scholars to write like animals than it is to imagine that they are all just narcissistic†, myopic shits; Academics seem to largely take it for granted that perverse incentives exist, but I think they're wrong. There's a long chain of research into the relationship between the readability and the reception (as measured in a variety of ways, but often using citation counts) of academic writing that originates in the early '80s, with a guy named Armstrong. Armstrong advanced the theory that “[a]n unintelligible communication from a legitimate source,” or an apparently legitimate source, “in the recipient’s area of expertise will increase the recipient’s rating of the author’s competence.” There have been a whole bunch of studies that have followed up on Armstrong's work (some published as recently as 2016), almost all of which have found that less readable prose is better received by academics or that readability makes no difference in either direction. Academics seem to have internalized those findings, but all of those studies share a glaring methodological flaw‡; the few studies that don't share that flaw have all found that, as all sane people would imagine, people (academics being a subset of people despite evidence to the contrary) receive prose that is easier to read and comprehend more favorably. That is, there is evidence to suggest that there are in fact professional incentives for writing clearly (if not stylishly), but academics seem to have been convinced that this isn't the case, or even that the incentives operate in the opposite direction. *I don't have a link for this one, but anyone with access to academic databases can probably find it: Bauerly, R. J., Johnson, D. T., & Singh, M. (2005). Readability and the impact of marketing. Journal of Marketing, 69, 19-20. †Unfortunately, there is evidence to suggest that being a narcissistic poo poo does lead to greater success within academia, at least according to a study from 2015 which found that (alongside a variety of other interesting findings) authors who self-cite with greater regularity are, in turn, cited more regularly by other scholars. ‡This relates to the way that they are all measuring readability. I'm happy to explain further if there is any interest, but it's a bit esoteric. Wallet fucked around with this message at 13:04 on May 23, 2018 |
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May 23, 2018 12:53
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On this sort of thing, I know someone (possibly years ago now) in this thread suggested Billig's Learn to Write Badly. I read it and I think it's a fantastic look at this stuff. It really sharpend my desire to use as plain of a writing style as possible, which can get a bit tricky in the philosophy of mind/psychology/phenomenology I often have to write about. I think 3) seems the most applicable to my topics. Also, philosophers have a habit of redefining common technical terms for use in their specific projects and only mentioning it once or twice throughout their oeuvre. That does not help matters. However, I find that philosophy journals are nowhere near as opaque to read, in terms of writing style anyway, as articles from other humanities and social science disciplines. History journals are normally pretty smooth reading too, to be fair. Politics and social science, when I read them, often invoke abstract entities, systems, and ideologies as concete agents and never is a person mentioned. I proofread a section of a close friend's Education Studies thesis and, best will in the world to them, it was jargon-stuffed and turgid. However, that may just be because I'm more familiar with the gobbledygook of philosophy. It's difficult to know how what our poo poo looks like to those staring into the bowl.
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May 23, 2018 18:06
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I'd just like to add, social science articles and books translated from French are the loving worst.
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May 23, 2018 19:05
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Siivola posted:[...] books translated from French are the loving worst. Seconded. I don't know whether to blame the translators, the theory, or the French.
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May 24, 2018 12:43
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I took your advice on how to better read literature with that one book but then trying apply it to the work I’m currently reading, Pale Fire, feels Sisphyean at best. How do I read this book because I love the poetry but the commentary makes me want to reach into the text and strangle Kinbote?
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May 26, 2018 01:47
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Wallet posted:‡This relates to the way that they are all measuring readability. I'm happy to explain further if there is any interest, but it's a bit esoteric. I'm very curious about this. It seems like the overwhelming pressure when you have a strict word count and need to communicate your findings efficiently to reviewers is to use jargon and sacrifice clarity for brevity. It seems like when I try to include an example to make things more concrete or clear it will usually get cut. (e: My examples could just be terrible, in fairness to my editors) a_good_username fucked around with this message at 04:34 on May 26, 2018 |
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May 26, 2018 04:30
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a_good_username posted:I'm very curious about this. It seems like the overwhelming pressure when you have a strict word count and need to communicate your findings efficiently to reviewers is to use jargon and sacrifice clarity for brevity. It seems like when I try to include an example to make things more concrete or clear it will usually get cut. (e: My examples could just be terrible, in fairness to my editors) Not all jargon is created equal. Jargon, or technical vocabulary, or whatever you want to call it, is useful because it enables concision, but a lot of it is lossy (or gets used so indiscriminately that it becomes so): at some point everyone started calling anything that has the potential to be interpreted as socially regressive from a modern perspective "problematic," which takes what could be an interesting argument about, for example, Shylock*, and turns it into a vague indication that the speaker thinks that there is something potentially objectionable somewhere within The Merchant of Venice. If I say that a poem is written in anapestic tetrameter, someone unfamiliar with poetry might have to look up what exactly that means, but no information has been lost. As Pinker has written, and Brainworm gestured towards, the difficulty of imagining what it would be like to not know what we know makes dealing with readability complicated. Your editors are probably academics who work in your field or one proximate to it, and so when they see an example that clarifies something they are already familiar with, it just looks like needless words to be omitted, because the example isn't there for them. The way that the vast majority of the studies I was talking about measure readability ignores all of those complexities, and the many other complexities, that go into determining how readable a particular person will find a particular piece of writing. Because dealing with human study participants is a pain in the rear end, authors have made use of a variety of readability formulas—most popularly Flesch reading ease and Flesch-Kincaid grade level, which happen to be the two formulas implemented in Microsoft Word—that invariably attempt to assess readability based on two or three very simple metrics, such as the average number of words per sentence in a text, the average number of syllables per word, or the percentage of words that are polysyllabic. Those metrics happen to be particularly bad at assessing the readability of academic texts. If various forms of the word "autotroph" make twenty appearances on a single page of a sixth-grade science textbook, It's probably safe to assume that by the fourth instance, the additional occurrences aren't making it any harder to read. It also (unsurprisingly) turns out that people who are familiar with the subject matter of a piece of writing, if not the particular content, tend to find it substantially easier to read—the degree to which academics specialize in particular fields of knowledge creates an ever increasing gap between what they believe to be readable and what everyone else does. *As I recall, Brainworm doesn't view that particular argument with much favor, but it was the first thing that came to mind.
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May 26, 2018 23:44
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I recently read A Shropshire Lad, and while I liked it, it did seem fairly one-note. On the other hand, this is the only poetry I've read since I was in school, so if it is doing anything more subtle, I'd probably miss it. Do you have any advice about what I should look for on a re-read?
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Jun 2, 2018 02:51
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Jo Joestar posted:I recently read A Shropshire Lad, and while I liked it, it did seem fairly one-note. On the other hand, this is the only poetry I've read since I was in school, so if it is doing anything more subtle, I'd probably miss it. Do you have any advice about what I should look for on a re-read? The humor. If there's one thing people miss about poems (and poets) it's that most of the good ones -- even the world-weary Modernists -- have a sharp sense of humor. Sometimes it's episodic -- just there to give a reader a break. At other times, it's woven into the fabric of a poem ("Prufrock" is a good example). If there's a poetic tradition of humor -- and I mean one that dates back to the Romans -- it's energetic, self-consciously mean-spirited, and borderline absurdist. Think Catellus 16 ("Pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo"),* Milton's fart jokes, or Herrick's Hesperides, which is a goldmine of epigrams like "Upon Pimp": quote:When Pimp’s feet sweat, as they do often use, The more classicist a poet is (or the more your poet is a student of poetry) the more of this you see. Even Adrienne Rich has her moments. But when it comes to being, like, energetically mean-spirited, I don't think Housman was playing against type. A.S. Gow (one of Housman's co-workers) published A.E. Housman: A Sketch shortly after Housman's death, and it's full of stories about Housman being a prick.** You'll get moments where that comes through in Shropshire Lad, like "Terence, this is stupid stuff...," or "Is My Team Ploughing," although it's buried under folksy meter the same way it is in someone like Frost. But later Housman flips the equation: it's 10% folksy and 90% mean-spirited absurdism. Take "Infant Innocence": quote:The Grizzly Bear is huge and wild; So, yeah. Look for the barbs. I should add that it's common to read e.g. Housman and Frost and other folksy poets as expressing subtle contempt for their subject or style, and I think that's off base. It's more that they use occasional barbs to deflate the tendency of e.g. pastoral poetry to make nature and simple people seem like some kind of uncomplicated ideal. * Roughly translated "I will rear end-rape and face-gently caress you." This is how Catellus deals with critics (who call him a bitch for writing love poetry). Brainworm fucked around with this message at 14:07 on Jun 4, 2018 |
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Jun 4, 2018 13:49
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I'd like to get into some Arthurian stuff, but don't know where to begin. I've got an Audible credit and I'm sorta looking at Tennyson right now, tell me why that's a bad idea.
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Jun 12, 2018 20:44
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Siivola posted:I'd like to get into some Arthurian stuff, but don't know where to begin. I've got an Audible credit and I'm sorta looking at Tennyson right now, tell me why that's a bad idea. There's nothing really wrong with Idylls of the King if you dig on narrative poetry. Depending on how much you want a novel (and how conventionally Arthurian you want that novel to be) you've got a lot of choices: The bearded classic among 20th c. Arthur novels is T.H. White's Once and Future King. It's the basis for most popular, subsequent takes on Arthurian legend -- think Camelot or The Sword in the Stone (if you're old enough to have seen that as a kid) -- and well-written as long as you don't cringe from phrases like "ugly as an African ape." If you want something more traditionally Arthurian, John Steinbeck started reworking Malory's Morte d'Arthur before he died. The fragment (which follows Malory closely and ends with the death of Lancelot) is usually published as the Acts of King Arthur and his Noble Knights. Most editions weigh in at 400 pages, so just because Acts is unfinished doesn't mean there's a shortage of story. It's not bad for late Steinbeck, either. Marion Bradley's Mists of Avalon tells the story of Morgan Le Fay. If you want a straight-ahead piece of storytelling with a fresh-but-not-pretentious take on Arthurian canon, Mists is it. There's a whose series of books derived from Mists but I can't speak to their quality. For what it's worth, I loved reading White and Bradley as a kid and love reading them now. There are few writers who are fully intelligible to children and also fit for adults.* That's something to think about in an audiobook, depending on who's riding with you. A kid listening to Steinbeck will be bored into wrist-slitting. There are newer works, too. I haven't yet read Kazuo Ishiguro's Buried Giant but I'd bet a finger that it's good. Google tells me it's Arthurian in the sense that it focuses on Gawain. Philip Reeve also won the Carnegie Medal for Here Lies Arthur. My niece liked it. * Think John Christopher (Sam Youd) or Robin McKinley, who wrote what would now be called "young adult fiction," but won't give you brain damage if you're over 25.
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Jun 13, 2018 17:17
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Thanks! I think I'll go with White's novel, then. I'm neck-deep in textbooks about chivalry and whatnot and could use something lighter. Trying to learn to listen to poetry might kill my enthusiasm about knights stone dead. 
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Jun 14, 2018 20:10
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What're your top 3 passages from Paradise Lost B-) Also, just how dope was Milton?
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Jun 24, 2018 23:33
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I'm a medieval lit PhD student at the end of my second year. How many papers should I have published by the end of my PhD in order to have even a shot at the job market? Currently I have three, and ~15-16 presentations. I also have, forthcoming, an edited edition of a medieval text, and two (co-authored) articles in the works.
chernobyl kinsman fucked around with this message at 04:35 on Jun 25, 2018 |
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Jun 25, 2018 04:27
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What's up with The Winter's Tale? I saw a production of it at the Globe recently, It was a quite decent tragedy for the first bit till Apollo's judgement gets released, then turns into this wierd comedy, with a happy ever after ending and a farcical scenes all the way up to it. Was it just twi plays mashed together?
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Jun 25, 2018 10:29
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Mighty Crouton posted:What're your top 3 passages from Paradise Lost B-) This first one is the shakiest: quote:What though the field be lost? These are Satan's word's to one of his confederate demons (Beelzebub, I think) and they're the first ones that really open up his character. Basically -- basically -- the thing that makes Satan evil is his inability (or unwillingness) to learn; the thing that makes Satan admirable (or made him admirable to e.g. Byron) was that this unwillingness presents or rationalizes itself as courage and strength of will. This line between Good and Evil is one of the subtleties that makes Paradise Lost so bafflingly good. Like, if I were a life coach or some other bullshit, I'd say that there's not much daylight between a good person and an effective one, and that good people therefore become good by listening to whatever the world has to say about their failures. quote:First, Moloch, horrid king, besmeared with blood This might be my favorite Paradise Lost quote from a strictly technical standpoint just because of the way that Milton uses the first line break to help the passage unfold. That sets up a pattern that continues through the first two lines: each clause raises a question that the next clause answers, to the effect that Moloch gets, like worse and worse. The whole passage unfolds something like this: Moloch's horrid. OK. How? He's smeared in blood. OK. Whose? Human sacrifices. Yikes. From children. Wow. OK. So... That the parents burned during an orgiastic drum circle. Got it. To me, the effect is equal parts comic and revolting. That's another play Milton consistently runs during Paradise Lost, and I don't think he gets enough credit for it. Milton is good at gross-out funny. The whole Satan/Sin/Death episode reads like that Aristocrats joke, and to something like the same purpose. quote:"...Thus it shall befall This quote is from the end of Book IX (after the fall of Adam and Eve). I've added the quotation marks here because some editors of Paradise Lost apparently think Milton was a closet incel, and attribute the quoted passage to the narrator rather than Adam. After God discovers Adam and Eve's sin, they (Adam and Eve) start arguing with each other. Like most good theatrical bickering, this piece progresses from the characters arguing about the problem to arguing about who they are; that is, it quickly progresses to value-driven name-calling. What makes this example particularly good is how well (and how economically) it paints Adam as high handed. "You made this mistake," he says "and you're blaming me because I let you." How recognizable is that combo platter of blindness and self-satisfaction? quote:Also, just how dope was Milton? I've probably mentioned that Milton laid down the greatest fart joke in recorded history during a Cambridge disputation. It goes like this: quote:...ne praecinenti ori succinat, et aenigmata quaedam nolens affutiat sua non Sphinx sed Sphincter anus, quae medicis interpretanda non Oedipo relinquo... Or -- in other words -- "he'll cut loose a riddle from his sphincter (rather then the Sphinx), whose interpretation will be up to a doctor (rather than Oedipus)." The weakness of the English is down to my weakness as a translator.
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Jun 25, 2018 14:51
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chernobyl kinsman posted:I'm a medieval lit PhD student at the end of my second year. How many papers should I have published by the end of my PhD in order to have even a shot at the job market? Currently I have three, and ~15-16 presentations. I also have, forthcoming, an edited edition of a medieval text, and two (co-authored) articles in the works. poo poo, dude. Hard to say. Just for starters, I think two things are true: 1) Publications as a graduate student tell people what you're capable of. Under that logic, there's no number of publications likely to set you above other published candidates. A single article in a top-10 journal speaks more highly of your research than a dozen articles in some open-access grindhouse. In other words -- as in most other realms of human experience -- a publisher's "yes" only means as much as how often they say "no." 2) More (and more prestigious) publications don't necessarily make a better candidate. There are matters of fit, like how closely your work aligns with a department's (or college's) mission. There are also soft skills. So there's a point -- and I'm not totally sure where it is -- when you ought to stop writing articles and start paying attention to these other things. For instance: every cover letter, statement of teaching philosophy, and so on that you send out ought to be written from scratch and expressly for the department or program to which you're applying. That takes a lot of time, and it should. A hiring committee isn't going to spend more time and energy reading your materials than you did putting them together. I'll also say that, as a candidate in Medieval Lit., you should pay careful attention to your (and your department's) place at the school and among its students. My own college is reorganizing now, and like most reorganizations this will involve laying off tenure-track and tenured faculty who are unlucky enough to teach unpopular or unmarketable subjects. It's a tough market for the newly-graduated, but tougher for a 50-year-old looking down the barrel of another tenure sprint. So you may not have much choice about where you end up working. But if you do, prefer a program where there's a community of interest around your subject (i.e. where students take your classes out of preference rather than obligation). Even the big boys are increasingly tuition-driven.
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Jun 25, 2018 15:37
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Nothingtoseehere posted:What's up with The Winter's Tale? I saw a production of it at the Globe recently, It was a quite decent tragedy for the first bit till Apollo's judgement gets released, then turns into this wierd comedy, with a happy ever after ending and a farcical scenes all the way up to it. Was it just twi plays mashed together? Funny you should bring that up. My own Shakespeare Festival is doing Winter's this season and I had the same impression. Part of the Shakespearean Comedy formula is a weirdly harsh law or precept that drives characters into conflict. That's true all the way back to Comedy of Errors and Midsummer, where you get put to death for washing up on the shore of a rival city or for defying your father's marriage arrangements. In both of those early comedies (and others), the ruler imposes some leniency. For instance, Theseus tells Hermia that she can become a nun if she doesn't want to marry Demetrius (as her father demands) or be executed (as the letter of the law says she should). That stays true of the comedies until about 1598 (or through the first third of Shakespeare's career). During Shakespeare's middle period -- call it 1598-1608 -- the engine of conflict becomes the absence of a wise or legitimate ruler. Laws operate without what Spenser called "the part of justice which is equity." For instance, there's the law against fornication in Measure: sex outside of marriage is a capital crime. That sounds like an early comedy, except that the Duke (who ought to temper the law the way that e.g. Theseus does in Midsummer) leaves his government in the hands of Angelo (who will not). The same kind of abandonment happens in Merchant (where Portia's dead father sets up the casket riddle) and As You like It (where the legitimate ruler, Duke Senior, leaves his daughter in the hands of the usurper, Duke Frederick, who eventually exiles her on penalty of death). The Romances (roughly 1608-16) make the rulers tyrannical rather than just irresponsible. That trend hits its high point in The Tempest, where there's no law at all: by dint of his magic, Prospero can do whatever he wants to anyone stuck on his island. But of all the Romance tyrants, Prospero is the least tyrannical. He can do whatever he wants, but -- roughly speaking -- has an interest in justice. That makes him an exception among the Romance tyrants. If you don't know Pericles, Prince of Tyre, for instance, the setup is that king Antiochus has a beautiful daughter. Anyone who wants to marry her has to guess the answer to a riddle. There's a death penalty for guessing the wrong answer. As it turns out, the riddle's answer is incest: Antiochus is banging his daughter. When Pericles learns as much, Antiochus tries to have him killed. There's a death penalty for guessing the right answer, too.* Students sometimes ask why Antiochus would pose the riddle in the first place. My usual answer is tyranny: the peak demonstration of your unlimited power is punishing people for doing exactly what you tell them to. That's the trap Hermione falls (marries) into with Leontes in Winter's Tale: if you're mean to my friend, you're disloyal, but if you're nice to him you're cheating on me. There's no way out from under him because he's preoccupied with demonstrating that he can do whatever he wants. It's not until a god starts killing off Leontes' family that he understands that he answerable to some higher authority. It makes for a weird first act, for sure, and I'm not sure that Winter's Tale is comedy gold. But all that stuff at the beginning of the play is something like the endpoint of a longer trend in Shakespearean comedy, where the arbitrary but high-stakes laws that drive conflict in early plays become something like fickle tyranny in the later ones. * Leading to an generation of MFA thesis productions where Pericles will doubtless be dressed like Jared Kushner.
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Jun 25, 2018 16:54
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As easily one of the most literary episodes, what is your deep-dive opinion of Star Trek: TNG's Darmok? https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x494zi5
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Jun 26, 2018 11:30
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ceaselessfuture posted:As easily one of the most literary episodes, what is your deep-dive opinion of Star Trek: TNG's Darmok? Let me start here: Since my library stocked books about science fiction in the same section all all the books on computers and chess, I spent most of my childhood thinking that Star Trek was art of a high nature. This is despite not seeing an episode until I was maybe 12, and then being consistently disappointed that Star Trek (TNG or otherwise) wasn't as brainy as I'd been led to believe. That's a long way of saying that I expected watching "Darmok" to be awkward, and I was surprised when it wasn't. That said, the central conceit of a species that communicates through references to its own history is interesting in a flash-in-the-pan kind of way.* At least one register of ordinary language always works referentially. (For a demonstration, see the comics in the BANKER.bmp). So the shithead critic who set up shop in the back of my mind has questions like these:
There are more, and they're just as pedantic. But credit where credit's due: I wasn't interested in this episode because of its linguistic novelty. I was interested it because it focused on the exploits of an intellectually and emotionally mature protagonist who says stuff like: Jean-Luc Picard posted:In my experience, communication is a matter of patience, imagination. I would like to believe that these are qualities that we have in sufficient measure. That's a long, long way from most storytelling -- and most television especially -- where conflict is driven by characters' emotional ineptitude. Like, I'm watching Westworld right now, and every character has the impulse control of a toddler. That can be fun, and at least its consistent with what I'll call the "world of the story," but it's also nice to see something different. * There's nothing particularly wrong with shallow premises in science fiction -- we're talking about a genre where "what if X animal were gigantic?" has driven like a dozen feature films -- but it's still worth noting if we're talking about "Darmok" as a think piece on language.
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Jun 26, 2018 14:51
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Brainworm posted:But credit where credit's due: I wasn't interested in this episode because of its linguistic novelty. I was interested it because it focused on the exploits of an intellectually and emotionally mature protagonist who says stuff like: Why do you think that is? Is it just because it's easier to write immature people actually having conflicts rather than two more developed people coming to a serious disagreement that would lead to conflict? Do you have any more examples of stories featuring "intellectually and emotionally mature" protagonists? I've not seen much TNG (and no other Star Trek) but as far as I know, Picard seems to be a unique character in this respect.
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Jun 26, 2018 19:08
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Are there any guides you guys would recommend for improving writing as a PhD student? I just finished getting my first paper published, and want to become a more sophisticated writer but in a grammatically sound way.
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Jun 26, 2018 21:04
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Stabbatical posted:Why do you think that is? Is it just because it's easier to write immature people actually having conflicts rather than two more developed people coming to a serious disagreement that would lead to conflict? I think that's exactly it. Also, a writer's own intelligence and perceptiveness limits the degree to which they can convincingly write those attributes into a character. I don't know if you've noticed, but realistically intelligent characters are really rare. The best most writers can do is a character who's "technically brilliant" (i.e. the character we're told is smart because they've achieved A, B, or C, but who never actually demonstrates ingenuity) or the character who "knows a lot" (i.e. the character is "smart" because they've committed a body of trivia to memory, e.g. Sherlock Holmes). It's not that its unrealistic for an intelligent character to be either accomplished or knowledgable (although the degree of it is sometimes ridiculous -- like Captain Picard spontaneously quoting a page of Gilgamesh); it's that intelligent people are generally capable of making accessible but perceptive ("obvious once you've thought of it") statements about whatever it is they do, and that those kinds of statements are hard to write convincingly. On top of that, intelligence is something like a productive attention to complexity. It's hard to have smart characters if their world is built out of well-defined problems. The best they can be is something like technically proficient. Like, add realistic complexity to the world of Sherlock Holmes and you get a better handle on the difference: Imaginary Novel posted:"That's the thing," said Sherlock. "Life is complicated and it is very hard to be sure. But you can find enough evidence to judge what's likely and, outside that, what's possible. And you need to temper certainty by asking what happens if you're wrong." Also: quote:Do you have any more examples of stories featuring "intellectually and emotionally mature" protagonists? I've not seen much TNG (and no other Star Trek) but as far as I know, Picard seems to be a unique character in this respect. I think Lois McMaster Bujold writes this way in her Miles Vorkosigian books and still manages to get her "swords and starships" space opera. The Vorkosigian books are basically Richard III in space (the same way that Game of Thrones is the Henry VI/Richard III tetralogy with dragons), but I think Lois Bujold writes a more developed Richard (with Miles) than GRRM does (with Tyrion).
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Jun 26, 2018 21:29
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One thing that sets The Next Generation (and The Original Series in particular) apart from most scifi on TV is that Gene Roddenberry was very insistent that the Federation was to be portrayed as a post-scarcity utopia, so the crew wants for nothing and everybody gets along. Zero bickering on the ship allowed. He even personally rewrote early scripts that had too much inter-crew conflict, and writers kept walking out in frustration. (Source)
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Jun 26, 2018 22:50
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Siivola posted:One thing that sets The Next Generation (and The Original Series in particular) apart from most scifi on TV is that Gene Roddenberry was very insistent that the Federation was to be portrayed as a post-scarcity utopia, so the crew wants for nothing and everybody gets along. Zero bickering on the ship allowed. He even personally rewrote early scripts that had too much inter-crew conflict, and writers kept walking out in frustration. (Source) Props to Roddenberry, although if I've learned anything from working in academia, it's that the less people need the more viciously they'll argue.
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Jun 27, 2018 12:13
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Where do you stand on the goon classic "Video games are/aren't art" debate? I think that the format has matured enough to 1) allow for some fairly complex inter-textual relationships and 2) have its own sort of "canon" of games that - through quality of product or just dumb luck - become the sort of foundational "classics" that other developers expand on. If that's any sort of factor in what makes something art, then games aren't all that dissimilar from literature (or any other art, for that matter), but at the same time, I mean, it's still a form where the best-known piece is about a plumber jumping on turtles and taking mushrooms.
Asbury fucked around with this message at 02:56 on Jul 4, 2018 |
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Jul 4, 2018 02:32
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Farrier Theaks posted:Where do you stand on the goon classic "Video games are/aren't art" debate? I think that the format has matured enough to 1) allow for some fairly complex inter-textual relationships and 2) have its own sort of "canon" of games that - through quality of product or just dumb luck - become the sort of foundational "classics" that other developers expand on. If that's any sort of factor in what makes something art, then games aren't all that dissimilar from literature (or any other art, for that matter), but at the same time, I mean, it's still a form where the best-known piece is about a plumber jumping on turtles and taking mushrooms. The short answer is "I don't know, but I have some biases." I think it depends on what you mean by art. I've used "art" to mean to mean at least four different things over the past ten years: The first definition of art -- the one you point to -- amounts to the idea that a literary or artistic canon comprises texts that respond to one another. Think of Star Wars responding to Hamlet (by importing its central conflicts and character webs) or Slaughterhouse Five placing itself in stylistic, historical, and thematic opposition to Red Badge of Courage. There's also a use of art that designates superlative craft or aesthetics. Just so we're all pointing our spears in the same direction, craft is something like technical facility, while aesthetics involves a standard of taste. Playing Chopin requires technical facility, and a good performance might be art. Nirvana songs aren't art in the sense that they're technically challenging, but might be because they have a distinctive and compelling style. Finally, I've also used art to mean something more relational: a text's capacity to help its audience make meaning out of human experience. I like to say that life is complicated, and that art helps people make sense of that complexity. In other words, I think it's sensible -- or at least defensible -- to call something art because it's influential, or because its well-crafted, aesthetically superlative (or innovative), or because experiencing it lends a viewer some understanding of complex human experiences. Tradition, Aesthetics, and Craft It's hard to argue against video games being art by way of tradition. You pointed out that video games have a canon and an intelligible tradition within that canon. That's probably true of any medium with a history. Craft and aesthetics are a little trickier, but not much. Neither craft nor aesthetics are properties of forms (like movies or novels or games or songs). They're properties of a form's elements. Just like "storytelling" is an element of forms like novels, plays, and films (and some video games), "animation" is an element of forms like films, games, and television shows. In other words, when we talk a song or a novel being either well-crafted or aesthetically distinctive, we're usually making a claim about isolable elements: a singer's range or control (in the sense of craft) or their voice's expressiveness (in the sense of aesthetics). So it makes sense to talk about a game like Cuphead being "art" in the sense that it's a superlative piece of animation, even though it's also not exceptional storytelling. Likewise, a programmer or hardware developer (for instance) might be awed by what Super Mario Brothers 3 did with its on-board MMC3 ASIC. The point, I think, is that to the extent we use "art" to designate excellence of craft or aesthetics, some video games (like some novels, films, and television shows) already contain artistic -- or potentially artistic -- elements like animation, storytelling, or acting. That said, the "superlative craft and aesthetics" definition of art includes just about form that can be done well (or poorly). I'm sure there's technically impressive CG furry porn. Art and Human Experience So that leaves me, at least, with one last question about whether video games can be art, and it's a motherfucker: regardless of whether a game is well-crafted, or interesting, or innovative, can playing it make you wiser? The problem with that question: no matter which game, movie, book, comic, or song you're talking about, and how shallow or inane or lovely it is, it will eventually deliver a subjectively meaningful insight to somebody. I have an uncle who, once upon a time, was a semi-famous and professionally successful country western singer. He finds Jimmy Buffet lyrics profound -- as in, they illuminate the darkest recesses of his own personality. His talk about them is weirdly moving.* Does that make Jimmy Buffet art? I don't know. My uncle's emotionally perceptive reads of J.B.'s lyrics, they're not baseless. But I also think he's meeting J.B. more than halfway. Parrotheads do not seem exceptionally self-aware. Then again, I could say the same thing about Shakespeareans or Jesus's disciples. So what do you do with that? Like, what do you do with the community of people who find honest-to-God meaning in dating simulators? I think my answer is that what counts as art -- that is, what progresses people to what counts as wisdom -- is really a function of culture. In that sense, it's useful to think of e.g. Bronys as a culture defined by the belief that watching My Little Pony helps people have the Right Kind of insights.** At a deep enough structural level, that's not terrifically different from people who believe you can become a better person by understanding Shakespeare or the Talmud. That sounds full-on Marxist, like "art is a cultural function that reproduces an ideology," and like a lot of Marxist conjectures it manages to be not-totally-wrong while also missing the point: the argument over whether video games are (or can be) art is really a proxy argument over which cultures are (or aren't) legitimate, and over which forms of wisdom we're prepared to endorse. Conclusions That sounds hopelessly subjective, and I suppose it is if you're the kind of person who thinks that every culture or belief system deserves a place at the table. I'm more of the "tolerate widely, endorse selectively, and repress effectively" type. And, for me, that means the following things are true:
* Context: My uncle was the only survivor of a late-1970s plane crash that killed his bandmates and fractured his skull. At the time of the crash he was also working as a truck driver. After the crash, he started a business that makes semi-trailers to haul highly-specialized machinery, and is in that respect successful even though he is also a serial addict and has been an absentee father. He wants to have a relationship with his now-adult daughters, but doubts he's emotionally capable of it (and is probably right). He forgets things, has a kind of intermittent aphasia, and does not know whether these problems are a consequence of his injuries or of his inability to process the crash and all the personal and professional losses that came with it. He's aware of all of this, and spent decades drifting between persistence in the face of all-consuming regret, and resignation to the seeming injustice of the plane crash and everything that came afterward. His word for that entire situation is "Margaritaville." ** And, regrettably, orgasms.
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Jul 5, 2018 22:00
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Brainworm posted:[*] It seems academically possible that playing video games could help people better make sense of their experiences. This whole debate is a thing I think is generally pretty silly, given how broadly people define "art," but I do sort of wonder about this piece of it in particular. I'm 100% with you on the storytelling in games being infantile for the most part (or, I guess, adolescent), but is that the right place to look? Novels and films have the capacity to cultivate wisdom through storytelling (and there's no particular reason games can't accomplish that as well), but visual art, particularly abstract visual art, seems to at least theoretically have the same capacity even when it isn't engaging in comprehensible storytelling; do you think it's possible for games to accomplish the same thing through player interaction and the rules governing player interaction in the absence of direct storytelling?
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Jul 6, 2018 13:12
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Wallet posted:This whole debate is a thing I think is generally pretty silly, given how broadly people define "art," but I do sort of wonder about this piece of it in particular. I'm 100% with you on the storytelling in games being infantile for the most part (or, I guess, adolescent), but is that the right place to look? Novels and films have the capacity to cultivate wisdom through storytelling (and there's no particular reason games can't accomplish that as well), but visual art, particularly abstract visual art, seems to at least theoretically have the same capacity even when it isn't engaging in comprehensible storytelling; do you think it's possible for games to accomplish the same thing through player interaction and the rules governing player interaction in the absence of direct storytelling? Oh, totally. Games can be being visually distinctive in compelling ways, and that's been true for probably 30 years. Cuphead and Yoshi's Island are rightly famous examples. So if you take as given that there's some factor of composition -- visual, musical, or whatever -- that can prompt people to have some kind of artistic experience, it would be hard to argue that games aren't capable of it. If I'ma run further off solid ground, I'd say that the things that make any given piece of music or visual art compelling are probably highly culturally specific. There's not much to a painting, a piece of music, or -- for that matter -- a poem. Those forms work by allusion and reference, and evocative ones do it with an uncanny degree of precision and subtlety. And so the same thing that's true for e.g. movies and poetry is probably also true for games: the broader or more diverse the market for a game, the less deeply evocative it's going to be.
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Jul 6, 2018 15:12
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Please expand on the "reverse fandom test" - are you using "Fandom" here with a gesture to that religious studies analysis of fan behaviour?
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Jul 6, 2018 15:21
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CommonShore posted:Please expand on the "reverse fandom test" - are you using "Fandom" here with a gesture to that religious studies analysis of fan behaviour? Yeah, I'd like to ask about that test too. I'm not sure if that is consistent with the 'anything no matter how shallow or inane or lovely it is, it will eventually deliver a subjectively meaningful insight to somebody' point, unless that fanbase vs audience is shorthand for a big, substantial difference between the two. Even though I think I kinda get the instinct behind it, that things with large or rabid (or large and rabid) defenders are more likely to have a simple/lower capacity to help its audience make meaning out of human experience.
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Jul 6, 2018 16:19
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Stabbatical posted:Yeah, I'd like to ask about that test too. I'm not sure if that is consistent with the 'anything no matter how shallow or inane or lovely it is, it will eventually deliver a subjectively meaningful insight to somebody' point, unless that fanbase vs audience is shorthand for a big, substantial difference between the two. Even though I think I kinda get the instinct behind it, that things with large or rabid (or large and rabid) defenders are more likely to have a simple/lower capacity to help its audience make meaning out of human experience. Well just to expand on my question and help it become discussion, there's a line of analysis in religious studies that examines fandoms variously as doctrinal religions or as mystery cults. Even healthy fandoms construct orthodoxy ("canon"), accumulate relics (loot and memorabilia), organize pilgrimages or gatherings (cons, viewing parties etc), and celebrate festivals (season premieres/finales, etc). Some establish holy places (e.g. Graceland). Some have fun creating apocrypha as a means of observation (fan fiction). As they become more toxic (this is my observation now) they become -more- religious in nature, creating different gates or trials for true belief (bigger/true fan pissing contests) and some particular crazies try to set themselves up as a kind of priesthood (my best example is Ian Levine, the dOcToR wHo sUpErFaN, who is a real piece of work and claims greater ownership of the show than even the showrunners and the BBC). This is all one of my favourite pop culture things to observe and critique in my head, and it has a real "can't be unseen" aspect. Now Brainworm's comment about "The reverse fandom test" is really compelling to me here, because it suggests that there's a difference in "finding wisdom" from art (here just using "art" in the sense of "a thing constructed") and having reverence for it. An audience consumes art and leaves it at that. A fandom shows an uncritical reverence for something that it finds compelling. But a... critic(? or critical audience?) finds wisdom for art through contemplation? This has now slid sideways into one of my other literary-critical hobby horses, that being the confirmation bias in art representing art: every book or essay about the value of literature, because they're all written and consumed by literary people, inevitably argues for the value of literature. Except, arguably, Don Quixote.
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Jul 6, 2018 16:59
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Stabbatical posted:Yeah, I'd like to ask about that test too. I'm not sure if that is consistent with the 'anything no matter how shallow or inane or lovely it is, it will eventually deliver a subjectively meaningful insight to somebody' point, unless that fanbase vs audience is shorthand for a big, substantial difference between the two. Even though I think I kinda get the instinct behind it, that things with large or rabid (or large and rabid) defenders are more likely to have a simple/lower capacity to help its audience make meaning out of human experience. True story: I had my whole desktop lock up about halfway through a response.* Meantime, CommonShore said some of what I mean to. Here's the short version: Once upon a time I had Maya Angelou in to work with my poetry students. She's taking them through a couple pieces by Edna St. Vincent Millay and one of my students (who I'll call Anna) wrinkled her forehead and says: "Who's this written for? I mean who was Edna writing to?" Maya takes a hit off her oxygen tank, points at Anna, and says: "You. She wrote it for you. Read it for you." That's pretty much the situation of art, right there. Whatever inspiration you pull from a text will have your fingerprints all over it. That's part of what makes it meaningful. I used to say that suffering brings wisdom only to the wise, and I think that's mostly true if you analogize it to art. Say you go to see the Mona Lisa. It's not going to just zap you into being a wiser person. You have to be prepared, sort of. It's not about paying the right kind of attention or about being in the right kind of mindset. It's having a body of actual, intellectual, and emotional experiences that seeing the Mona Lisa will somehow activate. For instance, maybe you look at Mona and think: "Wow. I never realized how delicate that painting is. How did it make it through two world wars? It might not have been here, except for a few thousand accidents over the last five centuries. It's kind of strange how our connection to the past can seem so ordinary and still be so fragile. That's especially true when you think about memory, and how all the little threads of it are the only things that really connect me to everything I value." Some people are going to be in an intellectual or emotional place where they can watch Netflix's Voltron reboot and have the same insight. Either way, that insight only means anything if it helps you understand individual, complex instances of what people do or think or feel. Like, maybe it helps you get why your aging mother cries when she can't find her car keys. Whatever you want to call that understanding, I'll call it wisdom but I won't call it fandom -- or what I usually associate with fandom, which is a kind of prestige economy subject to everything that CommonShore mentions: trivia-driven pissing contests, insular orthodoxies, uncritical celebration of both the text and its fan community's beliefs. Not to go totally Martin Luther, but the problem isn't that those practices involve something other than having an intimate moment with the text. I think they actively prevent it by endorsing ways of thinking and acting that (at their most toxic) can -- and occasionally do -- produce fringe communities of repellant insulars who, in the most extreme cases, come to define the experience of the text itself. E.g. Bronies. TL;DR: porn:sexuality::fandom:art. And some fandom is just inexplicable. Like, I've watched maybe sixty hours of Dr. Who and I just don't get it. I mean, I get it in the sense that after watching an episode I feel as though I have understood it on every level at which it can be meaningfully understood. Yet I can't shake the suspicion that Whovians must be watching a different (and much better) show. Football's the same way. Human excellence loving rules, but I'll be damned if I'm going to sit through two hours of Verizon commercials and Country music to see it. * We've switched from being a Linux household to a Mac household. I'm not saying it was a bad decision but there are times I regret it. Brainworm fucked around with this message at 20:04 on Jul 6, 2018 |
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Jul 6, 2018 20:01
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Brainworm posted:Some people are going to be in an intellectual or emotional place where they can watch Netflix's Voltron reboot and have the same insight. Either way, that insight only means anything if it helps you understand individual, complex instances of what people do or think or feel. Like, maybe it helps you get why your aging mother cries when she can't find her car keys. This may seem like a wild non-sequitur, but I recall you mentioning not having any taste for Ulysses, and this particular discussion made me wonder if you have any particular feelings about Finnegans Wake?
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Jul 6, 2018 22:55
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