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Since you've written a whole book about Shakespeare I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on this. Do you think there is limited room for new research on Shakespeare? There's only so much written by Shakespeare and we're never going to get any more, but it's been the focus of a vast amount of study for centuries.
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Aug 15, 2022 02:02
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CrypticFox posted:Since you've written a whole book about Shakespeare I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on this. Do you think there is limited room for new research on Shakespeare? There's only so much written by Shakespeare and we're never going to get any more, but it's been the focus of a vast amount of study for centuries. It depends on what you'd call "research." I don't mean that to be cagey. Good criticism is about people's relationships to the subject matter, not an objective or dispassionate review of the subject matter itself. One good example is James Shapiro's Shakespeare in a Divided America. You can say what you want about the concept -- like, I'm not sure the world needs another book that slaps a coat of Shakespeare over whatever problem of the day (e.g. love, management, existential angst) -- but it's a great example of a critic focusing on a relationship instead of on a body of historical evidence. (Also, James Shapiro wrote it so it's almost certainly really good.) More broadly: as ideas ascend in the popular consciousness, there's some demand for books that trace their history. Like, in 2055, academics and popular readers alike are going to be interested in how and why Indianapolis has 125-degree Summers or Silicon Valley is the new Atlantis. Most of the information in those books isn't going to be new. It's just going to be newly significant. There's another kind of research that is less critical but equally good, which is the ol' "debunk a baseless misunderstanding" book. Again, James Shapiro has a textbook example with Shakespeare and the Jews -- a whole book which (rightly) points out that the commonplace assumption about Jews in Shakespeare's England (i.e. that there weren't any) isn't in line with historical evidence. I guess what I'm saying is that, like, neither academic or popular writing exists to mine a factual body of content. Instead, it makes that content fresh and relatable to its audience and maybe conveys some degree of insight. If I were going to get all vague and hand-wavey, I'd say that life is complicated and art helps people make sense of it in ways that are emotionally and psychologically meaningful. Good criticism, academic or otherwise, is part of that sense-making process. And so there's always some demand for it. Shakespeare's plays might be mostly static, but the audience is a moving target. Brainworm fucked around with this message at 17:02 on Aug 15, 2022 |
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Aug 15, 2022 16:57
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Brainworm posted:Good criticism is about people's relationships to the subject matter, not an objective or dispassionate review of the subject matter itself. Thank you for the lengthy answer. I think the two comments from you I quoted answered my question most directly. My question was prompted by me thinking about Shakespeare in relation to Homer, two authors who are among the most studied people in Western scholarship. I've read a decent amount of scholarship on Homer (but basically none on Shakespeare). With Homeric scholarship, a lot of the work seems to be trying to mine the text of the Iliad and the Odyssey for insights. There's a mountain of articles on Homer that take a small passage from the Iliad or the Odyssey and intensively analyze it for what it says about the story, or about ancient Greek ideas of storytelling, or about about Homer's dialect of Greek. When I've read some of this stuff, I've sometimes thought that people seem to be struggling to find new insights, since these types are articles are often extremely narrow in scope, and they all build off a vast pool of existing scholarship, so I was curious what things would like in Shakespearen studies. However, this kind of research seems quite different from what you are describing.
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Aug 16, 2022 01:25
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Am I overthinking it by feverishly reading papers and books on what the heck a tragedy or tragic hero is? I started off just trying to find a definition and see if it fit a character in a video game I just played. (Arthur Morgan in Red Dead Redemption 2) Now I'm drowning in different things talking about the fundamental differences between Aristotle, Shakespeare, Arthur Miller, and more. Does a tragic hero need to have a flaw? Does he need to be high-born or in a position of authority? Apparently what even constitutes a tragedy is a huge debate with there being a firm set of traditionalists who don't think Miller or more modern tragedies count at all. I thought I was onto something with a Byronic Hero but again, some criteria don't really fit and I'm left adrift in a sea of confusion. Apparently they need more "antisocial tendencies" than I would credit most characters with now. Even flawed protagonists aren't House for the most part. I'm not even sure exactly what I'm asking apart from expressing exasperation at being a layman trying to find answers when there are so many answers. Maybe an expert such as yourself would know where exactly to look for just some basic understanding.
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Aug 26, 2022 14:07
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NikkolasKing posted:I'm not even sure exactly what I'm asking apart from expressing exasperation at being a layman trying to find answers when there are so many answers. Maybe an expert such as yourself would know where exactly to look for just some basic understanding. Taxonomy is rarely well fixed in my experience. Even for things that seem simple and clear you can go down a rabbit hole; there's at least three different things that people call alliteration, there's probably at least twenty distinct structures people call some form of rhyme. Context counts—how people interpret the same words in an academic context are different from a casual one. If you dig into that academic context and expect it to provide you with some kind of clarity about the terms you should use in casual conversation you will be disappointed (and probably confused) because the academic discourse is usually arguing about taxonomy instead of trying to clarify it. Calling someone a Byronic Hero is just a shorthand to say that they share some characteristics with Byron/his characters. Unless you're talking to people who are into Byron, I don't really know what the utility of that is even if you can find some equivalent that feels like it applies. Wallet fucked around with this message at 16:30 on Aug 26, 2022 |
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Aug 26, 2022 16:27
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NikkolasKing posted:Am I overthinking it by feverishly reading papers and books on what the heck a tragedy or tragic hero is? I recently took a graduate class on Tragedy and Comedy which used Louise Cowan's books on genre theory (The Tragic Abyss and The Terrain of Comedy). Her definition is basically as follows: Tragedy "evokes something rather than reminds us of something." "Its plots, then, should be recognized for what they are: not really, as Aristotle would have it, structures with a complication and a resolution - with a beginning, middle, and end - but dramatizations of single moments of unmasking, accompanied by whatever is necessary to reach that chilling and epiphanic event. For a moment in the tragic vision one looks beyond he boundaries of ordinary awareness and glimpses the caverns of a lightless abyss. The tragic protagonists who find themselves in this severe place - Job, Prometheus, Oedipus, Hamlet, Macbeth, Ahab, Joe Christmas, among others - discover that they are transfixed, as though caught in a trap. They face the immediacy of an ultimate choice. For, in the dead air of this unmoving time, they are unable to go forward or backward. They have reached a point of no return. These chosen protagonists qua victims confront the final alternatives. This is the tragic moment." "An impressive number of twentieth-century thinkers have attempted to isolate tragedy in one of its elements..." "These theories... advance single elements as key to the tragic. Yet no one of them completely captures its forbidding though oddly exhilarating power. In seeking the sources of this power, however, one must first acknowledge that tragedy seems not to have a definable content or a specifiable structure. As we have been suggesting, it presents itself almost as a kind of mechanism - or a sacrament - something that does something, that has an effect ex opere operato." And many more pages exploring those ideas. It sounds like she might be able to zero in on some of the issues you're running into when reading about tragedy.
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Aug 28, 2022 00:10
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litany of gulps posted:I recently took a graduate class on Tragedy and Comedy which used Louise Cowan's books on genre theory (The Tragic Abyss and The Terrain of Comedy). Thank you! It sounds quite interesting. I will add it to the mountain of books and papers I've accumulated since my post. If anybody else is interested, here's a few of the ones that interest me most so far: Fools of Time: Studies in Shakespearian Tragedy by Northrop Frye Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic by Terry Eagleton. He's a very sassy man but mostly in the first couple chapters he just says everyone else is wrong while saying what's right so leaving him aside for now. Modern Tragedy by Raymond Williams. Haven't read this one yet but his name has come up in other things I've read, citing him as a Romantic, and that makes me interested in what he has to say. I did find some nice, simple things like Key Concepts in Drama and Performance. I don't mind pursuing theory, it's quite enjoyable in fact now I have a grounding. I just wanted something straightforward to start off with and that book helped with that. And now I'll look into this Tragic Abyss book as well. Thanks again.
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Aug 28, 2022 03:33
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Poe, the Baltimore Ravens mascot got wrecked by a bunch of kids in a half time entertainment segment https://twitter.com/jamisonhensley/status/1563721731562430464 What do you think of this poem I found in the comments section of a sports website about the incident? quote:Once before the season started, hope still holding us fool-hearted I particularly like how the author changed Lenore to Lamar.
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Aug 29, 2022 13:17
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I would blow Dane Cook posted:Poe, the Baltimore Ravens mascot got wrecked by a bunch of kids in a half time entertainment segment The meter is off in most of the lines. And the internal rhymes aren't even trying; "started", "hearted", and "hardly"? "'Member", "member" (  ), and "fender"? "'Brating", "'tating", and "aching"? "Smarted", "carted", and "that fowl"????????3/10
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Aug 29, 2022 22:27
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Hey, what's satire? How do I tell if a piece of British pulp scifi is a satire, or just happens to be about bad people doing bad things? I'm asking because I'm reading a Warhammer forty thousand novel and, well, I could see why this setting is a hit in some right wing nerd circles.
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Oct 9, 2022 18:46
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Siivola posted:Hey, what's satire? How do I tell if a piece of British pulp scifi is a satire, or just happens to be about bad people doing bad things? OK. Satire is generally some kind of art that ridicules bad behavior. It usually does this ironically or sarcastically, by pretending to accept the ideas or practices it wants to question. A good modern example was The Colbert Report, where Stephen Colbert played a Bill O'Reilly-flavored host who took popular conservative ideas to their logical (but absurd) conclusions. Satires are also (usually) funny, and have parodic or farcical elements -- think South Park. And they can get surreal -- think Sorry to Bother You. But they can also involve a close and sophisticated inspection of social morals and practices that come close to ranting. Think George Carlin or Lenny Bruce. Technically, satire doesn't have to be comedy. But it usually is. The thing is, there's no single formal element that makes something a satire. It doesn't have to have wordplay or poop jokes or a laugh track. You can argue that a text was intended to be satirical. And you can also argue that a specific audience will receive or interpret something satirically. But satire is all about connections that an audience makes between the thing they're seeing or reading and the larger world in which they live and so, like irony, it's too dependent on socially fluid relationships to define in the same way that you define e.g. a sonnet or a haiku. quote:I'm asking because I'm reading a Warhammer forty thousand novel and, well, I could see why this setting is a hit in some right wing nerd circles. Yeah. I've had blessedly little exposure to Warhammer but I think it falls into the same bucket as Starship Troopers (the Heinlein novel, not the Verhoeven movie). If it were satire it'd be funny.
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Oct 12, 2022 13:51
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Brainworm posted:But satire is all about connections that an audience makes between the thing they're seeing or reading and the larger world in which they live [...] Not to stick my nose in, but I feel like it's slightly more than that. Something can be funny unintentionally, but as you point out re: Starship Troopers, I'm not sure it can be satire unintentionally. If you recontextualize most satire as direct expression it's aversive; in the other direction you can create found satire out of a work that wasn't intended to be one (The F Plus is the first example that comes to mind). To me satire doesn't just come down to the work and how it interacts with the audience's broader experience, it's also inherently tied to their relationship to the satire's source or presenter.
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Oct 12, 2022 14:40
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i think it's possible for something like "unintentional satire" to exist in the form of a work trying to promote a particular moral message (like a PSA) that is so badly executed or tone deaf that it becomes enjoyed ironically by large audiences and ends up having the effect of directly undermining the message it was intended to promote, and making a mockery of the original author. anti-piracy and anti-drug commercials of the 80's for example
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Oct 12, 2022 14:57
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Earwicker posted:i think it's possible for something like "unintentional satire" to exist in the form of a work trying to promote a particular moral message (like a PSA) that is so badly executed or tone deaf that it becomes enjoyed ironically by large audiences and ends up having the effect of directly undermining the message it was intended to promote, and making a mockery of the original author. anti-piracy and anti-drug commercials of the 80's for example The various attempts at attempts at rehabilitating Tommy Wiseau's The Room ("It's a parody of indie movies" "It's supposed to be bad" "It's an ironic commentary about the nature of sincerity") are another good example of this
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Oct 12, 2022 15:29
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Earwicker posted:i think it's possible for something like "unintentional satire" to exist in the form of a work trying to promote a particular moral message (like a PSA) that is so badly executed or tone deaf that it becomes enjoyed ironically by large audiences and ends up having the effect of directly undermining the message it was intended to promote, and making a mockery of the original author. anti-piracy and anti-drug commercials of the 80's for example The main difference to me is that if something is "accidentally" satirical that it stems from either a lack of an understanding or a deliberate misrepresentation of the ideas they're trying to explore -- like anti-drug PSAs that present a sort of catastrophic view of things like weed, cigarettes, alcohol, unidentified "pills," etc. that don't align with lived experience or reality, that sort of thing -- whereas genuine or effective satire seeks to represent a deeper truth via an absurd extrapolation of an idea because they do have a deeper understanding of the idea they're satirizing. That is, satire is an absurd-but-logical conclusion of an idea, where accidental satire is logical-but-absurd. If you buy into the logic that smelling weed drugs will instantaneously ruin your life, then the conclusions the PSAs draw about their harm are logical -- but they are absurd in the face of reality.
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Oct 12, 2022 15:30
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Brainworm posted:Yeah. I've had blessedly little exposure to Warhammer but I think it falls into the same bucket as Starship Troopers (the Heinlein novel, not the Verhoeven movie). If it were satire it'd be funny. Do you read the film as a satire?
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Oct 12, 2022 18:22
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Fuschia tude posted:Do you read the film as a satire? 100%. Lord knows what Verhoeven started with as a script, but e.g. the propaganda films do a pretty good job of ironizing the pro-war and what I'll call antidemocratic elements of the novel (which is as humorless even by Heinlein's standards). It's walks the same line as his Robocop.
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Oct 12, 2022 20:06
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Heath posted:The main difference to me is that if something is "accidentally" satirical that it stems from either a lack of an understanding or a deliberate misrepresentation of the ideas they're trying to explore -- like anti-drug PSAs that present a sort of catastrophic view of things like weed, cigarettes, alcohol, unidentified "pills," etc. that don't align with lived experience or reality, that sort of thing -- whereas genuine or effective satire seeks to represent a deeper truth via an absurd extrapolation of an idea because they do have a deeper understanding of the idea they're satirizing. That is, satire is an absurd-but-logical conclusion of an idea, where accidental satire is logical-but-absurd. If you buy into the logic that smelling weed drugs will instantaneously ruin your life, then the conclusions the PSAs draw about their harm are logical -- but they are absurd in the face of reality. If it helps, the usual term for what you're calling "accidental satire" is camp as in campy, which is something that's basically appealing or funny because the audience finds it ridiculous. The broad meaning of camp is media that's so conspicuously banal, mediocre, or ostentatious that is has a perversely sophisticated appeal. That kind of effect can be produced either intentionally or not. The piece to read on this is Sontag's Notes on Camp (1964); the upshot of that essay is that camp is characterized by a kind of frivolous, naive, middle-class pretentiousness -- exactly the kind of positioning that makes mental hygiene and anti-drug PSAs seem so wild. She uses the term naive camp to distinguish accidentally-interesting media like anti-drug PSAs from media that are more self aware.
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Oct 12, 2022 20:27
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Brainworm posted:Yeah. I've had blessedly little exposure to Warhammer but I think it falls into the same bucket as Starship Troopers (the Heinlein novel, not the Verhoeven movie). If it were satire it'd be funny. Isn't the trick though that Warhammer IS funny. It's a total mockery of fascism, but there's a large audience that sees the exaggerated mockup of fascism and thinks "that's really cool!" To one person, the ultra-masculine SPACE MARINE with no penis is an obvious joke. To another, it's aspirational. Isn't that a core element of satire? Where do you draw the line? What if your satire goes too far and becomes interpreted as sincere? The obvious contemporary example being Dave Chappelle and his show. Really edgy satire rides an edge that invites misinterpretation. Anyway, I don't really have a thesis here.
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Oct 13, 2022 03:21
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For what it’s worth, if you go back to the 40K early days a lot of it was pretty silly. Nowadays the grimdark takes itself a little too seriously.
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Oct 13, 2022 03:40
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litany of gulps posted:What if your satire goes too far and becomes interpreted as sincere? it happens thousands of times per day on the internet. that's why we have Poe's law. we've reached a point where whatever ridiculous worldview you cook up, a parody of the silliest conspiracy theory or dumbest political ideology you've ever heard of, probably has sincere believers out there somewhere - and if it doesn't, you'll somehow create some just by posting it.
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Oct 13, 2022 04:29
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I've seen people on 4Chan who've watched Starship Troopers and thought that service guarantees citizenship is a good idea.
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Oct 13, 2022 07:02
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Brainworm posted:If it were satire it'd be funny. litany of gulps posted:Isn't the trick though that Warhammer IS funny. It's a total mockery of fascism, but there's a large audience that sees the exaggerated mockup of fascism and thinks "that's really cool!" To one person, the ultra-masculine SPACE MARINE with no penis is an obvious joke. Being more fascist than real fascists isn't inherently funny, you need some kind of delivery. It's the difference between Heinlein's Troopers and Verhoeven's Troopers (or so I've gathered, I've not actually seen/read either in years). Historically, there have been some okay satires set in 40k, like The Imperial Infantryman's Uplifting Primer (2003), but their success doesn't actually transfer over to all the lazy grim-darkness-by-the-numbers slurry out there. For instance the novel I mentioned, The Dark Imperium by Guy Haley (2018), simply reproduces fascist imagery while apparently sincerely framing the main characters' Fascism Lite™ as a beacon of hope for the insane galaxy. It doesn't actually make fun of anything, it unironically sets about trying to somehow fix the nightmare setting.
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Oct 13, 2022 07:48
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WH40k is very silly stuff and isn't the in-universe rationale for WH40k fascism that, without an endless militarism and central control, humanity really would be genocided by one of several threats? Is the complaint that WH40k indulges in a scenario where the demonized others really are demons and really are out to get humanity?
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Oct 13, 2022 09:33
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I'm honestly just annoyed when fans and Games Workshop, the publisher, dodge the problem of right-wing dorks in the hobby with "it's satire, there are no good guys, these people are missing the point". Not only does that not seem supported by the text, it also kind of misses that tons of nerds find validation in the villains. But I guess nerd politics are kind of outside this thread's topic. 
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Oct 13, 2022 11:29
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I would blow Dane Cook posted:I've seen people on 4Chan who've watched Starship Troopers and thought that service guarantees citizenship is a good idea. i havent seen the movie or read the book but the general idea of "service gaurantees citizenship" and variations thereof have been fairly common in a lot of societies so i dont see why that would immediately be read as satire? you can literally become a us citizen through military service, and there are many other countries where some form of service is a mandatory aspect of citizenship. to be clear im not saying i agree with the idea, but it seems like a common enough element of many real cultures present and historical that it's not obviously a joke Earwicker fucked around with this message at 15:20 on Oct 13, 2022 |
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Oct 13, 2022 15:17
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In the story it’s “citizenship only through service”. Everyone is a second class citizen until/unless they serve.
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Oct 13, 2022 15:21
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Siivola posted:Thank you! It's similar to Fight Club, a satire of hypermasculinity written by a gay man, about a guy who finds modern life so banal and alienating that he attends support meetings for men who literally have no balls and grow breasts just so he can cry ("real women" are scary, but "feminized" men are safe). He responds to his "safe place" being invaded by a "real woman" by having a schizophrenic break and literally beating himself up for the amusement of others outside a bar, and then starting a cult where, to be free, the men live in a parody of austerity and monastic discipline, regularly self-harm (the bit with the lye), and only feel truly alive when beating the poo poo out of one another. Instead of growing up and having a relationship with Marla (something his split personality does easily), the protagonist does anything he can to avoid facing the idea that a manic pixie dream woman might like him and he might enjoy doing the weird poo poo she does. He and project mayhem do a lot of the same stuff she does (scamming, stealing, grifting), but, you know, it's with the boys, so it's okay. It's pretty much the little kid "I'm going to have a big club house and all the cool kids are going to be there and it's going to be like the temple in 36th Chamber of Shaolin and we're going to do epic pranks and there's no icky girls allowed" fantasy, but played "cool" alongside Brad Pitt's self-help rhetoric. Similarly, rather than embracing some form of positive masculinity (for example, being a good parent, supporting others around you, being dependable and capable), 40k instead says that "Real men are stoic, sexless, steroid enhanced mutants who die needlessly in service of a genocidal tyrant and are then locked into coffin tanks so they can continue to battle fruitlessly against the evil forces of violence, pestilence, lust, and intelligence for all eternity" In both instances, I can see why people miss the parodic elements. Both "role models" are presented as so cool on the surface that its easy to overlook all the details that make them ridiculous
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Oct 13, 2022 16:11
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Toph Bei Fong posted:In both instances, I can see why people miss the parodic elements. Both "role models" are presented as so cool on the surface that its easy to overlook all the details that make them ridiculous i think there's kind of a missing element here. Fight Club is a novel written by one person and it's that person's artistic expression, later adapted into a film. Warhammer is a franchise where the novels are part of a whole system of roleplaying games, strategy games, video games, novels, toys, and stores owned by the same company. it's a bit harder to read the latter as intentional satire when it's also part of a system designed to sell all of the above, and in which players literally play roles associated with the world. it's like if Fight Club started a chain of officially sanctioned "Fight Clubs" instead of just being a book/movie. Earwicker fucked around with this message at 16:31 on Oct 13, 2022 |
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Oct 13, 2022 16:29
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Earwicker posted:i havent seen the movie or read the book but the general idea of "service gaurantees citizenship" and variations thereof have been fairly common in a lot of societies so i dont see why that would immediately be read as satire? you can literally become a us citizen through military service, and there are many other countries where some form of service is a mandatory aspect of citizenship. Well, "service guarantees citizenship" is a joke in the US, since it doesn't. Vets get denied citizenship for reasons that would seem preposterous to anyone who hasn't been on the receiving end of military bureaucracy. It took Jim Pawlukiewicz 50 years, and he didn't do anything especially wrong. (He finally got his citizenship a couple years ago). Here are a couple stories about Paul Canton, who's a Gulf war vet from Florida. Surprise, surprise, his state government isn't doing jack for him: https://www.wesh.com/article/central-florida-military-veteran-denied-us-citizenship-again/33397860 https://www.ocala.com/story/special/2020/07/28/us-marine-veteran-from-marion-denied-citizenship-again/112694992/ And here's Roman Sabal, a Marine Corps Vet who couldn't even get back into the country for his citizenship interview: https://thehill.com/homenews/news/453225-marine-corps-veteran-denied-entry-to-us-for-citizenship-interview/ A quick Google will find you stories of vets who earn honorable discharges but get denied citizenship because of things like traffic violations or minor drug charges. Basically, programs like MAVNI are expedited pathways to citizenship rather than guarantees, and -- in a move that should surprise nobody -- recruiters appear to be dishonest about this. This is a longstanding issue and gets a lot of press in some circles. So I have, like, zero doubt that "service guarantees citizenship" in Troopers is a targeted line.
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Oct 13, 2022 16:43
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Earwicker posted:i think there's kind of a missing element here. Fight Club is a novel written by one person and it's that person's artistic expression, later adapted into a film. Warhammer is a franchise where the novels are part of a whole system of roleplaying games, strategy games, video games, novels, toys, and stores owned by the same company. it's a bit harder to read the latter as intentional satire when it's also part of a system designed to sell all of the above, and in which players literally play roles associated with the world. it's like if Fight Club started a chain of officially sanctioned "Fight Clubs" instead of just being a book/movie. Absolutely, there is definitely a lack of control and unified vision when it comes to multi-author franchises, especially when there's no firm editorial vision or control. This is especially a problem when it comes to the second generation of authors in a franchise who, rather than creating the thing based on other works, are basing their work on the thing itself (i.e. George Lucas being influenced by Kurosawa to make Star Wars, while JJ Abrams was influenced by Lucas to make his Star Wars). This can be especially bad in tie-in media, where, for example, while Boba Fett is a complete joke in the Star Wars movies (he looks cool, but all he manages to do on screen is accept a package, and then get shot by a blind Han Solo and fall into the Sarlacc pit, which burps after it eats him), but in the books and new TV show, he's an amazing warrior and the scion of a Proud Warrior Culture and the Most Dangerous Man alive. As to how to reconcile the "They don't get that this was a joke, but it's making us money, so we won't tell them" aspects of 40k? No clue. I see the parody, but I also see how people miss it, and how it benefits GW to have certain people miss it.
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Oct 14, 2022 15:44
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I just want to chime in to add that not all theories of satire consider "funny" to be a key factor. Seventeenth-century verse libel/satires often use a "plain dealing" tone (e.g. Andrew Marvell's "Painter" poems) in which scurrilous imagery is only one device of critique (e.g. characterizing the Lord Chancellor as a leech sucking the king's piles while a horde of other parasites suck his in turn - is it funny? It is at first glance but the more you contemplate its implications that humour goes away and mostly what's funny is Marvell's audacity in writing it - some of Rochester's libels do this too). Often the humour is a nihilistic. Where humour gets used it's to undermine the authority of a specific target en route to a more serious critique - Marvell was brilliant at this and did it judiciously rather than freely (in both verse and prose), which was why Swift liked him so much. But more to the point there's a tradition in SF/Dystopian literature too where satire's smokey "mirror" is completely without humour - it's possible (and I feel valid) to say that books like Utopia, A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder, Erewhon, Brave New World, 1984, or The Handmaid's Tale are satirical or satires of their respective subject matter. There isn't any kind of general humourous tone or laughter in these texts or in their distorted reflections of societies and values because in many cases the arguments that they're making is that what they're criticizing is deadly serious.
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Oct 14, 2022 16:22
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Toph Bei Fong posted:This is especially a problem when it comes to the second generation of authors in a franchise who, rather than creating the thing based on other works, are basing their work on the thing itself... This is an extremely good point and Ive often thought similar with regards to Silent Hill and its later games. It seems to me that largely where the later games fall short is that they are desperately attempting to recapture the magic of the earlier titles, and were thus drawing most of their inspiration from previous titles rather taking inspiration from anywhere else like the original games did. On a completely different aside. Would self aware horror movies count as satire? Like hitting all the obvious story beats and tropes of a slasher film?
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Oct 31, 2022 15:59
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Zeniel posted:[...] I'd call that parody. Although parody and satire are a lot alike in that they involve a perceptive and ironic imitation of something, satire generally does this as social or cultural criticism. Traditional (read: Horation or Juvenalian) satires also include recognizable people or personality types. So a satirical, IDK, zombie movie might have some Karen run out into her front yard with an AR-15 because she thinks there's a Black Lives Matter march about to get so close to her house that she could justify opening fire. But then the marchers turn out to be zombies, Karen gets eaten, and the cops start arresting everyone whose skin is darker than a paper bag. That's different from a movie that ironically repeats the tropes or conventions associated with a genre of film, although there are places where things get blurry. The second you allude to Invasion of the Body Snatchers or Get Out or a million other films you're going to produce a movie that reads like a political statement even if that's not what you intended.
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Nov 2, 2022 00:59
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Do you have a general approach for reading and understanding "difficult" texts? Taking it line by line, or reading around the cultural context, or identifying the key terms, or anything like that? Or is it just a case of banging your head against the wall long enough for it to crack apart?
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Nov 2, 2022 12:21
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rollick posted:Do you have a general approach for reading and understanding "difficult" texts? Taking it line by line, or reading around the cultural context, or identifying the key terms, or anything like that? Or is it just a case of banging your head against the wall long enough for it to crack apart? Generally, generally, I think you'll take your best shot with a text by doing three things: 1) Being comfortable with uncertainty. It's OK to read something and not get it. That true at the level of any individual sentence, chapter, paragraph, or entire text. In a lot of novels, artsy and not, confusion is part of the process a writer means to produce. it's a way of raising questions that you (the writer) promise to answer. Like, think of the first few pages of a SF staple like Dune. There's spaceships, a witch, some kind of test, and this bizarro feudal politics. None of that gets explained, right? You don't know poo poo from the jump. Ditto tons of other books. Blood Meridian or Riddley Walker. All you're getting is the promise of something interesting to be named later. 2) Re-reading. Sometimes something that happens later in a text clarifies or activates something that happens earlier. Like, you don't know which parts of a text are important until you know which parts it picks up later. I'm not one to re-read a sentence until I get it, but I will sure as hell re-read the beginning of a book with the end in mind. 3) Looking at relationships. If a text is designed intentionally (as most "difficult" texts are) there is some relationship between its different parts or dimensions. If you've got, like, an artsy novel, there might be stream of consciousness sections that at first don't seem to belong to any named character but (for instance) turn out to belong to a character who's revealed later, or an inanimate object, or someone's alternate personality, or whatever. A lot of famously abstruse theory (Derrida) is the same way. So you want to approach the text as though the effect it has on you is intentional. Figure it out all at once, like how an owl eats a mouse.
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Nov 3, 2022 14:09
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Brainworm posted:1) Being comfortable with uncertainty. It's OK to read something and not get it. That true at the level of any individual sentence, chapter, paragraph, or entire text. In a lot of novels, artsy and not, confusion is part of the process a writer means to produce. it's a way of raising questions that you (the writer) promise to answer. My favorite texts are all like this, and this is what makes it work for me. I just accept that there are things I don't understand and file them away for later. The questions can be their own plot, where a more standard plot isn't obvious (or comprehensible).
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Nov 3, 2022 15:08
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I've had friends in the past who get very frustrated with texts that are not 100% explicit in saying what they mean. If they don't immediately understand it, it's not that perhaps they weren't meant to, it was a failure on the part of the writer to be clear and concise. Like they got nonfictional report writing stuck in their head as "this is what all writing is, period, irrespective of genre or intention."
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Nov 3, 2022 16:51
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Heath posted:I've had friends in the past who get very frustrated with texts that are not 100% explicit in saying what they mean. If they don't immediately understand it, it's not that perhaps they weren't meant to, it was a failure on the part of the writer to be clear and concise. Like they got nonfictional report writing stuck in their head as "this is what all writing is, period, irrespective of genre or intention." Yeah. I've had friends and students who were just, like, violently against uncertainty. Like, they couldn't understand how not knowing something could be part of a rewarding relationship with a story. I try to respect it when I see it, but I'm also like who are you? I constantly suspect that I'm talking to some kind of very advanced performance artist prankster. It's like people who think in words. As in, I'm told that some people's actual thoughts take the form of an inner monologue. Like an episode of Scrubs I guess. I'm willing to let the whole idea go uncontested given (a) a vacuum of refutational evidence and (b) a polite need to overtly respect the truth of their experience. But I can't bring myself to really believe it. You might as well tell me a bird can fly to the moon.
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Nov 4, 2022 02:55
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Idk, I guess it’s like music. I’ve got friends who love that atonal experimental crap and also a good ABBA album. I’ll stick with the ABBA, thanks.
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Nov 4, 2022 10:25
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