Archives | Literature
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
Two from ARCADE: Kindle and Education
In a post about publishing in the digital age, Lee Konstantinou points out:
Who or what produces demand? Demand for what exactly? As I’ve argued elsewhere on Arcade, it is our educational systems, among other literary institutions, that produce demand. To be as clear as possible, it is not the market operating on its own that produces demand—including, especially, during the so-called golden age of publishing—but rather massive quantities of public money, pumped into literary education decade after decade, your tax dollars and mine at work.
Just around the corner, Brian Reed speaks out in favor of Kindle:
What has changed: the range and kind of prose that I read in my off hours, usually just before bed, when my brain grows too sluggish to follow poetry’s multidimensional zigzags.
With a Kindle, you typically pay something for the right to read a book ... So, for instance, if you want to read one of Charlaine Harris’s vampire novels, you look her up, click on the relevant icon, and within a minute you have the text on your device ready to read. And somewhere else in cyberspace your credit card is charged ten bucks or so.
Unless, instead of a contemporary book, you order one that is pre-copyright, or uncopyrighted, which means you aren’t charged for the right-to-read. In that case, the book arrives, voila, and you pay nothing.
Nothing! Books for nothing! As gamers say, that pwns.
He goes on to recommend, and comment on, some 18th and 19th century books he’s enjoyed.
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Sunday, April 18, 2010
Readings in Culture and Cognition
The International Culture and Cognition Institute (ICCI) has a useful page of readings on cognition and culture. The list includes links to books and links to downloadable PDFs. General topics:
- Arts and artifacts
- Cooperation (morality, norms, sympathy)
- Cultural transmission
- Emotions (expression, recognition, variation)
- Family (kinship, sex, gender relationships)
- Language
- Living beings (taxonomy, teleology, physiology)
- Mathematics and Physics (number, space, object, causality)
- Minds (agency detection, theory of mind)
- Religion, ritual and magic
- Social life (social norms, reputation managment, coalition formation)
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Sunday, April 11, 2010
Mrs. Astor and King Lear
It is a truth commonly held that literature embodies knowledge of human affairs. I wish to exercise that commonplace by considering a real life course of events in view of a particular literary text. The events I have in mind climaxed in the recent trial of Anthony Marshall for tampering with the will of his mother, the late Brooke Astor.
This particular exercise was suggested by a remark made by one of the jurors in Marshall’s trial. She told a New York Times reporter:
“It’s not like he is this awful villain or anything, he’s just a product of the whole family dynamics,” Ms. Fernandez said. “I feel it’s almost like a Shakespearean play because there’s a flaw, we all have our flaws and his was greed and his thinking that he wouldn’t get caught.”
While Ms. Fernandez was thinking of Anthony Marshall as the protagonist of this tragedy, I believe that Brooke Astor herself, though she has been dead for several years, is the more likely protagonist for the play I have in mind. That play, of course, is King Lear.
I don’t intend to present anything like a full inter-interpretation of Lear and the trial. The relevant cast of players is too large, their many plottings too various and complex. I wish only to indicate some points of contact, and departure. First, as I assume that few Valve readers are familiar with the case (how many have heard of Brooke Astor? hands up, please), I’ll present a quick sketch of the life and of the trial. Then into Lear.
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Tuesday, April 06, 2010
How to Spot a Good Neuro Critic
In the easiest case the neuro critic – or cognitive critic, Darwinian critic, whatever – will have published some work prior to their adoption of neuro criticism. Read some of that work, carefully. Do you find it interesting and compelling? If not, skip their neuro work; there’s not likely to be anything there. If, on the other hand, you DO find their pre-neuro work interesting, then move on to their neuro work.
Is it still worthwhile? Good. Now, how much of the neuro-criticism actually depends on neuro-knowledge? Is it pretty much like their pre-neuro work, but with the addition of neuro-lingo and citations? That is, just what work is the neuro doing? On the other hand, if the neuro work brings something new to the table, then you’ve got something.
If a given critic hasn’t done any work prior to their neuroconversion – or cognitive or Darwinian conversion – then you’ve got a problem. You may just have to go directly to their neurowork and see how it is. See the preceding paragraph for how to proceed.
More generally, any good literary critic should be able to function as a practical critic WITHOUT resort to supplementary methodological or theoretical knowledge. If they can get into the text without supplementary help, then there’s a chance that they’ll be able to use supplementary knowledge to build out from there. If they have nothing to say without that secondary knowledge, then they simply don’t know how to READ a text.
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Wednesday, March 31, 2010
“NATURALIST” criticism, NOT “cognitive,” NOT “Darwinian” – A Quasi-Manifesto
You mean a quasifesto?
Shoo, get out . . .
Fact is, if I’d known then what I know now, I’d never have thought of myself as being in the business of bringing cognitive science to literary criticism much less represented myself to the world in that way. But I didn’t (know) and I did (represent), so now I seem stuck with the moniker. I’d like to shake if off.
When I finally decided to publish a programmatic and methodological statement, “Literary Morphology: Nine Propositions in a Naturalist Theory of Form,” I adopted naturalism as a label. Fact is, I’d just as soon not think of it as anything but the study of literature. But we live in an age of intellectual brands, so I chose “naturalism” as mine.
Yes, I know that “the natural” is somewhat problematic, but you’ll just have to get past that. No label is perfect and I’m not about to coin a new term. Assuming you can struggle past the word, what does naturalism suggest to you? To me the term conjures up a slightly eccentric investigator wandering about the world examining flora and fauna, writing up notes, taking photos, making drawing, and perhaps even collecting specimens. That feels right to me, except that I’m nosing about poems, plays, novels, films, and other miscellaneous things. Beyond that I’d like the term to suggest some sense of literature as thoroughly in and a part of the world. There’s only one world and literature exists in it.
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Saturday, March 27, 2010
Back to Basics: Three Experiments in Language
Experiment 1: A “found” poem
Every so often you come upon an exercise that goes like this: Someone selects some arbitrary hunk of prose, breaks it into lines of some appropriate length, and presents in on the page as a “found poem.” If the person doing this is a literary critic, the object might be to worry the distinction between literary and non-literary language. That doesn’t much interest me, not here and now. What does interest me is simply that a chunk of language that wasn’t created as a “poem” can be made to read something like a “poem” by such a simple and arbitrary procedure.
Let’s look at a simple example. You should read the following passage aloud with a slight pause at the end of each line (you know, like a poem), or at least imagine it in your mind’s ear. It’s from a recent diary by David Patrick Columbia:
Continue reading "Back to Basics: Three Experiments in Language"Afterwards at dinner
at Swifty’s
(which was
jumping last
night) Margo and I talked
about Norris and her new book.
I mentioned the
item this week on Page
Six about the woman
who has written
her memoir
about her long
affair with Norman
Mailer. This was very upsetting
news for Norris when it broke
last year. What’s more
the woman was
making it known that she
was selling
her “papers”
to Harvard
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Monday, March 22, 2010
10 Influential Books
Urged on by a reader, Tyler Cowen seems to have started a books meme: What 10 books have influenced you the most? This sort of thing is something of a crapshoot, yadda yadda, but why not? I’ve limited my list to non-fiction.
My Teacher
David Hays, Cognitive Structures. Hays was my teacher, and most of what I learned from him I learned directly from him. His aim in this book was to integrate the analog and servomechanical model of William Powers (see below) with the propositional and digital style of his own earlier work in computational linguistics. It is embodied cognition before the term was coined and gained currency. I believe this is the most profound such attempt to date (Hays wrote the book in the Spring of 1976), but, of course, I am biased. It is also, alas, rather obscure in points, no bias.
Some Others
Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked. I’ve read a good deal of Lévi-Strauss, and this wasn’t the first. But it has had the most lasting effect on my thinking, which I’ve already discussed. Lévi-Strauss sees that there is a rigorous, but hidden, logic to a body of South American myths. He evokes this hidden logic by careful comparisons between myths, while discussing them in their larger socio-cultural context.
John Bowlby, Attachment. I read this in typescript under the tutelage of the late Mary Ainsworth. Bowlby set out to reconstruct psychoanalytic object relations theory using systems models (TOTE from Miller, Gallanter, and Pribram, Plans and the Structure of Behavior) and evidence from ethology, especially of primates. This became my model of biologically-based psychology.
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Wednesday, March 17, 2010
Style Matters
Intellectual style, that is.
When, some 35 years ago, I turned toward the cognitive sciences and away from structuralism & post-structuralism, deconstruction, and the rest, the turn was driven as much by intellectual style as by epistemological conviction. No, I didn’t have much affection for the predicate calculus, which I learned in a course in symbolic logic (it fulfilled my math requirement), but I did like the intellectual style I found in linguistics books, the sense of rigor and explicit order. I also liked the diagrams. A lot.
There were large sections in my dissertation—Cognitive Science and Literary Theory—where the major burden of the argument was in the diagrams. I’d work out the diagrams first and then write prose commentary on them. That modus operandi pleases me a great deal. In the preface to Beethoven’s Anvil, which had some diagrams, but not many, I refer to my thinking in that book as speculative engineering. I like that term: speculative engineering.
There are other intellectual styles, obviously. Some very different from my diagrammatic and speculative engineering style.
Take New Historicism for instance. I’ve not read much in that vein, but I’ve read some, and some of that I’ve found quite interesting and delightful. If New Historicism is, as I’ve been told, the closest thing literary studies currently has to a dominant methodological practice, I can’t help but thinking that is as much about intellectual style as about epistemological conviction.
It is, or can be, a very writerly style. One gathers a pile of stories, vignettes, and passages from various writers, literary and not, and arranges them more according to rhythm, surprise, and repose than for logical progression and finality — though such matters come into play as well. It is a style that can be a bit like literature itself, at least prose fiction, though one can sneak in some lyrical passages here and there, and maybe even a bit of insistent rhythm.
* * * * *
I’ve got two suspicions about style matters:
1.) In anyone’s intellectual ecology, style preferences are deeper and have more inertia than explicit epistemological beliefs.
2.) Some of the pigheadedness that often crops up in discussions about humanities vs. science is grounded in stylistic preference that gets rationalized as epistemological belief.
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Wednesday, March 10, 2010
Time’s Arrow in Literary Space
Is literary time directional? In some sense the answer, obviously, is “yes.” There is no doubt that Pride and Prejudice was written before A Passage to India. The issue, however, is whether or not Pride and Prejudice must necessarily, in some sense, have been written before A Passage to India and, if so, in what sense it must have been written first.
Stephen Greenblatt comes close to suggesting what I’m up to early in “The Cultivation of Anxiety: King Lear and His Heirs” (Learning to Curse, Routledge, 1990, pp. 80—98) which opens with a long passage from an early 19th century magazine article on the how the Reverend Francis Wayland broke the will of his 15-month old child. Greenblatt notes that “Wayland’s struggle is a strategy of intense familial love, and it is the sophisticated product of a long historical process whose roots lie at least partly in early modern England, in the England of Shakespeare’s King Lear.” To be sure, one need not read that as any more than a statement of historical contingency, that Shakespeare’s play just happened to have been written before Wayland’s article. But when one considers the larger institutional changes Greenblatt considers – from the public space of the king’s court (and Elizabethan stage) to the privacy of the bourgeois home – one may suspect that Greenblatt is tracking the directionality of literary time, that one text must necessarily have been earlier in the historical process in which both texts exist.
That directionality is what I want to look at, but not primarily on the scale of decades-to-centuries. My principle example involves three early texts by Osamu Tezuka, the great Japanese mangaka. He was born in Nov 1928, which puts him in his early 20s when these texts were written during the American occupation of Japan after World War II. The three texts have become known collectively as his SF trilogy: Lost World (1948), Metropolis (1949), and Next World (1951). Thus, they are early texts; in particular, they are before the Tetsuwan Atomu (Astro Boy) stories that became the centerpiece of his work for almost two-decades.
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Tuesday, February 02, 2010
Human Rights, Empathy, and Literature
Writing at OnFiction, Keith Oatley follows Lynn Hunt (Inventing Human Rights, 2007) in arguing that the notion of equality of rights among humans is at least partially grounded in literature:
Hunt’s finding is that invention of the idea of the equality of rights, declarations of rights, and the changes in society that have followed them, depended on two factors. One was empathy, which really is a human universal. “It depends,” says Hunt, “on a biologically based ability to understand the subjectivity of other people and to be able to imagine that their inner experiences are like one’s own” (p. 39). The other was the mobilization of this empathy towards those who were outside people’s immediate social groupings. Although Hunt does not attribute this mobilization entirely to literary art, she concludes that the novel contributed to it substantially. “Reading novels,” she says, “created a sense of equality and empathy through passionate involvement in the narrative” (p. 39). Many novels contributed. One that Hunt discusses is Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) written by a man and inviting empathetic identification with a woman of a humble social class.
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Friday, January 15, 2010
Don Draper as an unraptured Emma Bovary
(x-posted twice-over because this is the closest I’ve come to actual literary analysis, as opposed to comp-rhet material, in ages. As you might can tell, I’ve had some difficulties thinking of myself as a proper literary scholar of late, and have absented myself from these parts because of it. What can I say—other than when the profession refuses to treat you like what it trained you to be, you stop thinking of yourself in its terms. But enough of that. Here, have a post!)
As I noted in the comments to this post, it was only a matter of time before I started Mad Men; however, as I’ve studiously avoided reading about the show for the better part of two years now, I’m not sure my insights into it will be all that insightful. Still, I’ll soldier on, with the caveat that I’m about to watch the eighth episode of the most recent season and would rather not have it spoiled. Not, mind you, that I think it could be, as the one of the defining features of the show is the thundering predictability of its characters. That’s not as an indictment of Matt Weiner or his writing staff, merely an acknowledgment of the show’s central conceit: these are people who want to be left behind when the rest of the world is raptured by history—at least at first.
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Saturday, January 02, 2010
Cathy & Heathcliff xoxoxox, NOT!
During last year’s bruhaha over Cornel West’s sublime and funky as-told-to autobiography Michael Bérubé offered a side comment (115) that caught my attention: “Which reminds me. Could people please stop speaking about Wuthering Heights as if it were a romance novel, and about Heathcliff as if he were some dark Byronic hero? The book and its central character are profoundly creepy and unsettling and all-around chthonic.” He’s right, of course, both in his presupposition (that the book is often romanticized) and in his assessment of the book itself. Which leads me to this question:
How did Wuthering Heights ever come to be thought of as a paradigm of intense romantic love that, alas, could not be fulfilled?
My first inclination would be to blame it on the movies. I vaguely remember seeing one in which Olivier played Heathcliff; but all I remember of the film is that it stopped halfway through the book, with the death of Catherine. I’d assume that Hollywood removed the violence and the perversity as well.
But I’m not sure that Hollwoodification is the answer. After all, the book itself still exists and is taught in both secondary schools and college. How was the book received in the 19th century? Did 19th century reviewers look squarely at the book’s violence, which includes spousal abuse and near-murder, not to mention animal cruelty?
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Friday, January 01, 2010
BARDOLATRY QUESTIONED, HUZZAH!
Holy Crap! M. Gender-Neutral Webnets Super-Hero!
I missed it.
(Sigh)
There’s been an outbreak of skepticism about Shakespeare over at Crooked Timber, and I missed it. George Scialabba fired the first salvo in a Shakespeare thread initiated by John Quiggan on 21 December (so very loonnggg ago). That discussion was stopped on 26 Dec. Chris Bertram initiated a new discussion on 29 December; that discussion may still be on-going.
Come on folks! Will this reflexive worship of The Bard as THE GREATEST OF ALL TIME never end?
Has anyone argued, for example, that the standard-issue 19th century novelists saw deeper into humankind than Shakespeare did?
Happy New Year!
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Wednesday, December 30, 2009
Humans and Dogs in Wuthering Heights
About a month ago I posted a bleg in which I asked whether or not anyone knew of any critical work which looked at Wuthering Heights in relation to contemporary lore and literature on feral children. In that bleg I quoted this important description of Heathcliff from chapter 10 in which Heathcliff is likened to a wolf:
Nelly, help me to convince her of her madness. Tell her what Heathcliff is: an unreclaimed creature, without refinement, without cultivation; an arid wilderness of furze and whinstone. I’d as soon put that little canary into the park on a winter’s day, as recommend you to bestow your heart on him! It is deplorable ignorance of his character, child, and nothing else, which makes that dream enter your head. Pray, don’t imagine that he conceals depths of benevolence and affection beneath a stern exterior! He’s not a rough diamond--a pearl-containing oyster of a rustic: he’s a fierce, pitiless, wolfish man.
The wolf, of course, is biological cousin to the many forms of domestic dogs, and various forms of dogs do appear throughout Wuthering Heights. In particular, violence between dogs and humans takes place at important transition points in the novel. I’ve collected five such passages in this post and italicized the dog references within each passage.
Chapter 1: Lockwood has rented Thrushcross Grange and goes to Wuthering Heights to pay his respects to his landlord, Mr. Heathcliff. In a sense this is the the most important transition of all because it gets us and Lockwood into the Wuthering Heights world.
Continue reading "Humans and Dogs in Wuthering Heights"I took a seat at the end of the hearthstone opposite that towards which my landlord advanced, and filled up an interval of silence by attempting to caress the canine mother, who had left her nursery, and was sneaking wolfishly to the back of my legs, her lip curled up, and her white teeth watering for a snatch. My caress provoked a long, guttural gnarl.
‘You’d better let the dog alone,’ growled Mr. Heathcliff in unison, checking fiercer demonstrations with a punch of his foot. ‘She’s not accustomed to be spoiled--not kept for a pet.’ Then, striding to a side door, he shouted again, ‘Joseph!’
Joseph mumbled indistinctly in the depths of the cellar, but gave no intimation of ascending; so his master dived down to him, leaving me vis-a-vis the ruffianly bitch and a pair of grim shaggy sheep-dogs, who shared with her a jealous guardianship over all my movements. Not anxious to come in contact with their fangs, I sat still; but, imagining they would scarcely understand tacit insults, I unfortunately indulged in winking and making faces at the trio, and some turn of my physiognomy so irritated madam, that she suddenly broke into a fury and leapt on my knees. I flung her back, and hastened to interpose the table between us. This proceeding aroused the whole hive: half-a-dozen four-footed fiends, of various sizes and ages, issued from hidden dens to the common centre. I felt my heels and coat-laps peculiar subjects of assault; and parrying off the larger combatants as effectually as I could with the poker, I was constrained to demand, aloud, assistance from some of the household in reestablishing peace.
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Monday, December 21, 2009
For the Season, Categories in Red and Green
Coiled Alizarin, by John Hollander:
Curiously deep, the slumber of crimson thoughts:
While breathless, in stodgy viridian,
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
Commentary below the fold.
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