About Bill
Bill Benzon is an independent scholar who has been working and publishing on the 'newer psychologies' and culture for three decades. He is also a trumpeter who has opened for Dizzy Gillespie, B.B. King, and Al Grey.
More Bio:
I was educated in the heart of Theory country, but turned away from it. I did my undergraduate and master’s work at Johns Hopkins in the late 60s and early 70s and then went off to SUNY Buffalo for my Ph. D. I was OK with the notion that, for example, Western metaphysics was in trouble, but I didn’t think that Derrida & Co. knew what to do about it. Plus I just didn’t like that intellectual style. I liked the quasi-mechanistic style of linguistics, and I liked developmental psychology, and Karl Pribram had just written a fascinating article on neural holography in Scientific American.
So, when I was in Buffalo I hung out in the Linguistics Dept. with one David Hays and went deep into cognitive science, ending up writing a dissertation on “Cognitive Science and Literary Theory.” I figured cognitive science was up and coming and I would be the literary point man for it. And perhaps I was, but no one was listening back then.
Email Address: bbenzon@mindspring.com
Website: http://asweknowit.ca/evcult/
Posts by Bill
Saturday, August 21, 2010
Breaking the Primacy of Print
From a post by Karen Hellekson at the Symposium blog at Organization for Transformative Works:
...lots of academics who might otherwise submit to TWC find that they ought not, because their university has rules that online-only publications do not count for promotion and tenure.
What’s up with that? Does your institution have such an idiotic rule?
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Tuesday, August 17, 2010
Jane Austen’s Fight Club: Kick Ass or Die Single
Coming to a theatre near you:
We were no longer “good society.” janeaustensfightclub@gmail.com
Directed by Emily Janice Card & Keith Paugh
Written by Emily Janice Card
Director of Photography: Keith Paugh
Editing and Visual Effects: Jeff Dickson
Produced by Jeff Dickson, Emily Janice Card, Wendy Crompton
Stunt Choreography: Michelle Crompton
Sound Department: Leslie Paugh & Russell Lloyd
Makeup and Hair: Farrah Walker
Cast: Esther Rawlings, Emily Janice Card, Farrah Walker, Wendy Crompton, Michelle Crompton, Julie Hinton, Jessica Preece, Bonnie Anderson, Tiffany Jordan, Renee Miller, Kristen Hill, Kathryn Kulish, David Axelgard, Travis Morgan
© 2010 [RELATIVELY BADARSE PRODUCTIONS]
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Sunday, August 08, 2010
Language About Language
How is it, then, that we can talk about talking? If you are willing to assume the existence of basic perceptual and cognitive capacities, a relatively simple answer follows immediately. The sounds of talk are, after all, sounds like any other sounds. We can perceive them in the same way we perceive the sound of a waterfall or a bird’s song, a thunderclap or the rustling of leaves in the wind, a cricket’s chirp or the breaking of waves on a beach. All are things we can hear, easily and naturally, and so it is with the sound of the human voice.
Roman Jakobson famously theorized that language has six functions: referential, emotive, poetic, conative, phatic, and the metalingual function. That’s the function we’re interested in, our capacity to speak about speech. Jakobson talked of the metalingual function as an orientation toward the language code, which seems just a bit grand. For I’m led to believe that many languages lack terms for explicitly talking about the ‘code.’ Thus, in The Singer of Tales (Atheneum 1973, orig. Harvard 1960), Albert Lord attests (p. 25):
Man without writing thinks in terms of sound groups and not in words, and the two do not necessarily coincide. When asked what a word is, he will reply that he does not know, or he will give a sound group which may vary in length from what we call a word to an entire line of poetry, or even an entire song. [Remember, Lord is writing about oral narrative.] The word for “word” means an “utterance.” When the singer is pressed then to way what a line is, he, whose chief claim to fame is that he traffics in lines of poetry, will be entirely baffled by the question; or he will say that since he has been dictating and has seen his utterances being written down, he has discovered what a line is, although he did not know it as such before, because he had never gone to school.
While I’m willing to entertain doubts about the full generality of this statement – “man without writing” – I assume the it is an accurate report about the Yugoslavian peasants among whom Milman Perry and Albert Lord conducted their fieldwork and that it also applies to other preliterate peoples, though not necessarily to all.
Given those caveats, the paragraph is worth re-reading. Before doing so, recall how casually we have come to see language as a window on the workings of the mind in the Chomskyian and post-Chomskyian eras. If that is the case, then what can one see through a window that lacks even a word for words, that fails to distinguish between words and utterances? And what of the poets who don’t know what a line is? The lack of such knowledge does not stand in the way of the poeticizing, no more than the lack of knowledge of generative grammar precludes the ability to talk intelligently on a vast range of subjects.
Continued at New Savanna.
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Wednesday, August 04, 2010
Astronomy? Astrology? & Literary Studies
Cross-posted at New Savanna.
In a recent post, Aaron Bady quotes from Cleanth Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn, published in 1947: “The poem, if it be a true poem, is a simulacrum of reality . . . an experience rather than any mere statement about experience or any mere abstraction from experience.” My own favorite expression of such a sentiment dates from 1926 in Archibald McLeish’s “Ars Poetica”:
A poem should not mean
But be
Some such distinction seems to recur time and again.
Northrup Frye presents his version in the “Polemical Introduction” to his 1957 Anatomy of Criticism, where he distinguishes between the silent and incommunicable act of reading (“like prayer in the Gospels”) and the noisy business of criticism (Frye’s complete text is available online here; I discuss that passage in an old Valve post). In the title essay of his 1975 collection, The Fate of Reading, Geoffrey Hartman frets that “modern ‘rithmatics’-semiotics, linguistics, and technical structuralism . . . widen, if anything, the rift between reading and writing,” apparently believing that the noisy business of criticism is an attempt to enter into, or at least recover, the silent act of reading. Perhaps a little noisiness is just what the doctor ordered, but the new ‘rithmatics are too noisy. More recently, Hans Ulrich Gumbrich has launched a full-scale assault on meaning in the name of presence: Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey (Stanford U Press 2004).
Why does this discussion of experience vs. criticism (of this or that sort) come up over and over?
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Tuesday, August 03, 2010
Agora: Impurity, thy name is knowledge
This is a movie review, and it has spoilers. Cross posted at New Savanna.
As fate would have it, and along with Nina Paley and two other members of her free culture posse, Barry Solow and Clyde Adams, I went to see Alejandro Amenábar’s Agora last evening. Yes, there were moments during the film where I was thinking, ‘come on guys, can we just move it along.’ But at the end I was in a pensive mood, the kind that comes over me a film has, in whatever way, gotten to me. And so I really wasn’t into the after-movie debriefing session that Nina, Barry, and Clyde held in the downstairs lobby of the semi-ratty little movie house in the West Village. I did manage, however, to get in a word for menstrual symbolism, about which more later.
The film is set in ancient Alexandria during the rise of the Christians and centers around the philosopher Hypatia. It ends with Hypatia’s murder by a Christian mob. According to this post at Armarium Magnum it makes a hash of the history, a time-honored tradition in historical flix. In sum, this is what got botched:
Over and over again, elements are added to the story that are not in the source material: the destruction of the library, the stoning of the Jews in the theatre, Cyril condemning Hypatia’s teaching because she is a woman, the heliocentric “breakthrough” and Hypatia’s supposed irreligiousity. And each of these invented elements serves to emphasize the idea that she was a freethinking innovator who was murdered because her learning threatened fundamentalist bigots. The fact that Amenábar needs to rest this emphasis on things he has made up and mixed into the real story demonstrates how baseless this interpretation is.
OK, Amenábar blew it. I wouldn’t have known that if I hadn’t read that post, which I did before I went to see the film. Now that I’ve seen the film, you know what? I don’t give a termite’s ass. That is, assuming termites have asses, or what will pass for one.
I figure that when film-makers, or novelists for that matter, botch the history they pretend to be telling us, they do so because they want to tell us something other than history. They’re just using historical material to give us a myth dressed up to look like it really happened out there in the world. But that’s not where myths happen, ever. They happen in the mind and in the heart.
So what’s Amenábar’s myth about? Yes, it’s about knowledge and religious fundamentalism and intolerance and you can certainly read those Christian thugs as Taliban thugs if you wish I’m not going to try to stop you from doing that because you know your mind and so on. But that’s not the part of the myth that interests me, that’s not what drove me to silence by movie’s end.
The myth that held me is one about knowledge. Hypatia was a philosopher and a teacher. We see her in the classroom several times and listen to long disquisitions and demonstrations on matters mathematical and scientific – way more than would be necessary to a movie content and eager to score points against fundamentalist Christians. One of Hypatia’s students, Orestes, falls in love with her and declares his love publicly. She answers him the next day in class by presenting him with a handkerchief stained with her menstrual blood.
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Sunday, August 01, 2010
Are We Busted, Irrevocably?
Cross-posted in two other places. Why? Because I can.
By we I mean students of the human sciences.
* * * * *
Sometime in the early 1970s I read an article in Linguistic Inquiry, the house organ of Chomskyian linguistics, lamenting the lost promise of the Chomsky revolution. As I recall, the lament went something like this: In the early days it seemed possible that a complete grammar of English, or French, or Russian, or Quechua, or any other language was right around the corner. Then the articles began to get narrower and narrower in scope until finally the cutting edge of research discussed mere fragments. And the prospect of a complete grammar for some language, any language? Forgotten.
Almost four decades have gone by, with perhaps as many major revisions in Chomsky’s views on language. I don’t know what the official line is on the state of the Chomsky revolution, but, as far as I can tell, the situation hasn’t changed. It’s not just that the Chomskyians have failed to deliver on early promises, but that linguistics itself remains many. Chomsky never carried the day completely and, while some of the holdouts just wanted to remain stuck with the old ways, just as many wanted to forge ahead, but not under the Chomsky banner. As far as I can tell linguistics is, say, a half-dozen or so competing and apparently mutually incompatible schools that, for the most part, simply ignore one another. Linguists hold no deep conception that is as significant to all of linguistics as evolution is to biology.
And that goes across the board to all the human sciences. The cognitive revolution went flat in the 1980s. The neuroscientists have frittered away two or three decades taking pretty picture of the brain that benefit no one so much as the workers and stockholders of companies in the brain imaging business. Economists have been fiddling while the world economy burns and literary critics have been congratulating themselves on how revolutionary and counter-hegemonic they’ve been.
Up until recently I’ve believed this was the case because the problems are deep and compelling answers are hard to find. And, yes, that is true.
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Friday, July 30, 2010
The Anti-Theory Wing of Literary Studies
Nina Paley is the creator of Mimi & Eunice and is unleashing them on the world under a copyleft license.
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Wednesday, July 28, 2010
Fans: A New Public for Literary & Cultural Studies
In continuing to think about fan culture I sent a query to Francesca Coppa, a long-time student of fan culture and one of the founders of the Organization for Transformative Works, a non-profit that is all about fan culture, serving it, studying it, and advancing it. In her reply she mentioned several kinds of ongoing fan scholarship and observed:
I think of all of these as “real” research; the question, perhaps, is what sort of umbrella it would have to be gathered under to “count.” But everyone knows that “fans” are a kind of grassroots academy who know more about the things they are fans of than any “TV and media” scholar!
So, I’m thinking that if the literary academy really wants to reach the general public, these folks should be high on the list. But just what would that entail? These people are actively creating their own artistic expressions in words, images, and sound, and are actively pursuing their own research agendas. What does the academy have to offer these people? Can the academy conceive of a relationship that’s more of a partnership than a relationship conceived around more evaluative essays in intelligible prose?
Because I’m thinking that that’s where the deep action is going to be. Not in trying to reconstruct the glory days of Leavis and Trilling and the rest, but in doing something that’s of this 21st century, something that’s new.
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Friday, July 23, 2010
Toward a Fan-Based Research Collaboratory
Cross-posted at New Savanna.
Despite some reservations about fan scholarship—e.g. I’ve seen pointless edit wars at Wikipedia & pros are adept at pointless quarrels as well—I’m seriously thinking about an initiative to see if fans are interested in doing at least some of the descriptive work I call for in the piece on cultural evolution I recently did for the National Humanities Center (cf. this “quasi-festo" for naturalist criticism, and this piece on “Kubla Khan"). I see little prospect that academy-based scholars will under take such work in the near term. The sort of descriptive work I have in mind is not obviously subordinate to an inquiry into the “meaning” of a text. That pretty much means that the work is not unpublisheable on its own; there’s no obvious way to earn professional credit for doing it.
But fans may well be interested in doing such work, but on the texts that interest them. And those texts are only rarely going to be canonical high culture texts. And that’s just fine with me. I’ve done such work on manga and cartoons and would have no problem with doing it on episodes of, e.g. Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Star Trek (any generation).
I’ve recently been doing quite a bit of work on Sita Sings the Blues, an animated film by Nina Paley, which I discuss in the Humanities Center post. As some of you may know, the film is done in four different visual styles. So I’ve made a table with a column for each style and then gone through the film from beginning to end and briefly annotated each segment in the proper column. You can find that table online in a Google docs file here. One of those segments, the Agni Pariksha, is done in a fifth style. I’ve gone through that segment an annotated each “shot” or sequence within it. You can find that here. In prinple each of the some 60+ segments in the film could be described at the level of detail I’ve used in the Agni Pariksha segment.
In fact, one could easily describe a film frame-by-frame. Would that be worthwhile? In some cases, yes, and in some cases no. It depends. There’s really no way of knowing until the work’s been done in at least some cases and we can take a look at it.
It’s clear to me that such descriptive work is a necessary precondition to a deeper knowledge of texts, whether written, filmed, or videotaped. All the cognitive psych and evolutionary psych and neuro-psych in the world is not going to accomplish what can only be accomplished through description. If the pros aren’t going to do the work, then it’s up to the fans. If the fans get into it, then in a decade or two the pros will have no choice but to follow or simply to drop off the edge of the earth.
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Monday, July 12, 2010
Romantic Love, Conversation, Biology, and Culture
Note: This post grew out of reflection on an earlier post on bundling.
Cross-posted at New Savanna.
When I was an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins I took a course in Medieval literature and was thoroughly gobsmacked when I learned that romantic love had been invented in 12th century France. Until then I’d believed it to be a human universal – one and only, forever and ever, that was just how it was, no? Well, not quite.
What arose in Medieval Europe is something called Courtly Love, a set of conventions used by high-born men in wooing their lovers. And these lovers were not their wives, nor wives to be. For aristocratic marriage had little to do with personal preference; it was politics. Powerful families would forge alliances by arranging marriages among their young.
In time, over the course of centuries, so the story went, romantic love was transformed from an aristocratic game into a set of conventions used to define the necessary, or at least the ideal, precondition for any marriage. This set of conventions was in place, at least among the middle class, by the time Jane Austen wrote her novels in the early 19th Century. Those conventions have remained more or less in place up to the present, though they’ve become a bit tattered in the last decade or three as a soaring divorce rate has made it abundantly clear that true love does not last forever. That, of course, is not exactly news – why, for example, did Flaubert write Madame Bovary? – but the myth is so attractive that it dies hard.
That was the state of things during my undergraduate years – which coincided with the emergence of feminist activism in the late 1960s. Whatever their personal experience, everyone gave lip service to one and only forever and ever and believed that it was human nature. In that context, then, the revelations of the learned scholars shook my world.
Counter-Revolution
Learned scholars, however, do not constitute a single tribe. Their tribes are many, and often contentious. Even as the literati were blissfully proclaiming the recent and Western origin of romantic love, other scholars set out to prove them wrong. In 1992, for example, W. R. Jankowiak and E. F. Fischer published “A cross-cultural perspective on romantic love” (Ethnology 31: 149-155). They defined romantic love as “any intense attraction that involves the idealization of the other, within an erotic context, with the expectation of enduring for some time into the future” and they contrasted this with “the companionship phase of love . . . which is characterized by the growth of a more peaceful, comfortable, and fulfilling relationship.” They examined ethnographic data on 166 societies from around the world and discovered romantic love in 88.5 percent of them, suggesting “that romantic love constitutes a human universal, or at the least a near-universal.”
More recently Jonathan Gottschall and Marcus Nordland, published Romantic Love: A Literary Universal? (Philosophy and Literature 30: 450-470, 2006). They conducted a cross-cultural study of folktales from 79 cultures and at least one reference to romantic love in 55 of those collections and multiple references in 39 collections. They assert that their study “offers staunch support to the existing evidence that romantic love is a statistical cultural universal. It would also seem to increase the probability that romantic love may be an absolute cultural universal offers staunch support to the existing evidence that romantic love is a statistical cultural universal.” “Statistical universal” is a term of art meaning that something is in a lot of places, but not everywhere, yet. It seems clear that if Gottschall and Nordland were to place a bet, they bet that further research would find that romantic love is a true cultural universal, present in every culture for which we have reliable records.
Still more recently, just yesterday in the time-scale of academic publishing, Brian Boyd has asserted, with the calm assurance of senior scholar in command of wide learning, that “cross-cultural, neurological, and cross-species studies have demonstrated the workings of romantic love across societies and even species” (The Origin of Stories, Harvard 2009, p. 341). To this, Michael Bérubé has replied, with the calm assurance of senior scholar in command of wide learning, but learning leavened with a dash of school-boy wit:
This just won’t wash. Other species might court and mate for life, but they do not engage in romantic love in the sense that humanists employ the term, save perhaps for the cartoon skunk Pepé Le Pew. “Romantic love” does not mean “mammals doing it like mammals”; it refers to the conventions of courtly love, which were indeed invented in the European middle ages and cannot be found in ancient literatures or cultures. Those conventions are culturally and historically specific variations on our underlying (and polymorphous) biological imperatives, just as the institution of the Bridezilla and the $25,000 wedding is specific to our own addled time and place.
What’s going on here? Who’s right?
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Monday, July 05, 2010
The Human Sciences
I’m discussing Cultural Evolution: A Vehicle for Cooperative Interaction Between the Sciences and the Humanities, a blog of the National Humanities Center. Here’s the blurb:
IN THE FORUM
William Benzon, an independent scholar who has written about cognitive science, art, music, and the web, is in the Forum. The author of Beethoven’s Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture (2001), he outlines here a comprehensive approach to the human sciences, championing methods and insights from researchers trained in the humanities and the sciences. His essay,”Cultural Evolution: A Vehicle for Cooperative Interaction Between the Sciences and the Humanities,” claims that a humanistic range of knowledge of cultural phenomena is necessary for effective description of the objects of analysis. Lacking such background, students of the human are likely to produce unscientific models and theories about population-wide maintenance, propagation, and incremental change of cultural codes.
To build accurate models at what Benzon calls the micro-scale, one needs to understand perceptual and cognitive processes and how meaning is negotiated through interaction. On the larger canvas, one needs to see at the macro level how changes in cultural codes support the emergence of new forms of mental activity. Properly pursued, the study of humanity can reveal the design of cultural codes as emerging from the collective efforts of populations where each individual negotiates his or her life transaction by transaction.
Bill Benzon is on the scientific advisory board for the Institute of Music and Neurologic Function in New York City. Previously he was a Senior Scientist with MetaLogics, Inc., where he worked on knowledge representation and information design for web-based health services. Benzon taught in the Department of Language, Literature, and Communication at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and has published scholarly articles, reviews, and technical reports on African-American music, literary analysis and theory, cultural evolution, cognition and brain theory, visual thinking, and technical communication. In conjunction with Richard Friedhoff, he wrote a book on computer graphics and image-processing entitled Visualization: The Second Computer Revolution.
Come on down!
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Sunday, June 20, 2010
Between Fans and Scholars
Sites like tvtropes.org (discussed here) aren’t the only venues that are blurring the lines between scholarship and fanship. The Organization for Transformative Works has a variety of programs serving both constituencies. Here’s how OTW glosses “transformative”:
Transformative works are creative works about characters or settings created by fans of the original work, rather than by the original creators. Transformative works include but are not limited to fanfiction, real person fiction, fan vids, and graphics. A transformative use is one that, in the words of the U.S. Supreme Court, “adds something new, with a further purpose or different character, altering the [source] with new expression, meaning, or message.” A story from Voldemort’s perspective is transformative, so is a story about a pop star that illustrates something about current attitudes toward celebrity or sexuality.
The OTA envisions “a future in which all fannish works are recognized as legal and transformative and are accepted as a legitimate creative activity.” They have archiving projects, legal advocacy, a peer-reviewed journal, Transformative Works and Cultures, and Symposium Blog, that is intended to be “a bridge between the OTW’s academic journal and fannish discussions, through posts that discuss both fannish meta topics and fannish perspectives on fan and media studies.”
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Thursday, June 17, 2010
Rant: Theory of Mind, NOT!
Theory of mind (aka TOM) is all the rage in (some quarters of) cognitive science and evolutionary psychology. It’s driving me batsh¡t crazy. And its use by literary critics makes me super-mega batsh¡t crazy.
Why?
Well, first, in case you don’t know what TOM is, it refers to the capacity humans have for attending to and wondering about what’s on someone else’s mind. It’s a capacity that’s possibly unique to humans, though perhaps not, and it begins appearing at around four-plus years of age. My problem is not with the research itself or the notion that some-such capacity comes “online” at that point in development. What bothers me is the term and its implications.
It bothers Melvin Konner too. Here’s a passage from an opinion piece* he published in Nature a few years ago:
Meanwhile, social-cognition theorists have come up with a phrase inferential enough to make one almost long for the black-boxers: theory of mind. Freud sought one, Skinner assiduously didn’t, and most people don’t bother to ask themselves whether they have or need one. Yet there is serious debate as to whether chimpanzees or four-year-olds have a theory of mind. Closely inspected, the phrase seems to mean something like perspective-taking or, when mutual, intersubjectivity. True, a four-year-old can see and act on another person’s perspective whereas most three-year-olds can’t.
This is fascinating stuff and something we need to understand. But a term such as ‘theory of mind’ simply stands in the way. It makes for catchy article titles but conveys no meaning. Is the maturing orbitofrontal cortex newly able to calm an impulsive and self-centred limbic circuit? Is there a down-regulation of some neurotransmitter receptor, allowing a younger form of social mirror-imaging to grow into identification and parallel perspectives? As long as we are playing with pretty word-coins that substitute for brain functions, we will never know.
This TOM-talk is rather like Richard Dawkins talking about “selfish” genes. He knows perfectly well that genes aren’t the kind of agents that can be motivated by selfish considerations, but it’s a useful way of talking. And, in a pinch, he’s quite capable of explaining what’s going on without recourse to the personification; that is to say, Dawkins and others can give technical accounts that do not require genes to have mental states.
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Friday, June 11, 2010
A Myth of Africa: Ritual Structure in Dusk of Dawn
Cross-posted at New Savanna.
Serendipity, fate, kismet, synchronicity, or just plain coincidence. Call it what you will.
I’d been planning to post these notes ever since I started my series on race in the symbolic universe. Earlier this week I’d decided that this would be the week. And now I see that Aaron Bady has a post on the Western construction of Africa. And so this post of mine becomes something of an oblique counterpoint to that. While it too is about a Western construction of Africa, it is a specific construction, by a single individual, the great W. E. B. Du Bois. Du Bois was born in New England and died in Ghana. He was a Pan-Africanist whose need for a symbolic Africa was different from that which Bady describes in his post.
Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt. Dusk of Dawn. In W.E.B. Du Bois: Writings, ed. by Nathan Huggins, Library of American © 1986 by Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., New York, pp. 549 - 802. First published in 1940 by Harcourt Brace.
Ritual Structure
No autobiography is a simple chronological account of the facts. There is always a plot, an argument, some special pleading, a mythological/symbolic dimension. This is very obviously so with Dusk of Dawn —Du Bois tells us as much several times, first in the opening “Apology.”
I believe that Dusk of Dawn an overall form corresponding to ritual structure as expounded by Van Gennep and Durkheim. The center section of the book, in which De Bois describes his trip to Africa, corresponds to the marginal phase of ritual where the celebrants have left the secular world for the sacred but have not yet returned. It is in the center of the book, chapter 5 out of 9, that we find the romantic evocation of Africa.
Here’s how I explained this standard ritual structure in my essay on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight:
In “Two Essays Concerning the Symbolic Representation of Time” Edmund Leach has described the ritual structure of Durkheim’s “states of the moral person” (Leach 1965a). They are: 1) secular life, 2) separation from the secular world and transition to 3) the marginal state where the ‘moral person’ is in a world discontinuous from the ordinary world, often being regarded as being dead, and from which a return to the secular is made by a process of 4) aggregation or desacralization, often symbolized by rebirth. Arnold van Gennep talks of separation, transition, and incorporation in The Rites of Passage (Van Gennep 1960). The ritual sequence involves two realms of being, the secular and the sacred, and is designed to order the transition of initiates between these two realms. The ontological problem is isomorphic to that of hypnosis. Secular life corresponds to ordinary waking consciousness; separation corresponds to induction; margin or transition corresponds to trance; and aggregation or incorporation to release – which leaves the person back at the initial state, ordinary consciousness, or secular life. Hypnosis and ritual both involve ontological transition.
This is the pattern that Northrup Frye, in his Anatomy of Criticism, associated with New Comedy in ancient Greece, and which Frye C. L. Barber have used in analysing Shakespeare’s comedies. It is thus a pattern with a strong literary pedigree.
What’s surprising about finding it in Dusk of Dawn is that that work is not a work of fiction, it is an autobiography, a work of fact. Fictions can be patterned to suit the needs of the author. Lives are not so readily patterned, what happened is what happened.
But one need not tell what happened in the order in which it happened. One can change the order in the telling while remaining truthful about the dates so that the reader can supply the chronological order. And that is what Du Bois does. His displaces his first trip to Africa, which took place later in his life, to an earlier part of his narrative. It is that displacement that signals to the reader that something special is going on here.
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Tuesday, June 01, 2010
tvtropes.org & what it implies
Cross-posted at New Savanna.
Over at ARCADE, Andrew Goldstone had a post about tvtropes.org, which he describe as “is an amazing wiki devoted to the ‘tropes’ of television, film, fiction, and, potentially, everything. The organizing idea of the site is the trope, very loosely defined as any convention or pattern to be found in and around these cultural objects.” What makes TVT interesting, of course, is that it is not run by scholars, it’s run by ordinary folks, by fans. Goldstone is interested in what TVT implies about the future of the humanities. He thus takes comfort in the fact that it is formalist in method, indicating that, whatever the current state of affairs in the academy, formalist isn’t dead. He is also pleased that “the site is resolutely ecumenical in its treatment of culture.” Anything’s fair game.
He goes on to point out:
On the one hand, it means--just as media studies and cultural studies have been insisting all along--that popular culture, far from being a wasteland of zombielike acquiescence and repetition, is shot through with self-reflexivity, creative variation, and analytic thinking. Academic values and the values of other parts of culture at large may not be as divergent as we think in the darkest watches of the night.
Yes.
What interests me, at the moment, however, is the extent to which this “self-reflexivity, creative variation, and analytic thinking” reflects the success of literary and cultural studies pedagogy over the past half century (or more). Have we succeeded in creating a new kind of more or less routine public discourse about fictional texts?
Note that I’m not claiming that the academy gets sole responsibility for this, that pop culture really would be “a wasteland of zombielike acquiescence” if it weren’t for us. I don’t for a minute believe anything so silly. At the same time, I observe that it’s not as though popular culture were over there in some other universe having little or no connection with the universe in which we do our research and teach undergraduates. It’s the same universe.
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