About Bill Benzon
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.
Email Address: bbenzon@mindspring.com
Website: http://asweknowit.ca/evcult/
Posts by Bill Benzon
Tuesday, December 01, 2009
Bleg: French Fantasy
From my friend Tim Perper:
Two questions, actually, both bibliographic, more or less.
1. Do you know of any French literary critics who have dealt PRIMARILY with fantasy in the most general sense (NOT a publishing category)? By “fantasy,” I mean stories like “Lord of the Rings,” “Treasure Island,” Oz, “Alice in Wonderland,” Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, usw, (either written or in film). By “primarily,” I mean fantasy is the central focus, rather than being a side issue to things the writer thinks is more important?
2. Do any of the French Theorists—the usual suspects: Lacan, Foucault, Irigaray, Derrida, Kristeva, Deleuze, Beaudrillard, usw—deal anywhere with literary or cinematic fantasy? Again, I mean as a major focus of the essay, not as a footnote to Freud. They’ve written about cinema (or Derrida has) but I mean fantasy fiction and film in specific.
If you Google Derrida and cinema, you will encounter a delightful and very funny video of him expatiating in the most charming manner to a very pretty young woman about being a ghost in the film “they” are making of him talking about ghosts to a very pretty young woman in a film. It doesn’t take her very long to fall totally in love. But that’s not what I mean. I mean “Beaudrillard on Bradbury” or “Kristeva on Alice.”
Tim
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Sunday, November 29, 2009
Bleg: Wolf-Child on the Heath
Does anyone know of historicist criticism relating Wuthering Heights to stories of feral children? Note that Heathcliff’s background is opaque and he is occasionally likened to a wolf, as in this passage from chapter 10 (see the penultimate word):
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.
Further, dogs and their interactions with humans are a significant motif in the book. One of those dogs is named Wolf, and the canine-human interaction is often violent, e.g. Skulker biting Cathy Earnshaw in the ankle.*
On the other hand, wolf children do have a long-standing presence in the Western imagination, e.g. Romulus and Remus. Jean Itard’s The Wild Child of Averyron** was published in 1801, well before WH; and there were well over a dozen cases reported in Europe in the 17th, 18th and early 19th centuries.*** I’d think Brontë would have known some of this lore.
*BTW, has anyone read this as menstrual symbolism? She seems to be about the right age and a signal consequence of this action is that, after several weeks in bed, she develops a romantic interest in Edgar Linton (and an unaccounted for aversion to Heathcliff).
**The basis for Truffaut’s The Wild Child.
***Lucien Malson, Wolf Children and the Problem of Human Nature, Monthly Review Press, 1972, pp. 80-81.
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Friday, November 27, 2009
Lévi-Strauss 3: What’s the Subject?
When I wrote my first post on Lévi-Strauss I had no intention of writing a second. Rob’s response, however, led me to take a stroll through Derrida and Donato and in turn led me to take another shot at explicating Lévi-Strauss’s analytic method in The Raw and the Cooked. At about the time I was posting that second piece I’d also decided to develop that first post into a formal article and, in the process of doing that—I’m still working on it—I continued to read some older pieces, mostly about Lévi-Strauss and the subject, more in the Donato pieces, but also some de Man, which I’d not read back in the day, and Joseph Riddel. “So that’s what was afoot,” thought I to myself, though not exactly in those terms, “that’s what folks were all psyched about. Hmmm.” I’d pretty much forgotten that material, though I’d obviously read it with some care as the texts were underlined and had marginal comments. And then I got out Tristes Tropiques and reviewed some of the underlined passages, again, on the subject.
This is not my first copy of Tristes Tropiques, it is not the one I read in Dick Macksey’s course on the autobiographical novel at Johns Hopkins. That was an abridged translation, which I discarded when I purchased the 1973 translation of the whole book. So these underlings and marginalia were not those of a provincial newly arrived at the Big University. These markings were made by a sophisticated young intellectual who had both a philosophy BA and a humanities MA from Hopkins and who was then pursuing a PhD in English at SUNY Buffalo. I’d gotten my MA for writing a long and quite sophisticated thesis on “Kubla Khan.” Lévi-Strauss was my central methodological touchstone, but there was Jakobson and, I suppose, Piaget as well. And Merleau-Ponty. And the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus. Others, including Nietzsche, but also a bit of Chomsky.
I came out of that thesis convinced that cognitive science was the way forward. And that’s what I pursued at Buffalo. The story of how I managed to study cognitive science while enrolled in the English Department, well, that’s the story of an institutional style — and I do mean that, institutional — that may well have been unique in American letters, a style of adventure and generosity that is now gone. But that’s a story for another day.
Let’s return to Lévi-Strauss, and to the subject. I can’t imagine how puzzled I must have been to read about and hear talk of “the subject.” When I read Lévi-Strauss’ eclipse of the subject in Tristes Tropiques the exposition must have been strange, but without weight. That is, without the weight of the philosophical tradition Lévi-Strauss, himself trained as a philosopher, was critiquing. Sure, I knew of that tradition, and I’d even read about it in the later pages of Bertrand Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy. But I’d not read Kant or Hegel, nor the phenomenologists. Thus, I suppose, Lévi-Strauss’s rejection of the self is where I began, one of the places. All the rest is backfill.
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Steven Mithen’s Brain on Music (Could be Yours)
Music was very important to Lévi-Strauss, both personally and as a source conceptual figuration in his writing. There is a long tradition arguing that music predates language in human history. I’ve placed myself in that tradition, Beethoven’s Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture, and, more recently, so has cognitive archaeologist Steven Mithin, The Singing Neanderthals (my review of the book).
Now Mithen has summarized his views in a recent volume from the New York Academy of Scieces (h/t dlende at Neuroanthropologist). He also reports:
Continue reading "Steven Mithen’s Brain on Music (Could be Yours)"I find the interplay between inheritance and development of particular interest, partly for personal reasons. My research has argued that we have evolved as a musical species, and yet I am someone lacking in musical ability. My theories would predict that even my own adult and supposedly mature brain could still be manipulated to enhance its level of musical processing. So I undertook a pilot project to test this by working with the neuroscientist Professor Larry Parsons from Sheffield University and Pam Chilvers, a professional singing teacher. Not having participated in any music making for at least 35 years, I underwent a whole year of singing lessons and explored their impact on my own brain.6 Although the experiment was only a pilot study and lacked various control conditions, I did appear to be able to change my brain, increasing activity in Brodmann’s areas 22, 38 and 45, and decreasing activity in other areas. In effect, I began to release a potential musicality that had been placed there by millions of years of evolution, but was neglected and so remained dormant during my own life.
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Thursday, November 19, 2009
Lévi-Strauss 2: Subject and Object
In response to my previous post on Lévi-Strauss, rob reminded me of Derrida’s essay, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” revised from his presentation at the 1966 structuralism symposium held at Johns Hopkins. And not only that. In evoking Kant and capital “R” Reason, rob also reminded me that both Lévi-Strauss and Derrida had been operating within a philosophical tradition that stretches back to Kant though Heidegger and Hegel and various others. While I certainly read in that tradition as an undergraduate, and marked those books in blue, red, and green felt-tip pen, I abandoned it with Derrida, or perhaps with Lévi-Strauss himself – the exact formulation doesn’t matter.
I want to revisit that abandonment. Perhaps, even, re-enact it. In a small way.
Let us consider some passages from Derrida’s essay, which I present not to critique them, but simply to display them. For example (p. 256 in Macksey and Donato, The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man, 1970): “In effect, what appears most fascinating in this critical search for a new status of the discourse is the stated abandonment of all reference to a center, to a subject, to a privileged reference, to an origin, or to an absolute arché.” On the next page (257): “There is no unity or absolute source of the myth. . . . Everything begins with the structure, the configuration, the relationship. The discourse on this acentric structure, the myth, that is, cannot itself have an absolute subject or an absolute center.” From the subsequent discussion, in response to Jean Hypolite: “. . . this center can be either thought as it was classically, like a creator or being or a fixed and natural place; or also as a deficiency, let’s say; or something which makes possible “free play” . . . and which receives—and this is what we call history¬—a series of determinations, of signifiers, which have no signifieds [signifiés] finally, which cannot become signifiers except as they begin from this deficiency.”
That is to say, talk and thought of the center, the subject, and the sign are intimately bound together. Eugenio Donato, in his contribution to the symposium (“The Two Languages of Criticism”), notes (p. 94): “It is the possibility of maintaining the discontinuity between the order of the signifier and the order of the signified that permits Lévi-Strauss to avoid dealing with the problem of the individual subject and makes for the extreme rigor of his work.” Note that phrase, “extreme rigor.”
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Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Google Fun
Back in the ancient days of the Moretti book event I spent alot of time googling “xanadu” and related searchs by way of investigating the xanadu meme. It was nudgy work, but also fun.
I’ve just discovered some more fun things to do with Google. I assume that these have been around for awhile and that many of you know about them. For those who don’t, here’s a few words.
When you’re on the Google search page you’ll see a Show options link at the upper left, below the Google logo. Click on in and you’ll get a column of options listed down the lefthand side. The one’s that interest me are Wonder wheel and Timeline.
When you click on Wonder wheel the display changes so you see a hub-and-spokes arrangement with your search term at the hub and associated searchs at the ends of the spokes. If you click on one of the spokes, that search becomes the hub and has its own array of spokes (which your original search at the end of one of them). You can then click on one of those spokes and . . . you get the idea.
Timeline gives you as bar graph moving from the past at the left to the present at the right. The height of the bar is proportional to the number of times your search term is associated with that date range. Just what that association means is something you have to determine by inspection, though often enough it does mean that your term has appeared in a document written at that time.
The bar graph itself is clickable. When you click on a date range, you get a new bar graph spanning just that range. You can keep going until you’re looking at single years.
I assume one can use these features in service of serious work, though I’ve not tried it yet. I’ve mostly been having fun.
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Monday, November 16, 2009
Links while they’re hot
1. Mozart’s Orientalism & European curiosity
2. Gladwell blunders: the Igon Value Effect (also here)
3. The gene for X, aka the hunt for the hat gene, NOT
4. Has the memoir displaced the novel?
5. Neuroanthopology, an interesting blog on brain, body, and culturewhile they’re hot
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Saturday, November 14, 2009
Bleg: Two-Generation Stories
In my recent post on Lévi-Strauss, Pandosto, The Winter’s Tale (& other Shakespeare plays), and Wuthering Heights I discuss a story structure that extends over two generations. There is a conflict in the first generation between a closely attached male-female couple that ends badly. There’s a marriage in the second generation that involves a children of first-generation characters (the problematic couple, but others as well). Depending on the story, this marriage may serve to heal the first-generation rift.
Here’s the question: Do we have other examples of that two-generation story structure?
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Friday, November 13, 2009
The King’s Wayward Eye: For Claude Lévi-Strauss
Farewell to freedom in the Adriatic and to days of wild abandon.
– Hayao Miyazaki via Porco Rosso
The news of his death has, by now, no doubt spread to every region of cyberspace where his ideas have seen use and remembrance. I am speaking, of course, about Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009), tamer of wild flowers, pollinator of myth, and diviner of opposites. I learned of his ideas in the days when Structuralism was something in its own right rather than being a doormat at the threshold of Poststructuralism, Deconstruction, and Postmodernism. I thought his ideas about myth were quite profound, but not fully-formed.
This note is an attempt to indicate what I saw in his study of myth despite the fact that I cannot give a concise account of what he did nor can I recommend such an account. You have to read the man himself. First I say a little about his ideas, then I suggest their implications for literary study by giving an example from early modern English literature, a comparison of Robert Green’s Pandosto with Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. I then suggest extensions of that analysis both into Shakespeare and into the novel (Wuthering heights). (There’s small collection of Lévi-Strauss links at the very end.)
The Structural Study of Myth
I first learned of Lévi-Strauss during my undergraduate years at Johns Hopkins in the late 1960s. I believe it was in one of Dick Macksey’s courses, The Idea of the Theater. I forget whether Macksey assigned “The Structural Study of Myth” or merely suggested it. No matter. I read it, didn’t understand it, and was hooked: “The true constituent units of myth are not the isolated relations but bundles of such relations, and it is only as bundles that these relations can be put to use and combined so as to produce meaning.” First Oedipus; then the Zuni emergence myth, compared with those in other Pueblo tribes, finally a Plains myth to round things off. “In all cases, it was found that the theory was sound; light was thrown, not only on North American mythology, but also on a previously unnoticed kind of logical operation, or own known so far only in a wholly different context.” Yippie kayo git along little dogies!
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Thursday, November 12, 2009
Greek Classics in the US Military
First a NYTimes Op-Ed, now the Pentagon:
The Pentagon has provided $3.7 million for an independent production company, Theater of War, to visit 50 military sites through at least next summer and stage readings from two plays by Sophocles, “Ajax” and “Philoctetes,” for service members. So far the group has performed at Fort Riley in Kansas; at the Uniformed Services University in Bethesda, Md.; and at last week’s Warrior Resilience Conference in Norfolk, Va.
The scenes from “Ajax” show the title character plotting to murder Greek generals who have disgraced him. Under a trance by the goddess Athena, he ends up slaughtering farm animals he thinks are the officers. Ajax’s concubine is depicted as trying to bring him to his senses; the final scene shows Ajax in agony, committing suicide.
Have they given any thought to using more contemporary literary materials?
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Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Superman in WWII
According to Bruce Feiler, 25% of American soldiers had a comic book in their back pocket during WWII. And Superman was in a lot of those comics. Here’s the clip:
You might want to listen to the whole conversation, which is about the Moses narrative as the American narrative. & then we have Obama who proclaimed, as a candidate, that he was going to lead the Joshua generation into the promised land. And now he’s in office and is up against a pharaonic establisment and finds himself in the Moses seat. Whoops!
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Sunday, November 08, 2009
PTSD in Ithaca & Achilles in Afghanistan
Two weeks ago when I was hanging out in Bérubé’s joint Ric Rader, as USC classicist, mentioned Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character in passing. It uses the Iliad as a lens through which to examine the experience of soldiers in Vietnam. Now Caroline Alexander has an op-ed in The New York Times that makes the similar connection:
And most significantly, epic tradition hints at the dilemmas of military commemoration. In “The Iliad,” Achilles must choose between kleos or nostos — glory or a safe return home. By dying at Troy, Achilles was assured of undying fame as the greatest of all heroes. His choice reflects an uneasy awareness that it is far easier to honor the dead soldier than the soldier who returns. Time-tested and time-honored, the commemoration rites we observe each Memorial Day — the parades and speeches and graveside prayers and offerings — represent a satisfying formula of remembrance by the living for the dead that was already referred to as “ancient custom” by Thucydides in the fifth century B.C.
The commemoration of the veteran — the survivor who did not fall on the field of war — is less starkly defined. The returned soldier, it is hoped, will grow old and die among us, like Nestor, in whose time “two generations of mortal men had perished.” In our own times, the generation born in the optimistic aftermath of World War II has already encountered veterans of both world wars, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Persian Gulf war and our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq — and still has several decades of martial possibilities in reserve. As the earlier of those wars recede into the past, their old soldiers fade away; and thus, commemorative rites for the veteran — by definition, the survivor — also tend to end, perversely, at graves.
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Sunday, November 01, 2009
Oh Woe Is Us
1. The New York Times: top tier public universities becoming increasingly privatized, not good.
2. Louis Menand (Harvard Magazine): One more time: the Ph.D. Problem:*
If there is a conclusion to be drawn from this exercise, it might be that the academic system is a deeply internalized one. The key to reform of almost any kind in higher education lies not in the way that knowledge is produced. It lies in the way that the producers of knowledge are produced. Despite transformational changes in the scale, missions, and constituencies of American higher education, professional reproduction remains almost exactly as it was a hundred years ago. Doctoral education is the horse that the university is riding to the mall. People are taught—more accurately, people are socialized, since the process selects for other attributes in addition to scholarly ability—to become expert in a field of specialized study; and then, at the end of a long, expensive, and highly single-minded process of credentialization, they are asked to perform tasks for which they have had no training whatsoever: to teach their fields to non-specialists, to connect what they teach to issues that students are likely to confront in the world outside the university, to be interdisciplinary, to write for a general audience, to justify their work to people outside their discipline and outside the academy. If we want professors to be better at these things, then we ought to train them differently.
*hat-tip, Bruce Jackson.
[EDIT] 3. 23 million dollar presidents at private universities (NYTimes):
Why is university presidents’ pay going up so much?
“I think the answer you’d get from the governing boards that set these salaries is that it’s a market and it’s increasingly hard to find these people,” said Jeffrey Selingo, editor of The Chronicle of Higher Education, which has published its compensation survey annually since 1993. “That said, almost every year, presidential salaries have gone up faster than inflation, and faster than tuition, which rankles some people on campus.”
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Saturday, October 24, 2009
Shakespeare Wrong, Agincourt Wasn’t All That
Score one for Plato’s view that poets are liars. (Insert smiley-face emoticon.) The NYTimes reports:
The historians have concluded that the English could not have been outnumbered by more than about two to one. And depending on how the math is carried out, Henry may well have faced something closer to an even fight, said Anne Curry, a professor at the University of Southampton who is leading the study.
Those cold figures threaten an image of the battle that even professional researchers and academics have been reluctant to challenge in the face of Shakespearean prose and centuries of English pride, Ms. Curry said.
“It’s just a myth, but it’s a myth that’s part of the British psyche,” Ms. Curry said.
But Shakespeare gave Henry one hell of a speech, no? Note this:
And an extraordinary online database listing around a quarter-million names of men who served in the Hundred Years’ War, compiled by Ms. Curry and her collaborators at the universities in Southampton and Reading, shows that whatever the numbers, Henry’s army really was a band of brothers: many of the soldiers were veterans who had served on multiple campaigns together.
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Monday, October 19, 2009
What’s Up? Jeeves and Wooster
Sometime in my early teens I discovered the boxes of old paperbacks my father kept in the basement. That’s where I found 1984, Brave New World, some miscellaneous Freud, and this that and the other. The other included some books by P. G. Wodehouse, which I didn’t read but which, for whatever reason, I took note of. Since then I’d bump into references to Wodehouse here and there, often taking the form of praise for his language (Hilaire Belloc, “the best writer of English"), and finally, just last week, I found a cache of YouTube videos devoted to Jeeves and Wooster, a 1990s British TV series based on Wodehouse stores and starring Stephen Fry and Hugh “Dr. House” Laurie. So I watched a bunch of them.
What are these stories about?
Sure, they’re about a young gentleman of means, Bertie Wooster, and his valet (a gentleman’s personal gentleman), Reginald Wooster. Wooster is a good sort of chap, personable, not terribly well educated, who is constantly getting into scrapes helping his chums, or his aunts, out of this or that dicy situation. Jeeves is well-read – Spinoza is a favorite – highly competent in a wide variety of tasks, somewhat of a stickler for appropriate style, and most ingenious. He’s the one who comes up with stratagems for rescuing Bertie & Co. from their troubles.
That’s the premise of these stories, but what’s their cultural appeal? Bertie Wooster is of the idle rich, with a good nature that leavens his idleness. He doesn’t have to work and so he doesn’t. Jeeves does have to work, but he works as a servant to the affable Wooster, who is a Good Boss; there is, in fact, something of a comradeship between the two, though proprieties are maintained at all times. The net economic output of the pair is zero. Wooster’s wealth allows them to live in the world, but they need not be fully of it.
The premise is thus rather utopian. And the relationship between the two protagonists is one of balance. In some ways, Wooster, the aristocrat, is more of an Everyman than Jeeves, the valet. Jeeves, like most of us, has to work for a living, but his superior mien and education are at odds with his Everyman economic status. Taken together, the two add up to (some version of) an ideal middle-class male living in an economic utopia.
Or so it seems, on first take.
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