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.
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://new-savanna.blogspot.com/
Posts by Bill Benzon
Saturday, August 05, 2006
Fictional Characters 4: Much Ado about Simulation
I now want to look at the individual reader as he or she apprehends a text and thus (re)creates the lives of the fictional characters in the text. It is common to say that we come to identify with literary characters. But, as Norman Holland pointed out in The Dynamics of Literary Response (1968, pp. 262 ff.), it is by no means clear just what we mean by identification in this context. Still, in order to get this discourse on the road, we need some word for the relationship a reader establishes with a character. If not “identification,” then what?
Keith Oatley has been writing about fiction as simulation of the world (Word doc):
Shakespeare’s great innovation was of theatre as a model of the world. The audience member constructs the simulated model in the course of the play, and thereby takes part in the design activity. So fiction is to understanding social interaction as computer simulation is to understanding, perception and reasoning. Shakespeare designed plays as simulations of human actions in relation to predicaments, so that the deep structure of selfhood and of the interaction of people who have distinct personalities becomes clearer.
Oatley has the notion of simulation from computing, where computers are used to simulate a wide variety of phenomena - traffic patterns, explosions, fluid flow, and so forth. He proposes that simulation is just the notion we need in order properly to interpret the Greek mimesis. Stories are “the kind of simulation that runs on minds rather than on computers.”
I find Oatley’s proposal to be plausible, but things get tricky when one starts to think about just what’s being simulated. Thus much of what I say will be a critique. I am not particularly happy about this mode of proceeding as I would prefer simply to set forth a proper account based on the appropriate conceptual foundations. Alas, I am not aware of such an account and so must be content with a crude demonstration by via negativa.
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Monday, July 31, 2006
Miami Device: Paradise Regained?
Though I wouldn’t call myself a fan, I did watch Miami Vice back in the day. So, when the movie racked up some positive reviews (NYTimes, Slate, Salon) I went to see it. True to the reviews, it was a visually stylish action-packed cop show. Not deep, but fun; and rather different from the TV show, darker and short on Crockett-Tubbs banter and camaraderie.
But what’s it about? Sure, cops and drug deals and fast boats, hot babes tropical heat and living at the edge. But what’s driving all that? A. O. Scott observed:
Their private lives don’t take them far from the job. In his spare time Tubbs keeps company with a vice squad co-worker (Naomie Harris), while Crockett pursues a reckless affair with a drug kingpin’s wife and business associate (Gong Li), and these entanglements give the undercover work an extra jolt of intensity. By the time the final showdown with the bad guys comes around, Crockett and Tubbs have long since crossed the line that divides the professional from the personal.
But in the world of Michael Mann — a guiding creative force behind the small-screen “Miami Vice” and the writer and director of this movie version — no such line really exists. Whatever their particular jobs, his major characters tend to be men whose commitment to their professions transcends mere workaholism and becomes an all-consuming, almost operatic passion.
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Friday, July 28, 2006
Artifice and Freakin’ Reality
A recurring issue . . .
The animation blogosphere is up in arms over remarks Mike LaSalle made in a recent review of Monster House, an animated film using full computer generated imagery (CGI) and motion-capture (mocap) technology for character animation (like Polar Express). LaSalle said, in effect, that the mocap technology is the greatest thing since sliced bread and will allow animation finally to present deeply expressive human actions and expressions. The animators object, strongly: here, here, here, and here. I tend to agree with the animators: mocap has a way to go, and well-done traditional animation is fine.
This conversation is taking place on two levels. On the one hand, it’s about the appropriate technique for creating animated images of human beings—cf. this somewhat older post about Polar Express. But it’s also about nature and aims of animation. Disney aspired to realism in his animation; Warner Brothers went for a more abstracted and stylized look. CGI has aspired to photo-realism, but Brad Bird explicitly rejected it for his characters in The Incredibles. Is realism just one stylistic choice among many, or is it the standard such that any deviation must justify itself in . . . just what terms?
This issue arises more generally, of course, than in animation. It privileges live-action film over animation, in general, and realism over fantasy in live-action films and other narrative forms. Is this a bias we can lay at Plato’s feet? Is it deeper than that? Not so deep?
Does Shakespeare get his place in the canon because he evades the terms of this discussion?
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Thursday, July 27, 2006
More Stuff: Meta, Homer, Pennies from Heaven
Meta: About The Valve in Cyberspace
Over at Alexa we learn that The Valve currently ranks 570,861th in web traffic. But if we read their FAQ we also learn that rankings above 100,000 are not reliable. So maybe we’re at 135,289 K or 2,999,528 K. You can also get a list of the 318 sites currently linking in to The Valve.
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Tuesday, July 25, 2006
Fictional Characters 3: Analyze This
It's time to come at this issue from a different angle, and with a concrete literary example. Some years ago I published an essay on Much Ado About Nothing, a comedy, Othello, a tragedy, and The Winter's Tale, a romance.* All involve a protagonist who mistakenly believes the woman he loves to be unfaithful -- the Claudio-Hero plot in Much Ado. Though I argue the point in my essay, for the purposes of this post I will simply assume that that common plot feature betrays the same psycho-social problematic in each play. Thus in this group of three plays we have a "natural" experiment in which a single problematic is dramatically realized in three different kinds of play.
In the comedy the male protagonist makes the mistake during courtship; in the tragedy the mistake happens shortly after marriage; and in the romance, the mistake occurs well into the marriage. If we examine the relationships between the characters, we find that it gets closer as we move from one play to the next. And that's not all. There seem to be systematic differences among the configuration of characters in these plays. And that has led me to wonder whether or not those differences are related to the fact that we are dealing with three different genres, comedy, tragedy, and romance. Are these configurations merely incidental features of the plays or are they intrinsic to the different genres -- as realized by Shakespeare, if not in general? This line of thinking was suggested to me by a remark Frye had made in his Anatomy of Criticism, to the effect that a tragedy is a comedy where the last act, the reconciliation, has gone missing.
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Sunday, July 23, 2006
Fictional Characters 2: Norman Holland
Norman Holland devoted a chapter to “Character and Identity” in his 1968 The Dynamics of Literary Response. His objective was to justify the practice of psychoanalytic critics who provide psychoanalytic accounts of literary characters - Holland chose Mercutio as his example in this chapter. The argument he makes doesn’t really reach that far, but it does suggest how to think about readers - which is all I’m after at this point.
Holland begins with a nice five-page review of the history treatments of character in English criticism since the mid-17th century. Having done that he sets out (p. 266):
We have come, then, to an impasse. The old critics say we must think of dramatic characters as real people; the new critics say we must not. Logically, we cannot have it both ways, and logic comes down squarely against treating the characters as real.
He suggests that we look to the psychology of readers (pp. 271-272):
Continue reading "Fictional Characters 2: Norman Holland"Let us turn and look in another direction, namely, Smith College where in 1944 two psychologists performed a quite fascinating experiment. To a group of undergraduates, they showed an animated cartoon detailing the adventures of a large black triangle, a small black triangle, and a circle, the three of them moving in various ways in and out of a rectangle. After the short came the main feature: the psychologists asked for comments, and the Smith girls “with great uniformity” described the big triangle as “aggressive,” “pugnacious,” “mean,” “temperamental,” “irritable,” “power-loving,” “possessive,” “quick to take offense,” and “taking advantage of his size” (it was, after all, the larger triangle). Eight per cent of the girls even went so far as to conclude that this triangle had a lower I. Q. than the other.
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Friday, July 21, 2006
Stuff: metaphor, discipline, post-post-modernism
Metaphor, Neurons
Chris, over there at Mixing Memory, has conveniently consolidated links to old posts he’s done on neuroesthetics and on theories of metaphor in cognitive science. Eight posts in all. They’re interesting reading, the metaphor ones especially, as they make it clear that the cognitive linguistics line isn’t the only game in town.
Disciplinary Problems
Mark Lieberman over at the Language Log has an amusing riff on this cartoon:
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Tuesday, July 18, 2006
Fictional Characters 1: A. C. Bradley
That the characters in literary narratives are fiction is, of course, obvious. That we must, in some measure, treat them as real so that we may properly enter into their stories, this too is obvious. Though just what that entails is not so obvious. At least, so I take it, we must give these characters some purchase on our emotions. We must be concerned about their lives so that we are, by turns, pleased and distressed, saddened and filled with pleasure as we follow their stories.
How then, do we understand and explain the feelings and actions of these creatures of fiction? It has always seemed to me the one entirely appropriate answer to such questions is: That’s what the author requires of them. That answer, alas, is not terribly revealing; it reiterates the fictional nature of characters while tying it to a mysterious origin within an author - all of whom, we now know, are dead in the very nature of things.
Unsatisfactory though that assertion of authority may be, it somehow indicates something that, I fear, all too easily falls by the way when we attempt to explain characters’ actions in the same terms as we use to explain the actions of real people. While this is something that has bugged me for a long time, I have recently been prompted to think about these matters while reading evolutionary psychological and neural accounts which discuss literary characters in the same terms one would use to discuss real people. This seems odd to me, odd beyond my misgivings about evolutionary psychology in general. This sense of oddness has even prompted me to reconsider my use of psychoanalytic terms when discussing characters - though not when discussing (idealized) readers, which is altogether a different matter.
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Thursday, July 13, 2006
Essentialism run riot
I recently ran across a collection of Essentialist Explanations that is glossed thus: This page comprises a list of 794 “essentialist explanations” of the form “Language X is essentially language Y under conditions Z”.
Examples:
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Tuesday, July 11, 2006
Gradisil, SF, and Sacred Hunger
A few weeks ago I decided it was time to read a novel by our own Adam Roberts. So I went over to his website, looked around a bit, and decided to order his latest, Gradisil. It arrived in due course and, in due course, I read it and decided to engage Adam on it right here at The Valve.
But how to do that? It would be easy enough to write a review, said I to myself, but that would put Adam in a rhetorically awkward situation no matter how the review came out. So I opted for a different approach, and emailed him about it.
Here’s what I’m doing. First I’m going to say a little about the book, quoting from a description Adam’s posted at his web site. Then I’m going to write him a letter, here in public. I rather like the idea of addressing my remarks directly to him as opposed to some generalized Other. It affords us a bid of freedom. Maybe we can go exploring.
Others should feel free to join in the conversation.
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Monday, July 10, 2006
Whoops, there goes humanity!
Geoffrey Harpham, head of the National Humanities Center, has an article in American Scientist entitled “Science and the Theft of Humanity." I find it rather anodyne but, hey! that’s just me. After some run up about disciplinary boundaries and poaching (an invigorating thing) and stuff, he says:
Continue reading "Whoops, there goes humanity!". . . while humanistic scholars have been presuming core facts about human nature, human capacities and human being, scientists have been getting to work. One of the most striking features of contemporary intellectual life is the fact that questions formerly reserved for the humanities are today being approached by scientists in various disciplines such as cognitive science, cognitive neuroscience, robotics, artificial life, behavioral genetics and evolutionary biology. (Indeed, some of the most suggestive work is being done not just outside the humanities but outside the university, by inventors and innovators in the for-profit sector.)
Aspects of the question of autonomy are being taken up not just by philosophers but by investigators in cognitive science, genomics, biochemistry and the technology of bioinformatics. In all these fields, the presumed autonomy of the free human subject is being interrogated and complicated. The presumption of singularity that informs history is also being pressed hard by those working in computational science, animal intelligence, genetic engineering and evolutionary biology, all of which are making it harder to speak in traditional ways about the splendid self-sufficiency of the human species.
And creativity—the most splendid of all properties of human being, according to the humanities—is now being itself redefined by linguistics, cognitive science, neuroscience and even software development, which are assigning new meanings to this term, meanings that do not necessarily funnel back to the individual human being in a state of inspired frenzy.
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Saturday, July 08, 2006
What’s up with Beauty?
Alexander Alberro has recently written an essay review that begins thus:
Continue reading "What’s up with Beauty?"During the past decade, a number of texts by authors such as Arthur Danto, Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, Dave Hickey, Elaine Scarry, Peter Schjeldahl, and Wendy Steiner have sought to return our attention to the subject of beauty and in particular to the experience of the beautiful in contemporary art. The central questions raised by these authors, the questions they all in one way or another seem to need to address, are: Whatever happened to beauty? Why and how has it been disparaged? Who denigrated it? And why do so many art critics and historians no longer consider the judgment of beauty to be a valid exercise?
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Friday, June 23, 2006
Emmalina and Tasha: Culture in the Wild
I want to pick up on some of cultural dynamics stuff that’s been kicking around since the Moretti-fest, including Adam Roberts’ recent interest in the greatness of German music and some comments about the life cycle of blogs in Jonathan’s presentation of Alan Jacobs. I’ve just recently discovered YouTube, which, for those of you who don’t know, is an online environment where people can post and respond to video clips. It previewed starting in May 2005 and officially launched in December 2005. I found out about it because a number of classic cartoons have been posted there.
But that’s not what want to look at. I want to look at Emmalina, an 18 year old Australian who’s mostly been posting videos in which she presents herself. I have no particular reason for choosing Emmalina’s work over that of anyone else, no reason to believe she’s either typical or atypical of people who hang out at YouTube. I don’t know enough about the place to make such a judgment. Once I’d decided to look beyond those classic cartoons and to nose about in YouTube, however, I ran into Emmalina straight away.
Here’s how. I soon discovered that you could get a listing of videos ranked by the amount of discussion they elicited within YouTube. I looked at the list that specified how much commentary videos had received that day (there’s also a listing for the most recent week, month, and for all time) and one title caught my attention: “Did anyone need proof that I’m an attention whore?" That was Emmalina, dancing in her room to two different tunes, neither of which I recognized, at two different times, in two different outfits. The dancing was good, the videography artless, just a static camera. This clip had attracted upward of 250K viewings when I first saw it but now, a few days later, registers over 400K viewings. So far Emmalina has uploaded 30 videos and attracted almost 5000 subscribers. That is to say, 5000 people want to keep track of Emmalina’s videos. Just how that group is to be characterized - fan club, friends, the idly curious - is not at all obvious to me.
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Monday, June 19, 2006
Poll: How to Write Literary Criticism
This poll is an adjunct to John Emerson’s recent post on literary writing. One could argue—many have, many times—that the proper function of literary criticism is to illuminate or explicate the text, or body of texts. As such critical writing should be readily understandable to (sophisticated) readers of those texts. It is unnecessary and improper for criticism to require specialized knowledge and vocabulary beyond that needed to enjoy the literary texts themselves.
This is not my view. I don’t know whether, as stated, it is John Emerson’s view, though it seems to me consistent with what he argued. What I want to know is whether or not it is your view. I’m not particularly interested in arguing the point, I’m mostly looking for a show of hands. If you more or less agree, but don’t like my formulation, you might want to offer a different one. If you disagree, you might want to say why, though you need not do so at Holbonic length.
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Tuesday, June 13, 2006
Whither Literary Writing?
This post is in two parts. The second part is written by John Emerson, proprietor of Idiocentrism and frequent commenter at The Valve. John takes exception to a trend toward positivist thinking he sees, not only in my work, but in much of the work in the literary academy for the past 50 years. This first part of the post is my introduction to John’s remarks.
As should be obvious to anyone who’s read a number of my posts here at The Valve, or who has read some of my work (e.g. here) I’m interested in encouraging lines of inquiry that might, one day, emerge into a science of literature. The ambition is not a novel one; after all, I. A. Richards was conducting research on student response to poetry in the early 20th century. I think that a lot of good and interesting work can be done in this direction, and I have some fairly specific ideas on how to go about it.
At the same time I wonder about limits and purpose: Should all of literary studies go this way? Would it even be possible, at least in principle, for this to happen? The problem is that this line of investigation asks that we treat literary texts and literary experiences as specimens to be described, analyzed, probed, and modeled. Though the word “specimen” causes me to cringe a bit, it nonetheless seems apt. I can deal with that.
But is that how we want undergraduates to think about poems, plays, novels, movies, and so forth: as specimens?
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