About Bill20Benzon
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 Bill20Benzon
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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Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Avatar and Disability
Writing at Open Salon, Bill the Lizard (guesting for Chauncey DeVega) puts disability front-and-center in a reading of Avatar:
What many people seem to forget is that Jake Sully, the main character, is established early on in the story as being both an ostracized and emasculated character. Thus, he does not fall into the classic white privilege archetype that you see in white guilt fantasy.
Jake Sully is emasculated in a literal sense because of a combination of physical injury, financial inadequacy and family tragedy. Not only is Jake Sully a Marine who cannot walk or fight, but more tragically he knows that there is a cure for his injury, but cannot afford it. Further, Jake’s closest relative, his twin brother, has been killed in a meaningless act of violence that Jake could not prevent, and now Jake is now forced to step forward into a position that he does not feel he is smart enough to handle.
Thus, he compares Sully to Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises. Bill the Lizard goes on to point that, because of his disability, he did not enter the Avatar program from a position of privilege and entitlement. He was determined to “to apply his knowledge and skills towards his own self-care and development” had is “forced to operate outside of the two dominant spheres of influence at the Hell’s Gate facility on Pandora: the soldiers and the scientists.” That is to say, he entered the program as an Other. Thus “while the scientists are slowly accepting him, it’s very apparent that Sully would rather immerse himself within the Na’vi culture through his interactions with Neytiri.”
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Wednesday, January 06, 2010
Opsis
The current round of discussion of Avatar brings up an issue I think about from time to time: opsis, aka spectacle. In the Poetics Aristotle laid out six categories under which to examine drama: mythos (plot), ethos (character), lexis (diction), dianoia (theme/idea), melos (song), and opsis. He thought of opsis as a secondary matter, not so important as mythos or ethos. Fair enough. However, that was then, and now is now and movies aren’t plays.
Just how important is the look of a film in its overall impact? The story is the story regardless of whether the film is live action color, live action B & W, animated full (e.g. traditional Disney style), animated limited (most anime), CGI, etc. Character is not so independent of visual medium and at least some of the discussion about animation as a medium, hand-drawn vs. CGI (I’m thinking of Mike Barrier in particular), has to do with the presentation of character.
Avatar is scoring points – at least in some quarters – for its technical sophistication: CGI, motion-capture, 3D. And there are some in Hollywood who say that 3D in particular is the future (Jeffrey Katzenberg for one). Yes, much of Avatar certainly looks good. But I can’t say that the forest mysticism scenes look any better than similar scenes in Miyazaki (e.g. Princess Mononoki or Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind) and that’s mostly traditional hand-drawn cel animation. For that matter, Sita Sings the Blues looks as good as any film I’ve seen recently, and it’s all Flash animation. There are many ways of looking good.
But would Avatar be doing this well at the box office if it had been done as a superbly crafted work of hand-drawn cel animation (with the same cast doing the voice work)? I doubt it. But why not? Is the film’s look so tightly integrated with the story and character that the latter demand the former?
Of course, Avatar is but an example. I’ve just been re-watching Apocalypse Now, a live action film in shot in color. It’s a good-looking film, and a better one than Avatar. How much of that film is tied-up in the look?
Etc.
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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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Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Roy Edward Disney Has Died
Nephew of Walter Elias Disney, son of Walt’s brother, Roy Oliver Disney, Roy E. Disney has just died. He brought Disney’s animation division back to life in the mid-1980s. Obits: LA Times, NYTimes. Discussion at Cartoon Brew.
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Structural Instability: Two Examples and a Question
Structural instability is one of the things that interests me. What do I mean by structural instability? Consider these lines (17-24) from “Kubla Khan”:
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced:
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Of chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail:
And ‘mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
We’ve got eight lines, rhymed as four rhymed couplets (seething-breathing, forced-burst, hail-flail, ever-river), though the rhymes are not all strong, which, of course, is fine. But look at the syntactic organization; we’ve got three large phrases, each consisting of multiple clauses. The first phrase runs for three lines (17-19), as does the second (20-22), while the last phrase is only two lines long (23-24). Those first two phrases thus correspond to three rhymed couplets. The syntactic grouping is different from, cuts across, the rhyme grouping. That’s an example of structural instability.
Here we’ve got a string of 58 words. And we’ve got three ways of organizing that string into groups of substrings. First we break it into lines, eight of them. Now we’ve got to group those lines in units that are themselves smaller than the whole passage. One principle groups lines according to rhyme, another principle groups them according to syntax. These two principles produce different groupings. Hence, the two structural principles work against one another rather than reinforcing one another.
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Monday, December 14, 2009
Do Literary Texts Count as Strong Evidence about the Human Mind?
Now that Bérubé’s review of Boyd has got me thinking about “Darwinian criticism” or “evocriticism,” I want to look at a passage in Boyd’s book that is, in effect, the generalization of his criticism of the notion that romantic love is culturally specific. Here it is (p. 385):
Evocriticism can offer a literary theory both theoretical and empirical, proposing hypotheses against the full range of what we know of human and other behavior, and testing them. Though compatible with much earlier theory and criticism [that is to say, before “Theory” and its immediate precursors], it will reject some possibilities, such as assumptions of radical disjunction between human minds of different eras or cultures based on a general cultural constructivism or particular “epistemic shifts.”
It may be the case these days that “radical disjunction” between different eras and cultures is simply assumed, but there was a time when the disjunction was argued on the basis of evidence and, as far as I know, people are still making such arguments and presenting evidence in their favor. Isn’t that what historicist criticism is about? That is to say, Boyd seems to be implying that people just made up stuff about disjunction because they felt like it but that they didn’t have an plausible reason. He’s wrong on that, no?
And the reasons that have been and still are given involve both literary texts and non-literary texts. You read texts of different eras and cultures, you read them closely, and come to the conclusion that they thought and felt about X Y & Z differently than we do know or than those folks over that at that time. Hence there is a disjunction between our mind, their mind, and theirs as well. (I’ll dispense with “radical” as it seems to me to function as something of a weasel word in this general context. Just how much of a disjunction qualifies as radical?)
What I want to know is whether or not these various texts count as primary evidence, evidence that can’t be interpreted away? In particular, is it valid always to subordinate the evidence of those texts to the evidence of evolutionary psychology?
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Saturday, December 12, 2009
Romantic Love, Nature and Culture
That romantic love was culturally constructed was one of the big revelations of my undergraduate years at Hopkins. I had assumed that that’s just how things were, everywhere and for all time. And now I find out that it was invented at a certain time and place, 12th century Provençal. Kinda’ set me back a bit.
Of course, the Darwinians, psychologists and literary critics, don’t buy it. They regard romantic love as a universal feature of human nature and they’ve got the evidence to prove it. Thus tut-tutting the postmodern deconstructive social constructivists on this point is a minor feature of writing by Darwinian literary critics. And so we come to this passage in Michael Bérubé’s recent review of Brian Boyd’s On the Origin of Stories:
He scoffs, for example, at the idea that romantic love was invented at some point in the 12th century, because “cross-cultural, neurological, and cross-species studies have demonstrated the workings of romantic love across societies and even species.” 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.
I’m with Bérubé on this. I don’t think that C. S. Lewis and Denis de Rougement and others created romantic love out of whole cloth. Nor do I think the evolutionary psychologists are making up their arguments out of whole cloth. What I think is that things are complicated.
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Bérubé on Boyd’s Origin of Stories
Michael Bérubé has now reviewed Brian Boyd’s On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction. His review is online at American Scientist--yep, that’s right, “scientist.” Hope that doesn’t give you the heebie jeebies or the screamin’ meemies. He finds the first half, where Boyd lays out his psychological repertoire, to be “exhilarating,” but the second half, with its treatment of The Odyssey and Horton Hears a Who!, is disappointing. Discussions ongoing at Bérubé’s blog and at Crooked Timber.
My own review of Boyd is here.
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Friday, December 11, 2009
David Bordwell on Early Kurosawa
Criterion has released and 25 DVD set of the films of Akira Kurosawa and David Bordwell has taken that as an occasion to write about early Kurosawa.
During earlier decades, Japanese cinema had created a complex tradition. In part, it conducted a sustained dialogue with Western cinema. Tokyo had access to a wide range of Hollywood movies, and directors studied American technique closely. Just as Ozu would not be Ozu without his early fondness for Lubitsch and Harold Lloyd, Mizoguchi learned a good deal from von Sternberg. Between 1938 and 1942, alongside German imports Tokyo theatres screened Fury, Only Angels Have Wings, The Sea Hawk, The Awful Truth, Angels with Dirty Faces, Boys Town, Young Tom Edison, Only Angels Have Wings, and many French titles. In 1942, with Hollywood films now banned, one could still see René Clair’s Le Million and À Nous la liberté—films that had been circulating in Japan since the early 1930s and could have served as models of flashy sound technique. It’s misleading to talk of Ozu as “purely Japanese” and Kurosawa as “Western”: All Japanese directors of the 1920s and 1930s were deeply acquainted with Western cinema, and American cinema in particular furnished a foundation for most local filmmaking.
Yet there are crucial differences. Japanese cinema welcomed extremes of stylistic experimentation that would have been rare in Western cinema. The 1920s swordplay films (chambara) pioneered rapid editing, handheld camerawork, and abstract pictorial design. (I supply some examples here.) Directors working in the contemporary-life mode (the gendai-geki) experimented similarly, often achieving remarkable visual effects and bold stylization. Mizoguchi and Ozu have become our emblems of this creative rigor and richness, but they are the peaks of what was a collective approach to filmic expression. Not every film was an experiment—indeed, most behave like Hollywood or European productions—but many ordinary movies, signed by unheralded directors, exhibit flashes of unpredictable imagination. This was the tradition of permanent innovation that directors of the Kurosawa-Kinoshita generation inherited.
He concludes:
Kurosawa remains on our agenda through his commitment to a mode of storytelling that pursues vigor without lapsing into the diffuse busyness of today’s spectacles. He stretches our senses through staccato action, yet he drills into other moments so implacably that we are forced to see deeper. He lifts certain Japanese and imported traditions to a new pitch, in the process often creating something indelible and enduring.
The essay has many screen shots illustrating Bordwell’s formalistic analysis and has a short bibliographic essay at the end.
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Fantastic Mr. Fox is, well, Fantastic
It’s one of the best animated films of the year, and, these days, that means its one of the best films, period.
Wes Anderson directed this Roald Dahl classic, with the Fox and his wife being voiced by George Clooney and Meryl Streep (IMDB listing). It uses stop-motion animation that’s deliberately just a tad jerky, which is just fine and dandy. A wide-ranging palette, mostly saturated, leaning toward warm tones. Nice fur textures, nice teeth, too. I particularly like the plan views where you see a cross-section of the local topography with all the fox tunnels underground in relation to things above ground. A nice touch, juxtaposed against teeth-baring close-ups. That is to say, a pleasing range of imagery.
The story? Family stuff. He and she, get caught, get married, years later he’s settled down (columnist for the local paper), they have a kid, somewhat of an oddball, and a cousin comes visiting. Conflict within the family. Conflict between the foxes and the humans, and then all the animals vs. the humans. Could even be Nature vs. Culture, entirely within foxdom.
Here’s what NYC animator Michael Sporn says:
When I saw all the advance bits and pieces of The Fantastic Mr. Fox, I hated what I saw. I could imagine only negatives. The more I saw, however, the more I was being won over by the voice cast. When I saw the film, I loved it. I mean, I LOVED it. I’m looking forward to seeing it again . . . and again. Wes Anderson pulled together a brilliant film full of charm and wit and intelligence. It not only was one of my favorite animated films of the year, it was one of my favorite films . . . period.
Go see it. Now.
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Links: Sex, Theory, Prejudice, and Empathy
Bad Sex in Fiction Awards (h/t Bruce Jackson), e.g. Booker Prize winner John Banville: “She puts her hands flat against his chest and leans into him in a simulacrum of a swoon, making a mewling sound...” Nothing like a simulacrum to get the glands in a tither.
Literary Theory via online video at Academic Earth, from hermeneutics through New Critics and Russian Formalists to Post-Colonialism and Queery Theory in 25 lectures by Yale’s Paul Fry. Rated A.
Reducing Prejudice with Fiction: “Recently, however, Elizabeth Levy Paluck (Princeton) conducted the most amazing field experiment in Rwanda, examining whether a radio soap opera could facilitate reconciliation between Hutu and Tutsi listeners in the aftermath of the 1994 genocide. This was a large-scale study, involving 12 different community groups (6 experimental, 6 control), and 480 participants, 99% of whom were in Rwanda at the time of the genocide.” Read the rest at OnFiction.
Kiddie Lit and empathy: “In light of these convergent findings from separate research groups in three different countries, it seems increasingly likely that exposure to children’s storybooks (and perhaps movies), helps them to develop an understanding of other people and their internal states.”
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