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
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
Style Matters
Intellectual style, that is.
When, some 35 years ago, I turned toward the cognitive sciences and away from structuralism & post-structuralism, deconstruction, and the rest, the turn was driven as much by intellectual style as by epistemological conviction. No, I didn’t have much affection for the predicate calculus, which I learned in a course in symbolic logic (it fulfilled my math requirement), but I did like the intellectual style I found in linguistics books, the sense of rigor and explicit order. I also liked the diagrams. A lot.
There were large sections in my dissertation—Cognitive Science and Literary Theory—where the major burden of the argument was in the diagrams. I’d work out the diagrams first and then write prose commentary on them. That modus operandi pleases me a great deal. In the preface to Beethoven’s Anvil, which had some diagrams, but not many, I refer to my thinking in that book as speculative engineering. I like that term: speculative engineering.
There are other intellectual styles, obviously. Some very different from my diagrammatic and speculative engineering style.
Take New Historicism for instance. I’ve not read much in that vein, but I’ve read some, and some of that I’ve found quite interesting and delightful. If New Historicism is, as I’ve been told, the closest thing literary studies currently has to a dominant methodological practice, I can’t help but thinking that is as much about intellectual style as about epistemological conviction.
It is, or can be, a very writerly style. One gathers a pile of stories, vignettes, and passages from various writers, literary and not, and arranges them more according to rhythm, surprise, and repose than for logical progression and finality — though such matters come into play as well. It is a style that can be a bit like literature itself, at least prose fiction, though one can sneak in some lyrical passages here and there, and maybe even a bit of insistent rhythm.
* * * * *
I’ve got two suspicions about style matters:
1.) In anyone’s intellectual ecology, style preferences are deeper and have more inertia than explicit epistemological beliefs.
2.) Some of the pigheadedness that often crops up in discussions about humanities vs. science is grounded in stylistic preference that gets rationalized as epistemological belief.
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Sunday, March 14, 2010
A Defense of Literary Studies Anyone?
During the first minute or two of the clip below, Alec Baldwin gives an impassioned brief for the fundamental importance of acting, his craft. Has any humanist recently defended the humanities this unequivocally? Has any literary scholar defended the academic study of literature with like passion and conviction? And I mean the academic study of literature, not literature itself, that’s different.
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Saturday, March 13, 2010
Disciplinary Tension? Or, Holbo Meet Hillis
We need to make every effort to defend, in changed circumstances, the tradition that makes the humanities in the university the place especially charged with the combination of Bildung and Wissenschaft, ethical education and pure knowledge.
Curiosity about a pendant one Joshua Landy hung on a 2009 post by John Holbo led me, first to Landy’s comment (about Moretti on Sherlock Holmes) and then back to Holbo’s post. And that reminded me that I had intended to bounce a post off of Holbo’s. So here it is.
John is discussing a panel discussion he’d attended once upon a time not all that long ago. He remarks:
I was struck, in particular, by one panel discussion I attended at which it was more or less agreed by various participants that scholarship and pedagogy of literary history are, at present, mutually ill-suited. . . . On the one hand, you need a set of texts that will provide you with sufficient evidence to pronounce intelligently—justifiably—on such subjects as ‘the nineteenth century American novel’. On the other hand, you need a set of texts to fill out a 12-week syllabus for an undergraduate course of that title. There isn’t any one set of texts that can do both jobs.
Of course it isn’t so surprising that the most sophisticated scholarship goes beyond what can be crammed into an undergraduate semester. But there is more to the point, it seems to me. There seems to be a tendency for good undergraduate pedagogy to recapitulate bad (as opposed to merely incomplete or preliminary) historiography. The teacher finds him or herself proceeding as if ‘the nineteenth century novel’ (pick your suitably broad subject) is the sort of thing that is at all likely to show up through the lens of, say, eight novels to be read. Reading a small number of novels and writing a few interpretive essays can be a fine and enriching way to spend a few months. But it’s not the same kind of enriching activity as studying the novel historically, with scholarly rigor. In a sense no one really thinks otherwise. So tension between pedagogy and historiography is not just tension between for-students simplification and for-scholars sophistication. It is tension between certain notions of value and certain standards of validity.
Let me offer a brief interpretive gloss on this tension between value and validity, which may only have emerged into view recently but has been latent for a somewhat longer time.
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Wednesday, March 10, 2010
Time’s Arrow in Literary Space
Is literary time directional? In some sense the answer, obviously, is “yes.” There is no doubt that Pride and Prejudice was written before A Passage to India. The issue, however, is whether or not Pride and Prejudice must necessarily, in some sense, have been written before A Passage to India and, if so, in what sense it must have been written first.
Stephen Greenblatt comes close to suggesting what I’m up to early in “The Cultivation of Anxiety: King Lear and His Heirs” (Learning to Curse, Routledge, 1990, pp. 80—98) which opens with a long passage from an early 19th century magazine article on the how the Reverend Francis Wayland broke the will of his 15-month old child. Greenblatt notes that “Wayland’s struggle is a strategy of intense familial love, and it is the sophisticated product of a long historical process whose roots lie at least partly in early modern England, in the England of Shakespeare’s King Lear.” To be sure, one need not read that as any more than a statement of historical contingency, that Shakespeare’s play just happened to have been written before Wayland’s article. But when one considers the larger institutional changes Greenblatt considers – from the public space of the king’s court (and Elizabethan stage) to the privacy of the bourgeois home – one may suspect that Greenblatt is tracking the directionality of literary time, that one text must necessarily have been earlier in the historical process in which both texts exist.
That directionality is what I want to look at, but not primarily on the scale of decades-to-centuries. My principle example involves three early texts by Osamu Tezuka, the great Japanese mangaka. He was born in Nov 1928, which puts him in his early 20s when these texts were written during the American occupation of Japan after World War II. The three texts have become known collectively as his SF trilogy: Lost World (1948), Metropolis (1949), and Next World (1951). Thus, they are early texts; in particular, they are before the Tetsuwan Atomu (Astro Boy) stories that became the centerpiece of his work for almost two-decades.
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Tuesday, March 09, 2010
The “Crisis” in Literary Studies, by Mimi & Eunice
Nina Paley’s been working on a new cartoon strip, Mimi & Eunice, and posting strips on Facebook. She’s posted two that, while of general applicability, seem apt for the current situation in literary studies. Here’s what’s been going on since the French landed in Baltimore:
& that’s pretty much what I think about much of the “oh woe is us” that’s been visible here and there for the past decade, especially as many of the complaints are simply recirculations of complaints I heard back at Hopkins in the late 60s and early 70s. These aren’t complaints seeking new ways of doing things; these complaints are just seeking justification for misery.
Here’s the way out of the hole:
That’s what happened to me over thirty years ago.
Going meta: My use of Nina’s two strips exemplifies an argument Kenneth Burke made in “Literature as Equipment for Living,” Philosophy of Literary Form (UCal Press 1973), pp. 293-307.
EDIT: Nina’s now posted some strips to her blog, along with a discussion about what type of license to use when releasing them to the world-at-large. (I got the strips from Facebook, which is pretty public, but not completely so.)
Mimi & Eunice direct: http://mimiandeunice.com/
EDIT: More cartoon commentary on literary studies. (Not by Nina, but she pointed me to the site.)
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Tuesday, March 02, 2010
Interesting Talk
I’ve been listening to Craig “Late Late Show” Ferguson on YouTube and find him quite interesting. For example, he did a great interview with Desmond Tutu. Here’s the first part of his recent conversation with Stephen Fry. They did the conversation without (benefit of) a studio audience. Whoaa!
They have an interesting opening conversation kicked off by Craig confessing (at 1:07) that, in the early days, he thought Stephen had it all together when, in fact, though Fry may have been quite successful, but he was a wreck. And so on and so forth. In the second segment there’s a throwaway reference to Russell and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica in a conversation about Twitter. Jeeze! Sounds like these are educated people.
Principia Mathematica!?#! Late night TV in America. Can it be long before hell freezes over?
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Thursday, February 18, 2010
Avatar Rooted in Cameron’s Childhood Experiences in the Canadian Woods
Cameron talks to Charlie Rose:
Cameron had to fight the studios to play the environmental and spiritual so prominently in Avatar.
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Tuesday, February 02, 2010
Human Rights, Empathy, and Literature
Writing at OnFiction, Keith Oatley follows Lynn Hunt (Inventing Human Rights, 2007) in arguing that the notion of equality of rights among humans is at least partially grounded in literature:
Hunt’s finding is that invention of the idea of the equality of rights, declarations of rights, and the changes in society that have followed them, depended on two factors. One was empathy, which really is a human universal. “It depends,” says Hunt, “on a biologically based ability to understand the subjectivity of other people and to be able to imagine that their inner experiences are like one’s own” (p. 39). The other was the mobilization of this empathy towards those who were outside people’s immediate social groupings. Although Hunt does not attribute this mobilization entirely to literary art, she concludes that the novel contributed to it substantially. “Reading novels,” she says, “created a sense of equality and empathy through passionate involvement in the narrative” (p. 39). Many novels contributed. One that Hunt discusses is Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) written by a man and inviting empathetic identification with a woman of a humble social class.
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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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