About Jonathan
Jonathan Goodwin is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.
Email Address: joncgoodwin@gmail.com
Website: http://jgoodwin.net
Posts by Jonathan
Friday, January 18, 2008
Value-Judgment Friday
Seems like a great idea for a recurring feature, doesn’t it? Anyway, here’s Ron Rosenbaum, writing about whether Nabokov’s “The Original of Laura” should be burned: “Think of that: the final ‘distillation’ of the work of perhaps the greatest, certainly the most complex, writer of the past century."
1) Perhaps the greatest?
2) Certainly the most complex?
I don’t like to argue about #1. Let’s try the other. Did Nabokov write anything as complex as a Harry Stephen Keeler novel? Not in terms of plot. Did he openly disdain the most obvious counterexample, even if you somehow agree that he was #1 equivalent with Joyce? Yes. Would anyone care to argue that one of Nabokov’s works is more complex than Finnegans Wake? What are other complexity contenders for those in #1 set with Nabokov, however you choose to construe that?
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Tuesday, October 23, 2007
10/12
I suspect that this sentiment from Doris Lessing is going to get a lot of negative attention, if it’s not taken out of context. (Well, even if it obviously is. You know how that goes.)
But I wondered briefly about what would have happened had the IRA decided to kill the same magnitude of people at once during Thatcher’s regime. Has there been a fictional treatment of this or a related idea? (Would they have attacked Boston or New York, for example?)
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Sunday, October 07, 2007
The Mirror Was Watching Us
"Bioy Casares had dined with me that night and talked with us at length about a great scheme for writing a novel in the first person using a narrator who omitted or corrupted what happened and who ran into various contradictions, so that only a handful of readers, a very small handful, would be able to decipher the horrible or banal reality behind the novel” ("Tlön Uqbar, Orbis Tertius").
John made a similar inquiry a while ago, but would you care to propose an existing novel meeting Bioy’s criteria? The banal interpretation seems especially interesting to me, but you have to be among the handful in any case: i. e., not something that’s been amply discussed in the literature.
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Saturday, September 15, 2007
A Claim
Alan Wolfe is quoted in this NYTBR piece: “Everyone’s read ‘Things Fall Apart’ ” — Chinua Achebe’s novel about postcolonial Nigeria — “but few people have read the Yeats poem that the title comes from.”
Even before the last season of The Sopranos, this was so far from literal, allegorical, or anagogic truth that my eyes are still burning. Did Wolfe write this somewhere other than an email? (Emails are quoted.) Was this a silvercroak from Orthanc, so that it might be printed?
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Thursday, April 05, 2007
Leroy Searle’s “Literature Departments and the Practice of Theory”
The Valve has admirably or irresponsibly avoided discussions trending meta about matters such as theory, the profession, and the like. I would be interested, however, in hearing what you think of Searle’s piece. The English building at the U of Washington is apparently more of mass oubliette than panopticon, for example. (I haven’t seen it, but it sounds like a specimen of the “prison-functionalist” school of campus architecture. Turlington Hall at the U of Florida, affectionately referred to as the “Death Star,” is another noteworthy example.) Allow me to use a footnote for the obligatory quotation:
See, for example, Lindsay Waters’s sobering comments in Enemies of Promise: Publishing, Perishing, and the Eclipse of Scholarship (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm, 2004) on the ongoing decline in book buying even by libraries, which together with the current tax laws on inventory held for sale, puts the average sale of university press books, almost all of which are printed with the aid of subvention, at under 300 copies before they are remaindered. In the same context belongs the unprecedented presidential letter to the membership of the MLA from Stephen Greenblatt about four or five years ago concerning the crisis in book publication in the humanities, which directly affects the ability of our junior colleagues to get tenure. They just have to publish a book—and it is in far too many cases, a middling dissertation dished up as a book that answers to no compelling need and will not be read in any case. It is in every way a self-destructive syndrome.
Yikes. (I personally don’t buy the “will never be read” argument. It will, when it has to be.)
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Tuesday, March 20, 2007
Two Things
The lowest (or highest, depending) ordinal to be used before “-rate” is third. I was reading one of the n+1 threads, and someone referred to someone else as a “tenth-rate Satie.” Could you really begin to distinguish between a ninth-rate and eight-rate Sartre, for example?
Also, my favorite entry at “The Rosewater Chronicles” is this selection of readers’ reports. If I may quote one:
You stupid fuck! How can you submit to us an article with this incredibly stupid footnote? You obviously have not learned anything. . . . Keep playing around with Walter Benjamin and you will have a brilliant career among assholes such as yourself.
I gathered that there was a backstory. I have some that I’d like to quote from, but a combination of cowardice and discretion prevents me. Nothing as piquant as the above, however. But by all means feel free to share.
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Thursday, March 01, 2007
Alvin Plantinga Admits There’s No Political Bias in Academia
In his review of Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion, a volume I don’t think has been discussed here but has attracted attention (and criticism for being theologically unsophisticated) from some quarters, Plantinga writes “Here it’s not easy to take them seriously; religion-bashing in the current Western academy is about as dangerous as endorsing the party’s candidate at a Republican rally.“
Unless I’m mistaken, he means that it’s as easy to bash religion as it is to endorse a Republican candidate. I don’t think, from the tone of the rest of his piece, that he means that there are negative consequences for this so-called bashing, so therefore he admits that, as well all know, endorsing a Republican candidate is widely done in the humanities at least and the source of no fuss.
I found this review from the dispensable (yes, “dispensable,” as it’s universally described as “indispensable” and I’m a contrarian) Political Theory Daily.
UPDATE: Some more from Plantinga.
This paragraph is from his SEP article “Religion and Science"
Next, note many thinkers going back at least to Nietzsche (Nietzsche 2003) and possibly William Whewell (Curtis 1986) have pointed to a potentially worrisome implication of evolutionary theory. The worry can be put as follows. According to orthodox Darwinism, the process of evolution is driven mainly by two mechanisms: random genetic mutation and natural selection. The former is the chief source of genetic variability; by virtue of the latter, a mutation resulting in a heritable, fitness-enhancing trait is likely to spread through that population and be preserved as part of the genome. It is fitness-enhancing behavior and traits that get rewarded by natural selection; what get penalized are maladaptive traits and behaviors. In crafting our cognitive faculties, natural selection will favor cognitive faculties and processes that result in adaptive behavior; it cares not a whit about true belief (as such) or about cognitive faculties that reliably give rise to true belief.
I believe the passage from Nietzsche he means is the fragment entitled “Against Darwinism”:
---the utility of an organ does not explain its origin, on the contrary!
---for the longest time while a quality is developing, it does preserve or prove useful to the individual, least of all in the struggle with external circumstances and enemies
---what, after all, is “useful?” One must ask, “Useful in regard to what?” E.g., something useful for maintaining the individual over time might be unfavorable to its strength and magnificence; what preserves the individual might simultaneously hold it fast and bring its evolution to a standstill. On the other hand, a deficiency, a degeneration, may be of the highest use, inasmuch as it has a stimulatory effect on other organs. Likewise, a state of distress may be a condition of existence, in that it makes the individual smaller to the point where it coheres and doesn’t squander itself.
The rest of the fragment seems to point at a vitalist criticism of natural selection, which doesn’t concern me as much. I believe that it’s a psychological truism that healthy human belief tends towards the self-deceiving; happier people think they’re better-liked, more attractive, and more talented than other people would judge them to be. Nietzsche clearly anticipated the “less they know, the less they know it” effect, and his criticism of Darwinism seems based on psychological insight and aesthetics, both categories difficult to extrapolate from the theory itself.
I know that Plantinga’s argument against naturalism has attracted several philosophical rebuttals, many of them attempting to outdo one another in their deployment of Bayesian algebra. I also know that this type of thought experiment is used in several of the counterarguments; but doesn’t Plantinga’s argument for theism work as well for a deceiver deity, a demiurge familiar to us from various contemporary neo-Gnosticisms?
I talked about Gosse’s Omphalos in class yesterday, so perhaps the idea’s fresh in my mind.
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Tuesday, January 30, 2007
He Died Old
I thought it wonderful that De Quincey refers to J. C. Adelung’s (later volumes the work of J. S. Vater and Adelung fils) Mithridates, or The Universal Table of Languages when the “Malay” comes to visit in the Confessions. Observe
My knowledge of the Oriental tongues is not remarkably extensive, being indeed confined to two words—the Arabic word for barley and the Turkish for opium (madjoon), which I have learned from Anastasius; and as I had neither a Malay dictionary nor even Adelung’s Mithridates, which might have helped me to a few words, I addressed him in some lines from the Iliad, considering that, of such languages as I possessed, Greek, in point of longitude, came geographically nearest to an Oriental one. He worshipped me in a most devout manner, and replied in what I suppose was Malay. In this way I saved my reputation with my neighbours, for the Malay had no means of betraying the secret. He lay down upon the floor for about an hour, and then pursued his journey. On his departure I presented him with a piece of opium. To him, as an Orientalist, I concluded that opium must be familiar; and the expression of his face convinced me that it was. Nevertheless, I was struck with some little consternation when I saw him suddenly raise his hand to his mouth, and, to use the schoolboy phrase, bolt the whole, divided into three pieces, at one mouthful. The quantity was enough to kill three dragoons and their horses, and I felt some alarm for the poor creature; but what could be done? I had given him the opium in compassion for his solitary life, on recollecting that if he had travelled on foot from London it must be nearly three weeks since he could have exchanged a thought with any human being. I could not think of violating the laws of hospitality by having him seized and drenched with an emetic, and thus frightening him into a notion that we were going to sacrifice him to some English idol. No: there was clearly no help for it.
Some preliminary rummaging tells me that Adelung and Vater were the first to identify the structural similarities between Catawba and Woccon; does anyone else have wonders from the allgemeine Sprachenkunde? Alternately, I’m teaching De Quincey tomorrow and am interested in hearing how that’s gone from those of you who’ve done likewise.
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Thursday, October 19, 2006
Graduate Study for The 21st Century--A Good Book
After coming across Geneviève Brassard’s review [Muse] in the latest issue of Pedagogy, I read Gregory Colón Semenza’s book, subtitled “How to Build An Academic Career in the Humanities.” Equipped with an admiring foreword by Michael Bérubé, it’s a remarkably detailed and pungent volume, filled with meritocratic ethos and practical advice. I’d summarize its basic message as “get to work, parasite.”
You’ll learn that there’s a “mid-Atlantic university” who won’t hire anyone without at least two articles and who hasn’t taught at least ten courses, for example, an instance that invites generalization. You’ll be reminded several times that diligent industry is the key to academic success, not native intelligence, talent, flair, or even pedigree. There are sample everythings--conference proposals, job acceptance letters, varieties of dissertation abstract. Its advice about teaching evaluations might be held to be somewhat contradictory, but there’s probably a dialectical justification for the assertion that they are nearly meaningless, are the cause of grade inflation, and should be abolished (120), and the (mostly) high figures prominently listed in the sample teaching portfolio.
It’s a book that I wish had been written when I began graduate school, and one that I would encourage anyone currently in a graduate program, contemplating enrolling in one, or even having recently finished their degree to read. (Though Semenza works hard at providing examples from other disciplines, I’d say that its English Dept. origins show.) I mostly agree with the idea that pre-professionalism creates a more meritocratic academic culture, though I think the extent to which this is happening is debatable.
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Sunday, October 01, 2006
Linguistic Diversity An Asset
I remember a book, dating from the height of bicameral enthusiasm, which seemed to argue that Polynesian seafarers, speaking what might have been termed a low-noun or high-abstraction language, were thus in much better contact with their holistic half and could thereby perform abstractional feats of navigation that might defeat the intuition--if not the instruments--of the rocketmakers of Peenemünde.
This variety of linguistic relativism--not really derivable from S or W--is not modish and believed widely to be false. All languages have identical expressive power, at least in whole. From this belief, Walter Benn Michaels lab-ideates that the disappearance of languages is not to be lamented, since there will always be another, as good as any other in every relevant way.
I believe this to be an exercise in Fishian contrarianism, and the linguistic details about what “linguistic relativism” and “expressive power” actually mean can only bring what’s at stake here into sharper focus. In the spirit of the exercise, however, I want to suggest that it the argument applies to the burning of books (in any language) just as well. Most books are unread and those read will increasingly become unread as books grow and mutate. While every book is unique in its own way, that uniqueness stems from its diachronicity--the interaction of a means of expression with its particular time, interpreted, inevitably, developmentally by the reader. Since there is no eternal past for us to move into, whatever can be transmitted from this diachronic encounter already has been. Thus, burning the books that have affected us will not matter, as the effect is ineradicable; and burning the books that have not affected us does not matter, because they couldn’t change our knowledge of the past or thoughts about the present or future anyway. Whatever is truly unique in a book is lost in historical translation, so therefore its means of transmission might as well not exist, especially if it takes up valuable computing and recreational space. (Ontogenically, yes, such disappearances might matter; but that’s noise.) Books are not discrete entities from the historical view. They are connected to each other in patterns anterior to language, and the node-bearing books, those of connective significance, have already been identified.
Do you have the intuition that it’s a far worse fate for a language to disappear than a book?
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Thursday, July 20, 2006
Kirk’s Yard
I don’t know if you’ve seen Alan Liu’s sensible statements on Wikipedia, but I asked the students in the Intro to Media Studies class to comment upon them. Most of their responses seemed to agree with Liu about the proper use of Wikipedia. Several of them indicated that they used Wikipedia as a source of infotainment.
And one considerably entertaining thing I’ve noticed recently is the gratuitious Star Trek reference. For example, the entry on the Iranian airliner shot down by the U. S. S. Vincennes in 1988 contains one, as does the entry on ex post facto. Imagine my surprise, then, when after reading this somewhat oracular passage from Beyond Good and Evil: “the sacrifices of the first-born in all prehistoric religions belong here, as well as the sacrifice of the Emperor Tiberius in the Mithras grotto of the isle of Capri, that most gruesome of all Roman anachronisms” (Basic Writings of Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann, 257), I found that the inevitable did not manifest, being instead modestly tucked away on a disambiguation page.
I’m fond of comparing Britannica and Wikipedia entries on subjects such as the end of Tiberius, and I’d have to say here that the EB has it better.
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Tuesday, July 11, 2006
Culturally Sophisticated Self-Fashioning
If you’re anything like me, you’ve been waiting for Brian Leiter’s response to Alexandra Heifetz’s recent n+1 article.
Leiter’s response is measured and largely free of invective. Here’s what I think is the key paragraph ("graf"):
“Continental" for these folks does not mean “Continental philosophy,” as Ms. Heifetz’s spectacularly ignorant remarks well illustrate: she obviously hasn’t a clue about the thinkers, ideas, and arguments that constitute the glorious traditions of post-Kantian philosophy in Germany and France over the last two hundred years. “Continental,” rather, is more of a non-cognitive term, expressing something like the following: “yeah for left-wing opining about culture and politics, that’s philosophy.” As readers know, I’m a big fan of left-wing opining, but it ain’t philosophy, Continental or otherwise. This juvenile usage of “Continental” is widespread, I fear, among those who are philosophically illiterate but fashion themselves culturally sophisticated.
I don’t recall much in the way of discussion about these differing definitions of “continental” and “analytic” inquiry here, particularly as applied to questions of literary theory, and I thought it would be good to solicit some opinions from the readership.
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Sunday, June 18, 2006
Alan Jacobs on Blogging
Jacobs, a former prolific commenter here at the Valve, writes, “With few exceptions, posts at the ‘academic’ or ‘intellectual’ blogs I used to frequent have become the brief and cursory announcement of opinions, not the free explorations of new and dynamic thinking.“
What bullshit.
And what could be disturbingly perverse about Miéville? (Other than once referring to John Crowley’s work as “twee,” a word that should be retired from the language.)
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Saturday, June 17, 2006
Saturday Morning
Suppose that you could only own one of the Library of America editions. Which one would it be and why? (I don’t know if the Melville one is valuable, but please no.)
I’d probably go with this one.
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Sunday, June 11, 2006
Familiar Foreign Words
Here are those that are not italicized according to the 13th edition:
effendi
pasha
élan
barranca
remuda
trattoria
mea culpa
fazenda
ménage
weltschmerz
kappellmeister
a priori
And the 15th:
pasha
weltanschauung
in vitro
a priori
recherché
the kaiser
de novo
eros and agape
I wonder how many of those from the 13th (or is it thirteenth? I really can’t look it up at the moment) are holdovers.
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