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Friday, December 11, 2009
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.”
Comments
I’ve always been amazed at that philistine institution known as the bad sex awards, which could also be entitled - why the British middlebrows work as hard as they can to destroy the novel. Or perhaps - Auberon Waugh’s revenge. The idiocy of thinking that sex is best left offstage by the novelist, or that one should not write about it a, lyrically, b, clinically, or c, using any dirty words - makes for the UK winning the Psychopathological culture of sex award for, what is it, the one hundred and fiftieth year?
Perhaps we should also look at instituting the absence of sex award for a distinct slug of british novels.
OK. Twenty minutes into Fry’s lecture on New Historicism, and I was ready to stab my eyeballs out. Is this really what passes for teaching at Yale? I have no problems with lectures, but this was boring. What is the point of attending that class? Send one kid in to take notes, and copy those notes yourself. And is it anything that couldn’t be learned from reading a halfway decent intro to criticism book from Routledge?
Ugh. But at least it makes me feel like maybe I’m not such a bad lecturer as I worry I am sometimes.