ADDENDUM: And, you know, I’m rather skeptical about much of the work that’s been done in the name of cognitive criticism or cognitive rhetoric. It seems to me that those critics have missed the point of cognitivism, which is computation. And those diagrams that I so love are “about” computation. That is to say, the cognitive criticism I find wanting has no room for diagrammatic elegance. That’s one thing, the visual elegance. But, when this translates to “epistimontology” they become interpreted as mechanisms, which means that those literary cognitivists lack any sense of mechanism. Without that sense of mechanism, what’s the point of going cognitive?

But I almost always begin my structures with a “problem to be solved,” I was also a math major, I’m also (more successfully) a software engineer, and I also believe in the importance of attending to evidence. So one thing that’s interesting about my (and your, and Luther’s—and Roubaud’s and Nabokov’s and so on’s) aestheticism is how unconflicted we feel compared to how much conflict received wisdom would predict.

A few years ago when I first got the idea of writing a long essay on truth-in-citations and a longer essay on ethical criticism, I thought I’d finish the loose trilogy with a long essay on the role of beauty in math and science, but now I wonder if I’ll live so long.

a) You’re not a very good professor if you aren’t saying stuff that’s new to your students.

b) Remember the distinction between “doing humanities” and “teaching humanities”; how many lecturers in civil engineering spend their time building bridges?

c) Which are these arts organisations that don’t value originality?

I remember loving the oracular, gnostic atmosphere of Bloom’s early work; the twists and turns of Derrida; the Aristotelian (sp?) categorizing and defining of Frye’s *Anatomy of Criticism*; the fragmentary genius of Norman O. Brown; the passion of Charles Olson’s essays on poetics.

And it’s one of the issues I face when I teach high school English.  It’s a prep school, so the students write largely analytical essays on literature.  But the problem is that, while I want formal writing from them, I don’t want toneless, bloodless writing either.  But too often students adopt what they consider “the academic voice” when they write, and it’s mindnumbing to read.

One approach I’ve discovered that is beginning to solve this is to teach them that their introductions might begin in the first-person, almost like New Historicism.  Rather than begin with some lame quotation or definition or generalization, their essays might, I say, begin by putting the reader in the a-ha moment when you as a reader first noticed the problem or asked the question that the essay investigates.

This little infusion of narrative and voice into the intro spills out into the entire essay.  So I get essays that begin with something like:

“When I first read Book 5 of *The Odyssey*, I was stunned to learn that Odysseus, the great hero discussed throughout the first four books, has spent seven years sitting on a rock, gazing out to sea, paralyzed.  Why, I wondered, did he not think to build a boat before Kalypso tells him to do so?”

The thesis is then an answer to their question, which I now care about because they’ve made it personal and interesting to me.  It’s also *their* thesis, their own answer to a question they actually wondered about. 

Ultimately, I wish I had more examples for my students of clearly-written, thesis-driven critical essays that still have a sense of voice and tone.  The brief essays in the new Marcus/Sollors Literary History of American Literature have been my best resource.  I wish there was something similar written on British lit and world lit!

I would say not that style is important to the humanities, I would say that all humanities scholarship and theory is devoted to post-hoc justification of stylistic preferences.

Luther, since The Hurt Locker won all those Academy awards (first really good Academy award winner since Silence of the Lambs), it’s hard for me to put much effort into coming to its rescue. I made the basic points at Aaron’s post: this is a good solid war movie made at a time when good solid movies of any genre are rare and precious (albeit not based on a novel on Sapphire), with all the war movie virtues and some smart (if riskily understated) formal innovations. Of course no movie can take the place of a good journalistic or historical or sociological analysis, but presumably we can all still read. And of course any artifact can be examined as a symptom of its makers or its audience, and that examination might be valuable in its own right.

Of course they are, and there’s no “simply” about it. People spend their entire careers as (say) scholars of Tang Chinese poetry attempting to say something new about (say) Tang Chinese poetry. A scholar who just repeats what someone else has already said isn’t a very good scholar.

I like your blogroll suggestions.

Ray, I feel the same about the other authors on the list. I have no idea why they don’t cross-post (or just post) here more, or at all.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve developed a distressing tendency to seize upon opportunities, no matter how slim, to relive the persecutions of my youth. I hope at least it’s less destructive to seek out meager attacks on Ulysses than to seek out meager attacks on Christianity or atheism or unfettered capitalism.

“Flexibility is a word that describes several aspects of the law school. There is the flexibility afforded by having two fully integrated programs: a part-time program and a full-time program. This means a student may switch from one to the other, after the first year, merely by indicating the wish to do so. Both programs are taught by the same full-time faculty and there is no distinction made as to whether a student is a graduate of the full-time or the part-time program. This flexibility means a student who is willing to go full-time and take full summers of courses can graduate in as little as two-and-a-half years. If a student wants to take advantage of summer school, it’s possible, depending on how many summer school courses are taken, to register for one or more part-time semesters, thus creating the opportunity to clerk in Portland. Depending on how much summer school and how many part-time semesters a student decides to take, people can graduate in the typical three years or in three-and-a-half. Students who do not wish to take summer school and who plan to work all the way through law school, graduate in four years.”

And sure, Great Works become Great Works by being discussed.  But not by being discussed in any old way.  I’m amazed again and again at a certain repeating form at The Valve: this film isn’t great, but it raises some interesting issues about [insert hip topic here].  So no, *The Hurt Locker* isn’t going to become a great work because it gets us talking about the Iraq War.  It’ll be considered great when someone dares to posit its greatness. 

I’m with StevenAugustine here.

Michi is one of the central figures in Metropolis, the second of the three manga, and is an artificial being (jinzo ningen in Japanese) made of synthetic cells; as such Michi stands in contrast to ordinary electro-mechanical robots (robotto in Japanese), which also appear in the story. Michi was created by one Dr. Lawton at the behest of Duke Red, a criminal boss, who wanted this being to fly and to be super-strong. He also dictated that the being’s face be modeled on that of a statue, The Angle of Rome. Lawton did as he was ordered, but he also made Michi capable of being either male or female. There’s a switch in her throat that determines her gender. Despite her superpower, Michi is also very needy and spends most of the story searching for her father so she can learn whether or not she’s human.

There’s something else about Michi that most interesting, and peculiar. The first time we see Dr. Lawton in his laboratory he’s lamenting the fact that, while he’s succeeded in creating synthetic proteins, “breaking through the barrier to animate life has proven impossible” (p. 26). Then the cells suddenly come to life, which Lawton attributes to radiation coming from black spots on the sun. Much later in the story we learn that those black spots were created by omothenium radiation (which I assume is entirely fictions) that Duke Red had directed at the sun. Later on we’ll learn that that black spot radiation has had-wide spread effects all over the earth.

Thus Duke Red played two two roles in Michi’s creation. He specified certain properties, including her appearance; and he made it possible to her synthetic cells to be alive. The first action was direct, the second was not. Nor is there anything in the text to suggest that Duke Red was aware of the connection between his omothenium rays and Michi’s viability, much less that he created them to enable that viability. We are thus free to believe that bombarding the sun with omothenium rays is just one of those things that bad guys do to cause trouble in the world.

I take those omothenium rays to be an allusion to the radioactive fallout from the bombs dropped at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As I’ve indicated above, radiation also plays a role in Next World, where it also causes mutations. Tezuka uses the word Verderungun (mutant) in the text (2003C, p. 31) and glosses it in an afterword (2003D, p. 152). The most important mutants, of course, are the Fumoon, intelligent life-forms with advanced technological knowledge and the ability to communicate telepathically, both among themselves and with humans. The Fumoon have been quite active on earth, creating a large fleet of spacecraft and preparing the evaculate both humans and animals.

Radiation plays no role in Lost World, but there is something in that story which may well belong in this discussion. The story opens with the theft of a jewel that a scientist had hidden in his glass eye. That jewel was one of seven stones that had fallen to earth from Mamango; all of them were retrieved by Dr. Kenichi Shikishima, who discovered that they embodied tremendous amounts of energy. Thus they are like the uranium used in bombs; they have a tremendous amount of energy in a relativly small chunk of matter. The stones don’t do anything in the story; they don’t have radiation that has any effects; but the first half of the story is devoted to the theft and recovery of these stones. Tezuka thus has quite a bit of “aesthetic captital” invested in those stones.

With that in mind, let me suggest another progression. In Lost World energy is embodied in stones which are the focus of criminal activity. In Metropolis a criminal uses radiation to cause wide-spread changes in the world, changes which are at best ambiguous (Michi), but otherwise harmful, all the unnaturally enlarged plants and animals. Things get more complicated in Next World, which doesn’t contain evil criminals of the sort we have in Lost World and Metropolis. Rather, we have great powers in conflict, Star and Uran, and they’ve tested atomic weapons the fallout from which has produced mutants, including the intelligent Fumoon, who are autonomous agents. The Fumoon are not presented either as good or evil, but they and their works are effectively rejected.

[The reasoning in the final paragraph needs a bit of work.]