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[princeofcairo]

I realize that to some people, this is going to sound like a post beginning "there's this great album I just heard, Frank Sinatra's Songs For Swingin' Lovers". I realize that I certainly should have known all this long ago, and most certainly once I started dipping a semi-regular toe into the foaming waters of literary criticism. I understand and

Comments

[anonymous]

Yes, I see your analogy. But I'm not so sure that you can really apply it to mathematics. In poetry you have a preponderance of "pure" poets, great and small, along with some poets who do criticism some of the time (Dryden, Pope, Eliot). You also have a large body, these days, of "pure" critics, who probably couldn't write a worthwhile poem to save their lives but who can -- well, some of them -- contribute to criticism. Naturally, there are some in-betweeners -- poets who do lots of criticism, critics who (occasionally) write well -- but I'd agree that by and large there's a discontinuity in poets versus literary critics, and between poems and works of criticism.

What I don't see in mathematics is a large body of "critics". "Applying insights to the body of the discipline" is what essentially all real mathematicians are trying to do, genius or not; "normal" mathematicians are not really doing something akin to literary criticism. I think the analogy probably breaks down here: in this respect, mathematics is not like poetry (or fiction, or art).

It is interesting to find mathematicians who stop and publicly ask questions like "What are the most important unresolved problems in mathematics?" and "What should we try to do next?", as David Hilbert did. But Hilbert was (also) one of the greatest late 19th/early 20th Century mathematicians, so he's still a "poet" -- he's like Pope or Eliot, not like Frye.

Now, where you might best find activity analogous to pure criticism is over in philosophy -- specifically, philosophy of logic and mathematics. That's where you're more likely to find people who are not doing mathematics per se, but are asking questions like: "What is mathematics?"; "What can we know or not know about mathematics?"; and "What should mathematics be?" (And, he said cynically, it's in philosophy that you're more likely to find the equivalents of Derrida...)

So: poets -> mathematicians, great and small; critics -> philosophers of math and logic?

-- Peter Erwin

[princeofcairo]

Yes, I see your analogy. But I'm not so sure that you can really apply it to mathematics.

Well, neither was I, which is why I wrote that the parallel is not exact, above.

However, regardless of my insupportable supporting structure, I think that Frye's actual statement, which is that literature is as real a thing, and as independent of human observers, as mathematics, is essential to Frye's argument. And, quite possibly, correct, although obviously there's no way to tell for sure. What Frye demonstrates fairly convincingly is that literature behaves as if it were real, and that criticism should perhaps do likewise.