I'm not posting partly because I'm trying to catch up with the Racism & Cultural Appropriation Argument that Ate LJ, Jan2009. (Or at least the part of LJ I read
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Well said. I have read some of the essays, but none of the comment; reading others' references to them has been more than enough. What you've written just strengthens my resolve to avoid the comment threads.
"the dangerous assumptions are the ones you don't realise you're making".
Yes. I've been making a list of my premises, so that IF I write anything about this, I can make them clear upfront.
I've been deliberately limiting what I read in that thread: are people speaking up in favor of an objective approach, using that actual word? I've only seen people arguing against it, but as I say, small field.
Hmm...the balance between not wanting to read such comments and wanting to know what people are saying about lit crit finally settled with the latter winning. Links?
My guess is that "objective approach" more or less equals "close textual reading," informed by ideas including Wimsatt and Beardsley's intentional fallacy and affective fallacy. Note that the kind of po-mo approach you give builds on that, rather than rejecting it; it challenges the objectivity of the close textual reading, the only thing left.
Thanks for the warning that there might be po-mo (and *shudder* deconstruction?) going on--that increases my resolve yet again. (It isn't that I reject those ideas completely; it's just that almost everyone, including people with letters after their names, does them sooooo badly.)
It's more Cultural Studies than pure deconstruction, but yeah--putting down emotion is automatically part of the male/white/rational hegemonic discourse & academia is an institution historically oppressive to PoC. Well, yeah, but it got me thinking about how it's not, too--dead white anti-emotional males such as the Romantic poets, the Surrealists, at least back to Plotinus, you know. I do believe there is such a discourse, and it even seems to me that it is a power issue, but it isn't all-defining. At first I mentioned "pockets of resistance," but it isn't even that; really, it's just not that binary all the time. This was good thing to realize as I prepare my Fat Studies paper, and I may noodle about it in LJ.
I am reminded of a bit in (yes) a novel, in which someone describes a former student as having become obsessed with Max Beerbohm's sentences, so she turned him over to a different advisor, but now wants to consult him because the stuff said former student had been doing made him her local database expert (this was at least two decades ago). Objectivity gets you the number of "the"'s in Finnegans Wake, but then what do you do with that datum.
In my universe, you don't get to call your viewpoint "objective" just because it seems that way to you. You need to demonstrate that it actually is objective, according to some kind of explicit criteria, that the other person (with the "subjective viewpoint") agrees with.
I wonder if there is less prejudice and discrimination in your universe, and if so is it for that reason.
I have not been following the R&CAA conversation closely because every time I poke my nose in, I see something that I feel really angry about, and I don't want to feel angry.
I am not a professional fiction writer but I've been in enough writing workshops to know that a helpful response to criticism of one's work is to nod and say thank you for the feedback. I am not sure why the pro writers and their fans who went down the path of "Anyone who thinks this work is [fitb]ist is reading it wrong" didn't go that route instead.
Speaking as the professional literary scholar here: anyone who believes in objective literary analysis is either a) some 30 years out of date (Judith Fetterley, The Resisting Reader, anyone?) or b)deluded. There is no objectivity in reading
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Well, not the only PLS...my teaching isn't in a university, but I do work & am published.
I agree with much of what you say, especially that no reading is fully objective. However, I think I see a larger place for "fact."
For instance, similarity vs. influence--if the person comments on the earlier work in a journal, say, that's good evidence for influence; if the person says s/he never read that work, s/he could have forgotten, but I'd say it's pretty good evidence of similarity but not influence. One grad-school seminar in Blake did a good job of emphasizing this for me, and it has come up a few times in my work on Peter Straub's fiction.
My own approach is pretty magpie and definitely partly guided by the work.
I might give a larger space to facts if I weren't teaching; I think a lot of it is resistance against the students' demands for hard facts they can learn and which will always be true. I tend to say that what you need to know is when and where the book was written, to prevent them from going looking for facts everywhere. With tropes, I find the line between similarity and influence almost impossible to determine, though - it is much easier with not so generalised issues.
And I figured I wasn't the only PLS - not 'the...here' as in 'the only one here' but as in 'putting on this hat now.' I am angered by the people claiming, in that debate, that in the name of their holy objective view as Real Scholars, this is the truth. Sorry to have sounded like I was being self-aggrandising - that was certainly not the intention.
Ah, yes, teaching. I occasionally do literature, but it's individual help for high schoolers, and oddly enough mostly I have to encourage them that yes, their opinions are worthwhile, and if their support and reasoning are good, they should not worry about being "wrong
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"the dangerous assumptions are the ones you don't realise you're making".
Yes. I've been making a list of my premises, so that IF I write anything about this, I can make them clear upfront.
Reply
Hmm...the balance between not wanting to read such comments and wanting to know what people are saying about lit crit finally settled with the latter winning. Links?
My guess is that "objective approach" more or less equals "close textual reading," informed by ideas including Wimsatt and Beardsley's intentional fallacy and affective fallacy. Note that the kind of po-mo approach you give builds on that, rather than rejecting it; it challenges the objectivity of the close textual reading, the only thing left.
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I wonder if there is less prejudice and discrimination in your universe, and if so is it for that reason.
I have not been following the R&CAA conversation closely because every time I poke my nose in, I see something that I feel really angry about, and I don't want to feel angry.
I am not a professional fiction writer but I've been in enough writing workshops to know that a helpful response to criticism of one's work is to nod and say thank you for the feedback. I am not sure why the pro writers and their fans who went down the path of "Anyone who thinks this work is [fitb]ist is reading it wrong" didn't go that route instead.
Reply
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I agree with much of what you say, especially that no reading is fully objective. However, I think I see a larger place for "fact."
For instance, similarity vs. influence--if the person comments on the earlier work in a journal, say, that's good evidence for influence; if the person says s/he never read that work, s/he could have forgotten, but I'd say it's pretty good evidence of similarity but not influence. One grad-school seminar in Blake did a good job of emphasizing this for me, and it has come up a few times in my work on Peter Straub's fiction.
My own approach is pretty magpie and definitely partly guided by the work.
Reply
And I figured I wasn't the only PLS - not 'the...here' as in 'the only one here' but as in 'putting on this hat now.' I am angered by the people claiming, in that debate, that in the name of their holy objective view as Real Scholars, this is the truth. Sorry to have sounded like I was being self-aggrandising - that was certainly not the intention.
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