Wolf-Gang Iser: A Group of Lupine Cake-Decorators

It’s too cold out; that’s my “response” as a “reader” to nature’s “text.”

But anyway, today I’ll be talking about Wolfgang Iser. Our book has his essay “Interaction between Text and Reader” beginning on page 1673 (again, for those of you following along).This is a clear example of a reader-response approach; Iser looks at the different “poles” of “artistic” (author’s text) and aesthetic (reader’s realization) and how they interact within a work (which is not a text, but a digital, ethereal “catch-all” for both the direct text and the non-corporeal information and thoughts which people construct around the text). It’s pretty complicated, in my opinion. The rest of the essay is pretty complicated (and I’ll sum it up by saying that Iser thinks the interactions are complicated), so I’ll just go ahead and discuss the bits that I understand.

Iser says that “we are all invisible men” (1675), insofar as none of us can experience what other people experience, nor react to stimuli the same as other people could. I agree with this. We definitely all come from different backgrounds, and our experiences have shaped us in vastly different directions. However, I disagree with the assumption (which, to be fair, I’m not sure is actually in there) that we cannot understand at least the basics of what other people have experienced, or the basics of how someone else will view something. This is a tangent, but it makes more sense to me than the rest of Iser’s essay, so I’ll pursue it a bit.

I’m a big advocate of the “universality” of Human experience. While everyone has different experiences and different ideas which make up their way of viewing the world, the world itself is objectively the same. We all can feel happiness, can feel pain, and can feel the whole spectrum of Human emotions. I believe that while we all see the world differently, it is the things that all Humans have experienced or theoretically could experience which allows literature (not in the snobby sense of “literature”) to function. Our responses differ in the minute (my-nute, not min-it), but are close enough to function well.

Disagree? Think the minutia is important? Well, “texts ask leading questions,” and mine might lead you to think about this stuff a bit. Feel free to comment.

Until next time, see you around AndrewTheory (or, more likely, in class).

Bear with me on this one

OK, I’m going to keep this one short (though I think “Miʃɛl Fuko (Part Two)” makes up for it in length and depth; if you missed that one, read it rather than this one). Today’s post gets a little bit into the “Intentional Fallacy,” but never mentions it (besides right back there). Like the title says, bear with me on this one. It’s a bit “out there,” but it’s kinda interesting to think about.

How does someone’s reading and analysis of Dr. Seuss’s Hop on Pop differ from their reading and analysis of Voltaire’s Candide?

Bear with me here.

There can be no universal way of reading and analyzing texts. Any system that attempts to do such fails, not just because comparing apples and oranges doesn’t really work out too well, but also in part because apples and oranges don’t try to achieve the same goals.

Hop on Pop is a kids’ book. It, along with other classics like Red Fish, Blue Fish and that Grinch book, do not aim to be great literature. They aim to entertain children. It could be argued that even Candide did not set out to be great literature, written instead as a commentary on Voltaire’s world and the philosophies and personalities which permeated it. But there is no criteria, no matter how broad, which can encompass what the two works try to do.

Summary of this post: Simple. There can be no universal rule by which to judge all works. Disagree? Leave a comment, I’m curious what you people think.

This is AndrewTheory, signing off.

(And yes, this one is only 281 words. I hope you can tell that I feel just plain awful about it. Oh, wait, here we go. We’re at 300 now.)

Miʃɛl Fuko (Part Two)

Welcome back to AndrewTheory! More Foucault for all of you Foucalt Faux-Fans and Fanatics!

Ahem. Sorry about the alliteration.

OK, so back on topic. In my last post (Miʃɛl Fuko (Part One)), I talked about Foucault’s idea that language defines how we interpret reality, and how it both is built by and builds the structures of our world. If you go back and re-read that one, finding little of that, just give me the benefit of the doubt so I can move on, because I want to get into the crunchy bits of the book’s excerpts from Foucault’s “Truth and Power” this time around.

Here’s “TaP” in brief: “Truth is a thing in this world” (1668). It exists because of “the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true.” Some people get to decide what true is and, because they have power, can enforce this “truth” and use it to further reinforce their power. Truth should be (Foucault says) “emancipat[ed] . . . from the forms of hegemony, social, economic, and cultural” (1670).

That’s all folks. These basic concepts are expanded, but this is what you need to know and take away from Foucault’s essay, not his high-brow discussion of “universal and specific intellectuals.” What follows are my thoughts reflecting on Foucault’s ideas.

Foucault is a smart guy, a genius, definitely. What he states is fundamentally true, though what he draws from those stated facts about the nature of truth and power are nothing more than educated opinions with which I disagree. I accept that reality is, to some degree, defined by our language. While I believe that it exists objectively, I agree that we can only perceive it based on our language and its inherent conceptual structures. This fits in well with my Christian theology, which has a God who exists objectively, but is beyond my ability to comprehend, because, among other reasons, there are simply no words or Human conceptions which can allow him to be understood. That being said, I feel that we as Humans are not unduly constrained by our language. While there are limits to things we can understand, the development of Humanity has constantly shown that when new thoughts and ideas arise, new words and thus, new ways of viewing the world spring into being. Before the “Enlightenment,” no one talked much about the great ideas of Liberty and Equality for All (and yes, it is generally accepted that those words must be capitalized whenever mentioned in league with the Enlightenment), but when people began to develop such concepts, the words appeared or were appropriated to go along with them. Not to interrupt my tirade, but ignore Ancient Greece for the sake of my argument; you’ll find my point still holds for then, too. In any case, I also do not feel that the enforcement of language by people in power is altogether a bad thing. I’m obviously not a Marxist, but when I do see overt manipulation of a language (such as French, which won’t allow “e-mails” and invented a new word which a quick web search hasn’t shown) I do feel kinda ticked. However, despite my beliefs about that aspect, I can’t disagree more with Foucault’s final point (at least, his final point in my summary). Truth is enmeshed within culture, to my way of thinking. Culture is an amalgamation of various forms of hegemony, yes, but I do not see exactly why Truth needs to be “emancipated” from it, nor how it would be. Before you jump up in arms, let me clarify. I am anti-oppression. That said, social structures take a while to change, and they must have the will of the people behind the changes. As we’ve seen in the past, societal structures are prone to do exactly this (see “Enlightenment, The”), but they must do so at their own speed, by which point new hegemonies crop up. In a related note, despite the almost universally-deplored status that “hegemony” suffers from, it isn’t a bad word. Groups in power as well as groups out of power hold hegemonies or positions of dominance over various aspects of society, some good and some bad, but all together they make up our understanding of the world and are helpfully preventative of chaos, anarchy, and general confusion.

Wow.

That wasn’t half bad.

It was also 500 words just in that paragraph of rant (730 total for the post).

Until next time, have fun from AndrewTheory!

Miʃɛl Fuko (Part One)

Interesting Fact: At over five pages, Michel Foucault’s biography in the book is one of the longest on record!

Second Interesting Fact: It’s easier to copy the phonetic version of someone’s name (such as “Miʃɛl Fuko”) then it is to find the right symbols in WordPress’s “Insert Custom Character” interface.

Main Text: Today I’m going to be talking about Michel Foucault’s essay “Truth and Power,” which starts on page 1667 in our class textbook. According to the book, he’s “arguably the most influential European writer and thinker of the second half of the twentieth century” (1615). There goes my vote for Dr. Seuss for that position. In any case, the book includes no less than four (excerpted) essays by Foucault, with his “What is an Author,” “Discipline and Punishment: The Birth of the Prison,” “The History of Sexuality,” and “Truth and Power.” I’ve at least skimmed all of them and I must say, he’s a pretty sharp cookie.

The point of “Discipline and Punishment,” and by extension, a lot of his work, is pretty simple. We build prisons. Building prisons means we need to justify the cost of the prisons, as well as the pay for wardens, guards, and janitorial staff, as well as for the judicial system that puts criminals there. In order to justify this, we need to arrest more criminals to fill the prison. Once it gets full, we need more prisons. Endless cycle. Pretty sharp.

But this isn’t just limited to prisons. According to Foucault, it gets bigger… much bigger. In a way, words are like the prisons in that they’re how we define reality. Without the color orange, we’d divide things between yellow and red. Without having a word for a homosexual, we’d still just think of them as “confirmed bachelors” (yes, that’s a mix of “The History of Sexuality” and “America: The Book” by the writers of “The Daily Show).

So, according to Foucault, words shape our language. I’ll get into this and, more specifically, “Truth and Power,” next time I blog, which should be tomorrow or Thursday. See you back here then, at AndrewTheory.

The Cleverist Pro-Pontiff, Pope

(Pope was Catholic, in case the Pro-Pontiff thing doesn’t make much sense.)

Not much to say this time around; if you’re looking for a representative post, this one ain’t gonna be it. Pope wrote the excerpt in our book in a poetic form. His “An Essay on Criticism” reads like an awesome poem. Nothing deep here (see my theory of Shallowism), but I think that this is great. This is one of the few essays that I found interesting the entire way though, and I’m positive it’s because it’s a poem. That being said, I can’t think of anything interesting to comment about it. That doesn’t mean I won’t try, though…

Here’s a question for you: Would you rather be “Clever” or “Smart?” Pope, the lucky man, was both, but in comparison to most literary critics, he seems to have Wit in spades. Of course, the lived in a time where Wit was Wealth, so that makes sense. I’d rather be clever, just in case you were wondering. “An Essay on Criticism” is brilliantly, staggeringly witty; this almost baffles me when I recall that this same offbeat genius wrote the beautiful, coarse (and yes, still clever) “The Rape of the Lock.” Pope got a lion’s share of brains.

“An Essay on Criticism” is 750 lines, pretty much entirely rhyming couplets. Yet, despite this complicated form, Pope still manages to write a fairly spirited discussion of literary criticism, spending a lot of time discussing how stupid and vulgar many literary critics of his age were, and how their foolish meddling hurt readers as well as writers. Poor Pope lived in a great age of writers (I think Shakespeare, Johnson, and Marlow were around there somewhere), and they all at some point or another rail on (other) critics. Poor guys. Must have been hard being the best brains in literature at their time.

Nope, that’s it. Like I said, not much meat in this one. See you next time at AndrewTheory.

The Didablogalicon, or, On the Study of Blogging

To be fair, this post might need to be called the Blogascalicon to translate to “On the Study of Blogging” successfully, but I don’t know Greek, Latin, or whatever language this is. Though, in truth, this essay isn’t really about blogging much at all (aside from being a blog), so whatever.

Right, now, the essay I’m picking though for this entry is Hugh of St. Victor’s The Didascalicon, which is on page 204 of your textbook (if you’re in my class, and if you’re following along). I’m focusing on a part from Book Three of The Dida (as I’ll be referring to it), “Chapter Three: Which Arts Are Principally to be Read,” (pg. 206). I enjoyed Hugh’s somewhat comical view of his peers, such as when he states that “the students of our day, whether from ignorance or from unwillingness, fail to hold to a fit method of study, and therefore we find many who study but few who are wise.” He says this in reference to the fact that students of his era (and I shutter to think how much worse we are now) fail to memorize works, such as the Seven Greats of Pythagoras and antiquity. I have memorized nothing in the past several years intentionally, though I can quote the movie The Princess Bride with almost pitch-perfect recall.

But the main chunk and point of Hugh’s statements in this section are thus: (1) It is bad to pursue something negligently. (2) You really shouldn’t spend too much effort on stupid things. (3) It is bad to pursue too many things. (4) Hugh decides that, out of the good of his heart, he’ll just go ahead and tell you what to read. It’s unfortunate that the book doesn’t include what he said. In any case, I’m going to stick with points one through three and use them to critique modern education.

One: It is bad to pursue something negligently. Look, I can’t care about all of my studies. Some things just take precedence, especially when I can’t see the point of something. This goes along with number

Two: Don’t spend too much effort on stupid things. Every Single Teacher Breaks This Rule. I’m not sure why, but it seems like a requirement that we have busy work assigned frequently in almost every class, work which many people, myself admittedly included, do minutes before class or, for some people, as class starts. This can also apply to readings, especially if they’re long, frequent, or boring (or, Heaven forbid, all three).

Three: Unrelated to the other two, really, but “it is bad to pursue too many things” (and yes, I’m quoting myself, not Hugh). What does this say about a liberal arts education? The entire point of a college like Messiah is to study a wide array of topics, making some of us into Jack-of-all-Trades to back up our specific skills and knowledge. Is this a bad thing? I can’t really fault Hugh here; Mr. “Of St. Victor” was born somewhere around 1097. Still, he might be right, at least to some degree; the modern world is requiring more and more specialization in the workplace.

Anyway, this isn’t all strictly literary (or even loosely literary), but it was in the book, and I took off on a rant. Still, good food for thought, right?

See you next time, here on AndrewTheory.

Ayn Rant, or, Shallowism

Here’s a blog post based on nothing more than the swirling mass of ideas inside my head. No quotes from the book this time, nor any quotes whatsoever, since I can’t find my copies of Atlas Shrugged or The Fountainhead. I’m sure some of you are breathing sighs of relief. Before I begin: Yes, I like Ayn Rand. Feel free to berate me in the comments section if you feel like it.

In any case…

Ayn Rand promoted a theory of thought which she called Objectivism (if you click the word, you’ll be taken to the Wikipedia page). The basics of this are fairly straight-forward: what you see is what you get. Also, things are objectively either right or wrong, regardless of the circumstances (sort of). Anyway, that’s not entirely right, but that’s OK, since I’m going to be going in a totally different, only tangentially related path.

What if we develop a literary theory where basically, what you see is what you get; deep readings and intense hermeneutic studies are for the birds. Let’s call is Shallowism, despite the obvious, immediate negative connotations. Now, I’m not advocating this idea, I’m just putting it out there as food for thought. The basic premise is as follows: When you read a book, understand only as much as you understand on your first reading; don’t look up words you don’t know, don’t go on Wikipedia or SparkNotes to figure out what the author was “really” saying, just read it, figure what you figure, and (I’m sure Ayn Rand would approve of this last bit, though probably not the rest) make a personal, independent decision as to whether or not the work is good or bad. Entirely subjective, entirely shallow. Is my Shallowism a valid form of literary criticism? Is it criticism at all? I don’t know, though I don’t think so, but it’s just a bit of food for thought.

Howe Now, Browne Cow?

Last time here at AndrewTheory, I began to engage Raymond Williams’ idea that “the concept of ‘literature’ becomes actively ideological.” With that topic still in mind, I turn to Irving Howe and his essay “History and the Novel,” which runs from page 1535 to 1547 in our class textbook.

Howe’s interesting ideas about Christianity and Christian writers aside, some of his thoughts bear direct relevance to our question. In section IV, he quote Ortega y Gasset as remarking that “man has no nature; what he has is . . . a history” (1538), but immediately states that Gasset is overstating the issue. He “corrects” the statement by changing it to say that “man has no unchanging nature; what his nature does have is . . . a history” (1538, again). While Howe is looking at these remarks as directed towards characters in stories, they also apply to thoughts about how we look at stories, or blogs or whatever. Here’s a quote from later on, which I will not include in the 300 word word-count for this entry. It’s from near the end of section VI, on page 1541:

“Let us suppose then, that Frank and I, sharing a high estimate of [Dostoyevsky's] The Possessed, are not far apart in our political views. How are we to explain the differences between us? He believes that, in demonstrating the faithfulness of the novel to the actual experience of Nechaev, he has also demonstrated that ‘the usual accusations against Dostoyevsky [regarding the historical implication of the novel] must be qualified,’ while I believe that together with brilliant insights Dostoyevsky offered brilliant distortions. My admiration will probably turn out to be more qualified or uneasy than Frank’s” (1541).

Howe goes on to ask how we can be certain of whether these differences are due to political assumptions or literary valuations. He struggles with determining the accuracy of his views. In the end, Howe seems to think that History is what crafts a novel, but how we judge the novel is much more open-ended. He gives no clear idea of how we should judge, and as the above quotes indicate, it appears that he would agree that our views of literature are actively ideological. If the critic has no unchanging nature, then surely the critic’s history and innate insight is that which drives their perception of literature or literariness. Does this mean that Howe would think that determinations of literature are subjective? Would he leave it up to the reader as to whether a blog can be literary? I don’t know, I don’t have the answers here. I’m sure, however, that I’ll be coming back to this issue at some point, so keep an eye out if you’re curious.

Raymond Williams: Marxism and Blogging

To begin with, I think that Raymond Williams would be perfectly happy having a blog talk about him, had he any idea what a blog was/is. A leading intellectual who studied a number of aspects of popular culture, he would have probably had a blog himself. That’s just a note to warm us up here.

Now, Williams commonly attempted to unravel the histories of words within societal structure. So, lemme look at blog (as another quick digression) before we get into some crunchy bits. “Blog” comes from “Web Log.” In their original sense, they were like personal message boards where people put bits of personal or academic news for a select group of like-minded or interested parties. Eventually, blogs developed into a very broad-based phenomenon, with tons of people using them for all sorts of reasons. Now-a-days, blogs are seen as competing as news sources with actual news places, seen as punchy-er, less bogged down by corporate ties, and more “relevant.” Regardless of whether this is or is not true, blogs have developed in an odd way which is generally different than originally intended, though, in my opinion, this is a good and informative thing.

Not much room left here, so some quick Williams notes. Our textbook has an article called “From Marxism and Literature: Part 1, Chapter 3.” Williams writes on page 1568 that “the concept of ‘literature’ becomes actively ideological,” since it is bound up in abstractions and tautologies. While his essay characteristically continues into historical looks (as any good Marxist’s work would), it is this statement of the actively ideological which intrigues me most. In brief, the question develops: is how we view blogs (or any other literary convention, such as my personal fixation, genre) based on concrete things or generally more on how and what we are taught, and our ideological perspectives? More on this next time, here on AndrewTheory.

Been a while?

Hey, sorry nothing has been updating. I’m fixing the problem and getting things up as possible.

Update: It looks like my linked words aren’t coming up in the blogs. If I have time, I’ll go back and fix those.