I keep meaning to try Hornblower (books and show).

I actually haven't read a Sharpe's book in a while but I remember them being more...well, less...I'm not sure how to describe it but in some ways it seemed easier to read because maybe the narrative style felt a bit more modern. But I'm not sure that means what I think it does.

Joe Boucher pointed me to this thread at a Canada Day party tonight, so I'm a-catching up. Hec, you star.

This thread has always had an anti-intellectual, anti-academic, pro-populist slant. People are actively hostile about critical reading and defensive about reading for pleasure. And it's never simply championing genre or the pleasures of reading, but there's a weird defensive/guilty/angry whipcrack of resentment about difficult literature, the way literature is taught in colleges and critical theory. And it's layered on with self-congratulation and reverse snobbery.

This is, in fact, precisely why I don't regularly read this thread. This and what I'm going to address next. I love critical theory. Romance novels as a rule bore me. I do not, as my homies say, see myself represented within the discursive community formed here, and both the self-congratulation and the reverse snobbery tend to actively repel me.

(Though I will say that having been on the side of pop-culture in a "Can a work like Buffy ever reach the heights of art represented by Moby-Dick?" debate that raged for days in another Internet forum, it amuses me to no end to see them yoked together again here. Must be something in the, ah, water.)

Hec, do you have an issue with identification? How much is too much? And I include woobie-fication in this question too.

I'm not Hec, but I do have an issue with it, because it's really one of the shallowest forms of reading. As my tutor at Glasgow once put it, "some of my students write as though Elizabeth Bennett is going to walk into the room at any minute! Which is charming, but wrong."

Clearly, everyone loves a certain book or author or whathaveyou for all sorts of complex reasons, many of which are identificatory. I could point at the dissertation proposals of every one of my friends in grad school and tell you, "oh, this comes out of her bad relationship with her ex" or "he's working through his past with the church in this topic." But that's not all there is, or was, and the proposals that became finished works are a lot deeper in all sorts of ways than that facile five-second summary.

So, I'm not against identification -- I think it's a key part of the pleasure of the text, as Barthes calls it. But if you stop with identification, yes, you're missing something key. Because Elizabeth Bennett is never ever going to walk into the room. And so her story has a beginning and an end and themes and metaphors, and those tell you something key as well, both about the character and her times. Austen is a very scathing social critic -- not just about characters like Mr Elton in Emma, or Scott's influence in S&S, but about the entire system of marital exchange that she may at first seem to be hymning. If you never get past how dreamy you think Mr Darcy is, then you miss layers of what's going on in the book.

And I don't think it's necessarily limited to the canon -- I will happily tell you about the structure of the current Nightwing arc, and how "Becoming" works like a classical tragedy, and unpack all the thematic resonances in the final scene of the season ender of Smallville. What I do think is that there are two things that make a book canonical: one is the tenor of the time in which it is being read, which, as Hec notes, can change radically on a writer, and also, whether a work has the kind of depth that can really support a lot of readings and conversations and debates about it. Part of what makes Shakespeare great is that that there is so much going on in his work, and so much of it helped shape our current notions of (among other things) self-consciousness, comedy, and poetic form, that in different eras and places since then, people can feel like Beatrice is going to walk into the room at any minute, and yet take radically different meanings away from Much Ado About Nothing. Often, those works are more difficult than, say Nightwing. But they may tell you more about the nature of human existence, in the end.

And I still don't want you, or anyone else, fucking with the mechanism of what makes me happy by insisting I dissect every single fucking word down to its molecular level, under the guise of intellectualism.

Deb, if you really think that's what criticism is, then I feel sorry for you. Because you've missed some really great, mind-altering reads.

Michele (and Hec, if he's reading this), I have a question for clarification: when you say identification is a shallow form of reading, do you mean shallow in the sense of surface? Because if so, while I disagree, I can see and respect where you're coming from. In earlier instances where it came up today, I read it as "people who read for the pleasure of identification are shallow," which pisses me off.

And for myself, I have no trouble identifying with a character and simultaneously seeing themes and metaphors and what have you. But I think the fact that you feel like Elizabeth Bennet could walk into the room at any time is what makes P&P sing. And I don't think appreciating that and finding joy in it is shallow in any sense of the word.

I don't mean the people are shallow, no -- that it's a shallow form of reading. So you find Elizabeth Bennett lifelike. So? Why do I care? How does that make the book more or less valuable than any other with a well-drawn protagonist?

It's not that enjoyment or identification is bad -- I thought I'd made that clear, and I thought it was clear that I'm saying the way of reading is shallow, not disparaging people, either (what was that about defensiveness in the Literary thread, again?). It's just that identification is a necessarily local and limited way of talking about any work of art.

I think identification, at best, provides a point of entry to start digging into the meat of a character. Though I can't think of an example other than Buffy herself where I've really been able to do that.

I love reading/hearing critical theory *if* it's presented in an enthusiastic, inclusive, and accessible fashion. Which is probably exceedingly lazy of me, but I find it easier to connect with it that way.

That said, somewhat like Fred Pete, I'm uncomfortable/feel weird about discussing literature or even the more literary aspects of comics because I keep expecting to hear "bitch, PLEASE!" in harmony from the more educated portions of the crowd, who in my head have some sort of position of authority that trumps whatever I'd have to say, because a BA is a weak hand so I fold, and I think I just mixed my card metaphors.

I see what you mean now, and really it's what I thought you meant in your first post--it's just that to me "shallow" is such a loaded term that it's hard for me to see it as being anything other than extremely disparaging.

Anyway, I feel like this is a difference of emphasis as much as anything else. To me, themes, metaphors, historical context, and the like are all there and worth exploring, but they're not the main point--I read for compelling characters in fascinating settings, and now that I'm aspiring to write fiction myself, to understand how my favorite authors use their craft to create them. The rest may be interesting, but to me it's incidental.

t xposted

This is a question that has bugged me for ages--What *is* literary criticism? Is it discussion of why an author chose one word over another? Is it fitting a work into a particular historical/cultural background? (I'm predicting the answer to those two questions will be "yes".)

"oh, this comes out of her bad relationship with her ex" or "he's working through his past with the church in this topic."

Michele, how do you know this is what's going on in those passages? I had a couple of film criticism classes where the teacher would say, "The colors of the scenery in this particular scene emphasize the warmth of the characters, which shows the inherent dichotomy of the story, because these characters are the villains." My main reaction to that was "OK, I guess you could read it that way. Or maybe that's just the color of walls in a building that age."

Anyway, the point is, without having access to the author's journals or something, how do we know what a particular scene/theme/motif stands for?

what was that about defensiveness in the Literary thread, again?

I'll take a whack at this:

First of all, the collective group of posters here on buffistas.org tends to believe that they are more educated and more intelligent than the general populace. Statistics provide support here, but I am not saying everyone here is Mensa-level (nor am I saying anyone's not. You get my point?)

Secondly, many posters here admit to feelings of social anxiety and inadequacy. Combine those two, and you have people who feel that they are intelligent, but often misunderstood or who have sort of a themselves against the world view. Note how many times people say, "I thought I was the only person who did that!", or "Thank g-d I'm not alone!"

(Lord, I'm sure I'm pissing someone off now.)

So, we have a prime combination for defensiveness, especially when talking about something that people are "supposed" to enjoy/know.

hayden, I'm going to address your post today and your previous post, because those are clearer in my mind. I'm not picking on you deliberately. I do respect your viewpoint, though I disagree with most of it.

hayden's post today read rather in the accusatory sense, much like his post two (or so) weeks ago. It felt very much like an academic looking at the general discussion and deeming it unworthy. Instead of helping nudge the discussion along, it threw a grenade into the middle of it. Defensiveness piled on defensiveness about being defensive. hayden himself apologized for the finger-wagging tone for the previous post, so I don't think I'm too far off in my interpretation of tone.

I kind of enjoy the fact that discussion here tends to revolve around to books that I may not have time to read, but that are in the general cultural eye. I do not have the time or energy to get into long and detailed discussions of each work, which, frankly, is why I mostly skip in the Music thread. Music is also easier to access, as a rule, than a book. You can hear fragments in passing, listen to music as you post, run, whathaveyou.

I stand with Plei and Fred Pete in the mostly self-educated crowd, and will further admit that most literary criticism confuddles me, because I never had more than a passing brush with its uses and dialectic.

I had a conclusion somewhere, but I lost it. Tends to happen a lot. Night, folks.

I can remember when we could have had a discussion like this without anybody being accused of being self-congratulatory, anti-intellectual, pretentious, or dishonest -- except by themselves.

I liked us a lot better then.

It felt very much like an academic looking at the general discussion and deeming it unworthy.

Yes, this.

I get deep discussion of books in other forums (my classics book club, other places on LJ and so forth). I don't see what's inherently unworthy about the level of discourse here.

Again, if you don't like the level of discourse, do something about it. And telling us we're anti-intellectuals and shallow isn't the way to do that, I'm afraid.