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.

Betsy, believe me, I had conversations with Buffistas, both current and former, back in the day in which words like "self-congratulatory" and "pretentious" got used plenty to describe then-ongoing discussions and/or modes of discussion. I think it's healthier for the community that we're willing to lay our cards on the table.

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."

With stuff like that, my view is that it doesn't really matter whether it was "Let's go find some red buildings to shoot in front of" or "Huh. These red buildings will work for this scene," or even just, "Let's shoot here." It's that putting all those elements together will enhance the mood of the scene, if it's done well. Or, sometimes, you'll get movies where the scenery or the lighting just really don't work at all with the characters, and they just destroy the mood of the scene. Personally, I love going through and trying to figure out how a particular mood or tone was created -- noticing that a scene seems really tense, for instance, then going back and looking and seeing that, in addition to the characters fighting, there's a lot of tension in the shapes and colors of the sets, and harsh lighting with lots of contrast, and sound that emphasizes every movement. Maybe some of it was intensional, maybe some not, but I find it interesting to look and see what's going on, and think about how that same scene would play if some different choices were made.

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".)

Good call. Literary criticism is, simply put, writing about literature. Exegesis, the most common form of lit crit in modern times, is about trying to draw meaning out of a text, whether a novel or a TV show or a comic book -- to make an argument about the stuff in the text, and explain why it could, should, might matter to our reading of that text.

There is historicist lit crit (Raymond Williams's The Country and the City, showing the different ways these two locales and the relationship between them are depicted over the course of the rise of capitalism in England), there is formalist lit crit (the New Criticism of people like John Crowe Ransome, who puzzled over every word in "The Waste Land" looking for its meanings), there is psychoanalytic lit crit (Kaja Silverman's reading of It's a Wonderful Life as a celebration of masochism clarified for me why I don't like the movie). Any way of thinking can spawn a way of looking at the world, and a related way of looking at culture.

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."

OK, but here's the thing -- they chose to shoot in that place, with that lighting, that day. This is the Elizabeth Bennett thing in different form. Jane Austen created Elizabeth. The color that my building is a historical accident. There might be some interesting urban history to it, but there's no intent. There is intent, there is form, there are thinking minds behind works of art. And no, you can't ever know what a writer or director or painter was "really" thinking, even if they tell you, because God knows there are all sorts of aspects of the creative process that happen somewhere in the unconscious. But you can take the work and look at the ways in which the pieces work to make it what it is, and make an argument about what it says about itself, or its times, or another time.

Some of this is practice, pure and simple -- you need to spend a lot of time looking at the world with an interpretative eye before it becomes natural. I still remember the teacher who graded down my essay on Plato's "Ion" because in discussing the dialogue's take on truth and fiction, I'd neglected to consider that the dialogue itself was a fiction of sorts. Once he said it, it seemed obvious, but we're so used to taking the frame as a given that it's hard to see it for itself.

juliana is wise. I'm unsure how much I want to say and not feel like I'm baring my soul for attack, but a lot of my reactions in a discussion like this stem from the following three factors:

1. I'm the Smart Girl, and that's equally how others have labeled me from early childhood up and a central part of my identity and self-esteem.

2. I don't have any academic training in lit-crit to speak of--I'm just an insanely voracious reader who took a grand total of two English lit classes in college.

3. Being a writer, and a talented writer, at that, is nearly as core a part of my identity as being The Smart Girl.

Throw that all together, and I'm just covered in hot buttons if I feel like anyone's questioning my intelligence, my intellectual credibility, or whether I'm making worthwhile use of my brain as a reader or writer.

X-posty goodness with Hil!

Also, to say, I absolutely don't "know" what's going on in a work I'm interpreting -- there's no final right answer. Just a whole bunch of partial interesting ones. The argument has to have what I call the "so what?" factor, and it has to not be contradicted by the other parts of the text I'm leaving out, but there's no final answer. Consider, e.g., the debates over whether Buffy in S6-7 can still be fairly considered a feminist hero. There are strong arguments to be made on both sides of that issue, and even a strong argument to be made that the show's incoherence on the matter says more about the real state of feminism in society than either side can lay claim to. All that criticism asks is that you make a compelling case.

(As my friend Hilary says to her students, "There are an infinite number of interpretations of any text. That doesn't mean some of them aren't wrong, though.")