So a lot of modern litcrit is subjective, then? Many of the pronouncements I've seen have tended heavily toward objective, received truth.

All of litcrit is subjective, because art is subjective. Some things are almost objective cultural givens -- red roses mean love, for example, and a rose is a metaphor for beauty -- because they get used so much, and you can only pick some of them up from experience. (See, e.g., Hec above on Shakespeare, or, to return to the B'verse, ask yourself why the music played over Xander's hallway scene in BB&B in S2 is so funny.) Some forms of formalism think there is a "right" answer, but even there they'll concede there are multiple questions to ask of a text.

These kinds of discussions are interesting, but a great deal of the problem comes in when an interpretation is presented as fact and disagreement is considered willful obtuseness.

Within a community like this one, maybe, I guess, but one of the rules of the game in professional criticism, be it journalistic or academic, is that people get to disagree with one another. Sometimes, disagreeing loudly is the best way to make a rep (Book critic Dale Peck is most famous for having called Rick Moody "the worst writer of his generation," to take a recent example).

What is "deconstructiveism" or whatever the word is?

Deconstructionism is basically about the basic insight that language shapes how we experience the world -- unlike, say, Cassandra Cain in Batgirl, language is a fundamental filter between us and the world, and our concepts shape us as much as we shape our concepts. It's mostly interested in the way in which what we say necessarily gets away from us as a result.

However, the name "deconstructionism" gets applied willy-nilly across the entire spectrum of leftist European and Euro-influenced literary/cultural theory over the past 40 years, and generally means "interested in things other than poring over exact meanings of literary texts."

And, a PS to Plei:

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

Allow me to remind you that this is a crowd formed of people who avidly watched a show called Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Not a lot of kneejerk snobs make it past the title.

As a reader and a writer, there is nothing wrong or disloyal about saying, yeah, this is where I live, and the 'hood could use a little work.

No argument with that. I will even explicitly state, here and now, that a whole lot of what comes out every month in romance is poorly written crap. I just get pissy when I feel like I'm being told to move out of the 'hood rather than try to improve it.

Xposty with Plei! But I'm going to sleep now. I have to convince my co-worker of the value of canons in another context tomorrow.

Allow me to remind you that this is a crowd formed of people who avidly watched a show called Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Not a lot of kneejerk snobs make it past the title.

Y'know, a lot of the recent-blossoming of my intellectual insecurity is a direct result of a handful of conversations seen/heard/read over the last few months directly relating to Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel the Series.

Not, I should point out, here.

I will even explicitly state, here and now, that a whole lot of what comes out every month in romance is poorly written crap. I just get pissy when I feel like I'm being told to move out of the 'hood rather than try to improve it.

You can be the Daredevil in the Hell's Kitchen of literature!

One reason the idea of litcrit is so fuzzy to me is that people will read my fic then say, "I loved how you interwove the theme of X with the imagery of Y." I'll reply, "Thanks," but I'm looking at the story and saying, "I did? Where?"

I suspect this has many elements of my experience with my class on Aristotle's "Poetics" and dramatic progression and all that. I'd sit in class and think "But that's so *obvious*! Someone thought they had to write it down?" I find myself agreeing with many of the concepts, but I lack the vocabulary and specific framework to discuss it comfortably.

One reason the idea of litcrit is so fuzzy to me is that people will read my fic then say, "I loved how you interwove the theme of X with the imagery of Y." I'll reply, "Thanks," but I'm looking at the story and saying, "I did? Where?"

I don't know if it comes from the fact that my background in creative things was originally art, or if it is an artifact of random bits of cultural or historical knowledge that float in my brain looking for a beach, but I'm often quite deliberate with my word and image choice when I write. Which is to say, feedback like that makes me squee like a small child and say "YOU NOTICED!!!1!" for lo, in addition to lazy, I am also immature.

This also means that, my frame of ref being the only one I have and all, that I assume intent when reading the works of others.

meara, because I've got drugs to do and cats to feed and it's short, with the time-stuff.

Yeah, I don't remember arguing for a purely cerebral take on anything.

Well, nobody has ever used the phrase "challenge yourself" and "read" in the same sentence to me, under any circs, at any age, and meant that I should feel it in the pit of my stomach. Be honest, please; neither did you, and neither did Hayden, I'm wagering. You were daring me, us, whoever, to challenge our minds. I call that an argument for a purely cerebral take, and in response to my visceral preference, it reads like a dis.

In the interest of accuracy--IIRC, this was deb.

Yes, it was, and my question was exactly what it was today: a question. It was not a request to not classify, it was a statement of bewilderment. My method of absorbing books - or paintings, or music - means that, by simple definition, classifying means a 90% chance of fucking them up for me forever. What is not clear about that?

Untrue! Dana liked it. I'd love to see her explain why, because I've hated it every time I've read it, and I read it a lot when doing my IB extended essay.

So did I. I hated it because I could frickin' feel the Very Important Metaphors in every third paragraph, and being forced and manipulated by a writer - see discussion of Katharine Weber's Little Women - into an artificially literary position as a reader makes me want to bite people. If that's intellectual, well. I don't enjoy that.

Deb got to hear me expound for the better part of two hours off and on about why exactly that dramatic arc worked, and how perfect it was, and the art, and the circular, and the.....

Yes, Deb did, and Deb loved every second of it. Know why? Because it was Plei, and she was digging the story, and the moral, and it was bring deep, deep visceral joy for Plei to talk about it, and what makes Plei happy makes me genuinely happy. It seriously rocked.

Sometimes I didn't even know what the fuck I thought about a book at all until I'd sat locked in the library tower with fourteen other people hashing it out over three exhausting hours. And that utterly rocked. And I miss it and want it back, and it stings a little when that experience is conflated with the truly contemptible dismissive pseudo-Freudian autopsy school of criticism.

Jacqueline, sweetie, I love you dearly. I'm genuinely glad you got your book love via that route. But I don't. I never have. I'm not conflating anything. I'm just saying that for me - me me me, the only person for whom I have even the faintest right to speak - fourteen people telling me what to think about a book makes me want to reach for a gun. Tell me what YOU think of it. Don't tell me what I should think of it. And don't give me the other thirteen opinions as your own - if I'm asking you what you think, it's because your voice is the one I want to hear.

See? I am unsuited to any school of crit. I'm allergic.

David and I were posting about an attitude hereabouts (one that smacked me in the face during the Joyce discussion of two weeks ago that Brenda mentioned and one that has certainly rared its head here multiple times before) that when someone wants to talk about a Great Book, unless it was written by Jane Austen, it will immediately elicit a chorus of "I hated that book"s and "I prefer to read X genre"s and "What's the point?"s, exacerbated by few arguments about why. It's clearly a preference for the easy and familiar over the difficult and challenging, and it's a negation of the whole point of having Great Books in the first place. I call that anti-intellectualism.

And, we're right back where we started, damn it. I love James Joyce. I love him with a deep stoned passion. And I love him for completely unintellectual reasons: I get naked and roll around in his language, giggling incredulously, wanting more. For me, he is as visceral as it gets, right down to that glorious orgasm at the end of Ulysses.

So, I ask again: I'm not reading it to be challenged. I'm not reading it because it's a Great Work. I do not now, never have, and do not expect in the future to care what school of literature he belongs to. Discussion of why Joyce works or doesn't work risks ruining it for me - me, me, ME and only me.

I read him because I love him, because he does incredible things to my senses. I'm a sensualist, and a sensualist of a kind that apparently isn't that common anymore: the kind that digs it and rolls around naked in it because it feels good.

So, with that in mind, I ask it again: am I anti-intellectual?

fourteen people telling me what to think about a book makes me want to reach for a gun

In a good lit crit class, not one of those people would be telling you what to think. They'd be listening to what you think, and what twelve other people thought, and sharing their own thoughts. It's a learning conversation, not the Spanish Inquisition.

am I anti-intellectual?

It would seem so, although solely in the context of how you see yourself and how you experience literature. You pride yourself on being a sensualist and (if I'm understanding you correctly) saying that the intellectual has no place in your appreciation of literature.

I do understand, honestly, that you don't begrudge others the intellectual in their appreciation of literature, so I wouldn't call you "anti-intellectual" as it pertains to other people, or in any other context than this discussion.

In a good lit crit class, not one of those people would be telling you what to think. They'd be listening to what you think, and what twelve other people thought, and sharing their own thoughts. It's a learning conversation, not the Spanish Inquisition.

The best seminars were always marked by the feeling that you'd managed to find the easter eggs in the text. Person A would say, "Hey, did you catch X?" and you'd say, "Whoa, no, and check out how it relates to Y!" then you'd just riff on the whole thing until your brain wanted to just curl up and have a cigarette.