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.

Jen, that presupposes that I have a huge interest in sharing what I think about a book, or a painting, or a piece of music. I don't. That's kind of my point; of the 100% I get from other peoples' creativity, about 99.5% of that has nothing, nothing whatsoever, to do with cranial activity. The only time my mind gets more play than my body does on those subjects is when I'm part of a work in progress.

If you looked back over this thread, you'd find that pretty much the only time I come back with a thought-out opinion is when someone has either demanded it, or thrown down a gauntlet, by stating an absolute. That's pretty much my only trigger. I only check in here to see if people with similar tastes to my own are reccing something I might trust to like. I don't do it for a round-robin discussion.

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.

That's sweet, but I'm afraid the pity's wasted. In half a century, avoiding decon and general crit like the Black Death, I've somehow found a way to read, and write, rather a lot of stuff. I manage to enjoy myself, somehow. And I expect to keep doing so.

Jen, that presupposes that I have a huge interest in sharing what I think about a book, or a painting, or a piece of music. I don't.

I'm confused. All I'm saying is that you have a purely sensualist way of appreciating literature, and more than that, you've said that any attempt at intellectualizing that appreciation has ruined the work of art for you. In that specific context (the only one about which I'm speaking) you're anti-intellectual.

I don't understand the connection you're making with sharing thoughts about a book or a painting.

Jeez, Ple, I can't fathom you having intellectual insecurity any more than I can grasp that Fay is suprised that some man thinks she's the bees knees. I don't always agree with your take on things, but they're always well thought out, coherent, nuanced and above all really interesting and provocative.

I suspect steam escapes from Hec's ears when people get too character oriented, and a couple of his remarks led me to wonder if he thought that identification mandated a lack of ability to discuss or analyse.

No steam whatsoever. Didn't you see me babbling about Ahab? Character can be one of the most fascinating elements in a narrative. I've got my own issues with identification (maybe I should say over-identification) with characters - sort of along the lines that Misha articulated. That it can be an end-stop to getting more out of the book. I'm not that dogmatic about it, though, and it is one of the pleasures of reading. I certainly don't think it would prevent you from a deeper read of the book.

I want to clarify one thing - some people seem to have the notion that when I say "critical reading" I'm sitting down with a protractor and graph paper and parsing out the Stuff Of The Book without submitting to (what John Gardner called) the continuous awake-dream experience of reading. It's not like that. It's an integrated response. I am in the book, reading it, absorbed in it, moved by it and at the same time my brain is conscious that the author is making specific choices, teasing out recurring images, playing with the language, structurally mirroring certain things. Like that. I'd guess it's sort of how Jessica watches a movie, both simply viewing it and simultaneously being conscious of the editing choices. I've been trained to read like that.

It's interesting to see Ple note how the tone of my posts and Hayden's riled feathers. I'm not sure if people here understand that Hayden and I weren't coming down on anybody here because they weren't "reading things right." We weren't motivated out of some high mandarin sensibility that we needed to correct people. We were offended - personally, emotionally - by the disparagement of literature that is dear to us. And the casual dismissal that it's even valuable to discuss things thoughtfully and in depth. It was upsetting.

When Aimee said let us have our talk and quit shitting on us, I had a weird bizarro land feeling of "Dude, we are the insulted parties. What are you talking about?" Which is not claiming that's the truth of the conversation or what happened - I just don't know if people really understand what was happening on our end.

Why am I still awake? I couldn't sleep because I was troubled by this whole discussion.

Some of y'all are obviously insulted. I apologize if I've hurt your feelings. "Anti-intellectualism" must be too loaded a word to ever use in semi-polite company. I was trying to draw attention to a response I perceived whenever truly culturally significant books come up in discussion. Lord knows that I've tried to engage people here about those books many times over the last few years, mostly to stony silence or the aforementioned verbal shrugs coupled with the "what's the point?" attitude.

So, I don't have a substitute word for my meaning, but I wish I did. Maybe someone else has a suggestion. "Anti-intellectualism" obviously carries some heavy baggage, though. I notice that some of y'all have attributed points of view to me that I've never stated here. Several times today when I was responding to something, I had to stop and edit the argument because I was being backed into a corner that wasn't mine. Juliana's probably right about the smartness and context issue. I insulted people who read "anti-intellectualism" as "dumb", although (like I said) my intention was to raise awareness about a certain digging in of the heels.

I guess this gets under my skin (and I recognize that everytime I try to explain I make things worse, but what the hey, it's worth another try) because I do think that there's a culture war of sorts going on where the Good Books (n.b. this is not a definitive list, but a qualitative one) are being taught so incompetently and discussed so flippantly that smart people (and I mean you, the Buffistae, among many others) see them as stuffy, boring, and out of reach. Why bother reading them (or so I guess the argument goes) when you have to be a professor to understand them? Why not stick to the literature that makes you feel good? Is there that much difference between Raymond Chandler and, say, Scott Turow? A culturally illiterate man, a man who proudly doesn't read, a man about whom the papers can only conjure the word "incurious", a man like this can be the freakin' President. I (again, I'm projecting, and perhaps and probably incompetently) am smarter than he. I like some highbrow things; why do I have to hear about the rest, especially when someone tried to shove it down my throat in high school or early college?

This, to me, is cutting yourself short.

Again, I'm fighting a strawman here, because I know that none of you fully or reasonably embraces this position. I guess it evens out because I'm (to some extent) being treated like a strawman, not that I like it at all.

Anyway, that's the two pennies that I hope will let me sleep. Goodnight.

Jen, sorry, I missed this earlier:

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.

Very little place, no. That, however, makes me un-intellectual, rather than anti-intellectual, in the way I absorb creativity, surely? I'm not opposed to everyone else in the world doing it, and will defend to the death their right to do it any way they choose. I just don't do it myself. So, un rather than anti, I think.

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.

Well, I'm glad to know everyone understands that I don't begrudge others. That's right; I don't. But I do rather get the feeling that others begrudge me, which is rather a pity.

See, I don't for one nanosecond feel that my way somehow less than yours, or hayden's, or Michele's, or Hec's. Do you feel your experience is somehow richer than mine, because you've parsed 99.5% with your grey cells, rather than 99.5% with your soul or heart or groin or other amorphous non-cranial bit? That because I'm constructed to use my grey cells in a slightly different, unique-to-me fashion that I do not dream of judging others for not doing, it's somehow a lesser thing?

Because that, my dears, is the vibe I got, and am still getting. And that being the case? With no ill will in the world?

I am utterly and completely out of this thread.

edit: fast posting.

I don't understand the connection you're making with sharing thoughts about a book or a painting.

Just that any group of 14 people talking about a book makes me nuts. It becomes "blahblahblahAHABblahblahblah". I don't do group discussions.

So me outta here. I be clearly in the wrong thread.