On 14 Oct 2010 at 20:32, Robert J. Cordingley wrote: > I don't buy into > the idea that it would help understand the 'human condition' because > after all we are talking about fiction.
What Nick elided when he brought that up (and what, to my memory, always *did* get elided when he brought it up before [and I was around, which was certainly only a fraction of the times he did it]) is that a (modern) work of fiction surely must (although, e.g., Nabakov furiously denied it, according to Martin Gardner in the _Annotated Alice_ [and why isn't that on the list?]: but he did so in the context of Freudian literary analysis) be a rich source of data about the particular "human condition" of its author (given what appear to be modern Western norms about "creating fiction"--norms that don't or needn't necessarily apply to Cervantes or _The Tale of Genji_, and *maybe* not to [some] contemporary [maybe not "modern"?] non-"Western" authors). Extrapolating from that to the idea that the same data tells anything, much, about the general "human condition" (assuming that there is such a thing) is a big leap, and one that needs its own justifications (in addition to whatever justifications might need to be made for the word "surely" I used above). That is (to slip into a jargon I hear a lot, now, but which isn't really native to me), a work of fiction can (probably) be used as an *idiographic* study of the "human condition" (if one wants to use it that way), but getting from one idiographic study (or a whole batch of them) to general conclusions is ... difficult. Lee Rudolph P.S. I didn't say a *single* *mean* *thing* about "Freudian literary analysis". The reader is invited to do so on my behalf (or, if of a literary turn, could track down what Nabakov had to say about it, which surely used longer words than "piece of shit" to convey contempt; personally, I can't bear to read Nabakov, give me Martin Gardner and Lewis Carroll any day). ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
