On 10/14/2011 10:17 AM, Max Sawicky wrote:
The purpose of litcrit is not to instigate follow-through.
It is itself a type of performance, obviously dependent on the object of
discussion, but a separate mode of expression.
Now Carroll can eviscerate me.
After a decade plus on the same lists & you still haven't looked at how
I spell my first name? : (My grandmother apparently did not know how to
spell, so she dropped an "l" from my father's name when she named him.)
Anyhow, I think I mostly agree with your post, so no evisceration. The
trouble with LitCrit is the same as with econ, sociology, poli-sci: in
order to justify their existence as departments they have to pretend to
be _disciplines_. And they aren't. They are simply aspects of
historiography - which itself is not a "progressive" dis ipline.
(Progressive means a discipline that systematically builds on itself,
but none of thse pseudo-dsiciploines do. Rather than building on an
assured body of knowledge they continually start anew - usually by
bringing in some methodology borrowed from some other domain of
knowledge. Economics, a pseudo-science pretending to have replaced the
gentlemanly discourse of political economy is probably the most corrupt.
Now I think all these discourses, probably including even economics, do
have a justification. It is useful to the social order as a whole that
there exist bodies of men and women carrying on the conversation of
history and doing so in the presence of the oncoming generation, from
which they recruit their successors. The following passage from Pound's
Cantos is probably the best description of what llit, sociology, etc
departments should be:
***
And they want to know what we talked about?
_"de litteris et de armis, praestantisbusque ingeniis,_
Both of ancient times and our own; books, arms
And men of unusual genius,
Both of ancient times and our own, in short the usual subjects
Of conversation between intelligent men."
***
Despite the pressures of a society grounded in the production of
commodities, universities and colleges, however corrupt, seem to keep
together the participants in this useful conversation. It is threatened
by the need to serve capital on one side and its self-generated hysteria
about "standards" on the other hand; nevertheless, the converation has
not yet been totally broken.
Carrol
On Fri, Oct 14, 2011 at 11:05 AM, Jim Devinewrote:
Doug Henwood wrote: I was at Yale from 1971 to 1975 when the English
department was really cooking - Bloom, Hartman, de Man, Derrida
sometimes. You may find that gang to be full of it - I didn't, and still
don't - but it was intellectually very alive.<
Jim D: I think I've figured out what I don't like about literary
criticism. It's not the lit crit _per se_ (after all, a lot of economics
is BS, too). It's just that there's so little follow-through to write
novels and other literature based on the criticisms.
But since I'm not a literatum, my vision of this issue is likely blurred
at best. My barb is based on generalization from experience with so many
"heterodox" economists who talk about methodology but so seldom apply
what they perceive as a correct methodology; if they do, they rarely
seem to come out with much in the way of new understandings of reality.
I'm not against discussions of methodology _per se_ as much as
_stopping_ with it.
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