In what is generally a shittily-written book on how to write fiction, Anna Cron in Wired for Story does manage to dredge up a couple of half-decent cognitive studies which suggest something remarkable: we read fiction, first and foremost, in order to get inside a character's skin -- in order to feel life as they feel it, so we can specifically learn from what they did or didn't do, so we can give ourselves an emotional primer, a sort of rehearsal, for what we might do if faced with the same circumstances.
That is the primal, underlying reason behind every myth, fable, parable, or novel ever written: that by being in another character's body, we might learn something. Good fiction -- by which I mean the kind that transports you into the characters' world, something that Shakespeare was able to do like no one before and no one since -- moves you because you feel like you're in that person's shoes. This is not mere artifice: brain studies appear to indicate it, since when you read the same centres in the brain are turned on as if you were sensing something in the exterior world: read about a gunshot, and the auditory parts of the brain buzz.
If indeed the primary assumption of literature studies in the world is as that article says--
--then the entire body of literature studies from roughly 60 years back has been nothing but toilet paper with some gibberish written on it.
Reading is to be outside your own body, and in someone else's. Writing -- as good writers know -- is shamanism, the summoning of odylic forces to rip a reader's mind clean out of the meat that makes up his form and throw him headlong into another person's life. It is as much head as heart, but acadaemia does not understand that any more than it understands how real, felt-in-the-guts religion is like that.
But then academia itself is a shit world, mainly because its reason for being is to complicate. Edward de Bono understood this all too well.
That is the primal, underlying reason behind every myth, fable, parable, or novel ever written: that by being in another character's body, we might learn something. Good fiction -- by which I mean the kind that transports you into the characters' world, something that Shakespeare was able to do like no one before and no one since -- moves you because you feel like you're in that person's shoes. This is not mere artifice: brain studies appear to indicate it, since when you read the same centres in the brain are turned on as if you were sensing something in the exterior world: read about a gunshot, and the auditory parts of the brain buzz.
If indeed the primary assumption of literature studies in the world is as that article says--
Quote:Quote:
Literary texts, like other artworks, are neither more nor less important than any other cultural artifact or practice. Keeping the emphasis on how cultural meanings are produced, circulated, and consumed, the investigator will focus on art or literature insofar as such works connect with broader social factors, not because they possess some intrinsic interest or special aesthetic values.
--then the entire body of literature studies from roughly 60 years back has been nothing but toilet paper with some gibberish written on it.
Reading is to be outside your own body, and in someone else's. Writing -- as good writers know -- is shamanism, the summoning of odylic forces to rip a reader's mind clean out of the meat that makes up his form and throw him headlong into another person's life. It is as much head as heart, but acadaemia does not understand that any more than it understands how real, felt-in-the-guts religion is like that.
But then academia itself is a shit world, mainly because its reason for being is to complicate. Edward de Bono understood this all too well.
Remissas, discite, vivet.
God save us from people who mean well. -storm