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Manifestation of out cultural decline - The downfall of literature studies
#1

Manifestation of out cultural decline - The downfall of literature studies

Came across this great article.

The main point of the article is that great fiction helps us think and feel like another person, or even one of different culture. It builds empathy and understanding of the human condition.

However, students don't want to learn it. The articles names the following reasons for it:
1. Professors don't understand that their first task is to get the student to want to read literature.
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Students certainly see the point of wisdom, guidance in how to think about their values and decisions. But professors tend to laugh at such a conception as somehow philistine

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More sophisticated students usually have in mind some version of what might be called the Wikipedia test. If a book has a point, and the point can be briefly summarized, why not just read the summary? If a teacher cannot give a coherent reason why such a shortcut simply won’t do, then why should the student assume anything important is left out?

2. They focus on "thechnical" issues.
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The teacher dedicates himself to the book as a piece of craft. Who is the protagonist, and who is the antagonist? Is there foreshadowing? Above all, this approach directs students to look for symbols. It is easy enough to discover Christ symbols. Water symbolism can almost always be found, since someone sooner or later will see a river, wash, or drink...
At a more granular level, this approach involves teaching a dense thicket of theory focused on “the text.” But literary works are not texts; that is, they are not just words on a page linked by abstruse techniques. Does anybody really believe that Dickens set out to create a sort of puzzle one needed an advanced humanities degree to make sense of? And that he wanted the experience of reading his works to resemble solving a crossword puzzle? Would he have attracted a mass audience if he had?

3. There is a great disregard for the "Experience".
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The text is simply the way the author creates an experience for the reader.

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This means the first thing a teacher needs to do is help students have the experience the author is trying to create. There is no point in analyzing the techniques for creating an experience the students have not had

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It is crucial for them to see how one arrives at the interpretation and lives through that process. Otherwise, why not simply memorize some critic’s interpretation?

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Here is the crux of it: Characters in a novel are neither words on a page nor real people. Characters in a novel are possible people. When we think of their ethical dilemmas, we do not need to imagine that such people actually exist, only that such people and such dilemmas could exist.

4. "Death by Judgement". Yes, we all know it. Those "Snobs" who "know it all" have an agenda. The book either fits it or it is "No good".

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One faults or excuses author, character, or the society depicted according to the moral and social standards prevalent today, by which I mean those standards shared by professional interpreters of literature. These courses are really ways of inculcating those values and making students into good little detectors of deviant thoughts

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In this approach, the more that authors and characters shared our beliefs, the more enlightened they were. This is simply a form of ahistorical flattery; it makes us the wisest people who ever lived, much more advanced than that Shakespeare guy

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When intellectuals condemn what is wrong with “us,” they usually mean Americans without postgraduate degrees. This “us” is a strange use of the first person plural, for it excludes the speakers. It’s an us that excludes us. Perhaps we need a new grammatical category to designate it—let’s call it the “self-excluding we.” By the way, the “self-excluding we” exists elsewhere—for example, when parents talk to young children. “We’re having a little diarrhea today, aren’t we?”

6. "Fiction is documentary" claim.
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One does not read Dostoevsky to learn about Russian history; one becomes interested in Russian history from reading its classics. After all, every culture has many periods, and one can’t be interested in each period of every culture, so the argument about Russian history is bound to fail except with people already interested in Russian history.

7. "There is no great literature" - the post modern claim.
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it has been orthodoxy among literature professors for some three decades that there is no such thing as “great literature.” There are only things called great literature because hegemonic forces of oppression have mystified us into believing in objective greatness, whereas intrinsically Shakespeare is no different from a laundry list or any other document.

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what used to be called masterpieces are worthy of study only insofar as they fit into a liberationist program, and no further. If elements of popular entertainment illustrate social forces better than Pope or Proust do, then they should (and sometimes do) constitute the curriculum. The language of “production, circulation, and consumption” is designed to remind us that art is an industrial product like any other and supports the rule of capital no less, and perhaps more insidiously, than the futures market

However, this guy does not just whine about it. He has a point about literature and what to do:

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Many disciplines can teach that we ought to empathize with others. But these disciplines do not involve actual practice in empathy. Great literature does, and in that respect its study remains unique among university-taught subjects.

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When you read a great novel, you put yourself in the place of the hero or heroine, feel her difficulties from within, regret her bad choices. Momentarily, they become your bad choices. You wince, you suffer, you have to put the book down for a while. When Anna Karenina does the wrong thing, you may see what is wrong and yet recognize that you might well have made the same mistake

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It is really quite remarkable what happens when reading a great novel: By identifying with a character, you learn from within what it feels like to be someone else. The great realist novelists, from Jane Austen on, developed a technique for letting readers eavesdrop on the very process of a character’s thoughts and feelings as they are experienced. Readers watch heroes and heroines in the never-ending process of justifying themselves, deceiving themselves, arguing with themselves. That is something you cannot watch in real life, where we see others only from the outside and have to infer inner states from their behavior

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It is even possible to empathize with our failures of empathy. That is one of Anton Chekhov’s key themes, where we feel from within why it is that people who are not fundamentally unfeeling often fail to consider the other person’s point of view.

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It is therefore crucial to read passages aloud, with the students silently reading along. Students should sense they are learning how to bring a novel to life. “So this is why people get so much out of Tolstoy!”

At that point, students will not have to take the author’s greatness on faith. They will sense that greatness and sense themselves as capable of doing so. Neither will they have to accept the teacher’s interpretation without seeing how it was arrived at or what other interpretation might be possible. No one will have to persuade them why Wikipedia won’t do.

Students will acquire the skill to inhabit the author’s world.


Concluding remarks:

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Democracy depends on having a strong sense of the value of diverse opinions. If one imagines (as the Soviets did) that one already has the final truth, and that everyone who disagrees is mad, immoral, or stupid, then why allow opposing opinions to be expressed or permit another party to exist at all? The Soviets insisted they had complete freedom of speech, they just did not allow people to lie.

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Because literature is about diverse points of view, I teach by impersonation. I never tell students what I think about the issues the book raises, but what the author thinks. If I comment on some recent event or issue, students will be hearing what Dostoevsky or Tolstoy, not I, would say about it. One can also impersonate the novel’s characters. What would Ivan Karamazov say about our moral arguments? How could we profit from the wisdom Dorothea Brooke acquires? Can one translate their wisdom into a real dialogue about moral questions that concern us—or about moral questions that we were unaware are important but in light of what we have learned turn out to be so? Authors and characters offer a diversity of voices and points of view on the world from which we can benefit.

"I love a fulfilling and sexual relationship. That is why I make the effort to have many of those" - TheMaleBrain
"Now you see that evil will always triumph because good is dumb." - Spaceballs
"If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine" - Obi-Wan Kenobi
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#2

Manifestation of out cultural decline - The downfall of literature studies

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--

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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
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#3

Manifestation of out cultural decline - The downfall of literature studies

^ Exactly. I think Nietzsche said something like, "What good is a book that goes not carry me beyond all books?"
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#4

Manifestation of out cultural decline - The downfall of literature studies

I read the article somewhere else. It's a self-proclaimed literature expert bitching that students aren't reading the books that he and other academics have deemed to be "great." He ignores the fact that many read other books like Hunger Games or Harry Potter. Of course, neither of those is considered "literature."
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#5

Manifestation of out cultural decline - The downfall of literature studies

Quote: (09-10-2015 03:27 AM)puckerman Wrote:  

I read the article somewhere else. It's a self-proclaimed literature expert bitching that students aren't reading the books that he and other academics have deemed to be "great." He ignores the fact that many read other books like Hunger Games or Harry Potter. Of course, neither of those is considered "literature."

I disagree.
The article, if read carefuly, he writes avbout books giving you the ability to "be anf feel what someone else feels". That is good literature.
He does not bitch about it. He states what to do.

"I love a fulfilling and sexual relationship. That is why I make the effort to have many of those" - TheMaleBrain
"Now you see that evil will always triumph because good is dumb." - Spaceballs
"If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine" - Obi-Wan Kenobi
Reply
#6

Manifestation of out cultural decline - The downfall of literature studies

Why would a narcissistic Millennial want to think and feel like another person? After all, they're the most interesting, intelligent creature that has ever lived and already know everything worth knowing.
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#7

Manifestation of out cultural decline - The downfall of literature studies

It's a real societal problem:

Low attention spans.
The idea that everything should be instantly monetized, or else it's not worth anything.
The fact that many literature classes are taught by fuckheads with no real world experience.
Narcissistic students.
Narcissistic teachers.

All these factors play into the equation.

But those worthy of finding wisdom will seek it out and find it.
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#8

Manifestation of out cultural decline - The downfall of literature studies

I know quite a few english majors. Each one of them described how their teachers destroyed their love of reading from just sheer book overload. Assigning 4-5 books to read in a month, expecting 100 read pages a night. This is all on top of other BS from other classes because liberal arts is so important (read filling in the mistakes of the k12 experience).

Frankly most later 20th century authors are trash and I enjoy reading. My AP lit class destroyed my love of reading.
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#9

Manifestation of out cultural decline - The downfall of literature studies

Quote: (09-16-2015 03:04 AM)The Beast1 Wrote:  

I know quite a few english majors. Each one of them described how their teachers destroyed their love of reading from just sheer book overload. Assigning 4-5 books to read in a month, expecting 100 read pages a night. This is all on top of other BS from other classes because liberal arts is so important (read filling in the mistakes of the k12 experience).

Frankly most later 20th century authors are trash and I enjoy reading. My AP lit class destroyed my love of reading.


Hah! I was an English major. It worked out to 3-4 books a week, between all your classes. I transferred from an all right school to a really good school, and this was the biggest difference at first; my reading had tripled. You are right, it wasn't pleasure reading at that point. The upside was, you were focused on what you were reading, and how it was going to become a paper, and how it tied into the lectures from the minute you picked up a book. Being able to cut through a lot of words and turn them into a productive paper quickly was not, though, a bad skill to learn.

Also, because so much of what you were learning was the nuance of human character, it made taking history and poly sci classes a breeze.

Also. . . if you don't like reading, maybe you shouldn't be an English major.

“The greatest burden a child must bear is the unlived life of its parents.”

Carl Jung
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