Heinlein and "Great Literature"
dee
hoping to let the old ones die out.
In the earlier discussion, Valentine referred to _The Bridge at San Luis
Rey_, _Catcher in the Rye_, and _Brideshead Revisited_ in giving examples of
"literature." Bill Patterson suggested that they were not good candidates:
"I'm not sure that any of the examples cited -- -- could be classified
as 'great literature.' they were certainly prominent as culture commentary,
about on the same level as Crome Yellow, for instance. Competently written,
but addressed more to what Frye might call the "history of taste" than to
literary values."
Valentine responded,
"Point taken, but I was trying to find some books that might be popular,
modern and great. Something that Simon might have already read.
Suggesting Dante's Inferno wouldn't take this discussion very far. Any
suggestions?"
I think a list of candidates for "great literature" from this ng would
be very interesting. It woould be even more interesting to put it in a time
capsule and examine our choices 50 or 100 years from now. What will
withstand the test of time?
For that matter, of those that have withstood the test of time, which
ones just don't work for you? Which do? I like Shakespeare, for instance,
but Dickens bores me to tears. (Except _A Tale of Two Cities._)
Especially _A Christmas Carol_, but that may be because it has been "done to
death." I will make a small exception for the Patrick Stewart version, and
I wish I had seen his one-man stage presentation.
Someone here said, a while back, that a lot of the "classics" are only
read because the schools require them. I think there is some truth in that
today, but those works got to be classics because people wanted to read
them, and kept reading them, long before the teachers put them on required
reading lists. So why does Dickens just leave me cold, when people eagerly
awaited the next installment of his serializations? I'll have to think
about that one for a bit. Since I don't like Dickens, I haven't readhim in
a long, long time. I might even find that a re-examination changes my
opinion.
So, Mike, or anyone else, the floor is open for nominations to the
office of "great literature."
--Dee
David Silver
>why does Dickens just leave me cold, when people eagerly
> awaited the next installment of his serializations? I'll have to think
> about that one for a bit. Since I don't like Dickens, I haven't readhim in
> a long, long time. I might even find that a re-examination changes my
> opinion.
Dee, if you haven't read it, Bleak House is said to have led to the 1873
merger of the court of chancery with the common law courts. I enjoyed it.
--
David M. Silver
http://www.heinleinsociety.org
http://www.readinggroupsonline.com/groups/heinlein.htm
"The Lieutenant expects your names to shine!"
Robert Anson Heinlein, USNA '29
Lt (jg)., USN R'td (1907-1988)
ValentineSmith
A further question: if you name a resonably accessable book or two you think
is great Lit, would you place anything of Heinlein's on the list? On the
Paradise Lost, The Inferno, Hamlet...???
And I don't want to argue the above mentioned examples in particular. That
would be another alt.fan. That's just an example. Rather, does a book or more
of RAH belong in the Western Canon in you opinion?
Mike
BPRAL22169
I thought you were trying to your field of inquiry to 20th century works. I
think there are two books in the same genre written about the same time that
are candidates for the canon for which Stranger is extremely compatible --
Giles Goat Boy and Catch-22. Giles more canonical than Catch-22. Now, I think
Stranger is even more ambitious than Giles, Goat Boy, and in some ways more
successful at what it does, but it didnt catch the academic attention GGB did.
If you want to talk about the most centrally canonical books -- I think there
would have to be layers and layers of discussion before we could sensibly talk
about Job, let's say -- but could it be done? Yes. The route lies from The
Divine Comedy to Mark Twain. It really depends on what you mean by canonical -
there is a layer of transcendently great stuff. Harold Bloom argues that
Shakespeare and Dante are at the core of it all because they defined what we
now mean to be human. If you restrict your definition of the canon to the core
transcendents, then I don't think Heinlein is quite on that level; but if you
want to talk about people like Henry James and William Dean Howells and Herman
Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Mark Twain, then I do think Heinlein is
compassable on that level of discourse. I don't do rankings as a rule, but
this seemed necessary.
Bill
jump101
news:ua1p54h...@corp.supernews.com...
This will likely be my solitary post on this subject and the reason shall be
obvious.
Ladies and gentlemen, there can be no such thing as "great literature".
Literature is a creation of the mind of man and being such, any criteria
chosen to judge same is subjective. One cannot judge the works of a
Heinlein or a Niven by the same criteria as one would that of a Plato or
Shakespeare. Sure, one can pick them all apart and discuss at length the
good points and bad points, but who decides what is good or bad?
The reader decides what he/she likes and that can never be anything but
subjective. If we are to use a term like "great literature", then there
will have to be a set of rules created upon which everyone agrees
determining what is "great". The chances of this happening are zero to
none.
I might classify Plato's late dialogue, "Theaetetus" as great and "The
Republic" as less than great. I might say that I prefer "As You Like It"
over "Julius Caesar". I could tell you that "Ringworld" is better than
"Neutron Star". I could tell you why I prefer each one over the other, but
that would be subjective.
Terms like "great literature" should be a red flag to us all. While I think
it is wonderful to discuss different aspects of a novel or essay and wax
profoundly on our likes and dislikes, I also think that it is pretty
egotistical to assume that we can create an absolute from something so
subjective. As Emerson said, "Nature and books belong to the eyes that see
them."
~~Note: The opinion stated above is that of the relatively under-educated a
nd unlettered author and do not necessarily reflect the policies of the
management.
--
Steve
"While the rest of the human race are descended from monkeys, redheads
derive from cats." - Samuel Clemens in To Sail Beyond the Sunset
eeg...@exis.net
http://afhpics.mnsdesigns.com/
http://www.mnsdesigns.com/
dee
> > So, Mike, or anyone else, the floor is open for nominations to the
> > office of "great literature."
> >
jump101 wrote:
> This will likely be my solitary post on this subject and the reason
shall be
> obvious.
> Ladies and gentlemen, there can be no such thing as "great
literature".
> Literature is a creation of the mind of man and being such, any criteria
> chosen to judge same is subjective.
Well, Steve, let me rephrase the question. Do you have any nominations
for books written in the last 50 years that will still be read 50 or 100
years from now? I don't, at least off the top of my head. I will have to
spend some thought on this one.
Related question: what elements do books that "stand the test of time"
share?
--Dee
jump101
> Dee wrote:
> Well, Steve, let me rephrase the question. Do you have any
nominations
> for books written in the last 50 years that will still be read 50 or 100
> years from now? I don't, at least off the top of my head. I will have to
> spend some thought on this one.
I cannot think of a single one, Dee. To be honest, I am reminded of the
line from ST:IV where Kirk says "... you know, the the novels of Harold
Robbins... the works of Jacqueline Suzanne..." and Spock responds with
"Ah... the giants." Sarcasm at its best that was.
> Related question: what elements do books that "stand the test of
time"
> share?
>
> --Dee
This one will require a great deal of thought and I am not even sure I am
qualified to comment. I'll have to get back to you on this.
dee
"jump101" <eeg...@exis.net> wrote in message
news:a7r7jf$nmat3$1...@ID-134022.news.dfncis.de...
> "dee" <ke4...@amsat.org> wrote in message
> news:ua27eme...@corp.supernews.com...
> > Dee wrote:
> > Well, Steve, let me rephrase the question. Do you have any
> nominations
> > for books written in the last 50 years that will still be read 50 or 100
> > years from now? I don't, at least off the top of my head. I will have
to
> > spend some thought on this one.
Jump 101 wrote:
> I cannot think of a single one, Dee. To be honest, I am reminded of the
> line from ST:IV where Kirk says "... you know, the the novels of Harold
> Robbins... the works of Jacqueline Suzanne..." and Spock responds with
> "Ah... the giants." Sarcasm at its best that was.
Well, me too, but I am interested in the thoughts of others here. Might
even spark something in my own brain.
> > Related question: what elements do books that "stand the test of
> > time" share?
> This one will require a great deal of thought and I am not even sure I am
> qualified to comment. I'll have to get back to you on this.
Again, me too. But it might be a more productive question than "Did RAH
write real literature?" However, qualified, or not, I will throw a couple
of suggestions into the pot:
1. A plot that makes the reader want to continue reading.
2. Strongly drawn characters that "come alive" to the reader, making the
reader care about what happens to them.
3. Character development over the course of the work.
4. Consideration of some signifucant idea or issue demonstrated in the
character development--that comes under the heading of expressing some truth
about the human condition, that VS spoke of I think.
--Dee
Jani
<snipped cos I top posted .. sorry>
Emerson .. is that transcendentalism? (sorry, I'm half asleep and doped up
with a toothache, here)
*sigh* literature - *any* art -is communication of universal values. And you
can anrgue till the cows come home about universal is, what the values are,
or what communication is. Art *is*, and when it's proved it isn't, it no
longer has any value, means of communication, and therefore no universality.
Nobody has yet proved to my satisfaction that RAH doesn't fulfil the
criteria, even if slightly flawed. And even *that's only my opinion, since I
prefer poetry to prose, mostly.
I'm going to bed with my antibiotics, now :(
Jani
BPRAL22169
>chosen to judge same is subjective.
I regret to say that this is a very uninformed opinion.
Like all other creations of the mind of man, literary works have external
relations with other works of literature, with philosophy, with history, with
many other disciplines. These are not subjective matters -- even though the
real relationships may not be visible to any particular individual. As Aquinas
suggests, a proposition may be self-evident in and of itself and yet not
"obvious" to someone who is not equipped to realize that, for example, the
parts of the proposition are implied in each other.
Furthermore, there are internal relationships within each story that are true
but may not emerge into immediate awareness.
What one likes and does not like is an entirely separate matter from the
literary values in the work. What one likes changes over time and depends on
what one is individually ready to see or hear at any given moment. The
internal and external relationships don't depend on like/dislike,
popular/neglected, agree/disagree dichotomies.
The notion of a literary canon is not a hard-edged, binary proposition. If you
were to ask a whether a particular work has sufficient material to support
inclusion with the canonical works, that's something that can be weighed and
evaluated, though it's not a matter of fitting Tab A into Slot B.
Bill
James Gifford
>> Literature is a creation of the mind of man and being such, any criteria
>> chosen to judge same is subjective.
> I regret to say that this is a very uninformed opinion.
So you're saying there are absolutes by which literature can be judged?
That cultural referents are fixed in the eyes of all beholders? That
relationships are fixed and unchanging?
--
| James Gifford - Nitrosyncretic Press |
| http://www.nitrosyncretic.com for the Heinlein FAQ & more |
| Tired of auto-spam... change "not" to "net" for replies |
BPRAL22169
>That cultural referents are fixed in the eyes of all beholders? That
>relationships are fixed and unchanging?
That's three statements. As to B and C, no to both.
As to A, I don't know what you mean by "absolutes." I only know that a work of
literature has relationships to other works of literature, and that these
relationships can be discussed.
Bill
jump101
news:20020326211834...@mb-fi.aol.com...
I knew I would get dragged into this if I didn't keep my mouth shut.
Bill? Who says? Who decides what is canon and what is not? When did any
of us take a vote on who was going to decide what is and is not "great
literature"? And finally, regardless of who it was that made up the
"rules", it was based on their opinion and therefore subjective.
BPRAL22169
>of us take a vote on who was going to decide what is and is not "great
>literature"? And finally, regardless of who it was that made up the
>"rules", it was based on their opinion and therefore subjective.
We all decide every time we choose something to read.
What rules? It's not a matter of rules -- it's looking at the thing and seeing
what's there.
Yes, if you think you're making boxes and putting things in the boxes, it
doesn't make much sense, but that's not what the process is about.
Yes -- the canon is a matter of a lot of opinions over a long period of time.
That's what it is supposed to be. Subjective does not mean "not real."
Esthetic experience is intrinsically something that happens inside an
individual mind, but that's what we have language for. The denotation of an
esthetic experience is just as "real" as the denotation of color or a
mathematical equation.
Bill
James Gifford
>> So you're saying there are absolutes by which literature can be judged?
> I don't know what you mean by "absolutes." I only know that a work of
> literature has relationships to other works of literature, and that these
> relationships can be discussed.
But aren't the interpretations of each of those works, and their
interrelationships, other than the superficial ones, almost wholly
subjective?
jump101
Whoa! Wait up here. :-) Which is it... "great" or "real"? Real is a
whole different thing.
djinn
news:20020326214316...@mb-fi.aol.com:
I think whats bothering some of us is that the relationships are vague.
That is, there's no template or scale where we can look at a new book and
accurately measure its 'greatness'. Publishers would be deliriously happy
and academics and critics would need new jobs. :)
The degree of precision is what leads to discussion. Many of us think the
guage isn't very precise. You, perhaps having better tools, think the guage
works pretty well.
Now that Dee has clarified her request, I can't think of a book that will
certainly be popular in 100 years. My crystal ball is showing a 'blue
screen' :)
Jane Davitt
Who says? Who decides what is canon and what is not? When did any
> of us take a vote on who was going to decide what is and is not "great
> literature"? And finally, regardless of who it was that made up the
> "rules", it was based on their opinion and therefore subjective.
>
I think the idea is that if any of us judge a book by our own
reaction to it then the resulting judgment is automatically suspect
and subject to inevitable change as we ourselves change.
Enid Blyton is no longer my idea of the peak of literary achievement
for instance :-)
If you want to judge a book in any useful way, then you have to
create a system that stands alone, that is, apart from a value
judgment such as, "I prefer book A to book B because in book B the
heroine dies and I like happy ending best."
This is very difficult, especially for those of us who were brought
up to think that our views on art and such are as good as the next
person's and what do these fancy experts know anyway? <g>
A book is _meant_ to be so absorbing that you suspend all critical
musings and dive right into the plot. It's very hard not to succumb
and it might be this that fools us into thinking that after we've
read a book we can judge it based solely on that reading.
It's not that easy.
You have to be trained to look at things a certain way; a car engine
is an oily piece of metal to me, an mechanic sees it and can tell
which bits don't work. In the same way I suppose some people can
look at a book and isolate the elements that link it to other books,
other styles, historical and modern and really get to grips with
what job the author was doing when he wrote it and how well he
succeeded. All without letting their feelings about the book come
into it at all.
I'm not sure I could do that. I can discuss a Heinlein book in great
detail but not unemotionally, it's all about how I see it, not
objective at all - after a few pages, I'm lost, critical hat off,
reader hat on. Happened yesterday with Farmer; I began browsing it,
looking for examples of Bill and George's relationship, next thing
you know I'm cheering as Bill throws Saunders off his land and
sniffling over Peggy.
jump101
> >Who says? Who decides what is canon and what is not? When did any
> >of us take a vote on who was going to decide what is and is not "great
> >literature"? And finally, regardless of who it was that made up the
> >"rules", it was based on their opinion and therefore subjective.
>
> We all decide every time we choose something to read.
Let me see if I understand this. Using my question and your answer, would
it be fair to say, "Every time we choose something to read, we decide what
is canon."? I thought canon meant a set of rules or principles generally
established as valid/fundamental in a field, art or philosophy. I fail to
see how "we" are establishing that which is canon. Furthermore, what is
apparently canon now was once nothing more than the opinion of several
people and opinions are subjective.
> What rules? It's not a matter of rules -- it's looking at the thing and
seeing
> what's there.
"Dad sat down as I finished. Elapsed time from scratch, two minutes and
twenty seconds -- there's nothing hard about cooking; I don't see why woman
make such a fuss about it. No system, probably."
Person A sees this as a description of dinner preparation. Person B sees it
as an opinion on the difficulty of preparing dinner. Person C sees it as a
criticism of women. Each of them "sees what is there" according to their
own frame of reference... subjective.
> Yes, if you think you're making boxes and putting things in the boxes, it
> doesn't make much sense, but that's not what the process is about.
>
> Yes -- the canon is a matter of a lot of opinions over a long period of
time.
> That's what it is supposed to be. Subjective does not mean "not real."
> Esthetic experience is intrinsically something that happens inside an
> individual mind, but that's what we have language for. The denotation of
an
> esthetic experience is just as "real" as the denotation of color or a
> mathematical equation.
> Bill
OK, call me a country bumpkin, but when it comes to art, literature or
<insert anything not related to science or law>, why in the world should "a
lot of opinions over a long time" make my opinion any less valid. Said
opinions were based upon other people's frame of reference and their
experience.
I have no beef with the concept of the realness of an esthetic experience,
but each of us will react differently. Take twenty people to the museum to
see a Picasso. Let's say nine hate it and eleven love it. Throw out the
nine and ask the eleven why they loved it. If you get less than eleven
answers, I would be surprised. The experience would be real for all eleven,
but because we all have our own range of experience and frame of reference
our responses are different. Subjective!
--
Steve
(What color is red?)
djinn
news:3CA13DFA...@rogers.com:
>
> You have to be trained to look at things a certain way; a car engine
> is an oily piece of metal to me, an mechanic sees it and can tell
> which bits don't work. In the same way I suppose some people can
> look at a book and isolate the elements that link it to other books,
> other styles, historical and modern and really get to grips with
> what job the author was doing when he wrote it and how well he
> succeeded. All without letting their feelings about the book come
> into it at all.
>
This is the part I have trouble coming to grips with. While a mechanic
can't teach you to be a mechanic in a few minutes, a good one can explain
his diagnostic methods and the ways he can measure your engine.
To use an example from my own world, you can't learn to be a system expert
in 2 hours ( no matter what the IT manager says :) ) but I can ( and do)
explain to non-technical managers the technical and economic parameters of
their computer systems so that they can make financial and procedural
decisions.
If someone could just say something like "We measure the readability and
multiply by universal constants and divide by cultural references to get
this greatness index" I'll feel happier about this explanation. Or even
just "these other three books were written about this theme and and about
this level of vocabulary so this book is probably gonna be as great as
those three".
Don't really expect you to have the answer but your explanation was both
clear and concise and gave me an opportunity to express my mild frustration
with this subject.
Dave
PS- I go up to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art periodically. The
permanent exhibits are wonderful but some of the temporary exhibits lead me
to think that my judgement is certainly as good as some 'experts'.
jump101
news:3CA13DFA...@rogers.com...
I think we are in agreement here, Jane. My problem lies in that I fail to
see how one's appreciation of literature can be anything but subjective.
The only way I can see that one can place it in the realm of "rules and
regulations" is if one is going to discuss syntax or grammar. I think that
outside of sentence and paragraph structure, most everything else is up for
grabs.
Do I like the characterization? Do I like the dialog? Do I like the
interplay between characters? Do I like the way the environment was
described? Those are all things that require an opinion and as such are
subjective to my experience.
--
Steve, the one who will never be asked to write an essay on literature.
jump101
news:Xns91DDD25...@68.6.19.6...
Very well put, Dave. :-)
BPRAL22169
>
>Let me see if I understand this. Using my question and your answer, would
>it be fair to say, "Every time we choose something to read, we decide what
>is canon."?
Not what I said. Every time we choose, we contribute to the emergence of the
canon. The canon emerges from the millions of choices millions of people make
about what they read and what they talk about and what they used as building
blocks of their own life.
I thought canon meant a set of rules or principles generally
>established as valid/fundamental in a field, art or philosophy.
When speaking of a literary canon, what is generally meant is the set of
exemplary works regarded as touchstones, setting or extending the standards by
which other works are evaluated.
>I fail to see how "we" are establishing that which is canon.
Clearer?
Furthermore, what is
>apparently canon now was once nothing more than the opinion of several
>people and opinions are subjective.
First, you have defined it that way, buy your definition is screwey. Second,
The canon is never anything mor ethan "the opinion of several people." It's
customary to speak of the western canon as a consensus of opinion on the core
literary heritage of our civilization.
>> What rules? It's not a matter of rules -- it's looking at the thing and
>seeing
>> what's there.
>
>"Dad sat down as I finished. Elapsed time from scratch, two minutes and
>twenty seconds -- there's nothing hard about cooking; I don't see why woman
>make such a fuss about it. No system, probably."
>
>Person A sees this as a description of dinner preparation. Person B sees it
>as an opinion on the difficulty of preparing dinner. Person C sees it as a
>criticism of women. Each of them "sees what is there" according to their
>own frame of reference... subjective.
>
I repeat the question. What rules? It's not a matter of rules.
You are exhibiting a very rigid and narrow mindset in approaching this text,
and frankly it's not possible to do anything useful with that mindset. The
more nearly correct way of approaching this text is that these are three of
many possible dimensions of interpretation and they are all simultaneously
"correct." There is no subjectivity in the correctness of each of the remarks
-- the correspondence of the statement with the text is manifest. There is
subjectivity internal to the observer, in deciding what aspect or dimension he
wants to talk about at this moment. And that's the good part. That's what
makes literary analysis a worthwhile human endeavor, and that's why tastes
change and fashions change and people can get a charge out of talking about a
book 52 years after it was published. And this seems to address the remainder
of your post.
Bill
jump101
Thank you so much for your critique of my mindset and for the other kind
comments. This has served to enlighten me more than you know and reinforced
my original opinion that this is not a discussion in which I should be
involved.
Good evening.
--
Steve
BPRAL22169
>interrelationships, other than the superficial ones, almost wholly
>subjective?
If by "subjective" you mean "personal," then the answer is "yes, sometimes but
not always." The observation that, say, The Puppet Masters is in some respects
in dialog with War of the Worlds is not personal -- it's a matter of seeing the
correspondences built into the story figures, which is a matter of external
relationships, of mensurable congruities between one text and another. An
observation that The Puppet Masters is a Cold War book, verging into historical
modes of criticism, is not personal -- it's a matter of seeing how the book
fits into and is shaped by its historical context. Now, what any given
individual is able or inclined to see at any given moment is incalculably
personal, and what he can see is "subjective" by this definition -- not the
relationships, but only what he can see at any given time, his field of
presentation.
If by subjective you mean "not necessarily connected to the text," then the
answer is "no." And this answer can be demonstrated quite easily. If one
advances the interpretation that The Puppet Master is a 20th century retelling
of a Commedia del' Arte story -- or another one that it is a fictionalized
version of Being and Nothingness -- those interpretations can be shown to be
incorrect quite easily. Some interpretations are more congruous than others;
some are more debatable than others. Some are more useful than others. and
that really is the key, for the chief purpose of literary analysis is to enrich
our experience of the work.
Bill
BPRAL22169
>That is, there's no template or scale where we can look at a new book and
>accurately measure its 'greatness'.
Let me heave a sigh of relief. Thank ghu-ghu that it is so.
>
>The degree of precision is what leads to discussion. Many of us think the
>guage isn't very precise. You, perhaps having better tools, think the guage
>works pretty well.
There are no gauges; degree of precision is not a virtue; that's entirely the
wrong paradigm for viewing the phenomenon. There are no Bentham-Mill measures
of pleasure and utility -- pretty silly stuff -- and that is precisely the
degree of our freedom.
Bill
BPRAL22169
>multiply by universal constants and divide by cultural references to get
>this greatness index" I'll feel happier about this explanation. Or even
>just "these other three books were written about this theme and and about
>this level of vocabulary so this book is probably gonna be as great as
>those three".
There actually is an answer, and it is a koan. Joshu was found on his hands
and knees at night. His disciples asked what he was doing, and the master told
them he was looking for his keys. The disciples got down on their hands and
knees to look too, and after some searching, one disciple thought to ask him
where Joshu had lost his keys. Joshu told the disciples that he had lost his
keys three streets over. "But why are you looking here, Master?" "Because
there is no light there, and there is light here."
And the moral of this story is - -
Whereever there is light, you are certain to find something . . . but don't
expect it to necessarily be useful for the task you have set yourself. For
that, you have to go where the task is.
Readability and vocabulary don't really have anything to do with literature and
literary values. They just aren't even on the same level as art, and you have
to get on th e level where art is in order to be able to find art.
It's actually quite sad that you would be happier with an explanation that
didn't have anything to do with art.
Bill
Arthur McNutt
----------
In article <ua1p54h...@corp.supernews.com>, "dee" <ke4...@amsat.org>
wrote:
> As I promised Valentine, I am starting a new thread on this subject,
> hoping to let the old ones die out.
>
> In the earlier discussion, Valentine referred to _The Bridge at San Luis
> Rey_, _Catcher in the Rye_, and _Brideshead Revisited_ in giving examples of
> "literature." Bill Patterson suggested that they were not good candidates:
Are we speaking to /great/ literature here? Great would surely be a value
judgement, which lends itself to a good deal of subjectivity. There are no
"experts" on literature, only a few competent critics here and there; so
there is no objective community or institution to pronounce a work "great"
or "not great." Thank Goodness.
The best objective criteria for such, in my estimation, would be measuring
how long a work has been in print (not just how long a work has been
around). This would indicate a universal appeal, which one would think is
necessary to be qualified as "great."
This would disqualify most of Hemmingway--maybe with the exception of /For
Whom the Bell Tolls/, but would qualify /Catcher in the Rye/. /The Great
Gatsby/, which I can barely stand, has been in print since it was written,
as has many of Faulkner's crappy novels. Steinbeck puts them all to shame,
though he reads a lot like a Frank Capra movie, both of whose works would
have had Trotsky's seal of approval if it hadn't been for that Ice Pick
incident.
There were many huge, critically acclaimed novels just fifty years ago which
can only be found gathering dust in libraries today--Elmer Gantry, The Red
Robe, Advise and Consent, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Mildred Pierce, etc,
etc, etc. In many ways, the only way to judge a work is how continually it
has stayed in print. This indicates ongoing appeal; something compelling in
the work which bridges generations and the time in which it was written.
Stranger in a Strange Land, in this regard, is equal to Catcher in the Rye.
The Foundation Trilogy is equal to the Animal Farm.
> "I'm not sure that any of the examples cited -- -- could be classified
> as 'great literature.' they were certainly prominent as culture commentary,
> about on the same level as Crome Yellow, for instance. Competently written,
> but addressed more to what Frye might call the "history of taste" than to
> literary values."
>
> Valentine responded,
> "Point taken, but I was trying to find some books that might be popular,
> modern and great. Something that Simon might have already read.
> Suggesting Dante's Inferno wouldn't take this discussion very far. Any
> suggestions?"
>
> I think a list of candidates for "great literature" from this ng would
> be very interesting. It woould be even more interesting to put it in a time
> capsule and examine our choices 50 or 100 years from now. What will
> withstand the test of time?
>
> For that matter, of those that have withstood the test of time, which
> ones just don't work for you? Which do? I like Shakespeare, for instance,
> but Dickens bores me to tears. (Except _A Tale of Two Cities._)
Funny to note, that Poe was a contemporary of Dickens, and Poe,
surprisingly, was a great literary critic of his day. At a party, so the
story goes, Poe was heard to say that Dickens was a second rate hack.
Dickens was at this party, and confronted him--telling him of a new novel (I
forget which one). Poe proceeded to outline the entire plot of the novel
unerringly, which he had not read and which had not been published. Dickens
went ballistic.
---
Art
Mac
Of the 20th-Century?
I'm reminded of this one English teacher who was teaching a
course in "Literature" and would ask the students what they
thought of a story and then proceed to tell them all about the
story and the author and why the story, the book, was
"literature".
I do like Dickens (yes, I know he is not 20th Century).
A couple of Jack London.
John Steinbeck.
Robert Heinlein....
Alexansdr Solzenitsyn (sp?)
For me, literature is a story told well.
With believeable characters.
And, most important, an author telling me something about the
human condition and presenting a view that might be new, might be
challenging, and, yes, entertaining, without being turgid.
For that I think, even as "simple" as it is, I would be
considering "A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich", and either
"Cancer Ward" or "First Circle"... certainly "Gulag
Archipelago".
I am thinking of "Travels with Charley" by Steinbeck.
I am wondering about "Martin Arrowsmith".
and....
---Mac
David Silver
>
> ----------
> In article <ua1p54h...@corp.supernews.com>, "dee" <ke4...@amsat.org>
> wrote:
>
>
>
>> As I promised Valentine, I am starting a new thread on this subject,
>>hoping to let the old ones die out.
>>
>> In the earlier discussion, Valentine referred to _The Bridge at San Luis
>>Rey_, _Catcher in the Rye_, and _Brideshead Revisited_ in giving examples of
>>"literature." Bill Patterson suggested that they were not good candidates:
>>
>
> Are we speaking to /great/ literature here? Great would surely be a value
> judgement, which lends itself to a good deal of subjectivity. There are no
> "experts" on literature, only a few competent critics here and there; so
> there is no objective community or institution to pronounce a work "great"
> or "not great." Thank Goodness.
>
With the caveat that what you've said applies mostly to contemporary
literature I agree. I think that the very best critics may well turn out
to be 'experts;' for it's really a matter of correctly predicting the
future, e.g., Jonson, infra. With respect to older literature, that
which has survived the swings of taste and fashion, and is still read
and greatly admired, then perhaps greatness properly can be applied by
consensus as it has in the case of Shakespeare and others. Subjectivity
in and of itself isn't something that can be eliminated wholly, nor
should it be for reasons including those Bill Patterson has noted.
Biases of taste however need to be stricken, just as jurors must be who
are biased so much that they cannot put aside that which they believe to
be true outside the courtroom and attend only to what is presented them
when they are called to judge facts presented them as, here, critics
are. Both standards of criticism and fashions of writing come and go,
e.g., a standard of a competent writer, supposedly, when Shakespeare was
writing was a thorough education in Latin and Greek. Of Shakespeare, Ben
Jonson said, "small Latin and less Greek," iirc. Contrary to fashion of
the time, Jonson admired Shakespeare's writings for reasons other than
their reflection of Latin and Greek that he detailed. Others didn't.
Guess who turned out correct or, rather, none of us need guess. Marlowe
had that education Shakespeare lacked; moreover, he catered to the
fashions popular in his time, and was more popular than Shakespeare, by
far, during Marlowe's lifetime. Fashion favorites changed. The reasons
Shakespeare far surpasses Marlowe today, however, are not limited to
style and fashion, but once the fashion changed Shakespeare's
superiority became evident.
> The best objective criteria for such, in my estimation, would be measuring
> how long a work has been in print (not just how long a work has been
> around). This would indicate a universal appeal, which one would think is
> necessary to be qualified as "great."
>
It is surely one criteria. Would it surprise you that Northrup Fyre
considers the Bible high, if not first, among the paramount canon of
Western Literature? I need not say, need I, that his reasons do not
depend greatly upon any claim of 'inspiration' by a deity?
> This would disqualify most of Hemmingway--maybe with the exception of /For
> Whom the Bell Tolls/, but would qualify /Catcher in the Rye/. /The Great
> Gatsby/, which I can barely stand, has been in print since it was written,
> as has many of Faulkner's crappy novels. Steinbeck puts them all to shame,
> though he reads a lot like a Frank Capra movie, both of whose works would
> have had Trotsky's seal of approval if it hadn't been for that Ice Pick
> incident.
>
Today, perhaps; but let's wait. Sometimes a writer falls out of favor
temporarily, or readers forget the writings, or the fashion, or
contemporary history and society's mores turn against themes, or
resolutions of plotting in those writings, e.g., Kipling suffered
greatly in reputation between the world wars and thereafter for some
time. Then a resurgence may occur and part, at least, of the reputation
is restored, as has been Kipling's.
The jury of posterity hasn't been given the case, yet. Something like
resurgence may be going on in the case of Marquand, the author discussed
in the review of Yardley, OJ and I were discussing way up in the
"Delusion" thread. Sometimes a good critic, and Yardley appears as good
as most, especially the non-academic ones who review books for a living,
makes a case for an out of popularity or out of mind writer. Sometimes
these cases succeed, sometimes not.
The thing about Capra movies is this: they might have had Heinlein's
approval as well at the time: Heinlein suggested Jimmy Stewart as the
lead in Destination Moon. Jimmie did his Capra roles rather nicely. Had
Republic let him off his B-movie horse, I suspect Marion Morrison would
have done them nicely, as well, during the same period. Whether Trotsky
liked them or not is immaterial. Adolph Hitler liked dogs and children
and prohibited the heinous vice of smoking tobacco in his presence.
Shame someone didn't take a ice axe to him while he was in prison in
Barvaria.
Time is the great winnow.
> There were many huge, critically acclaimed novels just fifty years ago which
> can only be found gathering dust in libraries today--Elmer Gantry, The Red
> Robe, Advise and Consent, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Mildred Pierce, etc,
> etc, etc. In many ways, the only way to judge a work is how continually it
> has stayed in print. This indicates ongoing appeal; something compelling in
> the work which bridges generations and the time in which it was written.
>
> Stranger in a Strange Land, in this regard, is equal to Catcher in the Rye.
> The Foundation Trilogy is equal to the Animal Farm.
>
Res ipse locuitur. I've always been amazed that Animal Farm and 1984
haven't been shoved into the science-fiction ghetto; perhaps the English
really are differently treated.
[snip]
>>
>> For that matter, of those that have withstood the test of time, which
>>ones just don't work for you? Which do? I like Shakespeare, for instance,
>>but Dickens bores me to tears. (Except _A Tale of Two Cities._)
>>
>
> Funny to note, that Poe was a contemporary of Dickens, and Poe,
> surprisingly, was a great literary critic of his day. At a party, so the
> story goes, Poe was heard to say that Dickens was a second rate hack.
> Dickens was at this party, and confronted him--telling him of a new novel (I
> forget which one). Poe proceeded to outline the entire plot of the novel
> unerringly, which he had not read and which had not been published. Dickens
> went ballistic.
>
Which means only that Dickens' plots were predicable at least to Poe.
Plot originality may not have been Dickens' forte, nor a necessity for
him. I'd look for his strenghts elsewhere. Poe was a genius and died in
the gutter. However, his genius was such he was recognized in his own
time; sadly it didn't do him much good; nor did he write long enough for
us. Too bad someone didn't appoint him a Postmaster and assign a keeper
to watch his health. Cf. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Dickens in his time
was certainly as popular as Marlowe; whether that will remain will be seen.
--
David M. Silver
http://www.heinleinsociety.org
http://www.readinggroupsonline.com/groups/heinlein.htm
"The Lieutenant expects your names to shine!"
Robert Anson Heinlein, USNA '29
Lt (jg)., USN R'td (1907-1988)
Roger Connor
Category: Fiction
( I don't really keep up with dates published, just enjoy the books!)
Robert Heinlein: Stranger in a Strange Land, Starship Troopers, The Unusual
Profession of Jonathan Hoag, Double Star, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, Tunnel
in the Sky, I Will Fear No Evil, Time Enough for Love
J.R.R.. Tolkein : The Hobbit, The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, The
Return of the King.
Mary Stewart: The Crystal Cave, The Hollow Hills, The Last Enchantment, The
Wicked Day
Evangeline Walton: Song of Rhiannon, Island of the Mighty, Children of Lyr,
Prince of Anwin
Walt and Leigh Richmond: Shockwave
Harold Lamb: The Curved Sabre
Jack Williamson: Darker Than You Think (One of the greatest Witch stories ever
written), The Humanoids
A. Merrit: Burn, Witch, Burn (Other one of the greatest Witch stories ever
written)
Edgar Rice Burroughs: The Tarzan series, The Pelucidar series, The Barsoom
series
Jules Verne: Journey to the Center of the Earth, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under
the Sea
Zenna Henderson: The People: No Different Flesh, The People: Pilgrimage, The
Anything Box
Roger Zelazney: Lord of Light, This Immortal, Creatures of Light & Darkness,
The Amber Series, Jack of Shadows
Andre Norton: Last Planet, The Witch World series, Beast Master, Lord of
Thunder,
Lois McMaster Bujold: Miles Vorkosigan series
Glen Cook: The Black Company series
Sean Russell: Initiate Brother, Gather of Clouds
E.E. “Doc” Smith: The Galaxy Primes, The Skylark series, The Lensmen series
Steven Brust: The Vlad Taltos series,The Khaavren Romances series
Ursula LeGuin: The Earthsea series, The Lathe of Heaven
Gordon Dickson: The Dorsai series
C.J. Cherryh: The Faded Sun series, The Morgaine series, Cuckoo’s Egg
Clifford D. Simak: Waystation, A Choice of Gods, The Einstein Intersection
James Fenmore Cooper: The Deerslayer, The Pathfinder, The Last of the Mohicans
Thomas B. Costain: Below the Salt, The Black Rose, The Silver Chalice
Rudyard Kipling: The Jungle Books
Ingles Fletcher: Lusty Wind for Carolina, Raleigh’s Eden, Queens Gift
Louis L’Amour: Sackett’s Land, To the Far Blue Mountains, Sackett, Mustang Man,
The Lonesome Gods, Tucker, Bendigo Shafter, The Haunted Mesa, Sitka
Sax Rhomer: The Fu Manchu series
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: The Sherlock Holmes series
Agatha Christie: The Peroit series
Rex Stout: The Nero Wolf series
Gilbert K. Chesterton: The Father Brown series
Mark Twain: Letters From The Earth, Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, (and others)
Sir Walter Scott: Ivanhoe
Jack London: White Fang, Call of the Wild
Michael Moorcock: The Eternal Champion series, but specifically Elric of
Melinbone subseries
John Brunner: The Compleat Traveler in Black, The Whole Man, Quicksand,
Shockwave Rider
Alexander Dumas: The Three Musketeers, Man in the Iron Mask
Ray Bradbury: The Martian Chronicles
H.G. Wells: The Time Machine, War of the Worlds
Isaac Asimov: I, Robot
James Blish: A Case of Conscience, The Whole Man, Cities in Flight series
Arthur C. Clarke: Childhood’s End
Orson Scott Card: Ender’s War
A.E.vanVoigt: The Weapon Shops of Isher
Walter Farley: The Black Stallion,The Island Stallion
Sir Thomas Mallory: Le Morte d’Arthur (aka The Death of Arthur)
Farley Mowat: The Snow Walker
This, I might add, is part of my recommended reading list.
I tend to agree with Steve's point that "great literature" is in the eye of the
reader.
I categorize books as follows:
Don't bother picking it off the shelf
Wasn't worth the effort or time- Trash can material!
Worth reading once, maybe- don't pass on to friends.
Read once & enjoy: recommend to others to do the same-
Read & recommend heartily to others
Read & want to keep to re-read in the future.
(I figure a book is "great" if it passes both the last two steps)
Roger
dee
What elements do books that "stand the test of time" share? That
might be a more productive question than "Did RAH write real literature?"
jump101 wrote:
> Whoa! Wait up here. :-) Which is it... "great" or "real"? Real is a
> whole different thing.
Well, Steve, both terms were bandied about in the other thread(s). I
decided to reframe the question because I thought the other two were
unwieldy (translation: I don't know what either term means, even to me, much
less to you, or Bill, or Mike, or whomever.) IOW, we can't talk about the
other two terms without defining what we mean, and you saw what that got us
into. "Stands the test of time" is just my effort to define one playing
field.
So, do you have a short-form definition of "real literature." Would I
be correct in assuming that "great literature" is of necessity a subset of
"real literature?" What are the additional, distinguishing elements?
--Dee
dee
> Now that Dee has clarified her request, I can't think of a book that will
> certainly be popular in 100 years. My crystal ball is showing a 'blue
> screen' :)
Gee, djinn, you makeme a more demanding taskmaster than I meant to be.
:-) I don't ask for books that will "certainly" be popular in 100 years.
Just "probably." And by "still be read," I certainly men more popularn than
something only read by academicians, but not necessarily as popular as the
bestseller list. Hmm, even trying to reframe the question into something a
little more concrete than "great literature" is not easy, and requires
honing.
I don't have any candidates in mind, yet, either. But that may change,
as this discussion starts one or two neurons firing.
--Dee
Roger Connor
BPRAL22169 wrote:
> >> We all decide every time we choose something to read.
> >
> >Let me see if I understand this. Using my question and your answer, would
> >it be fair to say, "Every time we choose something to read, we decide what
> >is canon."?
>
> Not what I said. Every time we choose, we contribute to the emergence of the
> canon. The canon emerges from the millions of choices millions of people make
> about what they read and what they talk about and what they used as building
> blocks of their own life.
But each choice is a subjective experience. My experience with the majority of the
works most English departments foist off on students as "great literature" is that
they should have been allowed to die their natural death several decades ago.
There are a few, that I would categorize as having been worth reading as
indicators of culture or society or thought at a particular slice of time, but
that does not make them "great literature" only points of reference, which can
equally be had from close study of history texts.
>
>
> I thought canon meant a set of rules or principles generally
> >established as valid/fundamental in a field, art or philosophy.
>
> When speaking of a literary canon, what is generally meant is the set of
> exemplary works regarded as touchstones, setting or extending the standards by
> which other works are evaluated.
>
> >I fail to see how "we" are establishing that which is canon.
>
> Clearer?
>
No, as there are NO RULES, then there is only a subjective opinion. And I do NOT
think that one can compare works designed as plays, with poetry, or with prose,
and effectively determine that one is "inferior" and the other "superior". It's
like comparing potatoes, onions & yams- they are all roots, but very different in
all other ways.
>
> Furthermore, what is
> >apparently canon now was once nothing more than the opinion of several
> >people and opinions are subjective.
>
> First, you have defined it that way, buy your definition is screwey. Second,
> The canon is never anything mor ethan "the opinion of several people." It's
> customary to speak of the western canon as a consensus of opinion on the core
> literary heritage of our civilization.
But, the question begs: who took the measure of the "consensus"? From my point of
view, this is a myth that is perpetuated by the various departments of English,
because nobody is willing to stand up and say HOGWASH to what is very obvious to
the rest of the educated reading public.
>
>
> >> What rules? It's not a matter of rules -- it's looking at the thing and
> >seeing
> >> what's there.
> >
> >"Dad sat down as I finished. Elapsed time from scratch, two minutes and
> >twenty seconds -- there's nothing hard about cooking; I don't see why woman
> >make such a fuss about it. No system, probably."
> >
> >Person A sees this as a description of dinner preparation. Person B sees it
> >as an opinion on the difficulty of preparing dinner. Person C sees it as a
> >criticism of women. Each of them "sees what is there" according to their
> >own frame of reference... subjective.
> >
> I repeat the question. What rules? It's not a matter of rules.
>
> You are exhibiting a very rigid and narrow mindset in approaching this text,
> and frankly it's not possible to do anything useful with that mindset. The
> more nearly correct way of approaching this text is that these are three of
> many possible dimensions of interpretation and they are all simultaneously
> "correct." There is no subjectivity in the correctness of each of the remarks
> -- the correspondence of the statement with the text is manifest. There is
> subjectivity internal to the observer, in deciding what aspect or dimension he
> wants to talk about at this moment. And that's the good part. That's what
> makes literary analysis a worthwhile human endeavor, and that's why tastes
> change and fashions change and people can get a charge out of talking about a
> book 52 years after it was published. And this seems to address the remainder
> of your post.
>
> Bill
The point is exactly that: there are no rules- which makes the whole thing a
subjective determination, which is then passed on to the rest of the population.
Exactly as the "Masters" of Art have been determined. For instance, I'm one of the
"nine?" (cited earlier) that can't stand Picasso, and think the rest of the art
world lost it's good sense in calling anything he ever did as "good art" much less
a "Master" As there are only the opinions of self determined "art experts" to
support this status, I think my opinion is just as valid. However, those self
determined "experts" have bamboozled the rest of the population to think that a
disagreeing opinion cannot possibly be valid. Even if it is the majority opinion!
I presented my criteria in another post, but the bottom line for me is:
Will I recommend it to others, AND Do I want to read it AGAIN!
If the answer to BOTH is yes, than it rates as "Great Literature" in my opinion.
(YOURS, of course, may vary.)
Roger
dee
> >I think whats bothering some of us is that the relationships are vague.
> >That is, there's no template or scale where we can look at a new book and
> >accurately measure its 'greatness'.
Bill wrote:
> Let me heave a sigh of relief. Thank ghu-ghu that it is so.
> >The degree of precision is what leads to discussion. Many of us think the
> >guage isn't very precise. You, perhaps having better tools, think the
guage
> >works pretty well.
> There are no gauges; degree of precision is not a virtue; that's entirely
the
> wrong paradigm for viewing the phenomenon. There are no Bentham-Mill
measures
> of pleasure and utility -- pretty silly stuff -- and that is precisely the
> degree of our freedom.
Bill--
So what is the right paradigm?
What elements does "great literature" share?
I am indeed very uninformed on the subject of literary criticism. I
tend to fall in that very plebian, "I don't know art, but I know what I
like" category. I do think there is more to art than that, but I have not
succeeded in defining for myself what it is.
I think djinn had a pretty good example in another post, referring to
the mechanic. My mechanic can explain the problem with my car to to me in
terms that help me understand waht's wrong, how he came to that conclusion,
and what is neede to fix it. He doesn't even try to make a mechanic out of
me. A magazine or newspaper columnist can talk about a subject in terms
that us non-experts can come to grips with, and hopefully take something
useful from, without attempting to make us professionals in the field.
Is there any way for you to "write a column" about your field? Please
bear in mind that terms of art will probably need some definition, for some
of us.
--Dee
David Silver
that follows.
Roger Connor wrote:
>
> BPRAL22169 wrote:
>
>
>>>>We all decide every time we choose something to read.
>>>>
>>>Let me see if I understand this. Using my question and your answer, would
>>>it be fair to say, "Every time we choose something to read, we decide what
>>>is canon."?
>>>
>>Not what I said. Every time we choose, we contribute to the emergence of the
>>canon. The canon emerges from the millions of choices millions of people make
>>about what they read and what they talk about and what they used as building
>>blocks of their own life.
>>
>
> But each choice is a subjective experience.
Not wholly, unless you allow it to be. There are tools to assess the
quality of the writing, not the quality of what you perceive to be the
message -- that's always subjective, unless you line up what you think
the author's points to be against an external standard you bring to the
affray -- and it will really be an affray if that's what you do -- such
as is what the author "saying" orthodox or my version of [fill in the
blank, religious belief, moral belief, political belief, historical
belief, sociological belief].
There are neutral tools a good critic uses to assess a great many
things: plot, theme, characterization, unity, levels of reference, etc.,
and on and on and on. It's complication on complication and requires
skill, learning and study and experience. But anyone who can think and
render himself unbiased can do it. That's all they ask of jurors.
> My experience with the majority of the
> works most English departments foist off on students as "great literature" is that
> they should have been allowed to die their natural death several decades ago.
I cannot speak for all colleges, particularly not teacher's colleges,
but My experience is few, if any, university undergraduate English
departments teach 'great literature' classes; rather they mostly teach
surveys, e.g., Victorian novel, middle English poetry (except Chaucer)
through Gower, Restoration Drama and Poetry, the Metaphysical Poets,
American Literature from 1600-1760, from 1760-1880, from 1880-1920,
"Modern" English Drama (maybe you get up to G.B. Shaw), Victorian
Poetry, 17th and early 18th century Expository Prose, Walter Pater and
the End of the Victorian Cycle, the Great War Poets, etc., and so on.
These days I understand they have things offered such as the
Science-Fiction Novel and Short Story, the Detective Story, etc., but
those modern genres were unheard of when I went through university.
If the undergraduate department thinks it's great literature, there will
be a course with the author's name, exclusively, and you'll probably be
required to take it, or a certain number of them, e.g., Shakespeare
(very possibly a full year, two-thirds on the plays, the rest on the
sonnets and other poetry), Milton, maybe pick one of Chaucer or Spenser
and the rest of the other Elizabethans to fill in the gap once you
finish what there is of Spenser; otherwise after the one year long
Sophomore omnibus survey starting with Beowulf (maybe even in
Anglo-Saxon) and ending wherever the text breaks off and stops (maybe
1920, maybe later now), that's it. You pick your own poison from then on
from among the other courses offered. If you have an expert on the
department staff who still dabbles in teaching undergrads, maybe an
expert in Carlyle, then expect to see a Carlyle course for undergrads.
Maybe somebody likes the Victorian prose stylists, then you might
periodically expect a survey from ugh, Carlyle again (he sure is unique)
through Ruskin. You almost always get a course on Coleridge, the
Brownings, and Tennyson also including maybe today, Kipling's poetry, he
slowing coming out of disfavor (maybe called Major Victorian Poets).
Expect the same thing with Keats, Shelly and Byron. You want any of the
rest, take Victorian Poetry, or Romantic Poetry (unstated subtitle for
both the later two: the Minor ones).
To teach these surveys that take up more than half of the courses
offered, they include, well, a survey, sometimes even selecting popular
but bad works for the teaching points that they can gain by drawing
comparisons, i.e., The Castle of Oranto was a novel assigned in
Victorian Novel when I took it. Urrgh! Maybe, typically you'll get ten
or thirteen novels to read in a quarter or semester: that breaks down to
about one per week. So you blast on through them, lucky if you get two
hours of lecture per novel. That's okay for some, say Dickens, but not
so okay for others.
Great Literature courses, if they exist in an American university, are
usually lower division courses for non-majors, or are taught outside the
English Department, maybe in a Humanities Department if your university
has one. It counts as an elective if you're an English major, but not to
satisfy the requirements of your major. I took it: started with Homer
and Virgil, the Italians including Dante and Boccassio and then on to
the French, Rabeleis, Voltaire and Molliere, and to Goethe, then a roll
on through the Russians, a quick pop and a wave at Whitman, Melville and
Twain, and ending up with James Joyce and D.H. Lawrence ... oh, and by
the way, we did Hamlet again. Then I went over to the PoliSci Department
for the political writers (early modern ones Grotius through Bentham),
never did find anyone outside the Philosophy Department offering
Aristotle and Plato (I was warned away because they were teaching
Herbert Marcuse in those days, regardless what the course said), so I
missed them formally.
It's really unfair to do this to eighteen, nineteen, and twenty year
olds, assuming you're still seventeen when you start, as some still are.
But that's the way it works, except for G.I. Bill retreads as I was.
And that's the way they have to do it, but with this one distinction:
sophomore year they give you one or two courses in Criticism, and maybe
you elect an advanced one later, and you read a survey of critics (not
newspaper book or movie reviewers) telling you more or less exactly how
to write criticism of literature, of whatever various schools of thought
they possess on it with emphasis on whatever flavor your professor or
teaching assistant favors: and some are damned worthless. And you turn
in papers showing how well you can apply the critical methods you're
being taught, which are graded. Jane quoted Frye's joke about measuring
the amount of tears in each of someone's novels. Believe you me, there
are idiots teaching out there just as stupid. Most of them, including
one who perverted the 17th Century Novel course he was supposed to be
teaching us into a series of lectures on something he called "the
Chicago School of Criticism, (four standard plots, seven standard
characters, shove or ram the piegons in the holes even if they don't
fit)" now defunct, don't last to get tenure. But some of the critical
schools are fairly good.
Somehow the ones who survive this go on to English graduate schools, and
maybe get doctorates, unless they opt out, or they find a teacher's
credential program or get a job selling whatever, or learn something
useful. Or get married.
> There are a few, that I would categorize as having been worth reading as
> indicators of culture or society or thought at a particular slice of time, but
> that does not make them "great literature" only points of reference, which can
> equally be had from close study of history texts.
>
Maybe, maybe not. Are there any you were told were "great literature" in
those exact words in a non-gushing tone of voice that you think are not
and you'd care to name? [English Professors sometimes gush, other times
they 'gash gold vermillion'] If you care to only read Dickens' Hard
Times for a look at how Joe and his family lived, I won't stop you. I'm
not sure I consider Hard Times 'great literature' either, or Tess of the
d'Ubervilles, or many other pieces of (little "l") literature I had to
read. But there's a tenured full professor out there somewhere, who
wrote his dissertation or other articles on it, who'd dispute my opinion
and maybe, by reason and analysis, if I sit still for it long enough,
make me change it. And some *are* Great, and are included among the
others that fill up the surveys. How coarse a mesh are you planning to
use to catch these Great Literature fishes? Seine net or purse net?
>
>>
>>I thought canon meant a set of rules or principles generally
>>
>>>established as valid/fundamental in a field, art or philosophy.
>>>
>>When speaking of a literary canon, what is generally meant is the set of
>>exemplary works regarded as touchstones, setting or extending the standards by
>>which other works are evaluated.
>>
>>
>>>I fail to see how "we" are establishing that which is canon.
>>>
>>Clearer?
>>
>>
>
> No, as there are NO RULES, then there is only a subjective opinion. And I do NOT
> think that one can compare works designed as plays, with poetry, or with prose,
> and effectively determine that one is "inferior" and the other "superior". It's
> like comparing potatoes, onions & yams- they are all roots, but very different in
> all other ways.
>
Only if you refuse to concede there might be already developed 'rules,'
or standards, or benchmarks that make some sense. Then the only thing
that really counts is your opinion, but only to you. What critics try to
do is agree with others on a methodology and then apply it. Good ones
use neutral methodology. Others use or mix in moral judgments and
prejudices ("there's too many notes, take out some of the notes.") Why
cannot I compare a play, such as MacBeth, (which incidentally is a play
written in poetry) with poetry in epic form such are Paradise Lost, with
a prose in novel form such as Time Enough For Love? They all have the
basics: plot, themes, characters, and many of the more subtle measurements.
Let's test your thesis: go read the beginning of the "The Tale of the
Adopted Daughter," also titled Variations of a Theme, Chapter XI, of
Time Enough For Love (at p. 252, mass market paperback). Read the first
two paragraphs, ending with ". . . new beginnings--". Then tell me why I
cannot compare it with Longfellow's Hiawatha, a piece of poetry.
Obviously the test is loaded. I sometimes throw curveballs. :) The first
two paragraphs are written in prose format, but they're poetry and use
exactly the same metrical form as Hiawatha.
I'm not trying to embarass you, Roger, merely trying to shake up your
thoughts a little. I remember standing up in an English class one day,
saying I didn't understand and didn't agree with all the discussion of
what did the girl who got killed by the idiot who goes around killing
mouses in that Steinbeck novel symbolize. My opinion was "a tart is a
tart is a tart" and my opinion, to me, was the only one that counted.
Teacher thanked me for my opinion, in dead silence, I sat down, and they
went on with their discussion of what she symbolized, whatever it was;
and I ignored them. I think I was wrong then, because I closed my mind.
>
>>Furthermore, what is
>>
>>>apparently canon now was once nothing more than the opinion of several
>>>people and opinions are subjective.
>>>
>>First, you have defined it that way, buy your definition is screwey. Second,
>>The canon is never anything mor ethan "the opinion of several people." It's
>>customary to speak of the western canon as a consensus of opinion on the core
>>literary heritage of our civilization.
>>
>
> But, the question begs: who took the measure of the "consensus"? From my point of
> view, this is a myth that is perpetuated by the various departments of English,
> because nobody is willing to stand up and say HOGWASH to what is very obvious to
> the rest of the educated reading public.
>
Today's modern English departments in the aggregate really have very
little to say about which of today's modern writers will become accepted
into the canon. And what some departments say doesn't matter at all.
Some pigs is more equal than others. Still, the question is: when
Heinlein's been dead fifty years, will they be still assigning him in
the successor to Science Fiction Novel, i.e., Early Modern Speculative
Fiction?
The only way to try to ensure that is provoke folk to write the articles
in the language and using the tools and terms that those more equal pigs
may read and, fifty years from now, likely be using themselves -- you
must avoid transitory flavors of the day in criticism to do this. Maybe
even read only ten or twenty years from now. Ben Jonson gave Willy the S
a great send off with his obituary praising that man of small Latin and
less Greek. Fifty or a hundred years later, when the theatres were fully
reopened again and the censorship influence of the Puritans had abated
sufficiently to produce something a little more lively than they had
been they went looking around through the old already written mothballed
plays for something to produce and someone influential read Ben Jonson's
obituary speech for Shakespeare. I think his name was Dryden. He
repeated it, and the rest, as they say, is history.
>
[snip]
>>
>
> The point is exactly that: there are no rules- which makes the whole thing a
> subjective determination, which is then passed on to the rest of the population.
> Exactly as the "Masters" of Art have been determined. For instance, I'm one of the
> "nine?" (cited earlier) that can't stand Picasso, and think the rest of the art
> world lost it's good sense in calling anything he ever did as "good art" much less
> a "Master" As there are only the opinions of self determined "art experts" to
> support this status, I think my opinion is just as valid. However, those self
> determined "experts" have bamboozled the rest of the population to think that a
> disagreeing opinion cannot possibly be valid. Even if it is the majority opinion!
>
But your example may not be the way it works. Out of your nine, all may
think Picasso less worthy than, say, Turner, but six may feel Picasso
does a better job than Andy Warhol, maybe barely passing, but art. Real
art experts aren't self determined either, any more than real critics of
literature are. They earn it, by work and study and effort and the
exercise of judgment that proves sound. Those six will have tried to
find out what Picasso thought he was doing, and why some critics thought
he was doing something fine.
Me, when I was sixteen and had no patience with what was being taught,
my own opinion governed, because "a tart is a tart is a tart."
> I presented my criteria in another post, but the bottom line for me is:
> Will I recommend it to others, AND Do I want to read it AGAIN!
> If the answer to BOTH is yes, than it rates as "Great Literature" in my opinion.
> (YOURS, of course, may vary.)
I agree with you that it's probably a good book. I like the way your
mind works; and I'd read it, but not everything I reread and recommend
is literature. I'm like Oscar. I'll read the back of cereral boxes. :)
I love WEB Griffin's stories, but they ain't literature. But still, you
oughta read them! John D. MacDonald, maybe he will be recognized as
writing literature; but the net is pretty coarse . . . Heinlein? We'll
find out in the great by-'n-by.
Now if you don't mind, I'll have a little nip of brandy and go to bed.
Gotta pack for Seattle tomorrow. ;) Bill's already left for San
Francisco and his connecting flight, I think. Have fun!
ValentineSmith
>From: bpral...@aol.com (BPRAL22169)
>Date: 3/26/2002 7:59 PM Eastern Standard Time
>Message-id: <20020326195905...@mb-fo.aol.com>
>
>>would you place anything of Heinlein's on the list?
>
>I thought you were trying to your field of inquiry to 20th century works.
I do, but I wanted to establish a continuum. We could argue forever without
establishing some place in the beginning where we all can agree.
I
>think there are two books in the same genre written about the same time that
>are candidates for the canon for which Stranger is extremely compatible --
>Giles Goat Boy and Catch-22. Giles more canonical than Catch-22. Now, I
>think
The I agree about GGB, the problem is that it's something of a difficult read
for most people. (I've attached a snip from the book below,) C-22 is a more
workable book in that respect.
>Stranger is even more ambitious than Giles, Goat Boy, and in some ways more
>successful at what it does, but it didnt catch the academic attention GGB
>did.
Almost as an aside--while I don't agree with the overall lit merit of Stranger,
I'm willing to discuss it. On the other hand, RAH really didn't follow the
career path that would lead anyone in academe to take him very seriously.
>
>If you want to talk about the most centrally canonical books -- I think there
>would have to be layers and layers of discussion before we could sensibly
>talk
>about Job, let's say -- but could it be done? Yes. The route lies from The
>Divine Comedy to Mark Twain. It really depends on what you mean by canonical
>-
>there is a layer of transcendently great stuff. Harold Bloom argues that
>Shakespeare and Dante are at the core of it all because they defined what we
>now mean to be human. If you restrict your definition of the canon to the
>core
>transcendents, then I don't think Heinlein is quite on that level; but if you
>want to talk about people like Henry James and William Dean Howells and
>Herman
>Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Mark Twain, then I do think Heinlein is
>compassable on that level of discourse. I don't do rankings as a rule, but
>this seemed necessary.
Rankings are almost always problematical, especially on such neo-subjective
matters.
>Bill
>
Mike/Tom--my real name's Tom and I'll be going by that moniker if its not too
confusing.
Giles the Goat-Boy
George is my name; my deeds have been heard in Tower Hall, and my childhood has
been chronicled in the Journal of Experimental Psychology. I am he that was
called in those days Billy Bockfuss -- a cruel misnomer. For had I indeed a
cloven foot I'd now hobble upon a stick or need a pick-a-pack ride to class in
humid weather. Aye, it was just for want of a proper hoof that in my fourteenth
year I was the kicked instead of the kicker. I was in otherwords, the Ag-Hill
Goat-Boy. Who misbegot me, and on whom, who knew, or in what corner of the
university I drew first breath? It was my fate to call no men Daddy, no woman
Mom. Herr Doktor Professor Spielman was my keeper: Maximilian Spielman, the
great Mathematical Psycho-Proctologist.... His crusading ardor burned many a
finger... [and] he was drummed off the quad a year before retirement on a
trumped-up charge of intellectual turptitude -- though his only crime, he
avowed to the end, was to suggest in a public lecture that his science alone
could plumb the bottom of man's nature. Disgraced an penniless, he was obliged
to take whatever employment he could find to keep body and soul togeter; and
thus it came about that he spent his last years as senior Goatherd on th New
Tammany College Farms. His masterwork, The Riddle of the Sphincters, twenty
years in the writing... he fed to the goats a chapter at a time.... Embittered,
but to great-hearted for despair, he removed himself entirely from society and
devoted all his genius to the herd.... He became a vegetarian, grew a little
beard, exchanged cap and gown for a wrapper of mohair, and lemented only that
his years would not let him go on all fours. The goats... (to quote an entry
from his diaries) 'do not conceal in shame that axpect of their beuty I crave
to fathom; serenely aware, after their fashion, that a perfest whole is the sum
of perfect parts, the fly their flags high....' (From Giles Goat-Boy by John
Barth)
David Wright
"ValentineSmith" <valenti...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:20020327085251...@mb-cv.aol.com...
> >Subject: Re: Heinlein and "Great Literature"
> >From: bpral...@aol.com (BPRAL22169)
> >Date: 3/26/2002 7:59 PM Eastern Standard Time
> >Message-id: <20020326195905...@mb-fo.aol.com>
(snip)
> Almost as an aside--while I don't agree with the overall lit merit of
Stranger,
> I'm willing to discuss it. On the other hand, RAH really didn't follow
the
> career path that would lead anyone in academe to take him very seriously.
>
<sarcasm>
Right. He didn't sit at the feet of pompous fools, absorbing their BS, so
that he could become another old pompous fool, passing on the BS to others.
</sarcasm>
Don't get me wrong, I think that there are probably a large number of Ph.Ds
, (perhaps even a majority), who are teaching and who don't fit this
characterization, and I suspect that some of them may indeed take Heinlein
seriously. When I was teaching, some 20 years ago, Stranger was taught in
the modern literature courses. I don't know whether or not that is still
true or not, but it certainly was then. Of course, this was only the local
junior college, so it might not qualify as <sarcasm>academe</sarcasm>.
David W.
Teresa Redmond
and not any sort of attempt to be a "critic". :-)
I will be keeping this post to refer to for future book reads.
thanks, Roger!
On Wed, 27 Mar 2002 02:57:47 -0500, in alt.fan.heinlein, Roger Connor
<raco...@mindspring.com> quoth:
>Nominations for books that will still be read 50 or 100 years from now:
>Category: Fiction
>( I don't really keep up with dates published, just enjoy the books!)
>
>Robert Heinlein: Stranger in a Strange Land, Starship Troopers, The Unusual
>Profession of Jonathan Hoag, Double Star, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, Tunnel
>in the Sky, I Will Fear No Evil, Time Enough for Love
>J.R.R.. Tolkein : The Hobbit, The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, The
>Return of the King.
>Mary Stewart: The Crystal Cave, The Hollow Hills, The Last Enchantment, The
>Wicked Day
>Evangeline Walton: Song of Rhiannon, Island of the Mighty, Children of Lyr,
>Prince of Anwin
>Walt and Leigh Richmond: Shockwave
>Harold Lamb: The Curved Sabre
>Jack Williamson: Darker Than You Think (One of the greatest Witch stories ever
>written), The Humanoids
>A. Merrit: Burn, Witch, Burn (Other one of the greatest Witch stories ever
>written)
>Edgar Rice Burroughs: The Tarzan series, The Pelucidar series, The Barsoom
>series
I just can't see the Barsoom series as "great literature", in that it
will be read 50 to 100 years from now. I read many of those stories
while pregnant with Heather, took them home from the library. My
thought on them was that they were so predictable, after a time, that
you knew the girl would be placed in great danger, the boy would come
through great trials to rescue her, and those trials were not
believable in the least to me. So I guess I have to agree with VS
(Tom?) in that if you can't suspend disbelief, or if your belief is
shattered somewhere in the story, you can't believe the story will
survive. Is this the point you are trying to make, Bill, with what
you are saying? That my personal feeling on this series can't be
considered when you are talking about "great literature"?
Many people here will add to your list; I don't see _Mote in God's
Eye_, or others that I see here often... but I haven't managed to
read that yet (damn!!!)
>This, I might add, is part of my recommended reading list.
>I tend to agree with Steve's point that "great literature" is in the eye of the
>reader.
>I categorize books as follows:
>Don't bother picking it off the shelf
>Wasn't worth the effort or time- Trash can material!
>Worth reading once, maybe- don't pass on to friends.
>Read once & enjoy: recommend to others to do the same-
>Read & recommend heartily to others
>Read & want to keep to re-read in the future.
>(I figure a book is "great" if it passes both the last two steps)
I figure that as well, and agree with your breakdown. Barsoom series
only made it to read once and enjoy. Mary Stewart, however, has
honored space on my shelves. :-) Along with several others in your
list.
--
~teresa~
^..^ "Never try to outstubborn a cat." Robert A. Heinlein ^..^
http://www.heinleinsociety.org/ & http://rahbooks.virtualave.net
"Blert!!!" quoth Pixel, a small, yellow cat.
email me at pixelmeow at aol dot com, yahoo addy is spamtrap.
Yahoo Messenger and AIM id = pixelmeow
Jane Davitt
>
> Don't really expect you to have the answer but your explanation was both
> clear and concise and gave me an opportunity to express my mild frustration
> with this subject.
>
> Dave
>
> PS- I go up to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art periodically. The
> permanent exhibits are wonderful but some of the temporary exhibits lead me
> to think that my judgement is certainly as good as some 'experts'.
>
>
>
>
I think this is the problem. We all get a little huffy at the idea
that our judgment isn't valued as greatly as someone else's. See the
way you put 'experts' in quotation marks? <g> I don't have an answer
but I got to thinking as I spooned cereal into Lauren this morning
and this was what I ended up with.
Divide up the whole mess into two elements, _equally valid_
responses or approaches but different in type and purpose.
First we have the reader and his own personal thoughts on a book as
he is reading it and after he's finished. This is not lit crit; this
is opinion. During the reading you experience pleasure, boredom,
whatever. After the reading you make a mental comparison with other
books that the author wrote, other books in the same genre, all the
books you've ever read and you slot it in somewhere in your list of
'Books I Have Read'.
So, you decide you loved the book, will recommend it to your friends
and read more by this author. Then you open your Sunday paper, turn
to the literary supplement and find a reviewer slashing the book to
pieces, heaping abuse on it for various reasons and generally
declaring it a heap of dirtied paper.
You can either ignore this in the calm knowledge that your view is
as good as his, get angry at the insult to your taste or feel
anxious, doubt yourself and donate the book to the nearest charity
store under cover of darkness.
The last option is out. No one knows what books you will enjoy but
you. If you did enjoy it then all the negative reviews in the world
are themselves just a shocking waste of paper as far as you're
concerned. His view on the book is as valid as yours, it's simply
only of value to him.
The second option....well, he doesn't know you sat up till 2.00 am
reading it and he didn't mean to hurt your feelings.
The first option seems reasonable but it does have a drawback. Sure,
your view on how the book felt to you is the most important thing
(to you) but there's something to be said for considering other
POV's if you want to discover new things about that book. Maybe that
reviewer spotted something you didn't but which interests you. It
might even make you reconsider and give the book a 9 instead of a
ten on your personal scale. This isn't the same as option 3; it's
not you being bullied into lowering (or raising) the rating; it's
you amending your opinion as new data comes in.
But none of that is lit crit. Probably most of us readers aren't
qualified to do this; it's akin to being able to add 2 + 2 but not
being able to do the kind of mathematics that nuclear scientists do.
Being able to read a book and form an opinion does not mean that you
can subject that book to LC in any meaningful way.
That's because lit crit isn't interested in ranking a work, isn't
concerned with one's emotional response to it. What it's concerned
with is placing the work within a framework, identifying themes,
linking the book to the millions of other books that have been
written. In a piece of embroidery, each thread is equal, each stitch
is important. Opinion says, 'I like that flower down in the corner,
the petals look almost real'. Lit crit views that flower in the same
way as it views the solid piece of dark grey stitching in the
background, giving it no more attention and no less, because it's
equally important to the whole.
Lit crit is not all that important to most readers because it's a
way of looking at a book that doesn't mean much or add much unless
you have a vast and varied reading experience. Someone who likes
Harlequin romances and has never read anything else would have
nothing to cling to if they attempted to apply literary criticisms
to one of those romances (and I'm sure you could). It's very
difficult to lit crit a genre if you've never read outside that genre.
I have been reading Frye's book and quoting interesting bits these
last few days but I haven't even heard of some of the authors he
mentions and of those whose names I know, I don't always know their
books very well. I'm persevering with the book because despite that
I find it fascinating and I'm getting tantalising glimpses of what
he means but I couldn't apply lit crit to a book as I understand lit
crit (and maybe I don't understand it very well but this is afh not
the exam room so no worries :-)).
I can cross stitch but that's the only stitch I know; I would look
at that embroidery and be incapable of seeing the many other
stitches used: the use of colour and complex shading would appeal to
me but I wouldn't know by looking that the flower's petals were a
mixture of DMC240 and 321 (I made those numbers up btw).
The way I see it, lit crit is dissecting the butterfly, opinion is
deciding the Red Admiral has prettier wings than the cabbage white.
Not all of us are qualified or keen on doing the first but someone
has to do it in order to increase our knowledge of butterflies. It
doesn't make the cabbage white prettier to know what family of
butterflies it belongs to but it's important to a lepidopterist.
Jane
BPRAL22169
> I don't have any candidates in mind, yet, either.
One thing occurs to me: historically, satires have a very long shelf life. Of
the three I mentioned upthread, Giles Goat Boy (which Heinlein liked greatly,
BTW) seems to have fallen out already. Catch 22 may have some staying power,
but there's a good chance it's readibilty will be liked to fashion of concern
about World War II. On the other hand, Stranger seems to have thrown off its
link to the Countercultureof the 1960's and is still being read 40 years after
publication. Since it's theme is a perennial concern -- hypocrisy -- I'd say
there is a good chance Stranger will be read in 50 or a hundred years.
Bill
BPRAL22169
>point of
>view, this is a myth that is perpetuated by the various departments of
>English,
>because nobody is willing to stand up and say HOGWASH to what is very obvious
>to
Your point of view doesn't match up to the reality very well, I'm afraid. I
can certainly sympathize with your hostility to the pedagogical methods of
university English lit departments -- but I fail to see what that has to do
with the subject at hand.
No question is begged: I think the canon (whatever it is in detail) is an
emergent quality of millions of individual readers creating their own esthetic
experience out of their reading.
Bill
Simon Jester
> Nominations for books that will still be read 50 or 100 years from now:
> Category: Fiction
> Michael Moorcock: The Eternal Champion series, but specifically Elric of
> Melinbone subseries
Speaking of Mr. Moorcock, I recently read his latest addition to the Elric
series, "The Dreamthief's Daughter". People who are familiar with Moorcock's
work will be aware that he is dismissive (putting it mildly) towards
Heinlein, so when I reached the climax of the book, my response was "oh my
god...".
Anyone else read the book? Have similar reactions? Did Moorcock do it
deliberately? Does he even *know*?
Simon
Simon Jester
...
> I've always been amazed that Animal Farm and 1984
> haven't been shoved into the science-fiction ghetto; perhaps the English
> really are differently treated.
I don't think it's because they're English; IMO, this is an example of
exceptions being allowed for recognised "literary" writers who occasionally
dirty their hands with
SpecFic.
A few other examples might be Huxley ("Brave New World", "After Many a
Summer"), Lem ("Pirx the Pilot") and Forster ("The Machine Stops").
(Hmmm... two out of three English. Not what I'd intended.)
I think Ray Bradbury and Kurt Vonnegut are also considered to be more
"literary" than "science-fiction".
Simon
BPRAL22169
There isn't any single "right" paradigm; any paradigm that appreciates the
esthetic elements of the work would probably do pretty well. This is a wrong
paradigm because it tries to treat a work of art as though it were cordwood.
> What elements does "great literature" share?
This could be a very long discussion. Just a few remarks of a very general
nature; if we pick a dozen works that we agree are canonical -- perfectly
possible, as there's lots to choose from and some are really obvious as to
their shaping influence on us -- they might not have any technical elements in
common at all, because they are not regarded as important because of story
figures and rhetorical devices. The threshhold condition is that they must
induce the esthetic experience, which is a fundamentally different type of
experience from the metrical and logical experiences of science and
philosophy, for example. The conventional way of talking about the intense
esthetic experience is that it "shows us ourselves," and the clearest example
of a critical work based on that theory I could give you is Harold Bloom's book
on Shakespeare, in which his premise is that Shakespeare created the model or
paradigm we now use to define what it means to be a human being. And to close
out this remark, I'l refer you to another Bloom book -- I happen to be reading
it now -- The Western Canon. He chose 26 canonical writers and works to
discuss the meaning of the canon to us as a culture.
> I think djinn had a pretty good example in another post, referring to
>the mechanic. My mechanic can explain the problem with my car to to me in
>terms that help me understand waht's wrong, how he came to that conclusion,
>and what is neede to fix it. He doesn't even try to make a mechanic out of
>me. A magazine or newspaper columnist can talk about a subject in terms
>that us non-experts can come to grips with, and hopefully take something
>useful from, without attempting to make us professionals in the field.
> Is there any way for you to "write a column" about your field? Please
>bear in mind that terms of art will probably need some definition, for some
>of us.
Anyone can acquire the tools of literary analysis -- but literary analysis
isn't something that does the trick for everybody. A friend once said, when we
were jointly studying the Summa Theologica, that God's grace is so great that
he will redeem even creatures so miserable as theologians -- but it took
special heroic effort on his part, and therefore on ours. People who are moved
by logic and reason can be led to grace through that door. Doesn't matter if
most people are moved by other factors and have other doors for themselves.
The purpose of literary analysis is to enrich our experience of the work, and
if it doesn't do that for you, don't do it. Doesn't matter in the least.
But the tools are freely available.
Bill
BPRAL22169
>career path that would lead anyone in academe to take him very seriously.
Yes. Not only that,but he was quite hostile to literary academics and
uncooperative -- not that he was entirely unjustified in thinking nothing
productive could be made to come out of what the academics of the day were
doing. Barth took a quite different approach.
Part of the problem, too, lies in the problem of fashion. Heinlein's main body
of work was done at a time in which the main lines of academic thought were
quite hostile to his thoughtways and his artistic methods. I'm certain this
contributed to -- not just his popularity, but to the sometimes amazing
emotional investment people make in his writing, because Heinlein was affirming
things people sensed were important but got no (or little) positive
reinforcement about from pop or high culture.
I think Heinlein got more and more deliberate about this as time went on.
I also think that when one senses oneself in opposition, one tends to become
more polarized. Middle grounds tend to get neglected and extremes emphasized.
Bill
charles krin
<raco...@mindspring.com> wrote:
>Rudyard Kipling: The Jungle Books
and The Just So Stories....which are actually separate from The Jungle
Books, even if they are often packaged together...
ck
--
country doc in louisiana
(no fancy sayings right now)
dee
Dee wrote:
> > So what is the right paradigm?
Bill P. wrote:
> There isn't any single "right" paradigm; any paradigm that appreciates
the
> esthetic elements of the work would probably do pretty well.
So what are a couple of standard paradigms?
> > What elements does "great literature" share?
> <snip> The threshhold condition is that they must
> induce the esthetic experience, which is a fundamentally different type of
> experience from the metrical and logical experiences of science and
> philosophy, for example. The conventional way of talking about the intense
> esthetic experience is that it "shows us ourselves," <snip for brevity>
Do you mean something related to what Jubal had to say about art in
talking about the Rodins? I'll have to go back and read the passage again,
but essentially he says that if it doesn't move the viewer (reader,
listener, etc.) that he discounts it as art.
Can you name some other considerations?
> > Is there any way for you to "write a column" about your field?
Please
> >bear in mind that terms of art will probably need some definition, for
some
> >of us.
> Anyone can acquire the tools of literary analysis -- but literary
analysis
> isn't something that does the trick for everybody. <snip>
> The purpose of literary analysis is to enrich our experience of the work,
and
> if it doesn't do that for you, don't do it. Doesn't matter in the least.
> But the tools are freely available.
Yes, but remember the RAH discussion (in FItS, I think) about getting
started without a guide--where do you begin to acquire the tools to acquire
the tools. Can you recommend a primer or two? I have seen Frye discussed
here. Is he a good starting place? Any particular book first? You
mentioned Bloom's _Western Canon_, do you recommend it as a primer?
You gotta get started somewhere. And I have a prejudice to lean towards the
idea that if a subject is worthwhile, people who are really good at it can
at least open the door a bit for those who are not in the field, and don't
want to make a lifelong study, but do want to grasp a bit of the essential
idea. Can you recommend an Asimov of lit/crit?
Maybe it hasn't been done yet. Maybe it cannot be done--but my
prejudice leads me to think of the Emperor's New Clothes, in that case.
BTW, I have been reading _Cultural Literacy_ recently. (Don't have iit
at hand, don't remember the author. Are you familiar with it? If so, how
complete would you say the overlap is between the western canon, and what he
deems the essentials of cultural literacy?
--Dee
Jane Davitt
useful, not connected to any meal time at all. In fact I was mopping
the kitchen floor this time :-)
I have read Bill and Andy's book on SIASL. I had read SIASL so I got
a lot out of _Martian_that changed the way I regarded Stranger. It
referenced Frye a lot. Now I've read Frye I can go back and not only
get more from Bill and Andy's book, but more from Stranger too. The
three books are now linked for me. Not ranked; there's no point and
no purpose in deciding which of the three books is 'best' but I am
aware of a link running between them.
At a higher level of magnification so to speak, I could probably
see a myriad of links, a spider's web of them in an intricate
pattern from each book to many others. But I'd have to know about
the other books before I could see that they were linked and how
they were connected.
A good literary critic is therefore someone with an excellent memory
and the ability to spot connections and themes and use them to place
the books at the right spot in the web.It's a job that's never done
as each new book will have an effect on the whole that necessitates
continual tiny adjustments of position.
And though there could be disagreement about placing between
critics, there's no judgment being made about the book itself.
There's no top to the web...but it would be fun to locate the centre.
Jane
Cato
> As I promised Valentine, I am starting a new thread on this subject,
> hoping to let the old ones die out.
>
> In the earlier discussion, Valentine referred to _The Bridge at San Luis
> Rey_, _Catcher in the Rye_, and _Brideshead Revisited_ in giving examples of
> "literature." Bill Patterson suggested that they were not good candidates:
>
> as 'great literature.' they were certainly prominent as culture commentary,
> about on the same level as Crome Yellow, for instance. Competently written,
> but addressed more to what Frye might call the "history of taste" than to
> literary values."
>
> Valentine responded,
> "Point taken, but I was trying to find some books that might be popular,
> modern and great. Something that Simon might have already read.
> Suggesting Dante's Inferno wouldn't take this discussion very far. Any
> suggestions?"
>
> I think a list of candidates for "great literature" from this ng would
> be very interesting. It woould be even more interesting to put it in a time
> capsule and examine our choices 50 or 100 years from now. What will
> withstand the test of time?
>
How about Twain's Huckleberry Finn? Twain BTW was a considerable
influence on RAH (and upon most writers of his time).
> For that matter, of those that have withstood the test of time, which
> ones just don't work for you? Which do? I like Shakespeare, for instance,
> but Dickens bores me to tears.
Dickens is mainly considered "great" b/c of his influence on politics
and society. But he was a fine writer, too.
>
> Someone here said, a while back, that a lot of the "classics" are only
> read because the schools require them. I think there is some truth in that
> today, but those works got to be classics because people wanted to read
> them, and kept reading them, long before the teachers put them on required
> reading lists. So why does Dickens just leave me cold, when people eagerly
> awaited the next installment of his serializations? I'll have to think
> about that one for a bit. Since I don't like Dickens, I haven't readhim in
> a long, long time. I might even find that a re-examination changes my
> opinion.
>
Like Dickens' works, many of the books in the Enlgish Lit Canon are
there b/c of their influence upon society and upon the ideology and
public debate of issues and ideas in general. London, for instance.
THere are many many writers who were very competent story tellers for
THEIR TIME, but are hopelessly outclassed by today's much more skilled
storytellers. However, those writers of yesteryear are in the Canon
b/c of how they influenced what today's society is, and how they
influenced storytelling and literature of today.
Henry James is probably the best example of this phenomenon: he was
never a great storyteller, even for his day. But his exposure of
certain nascent Big Ideas to the general public, made him
historic...and so today he is in THe Canon, even though there are
authors today would can wipe him out, skillwise...
To a lesser degree, Joyce and Melville are also good examples of
this...
As far as "great" writers, what are my personal tastes? Shakespeare's
Macbeth, The Tempest....A lot of Poe's stuff....London,
Steinbeck....Wouk .... King....RAH....Twain (maybe the greatest of all
time).....Countless others....
Great SF writers? bradbury ? RAH?
ValentineSmith
Message-id: <20020327102052...@mb-fi.aol.com>
I live on the UWS of Manhattan and am a fixture at Columbia, (tho' not in
lit-crit.) From what I hear the dis' goes thus:
1. Goat Boy was never read even when it was a best seller--but it was/is a
fixture in every home library.
2. C-22 a good book. Still discussed.
3. Stranger in a Strange Land. ("Hay, you see that show about that spaceship
Andromeda--those Nietzscheans, they're those Heinlein guys. (dude!)
Tom/Mike
djinn
news:ua30oe5...@corp.supernews.com:
Sorry, probably trying to excuse my lack of an answer :/
Bill had a good point - the 'Satyricon' and 'Golden Ass' have stood the
test of time and translation.
The likliest contemporary work I can think of is Jin Yongs 'The Deer and
the Cauldron' which is a good story and excellent social satire. It's
historical fiction and so the references will be as good 100 years in the
future as they are now. Its partly translated into English now and the
translation is great.
Louis Lamour may be a good candidate too, the way Rider Haggard has been.
Simple adventure stories about a specific time period.
ValentineSmith
>Subject: Re: Heinlein and "Great Literature"
>Date: 3/27/2002 10:13 AM Eastern Standard Time
>Message-id: <101724305...@eurus.uk.clara.net>
That's a good point. It never was about SiFi, was it. It was about what the
book had to say.
Critics and people took pigs talking, future world possibilities, and rudely
drawn pictures of "beavers" as "art." Now those books are fixtures in the
"lesser canon." Books like these have their meaning intrinsic to the story.
And THEN the story, the story, ( not preaching), showed us universal truths
about humanity. SiFi can transcend to art very easily. It just has to be art,
not just storytelling with a "message" side order forced down our throat.
Tom
ValentineSmith
>Subject: Re: Heinlein and "Great Literature"
>Date: 3/27/2002 10:47 AM Eastern Standard Time
>Message-id: <20020327104704...@mb-fi.aol.com>
>
<snip>
>
>Anyone can acquire the tools of literary analysis -- but literary analysis
>isn't something that does the trick for everybody. A friend once said, when
>we
>were jointly studying the Summa Theologica, that God's grace is so great that
>he will redeem even creatures so miserable as theologians -- but it took
>special heroic effort on his part, and therefore on ours. People who are
>moved
>by logic and reason can be led to grace through that door. Doesn't matter if
>most people are moved by other factors and have other doors for themselves.
>The purpose of literary analysis is to enrich our experience of the work, and
>if it doesn't do that for you, don't do it. Doesn't matter in the least.
>
>But the tools are freely available.
>Bill
>
Dear Bill,
Seems there are areas in which we disagree, but that that point is beautifully
made and well taken.
Tom
djinn
news:3CA1E385...@rogers.com:
<snip most of explanation - good, but not what I was looking for >
> It > doesn't make the cabbage white prettier to know what family of
> butterflies it belongs to but it's important to a lepidopterist.
>
>
>
> Jane
>
>
The lepidopterist is a good example. I can't become a butterfly expert in
a 30 minute lecture. But a lepidopterist can certainly explain to me the
methods he uses and probably the general classification scheme he uses in
1/2 an hour or so. For that matter, an encyclopedia can probably give me a
detailed classification.
I can't find that for literature.
So far the best explanation I've heard is from my own Lit. professor* who
said that great authors produce characters and situations which lots of
other people can relate to. Its a fuzzy-edged definition, but does explain
why Aeschylus and Apulius and Shakespeare are still read.
I'm starting to feel like I might be pushing too hard here, so I'm going to
let this drop.
* I went to an old Southern school which felt that even computer scientists
should be literate.
ValentineSmith
>Message-id: <20020327105744...@mb-fi.aol.com>
>
>>On the other hand, RAH really didn't follow the
>>career path that would lead anyone in academe to take him very seriously.
>
>uncooperative -- not that he was entirely unjustified in thinking nothing
>productive could be made to come out of what the academics of the day were
>doing. Barth took a quite different approach.
I always hoped for juvenile Goat-Boy books. (a Joke)
>Part of the problem, too, lies in the problem of fashion. Heinlein's main
>body
>of work was done at a time in which the main lines of academic thought were
>quite hostile to his thoughtways and his artistic methods. I'm certain this
>contributed to -- not just his popularity, but to the sometimes amazing
>emotional investment people make in his writing, because Heinlein was
>affirming
>things people sensed were important but got no (or little) positive
>reinforcement about from pop or high culture.
He was "other " from both. Then and now. Yes, he had interesting thing to
say, ( and he said them in a most interesting way,) but most of what RAH had to
"say" had already been said before. He was a "populizer," not an original
thinker. The points RAH made were made before and in a muchly worse style and
highly academic manner. It was up to RAH to make the thoughts of others
available to the masses and he did that in style.
>
>I think Heinlein got more and more deliberate about this as time went on.
After, I Will Fear No Evil?
>
>I also think that when one senses oneself in opposition, one tends to become
>more polarized. Middle grounds tend to get neglected and extremes
>emphasized.
The "populizer" approach seems reasonable to take.
>Bill
Tom
djinn
news:20020327005904...@mb-cg.aol.com:
>>If someone could just say something like "We measure the readability
>>and multiply by universal constants and divide by cultural references
>>to get this greatness index" I'll feel happier about this
>>explanation. Or even just "these other three books were written about
>>this theme and and about this level of vocabulary so this book is
>>probably gonna be as great as those three".
>
> There actually is an answer, and it is a koan. Joshu was found on his
> hands and knees at night. His disciples asked what he was doing, and
> the master told them he was looking for his keys. The disciples got
> down on their hands and knees to look too, and after some searching,
> one disciple thought to ask him where Joshu had lost his keys. Joshu
> told the disciples that he had lost his keys three streets over. "But
> why are you looking here, Master?" "Because there is no light there,
> and there is light here."
>
> And the moral of this story is - -
>
> Whereever there is light, you are certain to find something . . . but
> don't expect it to necessarily be useful for the task you have set
> yourself. For that, you have to go where the task is.
>
I'm Theravadist, not Zen. we don't find koans very useful.
If you're looking in the wrong place, will you ever find what you're
looking for?
> Readability and vocabulary don't really have anything to do with
> literature and literary values. They just aren't even on the same
> level as art, and you have to get on th e level where art is in order
> to be able to find art.
>
Ok, thats good to know. Does that mean art can be unreadable? That would
explain a lot :)
> It's actually quite sad that you would be happier with an explanation
> that didn't have anything to do with art.
>
>
> Bill
>
I would ONLY be happy with an explanation that had something to do with
art. Just can't find one.
See my response to Jane,
Mac
> Almost as an aside--while I don't agree with the overall lit merit of
>the career path that would lead anyone in academe to take him very seriously.
I can not believe the above statement.
For a book to be considered for "Literary Merit" the author must
follow some approved career path???
Jeez!!
Well, my impression of "English Instructors" took a downturn as
a result of two creatures.
One, at a college in the Denver area, who insisted upon telling
the students what the story was they had just read and who
refused to listen to what the students got out of the story.
Two: at a college in Oregon, a "LITERATURE" teacher who
castigated Beowulf for going after the monsters ---and who,
when asked, stated she had no real idea of the verities and
standards of any military person protecting citizens as she hated
the military and had never served. But she felt free to state
that the "author" of Beowulf was making a point on the
foolishness of Beowulf.
Gee, maybe I had better mosey down to the local University and
ask them for a listing, a print-out of the "approved" career path
so I can give that out to friends who are writing so they will
know what they must do if they ever want to write "Literature",
and this way, they can avoid the blunders of jobs during their
life-times which Mark Twain and Jack London and John Steinbeck
and E. Hemmingway and others so obviously took.
---Mac
djinn
news:101724305...@eurus.uk.clara.net:
> David Silver wrote:
> ...
>> I've always been amazed that Animal Farm and 1984
>> haven't been shoved into the science-fiction ghetto; perhaps the
>> English really are differently treated.
> ...
>
> I don't think it's because they're English; IMO, this is an example of
> exceptions being allowed for recognised "literary" writers who
> occasionally dirty their hands with
> SpecFic.
>
> A few other examples might be Huxley ("Brave New World", "After Many a
> Summer"), Lem ("Pirx the Pilot") and Forster ("The Machine Stops").
>
Is Lem recognized outside the Science Fiction world? I've never read
anything he wrote that wasnt sf - or fantasy, depending on how you look at
Cyberiad.
> (Hmmm... two out of three English. Not what I'd intended.)
Not only were two out of three English, my translations of Lem are English
as well. Maybe translators count too.
Since you've read it, how would you compare Pirx to Space Cadet? Would you
be interested in a new thread?
ValentineSmith
>Date: 3/27/2002 3:25 PM Eastern Standard Time
>Message-id: <m8a4ausq0n4spt0vu...@4ax.com>
>
>SNIP SNIP
>> Almost as an aside--while I don't agree with the overall lit merit of
>>Stranger,I'm willing to discuss it. On the other hand, RAH really didn't
>follow
>>the career path that would lead anyone in academe to take him very
>seriously.
>SNIP SNIP SNIP
>I can not believe the above statement.
>For a book to be considered for "Literary Merit" the author must
>follow some approved career path???
>Jeez!!
Dear Mac,
I'm not say it SHOULD be that way, and I certainly don't make the rules, but
like everything in life it seems some paths are better than others to achieve
certain goals.
And literery fame is a goal--it's not always something that's just granted. A
lot of people work hard for it.
And there are a lot of great authors you or I will never hear of, just because
of some little thing that got in their way.
tom
Andrew Preston
"charles krin" <ck...@iamerica.net> wrote in message
news:t9p3auk2g9asq930c...@4ax.com...
Kipling would be one of the ones I would pick in the list. I'd just add Kim
in there as well, and his poetry is a landmark in it's own right.
Is there any opinion about Heinlein and Kipling?
Andrew
Andrew Preston
I'm going to weigh in here with a snippet I heard recently on the radio
news. There has been a push I believe to select a "Book for Manhatten" or
something along those lines, the idea being that everyone would read that
book during a certain period, giving talking opportunities on the subway,
buses ... whatever.
I heard that it was down to two finalists, but during the newsspot they
played interviews with people on the street for their thoughts on which book
should be selected. Second person (male, age unknown) came up with
"Definitely Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein. It's a classic,
and still relevant today"
So what defines literature?
We have sets of canons, which are added to and reviewed. One person's
opinion is as good as anyone elses, although those that publish their
opinions seem to be added to the canons if they can express their opinions
cogently. OK, sometimes they get added even if they can't!
Andrew
John David Galt
> I think a list of candidates for "great literature" from this ng would
> be very interesting. It woould be even more interesting to put it in a time
> capsule and examine our choices 50 or 100 years from now. What will
> withstand the test of time?
Frankly, I have never had any use for the "literature" label except as a
warning that something is probably (a) tedious to read, or (b) written as
a "moral fable" by someone I passionately disagree with. I have yet to
discover the existence of a lit-crit (or movie critic, or wine connoiseur)
whose tastes don't correlate very negatively with mine.
I'm not saying this to denigrate lit-crits or their field of study, but in
the hope that someone can enlighten me as to why they think the field has
any value.
Cato
>
> > My experience with the majority of the
> > works most English departments foist off on students as "great literature" is that
> > they should have been allowed to die their natural death several decades ago.
>
Of course the canon works are stylistically dated. However, they got
there b/c of the influence they had on other writers, and on society.
That's history. That will never change. And of course, b/c there human
society is so much more complex these days (more educated people etc),
it is much harder for any one writer to have such a large influence.
Thus, those writers who are already in the canon will likely remain.
>
> I cannot speak for all colleges, particularly not teacher's colleges,
> but My experience is few, if any, university undergraduate English
> departments teach 'great literature' classes; rather they mostly teach
> surveys, e.g., Victorian novel, middle English poetry (except Chaucer)
> through Gower, Restoration Drama and Poetry, the Metaphysical Poets,
> American Literature from 1600-1760, from 1760-1880, from 1880-1920,
> "Modern" English Drama (maybe you get up to G.B. Shaw), Victorian
> Poetry, 17th and early 18th century Expository Prose, Walter Pater and
> the End of the Victorian Cycle, the Great War Poets, etc., and so on.
THat's the Canon. That is "great literature"!
> I love WEB Griffin's stories, but they ain't literature. But still, you
> oughta read them! John D. MacDonald, maybe he will be recognized as
> writing literature; but the net is pretty coarse . . . Heinlein? We'll
> find out in the great by-'n-by.
>
LOVED MacDonald. But was he original? Did he influence society or
many other writers? Probably not....Chandler was certainly there
first, Spillane, too. In fact, I guess JDM is fairly derivative of
Spillane. But he had that GREAT character of Travis McGee. And that
fine fine voice. It was almost Sinatraesque in the way it spoke for
and almost defined that early 60s generation urbane, whisky sippin'
tough guy.
David Silver
> David Silver <ag.pl...@verizon.net> wrote in message news:<3CA1B2...@verizon.net>...
>
>>>My experience with the majority of the
>>>works most English departments foist off on students as "great literature" is that
>>>they should have been allowed to die their natural death several decades ago.
>>>
>
> Of course the canon works are stylistically dated. However, they got
> there b/c of the influence they had on other writers, and on society.
> That's history. That will never change. And of course, b/c there human
> society is so much more complex these days (more educated people etc),
> it is much harder for any one writer to have such a large influence.
> Thus, those writers who are already in the canon will likely remain.
>
>
With some shrinking among the minors, and perhaps a few readjustments in
stature once whatever brand of current "political correctness" dies,
yes. Spenser, for example, is less important than he once was. Kipling,
as noted before, is coming back home. Inertia and prior investments
usually govern, however.
>
>
>>I cannot speak for all colleges, particularly not teacher's colleges,
>>but My experience is few, if any, university undergraduate English
>>departments teach 'great literature' classes; rather they mostly teach
>>surveys, e.g., Victorian novel, middle English poetry (except Chaucer)
>>through Gower, Restoration Drama and Poetry, the Metaphysical Poets,
>>American Literature from 1600-1760, from 1760-1880, from 1880-1920,
>>"Modern" English Drama (maybe you get up to G.B. Shaw), Victorian
>>Poetry, 17th and early 18th century Expository Prose, Walter Pater and
>>the End of the Victorian Cycle, the Great War Poets, etc., and so on.
>>
>
> THat's the Canon. That is "great literature"!
>
Yes, but among them there is "Great Literature" and 'great literature'
and time constraints require some arbitrary adjustments. A great
medievalist, such as the popular Professor Tolkein, will redirect and
increase attention to the lesser known works of his field, often out
into works that are not strictly English language, but influenced
English lit. That may result in less attention paid to Thompson, or
Swinburne, or Hazlitt. But Shakespeare and Chaucer and Milton and a few
others will remain the Great Literature focus.
>
>>I love WEB Griffin's stories, but they ain't literature. But still, you
>>oughta read them! John D. MacDonald, maybe he will be recognized as
>>writing literature; but the net is pretty coarse . . . Heinlein? We'll
>>find out in the great by-'n-by.
>>
>>
>
>
> LOVED MacDonald. But was he original? Did he influence society or
> many other writers? Probably not....Chandler was certainly there
> first, Spillane, too. In fact, I guess JDM is fairly derivative of
> Spillane. But he had that GREAT character of Travis McGee. And that
> fine fine voice. It was almost Sinatraesque in the way it spoke for
> and almost defined that early 60s generation urbane, whisky sippin'
> tough guy.
>
Yes, indeed; and if I had a bottle of Boodles around just now, I'd
carefuly mix a G & T in honor of that fine, fine voice. Did you note the
post in which I reported a recent conversation with Ginny, Randy, in
which she told me that after the personal library was largely disposed
of, Robert retained his collection of MacDonald when they moved to
Carmel so he could be closer to medical treatment; and she still has in
her apartment the shelfull he kept?
--
David M. Silver
http://www.heinleinsociety.org
http://www.readinggroupsonline.com/groups/heinlein.htm
"The Lieutenant expects your names to shine!"
Robert Anson Heinlein, USNA '29
Lt (jg)., USN R'td (1907-1988)
Arthur McNutt
----------
In article <3CA17226...@verizon.net>, David Silver
<ag.pl...@verizon.net> wrote:
[snip]
> With the caveat that what you've said applies mostly to contemporary
> literature I agree.
Yes, I should have said this--and I meant contemporary as in 20th Century.
The problem is Steven King sells more books than Shakespeare right now, but
over all this isn't true--since Billy had a 400 year head start. Will our
grandchildren be able to find new reprints of The Shinning? Personally, I
think they may, but I don't think /their/ grandchildren will.
> I think that the very best critics may well turn out
> to be 'experts;' for it's really a matter of correctly predicting the
> future, e.g., Jonson, infra. With respect to older literature, that
> which has survived the swings of taste and fashion, and is still read
> and greatly admired, then perhaps greatness properly can be applied by
> consensus as it has in the case of Shakespeare and others. Subjectivity
> in and of itself isn't something that can be eliminated wholly, nor
> should it be for reasons including those Bill Patterson has noted.
> Biases of taste however need to be stricken, just as jurors must be who
> are biased so much that they cannot put aside that which they believe to
> be true outside the courtroom and attend only to what is presented them
> when they are called to judge facts presented them as, here, critics
> are. Both standards of criticism and fashions of writing come and go,
> e.g., a standard of a competent writer, supposedly, when Shakespeare was
> writing was a thorough education in Latin and Greek. Of Shakespeare, Ben
> Jonson said, "small Latin and less Greek," iirc. Contrary to fashion of
> the time, Jonson admired Shakespeare's writings for reasons other than
> their reflection of Latin and Greek that he detailed. Others didn't.
> Guess who turned out correct or, rather, none of us need guess. Marlowe
> had that education Shakespeare lacked; moreover, he catered to the
> fashions popular in his time, and was more popular than Shakespeare, by
> far, during Marlowe's lifetime. Fashion favorites changed. The reasons
> Shakespeare far surpasses Marlowe today, however, are not limited to
> style and fashion, but once the fashion changed Shakespeare's
> superiority became evident.
>
Excellent points.
>
>> The best objective criteria for such, in my estimation, would be measuring
>> how long a work has been in print (not just how long a work has been
>> around). This would indicate a universal appeal, which one would think is
>> necessary to be qualified as "great."
>>
>
>
> It is surely one criteria. Would it surprise you that Northrup Fyre
> considers the Bible high, if not first, among the paramount canon of
> Western Literature? I need not say, need I, that his reasons do not
> depend greatly upon any claim of 'inspiration' by a deity?
>
Understood. And it is only ONE criteria /and/ only a rule of thumb. It took
Mendelson to rediscover Bach, and Picasso to rediscover (actually to
discover) Van Gogh. The only famous literary example that comes to mind is
the French and Poe--though there are others. As you say below this happens,
and continually in print may not be the best rule of thumb--but it works
often.
>
>> This would disqualify most of Hemmingway--maybe with the exception of /For
>> Whom the Bell Tolls/, but would qualify /Catcher in the Rye/. /The Great
>> Gatsby/, which I can barely stand, has been in print since it was written,
>> as has many of Faulkner's crappy novels. Steinbeck puts them all to shame,
>> though he reads a lot like a Frank Capra movie, both of whose works would
>> have had Trotsky's seal of approval if it hadn't been for that Ice Pick
>> incident.
>>
>
>
> Today, perhaps; but let's wait. Sometimes a writer falls out of favor
> temporarily, or readers forget the writings, or the fashion, or
> contemporary history and society's mores turn against themes, or
> resolutions of plotting in those writings, e.g., Kipling suffered
> greatly in reputation between the world wars and thereafter for some
> time. Then a resurgence may occur and part, at least, of the reputation
> is restored, as has been Kipling's.
>
> The jury of posterity hasn't been given the case, yet. Something like
> resurgence may be going on in the case of Marquand, the author discussed
> in the review of Yardley, OJ and I were discussing way up in the
> "Delusion" thread. Sometimes a good critic, and Yardley appears as good
> as most, especially the non-academic ones who review books for a living,
> makes a case for an out of popularity or out of mind writer. Sometimes
> these cases succeed, sometimes not.
>
> The thing about Capra movies is this: they might have had Heinlein's
> approval as well at the time: Heinlein suggested Jimmy Stewart as the
> lead in Destination Moon. Jimmie did his Capra roles rather nicely. Had
> Republic let him off his B-movie horse, I suspect Marion Morrison would
> have done them nicely, as well, during the same period. Whether Trotsky
> liked them or not is immaterial. Adolph Hitler liked dogs and children
> and prohibited the heinous vice of smoking tobacco in his presence.
> Shame someone didn't take a ice axe to him while he was in prison in
> Barvaria.
Well, the thing with Capra and Steinbeck is their political agendas are
pretty thinly veiled (as was Heinlein's, admittedly). The amazing thing is
Capra loved and understood people so well that sometimes this got in his
agenda's way. Potter in "It's a Wonderful Life" is so finely drawn, written
and acted, he seems more a person than an archetype for Capitalistic Greed
(which he was meant to be). The same can be said for Steinbeck's characters,
and I loved /Cannery Row/ every bit as much as I loved "Meet John Doe,"
which is to say--a hellova lot.
>
> Time is the great winnow.
Amen.
>
>> There were many huge, critically acclaimed novels just fifty years ago which
>> can only be found gathering dust in libraries today--Elmer Gantry, The Red
>> Robe, Advise and Consent, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Mildred Pierce, etc,
>> etc, etc. In many ways, the only way to judge a work is how continually it
>> has stayed in print. This indicates ongoing appeal; something compelling in
>> the work which bridges generations and the time in which it was written.
>>
>> Stranger in a Strange Land, in this regard, is equal to Catcher in the Rye.
>> The Foundation Trilogy is equal to the Animal Farm.
>>
>
>
> Res ipse locuitur. I've always been amazed that Animal Farm and 1984
> haven't been shoved into the science-fiction ghetto; perhaps the English
> really are differently treated.
People in the publishing industry have their agenda's too.
>
> [snip]
>>>
>>> For that matter, of those that have withstood the test of time, which
>>>ones just don't work for you? Which do? I like Shakespeare, for instance,
>>>but Dickens bores me to tears. (Except _A Tale of Two Cities._)
>>>
>>
>> Funny to note, that Poe was a contemporary of Dickens, and Poe,
>> surprisingly, was a great literary critic of his day. At a party, so the
>> story goes, Poe was heard to say that Dickens was a second rate hack.
>> Dickens was at this party, and confronted him--telling him of a new novel (I
>> forget which one). Poe proceeded to outline the entire plot of the novel
>> unerringly, which he had not read and which had not been published. Dickens
>> went ballistic.
>>
>
> Which means only that Dickens' plots were predicable at least to Poe.
> Plot originality may not have been Dickens' forte, nor a necessity for
> him. I'd look for his strenghts elsewhere. Poe was a genius and died in
> the gutter. However, his genius was such he was recognized in his own
> time; sadly it didn't do him much good; nor did he write long enough for
> us. Too bad someone didn't appoint him a Postmaster and assign a keeper
> to watch his health. Cf. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Dickens in his time
> was certainly as popular as Marlowe; whether that will remain will be seen.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. No English novel has
ever had such a rip roaring good beginning--and the rest wasn't so bad,
either. Much better than "Call me Ishmael" or "Howard Roark laughed" from
two books I put above Tale of Two Cities. I digress, as usual, but I must
admit that "What the Hell goes on here?" was right up there with the best
opening lines of all times--from Sixth Column IIRC.
---
Art
Jane Davitt
>
> Is there any opinion about Heinlein and Kipling?
>
> Andrew
>
>
>
If you mean connections between them, I believe there are. I wrote a
fairly long essay on the subject for The Heinlein Journal, issue 6.
There are lots of smaller references and themes but the most
striking is the similarity between Kim and Citizen of the Galaxy.
Mowgli and Mike from Stranger are clearly alike too.
Jane
TreetopAngel
> Someone here said, a while back, that a lot of the "classics" are only
> read because the schools require them. I think there is some truth in
that
> today, but those works got to be classics because people wanted to read
> them, and kept reading them, long before the teachers put them on required
> reading lists. So why does Dickens just leave me cold, when people
eagerly
> awaited the next installment of his serializations? I'll have to think
> about that one for a bit. Since I don't like Dickens, I haven't readhim
in
> a long, long time. I might even find that a re-examination changes my
> opinion.
>
> office of "great literature."
>
> --Dee
>
>
Maybe I was lucky or just a really bizarre child, I read most of what is
considered "Literature" long before I entered 7th grade(U.S.) I read so
voraciously that no book (with the exception of one {1}) was left unturned,
in my parents house. I was even a proud holder of a 'special' library card
that allowed me the right to check out books deemed way beyond my years,
from the public library. My folks had to fight hard for that one.
I understand the "canon" of Great Literature and I have read the bulk of it,
some of it many times. But, I still don't see all of it as "GREAT." A lot
of it is tedious and boring. Those titles and authors I consider to be
worthy of being called "GREAT" are on my bookcases at this moment. (there
are others, but they are waiting to be recycled through the used bookstore)
I could give you a list, but it would be heavy and cumbersome. All genres
are represented, although it's a bit heavy on the Science Fiction end. I
got lucky and married a man who has the same taste in books. I guess you
could say that I love the written word and I read anything and everything.
I don't mind discussing books, but the level of discussion here at AFH is a
bit too much for me at times. I guess I don't understand the dissection
process and just enjoy reading for the pleasure of the words and the story.
Always did hate book reports. Well, enough of that.
TreetopAngel/Elizabeth
{1} Mama asked me not to read the Kama Sutra until I was at least 16 years
old and I didn't until I was almost 20. I recently asked her about this and
she told me it was because she would have been uncomfortable trying to
explain the answers to the questions she was sure I would have. :) She was
right!
Mac
Exactly what IS the "Career Path" the academics, the critics,
the "Literature" types in schools demand that an author follow to
be accepted into the hallowed grooves where "Literature" resides?
I'm asking as you apparently stated that RAH did not follow such
an approved career path ---- which has me thinking that you have
some idea of what it is; either directly or from some "Revealed
Source" within ivy-covered walls...
Please advise.
---Mac
***********************
On 27 Mar 2002 21:45:50 GMT, valenti...@aol.com
Simon Jester
"The Origin of the World" ?
> Now those books are fixtures in the
> "lesser canon." Books like these have their meaning intrinsic to the
story.
> And THEN the story, the story, ( not preaching), showed us universal
truths
> about humanity. SiFi can transcend to art very easily. It just has to be
art,
> not just storytelling with a "message" side order forced down our throat.
>
> Tom
My point was that it was snobbery, not artistic merit, that consigned some
authors to a literary purgatory.
Simon Jester
...
> Is Lem recognized outside the Science Fiction world? I've never read
> anything he wrote that wasnt sf - or fantasy, depending on how you look at
> Cyberiad.
I'm not sure - I thought I had read approving references to him from
"literary" sources, but I can't remember where.
A cynical answer might be that some critics had seen "Solaris", and decided
it was sufficiently tedious and soporific that it *had* to be "literature".
;-)
...
> Since you've read it, how would you compare Pirx to Space Cadet?
A number of people - including Spider Robinson, in "RAH RAH R.A.H." - have
observed that Heinlein seemed to be fascinated by competence. By contrast,
Pirx is anything *but* competent.
It's been a while since I read it, but if I had to sum up Pirx in a single
sentence, it would be "Mr. Bean joins the Space Cadets."
> Would you
> be interested in a new thread?
I've amended the subject line. It could be a short thread.
djinn
> djinn wrote:
> ...
>> Is Lem recognized outside the Science Fiction world? I've never read
>> anything he wrote that wasnt sf - or fantasy, depending on how you
>> look at Cyberiad.
> ...
>
> I'm not sure - I thought I had read approving references to him from
> "literary" sources, but I can't remember where.
>
> A cynical answer might be that some critics had seen "Solaris", and
> decided it was sufficiently tedious and soporific that it *had* to be
> "literature". ;-)
>
> ...
Since you mention it I think I've seen "Solaris" mentioned as well.
Your point is well-made :)
>> Since you've read it, how would you compare Pirx to Space Cadet?
>
> A number of people - including Spider Robinson, in "RAH RAH R.A.H." -
> have observed that Heinlein seemed to be fascinated by competence. By
> contrast, Pirx is anything *but* competent.
>
What I like about Pirx is that he was competent, just not in any approved
way. He got things done by preserverence, not brillance or imagination. In
fact in Pirx lack of imagination sees a virtue.
Pirx is the Merchant Marines answer to Space Cadet. He's lazy, and not
terribly smart, but can guide space freighters from here to there with a
pretty good chance of getting them there.
> It's been a while since I read it, but if I had to sum up Pirx in a
> single sentence, it would be "Mr. Bean joins the Space Cadets."
>
I think more of 'Rumpole as a pilot'
>> Would you
>> be interested in a new thread?
>
> I've amended the subject line. It could be a short thread.
>
Probably will be, just seemed OT from where we started
>
>
George Partlow
> djinn wrote:
> > Since you've read it, how would you compare Pirx to Space Cadet?
>
> A number of people - including Spider Robinson, in "RAH RAH R.A.H." - have
> observed that Heinlein seemed to be fascinated by competence. By contrast,
> Pirx is anything *but* competent.
>
> It's been a while since I read it, but if I had to sum up Pirx in a single
> sentence, it would be "Mr. Bean joins the Space Cadets."
>
> > Would you
> > be interested in a new thread?
>
> I've amended the subject line. It could be a short thread.
How much other Lem have you read? I much prefer Ijon Tichy to Pirx!
"Return from the Stars" is a masterpiece IMO.
James Gifford has no use for H. Bruce Franklin, but IMO Franklin's
book has some interesting ideas; at the very least, the book's title
"America As Science Fiction" captures something important about RAH's
_courpus_ as a whole, a facet of which is that fascination with
competence ("how things work") you allude to. ISTM the equivalent
title for Lem would be "20th Century Central Europe as Science
Fiction".
You might find the itnerview at
<http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/2594/lem.html> interesting!
George
djinn
news:e5dfe6d0.02032...@posting.google.com:
> "Simon Jester" <simon...@freeuk.com> wrote in message
> news:<10173118...@eurus.uk.clara.net>...
>> djinn wrote:
>
>> > Since you've read it, how would you compare Pirx to Space Cadet?
>>
>> A number of people - including Spider Robinson, in "RAH RAH R.A.H." -
>> have observed that Heinlein seemed to be fascinated by competence. By
>> contrast, Pirx is anything *but* competent.
>>
>> It's been a while since I read it, but if I had to sum up Pirx in a
>> single sentence, it would be "Mr. Bean joins the Space Cadets."
>>
>> > Would you
>> > be interested in a new thread?
>>
>> I've amended the subject line. It could be a short thread.
>
> How much other Lem have you read? I much prefer Ijon Tichy to Pirx!
> "Return from the Stars" is a masterpiece IMO.
>
As much as I could find. :) Disliked Solaris, liked the Cyberiad, can't
remember more titles right now. (More Tales of Pirx is propping up my
monitor, keeping it handy)
I don't remember "Return" very well. Is there a translation you recommend?
Wouldn't hurt to read it over.
I liked Pirx as being a similiar story to Space Cadet but with a very
different character.
> James Gifford has no use for H. Bruce Franklin, but IMO Franklin's
> book has some interesting ideas; at the very least, the book's title
> "America As Science Fiction" captures something important about RAH's
> _courpus_ as a whole, a facet of which is that fascination with
> competence ("how things work") you allude to. ISTM the equivalent
> title for Lem would be "20th Century Central Europe as Science
> Fiction".
>
<Sigh> something else to read....
Good call on Lem. His spaceships seemed to leak water....
> You might find the itnerview at
> <http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/2594/lem.html> interesting!
>
> George
>
Thanks, it was. I wondered how he got away with some of his stuff. Maybe
it was less obvious in the original.
George Partlow
> Yes, indeed; and if I had a bottle of Boodles around just now, I'd
> carefuly mix a G & T in honor of that fine, fine voice. Did you note the
> post in which I reported a recent conversation with Ginny, Randy, in
> which she told me that after the personal library was largely disposed
> of, Robert retained his collection of MacDonald when they moved to
> Carmel so he could be closer to medical treatment; and she still has in
> her apartment the shelfull he kept?
I'm delighted to hear that; I've always thought that RAH would have
appreciated JDM, and it's nice to have it confirmed.
I just re-read _Wine of the Dreamers_ (1950) over the weekend; it was
interesting to see how JDM could use bits of "real science" plausibly
and then slide off the deep end into gobbledegook double-talk in an
obvious way that RAH almost always avoided. I've always been sorry
that JDM gave up SF and fantasy, despite how much I enjoyed T McGee.
One of my favoirte time-travel stories is the one where the traveler
to the future is unable to make people believe him, and ends up being
lobotomized and hooked up to a sort of
direct-wired-in-to-all-nerves-channels TV pablum machine of the
future. A slight foretaste of _Nightmare in Pink_ (and the theme of
being unable to convince people one is not nuts is in _Wine_ and
probably other JDM's).
One obvious thing JDM and RAH shared was the fascination with how
things work (socially as much as technically) and an admiration for
competence and courage, often in unexpected places. In one of the T
McGee books McG is in a hospital and sees an elderly stroke victim
laboriously making his way of and down the hallway and remarks on the
immense but unnoticed heroism involved.
In the aftermath of 9/11 I certainly found myself wondering waht RAH
had to say about _The Green Ripper_...
George
[On the original theme of this thread: Adler and van Doren in _How to
Read A Book_ make a stab at defining "good books" and "great books";
they say there is a "pyramid": 99% percent of the several million
books written in the Western tradition alone "will not make sufficient
demands on you for you to improve your skill in reading... [they] can
be read only for amusement or information"; perhaps 1 in a 1,000 or 1
in 10,000 are ones "from which you can learn- both how to read and how
to live"; but of the few thousand latter category there is some much
smaller number, probably less than a hundred "that cannot be exhausted
by even the very best reading you can manage". They continue: "How do
you recongize this? Again it is rather mysterious, but when you have
closed the book after reading it analytically to the best of your
ability, and place it back on the shelf, you have a sneaking suspicion
that there is more there than you got. We say 'suspicion' because
that may be all it is at this stage. If you knew what it was that you
had missed, your obligation as an analytical reader would take you
back to the book immediately to seek it out. In fact, you cannot put
your finger on it, but you know it is there. You find that you cannot
forget the book, that you keep thinking about it and your reaction to
it. Finally you return to it. And then a very remarkable thing
happen.
"If [it belongs to the 2nd class], you find [...] that there was
_less there than you remembered_. The reason, of course is that you
yourself have grown in the meantime [...] Such a return in ineviatably
disappointing.
"But if [it belongs to the highest class] [...] you disvoer on
returning that _the book seems to have grown with you_. You see new
things in it - whol esets of new things - that you did not see
before."
The whole discussion in Chapter 21, "Reading and the Growth of the
Mind" is worth reading IMO, but I'm tired of typing! I would add that
they make it very clear that the list of books in each category
necessarily varies from individual to individual.
Of course they are talking about a wider spectrum than what is usually
meant by "literature".]
George
Gordon G. Sollars
...
> OK, call me a country bumpkin, but when it comes to art, literature or
> <insert anything not related to science or law>, why in the world should "a
> lot of opinions over a long time" make my opinion any less valid. Said
> opinions were based upon other people's frame of reference and their
> experience.
Your inclusion of law is interesting, given the role played by legal
/opinion/. If legal judgments can be true or false, why not aesthetic or
ethical judgments?
I think that a major concern driving those who hold that "art is just
opinion" is a very legitimate interest in autonomy. Ethical or aesthetic
realism - the view that statements in ethics or aesthetics really are
true or false - in particular seem to many to challenge personal
autonomy. If there are correct and incorrect judgments in these areas,
this suggests to some that we are not free to choose what we will think
or do.
However, there is no Authority - be it in ethics, aesthetics, law or
science - that /makes/ statements true or false. What we have are better
or worse arguments, and, in turn, methods of judging these arguments.
Your opinion is not "less valid" /because/ there are a lot of contrary
opinions over a long period of time - your opinion is as valid as the
arguments you can make for it. And, even if your arguments are not very
good, you are still entitled to your opinion - just as others are
entitled to point out that your arguments may not be very good.
Further, you need not make any arguments whatsoever for your opinions.
If you simply wish to communicate that you enjoyed, say, reading /Citizen
of the Galaxy/, then, "I like that book" is sufficient to your purpose.
If, however, you seek any deeper level of communication, if you go no
further than simply to say that you enjoyed the book "/because/...", you
have now made a statement that can be analyzed and found to be correct or
incorrect.
--
Gordon Sollars
gsol...@pobox.com
Simon Jester
...
> How much other Lem have you read?
Very little, I'm afraid.
> I much prefer Ijon Tichy to Pirx!
> "Return from the Stars" is a masterpiece IMO.
...
And another book for the reading list...
Roger Connor
BPRAL22169 wrote:
> >But, the question begs: who took the measure of the "consensus"? From my
> >point of
> >view, this is a myth that is perpetuated by the various departments of
> >English,
> >because nobody is willing to stand up and say HOGWASH to what is very obvious
> >to
>
> Your point of view doesn't match up to the reality very well, I'm afraid. I
> can certainly sympathize with your hostility to the pedagogical methods of
> university English lit departments -- but I fail to see what that has to do
> with the subject at hand.
>
> No question is begged: I think the canon (whatever it is in detail) is an
> emergent quality of millions of individual readers creating their own esthetic
> experience out of their reading.
> Bill
The point is: those "millions" of readers were told by somebody -usually an
English professor or teacher- that such & such is a "great" work. And, because
obviously the professor was the "authority" and usually got quite angry when
challenged, no one bothers to do so any more. Please don't misunderstand me here-
I think there are pieces of great literature that are clearly recognized by
numbers of people, including English professors- and I'm not trying to put down
anyone, or their profession. What I am trying to express is the notion that after
the first 1000 or so books, one gets a feel for the good stuff, and after 10,000
or so, one can tell when the "experts" were talking through their hat. And just
because the prof wrote his thesis on it does NOT make it great literature- after
all, he had to do something that hadn't been done before for the dissertation.
Alexandre Pechtchanski
wrote:
[ joining late - didn't see beginning ]
>djinn wrote:
>...
>> Is Lem recognized outside the Science Fiction world? I've never read
>> anything he wrote that wasnt sf - or fantasy, depending on how you look at
>> Cyberiad.
>...
>
>I'm not sure - I thought I had read approving references to him from
>"literary" sources, but I can't remember where.
I've read at least one Lem's novel "Szpital Przemienienia" (about survival under
Nazi occupation) that was not either SF or fantasy. Plus a novellas collection
"Maska" bears subtitle "not just SF" (and it is ;-), and I've read his popular
science/phylosophical book "Summa Technologii". LoC lists 100 titles by Lem,
but there are many repeats and different translations of the same books.
>A cynical answer might be that some critics had seen "Solaris", and decided
>it was sufficiently tedious and soporific that it *had* to be "literature".
>;-)
>
>...
>> Since you've read it, how would you compare Pirx to Space Cadet?
>
>A number of people - including Spider Robinson, in "RAH RAH R.A.H." - have
>observed that Heinlein seemed to be fascinated by competence. By contrast,
>Pirx is anything *but* competent.
>
>It's been a while since I read it, but if I had to sum up Pirx in a single
>sentence, it would be "Mr. Bean joins the Space Cadets."
C'mon! Pirx is never incompetent - he is reflexive, full of self-doubt, but he
knows his stuff and what he supposed to do, and does it despite difficulties
(always external, not something he inflicted on himself, as an incompetent
nincompoop would do). Of course, I may be mistaken, or just forgotten - haven't
read Lem for many years...
--
[ When replying, remove *'s from address ]
Alexandre Pechtchanski, Systems Manager, RUH, NY
djinn
news:MPG.170e4f839...@news.nji.com:
>
> Further, you need not make any arguments whatsoever for your opinions.
> If you simply wish to communicate that you enjoyed, say, reading
> /Citizen of the Galaxy/, then, "I like that book" is sufficient to
> your purpose. If, however, you seek any deeper level of
> communication, if you go no further than simply to say that you
> enjoyed the book "/because/...", you have now made a statement that
> can be analyzed and found to be correct or incorrect.
>
I'm going to try once again.
In law, if there's a difference of opinion, we can consult the lawbooks and
precedent. Where there's conflict, a judge or jury looks at the situation
and the applicable law and makes a decision. ( at which point your opinion
doesnt' matter any longer)
In science, if I decide that stepping off my house is a good way to fly, I
can pull down a physics book which will tell me that previously people have
noted that I will be attracted to the earth and fall toward it. A physicist
has even codified this as the Law of Gravitation and its commonly known.
I could of course try empirical methods which will also invalidate my
opinion. (making me an invalid in the process..)
It appears to me that aesthetic critism is a combination of the two
examples I made. That is, over time, certain works have been popular, or at
least valued enough to have been kept. Over time particular works have come
to be considered 'canon'. A new work may then be compared to this canon. We
can also read what other people have written who have studied these works.
Someone who has read the canon and studied the reasons these representative
works have endured will have a better basis for judgement than someone who
hasn't. New works will also be judged empirically, but since one of the
criteria seems to be duration, its only moderately useful for us.
So, if we want to judge Heinlein as Great Literature, we'll have to compare
his work to the canon. We don't however, have to accept this judgement on a
personal level. That is, there's no bailiff to enforce the judgement.
Harold Bloom's 'Western Canon' was recommended here, and it looks to be a
good exploration of representative works. His comparison of Marlowe to
Shakespeare helped me out, as Marlowe apparently was considered far
superior by contemporaries, but is almost unknown now, whereas
Shakespeare's name is a household word. His humor is helpful too, the
School of Resentment seems revealing. Any others like him?
The reason I keep coming back to this is that people keep posting that this
area is like science or mathematics or law. Those areas have rather
explicit 'laws' that can be referred to. When asked what corresponds to
these in literature however, examples from science and engineering are
posted.
David Silver's jury example did make sense to me, and if someone has
something else like it, please post.
If I'm kicking sacred cows here just let me know, I am actually interested
in knowing how Heinlein would be judged other than empirically.
jump101
news:Xns91E087...@68.6.19.6...
Thank you! Well said!
Steve
eeg...@exis.net
afhpics.mnsdesigns.com
http://www.mnsdesigns.com/
RDKirk
gsol...@pobox.com says...
> However, there is no Authority - be it in ethics, aesthetics, law or
> science - that /makes/ statements true or false. What we have are better
> or worse arguments, and, in turn, methods of judging these arguments.
> Your opinion is not "less valid" /because/ there are a lot of contrary
> opinions over a long period of time - your opinion is as valid as the
> arguments you can make for it. And, even if your arguments are not very
> good, you are still entitled to your opinion - just as others are
> entitled to point out that your arguments may not be very good.
>
Of course this all has been argued since Plato, but the reason they
worked on perfecting knowledge of "the good" (ethics), "the beautiful"
(aesthetics), and "the true" (epistomology) was because they believed
that there was one of each that would actually *work* better than
inferior versions.
That was the only justification for the social system of Troopers, and
perhaps the only good reason for any philosophy of ethics, aesthetics,
or law to become transendent in a society.
Are you saying that any given ethical philosophy works as well as any
other in any given society?
--
RDKirk
"It's always socially unacceptable to be right too soon." -- RAH
dont be fuelish
>So, Mike, or anyone else, the floor is open for
>nominations to the office of "great literature."
I would like to nominate Zen and the Art of
Motorcycle Maintenace, by Robert Pirsig. That
has to be one of the engrossing reads of my life.
Tian Harter
--
http://tian.greens.org
Early this afternoon, I traded a quarter hour of Berkeley
Bread for a jar of olives my friend Dana had grown
in her back yard and processed in her kitchen.
Then I went down to San Jose for the Peace Vigil.
dont be fuelish
>A good literary critic is therefore someone with an excellent memory
>and the ability to spot connections and themes and use them to place
>the books at the right spot in the web.It's a job that's never done
>as each new book will have an effect on the whole that necessitates
>continual tiny adjustments of position.
>And though there could be disagreement about placing between
>critics, there's no judgment being made about the book itself.
>There's no top to the web...but it would be fun to locate the centre.
I think of each of the treads that joins these works together as an
idea or meme. I see them as a gossimer cloth that establishes a
channel that works as cultural indicator.
I find myself wanting to make a toast. To channel markers that
work for all of us!
dont be fuelish
>BPRAL22169 wrote:
>
>>> Literature is a creation of the mind of man and being
>>> such, any criteria chosen to judge same is subjective.
>
>> I regret to say that this is a very uninformed opinion.
>
>
>So you're saying there are absolutes by which literature
>can be judged?
One that occurs to me is "does it stay in living memory
(defined as people living can remember reading it) on
its own. Books in print can reasonably be assumed to
be on that list. Books that have been in print for 100 years
are certainly the starts of that generation, at least by one
measure.
>
>That cultural referents are fixed in the eyes of all
>beholders? That relationships are fixed and unchanging?
It is not that they are fixed, it is that feedback loops in our
culture keep the mix fairly constant over the medium term.
For example, you can reasonably asssume that something
else is going to come along, it's just you can't say what that is.
dont be fuelish
>I don't ask for books that will "certainly" be popular in 100 years.
>Just "probably." And by "still be read," I certainly men more
>popular than something only read by academicians, but not
>necessarily as popular as the bestseller list. Hmm, even trying to
>reframe the question into something a little more concrete than
>"great literature" is not easy, and requires honing.
How about the Grapes of Wrath? That one has been in publication
for a long time already.
dont be fuelish
>One thing occurs to me: historically, satires have a very
>long shelf life. Of the three I mentioned upthread, Giles
>Goat Boy (which Heinlein liked greatly, BTW) seems to
>have fallen out already. Catch 22 may have some staying
>power, but there's a good chance it's readibilty will be liked
>to fashion of concern about World War II. On the other
>hand, Stranger seems to have thrown off its link to the
>Countercultureof the 1960's and is still being read 40 years
>after publication. Since it's theme is a perennial concern --
>hypocrisy -- I'd say there is a good chance Stranger will be
>read in 50 or a hundred years.
I gotta agree that there is a good chance Stranger will be
around for a very long time. I was surprised to find out
that Candide by Voltaire was easy to get at a bookstore
when I wanted it. That was another one of those thin
little volumes that was such a pearl to devour the first
time.
dont be fuelish
>I have no beef with the concept of the realness of an esthetic
>experience, but each of us will react differently. Take twenty
>people to the museum to see a Picasso. Let's say nine hate it and
>eleven love it. Throw out the nine and ask the eleven why they
>loved it. If you get less than eleven answers, I would be surprised.
>The experience would be real for all eleven, but because we
>all have our own range of experience and frame of reference
>our responses are different. Subjective!
I think that there would be one or two responses that you will
get from more than one person. There are some fairly common
mindsets out there. I have found some responses that I get
over and over from people that couldn't possibly know anything
about each other. A given peice of art will get the same reaction
from a significant percentage of the crowd. You can count on that.
Sean Kennedy
dont be fuelish wrote:
> Early this afternoon, I traded a quarter hour of Berkeley
> Bread for a jar of olives my friend Dana had grown
> in her back yard and processed in her kitchen.
> Then I went down to San Jose for the Peace Vigil.
Tian, how much is "a quarter hour" of Berkely Bread? The amount of bread
you can eat in a quarter hour?
Sean
(At Sloth Co. Peace Vigil, I give CA epoch lots.. Ta!)
dont be fuelish
>I go up to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art
>periodically. The permanent exhibits are wonderful but
>some of the temporary exhibits lead me to think that
>my judgement is certainly as good as some 'experts'.
Did you see that Van Gogh show they had a few years
ago? I thought it was great.
Tian Harter
--
http://tian.greens.org
djinn
news:20020330021243...@mb-mh.aol.com:
No I missed it. :(
I've been going more regularly lately. The contemporary art exhibit is
really funny, although I don't think it was meant to be....
dont be fuelish
>Tian, how much is "a quarter hour" of Berkely Bread?
>The amount of bread you can eat in a quarter hour?
Back in the 1960s, one of the names for money was
"bread." Over in Berkeley they made their own currency,
and they named it Bread, which stands for Berkely Regional
Exchange and Development. A week or two I accepted a
1/4 hour note. You can see one in the bottom picture on
this page:
http://members.aol.com/rahfan147/PennyWise.html
Berkeley Bread is denominated in hours because they want
you to accept one hour per hour for your labor. (That is the
comunism component.) I accepted this note as payment for
a MEND YOUR FUELISH WAYS sticker. The way it worked
out, my incredably radical friend Dana was very willing to
take it off my hands, giving me a jar of olives that has to be
worth at least four bucks retail for it. I got a good deal from
taking the risk of accepting that bill.
Tian Harter
--
http://tian.greens.org
dont be fuelish
>(dont be fuelish) wrote about the Los Angeles County Museum of Art :
>> Did you see that Van Gogh show they had a few years
>> ago? I thought it was great.
>No I missed it. :(
>
>I've been going more regularly lately. The contemporary art exhibit is
>really funny, although I don't think it was meant to be....
That was the last show I saw before I moved up here to Mountain
View. Ever since then, I have been doing the museums around
here instead.
San Jose has an Art Museum that resembles a large shoebox,
which is two floors of galeries that you can consume completely
in about an hour and a half. They change the shows often enough
that it is actually worth visiting once or twice a year. Every now
and then they have something great. You are spoiled to have
such a great Museum in your back yard.
Sean Kennedy
dont be fuelish wrote:
> Sean Kennedy asked:
>
>
>>Tian, how much is "a quarter hour" of Berkely Bread?
>>The amount of bread you can eat in a quarter hour?
>>
>
> Back in the 1960s, one of the names for money was
> "bread." Over in Berkeley they made their own currency,
> and they named it Bread, which stands for Berkely Regional
> Exchange and Development. A week or two I accepted a
> 1/4 hour note. You can see one in the bottom picture on
> this page:
>
> http://members.aol.com/rahfan147/PennyWise.html
>
> Berkeley Bread is denominated in hours because they want
> you to accept one hour per hour for your labor. (That is the
> comunism component.) I accepted this note as payment for
> a MEND YOUR FUELISH WAYS sticker. The way it worked
> out, my incredably radical friend Dana was very willing to
> take it off my hands, giving me a jar of olives that has to be
> worth at least four bucks retail for it. I got a good deal from
> taking the risk of accepting that bill.
Thanks Tian. If I didn't ask I would still be wondering.
Sean
(a gas saga)
Roger Connor
David Silver wrote:
> Forgive me, Roger, but I am constrained to disagree with some of this
> that follows.
Your opinion is welcome! I may even learn a thing or two!
>
> Roger Connor wrote:
>
> >
> > BPRAL22169 wrote:
> >
> >
> >>>>We all decide every time we choose something to read.
> >>>>
> >>>Let me see if I understand this. Using my question and your answer, would
> >>>it be fair to say, "Every time we choose something to read, we decide what
> >>>is canon."?
> >>>
> >>Not what I said. Every time we choose, we contribute to the emergence of the
> >>canon. The canon emerges from the millions of choices millions of people make
> >>about what they read and what they talk about and what they used as building
> >>blocks of their own life.
> >>
> >
> > But each choice is a subjective experience.
>
> Not wholly, unless you allow it to be. There are tools to assess the
> quality of the writing, not the quality of what you perceive to be the
> message -- that's always subjective, unless you line up what you think
> the author's points to be against an external standard you bring to the
> affray -- and it will really be an affray if that's what you do -- such
> as is what the author "saying" orthodox or my version of [fill in the
> blank, religious belief, moral belief, political belief, historical
> belief, sociological belief].
>
> There are neutral tools a good critic uses to assess a great many
> things: plot, theme, characterization, unity, levels of reference, etc.,
> and on and on and on. It's complication on complication and requires
> skill, learning and study and experience. But anyone who can think and
> render himself unbiased can do it. That's all they ask of jurors.
>
But your average reader is automatically using these neutral tools -
Plot- for example: Standard (Boy) Adventure: Hero meets girl, Hero & girl are put in
danger, 1st level of Danger passed, 2nd level more extensive problem, meanwhile Guy &
Girl getting to know each other better, 3rd level of danger dealt with, Hero triumphant,
adored by girl! For really good "adventures" vs "romance" novels danger must be mortal!
Characterization: Does some of the personality and quirkiness of the individual indicate
a Person, or is an exercise with pen & paper to manipulate the plot &/or Theme
Theme: Does the author present a message. Does he make the reader think, or is he just
pouring out his opinion. Does he support it, or is it a "take it or leave it "
situation.
Unity: Does the story hang together well. does the message or messages, if any, add to
or detract from the story.
Levels of reference: On the primary level it is always a story- the secondary level is
the Primary message if any, then comes the question, are there others? Are they also
presented well?
I would say that the Levels of Reference view of the story is the one that takes much
time and effort to learn to do well. However, this is taught in most high schools- or at
least the ones I'm familiar with. Whether or not the reader chooses to analyze the work
to that level, however, is moot. Most probably do not, at least consciously. This is
also the difference between those of us that read (several books a month at least) vs
those that maybe read a book a year. The former does this almost automatically.
Jurors are NOT required to be unbiased, it is impossible. Jurors are only required to
render a decision about reasonable doubt as to the prosecution's presentation of
evidence against the defendant, who is presumed innocent until proven guilty- no
relation to critiquing a story. Readers & critics are not unbiased either. I have a
general rule of thumb- if it made the "NY Times best seller list", then I probably won't
like it.
>
> > My experience with the majority of the
> > works most English departments foist off on students as "great literature" is that
> > they should have been allowed to die their natural death several decades ago.
<Snip: a discussion on English/Literature courses in college with many valid points- but
not really relevant to the discussion IMHO The major point being that most courses are
surveys, with few courses in "How to do literary critisim.".>
>
> > There are a few, that I would categorize as having been worth reading as
> > indicators of culture or society or thought at a particular slice of time, but
> > that does not make them "great literature" only points of reference, which can
> > equally be had from close study of history texts.
> >
>
> Maybe, maybe not. Are there any you were told were "great literature" in
> those exact words in a non-gushing tone of voice that you think are not
> and you'd care to name? <snip>
Yes. Many. To start the ball rolling, lets take three: Charles Dickens - Great
Expectations, Steven Crane- The Red Badge of Courage, JD Salinger- Catcher in the Rye.
Note that all were assigned reading by the English Department. All were specified as
"Great Literature". And I actually read all of them.
My comments are:
Great Expectations is my personal example of the WORST piece of writing I have ever
encountered. And I will note that I also read Tale of Two Cities (and enjoyed it) prior
to Great Expectations, and The Pickwick Papers afterwards.
The Red Badge of Courage was an OK read. Had some interesting points, but nothing I
would recommend to others that were not also war or Civil War buffs. Several other works
I have read I would consider as good, including a recent one, Cold Mountain. "Great
Literature" it is not, IMO.
Catcher in the Rye- This has the unenviable position of having been read, but was so
uninteresting that I can remember nothing about it. And I must add in my own defense,
that I can usually remember a great deal about the books I read. It was read as a class
assignment in college. I can clearly remember the red cover with yellow type, but
nothing of the contents. In comparison, I also had to read the Canterbury Tales (in Old
English), Heart of Darkness, and Of Mice and Men, of which I do at least remember
something.
> How coarse a mesh are you planning to use to catch these Great Literature fishes?
> Seine net or purse net?
Treble barbed fish hooks! They have to bite the bait first!
>
> >
> >>
> >>I thought canon meant a set of rules or principles generally
> >>
> >>>established as valid/fundamental in a field, art or philosophy.
> >>>
> >>When speaking of a literary canon, what is generally meant is the set of
> >>exemplary works regarded as touchstones, setting or extending the standards by
> >>which other works are evaluated.
> >>
> >>
> >>>I fail to see how "we" are establishing that which is canon.
> >>>
> >>Clearer?
> >>
> >>
> >
> > No, as there are NO RULES, then there is only a subjective opinion. And I do NOT
> > think that one can compare works designed as plays, with poetry, or with prose,
> > and effectively determine that one is "inferior" and the other "superior". It's
> > like comparing potatoes, onions & yams- they are all roots, but very different in
> > all other ways.
> >
>
> Only if you refuse to concede there might be already developed 'rules,'
> or standards, or benchmarks that make some sense. Then the only thing
> that really counts is your opinion, but only to you. What critics try to
> do is agree with others on a methodology and then apply it. Good ones
> use neutral methodology. Others use or mix in moral judgments and
> prejudices ("there's too many notes, take out some of the notes.") Why
> cannot I compare a play, such as MacBeth, (which incidentally is a play
> written in poetry) with poetry in epic form such are Paradise Lost, with
> a prose in novel form such as Time Enough For Love? They all have the
> basics: plot, themes, characters, and many of the more subtle measurements.
>
My contention is simply that there are no standards that person A, person B, and person
C can apply individually to any given work, and agree that said work fails to meet,
meets, or exceeds the standard to categorize it as "great literature". If you read the
critics -William Dean Howells is a good example- they can't agree between themselves
what constitutes good or bad writing, much less what is truly great. This means that all
such identification of " great" and "classic" or even "good" is entirely subjective, and
that the labels are merely being passed along by the various teachers/professors, simply
because one of their own made the statement in one of their classes.
The reason you can't compare MacBeth (a play) to Paradise Lost (a poem) to Time Enough
For Love (prose) is exactly that MacBeth was not designed to be read, but to be spoken,
on stage, with maximum body language and facial expression to convey additional nuances
to the audience. Reading "Out, out, damned spot" conveys little, without the visual
effects that go with it. Poetry, sometimes is meant to be read, and sometimes spoken
aloud, and the meter, rhythm, and rhyme scheme (if any) conveying additional meaning and
data. prose is seldom meant to be spoken aloud, and is almost always designed to convey
the complete message(s) within the structure of the words and sentence forms. While
there are occasions that each form borrows from the others, comparing them is comparing
apples to persimmons to oranges!
>
> Let's test your thesis: go read the beginning of the "The Tale of the
> Adopted Daughter," also titled Variations of a Theme, Chapter XI, of
> Time Enough For Love (at p. 252, mass market paperback). Read the first
> two paragraphs, ending with ". . . new beginnings--". Then tell me why I
> cannot compare it with Longfellow's Hiawatha, a piece of poetry.
>
> Obviously the test is loaded. I sometimes throw curveballs. :) The first
> two paragraphs are written in prose format, but they're poetry and use
> exactly the same metrical form as Hiawatha.
>
Yeah, I noticed when I read them long ago! There is nothing that says that iambic (the
most common speech rhythm) can't be used in quatrameter (4 beats to the measure,
normally breath) in prose. Pentameter is very frequent, as in Shakespeare. But that does
not make the book comparable to true poetry.
>
> I'm not trying to embarass you, Roger, merely trying to shake up your
> thoughts a little. I remember standing up in an English class one day,
> saying I didn't understand and didn't agree with all the discussion of
> what did the girl who got killed by the idiot who goes around killing
> mouses in that Steinbeck novel symbolize. My opinion was "a tart is a
> tart is a tart" and my opinion, to me, was the only one that counted.
> Teacher thanked me for my opinion, in dead silence, I sat down, and they
> went on with their discussion of what she symbolized, whatever it was;
> and I ignored them. I think I was wrong then, because I closed my mind.
I got blasted because I was the 3rd in a row, giving oral book reports, that stated I
would not consider the assigned book a "classic". Teacher informed us we weren't
qualified to judge that. I still think that is hogwash! I may have been young, and I may
not have read as much as the teacher had at the time, but I, and the others, could still
detect BS.
Shakespeare even had bad plays- take Titus Andronicus as an example! (Or Not- I don't
recommend it unless you have a cast iron stomach, and enjoy blood and gore.)
>
> >
> >>Furthermore, what is
> >>
> >>>apparently canon now was once nothing more than the opinion of several
> >>>people and opinions are subjective.
> >>>
> >>First, you have defined it that way, buy your definition is screwey. Second,
> >>The canon is never anything mor ethan "the opinion of several people." It's
> >>customary to speak of the western canon as a consensus of opinion on the core
> >>literary heritage of our civilization.
> >>
> >
> > But, the question begs: who took the measure of the "consensus"? >From my point of
> > view, this is a myth that is perpetuated by the various departments of English,
> > because nobody is willing to stand up and say HOGWASH to what is very obvious to
> > the rest of the educated reading public.
> >
>
> Today's modern English departments in the aggregate really have very
> little to say about which of today's modern writers will become accepted
> into the canon. And what some departments say doesn't matter at all.
> Some pigs is more equal than others. Still, the question is: when
> Heinlein's been dead fifty years, will they be still assigning him in
> the successor to Science Fiction Novel, i.e., Early Modern Speculative
> Fiction?
>
It doesn't really matter what the English department says. What matters is whether each
of us that truly enjoyed his works takes the time and makes the effort to introduce
those works to the younger readers, who will enjoy them enough to pass them along to
others. I've read thousands of books on the advice of parents and friends, compared to
at best a few hundred on the "approved" reading list of the English Departments. And for
the most part, I "cheated" on those, with a few minor exceptions, I picked books that my
father (also a great reader of books) recommended.
>
> The only way to try to ensure that is provoke folk to write the articles
> in the language and using the tools and terms that those more equal pigs
> may read and, fifty years from now, likely be using themselves -- you
> must avoid transitory flavors of the day in criticism to do this. Maybe
> even read only ten or twenty years from now. Ben Jonson gave Willy the S
> a great send off with his obituary praising that man of small Latin and
> less Greek. Fifty or a hundred years later, when the theatres were fully
> reopened again and the censorship influence of the Puritans had abated
> sufficiently to produce something a little more lively than they had
> been they went looking around through the old already written mothballed
> plays for something to produce and someone influential read Ben Jonson's
> obituary speech for Shakespeare. I think his name was Dryden. He
> repeated it, and the rest, as they say, is history.
As I recall, the only reason we know (or pay any attention to) Jonson is due to Boswell.
>
> >
> [snip]
> >>
> >
> > The point is exactly that: there are no rules- which makes the whole thing a
> > subjective determination, which is then passed on to the rest of the population.
> > Exactly as the "Masters" of Art have been determined. For instance, I'm one of the
> > "nine?" (cited earlier) that can't stand Picasso, and think the rest of the art
> > world lost it's good sense in calling anything he ever did as "good art" much less
> > a "Master" As there are only the opinions of self determined "art experts" to
> > support this status, I think my opinion is just as valid. However, those self
> > determined "experts" have bamboozled the rest of the population to think that a
> > disagreeing opinion cannot possibly be valid. Even if it is the majority opinion!
> >
>
> But your example may not be the way it works. Out of your nine, all may
> think Picasso less worthy than, say, Turner, but six may feel Picasso
> does a better job than Andy Warhol, maybe barely passing, but art.
NA-IMO
> Real art experts aren't self determined either, any more than real critics of
> literature are. They earn it, by work and study and effort and the
> exercise of judgment that proves sound.
The crux of the matter: They worked, they studied, and their teachers said "THIS is ART"
and being students- they weren't qualified to say "I don't think so!"
> Those six will have tried to
> find out what Picasso thought he was doing, and why some critics thought
> he was doing something fine.
>
> Me, when I was sixteen and had no patience with what was being taught,
> my own opinion governed, because "a tart is a tart is a tart."
>
Perhaps- you were right?
>
> > I presented my criteria in another post, but the bottom line for me is:
> > Will I recommend it to others, AND Do I want to read it AGAIN!
> > If the answer to BOTH is yes, than it rates as "Great Literature" in my opinion.
> > (YOURS, of course, may vary.)
>
> I agree with you that it's probably a good book. I like the way your
> mind works; and I'd read it, but not everything I reread and recommend
> is literature. I'm like Oscar. I'll read the back of cereral boxes. :)
>
And soup cans, and...
But I digress! Naturally, not everything fits that category, as I don't consider
instruction manuals, books on philosophy, religion, histories, most biographies, and
books on science and math to be "literature", no matter how well written. They may be
the foundation works in their fields, like Darwin's Origin of Species, or Machivelli's
The Prince, or contribute greatly to the understanding of the field, like Eric Hoffer's
The Ordeal of Change, or Arthur Charles Fox-Davies' A Complete Guide to Heraldry, but
they are not IMO, "literature". ( I recommend all of the above incidentally!)
>
> I love WEB Griffin's stories, but they ain't literature. But still, you
> oughta read them! John D. MacDonald, maybe he will be recognized as
> writing literature; but the net is pretty coarse . . . Heinlein? We'll
> find out in the great by-'n-by.
Don't know Griffin- MacDonald- I read a few, but wouldn't really recommend them.
>
>
> Now if you don't mind, I'll have a little nip of brandy and go to bed.
>
> Gotta pack for Seattle tomorrow. ;) Bill's already left for San
> Francisco and his connecting flight, I think. Have fun!
>
Take Care! Have a good trip!
>
> --
> David M. Silver
> http://www.heinleinsociety.org
> http://www.readinggroupsonline.com/groups/heinlein.htm
> "The Lieutenant expects your names to shine!"
> Robert Anson Heinlein, USNA '29
> Lt (jg)., USN R'td (1907-1988)
> Gordon Sollars wrote:
> I think that a major concern driving those who hold that "art is just
> opinion" is a very legitimate interest in autonomy. Ethical or aesthetic
> realism - the view that statements in ethics or aesthetics really are
> true or false - in particular seem to many to challenge personal
> autonomy. If there are correct and incorrect judgments in these areas,
> this suggests to some that we are not free to choose what we will think
> or do.
>
I am under the impression from my studies of ethics, religion, and philosophy that the
best (and most "correct" ) answer to statements in those fields is "It depends"!
Usually on point of view, and details. Exceptions to the generalities tend to bite!
> However, there is no Authority - be it in ethics, aesthetics, law or
> science - that /makes/ statements true or false. What we have are better
> or worse arguments, and, in turn, methods of judging these arguments.
> Your opinion is not "less valid" /because/ there are a lot of contrary
> opinions over a long period of time - your opinion is as valid as the
> arguments you can make for it. And, even if your arguments are not very
> good, you are still entitled to your opinion - just as others are
> entitled to point out that your arguments may not be very good.
>
I mostly agree- one would hope! that there is at the back of an opinion a well reasoned
argument, based on the individual's experience, knowledge, etc. However, even without
that, the opinion is as valid as anyone else's when dealing with subjective material. As
you indicate below.
> Further, you need not make any arguments whatsoever for your opinions.
> If you simply wish to communicate that you enjoyed, say, reading /Citizen
> of the Galaxy/, then, "I like that book" is sufficient to your purpose.
> If, however, you seek any deeper level of communication, if you go no
> further than simply to say that you enjoyed the book "/because/...", you
> have now made a statement that can be analyzed and found to be correct or
> incorrect.
> --
> Gordon Sollars
>
I disagree with the last sentence. If the "because" is a subjective opinion, AND there
are no standards, just other people's subjective opinions, then there is nothing to be
"correct or incorrect" about. Yes/No-True/False-Correct/Incorrect can only apply to
facts which can be measured against a standard.
Jane wrote:
Dave (djinn) wrote:
> PS- I go up to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art periodically. The
> permanent exhibits are wonderful but some of the temporary exhibits lead me
> to think that my judgment is certainly as good as some 'experts'.
> I think this is the problem. We all get a little huffy at the idea
> that our judgment isn't valued as greatly as someone else's. See the
> way you put 'experts' in quotation marks? I don't have an answer
> but I got to thinking as I spooned cereal into Lauren this morning
> and this was what I ended up with.
>
> Divide up the whole mess into two elements, _equally valid_
> responses or approaches but different in type and purpose.
>
> First we have the reader and his own personal thoughts on a book as
> he is reading it and after he's finished. This is not lit crit; this
> is opinion. During the reading you experience pleasure, boredom,
> whatever. After the reading you make a mental comparison with other
> books that the author wrote, other books in the same genre, all the
> books you've ever read and you slot it in somewhere in your list of
> 'Books I Have Read'.
>
> So, you decide you loved the book, will recommend it to your friends
> and read more by this author. Then you open your Sunday paper, turn
> to the literary supplement and find a reviewer slashing the book to
> pieces, heaping abuse on it for various reasons and generally
> declaring it a heap of dirtied paper.
> You can either ignore this in the calm knowledge that your view is
> as good as his, get angry at the insult to your taste or feel
> anxious, doubt yourself and donate the book to the nearest charity
> store under cover of darkness.
> The last option is out. No one knows what books you will enjoy but
> you. If you did enjoy it then all the negative reviews in the world
> are themselves just a shocking waste of paper as far as you're
> concerned. His view on the book is as valid as yours, it's simply
> only of value to him.
> The second option....well, he doesn't know you sat up till 2.00 am
> reading it and he didn't mean to hurt your feelings.
> The first option seems reasonable but it does have a drawback. Sure,
> your view on how the book felt to you is the most important thing
> (to you) but there's something to be said for considering other
> POV's if you want to discover new things about that book. Maybe that
> reviewer spotted something you didn't but which interests you. It
> might even make you reconsider and give the book a 9 instead of a
> ten on your personal scale. This isn't the same as option 3; it's
> not you being bullied into lowering (or raising) the rating; it's
> you amending your opinion as new data comes in.
>
> But none of that is lit crit. Probably most of us readers aren't
> qualified to do this; it's akin to being able to add 2 + 2 but not
> being able to do the kind of mathematics that nuclear scientists do.
> Being able to read a book and form an opinion does not mean that you
> can subject that book to LC in any meaningful way.
>
> That's because lit crit isn't interested in ranking a work, isn't
> concerned with one's emotional response to it. What it's concerned
> with is placing the work within a framework, identifying themes,
> linking the book to the millions of other books that have been
> written. In a piece of embroidery, each thread is equal, each stitch
> is important. Opinion says, 'I like that flower down in the corner,
> the petals look almost real'. Lit crit views that flower in the same
> way as it views the solid piece of dark grey stitching in the
> background, giving it no more attention and no less, because it's
> equally important to the whole.
>
> Lit crit is not all that important to most readers because it's a
> way of looking at a book that doesn't mean much or add much unless
> you have a vast and varied reading experience. Someone who likes
> Harlequin romances and has never read anything else would have
> nothing to cling to if they attempted to apply literary criticisms
> to one of those romances (and I'm sure you could). It's very
> difficult to lit crit a genre if you've never read outside that genre.
>
> I have been reading Frye's book and quoting interesting bits these
> last few days but I haven't even heard of some of the authors he
> mentions and of those whose names I know, I don't always know their
> books very well. I'm persevering with the book because despite that
> I find it fascinating and I'm getting tantalising glimpses of what
> he means but I couldn't apply lit crit to a book as I understand lit
> crit (and maybe I don't understand it very well but this is afh not
> the exam room so no worries :-)).
>
> I can cross stitch but that's the only stitch I know; I would look
> at that embroidery and be incapable of seeing the many other
> stitches used: the use of colour and complex shading would appeal to
> me but I wouldn't know by looking that the flower's petals were a
> mixture of DMC240 and 321 (I made those numbers up btw).
>
> The way I see it, lit crit is dissecting the butterfly, opinion is
> deciding the Red Admiral has prettier wings than the cabbage white.
> Not all of us are qualified or keen on doing the first but someone
> has to do it in order to increase our knowledge of butterflies. It
> doesn't make the cabbage white prettier to know what family of
> butterflies it belongs to but it's important to a lepidopterist.
>
> At a higher level of magnification so to speak, I could probably
> see a myriad of links, a spider's web of them in an intricate
> pattern from each book to many others. But I'd have to know about
> the other books before I could see that they were linked and how
> they were connected.
> A good literary critic is therefore someone with an excellent memory
> and the ability to spot connections and themes and use them to place
> the books at the right spot in the web. It's a job that's never done
> as each new book will have an effect on the whole that necessitates
> continual tiny adjustments of position.
> And though there could be disagreement about placing between
> critics, there's no judgment being made about the book itself.
> There's no top to the web...but it would be fun to locate the centre.
>
> Jane
>
Nice explanation, but I don't think it exactly holds water. In the first place, the lit
crit seems to be saying to the rest of us
" It doesn't matter that the embroidered flower is pretty, and executed perfectly, it's
in the wrong corner because I think it should be in the other one." And secondly, where
as Taxonomists-Entomologists-Lepidopterists have specific rules for including or
excluding members that are a series of true/false statements ( Identification Keys are
published explicitly for this purpose), no such standards exist for the critic as far as
I have been able to determine! Thirdly, its not a flat web, but at least three
dimensional and perhaps more. Take the Hugos for example- where or how does Stranger In
A Strange Land compare to Lord of Light by Zelazny? And lastly, there IS judgment about
the book itself. And gaining praise or not means big cash rewards, or the lack thereof.
> On the other hand, RAH really didn't follow the
> career path that would lead anyone in academe to take him very seriously.
> Tom valenti...@aol.com (ValentineSmith
>
Ah! I think there, too, is one of those subjective points for the lit critic! And why SF
is looked down upon by the "experts"!
I will note here, however, that my copy of the New York Public Library Desk Reference
(published 1989) lists RAH- SiaSL & TEfL under the Important US and Canadian Authors.
The opening statement being that the list contains authors who have had a substantial
impact on US & Canadian literature.
All in all, an excellent discussion! Sorry if I made this over long-
A round of applause for every one- drinks on me!
Roger
BPRAL22169
As far as I know (and my knowledge is not anything like comprehensive), there
is nothing like a "primer" of literary criticism. People learn to do it by
reading examples of other people doing it. I think Frye's Anatomy of Criticism
is very useful for thinking about the background issues that go into litcrit,
but it's more a book of literary theory than of literary criticism. It can
help you organize your impressions. I suspect that litcrit has always been
such a minority occupation that there has never really been any need for a
pedagogy of litcrit.
I am not familiar with "Cultural LIteracy." It sounds from what you say to
deal with similar subjects to Bloom's "Western Canon."
Bill
BPRAL22169
>1. Goat Boy was never read even when it was a best seller--but it was/is a
>fixture in every home library.
>
Hmmm. I sense a certain historial revisionism going on here. GGB was
voluminously talked about in the late 60s and early 70's because the
litcritters were going on and on (and on) about how the realistic novel had run
out of steam and satire would be the next wave of literary formula. It was
never as well liked as Catch-22, but being more definitely a "formula" book, it
was approved in academic circles at the time.
Bill
BPRAL22169
are qualities of the reader's interaction with the texts and talk about his
level of interest in what he's reading -- a highly subjective and changeable
quality. Ihave little interest in Spenser, for example, and so find this
"gentle knight a'pricking o'er the plain" tedious and boring. But I might
develop an interest in allegorical fiction (ghu, I hope not!) and suddenly find
it utterly fascinating. The work won't have changed in the interim.
There is a certain circularity built into the observation that some works only
survive because they are taught in schools -- they are taught in schools
because they are thought worthwhile. Schools do have to preserve the
historical context, no matter how badly baby wants the chocolate pudding and
not the strained carrots. We never get a chance to find out what survives
waves and surges of taste if we don't look outside the trammels of our current
taste. The process of forced exposure to other things is ipso facto useful for
the educational process.
Bill
djinn
> djinn wrote:
>
>>(dont be fuelish) wrote about the Los Angeles County Museum of Art :
>
>>> Did you see that Van Gogh show they had a few years
>>> ago? I thought it was great.
>
>>No I missed it. :(
>>
>>I've been going more regularly lately. The contemporary art exhibit is
>>really funny, although I don't think it was meant to be....
>
> That was the last show I saw before I moved up here to Mountain
> View. Ever since then, I have been doing the museums around
> here instead.
>
We must have been contemporaries for awhile then :)
> San Jose has an Art Museum that resembles a large shoebox,
> which is two floors of galeries that you can consume completely
> in about an hour and a half. They change the shows often enough
> that it is actually worth visiting once or twice a year. Every now
> and then they have something great. You are spoiled to have
> such a great Museum in your back yard.
>
I remember the Rosicrucian Museum and the Rose Garden.
I realize that. The one here in OC is good too. The Getty Villa is closed
for re-work, I really wanted to see that.
and then theres San Diego....
Can't believe I have a surfeit of museums !!
> Tian Harter
> --
> http://tian.greens.org
> Early this afternoon, I traded a quarter hour of Berkeley
> Bread for a jar of olives my friend Dana had grown
> in her back yard and processed in her kitchen.
> Then I went down to San Jose for the Peace Vigil.
>
Is Berkeley Bread barter ?
TreetopAngel
"BPRAL22169"
Hi Bill,
But, I did not name any of the authors or titles of 'Great' works that I
find 'tedious and boring.' My bookshelf-list may surprise you. I do
understand the need for certain books to be taught in schools and
universities. Broadening the mind is a wonderful thing. Exposure to
literature is one of my main goals, it's why I am a literacy tutor, everyone
should know HOW to read and they should also be able to get enjoyment from
it.
My point is, my mind was sufficiently broadened at such a young age, that
re-reading many of the texts was lost on me, not that I failed any of the
classes, I didn't. Unfortunately, for my teachers, I had already developed
a very broad taste in literature and I heartily disagreed with many of their
own opinions and objective views on the books. Granted, I was a
loud-mouthed, opinionated pre-teen and teenager, I made my literature
teachers nuts, but they liked teaching me...I brought out things in the
books they had never thought of. I also thought that I had read their
selections enough times before I ever hit the class and was disappointed in
their not teaching me about other books (not their fault.) One teacher even
allowed me to take the quizzes and tests on books at my speed and not the
class speed, consequently I spent a lot of time in the school library
reading what I wanted to read.
Luckily/unfortunately, I was on a fast track towards a nursing degree once I
hit college and never got the time to 'dabble' in literature. One of my
dreams is to go back and take literature courses so I can gain some of the
critical, criticism skills needed to really discuss books, rather than just
go over the parts I like. That is after I get my Master's degree...maybe
when I retire.
Respectfully,
TreetopAngel