Weirdmonger wrote:Sorry, I should have emphasised the 'for example' in above passage. Ligotti is only an example here, but an important one for me.
It also, for example, shares, describes, is sympathetic with
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Weirdmonger |
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Weirdmonger wrote:Sorry, I should have emphasised the 'for example' in above passage. Ligotti is only an example here, but an important one for me. Silly Idea - The Baser Pulps - Nemonymous - The Weirdmonger Wheel - Weirdmonger (Prime Book)
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marksamuels |
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Thanks for the responses, Des and Jack.
Not coming from an academic background, and having only picked up what little information I have on these forms of critical theory piecemeal, I should add that my comments have been framed in order to clear up certain questions in my own mind. I don't claim to be an authority on the subject (I'm not). However it seems to me that Des's use of the term "intentional fallacy" differs to such a degree from the more rigid interpretation Jack has provided to the degree that I wonder if it's application has any meaning. When I did a little background reading on the matter, I certainly came across the history (i.e. its having been coined by Wimsatt and Beardsley) but also references to having been subsequently utilised by Roland Barthes, to the extent that it was employed on the basis of support for the idea of "the text possessing meaning in and of itself" under the slightly different, albeit connected term, "authorial intentionality". This is whence I derived my curiosity about its current usage and development. But my central query still stands, I feel. And still no-one here seems to wish to address it: Is the work of those critical theorists who support the view that "intentionality" within a text is suspect, subject to the same objection? I recognise that I'm no expert in the field, but indulge an enquiring student ! Mark S. |
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Weirdmonger |
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marksamuels wrote: However it seems to me that Des's use of the term "intentional fallacy" differs to such a degree from the more rigid interpretation Jack has provided to the degree that I wonder if it's application has any meaning.That's why probably, in hindsight, I'm now trying to call my interests Nemonymity rather than the Intentional Fallacy. The latter ignited the former, only. I think these thoughts (that I've put into practice with 'Nemonymous' books) are the essence of my enjoyment in 'weird fiction' or 'magic fiction' (obverse of 'magic realism') as I prefer to call it. marksamuels wrote: Is the work of those critical theorists who support the view that "intentionality" within a text is suspect, subject to the same objection? ===================================================== Well, the unanswerability of that, I feel, makes my point for me. If one studies the mind one is using a mind (ie the same thing as one is studying). des... Silly Idea - The Baser Pulps - Nemonymous - The Weirdmonger Wheel - Weirdmonger (Prime Book)
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marksamuels |
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Thanks Des.
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Weirdmonger |
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well most things in literature are unanswerable. But to ask, as you effectively do, about the fallibility of a-theory-about-the-fallibility-of-theory seems a
trifle circular. :-)
Silly Idea - The Baser Pulps - Nemonymous - The Weirdmonger Wheel - Weirdmonger (Prime Book)
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marksamuels |
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I think it was described once as "the intentional fallacy fallacy", but then I suppose one could add another fallacy to those already there ad
infinitum!
Ummm... Mark S. |
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Weirdmonger |
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This way lies madness. :-)
Silly Idea - The Baser Pulps - Nemonymous - The Weirdmonger Wheel - Weirdmonger (Prime Book)
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Michael Johnston |
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To return a little to Koontz, it's interesting that Strange Horizons published a tribute to and interview with him
last month. In the tributes Charles de Lint wrote
"I always find it sad how so many people equate best-seller success with hack writing, as though one's work can't be both popular and literate. Koontz, like King and a number of other popular writers, has had to suffer this backlash-from the critics, rather than the general readership, naturally, since the former particularly appear to have these axes they need to grind. I know for a fact it's not true with Dean's work. Never mind that the books happily stand up for themselves in terms of quality. The truth is, Dean spends more time worrying over a sentence than most of us do over whole pages." http://www.strangehorizons.com/2008/20080428/0mccarty-a.shtml Is this sometimes the case do you think, not merely as applies to Koontz but in general? That popularity and best-selling status can sometimes diminish the literary 'value' of a work or body of work? Can there ever be a critical 'elitism' that sees good literature as essentially 'esoteric', to be appreciated only by the cultured and well-read, (and if necessary by those with a historical grounding in genre)? That since the 'masses' do not have the critical apparatus to appreciate good literature anything that is 'popular' immediately becomes suspect? That somehow good literature is 'difficult', that it requires work to appreciate its nuances. Related to this is the idea that certain work is not evaluated on its own terms, in what it's trying to be and do, but in terms that it makes no pretence to be aiming at - that a work whose sole focus is to tell a story well and engagingly is judged by other literary criteria and on those grounds regarded as 'bad' literature? Not posing this in defence or condemnation of Koontz or literary critics, but merely musing. |
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Jackula M Lit |
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Michael, both this and the opposite happens all the time. That is, people conflate ideas of quality and popularity in regards to art (film, music, writing)
consistently depending on their own prejudices. From one side of the aisle we get the attitude you mention, the belief that popular novels must be pandering,
lowest-common-denominator work without literary value. Seemingly perennial bestsellers like The da Vinci Code and The Five People You Meet in
Heaven are trotted out for proof of the masses' poor taste.
On the other side of the aisle are those who argue that popular works possess lasting literary qualities because they are popular, which is also a fallacious statement. These folks drag out writers like Dickens ("A bestseller in his day!" they cry) and Steinbeck (a bestseller and a Nobel laureate) as proof that there must be merit in anything that's so popular. Both sides fail to understand that popularity/monetary success and artistic merit are orthogonal (i.e., statistically unrelated) qualities. Sometimes (a lot of times) people like crap. Or with less venom I might say that a lot of times people like empty, easy entertainment. But that's not really enough of a statement, because in addition to a book like, for instance, James Patterson's recent Sundays at Tiffany's being maudlin and saccharine and shallow, it's also replete--at least in the excerpt available at Amazon--with weak writing. Overstuffed with static verbs, the prose limps along without luster. There's not a paragraph longer than three sentences, and not a sentence longer than two clauses unless it's a terrible run-on. But at least the run-ons are balanced out by frequent fragments. In short, the writing is awful. And whether the book sells a thousand copies or a million, the writing will still be awful; no amount of popularity can change that. On the flip side, just because a book is a commercial failure doesn't mean the prose is bad or the story worthless. Again, popularity and quality are orthogonal. Jack
I tried jogging once, but the ice kept spilling out of my tumbler. Touch A Dark Wolf! Touch it!
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rchandler |
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I seem to remember that Koontz has one his characters condemn literary deconstruction as a sign of civilization's decline. I think it's in THE TAKING,
but I'm not sure. I am pretty sure it didn't win Koontz any points with certain segments of the literary establishment, if any of those intellectuals
read it. And as THE TAKING can be seen as a religious story, that might've been another black mark against it.
It would probably be easy for a scholar to size up Koontz as anti-intellectual and discard his novels as formulaic hack work. |
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kpaffenroth |
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I don't think the point of trying to understand a lit crit is to look for some provocation for why he might dislike a particular author. It is a matter of
analysis, not taste or personal effrontery.
Kim Paffenroth, Stoker Award Winner for Gospel of the Living Dead, and author of the new zombie novel Dying to Live. Visit him at his blog
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Mamatas |
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Hank,
Flooding the thread with text isn't going to turn the word opinion into what you want it to mean. Are we getting to the point where you threaten to beat me up again, as you did a couple of years ago when I corrected your canned arguments about the "fossil record"? Hank: I see, so the accepted definition of society at large isn't good enough for you, because you prefer a different one. No, it is foolish to turn to dictionaries, which are descriptive rather than prescriptive, and doubly so when the definition doesn't even match what you claim it does. Hank: I think it's rather funny that the best link you could find to reject my "schoolboy definitions" of opinion Not best, first. Hank: So, in other words, you reject the definition from a collegiate dictionary as "schoolboy" in favor of one put forth in an education curriculum for teaching school children. Yep. It seemed to be about the level you needed -- and indeed, as you implicitly admit the page is more advanced than the dictionary. Children are not taught by other schoolboys or even by college students but by trained adults who have already finished college. Too bad your teachers didn't have access to Reading Genie back when you were in knickers. Hank: [the site] offers four categories, limiting opinion merely to self-reporting and not allowing for anything stated about the real world to be considered part of that category. Correct. And this is so. Then when you insist that "Measurable Quantity X is no surprise given exposure to Y" you are NOT expressing an opinion. You are making a factual claim. Declaring a correlation is as much a factual claim as anything else. Opinion is essentially self-reporting, as Reading Genie says. You were not engaging in self-reporting. Thus, you were making a factual claim. That there are multiple species of factual claim, ALL of which are distinct from opinion, is hardly relevant here. Hank: False claims and untested claims are neither fact nor opinion" Yes, AND? You made a factual claim. You called it an opinion when asked for proof of the claim. It remains an untested claim and is likely a false one. Factual claim does not equal fact. If it did, reality would reorder itself whenever any first grader said "Abraham Lincoln was the second president of the United States." It also does not equal opinion, as you insist that it did. Hank: By the definition you provided as the one "preferred" and "known by any freshman composition class," therefore, your Poe student did not offer an opinion, as you stated, but rather a false claim (hmm, does that critique sound familiar?). I didn't say the Poe student offered an opinion. I said "That's the major problem I've seen in my time in the classroom -- the idea that all opinions are equally credible and need not be based on some set of facts. That's why I recommend not confusing factual claims with opinions." The student confused factual claim with opinion. He thought he was expressing an opinion. He was, in fact, making a factual claim that was easily shown to be false. His defense was "Well, it's my opinion!" -- he was using that to claim that of course his paper was as credible as anything else anyone might say, as you did with your nonsense claim about pomo leading to a decline in reading. I pointed out to him, as I did I did to you, that no, it's not an opinion, it's a claim. Of course it sounds familiar; you're doing the same exact thing. Hank: An opinion being something based on probable evidence was only one part of one of the definitions I provided, but you act like it was the only one. Dictionaries generally give definitions in order to use -- the more common definitions go up top. The first definition of opinion you offered is "that which is opined", which doesn't tell us much -- any schoolboy knows that when looking up words for teacher one shouldn't use the definition that contains a form of the word defined. The first definition of substance you offered was the one regarding probable evidence, and thus the dictionary considers that the most common and most relevant. You can't complain that I'm ignoring society's definition on one hand and then ignore it yourself on the other. Hank: I don't think he, for one, would agree that I'm talking about a "rare-to-non-existent state of affairs," considering he referred to it as the "lunatic destruction of literary studies" and estimated three-fifths of the tenured faculty of the English-speaking world are dominated by such a conceit, something he called the "treason of the intellectuals." And yet, Bloom still put THINGS FALL APART in his own version of the Canon. I guess even lunatics are right, like clocks, twice a day. At any rate, the rare-to-nonexistent state of affairs is your claim: that these scholars use biocrit as a pretext to discredit pieces. Bloom surely thinks multiculti "resenters" are mistaken. He may well think some of them are insane, as your quote implies (and which rather shows the limits of Bloom's ability to read the work of his colleagues objectively). I seriously doubt he makes the basic error of thinking that postmodernists use biocrit and that they use it solely for malevolent reasons -- that is your mistake alone. As far as literature studies being limited to "appreciation and understanding", one need only point and laugh at yet another schoolboy footstomp. Literature isn't created in a political or economic vacuum, so it is trivially foolish to read it critically in one. It is nigh-impossible to *understand* literature without any examination of the cultural moment from which it sprung. Indeed, Bloom himself uses culture as a tool to measure society and vice-versa, thus his clever denunciation of all things Shockliney in his famed essay "They Have The Numbers; We Have The Heights": A country where television, movies, computers, and Stephen King have replaced reading is already in acute danger of cultural collapse. You're not going to get very far, Hank, using Bloom as a brickbat against minority literature given that Bloom often conflates what he and you see as the negative effects of such literature with the negative effects of the pop culture being defended in the first 12 pages of this thread. One can just as easily float the claim (or "opinion", as you would have it) that crusty old farts like Bloom are the ones driving people away from reading, as he won't even let them have their dog-eared copies of THE STAND. |
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rchandler |
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You could be right, Kim. On the other hand, if an author says something to antagonize a lit crit, than said lit crit might be less inclined to waste his time on that author and might judge him as unworthy of serious analysis in the first place. Koontz apparently has already a reputation as something of a hack, based on Joshi's words and some opinions expressed on this thread. It could be a bad career move for a lit crit to devote time to someone like Dean Koontz and risk ridicule of his peers. Unless the critical community is above such human behavior. |
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Mamatas |
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Randy: It could be a bad career move for a lit crit to devote time to someone like Dean Koontz and risk ridicule of his peers.
Nah, or at least not necessarily. There's plenty of pop culture lit crit these days, though little of it is about showing how awesome this or that writer is. You can check out the Popular Culture Association's website here: http://www.pcaaca.org/ If you look at the subjects covered at the various conferences here -- http://www.pcaaca.org/areas/pca.php -- you'll see entire programming tracks dedicated to Stephen King, Robert Heinlein, vampires, digital games, etc. I presented two papers at the last two national conferences. One was in the visual arts track, and it was about Pop Art and Batman. This year, I gave a paper on "open source" Lovecraft and what it may suggest for post-copyright creative work. There were also papers presented on Buffy, on Jell-O, on NASCAR, all sorts of things. (These weren't all English/Lit profs -- there were cinema studies types, sociologists, etc.) You can really do any ol' fucking thing these days and get credit for it, as long as you teach enough freshman composition or other "service" classes. |
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rchandler |
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Those are interesting links, Nick. I especially like Collective Behavior: Panics, Fads & Hostile Outbursts. That could make for some
interesting papers.
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Weirdmonger |
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Mark, another thing...
The Intentional Fallacy is a theory about art. Therefore to use it against itself is not applying it correctly. Silly Idea - The Baser Pulps - Nemonymous - The Weirdmonger Wheel - Weirdmonger (Prime Book)
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rchandler |
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3) horror as a genre depressingly maintains an anti-intellectual stance toward itself, and as a result perpetuates its own failure to be taken seriously as a literary genre Jack, I'm still wondering about #3. I'm not sure what it means. Should the genre take literary criticism (and critics) more seriously? How exactly could the genre remedy its anti-intellectual slouch? |
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Jackula M Lit |
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Randy, that's a huge question that requires a long answer I don't have time to give now, though I'd like to come back to it. Concisely, though,
I'm not sure it's possible in the public eye as long as the word horror continues to be associated with slasher films and low-rent schlock filling
video stores everywhere. The best thing we could do for the genre is build a time machine, go back to 1981, and stop the Friday the 13th franchise
from being made. If this involved multiple murders, so be it.
Embracing critics and criticism that treat horror seriously rather than attacking them because they may not hold your favorite writer in high esteem would be another positive move, but that's a small piece of the larger puzzle. Go back through this thread and take a look at the language used against criticism. The rhetoric is grossly anti-intellectual, and it paints the critical approach to literature as some sort of threatening outsider looking to dominate the genre and impose its views on all; that's not even remotely the case. We need a broad cultural shift in the genre rather than the separate-but-equal demands of fans or the defensiveness of readers and writers who want to refuse any sort of serious evaluation of the work they love, as these things perpetuate the ghettoization of horror. Jack
I tried jogging once, but the ice kept spilling out of my tumbler. Touch A Dark Wolf! Touch it!
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05/26/08 09:36:41.
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ghostbrain |
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That's stunningly accurate for something so concise, Jack.
Simon Strantzas
www.strantzas.com BENEATH THE SURFACE; Humdrumming Ltd.; 2008 Available now for pre-order |
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rchandler |
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Thanks, Jack. Though I may be guilty of holding some resentment for the idea that only academically trained scholars are capable of bestowing upon the genre
true respectability (if the actual works of horror aren't good enough to win respect, then maybe they aren't that good anyway), I'm actually all
for more criticism of horror. The genre shouldn't have to rely on only one well-known critic like Joshi for the "last word."
[By the way, look what happened to rock'n'roll after it gained respectability. It lost much of its edge.]
Last Edited By: rchandler
05/26/08 11:59:23.
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