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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.

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.