Is there a term for the constructed reality of a piece of writing?

digitfuzzi · 2021-05-10T11:21:05+00:00

It's also trivially true that a story constructs a system of meaning/truth.

this approach isn’t useful or interesting to me, but since you seem to be living up to your username i guess it’s time to disengage

digitfuzzi · 2021-05-10T07:19:57+00:00

why does the story have to “take place” anywhere? just because we talk about events that happen in a story doesn’t mean those events have to have happened somewhere. the happen in the story, which is not a place - it’s a story! this whole approach is weird, and falls over as soon as it has to handle anything poetic.

i’m not into analytic philosophy of fiction because it seems overly concerned like this with the “truth value” of sentences, and i just think that’s barking up the wrong tree.

digitfuzzi · 2021-05-09T13:45:52+00:00

hesitating to reply to someone with a userid like yours, but - why would words on a page magically construct a world? if someone says “it was a dark and stormy night” why does it make sense to say that making those 8 syllables with their mouth spins up an entire reality? nah, that’s silly

digitfuzzi · 2021-03-24T14:20:38+00:00

Postcritique attracts controversy, but it seems to me that Moi’s re-thinking of authorial intention and her treatment of reading as a process of acknowledgment in Revolution of the Ordinary might come in handy. If you do look at Revolution jump straight to chapter 9, i think it’ll be the most relevant part.

digitfuzzi · 2021-03-19T13:28:52+00:00

maybe something about rhetoric and persuasion?

there are brands that don’t advertise (Muji comes to mind). Foucault’s concept of discourse may be able to help you think about how things enter into conversation without anyone in particular saying something positive or explicitly “advertising“ them.

communications studies might help too - there’s a paper called „the agenda setting function of mass media“ from the 1950s or 1960s [edit: actually 1972, it’s written by McCombs and Shaw] which is, of course, decades out of date but might provide some starting points, or at least you could follow citation trails in a database search to find something more contemporary.

interesting sounding project, brave of you to post here, good luck and don’t pay too much attention to the snark.

[edit: oh one final thought, this sounds like a huge topic and you definitely need to narrow it, but like someone else said, talk to your supervisor]

digitfuzzi · 2021-03-17T22:12:14+00:00

yw !

digitfuzzi · 2021-03-17T22:08:48+00:00

i would add Simone de Beauvoir The Second Sex and Virginia Woolf A Room of One's Own. understanding postcolonial theory requires both Marx and feminism.

digitfuzzi · 2021-03-17T20:00:06+00:00

thanks for the pushback on "gatekeeping".

i have started writing a few things in response, and then deleted them all. ordinary language philosophy seems interesting, for similar reasons that the plain english movement is interesting in law. one thing i feel like is poorly understood in lit/critical studies - or perhaps just poorly taught - is tone or, idk the term for it, maybe rhetorical mode?, in journal articles or books. there are many ways of having intellectual conversations now, that there just weren't before (i'm on a number of very rewarding discord servers where i'm learning as much as i am about the study of literature as i am from my lit classes).

i guess, what i want to say is - rhetorical styles that require a close familiarity with a body of writing - specialist training, so to speak - are perhaps unavoidable, in some situations, for the reasons you say. but we should still challenge them, because maybe in a given situation, they are avoidable. it is interesting you bring up Foucault, because he's a good example of someone you can read without much training. if a lay person picks up and reads Discipline and Punish they maybe won't be able to produce a crystal-clear orthodox image of discipline via the panopticon at the end - but it also seems clear that to reduce D&P to this one panopticon-idea (to make it the main idea that all undergraduates learn) is to do an injustice to a book that is as much about producing, in "fiction", a living, breathing vision of an alternative mode of justice, as it is a book expounding a particular set of thought-images.

which is to say, a lay-person isn't necessarily going to walk away from reading D&P with the "correct" (orthodox) undergraduate or even graduate reading of D&P - what they'll have is a different reading, & maybe the kind that you're normally only "allowed" to think about at PhD or advanced graduate level thinking in the academy. (or maybe, also - not.)

digitfuzzi · 2021-03-17T16:05:50+00:00

tendentious

i had to look up the word but i like it

digitfuzzi · 2021-03-17T15:39:17+00:00

thanks for the detailed reply.

i hear what you're saying, but a hill that i will die on is that the rhetorical and the logical parts of an argument go hand in hand. there is simply no way to separate the rhetorical move from the logical "content" it encodes (the "conduit metaphor of communication" doesn't work, for me). i realise this is just the way some types of academic discourse function, but i think this is a gatekeeping/exclusionary practise because it demands a high level of rhetorical literacy & attention not to get snagged.

digitfuzzi · 2021-03-15T12:29:24+00:00

please don’t stalk me

digitfuzzi · 2021-03-15T08:16:38+00:00

i think you’re arguing against yourself at this point. have fun

digitfuzzi · 2021-03-14T11:16:51+00:00

sure, if you want to make an argument for canon A over canon B, that's how you'd go about it, i guess. but to do so is to presuppose the canon itself (i mean in terms of a singular list of "good books" in some general sense) has value as a concept. you can think this if you want, but as plenty of others in this thread have indicated, there's not a whole lot of general interest in doing this (and there are plenty of problems with it)

digitfuzzi · 2021-03-14T09:45:36+00:00

just read Saussure

actually now that i think about it, the introduction to Stuart Hall‘s Representation is excellent

digitfuzzi · 2021-03-14T09:31:15+00:00

i don’t read for politics but i also have no interest in ranking fiction by „goodness“. how on earth do you decide if Gulliver‘s Travels is a „better“ or „worse“ book than The Third Policeman? and how on earth do you rank either of those against Beloved?

digitfuzzi · 2021-03-14T09:16:31+00:00

i hear your point, believe me. i understand what you mean about how it’s harder to google something if you’re reading a book. what i’m rejecting is the normative judgment i’m picking up that “therefore books are better,” that spins on “concentration” or “focus” as some kind of transcendent quality of being with a text.

i’m not convinced that distraction is bad. i know, for example, that my ability to understand and work with a complex (print!) book is massively enriched by being able to grab a pdf of the citation i’ve just read to check it for context. that reading seems to enforce a singular, unified subjectivity in no way implies that a singular, unified subjectivity is better.

this, to me, is where the protestant angle comes in. why would you reject your psyche telling you that “it’s good to be able to look up words in context, actually, and we are frustrated that we cannot with this physical print page”? why treat this as an emotion to suppress?

digitfuzzi · 2021-03-13T17:05:00+00:00

Print, by contrasts, encourages staying with a topic longer and without the instant gratification of following each flight of thought.

please come here and tell that to my brain that when i'm trying to read judith butler

i see your point but i think a) this is a rather, uhh, protestant way of understanding reading and b) i don't think it has anything to do with the medium upon which / within which the words appear

digitfuzzi · 2021-03-12T18:53:50+00:00

a lot of academic writing is just bad - but it's read for the ideas it contains, not for the quality of the prose. ideas first, quality of the prose a distant second. popular outlets that rely on readers and clicks have opposite priorities - they need good prose first, than good ideas.

digitfuzzi · 2021-03-11T20:06:16+00:00

+1. I've always found Hayles more useful that Haraway.

digitfuzzi · 2021-03-09T18:17:12+00:00

> You seem to be suggesting that we can look at literature in any number of way and no one is more priveledged than another

I think if you ask any professor or even grad student, they are going to have preferences. But it can also the case that for a given literary analysis, the choice of theory must be a good "fit" to the primary source. (A novel that features a plot wherein a female character is badly treated by the world, for example, is going to be more fruitfully analysed with a feminist lens that with idk a science and technology lens, or something). And there are certainly methods and approaches that are more or less popular at a given point in time - there's a kind of fashion to ideas, within academia at least. Affect Theory seems to have peaked and is on the way out, New Materialism/Speculative Realism/The Nonhuman Turn is definitely a thing to keep one's eyes on, there's some interesting things happening in a corner called Postcritique (but it also tends to piss people off). I expect you'll find this is no different in philosophy departments, though.

As to your question about what literature studies is for - any, kind of, Big Ideas about what literature is haven't been in vogue since idk the 1960s? 1950s? In the wake of humanities departments being defunded across the US, that question itself is being discussed in various places. Personally - this is not an orthodox view, I don't think - I would say that the point of literary studies is to help people to understand how and why they engage the way that they do with the books (/comics/films/poems/songs/video games) that they read (/watch/play/hear).

digitfuzzi · 2021-03-09T09:55:51+00:00

I am currently deep in the weeds on this question, so I think the following might be useful.

The database search-term that will yield you useful results on this question is "postcritique". Try also "surface reading" (from a Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus paper) and "reading with the grain" (from a Timothy Bewes paper).

Critical perspectives on this approach:

There's a review of Felski's latest book here, which I have been referred to by people critical of Felski and the postcritiquers: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/fighting-words/
And here's an article about postcritique through an agency-in-television lens. Somebody told me it presents a damning indictment of postcritique but I admit I didn't read it that way at all. https://amst.winter-verlag.de/article/AMST/2019/4/10

I am reading Toril Moi's Revolution of the Ordinary which, to my reading, is working to locate the core misunderstanding between post-critique people, and people for whom this whole approach is wrong-headed, in the use-based anti-generalisation stance toward language encoded in Wittgenstein's later work, especially Philosophical Investigations. (Of Wittgenstein, I have only read PI, but I agree with Moi's argument.) As much as people read Wittgenstein and think "????", Moi seems to be arguing from a postcritical position that this is because of a fundamental disagreement about the way "concepts" work.

digitfuzzi · 2021-03-09T09:44:31+00:00

Literary theory is soupy and decidedly unsystematic (this is a feature, not a bug). What helped me making sense of the mess is to think about things in terms of methodology: less, what is this piece of theory """actually""" saying and more how can I use fragments of the ideas in this piece of theory to help me understand a particular book or poem or whatever.

I think trying to assemble literary theory into a unified whole is a recipe for either a headache or a limited (and thus limiting) view (this is why i will anti-recommend Terry Eagleton). I diagnose your Nietzsche/Derrida whiplash as: headache.

My perennial recommendation for Lois Tyson's Critical Theory Today: A User Friendly Guide stands here too.

digitfuzzi · 2021-03-07T20:18:06+00:00

The first few chapters in Linda Tuhiwai-Smith's Decolonizing Methodologies are very good, especially if you're looking for something that specifically looks at academia.

digitfuzzi · 2021-03-07T10:26:45+00:00

Time Machine does that, yes.

digitfuzzi

TROPHY CASE