Results tagged “literature” from Eccentric Eclectica

I’ve been toying with the idea of starting a classic literature reading group to meet somewhere out here in the Western burbs of Minneapolis. This post is a riff on that idea.

What if the group were to meet at a local retirement community? Surely there is an audience of people who are retired and interested in reading Shakespeare. Perhaps they never had a chance to read it before, or maybe they are just lifelong learning junkies like myself. Shakespeare would be a great choice because there are numerous recordings that offer nice affordances for those who may not be able to read text as well as they used to.

The group could meet for five weeks for an hour each week. This fits perfectly to the Shakespearean five act play and gives people time to fall behind or catch up.

The intergenerational fillip comes from inviting a group of high school students to join the discussion group, either for a single meeting or over the entire five weeks. The possibilities for character discussions seem endless if two such divergent audiences were to get together.

The silent litany of the workmen goes on –
Speed, speed, we are the makers of speed.
We make the flying, crying motors,
Clutches, brakes, and axles,
Gears, ignitions, accelerators,
Spokes and springs and shock absorbers.
The silent litany of the workmen goes on –
Speed, speed, we are the makers of speed;
Axles, clutches, levers, shovels,
We make signals and lay the way –
Speed, speed.

The trees come down to our tools,
We carve the wood to the wanted shape.
The whining propeller's song in the sky,
The steady drone of the overland truck,
Comes from our hands; us; the makers of speed.

Speed; the turbines crossing the Big Pond,
Every nut and bolt, every bar and screw,
Every fitted and whirring shaft,
They came from us, the makers,
Us, who know how,
Us, the high designers and the automatic feeders,
Us, with heads,
Us, with hands,
Us on the long haul, the short flight,
We are the makers; lay the blame on us –
The makers of speed.

— from Good Morning, America

Contrast the silent litany of the workmen to the noise of the engines they create. The gears, the clutches, the axles, and brakes. And the litany is a repetition of speed - the word.

Then the connection to we. Who is it that makes this thing called speed? The workers are "we" - the makers of speed. We lay the way and make the signals that propel this speed.

To the environment - the trees and the wood carved by our wants into the desired shapes. Something is wrong, something is destroyed by this thirst for speed, by our wants and desires. Drones and whines now fill the world built by us, the makers of speed.

Speed, a colloquialism for meth-amphetamine. It's a drug now, that we can't deny or relinquish.

Crossing the Big Pond two new words - "every" and "us". The point of the stanza - speed is everywhere, inside and outside of us. Us has a spectrum from the high designers to the automatic feeders, the long haul to the short flight. We're all encompassed now; we're all to the blame. And the blame is laid on us - the makers of speed.

I went to the University of MN today to see Mary Poovey speak in the last lecture of the IMPACTS series. Her book, A History of the Modern Fact, was one of the standout readings in my science, technology, and society class last spring.

Her topic tonight was “Reflections of a Worried Feminist, 30 years on.” She outlined the impact of feminist theory and activism on literary studies since the late 1970s and questioned how much benefit it has really had on the disciplines, especially the humanities.

She started with a personal anecdote about her first job at Yale. Soon after her arrival, a colleague pulled her aside and told her she needed to publish a book quickly if she had any hope of getting tenure. She panicked; she had never thought about publishing while she was a graduate student. Today that attitude would be naive. Graduate study has become very professionalized since the 1970s.

Her first project was a study of Mary Shelley, Jane Austen, and Mary Wollstonecraft. In the late 1970s and 1980s writing about women was a novel approach to scholarship. But throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s the women’s studies movement, feminism, French literary theory, and liberal politics pushed gender into the center of literary studies. And by the end of the 1980s and early 1990s the cultural wars were in full swing.

I saw Donald Kaagn fire one of the major volleys in the PC wars at my freshman convocation in 1990. I remember thinking the speech was a bit of a shock to the system, what did we know about the cultural wars raging in the academy. Some background on the “Great Political Correctness Panic.”

According to Poovey the theory wave of the 1980s had two outlets during the next 15 years. One outlet was a broadening of literary scholarship that began to look critically at institutions. Her book on the modern fact was one of the outcomes of this wave and moved away from direct literary sources to examine broader cultural trends. The other outlet was an elaboration of the leftist critique of gender. Gender became the central ideological issue for some literary scholars. She cited Epistemology of the Closet by Eve Sedgwick and Colonial Desire by Robert Young as two examples of this second outlet.

The two groups had different scholarly approaches and outlooks. The first group - the culturalists - tended to work on 18th and early 19th century topics and focus their literary arguments on broad changes to large categories, such as genre. The second group - the politicists (my terminology for both camps) - tended to focus on the later 19th century and the early 20th century when the problems of colonialism began to come to the fore and would often use literary scholarship to discover the telling allegory that confirmed their existing theoretic positions on the importance of gender.

During the same time period there has been a continual decline in the institutional power of the humanities within the university. The humanities don’t make money or bring in grants like the sciences and so they are marginalized by administrators.

Recently, Poovey has begun to question her belief in the transformative politics of the classroom. She and many others believed that the wave of ethnic and women’s studies departments started during the 1970s would have a liberalizing effect on student politics. If only we taught students how to think like the liberal professorate then the world would become a better place. But this didn’t happen. During the Q&A this was described by an audience member as the “narcissism of the classroom.” Today she has turned her teaching away from political topics to studies about the development of genre and the history of the discipline.

She concluded that we are faced with a choice between teaching as a political activity, which doesn’t seem effective and contributes to the marginalization of imaginative studies, or teaching as a disciplinary act.

In another anecdote she described a recent forum at NYU on the close reading requirement for undergraduate courses. Almost everyone agreed that close reading was useful. But near the end of the discussion one of the graduate students spoke up and said that everything that was said up to that point was useless to her as a radical lesbian teacher. The spirit of the discussion quickly chilled. Many of those who supported the political form of teaching were 20th century Americanists. During the Q&A this bias toward recent American studies seemed to be indicative of a general arrogance on the part of Americans seeing the world and literary studies through their own ideological blinders.

She said that the humanities are being squeezed between an antithetical administration that sees no value in them and a diffuse politics of identity that has no lasting effects. Politics in the classroom, a place that is already highly privileged, does not equal politics in Chinatown or Bed-Stuy. If we continue to politicize the classroom then the discipline of literary studies will lose its value.

For further reading and evidence I offer this commentary at Evolving Thoughts and two recent columns by Stanley Fish on French Theory in America.

I just finished reading a wonderful short novel "The Penderwicks: A Summer Tale of Four Sisters, Two Rabbits, and a Very Interesting Boy " by Jeanne Birdsall It is about the summer vacation of a family of four, very independent sisters and their widowed father. They rent a cabin on a large estate in the Berkshire Mountains. During their stay they meet a young boy who lives on the neighboring estate. The boy keeps trying to tell his domineering mother that he wants to study music instead of going to a military academy, but the rambunctious adventures of the four girls keep getting in the way and convince his mother to send him to military school a year early. The boy finally gets his mother to pay attention thanks to the help of the girls and their father. There are strong overtones of Little Women and Madeline L’Engle.

The interesting thing about this choice in novels was how I discovered it. I found it by looking through a list of award winning young adult novels. Over the past six months almost all of my leisure fiction reading has come from the shelves of the young adult section. First there was Philip Pullman’s brilliant Sally Lockhart novels about the steely adventures of a young woman trying to get ahead on her own in Victorian London, then it was Pete Hautman’s Invisible, No Limit, and Godless. I’ve read a few young adult novels on and off over the past 15 years but the bulk of my leisure fiction has been science fiction and fantasy. So what prompted the change?

Whenever I walk into a second hand bookstore, especially one with a good sf/f section that goes back a few decades I’m struck by the slimness of the mass-market paperbacks published during the 1970s and into the early 1980s. Authors like Samuel Delany, Joanna Russ, John Brunner, Barry Malzberg, and Phil Dick churned out short novels on an annual basis. As with all things the quality varied but the time it took to discover the quality of a piece of work was smaller than it is today.

A few months ago I tried to wade through Pandora’s Star by Peter Hamilton, which is over 1000 pages long in paperback and is the first part of a two book series. This is insane. Granted there were some good passages in the book but most of it was endless transporting of characters from one planet to the next in order to setup another confrontation or scene. But the confrontations never amounted to anything, everything was build up. At least until I gave up about 400 pages in. I wasn’t going to spend the hours needed to read 2000 pages for a conclusion that may on may not justify the buildup.

So I’ve left mainstream SF behind and delved into the YA world where I can read a book in a single evening and still get a thrill out of well-crafted characters and interesting plots. Philip Pullman is especially good; his plots in the Sally Lockheart series are easily as baroque as those by Peter Hamilton but they take place in less than half the total verbiage. See John Clute on Hamilton’s latest, The Dreaming Void.

I just stumbled across David Brin's brilliant essay that takes the whole mythology of Star Wars to task for being elitist, pompous, and anti-democratic.

Above all, I never cared for the whole Nietzschian Übermensch thing: the notion -- pervading a great many myths and legends -- that a good yarn has to be about demigods who are bigger, badder and better than normal folk by several orders of magnitude. It's an ancient storytelling tradition based on abiding contempt for the masses -- one that I find odious in the works of A.E. Van Vogt, E.E. Smith, L. Ron Hubbard and wherever you witness slanlike super-beings deciding the fate of billions without ever pausing to consider their wishes.

Brin continues to distinguish two trends in science fiction and critique the Joseph Campbell worship that pervades Star Wars. Science fiction at its best is a fiction of liberation that rejects the Homeric-heroic literary tradition in favor of a future in which questions are asked. To Brin an example of the ideals of SF can be found in Star Trek

Above all, "Star Trek" generally depicts heroes who are only about 10 times as brilliant, noble and heroic as a normal person, prevailing through cooperation and wit, rather than because of some inherited godlike transcendent greatness. Characters who do achieve godlike powers are subjected to ruthless scrutiny. In other words, "Trek" is a prototypically American dream, entranced by notions of human improvement and a progress that lifts all. Gene Roddenberry's vision loves heroes, but it breaks away from the elitist tradition of princes and wizards who rule by divine or mystical right.

As I read this I was reminded of another essay by Michael Moorcock "Starship Stormtroopers"

Star Wars carries the paternalistic messages of almost all generic adventure fiction (may the Force never arrive on your doorstep at three o'clock in the morning) and has all the right characters. it raises 'instinct' above reason (a fundamental to Nazi doctrine) and promotes a kind of sentimental romanticism attractive to the young and idealistic while protective of existing institutions. It is the essence of a genre that it continues to promote certain implicit ideas even if the author is unconscious of them. In this case the audience also seems frequently unconscious of them.