Alright, let me put it this way -- lit crit is often a mental experiment. Scientists have their own "thought experiments" which they can't completely prove, and so those in the humanities. They impose an arbitrary set of values on a text just to see what happens. A lot of them forget the results are unprovable, but is the experiment a loss just because its conductor was a pompous jackass?
Let me zero in on something you said, for a moment. You say "lit crit is often a mental experiment", and while I don't disagree that it's a mental exercise, I don't think that calling it an experiment is right.
Experiments are what you do when you want to determine that the practical value of something is.
Literature has a practical value that I believe is beyond needing experimentation.
Call it a side-affect of being a history minor, but I don't believe that there is any discipline that isn't capable of producing some kind of practical result - and by practical I don't mean something scientific or technological.
All of the best in-depth discussion, analysis, and examination of literature I've done has had more in common with psychology, history, and linguistics than with literary cricitism - and that's because that kind of examination of a text didn't look at it as "oh, it's just a text. We have to invent a reason that looking at it is important."
The good type of examination looked at literature as a practical asset.
It asked these things: How does literature teach us to think? How does it affect our heads? What does literature make out of us? And why?
For instance, when I studied the novel The Strange Incidence of the Dog in The Night Time (a novel I highly recommend, btw), instead of trying to decode imagery or authorial intent, we let that novel (which is about an autistic child) teach us about theory of mind, about what the world looks like when you have no access to the thoughts of others, and how our ability to guess at the thoughts of others has changed how we act, how we write literature.
You can't get that kind of experience from science. You can describe autism to me all day long, and I'll have no ability to understand it. But show me that book, tell me a story through that lens and suddenly I *am* autistic for a few pages. Suddenly I understand a part of my mental composure that I didn't really even know existed.
No psych class could ever replicate that experience. You can't say "imagine you don't know the thoughts of others". You physically have to put blinders on me and make me walk around that way - and the only way to accomplish that mentally is a story.
Literary criticism forgets this. Literary criticism seems to forget that literature is much, much older than it is, and that literature had a purpose long before criticism came along.
It forgets that we were telling stories in pictures and words before we had cities or writing or even farming - and it forgets that there is a reason we still have stories, because stories are very practically important.
Criticism sees a text. I see a story. There, we diverge. Texts are just words. Stories are something else entirely. Stories are, in a way, living things.
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Date: 2007-01-18 02:41 pm (UTC)Let me zero in on something you said, for a moment. You say "lit crit is often a mental experiment", and while I don't disagree that it's a mental exercise, I don't think that calling it an experiment is right.
Experiments are what you do when you want to determine that the practical value of something is.
Literature has a practical value that I believe is beyond needing experimentation.
Call it a side-affect of being a history minor, but I don't believe that there is any discipline that isn't capable of producing some kind of practical result - and by practical I don't mean something scientific or technological.
All of the best in-depth discussion, analysis, and examination of literature I've done has had more in common with psychology, history, and linguistics than with literary cricitism - and that's because that kind of examination of a text didn't look at it as "oh, it's just a text. We have to invent a reason that looking at it is important."
The good type of examination looked at literature as a practical asset.
It asked these things: How does literature teach us to think? How does it affect our heads? What does literature make out of us? And why?
For instance, when I studied the novel The Strange Incidence of the Dog in The Night Time (a novel I highly recommend, btw), instead of trying to decode imagery or authorial intent, we let that novel (which is about an autistic child) teach us about theory of mind, about what the world looks like when you have no access to the thoughts of others, and how our ability to guess at the thoughts of others has changed how we act, how we write literature.
You can't get that kind of experience from science. You can describe autism to me all day long, and I'll have no ability to understand it. But show me that book, tell me a story through that lens and suddenly I *am* autistic for a few pages. Suddenly I understand a part of my mental composure that I didn't really even know existed.
No psych class could ever replicate that experience. You can't say "imagine you don't know the thoughts of others". You physically have to put blinders on me and make me walk around that way - and the only way to accomplish that mentally is a story.
Literary criticism forgets this. Literary criticism seems to forget that literature is much, much older than it is, and that literature had a purpose long before criticism came along.
It forgets that we were telling stories in pictures and words before we had cities or writing or even farming - and it forgets that there is a reason we still have stories, because stories are very practically important.
Criticism sees a text. I see a story. There, we diverge. Texts are just words. Stories are something else entirely. Stories are, in a way, living things.
I guess we may have to agree to disagree.