Review: Critical Theory Since Plato · 7:12am Sep 24th, 2015
To gather data for my promised post on the “principal component of literature”, I’m skipping through Hazard Adams’ Critical Theory Since Plato, a 1271-page collection of the most-famous essays on Western literature from Plato up to 1988. It also includes texts not about literature that influenced literary theory, like excerpts from Locke, Kant, Schiller, Schopenhauer, Ferdinand de Saussure, Walter Benjamin, and Heidegger. This is a great way of finding parts of those texts about art without having to plow through, say, Kant’s entire Critique of Judgement.
I have the 2nd edition, not the 3rd. The third edition is 300 pages longer, and costs about 10 times as much.
You need to know that, until 1800, when people meant "literature" they said "poetry". They didn't have a concept of "prose literature." Le Morte d'Arthur in 1485 seems to be the first Western story thought of as "literature" that wasn't a poem, and Don Quixote in 1605 may have been the second. According to Google n-grams, the word "literature" didn't even exist before 1750 [0].
The book is pretty cool, but frequently horrifying. Literature is again and again made slave to power, religion, or ideology.
The Ancients (390 BC - 260 AD)
The Greeks and Romans start by saying poetry must be a tool for moral instruction. Plato says it's corrupt and should be banned [1]; Aristotle says it's okay if it "delights and instructs." This phrase echoes throughout the collection, down into the 19th century, yet few say out loud its more sinister implications:
1. Poetry's purpose is to delight in order to instruct. Poetry that merely delights isn't halfway successful; it's degenerate and should be burned.
2. "Moral instruction" does not mean to make people think. Stories that question conventional morality are degenerate and should be burned [2].
(The first writer in the volume to say that it's okay to just enjoy a story is Joseph Addison in 1712, who justifies this by saying that people are so evil that it's good to allow them any pleasure that isn't actively evil, just to keep them out of trouble.)
Plato said, more specifically, that literature is an imitation of reality, and reality is an imitation of the Forms. (The Platonic Forms.) A person thus does better to observe reality than to read poetry, and better still to study philosophy and contemplate the Forms directly.
Aristotle and the Romans thought that the purpose of literary theory was to help writers to write good poetry, just as the purpose of theories of engineering is to enable engineers to build things that work.
What a concept! 
Aristotle's Poetics is the must-read from this section. I don't agree with everything he says, but as far as I know, he's the only person before the 20th century who analyzed fiction structurally, asking how all its parts fit together to convey a message or effect. Others look at different pieces independently, but never synthesize them [6]. He approaches the task in the right way.
The Medievalists and the Renaissance (400 AD - 1700)
It's conventional to put the cut between Renaissance and Enlightenment closer to 1600, but I just don't feel it here. The critics in the 17th century seem more like the guys in the 16th century than like those in the 18th. The literature was very different (Shakespeare, Cervantes, opera), but the critics were still judging them by Aristotle and the Bible while trying not to get executed for heresy. (Perhaps art leads, and philosophy follows?)
The 1300 years of Christian piety from 400 to 1700 A.D. are probably the bleakest part of the book, and the second most full of worthless essays (St. Augustine, Boethius, Aquinas, Boccaccio, Henry Reynolds, Boileau-Despreaux). Some still give advice on how to write, but it takes a backseat to theology, moralizing, and mysticism, and the analysis of poetry often becomes instead the classification of authors into the virtuous and the villainous. I get the sense that independent thought was anathema to Europe during this time, and a need for some authority to worship and adore, whether God, Homer, Aristotle, or Shakespeare, recurs through the 19th century. The degree of praise a man of this time heaped on his chosen idols sometimes verged on psychotic, like Pope's praise for Homer in his preface to the Iliad (not in this volume), yet was no guarantee that he perceived his most obvious qualities (as shown by Pope's abominable translation of Homer's Iliad).
A lot of the discussion on how to write was arguments over how closely to observe Aristotle's Three Unities of action, time, and place. The fact that Aristotle never even said anything about unity of place tells you something about how useful this discussion was. Shakespeare eventually convinced everybody that the unities of time and place were useless by writing great plays that ignored them.
The emphasis on morality lingers on through the 18th century. It's impossible to tell when it's sincere and when it's forced, which complicates my attempt to associate each writer's views with the properties of his or her art. Boileau-Despreaux reminds his reader of a local poet who had recently been hanged for a poem that was judged impious.
Just as Pope's adoration of Homer didn't help him read Homer, the people who demand morality from literature always seem blind to morality--as the act of hanging a poet in Jesus' name suggests. They often praise the Iliad, a poem that glorifies rape and murder, for its virtue. Samuel Richardson's 1740 novel Pamela, or, Virtue Rewarded, was considered indecent by Britain's upper class, not because its heroine was "rewarded" by getting to marry (rather than be raped by) the evil man who imprisoned and abused her, but because she wasn't good enough for him, being born to a lower class. Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'urbervilles was considered outrageous in 1890 not because its heroine, Tess, was raped, not because this led to her meeting a horrible end, but because Hardy implied that she didn't deserve to be punished for being raped.
(Moral literature is surprisingly rapey. 
)
A common approach to art theory during this period, and on through the 18th century, was to respond to Plato by saying that art could approximate the Forms even better than direct observation of reality could, if the artist were careful to depict idealized people, lacking any distinctive personalities, having idealized emotions, rather than real people with real emotions. You can see this in the essays by Philip Sydney and Francis Bacon, and also Joshua Reynolds and Samuel Johnson in the 18th century. This is what Johnson means (in 1765) when he praises Shakespeare because "in the writings of other poets a character is too often an individual; in those of Shakespeare it is commonly a species." Characters were not supposed to have depth. Depth meant individuality, and individuality was merely the way in which a particular person fell short of the Form.
This was... a terrible idea, which led to nearly 2000 years of bad literature. You know how lovers in old romances (I mean, really old romances) are smitten with a crippling love at first sight, based on the transcendent beauty of the beloved? Like in Chaucer's Troilus and Crisyde, and Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet? That wasn't lazy writing. That was deliberate. That was the accepted theoretically correct way to portray the highest form of love. Anything else was degenerate.
But then again, men of these times seem not to have had a concept of romantic love. This sounds hard to believe, especially since they spent their whole lives writing about it. But there are a couple of essays that try to analyze romantic love, and they seem to be talking about lust, and one uses the words interchangeably. When they write of love and its proper portrayal, trying to enumerate the possible kinds of love, all they can come up with is lust and this mystical Platonic pure-spirit hogwash. Some of these guys knew Greek, so they must have heard of pragma, the love of old married couples. But they don't think to mention it.
I've read nearly all of this section, and the only essay I recommend is John Locke's "An essay concerning human understanding" (1690). It demolishes Plato's essences, and is one of the best rational investigations into how words work in all philosophy. It's especially stunning because it doesn't rely on any technology or scientific discoveries. It seems Aristotle could have written this, and saved us from 2000 years of nonsense. An interesting question is, why didn't he, or someone else during the next 2000 years?
The Enlightenment and Modernity (1700 - 1950)
These two and a half centuries seem to me to fit together, and to contrast with the pious 18th century before them, and the angry late 20th century after them. It stands out to me as the time period during which critics could think clearly. This is the brightest part of the book, and the longest. I've read very little of it, but most of what I've read, I've liked. People are back to talking about writing techniques and the purpose of stories. Plus, they're talking about novels! Also language, and literary movements.
And often, they're... how do I say this... not stupid. Bouncing back and forth between the 17th and 19th centuries, I'm struck by the contrast: The 17th-century writers have an amazing command of the language. Some twist their sentences in flourishes like Bacon; some have only the grandeur of precision and clarity. And yet, though each sentence is constructed with great care, their train of thought usually runs into the ground, in accidental assumptions, unjustified assertions, appeals to authority, overconfidence, dismissals of evidence or of alternative hypotheses, or wishful thinking. Alternately, they have nothing to say but trite common sense. It's as if constructing beautiful sentences used up all their mental powers. The 19th-century writers may muddle along in ugly run-on sentences, but they often have something to say.
If I'd read more 17th-century poetry, maybe I could draw a parallel here...
Locke's 1690 essay, which I talked about above, is a watermark. I look before it and see fearful piety, reverence for the ancients, high style, and less reasoning than rationalizations for pre-drawn conclusions. I look after it and see free and diverse opinions, degenerate style, and clear thought. It seems to me that freedom of speech and a loss of reverence was the crucial change. Strangely, this made people able to observe and think where they could not before, even along lines that were acceptable under the old rules, such as Lessing's 1766 analysis of Homer.
It's worth noting that the monarchs were "right" in suppressing thought, for by 1800 most of them had been overthrown.
Also, a woman! Until Mary Wollstonecraft’s 1792 “A vindication of the rights of woman”, and Madame de Stael's 1800 "Literature in its relations to social institutions", it’s all by men, about men, for men. There are more women as you get towards the end of the book, but most write only about how literary criticism oppresses women.
I've read only a few of these entries. You might like Alexander Pope's poem about poetry. It's kind of fun, and a little useful. Lessing's "Laocoon" (1766) is the first to look closely at Homer's writing style and pick out his techniques. Kant's excerpt from Critique of Judgement is required reading if you want to argue with philosophers about aesthetics. Emile Zola's essay is very interesting but about 20 times as long as it should be. Anatole France's is, by contrast, wonderfully compact; a few paragraphs, each sentence loaded with meaning. Mallarme's interview is entertaining, if a little irritating. He messes up my theory: he's an idealist, yet also an individualist. (Literary idealism, which means the belief that literature should be about idealized people, and written in an idealized style, is usually found in the service of a state or a religion, and advises unity and censorship.)
In the 20th century, the articles by De Saussure, Hulme, Eliot, Wimsatt & Beardsley, and Brooks are probably the must-reads.
Post-Modernity (1950 - 1988)
In the 1950s there's a sudden plunge into ideology and sloppy armchair epistemology [3]. Aristotle's original idea, that literary criticism was to help writers write, is completely lost. There's nothing more about writing techniques or the purpose of story.
Instead, literature is used as a one-sided battleground for ideological wars, where victims seek proof of their oppression. There are no conservative voices in this part of the book, as if conservatives were all dead and gone by 1960. Maybe that’s just what got published in the late 20th century.
Other than liberal ideology, literature becomes anthropology and philosophy. Instead of the theory of how to write stories about society, criticism becomes the discipline of how to read between the lines and see what the author has unwillingly confessed about society. Instead of using philosophy to ask what stories are worth telling, now it is philosophy using literature as data. Literary interpretation is attempted not in order to interpret anything, but to observe the process of interpretation and draw philosophical conclusions. No longer can an English major read the essays; they use more and more specialized vocabulary drawn from semiotics and post-modern philosophy.
The Christian era's need for heroes to worship is mirrored by the late 20th century's need for heroes to tear down. Instead of praising something, every essay seems to be complaining about something, or claiming to have debunked, dissolved, or deconstructed something. All of this is probably important. None of it is useful to me as a writer.
Nor is much of the philosophy very good. Literary theory and philosophy since the 1930s have both turned on the study of language, yet few in either field thought to study language. By “study” I mean either count data, perform experiments, or read the works of those who counted data or performed experiments. Noam Chomsky developed his influential theory of a universal grammar a decade after Claude Shannon developed the communication theory needed to debunk Chomsky’s key argument [4]. Eleanor Rosch experimentally debunked the entire semiotic tradition only a few years after Jacques Derrida’s tremendously influential essays [5], but to this day no one in literature or philosophy has noticed.
There was good work in literary theory during this time period; it just isn't included. This was when "empirical criticism" developed. Willie van Peer and Colin Martindale independently developed a scientific literary theory which constructs and tests hypotheses about literature. I should probably post about their work. van Peer gained a lot of followers. Their work is interesting, but hampered because none of them seem to be writers. They often ask what a writer would say were the wrong questions. Martindale's favorite thesis was that art was driven by the search for novelty, and that this led to predictable, cyclic stylistic change. He gathered a lot of data, but his analysis is marred by his unfamiliarity with information theory and statistics. He uses baroque ad-hoc metrics when what he really wants is just to measure entropy, and he seems unable to compute confidence intervals or adjust for degrees of freedom correctly. Once he fit an equation with 6 degrees of freedom to 10 data points, and was pleased that it explained 71% of the variance.
Summary
That cultivated ignorance of science is, throughout this collection, the dog that doesn’t bark in the night. The selected essays show the close historical relationship between literary criticism, philosophy, theology, and ideology. By the mid 20th century you couldn’t even call them separate fields. Yet it shows almost no connections between literary criticism and science, except when it’s pseudo-science (like Marx, Saussure, Freud, and Lacan), or science-bashing (like Kuhn). Many literary theorists use testable ideas, yet no one tests them. Even such a basic endeavor as finding experimentally, say, what fraction of people or what kind of people actually like Homer, is never attempted.
The empirical literary theorists I mentioned above do attempt such things. They're the only people I'm aware of still doing literary theory, rather than using it as an excuse to do sociology or philosophy, and they are ostracized from mainstream literary theory. You will not find their works in any academic collections or taught at any university other than the ones they teach at, as far as I know. I found them both only by doing keyword searches on Amazon. It seems literary theorists quite deliberately scorn and avoid quantitative thought.
The sole exception I found in this volume is Emile Zola's 1880 essay, "The experimental novel." The title is accidentally ironic; this was before what we call experimental novels. Zola meant the naturalistic novel, the novel which depicts ordinary people in ordinary circumstances, which is considered an invention of 19th-century French writers. He said that philosophy and poetry are the muses to science, asking questions that they don't have the tools to solve, and so giving science direction and inspiration to press onward and actually solve them. "The philosophers [are] musicians often gifted with genius, whose music encourages the [scientists] while they work and inspires the sacred fire of their great discoveries. But the philosophers, left to themselves, will sing forever and never discover a single truth." Zola says that naturalistic novels can now fulfil that role. A classic poem uses as its material only the phenomena of human nature: anger, greed, love. Homer says Diomedes is brave, but if you ask him why, he can only say it is because of his noble ancestry. A naturalistic novel posits a hypothesis about why someone is brave, and works it out scene by scene.
This is pretty close to my own view of the "purpose" of literature. When we read, we are "conducting experiments," exploring things that might happen, and asking ourselves what we might do in someone else's shoes. Some of the pleasure we get from reading is pleasure from vicarious gratification, but some, I suspect, is the pleasure we get from learning.
A more mundane fault to this collection is that the editor had a questionable understanding of the material. Adams introduces each essay with a one-page summary. These summaries are worth reading, but with caution. They sometimes either miss the main points (Burke, Mazzoni, Lessing), or attribute opinions to the writer that he didn't express, or even disagreed with (Longinus, Keats). The choice of which part of a larger work to quote are especially disastrous for Sir Francis Bacon. His observation that previous philosophers have "considered art as merely an assistant to nature, having the power to finish what nature has begun... but by no means to change, transmute or fundamentally alter nature," holds a key to interpreting the entire previous 2,000 years of criticism from a modern perspective; yet that part was omitted. The choice of passage from Coleridge's essay on Shakespeare is outright obtuse. The index is poor; there are entries for "art" and "didacticism", but not for "Chaucer" or "Homer".
In closing, I give you semi-random quotes from the book's closing essays. Maybe they will inspire you as you write your next story.
Because we are never not in a situation, we are never not in the act of interpreting. Because we are never not in the act of interpreting, there is no possibility of reaching a level of meaning beyond or below interpretation. But in every situation some or other meaning will appear to us to be uninterpreted because it is isomorphic with the interpretive structure the situation (and therefore our perception) already has.
Stanley Fish, 1978
Despite Ricouer's simplified idealization, and far from being a type of conversation between equals, the discursive situation is more usually like the unequal relation between colonizer and colonized, oppressor and oppressed. Some of the great modernists, Proust and Joyce prominent among them, had an acute understanding of this asymmetry; their representations of the discursive situation always show it in this power-political light.
Edward Said, 1983
If we are conscious of the provisional nature of the aesthetic dream that the poem nurtures, we also look for the poem's own self-consciousness about its tentative spatializing powers. Its fiction, and our awareness of it, contain the twin elements of symbol and antisymbol, of words that fuse together even while, like words generally, they must fall apart in differentiation. Even further, the poem, together with our apprehension of it, combines its transformation of time into myth with its resignation to the countermetaphor of time as mere historicity.
Murray Krieger, 1981
[0] I've looked at the samples from the 17th century, but they all turned out to be collections of 17th-century stories published in the 18th century, when books didn't include their own publishing dates. Google's computers scanned them for the publishing date and picked up the dates of the stories in them.
[1] Not really, but that's what everybody remembers him as saying.
[2] It doesn't even mean stories that support conventional morality if you think about them. Dangerous Liasons, an 18th-century French libertine novel, is about two wicked people whose wicked schemes lead them to bad ends. It was universally condemned as wicked. Presumably figuring out that you're not supposed to imitate the wicked people was considered too difficult for readers. Stories are supposed to have a clear, black-and-white morality, in which good people do good things and win a reward.
[3] Epistemology is the investigation of what distinguishes justified belief from opinion.
[4] Chomsky said grammars of human languages take more information to specify than humans can glean from the language they hear in the time it takes them to learn the language. Shannon showed how to measure the information content in a grammar. Measure it, and it turns out Chomsky is very wrong.
[5] Semiotics is based on a logical theory of categories, in which linguistic "signifiers" (words) mediate between "signs" (not signs, but concepts; blame Saussure) and things in the world. It assumes that people can think only in words, and so words correspond exactly to concepts, and so you lose no information by examining only words without asking about mental representations. This means words must mean the same thing in every context. Yet words have different implications in different contexts. Saussure interpreted this as showing that meaning is not present within the words, nor associated with words, but is something mystic and non-decomposable, brought to life by a body of words in the way that a soul is brought to life by the body of a man (my interpretation).
Wittgenstein and Derrida showed that words have different meanings in different contexts, and argued, more or less, that this meant they had no fixed meaning at all. Rosch's study of categories, especially color terms, shows that categories have a lot of internal structure, and that the whole "a thought is a mental representation of a sentence, and a concept is a pointer to a word" theory is wrong.
[6] I may write a blog about analysis and synthesis. This is a distinction made often in philosophy. People say that Aristotle and scientists are "analysts" who break things down into their components, while Plato and mystics are "synthesizers" who combine things together into unified wholes. The distinction is often made in order to dismiss science as reductionist and say, "Yeah, sure, you guys can break things down into pieces, but you need a poet / a philosopher / God to put them back together."
This is stupid. Look at the Poetics, and you can see that what Aristotle does is first analysis, breaking poetry down into its parts, and then synthesis, showing how the parts come together into a unity greater than the sum of its parts. That's synthesis. What Plato, Hegel, and the other people who are called synthesizers do is make shit up. They aren't doing synthesis because they never isolated any parts to combine.
Here’s the table of contents of the 3rd edition:
Plato. Ion. From "Republic." From "Phaedrus." From "Sophist."From "Philebus." From "Cratylus."
Aristotle. From "Metaphysics." Poetics. From "Rhetoric."
Marcus Tullius Cicero. From "Brutus."
Horace. Art of poetry.
Strabo. From "Geography."
Publius Cornelius Tacitus. From "A dialogue on oratory."
Pseudo-longinus. On the sublime.
Plutarch. From "How the young man should study poetry."
Flavius Philostratus. From "Lives of the sophists."
Plotinus. From "Enneads."
Saint Augustine. From "On Christian doctrine."
Anicus Manlius Severinus Boethius. From "Consolation of philosophy."
Saint Thomas Aquinas. From "Summa theologica."
Dante Alighieri. From "The banquet." From "Letter to can grande della scala."
Giovanni Boccaccio. From "Life of Dante." From "Genealogy of the gentile gods."
Giralomo Fracastoro. Naugarius.
Julius Caesar Scaliger. From "Poetics."
Lodovico Castelvetro. From "The poetics of Aristotle translated and explained."
Sir Philip Sidney. Apology for poetry.
Giordano Bruno. From "The cause, the principle, and the one."
Giacopo Mazzoni. From "On the defense of the comedy of Dante."
George Puttenham. From "The arte of English poesie."
Torquato Tasso. From "Discourses on the heroic poem."
Sir Francis Bacon. From "Novum organum."
From "The advancement of learning." From "The wisdom of the ancients."
Pierre Corneille. Of the three unities of action, time, and place.
John Dryden. An essay of dramatic poesie.
Nicolas Boileau-despreaux. The art of poetry.
John Locke. From "An essay concerning human understanding."
Alexander Pope. Essay on criticism.
Joseph Addison. From "On the pleasures of the imagination."
Giambattista Vico. From "The new science."
David Hume. Of the standard of taste. Of tragedy.
Edmund Burke. From "A philosophical inquiry into the origin of our ideas of the sublime and beautiful."
Edward Young. From "Conjectures on original composition."
Samuel Johnson. Rambler 4. From "Rassalas." From "Preface to Shakespeare."
Henry Home, Lord Kames. From "Elements of criticism."
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. From "Laocoon."
Denis Diderot. From "The paradox of acting."
Sir Joshua Reynolds. From "Discourses on art."
Immanuel Kant. From "Critique of judgment."
Mary Wollstonecraft. From "A vindication of the rights of woman."
William Blake. From "The marriage of heaven and hell." From "Letter to thomas butts."
From "Annotations to Reynolds' discourses." From "A vision of the last judgment."
Friedrich Schiller. From "Letters on the aesthetic education of man."
Friedrich Schlegel. From "Critical fragments (lyceum fragments)."
From "Athenaeum fragments." On incomprehensibility.
William Wordsworth. Preface to the second edition of lyrical ballads.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge. From "Shakespeare's judgment equal to his genius." From "The principles of genial criticism."
From "Biographia literaria." From ""essays on method" in the friend."
From "The statesman's manual." From "On the constitution of church and state."
Wilhelm Von Humboldt. From "The eighteenth century." From "Essay on aesthetics."
From "Catium and Hellas." From "Introduction to general linguistics."
From "Announcement of an essay on the language and nation of the basque."
From "On comparative linguistics."
From "On the national characteristics of languages."
From "Basic characteristics of linguistic types."
From "On the episode from the mahabharata known as the bhagavad-gita ii."
From "On the differences in human linguistic structure."
John Keats. From "Letter to benjamin bailey." From "Letter to george and thomas keats."
From "Letter to john taylor." Letter to richard woodhouse.
Thomas Love Peacock. The four ages of poetry.
Percy Bysshe Shelley. A defense of poetry.
Arthur Schopenhauer. From "The world as will and idea (representation)."
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. From "The philosophy of fine art."
Ralph Waldo Emerson. From "The american scholar." The poet.
Edgar Allan Poe. From "The poetic principle."
Matthew Arnold. Preface to the 1853 edition of poems.
The function of criticism at the present time. From "The study of poetry."
Charles Baudelaire. From "The salon of 1859."
Karl Marx & friedrich engels. From "The communist manifesto." From "The German ideology."
From "A contribution to the critique of political economy."
Walter Pater. From "Studies in the history of the renaissance." Introduction: the modern era.
Hippolyte Adolphe Taine. From "History of English literature."
Charles Sanders Peirce. On a new list of categories.
From "Lessons from the history of philosophy." The first rule of reason.
From "Training in reasoning." From "What pragmatism is."
Walt Whitman. From "Democratic vistas."
Friedrich Nietzsche. From "The birth of tragedy from the spirit of music."
From "Truth and falsity in an ultramoral sense."
Emile Zola. From "The experimental novel."
Oscar Wilde. The decay of lying.
Stephane Mallarme. The evolution of literature.
The book: a spiritual instrument. Mystery in literature.
Gottlob Frege. Sense and meaning.
Sigmund Freud. Letter to Wilhelm Fleiss. From "Archaic and infantile features in dreams."
From "Development of the libido and sexual organization."
Leo Tolstoy. From "What is art?"
Edmund Husserl. From "Logical investigations."
Ferdinand De Saussure. From "Course in general linguistics."
Viktor Shklovsky. Art as technique.
T. S. Eliot. Tradition and the individual talent. The frontiers of criticism.
Bertrand Russell. Descriptions.
Paul Valery. From "Leonardo and the philosophers."
Ludwig Wittgenstein. From "Tractatus logico-philosophicus."
From "Philosophical investigations."
C. K. Ogden & I. A. Richards. Thoughts, words, and things.
I. A. Richards. From "Principles of literary criticism."
From "Science and poetry." Four Kinds of Meaning.
Leon Trotsky. The formalist school of poetry and marxism.
Boris Eichenbaum. The theory of the "formal method."
Virginia Woolf. From "A room of one's own."
William Empson. From "Seven types of ambiguity."
Mikhail M. Bakhtin. Epic and novel: toward a methodology for the study of the novel.
V. N. Volosinov. Verbal interaction.
Antonio Gramsci. From "Prison notebooks."
John Crowe Ransom. Poetry: a note in ontology.
R. P. Blackmur. A critic's job of work.
Rudolf Carnap. The elimination of metaphysics through logical analysis of language.
Empiricism, semantics and ontology.
Jacques Lacan. The mirror stage.
Walter Benjamin. Theses on the philosophy of history.
Max Horkheimer. The social function of philosophy.
William Carlos Williams. Against the weather: a portrait of the artist.
Kenneth Burke. Literature as equipment for living. Four master tropes.
Ernst Cassirer. From "An essay on man."
W. K. Wimsatt AND monroe c. Beardsley. The intentional fallacy.
Cleanth Brooks. The heresy of paraphrase. Irony as a principle of structure.
Martin Heidegger. From "Letter on humanism."
Ronald S. Crane. The critical monism of Cleanth Brooks.
From "The languages of criticism and the structure of poetry."
M. H. Abrams. Orientation of critical theories.
Theodor Adorno. Cultural criticism and society. From "Negative dialectics."
Claude Levi-strauss. The structural study of myth.
Roman Jakobson. The metaphoric and metonymic poles.
Georg Lukacs. The ideology of modernism.
Northrop Frye. From "Anatomy of criticism."
Noam Chomsky. From "Review of verbal behavior." From "Aspects of the theory of syntax."
Jean-Paul Sartre. Marxism and existentialism.
Frantz Fanon. On national culture.
Jacques Derrida. Structure, sign, and play in the discourse of the human sciences.
Meaning and representation. From "Of grammatology."
Hans Robert Jauss. Literary history as a challenge to literary theory.
Roland Barthes. The death of the author.
Michel Foucault. What is an author? truth and power.
Thomas S. Kuhn. From "The structure of scientific revolutions: postscript, 1969."
Louis Althusser. From "Ideology and ideological state apparatus."
Paul de Man. Criticism and crisis. The resistance to theory.
Clifford Geertz. Thick description: toward an interpretive theory of culture.
Laura Mulvey. Visual pleasure and narrative cinema.
Mary Louise Pratt. From "Toward a speech act theory of literary discourse."
Raymond Williams. From "Marxism and literature."
Edward W. Said. From "Orientalism."
Annette Kolodny. Dancing through the minefield: some observations on the theory, practice, and politics of a feminist literary criticism.
Stanley Fish. Is there a text in this class?
Pierre Bourdieu. The production and reproduction of legitimate language.
Identity and representation: elements for a critical reflection on the idea of a region.
Jean Francois Lyotard. Answering the question: what is postmodernism?
Benedict Anderson. From "Imagined communities."
Jurgen Habermas. From "The philosophical discourse of modernity."
Gilles Deleuze & felix guattari. Rhizome.
James Clifford. On ethnographic authority.
Richard Rorty. The contingency of language.
Eve Sedgwick. From "The epistemology of the closet."
Philipe Lacoue-labarthe. The truth of the political and the fiction of the political.
Stephen Greenblatt. Resonance and wonder.
Judith Butler. Imitation and gender insubordination.
John Guillory. From "Cultural capital: the problem of literary canon formation."
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Teaching for the times.
Slavoj Zizek. From "The ticklish subject: the absent center of political ontology."
Ernesto Laclau. Subject of politics, politics of the subject.
Well, let's face reality here: if we assume that all modern literary critics are incompetent, then they have a large incentive against any sort of empiricism, because empiricism might mean that they're wrong about stuff, and therefore, not experts on literary criticism.
I read the words in this paragraph, but I gleaned absolutely no meaningful information from them. Here's my attempt at a translation:
All I see is a bunch of nonsensical claims that are supposed to sound wise! To me, it makes as much sense as this, which I just made up: "The poem's higher self does unto itself as we have unto the past metaphors of time (but only insofar as this can be reinterpreted in a semiotic sense on Tuesdays)." What am I missing? A degree in literature? Am I supposed to interpret this paragraph in a charitable fashion as one might the Bible? "Oh, yes, I suppose that makes sense if you turn the argument this way and call Jeremy the antisymbol..."
The paragraph is written in English — so why am I unable to read it?
(Also, this was a great blogpost, BH.)
What i got from this:
As many crappy things are going on now, the world is a lot less crappy than it used to be, especially if you're a woman.
Intellectuals in the last hundred years devolved into pretentious metaphysical word wankery, but I already knew that from your essays on postmodernism.
Did you retype that whole table of contents?
You know, as a Spaniard, I both take that mention of the Quixote as a matter of pride and as a really baffling thing. While now we see it as the classic (you'd be hard-pressed finding a household in this country that doesn't have at least one edition of that book, even if nobody has read it; I personally own three and a half "normal" editions, and one watered-down version for kids), in its time it was a best-seller, and famous because it was so funny.
That's the thing -- it was a comedy that made fun of the chivalric romances that were everywhere back in time. Cervantes was an one-handed soldier who collected taxes and liked to write poetry and stories, and he made a comedy spoofing the whole genre.
That turned into what many say it's the first modern novel (I can't really tell if they refer to the first modern spanish novel or the first modern novel ever; sadly, I never studied Literature as much as I wanted, and I never got around to reading about it because I'm a hack), the second most translated, most edited book in history (only surpassed by the Bible) [1]. Spain sees it as the bestbook that has ever been written in this language, and it's genuinely funny -- I know I've laughed at it.
So it's kind of interesting that one of the first books that is seen as actual "literature" is, really, nothing more than a guy saying that dude chivalry romances are fucking dumb. I mean, don't get me wrong -- the Quixote is a masterpiece. I really don't know if the translations make it justice, but in Spanish, it's a neverending gift to the eyes. Cervantes really knew how to write in Spanish, and even more, he knew how to make it funny. It's also meta as hell, including a chapter where the author explains that he's not the author, he's just translating it, [2] and the character meeting fans of the book itself during its second part, because what the hell.
But above it all? The Quixote has mistakes. Many, many mistakes. Sancho's wife gets her name changed a bunch of times (sometimes in the very same paragraph) because Cervantes couldn't be arsed. Characters appear and disappear like there's no tomorrow. Continuity is, if I remember correctly, quite shady. And it's a really, really, really dumb piece of fiction.
I'm not saying it wasn't a good book, but I sure think it wasn't absolutely perfect. Yet it's seen as a masterpiece (AND RIGHTFULLY SO!) but I think it's interesting to note that it was actually seen as art, because it was criticising something people were tired of.
To reiterate my point, as I think it's not clear: the Quixote was seen as literature because it was criticising something regarded as entertaining, but not literature. It was, all in all, a way for people to feel smart about how chivalry romances were really really dumb -- and it was so much better if you actually knew the specifics of what it was spoofing.
That idea actually fits rather well with what you explain in this blog, I think. Literature is seen as an art and something worthy of your time (and not despicable) when it teaches something, when it's intellectually rewarding, or when it makes you feel intellectually superior.
Not bad in itself, of course. Intellectually challenging books can be really, really good. However, if literature seems to be put down now and then in order to preach theology or politics, is because until very recently, it just wasn't seen as something smart, I think. Having "fun" reading the adventures of a knight rescuing a fair maiden and defeating a dragon is not something intellectuals do, it's for kids. So why bother with giving it that much thought?
Old timeys were not just rapey, they were apparently really smug too. That's mostly what I was going for here.
[1] Source for this thing -- sadly, it's in Spanish, but the claim ain't baseless. I really didn't know this until I checked it out right before writing this comment -- I knew it was in the top ten, I didn't know it was at the top.
[2] Cervantes explains that the book was actually written by a muslim historian named Cide Hamete Benengeli. "Cervantes" comes from the word "deer" in Spanish (ciervo), and Cide Hamete Benengeli is just a long, arabic deer pun. The guy spent a long-ass chapter making a bilingual pun nobody would ever get, because I'm serious when I say the Quixote is sidesplittingly hilarious.
Today I started the morning feeling like an unread gibbering moron. Thank you!
Well...I'm grateful to you for ploughing through all this for us, Bad Horse. I wouldn't have had the patience or forbearance. And certainly it's important stuff.
But I agree with your conclusion: for all "that wit or worthy eloquence or learning deep*" you don't learn half so much about what really works in Western storytelling as you would from binge-watching Gilligan's Island.
(No, I'm not going to do that for you)
* "Barnabe Googe" No shit--Barney Google!
Ugh. I'm getting flashbacks to my metaphysics course. It feels like it's only a matter of time before they start debating whether words are things or stuff, assuming they exist at all.
I suspect literary analysts are using this philosophical mysticism as a blind against counterargument. If you have to think like them to even understand what they're saying, then no one's going to try to dispute the claims.
At least it's gotten less rapey.
3416048
As if I already didn't love the guy enough...
Semiotics is a word I should know because it describes thing that I've witnessed firsthand when reading/writing.
It's nice to be able to put a name to the face, as it were.
That's how I justify the internet.
As we've discussed, people still don't.
To be fair, this stuff gets the most press. Which do you think is going to get more views and comments for me, a blog about how to write a story that makes the feature box, or a blog about how the feature box oppresses women?
Anyway, I'm jealous. You always have the coolest books.
3416048 thanks for making an old Spanish book come alive! All really interesting information!
3416026 Hell no. Copy-paste from an Amazon web page. It was all uppercase, though, so I had to use a lot of regular-expression search-and-replace in vim.
3416048 I'll tell you what I think is special about Don Quixote, and why some people (Gabriel Josipovici and Michael Foucault) call it "the first modernist novel". The book was written in 2 parts, many years apart, and it was book 1 that made Don Quixote famous in 1605, but it's book 2 that people consider great today. So what I'm going to describe is all in book 2.
There are many, many satirical novels, and at first Don Quixote seems to be one of them, in which Don Quixote is the fool whom everyone laughs at. Book 1 is something like that, and that's how people thought of it in the 17th century.
But it's a very ironic novel. Don Quixote is mad, and a fool, yet he is brave, indefatigable, and noble, and the novel isn't making fun of him the way any other satirical novel would make fun of its fool. Sancho, who is fool to Quixote's fool, becomes infected with the Don's madness, but this makes him a better person too. The Don's madness gives him his spirit, and as soon as he is cured of it, he dies. So it is not just a satirical novel; you can read it as an ambiguous, two-sided social critique: Is it saying that you can either be noble and mad, or sane and cynical? In this world, is it better to be sane, or mad? That's positing a moral dilemma, and not giving the answer, as fiction of that day usually did, but implying that it can't be resolved. That's a modernist thing to do. (There are other examples: Hamlet, Julius Caesar. Unfortunately I don't know anything from this period other than Don Quixote and Shakespeare.)
That isn't how people read it at the time. But here in the 20th century, many people look back on it and see it as more like a 20th-century novel in that way than like a 17th-century one. You can see more clearly what they're thinking if you watch Man of La Mancha, a remake of Don Quixote that changes the story to bring these 20th-century aspects out deliberately.
In Book 1, the Don is mad, and Sancho is stupid. But in Book 2, there are places where each of them are partly aware that they're deceiving themselves, where they tell themselves stories and then start to believe them. This is very Freudian, and something you usually see only in late 19th or 20th-century literature.
It's also a meta-fiction; at the start of Book 2, someone has published Book 1 within the world of the novel, and the characters talk about and criticize Book 1. Also, the narrator comments on the text and casts doubts on its truthfulness, for instance suggesting that some lines are fabrications, because Sancho speaks too intelligently in them. This is partly Cervantes making fun of his own inconsistency, partly Cervantes highlighting the change in Sancho's character, and partly putting the reader on guard against believing that things written down correspond unambiguously to reality. These are all the sort of things post-modernists like Borges do.
There's a good reason why literature is often enslaved to ideology or politics:
img.photobucket.com/albums/v129/umbrellaofdoom/got-to-get-paid.jpg
Writers have to pay the bills, too. So they write what sells, which in those days meant writing for the aristocracy. "The Knight of the Cart", for instance, although written by a monk (several, actually, after the first one found it too scandalous and bailed), was for a female patron (and she wasn't the only one by far). The technical skills of writers up to 17th century were perfect because they came from a tradition of being writers-for-hire, engineers for the fantasies of their patrons. Even Shakespeare, gifted as he was, wrote whatever appealed to the royal court, like how all his plays revolved around witchcraft symbolism when James came to power. Although you could make the case that Christopher Marlowe was a better writer than Shakespeare, one of them was arrested and killed "in a barfight" while the other enjoyed massive fame and success.
Those dark years for literature were also dark years for life in general. There was no concept of romantic love because everything was ruled by arranged marriages designed to pop out kids so someone could inherit the farm, the duchy, the kingdom, otherwise society collapsed. So people -- rich people, that is -- read and paid for stories about torrid, passionate lust because, when you're staring at some guy or gal in court you want to bone but can't -- an illegitimate child could lead to civil war (hello, A Song of Ice and Fire!) -- it's a very appealing fantasy.
The Protestant Reformation helped to end all this. Though the Reformers themselves were often fierce theocrats, by eroding the power of monarchism and giving more wealth to the lay people, they facilitated the later creation of the marketplace of ideas. Many of the great Enlightenment writers were middle-class guys, the sons of merchants or civil servants, and they could sell their books and their ideas to other middle-class people without fear of reprisal.
It was a direct response to fascism, by teaching people to be wary of grand myths about the glory of the nation-state and its people. There's a reason fascists went after "degenerate" modern artists in the 20s and 30s.
While that may have been true to Saussare, it's certainly not true about modern semiotics, which is more akin to a broad study of how symbolism communicates to people. Language is a part of that, but it also covers, say, the tableau of wax museums or traffic lights.
Of course:
The big Homeric poems were actually composed before the invention of writing, so getting into Homer's techniques means you've gotta dig into the whole mess that is the theory of oral-formulaic composition. I wrote several essays about it thirty years ago and to this day have no idea how it works.
Mike
3416466
Not only that. Book 1 was massively popular, to the point where there was an apocryphal sequel in 1614 by some fella named Avellaneda (a pseudonim -- there's no real proof to who was the actual author, tho it's known he was from Aragón -- Spanish region, not me personally -- and friends with Lope de Vega, a really influential Spanish poet), that included a prologue with some really insulting words against Cervantes himself (written by third author, no less).
Add that to the fact that the book, while by no means atrocious, was really inferior to the first book, and Cervantes couldn't really let it pass. The main reason why he wrote the second part, many say, is because he felt so insulted by what they've done to his work that he wrote a bigger, better sequel, in which Alonso Quijano himself said that whoever Avellaneda was, he was an idiot and had no idea what he was doing. [1]
Cervantes also killed the Quixote, as you said, right after making him go sane [2]. Both because that's the message of the book and because go and try write a sequel now, Avellaneda. And he succeeded! Avellaneda is seen as a horrible villain at best in popular culture.
Then again, if you look at the book for what it is, then yeah -- it's surprisingly modern. Cervantes included the criticism in the second part, and seeing how he had already broken the fourth wall, added all the tasty stuff you mentioned -- I'd never looked at it that way, and now I kind of feel like an idiot. Hah! The first part is more studied than the second, however, and many people only read that one, so I guess it's not completely my fault. [3]
Man of la Mancha is really really really unpopular in Spain, though. People either don't know of it or downright hate it. Don Quixote is too much of a Spanish symbol for anybody to accept a version that is not completely loyal to it and also made by some old Spanish writer who has proved himself to be worthy of the task or something like that. Songs are catchy, though.
3416310
Spanish literature, man. I could talk for days. Don't ask me about El Cid (oldest book in Spanish that we know of; a long-ass poem about a knight who gets his title taken by the king but still fights for him and Spain, and reconquista Spain to get back his honor) or you'll find yourself buried with words.
[1] It's also really, really hard to find an edition of Avellaneda's Quixote. You can find it, sure, but not in any library. It's also never, ever studied or even looked at with any emotion other than scorn unless you study some really specific courses in college.
Lately it's been rumored that Avellaneda might have in fact been a woman, which would explain a lot, actually -- both the pseudonim and the fact that they tried to jump on the bandwagon of the most popular book in Spanish history. Writing as a woman was hard, and getting any recognition was even harder. They just were unlucky enough to piss off Cervantes, I suppose.
[2] It's a surprisingly touching scene. When I was a little kid and learned that the Quixote died at the end for the first time, I got so sad my mother made up an alternative ending in which he survived and became an actual knight, because the King of Spain had heard of him and his bravery. And then they lived happy ever after, him and Sancho, always friends for many many years to come.
Thematically not the best ending, but damn, Little Me loved it.
[3] I am the only person I know, aside from my Literature teachers, that has read the second part. It's a long book, though, so I get why they do that.
3416916 You can read an English translation Avellanda's Quixote here, but I can't figure out how to download it. A PDF is here.
Not that I'm actually going to read it.
3416916
Have you read the Borges tale "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote"?
It's a fake literary review of a fake author, Pierre Menard, who decided to write the whole of the Quixote. Not just copy it, but write it. He writes and writes until he ends up with a page that is coincidentally identical to what's in the Quixote. And then the fictional Borges proceeds to say Menard's Quixote is richer and subtler than Cervantes's, because Menard bring contemporary philosophy and historical insight to the text.
It's half-satire, half-thought exercise about authorship, and entirely recommended.
(Though the beginning, Menard's bibliography, is eminently skippable)
3417047
Yeah, I read it long ago. I remember being kind of bothered about it -- while I get what Borges was trying to do, and even though the idea was really interesting and well-done (Borges was a master), he could have laid off the insults to Cervantes.
Like, gagh. It was satire, sure, but it bothered me. As far as autorship goes, I think Tlon and Averroes's Search are better tales from Borges, even though thee message is not the same.
Borges' insistence on how Menard's Quixote is better when the text is exactly the same is hilarious, though, gotta give that to him.
3417056
The insults weren't serious, though. Borges loved the classics.
3417047 I love that story! Even though it's pushing the post-modernist "there is no text" idea.
... although I could also say it was making fun of that idea. The basic idea itself is correct; what's wrong is taking it too far, which "Pierre Menard" does deliciously.
3417083
In all the Borges I've read, I've never once got the feeling he was being completely forthright about what he was saying. Always playing the role of the author, he was. A literary trickster, if you will. Which, in a way, fuels his central premise about the slipperiness of authorship.
3416050
I know, right? Thanks, Bad Horse.
Yeesh!
I've read this three times so far today, and every time, it's had more stuff slipped into it here and there!
My question, though, has to do with this statement from the beginning--"Aristotle says it's okay if it 'delights and instructs.' This phrase echoes throughout the collection, down into the 19th century"--and this one from the end--"Some of the pleasure we get from reading...is the pleasure we get from learning." Aren't these both saying the same thing? Is this a point of agreement between you and everyone else who's ever lived even if you disagree with most of the things they thought it was important to teach?
'Cause I'm a born mediator, always trying to find common ground however swampy and uncertain it might be...
Mike
You know, trying to decide how to write by reading an anthology of literary criticism, is like trying to decide what to cook for dinner by reading a bunch of restaurant reviews.
Even if...
...some of them are pretty fukkin' funny.
But then Oscar Wilde warned us: "To the critic the work of art is simply a suggestion for a new work of his own, that need not necessarily bear any obvious resemblance to the thing it criticises. " And in fact modern criticism seems to be and do nothing else.
(I really think "The Critic as Artist" would have been a better choice than "The Decay of Lying." Though the latter's not a bad one.)
3416740
So you write down a word
And it's not the right word
So you try a new word
But you hate the new word
And you need a good word
But you can't find the word...
3417554
Good question! They sound similar, but our intent is different.
I'm saying that we enjoy reading because we're learning, or our brain is fooled into thinking it's learning. I mean this only as a possible explanation of the pleasure. I can enjoy the story without understanding what it's teaching.
Aristotle says that a story must be designed to instruct, and what it must instruct is conventional morality. Unless the story portrays a good man, of noble birth, behaving virtuously as all men agree virtue is constituted, it should not be written.
Modern fiction usually instructs, when it does, by questioning society's rules. Aristotle thought fiction must reinforce society's rules.
Rereading this sentence, I'm reminded of one of my favorite books, The Island of the Day Before, by Umberto Eco.
It's about a 17th century Italian nobleman marooned on a deserted ship, the diary he keeps wherein he details his past encounters with the science and philosophy of this time and his abortive love life, and how he slowly goes mad because of how hollow and soulless 17th century prose is. (It's a lot more exciting than it sounds.)
I highly recommend it for fans of literature and literary criticism.
3417661
Amazing.
3416740
Here's a question: The Iliad is basically totalitarian propaganda. It mocks the "degenerate" values of democratic Greece, and justifies the rule of the tyrants Athens, etc., had only recently overthrown. Why did democratic Greece still love it?
3417769
I'm not as up on my classical scholarship, honestly, so I couldn't say for sure. But no free society is ever a unified whole. There's always a spectrum of opinion, from "Democracy is great!" to "It's pretty bad, but better than all the others" to "Why did we ever move out of Arcadia?" to "The tyrants should come back and gut you all". That's always the pitfall of democracy, isn't it?
I'd wager some of it also comes down to that conservative traditionalist mentality that nowadays, even in our democratic society, praises the Spartans despite them being brutal slavers. Traditionalists are always longing for the purity of the golden age, even as they reap the fruits of "sinful" democracy.
Did Ancient Greece unanimously love Homer, though? I was under the impression some of the big name scholars weren't very enthused with this work (Democritus?). Are you sure it wasn't a bunch of monarchists railing against democracy and/or a bunch of farmers who were just happy to hear about something happening beyond their farm?
EDIT: No, it was Socrates who rejected Homeric ethics. The same guy who got killed by the government for causing a scene with his constant questions.
I think rather: If we are conscious of the provisional nature of all aesthetic dreams, not just the ones espoused in poems, then we look for our own self-consciousness about our ability to perceive aethetics through poetry, especially if we deconstruct the poem too thoroughly. The words should not fall apart in differentiation to the point where we cease to perceive meaning, and yet should be allowed to recombine in myriad ways in combination WITH the historicity of the time within the poem, so that we see the poet's cry(I will not debase that by using the word "meaning" here) while also being aware of the cry from within ourselves. This is the beauty of poetry, that its transformation of time into myth allows the poet to not only speak to the world, but also specially and specifically to one individual.
3417975 I, a mere satirist, bow to the mediator.
3418070 Bad horse, YOU are not a mere anything. Too many people hold you in awe for that to be true. To paraphrase Scribbler (as one mere example) when asked what to read: "Anything by Bad Horse." This blog is certainly evidence of that.
3417975
All shuffle there; all cough in ink;
All wear the carpet with their shoes;
All think what other people think;
All know the man their neighbour knows.
Lord, what would they say
Did their Catullus walk that way?
3418810
LOL, Master I could not agree more. I hoped I had said as much by twisting Krieger's ivory tower babble to my own purpose.
3418859
But now I'm imagining all those phrases as labels on various jars and bottles in Starswirl the Bearded's laboratory:
"Gah! This Elemental won't obey my commands--should've used more Resignation to the Countermetaphor..."
Or:
"But Starswirl, what if Symbol and Antisymbol were to meet?"
3418859 Yes; I wanted to say something like "fixer-upper" instead of "mediator", but I was lazy.
3418890
You jest, but that's exactly what famous sorcerer/old nutter John Dee was doing with the Enochian language.
3418895
Not many know this but for years my cutie mark has been a simple schematic representation of a diode, a RECTIFIER if you will.
3418890
Scotty! I need more spatializing power!
3419069 Are ye daft man! Ye cannae mix symbols with antisymbols cold! They'll fall apart in the differentiation matrix!
3419214
"Cap'n, I canna gie ye more power--summat's happened tae all the *burp* dilithium crystals!"
I'm coming late to the party, but both the post and its comments were fascinating reading. Thank you for this.
I've always been grateful to be living in a time period in which mainstream civilization has so thoroughly bucked the trends of most of human history, during which lives were nasty, brutish and short. I certainly have a soft spot in my heart for nature and find a lot of power in connecting to it, but I would literally have been dead at the age of 18 of a burst appendix if not for 20th-century medicine, and would be a miserable little weirdo indeed (or a dead, smart-but-a-little-too-naive-and-earnest revolutionary) if not for the Enlightenment and the gradual secularization that produced the society I live in.
It is thoroughly unsurprising that literature, for virtually all of human history, was just as nasty, brutish and anti-intellectual as the lives that people lived. Still, it's good to get some historical perspective on it.
Eeeeeeyup.
You'll always find that people who are avoiding ugly truths about themselves tend to vehemently condemn those flaws in others. This tends to be especially true in those claiming to have attained righteousness. They are surprisingly quick to swing the punishing sword of judgment against the unrighteous. Why? Because, I think, they are evading the unwanted truth that they are not, in fact, righteous. Rather, they're caught up in pride.
I can't speak with copious life experience here, but it seems to me humans like having a formula to follow. This makes me think of the current fashion in fanfiction (at least) to overemphasize body language and discourage mention of feelings. The all-important, "show don't tell", in its proverbial understanding.
I think the lack of any hard science has to do with the classical(?) idea that science and art are opposed. Try to do art with science and you kill it.
Also, I'd like to ask for some clarification if I may, BH; you're a proponent of giving stories a moral purpose, aren't you? If a story harms you, perhaps by infecting you with bad ideas, then it's a bad story. I believe this is an argument you have made in the past, and it's a moral one.
I'm asking because you seem here to condemn moralizing with fictional analysis. Perhaps just simplistic moralizing?
3420520
Very good question. I am a big proponent of stories with a moral purpose, but with differences.
- Stories only interest me when they have some new angle or consideration. If somebody writes a story about a noble sheriff who defended his town from a gang of bandits, yawn. I'd rather watch "High Noon". But maybe that's just me. I was always the kid in class who wanted to keep pushing ahead and learn new things, to the chagrin of the other kids, who didn't want to do that.
- I want to consider morality using reason, as a system of rules, say, rather than as a big set of examples of good and bad. Whereas the medievals emphasized rote memorization. They might respond that people needed continual reminders of what was virtuous, and that most people shouldn't try to learn the rules of ethics, they should just be shown a bunch of examples to follow.
- I want to risk permitting many diverse opinions, rather than clamping down on opinions that disagree with the current consensus or regime.
- I'm pretty liberal. I'm playing with the idea that throughout history there are basically 2 approaches to civilization, which I call the subservient and the subversive. The subservient (or conservative) emphasizes unity, survival, subservience to the greater social good, and holding on to what you have. It sees society as composed of dangerous people who must be controlled and surrounded by barbarians. Think China, but this also includes most times of constant war. The subversive (or liberal) usually is in times of plenty, and emphasizes growth, fulfilment, discovery, questioning, and the individual.
(Actually I could call these FOXO and TOR, for the respective genes that control these two modes in animals.)
This scheme doesn't quite work, because, say, the Mongols, Alexander the Great, or the Roman empire had the characteristics I call "subservient" (centralized authority, rigid social morals, little individual freedom), yet were expansionist. But anyway...
I want stories that question conventional morality, written by individual authors with their own weird viewpoint. Whereas a conservative would place more value on stories that repeat the morality we already agree on, to reinforce it.
3421453
The medieval writers were also all monks, which probably had something to do with it.