Slashdot Mirror
Engineer Deconstructs Literary Criticism
DNS-and-BIND writes "This is the story of one computer professional's explorations in the world of postmodern literary criticism. Wouldn't it be nice to work in a field where nobody can say you're wrong?"
Another widely reported exploration into post-modernist literature was "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" by Sokal. Sokal says, in order to "test the prevailing intellectual standards, I decided to try a modest (though admittedly uncontrolled) experiment: Would a leading North American journal of cultural studies -- whose editorial collective includes such luminaries as Fredric Jameson and Andrew Ross -- publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions? The answer, unfortunately, is yes."
Crikey!
The Army reading list
You haven't been around any English departments, have you? My wife has an MA in English, and it sounds like the department was pretty vicious.
I'd argue that it's a lot harder being in a field with "soft" realities. Anything you say is subject to criticism, and it's really hard to "prove" you're right. I'll take an objective field, where I can demonstrate truth or falsehood irrefutably, any day. (I know that's an overstatment: you can always debate the meaning of experimental results. But you get the idea.)
Consider the following paragraph from the article:
Now read an essay by the postmodernism generator. Can you tell the difference? ;-)
Indeed, at the beginning of the article he even explains how he read the basic fundamentals of the field to determine weather or not there was any merit to the whole process. In doing so, he discovered that the whole exercise was not as difficult as first appeared and proceeded to explain in laymens terms how the whole thing works. That's why its a great article.
I read the internet for the articles.
in said scene, a literary critic develops a program to count the frequency of words in a given book (ignoring prepositions, pronouns and the like) and then display the 20 most and least frequent words. the theory is that the core concept of the book can be gleaned by simply reading these lists.
now i have tried this myself and can say, while it does not work to the level stated by calvino, it does certainly give you a feel for the book. different genres have noticable word distributions especially. it's easy to identify, say, a western or sci-fi or romance novel from these lists.
2 1337 4 u!
Wesley Phoa has written a good text called
Should Computer Scientists Read Derrida? that i can only recommend. Unlike the usual Deconstruction-Bashers that don't bother to understand what Deconstruction is about, this text, written by mathematician, is pretty clued up!
As an avid reader, I have to say that this entirely true. But then again, deconstruction is not about being intellectual. It's about SEEMING intellectual, when in fact all you are doing is rewriting somebody else's work using the tersist means possible. In short: deconstruction is creative writing for essayists. It is a tool for those learning how to write. And expecting something so masturbatory to be anything more than a bit of clever fun is going to result in anti-intellectual rage.
When you deconstuct a work, you create a paper which is impossible to fail on a theoretical basis, because each deconstruction is in fact its own theoretical entity. It's very hard to say, objectively, that a deconstruction is "wrong." And therefore, in the eyes of many professors, your grade on this paper can only be judged on its logical progression and its written style.
In short: deconstructions can be interesting, can be fun, and show off a person's analytical and prosaic talents. But no, they aren't going to further the "intellectual" pursuit of writing. But this is no different from a forensics meet, where people argue a position they themselves may not hold, to showcase their oration and research talents. This is no different from a poetry slam or rap battle, where people read disconnected passages to gain a subjective edge over other poets. And it's certainly no different from engineers engaging in robot battles, code obfuscation contests, or blog entries about how literary criticism is bullshit.
Incidentally, while deconstructionists can never be wrong because they write their own assumptions, literary critics in general CAN be. In fact, one of my favorite exercises in my 350 level discourse class was to rebutt a literary criticism from the New York Times magazine. Literary critics make mistakes in logic, levy unfair comparisons and make mistakes of intent all the time, and these often result in an unlikely hypothesis being legitimized. Hence the popularity of Ayn Rand!
Hey freaks: now you're ju
Did he misrepresent himself?
Did his joke go unnoticed?
I agree with you that there are some engineering fruitcakes out there, but this may not be one of them.
A creative, educated, "non-expert" perspective in a field can sometimes be very valuable. For instance, journalists. In tech, we know they're often full of garbage, but they do say the odd thing, which when interpreted by somebody with a deeper technical understanding can be valuable.
Maybe a better example is the absurd blithering of a really bright first-year student.
Although I'm not a literary critic, I am married to one, and she always disagreed with Derrida (the father of deconstruction theory, as I understand it). Interestingly enough, we had the chance to listen to him present a seminar a few years ago in Auckland, New Zealand, as he was participating in a conference sponsored by the Auckland University School of Philosophy.
So we went to listen to him speak (unfortunately not on deconstruction, but she was still very excited to have the chance to hear him). We left the Town Hall after the seminar and my wife said to me "Dammit, now I can't dislike him any more, he's so nice". A few seconds pause, then "But he's still wrong about deconstruction".
Sokal's experiment demonstrated that peer review standards in deconstructionist journals are low. It did not demonstrate, however, that the whole discipline is meaningless, just that one journal (albeit a respected one) was unable to distinguish the meaningless from the meaningful.
... and its little lights would flash and it would play a tinny little melody.
About a year ago, my parents gave me an amusing little animatronic toy which (allegedy) responded to voice commands. "Kuma! Sing me a song!" you'd say, and its little lights would flash and it would play a tinny little melody. Then you'd say "Kuma! Hing freeb gafrob nok!"
Reasonable conclusion: Kuma cannot differentiate English from nonsense.
Unreasonable conclusion: All English is nonsense.
After some searching, I found Semiotics for Begineers, which was a pretty good introduction to the field, and written with enough clarity that even this programmer could figure out the strange language. Go give it a try.
It might also help you as a programmer. We use esoteric language all the time, like '\n', 0xDEADBEEF, deques and queues, stdout, stderr, stdlog, etc. etc., and semiotics tries to explain how these somewhat random characters can be attached to ideas, so that our community can send the characters back and forth to communicate the ideas. However, if it comes to an assembler class vs. a semiotics class, please take the assembler class.
This is the meat of the article, and, to my mind, accurately picks out that which is of value in the humanities.
As far as I'm concerned, the humanities need a major overhaul. Those majoring in english or art should have their science requirements increased beyond whatever they are now. At the same time, I think the sciency types of the world should be similarly forced to undertake a number of humanities courses. But the humanities teachers should be forced to explain themselves in terms as simple, obvious, and concise as the author did above.
Now, back to my botany studies...
I want to a highschool where literary critism was a normal event in literature classes. I've always been opposed to this nonsense, since I started out as an artist and have heard people reading things into paintings I've done, or paintings that have been done by people I know: paintings which in many cases mean absoultely nothing. In addition, a good percentage of the art teachers I've had have taught "tricks" like blind contour drawings as basis for paintings, and using color schemes that apply a meaning even when no meaning exists.
In any case, in my softmore year, we were assigned the hobbit which we had to read, and then explain what the book was really about. Aside from having read the book several times prior to the class, I happened to have the first official U.S. priting, which had a rather extensive introductory letter by tolkien. Aside from the very beginning, which talked about how this was the first printing, and not to purchase the book from other U.S. publishers (they did not have the rights to publish it and were not giving him residuals) he went on to discuss the meaning of the book -- speciffically, the entire lack thereof. He disavowed the book being a metaphore for anything, and asked the reader to accept it for what is was - a story, a flight of fancy, a fantasy which he wrote for nothing other than the purpose of enjoyment. I photocopied the introducion, wrote a quick appology for not disecting the meaning of the book considering that I felt it would be disrespectfull of the author to read meaning into it when he has specifically asked his readers not to. I got a D-.
RandomAndInteresting.comdefending the world from stupidity since 1979