And plenty of white faces in the riots. Nobody here on the ground can think that these are predominantly racial riots, but the white supremacists do seem to be trying to turn them into race riots.
That's what the media would have you believe. But those who have appeared in court so far have mainly been employed or college students. And remember that much of the coordination of the riots seems to have been done via Blackberry. Even if they stole the handsets, somebody is paying for a data package that I can't afford.
At least what I say is based on fact. The police account of the killing that sparked it all -- which the original AC took as fact -- was uncertain at the start, and is looking more questionable with every news bulletin.
Hasn't the army already said it can't help because they're already overextended in the Middle East? I think your analysis of the steps is about right; not all rioters are doing it for the same reasons.
What I replied to was "move away from a written test" and maybe move away from tests altogether. I never said anything about the difficulty in eliminating tests in journalism or creative writing courses. Anyway, has it occurred to you that assessing the "body of work generated during the journalism and creative writing courses" is a test?
Interesting. I rarely saw even a hint of that kind of work in undergrad, but I suppose it was a combination of the newness of the subfield combined with the delay in exposing undergraduates to real academic work.
I chose the topic myself, based on the empirical work we'd learned about on the English Language side of the course, but the tutor identified where it fitted into the field. She was quite exited about it, actually, because it was fitting in with quite cutting-edge stuff (a few years ago), so on the litcrit side it's probably postgrad stuff.
the lack of taste
Yes. Effectively, I believe that English can be a beautiful language. Most Criticism I have read has been written quite poorly, using a large quantity of words to say things that could be said more quickly and that are not particularly insightful. Hence the perception by most people that much of it is contentless.
I could say the same about most computer programming texts I've read, but I don't conclude that computer programming is contentless.
Litcrit != literature.
The idea of writing horribly because you can is not cute and is not a sign of maturity, but is a sign of childish snobbery.
I don't think any of the well-regarded literary critics write horribly just because they can, although all fields have some people who do. I think most serious scientific articles are written horribly, but I don't use that to dismiss science or accuse scientists of childish snobbery. It's just that both fields require a particular sort of writing.
That would be an interesting empirical exercise, although it assumes a "target audience" and it only considers the current audience -- I'm not sure that modern readers get the same out of Jane Eyre as Brontë's contemporaries did (the Freudian interpretation of the red room section wouldn't have been available, for instance, although for most modern readers that seems to be the natural interpretation -- but maybe Brontë's contemporaries would have had the same interpretation, just not the label?)
It's still missing the point, though, because the purpose of the academic study of literature is rarely to determine the meaning[s] of texts. It's more about how they acquire those meanings, how the texts are determined to be of value (or otherwise), what ideological assumptions underlie the text (which a target audience might miss but still be influenced by) and so on. The stuff that gets done at university isn't just a continuation of what you did in junior high.
But then isn't the TA saying what the student was thinking which according to you is impossible, the best the TA can do is think what the student may have been trying to convey.
Absolutely. But academic writing seeks to limit the range of credible interpretations, whereas literature doesn't (usually) -- in fact, openness to multiple interpretations ("polysemy") is widely regarded as a mark of creativity in literature.
This might be why literary analysis can't be takes seriously, why would the opinions of other critics be any more valid, it seems what this class is really teaching is conformity.
Not really. I got first-class honours by disagreeing with my tutors at virtually every turn. But I justifyied my disagreement, which showed engagement with the subject, not just conformity (conformity would probably have got me a basic pass). The whole "what Shakespeare thought" is a sidetrack, because litcrit isn't about that, and although the student's and critics' views on that might come up in an essay they will tend not to be the subject of the essay, which is more likely to be about successfully applying tools and techniques to a text.
No you don't, but you can't say what Shakespeare thought, you can only say what you think Shakespeare might have thought. That's valid interpretation, and if you can back it up with the work of other critics then you're heading towards a supported academic position. If you claim to know what Shakespeare thought then everybody knows you are bullshitting because nobody does.
It's a bit like preceding every sentence with "I think we should go to the park", "I think Gladiator is the best movie", "I think ice cream is the best desert" instead of "We should go to the park", "Gladiator is the best movie", "Ice cream is the best desert."
The "I think" is actually implied in those spoken statements to begin with and is redundant.
But those sentences are pretty much useless in academic essays, with or without the "I think".
Essays are persuasive opionions, sometimes using fact to bolster an argument.
In coursework and exams that's not their primary function, although it is their structure. Their primary function is to show your understanding of the course material and ability to apply the tools of analysis that you have been taught.
But most Eng 101s teach one to take the "I think" out of the pieces as it weakens them.
"Gladiator is the best movie" is not a persuasive opinion, it's just an opinion, and it doesn't use facts to bolster the argument. The problem is far more fundamental than whether it has "I think" in front of it.
Linguistically, "I think" is termed a hedge, and interestingly (to me, at least) there's research that shows that novice academic writers and experienced academic writers use hedges about the same amount, but they hedge different things. In other words, the novices tend to flag as weak the bits that are not weak and fail to flag the bits that are. The experts get the flagging right.
"Even in sciences and engineering, the person who can communicate their ideas clearly and persuasively in writing will have a big edge over one who has similar technical skills but can't write well."
No, rather:
Even in sciences and engineering, the person who communicates his ideas clearly will have a big handicap over someone who has similar technical skills but is willing to write incomprehensible (but presumably deep) buzzword-raddled bullshit.
That isn't an advantage in sciences and engineering. It's a route out of sciences and engineering and into management.
I wrote a response to this, but I think Slashdot ate it.
Has anyone done good empirical work on similarities and differences in perceptions of literature, according to cross-cultural, demographic, or other factors?
I don't know of such work, but I'd be interested to see it. I think it would fall more under sociology than anthropology than under literary criticism, though.
The greatest weaknesses I have seen in the litcrit I've been exposed to have been the lack of empiricism
There is empiricism. For instance I did a term paper that did a statistical analysis of the verb forms used in texts identified by literary pundits as either "showing" or "telling", and found a statistically significant difference (which I then applied to some texts I'd held back, and it classified them in the same way as the original pundits). That sort of application of computational linguistics to litcrit is quite a young field, though.
the lack of taste
You mean disagreement with your taste?
and the lack of ability to write well (in fact, the propensity to write quite poorly, despite the use of jargon).
Firstly, academic litcrit is a specialised register, and I doubt any of us here are in a position to judge how well a text conforms to that register. Secondly, even if some critics don't write well it's not necessarily any reflection on their skill at analysing texts (not least because some modern critics, following Derrida, actively try to subvert language; one wouldn't condemn all coding just because of the existence of the obfusticated C contest.).
You can't tell with certainly what I meant by the post, true. But in literary criticism you can't just make meanings up, you also have to be able to justify the meanings from the text. It's a fundamental blunder to assume that because one might not be able to restrict a text to one meaning then absolutely any meaning is equally valid.
So? There's far more calculation in engineering courses than in the test. Saying that x is included in the course is no reason for not being included in the test -- it would be a strange course that only tested you on stuff that wasn't in the course.
Duh? When someone says "Shakespeare might have intended to convey such and such," it takes a very special sort of pedant to assume the former and not the latter. I'm glad I studied a field that isn't full of such masturbatory bullshit.
You can legitimately make a claim like "Shakespeare might have intended to convey such and such" in an academic essay, but it won't get you many marks because you could just as well say "Shakespeare might have been an alien shape-shifter from Alpha Centurai." You need to back it up.
And that's even before you get into the question of whether Shakespeare was written by Shakespeare or by somebody else of the same name...
When as a grad student I did a close reading of an extract from King Lear, I was interested to note that the second folio version had a lot more of the sort of stuff that structuralists look for than the first folio version did, which at least raises the question of how much of Shakespeare's reputation is because of good editors.
The author (possibly) knows what [s]he intended to communicate. You find what [s]he actually communicated in the words on the page. They're not necessarily the same.
What was actually communicated is entirely subjective and will usually vary from person to person. What was intended is singular.
What was intended might be singular but it rarely merits academic study and is inaccessible (even if the author is on record about it, how do we know that they were accurate and honest?)
The whole point about the humanities is that they are inherently subjective (there's a bit of a clue in the name), so learning to deal with subjectivity is an important part of a humanities course. What one person thinks is of some limited interest. The similarities and differences between what different people report finding in a text and the possible reasons for those similarities and differences do tend to be worthy of academic investigation.
more classes need to move away from the written test and to a more hands on / maybe even no test class.
Good luck implementing that approach for journalism and creative writing courses! In some fields being able to write well is a vital skill. Even in sciences and engineering, the person who can communicate their ideas clearly and persuasively in writing will have a big edge over one who has similar technical skills but can't write well.
This is why most people don't take literary analysis seriously. There is a real human being who took the pain to write a 400-page long book. Presumably, he wanted to convey *something*. But apparently, we have to act as if the book came down from heaven and we can't try to discover what the author wanted to say?
No you don't, but you can't say what Shakespeare thought, you can only say what you think Shakespeare might have thought. That's valid interpretation, and if you can back it up with the work of other critics then you're heading towards a supported academic position. If you claim to know what Shakespeare thought then everybody knows you are bullshitting because nobody does.
The worst manifestation of this is when some literary theorists seem to argue that *even the author* cannot interpret what he wrote better than anyone else. He's just another reader!
This sounds ridiculous to me. Even if the author writes an essay saying "this is what I meant when I wrote this", we're supposed to ignore that and simply focus on the words of the work because this is all that matters in literary criticism?
The author (possibly) knows what [s]he intended to communicate. You find what [s]he actually communicated in the words on the page. They're not necessarily the same.
Slashdot Mirror
And plenty of white faces in the riots. Nobody here on the ground can think that these are predominantly racial riots, but the white supremacists do seem to be trying to turn them into race riots.
That's what the media would have you believe. But those who have appeared in court so far have mainly been employed or college students. And remember that much of the coordination of the riots seems to have been done via Blackberry. Even if they stole the handsets, somebody is paying for a data package that I can't afford.
I wouldn't bank on it -- have you heard any of the interviews with the rioters?
At least what I say is based on fact. The police account of the killing that sparked it all -- which the original AC took as fact -- was uncertain at the start, and is looking more questionable with every news bulletin.
It doesn't. But it justifies the peaceful protest that turned into the trigger for the trouble.
Actually, the Metropolitan Police are sometimes referred to as "Scotland Yard", a textbook case of metonymy.
Hasn't the army already said it can't help because they're already overextended in the Middle East? I think your analysis of the steps is about right; not all rioters are doing it for the same reasons.
I'm glad that somebody knows what happened, because nobody actually involved seems to . Even the Met admitted that they handled it wrong.
And they wouldn't be able to do anything because of their incitement.
What I replied to was "move away from a written test" and maybe move away from tests altogether. I never said anything about the difficulty in eliminating tests in journalism or creative writing courses. Anyway, has it occurred to you that assessing the "body of work generated during the journalism and creative writing courses" is a test?
Interesting. I rarely saw even a hint of that kind of work in undergrad, but I suppose it was a combination of the newness of the subfield combined with the delay in exposing undergraduates to real academic work.
I chose the topic myself, based on the empirical work we'd learned about on the English Language side of the course, but the tutor identified where it fitted into the field. She was quite exited about it, actually, because it was fitting in with quite cutting-edge stuff (a few years ago), so on the litcrit side it's probably postgrad stuff.
the lack of taste
Yes. Effectively, I believe that English can be a beautiful language. Most Criticism I have read has been written quite poorly, using a large quantity of words to say things that could be said more quickly and that are not particularly insightful. Hence the perception by most people that much of it is contentless.
I could say the same about most computer programming texts I've read, but I don't conclude that computer programming is contentless.
Litcrit != literature.
The idea of writing horribly because you can is not cute and is not a sign of maturity, but is a sign of childish snobbery.
I don't think any of the well-regarded literary critics write horribly just because they can, although all fields have some people who do. I think most serious scientific articles are written horribly, but I don't use that to dismiss science or accuse scientists of childish snobbery. It's just that both fields require a particular sort of writing.
That would be an interesting empirical exercise, although it assumes a "target audience" and it only considers the current audience -- I'm not sure that modern readers get the same out of Jane Eyre as Brontë's contemporaries did (the Freudian interpretation of the red room section wouldn't have been available, for instance, although for most modern readers that seems to be the natural interpretation -- but maybe Brontë's contemporaries would have had the same interpretation, just not the label?)
It's still missing the point, though, because the purpose of the academic study of literature is rarely to determine the meaning[s] of texts. It's more about how they acquire those meanings, how the texts are determined to be of value (or otherwise), what ideological assumptions underlie the text (which a target audience might miss but still be influenced by) and so on. The stuff that gets done at university isn't just a continuation of what you did in junior high.
But then isn't the TA saying what the student was thinking which according to you is impossible, the best the TA can do is think what the student may have been trying to convey.
Absolutely. But academic writing seeks to limit the range of credible interpretations, whereas literature doesn't (usually) -- in fact, openness to multiple interpretations ("polysemy") is widely regarded as a mark of creativity in literature.
This might be why literary analysis can't be takes seriously, why would the opinions of other critics be any more valid, it seems what this class is really teaching is conformity.
Not really. I got first-class honours by disagreeing with my tutors at virtually every turn. But I justifyied my disagreement, which showed engagement with the subject, not just conformity (conformity would probably have got me a basic pass). The whole "what Shakespeare thought" is a sidetrack, because litcrit isn't about that, and although the student's and critics' views on that might come up in an essay they will tend not to be the subject of the essay, which is more likely to be about successfully applying tools and techniques to a text.
It's a bit like preceding every sentence with "I think we should go to the park", "I think Gladiator is the best movie", "I think ice cream is the best desert" instead of "We should go to the park", "Gladiator is the best movie", "Ice cream is the best desert."
The "I think" is actually implied in those spoken statements to begin with and is redundant.
But those sentences are pretty much useless in academic essays, with or without the "I think".
Essays are persuasive opionions, sometimes using fact to bolster an argument.
In coursework and exams that's not their primary function, although it is their structure. Their primary function is to show your understanding of the course material and ability to apply the tools of analysis that you have been taught.
But most Eng 101s teach one to take the "I think" out of the pieces as it weakens them.
"Gladiator is the best movie" is not a persuasive opinion, it's just an opinion, and it doesn't use facts to bolster the argument. The problem is far more fundamental than whether it has "I think" in front of it.
Linguistically, "I think" is termed a hedge, and interestingly (to me, at least) there's research that shows that novice academic writers and experienced academic writers use hedges about the same amount, but they hedge different things. In other words, the novices tend to flag as weak the bits that are not weak and fail to flag the bits that are. The experts get the flagging right.
"Even in sciences and engineering, the person who can communicate their ideas clearly and persuasively in writing will have a big edge over one who has similar technical skills but can't write well." No, rather: Even in sciences and engineering, the person who communicates his ideas clearly will have a big handicap over someone who has similar technical skills but is willing to write incomprehensible (but presumably deep) buzzword-raddled bullshit.
That isn't an advantage in sciences and engineering. It's a route out of sciences and engineering and into management.
I wrote a response to this, but I think Slashdot ate it.
Has anyone done good empirical work on similarities and differences in perceptions of literature, according to cross-cultural, demographic, or other factors?
I don't know of such work, but I'd be interested to see it. I think it would fall more under sociology than anthropology than under literary criticism, though.
The greatest weaknesses I have seen in the litcrit I've been exposed to have been the lack of empiricism
There is empiricism. For instance I did a term paper that did a statistical analysis of the verb forms used in texts identified by literary pundits as either "showing" or "telling", and found a statistically significant difference (which I then applied to some texts I'd held back, and it classified them in the same way as the original pundits). That sort of application of computational linguistics to litcrit is quite a young field, though.
the lack of taste
You mean disagreement with your taste?
and the lack of ability to write well (in fact, the propensity to write quite poorly, despite the use of jargon).
Firstly, academic litcrit is a specialised register, and I doubt any of us here are in a position to judge how well a text conforms to that register. Secondly, even if some critics don't write well it's not necessarily any reflection on their skill at analysing texts (not least because some modern critics, following Derrida, actively try to subvert language; one wouldn't condemn all coding just because of the existence of the obfusticated C contest.).
You can't tell with certainly what I meant by the post, true. But in literary criticism you can't just make meanings up, you also have to be able to justify the meanings from the text. It's a fundamental blunder to assume that because one might not be able to restrict a text to one meaning then absolutely any meaning is equally valid.
So? There's far more calculation in engineering courses than in the test. Saying that x is included in the course is no reason for not being included in the test -- it would be a strange course that only tested you on stuff that wasn't in the course.
Duh? When someone says "Shakespeare might have intended to convey such and such," it takes a very special sort of pedant to assume the former and not the latter. I'm glad I studied a field that isn't full of such masturbatory bullshit.
You can legitimately make a claim like "Shakespeare might have intended to convey such and such" in an academic essay, but it won't get you many marks because you could just as well say "Shakespeare might have been an alien shape-shifter from Alpha Centurai." You need to back it up.
And that's even before you get into the question of whether Shakespeare was written by Shakespeare or by somebody else of the same name...
When as a grad student I did a close reading of an extract from King Lear, I was interested to note that the second folio version had a lot more of the sort of stuff that structuralists look for than the first folio version did, which at least raises the question of how much of Shakespeare's reputation is because of good editors.
The author (possibly) knows what [s]he intended to communicate. You find what [s]he actually communicated in the words on the page. They're not necessarily the same.
What was actually communicated is entirely subjective and will usually vary from person to person. What was intended is singular.
What was intended might be singular but it rarely merits academic study and is inaccessible (even if the author is on record about it, how do we know that they were accurate and honest?)
The whole point about the humanities is that they are inherently subjective (there's a bit of a clue in the name), so learning to deal with subjectivity is an important part of a humanities course. What one person thinks is of some limited interest. The similarities and differences between what different people report finding in a text and the possible reasons for those similarities and differences do tend to be worthy of academic investigation.
more classes need to move away from the written test and to a more hands on / maybe even no test class.
Good luck implementing that approach for journalism and creative writing courses! In some fields being able to write well is a vital skill. Even in sciences and engineering, the person who can communicate their ideas clearly and persuasively in writing will have a big edge over one who has similar technical skills but can't write well.
This is why most people don't take literary analysis seriously. There is a real human being who took the pain to write a 400-page long book. Presumably, he wanted to convey *something*. But apparently, we have to act as if the book came down from heaven and we can't try to discover what the author wanted to say?
No you don't, but you can't say what Shakespeare thought, you can only say what you think Shakespeare might have thought. That's valid interpretation, and if you can back it up with the work of other critics then you're heading towards a supported academic position. If you claim to know what Shakespeare thought then everybody knows you are bullshitting because nobody does.
The worst manifestation of this is when some literary theorists seem to argue that *even the author* cannot interpret what he wrote better than anyone else. He's just another reader!
This sounds ridiculous to me. Even if the author writes an essay saying "this is what I meant when I wrote this", we're supposed to ignore that and simply focus on the words of the work because this is all that matters in literary criticism?
The author (possibly) knows what [s]he intended to communicate. You find what [s]he actually communicated in the words on the page. They're not necessarily the same.
Sorry, I don't get all these analogies. Does anybody have anything involving a car?
Just so. And since the majority of Wikipedia users are not admins, the majority of dicks on Wikipedia will not be admins.