proximoception | (no subject)

Last thing that would ever happen but: how about a movement of minimalism in literary studies? Seems like, for many texts, there's a finite number of helpful things you can say about them, and an infinite number of distractingly irrelevant or destructively off-base or reductive ones, and it's these that carry the day. How about a new kind of explication journal, jury reviewed, where people make their submissions in the form of individual sentences, paragraphs at most, little key things to bear in mind or zero in on when reading a particular text, passed or rejected from the journal by a vote of "likely" or "not convincingly likely as phrased"? There's, like, four people in history I read expecting regular, expansive accuracy on these matters. Everyone else gets lucky hits, sure, but generally buried in the implausible or predictable (or, increasingly, both at once). I accept that "Andrea del Sarto" will strike each passing generation as a little more mysterious, but the drift involves specifics. The drift to date has also involved specifics. What is it about teachers that hates handling the obvious? It's the best gift you can give most of your students, and the remainder might be best left alone with books of fiction and fact.

I guess the idea is to yoke everything together, thus demonstrating what these texts are supposed to help us do anyway, to model some useful or happy totality of thought: for professors to prove how, for students to see the yoking as well as the specific insights, and try to follow suit with the hows of both without, ideally, repeating the whats without citation. Which notion has some honor to it; so I must actually mean, fire the 40 to 90 percent of professors who yoke badly (and get the facts wrong). Fire 90 percent of everybody is my becoming my default opinion, actually; the remaining 10%, I'm convinced, will be able to handle the consequent unemployment/retraining/low self-esteem crisis.

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I would like this journal, I think. Also I'd like to know, who are the four people you read expecting regular, expansive accuracy on these matters?

My presentation for my Melville class sort of tried to deal with similar matters: I thought in some ways our class had been exemplarily naive and examplarily fascinated with regard to the texts--that we had been philologists. And my question was, how to have a philology that loves texts and doesn't read away from them, but that isn't so pure it finally becomes rhapsody, recitation?

(I wasn't thinking much about philology as such, just using the word to try to talk about love & fascination for the books we'd read.)

I would still like criticism to allow for some rickety theories and fascinating constructions, but not add to the implausible and predictable.

I read a little bit of a book about Melville-as-portrayer-of-the-multitude, and it just did not interest me, no matter how much I like multitude-talk and Melville, both.

Perhaps I am not saying much. I may just be yoking badly to your post.

I'm all for speculation, I just think people should get most of the available facts first--and not be idiots. That's why I switched it to the 90% thing, I realized I wasn't complaining about existing forms and traditions, which are at least potentially good/productive. They're just not idiot-proof. I guess a Journal of the Relevant wouldn't prove to be either.

I think the only general statements about literature I've greatly liked have been by Bloom and some Bloom-people: Hazlitt (who has the hitting record), Emerson, Pater--and Shelley and Stevens if poets count. I don't say no to the rest, but for the most part say "Yes, but..." and the but's strong enough that the criticism wasn't really worth my time. Extensive factual accounts are even more tedious, I guess--strong disagreement at least provides some seasoning. Zeroing in on the helpful facts requires knowing what writing and reading are about in general, and so few have that sorted out.

And of course my enemy is still Theory & Co. And religion, but I take that to be a local problem.

I guess the rhapsodizing/recitation route was the refuge of incompetents, pre-Theory? And Theory saw itself as, in part, the cure--but instead became what was recited and rhapsodized over, so, so often. So the common element is the pretentious subset of the underinformed. After the revolution they'll go to informing school or be assigned orchards to watch.