- 1. Literary Theory Reader-Response
- 2. Subjective vs. Objective • When we refer to something as “subjective” we mean that it pertains to the individual (the reader). A subjective reading of a text is one in which emphasis is placed on the attitudes, moods, and opinions of the reader. • When we refer to something as “objective” we mean that it pertains to an object (the text) separate from the individual (the reader). An objective reading of a text is one that is uninfluenced by emotions or personal prejudices. • Reader-Response criticism offers a subjective, or egocentric, reading of a text. Egocentrism refers to anything that regards the self of the individual as the center of all things.
- 3. What is Reader-Response? • RR critics believe that a reader’s interaction with the text gives the text its meaning. The text cannot exist without the reader. • If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it does it make a noise? If a text sits on a shelf in a bookstore and no one is around to read it, does the text have meaning?
- 4. What is Reader-Response? • RR criticism is NOT a free-for-all school of thought where anything goes. RR criticism is still a disciplined theory deserving of a careful reading of the text. • RR critics are focused on finding meaning in the act of reading itself and examining the ways individual readers or communities of readers experience texts. • The reader joins with the author to “help the text mean.”
- 5. What is Reader-Response? • A successful reader-response critic does not just respond to a text—anyone can do that— but analyzes his or her response, or the responses of others. • Our life experiences and the communities we belong to greatly influence our reading of a text • Because each reader will interact with the text differently, the text may have more than one valid interpretation.
- 6. READER-RESPONSE STYLISTICS According to Jonathan Culler (1981), RR examines the reader’s response to a text as a response to a horizon of expectations. By a horizon of expectations, is meant that there is multiplicity of meanings of interpretations in a text and these can be accessed by the reader according to his or her level or literary competence.
- 7. A reader’s literary competence is highly informed by the social world in which a text is produced as it usually has a shaping effect on his or her interpretation of a such text. In RR, there is an interaction between the structure of the text and the reader’s response. It evokes a situation where individual readers give meaning to the text. This is because each reader will interact with the text differently, as the text may have more than one vivid interpretation.
- 8. RR theorists share two beliefs: 1. The role of the reader cannot be omitted from our understanding of literature (unlike New Critics who believe that the meaning of a text is contained in the text alone). 2. Readers do not passively consume the meaning presented to them by an objective literary text. Instead, readers actively make the meaning they find in literature.
- 9. Reader Response Theory, simply stated, is the reader's response to literary text. Tyson (2006) describes in Critical Theory Today the five types of Reader Response theories and the differences that lie within each. The following table summarizes each theory, the noted researcher(s) associated with the theory, and provides a basic definition.
- 10. Theory Theorist(s) Definition Transactional Louise Rosenblatt; Wolfgang Iser Transactional Reader Response Theory analyzes the transaction between the text and reader. Both are seen as equally important. A reader can take an efferent stance, based on determinant meanings in a text, or an aesthetic stance, based on determinant and indeterminacy of meanings. Affective Stylistics Stanley Fish Affective Stylistics Reader Response Theory examines a text in a "slow motion" format, in which each line is studied in order to determine "how (stylistics) affects (affective) the reader in the process of reading" (Tyson, 2006, p. 175). Subjective David Bleich Subjective Reader Response Theory believes that the readers' responses are the text, and that all meaning of a text lies in the readers' interpretations. Psychological Norman Holland Psychological Reader Response Theory znalyzes what the readers' interpretations and responses reveal about the reader, not the text. Social Stanley Fish Social Reader Response Theory believes that readers approach a text with interpretative strategies that are the products of the "interpretive communities" in which they belong.
- 11. Transactional Reader Response Analyzes the transaction between reader and text both the reader and the text are necessary in the production of meaning As we read, the text acts as a stimulus to which we respond feelings, associations, and memories all influence the way we make sense of a text as we read it.
- 12. CONCLUSION Reader response theory is the best theory which makes the reader and students to be active and to analysis a text by their own ways it achieved great importance in 19th century and for students and teacher it is the most reliable method of studying and teaching.
- http://www.slideshare.net/leniebelandres/readers-response-cticism
Monday, April 25, 2016
Reader Response Criticism from Lenie Belandres Slideshare
Sunday, April 24, 2016
The Emergency Poet
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Emergency-Poet-Anti-Stress-Poetry-Anthology/dp/1782434054/ref=pd_sim_14_2?ie=UTF8&dpID=5143j3xtu7L&dpSrc=sims&preST=_AC_UL160_SR107%2C160_&refRID=KV5NPB97SYHW9D0JBTD8#reader_1782434054
Words Work Well Scotland bibliotherapy examples
http://wordsworkwellscotland.co.uk/lapidus_tool/examples-of-bibliotherapy/
Friday, April 22, 2016
Feb 2016 issue of Lancet article
http://relit.org.uk/sites/default/files/books_do_furnish_a_mind-_the_art_and_science_of_bibliotherapy_-_piis0140-67361600337-8.pdf.pdf
from ReLit
bibliographic notes
--Cornett, CE and Cornett, CF. Bibliotherapy: the right book at the right time. Phi Delta Kappa Educational Foundation, Bloomington, IN; 1980
--Crothers, SM. A literary clinic. Atlantic Monthly. 1916; 118: 291–301
--Jack, SJ and Ronan, KR. Bibliotherapy: practice and research. Sch Psychol Int. 2008; 29: 161–182
--Kelly, R. Black rainbow: how words healed me—my journey through depression. Hodder & Stoughton, London; 2014
--Latchem, JM and Greenhalgh, J. The role of reading on the health and well-being of people with neurological conditions: a systematic review. Aging Ment Health. 2014; 18: 731–744
Wednesday, April 20, 2016
Neuroplasticity as potential direction for bibliotherapy
http://news.nationalpost.com/arts/books/robert-fulford-the-world-of-bibliotherapy
excerpt
The world of bibliotherapy contains many researchers, most of them academics, searching for ways to develop it into a more effective technique. A typical figure is Hoi F. Cheu, a professor in the English department at Laurentian University. A student of literature with a bent for unexpected themes (he wrote his PhD dissertation on Zen and the Art of James Joyce), he now concentrates on bibliotherapy. He works with several hospitals, including the Sick Children’s Hospital in Toronto.
Cheu believes that recent explorations of neuroplasticity open new directions for bibliotherapy. He quotes Norman Doidge’s book, The Brain that Changes Itself, on “The Culturally Modified Brain.” As Cheu writes, “We now have scientific observations to demonstrate that cultural activities can change brain structures. After decades of cultural construction theories, we can now reunite with the scientists to investigate a biological approach to literature.”
excerpt
The world of bibliotherapy contains many researchers, most of them academics, searching for ways to develop it into a more effective technique. A typical figure is Hoi F. Cheu, a professor in the English department at Laurentian University. A student of literature with a bent for unexpected themes (he wrote his PhD dissertation on Zen and the Art of James Joyce), he now concentrates on bibliotherapy. He works with several hospitals, including the Sick Children’s Hospital in Toronto.
Cheu believes that recent explorations of neuroplasticity open new directions for bibliotherapy. He quotes Norman Doidge’s book, The Brain that Changes Itself, on “The Culturally Modified Brain.” As Cheu writes, “We now have scientific observations to demonstrate that cultural activities can change brain structures. After decades of cultural construction theories, we can now reunite with the scientists to investigate a biological approach to literature.”
Bibliotherapy's memorable dates
from Jeffrey Kottler's list of memorable dates:
1802 Benjamin Rush, the "father of psychiatry," recommended reading as treatment for mentally ill
1846 Minson Galt developed guidelines for using books with mentally ill
1904 first professional librarian appointed to a mental hospital
1916 Samuel Crothers coined "bibliotherapy"
1923 Sadie Peterson-Delaney established bibliotherapy program in Tuskegee VA hospital
1925 Josephine Jackson published The Therapeutic Value of Books
1937 Elizabeth Pomery completed first systematic research study on bibliotherapy
1941 Bibliotherapy appears in Medical Dictionary
1945 Clara Kircher developed children's literature bibliography for bibliotherapeutic use
1961 Bibliotherapy appears in Webster's Dictionary
1962 First symposium on bibliotherapy
1970 Bibliotherapy Round Table founded
1802 Benjamin Rush, the "father of psychiatry," recommended reading as treatment for mentally ill
1846 Minson Galt developed guidelines for using books with mentally ill
1904 first professional librarian appointed to a mental hospital
1916 Samuel Crothers coined "bibliotherapy"
1923 Sadie Peterson-Delaney established bibliotherapy program in Tuskegee VA hospital
1925 Josephine Jackson published The Therapeutic Value of Books
1937 Elizabeth Pomery completed first systematic research study on bibliotherapy
1941 Bibliotherapy appears in Medical Dictionary
1945 Clara Kircher developed children's literature bibliography for bibliotherapeutic use
1961 Bibliotherapy appears in Webster's Dictionary
1962 First symposium on bibliotherapy
1970 Bibliotherapy Round Table founded
Stories We've Heard, Stories We've Told: Life-Changing Narratives in Therapy by Jeffrey Kottler
https://books.google.com/books?id=dfBwBAAAQBAJ&pg=PA170&lpg=PA170&dq=%22Bibliotherapy+Round+Table%22&source=bl&ots=uH8Rjxa6oT&sig=3XFFvZd7aHw0NRIM6nBRIG--tYA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiU-t3juZ7MAhUB7WMKHSkXCUoQ6AEIOjAF#v=onepage&q=%22Bibliotherapy%20Round%20Table%22&f=false
This book is a bit expensive, but the Google Books preview includes a list of dates, starting in the 13th century, in which some form of reading as therapy has been recorded.
This book is a bit expensive, but the Google Books preview includes a list of dates, starting in the 13th century, in which some form of reading as therapy has been recorded.
Monday, April 18, 2016
Deleuze and Guattari
http://csmt.uchicago.edu/annotations/deleuzerhizome.htm
“There is no longer a tripartite division between a field of reality (the world) and a field of representation (the book) and a field of subjectivity (the author). Rather, an assemblage establishes connections between certain multiplicities drawn from each of these orders, so that a book has no sequel nor the world as its object nor one or several authors as its subject.”
"Rhizome," in A Thousand Plateaus
“There is no longer a tripartite division between a field of reality (the world) and a field of representation (the book) and a field of subjectivity (the author). Rather, an assemblage establishes connections between certain multiplicities drawn from each of these orders, so that a book has no sequel nor the world as its object nor one or several authors as its subject.”
"Rhizome," in A Thousand Plateaus
Friday, April 15, 2016
Thursday, April 14, 2016
Tuesday, April 12, 2016
Thursday, April 07, 2016
Wednesday, April 06, 2016
Paolo Coellho's the Witch of Portobello
Quotes: Don't confuse the teacher with the lesson, the ritual with the ecstacy, the transmitter of the symbol with the symbol itself.
Sunday, April 03, 2016
Friday, April 01, 2016
Monday, March 14, 2016
Sunday, March 13, 2016
Lou Andreas-Salome quote
“Poetry is something in-between the dream and its interpretation.” ― Lou Andreas-Salomé
Saturday, March 12, 2016
Friday, March 11, 2016
Thursday, March 10, 2016
Monday, March 07, 2016
Sunday, March 06, 2016
Thursday, February 25, 2016
Friday, February 12, 2016
Sonnet
| PLEA BITE The plea condensed into a form absconds Tough kisses cool that bite instead of soothe And water lilies more appropriate for ponds The surface glistens sparkling as it moves A blue lit cloud my thought invoke, surround, Is ruining dead religion such a sin Surprising myth an open door propound Belief began inside a seed within. Take red ripe bite into an apple hot And softly hug your dreams but don't bestow Before consider what you have begot The frog, warts and all, we cut long ago. Then say enough begin wih sharpened tools Important thoughts not need observe just rules. |
 |
Saturday, February 06, 2016
Choose Books by Locale
http://www.packabook.co.uk/books-set-in-usa.html (Oregon)
http://www.packabook.co.uk/
Find fiction and nonfiction based on geographic locations all over the world.
Friday, February 05, 2016
Wednesday, February 03, 2016
LitMed book suggestion 17
http://medhum.med.nyu.edu/view/11805
ON WITH THE STORY
John Barth gets mixed reviews on Amazon from Publisher's Weekly for this collection of stories.
Have not read. However, consensus seems to support that whether or not this is his best work, Barth is a clever boy.
ON WITH THE STORY
John Barth gets mixed reviews on Amazon from Publisher's Weekly for this collection of stories.
Have not read. However, consensus seems to support that whether or not this is his best work, Barth is a clever boy.
LitMed book suggestion 16
http://medhum.med.nyu.edu/view/1354
SCAR TISSUE
for which Michael Ignatieff was short listed for the Booker Prize in 1993, comes highly regarded and covers a lot of ground according to this list of tags from the NYU LitMed database. Clicking on any link should pull up the titles in their collection that have been tagged the same.
SCAR TISSUE
for which Michael Ignatieff was short listed for the Booker Prize in 1993, comes highly regarded and covers a lot of ground according to this list of tags from the NYU LitMed database. Clicking on any link should pull up the titles in their collection that have been tagged the same.
- Adolescence
- Aging
- Art of Medicine
- Caregivers
- Children
- Chronic Illness/Chronic Disease
- Communication
- Death and Dying
- Dementia
- Depression
- Disability
- Disease and Health
- Doctor-Patient Relationship
- Empathy
- Family Relationships
- Father-Son Relationship
- Grief
- Hospitalization
- Human Worth
- Illness and the Family
- Individuality
- Loneliness
- Love
- Marital Discord
- Medical Research
- Memory
- Mental Illness
- Mother-Son Relationship
- Mourning
- Narrative as Method
- Nursing
- Obsession
- Parenthood
- Religion
- Science
- Suffering
- Survival
- Technology
- Time
- Women's Health
LitMed book suggestion 15
http://medhum.med.nyu.edu/view/1275
THERAPY
David Lodge tells his story through the pages of his protagonist's psychotherapy journal.
LitMed book suggestion 14
INTER ICE AGE 4
Kobo Abe's near-future scifi looks as if it would hit my cyberpunk sweet spot. Look forward to reading this one.
Monday, February 01, 2016
Wednesday, January 27, 2016
Sunday, January 24, 2016
University of Liverpool case histories of bibliotherapy course
https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/cpd/courses/cpd-london/bibliotherapy/
One woman self treats post partum depression with books
http://www.empowher.com/depression/content/bibliotherapy-reading-list-relief-depression?page=0,2
BTT biblio telephone therapy a success
http://www.thepsychiatry.com/feasibility-and-acceptability-of-bibliotherapy-and-telephone-sessions-for-the-treatment-of-late-life-anxiety-disorders/
Excellent bibliography on Words Work Well Scotland
http://wordsworkwellscotland.co.uk/lapidus_tool/biblio-therapeutic-uses-of-reading-and-writing/
Bibliotherapy in Scotland
http://wordsworkwellscotland.co.uk/ted-bowman-gives-talk-on-bibliotherapy/
Bibliotherapy blog well set up but not sure it is therapeutic so much as reviewing
http://biblio-therapy.com/category/genre/graphic-novel/
WebMD lists how reading might make you happier
http://blogs.webmd.com/art-of-relationships/2015/12/how-reading-might-make-you-happier.html
School of Life bibliotherapists on staff £100 a shot
http://www.theschooloflife.com/london/shop/individual-bibliotherapy/?utm_source=The+School+of+Life+Mailing+List&utm_campaign=41278306de-Anxious_Gift_Guide12_2_2015&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_ee13007971-41278306de-20832913&mc_cid=41278306de&mc_eid=757be0fe2c
Well thought out review of A NOVEL CURE
https://themisanthropologist.wordpress.com/2015/12/14/a-novel-cure-an-a-z-of-literary-remedies/
Saturday, January 23, 2016
Friday, January 22, 2016
Wednesday, November 18, 2015
Gotham questionnaire character prompts
https://www.writingclasses.com/toolbox/character-questionnaire/gotham
Proust questionnaire of character prompts
https://www.writingclasses.com/toolbox/character-questionnaire/proust
Sunday, November 15, 2015
Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
Quotes:
I'm like a man who's been half-asleep all his life, trying to find out what he was like before he woke up.
...emotional problems can't be solved as intellectual problems are.
I am not only a thing, but also a way of being--one of many ways--and knowing the paths I have followed and the ones left to take will help me understand what I am becoming.
How many great problems have gone unsolved because men didn't know enough, or have enough faith in the creative process and in themselves, to let go for the whole mind to work at it?
Tuesday, October 13, 2015
Saturday, October 10, 2015
Tuesday, August 18, 2015
Neal Stephenson SEVENEVES
Was reading along getting into the storyline, even enjoying the hard science details up until the part where NS jumps ahead 5000 years into the future, leaving the first part of the novel abruptly and disconcertingly and unsatisfingly hanging. I put it down at page 638, with 861 total, though I had started skimming about a hundred pages earlier. Really too bad. So much time and thought obviously went into its making. Being a big NS fan, I was ultimately dissapointed.
Even though some resolution was implied, in that there are descendants of survivors, the Eves, making up the second part of the novel - there is no sense of continuity. It almost seems as if this were a 1000+ page novel and that publishers edited down the pastry shell to 638 but left out the creamy center. Or maybe NS just lost the momentum he needed to bring it all home.
Seven moons is about how long it will take to plod through to the end. (I had a peek through and skimmed the last chapter. There is a teaser about a character from the first part. Will we see the parallel storyline developed in a 2nd in a series of #? Will I even care?
Even though some resolution was implied, in that there are descendants of survivors, the Eves, making up the second part of the novel - there is no sense of continuity. It almost seems as if this were a 1000+ page novel and that publishers edited down the pastry shell to 638 but left out the creamy center. Or maybe NS just lost the momentum he needed to bring it all home.
Seven moons is about how long it will take to plod through to the end. (I had a peek through and skimmed the last chapter. There is a teaser about a character from the first part. Will we see the parallel storyline developed in a 2nd in a series of #? Will I even care?
Tuesday, July 28, 2015
Picture This by Lynda Barry
Quote: the image world is not part of our mind - our mind is part of the image world.
Barry is great for helping me get out of my head. Perfect inspiration for starting the process of visual journaling. She supports drawing for no reason and inner critics on vacation. Be a kid. Pick up a brush. Make a mess. Make art farts.
Sunday, July 26, 2015
Nox by Anne Carson
I have this book sitting beside me...a beautiful book physically. Boxed with pages in one long sectionally-glued manuscript with archadian fold. It would be a good book for me to read, about a girl who lost her brother. So irresponsible of her...
Thursday, July 09, 2015
Haruki Murakami
Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki took me back to high school and the inevitable feelings of alienation adolescence engenders. And guess what, if I'm interpreting the novel correctly, it doesn't end with adolescence but shadows our experience always.
I Am Radar by Reif Larsen
Quotes:
"It's not the act of observation which makes things inherently uncertain--it's the system itself which is uncertain. We blame it on us, the observers, but this is merely a convenient excuse, for the uncertainty is actually built into the world. A particle can never have two definite atributes--direction and position. If you define one, the other fades into determinism. And so: there is no way to know everything. You must choose your knowledge."
"The Japanese have a saying: Shiranu ga hotoke...
You must be prepared not to know what you want to know...you must be prepared for the question to be the answer."
"...two different types of Norwegian-Nynorsk and Bokmal...
nynorsk was the language invented for the people, not the elite, who all spoke Bokmal.
Bokmal is really a kind of bastardized Danish."
Pg90
Thursday, June 04, 2015
Lory's Blog on Bibliotherapy
http://luzblanco811.blogspot.com/2015/05/summary-of-final-project_12.html?m=1
Looks like another enthusiast here. Must explore.
Wednesday, February 18, 2015
The Rise and Fall of Great Powers by Tom Rachman
"People kept their books, she thought, not because they were likely to read them again but because these objects contained the past--the texture of being oneself at a particular place, at a particular time, each volume a piece of one's intellect..."
Referencing J.M.E. McTaggart, "...human perception deceives us: time only feels like a forward moving flow because of the limits of our minds, whereas time actually exists, as another country and its inhabitants exist even once you leave it."
"...past is like overseas: it still exists, even when you are not there anymore."
"Like a black hole, the Internet generated its own gravity, neither light not time escaping."
Monday, January 19, 2015
Fictional "Experience-taking" Transforms Lives
http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/exptaking.htm
Psychological study shows, if we immerse ourselves in a character, we are more likely to act in ways in accordance with the behaviour patterns of the character.
Psychological study shows, if we immerse ourselves in a character, we are more likely to act in ways in accordance with the behaviour patterns of the character.
Decon
http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/decon.html
How to Deconstruct Almost Anything
Step 1 -- Select a work to be deconstructed. This a called a "text" and is generally a piece of text, though it need not be. It is very much within the lit crit mainstream to take something which is not text and call it a text. In fact, this can be a very useful thing to do, since it leaves the critic with broad discretion to define what it means to "read" it and thus a great deal of flexibility in interpretation. It also allows the literary critic to extend his reach beyond mere literature.
full text
How to Deconstruct Almost Anything--My Postmodern Adventure
Chip Morningstar, Electric Communities
"Academics get paid for being clever, not for being right." -- Donald Norman
This is the story of one computer professional's explorations in the world of postmodern literary criticism. I'm a working software engineer, not a student nor an academic nor a person with any real background in the humanities. Consequently, I've approached the whole subject with a somewhat different frame of mind than perhaps people in the field are accustomed to. Being a vulgar engineer I'm allowed to break a lot of the rules that people in the humanities usually have to play by, since nobody expects an engineer to be literate. Ha. Anyway, here is my tale.
It started when my colleague Randy Farmer and I presented a paper at the Second International Conference on Cyberspace, held in Santa Cruz, California in April, 1991. Like the first conference, at which we also presented a paper, it was an aggressively interdisciplinary gathering, drawing from fields as diverse as computer science, literary criticism, engineering, history, philosophy, anthropology, psychology, and political science. About the only relevant field that seemed to lack strong representation was economics (an important gap but one which we don't have room to get into here). It was in turn stimulating, aggravating, fascinating and infuriating, a breathtaking intellectual roller coaster ride unlike anything else I've recently encountered in my professional life. My last serious brush with the humanities in an academic context had been in college, ten years earlier. The humanities appear to have experienced a considerable amount of evolution (or perhaps more accurately, genetic drift) since then.
Randy and I were scheduled to speak on the second day of the conference. This was fortunate because it gave us the opportunity to recalibrate our presentation based on the first day's proceedings, during which we discovered that we had grossly mischaracterized the audience by assuming that it would be like the crowd from the first conference. I spent most of that first day furiously scribbling notes. People kept saying the most remarkable things using the most remarkable language, which I found I needed to put down in writing because the words would disappear from my brain within seconds if I didn't. Are you familiar with the experience of having memories of your dreams fade within a few minutes of waking? It was like that, and I think for much the same reason. Dreams have a logic and structure all their own, falling apart into unmemorable pieces that make no sense when subjected to the scrutiny of the conscious mind. So it was with many of the academics who got up to speak. The things they said were largely incomprehensible. There was much talk about deconstruction and signifiers and arguments about whether cyberspace was or was not "narrative". There was much quotation from Baudrillard, Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard, Saussure, and the like, every single word of which was impenetrable. I'd never before had the experience of being quite this baffled by things other people were saying. I've attended lectures on quantum physics, group theory, cardiology, and contract law, all fields about which I know nothing and all of which have their own specialized jargon and notational conventions. None of those lectures were as opaque as anything these academics said. But I captured on my notepad an astonishing collection of phrases and a sense of the overall tone of the event.
We retreated back to Palo Alto that evening for a quick rewrite. The first order of business was to excise various little bits of phraseology that we now realized were likely to be perceived as Politically Incorrect. Mind you, the fundamental thesis of our presentation was Politically Incorrect, but we wanted people to get upset about the actual content rather than the form in which it was presented. Then we set about attempting to add something that would be an adequate response to the postmodern lit crit-speak we had been inundated with that day. Since we had no idea what any of it meant (or even if it actually meant anything at all), I simply cut-and-pasted from my notes. The next day I stood up in front of the room and opened our presentation with the following:
The essential paradigm of cyberspace is creating partially situated identities out of actual or potential social reality in terms of canonical forms of human contact, thus renormalizing the phenomenology of narrative space and requiring the naturalization of the intersubjective cognitive strategy, and thereby resolving the dialectics of metaphorical thoughts, each problematic to the other, collectively redefining and reifying the paradigm of the parable of the model of the metaphor.
This bit of nonsense was constructed entirely out of things people had actually said the day before, except for the last ten words or so which are a pastiche of Danny Kaye's "flagon with the dragon" bit from The Court Jester, contributed by our co-worker Gayle Pergamit, who took great glee in the entire enterprise. Observing the audience reaction was instructive. At first, various people started nodding their heads in nods of profound understanding, though you could see that their brain cells were beginning to strain a little. Then some of the techies in the back of the room began to giggle. By the time I finished, unable to get through the last line with a straight face, the entire room was on the floor in hysterics, as by then even the most obtuse English professor had caught on to the joke. With the postmodernist lit crit shit thus defused, we went on with our actual presentation.
Contrary to the report given in the "Hype List" column of issue #1 of Wired ("Po-Mo Gets Tek-No", page 87), we did not shout down the postmodernists. We made fun of them.
Afterward, however, I was left with a sense that I should try to actually understand what these people were saying, really. I figured that one of three cases must apply. It could be that there was truly some content there of value, once you learned the lingo. If this was the case, then I wanted to know what it was. On the other hand, perhaps there was actually content there but it was bogus (my working hypothesis), in which case I wanted to be able to respond to it credibly. On the third hand, maybe there was no content there after all, in which case I wanted to be able to write these clowns off without feeling guilty that I hadn't given them due consideration.
The subject that I kept hearing about over and over again at the conference was deconstruction. I figured I'd start there. I asked my friend Michael Benedikt for a pointer to some sources. I had gotten to know Michael when he organized the First International Conference on Cyberspace. I knew him to be a person with a foot in the lit crit camp but also a person of clear intellectual integrity who was not a fool. He suggested a book called On Deconstruction by Jonathan Culler. I got the book and read it. It was a stretch, but I found I could work my way through it, although I did end up with the most heavily marked up book in my library by the time I was done. The Culler book lead me to some other things, which I also read. And I started subscribing to alt.postmodern and now actually find it interesting, much of the time. I can't claim to be an expert, but I feel I've reached the level of a competent amateur. I think I can explain it. It turns out that there's nothing to be afraid of.
We engineers are frequently accused of speaking an alien language, of wrapping what we do in jargon and obscurity in order to preserve the technological priesthood. There is, I think, a grain of truth in this accusation. Defenders frequently counter with arguments about how what we do really is technical and really does require precise language in order to talk about it clearly. There is, I think, a substantial bit of truth in this as well, though it is hard to use these grounds to defend the use of the term "grep" to describe digging through a backpack to find a lost item, as a friend of mine sometimes does. However, I think it's human nature for members of any group to use the ideas they have in common as metaphors for everything else in life, so I'm willing to forgive him.
The really telling factor that neither side of the debate seems to cotton to, however, is this: technical people like me work in a commercial environment. Every day I have to explain what I do to people who are different from me -- marketing people, technical writers, my boss, my investors, my customers -- none of whom belong to my profession or share my technical background or knowledge. As a consequence, I'm constantly forced to describe what I know in terms that other people can at least begin to understand. My success in my job depends to a large degree on my success in so communicating. At the very least, in order to remain employed I have to convince somebody else that what I'm doing is worth having them pay for it.
Contrast this situation with that of academia. Professors of Literature or History or Cultural Studies in their professional life find themselves communicating principally with other professors of Literature or History or Cultural Studies. They also, of course, communicate with students, but students don't really count. Graduate students are studying to be professors themselves and so are already part of the in-crowd. Undergraduate students rarely get a chance to close the feedback loop, especially at the so called "better schools" (I once spoke with a Harvard professor who told me that it is quite easy to get a Harvard undergraduate degree without ever once encountering a tenured member of the faculty inside a classroom; I don't know if this is actually true but it's a delightful piece of slander regardless). They publish in peer reviewed journals, which are not only edited by their peers but published for and mainly read by their peers (if they are read at all). Decisions about their career advancement, tenure, promotion, and so on are made by committees of their fellows. They are supervised by deans and other academic officials who themselves used to be professors of Literature or History or Cultural Studies. They rarely have any reason to talk to anybody but themselves -- occasionally a Professor of Literature will collaborate with a Professor of History, but in academic circles this sort of interdisciplinary work is still considered sufficiently daring and risquÝ as to be newsworthy.
What you have is rather like birds on the Galapagos islands -- an isolated population with unique selective pressures resulting in evolutionary divergence from the mainland population. There's no reason you should be able to understand what these academics are saying because, for several generations, comprehensibility to outsiders has not been one of the selective criteria to which they've been subjected. What's more, it's not particularly important that they even be terribly comprehensible to each other, since the quality of academic work, particularly in the humanities, is judged primarily on the basis of politics and cleverness. In fact, one of the beliefs that seems to be characteristic of the postmodernist mind set is the idea that politics and cleverness are the basis for all judgments about quality or truth, regardless of the subject matter or who is making the judgment. A work need not be right, clear, original, or connected to anything outside the group. Indeed, it looks to me like the vast bulk of literary criticism that is published has other works of literary criticism as its principal subject, with the occasional reference to the odd work of actual literature tossed in for flavoring from time to time.
Thus it is not surprising that it takes a bit of detective work to puzzle out what is going on. But I've been on the case for a while now and I think I've identified most of the guilty suspects. I hope I can spare some of my own peers the inconvenience and wasted time of actually doing the legwork themselves (though if you have an inclination in that direction I recommend it as a mind stretching departure from debugging C code).
The basic enterprise of contemporary literary criticism is actually quite simple. It is based on the observation that with a sufficient amount of clever handwaving and artful verbiage, you can interpret any piece of writing as a statement about anything at all. The broader movement that goes under the label "postmodernism" generalizes this principle from writing to all forms of human activity, though you have to be careful about applying this label, since a standard postmodernist tactic for ducking criticism is to try to stir up metaphysical confusion by questioning the very idea of labels and categories. "Deconstruction" is based on a specialization of the principle, in which a work is interpreted as a statement about itself, using a literary version of the same cheap trick that Kurt Gðdel used to try to frighten mathematicians back in the thirties.
Deconstruction, in particular, is a fairly formulaic process that hardly merits the commotion that it has generated. However, like hack writers or television producers, academics will use a formula if it does the job and they are not held to any higher standard (though perhaps Derrida can legitimately claim some credit for originality in inventing the formula in the first place). Just to clear up the mystery, here is the formula, step-by-step:
Step 1 -- Select a work to be deconstructed. This a called a "text" and is generally a piece of text, though it need not be. It is very much within the lit crit mainstream to take something which is not text and call it a text. In fact, this can be a very useful thing to do, since it leaves the critic with broad discretion to define what it means to "read" it and thus a great deal of flexibility in interpretation. It also allows the literary critic to extend his reach beyond mere literature. However, the choice of text is actually one of the less important decisions you will need to make, since points are awarded on the basis of style and wit rather than substance, although more challenging works are valued for their greater potential for exercising cleverness. Thus you want to pick your text with an eye to the opportunities it will give you to be clever and convoluted, rather than whether the text has anything important to say or there is anything important to say about it. Generally speaking, obscure works are better than well known ones, though an acceptable alternative is to choose a text from the popular mass media, such as a Madonna video or the latest Danielle Steele novel. The text can be of any length, from the complete works of Louis L'Amour to a single sentence. For example, let's deconstruct the phrase, "John F. Kennedy was not a homosexual."
Step 2 -- Decide what the text says. This can be whatever you want, although of course in the case of a text which actually consists of text it is easier if you pick something that it really does say. This is called "reading". I will read our example phrase as saying that John F. Kennedy was not a homosexual.
Step 3 -- Identify within the reading a distinction of some sort. This can be either something which is described or referred to by the text directly or it can be inferred from the presumed cultural context of a hypothetical reader. It is a convention of the genre to choose a duality, such as man/woman, good/evil, earth/sky, chocolate/vanilla, etc. In the case of our example, the obvious duality to pick is homosexual/heterosexual, though a really clever person might be able to find something else.
Step 4 -- Convert your chosen distinction into a "hierarchical opposition" by asserting that the text claims or presumes a particular primacy, superiority, privilege or importance to one side or the other of the distinction. Since it's pretty much arbitrary, you don't have to give a justification for this assertion unless you feel like it. Programmers and computer scientists may find the concept of a hierarchy consisting of only two elements to be a bit odd, but this appears to be an established tradition in literary criticism. Continuing our example, we can claim homophobia on the part of the society in which this sentence was uttered and therefor assert that it presumes superiority of heterosexuality over homosexuality.
Step 5 -- Derive another reading of the text, one in which it is interpreted as referring to itself. In particular, find a way to read it as a statement which contradicts or undermines either the original reading or the ordering of the hierarchical opposition (which amounts to the same thing). This is really the tricky part and is the key to the whole exercise. Pulling this off successfully may require a variety of techniques, though you get more style points for some techniques than for others. Fortunately, you have a wide range of intellectual tools at your disposal, which the rules allow you to use in literary criticism even though they would be frowned upon in engineering or the sciences. These include appeals to authority (you can even cite obscure authorities that nobody has heard of), reasoning from etymology, reasoning from puns, and a variety of word other games. You are allowed to use the word "problematic" as a noun. You are also allowed to pretend that the works of Freud present a correct model of human psychology and the works of Marx present a correct model of sociology and economics (it's not clear to me whether practitioners in the field actually believe Freud and Marx or if it's just a convention of the genre).
You get maximum style points for being French. Since most of us aren't French, we don't qualify for this one, but we can still score almost as much by writing in French or citing French sources. However, it is difficult for even the most intense and unprincipled American academician writing in French to match the zen obliqueness of a native French literary critic. Least credit is given for a clear, rational argument which makes its case directly, though of course that is what I will do with our example since, being gainfully employed, I don't have to worry about graduation or tenure. And besides, I'm actually trying to communicate here. Here is a possible argument to go with our example:
It is not generally claimed that John F. Kennedy was a homosexual. Since it is not an issue, why would anyone choose to explicitly declare that he was not a homosexual unless they wanted to make it an issue? Clearly, the reader is left with a question, a lingering doubt which had not previously been there. If the text had instead simply asked, "Was John F. Kennedy a homosexual?", the reader would simply answer, "No." and forget the matter. If it had simply declared, "John F. Kennedy was a homosexual.", it would have left the reader begging for further justification or argument to support the proposition. Phrasing it as a negative declaration, however, introduces the question in the reader's mind, exploiting society's homophobia to attack the reputation of the fallen President. What's more, the form makes it appear as if there is ongoing debate, further legitimizing the reader's entertainment of the question. Thus the text can be read as questioning the very assertion that it is making.
Of course, no real deconstruction would be like this. I only used a single paragraph and avoided literary jargon. All of the words will be found in a typical abridged dictionary and were used with their conventional meanings. I also wrote entirely in English and did not cite anyone. Thus in an English literature course I would probably get a D for this, but I already have my degree so I don't care.
Another minor point, by the way, is that we don't say that we deconstruct the text but that the text deconstructs itself. This way it looks less like we are making things up.
That's basically all there is to it, although there is an enormous variety of stylistic complication that is added in practice. This is mainly due to the genetic drift phenomenon I mentioned earlier, resulting in the intellectual equivalent of peacock feathers, although I suspect that the need for enough material to fill up a degree program plays a part as well. The best way to learn, of course, is to try to do it yourself. First you need to read some real lit crit to get a feel for the style and the jargon. One or two volumes is all it takes, since it's all pretty much the same (I advise starting with the Culler book the way I did). Here are some ideas for texts you might try to deconstruct, once you are ready to attempt it yourself, graded by approximate level of difficulty:
Beginner:
Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and The Sea
Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers
this article
James Cameron's The Terminator
issue #1 of Wired
anything by Marx
Intermediate:
Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn
the Book of Genesis
Francois Truffaut's Day For Night
The United States Constitution
Elvis Presley singing Jailhouse Rock
anything by Foucault
Advanced:
Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene
the Great Pyramid of Giza
Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa
the Macintosh user interface
Tony Bennett singing I Left My Heart In San Francisco
anything by Derrida
Tour de Force:
James Joyce's Finnegans Wake
the San Jose, California telephone directory
IRS Form 1040
the Intel i486DX Programmer's Reference Manual
the Mississippi River
anything by Baudrillard
So, what are we to make of all this? I earlier stated that my quest was to learn if there was any content to this stuff and if it was or was not bogus. Well, my assessment is that there is indeed some content, much of it interesting. The question of bogosity, however, is a little more difficult. It is clear that the forms used by academicians writing in this area go right off the bogosity scale, pegging my bogometer until it breaks. The quality of the actual analysis of various literary works varies tremendously and must be judged on a case-by-case basis, but I find most of it highly questionable. Buried in the muck, however, are a set of important and interesting ideas: that in reading a work it is illuminating to consider the contrast between what is said and what is not said, between what is explicit and what is assumed, and that popular notions of truth and value depend to a disturbingly high degree on the reader's credulity and willingness to accept the text's own claims as to its validity.
Looking at the field of contemporary literary criticism as a whole also yields some valuable insights. It is a cautionary lesson about the consequences of allowing a branch of academia that has been entrusted with the study of important problems to become isolated and inbred. The Pseudo Politically Correct term that I would use to describe the mind set of postmodernism is "epistemologically challenged": a constitutional inability to adopt a reasonable way to tell the good stuff from the bad stuff. The language and idea space of the field have become so convoluted that they have confused even themselves. But the tangle offers a safe refuge for the academics. It erects a wall between them and the rest of the world. It immunizes them against having to confront their own failings, since any genuine criticism can simply be absorbed into the morass and made indistinguishable from all the other verbiage. Intellectual tools that might help prune the thicket are systematically ignored or discredited. This is why, for example, science, psychology and economics are represented in the literary world by theories that were abandoned by practicing scientists, psychologists and economists fifty or a hundred years ago. The field is absorbed in triviality. Deconstruction is an idea that would make a worthy topic for some bright graduate student's Ph.D. dissertation but has instead spawned an entire subfield. Ideas that would merit a good solid evening or afternoon of argument and debate and perhaps a paper or two instead become the focus of entire careers.
Engineering and the sciences have, to a greater degree, been spared this isolation and genetic drift because of crass commercial necessity. The constraints of the physical world and the actual needs and wants of the actual population have provided a grounding that is difficult to dodge. However, in academia the pressures for isolation are enormous. It is clear to me that the humanities are not going to emerge from the jungle on their
How to Deconstruct Almost Anything
Step 1 -- Select a work to be deconstructed. This a called a "text" and is generally a piece of text, though it need not be. It is very much within the lit crit mainstream to take something which is not text and call it a text. In fact, this can be a very useful thing to do, since it leaves the critic with broad discretion to define what it means to "read" it and thus a great deal of flexibility in interpretation. It also allows the literary critic to extend his reach beyond mere literature.
full text
How to Deconstruct Almost Anything--My Postmodern Adventure
Chip Morningstar, Electric Communities
"Academics get paid for being clever, not for being right." -- Donald Norman
This is the story of one computer professional's explorations in the world of postmodern literary criticism. I'm a working software engineer, not a student nor an academic nor a person with any real background in the humanities. Consequently, I've approached the whole subject with a somewhat different frame of mind than perhaps people in the field are accustomed to. Being a vulgar engineer I'm allowed to break a lot of the rules that people in the humanities usually have to play by, since nobody expects an engineer to be literate. Ha. Anyway, here is my tale.
It started when my colleague Randy Farmer and I presented a paper at the Second International Conference on Cyberspace, held in Santa Cruz, California in April, 1991. Like the first conference, at which we also presented a paper, it was an aggressively interdisciplinary gathering, drawing from fields as diverse as computer science, literary criticism, engineering, history, philosophy, anthropology, psychology, and political science. About the only relevant field that seemed to lack strong representation was economics (an important gap but one which we don't have room to get into here). It was in turn stimulating, aggravating, fascinating and infuriating, a breathtaking intellectual roller coaster ride unlike anything else I've recently encountered in my professional life. My last serious brush with the humanities in an academic context had been in college, ten years earlier. The humanities appear to have experienced a considerable amount of evolution (or perhaps more accurately, genetic drift) since then.
Randy and I were scheduled to speak on the second day of the conference. This was fortunate because it gave us the opportunity to recalibrate our presentation based on the first day's proceedings, during which we discovered that we had grossly mischaracterized the audience by assuming that it would be like the crowd from the first conference. I spent most of that first day furiously scribbling notes. People kept saying the most remarkable things using the most remarkable language, which I found I needed to put down in writing because the words would disappear from my brain within seconds if I didn't. Are you familiar with the experience of having memories of your dreams fade within a few minutes of waking? It was like that, and I think for much the same reason. Dreams have a logic and structure all their own, falling apart into unmemorable pieces that make no sense when subjected to the scrutiny of the conscious mind. So it was with many of the academics who got up to speak. The things they said were largely incomprehensible. There was much talk about deconstruction and signifiers and arguments about whether cyberspace was or was not "narrative". There was much quotation from Baudrillard, Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard, Saussure, and the like, every single word of which was impenetrable. I'd never before had the experience of being quite this baffled by things other people were saying. I've attended lectures on quantum physics, group theory, cardiology, and contract law, all fields about which I know nothing and all of which have their own specialized jargon and notational conventions. None of those lectures were as opaque as anything these academics said. But I captured on my notepad an astonishing collection of phrases and a sense of the overall tone of the event.
We retreated back to Palo Alto that evening for a quick rewrite. The first order of business was to excise various little bits of phraseology that we now realized were likely to be perceived as Politically Incorrect. Mind you, the fundamental thesis of our presentation was Politically Incorrect, but we wanted people to get upset about the actual content rather than the form in which it was presented. Then we set about attempting to add something that would be an adequate response to the postmodern lit crit-speak we had been inundated with that day. Since we had no idea what any of it meant (or even if it actually meant anything at all), I simply cut-and-pasted from my notes. The next day I stood up in front of the room and opened our presentation with the following:
The essential paradigm of cyberspace is creating partially situated identities out of actual or potential social reality in terms of canonical forms of human contact, thus renormalizing the phenomenology of narrative space and requiring the naturalization of the intersubjective cognitive strategy, and thereby resolving the dialectics of metaphorical thoughts, each problematic to the other, collectively redefining and reifying the paradigm of the parable of the model of the metaphor.
This bit of nonsense was constructed entirely out of things people had actually said the day before, except for the last ten words or so which are a pastiche of Danny Kaye's "flagon with the dragon" bit from The Court Jester, contributed by our co-worker Gayle Pergamit, who took great glee in the entire enterprise. Observing the audience reaction was instructive. At first, various people started nodding their heads in nods of profound understanding, though you could see that their brain cells were beginning to strain a little. Then some of the techies in the back of the room began to giggle. By the time I finished, unable to get through the last line with a straight face, the entire room was on the floor in hysterics, as by then even the most obtuse English professor had caught on to the joke. With the postmodernist lit crit shit thus defused, we went on with our actual presentation.
Contrary to the report given in the "Hype List" column of issue #1 of Wired ("Po-Mo Gets Tek-No", page 87), we did not shout down the postmodernists. We made fun of them.
Afterward, however, I was left with a sense that I should try to actually understand what these people were saying, really. I figured that one of three cases must apply. It could be that there was truly some content there of value, once you learned the lingo. If this was the case, then I wanted to know what it was. On the other hand, perhaps there was actually content there but it was bogus (my working hypothesis), in which case I wanted to be able to respond to it credibly. On the third hand, maybe there was no content there after all, in which case I wanted to be able to write these clowns off without feeling guilty that I hadn't given them due consideration.
The subject that I kept hearing about over and over again at the conference was deconstruction. I figured I'd start there. I asked my friend Michael Benedikt for a pointer to some sources. I had gotten to know Michael when he organized the First International Conference on Cyberspace. I knew him to be a person with a foot in the lit crit camp but also a person of clear intellectual integrity who was not a fool. He suggested a book called On Deconstruction by Jonathan Culler. I got the book and read it. It was a stretch, but I found I could work my way through it, although I did end up with the most heavily marked up book in my library by the time I was done. The Culler book lead me to some other things, which I also read. And I started subscribing to alt.postmodern and now actually find it interesting, much of the time. I can't claim to be an expert, but I feel I've reached the level of a competent amateur. I think I can explain it. It turns out that there's nothing to be afraid of.
We engineers are frequently accused of speaking an alien language, of wrapping what we do in jargon and obscurity in order to preserve the technological priesthood. There is, I think, a grain of truth in this accusation. Defenders frequently counter with arguments about how what we do really is technical and really does require precise language in order to talk about it clearly. There is, I think, a substantial bit of truth in this as well, though it is hard to use these grounds to defend the use of the term "grep" to describe digging through a backpack to find a lost item, as a friend of mine sometimes does. However, I think it's human nature for members of any group to use the ideas they have in common as metaphors for everything else in life, so I'm willing to forgive him.
The really telling factor that neither side of the debate seems to cotton to, however, is this: technical people like me work in a commercial environment. Every day I have to explain what I do to people who are different from me -- marketing people, technical writers, my boss, my investors, my customers -- none of whom belong to my profession or share my technical background or knowledge. As a consequence, I'm constantly forced to describe what I know in terms that other people can at least begin to understand. My success in my job depends to a large degree on my success in so communicating. At the very least, in order to remain employed I have to convince somebody else that what I'm doing is worth having them pay for it.
Contrast this situation with that of academia. Professors of Literature or History or Cultural Studies in their professional life find themselves communicating principally with other professors of Literature or History or Cultural Studies. They also, of course, communicate with students, but students don't really count. Graduate students are studying to be professors themselves and so are already part of the in-crowd. Undergraduate students rarely get a chance to close the feedback loop, especially at the so called "better schools" (I once spoke with a Harvard professor who told me that it is quite easy to get a Harvard undergraduate degree without ever once encountering a tenured member of the faculty inside a classroom; I don't know if this is actually true but it's a delightful piece of slander regardless). They publish in peer reviewed journals, which are not only edited by their peers but published for and mainly read by their peers (if they are read at all). Decisions about their career advancement, tenure, promotion, and so on are made by committees of their fellows. They are supervised by deans and other academic officials who themselves used to be professors of Literature or History or Cultural Studies. They rarely have any reason to talk to anybody but themselves -- occasionally a Professor of Literature will collaborate with a Professor of History, but in academic circles this sort of interdisciplinary work is still considered sufficiently daring and risquÝ as to be newsworthy.
What you have is rather like birds on the Galapagos islands -- an isolated population with unique selective pressures resulting in evolutionary divergence from the mainland population. There's no reason you should be able to understand what these academics are saying because, for several generations, comprehensibility to outsiders has not been one of the selective criteria to which they've been subjected. What's more, it's not particularly important that they even be terribly comprehensible to each other, since the quality of academic work, particularly in the humanities, is judged primarily on the basis of politics and cleverness. In fact, one of the beliefs that seems to be characteristic of the postmodernist mind set is the idea that politics and cleverness are the basis for all judgments about quality or truth, regardless of the subject matter or who is making the judgment. A work need not be right, clear, original, or connected to anything outside the group. Indeed, it looks to me like the vast bulk of literary criticism that is published has other works of literary criticism as its principal subject, with the occasional reference to the odd work of actual literature tossed in for flavoring from time to time.
Thus it is not surprising that it takes a bit of detective work to puzzle out what is going on. But I've been on the case for a while now and I think I've identified most of the guilty suspects. I hope I can spare some of my own peers the inconvenience and wasted time of actually doing the legwork themselves (though if you have an inclination in that direction I recommend it as a mind stretching departure from debugging C code).
The basic enterprise of contemporary literary criticism is actually quite simple. It is based on the observation that with a sufficient amount of clever handwaving and artful verbiage, you can interpret any piece of writing as a statement about anything at all. The broader movement that goes under the label "postmodernism" generalizes this principle from writing to all forms of human activity, though you have to be careful about applying this label, since a standard postmodernist tactic for ducking criticism is to try to stir up metaphysical confusion by questioning the very idea of labels and categories. "Deconstruction" is based on a specialization of the principle, in which a work is interpreted as a statement about itself, using a literary version of the same cheap trick that Kurt Gðdel used to try to frighten mathematicians back in the thirties.
Deconstruction, in particular, is a fairly formulaic process that hardly merits the commotion that it has generated. However, like hack writers or television producers, academics will use a formula if it does the job and they are not held to any higher standard (though perhaps Derrida can legitimately claim some credit for originality in inventing the formula in the first place). Just to clear up the mystery, here is the formula, step-by-step:
Step 1 -- Select a work to be deconstructed. This a called a "text" and is generally a piece of text, though it need not be. It is very much within the lit crit mainstream to take something which is not text and call it a text. In fact, this can be a very useful thing to do, since it leaves the critic with broad discretion to define what it means to "read" it and thus a great deal of flexibility in interpretation. It also allows the literary critic to extend his reach beyond mere literature. However, the choice of text is actually one of the less important decisions you will need to make, since points are awarded on the basis of style and wit rather than substance, although more challenging works are valued for their greater potential for exercising cleverness. Thus you want to pick your text with an eye to the opportunities it will give you to be clever and convoluted, rather than whether the text has anything important to say or there is anything important to say about it. Generally speaking, obscure works are better than well known ones, though an acceptable alternative is to choose a text from the popular mass media, such as a Madonna video or the latest Danielle Steele novel. The text can be of any length, from the complete works of Louis L'Amour to a single sentence. For example, let's deconstruct the phrase, "John F. Kennedy was not a homosexual."
Step 2 -- Decide what the text says. This can be whatever you want, although of course in the case of a text which actually consists of text it is easier if you pick something that it really does say. This is called "reading". I will read our example phrase as saying that John F. Kennedy was not a homosexual.
Step 3 -- Identify within the reading a distinction of some sort. This can be either something which is described or referred to by the text directly or it can be inferred from the presumed cultural context of a hypothetical reader. It is a convention of the genre to choose a duality, such as man/woman, good/evil, earth/sky, chocolate/vanilla, etc. In the case of our example, the obvious duality to pick is homosexual/heterosexual, though a really clever person might be able to find something else.
Step 4 -- Convert your chosen distinction into a "hierarchical opposition" by asserting that the text claims or presumes a particular primacy, superiority, privilege or importance to one side or the other of the distinction. Since it's pretty much arbitrary, you don't have to give a justification for this assertion unless you feel like it. Programmers and computer scientists may find the concept of a hierarchy consisting of only two elements to be a bit odd, but this appears to be an established tradition in literary criticism. Continuing our example, we can claim homophobia on the part of the society in which this sentence was uttered and therefor assert that it presumes superiority of heterosexuality over homosexuality.
Step 5 -- Derive another reading of the text, one in which it is interpreted as referring to itself. In particular, find a way to read it as a statement which contradicts or undermines either the original reading or the ordering of the hierarchical opposition (which amounts to the same thing). This is really the tricky part and is the key to the whole exercise. Pulling this off successfully may require a variety of techniques, though you get more style points for some techniques than for others. Fortunately, you have a wide range of intellectual tools at your disposal, which the rules allow you to use in literary criticism even though they would be frowned upon in engineering or the sciences. These include appeals to authority (you can even cite obscure authorities that nobody has heard of), reasoning from etymology, reasoning from puns, and a variety of word other games. You are allowed to use the word "problematic" as a noun. You are also allowed to pretend that the works of Freud present a correct model of human psychology and the works of Marx present a correct model of sociology and economics (it's not clear to me whether practitioners in the field actually believe Freud and Marx or if it's just a convention of the genre).
You get maximum style points for being French. Since most of us aren't French, we don't qualify for this one, but we can still score almost as much by writing in French or citing French sources. However, it is difficult for even the most intense and unprincipled American academician writing in French to match the zen obliqueness of a native French literary critic. Least credit is given for a clear, rational argument which makes its case directly, though of course that is what I will do with our example since, being gainfully employed, I don't have to worry about graduation or tenure. And besides, I'm actually trying to communicate here. Here is a possible argument to go with our example:
It is not generally claimed that John F. Kennedy was a homosexual. Since it is not an issue, why would anyone choose to explicitly declare that he was not a homosexual unless they wanted to make it an issue? Clearly, the reader is left with a question, a lingering doubt which had not previously been there. If the text had instead simply asked, "Was John F. Kennedy a homosexual?", the reader would simply answer, "No." and forget the matter. If it had simply declared, "John F. Kennedy was a homosexual.", it would have left the reader begging for further justification or argument to support the proposition. Phrasing it as a negative declaration, however, introduces the question in the reader's mind, exploiting society's homophobia to attack the reputation of the fallen President. What's more, the form makes it appear as if there is ongoing debate, further legitimizing the reader's entertainment of the question. Thus the text can be read as questioning the very assertion that it is making.
Of course, no real deconstruction would be like this. I only used a single paragraph and avoided literary jargon. All of the words will be found in a typical abridged dictionary and were used with their conventional meanings. I also wrote entirely in English and did not cite anyone. Thus in an English literature course I would probably get a D for this, but I already have my degree so I don't care.
Another minor point, by the way, is that we don't say that we deconstruct the text but that the text deconstructs itself. This way it looks less like we are making things up.
That's basically all there is to it, although there is an enormous variety of stylistic complication that is added in practice. This is mainly due to the genetic drift phenomenon I mentioned earlier, resulting in the intellectual equivalent of peacock feathers, although I suspect that the need for enough material to fill up a degree program plays a part as well. The best way to learn, of course, is to try to do it yourself. First you need to read some real lit crit to get a feel for the style and the jargon. One or two volumes is all it takes, since it's all pretty much the same (I advise starting with the Culler book the way I did). Here are some ideas for texts you might try to deconstruct, once you are ready to attempt it yourself, graded by approximate level of difficulty:
Beginner:
Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and The Sea
Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers
this article
James Cameron's The Terminator
issue #1 of Wired
anything by Marx
Intermediate:
Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn
the Book of Genesis
Francois Truffaut's Day For Night
The United States Constitution
Elvis Presley singing Jailhouse Rock
anything by Foucault
Advanced:
Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene
the Great Pyramid of Giza
Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa
the Macintosh user interface
Tony Bennett singing I Left My Heart In San Francisco
anything by Derrida
Tour de Force:
James Joyce's Finnegans Wake
the San Jose, California telephone directory
IRS Form 1040
the Intel i486DX Programmer's Reference Manual
the Mississippi River
anything by Baudrillard
So, what are we to make of all this? I earlier stated that my quest was to learn if there was any content to this stuff and if it was or was not bogus. Well, my assessment is that there is indeed some content, much of it interesting. The question of bogosity, however, is a little more difficult. It is clear that the forms used by academicians writing in this area go right off the bogosity scale, pegging my bogometer until it breaks. The quality of the actual analysis of various literary works varies tremendously and must be judged on a case-by-case basis, but I find most of it highly questionable. Buried in the muck, however, are a set of important and interesting ideas: that in reading a work it is illuminating to consider the contrast between what is said and what is not said, between what is explicit and what is assumed, and that popular notions of truth and value depend to a disturbingly high degree on the reader's credulity and willingness to accept the text's own claims as to its validity.
Looking at the field of contemporary literary criticism as a whole also yields some valuable insights. It is a cautionary lesson about the consequences of allowing a branch of academia that has been entrusted with the study of important problems to become isolated and inbred. The Pseudo Politically Correct term that I would use to describe the mind set of postmodernism is "epistemologically challenged": a constitutional inability to adopt a reasonable way to tell the good stuff from the bad stuff. The language and idea space of the field have become so convoluted that they have confused even themselves. But the tangle offers a safe refuge for the academics. It erects a wall between them and the rest of the world. It immunizes them against having to confront their own failings, since any genuine criticism can simply be absorbed into the morass and made indistinguishable from all the other verbiage. Intellectual tools that might help prune the thicket are systematically ignored or discredited. This is why, for example, science, psychology and economics are represented in the literary world by theories that were abandoned by practicing scientists, psychologists and economists fifty or a hundred years ago. The field is absorbed in triviality. Deconstruction is an idea that would make a worthy topic for some bright graduate student's Ph.D. dissertation but has instead spawned an entire subfield. Ideas that would merit a good solid evening or afternoon of argument and debate and perhaps a paper or two instead become the focus of entire careers.
Engineering and the sciences have, to a greater degree, been spared this isolation and genetic drift because of crass commercial necessity. The constraints of the physical world and the actual needs and wants of the actual population have provided a grounding that is difficult to dodge. However, in academia the pressures for isolation are enormous. It is clear to me that the humanities are not going to emerge from the jungle on their
BBC initiates new bibliotherapy column
http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20150106-can-you-read-yourself-happy
from Hephzibah Anderson and the BBC: Can you read yourself happy?
Dorland’s Illustrated Medical Dictionary first acknowledged bibliotherapy in 1941, defining the term as “the employment of books and the reading of them in the treatment of nervous diseases”, but according to the Oxford English Dictionary, it first popped up in print in 1920, in Christopher Morley’s The Haunted Bookshop.
Set in a world still reeling from World War One, the novel pairs a screwball rom-com involving a young adman and the heiress to a prune empire, with a German plot to blow up the US president. It’s a period piece, really, but its backdrop – a second-hand bookstore in Brooklyn called Parnassus at Home – remains a bibliophile’s paradise, fragrant with the scent of “mellowed paper and leather” and tobacco from the pipe that its owner, Mr Mifflin, puffs away on day and night.
Mifflin is not just a bookseller, though, he’s a “practitioner of bibliotherapy”. As he explains it, “My pleasure is to prescribe books for such patients as drop in here and are willing to tell me their symptoms... There is no one so grateful as the man to whom you have given just the book his soul needed and he never knew it.”
(Perhaps being of Morley ancestry has something to do with my ongoing bibliotherapeutic fervor)
from Hephzibah Anderson and the BBC: Can you read yourself happy?
Dorland’s Illustrated Medical Dictionary first acknowledged bibliotherapy in 1941, defining the term as “the employment of books and the reading of them in the treatment of nervous diseases”, but according to the Oxford English Dictionary, it first popped up in print in 1920, in Christopher Morley’s The Haunted Bookshop.
Set in a world still reeling from World War One, the novel pairs a screwball rom-com involving a young adman and the heiress to a prune empire, with a German plot to blow up the US president. It’s a period piece, really, but its backdrop – a second-hand bookstore in Brooklyn called Parnassus at Home – remains a bibliophile’s paradise, fragrant with the scent of “mellowed paper and leather” and tobacco from the pipe that its owner, Mr Mifflin, puffs away on day and night.
Mifflin is not just a bookseller, though, he’s a “practitioner of bibliotherapy”. As he explains it, “My pleasure is to prescribe books for such patients as drop in here and are willing to tell me their symptoms... There is no one so grateful as the man to whom you have given just the book his soul needed and he never knew it.”
(Perhaps being of Morley ancestry has something to do with my ongoing bibliotherapeutic fervor)
What reader species are you?
What reader species are you? - http://pinterest.com/pin/454089574899370852/
Kate Atkinson LIFE AFTER LIFE
Fascinating application of time sequencing. The protagonist is born, lives and dies in what can best be thought of in terms of multiple realities. As the plot lines move our heroine forward on one fork, the road twists and turns and ends in quite another fork. Suspense builds concomitantly with the relief we have knowing there will be another avenue for her to explore, another version of her life to live out, however briefly.
Set in England post WW1, continuing through WW2, the war supports the random relationship we all have with death, our constant companion, and our forever subconscious knowing that our paths ultimately converge.
Readers Advisory
I explored recent bibliotherapy titles and found 1001 Books for Every Mood by Hallie Ephron better than The Novel Cure by Ella Berthoud and Susan Elderkin for book recommendations. Ephron includes a grading star system for literary merit that is incredibly important if you require intelligent writing along with your entertainment. She also has a handy system of using icons that allows the reader to see at a glance which categories the book covers: provocative, influential, inspirational, humorous, brainy, easy reading, page turner, challenging, bathroom book, or family friendly. There is even an icon for indicating if the book has been made into a movie. Additionally, The Novel Cure lacks the wide range of ailments and bibliotherapeutic suggestions for remedies found in 1001 Books.
Reading favorite author RICHARD POWERS Orfeo
Why should bottomless grief feel so bracing?
The day is lovely. Don't be afraid.
Antibody theory
Sanctuary theory
Shadowboxing
Mastery by habituation
Sunday, December 14, 2014
Saturday, December 13, 2014
Saturday, November 08, 2014
TORCH by Cheryl Strayed
Quote:
Without their mother...they were not a family anymore, but siblings--a leaner, sparcer thing. ...two people wandering in the wilderness, each of them holding one end of a string.
Friday, November 07, 2014
Thursday, October 23, 2014
Cory Doctorow's EASTERN STANDARD TRIBE
Quote:
Stories are propaganda, virii that slide past your critical immune system and insert themselves directly into your emotions.
Was delighted to find this book long after I thought I had read it, but hadn't. Still one of my favorite contemporary novels, Doctorow writes stories to address society's wrongs in a way that is at once entertaining and educational. I learn something every time I read him and can't put the book down until the story is lodged in my heart.
Monday, October 20, 2014
Quote
"A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us." ~Franz Kafka - http://pinterest.com/pin/357614026634304928/?utm_source=android_share
Friday, October 17, 2014
Amy Tan's The Valley of Amazement
Quote:
When we're in love, as if by magic, our different hearts come together perfectly toward the same desire. Eventually, the differences return, and then comes heartache and mending, and, in between, much loneliness and fear. If love remains despite the pain of those differences, it must be guarded as rare.
Dear Thea
https://theabrookebibliotherapy.wordpress.com/2014/07/13/why-then-do-we-not-despair/
I like Thea Brooke's approach to bibliotherapy. In a Dear Abby style blog, she recommends titles to address life passages and transitional challenges posed by write-in querents. Well chosen titles and well done, Thea.
Sunday, October 12, 2014
Friday, October 10, 2014
Friday, October 03, 2014
Feminist Classic
Written in 1969, THE QUEEN IS IN THE GARBAGE is a reminder of how far we have come as well as how far we yet have to go as women in what remains a man's world in 2014.
A stream of consciousness story of a woman's experience giving birth, LILA KARP broke new ground with her honesty and her self-awareness of the ambiguity surrounding bringing a life into the world alone and the fear of becoming not just 'a mother' but 'her mother.'
Vivian Gornick's Afterword quote:
The shock in all of these writings comes from the open declaration of that feeling of erotic murderousness for the one from whom separation seems impossible. We accept rage and ruthlessness as a matter of course in sexual attachment; but when the intimacy is with a parent--especially with a parent of the same sex--the force that these emotions engender seems world-shaking. Yet, no sooner is the insight articulated than the reader calmly thinks, of course, how could it be otherwise? This, after all, is the intimacy that will bind us all our lives, holding us forever in its thrall, shadowing every other relationship, and determining for a good part, if not all, of our years, our ability to perform the task implicit in all human relations: how to connect yet not merge, how to respond yet not be absorbed, how to detach but not withdraw.
Thursday, September 11, 2014
Saturday, September 06, 2014
Wednesday, August 27, 2014
Right/Left Brain Exercises from Nick Bantock
Right/Left Brain Exercises from Nick Bantock from the Trickster's Hat
I.2 paragraphs from 2 different sources
Underline nouns
Transpose
Join the 2
Edit to fit
But don't change the order
II.
2" X 24" paper
20 Small images
20 words
Both cut out of mag or news
Intersperse in a line
Try to read the message
III.
List 7 favorite songs
Imagine 7 questions you would ask an Oracle
The words in the songs answer your questions
Pick the one with the best fit and write about it
IV.
Dream analysis
Imagine yourself looking thru the eyes of all dream characters or creatures, from many different dream element perspectives
(Barry Stevens of Don't Push the River might say wearing your "perspectacles.")
Friday, August 22, 2014
Tuesday, August 19, 2014
Wednesday, August 13, 2014
Reading List
50 Great Books You'll Never Read in School - http://pinterest.com/pin/65302263322396039/?utm_source=android_share
Tuesday, August 05, 2014
Orfeo
By one of my favorite authors, Richard Powers.
Quotes:
The job of taste was to thin the insane torrent of human creativity down to manageable levels. But the job of appetite was never to be happy with taste.
We're either hungry or dead.
Life is nothing but mutual infection. And every infecting message changes the message it infects.
Life is an escaped experiment, say the artists, and the only real safety is death.
Saturday, August 02, 2014
Extensive collection of published reports on how reading heals hearts, minds and bodies
http://www.thereader.org.uk/what-we-do-and-why/research.aspx
Reading Revolution in the UK
http://www.nationalreadingcampaign.ca/research/bibliotherapy-for-depression/
Reading in Practice MA degree in Liverpool
http://www.thereader.org.uk/courses/university-courses/reading-in-practice-ma-degree.aspx
Tuesday, July 29, 2014
Realistically
Can someone recommend a book in a way that will reliably produce a therapeutic result? So much of the positive effect of reading is dependent on the right book at the right time.
The book you read is not necessarily the same book I read. I.e., what works for me may not do the same for you. Which is one of the mysteries of the reading process, within the realm of mystical consciousness more than practical application.
Reading becomes background noise for a walk through our memories. We are semiconscious of both and responsive to the amalgamation. Do we cry for the tragedy of the book's characters? No, it is our own tragedy that overwhelms us.
And yet, it is the artistic representation that is often able to speak to and call forth the emotion in a manner of which we are incapable left to our own devices. However, from the evocation we might find a way to utilize our own experience in a way that is also creative, culminating in a domino effect aka inspiration.
Friday, July 25, 2014
Friday, July 18, 2014
The Bone Season by Samantha Shannon
Perhaps the most notable fact about this novel is that the author is 23 and says its the first of a 7 book series. Though not quite Harry Potter, the protagonist has a readable story.
I especially like the list at the front of the book that lists the varieties of occult/mystical mastery. Including:
Soothsayers
Aka Seers
Aka cottabomancer/cryomancer/catoptromancer/axinomancer/bibliomancer/macharomancer/hydromancer/crystalist/cartomancer/cyathomancer/cleromancer/cleidomancer/astragalomancer/aichmomancer/acultomancer
Mediums
Aka automatiste/psychograpaher
Sensors
Aka gustant/sniffer/polyglot/whisperer
Augurs
Aka osteomancer/haematomancer/drymimancer/chiromancer/oculomancer/andropomancer/extispicist/rhabdomancer/pyromancer/halomancer/tasseographer/botamancer/theriomancer/spodomancer/capnomancer/libanomancer/anthomancer/sycomancer/dendromancer/daphnomancer
Guardians
Aka binder/summoner/necromancer/exorcist
Furies
Aka sibyl/unreadable/beserker
Jumpers
Aka dreamwalker/oracle
Categories that would certainly rival True Blood for coopting the occult should HBO decide to run another series in the same vein (pun intended.)
If this is indeed the first of 7, characters will likely flesh out nicely and readers will have a chance to evolve along with our heroine as she saves the world from narrow minds.
Tuesday, July 08, 2014
Marge Piercy's Dance the Eagle to Sleep
There are no people so primitive or poor they did not practice arts: except a thoroughly exploited, colonialized, proletarianized people--thoroughly robbed.
I saw that to survive we had to stop wanting their things and only want what we could give each other.
Power implied subject and object. They needed some way to recognize (for everyone to recognize) that everybody was a subject.
...violence was the pornography of their culture.
Jonathan Lethem's Dissident Gardens
The difficulty in beholding another person was how you stood in your own way.
I'm trying never to live dishonestly and with regrets. Please don't write to me again.
Aphanisis: the dissolving subject's failure to identify, in the face of the world's depredations, with the contours of her own desire.
Tuesday, June 24, 2014
Book Hooked post on bibliotherapy
Booked Hooked comments on her instincts regarding bibliotherapy and brings up some good questions in her blog post.
Who do you trust to prescribe books being quite critical...
Monday, June 23, 2014
Wednesday, June 18, 2014
UK Bibliotherapy for problem solving and self-management
http://www.imn.ie/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=5639:the-power-of-words&catid=57:clinical-news&Itemid=3
Sunday, June 15, 2014
Sample Bibliotherapy Session
Excerpted and edited from
How Literature Saved My Psyche: Attending a Book-Themed Therapy Session at the Center for Fiction
By M. H. Miller |
Just what the doctor ordered!
The Center for Fiction—a nonprofit that holds readings and events, gives writers office space and promotes the general celebration of literature—called A Novel Approach, in which writers and editors involved with the center (“bibliotherapists”) will give you a 45-minute consultation dealing with the life crisis of your choice and prescribe a year’s worth of reading to help you get through it.
Center’s offices in the old Mercantile Library on East 47th Street, Noreen Tomassi, director since 2004.
SAMPLE SESSION:
“WHY DO YOU WANT to come and explore whatever you need to explore in your life through books?”
“Is there a particular issue that you’d like to address in your reading that we prescribe for you?”
“Is there a book that has really made a huge difference in your life?”
“Are there writers right now that you just absolutely hate or feel like they’re overrated?”
Where are the gaps in your reading in your opinion? (Need more of?)
“A couple either/or questions,” “Answer these off the top of your head: Tolstoy or Dostoevsky?”
“Brontës: Emily or Charlotte?”
“Do you have a story that you think is the perfect short story?"
“You have a few writers over for dinner. Who’s there, living or dead? Pick six, including you.”
Nutshell:
gaps in your reading,
problem you want to address,
your history as a reader,
what you’re attracted to in writing.
Therapist taks about a week to two weeks, and does a list, consulting with a group of people who are connected to the program--writers, editors--then makes a prescription.
My (journalist's) prescription: “Five classics, one big unwieldy post-modernist, one book about love, money and friendship, two non-fiction selections, two contemporary novels, and a dash of genre fiction. No more than one per month, client to be shaken and stirred.”
NYC Center for Fiction marketing bibliotherapy
http://centerforfiction.org/for-readers/a-novel-approach/
Sunday, June 08, 2014
Cats and their Writers
http://www.buzzfeed.com/summeranne/30-renowned-authors-inspired-by-cats?sub=1757482_570173&s=mobile#570173
Thursday, June 05, 2014
Audrey Niffenegger's THE NIGHT BOOKMOBILE
Thank you for noticing, Audrey.
Readers everywhere embrace your inner child and get ready for a children's book format graphic novel written for adults.
Love it.
And, BTW, learn how making your own zines leads to graphic novels and comics at IPRC (Independent Publishing Resource Center) located in Portland Oregon but now with an online certificate program.
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