If you’re here to audit Introduction to Theory of Literature with me and don’t care about the preamble, skip ahead to the next post in this series. If you’re worried that I gave up on The Wheel of Time, don’t be: I’ll pick that up again soon.
You can find the rest of this series here:
You can find the rest of this series here:
Introduction to Literary Theory Part 0: What am I talking about?
Introduction to Literary Theory Part 1: What is Literary Theory?
Introduction to Literary Theory Part 2: The Hermeneutic Circle
Introduction to Literary Theory Part 3: Formalism
Introduction to Literary Theory Part 4: Structuralism
Introduction to Literary Theory Part 5: Deconstruction
Introduction to Literary Theory Part 6: Psychoanalytic Literary Theory
Also note that I’m having a difficult time coming up with relevant ideas for pictures but I don’t just want these posts to be huge blocks of text, so I’ll just post some pictures of my (late) ferrets, Edward and Alphonse, whenever it seems like there are too many words in a row.
What am I doing?
Alright, so, I should probably explain what I’m trying to do here. Take “here” to be either “this series of posts” or Cout.ninja. Side-note, everyone gets that it’s pronounced “see-out“, right?
I went over my current situation in my first post. Basically, I quit my job so I’d have more time to do… something, but I’m not sure what that is yet. Something expressive and meaningful. While I figure that out, I’m just devouring as much media as I can: mostly stuff that I’ve been meaning to get to for a while now, but either didn’t have the time for or didn’t have the energy to properly examine while focusing on a complex career. Some of this stuff is fairly frivolous – popular media – and some of it is more academic, such as looking at the Prose Edda in translation or doing an analysis of some Greek classics. I’m also trying to improve my piano and guitar skills and I’d love to get better at sketching and digital painting… but, even with the extra time I have, I still need to start somewhere. This must seem (at least, it would to me if someone else told me this), a flimsy excuse to slowly transform into a giant leach without ever admitting it, but I sincerely feel as though I’m grasping at something that matters. Reaching directly for it hasn’t really worked, but sometimes it feels like I’m getting closer when I stop reaching directly for it and focus instead on seemingly irrelevant discussion on media and topical social issues.
However, if I just spend all of my time passively consuming media, then I don’t expect that I’ll stumble upon any significant realizations, and I’m likely to start forgetting things or letting it all blend together. So, I’m writing up my “responses” to anything I consume that strikes me as interesting.
Now, I’m a reasonably educated and well-read person, but I’m quickly finding that I don’t quite have the foundation or vocabulary to fully articulate my thoughts here. The first thing I realized was that I don’t want to merely do “reviews” in the sense of scoring or recommending products, hence the word “response” in my posts thus-far. I’m not particularly interested in whether something is “good” here, whatever that even means. I’m interested in what this all means. But… what does that mean? I’ve been more-or-less settling on expressing my personal “response” to what I’m consuming: what stands out, what am I excited to talk about, and what connections I make between it and other things. Maybe that’s sufficient, but it has been bothering me that I’m not really sure what it is that I’m actually doing here.
What will I do next?
Well, if what I’m doing is more-or-less fine, then I may as well keep doing it until it no-longer seems fine, right? That brings us to my next question: what should I cover next? Thus-far, I’ve mostly been covering things as they come to mind. I started off with The Matrix Resurrections because the movie had just come out. I moved on to my other posts because I had just been playing The Secret World and reading The Wheel of Time.
I have a number of other things I’d like to cover in the near future. Neon Genesis Evangelion, some William Gibson novels, Final Fantasy XIV, and Norse mythology to name a few. But, what I’m currently most excited about is Destiny 2. Bungie just had their 30th anniversary and I recently received a Destiny 2 lore book that I ordered what seems like years ago so I’ve been thinking about Destiny‘s lore quite a bit: it’s really good. Before I cover Destiny, it seems like I should also cover Halo though, as Bungie has a tendency to carry themes forward in their games. Well, if that’s the case, then I should also cover Marathon, right? I played a few hours into Marathon (fantastic game, by the way) and found that the story reminded me of I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream and some of Gibson’s work. So, I figured that maybe I’d do a whole series on things loosely connected to cyberpunk and transhumanism… but, if I’m going to do that, then I really feel like I should finally get around to figuring out Simulacra and Simulation too. Given that I covered a Matrix film in my first real post, this doesn’t seem unreasonable… though it is starting to feel as though I’m pulling on a thread that will either never end or will unravel everything I’m wearing and leave me more befuddled than I started.
I tried to get through S&S a year or so ago and I really couldn’t grok it. I sometimes felt as though I was starting to figure things out, but I didn’t have the foundation or vocabulary to make much sense of it. Interestingly, even with my partial understanding of it, I found that the concepts were more applicable to problems I’ve encountered over the past few years than I thought it would be. In particular, I’ve been participating in social/political debates with a few friends for some time now and in the course of those discussions I’ve occasionally felt as though I was very close to figuring out something important and meaningful, but couldn’t quite articulate it.
This mostly comes up when I’m trying to work out how to bridge the gap between very different worldviews. I maintain that there’s a way to bridge the gap in worldviews to achieve empathy between any two people (and thus, in theory, any two communities) so long as they’re both sincerely interested in coming to a mutual understanding. I also hold that many of the problems in modern American society are rooted in what I fumblingly called “virtual thinking”. It seems to me that very few people are simply “evil” or even “stupid” (at least in an unqualified sense) and most people are legitimately in support of doing what’s best for everyone. Yet, very few people – if any – are capable of removing their own ego from their comprehension of their own worldview.
One metaphor I attempted was to look at a rational line of reasoning as a chain: even if each link in this chain is perfect and perfectly linked to each of its neighbors, the chain cannot accomplish anything real unless both the first and last links are securely affixed to something real. Particularly for radicals, I’ve noticed that their chains of reasoning are sometimes very nice, but they fail to secure each end to reality, either tethering the real world to a virtual one or only realizing the chain in its entirety within a virtual space. You can plainly see this in the debate style of someone like Ben Shapiro, who often has a very pretty chain of logical clauses, but fails to fasten each end to reality, resulting in an argument that’s difficult to refute but is also obviously bad. I say “bad” here because, as we’re considering reality, we’re not merely concerned with correctness but with the impact on reality, which is necessarily subjective and must – at some point in the chain – concern itself with goodness rather than mere accuracy or precision. Note that while I chose Shapiro as an example here, I don’t see this as a problem unique to to any particular group or ideology: we all do this sometimes, often with no bad intention or guile.
This might all seem completely unrelated – just a sequence of random thoughts – but I have a pretty strong hunch that there’s something pulling all of these seemingly random things together. Until the past couple of days, this was only a gut feeling, but now I think I can see at least a small glimmer of legitimate meaning in all of this. I found this glimmer of meaning in literary theory.
What is Literary theory?
Honestly, I only stumbled upon literary theory while trying to make sense of Simulacra and Simulation again. Now, literary theory – as you can see if you follow that link to Wikipedia – is “the systematic study of the nature of literature and of the methods for literary analysis.” Again, this may seem unrelated, but bear with me. First off, “literature” doesn’t merely describe art but any collection of “written” work (though, I don’t think that the “written” qualification here is necessarily meaningful.) Obviously the precise meaning of literature will very based on context, but note that some of the more influential literary theorists were focused specifically on philosophical work and that hermeneutics (the theory and methodology of interpretation) began with biblical interpretation (in a context where it was considered at least as important and real as any scientific or philosophical work.) In other words: literary theory is relevant when attempting to analyze the sort of sociopolitical discussion that everyone in America has been having non-stop for some time now. Side-note: I’m not actually sure how unique this current moment is in American sociopolitical engagement. It seems hotter than usual, but I’m not really sure whether it’s just more heated than it’s been in a few decades or if this truly is a particularly divisive moment in American history. In any case, literary theory is explicitly interested in examining this exact sort of “writing” at least as much as it’s interested in the sort of fiction and poetry that I would usually think of when I hear the word “literature”.
But, perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself: what even is literary theory?
Well, we could read the Wikipedia page and follow all the links, but for a topic this challenging, I’m not confident that this would be an effective approach. So, I decided to look around for a lecture series. Introduction to Theory of Literature with Paul H. Fry seems popular on YouTube, and there’s an accompanying Open Yale course page for it, so it seemed like a good place to start. Only… well, I got through the first video, and this guy is a terrible lecturer. I’m not trying to be mean here, but goddamn, he makes simply no effort to convey his ideas in a manner that can be easily understood. It’s a complex topic, so I wouldn’t expect it to be “easy”, but the guy goes out of his way to have convoluted sentences and use obscure terms and references that do nothing to elucidate his point and could be easily avoided by better preparing for a lecture. If that sentence felt hypocritical to you, note that it’s in text, not a video lecture series.
Thankfully, he turned his lecture transcripts into a book: Theory of Literature (The Open Yale Course Series). I wouldn’t call it a “good” book, as it’s basically just the transcribed lectures cleaned up a bit, but I’m finding it far more approachable than the video lectures, if only because Fry’s convoluted sentence structure is far better understood in text where the half-forgotten start of a sentence can be easily referenced and obscure terms can be looked-up.
Want to audit Introduction to Theory of Literature with me?
I am going to audit this course. Would you like to audit it with me?
I find that I understand and retain information much better when I have to explain it to someone else (I’m pretty sure that this is universal, but it’s definitely important for me.) To that end, I’m going to post a summary and a response to the lecture series and assigned readings. I’ll break it up into a few posts, but I’m not going to make a post for each lecture: I’ll just cut things off when it seems like the current one is “long enough”.
If you’d like to follow along with the material yourself, treat my posts as a bit of extra discussion. Maybe we’ll interpret things differently: if we do, maybe I’m the one who’s wrong! Leave a comment if you think I fucked up somewhere, I’d really appreciate it! Maybe you’ll be wrong and you’ll actually learn something from one of my posts: I would love that too!
If you don’t want to slog through all of this material yourself, I’ll do my best to briefly and casually summarize the content in addition to responding to it. My hope is that my posts will serve a stand-alone, simplified version of the lecture series as a whole. I won’t be nearly as concerned with all the details, dates, and names, but I’ll do my best to convey the concepts in a relatable way that doesn’t strictly require engaging with the actual course material.