The humanities. Literary theory, culture and media studies, as well as philosophy (continental philosophy in particular) are fields filled with nonsense. The main problem with these fields stems from the lack or difficulty of an objective judgment, in my opinion. In literary theory, for example, it’s more important to be interesting than to be right.
I have to admit that they fail the heuristic of ideological interest as well. Even if we ignore for a moment Nobel and other prizes in literature (which have always been seriously biased), as well as culture studies in totalitarian states (where they were completely ideologized), we see that the most influential “schools” of literary theory in Western academia are ideologically charged: Feminism, Marxism, Postcolonialism etc.
It’s a shame, especially because there are more than a few low-hanging fruits in literature studies. Whatever you think about it, literary criticism has plenty of possible objectives that are both interesting and useful:
to help the reader to select texts that merit his attention; the critic should serve the public as a filter, as an independent evaluator of texts, as someone with the hidden knowledge how to distinguish “good” books from “mediocre” ones;
to help the reader to gain better understanding of existing texts;
to help the writer to write better: deeper, clearer, using a richer set of literary devices and methods.
There are lists like 1000 books to read before you die for the first objective (which are mostly useless, but that’s not the point); there are books like Unlocking Harry Potter: Five Keys for the Serious Reader for the second objective; there are books like How to Write a Damn Good Novel for the third one; but none of these objectives apparently are interesting enough for literature departments in elite universities.
I’m not knowledgeable about the whole field of literary studies and I’m sure there’s plenty to criticize there. But at least the first two objectives you mentioned are actually things that literary critics do, at least sometimes.
If you read something like a Norton Critical Edition of a classic book, the introduction and critical essays are written by literary scholars, and they can be lifesavers for the recreational reader. Historical context and formal analysis really helps for some books. I read Moby Dick back in high school, and I read a lot of commentary off JSTOR, and it probably doubled the value of the book for me. Think about Shakespeare—you really want commentary and context for that. You get more out of it if you dip into the scholarship, even a little.
As for the curatorial function, a lot of that is taken over by book reviewers, but Arts and Letters Daily probably falls into that category.
How to write well is more properly the function of creative writing departments than literary criticism departments, if you want to look for it in academia. The two branches have pretty much separated by now. (Possibly interesting: Elif Batuman’s prickly take on the difference between creative writing degrees and literature degrees.)
That these functions need to be “taken over” by someone else is exactly what signals existence of a problem.
They are taken over in the same way in computer science programming language design was taken over by smart hackers like van Rossum, operating system design was taken over by smart hackers like Torvalds, search engine design was taken over by smart hackers like Brin & Page, etc. - you got the point.
Umm, I would say Guido is seriously harmed by his lack of strong background in programming language theory. I agree he came up with a useful language but I’ll take ruby’s lisp influenced design over python any day. Heck Larry Wall is up to his ears in programming language theory in the design of perl 6 and I think it will be better for it (though ultimately still focused on being a practical tool).
Torvalds was hardly uninfluenced by academic OS design. He just didn’t buy into the overhyped microkernel approach.
Ohh and Brin & Page are straight out of academic research. Their page rank algorithm is pure academic CS. They just applied it.
[...] I’ll take ruby’s lisp influenced design over python any day.
Could you give me an example where Ruby is clearly superior? I’m currently transitioning from Python to Ruby and would appreciate some strong selling point I haven’t noticed yet.
The humanities. Literary theory, culture and media studies, as well as philosophy (continental philosophy in particular) are fields filled with nonsense. The main problem with these fields stems from the lack or difficulty of an objective judgment, in my opinion. In literary theory, for example, it’s more important to be interesting than to be right.
I have to admit that they fail the heuristic of ideological interest as well. Even if we ignore for a moment Nobel and other prizes in literature (which have always been seriously biased), as well as culture studies in totalitarian states (where they were completely ideologized), we see that the most influential “schools” of literary theory in Western academia are ideologically charged: Feminism, Marxism, Postcolonialism etc.
It’s a shame, especially because there are more than a few low-hanging fruits in literature studies. Whatever you think about it, literary criticism has plenty of possible objectives that are both interesting and useful:
to help the reader to select texts that merit his attention; the critic should serve the public as a filter, as an independent evaluator of texts, as someone with the hidden knowledge how to distinguish “good” books from “mediocre” ones;
to help the reader to gain better understanding of existing texts;
to help the writer to write better: deeper, clearer, using a richer set of literary devices and methods.
There are lists like 1000 books to read before you die for the first objective (which are mostly useless, but that’s not the point); there are books like Unlocking Harry Potter: Five Keys for the Serious Reader for the second objective; there are books like How to Write a Damn Good Novel for the third one; but none of these objectives apparently are interesting enough for literature departments in elite universities.
I’m not knowledgeable about the whole field of literary studies and I’m sure there’s plenty to criticize there. But at least the first two objectives you mentioned are actually things that literary critics do, at least sometimes.
If you read something like a Norton Critical Edition of a classic book, the introduction and critical essays are written by literary scholars, and they can be lifesavers for the recreational reader. Historical context and formal analysis really helps for some books. I read Moby Dick back in high school, and I read a lot of commentary off JSTOR, and it probably doubled the value of the book for me. Think about Shakespeare—you really want commentary and context for that. You get more out of it if you dip into the scholarship, even a little.
As for the curatorial function, a lot of that is taken over by book reviewers, but Arts and Letters Daily probably falls into that category.
How to write well is more properly the function of creative writing departments than literary criticism departments, if you want to look for it in academia. The two branches have pretty much separated by now. (Possibly interesting: Elif Batuman’s prickly take on the difference between creative writing degrees and literature degrees.)
That these functions need to be “taken over” by someone else is exactly what signals existence of a problem. They are taken over in the same way in computer science programming language design was taken over by smart hackers like van Rossum, operating system design was taken over by smart hackers like Torvalds, search engine design was taken over by smart hackers like Brin & Page, etc. - you got the point.
Umm, I would say Guido is seriously harmed by his lack of strong background in programming language theory. I agree he came up with a useful language but I’ll take ruby’s lisp influenced design over python any day. Heck Larry Wall is up to his ears in programming language theory in the design of perl 6 and I think it will be better for it (though ultimately still focused on being a practical tool).
Torvalds was hardly uninfluenced by academic OS design. He just didn’t buy into the overhyped microkernel approach.
Ohh and Brin & Page are straight out of academic research. Their page rank algorithm is pure academic CS. They just applied it.
Could you give me an example where Ruby is clearly superior? I’m currently transitioning from Python to Ruby and would appreciate some strong selling point I haven’t noticed yet.