[lbo-talk] Re: USA 2003

Brian Siano siano at mail.med.upenn.edu
Tue Sep 16 22:33:48 PDT 2003


On Tue, 16 Sep 2003 18:16:16 -0700, <dredmond at efn.org> wrote:


> Quoting Brian Siano <siano at mail.med.upenn.edu>:
>
>> [Literary criticism] is a specialized field of analysis, with little
>> real-world application beyond the analysis of texts, and rests mainly on
>> the novelty of the insights of its practitioners.
>
> Nonsense. TV, videogames, movies, posters, chatrooms, listservs, email
> are all
> texts of various kinds, and the job of literary criticism is to read all
> that
> stuff, figure out how it works, and sort the diamonds from the BS.

Let me know when the job's done.


> The only way to abolish literary criticism is to abolish reading.

Who called for abolishing it? It'd be like abolishing finger painting.


>> noticed that the amazing insights offered by deconstruction, or
>> "critical theory," seem to produce genuinely _awful_ writers,
>
> Adorno, Sartre, and Fred Jameson are all luminous, beautiful writers.

Sartre was OK. Adorno was turgid. Haven't bothered with Jameson. Probably won't, unless someone can convince me he's more worthwhile then, say, Neil Stephenson, Thomas Pynchon, or Donald E. Westlake.


>> Why was their approach insufficient, until the advent of critical
>> theory?
>
> Because they lived in much simpler times, and we live in a high-tech
> world-system of 6 billion people.

Sounds like we need political theorists with a better background in electronics, computer technology, information theory (the real kind), biology and evolutionary theory, and the mathematics of complex systems. Can't see why we'd need more lit professors.



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