Essays: May 2008 Archive Page

Boston Globe:

Without a robust study of literature there can be no adequate reckoning of the human condition - no full understanding of art, culture, psychology, or even of biology. As Binghamton University biologist David Sloan Wilson says, "the natural history of our species" is written in love poems, adventure stories, fables, myths, tales, and novels.

The study of literature is worth doing - and worth doing well. No one should be content to watch it fading gently into that good night.

I'm not the first to argue for a closer engagement of literary studies with science. For instance, in his famous 1959 essay on "The Two Cultures," the British physicist and novelist C.P. Snow lamented the scientific ignorance of "literary intellectuals," identifying it as a main reason for the yawning divide between the cultures of literature and science.

But I would go beyond Snow's suggestion that literary scholars should know more about science. Literary scholars should actually do science. --Jonathan Gottschall

A thoughtful post about the fate of film criticism.  Much of this boils down what happens when film criticism leaves the world of print journalism and adapts to the TV -- not only in the content of the review but the context of celebrity/insider/gossip in which movies are pressnted to the public. (Armond White, New York Press, via)

In the Ebert age of criticism, the Aesthetic of the Hit dominates everything. Behind those panicky articles about critics losing their jobs (what about autoworkers and schoolteachers?), lurks the writers' own fear of falling victim to the same draconian industry rule: Most publishers and editors are only interested in supporting hits in order to reach Hollywood's deep-pocket advertisers. This is what makes traditional criticism seem indefinable and obsolete, leaving web criticism as a ready (but dubious) alternative.

The Internetters who stepped in to fill print publications' void seize a technological opportunity and then confuse it with "democratization"--almost fascistically turning discourse into babble. They don't necessarily bother to learn or think--that's the privilege of graffito-critique. Their proud non-professionalism presumes that other moviegoers want to--or need to--match opinions with other amateurs. That's Kael's "layman" retort made viral. The journalistic buzzword for this water-cooler discourse is "conversation" (as when The Times saluted Ebert's return to newspaper writing as "a chance to pick up on an interrupted conversation"). But today's criticism isn't real conversation; on the Internet it's too solipsistic and autodidactic to be called a heart-to-heart.

Tomorrow is the last day of classes, but it's not too late to bring up a new topic.  Many of my students in "Intro to Literary Study" were fascinated by Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game, so I thought they might appreciate hearing about Card's dismissal of J.K. Rowling's suit against a fan-created reference work devoted to the world of Harry Potter.

The author of the Ender series has some choice words about the author of the Harry Potter series. Note that he's not actually accusing her of stealing his ideas, he's just pointing out how ridiculous he feels her claims are.

The Weekly Standard does not like The Newseum.

Our terrific country offers lots of ways to make a living, but with the possible exceptions of movie acting and architecture, only modern journalism would have the nerve to celebrate itself with something as gaudy and improbable as the Newseum.