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By the way, you can access some of the Goldthorpe/Chan papers from the study in question via Google Scholar.
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Mark, perhaps I didn’t make myself clear. I’d love it if they were studying Patrick White. But they are studying government websites and speeches by Noel Pearson. Now, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with this. I tried to say that I think there are many ways texts can be conceptually challenging (not just historically). But I do think they should have SOME experience beyond the past 50 years, and that they should engage with SOME texts that play with concepts and abstract reason in a challenging way.
“In any case, usually calls for teaching the canon are dehistoricising and decontextualising. There’s a big difference between Stephen Greenblatt’s Shakespeare and a formalist Shakespeare who speaks to eternal verities or
“pathosâ€? or whatever.”
Yes to both. But who cares? Why bring up artificially dichotomous partisan disputes?
Because we’re stuck in an artificially dichotomous partisan dispute, David?
Is it really the case that you can avoid studying literature at all in NSW Senior English? Just Noel Pearson and websites?
Pfft to NSW then.
Here’s Qld:
http://www.qsa.qld.edu.au/yrs11_12/subjects/english/guide.html
I have absolutely no problem with including the two latter categories, and I note that there’s an optional yr 12 English extension (literature) subject as well:
http://www.qsa.qld.edu.au/yrs11_12/subjects/english_lit/guide.html
I’ve also made the point before – against the culture warriors – that in real as opposed to idealised classrooms, holding students’ interest is probably 90% of the trick.
“Because we’re stuck in an artificially dichotomous partisan dispute, David?”
Speak for yourself!
“Is it really the case that you can avoid studying literature at all in NSW Senior English? Just Noel Pearson and websites?”
I didn’t say they did “just Noel Pearson and websites”. But they are options, whereas Patrick White, or anything similar, is not. You can avoid doing anything that anybody would consider ‘hard’ or outside the last 50 years. Of course these things are about balances, and, I think the balance has shifted too far in the Noel Pearson and websites direction.
“I’ve also made the point before – against the culture warriors – that in real as opposed to idealised classrooms, holding students’ interest is probably 90% of the trick.”
Wah wah wah students’ interest. Somehow maths teachers all manage to teach calculus. You get interested because you fear getting crap marks!
Everyone does senior English if they stay at school. A lot don’t do maths. A lot don’t care that much about getting crap marks. When I was in school, some of the kids in my English class were literate but that was about it. What marks they got made no difference to whether they’d get an apprenticeship or get into TAFE. I don’t think your view is very realistic. Nor do I think anyone, of any age, learns anything much, if they have no interest in it. You might be able to write an essay on Patrick White, but what’s the use if you don’t have any interest, and forget all about it the next day.
“Everyone does senior English if they stay at school. A lot don’t do maths. A lot don’t care that much about getting crap marks.”
1. Maths manages to teach boring stuff all the way through.
2. I’m talking about the upper levels of senior English (four unit even).
3. A lot don’t care about the teacher’s and curriculum’s effort to make it ‘relevant’ either.
The ability to focus on something you are not interested in is a virtue in itself. That’s why employers and unis care about grades in all subjects, relevant or not – they are predictors of diligence. No big deal if you never use it again. No big deal if some students don’t care about getting crap grades and therefore get crap grades. It shows the ranking system is working well.
Oh no, you’re one of *us* now. Welcome to the artificially dichotomous partisan dispute, you may pick up your mess tin and kit from the Quartermaster. Virginia Trioli and Mike Carlton will blow reveille from 0500 through 0930 (the drive shift).
New South Wales’ curriculum is in this botch job of a website here (warning: word and PDF hammer horror).
You’ll be happy to hear that Noel Pearson features only as an elective, and only then in amongst other speechmakers; needless to say, the kids in this State can’t get away from literature, no matter how much they dislike the fucking butler in Wuthering Heights, or that tiresome Puritan attention-seeker John Proctor.
And let’s not start on Kenneth Slessor.
Bugger that tosh! You only need the One Day of the Year, some Bruce Dawe, a flagpole, a map with some unpronounceably foreign explorers’ heads on it, and youre ready for culture as she is spoke.
As Barry McKenzie said, these days in Australia, we’ve got culture coming out of our arseholes.
“Oh no, you’re one of *us* now. Welcome to the artificially dichotomous partisan dispute, you may pick up your mess tin and kit from the Quartermaster. Virginia Trioli and Mike Carlton will blow reveille from 0500 through 0930 (the drive shift).”
ROTFL.
“You’ll be happy to hear that Noel Pearson features only as an elective, and only then in amongst other speechmakers; ”
Read the small print. The class only chooses to do ONE speech (so Noel Pearson could be their entire study for that significant module). Again, my point is not that stuff like Shakespeare is not an option, but that classes can and often do completely avoid it. My other point is that the amount of ’simple’ stuff significant outweighs the rest. Further, stuff like Patrick White (or anything consciously complex) is not an option at all (perhaps Yeats is an exception).
Having “options” to do tough stuff usually serves as a useful defensive in newspapers columns, without the readers realising that teachers don’t actually do them. (I wouldn’t if I were a teacher either. I’d want my students to get the best UAI they can, and therefore I’d choose the easiest material with the lightest workload.)
My categorisation was a bit sloppy and unclear.
I meant to create three heuristic categories of ascending difficulty:
1. “simple stuff” – eg. Noel Pearson and websites. (lots of options for this, can’t really avoid doing it)
2. “stuff like Shakespeare” – eg. your standard canon – Brontes, etc. (a few options for this, can avoid doing it)
3. “stuff like Patrick White” – eg. consciously complex stuff like Joyce. (no options at all).
However, when I said “tough stuff” in the last paragraph, I really meant no.2 “stuff like Shakespeare”.
As you can see, my English grades have greatly enhanced my personal eloquence and language-ability stuff.
Your unstated premise appears to be that the purpose of education is to prepare students for employment or uni. What does it matter, then, what is taught? Diligent students can presumably be as diligent at Noel Pearson as at Patrick White.
Ol’ Noel would be quite a study, actually, if you were looking at rhetorical tricks and switch and bait.
And I’m still completely unconvinced that high school students should or could be reading Joyce.
I think that no debate on English in our secondary schools can be meaningful until we separate the grammar and vocabulary from the literature.
The grammar, with the vocabulary, is a tool. It is an awesome tool. It is a simple grammar but with its prepositions it gives us almost infinite subtlety to deploy its vast vocabulary and from that we get the glory of our language in which simple words and a simple grammar can deliver a powerful message.
English literature, though, is another thing. Much of it is not English, but European literature, including the Russian, and Spanish, and German and Italian and French classics in translation. It is an exposition of ideas and of views on the world in which we live which, because they are not English, give us a broader perspective than the cultural confines in which English evolved.
“Your unstated premise appears to be that the purpose of education is to prepare students for employment or uni. What does it matter, then, what is taught? Diligent students can presumably be as diligent at Noel Pearson as at Patrick White.”
It’s not the only goal. You’ve tangled my argument in a way I can’t be bothered to explain at this hour. But, briefly, I don’t all subject matter (eg. XBox skills) are equal in their ability to 1) predict diligence or 2) expand our cognitive capacity. My sole point was that it’s no big deal if some students don’t do the work because they aren’t interested in complex material. Let them get bad grades.
“And I’m still completely unconvinced that high school students should or could be reading Joyce.”
They shouldn’t – it’s too tough.
“My sole point was that it’s no big deal if some students don’t do the work because they aren’t interested in complex material.” Rather, let them drop to the low-level classes. Their lower scaling marks (or poorer grades in upper level subjects) will be a useful way to measure their ability to understand/persevere/apply themselves to mental weightlifting/or stuff they don’t really enjoy. This will be one of the many things factored into the year’s overall score or ranking.
my students at uni last semester loved joyce!
but, errr, back on topic.
From one of Chan and Goldthorpe’s papers http://users.ox.ac.uk/~sfos0006/papers/party5.pdf :
we take occupation as being one of the most salient positional characteristics to which status attaches in modern societies, and close friendship as implying a relation of basic equality between individuals—that is, as one into which status differences are unlikely to intrude. Specifically, we use dissimilarity indices for the occupational distributions of friends by occupational grouping as input to a
multidimensional scaling analysis. From this analysis, a leading dimension emerges on which occupational groupings are ordered, according to the degree of similarity of their friendship patterns, and which can, we believe, be most plausibly interpreted as representing status. That is to say, starting from the structuring of a relationship implying social equality, a structure of inequality can be inferred.[...] In general, occupations that require working with symbols and perhaps people, and especially professional occupations, confer highest status, while those that require working directly with material things confer lowest status. (7-8)
So they assume status from a combination of occupation and friendships that one has of a similar ’status’. I am not sure what friendship has to do with this? Why do they include it? They make some tremendous assumptions about what occupations have what status (but, sure, probably accurate), and then use a slightly bunky definition of the ‘operational’ integrity of such a definition by looking for status consistency (defined by the exclusion of difference!!!!) amongst friends. So is friendship a causal indicator of status? Or of the consistency of the status categories that they have assumed? Why use the word ’status’ at all when what they are analysing are (assumed) hierarchical gradations of friendship networks? Are they actually saying that people who are friends with each other will consume the same thing and this is a better indicator than those who belong to the same class? WTF!!!! Yes, I often take part in cultural consumption with friends… got status? Surely status would have to be a question of perspective, the distribution of difference (not just the stratification of ’similarities’, ie consistency of friendship networks), and the horizontal distinction between different forms of status?
As they infer in footnote 29, when they extend their analysis beyond ‘cultural’ cultural consumption (ie what they call ’self-selection’) and look at other forms of ’sporting’, ‘amateur’, etc cultural consumption then it seems to me class will come back into the picture…
oh, and I suggest this implies that the original newspaper article was nonsense because the field of cultural consumption that the researchers used is arguably homomgeneous, and without raw numbers of participation in such fields the statistical analysis is problematic (to say the least).
Sorry, you included Joyce in your typology of complexity @ 10. Since we are discussing high school curricula, it seemed to imply that you thought it would be desirable that he be read in Senior classes.
glen, I think you should probably have a look at the paper on distinguishing between class and status. Goldthorpe is a customer who’s been around for a very long time – in the mid 60s the well known “Goldthorpe studies” were the first to point to a decline in conscious working class culture and sparked a debate on “embourgoisement” of skilled manual workers. I’m sure there’s a rationale for including friendship networks which makes sense (even though I might or might not disagree with it – I haven’t had time to look at the paper yet).
In my day, GregM, we used to work on grammar very heavily in grades 9 and 10 – by grade 11 you were expected to have grasped it, or you were expected never to be able to grasp it.
“From this I shall evolve a man.”
– Stevens, “The Man With the Blue Guitar”
There’s a dimension to the culture-wars debates that is sort of implicit, but rarely talked about at much length. One of the defining aspects of the (admittedly often-changing, or, to use a better and itself classical term, polytropos, many-turning) contents of a canon is its role as the seed-corn of a civilization.
Say that somehow tomorrow, mysteriously, Chinese culture disappeared from the world, as the Chinese people found themselves engulfed by India, Islam, and the West; but the core of old Chinese literature remained in a few libraries somewhere. By using a handful of texts, say the I Ching, Analects, Tao Te Ching, Chuang Tzu, Han Fei Tzu, Odes, Records of the Grand Historian, and a few others, the Chinese could credibly re-constitute a civilization that would be recognizably, if not entirely, once again Chinese. That is part of what makes these texts “classics”. We could try the same thing using a handful of medieval Buddhist sutras in Chinese translation, and the encrusted thought of the late neo-Confucianists, and it would be rougher going. Using Tu Fu, Li Po, and Su Tung-p’o would be better. But the most successful way would be with the “classics.”
This isn’t a thought experiment: it actually happened once, in human history. Remember the Renaissance? An entire ancient humanist civilizational tradition was brought back to life using Homer, Plato, Aristotle, the tragedians, and a handful of Roman writers. The classics. It’s not the whole story, obviously, but it’s a key aspect.
This is one of the reasons cultural conservatives think it is crucial to nurture and cultivate a wide-spread knowledge of the classics. And the ‘wide-spread’ part is important, too. There need to be ENOUGH knowledgeable people around at any given time in order for a civilization to survive. During the Dark Ages, a bunch of Irish monks knew all this Greco-Roman stuff, but there weren’t ENOUGH of them. You can teach King Lear to a class of high school students, and for most of them it won’t make a serious dent; but a few will be inspired, a few more will come back to it later in life, a few more will grasp the major salient points, and most if not all will at the very least gain a healthy respect for this peculiar and somehow important cultural monument, enough to at least recognize it as “theirs” and worth preserving as such. That’s important in itself. But if we repeat the exercise often enough, we will have ENOUGH people at any given moment to move forward in a healthy way.
Granted the contents of the canon change, but they should change in accordance with standards of excellence at a given time, and using civilizational pole-stars as often as possible (while frankly acknowledging that that isn’t always possible, nor is it desirable 100% of the time). A major quarrel of the culture wars is not that Hamlet is ignored, but that in the hands of cultural relativists and subversives, Hamlet is put, by some, on the exact same level with obvious tripe like “Yo Soy Rosa Gonzalez,” for reasons that are largely political, and frequently venomous. This is seen by some as a kind of attack, a species of willful and deliberate cultural undermining (I use the term in the literal sense), and not entirely without reason. It always makes me laugh that so many of the leftie cultural cadres, who shudder at the thought that Shakespeare and Dante might be seen as ’superior’ to say Jean Toomer, have no problem with pointing out that the cultural achievements of say medieval China and Persia are in many ways ’superior’ to what was on offer in 9th-century Europe.
Forget even about past versus present, or old versus new. Often what matters is density, richness, enduring relevance. Think of two songs: “Hey Jude” by the Beatles and “You Can Live at Home” by Husker Du. Both songs are formally identical: in the first half, the singer offers a series of lyrical and emotional observations, couched in about three or four basic musical ideas, in a semi-ballad structure. In the second half, one of the musical ideas is turned into a prolonged, repeating drone, which becomes sort of trance-like through repetition, while variations on it are worked in the background. I love both songs, but if I had to preserve one as a “classic,” I would choose “Hey Jude,” not only for its greater historical value, but because it is emblematic of much more musical history. You could use “Hey Jude” to re-constitute a huge swathe of the history of rock and roll, as well as other decades of musical tradition, and vocal technique, going all the way back to the 1920s. But the Husker Du song really only tells you about the punk and post-punk moments in America. In that sense, “Hey Jude” is “high culture” and the other song is not, even though both, as rock songs, are currently not in the canon of the “high” musical institutions.
Is this a mathematical formula? Of course not. But it’s a tendency, and something we can put our fingers on, if not for all time, then at least some of the time.
“–I don’t understand. –Oh, we never understand. But we feel certain things. Stories that we can understand, are just badly told.”
– Bert Brecht, “Baal”
No worries, Mark. I can see it was ambiguous.
Nicely argued j_p_z.
Let’s stretch it around to find out where the holes may be.
Are you talking about the civilisation being recreated or the civilisation doing the recreating? To use your example, the persons recreating the hypothetical dead Chinese civilisation would be, by definition, not culturally Chinese. Their task would be anthropological, not civilisational. The same process happened with the recreation of Maya civilisation four centuries after the Catholic priests of Spain burned their vast literature. We westerners are very good at this task. We do it for a variety of reasons. Only sometimes do we do it to flatter our own sense of cultural continuity.
So therefore I ask of the following:
A key aspect of what?
The unifying feature of all the high civilisations you mention is their self-awareness. Classical Greek civilisation, for example, grew out of the long project of destroying the memory of the potency of the old, often female-centred cosmology and to replace them with the new, olympian gods. This wasn’t an act of fealty. It was an act of cultural genocide. At this remove, does this cause us to think less or more of classical Greece? We certainly think less of the Soviet Union for attempting to do the same to the aristocratic, Christian traditions of Russia. Do we think less or more of Akhenaten when he overthrew the old Egyptian gods during pharaonic Egypt’s brief dalliance with monotheism? Do we think more or less of the priests who then attempted to destroy all memory of Akhenaten? German biblical scholars of the C19th blew 1500 years of traditional christology out of the water. How does a “cultural conservative” view these acts of determined and deliberate cultural destruction? Are these behaviours suitable for impressionable minds to know? What do we teach and what do we edit out of these stories, and why? Precisely (or even approximately) what is “healthy” and what is “unhealthy” to know?
Thus, while I agree with your comments about Lear and Hamlet (there is no more self-aware personage than William Shakespeare) the leading element of those stories was patricide. Shakespeare invested his life into not recreating medieval sensibilities, but in replacing them. We study Shakespeare not because he is old but because he was shockingly new.
There are many stupid lefties. They have forgotten why Dante and Shakespeare are important. But my argument is that in a fundamental sense righties never ever knew.
Thus this leftie finds much which is commendable in this statement. Density and richness I applaud. But “relevance” is such a limp word. I’d prefer to replace it “shock and disorientation”.
Well that’s a lot of interesting stuff, Katz. I can’t address all of it, though.
But regarding Shakespeare: yes, he was “shockingly new,” as you say, in a way. But here’s the thing. Shakespeare knew his Greeks and Romans backwards and front, he also knew his native Chaucer and his Bede and his Holinshed, and he even puts Gower in one of his plays. He constantly quotes and references his predecessors with relish, gusto and respect, and even when he parodies his literary father, Marlowe, he does it lovingly. When he begins to add lots of new things to his tradition, he does not destroy or denigrate his forbears. He calls nobody a “dead white male,” does not insist on the revaluation of history and values, and the only severed heads he calls for are those of frauds and lawyers. He makes it new, like Ezra Pound suggested, but he cherishes and preserves the old, and builds on it. And his newness is the result of his struggle with his tradition (like Pollock’s was), not the result of his rejection of it (like many a rogue I could name, but won’t).
Hamlet is predicated on a smarty-pants joke: a guy named Hamlet, if he had his druthers, would actually prefer not to be the star of a story called “The Tragedy of Hamlet.” Just down the street, at roughly the same time, Cervantes was working on the mirror image of the joke: a guy named Don Quixote wants to be the hero of a story called “Reality” that doesn’t recognize him as the star. Both of these hyper-modern innovations would not be possible without the tradition of Revenger’s Tragedies and chivalric romances.
Anyway, you get the idea. Cheers…
Knowledge ≠reverence.
You’re right. Shakespeare wasn’t into denigration. He was into writing hugely entertaining plays. His livelihood relied on getting punters through the turnstiles.
Disquisitions on cultural history weren’t box office in the early 17thC just as they aren’t box office in the early 21stC.
Half a generation earlier what Marlow and Jonson and Shakespeare were doing was not only impossible, it was unimaginable. These guys’ activities worried and disturbed a lot of folks. Marlow paid with his life.
Their lives and careers were a living, breathing refutation of ancient verities. They deliberately set themselves up in opposition to the old order of cultural life.
Like all good cultural warriors they studied their quarry. This is how they differed from infantile leftists. These latter personages assume that it is unnecessary to know their adversary.
Such an approach usually results in humiliation.
“Like all good cultural warriors they studied their quarry. This is how they differed from infantile leftists. These latter personages assume that it is unnecessary to know their adversary.”
Interesting to hear that you view your own culture as “quarry” and as an “adversary.”
I believe Katz had “cultural conservatives” in mind rather than the whole shebang, JPZ.
Thanks for the Luger’s tip, BTW – couldn’t get a table unfortunately. Ended up eating at Sammy’s (kosher) Roumanian Steakhouse in (kinda) Nolita. Man, that was pretty fucked up. Not all the schmaltz came from the cabaret singer. Not by a long shot.
You’re flat wrong there, JPZ. Shakespeare’s historical plays, although they’re really great drama, aren’t much more than an elaborate hatchet job on the Plantagenets. Poor old Richard III, condemned to the canon as a pantomime hunchback villain.
…
As for the shock of the new, as Katz mentioned, what about the shock of recognition? Cultural artefacts have to have some kind of link between trancendence and the 461 bus. Social change makes some classics classics, and turns some alien.
An example: the film The Birth of a Nation. There’s no question it’s a classic of the medium, but would you want to resuscitate an overwhelmed North American culture from it?
“Like all good cultural warriors they studied their quarry. This is how they differed from infantile leftists. These latter personages assume that it is unnecessary to know their adversary.”
My connection dropped out, but I was going to suggest earlier that a useful distinction is between refutation and iconoclasm. It strikes me that what j_p_z is rejecting is iconoclasm (or something like it) rather than the refutation of earlier positions. Iconoclasm (in my reading) is about destructive gestures directed at objects of reverence held by others, whereas there are forms of refutation that are aware of their own dependence upon that which they refute, or to put it in Katz’s terms: assume it necessary to know their adversaries and, I would add, know that their adversaries are also part of themselves.
Yes KK.
I like the distinction between refutation and iconoclasm.
Of course, the classical Greeks, the anti-Akhanaten priests, the Soviets and the Spanish priests in the Maya lands were all heavily into iconoclasm.
Shakaspeare was more into refutation by indirect means. He simply denied older forms oxygen by dint of his authorial and entrepreneurial genius.
I think iconoclasm requires force to succeed – although it would be hard to argue that the Greeks, Soviets or Spanish succeeded in the absolute sense that they may have intended (I simply don’t know anything about Akhanaten, so can’t comment). We can see traces and continuities even with the Maya (and Lenca and Pipil etc) in the mestizo nations of Central America, especially in the countryside.
“How does a “cultural conservativeâ€? view these acts of determined and deliberate cultural destruction?”
That’s the single biggest reason why the conservatives don’t like the new-fangled way of doing thngs, because it strikes at the heart of their precous world view.
There’s as much wisdom in Aboriginal Australia as there is Greece and Rome – and a lot less war and murder, slavery and despotism.
Shakespeare bored me shitless at school and I haven’t read him since. Calculus bored me shitless and i haven’t done it since. There’s as much politics and philosphy, and rhetoric, in a Noel Pearson speech as there is in any book of the canon.
And i think the great mass of people have never given two shits for declension of latin verbs or the soliloquys of shakespeare. Let those who wish to study Joyce do so, let those who’s life will never intersect with literature get on with theirs.
“let those who’s life will never intersect with literature get on with theirs.”
Only a very shallow conception of “intersection” would bear your position out. Many of the words you use every day have come from the study of Shakespeare, and everything from your local bridges to your computer from calculus. By all means reject everything that reminds you of the evils of western civilisation, but I hope you’re not planning our nation’s education on that basis.
mark, yeah I read the paper available through google scholar: http://64.233.179.104/scholar?hl=en&lr=&q=cache:J1cbWbc2kp4J:users.ox.ac.uk/~sfos0006/papers/asr2007.pdf+
…and it is not clear what the purpose of the distinction is beyond the reinscription of a weberian disciplinarity. A discussion of “Libertarian–Authoritarian attitudes” is a far cry from the many studies of cultural consumption that investigate its practical, institutional, geographical, and historical character character. For who is such a L-A discussion relevant? Other sociologists of an allegedly ’scientific’ bent?
Their dismissal of Bourdieu’s work highlights the lack of focus on the genesis of class groups. Bourdieu’s work essentially looks at the interplay between two forms of stratification — the class structure and symbolic stratifications expressed through cultural consumption. They want to reintroduce a third form of stratification based on assumed status hierarchies and the consistency of friendship networks within these status gradations. So what? There are many ways social groups are stratified!?!?! What is so important about “Libertarian–Authoritarian attitudes” abstracted from any context? Isn’t it more important to look at how such stratifications (and, therefore, differences) emerge?
It seems to me to be a bourgeois oxbridge attempt to efface the material conditions of existence and the distributions of difference within culture.
An example: the film The Birth of a Nation. There’s no question it’s a classic of the medium, but would you want to resuscitate an overwhelmed North American culture from it?
liam, you seen Paul D. Miller’s (aka dj spooky) remix? http://djspooky.com/art.html (scroll down). Miller teaches at the elite european graduate school http://www.egs.edu
Nothing like exaggeration FDB, perhaps you missed out on all that education you’re advocating for others.
Learning to speak and write isn’t literature – it’s literacy.
Joyce is literature. Dan Brown may or not be – i’d call it a story. And i am a bad person because i liked it.
The point i was making was the assumption that everyone should study shakespeare is a crock of shit. and the view that in the past people studied shakespeare (or actually benefitted from it) is likeweise a crock of shit.
And my opinion is that schools are better places today than they were when i was there.
and the new-fangled way of doing things opens up areas of western civilisation closed off by the canon-makers as much as it “seeks to destroy its evils”
FDB and others,
Thgough I haven’t had much to contribute to this thread for days I’m really enjoying the discussion (apart from our new troll)so please ignore it and proceed as you have done. I’m actually learning something, which is always a pleasant experience.
I remember having an argument with the rather literal minded editor of a film mag I used to work on. She was insistent on the pristine applicability of certain discreet categories of film: some are art, some are pap etc. I pointed to her that the filing cabinet view of cultural categories doesn’t really apply in real life. I think culture is more like water systems: estuaries, streams, rivers, lakes, seas, oceans. There’s an ebb and flow and no real discreet boundaries. Hence Bourdieu’s classifications whilst a useful starting point don’t really cut it.
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Take for example Yawn’s comment:
Well I dunno about Brown ’cause I’ve never read him but Raymond Chandler wrote pulp fiction; is he literature. I’d say yes definitely. To me just as important as Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Garcia Marquez or Tom Wolfe.
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Why mention Tom Wolfe? Because despite the fact that he’s obviously a significant American writer he tends to get ignored by a large slab of the academic establishment. Why? Because he’s a described of popular culture (in the true sense of the phrase) and (I reckon) because he’s right wing. For other reasons certain writers like William Burroughs or Hunter S Thompson are likewise marginalized.
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Does that matter? No. Because the academy has always had its various agendas. And inter-generational conflict has always rocked the boat. I remember having this preposterous argument with a crusty old Marxist film lecturer who insisted that I couldn’t like the films of John Ford (the American imperialist swine). That scenario has played out many times according to many criteria.
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As Orwell said in discussing Tolstoy’s disdain for Shakespeare, you cannot prove empirically that this writer is better than that. Same goes for any cultural product there is no mathematics of taste. It’s just something you know. It’s worth remembering that Shakespeare, widely regarded as history’s finest writer, was not well regarded by the haute intelligentsia until the 18th century. This is not simply the folly of the past. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences habitually fails to honour the most innovative Hollywood directors: Kubrick, Hitchcock and Welles never won Oscars.
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It’s irritating to post-Marxian studies of culture but the realm of the truly cultivated is a province of the elite.
Glen, yes, I saw him perform it in Sydney a year or two ago.
There is a worrying barrage of posts celebrating the notion that the High School English syllabus should be seen as nothing more than providing ammunition in some surely long passe neomarxist political agenda.
Adrien
Mozart was radical, so was Shakespeare. Lots of people decry Shakespeare for his aristocratic personae…This links him to Sophocles another radical.
Shakespeare was lower middle class, hardly aristocratic. And Sophocles was as conservative and aristocratic as they came in the Athens of the fifth century BCE.
Likewise Euripedes whose Women of Troy is probably the first anti-war ‘film’. Imagine the rage of Athenian ultra-conservatives at Achilles being protrayed as the killer of children.
Who were these ‘Athenian ultra-conservatives?’ The rural middle class, mesoi and lower-class thetes who sat in the 14,000 strong audience sitting in the City Dionysia on barmy Spring nights during the Festival Dionysia? Clearly many were OK with it, otherwise Euripides would not have been chosen to produce his plays for the Festival Dionysia competition. In fact, arguably the most democratic artist in history – Aristophanes – centred his plays on pillorying not only Euripides and Socrates, but also Athens leading statesmen and generals such as Pericles and Cleon.
It is true that Women of Troy was produced around the time of the Athenian massacre of Melos, but Women of Troy is also a panegyric to Athens. The enslaved women of Troy hope that of all the Greek cities, it is Athens they are sent to. Greek drama is filled to the brim with “anti-warâ€? messages: The Persians, Agamenmon, Ajax, Hecuba, all of which pre-date Women of Troy. And then the ultimate anti-war play, the (satire) Lysistrata by Aristophanes. The major objection to Euripides were aesthetic, as Aristophanes so brilliantly – and correctly – satirised him in Frogs. He was accused of substituting the transcendence of the Dionysian chorus with the sterile rationalism of the Sophists and Socrates.
But Athenians would never have been so vulgar as to read Euripides or any other poet as a mere kerb-krawling “Anti-War� pamphleteer. We’re talking Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes here, not Jane Fonda, The John Butler Trio or Judy Fricking Davis!
I imagine that such barbs at the Greeks’ most cherished icons might’ve influenced the tenth book of Plato’s Republic where he articulates the first totalitarian philosophy for the arts. The I-don’t-like-what it-says-so-it-ain’t-no-good school of literary criticism.
Actually Plato’s criticism was more directed at poetry’s emotive capacities – “affectâ€? in the patois of postism – which could be thus exploited for good or evil.
Katz
The unifying feature of all the high civilisations you mention is their self-awareness. Classical Greek civilisation, for example, grew out of the long project of destroying the memory of the potency of the old, often female-centred cosmology and to replace them with the new, olympian gods. This wasn’t an act of fealty. It was an act of cultural genocide. At this remove, does this cause us to think less or more of classical Greece?
Cultural genocide ROFL. Dude, where do you buy this shit you’re smoking? Actually Katz, that loss of cultural memory was due to a combination of biogeographical and economic reasons that led to massive population collapse and the total loss of the ability to write. There was no state, and even representational art was lost. The 300 year long Greek Dark Ages were very real, not the conscious act of a civilisation suppressing the “Other.� Also, you must remember that fifty percent of the Olympians are female.in archaic and Classical Greece, the female retained an extremely powerful role in Greek theosophy.
We certainly think less of the Soviet Union for attempting to do the same to the aristocratic, Christian traditions of Russia. Do we think less or more of Akhenaten when he overthrew the old Egyptian gods during pharaonic Egypt’s brief dalliance with monotheism?
We simply do not make ethical or moral judgements on Akhenaten, so who cares?
Do we think more or less of the priests who then attempted to destroy all memory of Akhenaten? German biblical scholars of the C19th blew 1500 years of traditional christology out of the water. How does a “cultural conservative� view these acts of determined and deliberate cultural destruction? Are these behaviours suitable for impressionable minds to know? What do we teach and what do we edit out of these stories, and why? Precisely (or even approximately) what is “healthy� and what is “unhealthy� to know?
None of this has anything to do education syllabi. It is merely you instrumentalising (incorrectly understood I must say) cherry-picked events to fight particular battles in the Culture Wars.
Thus, while I agree with your comments about Lear and Hamlet (there is no more self-aware personage than William Shakespeare) the leading element of those stories was patricide.
Wow, you’re right. No need to study literature as Katz has one word to sum them all up. Please. Hamlet is a secular tale of human transcendence. A precursor to the bourgeois tragedies.
Shakespeare invested his life into not recreating medieval sensibilities, but in replacing them. We study Shakespeare not because he is old but because he was shockingly new.
Actually kids today do NOT “study Shakespeare.” But WE studied him because no other writer has ever shown such facility with the English language; because he used that facility to paint the most psychologically complete picture of humanity known to literature. Your insistence on literature being little more than an infantryman in your neomarxist Culture War is as offensive as it is ugly and boneheaded. Are you Pat Byrnes or Wayne Sawyer?
jpz
Tick, tick, tick to everything you have said: great civilisations and their literature. On Hey Jude (which by the way, I think is close to the greatest pop song ever made), are you saying it was born as HC, oronly becomes so after more than a generation of assessing its import?
Just like Australian Aboriginal culture, there is not a hope in hell of resucitating American Indian culture, because they would never return to the nomadic mode of production, technology level that was inextricably linked to that culture.
Those Sociology dudes would do well to know that in Britain there is a huge correlation between Class and Status seeking. Investment banks, media organisations, management consultancies, corporate law firms etc. are filled to the brim with kids from the major public schools, Oxbridge etc. and very few from comprehensive schools, the former polytechnics (British Dawkins Universities), or housing estates.
And as I am always trying to tell y’all, anybody who thinks the yuppie bourgeois Pepes Le Pew have ANYTHING to do with the Anglosphere in general, let alone Australia in 2007 is clearly off their rocker. As EH Carr said “first study the historian, then study the facts.”
The nihilistic hopelessness of post WW2 Pepe left-wing academics – Focuault, Derrida, Bourdieu, Lacan, etc. – is the very opposite of the Aussie spirit.
More. Piffle.
And you would “do well” to go back and respond to some of the criticisms to your earlier comments, rather than favouring us with more of these gems.
Learn. How. To. Argue!
I mean, for a start, Bourdieu has nothing to do with Lacan or Foucault. His first work was in anthropology, and Distinction is basically empirical sociology based on survey research, FFS. Far from “nihilistic hopelessness”, his interventions into political debates were grounded in the recreation of a left political project of hope.
You really are ignorant, JG.
Huh? Where?
Kim
Jesus Christ woman. Get ye to an ESL class. Read again.
Well, how’s all that blather about Greek tragic drama to be related to Princess Di? Remember you said that’s what people should be discussing in tutes. So discuss. How did Greek drama supposedly influence the bible? How do you respond to the criticism of your attack on Derrida?
Come on. Have at it.
Kim
The thread changed. If you have specific questions please post, using appropriate quotes and links where necessary, and I will be glad to discuss with you. However, if all you are going to do is respond “piffle” or comment on my typing, well, I DO have to file my nails, you know.
Mr Greenfield, the fact that you can uncritically use a term like ‘the Aussie spirit’ to argue your point suggests a great deal about the degree of rigor with which you have approached these questions. Please define this concept.
Fine, JG.
Specific questions were posed to you in this comment, and the five succeeding ones:
http://larvatusprodeo.net/2008/01/04/cultural-elites-dont-exist-study-finds/#comment-427397
Let me just say, regarding my comment above at 46, that there is of course nothing wrong with not understanding Bourdieu’s work or methods or disciplinary affiliations. However, what is wrong is lumping him in with a range of other scholars as if there were no differences.
It might be fair to say that Lacan’s political stance was nihilistic, though I’d have thought that you’d have agreed with him, JG, when he told students at Vincennes in May 68 they should be learning ancient Greek. The debate about Foucault’s politics is a broad one, however, and Derrida’s political work is anything but nihilistic.
“Just like Australian Aboriginal culture, there is not a hope in hell of resucitating American Indian culture, because they would never return to the nomadic mode of production, technology level that was inextricably linked to that culture.”
Well, it didn’t stop Australia glorifying the itinerant bushmen/ swaggie at the exact point in history when they were disappearing, owing to changes in the mode of proudction (viz., mechanisation of agriculture/ shearing).
In fact, such nostalgia seemed to spur cultural production of national identity, aka ‘the Australian legend’.
So, in sum, I find your thesis wanting, Greenfield.
Also, there’s no reason why a cultural renewal needs to involve a ‘return to’ approach: it could involve the recognition of surviving elements continuous with the past, their amplification or celebration. We could also speak of post-1788 Aboriginal cultures that have been subsequently devalued as worthy of recognition or renewal, and they were already formed in the wake of disconnection from that material base.
In response to John Greenfield who wrote:
It’s advisable before one presumes to give lectures to check facts and learn to read properly. I made no comment about Shakespeare’s socio-economic position, I made a commentary on his personae. As in dramatis personae. As in the stuff he made up.
>
Please explain to me how Hamlet, Lear, Romeo Montague, the exiled Duke of Milan and the treacherous Thane are lower middle-class. As for your observations about Sophocles and Athenian society I should like to remind you that Sophocles was part of Pericles’ circle. The ultra-conservatives to whom I refer are obviously the Oligarchs. Pericles was famously not.
>
To proceed from there to your observation regarding Athenian anti-war works I must add to your list of anti-war stuff Homer’s Illiad. All depictions of war other than the most base propaganda are anti-war because war is a rather nasty business. What makes Euripedes’ work special is that the central to it are the victims of a war upon which Greek society founded its self-defining mythology. Euripedes makes clear that these are victims of crime. It’s akin to making a movie in which a bunch of Galipolli Anzacs pack-rape a Turkish girl.
>
Your polemic on Plato does nothing to contradict my observations. Plato says poetry is bad because the characters don’t act the way he’d like ‘em to. It encourages bad behaviour. The monkey see, monkey do theory of Art as opposed to Aristotle’s notion of catharsis persist to this day in authoritarian-libertarian debates pertinent to fiction and its effect on behviour. Poetry should kneel before the State he says. His policy is entirely compatible with the spirit of every art-hating demagogue since.
>
As for your observations re the nihilistic Pepe le Pews and the Australian spirit I raise my eyes to heaven. What Kim said and more. Foucault for example stresses the positive articulation of power, the enabling function of rules. There is to be sure a certain relevance gap between the French perspective and the Anglospere. Camille Paglia serves this up with wit and understanding. Your approach is more Alan Jones. Go listen to him I think he’s on now.
>
And what this Aussie spirit is I shouldn’t wonder. When I hear someone try to define my nation’s spirit for me I reach for my sword. The Australian ethos forged in the world’s first gulag is rooted in nihilism. Nihilism, literally, the belief in nothing. More accurately the belief that all beliefs are products of human manufacture. I reckon every Australian outside of Hillsong tends to share that view.
BTW John
>
I am not pursuing any neo-Marxian agenda and fail to see how any of my commentary can be read thus. My attitude to the ‘culture wars’ is that it is an unimportant skirmish between two groups of people who wish to rewrite history to make themselves the good guys. The victims of such scand’lous behaviour are people who have more than one eye. Orwell said: the enemy is the gramaphone mind. Tatoo that on your forehead.
JG is the materialist, Adrien – he apparently maintains that identity and culture are dependent on the mode of production in any given society.
Oh the vulgarity!
A phrase he used as an imperative to self-reflection, JG, as you’d know if you’d ever read EH Carr. You would do well to, etc. etc. etc.
Yes JG’s attack on neo-Marxism is ironic because he’s still quite Marxian in certain ways. I’ve got a sympathy with that point of view, LE but it’s not the entire story for the same reason that Marx (where he gets things right) is not the entire story. There is no entire story.
>
I kinda regret my vitriol but I’m a little sick of being pegged into boxes I don’t belong in, as in any of ‘em. Plus there’s the fact that he’s got certain facts wrong and can’t distinguish between the seriously polemical and the glib. Maybe I should put up a warning.
>
Attention: Ye Doctrinairres the following is not serious
Well, Ive got a funny feeling JG’s strict materialism may apply only to indigenous cultures, Adrien.
Obviously, for example, the values inherent in the charge of the light brigade would continue to resonate in contemporary Skip culture despite the long-term obsolescence / redundance of the military technology.
Not to mention battlefield donkeys.
David
Why do current reading lists have such a fixation with the present?
Indeed. And WTF would English/Cultistudies/blah teachers know about culture in the present? The present is being created right now by students. They do not need it mediated by High School (or even worse uni. Academics). Teachers and academics are there to provide a potted exposure of the best that has been thought and said from THE PAST. That is all they are trained to do. The process Data –> Information –> Knowledge –> Wisdom/Profundity/Assessment takes time. To be sure, while imparting this wisdom, lights will go on in the students head attesting to either the continuity of events in their day-to-day life or perhaps anxiety might descend when circumstances are confronted that not even education could prepare them for. These on and off lights are totally unpredictable. All the teacher can do is offer the best knowledge we have thus far.
On the old thread Ag posted
In my field of OzLit a novel like Grenville’s ‘The Secret River’ can be evaluated against Alexis Wright’s ‘Carpentaria’. Both are concerned with frontier conflict and the possibilities of reconciliation.
To which I replied
If these books are about pop slogans like “Reconciliation� they have no place on the school syllabus. Kids deserve a break from contemporary pamphleteering, most of which will end up in history’s trash can. Much better books would be Katharine Sussanah Pritchard’s Coonardoo, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mocking Bird each of which I read in high school. Of course, the first great “Self in Other� work of literature was Homer’s The Iliad, but I digress.
If you want kids to deal explicitly with contemporary debates, save it for Civics, or deal with it if it comes up incidentally through novels, plays, and poems. Do not start the curriculum with a desired political outcome and then cherry pick texts that will serve that political agenda. Better than Grenville is the study of actual, you know, er, History! You should read the diabolical Nazism in current English curricula. VERY scary!
The Charge of the Light Brigade’s values are alive and well LE. It’s called Iraq.
Does Rumsfeld wear a cardigan? Does Cheney get annoyed when people drink moselle at dinner? These are the questions the In Search Of team ask when they are trying to prove reincarnation.
Mark
One thing that is a tad ironic, JG, is that you might “do well� to take some courses in avoiding hyperbole and being responsive to arguments when you try to refute them.
Quite so. But perhaps not the ones taken by you. “At the root of much culture wars talk is an opposition to the overthrow of the high culture/low culture distinction – you know you’re on this terrain when columnists start raving about teh evil postmodernist Maoist teachers privileging comics over Chaucer or equating Big Brother and Shakespeare.â€?
The comment that no one can understand Derrida without knowledge of “Attic Greek� is nonsense. And the Septaguint (but not “The Bible�) was written in Koine Greek.
Where did I say anything about the Septuagint? (I am surprised Miss Hathaway has not swooped to point out your spelling error. NOT!) Especially where I have made any comment on the languages it has been written in?
What I DID say was “Mark, Western Culture is incomprehensible without The Bible!. Try understanding Derrida without it! His whole shtick against logocentrism is rooted in his anti-Christianity. It is also the source of his gravest errors. I am still only nudging my way through him, but I think I have got his number already, and there is absolutely no way any person can competently read Derrida without knowledge of The Bible AND Attic Greek. “
If you cannot see that Derrida’s silly claims about logocentrism are not rooted in a misrepresentation of Attic Greek, the Book of John, and Genesis then studying Derrida must have been an extremely long and painful process for you. I would be very interested to read what Muslim scholars have had to say about Derrida’s pursed-lips and hands-on-hip deriding of logocentrism.
You’ve made similar arguments before and they’re still wrong. It may be better to read Derrida in French but you don’t need to be a polymath to understand him. Just intelligent.
Well actually no. Pure intelligence without being a polymath will see you succeed in an IQ test. And Pure Mathematics However, Derrida is extremely consciously shrouded in a great deal of western intellectual history, without which you will either be at sea, or very easily fooled.
It’s also quite wrong to say this
His whole shtick against logocentrism is rooted in his anti-Christianity and the Greek roots of western metaphysics.
In any case, I’m not discussing Derrida
And yet that is PRECISELY what you are discussing.
Your comments about philosophers would have more credibility if they demonstrated that you understood argument. Derrida was sometimes (wrongly) criticised for privileging rhetoric over logic. If that’s to be a postmodern luvvie, it seems to me that you stand self-accused.
So, you ARE discussing Derrida? Good lord, could you post a schedule first thing each morning, so we can follow your ramblings throughout the day?
Have you read or seen Antigone? Where’s the parallel?…over the influence on The New Testament of pathos in fifth century Athenian tragedy.
What influence?
And now for what was ACTUALLY posted
j_p_z/Klaus K
Someone raised the question earlier on, of whether or not there was a good (and reasonably ‘objective’) example in music of the transcendent, qua transcendent, independent of pathos.
I reckon the King’s College Boy’s Choir in the Rolling Stones’ Can’t Always Get What You Want must come close! J But why the antipathy towards pathos? If only CultiStudies tutorials trilled with passionate debate over the influence on The New Testament of pathos in fifth century Athenian tragedy, particularly in light of Plato’s criticisms – Book X, The Republic – Aristotle’s thumbs up in Poetics and Nietzsche’s in The Birth of Tragedy. Even better, how Wagner’s early operas, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and/or Mozart’s treatment of these issues might help us understand Princess Diana’s celluloid mythography. Diana as postmodern Antigone, per chance?
Mark
I’m deliberately using opposite extremes, but it makes heuristic sense as an explanation of a continuum (actually, that’s still a simplification: many continuums of multiple cognitive requirements).
Clearly “heuristic� is a very fashionable dish among the nouvelle cuisine nibblers of The Luvviesphere, while the rest of us must masticate on the slops of “One thing that is a tad ironic, JG, is that you might “do well� to take some courses in avoiding hyperbole.�
In a way, I suspect Frank Hardy would be harder to read in this sense than rural novels – because his urban Australia really is stranger than the typical 19th century novel
Really Luvvie? The realities of 20th century Sydney and Melbourne are so strange to a kid growing up in what has been among the top three most urbanised nations of earth for many, many decades, in cities such as, er, er, er, Sydney and Melbourne? And yet, 8 year olds see no problem with Middle Earth, Hogwarts, Narnia, Sherwood Forest, Wonderland….As Oscar Wilde said, ““there is no such thing as a moral or immoral book. Books are well written or badly written.� And there would be few more thoroughly drenched in AP than Wilde! And for the purposes of High School English there we have it.
I also think, as usual, this comment over-estimates how far you actually can stretch a high school mind.
Yet they are perfectly at ease with poststructuralism?
I don’t think I really understood anything much about motivations, mores, practices, et, in Elizabethan England until much later in life.
When you became a skilled and OBJECTIVE historian, perhaps? How very modernist of you!
I think it would be an exceptional, really rare English teacher who could teach even bright students the way you’d like.
Yet it happened for decades before the Brave New Postit Curriculum. You have just said that you, yourself were so taught. Jesus, do you even read what you write?
In any case, usually calls for teaching the canon are dehistoricising and decontextualising.
Can you give us examples of these “calls for teaching the canonâ€? that are “dehistoricising and decontextualising?â€? Presumably there are many, as such calls are what is “usual.â€? Also can you provide a good reason why – given you say you were so were well taught – you would use such vapid and ugly language?
There’s a big difference between Stephen Greenblatt’s Shakespeare and a formalist Shakespeare who speaks to eternal verities or “pathos� or whatever.
Big stiffy. Again, where are these “eternal verities� arguments? Are you asking what pathos means? If not, what are you trying to say?
The relevance of the Septaguint (and I apologise for the typo), JG, is that the Hebrew Bible is not written in Greek, though there are parts of the Hebrew Bible which exist in a somewhat different Alexandrian redaction.
I’m surprised, as you’re apparently such a keen student of Plato, that you don’t realise that the term “logos” is central to some of his arguments and this is what Derrida is talking about in Of Grammatology, not John the beloved disciple.
But then, polymath that you are, you apparently have a superior understanding of Derrida without having to read any books by Derrida.
Oh, and restating your babble about pathos does not constitute an elucidation of it. We’re still waiting for the revelations about the influence of Greek Drama on biblical authors, and what this and Wagner, Mozart etc. has to do with Diana.
Antigone by the way was the daughter of the unkowingly incestuous union between Oedipus and Jocasta, and she commits suicide not knowing that Creon has permitted Polynices’ burial.
Perhaps you’ll give us all the benefit of your profound learning and insight to explain the relevance.
I didn’t write that, JG, David did. In your haste to cut and paste, you must have missed that.
I’ve always said that I’m not a postmodernist.
Try the prolific Dr Donnelly.
Oh, and no doubt I’m flattered that you address me as “luvvie”, but I’m afraid your love is unrequited.
“I think culture is more like water systems: estuaries, streams, rivers, lakes, seas, oceans.”
Not a bad analogy there Adrien. And to stretch it a bit further, these systems gradually but firmly shape the landscape which in turn then affects how they are accessed and used.
“Orwell said: the enemy is the gramaphone mind.”
Or in ole Greenfly’s case, the photocopy frontal lobes. He may cut ‘n’ paste a lot into into his head, but he does little with it once it’s there except spit out badly when the bell rings. It’s like someone regurgitating duck a l’orange and loudly announcing it’s a new recipe for fruit and fowl.
Everyone’s have a merry old time pointing out his many egregious howlers, (“personaâ€? for “personaeâ€? – I mean really…)
Here’s another one for the fast-growing collection.
“that loss of cultural memory was due to a combination of biogeographical and economic reasons that led to massive population collapse and the total loss of the ability to write.�
So where did Homer get his dramatis personae, settings and basic storylines for the Iliad and the Odyssey? How did particular Mycenaean deities morph their way into the Greek Pantheon? Just because you spend most of your time writing longwinded essays and puerile polemics, doesn’t mean everyone else throughout history is dependent solely on the written word as a way of transmitting culture. Ever heard of oral tradition?
“…and even representational art was lost�
You would do well to actually visit Greece and tour places like the National Archaeological Museum of Athens and the Delphi, Eretria and Heraklion Museums to see how Bronze Age representational art, along with pottery and decorative art, was not only not lost but kept evolving and influencing culture during the Greek Dark Ages.
Also they serve a killer crushed ice and fruit syrup concoction at the Delphi Museum snack bar. Just watch out for the official harpies infesting all the Greek museums snapping at you not to use a flash (why?).
But hey, I’ll let you have the last word because I’m that kinda guy.
“It is merely you instrumentalising (incorrectly understood I must say) cherry-picked events to fight particular battles in the Culture Wars.�.
PS: It was the London Bach Choir and not the King’s College Boy’s Choir on “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”. Is there anything you can’t always get wrong?
Really. Luvvie. ORLY.
Try reading Power without Glory, C’n'P, and get back to us. It’s got flogging in it—you’ll like it.
EH Carr has some things to say about historians’ objectivity. As I said, give him a read and get back to us.
Nabakov, it’s truly an epic fail.
JG,
I hate to join the howling mob, BUT
Have you truly done any philosophy of history. You deon’t appear to have read Carr’s What is History? You seem to have no knowledge of the objectivity/subjectivity debate otherwise you wouldn’t have made the silly comment you did about objectivity. You don’t seem to have any concept of historical imagination. You certainly seem to be utterly unaware of an historian’s awareness, not only of the bias of others, but his own subconscious bias which he struggles to make conscious. I could go on and on, but I can’t be bothered, but just show I have no hard feelings, and because I’ve just learnt how to do it.:)
Like I said, Paul, JG manages to be an expert on Derrida without reading Derrida.
Mark,
The only postmodernist philosopher I’m familiar with is Foucault. I once glanced at Derrida, but that’s all it was. That’s why I try to keep out of these debates, unless something comes up where I might make a useful contribution.My impression is, from the discussions, that the are mostly influential in literary studies, and they weren’t around when I did English 100. I see no conflict between high/low culture. I’m a devotee of both. I mean, I stop work, or leave LP if I’m on line, every weekday to watch The Bold and the Beautiful.Though I think I would stop at giving Noel Pearson precedence over Shakespeare or Dickens, somehow.
Well, so would I, Paul.
And I used to be quite the Days of Our Lives addict!
I also watch the Today Show on Channel 9 regularly. That’s more political. Getting to know the enemy, so to speak.
stop being so hard on JG – this thread is the first time that he has actually ever made a substantive comment as opposed to snide one-liners.
anyway, to go back to the original topic: I was in grade 12 about seven years ago, at one of Brisbane’s biggest public schools (McGregor State High). The overwhelming majority of the non-Asian students couldn’t have cared less about what they were studying – their interests barely extended beyond cars, binge drinking and getting laid. Perhaps this is the “Aussie Spirit” that JG is talking about.
Aussie high school students would rather waste their time working for $6 an hour in some bullshit casual job than reading or studying, since they need money to support their ever-so-important social life. In high school social popularity is vastly more important than anything else, and social popularity tends to be inversely proportional to your academic ability and intellectual curiosity (that goes double for boys).
My brother is in grade 11 now at the same school and from what he says nothing has changed – maybe private schools are different, but I suspect it is merely a difference of degree. It hardly matters how ‘contemporary’, ‘relevent’ or dumbed down the curriculum is (and it IS dumbed down) – none of it is retained anyway, 99% of the time it is completely forgotten as soon as the class moves onto a new unit.
So instead of worrying about the subtleties of political shading in the curriculum, how about addressing the fact that the entire school system seems set up to pretty much make kids hate learning, and that we live in a culture that places far more importance on sport and sex than on education. I mean, why on earth do we divide students into classes on the basis of their birth-year? It does nothing but punish the talented students while reinforcing peer-group immaturity. And the school places far more importance on arbitrary and capricious discipline than on education – if I’m getting C+ in every subject, that’s just fine – normal. But if I wear the wrong shoes, turn up late or skip a pointless class because I want to do something more interesting then I am punished with a detention!!
Many of the teachers are either totally indifferent or mentally unbalanced power-freaks. Of course there are a few great teachers here and there, but their efforts cannot redeem the dreadful system, and while I’m sure they would love to focus their efforts on the small minority of students who are interested in learning, the system dictates that they drag these students down to the lowest common denominator.
I hardly learned anything useful in school. I learned far more in my own time, just by reading books and websites, guided solely by my own curiosity. And then one day, while stoned in class, I realized – school isn’t about learning anything. It’s about getting ready for life as a worker-drone, in a boring 9-5 job, taking shit from your boss without talking back, and doing stuff that you have no interest in. In other words – school is just a prelude to your meaningless existence as a member of the nation’s workforce.
As you may have guessed, I hated school passionately. Thank God for University!
No that’s a cry from the heart yeti. I can hear the echoes in the chambers of my own blood pumpin’ muscle.
Probably the worst thing you can do to active, bright and bouncy nubile primates is lock ‘em up in a series of rooms for six hours a day to have data drummed into ‘em by grown up primates who really don’t want to be there either.
I can’t remember much I was taught at grammar school (except for the cool English teacher’s classes where we were introduced to TH White and Alfred Bester) but I sure learnt a lot there, mainly about how formal and informal social structures work – ’specially when the Deputy Principal caught me as stage manager for the school concert in the wings having a nip from my Dad’s “borrowed” hip flask, confiscated it for a big swig and then returned it to me with a bleary wink. That’s when I really realised grownups were big fallible kids too.
And then yes, yeti, uni. Probably the three most innocently well-funded fun years of my life. I learnt little more but discovered an awful lot otherwise.
All that played a vital role in making me the suave, worldy, poo-flinging silverback I am today.
Yet Yeti, according to your own account your “Asian” contemporaries do seem to have got something out of their school experience.
How many of them are still at the bottom of the food chain?
It’s impossible to legislate against stupidity.
Skips lose.
“Yet Yeti, according to your own account your “Asianâ€? contemporaries do seem to have got something out of their school experience.”
Well they got high OP scores, although I doubt that they found school particularly interesting or a fulfilling outlet for personal creativity. It just comes down to the cultural difference between Asian and western parenting styles. Asian parents will demand 100% competitive academic effort from their kids, and drill the hard-work ethos into them from a very young age. as a result, the Asian kids always tend to excel academically, and are socially ostracized from the Aussie kids, who think they are nerds that should “get a life”.
unlike their Confucian counterparts many western parents are just as content to let their kids spend their after-school hours watching endless simpsons re-runs, playing hours of playstation on end, spewing up vodka with their friends, working for minimum wage in Woolworths or other unproductive activities. and then they resent the immigrants for snapping up the good jobs!
Well, since we’re recounting school experiences – apart from maths, I really enjoyed school, especially English and History. Though I nearly killed myself once in a chlorine making experiment (conducted by the teacher) in chemistry once. But that’s another story. I was pulled out of school by a fairy book wicked stepmother at School Certificate level because she feared I wqould lose my immortal soul if I got an education. Actually she wanted to spend the school fees (Catholic boy goes to Catholic school)on house renovations. But that’s yet another story. So when I finally got a chance to get a real education I somewhat valued it.Ecessively.
Though I do agree that school’s main purpose is creating obedient clones for the workforce.
And we are being too hard on JG. I really enjoy my debates with him, because he frequently does have something worthwhile to offer in his comments. Though, JG, you do deserve it sometimes.;)
John Greenfield: Curious as to why you waited so long to show your hand. Care to share?
You are quite brilliant. And all your foes and would be interlocutors are languishing in your wake, no doubt green with envy and in the throes of impotent rage.
Bravo for the magnificent swathe and sweep. And the entertainment!
JG,
You wouldn’t stoop so low, would you? Mind you, my skills in textual analysis aren’t that finely honed, but …;)
For someone who has never posted before on LP, “John Gray” does speak with some assumed authority about transactions here.
There’s nothing definitive in this information.
However, Dorian Gray was quite a well-known narcissist.
And what narcissist can resist using part of his own identity, even in an assumed identity?
Paul Burns @ 36 above
I agree, am reading (slowly) and enjoying this: up there with the best LP threads I suggest.
Late last year someone on LP asked: “what will we blog now that Kevin’s been elected?”
Ladies and gentlemen, the answer is here in front of us.
cheerio
& good wishes for 2008
Mark
Nowhere have I said I am a “polymath.” On the contrary I have made it quite clear that I am far from it. But I am curious, and that is why I am studying. And again, as I have also made clear I am nudging my way through Derrida at the moment.
JG manages to be an expert on Derrida without reading Derrida.
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So? That makes him at one with all the other Derrida experts. No-one reads him. He’s unreadable. Judith Butler and Jacques Derrida: scribes to naked emperors everywhere.
John Gray has written an Elegy on JG, Katz.
Should we rejoice?
MarkB on Antigone and Lady Diana:
i have located a minor manuscript from the Redbrick College Annual Prizegiving, where Jimmy Green (another JG; they swarm, they replicate, they sweep, they stoop to conquer!) gave the annual Oral Oration. His topic: “Antigone & Diana, yeah!” :
there’s this chick – yeah? – Antigone ‘n she’s tryin’ ter get ‘er bruvver all fixed up ‘n buried, right? but them [other] geezers weren’t havin’ nuffin of it, yeah – like they said NO way!! jo-say!! so she’s goin’ about beatin’ her tits, ‘n complainin’ to the Social Services ‘n stuff, ‘n
well Diana, she was brilliant, right? I mean she held hands wiv a guy’s got AIDS right? ‘n then Mohamed got Fired up ‘n then [they] had this big funeral with the flowers ‘n all, we saw it on telly, ‘n her bruvver – bleedin’ hell, he tipped such a bucket of shit on them Royals – yeah? it was Murder in That Cathedral, I’m tellin’ ya. But then he’s dropped outta sight, man, probably got bumped off by MyFive. So Antigone wannered ta bury ‘er bruvver, and Diana got buried like for real but ‘ER bruvver got…. well, ya see what I’m gettin’ at? eh?
[Polite Applause]
Well, JG, while you’re making your way through him, surely the intellectually honest thing to do would be to refrain from making sweeping statements about him? Such as claims that he’s a “nihilist” and “anti-Christian”?
Adrien, I disagree, though I’ll grant you Judith Butler.
If y’all lack the imagination to be able to carry on a discussion about Antigone and Diana, god help your students!
Mark
Sorry Mark, but I’ve got his number already by Chapter 2.
Oh that god awful Judith Butler. These poor Gen Y girls and young women. What is it about the bizarre embrace of Focuault by lesbians?
Judith Butler is quite readable at times, especially her recent stuff like ‘Undoing Gender’. I’ve taught using pieces from there with some success (well, the majority of final essays for that semester suggested that she was understood). I found ‘Bodies that Matter’ fairly straightforward as well, for the most part. I’ll happily grant that there is other stuff of hers out there that presents a challenge, and yields less in return than it should given the amount of effort.
Well, if that’s the case, then JG, you should be able to justify and back up your arguments about him in response to criticisms and questions. You can’t? Oh well. We know what value to place on your assertions in future. Nor do you enhance your credibility by throwing the responsibility back on your interlocutors to justify your assertion that there is a parallel between Antigone and Diana. And your stuff about tragic drama and the influence of Greek drama on the NT remains unelucidated.
Mark
On logos, you recall the opening sentence of John.
In the beginning was the Word (logos), and the Word (logos) was with God, and the Word (logos) was God.
In Greek thought, literature, and science ruminations over logos go back to at least the sixth century. Influenced by the Ionian scientists, Herodotus is one long disquisition on the role of logos and nomos in human affairs and history. However, Derrida presents a very slippery version of logos, which would lead the innocent up the garden path. Even after Plato and Aristotle, The Neoplatonists were all over logos and it played a huge role in the late antique Christological to-dos, particularly the Council of Chalcedon.
Derrida is having a go at dismantling the whole foundation of western metaphysics – Attic Greek grammar and theosophy plus Abrahamic monotheism, particularly Christianity.
That is why I asked if you were familiar with Islamic responses to Derrida’s critique of logocentrism.
Klaus
A bit of Biology and Neurophysiology would do Butler the world of good, and would be a godsend to the poor kids having her shoved at them!
JG, I think you’re using theosophy in the wrong sense.
And you’re reading out of context – Derrida’s program is not the “dismantling” but the “deconstruction” of Western metaphysics. He deliberately avoids using Heidegger’s term “destruction” – while gesturing towards it. In addition, he wrote and spoke extensively on Abrahamic monotheism towards the end of his life, and hostility towards it couldn’t be further from what he’s doing. Now, I’m not suggesting you should have read his whole oeuvre, but others have, and you might do well, etc., etc.
Mark
Was that post a parody!?
Well, I’m not a huge fan of Butler, but she remains a significant and influential theorist of gender: most contemporary feminist theorists and philosophers are in dialogue with her either explicitly or implicitly, and many criticise her work for its attitudes towards the body and biology. As for teaching, I find that Butler is best applied as a way of challenging both biological determinist and social constructionist arguments which students tend to bring with them. It’s about opening up the possibilities of thought, and some of her pieces can do that nicely for certain case studies.
For my money, I like the work of Elizabeth A Wilson, which is critical of Butler:
http://www.amazon.com/Psychosomatic-Feminism-Neurological-Elizabeth-Wilson/dp/0822333651
No, I’m actually trying to be helpful, JG. You can either learn something about Derrida or stay at the snarky uninformed comment level. Up to you.
Generally, in academic debate, it’s considered helpful to:
(a) know what you’re talking about;
(b) critique authors with citations and quotes from their works, not with sweeping generalisations which read into them all sorts of stuff that isn’t there.
Though I note the irony that you’re obviously a much bigger believer that any text is potentially relatable to all sorts of other texts than I am. By roping in Neo-platonism, etc, you’re being quite the deconstructionist. Hope you enjoy it. Not sure if it makes you a “luvvie”. You’d better report back later as to whether any symptoms are developing.
Have you read E. H. Carr yet, btw?
Klaus
Ah yes, of course. So much to “challenge,” “subvert,” “problematise,” blah, blah, fucking blah.
Sorry, JG, don’t you have some reading assignments to be getting on with?
Mark
Well let’s see how we go when you learn to stop deliberately insisting posters have said things and raised issues that they clearly have not, before you progress to your signature bait and switch.
Exactly, because when students come to me they have not generally engaged in much critical reflection on their own positions on sex and gender. They often think that it’s either all about what ’society’ tells you to do, or that it’s all in the genes, or have similarly reductive positions on certain key questions. My job is to challenge and problematise, although I don’t think ’subversion’ is on the agenda in any meaningful sense.
If you can’t challenge and problematise common sense positions at the tertiary level, then I don’t see much value in universities existing at all. Historians frequently challenge and problematise received wisdom as well. What you object to are the buzzwords, and that’s fine, but I don’t see why there would be a problem with asking students to learn something new.
Klaus
So you’re a Social Worker, now? Great to see our education dollars are being spent so well.
No, when I’m teaching I’m a teacher. I introduce them to the study of sex, sexuality and gender as that study is conducted in the humanities and social sciences, and for them to learn anything new about that field, they have to move beyond the assumptions they arrive with, whatever those are, and start asking questions. To learn, one must be challenged.
Or, as one of my lecturers told me, if you can completely understand something the first time you read it, you probably haven’t learned anything from it.
JG,
The whole purpose of universities is to teach people how to think, and at a higher level to engage in critical independent thinking via one’s chosen area of research. Believe me. as a teacher, there’s nothing better than watching a mind go ‘click’.and as Fine implied it always takes a while to get there.Whether its undergraduate, postgraduate or post-doctoral. But when you do, wow!
How one writes is in itself a political act. Career feminists like Judith Butler have no interest in bettering the lives of oppressed women. That is obvious from the way she writes. She could never claim through her written work to have helped a single woman leave an abusive husband or taught an illiterate girl how to read, or a smart one how to think, or done anything useful whatsoever for humanity, or the humanities.
People like her do the opposite – fortunately, their use-by-date as a philosophical current is well nigh – and only help confuse and exasperate those in the most need. What a travesty. Good riddance to bad rubbish, when this all goes down the gurgler of academic history. Any female university students forced to read her drivel should treat her work as an example of masculinist theory at its worst.
Besides, like all the pomo lit/critical theory poseurs she says nothing that wasn’t said – better – up to 2500 years ago as John reiterates.
Down with mediocre minds purveyed by careerist charlatans.
John, you do stand out in your obvious passion for the ‘wisdom of the ages’ and your wish to share that with others. You would be an excellent humanities teacher and, Gaia help us all, we certainly need more of those.
I had a wonderful English lit teacher when I did my Masters at the University of Qld. You remind me a little of him. His name is Dan O’Neill. He is retired now but runs, for free, lengthy discussion groups on the work of Joyce, Proust, Wordsworth and that ilk which an eclectic range of people attend, including several of my relatives.
He’s revered by countless students and peers and by the many ordinary men and women, including several generations of Aboriginal community members from Qld, whom his work has touched. His work also included a lifetime of radical political activism.
Like his teaching and his current voluntary work, that was rooted in his immense and generous capacity for love which your writing and passion for knowledge and the best that human culture can offer everyone, and the wish to share that also unmistakably exhibits.
Antigone and Diana? Absurd. Now Antigone and Paris Hilton, that’s a theses worth writing.
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I really would like to see how anybody uses Judith Butler in a way that helps. The only skill she seems to possess is the capacity to write something that is axiomatically simple using 100 words in a sentence that has no punctuation.
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Derrida? descontruction’s an idea. But it can be distilled to a few simple lines. Whatever I thought we were discussing cultural class politics. Where do the punks on Brunswick St with origial Russ Meyer film posters and old Elvis vinyl fit in?
I think that Rosemary’s point about writing being a political act is a very valid one, but I don’t draw the same political conclusions as she seems to from Judith Butler’s writing.
Also, I’m not sure which of Butler’s arguments are supposed to have been offered in better form more than 2000 years, and would be glad to know.
The comparison of Mr Greenfield to some beloved teacher from Ms McCann’s past, I think we can agree, is irrelevant to this discussion. Mr Greenfield’s good character has no bearing on his arguments.
Adrien, I disagree. Antigone is a character who is deeply concerned with cosmic order – ie with observing proper burial rites for her brother. I see no parallel in Paris Hilton.
John Greenfield is one stone cold righteous savant. So you show him some goddam respect or I’ll come and deconstruct your asses.
Why you say bad things about John-san? You make Hello Kitty cry.
Well, I know Dan O’Neill as well from my time at UQ. Dan’s incredibly intellectually generous, and very well read. He’s also a Marxist, which JG would no doubt not like.
I’m honestly not trying to be snarky in responding to JG. It’s just that the judgements he makes on scholars are made from a position of preconception – and I suspect his reading of them is too. They’re also made from a very selective acquaintance with their work. This is a very bad intellectual habit to cultivate – you should always read anyone’s work with as open a mind as possible, and free to the extent that you can from mischaracterisations of their work in political polemics. It seems to me a just criticism of JG that he doesn’t do this. I’ve gained much from reading scholars – Hayek, for instance – whose politics I couldn’t be in greater disagreement with, and who, FWIW, are often trivialised and misinterpreted by their own polemical cheer squads.
JG really does have to make a choice as to whether he wants to seriously get to grips with issues in historiography and philosophy, or just engage in pointless snark (“so and so is a luvvie, or a Pepe Le Pew”). There’s nothing wrong with polemic per se, if it’s on the basis of a deep understanding and a wide reading.
I’m pretty sure I know what Dan’s attitude to all this would be.
Klaus, I edited nuggett/Rosemary’s comment to delete what seemed to be an email signature. I’m not sure she really wants her work and mobile phone numbers and job details to appear on a blog.
Klaus – Um that’s what you call a joke. Signified by an emoticon. Allow me to demonstrate:
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See? The serious scholarly work on Paris Hilton is mostly done in the engineering, chemistry and zoology fields. As in what’s best? Explosives, guns? No. I know. Sharks.
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Chuck Norris – Shave that beard laddie. It’s diabolical.
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Re my point about brunswick St Elvis/Russ Meyer fans. This is a sub-culture that’s been growing since the 50s. It intersects the rockers, the mods, the punks etc. Is it elitist? Well actually by experience I’d say it was. Members of the sub-cult look upon you with disdain if you like bubble-gum pop (after ‘67) or have otherwise middle-brow tastes. They enjoy a lot of trash culture’s more obscure alleyways. Ed Wood’s status would not be thus if they hadn’t dragged PLan 9 From Outer Space out of obscurity.
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However what they like is ‘trash’. Not ’serious’ art, not the middle-brow stuff of which the Oscars is made, not the wildly popular stuff either. It’s a sub-culture that creates it’s own little enclave, what I call a ‘taste regime’. There are many such like it (albeit completely different). I’d wager global culture facilitated by such as this forum and the like is creating a multiplicity of these ‘taste regimes’. They’ve got a tag for a certain youth sub-culture these days: ‘Emo’. When I was a teenager ‘Emo’ meant the chicks that hung around punk clubs and liked the Cure.
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My point here is that imagining cultural hierarchies as pyramid-like is an outdated metaphor. This is a democracy not an aristocratic regime with a mostly illiterate and disenfranchised populace. The structure of culture is concentric and also poly-centric. Add to this the concept of Romantic Individualism and even the concept of ‘taste regimes’ is not accurate. There are taste zones of association and lots of individuals who choose there own paths thru whatever’s available.
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Sadly however most of us pay no attention to the important stuff on purpose.
Sorry Adrien, very much in stoush-ready attentiveness here, but apparently not attentive to humour. BTW excellent points on culture, very interesting.
Mark, you can remove or edit my comment that mentions her by name then also. I found it strange that those details were up there, but I thought at first that it was some kind of bizarre form of argument from authority: ie the authority of someone authentic enough for ‘complete disclosure’. In retrospect it was clearly a mistake.
Well at this point I’m pretty much checked out of this discussion (still very interesting, btw, I’m just out of gas), but a side point w/r/t Antigone, which keeps getting brought up again and again in a rather amusing way…
“Antigone is a character who is deeply concerned with cosmic order…”
Well that could certainly be true. Regardless of what one thinks of Antigone the character, I think (personally, not via scholarship) that “Antigone” the play only makes sense as the last part of the Oedipus cycle, Oedipus Rex/Oedipus at Colonus/Antigone. Not that it’s incomprehensible without the previous two works attached, just that it’s kind of uninteresting and shrill without them.
But like I say, that’s just a personal view. Carry on.
j_p_z, you may be right, and part of the fact that Antigone is so often discussed in isolation – well, by lots of philosopher I’ve read recently – could be an anti- or post-Freudian thing.
Klaus K, j-p-z,
Might it not be said philosophers are somewhat unfamiliar with Oedipus at Colonus.Its not exactly something that you come across on a day to day basis. Everybody knows about Oedipus Rex,and in Australia at least Antigone was frequently put on school syllabi,(I don’t know if it still is) but Oedipus in Colonus is one of those Greek tragedies you don’t come across unless you’re into theatre/drama in a big way, or ancient history. And from memory, it being decades since I read the play, its not particularly good anyway,(though perhaps its a bit cheeky of me to suggest said philosophers might not be as well-read as we might expect.)
Is Robert Walker from the University of NSW sufficiently numerous to constitute a cultural elite?
I doubt unfamiliarity in the sense of not being exposed to the play: my copy has the three together, and they would be widely understood as being part of a cycle. It may be that it is hiding in full view however and that interest in Oedipus Rex and Antigone has enough precedent from earlier thinkers for the cycle as a whole to be put aside. I don’t know how it is dealt with by those who actually study Sophocles. The other reason why Antigone is of interest is because of Hegel’s interpretation.
Paul Burns on “Antigone” in Australia
Yes, I read it (in isolation) in Year 12 English Lit in Victoria, four decades ago. Powerful. Shrill? perhaps.
The other play that year which captured my emotions was “The Crucible”: the author was referring to HUAC and ‘naming names’ but it was on my 17-year old’s mind whether the Govt would be using my name (and my likely woeful soldierly skills) in a foreign war, by conscription. The protagonist’s cry “they shall not use my name!” sent a chill.
Katz here long ago: yes, great works have continuing ‘relevance’. Other stronger words I suggest include: power, richness, authority, freshness, distinctiveness, authenticity, integrity. I like Bloom’s writing: the great works have a freshness and power; their authors are in battle with all the previous books (canonical or not). Shakespeare knows himself and his fellow humans. Some great works are strange, but will they be preserved if TOO strange? (i.e. bordering on incomprehensible…)?
Since some have quoted short passages, here’s another. It’s from “The Track Less Thrashed” by Alain Frost, in the collection “The Even More Complete Book of Australian Verse” edited by John Clarke; Allen & Uniwin, 1994.
…. You talk
To him mother, he said, I cannot deal
With him, the boy’s a bloody idiot.
The shock of recognition: yes, that’s how we talk, here in Australia and NZ. There’s a summary of boy/father and father/mother relationships downunder. Wife as family mediator, sullen son, etc
You couldn’t construct our whole society from the poem, but it’d give you a bit of a clue.
From the same volume, “A Child’s Christmas in Warrnambool” by Dylan Thompson, could make a lad weep for the memories of sun-drenched summers. Young Clarke goes so far beyong parody, it’s a blessing.
cheerio
No worries Klaus
Sophocles Oedipus plays of which Antigone is the concluding chapter (albeit second to come out) are all about duty and responsibility. The three fields there are the individual, the state and the cosmic order (the gods).
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In Oedipus Rex fate conspires to make Oedipus do evil unwittingly. One can’t escape fate. There are forces we cannot control. Oedipu, despite the lack of mens rea, takes responsibility.
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In Oedipus and Collunus Oedipus asserts his faultlessness and demands forgiveness. Some of his family support him (like Antigone) some disregard him in their quest for power – his sons, Creon. But the play illustrates the flipside of justice – mercy.
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In Antigone the conflict between the state and the individual. Antigone wants to bury her rebellious brother. Her Uncle/brother wants him left to the carrion. Theyy’re both uncompromising with disasterous results.
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The trilogy are interesting because they promote different metaphysical views along the same story arch. I’d wager the second Star Wars trilogy would’ve been more interesting had Lucas thought to do this. But then he’s not a writer.
Interesting point Ambigulous.
After the initial acclaim of Sterne’s “Tristram Shandy” subsided, Dr Samuel Johnson predicted, “Nothing odd will do long. Tristram Shandy will not last.”
Yet we now know that Sterne was the wellspring for much which is still great in British humour,
And who reads Johnson’s “History of Rasselas” these days?
Interesting how high culture this conversation is getting. Especially considering so many here are the neo-Marxist fiends who want to teach Bugs Bunny instead of Shakespeare.
Warner Bros. What commies!
“Nothing odd will do long.”
Bah! Tell that to Talking Heads.
Talking Heads? Outstanding. Much better than Elton John.
Thanks Katz, for Samuel’s prediction.
How’s his dictionary coming along? Have the Scots forgiven him for the entry on osats?
“And who reads Johnson’s “History of Rasselasâ€? these days?”
Wait for the musical version…on ice!
And until I enjoyed myself to Larva Rodeo, I always thought Antigone was an over the counter cold medicine.
It’s been ages since I read the thing but I as recall it was another bloody palace brawl triggered by Big Daddy going walkabout. Also *SPOILER ALERT* doesn’t the title character top herself at the end basically to escape that bloody awful Chorus constantly telling her what she should do next?
The thing about all these Greek Dramas is once they created and injected their psychologically highly charged archetypes and storylines into the storytelling pool, everyone has borrowed, adapted, reinterpreted or just plain thieved this bunch of characters and storylines about forbidden love, dynastical duels and family fuckups (looking at you Sigmund Freud, Tennessee Williamns, Harold Robbins and Jackie Collins).
So when you see the Theban Trilogy staged with all due reverence now, it’s kinda like listening to well-meaning but basically gormless renditions of the kinda of classic old folk and blues tunes that the likes of Dylan and the Stones picked up and shook into new sense by the neck.
You want some real cross-cultural stuff doing its thing on a dance floor of eternal verities? Then I reckon a young, smart and rather brave bunch of Chinese film folks updating Zola’s Germinal to the immense assembly factories of China.
Or “Man Without Qualities” set in the Pentagon now.
* oats
That’s the thing about classics, eh Nabakov? So damn powerful, that lesser writers keep feeding off them (and they’re Magic Puddings that sustain for centuries, millenia…)
Or to put it another way, the classic works powerfully portray patterns of behaviour, thought and self-awareness (Will Shakespeare) that seem to recur perennially. So if a writer hit the mark centuries ago, he/she will still be hitting the mark now. That is, as j_p_z noted, assuming that the work is still in print or remembered.
Is it fair then, to talk of “essential human nature”? or “unchanging verities”? No, viewoints and mores and knowleges all change, but there must be some continuities, otherwise there wouldn’t be enough that was recognisable by us, for the old piece to hold our attention, IMHO.
Getting back to recent borrowings from classics, Nabakov…. what have they been doing with your sweet, dreamy “Lolita”? Has she popped up in “Big Brother” or some teen flick?, the lovely little poppet.
And your “Pnin” is timeless, maaaate!
Ah, Samuel Johnson. Allow me if you will. IMHO he was the greatest poseur and fake in English literary history. A thoroughly unpleasnt, self-opinionated, ill-mannered, bad-tempered old bore. If it had been for the genius of that clap-ridden Boswell, none of us would ever heard of the old fart. He would be a very minor footnote in English literary history.
Lolita? Pornagraphic un-American trash.
The issue is not so much that Antigone qua character is interested in the “cosmis” order, it is that the genre of Sophoclean tragedy is insterested in the cosmic order. Remember, character is secondary to plot in classical tragedy. I argue that Antigone is the first humanist work of art. But more on that some other time.
I shall comment more anon, but I have taken the sensitive and generous words of encouragement from Mark and Lefty E to heart and so will knock up a Diana: The Postmodern Antigone piece and shop it around the place.
Nabakov
The Greek tragedies have been tarted up to suit this or that ideological/political/aesthetic agenda for hundreds of years. In the article I am trying to get published on Orientalism in fifth century Greece, there is a whole section (which will probably be edited out) on productions of The Persians within the former Soviet bloc, during the first Gulf War, and a few other instances.
Many moons ago, I saw a Richard Wherrett production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Sydney Wharf. He set the whole thing at a dance party, complete with house music, trannies, eckies, the whole nine yards.
This is what the “Theatre Studies” set does 24/7. Luvvies that they are.
Pornographic and unAmerican in the same sentence. You jolly jackanapes Adrien.
John G – I argue that Antigone is the first humanist work of art.
The first humanist work of art is The Epic of Gilgamesh
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There’s nothing wrong per se with setting up Shakespeare with house music. It’s called art. Orthodoxy and art are bitter enemies. The only question is: does it work? The only responsibility an artist has is to make good art. That’s it.
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Baz Lurhmann’s Romeo + Juliet was very postmodern. It also probably switched a generation onto Shakespeare. And Horlld Perreneaux was brilliant as Mercutio.
Adrien
You could well be right on Gilgamesh, but I’d need a bit more persuading.;) On modern translations, I agree with you 100%. As Oscar Wilde said about there being no moral or immoral books, only well-written and badly-written ones, so too with adaptations of old art works.
And for the record, I loved Clueless
Well it was joke about Gilgamesh. But it’s still pretty good. Apparently Neil Gaiman wants to adapt it. I’ve always loved the following:
Why postmodern?
I thought the over the top Catholic imagery actually was far more baroque in feel, but I don’t think it was used in a pomo sense.
Bloody brilliant use of music too.
Adrien
I haven’t read it for a while. When we studied it, the tutor asked for a quick summary, I said “humanity’s first gay buddy flick.” Shocked silence from the class!
From memory, the gods are all very active and present in Enkidu and Gilgamesh’s journey. Don’t the gods even kill Enkidu, and Gilgamesh turns for solace to some dudes who the gods made immortal (Utnapishti???). And doesn’t Gilgamesh ultimately learn that he is not equal to the gods and it is foolish to disobey their wisdom? And then all that stuff about civilisation versus nature?
Also, I would reject the “humanist” label unless we had evidence that the Babylon of 3,000 BCE was a crucible of humanist intellection as was fifth century BCE Greece (or Ionia at least)? Anyways, without the text nearby I am all out of Uruk!
Mark – Why postmodern?
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Various things, the transposition of 16/17th century into a modern cotext stuff like Post Haste as Fed Ex. The video clip aspects like when Mercution does his ‘Young Hearts Be Free’ thing. Postmodern is a word so stretched as to be meaningless. Let’s just say it was contemporary. In fact because its so contemporary it’s actually dated quite rapidly.
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John – it was Upnapishtim. The Sumerian Noah. The bit I like the most is that the gods don’t cause the flood that almost wipes humanity because we’re wicked. Rather it’s ’cause we’re making to much noise. The humanist angle was a piss-take.
I’ll have to watch the dvd again, Adrien, because I’m not sure I’d agree that it’s dated. But I’ll keep an open mind. But it seems to me the transposition of Shakespeare to a contemporary setting is actually a characteristic of modernism in the performance history of the plays.
It did the last time I saw it. All the ramping. But it’s probably revived by now. This might turn into one of those musical hairsplitting type conversations.
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Dude, The Pixies are a post-punk garage band with an indy twist.
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No Dude you’re nuts they’re obviously a post-garage indy band with a punk twist.
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You’re both nuts. They’re a twisted indie band with post-punk garage influences.