• 3 Posts
  • 232 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: July 17th, 2023
  • YouKnowWhoTheFuckIAMtoSneerClub•The Professor Assigns Their Own Book — But Now With a Tech Bubble in the Middle StepEnglish
    7·
    1 year ago

    At most, you need to add to it as the field progresses, but I doubt literary analysis ever turns out to have been wrong.

    Sometimes. But more importantly a good literature prof will be highly responsive to ongoing changes in the world around them with respect to the selection of texts, texts themselves will develop new resonances as times change (consider how Richardson’s Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded might have changed before and after MeToo), and as critics generate new literature of their own, new perspectives have to be considered. These points, it turns out, all circulate around what you said here:

    I don’t think works of literature get a lot of updates as time passes

    This isn’t really true. At the most basic level of analysis (which isn’t strictly correct, but will do for now), there are never less than two components, and one of them does change as time passes. (1) The words themselves, usually printed on a page without much variation between copies, and (2) the reader of those words. This “reader” is a hugely complicated object, and the text itself doesn’t really exist in any meaningful sense without one (dried ink letters are not “language” as such, but at most a record of information which generates language upon activation by a mind). It is this “reader” (or the huge variety of “readers” who continue to come in and out of existence as time passes) who generates changes that have to be kept up with in the study of literature, but that reader is a vital object of study in the (very roughly speaking) twofold object of literary studies.

    Even the idea of an unchanging but growing corpus disguises, and yet relies on, this twofold division. The maintenance of such a corpus relies on the maintenance of a tradition of readers entrusted with the assumptions and techniques of interpretation pertinent to the ideals of that tradition. What is often foregrounded here is the maintained tradition, external to individual readers, but it is those individual readers who, collectively, actually do the work of keeping it.

    The job of an up-to-date literature course is to attempt to account for such changes over the span of a three month term/semester, and it’s the consequent process of selection and refinement that generates the work which is being suspiciously handed off to a scammy robot in the article.

  • YouKnowWhoTheFuckIAMtoSneerClub•Extropia's Children, Chapter 1: The Wunderkind - a history of the early days of several of our very good friendsEnglish
    4·
    1 year ago

    Meditations on Moloch is “soul-wrenching”, apparently. Jesus fucking Christ.

    In what world do these people grow up? “Oh my God, conflict exists between interests and values, things are hard, not every problem is tractable”.

    There used to be a refrain that “Moloch” is effectively Siskind’s word for capitalism, because he can’t bring his libertarian heart to name what everybody understands. But that’s wrong, because Siskind’s view is no more than the shallowest Burkeanism. And the worst thing about every single anti-Utopian is that they all assume everybody else feels as mugged by imperfection as they do.

  • YouKnowWhoTheFuckIAMtoSneerClub•What's the deal with the recent activity on the old subreddit?English
    12·
    1 year ago

    I just think, and perhaps this is just me, that it is weird, conspiratorial, speech to summarise your research into this question as, paraphrasing, ‘I found out one of the old mods has gone alt right’ and nothing more

    It’s also defensive speech to say “people are allowed to comment on the vibe”. I know they’re allowed to comment on the vibe! I think they’re weird for detecting a bad/weird vibe! I think it’s indicative of a conspiratorial framing! There is so little information to go on in these speculations, and literally none of it out of keeping with ordinary goings on at SneerClub, for anyone remotely invested in anything that has ever gone on there

    Similarly, I found your speech to frame the question itself conspiratorially, as if the fact that one of the old mods has hints of having gone alt right - despite having nothing to do with any recent posts on the subreddit - is worth mentioning at all, certainly not as the only thing of note that your research turned up

  • YouKnowWhoTheFuckIAMtoSneerClub•What's the deal with the recent activity on the old subreddit?English
    23·
    1 year ago

    Throwing in that comment about Son_of_Sophroniscus was pretty out there! My roll would be pretty damn slow had you just left that out. But instead we’ve got that, people talking about a “weird/bad vibe”, reading tea leaves all over the shop…

    But even in just your own case, it seems like the opposite of not jumping to conclusions to throw in references to old mods going alt right that bear absolutely zero relationship to any of the handful of posts on the “resurrected” sub

  • YouKnowWhoTheFuckIAMtoSneerClub•What's the deal with the recent activity on the old subreddit?English
    25·
    1 year ago

    “Why, for fuck’s sake?”, as an illucutionary act, seems to do a lot more than simply “asking the obvious question”

    But it is, indeed, in typical reddit fashion to omit that sort of thing from one’s own complaint about the response one got to one’s provocation, notwithstanding the traditional SneerClub response to user’s complaints, which is of course “if you want to leave, but can’t, we can help with that”