Why are all literary homework questions so dumb?

(i.e. our high-school literature isn't there to create 'literature' or 'writing' as a distinct phenomenon, although it might use a certain antiquated rhetoric of respectability surrounding that notion of 'literature' i guess i'm not sure for what purposes)

what kinds of literature questions would you set?

did you file this under 'chris piuma vs. conventional poetry'?

It's not just the lack of will to do their own work, but the fact that they can't even be bothered to seek out a more appropriate forum for cheating than this message board, the apparent lack of skill in even using Google although today's kids are supposed to be so web savvy, the spelling and grammar which isn't just poor but often impedes comprehension altogether, the lack of any conception that they're asking people for HELP and how such requests need to be phrased politely. I mean, FFS!

Why is code maping causing errror? Is global platform vaible given short deadline? Is deedline inflexible? What is roll of steering group?

Needs to be in by Thursday. Thanks

Want me to do your homework? Fuck you, pay me. As it were.

Can't something similar be put in flashing red at the top of the New Question page?

- just, you know, do similar and sign yr posts 'the moderators'.

this is all the fault of that sodding novel summaries thread.

how old are these kids? the politeness and internet uh etiquette issues are a bit harder to calibrate, maybe.

Nobody has really answered the thread question :(

Like the best questions, this one is best "gotten around to" rather than answered straight-out.

That's just one possibility, of course.

I did use some texts for Freshman Comp type classes, though.

Not acceptable if in the format of 'what is the theme/plot of X?'

I do like the idea that people think we're some hive of reading activity, sitting about in easy chairs, sighing heavily whenever someone posts a homework question before we dust off our copies of The Red Pony and attempt to point out incidents of lost innocence therein (or similar).

But Sandy has a question. Yes Sandy, what is your question?

Because ILB is secretly filled with very helpy people!

In short "Does the hath not a jew eyes? speech save Shakespeare (in Merch of Venice) from charges of anti-semitism?

My point being I could have started a thread like umm 'How should we feel about Shakespeare in view of political correctness'

For example, if Titania appears to be in love with the ass Bottom, was it a triumph of art, or because Shakespeare was a fornicator with barnyard animals?

wikipedia also suggests a couple other possible avenues of enquiry: one, the play is popular/frequently performed in israel; two, christian vs jewish concepts of sin/forgiveness/redemption.

It could be both, but the play can be taken as conclusive evidence for only one. The art is apparent in the text. The experiential background is not.

I recently posted a set of haikus about drinking bad wine in a thread on ILE; Beth Parker took it as evidence I had undergone the experience described, whereas the truth was I had not.

Imagination can co-opt the experiences, opinions, attitudes and thoughts of others. It can even co-opt the experiences of non-humans (generally animals). Co-opting the opinions, attitudes and feelings of an anti-semite would be child's play for an imagination of Shakespeare's versatility. The more strongly he can portray it, the more dramatic the clash of the characters will become. That was his ultimate goal - not political propaganda, but a kind of dramatic verisimilitude.

The thing is, Shakespeare is so central to a certain sense of English-as-a-culture that people tend to forget this, and start trying to defend Shakespeare the person (as opposed to Shakespeare the hypothesis) from charges of hate speech, which is quite dull. (When people prove that Shakespeare-the-person was black, gay, female, etc., it's less dull, but perhaps as ultimately unproductive except as a fun rhetorical move.)

That said I'd tend to dislike the question because I'd just kind of like some basic acknowledgement that the text is a PLAY and a LIVING TEXT that people PERFORM and are ENTERTAINED BY and not just READ in CLASSROOMS but I live in a bizarre utopia where the world is ruled by love and the clouds are made of candyfloss.

Arrgh! Whatever that "implied authority" might be, it is certainly not of the author's making. Rather, it is the ponderous authority of institutions, who have made Shakespeare into a figurehead for their strange vessel full of brow-beaters and finger-waggers and pill-rollers, who try to overawe the weak-minded with a surplus of solemnity. Hacks. Jackasses. Painstakers. Toads. I deplore them.

From the etymonline.com:

authority
c.1230, autorite "book or quotation that settles an argument," from O.Fr. auctorité, from L. auctoritatem (nom. auctoritas) "invention, advice, opinion, influence, command," from auctor "author" (see author). Meaning "power to enforce obedience" is from 1393; meaning "people in authority" is from 1611. Authoritative first recorded 1609. Authoritarian is recorded from 1879.

author
c.1300, autor "father," from O.Fr. auctor, from L. auctorem (nom. auctor) "enlarger, founder," lit. "one who causes to grow," agent noun from augere "to increase" (see augment). Meaning "one who sets forth written statements" is from c.1380. The -t- changed to -th- on mistaken assumption of Gk. origin. The verb is attested from 1596.

"...[W]riting means revealing onesself to excess .... This is why one can never be alone enough when one writes, why even night is not night enough. ... I have often thought that the best mode of life for me would be to sit in the innermost room of a spacious locked cellar with my writing things and a lamp. Food would be brought and always put down far away from my room, outside the cellar's outermost door. The walk to my food, in my dressing gown, through the vaulted cellars, would be my only exercise. I would then return to my table, eat slowly and with deliberation, then start writing again at once. And how I would write! From what depths I would drag it up!" [Franz Kafka]

Points taken away for quoting Kafka as if he wrote in English.

-- tom west

Well, I dunno I'd go that far...

i wonder if sandy's coming back.

anyway, first three i came to, having gone back to it:

"The unconscious is undecidable, either the always already other, out of reach of psychic descriptions, or else it is thoroughly and constitutively implicated in so-called conscious activity."

...

"It is therefore not too extravagant to say that 'writing' or 'differance' is the structure that would deconstruct structuralism - as indeed it would deconstruct all texts, being, as we shall see, the always already differentiated structure of deconstruction."

...

"We have seen how, according to Derrida, Husserl's text is tortured by a suppressed insight that the Living Present is always already inhabited by difference."

Including a band called The Always Already!

yes, i've googled it. i might start reading that blog all regular-like. actually a couple of posts on the 'poetics' of philosophy look to be a bit of an attn: josh. - hey josh.

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=always+already seems to suggest it as an "postmodern" alternative to "right now". hm. it also has a definition for "bout it", which has had me curious for a while. actually "i been bout it" might just function similarly.

I guess this sort of muddled jargon salad, where terms are invented that are perpendicular to the language (I really think something can't be "already whatevered" unless at some point it was "not yet whatevered" -- an egg can't be already hatched unless at some point it was not yet hatched -- but you can't say "two plus three was already five"! -- but prove me wrong).

I mean, "always already" is an interestingly poetic phrase, forcing those two contrary ideas together, it's a nice disjunct, and makes a great band name, but to act like "always already" is meaningful in its content rather than in its disjunction seems like a terrible, terrible mistake.

"two plus three was already five" sounds kind of plausible to me /: - there was a chance of it being something else? two and three wasn't five before someone pointed it out? - i have a group of two coins and another group of three coins on this desk table. there are already five coins on this table, whether i put them together or not. - i'm trying to work out how the equals sign and identity sign map onto this, but they're normally plain language "is" and "is always", insofar as i can remember: math was a while ago.

i mean insofar as i understand it derrida is all about* the intrusion of the interestingly poetic and unresolvable into argument - "insofar as i understand" because generally a dozen pages of derrida has me howling for the secondary / explicatory texts, and ten minutes with those just has me howling - cf. the horrible thing we have done to this thread. - anyway i just flicked through the chapter of the actual book i'm going back to and it is in there, expect me to quote that one when i get to it - is there a derrida thread to take this to? the pinefox can show up and explain that he is overrated, again - and i will make sure to highlight the face that he was not writing in english and in fact translated by this gayatri spivak git.

* "all about" in the sense that i can be all about, say, ice cream with cookie dough marshmallow swirls, that is, or that i am all about aaron sorkin's new show and they haven't even filmed the pilot yet; not in the sense that victorian novels are all about marriages and shit

Wittgenstein's Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics is sort of all about how "Two plus three is five" is a social agreement than an absolute fact (I'm totally and broadly simplifying here) and I just haven't been convinced of it yet.

It seems really problematic to say something like "two plus three wasn't five until someone pointed it out" -- it seems like people can't have said "Hey, what's two plus three?" until someone had already figured out the answer. I might be wrong here. Either way, I think you'd still be saying that "We already knew that two plus three was five", not "two plus three was already five". Unless you have a sense of what it was beforehand.

That's something I'm thinking about a fair amount lately and am undecided on, so.

I agree that Derrida is all about that (as far as I can tell), and I think that's fine if you want to treat it as a poetic text -- but then you have to be willing to read it like a poetic text, where you can indicate a few rough outlines but cannot point to the center, and cannot be sure of what the center is unless you are deeply and unspeakably sure. I mean, again with the Wittgenstein, but adding that sort of poetics into the discourse seems to be a way around the problem of "whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent". But, you know, no, really: You can't turn that into a critical discourse; it has to remain in the mystic.

I did misread your coins on the desk bit, but I think I would form my argument the same way. I said "two plus three is already five", and you said "there are two coins and there are three coins, so there are already five coins" which, again, is a very different sentence! There are no coins at all in "two plus three is already five".

Why do you think there is ambiguity to what the "is" indicates? I'm not sure there is.

okay i didn't do philosophy of math. or philosophy. or math, really.

that seems to be the most assured definition of what a poetic text is that you've vouchsafed here so far, am i wrong..?

-

also: Always Already sounds like a rubbish band that sound like Train or something or failing that Clouddead (n.b. have not looked at the site). Under Erasure, on the other hand, that one could work. Like a post-hardcore Wire or something. or an overintellectualised Erasure covers band.

I wouldn't get too hung up on the singular grammar. After all, there is great debate between whether a band "is" or "are" and we often talk about how pants "are" or scissors "are" despite being secretly singular. The grammatical singular-ness of a phrase isn't necessarily related to whether the subject is literally singular or not.

I've made stronger claims to what a poetic text is -- it's the old form vs. content divide, where prose is content and poetry is form. If meaning is conveyed by what the words say, that's prose. If it's conveyed by how they are said, that's poetry. They can reside within the same text. A text with a disjunctive prose sense (like "always already") is poetic in how it fails to mean.

(i mean i think you can have an 'always already' that requires a sense of a whole series of acts, each of which find they're already, uh, compromised? .. "two and three is always already five" - the 'already' is insurance taken out against just claiming that "two and three is always five", which is an illegal move while we are playing this particular game. i mean, perhaps that's the point, the dinsjunction is notice that the rules have changed..?

derrida's uses of it aren't as bad as his introducer's. although i'm not going and finding them again. and okay "[David] Fincher has always already lost [...] faith in the significance of [suspense and fear as] narrative artifacts" is totally nonsense. and i am totally ducking out of this now.)

Search: Nice ex-coworker who I knew as a Unix systems guy who told about his previous life, when he took his qualifying exam for his PhD in Literature and arrived he-new-not-how at Harvard Square after a sleepless night, where his panel, which included Harry Levin, asked him questions like this one: in Proust's Remembrance Of Things Past was there any indication that they had electricity when it took place? and he thought for a second and then said: "Yes, because they took the elevator..."

That, or something involving counting.