CiG
Approximately Infinite Universe
Peterson's wife is battling cancer and Peterson started using anti-anxiety medication, but when he stopped using them he had huge withdrawals so he checked himself into rehab. Wtf?
hahaha"Pharmaceutical drugs are great for you" J. Peterstein
I mean no offense, but I don't believe you've read enough literary criticism or novels to make this claim.
Most of my colleagues would agree with me; novels aren't political manifestos. And it's only on an intellectual basis that I'm making this claim. Novels are narratives, not arguments. They contain contradictions, the positions of which can't be traced back to--or dialectically synthesized into--the author's political sympathies. When we're able to do this--as in certain Updike novels, for example--critics tend to agree that the work fails aesthetically. It's no longer a novel, but a treatise.
The closest mainstream literary criticism comes to intuiting the politics of a text is Jameson's political unconscious methodology. But this approach doesn't claim that texts evince certain political positions; it claims that texts betray the underlying structural contradictions of their sociopolitical context.
Who bequeathed to literary academics the right to determine what "fails" or "succeeds" "aesthetically"?
Seriously? I mean, that’s part of what literary scholars do. Asking this would be like me asking who bequeathed to psychologists the right to determine whether a person is of sound mind.
I mean, I guess you could argue that being of sound mind is subjective, and I would agree that there is some grey area to discuss there. But beyond that art criticism departs significantly. Psychology depends on group norms significantly to determine norms (basically by definition), which is almost functionally the opposite of art criticism. Group norms in terms of aesthetic acceptance render most art, from a critic's stance, to "not art" or "failing" aesthetically. In the most basic sense, see the divergence in many cases of critic scores for movies vs box-office receipts/public ratings, or the popularity of Thomas Kincade works with the general public even while being widely maligned by fine art critics. Duchamp's fountain "fails aesthetically" to the public. To the critic, it's a masterpiece.
Aesthetics also depends on norms to determine norms--it just doesn't determine the norms of the same object that psychology does (i.e. people). A painting is cubist, or impressionist, or romanticist, or realist, a landscape painting or a portrait, a still life or an assemblage, depending on whether it conforms to certain visual tropes and makes use of certain techniques.
Aesthetics isn't reception theory (although some reception theorists discuss aesthetics). It's not interested in what the masses think. It's also not interested in telling people what they should like (although it used to be, in Samuel Johnson's day). It's interested in how artistic/literary movements are shaped and how they evolve. It's the study of forms, styles, and techniques. That's not something you just feel; it's something you have to learn through years of work.
The reason Ayn Rand's books are crappy novels is that they're manifestos masquerading as fiction; but they actually have no interest in their fictionality beyond its utility in conveying a moral message. They have very little (if any) interest in being novels.
Holy fuck, funniest thing I've read all week.
EDIT: I got to the second screencap and it broke plausibility, but still not bad.
key parts of the intersectional narrative are not born out by data. It is now a standard trope, implanted in freshmen summer reading lists through the works of Ta-Nehesi Coates and others, that whites pose a severe, if not mortal, threat to blacks. That may have once been true, but it is no longer so today. Just this month, the Bureau of Justice Statistics released its 2018 survey of criminal victimization. According to the study, there were 593,598 interracial violent victimizations (excluding homicide) between blacks and whites last year, including white-on-black and black-on-white attacks. Blacks committed 537,204 of those interracial felonies, or 90 percent, and whites committed 56,394 of them, or less than 10 percent. That ratio is becoming more skewed, despite the Democratic claim of Trump-inspired white violence. In 2012-13, blacks committed 85 percent of all interracial victimizations between blacks and whites; whites committed 15 percent. From 2015 to 2018, the total number of white victims and the incidence of white victimization have grown as well.
Well it's one thing to categorize, and another to claim something "fails" or "succeeds" aesthetically. I have no issue with a field of academia attempting to order things into categories.
I disagree that Rand had no interest in spelling out an idea in the form of a novel. Otherwise she could have have just used some other format.