Einherjar86
Active Member
And you avoided all that in your graduate study. Probably a good thing...
You're doing it again--i.e. treating Freud as a psychologist or philosopher of mind. That's not why he's relevant to literary critics and other humanities scholars. The structure that Freud attributed to the mind makes more sense if you apply it to a text. Of course, it's ridiculous to think of a mind as a text. What I'm saying is that Freud's methodology has a lot to say about hermeneutics, mimesis, metaphor, etc. These are literary phenomena, not elements of cognitive functioning. Freud hypothesized that there are different levels of meaning in human psyche, but all these levels were somehow textually operative (Lacan underscores this point); this is most likely not the case. However, literary scholars began to notice that Freud's schema could explain variability or contradiction in literary texts by exposing discrete scales of meaning (the most famous version of this in literary studies is probably Jameson's political unconscious). On the level of language itself, the phrase "her world was coming apart" has multiple meanings, even without context; and these meanings form a system that goes beyond mere realism (which, in this case, would mean that this person's world was literally coming apart). In fact, some literary scholars have empirically observed and tested this notion by reading other cultural texts from certain periods, like religious pamphlets, or political tracts, or scientific treatises, etc. Values of textual representation change over time, but adapting Freud's ideas to literary meaning can be quite illuminating (and it doesn't have to be all penises and horny sons, so I'd urge you to resist that temptation--pun intended).
And finally, please don't restrict perceptivity and value to what we can empirically see. You of all people know how fucking weak visuality is when you start to put pressure on it. When it comes to the sciences, then yes--observation is necessary and valuable. That doesn't mean that non-empirical practices aren't valuable or intellectual. There was no way to empirically see the value in discovering the Higgs Boson, but that doesn't mean the project was worthless.
It's not superior, that's where you're basing everyone entirely on your tired notion of craft and skill. Kerry James Marshall is actually an incredibly talented artist. He can draw/paint in a realist mode, but he chooses not to. Why is that? Does it just mean he's a bad artist? He's clearly talented, but you don't know that because you don't know anything about him beyond a cursory Google search. So why does he choose to paint in a less realist mode? Is it because he's tapping into a variant of African imagery? Is he channeling an interwar modernist style that privileged expression over anatomical accuracy? Is it because he sees anatomical accuracy as indicative of (or at least related to) medical practices that categorize blacks as hierarchically inferior to whites?
Does any of this cross your mind? No, you look at the pictures and think "That's not pretty." Deep, bro.
I've never read McCarthy but I assume his ability to craft a story is decent based on the movie adaptation of No Country for Old Men. I'm sympathetic to deontology but Kant was a bad writer.
Kant was a bad writer. Has it occurred to you that the criteria for good/bad writing changes depending on the mode/genre of writing? Again, seemingly no.
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