OH WASTER! There's a Lit Critter in my SOP

[Terrance]

Paul Nightingale wrote:
> 
> Terrance wrote:
> >
> > Again, What kind of fiction is the Foreword?
> >
> > no reply.
> >
> Hadn't quite got round to it. The apparent absence of a reply, ie
> something that signifies reply, the existence of a signifier 'no reply',
> doesn't necessarily mean that no reply exists, somewhere.
> 
> Anyway, what kind of question is that? Does it need to be answered?
> 
> If all writing is fiction (ie if the fact/fiction boundary is being
> challenged) do we need such categories?

Do we need categories, a System? Genres? Classifications? 

We don't need categories and they needn't be used as straight jackets
except for tangling up the figures of Madness and Chaos Randomly Walking
down Gibberish Lane. 

Frye says, 

"The purpose of criticism by genres is not so much to classify as to
clarify  traditions and affinities, thereby bringing out a large number
of literary relationships that would not be noticed as long as there
were no context established for them.

The Greeks gave us the names of three of our four genres: they did not
give us a word for the genre that addresses a reader through a book, and
naturally
we have not invented one of our own. 

The nearest to it is "history," but this word, in spite of
Tom Jones, has gone outside literature, and the Latin "scripture" is too
specialized in meaning. As I have to have some word, I shall make an
arbitrary choice
of "fiction" to describe the genre of the printed page. I know that I
used this word
in the first essay in a different context, but it seems better to
compromise with the
present confused terminology than to increase the difficulties of this
book by
introducing too many new terms." 

In that First Chapter (I will get to Frye's  Orwell and Churchill
examples) or "Polemical Introduction" Frye says, "Thanks to the Greeks
... the Greeks hardly needed to develop a classification of prose forms.
We do, but have not done so. We have, as usual, no word for a work of
prose fiction, so the word "novel" does duty for everything, and thereby
loses its original meaning as the name of a genre. The
circulating-library between fiction and non-fiction, between books which
are about things admitted not to be true and books which are about
everything else, is apparently exhausting enough for critics. 

And so on ... good book....

The Rhetoric Of Fiction (Booth,  is also a good book and worth reading,
if only to see how ridiculous Brian McHale sounds as he dismisses the
"implied author" with a wave of his hand. 
 

When I think of analysis I think of a Greek named Aristotle. Analysis
means a loosening up, a disentanglement,  or resolution. 

Of course there is also a large and influential group of contemporary
philosophers, predominantly "logicists" but including some "sophists,"
who use the term as a general term for their or approach or method and
call themselves "analysts" and their philosophy "analytic philosophy." 

BTW, Freud and Marx, Newton and Descartes, for example, distinguish
analysis and synthesis within their methods. 

ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY

http://www.philosopher.org.uk/anal.htm

Logistic analysis proceeds from whole to parts, but analysis in the
sense
that I'm talking about ("Aristotle's sense") proceeds from problems to
solutions, and a problem with respect to the parts may be resolved by
the principle of the whole. 



 

What kind of question is that? Does it need to be answered?