Today's debate question

[Mark Kohut]

Yeahp, nice response. I called it a debate question for this reason.
Let me try to frame 'the other perspective".

Literature, including drama and (most) poetry is about Life, "life and
life only--Dylan" in ways most disciplines are not. The distancing of
Logic; science, even the objectivity of the scientific method are not
necessary to it. Our common--and uncommon humanity IS. That humanity
remains abstract and distant unless we can feel it just as our own
emotions---some say our own thoughts even (!)--are reguired to
understand our human feelings, our humanity.
Without being able to identify with the words, scenes and characters
in any work of literature we are as good as autistic. Perhaps a savant
but ultimately clueless to what matters in Literature.

On Tue, Dec 22, 2015 at 11:01 AM, Becky Lindroos <bekker2 at icloud.com> wrote:
> I see what you’re saying Mark but I still have to disagree with the broadness of your statement.    Whether or not a reader’s identification with the characters is a good thing or not depends on what she/he’s  reading - furthermore,  reading on one level does not eliminate other levels.  -  Also,  what does “identify” mean in this case?  As far as I can think,  identification is a range with “knowing someone like that” on one end  ->   “caring about”  a character being in the middle range -  and becoming "psychologically enmeshed with a character” on the rather intense end.
>
> This is good about the more intense identification:    http://www.salon.com/2012/05/17/can_you_identify/
> Includes books like On the Road (Kerouac) and The Sorrows of Young Werther (von Goethe) goes on to contemporary homosexual and racial stuff.
> **
> Also from today in Nebraska re Snoopy the comic strip - the lighter "knowing someone like that” -:
> http://www.kearneyhub.com/opinions/hubcolumns/lori_potter/we-identify-with-characters-in-peanuts/article_6b6891c0-9a9e-11e5-a9e8-a79105d8c36f.html
>
> Charles Schulz and his “Peanuts” comic strip kids had been fixtures in daily newspapers since 1952, but their popularity soared after people saw “A Charlie Brown Christmas.”
>
> I was age 9 in 1965, so my friends and I were pretty much like Charlie Brown and his friends. Or at least we knew other kids who seemed like them.
>
> Some identified with the inept Charlie Brown, who couldn’t fly a kite, kick a football or win a baseball game. Others may have thought our teachers and other adults sounded like “wah-wah-wah.”
>
> We knew bossy girls like Lucy. For any Wilcox classmates who thought I was one of them, let me set the record straight. I’ve always been judgmental, not bossy.
>
> I was a Peppermint Patty tomboy who played sports with the boys at recess decades before most Americans thought it was OK for girls to do “boy things” and vice versa.
>
> I salute the boys who let me play and risked the shame of losing to a girl.
>
> We loved Linus’ innocence and understood why it was so hard for him to give up his security blanket. We admired the talents of Schroeder, the piano prodigy, and thought it would be cool to have a happy-go-lucky, dream-big, drama-loving dog like Snoopy.
>
> ****
> ME >  I personally identified with Charlie Brown and that’s kind of cool because he’s a boy. (I’ve identified with other males though so it’s not that big a deal.) Know any males like Lucy?  That’s called “Men Explain Things to Me.”  - lol -  My big identification thing was Jo in Little Women and Nancy Drew -  (good role model stuff there, imo.)
>
> We identify because we know folks like that - and it works well for adult readers in satire and tear-jerkers and anti-war movies and so on.  Some folks identify to the extent of losing themselves in the emotions of the character (escape romances?)  ->   After many years of reading many books in many groups with many people,  I think some women tend to enjoy identifying with characters more than other folks (both sexes) do.  And those women who do place importance on the identification factor enjoy reading books that are aimed at that.   Do men identify with the guys in war novels?  (I have no idea.)  These books aren’t that great imo but they sell well.
>
> In Pynchon’s books I’ve identified with some of the women characters - a couple in AtD,  CoL49 a little bit,
> Bek
>
>
>> On Dec 22, 2015, at 1:57 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Proposition: That reading by identification with a character condemns the reading to be second-rate most of the time. The major reason: it reduces the sensibility of the writer, whose sensibility is supposed to be richer than ours ( most of the time) but which at least is Other than ours....
>>
>> To ours. The vaunted empathy is crippled; the genius of observation and imagination is lost. The reading is ultimately solipsistic.
>>
>> Sent from my iPad-
>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>
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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l