Today's debate question

Tue Dec 22 11:43:06 CST 2015

Sort of reminds me of computer assisted text analysis.

Apropos of nothing but * had to post it.*

*I think the "autistic analyst" is a good figure of speech.*

*The computer's the idiot savant.*

*Without the empathizing reader, it's a pretty bleak proposition all
around.*

*I'm not saying don't do it, but it's way secondary.*

*Dispassionate analysis, I'm talking about.*

On Tue, Dec 22, 2015 at 11:27 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
> >
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>
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