Lizzie Grace

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on the atlas — 21

highlights — 52

I remember there was discussion during the period when I was coming out of high school of how if people no longer used slide rules to do calculations, they wouldn't have the fundamental intuition for what was going on within the calculation that using a slide rule provided if they used a calculator instead. I remember when there was discussion of how the printing press would diminish the role of telling and of memory by enabling storage in this other way on pieces of papyrus.
Larry Summers on What Went Wrong on Campus - Persuasion
while on the one hand we think of intellectual communities as being the most broad-minded of communities, on the other hand they are actually among the most narrow, insular and inward-looking in the way they evaluate themselves and in the way they think of the necessary decision making.
Larry Summers on What Went Wrong on Campus - Persuasion
Now, at Harvard, and Harvard is not atypical of leading universities, 70 to 75% of the grades are in A-range. Why should the institutions that are most celebrating of excellence have only one grade for everyone in the top half of the class, but nine different grades that are applied to students in the lower half of the class? That is a step away from celebrating and venerating excellence.
Larry Summers on What Went Wrong on Campus - Persuasion
we've moved away from that to an idea of identity essentialism, the supposition that somehow the conditions of your birth determine your views on intellectual questions, whether it's interpretations of quantum theory or Shakespeare.
Larry Summers on What Went Wrong on Campus - Persuasion
Kant doesn’t say that anything is necessarily beautiful. He doesn’t say that beauty exists. All he says is that I sometimes get a particular feeling, and that feeling makes me believe that other people exist, and that it is possible for them to judge also, and that somehow their judgments should be in line with mine. It’s the sociability of beauty as an experience.
I Want a Critic | Andrea Long Chu | The New York Review of Books
I realized I liked thinking about things more than I liked actual theater.
I Want a Critic | Andrea Long Chu | The New York Review of Books
The essential sorting function of the “ecology of judgment” is valuable for, but also independent of, the scholarly project of interpretation. That independence is part of a long tradition: the great literary critics of the past (Johnson, Coleridge, Arnold) were not, primarily, interpreters of texts, and this remains the case among the major literary critics of the twentieth century (Eliot, Wilson, Trilling, Barthes, Hardwick, Sontag, etc.). What those critics were, often enough, were writers whose critical faculties grew out of, or alongside, literary ambitions. The object of their desire was…
Ideas as Aesthetics: On Michael W. Clune’s A Defense of Judgment – Chicago Review
Against the logic of a commercial culture in which “consumer preference is the sole standard of value,” aesthetic education resists “market totalitarianism” by “teaching students to transcend preference” and to see the general value of literary ideas (3–4).
Ideas as Aesthetics: On Michael W. Clune’s A Defense of Judgment – Chicago Review
Thus many literary scholars might be said to live a kind of bad faith: we make our value judgments in the relative privacy of our syllabi or our classrooms, while paying public lip service to the idea that such judgments should be, as a rule, demystified.
Ideas as Aesthetics: On Michael W. Clune’s A Defense of Judgment – Chicago Review
Kramnick makes us remember and hold on to the practice of reading our criticism aloud, word for word, when we present it. [Ralph Waldo] Emerson used to read his essays out loud word for word — there was no extemporizing at all — because the writing, the exactness, the choice of words in their order matter; they cannot be reduced to bullet points or downloaded as information. That’s what Kramnick means when he describes the way that knowledge resides in the fingers doing the writing, in the virtuosity of the practice: that the argument comes in the act of the performance and not prior to it in …
Literary Criticism and the Craft of Reading
Toni Morrison said, “I read books. I teach books. I write books. I think about books. It’s one job.”
Literary Criticism and the Craft of Reading
If you wanted to make a claim for how English as a discipline is making a difference in the world through its average everyday work, I think teaching is the place to look for that. Not that I think scholarship isn’t valuable, but its value has to be seen in the context of the wider enterprise. I think the relation of publications to the ecology of the discipline is very different in the humanities than in the natural sciences.
Literary Criticism and the Craft of Reading
Tamarkin: To try to stake all the claims for knowledge and truth in the discipline on method alone, and on the method of close reading, might not address what it actually takes to write well about writing: the sort of knowledge, the sort of training, that it takes to write elegantly or dexterously about literature, to embed other words in our words. This requires not only learning a method of writing; it often requires a deep base or stock of knowledge, a resourcefulness about where to turn. Sometimes that stock of knowledge includes a great deal of linguistic knowledge; sometimes it includes …
Literary Criticism and the Craft of Reading
it’s the distortion of the defensive pose of trying to put literary studies on the same footing as the sciences, because being true to and making a truth claim are not the same thing.
Literary Criticism and the Craft of Reading
There is something about this need to defend the discipline on the terms of a kind of analogy to the sciences, an analogy that he explicitly invites, that I think unnecessarily strains the argument.
Literary Criticism and the Craft of Reading
there’s a lot of emphasis on “dexterity.” Literary criticism is very much a craft, a kind of handiwork. He turns to examples of what he describes as the everyday practices of close reading — including the use of embedded quotations (that “weave” other people’s words with our own), the ways in which quotations point to specific moments in texts, as well as creative paraphrase — that he says are so ordinary we have stopped noticing them.
Literary Criticism and the Craft of Reading
Such willingness to invoke “the world” as an object of literary knowledge is Criticism and Truth’s boldest and most vulnerable move. It is bold because it refuses to cede literary studies’ access to truths beyond personal experience, and vulnerable because doing so opens up a host of thorny questions about how to measure truth as an interpretive outcome
Literary Criticism and the Craft of Reading
our so-called method wars have drained the lifeblood from what we do, because good criticism is not only or even mainly a matter of politics, affect, or tone, but of mundane attentional labor with texts that reward it.
Literary Criticism and the Craft of Reading
the best way to do this is to emphasize rather than transcend disciplinary distinctions, insisting on the importance of maintaining a well-honed plurality of means to reaching the same broad end.
Literary Criticism and the Craft of Reading
By a certain point, she never sat down and forced the writing, in that capitalist model of literature as an assembly-line product or performance of identity encouraged in many MFA programs.
The Yale Review | Meghan O'Rourke Remembers Louise Glück
it has often been described as “chilly” or “austere”—a characterization I can’t help but think of as partly gendered.
The Yale Review | Meghan O'Rourke Remembers Louise Glück
James Baldwin: You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discovered it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky. This is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that he is alone. This is why art is important.
you like books and think they are your friends - by Ava
reading is how I became a person.
you like books and think they are your friends - by Ava
literature’s distinction from other forms has been increasingly diminished toward what the scholar Aarthi Vadde calls “literary indistinction.”
What Was Literary Fiction? | The Nation
“Literary fiction.” By that phrase, I mean fiction that privileges art over entertainment.
What Was Literary Fiction? | The Nation
As for the larger question of the connection between academic work and political efficacy, there is no one-answer-fits-all formula that I can offer. Value neutrality may be a scholarly ideal, at least for those persuaded by Max Weber’s “Science as a Vocation,” but it is hard to achieve in practice and in certain circumstances harder to defend in principle
Martin Jay and the Fate of Radical Ideas
“There is no more contentious and perennial issue in the history of Western thought — and perhaps not it alone — than the vexed relationship between the genesis of an idea or value in a specific context, and its claim to validity beyond it.”
Martin Jay and the Fate of Radical Ideas
for people my age, as in the past, the way young people are looks worse than it is when viewed from the wide-angle of an article or essay
The Okayness of the Young - by Mary Gaitskill - Out of It
But while the corrective apparatus is providing a measure of control, it cannot really provide safety. Metaphorically, it is making sure that the crusts are cut off all the sandwiches and that no dishes are left in the sink while zombie hoards beat on the walls and stick their hands through the windows.
The Despair of the Young - by Mary Gaitskill - Out of It
few of them seemed able to describe anything. It is harder than it seems to accurately and evocatively “see” the world through a character’s eyes. It is even harder if your own eyes are so often fixed on a tiny screen that you barely register what is actually happening in front of you.
The Despair of the Young - by Mary Gaitskill - Out of It
Becca Rothfeld’s “Sanctimony Literature” is a sharp critique of the over-politicization of contemporary literature (Ben Lerner, Sally Rooney, “Cat Person”), which in her view errs “not because it ventures into moral territory, but because it displays no genuine curiosity about what it really means to be good.”
Liberties: A Magazine in Revolt Against the New | The Nation
asks of our intellectual life more than a choice between orthodoxies.
Liberties: A Magazine in Revolt Against the New | The Nation
prose often benefits from the cushioning of a few extra words — for rhythm, for sense, sometimes simply to counter the airlessness of sentences that are so straitened they can’t breathe.
Opinion | Why to avoid 'very' in English grammar - The Washington Post
we are art historians — and, at that, embattled defenders of the old Enlightenment understanding of art, against the anthropological concept of culture that came to dominate our discipline and others during the Cold War
Administrators’ Hysterical Response to Campus Controversy
Critical thinking is difficult. It is more like running a marathon than it is like riding a bike — that is, it is more a matter of intellectual and emotional fitness than a technique one can learn and never forget. To think contradictory thoughts simultaneously and fruitfully, to question one’s own assumptions in a way that generates better alternatives, all while charitably entertaining the views of others, is hard to sustain. It requires a lot of instruction and regular practice. Students struggle to get in condition — and administrators removed from the day-to-day practice of teaching and s…
Administrators’ Hysterical Response to Campus Controversy
the canny cheeriness of Dickens’s upwardly mobile heroes – and several rogues – indicates that the quality has become ‘a virtual job requirement for the low-born, ambitious personality’.
When did cheerfulness get so miserable? | The Spectator
Forget your ‘essential’ nature or disposition. As Madame de Staël wrote: ‘What one does to please others ends up shaping what one feels oneself.’ This ‘performative’ aspect of cheerfulness Hampton reads not as a taint but a blessing. No one need be innately cheerful. Act it and you become it.
When did cheerfulness get so miserable? | The Spectator
Jane Austen’s heroines, as he shows, chafe against the elevation of cheerfulness into a ‘social norm’.
When did cheerfulness get so miserable? | The Spectator
When that epic grouch Theodor Adorno asked ‘Is Art Cheerful?’, his answer was no surprise. In Adorno’s stricken 20th century, ‘any gaiety in art’ implied ‘an avoidance of the pain of history’. Good cheer had withered into a fake fix peddled by self-improvement merchants, ‘an affective tool that can reconcile you to drudgery’
When did cheerfulness get so miserable? | The Spectator
DIDION What's so hard about that first sentence is that you're stuck with it. Everything else is going to flow out of that sentence. And by the time you've laid down the first two sentences, your options are all gone. INTERVIEWER The first is the gesture, the second is the commitment.
Joan Didion, The Art of Fiction
I always say Hemingway, because he taught me how sentences worked. When I was fifteen or sixteen I would type out his stories to learn how the sentences worked.
Joan Didion, The Art of Fiction
It's hostile in that you're trying to make somebody see something the way you see it, trying to impose your idea, your picture. It's hostile to try to wrench around someone else's mind that way.
Joan Didion, The Art of Fiction
Whereas the crisis of a form like the novel, both as an artform and as an object of study, has much to do with its receding place in the media system as a whole, the critical essay flourishes on a platform like Twitter: it is swiftly consumed and, as its basis is fundamentally discursive judgment, it fits comfortably in a medium that rewards position-taking, epigrammatic writing, and further elaboration in the form of an online «conversation» of potentially global reach.
A Golden Age? (Ryan Ruby on literary criticism and the internet) | Vinduet
The overall effect of both the sticks and the carrots has been to drive academics into the critical field in droves, which has been enriched by the methodological sophistication and specialist knowledge accumulated by these scholar-critics. Liberated from the stultifying stylistic protocols and citational practices of the academic paper, the taboos against aesthetic judgment, the need to explicitly foreground rather than simply apply methods of interpretation, and the narrowness of period and other specializations, these scholar-critics are flourishing, especially as they command a much broade…
A Golden Age? (Ryan Ruby on literary criticism and the internet) | Vinduet
critics often view themselves not just in competition with other critics – which encourages a fine-grained noticing of detail and structure in order to say something distinctive or novel about the book under consideration – but often also with the author of the writing they’re considering, which encourages a heightening of the prose style to levels expected of literary artwork as the critic, especially in the case of a pan, attempts to turn in a bravura performance of hermeneutics and rhetoric.
A Golden Age? (Ryan Ruby on literary criticism and the internet) | Vinduet
If it is to be objected that a group of 50–100 critics writing for one to two dozen venues which reach an audience that maxes out in the low five digits is nevertheless a very small group of people, I will just say that, historically speaking, literary revolutions have been made by far smaller groups than this.
A Golden Age? (Ryan Ruby on literary criticism and the internet) | Vinduet
Consciously or unconsciously, these new theoretical horizons led to a post-hermeneutic position—in other words, to hesitation over forceful interpretation. A project was said to “ask questions about” or “draw attention to” a topic, without any obligation to formulate conclusions or provide an easily digestible message. With hindsight, we can see that the nonlinearity of digital hypertext and poststructuralism cut two ways: On the one hand, it helped to dismantle master narratives; on the other, it produced an excess of information that was difficult, if not impossible, to meaningfully grasp.
Claire Bishop on the superabundance of research-based art - Artforum International
very few influential texts or manifestos by artists of the past would ever have earned their writers a doctorate, because some of the best writing by artists has been dogmatic and impulsive rather than laboriously researched and peer-reviewed.
Claire Bishop on the superabundance of research-based art - Artforum International
Higher education is increasingly expected to be a concentrated site for focused job training and career preparation; this comes with an attendant fantasy of a robust economy and ample employment opportunities. This is one kind of “hallucination,” to use Grebowicz’s term. On the other hand, college can be imagined as a fecund (or vivid, anyway) wilderness of sorts, life-generating and adventurous. This is the “scenic backdrop” behind Bean’s formulation of critical thinking. It may be well-intentioned and even motivating from a pedagogical (and learning) standpoint, but we would do well to recog…
Thinking Critically about Critical Thinking - Public Books
Can we so easily justify course design and instruction—not to mention the entire project of the liberal arts—with recourse to active engagement with life, to what is “natural, healthy, and motivating”?
Thinking Critically about Critical Thinking - Public Books