#litcrit

[jadagul]

So there's this idea I've seen circulating periodically of "don't tag your hate", that fandom tags are for being positive about the fandom and if you're going to say negative things about a work you shouldn't tag it and harsh the vibe of the fans.

And this is, like, utterly baffling to me. If I'm a fan of something I want to see critical analysis! And some of that will say good things and some will say bad things. Unmitigated positivity mostly just pisses me off for being shallow.

Like, the first thing I ever really did with the internet was join a Wheel of Time fan community. But I also spent time looking for negative comments about the books. (I just didn't find any that made sense! The two critiques were "it's too long", which like fair enough but I was a bored speedreader in high school; and "all the female characters are indistinguishable", which may be one of the most incorrect claims about a work of literature that I've read.)

If I post meta about a work of literature, I'd kinda like people to argue with me! That's fun and engaging. (As long as the things they're saying aren't stupid, obviously, but stupid responses are annoying regardless of whether they're positive or negative.) And when I search for commentary, I'd like both positive and negative commentary.

I kind of suspect that I just don't do "fandom" in the sense that people who are part of fandom think and talk about it.

Of course, the weirdest one is that in the early days of this blog, I did a lot of criticism of effective altruism, and I got asked not to tag it "effective altruism" because that tag was for positive stuff about EA. Which is why my tag for effective altruism discussion is still "ea cw".

#fandom #ea cw #litcrit #wheel of time

[sneezypeasy]

Watsonian vs Doylist Analyses - A Couple Points of Clarification

I just want to clear up a couple of misunderstandings I may have unintentionally contributed to in my previous references on the subject:

1. There can be multiple explanations (multiple Watsonian explanations, multiple Doylist explanations, multiple of each etc) of a given scene or character portrayal or plot point, and people can accept more than one explanation at the same time. It's just uncommon for people to accept or present multiple explanations at once because that's kind of how people people.

2. Doylist takes aren't inherently "better" than Watsonian takes, and vice versa. People use both to engage with the text in different ways and for different purposes. Watsonian logic is fun for roleplay or immersing yourself into the story, and I imagine a lot of fanfic writers often start from a prompt like "I wonder what would happen next if I took x character and then put them in y scenario". Doylist logic is fun if you like examining the text from a more "meta" standpoint, trying to see what purpose various narrative choices serve (or undermine). Neither angle is intrinsically a more valid way to engage with fiction, and you might enjoy doing one thing one day and another thing the next - with different texts or even with the same text.

In litcrit, because I like to pick my brain on the subject of "what would have made for the best story here", I tend to be more interested in analyzing theme, character arcs, setup and payoff etc, which are Doylist interpretations. Some people focus a lot on authorial intent, which is also a Doylist perspective (just a different one). Some people like to try to get into the heads of the characters they're analyzing and discuss ideas like "what choice would make the most sense for x character given who they are as a person". That's a Watsonian take. There are contextual and individual reasons why some explanations may resonate with you more than others some of the time or even most of the time, but they're really apples and oranges. Which one you prefer will likely vary depending on the type of question being posed and what scope seems to be the most appropriate for it - and people are always going to have different opinions about that too... because that's how people people.

Of course, the opinions I personally care enough about to splash all over the internet are going to be opinions I hold with very strong convictions, which is why I can come off quite aggressive about them, but they're still just opinions and there's no such thing as "one true explanation", whether that's Watsonian or Doylist. If I make a Doylist argument and I dismiss someone else's rebuttal on the basis of it being Watsonian, that's not because Watsonian takes are intrinsically weaker, it's just because you generally can't use a Watsonian take to rebut a Doylist one or vice versa. You need to engage with someone's point in order to counter it, and you can't generally do that when you completely change the scope of the question, which is what tends to happen when a Watsonian perspective and a Doylist perspective comes into conflict.

(Of course, you can argue that a Doylist scope is situationally stronger than a Watsonian one or vice versa, but that's a different argument and usually context-dependent lol - point is just because a Doylist answer might fit one particular prompt much better this time, doesn't mean all Doylist answers will always trump all Watsonian answers in every single context all of the time, and that's not even accounting for the fact that you're never going to reach unanimous agreement about these sorts of things anyway.)

I hope that clears things up 😊

#litcrit #watsonian vs doylist #apples and oranges #long post #text post #side note but this is why I tend to only engage in Watsonian logic myself when I'm the one doing the rebutting #I don't usually care to come out with my own Watsonian takes #but occasionally I'll come across someone else's that seems totally bonkers #and unsubstantiated by anything #at which point I'll put the Watsonian hat on so I can engage 😂 #otherwise I prefer my trusty Doylist hats 😁 ✌

[grendelsmilf]

“Science fiction is a literature of possibilities. The universe we live in is also one of countless possibilities. For humanity, some universes are better than others, and Three-Body shows the worst of all possible universes, a universe in which existence is as dark and harsh as one can imagine. Not long ago, Canadian writer Robert Sawyer came to China, and when he discussed Three-Body, he attributed my choice of the worst of all possible universes to the historical experience of China and the Chinese people. As a Canadian, he argued that he had an optimistic view of the future relationship between humans and extraterrestrials. I don’t agree with this analysis. In the Chinese science fiction of the last century, the universe was a kind place, and most extraterrestrials appeared as friends or mentors, who, endowed with Godlike patience and forbearance, pointed out the correct path for us, a lost flock of sheep. In Jin Tao’s Moonlight Island, for example, the extraterrestrials soothed the spiritual trauma of the Chinese who experienced the Cultural Revolution. In Tong Enzheng’s Distant Love, the human-alien romance was portrayed as poignant and magnificent. In Zheng Wenguang’s Reflections of Earth, humanity was seen as so morally corrupt that gentle, morally refined aliens were terrified and had to run away, despite their possession of far superior technology. But if one were to evaluate the place of Earth civilization in [Three-Body's] universe, humanity seems far closer to the indigenous peoples of the Canadian territories before the arrival of European colonists than the Canada of the present. More than five hundred years ago, hundreds of distinct peoples speaking languages representing more than ten language families populated the land from Newfoundland to Vancouver Island. Their experience with contact with an alien civilization seems far closer to the portrayal in Three-Body. The description of this history in the essay “Canadian History: An Aboriginal Perspective,” by Georges Erasmus and Joe Saunders, is unforgettable. I wrote about the worst of all possible universes in Three-Body in the hope that we can strive for the best of all possible Earths.”

“The Worst of All Possible Universes and the Best of All Possible Earths: Three-Body and Chinese Science Fiction,” Liu Cixin, trans. Ken Liu

#go off!! #three body problem #liu cixin #ken liu #from the anthology #invisible planets #litcrit

[violsva]

God, how much I love meaningful violence in media. Consequences to violence in media. I love a 16 year old girl calmly walking into a room, killing the two people in there with no second thoughts (because she's done it before), and then feeling a part of herself literally rot away as a result. And then, still calmly (because she's done it before), cutting that piece of herself out of her own flesh with the same knife, and burning it as an offering to her patron.

You can say that a world made of food where everyone is food is inherently silly, but there's nothing you can do to make that silly. It doesn't matter that the girl is a chili pepper. That's still just horrible. As it should be.

This is what fantasy is for: realizing metaphors. You can go on deep journeys into characters' psyches as much as you want in realistic fiction, but you will never get that pure and impossible-to-misinterpret horror of violence having an immediate and physical corrosive effect on the perpetrator.

#(*one* of the things fantasy is for) #litcrit #dimension 20 #the ravening war #trw spoilers #karna solara #aabria iyengar #violence #gore tw #yes i am having a lot of feelings about these food people #and it is not going to stop #pacifism

[metamatar]

Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland (2013) and Neel Mukherjee’s The Lives of Others (2014), that embody this tendency: a universalization that, in fact, neither comprehends nor sympathizes with the social and political contradictions in contemporary South Asia.

Both novels place at the center of their narrative what is commonly referred to as the Naxalite movement, which began in 1967 with a peasant uprising in Naxalbari, a village in northern Bengal near the Nepal border. Initially led by armed members of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), the movement later broke away to form the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) and has largely followed Mao’s doctrine of “people’s war.” Begun in the countryside, it spread to the cities during the 1970s, attracting significant numbers of educated, unemployed youth energized by the peasants’ struggle for rights and recognition. A brutal counteroffensive, empowered by draconian anti-terrorist laws, brought the first phase of the movement to an end. In both novels, the central figures are Naxalite militants. Their immersion in the movement, together with the fallout of their decisions on the lives of those around them, largely propels the narrative in both.

By placing an emancipatory movement at the core of their novels, Lahiri and Mukherjee also place the politics of resistance front and center. And yet, even though both novels are structured by the political actions of key characters, neither author is able to muster an empathetic understanding of their characters’ actions. Moreover, the very idea of a life of struggle is made to appear at best quaint, at worst objectionable. In both novels, politics remains something imposed on the characters, an external, impinging force—but never a source of self-actualization. Instead it serves as a source of dislocation, self-doubt, broken relationships and disrupted lives. Each novel exposes its author’s inability to perceive the political as an intrinsic aspect of the individual being.

Hence, while each of the authors locates a politics of resistance at their novel’s center and views that politics through a universalizing prism, neither can fathom its attraction. Such an approach to emancipatory politics reinforces the neoliberal view that all resistance is doomed because there are no possible alternatives to the current order. And although both authors seem to want to escape an ethos where resistance is viewed as futile, neither is able to do so. As a result, neither is able to engage, much less express, the internal lives of their own central characters. Because of this, they remain limited, not just as post-colonial novels but simply as novels.

The World In a Grain of Sand, Nivedita Majumdar (emphasis mine)

#postcolonial literature #litcrit #the central narrative of jhumpa lahiri's lowland is... killing cops is bad and will bring emotional vengeance upon you wtf #it makes her other novels look really inoffensive tbh #nivedita majumdar #diaspora lit

[mostlysignssomeportents]

But what I had either missed or forgotten about those books was the bitterness of the noir hero. I remembered their affect as being wry, smart-assed, even dry. But the bitterness surprised me.

What surprised me more was the source of that bitterness. The median noir detective is a veteran of either World War I (if the action is set in the interwar years) or World War II (for midcentury settings) and the thing they are just smouldering with rage at is the way that the America they fought for has changed.

They left an America where the right people were running the show — affluent white guys who evinced a priggish moral code. They come back to an America where women, Black and brown people and queers are visible and unashamed of it. They come back to an America where the rich have revealed themselves to be deviants and perverts.

The affect of the noir hero is bitterness over progress.

Much like Edward Neumeier discovering to his dismay that the beloved cracking space-battle novel of his boyhood was actually a reactionary, book-length antidemocratic screed, revisiting those noir novels made me realized that those hard-boiled tough-guys I loved were reactionary creeps.

-Silicon Valley Noir: Red Team Blues and the Role of Bitterness in Technothrillers

#martin hench #red team blues #litcrit #literary criticism #noir #hard boiled #crime fiction #technothrillers

[robtopus]

Still one of the best and most lucid works of Shakespeare criticism.

@transsexualcoriolanus it even has one on Coriolanus!

#Shakespeare #literary analysis #litcrit #jan kott

[oliviawaite]

“The upfront fun of a con artist is the way they manipulate the social fabric. Prohibitive rules and unspoken undercurrents become navigational channels into locked spaces: Martin Bishop holding a cake and balloons so the guard has to open the security gate for him, Sophie Devereaux playing both a wealthy duchess and a nerdy art restorer to gain access to a locked gallery. It’s a game, a puzzle, a magic trick, and like all those things we automatically root for it to work.

But we also root for the con artist to get caught — not by the law, but by the social threads they so clearly understand. We want them to come to trust the partner they’re forced to work with, we want them to fall for the mark, to leave half the cash on the steps of the orphanage and get the real villain, the heartless villain, hauled away in cuffs. We’re always looking for the moment they start to see the con as a means of making people happy, rather than extracting wealth.”

#romance novels #con artists #heists #writing craft #character archetypes #really I’m just always thinking about Leverage #litcrit #literary analysis #books

[vergess]

Well meaning lit teacher: So, every detail is here by design!

What he meant: In real life, many thing emerge as a natural consequence of interacting systems; their relevance to any one system or situation cannot be assumed. The written word is focused through only a single system: the author. If the author had not written the detail, it would not exist. So, knowing that it was consciously constructed, we can presume its relevance to something. What we as readers ask ourselves is, "to what is the detail relevant?" Our answers constitute our interpretation and analysis of the text.

What I, age 14, heard: You have to make everything you write into an insoluble puzzle box

#automatic op tag #Perfectionism be like #Anyway the way we teach critical analysis to kids in the us is broken #litcrit #lit crit #literary criticism

[miasmic-skies]

Literary style should be a way of knowing how the world is met in its unfolding. 

Paul Lynch, author of Prophet Song (Literary Hub)

#litcrit

[jadagul]

That night he dreamed. A duel between magicians makes a fascinating tale. Such tales are common—and rarely true. The winner of such a duel is not likely to give up trade secrets. The loser is dead, at the very least. Novices in sorcery are constantly amazed at how much preparation goes into a duel, and how little action. The duel with the Hill Magician started with a dream, the night after the Warlock's speech made that duel inevitable. It ended thirty years later. .... And in his sleep he concentrated, memorizing details. A narrow path curled up the hillside. Facts twisted, dreamlike. There was a companion with him; or there wasn't. The Warlock lived until he passed through the gate; or he died at the gate, in agony, with great ivory teeth grinding together through his rib cage. He woke himself up trying to sort it out. The shadowy companion was necessary, at least as far as the gate. Beyond the enemy's gate he could see nothing. A Warlock's Wheel must have been used there, to block his magic so thoroughly. Poetic justice? He spent three full days working spells to block the Hill Magician's prescient sense. During that time his own sleep was dreamless. The other's magic was as effective as his own.

Larry Niven's novelette "What Good is a Glass Dagger" isn't generally super well remembered; to the extent people think of it, it's in relation to the much more famous sequel, "The Magic Goes Away", which used magic as a metaphor for the oil and energy crisis.

(It's also one of the first stories to use the word "mana" to refer to magic power; it's still exotic enough that Niven italicizes it in the text. It's not the first ever, but I believe it's the actual source that RPGs drew on when they used that word.)

But this passage has always stuck with me. Wizard duels aren't flashy explosions of power. They're very careful maneuvering, with decades of prescience, and the winner is the one who best manages that careful maneuvering around their opponent's blind spots while creating blind spots for their opponent.

(There's a truism in D&D3.x that a level 13 wizard, with time to prepare, can kill anything that isn't preparing in return. And I feel like this story represents that concept really well, though the details are all different.)

#larry niven #the magic goes away #what good is a glass dagger #dungeons and dragons #d&D #d&D 3.x #litcrit

[bigmilkagenda]

Of the many, many plates of pancakes* that were offered to the listener in magp 1-07, this one may be my favourite

[ID: A screenshot of an unofficial transcript to The Magnus Protocol. CELIA is saying "Yeah. I mean, it's an old system, but it could have been worse. It's not like we're wrestling with tape recorders and manila folders." /end ID]

When we meet TMA-Celia for the second time, she's lost her name. She was Lynne Hammond, and now she's not. She doesn't seem to remember Martin, either, but it's not clear how much of herself and her life from before the change she does remember. She's freaked out by the tape recorders that start showing up, and there's no indication that she associates them with the Institute specifically.

If Celia Ripley is, as we are clearly intended to believe or consider, the same Celia as in TMA, why is she making knowing comments about manila folders and tape recorders? Tape recorders in particular are hardly standard equipment at what seems to be mostly a text data-entry and cataloguing job. She could have said typewriters, or carbon paper. Fax machines, if we're dunking on Freddy specifically.

She says "tape recorders and manila folders." Celia Ripley is referencing The Magnus Institute, particularly the outdated technologies in use in the Archives.

Maybe she learned more from Melanie about what the recorders were and did at the Institute, sometime after MAG 190. Maybe she has those specific memories of giving her statement in MAG 100, and little else. Maybe Martin grew an apocalypse beard and she remembers everything, but just didn't recognise him out of context and in a tunnel and during A Pretty Weird Time Overall.

Maybe she stuck around with Melanie-Georgie-Basira for a while after things returned, and that's how she learned about the particular significance of tape recorders.

Maybe she found some tapes and listened to a couple hundred of them.

Or maybe she's simply an AU Celia, with a knack for oddly specific and kind of clunky comparisons, drawn into this through the powers of metafiction and string theory.

Or maybe someone filled her with spiders and sent her to finish the job of spreading Fear to this particular world.

And the reason this particular plate of textual pancakes** (short stack, butter and nightmare syrup) is one of my favourites from "Give and Take" is because I genuinely have no idea! None of these are theories because there isn't enough evidence to point me in any particular direction. It's a mystery!, Jon voice, etcetera.

If you cornered me and paid me to have an opinion about it I could say which options I thought were more likely, I guess. But the odds are high that I'd be wrong, and I think the boat for me getting paid to interpret texts probably sailed fifteen years ago, besides. I'm in this for the love of the game.***

November is the true spooky season in the northern hemisphere.**** Yeah, October ends with Halloween, but you know what month starts with Halloween? Mmhmm. By November of 2019 TMA had been on my list for a few years, and someone I was getting to know and really liked recommended it to me specifically in the days after 159 aired. The conditions were correct for me to get into something new, is what I'm saying. I still remember listening to "Anglerfish" for the first time, walking home from my office job in the blustery November dark. I got home starry-eyed and red-cheeked and thrilled by the story I'd just heard.

It took a couple of months for me to catch up, and though I loved having so much to listen to there were times when I wished I'd started earlier, to have the experience of seeing things unfold.

And now we're back at a beginning, and get to experience the horrible joys of finding out.

[ID: A screenshot of an unofficial transcript to The Magnus Protocol. LENA is saying "Of a sort. I hope you're as ready for it as you think you are. Consider yourself "in." /end ID]

*Sabrina pancake meme

** the best kind, especially if it's a contest between textual and fluffy pancakes. Keep those spongy bastards away from me, I'll take the kind with a typeface instead

***Being a huge nerd

**** For more of my opinions on November, see https://www.tumblr.com/almostmolly/188799234276

#tmagp #tma #the magnus protocol #celia ripley #celia tmagp #lynne hammond #tmagp meta #loosely. this is neither litcrit not analysis nor speculation in the sense that i don't subscribe to any of the possible paths as true #and also realise there could be a dozen other things i haven't talked about here #i know I've said spiders celia twice but I'm kind of like a person who makes red string boards for the aesthetics #it's part of the decor y'know? #sorry for the link to my tumblr poetry blog but also: I'm not bad at it so. not that sorry #pancakes (derogatory)

[unpretty]

every now and again i read a post that gives the strong impression that the op thinks that if people really liked 'good' books they would compulsively write book reports about them

#original #i regret to inform you that i only write effortposts about things that are bad *gestures at batman* #i read many good books which are fine the way they are and i have no notes actually #if you want me to write litcrit you are going to have to pay me #and in the end what you will get is litcrit written by someone who majored in accounting

[helga-grinduil]

>Make a 'Female Characters in Shonen' type of video >Include MHA >Talk only about Uraraka (when Toga is right there) >Discuss only her moments/character from earlier parts of the story >Reduce the encounter between Toga and Uraraka in S6 to being about Deku >Get views and likes >Profit!

#bnha #usual salt #uraraka ochako #i'm putting y'all into mandatory litcrit and reading comprehension classes

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Going back to old favorites is a weird exercise. I remember reading an interview with Edward Neumeier about his script for Starship Troopers, describing how he remembered the original Heinlein novel as a kind of fast-paced action-adventure thriller about massive set-piece battles with alien monsters. But when he actually went back and re-read the novel, he discovered while that those battles make up the beginning and end of the novel, the meat of the book is a bunch of boring lectures about whether only soldiers should be allowed to vote.

I remembered those hard-boiled novels as plot-forward, pacey books about two-fisted heroes beating all the odds to defeat deliciously evil villains. I thought of them as Ur-pulps, as William Gibson told The Paris Review:

The only kind of ghetto arrogance I can summon up from being a science fiction writer is, I can do fucking plot. I can feel my links to Dashiell Hammett. If I meet some guy who subsists on teaching writing in colleges, and if there’s any kind of hostility, I think, I can do plot. I’ve still got wheels on my tractor. The great thing is when you’re doing the other stuff and you whip the plot into gear, then you know you’re driving something really weird.

Gibson’s not wrong here. These books have got wheels on their tractors. They can do fucking plot.

-Silicon Valley Noir: Red Team Blues and the Role of Bitterness in Technothrillers

#martin hench #red team blues #science fiction #sf #litcrit #literary criticism #noir #hard boiled #detective fiction #crime fiction #technothrillers

[random-french-girl]

In other news yesterday I finished reading Kindred, by Octavia Butler, for the first time, and I can’t stop thinking about it. One of the best books I’ve ever read.

#rfg read #I found it a goodwill and devoured it in two days. it is extraordinary. I want to read litcrit about it tbh