On art and specificity.

[dadafountain]

A disclaimer here, because try as I might I haven't been able to get this into the shape I've wanted. But here we go with what I've got:

So a week or so ago I was reading Sylvia Plath's Ariel and some collected Ted Hughes (because I didn't have a strong opinion on where to start), and to my great surprise, I liked the former a lot and couldn't

Comments

[paeanist]

hear, hear!

as for plath, in spite of the fact that thousands of clueless teenage goth girls probably have dog-eared copies of it clutched to their heaving sobbing bosoms as they sleep at night, i truly think the bell jar is a brilliant poetic chronicle of severe depression (among other things). i've read it many times over the years, and it hasn't lost a thing.

[kirstyn]

whoo, nellie -- this is something that i don't think i have a full and blossomed opinion on yet (much like the heaving bosoms of the goth girls!) and thus i think it warrants another pitcher... what say ye? tuesday?

[dadafountain]

Well read my update at the end of the entry, because I hope it clarifies things a weeeee bit and sounds less INSANE. Also, is there any way you could do Monday instead? You could basically pick a time that day.

[kirstyn]

the insaner, the better, my friend. i'm gonna have to read some ted hughes first, but monday works -- 4-ish, again? i shall give you a jingle...

[alwayselephants]

In one sense, I hear you.

In another, very important sense, I see this particular pet-peeve of yours as a pet-peeve that (ironically) could only arise in you because of your place and time. It is only very recently that awareness of one's own cultural or economic bias/frame has even been valued in literature. While it makes a certain amount of sense to assess contemporary writing from certain countries according to these standards (seeing as many writers in many countries nowadays have intellectual access to globalization and some kind of self-conscious awareness of what post-colonialism means, &c. as well as the notion that individuals arise from contexts), it is a bit unfairly anachronistic and/or Eurocentric to condemn either writers from earlier times, or writers from places that do not encourage that kind of awareness. Your taste is decidedly 21st century liberally-educated American.

[dadafountain]

Well, I forgot to write a sentence to the effect, but this is particularly a criticism of mid-20th-century and later literature in America and England, which I think has lost some of its best kinds of realism -- compared to strains in the early 20th century as well as others in the 18th and 19th centuries -- even as there became more ways to talk about it on a theoretical level. I actually think Westernizing countries are often better at art from these perspectives than we are, these days; I can think of very good stuff from Latin America, Russia, India, and Japan that is worth discussing through this sort of lens. Magical Realism certainly has a fair claim in this regard, but that's just one set of examples.

Also, this is a particular pet peeve I've got right now about my experiences of late and some social trends I don't like, not a vast Theory of Literature. At its absolute strongest, I might consider it a bit of personal canon formation with an aim to think about how I might wish to write at some point in the future. But in

[alwayselephants]

Aye, aye! Everything's ship-shape here, mate!

::sails time-trireme back to before the common era::