tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8052308.post8429002074254619103..comments2024-01-24T06:50:01.683-06:00Comments on Samizdat Blog: Graham Harman, Kenneth Goldsmith, & Franco Moretti Walk Into a Bar: A Future for Literary StudiesArchambeauhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17273511539172747550noreply@blogger.comBlogger29125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8052308.post-73240123223954886722014-02-08T16:44:14.156-06:002014-02-08T16:44:14.156-06:00Well, I'll check in with you in five years. M...Well, I'll check in with you in five years. Meanwhile, here's a little experiment I think of as interesting from the Harman point of view...<br />http://www.theeconomyweekly.com/2-8-14-ANTHONY-MADRIDArchambeauhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17273511539172747550noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8052308.post-22925881527875414852014-02-08T14:53:44.612-06:002014-02-08T14:53:44.612-06:00I've got some training in computational lingui...I've got some training in computational linguistics (my dissertation was a quasi-technical exercise in knowledge representation), I know something about the history of the discipline, and I know a bit about the kind of technology used in Moretti's lab. It's one thing to automatically do syntactic analysis of texts. But taking existing texts and transforming fragments of them into syntactically different forms that nonetheless preserve meaning and are grammatically correct, that's a much more complex task. <br /><br />Moreover, it's not simply that you have to re-organize an individual sentence in isolation. But you have to do so in a way that preserves discourse relationships with preceding and following text.That's likely to be tricky stuff, the sort of thing that takes a bit of skill. That's the sort of thing editors do.<br /><br />I'm skeptical about computers being able to do that now and in the forseeable future.Bill Benzonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08360044945265178991noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8052308.post-70172647171367536912014-02-08T12:49:33.190-06:002014-02-08T12:49:33.190-06:00We'd really have to talk to someone in Moretti...We'd really have to talk to someone in Moretti's lab. They've got Stanford's Silicon Valley connections and a fairly strong set of resources, so it's not just a matter of Google book search. I don't know what they can and can't do, but I do know these things are progressing rather rapidly. Let's imagine five years out...Archambeauhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17273511539172747550noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8052308.post-24000489635121751102014-02-07T06:56:32.640-06:002014-02-07T06:56:32.640-06:00"...Moretti has the technical resources to ma...<i>"...Moretti has the technical resources to make massive substitutions: he could change Crusoe's verb forms around electronically, and produce exactly the kind of modified text Harman describes..."</i><br /><br />Come to think of it, I'm not at all sure this would be possible with current technology. It's not as simple as doing a global search and replace to find all instances of, say, "big" and replace them with "large." Here's your example sentence, in context:<br /><br /><i>In about three miles or thereabouts, coasting the shore, I came to a very good inlet or bay, about a mile over, which narrowed till it came to a very little rivulet or brook, where I found a very convenient harbour for my boat, and where she lay as if she had been in a little dock made on purpose for her. Here I put in, and having stowed my boat very safe, I went on shore to look about me, and see where I was.<br /><br />I soon found I had but a little passed by the place where I had been before, when I travelled on foot to that shore; so taking nothing out of my boat but my gun and umbrella, for it was exceedingly hot, I began my march.</i><br /><br />What are you going to change that sentence to? How does the computer decide? Will the same kind of decision work in every case? I doubt that we've got off the shelf technology that can do this.<br />Bill Benzonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08360044945265178991noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8052308.post-42469676965163486822014-02-04T10:41:26.795-06:002014-02-04T10:41:26.795-06:00Even when one is qualifying things by saying "...<i>Even when one is qualifying things by saying "these are VERSIONS of the novel," we presuppose the notion of the novel, that it exists as an essential entity with various accidental variants.</i> <br /><br />I wonder. Under the pressure of Harman's observations it may seem that way, but it's not clear to me that that's what's going on. Maybe we've just got informal conventions for talking about sets of closely related texts held together by acts of authorship but we're not necessarily presupposing any strong notion of essence holding them together.<br /><br />* * *<br /><br />What happens to these questions if we pose them in the context of story-telling in a pre-literate culture? I don't mean any and all story-telling, but the telling of culturally important stories, myths?<br /><br />The author as such disappears. The stories are traditional, passed down from one generation to the next. The storyteller is (just) a performer, not an author. So the Max Perkins/F Scott Fitzgerald problem disappears.<br /><br />Each performance of the story is different. Whatever the identity criteria are for a given myth, they don't depend on the exact wording. Presumbably they have to do with required characters and incidents and perhaps an obligatory phrase here and there. And it IS a performance. The teller is in the presence of an audience and presumably is responsive to that audience.<br /><br />Some years ago there was an interest in "story grammars" in several closely related disciplines. The idea was to specify formal requirements that make a given discourse into a proper story. As far as I know, this enterprise collapsed. But perhaps something like that is what's a stake in worrying about the identity conditions of a story (or a poem).Bill Benzonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08360044945265178991noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8052308.post-84475389710313443792014-02-03T14:59:13.231-06:002014-02-03T14:59:13.231-06:00And it seems that the 1956 American film was dubbe...And it seems that the 1956 American film was dubbed into Japanese and then <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godzilla,_King_of_the_Monsters!" rel="nofollow">released in Japan</a> with Japanese subtitles. It seems to me that whether you think of them as two versions of the same film or as two different films with extensive similarities is a matter of mere definition rather than one of deep substance.<br /><br />And the same goes, for example, the published version of Coleridge's "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison" and the verse letter Coleridge wrote to his friend Southey. And so on for many other examples.Bill Benzonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08360044945265178991noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8052308.post-60698953964786937182014-02-03T13:15:48.719-06:002014-02-03T13:15:48.719-06:00About the time I got to the fourth paragraph I was...About the time I got to the fourth paragraph I was inspired to write this fragment I intend to insert in my epic poem about the life of Lucretius. <br /><br />Lucretius: <br />"Objects in this world are composed of atoms <br />that exist as matter structured in patterns <br />whether or not our brains perceive their forms, <br />while our brains construct virtual reality <br />from concepts of objects based on perception <br />which we express through ideas in words, <br />so we dream this already existing world <br />then sing what we see in religious hymns." Surazeushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03649381910384416079noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8052308.post-64072040805811872992014-02-03T13:13:21.171-06:002014-02-03T13:13:21.171-06:00I modified original text in one work to integrate ...I modified original text in one work to integrate it into a work of literature I composed. I wrote a narrative poem in blank verse on the life of philosopher Aristokles Platon. In a scene near the end, I picture him in the Akademia giving a lecture to his students. I took the long passage in The Republic widely known as the Allegory of the Cave, and rewrote it in blank verse as his speech to his students rather than a dialog between Sokrates and Glaukon brother of Platon. I tried to reexpress the exact concepts in more elaborate blank verse form. Since I have not yet published it, that text can be read here: http://scribd.com/surazeus Surazeushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03649381910384416079noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8052308.post-27290881774915848182014-02-03T11:41:42.457-06:002014-02-03T11:41:42.457-06:00Fair enough -- the first thing I think when I'...Fair enough -- the first thing I think when I'm hit with a snowball isn't "did the impact modify the snowball to the point where it is no longer the snowball," it's "which member of the anthropology department threw that thing." One can get through life without ontology. But one can also get through life without Chopin.Archambeauhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17273511539172747550noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8052308.post-10900844648143627942014-02-03T09:53:09.378-06:002014-02-03T09:53:09.378-06:00It isn't banal or ridiculous, but most of the ...It isn't banal or ridiculous, but most of the questions are practical rather than philosophical. Great Expectations has two endings which make a big difference. I'm glad I got to know it in an edition that gave me both. That's worth knowing about, as a specific version. "Director's cut" versions are usually pretty well labelled as such, other kinds of edition often not. The effect of the missing forty words in Tess might depend on which words they are, but the main thing is that you've been short-changed on the goods, whether you noticed or not. It's "the goods as advertised" that are the thing we're discussing, surely? In which case the subject is really the advertising more than the goods. With the Kenny Goldsmith version of the New York Times, it's his publicity that's the whole point (cf Leavis on the Sitwells belonging to the history of publicity rather than poetry). As long as he transcribed it accurately (and frankly who cares), the information is the same. Does anyone get an ontological panic when they see two identical copies of Tess in a bookshop? No, they pick up one and ignore the other because it's "the same book" even when it isn't the same object. So far I haven't seen anyone offer that as an example of such a problem of definition: it's when one of the copies has a page missing you go back to the shop and they check whether they were all like that.Peter Danielshttp://www.peterdaniels.org.uknoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8052308.post-28239011502226159492014-02-02T18:33:29.568-06:002014-02-02T18:33:29.568-06:00Even when one is qualifying things by saying "...Even when one is qualifying things by saying "these are VERSIONS of the novel," we presuppose the notion of the novel, that it exists as an essential entity with various accidental variants. But what is of the essence? Well, perhaps this does seem academic. But so am I, for better or for worse.Archambeauhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17273511539172747550noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8052308.post-74528620106142389622014-02-02T18:23:00.751-06:002014-02-02T18:23:00.751-06:00Walking around the grocery store I was kind of los...Walking around the grocery store I was kind of lost in questions about when a text ceases being itself. Auden's revisions were extensive -- is it the same poem? I what sense? I mean, I get that a librarian will label them as different versions and be done with it. But I don't find the question "where do we draw the line between a text being itself and not being itself?" irritating. It's easy enough to say "the thing the author wrote is F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby," but so much of what we admire in that novel was put in by Max Perkins -- would it still be the same novel if we reverted to FSF's text?. Change forty words in Tess of the D'Urbervilles and I doubt I'll notice -- it'll be the same novel to me, even though I read it twice a year. And so on. Perhaps you find this more banal or ridiculous than I do, but I'm sort of used to people thinking things I care about are ridiculous. <br />Archambeauhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17273511539172747550noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8052308.post-17686588600177001372014-02-02T17:22:43.351-06:002014-02-02T17:22:43.351-06:00Or the community of librarians who have to catalog...Or the community of librarians who have to catalogue these things as "Gojira [film]. Japan, 1954" and "Godzilla [film]. USA, 1956". That's the tool that addresses the question. Then the scholars use the catalogue and find the two different films, whose differences are thoroughly documented, and turn them into something mysteriously philosophical.Peter Danielshttp://www.peterdaniels.org.uknoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8052308.post-21281910098384468602014-02-02T17:16:14.074-06:002014-02-02T17:16:14.074-06:00Ah yes, your job is to juggle them all into a unif...Ah yes, your job is to juggle them all into a unified field, and mine is to take things as they come. The luxury of having dodged the academic life.Peter Danielshttp://www.peterdaniels.org.uknoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8052308.post-25734361964481600262014-02-02T13:55:44.560-06:002014-02-02T13:55:44.560-06:00In answer to the first question -- we're proba...In answer to the first question -- we're probably driven back to Stanley Fish and the idea of the "interpretive community." Archambeauhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17273511539172747550noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8052308.post-63499771589115346532014-02-02T13:38:11.981-06:002014-02-02T13:38:11.981-06:00"I think it's in finding the limits of wh..."I think it's in finding the limits of where the work is no longer itself that we'll find something interesting..."<br /><br />But who makes that determination? What are the criteria?<br /><br />At the moment I'm working and blogging about <a href="http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/search/label/gojira" rel="nofollow"><i>Gojira/Godzilla, King of the Monsters</i></a>. <i>Gojira</i> is a Japanese film that came out in Japan in late 1954. <i>Godzilla, King of the Monsters</i>, is an Americanized version of the film that came out in the USA in 1956. It's significantly different from that Japanese film. Roughly 30 minutes (out of 95) in the Japanese film was scrapped and replaced by 20 minutes shot for the American version. The new footage centers on a new character, an American reporter named Steve Martin, who tells the story. The Japanese film has a romance plot involving a conflict between arranged marriage and marriage by personal choice; that was almost completely eliminated from the American version. <br /><br />Are they the same film? I can't say that the answer much matters. What's interesting are the differences between the two films. I assume that romance plot was weakened considerably in the American version because arranged marriage was (and is) not a live issue for an American audience, while it was relevant to a mid-20th-century Japanese audience (and still turns up in manga and anime). And I figure that the American reporter was added so as to give an American audience a more comfortable point of entry into the film, an on-screen American they can identify with.<br /><br />What's really interesting is THE crucial decision in the stories, the one that allowed the creation of a device capable of killing the monster. In the Japanese version that decision was made by Emiko Yamene, who knew about the secret research of her childhood betrothed, Dr. Serizawa. Her decision to communicate that knowledge to others more or less forced Serizawa to build the weapon (and to commit suicide). In the American version Steve Martin played a role in prodding Emiko into making that decision. Is that a merely contingent fact of the film or is in linked into the underlying causal structure?<br /><br />However interesting object-oriented ontology may be – I've blogged quite a bit about it a year or so ago – I don't see that it provides any tools for addressing these questions. Nor, for that matter, do I know of any form of criticism that does.<br />Bill Benzonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08360044945265178991noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8052308.post-14010504159840639442014-02-02T13:24:43.708-06:002014-02-02T13:24:43.708-06:00I suppose where we differ is in that term "on...I suppose where we differ is in that term "only."Archambeauhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17273511539172747550noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8052308.post-70584240749716142962014-02-02T12:11:20.597-06:002014-02-02T12:11:20.597-06:00It's only a matter of definition in terms of g...It's only a matter of definition in terms of giving the thing the snappy title of "Frankenstein" or "Macbeth" without explaining the differences at length. A performance is a performance and exists in time in a different way from a text, and a variant edition is a variant edition and ought to be advertised as such to anyone who's going to know the difference, but mostly it's convenient enough to give it the recognisable title. The business does get complicated, but only if all the multitudes it contains have to be juggled with at once - and most of the time, they don't.Peter Danielshttp://www.peterdaniels.org.uknoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8052308.post-1041763026516632572014-02-02T11:53:32.328-06:002014-02-02T11:53:32.328-06:00One might also think of stagings of plays -- when ...One might also think of stagings of plays -- when does MacBeth cease to be MacBeth, in radical stagings? And then there's the question of readings aloud of poetry, especially when different accents make rhymes full or slant -- at what point does sounding matter? What features don't count as changing a text? I mean, it all gets pretty complicated pretty quickly, I think. And I like that.Archambeauhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17273511539172747550noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8052308.post-16581788088171233932014-02-02T11:50:14.762-06:002014-02-02T11:50:14.762-06:00What do we make, though, of things like Mary Shell...What do we make, though, of things like Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, where there are versions with or without the suggestions made my P.B. Shelley (mostly diction changes) -- Mary Shelley approved them and they were part of the first publication, though not of the first manuscript, and both versions are still on the market, published, read, and accepted as Frankenstein? Is it Mary's approval that makes both of them still Frankenstein? Is one of them more 'the real one' than another? What about things that come to us out of the oral tradition in various versions? I mean, I can understand not getting entirely on board with the death of the author, but aren't there cases where textual variations don't obliterate the identity of the work? I think it's in finding the limits of where the work is no longer itself that we'll find something interesting...<br />Archambeauhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17273511539172747550noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8052308.post-32464717445314718502014-02-02T11:27:47.595-06:002014-02-02T11:27:47.595-06:00At what point is it not itself is pretty soon afte...At what point is it not itself is pretty soon after it gets monkeyed with - it becomes the acknowledged abridgement, or the lightly edited plagiarism, or the evidence in the linguistic experiment with connotations of syntax, or further down the line the film script or the musical or the fan fiction. The thought experiment of Nietzsche writing Shelley doesn't make him write Shelley of course, though the thought experiment might lead to some conclusions about how they differ as authors. But they are authors and they wrote what they wrote unless proved otherwise.Peter Danielshttp://www.peterdaniels.org.uknoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8052308.post-55815334344795353882014-02-02T10:40:46.967-06:002014-02-02T10:40:46.967-06:00Yes, I'm THAT Bill Benzon.Yes, I'm THAT Bill Benzon.<br /><br />Bill Benzonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08360044945265178991noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8052308.post-4120812137581432922014-02-02T10:29:10.974-06:002014-02-02T10:29:10.974-06:00By the way -- are you the Bill Benzon who wrote &q...By the way -- are you the Bill Benzon who wrote "Beethoven's Anvil"? Read that some years ago in a copy I checked out from a library. Just added it to my Amazon wish list, since there are things in it I'd like to read again.<br />Archambeauhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17273511539172747550noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8052308.post-76624207131097571072014-02-02T10:24:29.935-06:002014-02-02T10:24:29.935-06:00I see what you mean -- I suppose that, like any me...I see what you mean -- I suppose that, like any method, it can be applied in ways that give us utterly banal results. I actually think that versions of texts (graphic novel or film adaptations or abridgments or what have you) make for interesting test cases of the identity of a narrative—at what point is it not itself? But I'm interested to give your posts a read: thanks for the links!<br />Archambeauhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17273511539172747550noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8052308.post-65989695815124477812014-02-02T09:45:25.766-06:002014-02-02T09:45:25.766-06:00The thing about Harman's counter factual criti...The thing about Harman's counter factual criticism, as I initially pointed out in <a href="http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2012/08/harman-on-literary-criticism-curious.html" rel="nofollow">this post</a> and then <a href="http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2012/10/from-greene-to-shakespeare-if-harman.html" rel="nofollow">in this one</a>, in a different mode, is that it pretty much collapses onto the actual process of literary culture. We already have <a href="http://tinyurl.com/8dk52fa" rel="nofollow">abridged versions of <i>Moby Dick</i></a> and of many other texts of varying literary quality and importance. <i>Reader's Digest</i> made a big business out of cranking our abridgments of texts of all kinds. I don't know whether his <i>Pride and Prejudice</i> variation has been tried, but Francis ForD Coppola took Conrad's <i>Heart of Darkness</i> and set it in Vietnam and Cambodia in <i>Apocalypse Now</i> (and <i>Apocalypse Now Redux</i>) and there's a <a href="http://starkana.com/manga/W/Who_Fighter_with_Heart_of_Darkness/chapter/2/2" rel="nofollow">Japanese manga version of <i>Heart of Darkness</i></a> that owes debts to both Conrad and Coppola.<br /><br />It's not clear to me that Harman's suggestion is anything more than an empty thought experiment. One can play with it in a Borgesian way, but I don't see that it has the capacity to tell us anything new or interesting about how literature works.Bill Benzonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08360044945265178991noreply@blogger.com