YouKnowWhoTheFuckIAM

joined 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 weeks ago

At most, you need to add to it as the field progresses, but I doubt literary analysis ever turns out to have been wrong.

Sometimes. But more importantly a good literature prof will be highly responsive to ongoing changes in the world around them with respect to the selection of texts, texts themselves will develop new resonances as times change (consider how Richardson’s Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded might have changed before and after MeToo), and as critics generate new literature of their own, new perspectives have to be considered. These points, it turns out, all circulate around what you said here:

I don’t think works of literature get a lot of updates as time passes

This isn’t really true. At the most basic level of analysis (which isn’t strictly correct, but will do for now), there are never less than two components, and one of them does change as time passes. (1) The words themselves, usually printed on a page without much variation between copies, and (2) the reader of those words. This “reader” is a hugely complicated object, and the text itself doesn’t really exist in any meaningful sense without one (dried ink letters are not “language” as such, but at most a record of information which generates language upon activation by a mind). It is this “reader” (or the huge variety of “readers” who continue to come in and out of existence as time passes) who generates changes that have to be kept up with in the study of literature, but that reader is a vital object of study in the (very roughly speaking) twofold object of literary studies.

Even the idea of an unchanging but growing corpus disguises, and yet relies on, this twofold division. The maintenance of such a corpus relies on the maintenance of a tradition of readers entrusted with the assumptions and techniques of interpretation pertinent to the ideals of that tradition. What is often foregrounded here is the maintained tradition, external to individual readers, but it is those individual readers who, collectively, actually do the work of keeping it.

The job of an up-to-date literature course is to attempt to account for such changes over the span of a three month term/semester, and it’s the consequent process of selection and refinement that generates the work which is being suspiciously handed off to a scammy robot in the article.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago

Meditations on Moloch is “soul-wrenching”, apparently. Jesus fucking Christ.

In what world do these people grow up? “Oh my God, conflict exists between interests and values, things are hard, not every problem is tractable”.

There used to be a refrain that “Moloch” is effectively Siskind’s word for capitalism, because he can’t bring his libertarian heart to name what everybody understands. But that’s wrong, because Siskind’s view is no more than the shallowest Burkeanism. And the worst thing about every single anti-Utopian is that they all assume everybody else feels as mugged by imperfection as they do.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 months ago

Just the very starkest most ratiocinationary combination of a contrarian red herring and a false dilemma

[–] [email protected] 16 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

yeah dude the reason people think MDMA isn’t worse than meth is that it isn’t their heart rate they’re worried about with habit-forming meth consumption

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

It’s all a system. None of that shit is organic. Even on /r/SSC TP0 and Kirkegaard had to pretend they didn’t actually know each other personally

These people are racism Trotskyists

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

For a moment I thought I’d replied in the wrong context, but it looks like I just straight up replied to the wrong thing. My bad either way

Ooooh somehow I replied to your reply to the comment rather than to the comment (originally replying to me)

[–] [email protected] -2 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

It’s more that I think the whole discussion is completely head-ass

Nobody who knows anything about the sub should think it’s remotely worth asking beyond “I guess a mod did that”, it’s literally always been this way

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago (7 children)

No, I’ve done a lot of research here and it may be time

[–] [email protected] -1 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (2 children)

I just think, and perhaps this is just me, that it is weird, conspiratorial, speech to summarise your research into this question as, paraphrasing, ‘I found out one of the old mods has gone alt right’ and nothing more

It’s also defensive speech to say “people are allowed to comment on the vibe”. I know they’re allowed to comment on the vibe! I think they’re weird for detecting a bad/weird vibe! I think it’s indicative of a conspiratorial framing! There is so little information to go on in these speculations, and literally none of it out of keeping with ordinary goings on at SneerClub, for anyone remotely invested in anything that has ever gone on there

Similarly, I found your speech to frame the question itself conspiratorially, as if the fact that one of the old mods has hints of having gone alt right - despite having nothing to do with any recent posts on the subreddit - is worth mentioning at all, certainly not as the only thing of note that your research turned up

 
 

Bwahahahaha get fucked you unbearable scumsucking dork

I mean just look at his fucking sentence construction with the rule of three and the cute internal rhyme/alliteration on “ideology/inevitability/individual”

I’m sorry, and this isn’t massively SneerClub except insofar as the death bit is obviously very Yud-coded, it’s just this quote came up again in the middle of a long and really bleak article, and for whatever reason I just burst out laughing

He’s always so goddamn indignant, like he’s being bullied for his lunch money but he came prepped with the most badass comebacks he could think of in the mirror - I mean seriously, read the quote back to yourself out loud and see if it would ever work outside “an online libertarian journal”, let alone on a stage

Look at his fucking face, how does this guy get up in the morning and not only take himself seriously, but take himself that goddamn seriously

Anyway…

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