posted
I've really enjoyed this thread. It has been thought-provoking, amusing, and, best of all, I finally learned to make those little underline quote thingies. And I have to say, the debate here has been downright fiery. Presidential debates don't have this much passion.
This discussion takes on special significance for me in light of a very strange e-mail I got yesterday. My publisher for Nobody Gets the Girl forwarded me an e-mail from Dr. Namita Goswami of DePaul University. DePaul University had ordered a large number of copies of Nobody Gets the Girl, and my publisher had e-mailed the university to find out why. They got the following response from Dr. Goswami:
quote:I'm using it for a sophomore seminar on multiculturalism from philosophical perspectives. They'll be reading Neuromancer and More's Utopia and Nobody to think through the relation between technology and society a little bit. I also want them to read science fiction as a form of cultural and social production as well as commentary.
I'm am simultaniously delighted, bewildered, and mortified by this response. When I was writing Nobody, I certainly never had any thoughts on commenting upon multi-culturalism. And, while arguably all science fiction is a comment on relationships between technology and society, most of the technology in Nobody is purely fictional and purposefully silly--a time machine made from a pocket calculator and a microwave oven, for instance.
My reaction to learning that my book would be studied in a classroom was, "Holy cow! I'm literature!" Such was never my intention. At no point while writing Nobody did I ever entertain the notion that I was writing a "literary" work. My inspiration was comic books, perhaps the least intellectually respected artform ever.
I thought about e-mailing the professor to learn more about how my book fit into her lesson plans, but I've decided it's best I don't know.
All of this has made me think about the first novel I wrote after college. Many of the lessons about "great literature" were still in my head and I set out to write a work of staggering intellectual significance. The novel's hero was a homeless man, the fashionable social malady of the late 80's. I had not one, not two, but THREE unreliable narrators telling the story in a non-sequential pattern, often pausing to deliver long monologues about society and the human condition. To conclude the novel, I spent the last 10,000 words jumping around to ever character that had appeared in the novel and writing scenes in which they died. No one got out alive.
It was, may I say in all modesty, the most pretentious piece of dung ever committed to paper. Completely unreadable, self-serving, and pointless. But, it was the sort of thing that had been held up as "great writing" by many of my professors. I had one professor tell me that the greatest novel ever written was Finnegan's Wake--because it was the one novel she had never been able to finish reading. No wonder I was warped.
Fortunately, after my first novel, I had the startling revelation that I would enjoy being read by people other than English Literature professors. I spent many years unlearning what I'd been taught in college. I grew very disdainful of those who valued "literature" over a good read. Literary to me became synonymous with dry, pretentious, and difficult.
So I've fought on both sides of the literature versus popular fiction battle, and last week would probably have pitched into this battle with some sweeping statement like, "99% of all literature is crap."
Now I have to wonder, "Can't we all just get along?"
--James Maxey
[This message has been edited by James Maxey (edited January 20, 2004).]
[This message has been edited by James Maxey (edited January 20, 2004).]
posted
Gosh - I thought we were all getting along just fine. I haven't witnessed a single meltdown, nor has anything come close to being classifiably flame-war-ish.
posted
BTW, James, your book is wild. Like Marianne, not my normal reading, but I enjoyed it. I'll have to think about its literary applications, though.
The fact that the classics were the best or the longest lasting, for whatever reason, even if only because of the past smaller competitive field, seems to be the key. I dare say the writing field will never be the same as it was when the classics were written, and maybe the classics couldn't have competed in today's marketplace, but they speak to where we've been in ways we cannot duplicate today.
Any period piece today is filtered by the years between, no matter how hard we try otherwise. If we're interested in the human condition, whether as writers or readers, the classics may not be the only barometers, but they are invaluable to the study.
posted
To hijack a quote that OSC already hijacked from someone else, literature is whatever I'm pointing at when I say "literature." It's the ultimate argument-ending phrase.
Posts: 249 | Registered: Jan 2004
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posted
Does Godwin's Law still have teeth? "Hitler" and "Nazi" accusations against the Bush government on the part of our nation's more liberal elements have been so routine in the last couple of years that it's actually become an *expected* tactic in political discourse, and is no longer a debate ender.
posted
Even granting that there are legitimate lessons to be learned from the rise of National Socialism and its horribly tragic results, and thus applying Godwin's Law only in cases where there is no rational connection between the points being argued and Nazis, Godwin's Law doesn't state or imply that the argument is over.
It merely points out that at some point in any long running use-net discussion, Hitler or Nazis will be mentioned as part of the argument.
Indeed, in light of the fact that much of our modern political discourse springs from the lessons of Auschwitz, Dachau, and the other horrors that National Socialism eventually inflicted, it is hardly a surprising statement. It would be just as valid to observe that slavery in antebellum America or the French Terror or WWI will eventually be mentioned as an argument in any discussion that becomes long enough.
True, I imagine that Godwin was more sensitive to comparisons with Nazis than with the Star Chamber, but the rule holds for both.
What some people fail to realize is that the only reason for invoking Godwin's Law as a reason to end an argument is because the comparison with Hitler cannot otherwise be refuted. Thus, it is the person that attempts to end the discussion after being compared to a Nazi, without answering the charge, that reveals a lack of credible argument. If you can't even refute the statement "you're a *&^%ing NAZI!!!!" then how can your argument be taken seriously?
This is the reason for the well known codicil, that anyone attempting to invoke Godwin's Law as a defense against being charged as a Nazi will fail.
quote:If you can't even refute the statement "you're a *&^%ing NAZI!!!!" then how can your argument be taken seriously?
And yet, sadly, the argument is taken very seriously, or at least very seriously used in today's political scene by a section of the populace that even as a not-quote-fringe political minority is still distressingly large. That is, we have a lot of people in this country throwing the charge around who really should know better. It says extremely bad things about our educational system that the "[He] is a Nazi!" crowd doesn't actually seem to know what it's saying.
[Waves hands, Herman Munster-like]
Bah! A pox on such de facto Holocaust deniers.
On to more forum-appropriate activity:
My "Great Literature" list is the greatest EVER. Nyah!
quote:What some people fail to realize is that the only reason for invoking Godwin's Law as a reason to end an argument is because the comparison with Hitler cannot otherwise be refuted. Thus, it is the person that attempts to end the discussion after being compared to a Nazi, without answering the charge, that reveals a lack of credible argument. If you can't even refute the statement "you're a *&^%ing NAZI!!!!" then how can your argument be taken seriously?
I disagree, Survivor.
For example, in a discussion about whether punctuation should go inside or outside of quotation marks, when the puctuation was not originally part of the quoted material, if someone on either side of the question gets so worked up about it that he levels the accusation "you're a *&^%ing NAZI!!!!", then I think it would be perfectly acceptable for the accused to decline further participation in the discussion, without bothering to take the time to refute the accusation.
Any person who drags an obviously inapt and overwrought comparison to Nazis into an unrelated discussion is not someone whose reasoning needs to be taken seriously.
quote:The ultimate argument ending phrase is "Bye!"
posted
Actually, nobody here has used the "nazi" accusation. Somehow, it came up as an example of really, really poor argumentation.
Posts: 249 | Registered: Jan 2004
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