
T.S. Eliot and the Demise of the Literary Culture - helwr
https://www.commentarymagazine.com/viewarticle.cfm/t-s--eliot-and-the-demise-of-the-literary-culture-15564
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gjm11
The author gives a little list of notably memorable fragments of Eliot's
poetry. Unfortunately he gets one of them wrong, which is a pity because the
very thing he gets wrong is (I think) an absolute masterpiece of subtlety on
Eliot's part.

As quoted in the article: "Humankind cannot bear very much reality."

As actually written by Eliot: "Human kind cannot bear very much reality."

The difference is a single space, separating the two halves of a compound word
-- but it's a big difference.

1\. Eliot's version is better rhythmically. It introduces a tiny extra pause
between "human" and "kind", and it sounds better that way. (One particular way
in which it sounds better: the slight slow-down makes it that bit more
magisterial, which is part of its appeal.)

2\. Eliot's version suggests an individual human rather than the species as a
whole, which makes better sense: the human race, as such, can neither bear nor
fail to bear very much reality, but individual humans certainly can.

3\. Eliot's version, by its slight unfamiliarity, encourages the mind to dwell
a bit more on the associations of those words, the latter especially. Kin.
Kindness. German _Kind_ , a child (children typically can't bear very much
reality either).

[EDITED a minute or two after posting to fix formatting; no changes in
content]

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klbarry
This article probably isn't targeted towards a layperson, but it didn't tell
me why he was important to the world, important he may be. Why is literary
criticism so important?

My background memory: A while back, didn't someone submit a made-up literary
criticism to a journal in the field using false credentials, and have his work
lauded?

Edit: The above memory doesn't mean anything regarding this subject, scratch
that.

~~~
quanticle
You're probably thinking of the Sokal Hoax
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair>), where Alan Sokal basically made
up a nonsense paper and submitted it to a literary journal and got it
accepted.

To me, the hoax illustrates the real reason why the "literary culture" has
declined so. Its not due to any diminishing of Americans' literary
sensibilities, but rather due to the literary world's increasing insularity
and elitism. Today the world of "high literature" is so self-referential and
abstract as to require a degree in literature to simply comprehend why any
given work is good or bad. Most people rightly don't want to put in that kind
of effort.

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Homunculiheaded
To be fair 'Social Text', the journal Sokal submitted his article to was not
peer reviewed at the time, so it's not really a good representation of
consensus of the academic community in that area. Additionally similar hoaxes
(cited at the end of that wikipedia article) have been pulled of in the
sciences. The hoax demonstrates many of the current problems with academia,
but I don't think it provides good grounds to singularly pick on literary
criticism.

~~~
vixen99
It was, I suggest, the aftermath that actually provided good grounds. For
instance, several 'giants' of literary criticism were demonstrably shown,
because they'd ill-advisedly chosen to stray into topic areas which they were
ill-equipped to handle, to be talking nonsense. One topic was mathematics
where it was shown very clearly that a certain well-known 'intellectual' was
manifestly ignorant of the mathematics she enjoyed quoting in support of her
'arguments.

~~~
_delirium
I don't think there was much demonstrated in the aftermath, just a lot of
mudslinging on both sides. While I thought the parody was hilarious, the
"serious" followup, in Sokal and Bricmont's book, is not that great. It mostly
boils down to: some random critical theorists make too much use of crappy or
stretched mathematical/scientific metaphors. That point was demonstrated much
more penetratingly in the parody.

The book, though, feels like a literary scholar-pedant finding a metaphorical
reference to Faust in a physics paper and launching into a longwinded critique
about how the physicist has clearly misunderstood Faust. Well, maybe, and if
that were common it'd be an annoying writing style, but errors in
interpretation of Faust aren't really the point if it's a physics paper!

And to make matters worse, they don't even go after most of the big names---
there are no chapters in the book on Derrida, Foucault, Althusser, Barthes,
etc., because they couldn't find any material to critique.

~~~
quanticle
The problem I have with Derrida, Focault, et. al. is that they're effectively
impossible to critique. The density of their writing, combined with their
tendency to redefine terms on the fly means that critiques often end up being
critiques of interpretation, rather than critiques of the work itself.

Of course, the writers would argue that that's exactly the point. The main
idea of postmodernism is that the work is inseparable from the interpretation.

