Three articles for your procrastination pleasure

If only to close a few of the many windows currently open on my desktop, which state of affairs has slowed my computer speed to somewhere  between slug and molasses in January, I give you three articles to distract you from whatever you're supposed to be doing.

1)The Christian Science Monitor weighs in on the memoir controversies.  David Sedaris is quoted as saying, "I guess I've always thought that if 97 percent  of the story is true, then that's an acceptable formula. Put it on a scale. Is it 97 percent pure?" 

I can't really get all het up over the exact factual accuracy of Sedaris's work--I guess I put him more in the category of humorist than memoirist.  More in the S.J. Perelman school, with wide latitude for broad exaggeration.

(One window closed!)

2) Jonathan Gottschall in the Boston Globe suggests a new approach to lit crit that seeks to reign the field back into the realm of at least nominally relevant:

While most other fields gradually accumulate new and durable understanding about the world, the great minds of literary studies have, over the past few decades, chiefly produced theories and speculation with little relevance to anyone but the scholars themselves. So instead of steadily building a body of solid knowledge about literature, culture, and the human condition, the field wanders in continuous circles, bending with fashions and the pronouncements of its charismatic leaders.

He makes this very interesting point:

Contemporary literary theory, for instance, is deeply rooted in the "blank slate" theory of the mind - the idea that the human mind is overwhelmingly shaped by social and cultural influences, rather than by biology. But this theory has perished in the sciences, killed off by advances in evolutionary biology, cognitive science, neuroscience, and other related fields. So most of the "big ideas" in contemporary literary studies have been flawed from their inception - they have been based, at least in part, on failed theories of human nature.

...and also notes that much scholarship in the field goes unread or even unpublished because no one, not even other scholars, wants to read it.  Because, I would add, it's mostly unreadable, at least the stuff I had to wade through the last time I bothered wading through any lit crit.  I briefly contemplated going on to a PhD in  literature, but  the thought of  having to read more of that stuff, much less write like that,  convinced me otherwise.  I never understood how a field that is all about the beauty of language and narrative could produce so much suffocatingly unreadable writing where you were forever having to go back one more time to the dictionary and look up "hermeneutics" again because you could never remember what it meant. (For the record, I still can't remember what it means).

3) Finally, Slate considers the question of procrastination (what, me?  never!  Um, I think I need to go fill the bird feeder) vs. writer's block (I never have that--I can always think of PLENTY of things to write, particularly if they are completely unrelated to the project I'm  supposed  to be working on at the time).

(Three windows closed!)

Comments

[tina]

you go, girl! (she says, over three weeks later).