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truepennyI think I hit the post-dissertation doldrums on Wednesday. Probably not out of them yet, really, but enough to catch up on LJ and post some rather disconnected thoughts on various things.
For those of you keeping score at home, the wordcount for the six completed chapters of Kekropia goes like this:
For a total of 91,082 words, with 4,069 thus far in Chapter 7.
The third Harry Potter movie is better than the second which was better than the first. I even think the movie of Prisoner of Azkaban is in some ways better than the book, and the set-designers should be awarded medals. (I am completely in love with the clock.)
Troy, otoh ... I haven't laughed so hard at a death scene since the movie of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And that was Paul Reubens and I was supposed to be laughing. I started laughing about the time we got Spiderman!Achilles climbing the wall of the palace and didn't properly stop until the fade-out off of Achilles's artistically sprawled corpse. That was an unspeakably bad movie with some very good actors trapped inside it.
Haven't been participating in the Wiscon discussions going on in![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
desayunoencama's journal and other places. See above re: post-dissertation doldrums. But I particularly liked the thing nadinelet said about Wiscon being interested in feminist practice moreso than feminist theory. That clicked with me. melymbrosia has a post trying to differentiate between feminism qua feminism and feminist literary theory, which I think is an important distinction.
I'm not a theory-head. I find theory without application boring and pointless. And literary theory can get incredibly abstract and abstruse, so that one ends up feeling that one is applying one theoretical construct to another, like a Snark dissecting a Grue to see how many Heffalumps it's eaten recently.
Ultimately, Theory doesn't exist. There are theories, some of which cooperate with each other; some of which are in brutal competition with each other. All any theory is is a set of tools for interpreting a given object, whether it be a text, a historical event, a social group, a work of art, a cultural phenomenon ... Feminist literary theory can be an incredibly useful tool, but that's still all it is. Feminism is not theory, even though there are days when it still feels pretty damn theoretical. Feminism is the application of theory, and the better it works, the less theory there is in it.
Having made that tendentious and iconoclastic statement, I'm going to add that I think theories do have value, in that they give us a vocabulary to talk about certain extremely slippery and subtle concepts. This is as much true of Marxist theory as it is of feminist theory, or of psychoanalytic theory or even, for all its egregious and multitudinous sins, New Criticism. But it's important to remember that theory is the tool, not the tool-user.
Which is all to say that theory is not and should not be the point. Feminism is.
::steps apologetically off soap-box::
Friday the Thirteenth comes on a Sunday this month.
For those of you keeping score at home, the wordcount for the six completed chapters of Kekropia goes like this:
Chapter 1: 15,351
Chapter 2: 12,697
Chapter 3: 13,041
Chapter 4: 12,919
Chapter 5: 21,487
Chapter 6: 15,587
For a total of 91,082 words, with 4,069 thus far in Chapter 7.
The third Harry Potter movie is better than the second which was better than the first. I even think the movie of Prisoner of Azkaban is in some ways better than the book, and the set-designers should be awarded medals. (I am completely in love with the clock.)
Troy, otoh ... I haven't laughed so hard at a death scene since the movie of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And that was Paul Reubens and I was supposed to be laughing. I started laughing about the time we got Spiderman!Achilles climbing the wall of the palace and didn't properly stop until the fade-out off of Achilles's artistically sprawled corpse. That was an unspeakably bad movie with some very good actors trapped inside it.
Haven't been participating in the Wiscon discussions going on in
desayunoencama's journal and other places. See above re: post-dissertation doldrums. But I particularly liked the thing nadinelet said about Wiscon being interested in feminist practice moreso than feminist theory. That clicked with me. melymbrosia has a post trying to differentiate between feminism qua feminism and feminist literary theory, which I think is an important distinction.I'm not a theory-head. I find theory without application boring and pointless. And literary theory can get incredibly abstract and abstruse, so that one ends up feeling that one is applying one theoretical construct to another, like a Snark dissecting a Grue to see how many Heffalumps it's eaten recently.
Ultimately, Theory doesn't exist. There are theories, some of which cooperate with each other; some of which are in brutal competition with each other. All any theory is is a set of tools for interpreting a given object, whether it be a text, a historical event, a social group, a work of art, a cultural phenomenon ... Feminist literary theory can be an incredibly useful tool, but that's still all it is. Feminism is not theory, even though there are days when it still feels pretty damn theoretical. Feminism is the application of theory, and the better it works, the less theory there is in it.
Having made that tendentious and iconoclastic statement, I'm going to add that I think theories do have value, in that they give us a vocabulary to talk about certain extremely slippery and subtle concepts. This is as much true of Marxist theory as it is of feminist theory, or of psychoanalytic theory or even, for all its egregious and multitudinous sins, New Criticism. But it's important to remember that theory is the tool, not the tool-user.
Which is all to say that theory is not and should not be the point. Feminism is.
::steps apologetically off soap-box::
Friday the Thirteenth comes on a Sunday this month.
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no subject
Date: 2004-06-13 10:56 am (UTC)---L.
no subject
Date: 2004-06-13 11:32 am (UTC)And they're definitely chapters. I don't think I can articulate the difference I feel between "chapters" and "sections," but these are chapters. Just really really long ones.
no subject
Date: 2004-06-13 01:25 pm (UTC)---L.
no subject
Date: 2004-06-13 11:09 am (UTC)I particularly hate books on theoretical development, which generally get bogged down in a form of meta-theory I find exceptionally useless to the litarery scholar.
I am a theorist myself, to my horror, but I find that one point where feminist theory differs from many other literary theories is the application to life in general. You can be a feminist or marxist outside your scholarly work as well as inside it, whereas it's hard to find people who are deconstructionist in any other sense than applying deconstruction theory to art.
no subject
Date: 2004-06-13 11:27 am (UTC)I think feminism and Marxism, in particular, are philosophies that can be applied to literary texts, rather than literary theories per se. The various psychoanalytic theories are theories that can be applied to more than one subject but decidedly not philosophies.
no subject
Date: 2004-06-13 11:43 am (UTC)For a case of cyclopean tunnel-vision, there's a whole school of psycho-historians (actually I think it may be just one man and a few acolytes) who argue that the whole of history is about the dire effects of awful child-rearing practices (Blame Mommy). This hardly allows for the process of historical change by which they can sit and describe classical/medieval/early modern/Victorian parenting practices as abominable. This kind of approach can be useful for thinking about certain phenomena which don't fit any kind of rational self-interest model, but my general reaction to this monolithic interpretation is 'Close thy Freud: Open thy Marx.'
Anyway, yes, 'nice little theory: what can we do with it?' is my approach (and see my own brief suggestion that the trouble with theory is that too often it's mono-theory-mania, yesterday).
no subject
Date: 2004-06-13 12:10 pm (UTC)Nice. :)
no subject
Date: 2004-06-13 12:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-06-13 02:13 pm (UTC)In the index of my next book there should be an entry:
Eclectic use of theory, the virtues of
no subject
Date: 2004-06-14 02:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-06-15 01:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-06-13 12:03 pm (UTC)Which is all to say that theory is not and should not be the point. Feminism is.
Well and succinctly put. The goal is to liberate ourselves, not to have better and better descriptions of oppression.
no subject
Date: 2004-06-13 12:08 pm (UTC)Thank you. It means a lot to me to have you say that.
no subject
Date: 2004-06-13 01:55 pm (UTC)At Wiscon, I finally bought a copy of the zine that has "Three letters from the Queen of Elfland". Of course, it got mixed up with other stuff, and I didn't find it again until two days ago.
It was worth waiting for, a truly exquisite story. Perhaps more beautiful than the necklace.
And you are writing a whole novel?! Wow, I can hardly wait.
no subject
Date: 2004-06-13 02:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-06-13 01:57 pm (UTC)theoryfeminismI adore you. Offerings will be made and libations poured at your earliest convenience.
no subject
Date: 2004-06-13 02:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-06-13 07:20 pm (UTC)<flings glitter>
<disappears>
no subject
Date: 2004-06-13 08:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-06-14 05:51 am (UTC)