literature as a discipline

i am sure i am not the only one noticing that there are two main ways to approach and "study" literature. internal and external. i am studying literature at my uni and i want to tell you about my impressions so far as the second semester out of six. my passion is to analyse literature in the context of its internal techniques. i love the concept of narratology, formalism and especially archetypal criticism. i am the only person in my class that chose literature because of pure passion (and a hidden wish to become a writer, but i don't want to acknowledge it so i don't have an obligation before myself). i am genuinely interested in every art medium, and literature is one of them. to my disappointment the biggest part of the cource is about "critical thinking" and all of the external factors following literature. moreover it's really fuarrrking woke lmao. you can imgaine what kind of discussion and theme are followed by the reading of othello and oroonoko. i'm trying my best to ignore it and just enjoy the texts. (there are good sides as i pretty much enjoyed beowulf and battle of maldon, as well as learning about sonnet's rhyme structure) so, why i am writing these? firstly, i have nowhere and noone to vent about it, secondly i want to ask if someone could recommed me some works on archetyl criticism, maybe lectures? (other than jung, and nikolay dybowski. oh yes my mother tongue is russian). and also to ask whether there are an actual academical division in studying literature that i mentioned. please don't upset me on the matter of wokeness, i am not planning to drop my stuidies anyway.

>>10850 I'm curious what you mean by internal vs external (you say they focus on the external factors). Also find it odd the class is covering "critical thinking." Like what is the content there? Also, I think the best way to deal with wokeness is to treat it as just another point of view.

>>10851 well, about critical thinking and the content of the course. for example on the lecture about othello all i heard was "well that play is about racism and sexism". and my eastern-european mind just cannot understand how is this relevant at all? nothing about internal properties of the piece (though there's not a lot to say as all of the shakespeares plays have quite boring conflicts based on misunderstanding and withheld informantion). i felt like the entire lecture was about "people thought like that and we should not repeat that". another example from my assignment about tintern abbey by wordsworth. the question in the assignment is "does author poeticize the fact of poverty?", (context: author wanted to appease authorities and called homeless people "hermits", basically omitting the problem) i wrote that writer is not obliged to make a social-economic critique out of his poem and it doesn't matter as art can romanticize everything, and that is the main point of art (not that strictly). it's not woke, but still about external factors that have nothing to do with the content. i get an impression that what they call critical thinking is a mask for woke brainwashing. about the content, well there are some dubios pieces of literature in our curriculum for later like a play "top girls". like wtf even is that. i am not talking even about post-colonial british literature in the list.

>>10852 Oh, I see. How the work relates to the world, vs how it relates to itself. That is pretty bad. You should try to derail your assignments and talk about technique. Just take a hard right turn after the intro, "the author does not romanticize poetry because he was actually doing this: ..." Idk anything about Top Girls except Wikipedia. I think they still had some standards in 82. When you get around to reading it I hope you'll let us know whether its pure slop. Who knows, sometime feminist themes are done well, probably not though. What do your classmates think about this? What is the professor like?

>>10856 i believe works with "woke and feminist" implications can be good, for sure. we also has mrs. dalloway in the curriculum, i haven't read it yet, but from what i've heard it introduces unique narrative technique - stream of consciousness, and i am intrigued by this concept. also as an example of good piece of art with wokeness i could say that fear and hunger termina is a great example of how it should be made. it's a game not a book, but still an artistic expression. like lol this game has portrayed trans and disabled people seamlessly great, given the dark macabre setting. it amazes me. i would definitely post here as soon as i read top girls to give my review, but it probably won't so be soon. my seminar leader is chill and cool. well, she's not fixated on feminism and i find it good enough. as for classmates, idk, i don't interact with them at all. 95% probably do not care about literature at all and it's just a part of their main program. also on the 4-6 semesters of my bachelor there are completely no course predetermined subjects, meaning that i can choose whatever i want. i have a lot of ideas. i am passionate about lots of things. i might go with old english in-depth, or philosophy, or something similar to narratology or archetypal critizism, or classical philology, or basically deepening in whatevers lands literature.

>>10857 Frankly, if you are actually interested in something, it should be something you are bringing up with strangers, it should be hard for people to get you to stop talking about it.

>>10850 I want to ask if you've considered whether it is possible for you to pursue the academic career you are pointing to? I believe all this stuff will one day be a funny memory, but right now it isn't, and probably won't change before you move in. Going into the humanities as a 'straight(?) white man' interested in the West in the modern day, seems like writing yourself a 'kick me' note, especially if you don't have a proven record of kowtowing to their mindset. I don't want to discourage you. On the contrary, I commend you if you should stay the course, for these really are untrod waters, who knows how things will change, what will happen? But we must work to keep the knowledge alive, passing between the generations. You simply must know what you are going up against. I have a similar experience, when my high school literature teacher had students do a Marxist analysis of Shakespeare. After class I asked her is that not absurd? She said yes it is, but she is beholden to curriculum, that awful thing. I've also realized something, which I sort of knew in my gut always, that 'thematic analysis' we learned in high school is so stupid. You either make the most obvious and unnecessary conclusion about the contents of the poem, or you make an extravagant leap of logic. Both are equally useless.

>>10868 i have always been really solituteful. i just don't interact with peers at all. the funny thing is i don't care about career, i've never thought about my future job in depth. i haven't yet felt that i am wearing a "kick me" note. maybe it's because i have a "refugee" shield, as i am from ukraine. i just go with my passion which is linguistics (and basically humanities as a whole), and my main course is about linguistics. as my thesis i can choose old english, which kinda thrills and sounds cool to me. i view my studies not like a way to get a future career but rather a way to absorb things that interest me. if situation won't change i'd pursue masters and then in the best case i'd go for phd. if someone will one day interrogate my about my views i will just say that "i just don't understand whether i am doing something wrong because it's cultural". i think there's no counter-argument to that. if someone says this book is bad because it's racist i'll just say well people thought like that before. that's it. but overall i am quite silent and i don't hold any grudges. literature is just one part of my stuides. does woke mentally soak into linguistics, philology or philosophy? i doubt that, or maybe just don't see it yet. we will see. right now i have a miracle to get a european education from a good uni for free (!) and i am thankful for that possibility.

>>10871 do you know where can i find a roadmap to fully explore linguistics ?

>>10872 well, the basic linguistics as a discipline are quite straightforward. they go with as layers: phonetics, about isolated sounds phonology, about interaction between sounds morphology, about how words about built syntax, about how sentences are built semantics, about meaning of words pragmatics, about meaning of words with other words i learnt it in that order and i believe it's like that everywhere. hardest is probably syntax. and morphology can be hard if you don't speak any synthetic languages or any language with case system. you would need to learn about concepts that are not present in english. i think most of the uni programs also imply that you study atleast one more language.

>>10852 Determination happens by context and with wokeness the subject is being disregarded to have internal relations, which is not accessible to the viewer and it gets substituted with external Modells of thinking or valuing. And Art is not romanticizing, not in a derogatory way, as it always showed depth and complexity and connectivity and it is the mainstream key of interpretation, that is simplifying and overlooking. And my take is, it’s to discredit art, as it has the freedom of movement. This type of critical thinking reminds me of the scientists, that saw an animals skeleton, and the joints and deducted its movements but drew the skin directly on top of the bones. That’s why you get those weird scientific drawings. And they somehow forgot all the tissues and muscles and blood vessels that maintain ph level and temperature and breathing and much more, and if you would nowadays, one still would deduct how they move in the world, but not know how the animal experiences its world. This wokeness or „critical thinking“ is a relational disease, and its purely control, framed for pillars they deem functional, which is nothing but them determining what is purposeful within their worldview, casting meaning over other frameworks. Each character have their own inner world building and you can access it with archetypal criticism and still it is incomplete, as they resides in the „pockets“ so to speak of their actions, it’s the white spaces, which is giving a chain or tree of inner references, which is not layed out for the reader. Wokeness is in that sense denying the relation ship of a character to its inner world, or it can only be under their own points of reference. It forces what you mean an externality, which is not applicable and loses in the process tons of meaning. And as woke as it sounds, you are brave for acknowledging, what you are running away from.

>>10872 MIT open courseware has a whole introductory class on linguistics available online. https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/24-900-introduction-to-linguistics-spring-2022/

>>10874 great point. i loved reading that. i felt that wokeness superficializes the art but couldn't form it that way. i believe unless i say that holocaust didn't happen or that blacks need to die i won't get in trouble analysing literature the right way and presenting it at uni.

>>10876 >>10876 The Uni would highly benefit from your perspective, good luck.

>>10852 for Othello, how do you expect to discuss it without touching on racism and sexism? As with the rest of Shakespeare, the vernacular of the time is different enough to ours that most of the word choice and wordplay will go over people's heads. For Othello, that includes some racial slurs/jokes and misogynistic jokes. If you don't discuss the race/sex relations/roles/slurs of the time period, you won't have the background to understand why Othello was entertaining when it was written. It would be like reading Candide without getting a brief primer on Leibnizian optimism or the Lisbon earthquake, or watching The Producers with no knowledge of the Holocaust. >my passion is to analyse literature in the context of its internal techniques. i love the concept of narratology, formalism and especially archetypal criticism. >i am the only person in my class that chose literature because of pure passion (and a hidden wish to become a writer, but i don't want to acknowledge it so i don't have an obligation before myself) that's all well and good, but literature does not exist in a vacuum, other students' interests may vary from yours and include analyzing the how/why a piece relates to the world it was written in, and how it shaped the world after it. I'd even expect that's the dominant interest. If you wish to be a writer, then take classes for writers. Reading Shakespeare isn't going to make you a better writer. A more pretentious writer, maybe. Also, this is your second course, which means there's an understanding that many students are just there to fill out their literature elective requirements, and is a possible reason why analysis is casual. The later courses will likely go more in depth, though you should check your course catalog to see what is coming and if the topics interest you, and if there are electives you can take that better align with your interests. At any rate, just say whatever you have to say during the discussions. You're too spooked about wokeness (which is largely just a bogeyman). When we read Candide, the antisemitism came up during class discussion. I said it was funny, Voltaire did it to be funny, and as far as the writing was concerned, it was just a reflection of Voltaire's distaste for Jews. Nothing bad happened. I wasn't crucified, canceled, or shunned, and it had no impact on my academic life.

fuarrrk it, next semester i'm taking ancient greek course over my obligatory literature and linguistics. i have 2 lectures and 2 seminars per WEEK. and it's considered full-time study. in ukraine i've had like 10 disciplines for semester and it's like 6 hours of lectures/seminars per day. like i know that in europe people usually do a part time job while studying, but i am not and why not take full advantage of it. i hope schedule won't overlap. and i hope i won't lose this mood.

>>10881 thank you. that actually helped me. being a writer is kind of a subgoal. i also feel like the more i know the more it would help me with that. after all knowledge in any field can help with writing. you're right that i'm just spooked, i just don't have a lot of experience in the western world and tend to overthink. context is definetely important as you said. no questions about othello itself, i rather was unpleasantly surprised by the choice of books, by the quantity of books with this submeaning. othello, oroonoko right after it, then this "top girls" play, "the white man's burden" and a couple of nigerean nonames, what do they even have to do with british literature? idk, maybe they are important figures, i didn't dig into that. it's just an impression i got when i opened my list of literature and googled the names and main themes. the impression of a viscious intent