Sustained Criticism

Hemingway wrote stories in only six words, mini short stories in a sense. "For sale: baby shoes, never used." It was a prompt in a writing community, and I've been toying with 6 word stories since. They're wonderful ways of practicing the 'show, don't tell' mantra (which I've a newly gleamed understanding off, gained partially from Shklovky's ideas about defamiliarisation and reading a lot of really bad fiction). And they're pieces I have the heart and time to finish. Though mine tend to have eight words. Not using colons and semi-colons is so difficult.

They remind me of William Carlos Williams' poetry: images and short glimpses you can do what you will with. It's not so much what the writer intended, but what the reader sees (Fuck, I sound like Stanley Fish: there is no text, there are only readers).

I'm evidently not dead yet. I'm just buried in literary theory. Which has crystallized my need to get away from this hornet's nest of a field. I am a philologist at heart, and I will always be, but I cannot work with it. Had I not tried I would likely always have regretted it, and I would have missed this experience. While it has not been what I wanted, it turned out to be edifying. Though I will always long to study at Oxford. Perhaps I will, once. When I am old and grey, and finally have time.

Drinking coffee now, trying not to spill all over the Greenblatt text. He's one of the only theorists I can stomach. So many of them are bad writers, or terribly vague. They use stilted jargon to hide bad reasoning, or complete lack of reasoning (Foucault, I want to strangle you). I find it heartening that a Norwegian intellectual agrees, Jon Elster caused an uproar a few years back for calling Kristeva, Foucault, Derrida (and a good deal of others) notorious charlatans. Elster claims most of their works are based on faulty abstractions, and that they lack proper reasoning. I think he even went so far as to call it 'bad quasi-philosophy'. I'm tempted to mail him and tell him just how refreshing I find that view, or quote him on my exam. (Though that would get me failed, they do not call for critique beyond correction of misspelled names.) I met him briefly in Ebbe's funeral, and my last name would likely go down well.

Elster actually closes any books that voices sympathy towards any of these theorists. He claims all sensible people agree with him, and that life is too short to read drivel. I think I'll copy that. I will read the originals, or anything critical, but nothing else. Life really is too short to read useless literary theorists.

The problem about it all is that most of literary theory (perhaps excepted narratology), is based on these abstractions. Either through the works of structuralists and formalists directly, or by way of representation theory. If you remove these foundations, there is no raison d'être left for the literary sciences.

But I'll get back to my sortie later. I'm writing a suicide letter (quite harmless, really, but it is a literary studies suicide). I just don't quite know where I want to address it. [I can't help include my cheesiest tag ever: 'Alexandra's sortie', there is no such thing as too much drama. And I am part Russian, after all.]

I want to read literary theory, but where on earth to begin? And about theatre. And I think I should start reading Norwegian again, my written Norwegian is god-awful - and I think I shall write something about why I dislike Vinje.


It is no secret that I think Norwegian school is, for the most part, useless. A school based on the notion that everyone is alike and has the same abilities, is bound to fail. While learning is partly about good technique discipline, it is also about talent and ability. Genetic disposition and environment, leave some children more favourably disposed for mathematics others for languages. Schools teaching at a middle level leave the above- and below-average students bored and helpless. If an above-average student asks for more challenging work, he is awarded with more work on the same level. And in the instance that someone needs help, the teacher does not have time enough to explain as thoroughly as needed.

It leaves everyone but those of average skill, accomplishment or motivation out. It continues on, with upper secondary being mandatory in all but law. There is a too high percentage of people taking higher education, and yet we put everyone through upper secondary? What could have been a stimulating environment for those interested in higher education turns into a kindergarten, where Norway's 18-year-olds are kept to make sure they know their advanced Maths when they end up sitting behind a counter.

On the other hand, I made a scary discovery today. We discussed society's development and how it turned into what we have today, and it struck me that I have learned so much these past 6 months that I should have been taught long ago. The workings of politics, how wars and crises spur development, for instance. As it turns out, my disinterest in politics has simply been due to lack of knowledge. I even read papers with interest, these days, because I was taught how to read them! Not directly, but through social anthropology and history.

How can anyone make sense of what goes on around them without having been introduced to these things? Much less take part in debates? But then the question of whether or not everyone should participate arises. Democracy, which in reality, does not function as well as we would like because everyone does not have the same competence? Or centralism, which leaves the competency in charge? Is the competency not already in charge? Because most of us do not possess, or, in the even that we possess it, use, the necessary competence those in charge are left to govern on more or less their own premises (simplifying things horribly, and leaving media and the judiciary, for instance, out of the equation) - taking the play that is politics into account.