Visiting the Library

I went in to DCU last night after work, and Nina showed me the library. Possibly even the Library. Now, I was in and out of the libraries fairly regularly in Trinity, often looking for textbooks that other people had snagged, borrowed, or in some cases, hidden. They never had all that much impact on me, even though I know that in formal terms, they’re bigger. But looking into the rows of shelves yesterday and having the card-reader let me in was great. I can now find my way around the place – it’s Dewey Decimal, which makes it pretty easy – and borrow books. It’s all automated – scan card, scan book, deactivate alarm tag, and off you go.

There are also many rows of computers, on which you can log into a college account. I knew about this; I did not know about the huge amount of file storage which goes with it. I was looking at something over 200 gigs of storage there, which I suspect is more than I’ll ever need. And there’s a very intelligent sort of print service; you print to a virtual printer, and then walk over to the nearest real printer, tag on with the ID card, and lo, your documents appear.

I borrowed two of the books on the sociology list, more to try the system than with any major intent of working from them, although I’m certainly going to scan through them and see how closely they match the module curriculum. If there’s enough overlap, I’ll look to buy copies – I may well be able to get them second-hand from someone who did the module last year, as there seems to be a solid trade in such things.

I’ll get an official tour of the library and other services on Saturday, when there’s a Welcome Day for us distance-learning people. But it really does feel like the whole thing is getting going now.

Course Material: LIT1

The course materials for the first chunk of LIT1 arrived today. This covers the first 8 units of what I believe is a 21-unit course. It’s presented as punched A4 sheets, printed both sides, on good paper and generally high production values, in a good binder. It confirms that the reading list is the same as last year, and contains some how-to-study material alongside the actual literature material. This is still of value to me, although I expect to be able to more-or-less skip it when I’m doing future introductory modules.

I haven’t really had a chance to look at it in much detail yet, but at a glance, it seems to be well-written – plain, to-the-point language, with clear meanings and references. I’m looking forward to getting dug into it – the term starts formally on the 26th of September, but I fully expect to have most of this material read through by then, at least once.

Materials for HIS1 and SOC1 should arrive soon too.

ID Card

My ID Card for college has arrived. Now, the process has taken the photo I sent them and reduced it to a blur of a close-up on my face, but it’s still recognisable, and the library is accessed via some kind of automated card-reader anyway. I do have some priorities here .As far as I’m concerned, there are two reasons to actually go for a university course rather than just doing the reading and studying myself. One is the guidance of the actual course and lecturers/tutors, but the big one is the library access.

It’s peculiar how completely the card convinces me that I’m actually doing the course. It’s like some sort of talisman, an Amulet of Studentness +5. I’m now very keen to get in, see the library, and get working on the course material.

 

Waiting for the Term

All my registration papers are in, payments are made, modules are selected, and I’ve even sent in the photographs for the ID card. Now, there’s the period of waiting while the university spins up out of holiday mode into term time. And I’m impatient.

A study skills book arrived in this morning’s post. It’s not the curriculum outline or book list I was hoping for, but it’s certainly a start, and it’s an area that remains something of a mystery to me. I never really learned to study in school, and my previous college experience was, in hindsight, impressively unguided. So I’ll be going through that in the next few days, at least.

And some poking around on the DCU website has found course outlines, which seem to give an idea of what’s involved. I’m not sure if they’re up to date for this academic year or not, but I suspect they won’t change vastly from one year to the next, at least for the foundation modules. So I can at least pick out the likely books for the literature module from that. They are:

  • Hamlet
  • Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
  • poetry of Yeats
  • Dickens’ Great Expectations
  • James Joyce’s Dubliners
  • Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things

 

That looks like an eminently reasonable list of reading. I’m also very much liking the look of the history and sociology listings – those being the three modules I’m doing this year.

Narrative in History

I’ve been concentrating on the literary aspects of the Humanities degree I’m going to be starting, but there are other components as well – history, philosophy, and so on. At the moment, I’m looking at the historical thing, because there’s something that bothers me.

I’ve come across a few references in the recent past to “creating narratives”. This has usually been with regard to journalism, and the way in which it’s fracturing and breaking up as social media cut into it in various ways. The social media provide bits of information, but they don’t provide a coherent story, as put together by a professional journalist. That’s fine, so far as it goes there – people use stories as a way to understand things, and a narrative that goes “this happpened, and then this happened, and then this person said this, and so this happened…” can provide a way to get the situation clear in your mind.

The trouble arises when we start to consider this narrative as being a historical fact, and to approach history as a narrative, rather than a field of information.

This came to the fore recently in a discussion I was having with a friend about the term “McCarthyism”. I noted that I wasn’t familiar with the term, having not studied US history. This was greeted with some disbelief, and I was told that Senator McCarthy was one of the great movers and shakers of modern US history, responsible for the entire communist scare within the USA. And that is, indeed, how the story goes.

Except that if you look a bit deeper, that’s not what happened. J. Edgar Hoover, in his role as director of the FBI, was far more responsible for McCarthyism than McCarthy, if you want to point to one person. But I feel that pointing to particular people, the Great Man approach, is flawed. And when you take out the focus on particular people, your narrative starts to look rather dull. Not much like a story at all. Because history isn’t a story, any more than evolution is. It’s a broad process, taking hundreds, thousands of factors into account.

Raymond Wolfinger famously said that “the plural of anecdote is data”, but this has been reversed in common usage to “the plural of anecdote is not data”. When we try to string the anecdotes together into a historical narrative, we miss the broad field of information about attitudes, economics, religion, immigration, and so on, which are much more likely to have been the actual causes of upheaval than anything one minor Senator said to a  small crowd.

Distant Reading & Qualitative Analysis of Plot

There’s a fascinating article in the New York Times’ Sunday Book Review about distant reading and qualitative analysis of plot. It touches on a few topics I’m interested in – namely, the breadth of literature, even if you’re dealing with specific genres, and the representation of literary structures as data. Partly because of my work in web development and marketing, I’m halfway convinced that there’s nothing you can’t represent as a spreadsheet, and this kind of thinking plays right into that.

But while I’m interested in the breakdown of particular works into these formulae and calculations, I’m also interested in the broad genre analysis mentioned – in particular the example whereby Gothic literature can be recognised by an algorithm because the word “the” occurs more often. You can look at that a few ways – one is that there’s some commonality of style, which may be a result of influences in common among the authors. But you could also say that the higher use of the definite article plays up the presence of the unique, the lonely, and the defined object in Gothic literature. You’d never notice that in your own reading; the eye passes over “the” quite completely, but the computer analysis brings it out.

We can reckon that “sword” and “magic” will occur a lot in fantasy, “gun” and “rope” in Westerns, but I wonder if other things might not break out of the data, particularly as you approach sub-genres. A predisposition toward northern directions in low fantasy? A higher occurrence of proper nouns in high fantasy? More use of gender-neutral pronouns in hard science fiction? And I wonder what you could do with that data, when you have it.

Are Games Art?

Coming up in a timely manner considering the very basic reading I’m doing in literary theory, there’s a post over on Terra Nova about the perpetual question of whether video games are art. This time, it’s written by someone who know something about art, as well as knowing something about games, which makes it a new departure from most such articles I’ve seen.

Finding One’s Place

Continuing with Barry’s Beginning Theory, which is the kind of dense book I have to take breaks from, I’ve come across an bit of text which makes me stop anyway. The following quote is much elided, to cobble together the sense I want to respond to, but I think his meaning is intact.

“Postcolonial criticism… is one of several critical approaches we have considered which focus on specific issues, including issues of gender (feminist criticism), of class (Marxist criticism), and of  sexual orientation (lesbian/gay criticism). This raises the possibility of a kind of ‘super-reader’ able to respond equally and adequately to a text in all these ways… Should we, in general, try to become super-readers?… My own feeling is that while an even spread of awareness across all these issues is theoretically possible, in practice aiming for this… is bound to produce superficiality. A genuine interest in one of these issues can really only arise from aspects of your own circumstances.”

Now, this raises a question I’ve been poking at, and which may even be answered later in the book, but which I want to lay out my own thinking on: none of the forms of criticism I’ve read about so far suit me, so how should I be approaching literary analysis? There’s a definite impression that any given critic either falls into one of the categories of structuralism, post-structuralism, post-modernism, Marxism, feminism, and so on. They may change at some point in time, but generally stay consistent within those changed directions.

My own initial inclination on this is to treat the whole lot as a toolbox, like the various functions in Photoshop. Spot of Marxist analysis there, bit of post-structuralism here, nudge that with some basic liberal humanism to block it in, and then focus some queer theory on it… but I suspect this may result in some very incoherent thinking, not least because some of the approaches directly contradict each other, and each one wants to be applied to the whole text (or texts) under consideration. I can certainly pick one and use it for the duration of the essay – so you can apply Marxist criticism to Lord of the Rings, say, and queer theory to Ender’s Game, and maybe post-structuralism to an article in the Irish Times.  But that still leaves me choosing something to work with on the text, not working on the text from my chosen point of view. And it feels a little early in the process to say that I’m going to use Shielist theory.

I suppose the next thing to do, then, will be to read some actual criticism,  and see how it’s done there. Is there a pick-and-choose toolbox approach, or am I going to have to pick my guns and stick to them?

Criticism Instead of Learning

One of the things that strikes me as being very different about university level study of literature – or, indeed, looking across the broader spectrum of the arts – is that it’s about criticism, about one’s own ideas, and how other people’s works measure up.

This is in stark contrast to how English is taught in secondary schools here, and indeed, how science is taught at least up to first year. “Here is the received wisdom and the works of the masters; seek to understand it”. So coming from that background – and indeed, my own teaching activity, which is in online marketing, and mostly consists of “this is the internet, it doesn’t bite, unless you’re going to the wrong websites” – to something like Peter Barry’s commentary on T.S. Eliot is rather astonishing.

“All Eliot’s major critical ideas are thus flawed and unsatisfactory, and perhaps their long-standing currency is indicative of the theoretical vacuum into which they were launched.”

Ouch. And this is of one of the men held up as the Great Poets in school. Now, I’ve developed plenty of critical faculties of my own in the meantime, so I’m not as uncomfortable as I might be, but it must be something of a shock in many ways for someone entering college directly from school to study English. Somehow, over that one summer or gap year, you’re supposed to go from Understanding to Criticising. It’s an attitude shift that can’t be all that easy.

Barry’s Questions

I’ve started reading Peter Barry’s Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory. I’m pretty sure someone explained the SQ3R reading technique to me before, so it’s not the lightning bolt it might otherwise be, but it’s still a pleasantly reassuring and solid sort of an idea. I’m equally sure that the explanation of the technique did not come up in school or college, but during the time I was working as a web developer, when my boss was a technical editor. Funny, that.

However, he asks in the introduction that the reader try to answer four questions, in outline at least. These are:

1. what first made you decide to study English, what you hoped to gain from doing so, and whether that hope was realised;

2. which books and authors were chosen for study and what they had in common;

3. which books and authors now seem conspicuously absent;

4. what, in general terms, your previous study taught you (about ‘life’, say, or conduct, or about literature itself).

And while those questions presuppose rather more study than I’ve done – or possibly, more recent study – I think they’re still well worth having a crack at.

I studied English in school because it was on the standard curriculum, and there was no way to avoid it. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have tried to avoid it anyway; I’ve always been a voracious reader, and English was essentially an easy mark. But it wasn’t an option not to. I’m picking up on it now, as literature, and as part of the Humanities course, because it’s something that has stuck with me, something I’ve done some reading and thinking in since, and because, as per the hypothetical mechanic in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, I’ve come to realise it’s something I need to know about.

Which books were chosen for study – man, that was a long time ago, and I do not recall. I know we covered Macbeth. There must have been a novel or two. I have no idea what they might have been. I do know that the exam questions we had said things like “from a novel you have read, explain…” – and I did not realise until the final school exams that we were supposed to use a novel we’d read in class. I always used some other novel I’d read outside of class for analysis; they were a lot more interesting. It’s kind of sad to think that the novels in class were the whole set of reading for some of my classmates.

There was a lot of poetry; I’m not sure if it’s an accurate recollection or not, but it feels like there was more than two-thirds of the course on poetry. The later OU course had the aforementioned Wide Sargasso Sea, and covered some of Shakespeare’s sonnets as well. I really liked sonnets, both in school and later. There was undoubtedly also some of the the works of Synge, and while I know some people like him, for me he’s in the same category as Peig Sayers and the Irish national anthem – dreadful dirges.

What seems conspicuously absent – do not get me started. The entirety of British and American literature, with the grudging exception of The Catcher In The Rye. Anything in translation, ever. Anything in sf, fantasy, or indeed any other genre. Is it any wonder I used my extra-curricular reading for analysis?

What my previous study taught me: that anything that lands on a curriculum is suspect. I don’t mean that as a sort of cheap shot; I think it’s probably no longer true. I hope it’s no longer true. But at the time, everything that got as far as being taught was inoffensive, in line with some of the nationalist ideals of Ireland, and had been taught for so long that the teachers were, through no fault of their own, repeating words they’d said ten or twenty times before, without any remaining interest.

I really am going into this with a whole arsenal of chips on my shoulders.

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