Fishin' in the stream of consciousness (all-purpose, no topic chat thread)

Yea, but eng. lit. is just pulling conclusions out of your ass based on *no empirical data whatsoever*, beyond prooftexting other people who did the exact same thing - like a real estate valuation scam.

If people want to assert that X connotes Y, I reckon they should do some experiments and prove it.

 

Huh, I think that's actually a new one! Neat. :D (People really commonly misspell it as "keltana", to the point where I assume that must be an inherently more intuitive spelling somehow? Language is weird and fascinating.)

 

You mean like discussing the predominant cultural and sociological context of when a work was written, the etymology of the words chosen in a passage and potential linguistic drift that led to them being chosen, and the surveyed understanding of the connotations of a phrase based on popular usage?

Or is that too soft sciences for what you’re thinking here?

 

Kingstarscream, it's the methodology I take issue with - having seen it done for the last 15 years, a hell of a lot of it seems to be opinion buttressed by opinions bootstrapped to fact by virtue of publication... which, once published, gets bootstrapped to fact itself.

There's an awul lot of hypothesis->conclusion->quote-mining->evidence going on: come up with a cool idea, spin it into something that sounds good, then go find quotes to back it up.

And taking usage as an indication of connotation is wonderfully circular; without data on what people could be shown to think it connoted to back it up, you're chasing your tail.

 

(hey, at least I didn't use the phrase 'publicly-funded vanity press'...)

 

I mean not to be too much of an anti-establishment in academia gremlin but like hard science methodology is inherently super unsuited to linguistic research bc
1) words and phrases are at the sum of their parts only the way they are used and this is ever-mutable and ever-changing in a living language
2) therefore trying to research language connotation in an extremely clinical environment to the exclusion of variables inherently changes the research subject's comfort level, thus skewing the results of perceived connotation due to context and stress
3) please show your work on how you plan to minimize or eliminate the factor of psychological need to appeal to authority in a test like that (bc the thing you initially laid out sounds a lot like a vocab test, which adults who went through any sort of public education will be conditioned to try to 'pass' thus skewing your results in unpredictable ways)
4) I know behavioral psych and neuro psych are both super fond of this kind of experimental set up but like please consider that lab results for those are often inherently flawed just bc controlled environments change behavior. A discourse analysis like @KingStarscream described is much closer to environmental observations 'in the wild' which will arguably produce more 'natural' results.
5) The hyper-formulaic approch to research endemic in so-called 'hard sciences' is a tool of misogynist-classist-racist-ableist exclusion from academic discourse and language belongs to everyone -stuffs inner marxist back in the box-

 

It's not like the "hard science" approach is immune to fuckery.

hypothesis->conclusion->data-mining->evidence: come up with a cool idea, spin it into something that sounds good marketable, then go, ahem, massage the data to back it up.

 

Yeah that’s what I was trying to get at—properly done scientific method English Lit would inevitably look more like anthropology or sociology in practice, because once you start running social experiments with each book you lose the ability to actually analyze the work without running into the issue of Must Find Right Words To Convince Teacher.

I mean, a more likely experimental design would be “we handed out two copies of this book, one where the protagonist is male and one where they’re female, let’s see how dominant cultural assumptions about gender change the reading of the text” and... people do that. I’ve seen essays on exactly that sort of thing.

 

the chaos has already begun :D

oh shit really? for me it's always been "kelt-enna" (how I mentally say it, DEFS not how I spell it) but that's because I personally would split my own name after the t? like my mental self-nickname is "kelt", so I see the kelt part of your username first

 

I've never had the confusion issue since I've known Keltena on other platforms for years and tend to parse avatars first on here anyway, but I've always said it "kel-TEE-na".

Re: literary analysis, I think it's also worth pointing out that the goal of literary analysis is not the same as the goal of scientific research. The aim isn't to find The Objective Truth, because the nature of literary analysis is such that there is no Objectively Correct And Verifiable way to engage with a text, just more or less compelling readings and how much you can support your particular point. The methodology of the scientific method is looking for something completely orthogonal to what literary academics are looking for; you're pretty unlikely to find new lenses to interpret a work through by running double-blind studies. By the time you're looking for something that could be tested and reported with numbers, you're almost by definition out of the territory of literary analysis and into psychology or sociology or linguistics.

 

I wish someone had told my 5th and 6th grade (of high school) English teachers that. They basically disapproved of all opinions that weren't their own.

 

Why did noone tell me that coloring cutesy pictures of swear words could be so relaxing

 

I'm LOSTING MY SHIT watching battlebots I can't stop from laughing every time someone talks about winning THE GIANT NUT

 

I don't know what battlebots is but I find the phrase 'Winning The Giant Nut' pretty great

 

It's a televised robotics competition where people make robots with weapons on them- things like spinning metal blades, for example, or drum grinders, hammers and flippers to flip the other robots on their back.

It's really fascinating to watch because some of the designs are super interesting. The trophy for the winner of the tournament is a giant lug nut.

 

Oh, Battlebots is so much fun! I remember watching the OG version a ton as a kid. Don't watch it as much now, but my parents are fans and I do sometimes pop in to watch it with them!

(But Giant Nut omg)

 

I should probably watch it tbh. Robots are fun.

 

I am at Fantastic Beasts Night, which means the first film first. Followed by the second! :D