I’ve been going through John Livingston Lowes’s The Road to Xanadu in
preparation for teaching Coleridge this week, and I found an interesting
footnote on the aforementioned phenomenon from Havelock Ellis’s The
World of Dreams:
There is abundant evidence of the invention of new words in
dreams–see, for example, Havelock Ellis’s selvdrolla and jaleisa
Lowes then notes that “Xanadu,” “Abora,” and “Alph” are all perfectly
“normal formations, when judged by the semasiology of dreams” (396 n).
I look forward to reading
article
in the latest Science, particularly as I"m interested in the evidence
for this claim: “Our findings identify a general tendency for increased
rates of linguistic evolution in fledgling languages, perhaps arising
from a linguistic founder effect or a desire to establish a distinct
social identity.”
Is the title of the graduate seminar I’m teaching now (borrowed from
Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending). Here’s the course description:
The twenties and thirties were revolutionary, violent, low, and
dishonest by turns. They were also haunted by the promise of a better
world. This seminar will examine how writers of the British Isles
envisioned the future and diagnosed the present in the interwar era.
We will read works written in an overtly apocalyptic mode and those
whose vision is more restrained, more concerned with the changing
perception of time in the emerging modernity of the present. Also of
interest will be literary reactions to Weber’s progressive
“disenchantment” of the world and rationalization. We will read for
signs of the political theology and aestheticizing of politics that
led to fascism. Some of our reading will expand into Transatlantic,
Colonial, and Continental contexts, though the focus will remain on
Anglo-Irish work. Of particular interest will be the focus in recent
modernist studies on literary representations of nationalism, and we
will also read recent critical work on national identity in modernism
by Jed Esty, Pericles Lewis, and others.
I gave a talk on Wyndham Lewis yesterday, and as I was reviewing his
always provoking Time and Western Man, I noticed this quite-apt
passage on de Sade:
Whatever the Marquis de Sade said about life or things in general, you
could be in no doubt as to what his remarks would come back to in the
end; you know that they all would have the livery of the voluptuary,
that they would all be hurrying on the business of some painful and
elaborate pleasure of the senses, that they would be devising means to
satisfy an overmastering impulse to feel acutely in the regions set
aside for the spasms of sex. (133-34)
Stanley Fish has attracted significant attention, at least from those of
who us who feel compelled to comment on such things, with his NYT posts
on the value of the humanities.
Before Fish’s posts, I read this
response
to an MLA panel. Dr. Crazy cogently notes that socialization to
literature varies widely within different student populations. I want to
respond to this paragraph in particular:
To give students a vocabulary for discussing things that are complex,
which is ultimately about socializing them to talk, think, and feel in
ways that allow them to be upwardly mobile. Most of my students do not
come from families that discuss books over dinner - or art, or
advances in science, etc. If they don’t learn how to have
conversations about these things, they face a disadvantage when they
leave college and enter the broader world. (I should say, I think this
may be one of the most compelling arguments for the humanities in the
context of higher education at my kind of institution, as it doesn’t
matter what degree one has if one can’t hobnob with people from higher
class backgrounds when one is done.)
In M. John Harrison’sNova Swing, a
character named Alice says, “We would of iced them, Vic, but what do you
do?” (68)
To my ear, “would’ve” and “would of” are homophones, which is why they
are confused in writing. Alice, if she’s literate, very possibly would
have made this mistake. But this is dialogue reproduced by the narrator.
I don’t think you can credit the notion that it is rendered dialect, as
there’s no difference in pronunciation. I also don’t think that having
characters’ speech rendered as those characters would write it on their
own is quite covered by free indirect technique, which is not on display
here as far as I can tell.
A number of folks have called attention to Jerry Fodor’s recent LRB
columns in which he criticizes the theoretical coherence of
adaptationism as an explanation. The exchange of
letters in the most
recent edition has Fodor writes that his critics “admit that the theory
of natural selection can’t distinguish among locally coextensive
properties while continuing to claim that natural selection explains why
polar bears are white.”
He then goes on to suggest that adapative phenomena will likely be
explained by “endogenous constraints on phenotypes.” Developmental
pathways are constrained. Linkage of traits is endogenous and thus
cannot be explained by reference to exogenous variables. I’m not sure
how Fodor addresses the “selection of/selection for” argument. He seems
to imply that it is an epistemological question and thus outside the
explanatory domain of adaptationism as a theory.
Where did the prosecutors [who argued in court that amateurish
Al-Qaeda suspects only seemed that way] learn to think in such a way?
The answer: in literature classes in the United States of the 1980s
and 1990s, where they were taught that in criticism suspiciousness is
the chief virtue, that the critic must accept nothing whatsoever at
face value. From their exposure to literary theory these
not-very-bright graduates of the academy of the humanities in its
postmodernist phase bore away a set of analytical instruments which
they obscurely sensed could be useful outside the classroom, and an
intuition that the ability to argue that nothing is as it seems to be
might get you places. Putting those instruments in their hands was the
trahison des clercs of our time. “You taught me language, and my
profit on it is I know how to curse.” (33)
Surely there is no place in the world where the inhabitants live with
less labour than in North Carolina. It approaches nearer to the
description of Lubberland than any other, by the great felicity of the
climate, the easiness of raising provisions, and the slothfulness of
the people. Indian corn is of so great increase, that a little pains
will subsist a very large family with bread, and they may have meat
without any pains at all, by the help of the low grounds, and the
great variety of mast that grows on the high land. The men, for their
parts, just like the Indians, impose all the work upon the poor women.
They make their wives rise out of their beds early in the morning, at
the same time that they lie and snore, till the sun has risen one
third of his course, and dispersed all the unwholesome damps. Then,
after stretching and yawning for half an hour, they light their pipes,
and, under the protection of a cloud of smoke, venture out into the
open air; though, if it happens to be never so little cold, they
quickly return shivering into the chimney corner. When the weather is
mild, they stand about leaning with both their arms upon the
corn-field fence, and gravely consider whether they had best go and
take a small beat at the hoe: but generally find reasons to put it off
till another time. (William Byrd, History of the Dividing Line [Run
in the Year 1728])