#DORRIT COHN WHEN I GET YOU

[ancientrimer]

i can't believe this keeps happening to me. i figure out a theory i think i might want to apply in my thesis, go look at the text that has the theory, and find that that text already mentions jane eyre

[sizhui]

Unrelated to that though how is your literature class going ^_^ I think I will minor in literature at college. I'm really interested in the topic and I'm trying to read more because my attention span got screwed over by the internet but I think that happened to a lot of people. What books do you recommend and do you have any advice for trying to study literature at a more advanced level without having gone to college yet?

HIII part 2! im currently working on a large essay on surrealist novels for a final grade in avant-garde class, as well as catching up with dramaturgy because I missed a lot of those classes due to being sick last semester ^_^! im really enjoying doing some solo research and reading because my professors sent me a LOT of materials and it's so fun because it helps me understand my interests better, too! I'm really happy you're interested in studying literature - i feel that you and your thoughts would fit perfectly into my classroom, and i do hope you'll find a lot of joy and worth in your future classroom! That definitely happened to me too ... throughout highschool, i didnt read as much as i was supposed to and i got very rusty. still getting back into it, it's a long process but it's very rewarding!

I have some literary theory texts from my freshman year narratology class that I feel are really helpful for beginning to study literature seriously, but I sadly have pdfs only in croatian and serbian and i'm not sure how easy they are to find online in english, but i'll mention them anyway: Viktor Shklovsky's Art as Technique , A. J. Greimas' Reflections on Actantial Models, Gerard Genette's Order, Duration and Frequency, Schlomith Rimmon-Kenan's Narration: Levels and Voices, Gerard Genette's Types of Focalization and Dorrit Cohn's Narrated Monologue. If not, i still sincerely recommend doing some googling on : estrangement and russian formalism, actantial models, narrative levels, focalisation, and types of narration...

To "read like a literature student" aka at a more advanced level, my golden rule is simply to QUESTION EVERYTHING ON THE PAGE! Try to read not for the story, but for noticing the patterns and literary devices beneath the story and figure out why each bit is the way it is! Thats's not to say DON'T ENJOY THE STORY, but I find that trying to trace the story back to its mechanic parts is just as fun!

My brain is a little blank when it comes to book recs rn, but I really recommend Pachinko by Min Jin Lee for one of the most masterful examples of manipulating focalization and omniscient narration (as well as a deeply touching saga about the lives of Korean immigrants) and Babel, or the Necessity of Violence by R. F. Kuang for a truly masterfully woven story about languages and translation and hauntingly good writing. These two books live in my head at the moment!

thank you for coming to me with that question, good luck and lots of love!

[abeautifulblog]

you are honestly my favorite fanfiction author of all time, and it feels sort of back-handed in a weird inexplicable way to have "fanfiction" preface that... in my very humble opinion, if was to list my favorite (no preface) authors of all time, you'd definitely be in my top three; beaten only by Mitch Albom and Scott F. Fitzgerald for me, and youre steadfast one of the main authors I re/read for inspiration when i write... who are the authors that inspire you most??

O wow! That is – some high praise indeed, I am deeply honored. :) It’s gratifying to hear that this fic is resonating with you, because it is the most personal piece of fiction I’ve ever written. (Honestly, I’d be happy not to write anything this personal ever again.)

As for the authors who have influenced me (strap in)…

One of the most influential writers when I was a teenager was Anne Rice and her vampire series, though I think it was less about the vampire thing and more about the raging homoeroticism (I joke that Anne Rice made me gay) and the intense, almost claustrophobic emotional intensity of those books. I’ve actually written about her influence on my writing here. (I don’t update that blog anymore, I don’t even know how to approve/respond to comments anymore, but it’s got a pretty extensive archive for people who like hearing me talk about media.)

It’s interesting because just recently (like, last week) I reread a few of her earlier books – Queen of the Damned, The Vampire Lestat, and I’m about halfway through Tale of the Body Thief – and was reminded that yes, she was in fact really good before she went off the rails. (After Tale of the Body Thief, the rest of the series is nigh-unreadable.) She writes lonely people really well – the struggle of endlessly trying to achieve intimacy and failing. When I’m on my game and writing powerful emotional content, I feel like my style owes a lot to the way she does descriptions, which is… kind of hard to describe, but it’s like… emotive language in unexpected combinations? Pairing descriptions of the landscape with adjectives that tie in to the character’s emotional state, or abstract nouns with adjectives that describe a physical sensation. I don’t know, I don’t have any specific examples I can give, but I’ll catch myself writing sometimes and go “ooh that’s good” followed by “haha, you’re pulling an Anne Rice.”

Besides Anne Rice, most of what I read is sci-fi/fantasy; I tend to have very little use for realistic/literary fiction. (Which is why it’s kind of funny that I’m 70k and counting into a suburban love story.) I like SFF, and I like it gay, and for many years it was my quest to find and read every book in the intersection of that particular Venn diagram – the fruits of my quest are here, The Gay Fiction Booklist That Doesn’t Suck. Anything with a throbbing “top pick” icon next to it is, well, exactly that, but I’m not sure whether I’d call them an influence, because I was already in my twenties by the time I read them, so my literary style was kind of settled by then.

(Although when I need to read something to ~get me in the mood~ for writing, Karin Lowachee, Jacqueline Carey, and Sarah Monette are excellent choices for top-notch prose and top-notch emotional engagement.)

Someone who’s not on that list is a relatively obscure manga writer named Miyamoto Kano, who I really wish I could rec to a wider audience, but her work is mostly inaccessible if you don’t read Japanese. Her stories have been a very strong influence on the way I write romance, namely that in the real world, sex doesn’t actually resolve anything (except sexual tension, I guess), and it is not where you should be investing your narrative tension. I’m much more a fan of letting characters jump into bed with each other before they’ve finished working out their shit, and not making the resolution of the drama hinge on them having sex.

(…Which, again, funny – because we’re 70k into A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood and they still haven’t shagged, which means I’m writing exactly what I say I don’t write.)

I’m also a huge fan of Miyamoto’s brand of off-beat realism, that you’ll get these moments of comic absurdity popping up even at the most dire moments because that’s what life is. The universe has no respect for your personal crisis, and you get weird/funny/distracting shit popping up when you’re just trying to have a good cry, or a good solid screaming match. To reiterate my favorite George Bernard Shaw quote: “Life doesn’t cease to be funny when people die, any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.” Miyamoto gets that, so beautifully.

And I’m probably forgetting something, but those are the strongest fiction influences I can think of. I read a lot of nonfiction too in order to understand people better on both an individual and a societal level – my top picks would be Influence (Cialdini), Whipping Girl (Serrano), Made to Stick (Heath), On Killing (Grossman), Stigma (Goffman), Collapse (Diamond). (With a much longer list of specialty books for specific subjects.)

For learning how to write emotional involvement, I am a serious nerd for narratology and I recommend Dorrit Cohn’s Transparent Minds. It’s not a book on how to write, it’s one that documents the different methods for conveying a character’s consciousness to a reader. I read it for my thesis, but it wound up being an epiphany, because it explained exactly why some books achieve so much more emotional engagement than others.

And lastly, because it would be ungenerous not to give a shout-out to the very excellent fanfics that are no doubt feeding into my own writing in some way, here’s a sampling of some lesser-known favorites:

Ain’t No Grave (Can Keep My Body Down) - Steve/Bucky, with a very different take on Bucky than what you usually see. I guess maybe this one isn’t so unknown anymore, but I FOUND IT BEFORE IT WAS POPULAR.

Odi et Amo - Eagle of the Ninth, aka, that movie set in Roman Britain where Channing Tatum and Jamie Bell were being hella gay at each other. This fic is a Dead Poets Society fusion, beautifully atmospheric, makes you wish you knew more about poetry.

Love Is All You Need To Destroy Your Enemies - Dresden Files/Welcome to Night Vale crossover. So good that I don’t even begrudge it having dethroned my own Dresden fic from being top-in-fandom.

World Ain’t Ready - Les Miz high school AU. You don’t need to know anything about Les Miz to enjoy this; I didn’t! :D

In His Image - Supernatural, Dean/Castiel. There are a number of fics that are reworkings of season 5, but this one is brilliant. Like when you’re all of a page into the first chapter of a fic and you can feel a smile starting to spread across your face because, oh, oh, this writer is GONNA BE GOOD.

If You Liked The Book, You’ll Hate The Movie - X-Men: First Class, another high school AU because why not. I have a weakness for weird, dysfunctional people being weird and dysfunctional.

…And that does not even scratch the surface of the fics I’ve read and enjoyed, but yeah.

I should stop now. Thank you for reading this far.

[boatiechat-blog]

Snape, Dumbledore, and when the end narrative is counter-moral

I’m reposting here, with minor edits, a (long, sorry) comment I made under a super rich discussion on the abuse Snape suffered. My main thesis is that Rowling uses narrative and symbolic cues to paint characters as positive or negative, especially in the first book, but then subverts these alignments with several plotlines. This is not resolved in a satisfying way in the end, with a reversal to black-and-white morality based on redemption, undermining the more subtle developments of the mid-series.  *** I think all of those analyses [about Snape’s victimhood] are absolutely fascinating and pretty spot on, but there is one thing that gets glossed upon in all of those replies. This a work of fiction shaped by narrative processes that are meant to manipulate our emotions into feeling a certain way. Most of the disagreements I see in fandom, and the conflicted emotions people have within themselves regarding Snape, usually boil down to this. I’m taking most of my analysis from Margrethe Bruune Vaage’s book The antihero in American Television (she’s my PhD supervisor and a total badass, I love her). Most of the arguments can be used for literature too, but for the specific narratological points, I would refer to Dorrit Cohn’s Transparent Minds, Representing consciousness in fiction. I- How do we form moral judgements? Jonathan Haidt and Joshua Greene speak of a “dual process” of moral judgement. The first one is rational: one weighs the pros and cons, the various outcomes, the validity or impact of a certain course of action, and passes a judgement. The second is intuitive: it’s a quick-and-dirty process, through which we intuit a positive or negative value to an action based on subconscious, or at least not causal, connections. See it as a shortcut of sorts: if you hear someone raise their voice in anger at an old person, your first intuition would be distaste. You do not make the conscious reasoning “this person is vulnerable and disoriented, therefore one should use patience and not violence in order to interact with them”. You’re like “wow, that’s mean”. Rational judgements can, with time, transform themselves into intuitive judgements. For example, someone might weigh the pros and cons of eating meat, decide to become, vegetarian, and stick to it. Years down the line, the very thought of eating a steak could be repulsive for that person, without needing to rework through the rational judgement all over again every time. II- How does that apply to fiction? Fiction deactivates, or at least, tunes down, the rational part of our moral judgement values, encouraging us to use intuitive judgement, which can be relatively easily influenced by narrative methods. Basically, when you’re reading or watching a work of fiction, you put your reasoning mind on hold and you buy into the moral undertones of the work you’re reading. Which is why people actually root for Walter White, or Dexter, etc. Bruune Vaage calls it “fictional relief”: the fiction relieves you of the burden of making rational judgements because it doesn’t really matter, and so the things one might find reprehensible in real life can be justified in the fictional world (such as stealing, or killing). Depending on the work, killers and thieves can be the most moral people around (ex Game of Thrones). Sometimes, our rational judgement kicks in, and we find ourself torn by our feelings. This is what makes anti heroes so compelling. We KNOW that selling meths to kids is not a moral course of action, but we still appreciate seeing it. III- Which brings me to Harry Potter: The first few books try very hard to present Snape as a repugnant character. “Repugnant” is related to disgust, which is an intuitive form of judgement. Snape is dark, dirty (greasy hair), unpleasant and rude, and harassing the people he was supposed to be caring for. Dumbledore on the other hand, is presented as a positive, comforting figure. Sweet, excentric grandpa, who supports and comforts Harry and the trio. He gives them information, sets them on their tasks, and generally moves the narrative forward by empowering the (very young!) protagonists. This pattern is very effective, and, it’s a children’s book. We don’t expect subversion of these tropes at all. Repugnant = BAD, Comforting = GOOD. Even the sounds of their names evoke contrasting reactions.The performances in the film reinforce these impressions. As the narrative progresses, we learn more things about the backstory and past actions of Snape and Dumbledore. We learn them as the trio does, so it comes after the first impressions we had, and progressively. In HPAPS, people accuse Harry of being biased against Snape because he’s mean. This subversion is progressive and subtle. First it is revealed that Snape was not trying to steal the stone. Then, several books later, it is revealed that he is a member of the Order of the Phoenix. To complicate matters, we also learn that he HAD been a Death Eater, but had repented for .. dubious moral reasons (selfish, regarding the one person he loved). We also learn that Harry’s dad was arrogant and a bully, but that he did change, that his mother used to be a friend of Snape, but stopped when he got radicalized by an extreme racist cult. We learn that Dumbledore had used Harry while knowing he had to die. I’m trying here to present things in the most morally neutral way possible, but it is almost impossible. At the end of the series, both Dumbledore and Snape have sacrificed themselves for the Cause, and proved their alignment towards the Good. A lot of “do they end justify the means?” arguments have been made, but I won’t get into that. My point is: at the end, the two most prevalent adult figures in Harry’s life, polarized from the beginning, ended up being a lot more ambiguous and morally grey that what was suggested at the beginning. The characters are rich, and the tension between moral alignment, likeability, and perspective (we see things from Harry’s PoV, mostly) are absolutely fascinating. I love it! It produces a lot of rich discussion (like the ones above). But ... IV- Where, IMO, Rowling failed: A lot of these discussions happen because people have turned their rational moral judgement back on. At no point does the narrative condemn Dumbledore for the creepy, irresponsible things he’s done. Ultimately, the narrative redeems Snape, by having Harry name his child after him and Dumbledore. “the two bravest men I knew” is a very dubious line. The end of the last book returns to the morally obvious distinctions of the first few books, despite the fact that the narrative, the trio, AND the readers, had grown up. Our rational judgements tell us that Dumbledore and Snape were part of the Good Guys. That Dumbledore was friendly and supportive of the protagonists, while Snape was rude and emotionally violent. Dumbledore, despite his abusive behaviour, remains likeable all along (there’s a plot arc in which Harry learns the bad things Dumbledore has done, but still decides to see him as a positive figure -- after all, it’s LOYALTY that helped Harry in the Chamber of Secrets). Dumbledore’s abuse of Harry is never really discussed, let alone the very real abuse he conducted against Snape, or Lupin. None of what has been written above is touched upon AT ALL in the books or movie. All of this is (very valid) rational extrapolation from the facts we get in the books. Snape is never really presented as likeable, but he and Harry share a touching moment when he dies, and Harry seems to (IMO, unbelievably) forgive him years of abuse and degradation. Rowling seems to think that the resolution of a conflict implies the disappearance of its consequences. Snape redeemed himself by making the moral choice, so he’s forgiven. The trio defeated Voldemort, and so “all was well”. The narrative tries to make us feel something that most of us are reluctant to feel. The “fictional relief” is not enough to make us buy into the smoothed out morality of the epilogue. V- How I think it should have ended: I think fighting with the good guys does not make one not be an abuser (Snape), and being likeable while fighting for the good guys does not make you not be an abuser (Dumbledore). Both in their ways were shitty people that had a positive impact on the world, and a mixed (at best) impact on Harry. It would have been much richer and complex if, for example, the wizarding world had recognized the heroism of Dumbledore and Snape by giving them posthumous titles or honours. I can buy into the fact that Harry could still have positive feelings about Dumbledore because I totally believe he was groomed into loyalty from a young age, and that in itself would be an interesting aspect if it was brought forward by one of the other characters (my bet would be Hermione, she’s always had perspective, or Ron, as he has a very strong sense of familial support and morality). Similarly, imagine if Snape had been celebrated, and the trio (plus Neville, and most of the Hogwart students) had expressed doubt, or at least mixed feelings towards it. I’ve had feelings of antipathy for people who had done far less egregious things to me than Snape did to the students. Hostility and enmity do not vanish after having been present for years, with cause, just because you understand, rationally, that a person was actually on the right side of history. Imagine a scene in which the trio learn that Snape and Dumbledore are going to be celebrated with a new special Wizarding medals. Harry understands for Dumbledore, but Ron/Hermione point out all the dubious things he’s done. Then all agree that Snape shouldn’t be celebrated. Our own history is full of very morally dubious people who still get celebrated: (Churchill, Ghandi, Nelson ...), while others, much more deserving, get forgotten, like McGonagall (a woman), Hagrid (mixed-race), or Dobby (an elf). This could have been a really deep and interesting ending, leaving open all the moral ambiguities created by the later books and films, and putting the character’s perspective better in focus, while allowing our own interpretation of the events.