Bakker’s Dozen: Questions to Fuck Up Your English Professor
by rsbakker
Aphorism of the Day: Questions make ignorance visible, ignorance makes hypocrisy viable, and hypocrisy makes self-interest divine. All authority requires the conservation of ignorance, especially when it pretends to educate.
As promised. Feel free to ammend or to add questions of your own. For those of you who are both wired and virally minded, pass this on, and do post the responses you encounter (in your conscience if nowhere else)! I would love to see this plague literary academics everywhere, and perhaps induce some to defend their values here.
13) Should we judge Literature by what it resembles or by what it accomplishes?
12) If we should judge Literature by what it accomplishes, who should the literary author write for? Audiences who already share their values and attitudes, or audiences who do not?
11) If conventions are nothing more than the expectations of real people, and if people generally prefer to have their expectations confirmed, then doesn’t ‘violating conventions’ amount to turning your back on real people?
10) (If fundamentalism is raised as an object of ridicule). Which literary authors write for fundamentalist Christians? (If right-wingers or ‘rednecks’ are made an object of ridicule). Which literary authors write for rednecks?
9) Given that ‘groupishness’ is a universal human trait, and that groups invariably use their values to assert their social superiority, to police membership, and to secure their institutional privileges, which of your values do you think best serve these various roles?
8 ) What’s worse: the crap Hollywood produces, or convincing people who might change Hollywood to turn their back on it and only create for people who already share their attitudes and values?
7) What percentage of scholarly papers would you say are more motivated by the need to secure in–group prestige and/or discharge bureaucratic requirements as opposed to a genuine love of the subject matter?
6) Given that humans are hardwired to appreciate spectacle and convention (one need only look at myth), what are we to make of social groups that explicitly devalue spectacle and convention?
5) To the extent that you teach students what to take seriously, and what you take seriously tends to alienate consumers of popular culture, are you not teaching your students that turning their back on their cultural community is the only way for them to be taken seriously?
4) Given (5), would you say you are part of the cultural solution or part of the cultural problem?
3) What’s worse: selling out to strangers or writing exclusively to friends?
2) What should society make of authors who continually write about people they are too embarrassed to write for?
1) Have you ever admired yourself wearing a scarf in a mirror?
Three Pound Brain 
Love the aphorism.
I went to one literature class in college. One. It was on Russian crap. In the first class we explored the meaning of the word ‘dissent’ and were asked to write a paragraph on it. I remember the professors face when I told her I had already read One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and hated it.
I dropped the class immediately. I’d rather breathe in the toxic ketone fumes of an organic chemistry lab than deal with pompous farts.
Please understand I am not hostile to literature, it’s just the entire intent of the class was so absurd. To fulfill my writing requirement I attended a class on Asian cinema and it was one of the best classes I took in college, mainly because the guy who taught knew exactly how to engage us with the serious material: by promising some Kung Fu shit along the way!
“By promising some Kung Fu shit along the way!” You must be a real fan of asian culture and cinema. I can tell. Was there not enough action and karate chops in A Day in the Life for you?
[…] just read through “Bakker’s Dozen: Questions to Fuck Up Your English Professor“. Although this list is clearly aimed at English professors, a group of which I am not a […]
I liked the aphorism so much, I wrote a whole post on it!
I’ll make my way to the questions later, although I think number one really put my whole life and aspirations into a great perspective!
http://gizmodo.com/5843117/scientists-reconstruct-video-clips-from-brain-activity
http://www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822%2811%2900937-7
Their decoder is obviously rough at the moment (I guess they didn’t have stock footage of a parrot flying programmed into it) but…
You just blew my mind Jorge.
I think 8 might read stronger without the final clause, at least in the context of the other dozen questions it doesn’t seem necessary.
7 strikes me as sort of out of place because it’s framed as a trap question (by speculating any percentage greater than zero you automatically agree with the base premise) with an easy trap door to escape the question: just say “none are” and you don’t have to engage the question at all.
13, 12, 10 should be grouped together to make a more effective progression. You lose the overall idea by breaking it up, keep it together and you establish a nice rhythm
5&6 seem to go better with 9&8 but I love the progression of 5-1, great punchline to finish off the list.
Also, virtually all genre writes for only a genre audience, by choosing to write genre are you not implicitly choosing to write only for friends and other in-group members?
They generally don’t pretend otherwise.
I’m skeptical about 11 – given the apparent (to me atleast) method of courting convention while subverting it in various ways, rather than really reinforcing it as a genre faithful book might. Or is the PON series utterly, 100% genre faithful? I might just not know the genre, not a huge fantasy reader, I’ll pay that.
To be honest, ‘violating conventions’ almost seems like an organic outgrowth of courting yet partially subverting genre. It’s like that partial subversion seemed good – and so over steer occurs, where more and more subversion seems good, until it’s just a plain old violation.
It just seems unfair in a way – it’s like telling someone who’s swinging a two by four wildly around they suck, when you’ve got a rapier in your hands. Yeah, rapier is more subtle, but they are both positions on the one progression. Actually, perhaps a dagger beneath a genre cloak might be a better fit than the rapier…
Also, not sure how to stumble upon this – what category should I put it under? Literature? Or is that more in crowding? I’ll take a silent responce to mean lit as the category is as fine as any.
But that’s the point: to chuck all the formal ‘genre talk’ (which allows literary writers to hide their insularity) in favour of audience talk, and take this as your starting point for gaming conventions.
Yeah, but if ‘genre violation’ and ‘gaming conventions’ are essentially the same thing (ie, two different positions on the one spectrum), you don’t really want to demonise genre violation as your ‘in’.
To me the important thing your describing is the shift in goal – instead of the goal being that somehow genre violation is somehow great in itself, the goal shifts to reaching dissenting audiences. But the means…it’s still kinda the same? They are basically smashing shit up with a hammer – that doesn’t mean hammers are bad/demonise hammers to stop them smashing shit up?
Anyway, you’ve got a shit load more flying hours than me – this is just what you get when you ask for feedback from punters like myself: massive conjecture! >:)
i think question number one has the most potential to freak out my English professors.
The Editor: Now there’s an interesting point. Is a slave a slave if he doesn’t know he’s enslaved?
The Doctor: Yes.
The Editor: Aw. I was hoping for a philosophical debate, is that all I’m gonna get: “yes”?
The Doctor: Yes.
– Doctor Who, “The Long Game”
I actually have a hard time believing most of my English profs would’ve had trouble with any of these, but they all tended to be big fans of genre – and they tended not to take themselves too seriously. (My Introduction to Litrary Criticism prof explicitly referred to the process of applying different schools of criticism to a work as a “party game”.) I also think most of them would have been easy to convince that “literary” is itself a genre.
If you want to get people to read your stuff who don’t already agree with you, you would need to basically trick them into thinking they agree with you. So they would read your books expecting their beliefs/biases/whatever to be confirmed and instead finding at the end (without suspecting you of tricking them) that they don’t hold those same beliefs so strongly anymore.
Of course you wouldn’t keep on going on about it in a blog though, if you were seriously actually trying to do this. But hey, it’s easy enough to criticize.
The real problem is the kind of people who need to change their beliefs (IMO) don’t read books in the first place.
Tricking is only one strategy. Another is to simply marble what they want with stuff they haven’t encountered before.
We went and saw Lion King last night. Now there is an example of everything that genre can do, done right. Like the classic, dark, fairy tales, this is a story that explicitly teaches children about life and death. But what it is actually doing with the life and death lesson is confronting children that they can’t run away from their problems; the story makes running away and returning a life or death situation.
And just look at how complex Scar’s delicious manipulations are. He praises in order to criticize, his insults are couched in compliments. When he tells Simba it was an accident, he then implies it was actually Simba’s fault and he should fear what others will think, regardless of the truth. So what does all that mean to children? I think it teaches them to listen to what people are doing with words rather than just listen to what they are saying. Every kid knows that Scar is bad and is lying, but it’s astonishing just how egregiously he uses lies to position himself in the best light, as the wronged party. It’s amazing not what Scar’s manipulations say to kids, but what it says to adults as well. As a kid I just recognized Scar as a mean liar, as an adult, I recognize everything he does as something I’ve seen coworkers and employers do to other adults. And it makes me think.
Another interesting example at the cinemas is the film Drive. Drive is not an awful movie, it’s a poor man’s Cutter’s Way or To Live and Die in LA. It’s a film that has crawled far up its own ass and is currently admiring the gorgeous colonic perspective of poo. But what Drive does is violate conventions. The film is sold as an action packed dark thriller but it is actually a slow paced existential meditation on violence. So there’s about ten lines of dialog, when someone asks Gosling a question he justs looks at them silently in response. Every once in a while there’s an explosion of insane violence. Gosling doesn’t just beat someone when they attack him, he kicks them when they’re done and stomps on them repeatedly until he crushes their skull open against the floor. It’s definitely violating the conventions of the action or thriller genres of movies, both in how it tries to present violence more ‘realistically’ (ha!) by making the violence more extreme, and it’s extreme slow pace (the slowness is why all the critics are fawning over it, because they’ve been conditioned to think that slow = artistic).
I like lying–it’s saved me from a lot of bad situations. Your antagonism towards lying disturbs me, sir.
I just read the James Sallis novel (or novella…its only 150 pages in length..don’t know the word count) that the film Drive was based on and now I can’t wait to see the movie.
My fear is that the film would forgo some of the existential elements of the book in order to draw in the “typical” action crowd. Your comments (along with a couple of the reviews I have read) help to alleviate that fear.
Did you ever see ‘The lost highway’. There’s this scene where a character takes something out of a package, and the other asks what it is.
The fucking massive pause before ‘It’s a video’. Fuuuuuuuuuuu! Was not significant silence! Was simply idle time! Man, that movie dragged things ouuuuut!
Why should these questions freak anyone out? They are all so extreme, trying to create false binaries. My answers for most of them were either yes, no, both, or not necessarily. Some of them would make for decent essay topics, but none of them are earth shattering mindfucks or anything.
So most English professors think they’re in-group specialists more invested in securing a privileged identity (using ‘linguistic art’ as their conceptual dodge) than engaging their community that makes them possible?
The generalizations are cartoonish (that’s actually a premise of this blog), but then so are all conceptualizations. Charges of ‘false binaries’ sound good, but you need to be more specific.
I was just reading Walter Benjamin for class when your post came up and read this passage which I thought was relevant.
“In the appreciation of a work of art or an art form, consideration of the receiver never proves fruitful. Not only is any reference to a certain public or its representatives misleading, but even the concept of an ‘ideal’ receiver is detrimental in the theoretical consideration of art, since all it posits is the existence and nature of man as such. Art, in the same way, posits man’s physical and spiritual existence, but in none of its works is it concerned with his response. No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener. ” – The Task of the Translator
Now, I personally have always felt that accessibility for the audience is important (to some degree, some work on the reader is good), but on the other hand I agree with Benjamin here too. I find that the work should exist in a sense outside of the reader.
So isn’t the default to ‘write for yourself’? And doesn’t this amount to writing for people like yourself? Benjamin, like Adorno and Horkheimer, always had a weakness for the formalisms they so roundly criticize otherwise.
I felt the most relevant part of the Benjamin quote was “even the concept of an ideal receiver is detrimental in the theoretical consideration of art”
So your ideal receiver is, say, Theodore Beale, but in writing with changing his paradigm in mind you may not only be failing to reach him but disappointing your audience as well.
And I think it’s better to say that the default is actually “write for yourself first.”
Otherwise you should be/are writing political speeches. Consider Ayn Rand’s characters delivering thirty page speeches. She was writing for people who disagreed with her philosophy too you know. She was just really bad at it.
Last question if you will: what do you mean when you say that they ‘always had a weakness for the formalisms they so roundly criticize otherwise.”
I’m not sure why an artist needs a concept of an ‘ideal receiver’ to write for others, let alone why such a concept should be ‘detrimental.’
There’s nothing instrinsically wrong with ‘writing for yourself’ (just as there’s nothing intrinsically right with it either (contrary to Benjamin)). Right or wrong comes down to the fit between your goal and your accomplishment: more and more, writing for yourself, especially now in the information age (given the efficiency with which suppliers and buyers connect) means writing for people like yourself, and this, I would argue, makes the production of literary effects damn near impossible. So if your goal is to do something than merely entertain your readers, you need to reach out to dissenting audiences, not in. In other words, write for others. Check the Bears essay on the blog here.
Marxist hangover. Adorno, especially, was prone to interpret the world in terms of totalizing structures. Take ‘identity thinking’: for him, art is a privileged locus of the ‘nonidentical,’ the one point where the limits of consumer culture explicitly breached the bubble of identity thinking – a formal apparatus that makes considerations of art vis a vis real individuals with real socio-economic backgrounds difficult, to say the least. A similar critique can be made of his formulation of the ‘Messianic moment,’ a saw which Benjamin shared.
So your ideal receiver is, say, Theodore Beale, but in writing with changing his paradigm in mind you may not only be failing to reach him but disappointing your audience as well.
This is like what I was thinking – aren’t you always turning your back atleast partially, on an audience? Even if it’s just turning your back on the part of them that wants pure flattery?
Granted, big difference between turning your back on someone utterly and turning partially. But basically, they are both on the same spectrum.
These questions have subjective answers. As far as I understand, the purpose of literary academia is to ask and discuss these questions anyway. Either you only know really precious professors, or I know only non-precious lit profs. Weird isn’t it? Especially since this sounds like it was written to appeal to a specialised clique of like-minded lit prof despisers.
So your profs disparage contemporary literary fiction as a socially inert, in-group exercise? They encourage students to infiltrate and rewrite popular culture, rather than emulate the works they teach? They tell you that essay writing trains you, not how to think critically, but how to avoid it, which is to say, how to better rationalize? Of course not. The thing to realize about ‘critical thinking’ in the humanities is that it’s pretty much the same as it is everywhere else: rhetorical window-dressing. We’re hardwired to sell ourselves as special, and English profs are no exception, save that ‘criticality’ is one of their most coveted badges.
The tide is changing, I have no doubt of that, but the ‘precious types’ still run pretty much everything from the awards to the funding, let alone the classroom. If you know of a clique of like-minded prof. despisers please point me to them, because I’ve felt like a madman in the wilderness for long, long time now!
This post reminds me of a quote by Kurt Vonnegut, “Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak.”
Now that’s an aphorism. It captures the bud (pardon the expression) of the argument I’m trying to make, which is that literature aims in. If you buy Mullan’s argument about the rise of contemporary literary fiction turning on the ‘success’ of academic literature programs, then you can say that literary culture has built a very large asshole for itself!
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