Overview of 2006: The Gloves Come Off
I’m sure you’ve noticed that the last few posts here have been about taste, a move which began with my recognition (way back in December) that the year was coming rapidly to a close, sleigh bells and champagne sales were on the rise, and it could only be a matter of time before the situation exploded into a series of resounding Best-Of-Year lists from all over the Internet and the print media.
Well, it’s now January, and (as you might have guessed from the last post) the fire kicked up over at The Valve continues to smolder in ways both interesting (Bill Benzon and I continue our debate) and ludicrous — a irascible chap by the name of Steven Augustine has published a list of the ten reasons why he hates what I write, which concludes on a magnificent note with him accusing “Kugelmass” of being a pseudonym.
I’ll continue to speak up over there, but here at The Kugelmass Episodes we’re transitioning into a series of posts that look back on 2006 and ask the question: Why? WHY? It was a bad year for music. It was a bad year for movies. It was a bad year for politics until November, and we’re still in a heap of trouble (obviously). I am writing this post having just stripped the duvet off my bed, replacing it with a thin woolen throw that will not suffocate me at night. This is a yearly ritual, performed when Irvine starts to heat up for spring, and then reversed towards the end of autumn. I have performed it today and we are not halfway through January. The situation is going from worrisome to blatant, so don’t be surprised if I start reading the Left Behind series and doing a “Best of 2007” sometime around July.
Blogging was a mixed bag. I became a serious blogger this year, and so did a lot of friends. Some people, like Irrelevant Narcissism, started new blogs, while others (including Truly Outrageous and Uncomplicatedly) took highly successful LiveJournals and moved them to the more fully-featured WordPress site. Credit is due again to Acephalous and Tomemos for helping to foster a blogging community at Irvine. I am very impressed that Scott Kaufman, of Acephalous, helped spread the word about academic blogging via his successful presentation at the MLA.
On the other hand, as a new blogger, I have to admit that I looked around several communities and found idiosyncrasy and disrepair. While I’m sure somebody out there understands what has become of Long Sunday and The Weblog, both sites contain a surprising number of asides and in-jokes that end up being substitutes for content. It was discouraging to note the way that a certain team of scholars interested in religion tried to enforce a position of scholarly “reasonableness” towards religion in the academic blogosphere. This meant basically admitting that their God was pretty real, and definitely valuable. My own investigations into religion aside, I have been delighted that Jane Awake has emerged as a new blogger with a defiantly atheistic bent. My guess is that a new wave of academic blogging will begin, partly thanks to Scott’s work, and that this will lead to a blossoming of content.
There are some veterans out there who continue to do wonderful work, including Spurious, Rough Theory, and Larval Subjects. (I’ve also recently added the wonderful blog This Space to my academic bloggers list. Check it out.) Likewise, I was very impressed by belledame222‘s ability to be everywhere at once, all over the blogosphere, with her characteristic flair and intelligence. But the feminist blogosphere continued to be as troubled as ever: the relationship between everyone and Twisty (of I Blame The Patriarchy fame) reached an insane pitch of furor when Twisty allowed a lot of hateful comments about transgendered individuals to stand. The community continued to struggle with questions of sexuality — not just transgendered people, but S&M, “femme” women, porn, sex work, and so on. Posts that said the same thing over again would fill with comments like a bucket in the rain, but nothing was accomplished. Individual writers — notably Truly Outrageous — continued to drop good hints about where to find the stuff that mattered, so I increasingly turned to those filter sites as my RSS feedlist shrunk.
That’s a good enough overview. Let’s get down to it: the records, the movies, the sites, the posts, the trends. I will try to be faithful to my own aesthetic theory by writing unfairly, subjectively, and honestly about what I liked, what I didn’t, and why over the course of this past year. It seems to me that the only way I can go forward is honestly, in the belief that agreement and disagreement about culture (bloggging is certainly that) can be exciting, provocative, and informative.
-Kugelmass
Maybe you just need more quotation marks. How did Mr. Augustine put it? “The Joker (from Batman) isn’t evil…he’s ‘evil’”
If only you had written “To borrow the terms I used to describe the style of Lolita, Nabokov comes across in works like Speak, Memory as ‘meticulous, tricky, Romantic, and ‘viciously elitist.’’” With a second set of quotation marks, Mr. “Kugelmass.”
Augustine’s is a perversion of the textualist position. Also, last quarter in E28C, I never gave above a C+ to papers that couldn’t get beyond “the PR energy the character or situation can generate” to a statement of what work the character or situation is giving.
I still owe you a comment on De Man. It will not be infinitely deferred. Also, there may be yet another new blog on its way in the near future…
How strange to find myself described as a… veteran… ;-P
The content/community balance is a difficult one – among other things, because the fact that blogs break across established institutional and disciplinary barriers actually necessitates the negotiation of some kind of common frame of reference that makes productive, high-level discussion possible. Of course, some blogs are happy to host free-for-alls of ever-renewed mutual incomprehension… ;-P But if you want to use the potential diversity of a blogging community creatively, generatively, this probably does mean letting a community hash out its own rituals, references, and rules – and these shared norms, plus an active knowledge of the history of the discussion in a particular community, does tend, over time, to raise the barriers to participation for new posters – and raise the risks that established posters will cold shoulder anyone new… Some blogs won’t mind this process of closure – they might be perfectly happy to communicate with the community that has already coalesced around them. The challenge is for those blogs who want to remain open: how can we do this while (1) facilitating the kinds of shared vocabularies that enable productive communication across backgrounds, and (2) dealing with the sheer weight of our own accumulated histories, so that a lack of knowledge of the sorts of discussions that have already taken place doesn’t unduly disadvantage new participants…
You’ve placed me on the “content” side of things (I think!) in your characterisation, and I try… ;-P But the reality is that I make fairly constant references to older discussions, and my posts actually contain quite a few references that would only be legible to people who have followed the site for a while (or, sometimes, to people who know me in person, or even to specific individuals). The difference, I suppose, is that I also try to make sure that this kind of thing is window dressing – that it doesn’t interfere with a new reader’s ability to understand the core issues under discussion (of course, given what the “core issues” are for me, the content of the site itself is probably offputting to a lot of people to begin with… ;-P).
But shared vocabulary – of the sort that develops in particular in longish discussions that perists across blogs or within a blogging community over a longish period of time – can be both absolutely essential to a high-level discussion, and also extremely difficult to communicate easily to new readers. I try to remember to cite backward to the antecedents of a discussion (and am currently looking for an effective plugin to allow me to link posts back into series, in case someone really wants to backtrack the history of an issue through the blog – all the ones I’ve looked at so far… aren’t so flash…), and I try to foreground vocabulary that might be problematic. But really productive, cumulative discussions – exactly the sorts of discussions I most want to have – come at a price, in terms of what they ask from new readers… And sometimes even old ones: I’ve had a couple of long-term readers mention on back channels that they are having trouble following posts related to cross-blog discussions because these posts place them in the position of seeing, effectively, half the conversation – either because they’re not following links over to the other blog (just because I read specific blogs, doesn’t mean my readers feel compelled to…), or because, when they do follow such links, they find the unfamiliar discursive environment too alien (they’ve gotten used to my style, but don’t want to adjust to someone else’s when they don’t plan on reading regularly)… So my guess would be that, from the standpoint of at least a few folks who are otherwise very interested in what I write, I’m engaging in too many referential conversations that seem exclusionary…
This isn’t to call into question anything you’ve said above – just to note that the medium has its own dynamics, and requires a delicate balance between producing content and producing community – a balance that, I suspect, becomes more and more difficult as blogs become better established… And that, like all balances, spends most of its time out of its ideal equilibrium state… ;-P
Sorry for the long post… :-)
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N. Pepperell, I think there is great value in the kinds of community that can be fostered over the web. There are certain blog communities that are structured like intuitive webrings, with intertextual references, reciprocal blogrolls, and above all commonality of content.
That said, I think that “continuity” is a fairly hard thing to achieve on the Internet, and I haven’t been particularly happy with where I’ve seen it lead. For example, it often leads to paralyzing rhetorical identities for given bloggers. I like the medium best when it is pithy, provocative, and alive with the enthusiasms of the moment.
Most of the personal interactions to which blogging can lead ought to be carried out via so-called “back channels”: e-mail, instant messaging, and (eventually) phone calls and visits. A blog can be anything its user wants, of course…but as someone who wants to provide and peruse writing with intellectual content, I recognize the obligation to the stranger who arrives via a blogroll, or a forwarded or re-posted link, or via Google.
My thinking is this: references to my own back pages should be linked, and summarized if there are too many entries involved. Stuff from other blogs should be linked, and summarized if possible (think of the confusion that already befell some of my readers because they hadn’t read Bill Benzon’s responses to me on taste). A good long blockquote from the other blog works wonders.
Finally, the blogger should always respect herself and her audience enough to reach for (even in one sentence, or a few short sentences) a moment — of being, truth, humor, or pathos.
It goes without saying that personal entries are entirely capable of achieving this moment, which is why many of the blogs I read are personal.
The fact that Bérubé’s blog is shutting down seems like timely confirmation of the hope for a new wave.
I’m sorry to see him go; reading his book, reviewing it, and responding to comments by him and others was a highlight of this past fall.
Matt: yes to the blog. Yes to the comment on de Man.
I think what interests me about the issue of continuity (although I do agree that it’s difficult to achieve on the web) is that it seems essential in order fully to exploit the potential for interdisciplinary critical exchange. What I sometimes call “drive by” posts can give you a small taste of interdisciplinary exchange – often in the sense of showing you what kinds of miscommunication can easily occur when speaking across disciplinary lines. To move beyond this, though, does require either interacting enough to learn one another’s languages, or to negotiate some kind of shared, compromise lanaguge – these common points of reference, which take time (and, I should add, substantial goodwill and a shared commitment to achieving a particular kind of discursive space) to develop, can substantially deepen interdisciplinary exchange.
So I value these things – but am also trying to keep their risks in view. An ossified interdisciplinary community is probably not substantially different from an ossified disciplinary monoculture… And I also agree that, when we decide to open the records of our discussions to the web, it’s at least polite to enable new visitors to make sense of what’s going on… (And, on a more personal level, I tend not to like the dynamics of closed and self-reinforcing communities, online or in-person…)
Most of these issues, though, loom large for me because I’m trying to achieve some specific goals by blogging, goals that I can’t reach if there is no opportunity for ongoing discussion, and that I also can’t reach if I just create some new kind of closed community… I’m very reluctant to make statements about what blogs should be in general – I think the medium provides a flexible tool for multiple goals, and I suspect my personal goals are somewhat idiosyncratic (mainly because, when I see other people generalising about the medium, I generally have trouble recognising myself in their declarations… ;-P).
So I find myself agreeing with much of what you say above as a matter of personal practice, but have not generally thought about these practices in terms of standards for the medium (not that you were doing this, either – I take your statements as markers of personal commitments or ideals that would structure your own use of the medium).
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Joseph, I truly shudder to think that “Matt” is “teaching” anything as regards the interpretation of texts if he can’t even get a fraction of my clearly stated position straight. He writes:
“Augustine’s is a perversion of the textualist position. Also, last quarter in E28C, I never gave above a C+ to papers that couldn’t get beyond ‘the PR energy the character or situation can generate’ to a statement of what work the character or situation is giving.”
The sentence he quotes refers not a whit to what the invented character or situation is “giving” (and needn’t have, in the context) but to what an author’s (one among many) calculations might be in the creation of same (above the agency of his/her own murky subconscious, which is so opaque to her/his own self but clear as an unmuddy lake to the Magi of Hackademe, apparently).
For example: whilst adultery was jazzy enough a theme to suit Hawthorne back in the day, were he to attempt the same sort of book in the current publishing climate he’d probably opt to make Hester an adulteress AND a cannibal, his own cravings for human flesh aside.
For the record, “Matt”, I give you a “D” (enough quotation marks for you?).
The excerpted sentence meant to remind *you*, Joseph, that there are, in fact, conscious, banal (business) strategies to take into account when parsing a writer’s motivations. It doesn’t all trail neatly back to the primal scene; treating a published novel (or any element thereof) as the pure excrescence, or pathology, of a psyche is naive. Before this is dismissed as a “straw man” (the Top Ten meme of middlebrow comment threadery), I refer you to your insinuations as to Nabovok’s “real” stance towards pedophilia (and pederasty, possibly). One can only nod at Nabokov’s outrage at Andrew Field’s “discovery” that “Lolita” was the translated diminutive for Nabokov’s mother’s name.
Also, I must say, it strikes me as a lapse in ethics for you to set up your own little dunking tank, in the safety of your back yard, with me in effigy on the platform. More slipshoddiness from the choir-preaching, barrel-fishing, log-rollery that is the Hackademic Blog?
(High fives, though, for hilariously…that is, with a “straight face”…invoking Delmore Schwartz in a debate about reality, of all things, in that Valve thread; I hope you got my subsequent ‘two Hums’ joke).
They’re heeeeeere….
Steven,
Apologies, first off, for the tone of the comment to which you are responding (that was me, but I’ve since taken this username). The grading comment in particular was a demeaning way to make my point, and not conducive to the level of debate I’d like to see. If we must speak of an author’s PR calculations in writing, let me point out, in speaking a bit in my defense (back when I was calling myself Matt), a bit of my own motivations. Steven, the comment you cite was posted on Joe’s blog as a mere show of support, an admittedly reactive one at that, mainly in response to the tone of your post (which seemed to make a rather impersonal academic argument in an oddly personal way) and not yet as a rigorous argument. The haste is evident in the fact that I wrote the rather awkward word “giving” where I meant “doing.” If I had intended to take the time to fully work out an argument that would stand up to criticism or even fully express my position, I might have posted over at the Valve and made a serious attempt to respond to your points one by one. This was not, however, my intention, so I left my comments to Joe’s little “back yard.” I did not, and do not, have the time to read through the long series of comments in response to Joe’s post over at the Valve, particularly because I didn’t find most of that thread helpful.
I’m happy to engage in a more sustained debate over the basic methodological assumptions of my practice as a literary scholar (our practices? is it safe to assume that you’re also a study literature professionally?), but I didn’t want to have that discussion in the comment field of Joe’s post at the Valve, just as I don’t want to have it in the comment field here, starting from an attempt to defend a hastily written comment. If you’re willing to wait a bit, you’ll find a much more careful methodological argument starting from de Man’s “The Concept of Irony” over at http://oubliesurlacarte.wordpress.com/, hopefully in a few days. I hope you’ll read it and respond critically but respectfully (not to ignore the adjacent debate on the advantages and disadvantages of “respectful” debate in the blogosphere, but this simply seems to be the kind of debate in which no one’s subject position ought to be really involved, in which, even though there is clearly something at stake, there’s really no reason to get personal, and where there is plenty of time to be sure that you understand an argument rather than oversimplifying in the name of a rhetorical ploy).
In the mean time, if you look around at my other comments on this site, I hope you’ll find them more carefully considered and, even, probably more aligned with your position than you might expect–in some ways, even more aligned with your position than with Joe’s. I’m equally hesitant of Joe’s desire to read ethical statements into texts (again, I’m merely paraphrasing my recollection of the debate between you and Joe, as I don’t have the time at the moment to reread the entire extended debate) but for different reasons. I’m particularly sympathetic to your call for more evidence, insofar as I suspect that ethical readings have a tendency to collapse under the weight of irony and contradiction when held up to the scrutiny of close reading, but that is a position that I can only defend through reading, and I simply don’t have the time to offer up a critique of Joe’s reading of Lolita.
Regarding the quotation marks, my point was that texts do project worlds in which moral standards exist, so that the moral criticism of a fictional character, if problematic, is not, at a minimum, nonsensical. To morally condemn the behavior of a character in a novel is to say that the text itself projects ethical norms based on which that behavior is condemnable. It is also to say, extra-textually, that the norms thus projected are relevant to our own ethical behavior. Thus, your haste to throw out Joe’s ethical criticism, the way you proceed to ridicule his position, seems to me unjustified, even if the conclusion may be somewhat justified by the problems that arise in trying to pin the text unproblematically on any particular ethical position.
As for the quote on ‘PR energy,’ your response seems rather to confirm my original reading rather than revise it. You write that your original sentence “refers not a whit to what the invented character or situation is ‘giving’ (should be ‘doing’),” which is precisely my complaint–I’m arguing, quite clearly, that I expect student papers to get beyond this problem of “PR energy,” which is to say, beyond the rhetoric of persuasion, and to articulate instead, or in addition, an understanding of the consequences these decisions have on something like “meaning,” though I’m aware this particular word is still problematic. The move from actual “PR energy”/actual persuasion to intended/calculated “PR energy”/persuasion does not in any way resolve my concerns with this position. It seems to dodge the affective fallacy in favor of the intentional fallacy, which is to say, you avoid the problems associated with talking about the reception of the text by grounding your argument on an authorial intention (a deliberate calculation directed towards an implied audience) that you yourself acknowledge to be equally murky. I suppose, in light of this shift, it was ultimately wrong to put you on the textualist position, but beyond this, it’s still not clear to me how I got your position wrong (and even less clear how I got it wrong to such a degree as to disqualify myself as a teacher of undergrads).
To elaborate on my comment on grading, and perhaps assert myself pedagogically in response to your rather unfounded opening comments (how could you possibly be in a position to assess my effectiveness as a teacher?), let me give an example from recent teaching practice. I recently taught Moll Flanders to a group of undergrads. We spent a lot of time talking in precisely the terms you suggest about something like PR calculations–how the novel has to be at one and the same time a spiritual autobiography which includes the “scandalous” (note the quotation marks) episodes of Moll’s youth and middle-age only for morally instructive reasons, and a picaresque novel which luxuriates in scandal and ends in a feigned repentance only to throw off the scent of the censors. These are central considerations to Moll Flanders, and the students are genuinely surprised to realize the extent to which PR considerations shape the novel. However, as soon as these considerations become the end point, it becomes impossible to say anything more than “Defoe creates uncertainty of the genuineness of Molls repentance in order to sell more copies of his book and stay out of jail.” This is probably true, but hardly an insightful argument (same re: your analysis of Hawthorne writing a contemporary cannibal novel). In other words, yes, banal considerations definitely come into play in important ways in writing a novel, but they are still banal. They become interesting not as conclusions, but as starting points, so that, for example, if we start by considering the context of reception that Defoe has to address, and use that to discover an important formal feature of the novel (the ambiguity of its genre) we’ve accomplished something, something that my better students might use, in turn, to analyze Moll as a figure for the novel itself or to help explain Moll’s parody of the gentility, for example; whereas, if we start by identifying a formal feature of the novel and move to explaining it as a “PR move,” we’ve really accomplished very little.
I hope this helps clarify my comments and move us from character assassination to serious debate
Apologies accepted (for the sake of simplicity, I’ll refer to you as “Matt”, still). A truce is a fine idea, and I appreciate your obviously sincere interest in a genuine discussion. I think I can do my side of this stage in a nutshell:
1. “…if we start by identifying a formal feature of the novel and move to explaining it as a ‘PR move,’ we’ve really accomplished very little.”
This may be the case, Matt, but I can’t support a particular reading merely because of the relative advantages it entails; my question would be: is it true that certain elements in the text are there not as a result of the author’s private obsessions but as a cold calculation (or even at the suggestion of an agent or publisher) about the work doing well in the marketplace? And if the answer is “yes”, that will skew psychological readings of the text. This is not to exclude psychological readings of the text as a posibility, but to mitigate them, yes? This has turned out to be my chief ‘bone to pick’ with this debate…that my remarks are painted as proscriptive.
I only ever pointed out that it’s on shaky ground indeed that we use an artwork to reverse-engineer the artist’s inner state in generating said work; factors such as the above-stated “PR” bit figure into it. The ground becomes shakier in direct proportion to how controversial or even libelous the ‘discoveries’ are that such reverse-engineering point to. Specifically, I felt that Joseph’s essay was rather casual to stake such serious claims against Nabokov’s reputation.
2. My other important point was not just a defense of “Art for Art’s sake” but a philosophical matter that can only be dealt with in a fairly legal attention to words (which is why I’ve spent the great bulk of my time on this topic clarifying my position). Anyone is free, obviously, to read a text in any way that he/she choses (again: I am far from proscriptive in this matter)…but beyond my feeling that reading Lolita “morally” is like using a butter knife as a screwdriver (still, anyone is free to…)…isn’t there an interesting philosophical question to be put to the practise of applying a “moral” framework to a “creature” who has neither inner-life nor free will? Isn’t, therefore, a “moral” investigation of any artwork, essentially, a pantomime…a mock trial, as it were? There *must* be a qualitative/quantitative difference between moral readings of a book and moral readings of a real-world case involving actual humans. That being the case, are the former truly fruitful when the latter are so readily available?
I only argue, in the end, that keeping the ‘real’ (life) and the ‘unreal’ (art) distinct can lead to more efficient ‘uses’ of both.
Steven,
I’m glad you enjoyed the Weird Al joke, and assure you that, though I didn’t get the “two Hums” joke, I would like to.
I was angered by the way that you tried to discredit bloggers like Tomemos and petitpoussin by assuming that they responded to you out of blind loyalty. The fact that you got this “information” from this blog, rather than from the Valve, highlights the difference between the two sites. On the Valve I make a sustained effort never to resort to personal remarks, nor even to characterize the bulk of an interlocutor’s comments in any hasty way, if I can possibly avoid doing so. (By the end of that debate, I did not feel I could.) In other words, I have a very strict idea of the rules of engagement over there.
Not so here; this is a blog about my own thoughts and experiences, and diverges significantly from the Valve. To borrow Hofstadter’s term, I feel free to “pop out” of a discussion taking place here or anywhere and characterize it as I please, albeit honestly. If this strikes you as an ethical lapse, it is because you have misunderstood the extent to which bloggers become public figures, under their real or assumed names.
I have been “dunked” quite a few times already by various bloggers, Conrad included, on their home sites. It is something I accept and even something I occasionally find amusing. I accept it for the following reason: the blog owner has sovereign authority over their own personal web address, the same authority you have over your WordPress site and any others you may establish.
surlacarte,
Yes, I care about ethics. Yes, ethics play a significant role in my critical work.
I am not indifferent to aesthetic pleasures that escape easy ethical assignation, nor do I run for cover in the face of ethical ambiguities. I’m perfectly comfortable describing ambiguities, since I see my role as critic as largely descriptive. Some artworks are not ethically “solvable,” and that is their strength.
I just don’t have the reverse, either — I wouldn’t go into a text waiting for irony to snap its jaws, as though such a thing were foregone.
I apologize for being piqued. It’s not that I disdain a formalist approach, it’s that I’m not going to be caricatured in a way that minimizes my love for beauty. I wish that we were surrounded by more works of beautiful art. The fact that a nightmarish film like Pan’s Labyrinth is the current standard for aesthetic splendor may help explain why I seem obsessed with ethics to those who would prefer a different approach. The works themselves seem obsessed that way, with the possible exception of the films of David Lynch.
First, Joe, to quote the relevant part of my post: “I’m merely paraphrasing my recollection of the debate between you and Joe, as I don’t have the time at the moment to reread the entire extended debate.” I’m not trying to put you on a oversimplified blind commitment to ethics, and if it seems like I often highlight the moments where your arguments tend towards “ethical criticism,” it’s mainly because these are the moments when our views on literature most often depart. It’s also in part because you once described your work to me in those terms. The last position I would put you on is a disdain for beauty, and I’m not in anyway suggesting you’re unwilling or incapable of acknowledging ambiguity or irony (or form or figural language, etc.)–actually, I’m not sure where you get this from my post–but I think it’s fair to say that we disagree regarding the way that ambiguity and irony ultimately work–you articulate the dispute quite clearly yourself in your post on de Man when you commit yourself to finite rather than infinite irony. In fact, I think there are some sound methodological reasons to “go into a text waiting for irony to snap its jaws, as though such a thing were foregone,” regardless of whether such a thing is, in fact, foregone. I’m sorry I have to keep excusing myself from articulating why, but I would like the chance to lay out my position all at once first. Once I get that onto the table, let all hell break lose.
Maybe I should just release part one tonight. I just don’t want too much of a lag between that and the rest of the argument, precisely because I don’t want to come off as caricaturing anyone. We’ll see.
Steven, for similar reasons, I’m reluctant to continue this particular corner of the debate in this particular corner of the internet, precisely because it does kind of commit me to defending a kind of caricature of Joe’s position. I will simply say that I agree that there is an “interesting philosophical question to be put to the practise of applying a ‘moral’ framework to a ‘creature’ who has neither inner-life nor free will” but that this philosophical question does not, itself, in principle make ethical criticism impossible, and that the only thing to be done is to commit oneself to what you call a “fairly legal attention to words” (acknowledging of course that words are tricky things that often resist a sort of legal attention)–though there are certainly times and places where its appropriate to play faster and looser and to defer the details. As for questions of starting and ending points, I don’t think methodological questions about what “counts” as a reading are reducible to questions of the accuracy of an explanation; or, in other words, I would argue that questions of interpretation and questions of explanation are not mutually exclusive. Thus we might decide that a certain aspect of a novel can be, 100%, without a doubt, attributed to a banal consideration of the literary marketplace, but nonetheless still continue to address the implications of that aspect of the novel for the meaning of the rest of the novel. Then, of course, there’s also the pesky problem of overdetermination.
Joseph:
The “two Hums” are Humbert and Humboldt. (I’ll send an email regarding misc. other points so as to let this comment-based ping pong die a natural death).
Surlacarte:
I agree we’ve gone as far as we can on this in this context!