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Mar. 3rd, 2019 11:41 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lotesseI caught some Literary Theory Writing on tumblr this morning, and it got me thinking about periodization, and the problems it pushes critical discourse towards.
If I look, over time and space, at what human beings do with narratives, what I see is that techniques for producing strangeness and familiarity are used cyclically, depending on the needs of the age. Sometimes this is impacted by large events; but part of it is just the rhythm of fashion, like the 10-year oscillation of mini and maxi skirts. One of the things that human beings like is novelty - so we alternate favorite narratives and strategies. But the underlying drives and desires remain mostly the same, because on an evolutionary timeframe we are just about exactly like the human beings from long ago, made of the same biochemical stuff, endowed with the same genetic memories.
I think there is often a fundamental misattribution of attention in critical writing about the arts, that seeks to tie works toward a linear narrative of progress or development, and wants for politics to have been mirrored very directly and immediately in art, without consideration for the melange of historical influences that form a single human viewpoint. What is more interesting, to me at least, is to look at why and how the shifts take place. How the desires are rearranged, reprioritized, but do not ever really disappear.
(Frex, in fandom, there's maybe an interesting conversation to be had about the creative pendulum swing to the "put sex on it" attitude of the 00s to the "but what if ace?" approach that's increasingly popular. Both approaches to fanwork do the same base move, viz. upholding and indulging in a fantasy via extant characters. It's just that they're different sorts of fantasies; one of a world where sex was more free, more exciting, less painful, and one of a world where sex was less pressing, less present, less distressing. Pitting the one fantasy against the other misses the larger action of [women, nb people, transfolks] seeking to express a thing desired that is basically liberatory. Of course the antis are all out for a fight, so it's hard to have much discussion at all. Perhaps what I'm unhappy about, more broadly, is the tendency to stake out a narrow little piece of litcrit ground and then defend against all comers, when the flow of things is so much more wild and interesting than these grudgematches.)
If I look, over time and space, at what human beings do with narratives, what I see is that techniques for producing strangeness and familiarity are used cyclically, depending on the needs of the age. Sometimes this is impacted by large events; but part of it is just the rhythm of fashion, like the 10-year oscillation of mini and maxi skirts. One of the things that human beings like is novelty - so we alternate favorite narratives and strategies. But the underlying drives and desires remain mostly the same, because on an evolutionary timeframe we are just about exactly like the human beings from long ago, made of the same biochemical stuff, endowed with the same genetic memories.
I think there is often a fundamental misattribution of attention in critical writing about the arts, that seeks to tie works toward a linear narrative of progress or development, and wants for politics to have been mirrored very directly and immediately in art, without consideration for the melange of historical influences that form a single human viewpoint. What is more interesting, to me at least, is to look at why and how the shifts take place. How the desires are rearranged, reprioritized, but do not ever really disappear.
(Frex, in fandom, there's maybe an interesting conversation to be had about the creative pendulum swing to the "put sex on it" attitude of the 00s to the "but what if ace?" approach that's increasingly popular. Both approaches to fanwork do the same base move, viz. upholding and indulging in a fantasy via extant characters. It's just that they're different sorts of fantasies; one of a world where sex was more free, more exciting, less painful, and one of a world where sex was less pressing, less present, less distressing. Pitting the one fantasy against the other misses the larger action of [women, nb people, transfolks] seeking to express a thing desired that is basically liberatory. Of course the antis are all out for a fight, so it's hard to have much discussion at all. Perhaps what I'm unhappy about, more broadly, is the tendency to stake out a narrow little piece of litcrit ground and then defend against all comers, when the flow of things is so much more wild and interesting than these grudgematches.)
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Date: 2019-03-06 06:12 pm (UTC)I love this description of it. <3
The grudge matches are so frustrating: they seem inherent to any of these small groups, whether lit crit or fandom. I feel like purity culture so present in fandom at the moment really discourages debate or openness to other opinions.