Lev Grossman's recent article in Time on the form and function of recommendation engines draws distressingly close to the coda of my recently finished dissertation, and there's no doubt he's remembered his years as a Comp Lit PhD student at Yale. In an earlier post, I wrote on some of the connections between Milton's Raphael and Google's PageRank algorithm as superhuman mediators of what we would call information overload, and some of that found its way into my conclusion. Grossman's article begins and ends with nods in the direction of the eighteenth century, and the issue at stake is the same: how to select what's worth paying attention to when faced with overwhelming volume.
The question Grossman asks of recommendation engines--the software responsible for matching what you've watched, heard, bought, etc. against other things you might like to watch, hear, buy, etc. and letting you know it's available--in his openers is "can a computer really have good taste?" The matters of taste and discernment of course ring rather a large bell in the addled brain of your average eighteenth-century scholar given what several authors of the time (especially Pope and Swift) perceived as a "deluge" of impolite or otherwise pointless writing the rising tide of which threatened to sink all boats and swamp the nation. If in Paradise Lost humanity emerged from the garden dependent on their powers of discernment to know good from evil, then under the Augustan conservatorship of taste and judgment discernment became the critical faculty by which the fragments of knowledge worth keeping would be separated from those better left to what Harold Weber has described as the "'garbage heap' of memory." Plenty of other authors and editors got into this act as well; indeed, whole genres emerged to do the work of selection so the poor reader wouldn't have to. Magazines like The History of the Works of the Learned and The Present State of the Republick of Letters, for example, accounted for what they defined as the most notable or most valuable works from Britain and beyond and left the rest to descend into oblivion.
In writing of the Digital Deluge, Grossman returns to an old analogy. Online retail provides us with a lot of choice--so much choice, he says, that "we're drowning in it." The recommendation engines (like the search engines of Google, Bing, what have you, that reduce the immensity of the web to ranked lists of returns) serve as what he calls an "informational prosthesis" that winnows the potentially paralyzing embarrassment of riches down to something manageable. Whereas Pope, however, would have had you (and everyone else, I think) rely on his good taste to set out something of a curriculum, the recommendation engine relies on your taste and that of your peers to point you towards something you're likely to like. If I were feeling particularly pedantic or just outright snooty I'd try to make an argument about taste versus preference, but it wouldn't get me anywhere. Fashion, if I can dive into the late 19th century for a moment, is what one wears oneself, and you already know the rest.
Grossman ends on a note lamenting the technodetermined perpetuation of existing preferences as opposed to the more locally driven processes of truly personal recommendation and serendipitous discovery (that old chestnut) that have the power to expand rather than reify the boundaries of one's "taste." And for reasons not so far passing understanding as they seem, he notes that, among other things, recommendation engines "won't force you to read the 18th century canon."
Damn right, I say--that's my job. Like plenty of authors, poets, and critics before me, I too am an "informational prosthesis" designed to function (at least in part) as a mediator of and remedy for information overload. If you liked Pamela, you'll like Tristram Shandy. You're bloody well going to read it, at any rate.
Showing posts with label alexander pope. Show all posts
Showing posts with label alexander pope. Show all posts
5.31.2010
6.13.2007
Nostradamus Goes to the Bookshop
My roommate has a subscription to New York Magazine. In last week's issue (June 4, 2007), following an article entitled "The Best Novels You've Never Read" and preceding one about talent emerging where no one is looking for it, is a one-pager called "The Future Canon." Obviously this piqued my interest a bit. The author, or reporter, or writer, or interviewer, or compiler, or whatever one is when one puts one of these things together apparently went about asking folks which contemporary novels and novelists would be taught in fifty years' time.
Let's pick this apart.
Horace, in the first century BC, writing about the veneration of the past, mockingly posited that one hundred years was the appropriate period a text should have to survive in order to pass the test of time. Pope, in the eighteenth century AD, followed suit. Johnson was aware of the standard, and likewise aware that Pope, like Horace, had scoffed at it. But quantification was all the rage in the later eighteenth, thanks very much Mr. Science, and as Trevor Ross notes in The Making of the English Literary Canon, that gave the number some measure of rhetorical if not practical force (274). Which is not to say Johnson gave it any credit.
I bring this up for no other reason than I found it interesting that fifty is the new hundred, at least according to this article. I quite wonder whether there would have been different answers for different periods. If Atonement, by Ian McEwan (fantastic book, by the way, and certainly very worth teaching), will still be taught in 2057, as Morris Dickstein of the Graduate Center asserts, will it have dropped out of favor by 2107? If the interviewer had said two hundred years instead of fifty, would James Shapiro at Columbia have given a name other than J. M. Coetzee's? (I've read Disgrace, but am otherwise unfamiliar.) My gut instinct tells me that these profs would have returned these titles and names regardless of time-frame. I suppose I can see the virtue in a half-century mark, though, as it doesn't seem unfathomably distant--rather like predicting the weather in a week as opposed to a month. There's timely and there's timeless, and the two can but don't have to overlap. It's easier to imagine what will be worth teaching to our grandchildren rather than our great-great-grandchildren, who rather than going to school and being taught literature will likely attend off-world mandatory education centers for maintained intellectual calibration in the name of the Supreme Galactic Imperator (a wholly owned subsidiary of Pharmapepsipetrolon Insurance Co.). But I seem to have digressed.
Fine, fine, let's call it fifty, then, and move on.
I have no way of knowing -- short of asking, which seems unlikely -- how many responses Lori Fradkin of New York Magazine received, and obviously the point of the article was to provide an array of texts rather than a scientifically conducted inquiry into academically-driven canon-formation, but if one did assume that she asked twelve people from twelve universities for exactly one response each, then THAT would be neat, because there's absolutely no consensus. I'd find the whole thing more convincing if five out of twelve had put their bets on the same book. Then fifty years from now we could look back and see who got it right, and if they got it right because they said they would. Let's start running the numbers on the self-fulfilling prophecy of canonicity! But as I said, that might have been the unheeded spirit of the article rather than its practical point, which is self-evidently to introduce a broader number of books to potential readers.
Another interesting thing at work here is the way the question is phrased. Ask what "canonical" means to an author in 1715 and you're approaching the problem from a very different angle than that taken by the article. Religious components aside, the "canon" for much of the eighteenth (to the extent the term was used at all, which is an open question) meant texts read, not texts taught. The first professorship in English Literature didn't come until 1828, though of course texts were "taught" before that. But Fradkin polled university-level profs, so that's what I'm sticking with. I wouldn't disagree that the "canon" now belongs more to academic than popular discourse, but you're asking a very different question when you ponder what will be taught in fifty years rather than what will be read. The argument here is, I guess, about what wouldn't be read without the advantage of being taught. Does Harry Potter need the academy's help to go the distance? What does it say about Andre Aciman (Diana Fuss of Princeton's choice) that he does? The teaching canon is about what those granted the authority to do so determine should be passed on and protected from Oblivion -- whether Oblivion wants it or not. And of course what Oblivion wants changes.
The important thing here is whether or not what of contemporary literature will be read and what will be taught in fifty years amount to the same thing. In fifty, maybe not; in one hundred, maybe. I don't quite know the period of independent discovery. What have I read from the 1940s and 50s that I didn't come by as the result of education? Going back another fifty or so, would I ever have "found" Conrad, Ford, or Joyce? Without the academy, would they have been there to be found?
Here, in case you are wondering, are some of the reasons presented supporting the selections:
Let's pick this apart.
Horace, in the first century BC, writing about the veneration of the past, mockingly posited that one hundred years was the appropriate period a text should have to survive in order to pass the test of time. Pope, in the eighteenth century AD, followed suit. Johnson was aware of the standard, and likewise aware that Pope, like Horace, had scoffed at it. But quantification was all the rage in the later eighteenth, thanks very much Mr. Science, and as Trevor Ross notes in The Making of the English Literary Canon, that gave the number some measure of rhetorical if not practical force (274). Which is not to say Johnson gave it any credit.
I bring this up for no other reason than I found it interesting that fifty is the new hundred, at least according to this article. I quite wonder whether there would have been different answers for different periods. If Atonement, by Ian McEwan (fantastic book, by the way, and certainly very worth teaching), will still be taught in 2057, as Morris Dickstein of the Graduate Center asserts, will it have dropped out of favor by 2107? If the interviewer had said two hundred years instead of fifty, would James Shapiro at Columbia have given a name other than J. M. Coetzee's? (I've read Disgrace, but am otherwise unfamiliar.) My gut instinct tells me that these profs would have returned these titles and names regardless of time-frame. I suppose I can see the virtue in a half-century mark, though, as it doesn't seem unfathomably distant--rather like predicting the weather in a week as opposed to a month. There's timely and there's timeless, and the two can but don't have to overlap. It's easier to imagine what will be worth teaching to our grandchildren rather than our great-great-grandchildren, who rather than going to school and being taught literature will likely attend off-world mandatory education centers for maintained intellectual calibration in the name of the Supreme Galactic Imperator (a wholly owned subsidiary of Pharmapepsipetrolon Insurance Co.). But I seem to have digressed.
Fine, fine, let's call it fifty, then, and move on.
I have no way of knowing -- short of asking, which seems unlikely -- how many responses Lori Fradkin of New York Magazine received, and obviously the point of the article was to provide an array of texts rather than a scientifically conducted inquiry into academically-driven canon-formation, but if one did assume that she asked twelve people from twelve universities for exactly one response each, then THAT would be neat, because there's absolutely no consensus. I'd find the whole thing more convincing if five out of twelve had put their bets on the same book. Then fifty years from now we could look back and see who got it right, and if they got it right because they said they would. Let's start running the numbers on the self-fulfilling prophecy of canonicity! But as I said, that might have been the unheeded spirit of the article rather than its practical point, which is self-evidently to introduce a broader number of books to potential readers.
Another interesting thing at work here is the way the question is phrased. Ask what "canonical" means to an author in 1715 and you're approaching the problem from a very different angle than that taken by the article. Religious components aside, the "canon" for much of the eighteenth (to the extent the term was used at all, which is an open question) meant texts read, not texts taught. The first professorship in English Literature didn't come until 1828, though of course texts were "taught" before that. But Fradkin polled university-level profs, so that's what I'm sticking with. I wouldn't disagree that the "canon" now belongs more to academic than popular discourse, but you're asking a very different question when you ponder what will be taught in fifty years rather than what will be read. The argument here is, I guess, about what wouldn't be read without the advantage of being taught. Does Harry Potter need the academy's help to go the distance? What does it say about Andre Aciman (Diana Fuss of Princeton's choice) that he does? The teaching canon is about what those granted the authority to do so determine should be passed on and protected from Oblivion -- whether Oblivion wants it or not. And of course what Oblivion wants changes.
The important thing here is whether or not what of contemporary literature will be read and what will be taught in fifty years amount to the same thing. In fifty, maybe not; in one hundred, maybe. I don't quite know the period of independent discovery. What have I read from the 1940s and 50s that I didn't come by as the result of education? Going back another fifty or so, would I ever have "found" Conrad, Ford, or Joyce? Without the academy, would they have been there to be found?
Here, in case you are wondering, are some of the reasons presented supporting the selections:
- According to Prof. Dickstein, "books largely survive because of the quality of their writing, and [Ian McEwan] writes beautifully." Now certainly I'd like to believe this is why books survive, and it has that lovely warm essentialist aesthetic feeling about it, but it seems to be an answer about reading rather than teaching. If beauty is all, or even most, of what it takes, then a beautifully written book wouldn't need people like me to shove it down anyone's throat by way of syllabus. And beauty remains problematically in the eye of the etc.
- Diana Fuss offers (as with all the others, undoubtedly in oversimplifying extract courtesy of editorial mandate and/or spatial constraint) that Aciman's place in the future is guaranteed by his adeptness at capturing the nuances of human emotion. There's something pleasantly essentialist about this too--not that I think the nuances of human emotion are likely to change in fifty years (I very quietly don't think they've changed all that much in the last five thousand) , but Pope felt that enough had changed in manners if not in secret souls that Homer had to be substantially fiddled with to make him time-and-nation-appropriate. That's a much longer period than fifty years, but hey, in this age of half-hour news cycles and interwebbification, who knows.
- Stephanie Li, of the University of Rochester, went the Wordsworthian route. She chose Colson Whitehead's Apex Hides the Hurt, which I've never heard of and which in any case was "not reviewed very well." It will be taught in fifty years, she thinks, because it will take that long for the academy to find it again. If not ahead of its time, the novel is certainly not in its time, so it'll simply have to wait. Wordsworth wrote as much about his own poetry at the close of the eighteenth. Except, of course, rather than having a misplaced sense of humor like Whitehead, Wordsworth had none at all.
- Andre Aciman, the adept nuance-capturer, chose Austerlitz. Aciman's reasoning is perhaps the most relevant to my line of inquiry. The survival of this novel, he claims, is attached to a generic shift yet to be undergone by Holocaust memoirs. Fifty years will make historical documents out of the memoirs and alter their place in the generic hierarchy. "The high literature," Aciman writes, "will migrate to books like Austerlitz." I would have thought Austerlitz would migrate to high literature out of whatever category it currently occupies, but what we have here is a potential flaw in my perspective. Is it the texts that define the category, or the category that defines the texts? Austerlitz will have been around for fifty years--so in that respect it will have been around longer than however high literature is synchronically constituted. High literature would therefore of necessity have to come to Austerlitz. But of course, Austerlitz will have been around for fifty years outside a diachronic category of high literature. So of necessity it would have to enter that category.
- The best answer, or at least the most honest, is given by NYU's own Dean Catharine Stimpson, who after naming Jhumpa Lahiri and offering some notes in praise thereof, concludes thus: "if anybody thinks they know how canons are going to be formed, they are guilty of hubris bordering on stupidity."
12.29.2006
Displaced Author Function Seeks New Texts to Inhabit
I, like many a mortal, am obsessed with notions of immortality. Until science figures out a way to download the entire working mind to some piece of solid-state, solar-powered, titanium-based something or other, however, the best we humans can hope for is genetic transmission or textual remembrance (text here incorporating all forms of "print," real or virtual, visual, oral, etc.). After thousands of years of writing, from cuneiform to hieroglyphics and on to little ones and zeroes brought to you by means I understand even less, and following countless astounding medical advances that threaten to extend the average human lifespan to and beyond the century mark, we are still faced with essentially the same choice as our most distant ancestors: reproduce, or write.
The vast majority of people attempt one or the other of these things, and for a similar majority the effort pleases more than the result.
It was fairly common in the eighteenth century for an author to refer to a text in terms of offspring, thereby conflating the two means into a single transferable item. The trope had (appropriately) Renaissance roots. As Mark Rose notes in Authors and Owners, "the most common figure in the early modern period is paternity: the author as begetter and the book as child" (38). Sidney, for example, called Arcadia "this child which I am loath to father." A century and a half later, David Hume claimed that his A Treatise of Human Nature "fell still-born from the press." For reasons that this blog will no doubt return to again and again, all texts are problem children, and, as with the real thing, one takes one's chances in spawning them. A text, though it may seem to spring fully-formed from the head of its creator, is really only half its parent's child; for it to have life, a reader must come along and take it up--as Hume's quotation above reveals. And there's no telling what manner of unsavory character might come along and nurture it out of its nature with his or her ridiculous (mis)reading. The next thing you know, the sweet little book over which you labored so hard has turned into a surly teenager that looks just like you but which everyone says is up to no good. You, the well-intentioned author-parent, have no recourse but to shrug and say, "it must have gotten that from it's reader's side of the family."
So there's really nothing to be done. Authors must die, texts have a life of their own. This brings me to Scriblerus, and the nature of this blog. In adopting and revivifying the name of the Scriblerians' erstwhile editor, author, and dupe, how do we affect each other? What quality of life do I give him, with respect to the one he had 250 years ago as well as those he enjoys in the hands of other modern writers (I am not the only Scriblerus on the web). Scriblerus was a collective creation; an unreal person with a real CV. To who else can we rightly attribute the Memoirs, if we have no idea who was responsible for the various parts of them? One edition on sale at Amazon attributes them to all the members of the Scriblerus Club; another flatly credits Pope alone. The minds that created his are all dead, but perhaps his mind could live on in the only world he ever truly inhabited.
If someone came along and actually wrote in the style of Scriblerus--never breaking character, addressing the same issues in a sort of Enlightenment-meets-Borat kind of way--would "Scriblerus" be any less the Scriblerus of Pope, Arbuthnot, Parnell, Swift, and the Earl of Oxford? Well, yes, obviously. The break in time gives ownership to his dead fathers. But if, Zorro-like, successive writers had inherited the role over generations, what then would have been the nature of his Authorship and immortality?
The vast majority of people attempt one or the other of these things, and for a similar majority the effort pleases more than the result.
It was fairly common in the eighteenth century for an author to refer to a text in terms of offspring, thereby conflating the two means into a single transferable item. The trope had (appropriately) Renaissance roots. As Mark Rose notes in Authors and Owners, "the most common figure in the early modern period is paternity: the author as begetter and the book as child" (38). Sidney, for example, called Arcadia "this child which I am loath to father." A century and a half later, David Hume claimed that his A Treatise of Human Nature "fell still-born from the press." For reasons that this blog will no doubt return to again and again, all texts are problem children, and, as with the real thing, one takes one's chances in spawning them. A text, though it may seem to spring fully-formed from the head of its creator, is really only half its parent's child; for it to have life, a reader must come along and take it up--as Hume's quotation above reveals. And there's no telling what manner of unsavory character might come along and nurture it out of its nature with his or her ridiculous (mis)reading. The next thing you know, the sweet little book over which you labored so hard has turned into a surly teenager that looks just like you but which everyone says is up to no good. You, the well-intentioned author-parent, have no recourse but to shrug and say, "it must have gotten that from it's reader's side of the family."
So there's really nothing to be done. Authors must die, texts have a life of their own. This brings me to Scriblerus, and the nature of this blog. In adopting and revivifying the name of the Scriblerians' erstwhile editor, author, and dupe, how do we affect each other? What quality of life do I give him, with respect to the one he had 250 years ago as well as those he enjoys in the hands of other modern writers (I am not the only Scriblerus on the web). Scriblerus was a collective creation; an unreal person with a real CV. To who else can we rightly attribute the Memoirs, if we have no idea who was responsible for the various parts of them? One edition on sale at Amazon attributes them to all the members of the Scriblerus Club; another flatly credits Pope alone. The minds that created his are all dead, but perhaps his mind could live on in the only world he ever truly inhabited.
If someone came along and actually wrote in the style of Scriblerus--never breaking character, addressing the same issues in a sort of Enlightenment-meets-Borat kind of way--would "Scriblerus" be any less the Scriblerus of Pope, Arbuthnot, Parnell, Swift, and the Earl of Oxford? Well, yes, obviously. The break in time gives ownership to his dead fathers. But if, Zorro-like, successive writers had inherited the role over generations, what then would have been the nature of his Authorship and immortality?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)