What makes research compelling?

[CulturalCriminal]

15 minutes ago, WildeThing said:

Jumping on the hate-to-read but love Lacan bandwagon.

I have this with Spivak and Bhabha

[Melvillage_Idiot]

Big thank you shout-outs to @rising_star, @Hermenewtics, and @Crow T. Robot for giving me a HUGE amount to think about (and making me feel a hell of a lot better about it all), and to @Crow T. Robot in particular for maybe hitting the nail on the head with the different scholarly approaches.

Yay learning!

 

[Mise]

On 2018. 2. 22. at 11:36 PM, CulturalCriminal said:

I have this with Spivak and Bhabha

I ran out of reactions, so here's my manual "like" and "upvote"! 

[Mise]

I'm interested in Alex Woloch's theory of characterization, as formulated in The One vs. the Many. In his book, he explains how characterizations of major and minor characters happen differently in 19th century Realist novels (Austen, Dickens, Balzac), and makes the connection between novelistic form and historical context. His keywords are "character-space" and "character-system," and they kind of speak for themselves. He makes a much more specific and compelling argument about the "connection," but I can't explain it here because I don't want to open my copy of his book now, and I sort of have the fear of speaking in public... I was really interested by his argument and observations because it combined a formalist approach with a historicist approach... which means that he explained why there are so many characters in 19th century novels and how they are structured one against the other (actually, the "many") through close-reading and historical backup. I think I liked his argument because his book answered one of my questions about novels (why so many characters? why do minor characters always seem so "flat"?) and also provided me with a basis for starting my studies in novels.