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axe8472 · 1 year

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I have thoughts in my brain about six of crows and they may or may not make sense. So. The thing is when people talk about how the crows couldn't possibly be 16-18 because they're overly mature and competent and have life experience etc etc. i get that BUT is that not the whole point? I mean the books really hammer it home that notions of childhood in their world are entirely different from ours, like to the point where i would even say it's a main theme and kinda the driving force behind all the events in the duology.

Kids are taken away from their parent at like 11 to train as soldiers. Kaz was all alone in Ketterdam at 9 years old and there doesn't seem to have been any functioning system of care for kids like him, nor mandatory schooling. In Fjerda, it seems like the closest thing to foster care is being taken on by the Druskelle. Inej started training as an acrobat pretty much as soon as she could walk and was playing starring roles in performances by the time she was 14 (and probably a fair bit younger). I don't remember Jesper's backstory perfectly but I think he was put to work in the jurda fields (a hazardous agricultural job) as a small child, then worked with guns in some way, then got sent to school in a different country when he was like 15. This isn't exclusive to the crows - it's mentioned a lot that there are many kids in situations similar to Kaz and Inej in the Barrel. Even Joost, despite seemingly being quite sheltered, is working full time night shifts as a guard when he's not even old enough to grow facial hair.

It seems that there's just much more of a vocational focus for kids/teenagers in the grishaverse. This makes a lot of sense because many elements of culture across the grishaverse countries come from the ~1800s when the attitude towards kids was that they weren't all that different from small, inexperienced adults, especially in working-class and rural settings where you just had to get on with things. Kerch especially took inspiration from victorian England, where kids as young as 9 could legally work up to 60 hours a week in dangerous conditions. So yeah that's kind of the whole point imo. It's especially interesting because I read the soc duology as a (potentially semi-unintentional?) criticism of capitalism. This is highlighted by the fact that Wylan, the only one of the crows from a rich background, is also the only one who had a childhood and got an education even vaguely comparable to what we would consider normal. So clearly the whole childhood innocence vs being put to work at like 4 thing is closely tied to class. (obviously Wylan did not have A Good Childhood but it seems from the books that the standard for merchers' kids is to give them a really good and varied education with 1-to-1 tutoring etc, which is very different from what all the other characters seem to have had as kids.)

And okay yeah they're unrealistically skillful and competent and just generally smart, but that would be the case even if they were adults. Like you kinda have to just take liberties with your characters of they'll never manage to do anything, especially in a world that's so hostile toward them. And it's actually kinda hard to even say how unrealistic their capabilities are because their experiences are so different from the experiences of real-life modern teenagers. Like kids are crazy adaptable and good at learning things, especially when they've had no other choice, and the crows actually mostly have quite a lot of experience and had time to develop their respective skills because they haven't spent 8+ hours a day in school for most of their lives. The same goes for the degree of adult-ness in their general behaviour - they're really quick thinkers and less likely to panic in a crisis than any teenager I've ever met. Again I'd say that's the whole point. The charaters are acting older than they have any right to because the experiences they've had have forced them to develop the capacity to do so.

Idk maybe i just read it differently to some people but yeah i think that cross-cultrually throughout the grishaverse children just have very very different experiences to kids in real life. It makes sense that they would then grow up to be very different from real-life teenagers, and obviously the crows are an extreme example of that but there is like. clear historical inspiration behind a lot of the crows' backstories and the general cultural backdrop of the duology. And the whole thing with the books is yeah they're doing all of this stuff and they're capable of these amazing things but actually they are literally children and they are doing all of it mostly for the sake of survival and taking back the things that they deserve from the world. And everything they've done for years and the people that they've become has all been for the sake of survival. And they're kids.

#my posts #soc #six of crows #i hope this makes sense i did not proofread it and i took like a total of one english class in school rip #there's also something to be said here for survivor bias like the book is written about this group of kids who've survived in a very #hostile world #partially because of certain capacities or gifts they already had and partially because they are unusually smart and adaptable #if they weren't then they wouldn't have lived to that age anyway yk?#okay ill stop now #also i know this piece of writing is not up to academic quality its because im using it to procrastinate on my academic work #dont go to school kids its not worth it #the fact that i wrote these 800+ words in less than an hour and im still gonna have to write twice as fast in my 4.5 hour exam next week #okay ill stop now im done

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taruruchi · 4 months

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it just clicked into my brain today bc sometimes i forgot you're also a stay LMAOOOOOOO I CANT USE MY BRAIN ANYMORE

HAJSNKFMSF I mean idt I ever explicitly said it so 😭 But yeah, all that stuff from last year complaining about how my sister was trying to get me to know stray kids...... Yeah. Yeah that worked a bit too well

#But I think I remember you mentioning you were also into them ??#If you were... I'm curious who your bias was if you had one 👁️👁️#Way back when my sister was really new to skz she wasn't sure who hers was yet and one of my friends said “she seems like a seungmin or i.n”#That aged REALLY well. Jeongin is her ult now and seungmin is her bias wrecker 😭#And I'm still baffled by the fact that SHE WAS SO RIGHT ABOUT WHO MY BIAS WOULD BE #HOW DID SHE DO THAT #EVEN I DIDN'T THINK IT AT FIRST #If I ever need someone to set me up with dates ik who to turn to /j (too busy being an academic weapon for dates 💪)#<- not even studying rn #☆ inside taruchi's ask box 💌#☆ a friend!! sol 🕯️

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darlingofdots · 1 month

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reading a study on sexual scripts in romance novels and not only did they define "contemporary romance" as "written after 1945" which is not at all what that means, their sample is winners of the RWA Rita award 1989-2009 which is a perfectly fine way to pick your sample, I guess, but it does not shock me that 90-95% of protagonists of those novels were Caucasian? Romance is too white but the RWA specifically has a history of racism in award choices so like

#your sample is off and you should address its bias #study is from 2011 so before the big meltdown in 2020ish #but STILL #dottie academes #dottie rambles #romance on main

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cypric-rat-hyperfixation · 1 year

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As my following grows and as I meet more and more people who have rats, had rats, know someone who has/had rats, and love rats...

increasingly I wonder if/when a day will come... a day that I'll express rat enjoyment to someone and they'll enthusiastically ask me if I've heard of This Funnie Little Rodent Blog they like, figuring I may already know it or will enjoy it if not...

and it's.. my blog... and then I have to come out as popular Rat Tumblr blogger that they follow and now know IRL.......

#/lh #I'm saying this like it's some big deal but I'm just exaggerating for comedic effect adjfgsbkdfj #no idea what the likelihood on that looks like. based on statistics of people estimating statistics? probably likelier than we all think #anyway that time I posted a survey for a university research project here and you all wound up comprising 2/3 of our sample was so funny #I had to actually say in an academic research paper that one possible flaw in our study #was bias that may result from 2/3 the sample having come from a niche and extremely specific demographic of people #due to the fact that they flocked in from One Of The Researchers' Substantial Online Following Centered Around A Particular Theme #And Selected Specifically To Have Only A Certain Kind Of Person On It Via Boundaries And Blocking #literally you all made up 98/150 respondents (but that's assuming all digital responses were from y'all-- we had 52 paper responses)#ah but the research symposium was the best. in the paper I was able to remain that generic about it #but at the research symposium. well it's a glorified science fair. so participants have their own stations set up and observers tour them #as the participants speak to their audience; directly providing a summary and then answering any questions #some of the audience/observers are faculty and most are fellow students #so real scholarly scientific types yeah? so they had questions. thoughtful questions #long story short I confessed to numerous listeners throughout the day that the sample's bizarre gender ratio is probably my fault #around 57% women; 21% nonbinary adults; 17% men-- an unusual proportion #so I had to academically tell my professors... underclassmen..... my classmates....... acquaintances.... foes..........#... that I'm big famous in Rat #and it was so. djkjSBCJXHQKRIGAJFSHF

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liberalfartsdegree · 11 months

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People on Twitter are arguing abt how academic conferences are useless money pits (true and not true) but the biggest “hot take” is that Twitter is better for professional networking than conferences

Which is just funny because gang. Friends. The sampling bias

#y’all are on Twitter and are extremely Twitter brained talking abt how it’s the best #like yeah that’s the confirmation bias #if you’re on Twitter all the time talking to other Twitter ppl then what’s going to happen is that you get to talk to more ppl on Twitter #that being said I don’t actually wanna talk to academics on Twitter!! y’all are kinda mean and stupid!!#and thirsty for attention to an unhealthy degree!!#don’t want to base my professional worth on going viral on a dying site run by techno fascists!!!

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religion-is-a-mental-illness · 1 year

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By: Abigail Anthony

Published: Apr 19, 2023

Princeton has long had a reputation as the open-minded Ivy. High-school students enduring the arduous college-application process will come across articles describing Princeton as hospitable to conservatives, while the university’s president, Christopher Eisgruber, recently claimed, “We have civil discourse on this campus.” But Princeton’s reputation for relative openness is no longer deserved. In recent years, Princeton has embraced the imperatives of diversity, equity, and inclusion, making it an unwelcoming space for anyone—conservative or liberal, religious or secular—who happens to dissent.

Princeton’s diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives are misnamed: They divide, exclude, and ostracize students of all political affiliations by rendering it socially dangerous to express any criticism of progressive mantras. Thirty-one academic departments have DEI committees, which could explain the land acknowledgements in syllabi and the deluge of departmental anti-racism statements that inform students what can and can’t be said in class. The university’s McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning offers recommendations for “inclusive teaching” and encourages instructors to “address blatantly offensive and discriminatory comments and hold students accountable for their behavior,” which seems to contravene the university’s adoption of the University of Chicago’s Free Speech Principles. Princeton’s Office of the Provost encourages departments to “develop a departmental procedure for the regular examination of syllabi to ensure the representation of a diverse array of scholars in the field” and to “redesign the curriculum to address inequities in access and retention.”

In the name of diversity, some requirements have been dropped and others have been added. In 2021, the Princeton classics department began “removing barriers to entry” and stopped requiring study of Greek or Latin, while the politics department introduced a Race and Identity track. The Provost recommends boosting the number of “underrepresented discipline-specific scholars and researchers to participate in departmental events.”

To ensure that faculty hiring results in a diverse work force, academic departments (possibly illegally) appoint a search officer who is the “only individual who can see the confidential individual, self-identified demographic data, including data about gender, race, and ethnicity,” and the officer should “monitor the recruitment and selection processes for tenure-track and tenured faculty positions.” The guidance states that “before the short list is sent to the associate dean for academic affairs or the deputy dean, the search officer must review it for gender and racial/ethnic representation.”

The search officer indicates to the search committee whether the applicant pool is diverse enough and recommends specific individuals without explicitly stating why, thereby circumventing federal and state laws prohibiting race-based hiring. Unsurprisingly, the university has documented a rise in Asian and black tenure and tenure-track faculty since fall 2018, while the white tenure and tenure-track faculty fell by 4.4 percent. Although Princeton doesn’t require diversity statements for hiring, the university has developed guidelines for departments that do wish to ask for such affirmations.

Despite these facts, many still claim that Princeton is insufficiently progressive. Since September 2021, three diversity, equity, and inclusion staff members have resigned from Princeton University alleging a lack of institutional, financial, and emotional support. Former employee J.T. Turner is a self-described “black queer nonbinary person” and a “DEI practitioner [of] 10 years” who was “hospitalized” due to the “highly macro-aggressive environment” in the athletics department. Jim Scholl, a former employee who is HIV-positive, recounted requesting a day off to receive the monkeypox vaccine in New York and being asked to join the morning meeting and work on the train, which supposedly displayed a “complete lack of empathy” for a “queer person trying to survive yet another plague.” The third former employee, Avina Ross, published the article titled “Angry Advocate Revelations,” describing how “exclusion, silencing, white guilt, compassion fatigue, and white assimilative practices” caused her “harm.”

When the Daily Princetonian reported on these resignations, conservatives ridiculed the staffers. Yet one important fact went largely unnoticed. According to the article, Princeton has “more than 70 university administrators whose primary responsibilities consist of diversity, equity, and inclusion.” That averages to about 1 DEI administrator for every 80 undergraduates.

When I inquired about the salary ranges for three DEI-related positions—including the position that Avina Ross held—the university clarified that these are “mid-senior level professional positions” and the expected salary ranges are “$75,000 plus for experienced professionals.” (For comparison, Princeton recently announced increasing graduate students’ fellowship and stipend to approximately $40,000.)

Princeton’s diversity bureaucracy functions as an ideological surveillance system that regulates the social and academic cultures. Freshman orientation has compulsory events that include “diversity and inclusion” in the session’s title, as well as mandatory programs on LGBTQ identity, “mindfulness,” socioeconomic status, and the university’s history of systemic racism.

Undergraduates seeking a bachelor of the arts are required to complete a course in the “Culture and Difference” field, which can be satisfied this semester with courses like “Body Politics: Black Queer Visibility and Representation,” “Police Violence, #BlackLivesMatter, and the Covid-19 Pandemic," “Asian-American Psyches: Model Minority, Microaggressions and Mental Health,” and “Black + Queer in Leather: Black Leather/BDSM Material Culture.”

In 2020, Eisgruber, the Princeton president, asserted that “racist assumptions from the past also remain embedded in structures of the university itself,” and he committed the institution to a wide range of anti-racism initiatives, such as “develop[ing] an institution-wide, multiyear action plan for supplier and contractor diversity […] and other business partners, including external investment managers.” This “action plan” quickly produced results: The university’s 2021-2022 DEI Report affirms that all $600 million worth of bond transactions were “led by a financial firm owned by people of color, women, veterans, and members of the LGBTQIA+ community.”

Princeton’s h.r. department offers a free “Inclusion & Diversity Certificate Program,” complete with courses like “Exploring White Identity,” “Ouch! That Stereotype Hurts,” and “Bias, Privilege, Power, & Workplace Communications.” Moreover, there are “Brave Spaces” for discussions which focus on different themes, such as inclusive language, privilege, and microaggressions. HR events include “LGBT Book Club: ‘Postcolonial Love Poem’” and “What Just Happened? Racial Anxiety in Our Work Relationships.” There are at least 11 employee resource groups, such as the “Network of African-American Male Administrators at Princeton,” which seek to provide “the opportunity to network, share knowledge, build allyship, connection, and increase cultural dexterity.” Princeton’s h.r. department also provides a curated list of resources to combat racism: recommendations include How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi and a 10-minute interview with Robin D’Angelo on her book White Fragility.

Extensive as the university’s diversity efforts are, they are insufficient for some undergraduates. Students demanded that the Lewis Center for the Arts implement biannual anti-racist, implicit-bias, and anti-oppression training for all faculty and staff. Students in the creative-writing department demanded affinity spaces for BIPOC students and clarified that “if spaces are created for white [creative writing] students, it is imperative that these spaces exist only as anti-racism learning spaces that are accountable to BIPOC.” Dance students demanded “deconstruct[ing] the association of ‘technique’ with whiteness” and “equitable auditions.”

Ultimately, the university’s allegedly “diverse” spaces are homogenous. They segregate—rather than integrate—individuals with different beliefs, backgrounds, and values. My class’s upcoming graduation in May will have at least five “affinity” celebrations, including an Asian Pacific Islander Desi American graduation, a Latinx graduation, Native American graduation, a Pan-African graduation, as well as Middle-Eastern, North-African, and Arab graduations. Graduation should be a time when all students are united by the accomplishment of completing four years of demanding education, rather than divided on the basis of immutable characteristics.

Meanwhile, the “inclusive spaces” immediately ostracize anyone who slightly disagrees with the orthodoxy du jour. For example, the university’s Gender and Sexuality Resource Center expanded the mission of the Women’s Center to encompass males and “nonbinary” individuals, and the center released a statement condemning the Dobbs decision, thereby clarifying that the center isn’t a space for women, but for people—of either sex—who subscribe to a certain ideology.

Princeton formerly had the motto Dei Sub Numine Viget, meaning “Under God’s Power She Flourishes.” Now, Princeton seems to have embraced a new definition of Dei and updated the motto: Under Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion She Flourishes. Students who hold a different creed should consider applying elsewhere.

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rebellum · 2 months

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Basically whenever you see something that gives evidence which makes you think "yeah, exactly! I always knew it!" you should look more into it.

This is re: the calorie post I just reblogged, but is also about that post from a year or two ago where people were like:

"LOOK THIS STUDY BLATANTLY SAYS NO DIETING EVER WORKS, YOU CANT LOSE WEIGHT FROM CHANGES IN FOOD INTAKE"

and the conclusion of the study was like "after studying these 8 fad diets we concludesd that the rate of weight loss evens out after 18 months"

so people were literally just straight up lying, and everyone reblogging it thought "this person says this study proves what I already think is true (that dieting can't work), so it must be true"

#like. a) dieting =/= fad diets.#b) yeah actually. dieting does work. for many people. like there are quite many people who lost weight due to diet and exercise.#c) the fact that dieting works doesnt mean that fatphobia is okay or something. both things can be true.#and like... links between things are very often WAY more complicated than it seems. theres always like 5 more factors #like to someone racist if they hear “this study shows schools in black-dominated areas achieve lower test scores and have fewer students #that receive academic scholarships“ theyre gonna be like ”YEAH SEE? BLACK PPL ARE STUPID“#when really a) test scores dont measure intelligence b) black dominated areas tend to be low income areas which have i) overworked teachers #ii) kids have life issues that impact their schoolwork. eg lack of food and housing security or violence.#iii) lack of things like free tutoring after school programs #iiii) lack of resources for students with disabilities (which are common in low income areas for MORE reasons)#c) scholarship committees that arent specifically devoted to affirmative action are often super racist #like... its not just racists or whoever that make these connections due to bias and lack of critical thinking. everyone does it.#including me and you.

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bijoumikhawal · 10 months

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Certain academics will say "we shouldn't call it Coptic art because that erases all the Greek and Roman people living in Egypt then" but they'll file art from periods when Egypt was still majority Christian even while under Islamic leaders as "Islamic art"

#cipher talk #Personally I'm not. Horribly offended by the latter but it's interesting to see what I've seen academic fussing over and what I haven't #Also its telling in the first case that they never mention the other groups that don't really fall under the Coptic label as being erased #(Most of the other groups are not considered 'European' which feels like bias but so does the whole conversation)#Also I have seen tefillin misfiled as 'Islamic art' because they happened to be made in Egypt which is weird

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mistprints · 1 year

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Follow therealspeechprof on YouTube for more great commentary

#higher education #acceptance #indoctrination #breaking out from beliefs #politics #learning #this is why diversity and inclusion is important though #so you get to actually meet people you may have never had the chance to #and it can break your conceived notions about them #preconceived bias #lgbtq #lgbtqia #things you learn in college #outside your hometown #it’s a cultural education as much as an academic one #and that’s important to be exposed to first hand

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ride-a-dromedary · 1 year

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I feel like the word “we” doesn’t belong on fanwikis anymore than it does other wiki articles - like “we” who? We the audience? We the specific fangroup? We who are interpreting information? We the individual who is writing the article that may have bias and limited view on the topic?

#like i'm not trying to nail a sign to the lawn that says no fun allowed #but a wiki is meant to be a source of information edited by fans correct?#sources of information should carry objectivity and distance from any bias of the author #it's not subjective information - it's unbiased objective information #'we' makes a text involved in itself which sways the reader #into instead of just reading the information and coming to their own conclusions from the detail #are persuaded into feeling as though 'oh well...if everyone else thinks this then - '#it's also alienating to new fans and may incorrectly sway them to think in a specific way #you know what i mean - idk maybe that's the academic writer in me #idk everytime i see the word 'we' i'm like *we*? not me we who is we??#jibber jabber blabber bluff

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kimyoonmiauthor · 1 year

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“But conflict and problem can be different, you misunderstand conflict. All stories need a problem.”

Is that what Lit profs are teaching you? ‘cause ummm... that is load grade A retconning there. Those are Lit profs that are scared that their knowledge might be *gasp* wrong, which it is. I’ve covered this multiple times and even found the origins of the conflict narrative.

Seriously, I think they need to do some studying of Writing Advice Books and Writing Theory itself before making such assertions. Honestly, it’s poor study of literature, from my POV, but I understand why the assumption was made. So let’s get into it.

Academics basically functions like this

You have a summer, usually, to read a bunch of books, but you don’t have time to read those books, so what do you do? You find other people who have read those books and find their takes on those books. The thing is that Writing Advice books, as I’ve griped over and over and over are traditionally poorly sourced. So if you find one, and read it, but only part of it, its’s really difficult to back trace where the ideas came from. But you have say, 3-4 months.

This leads to copy errors and so often the fallacies continue, until someone comes along and challenges the entirety of the copy errors (There is a great paper, for example, which I linked in the master post about Short Story Advice manuals and the origin of Writing Advice manuals started with short stories--if you’re thinking that’s after Poe, that is correct.)

So is it your teacher’s fault they listened to professors who couldn’t back trace and read all of say, Freytag and find out that he was really racist, ethnicist, etc? No. It isn’t. But the blind worship of him is. Because reading him took me with free time to spare a week because frankly he’s an asshole. (There is no milder way to put it.) He’s not a genius, BTW, because he didn’t publish that much. Nor is he lauded for those works in Germany because honestly, genocide and Germany no longer mix.

So basically people were picking and choosing without citation. Which is where I say, !@#$ Cite your works kids, it makes the academics happy. It’s not all about plagiarism. It’s also because people don’t want to call you ut for being an a-hole later and doubting your motives.

So forgive your teachers and take it from me that Writing theory is very poorly cited. And it took me forever and a day to figure out what I’m about to lay down. (And yes, I’m still working on connecting it.)

Conflict, from Percy Lubbock Craft of Fiction 1921

BTW, later attributed wrongly to Shakespeare, Aristotle, Brecht and a bunch of straight guys (Lubbock was gay, and came out much later, but tried to appear straight passing.)

I should note I pulled a lot of teeth tracking down this book and triangulating it. I read through the Aristotle to the 19th century, couldn’t find it, read through the 1940′s, couldn’t find it, took a few blind stabs, couldn’t find it, and then guessed after World War I, and using those previous points finally found it with the type of argument you expect from someone making a pioneering argument.

Complete text to check my work is here: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/18961/pg18961-images.html

“What is the story? There is first of all a succession of phases in the lives of certain generations; youth that passes out into maturity, fortunes that meet and clash and re-form, hopes that flourish and wane and reappear in other lives, age that sinks and hands on the torch to youth again—such is the substance of the drama. The book, I take it, begins to grow out of the thought of the processional march of the generations, always changing, always renewed; its figures are sought and chosen for the clarity with which the drama is embodied in them.“

Because I had an extreme amount of time, I actually looked for reasons he might have thought this way. He’s described mostly as a reluctant modernist. He was gay, as I cited, but not out. He did write this after WWI, and if you remember, the world was basically in chaos then. People thought the world was ending. There was a massive world war. War was no longer “fun” as LM Montgomery put it (Rilla of Ingleside covers this--BTW, still one of my favorite, if not my favorite WWI account books.). People saw the cost of war. There was also a big plague of 1918 prior. People were staring at a ton of sudden industrial flurry too. And so, by 1921, of course the world looks like a bunch of conflict. Of course people think things need to change.

But the question is in what direction?

Modernists

The Modernists, unlike what was taught to me, already had a start long before 1921. It wasn’t all in reaction to WWI. Some of it was people getting tired of the endless wars and making commentary on social conditions of industrialization. Édouard Manet is credited with starting the art version of it. And on the writing side, Gertrude Stein is mostly credited with the start, but you can see roots in other 19th century writers, such as John Ruskin George Elliot, etc. (She didn’t take it from nowhere.)

Yes, yes, some of the ideology was Marxism, though not formalized until later, but some of it was asking questions which were viewed as highly offensive. (I kinda of think Waldemar Januszczak's documentary series probably does the best job to lay down the principles for you in ways my art profs would approve of. I could cite snobby books for you, but Waldemar is fun to watch.)

If you want to look at the early modernists, and paintings like the Gleaners, it’s all questions about industrialization and its effects. The Modernists are by definition, anti-structuralist because industrialization feels like a lot of constraint, and the WWI part is a “See, I told you moment.” Modernists are also popular outside of Europe because of the destruction colonialism and imperialism has done to the rest of the world. (Also, not usually covered by Lit professors). Because Modernism questions industrialization and power structures, it’s not particularly popular with the elite beyond knowing of its existence, but it is popular with people who feel oppressed by those systems: Gays, Lesbians, Women, People of Color, etc.

Modernists embraced the flurry of activity from lower classes and the invitation to literature from the Rotary Printing Press.

But then you had...

The Structuralists

These are basically the opposite end of the Modernists--how do you make Capitalism work for you? Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) is usually credited for the start of Structuralism and Functionalism. (BTW, neither of which should be taught to you in the social sciences as anything more than long debunked, but so seductive to think about. I’ve covered over and over though how the writing community loves to hang onto theories from other fields that have long been debunked.) So you should be thinking Levi-Strauss, Durkheim, and a bunch of French Philosophers.

In this corner, you have Freytag (Germany needs to exterminate all of the Polish people and anyone outside of Germany is backwards and not worth your time because English Lit has gone down the drain compared to German Lit. And Freytag is the greatest writer of all time--greater than Shakespeare, even though he’s written far less plays. --;; This is basically the summary of his book.)

Structuralism is sexy because it says there is a formula to life: You just have to find it. And if you find the formula to control, manipulate, and put everyone into tiny little boxes, then you can beat the entire system, and in fact, help build the system.

Say like Michel Foucault did by sexually assaulting a bunch of boys https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/french-philosopher-michel-foucault-abused-boys-in-tunisia-6t5sj7jvw and had philosophy about the Panopticon, also scarring a bunch of French boys and girls at the same time. Or his theories about the mental health wards, which to my mind, made them worse, but you are free to disagree by reading his essays, which, to be clear, he made harder to access on purpose so he could sound like a rich academic. (I’m not a fan. And no, it’s not because he’s gay, but because his ideas went to scar generations of people and sexual assaulters being worshipped isn’t my favorite thing in the world.)

Levi-Strauss is mostly a dick, but I do like his essay on the Raw and the Cooked philosophy that was is not culture is often seen as “Nature” (Only works pretty much for Europe, because these French guys never really ventured outside of France). And anything in between is seen as Taboo good or Taboo Bad, but it’s an exercise in patience reading his work, because he tries to sound more academic, again, also because he’s pro-imperialism in a lot of ways and sounds absolutely racist.

But if there was a formula to control people and social structures, it might also work for books, and this is the side that your Lit Profs are usually taught as “Commercial” and “correct” writing, even superseding the actual philosophies of the Modernists, even if the Modernists, over and over objected to the Structuralists. You have both EM Forster and Virginia Woolf hating the fact that Percy Lubbock is breaking away from Modernism.

Likewise the Structuralists hated the Modernists--the amount of hate towards Gertrude Stein is high, which starts with Rowe, and continues with Lajos Egri and she gets snubbed by Syd Field when he boasts about knowing Modernist artists, and skips her over.

In the writing theory corner, the structuralists came late as theorists, So you’re looking at Roland Barthes, somewhat Bertolt Brecht, etc. Mostly the structuralists like to call on the powers of Shakespeare and Aristotle retcon them hard. It’s a tradition, you see, because Freytag started it. It’s a false call to authority (which BTW, people don’t understand the fallacy for). Because Shakespeare never said anything about his own writing. And most of the time it’s a decontextualization and misunderstanding of Aristotle (Whom I carefully cited on his ideas one by one.)

Honestly, though Barthes was writing in the 1960′s, and was only translated sometime probably in the 1980′s, (My loose theory is that the US wasn’t interested in Structuralism in the 1960′s, but the backlash in the 1980′s fit very well with the ideals. See Satanic Panic) by the 1980′s, in the US, Structuralism, as an idea in Sociology, Anthropology and History was losing a foothold (Along with the Great Man theory, which fed into the idea of Character-Driven v. Plot-driven. Both based in Imperialism, BTW.)

But as I said, the writing community loves, loves to hang on to old ideas and so, it gained steam and played well with the other writing advice books, which publishers had carefully selected to be, and I wish I was kidding, mostly White cishet abled men. Women got to publish in the 1980′s, sure about theory, but not quite in that section of the bookstore, so most of the writing advice is located either in academic texts out of the public eye, i.e. inaccessible, or in Memoirs, which people won’t read unless they are interested in the author.

This means, in the public eye, who aren’t questioning this, the Structuralists have won.

But what does that have to do with Conflict v. Problem?

Since conflict was invented in 1921, by structuralist/Modernist Percy Lubbock, whom again, needs to get more credit for his actual work (and preferably read in tandem with Forster and Woolf when examining writing theory), he actually did mean it to be conflict. Because that’s the word he uses over and over again. He did not mean problem. He meant it as the central driver of the story: Story Driver. This was his intention, which is picked up later by Rowe (no credit. !@#$ I have so many curse words for Rowe’s plagiarism. He was a university professor who got Shakespeare and Aristotle wrong and was called on it by Lajos Egri, dammit.), and mainly Syd Field, who popularized the Three Act (though it got away from him in the 1970′s-1980′s. I’m still working out how).

This was doubled down by Brecht (1898- 1956), because the “proper” model is that the climax is the main character’s lowest point. The discourse is that it “Makes the story interesting” But Brecht’s first assertion was that it would show what the character was truly made of. If you notice the dates, he lived through a ton of trauma. SO of course he’s going to think that. I should note he hated Aristotle. (Aristotle got the credit later for his ideas. --;; It’s not completely wrong on one hand to make them join together, but the motivation for both is very, very different.)

Brecht absolutely, and positively did mean conflict. I mean look, he lived through 2 world wars, several other wars, a pandemic, and of course he’s going to think that conflict could show the worth of a person. What do you think? But unlike Aristotle who is using it as negative reinforcement, Brecht is viewing it as a way to uplift, because what? The person gets out of the conflict.

If you don’t believe me, then let’s look at Romance as an example (Note that most Romance authors know this is not a healthy relationship.) You have introduction, cutemeet (Inciting incident), and the climax is what? Let’s say it together: The couple breaks up. This is following the Brecht model. The conclusion is that the characters get back together.

Is this healthy? No. Do people encourage you to do it in real life? Hell no. In fact therapists say if you are in a cycle of doing this, it’s unhealthy and to find better conflict resolution.

Action movies? What’s the worst fear for the main character? Let’s make it become true.

Horror movies: Highest anxiety is met by making the worst become true.

This was the accepted formula.

Saying it was always problem, is retconning Literary history without the text support, in which case, you shouldn’t do that, and often Lit profs lecture heavily against it.

Then why does my teacher say problem?

Honestly, the education system is poor. Your professor/teacher should be teaching Shakespeare like the Historians do and talking about Morality. As they put it bluntly: Honor the Monarchy, or get your head chopped off.

They should be talking Emotionality with the Gothic writers and John Locke.

They should be talking about Discovery.

About Naturalism, and all of the ideas that flooded the 19th century, but the truth is they weren’t really taught those things, and working from one formula, hearing someone talk about “But not every story has conflict” it’s hard to switch ideologies when it’s rooted that hard into your psyche.

So then, you start with, “Well, if not conflict, then problem.” Because the later thought is, if there is no problem then will not be interesting.

But let’s challenge that thought.

Is human motivation purely conflict? This is the question the Modernists actually rose, if you bother to look at them.

Do humans not also cooperate?

Gleaners, again. Art. But it asks a lot of questions about human cooperation.

I mean if you’ve watched reality TV shows and read the comments on Youtube, the same comment pops up over and over--they are sick of the conflict in reality TV shows and applaud the cooperation narrative and rat on the US for being terrible and manufacturing such things, even going so far as saying the judges are better when they aren’t doing that and comparing regionalities of shows with each other. Even “It’s Me or the Dog” has taken down most of the These are terrible owners” aspects of the show, because people like compassion too.

People actively complain when they feel like the conflict is created by the producers. Do humans not have points of fascinating discovery about the world and themselves?

This is where the Futurists and the eventual Speculative Fiction roots actually come from. The exploration of this question.

Do humans not have systems by which they need to teach the next generation how to live?

What are Children’s books for? But generally, a lot of folktales, either cautionary or not are talking along this line. Apache stories, BTW, from my looking at own voices talk about their stories say that their stories also teach parents and adults too. Because they design it so it means different things at different stages of your life.

Do humans not have questions about morality?

I mean the whole of Star Trek, if you think about it. Star Wars? Rashomon? Should that morality enforce the given powers or challenge it? (And you can see why Privileged Elitists hate this one. OMG, you’re challenging the structuralists powers.) Adam Bede? Most of George Elliot’s writing.

Might be unintentional, but Tolkien had a ton of morality in his work. And you have to be kidding me if you seriously think CS Lewis can’t be examined through this lens. He put Jesus. Figurative Jesus and bragged about it in his novels for children. And he tried to get Tolkien to embrace Christianity too. (Which drove Tolkien up the wall sometimes... since Tolkien was pro-Science they had quite the up and down friendship.)

Do we lack emotions? What separates us from animals? Are humans robots?

Every robot story ever. But the fundamental of this is always what separates us from being terrible people?

But is the greatest part of humanity its ability to remember?

Regret stories are often like this. Not a surprise that Foucault hated Confession Stories since they operated on memory and regret. If you view What Dreams May come through memory, the story transforms.

And the thing is that stories are flexible enough to encompass all of these. There may be some we don’t know or have lost along the way. They can drive the story forwards. There’s stories there the events are selected around themes or tone as well.

Backfire Effect and why call it a problem?

But the actual problem is that when you’re taught one way, and suddenly challenged there is another way, you think everyone hates your way, but that’s not what’s happening and you’re shown alternatives, so you often have what would be called “selection bias” and “correlation bias”. You might be challenged like I just demonstrated that Brecht and Lubbock were wrong. There isn’t one way and we shouldn’t be boiling stories down that way, so you need to preserve your base belief (This, folks, is called the Backfire effect).

Of course every story has a problem, even when faced with child stories like: I saw a dog. The dog licked me. I liked it. The dog was fun.

If you were to try for correlation and selective bias it would look like this.:

The problem clear is that there is a dog, see... and and...uhhh, the inciting incident is that the dog licked the kid. And see.. the climax is that the kid liked it. OK, it doesn’t fit the Brechtian model, but see that’s tension, right there. And the “Denouement” is that the kid found the dog is fun. The other tactic is to state: This is not a story. Look, the kid doesn’t face any problems. It’s not that interesting. Sure it has a narrative set of events that are strung together by a central theme, but is it a story? (And then loose canon, no.) But will the kid themselves call it a story? Probably. Are you going to tell a little kid to their face that it doesn’t pass academic rigor, therefore it’s not a story? If you say yes, I’m going to ask what is wrong with you?

BTW, Japanese would call that a story that fits Kishotenketsu. The I saw a dog is the introduction. The “The dog licked me” is development. The “I liked it” is the emotional height/twist and a discovery. The result is “the dog was fun.”

But if you want to see it, without looking at the paratext, you’ll always find what you’re looking for, but this is super true if you don’t read the entire text. (Say Bible Thumpers who don’t read the entire passage before waxing on and on, until you contextualize it for them.)

And so, they need to put it down to “Problem”. They see the story of Spirited Away, which is about self discovery and memory as boiling down to problem. But I’d beg, beg people who watched the movie this way to go back, read up on Kishotenketsu, and look specifically for where the memory and discovery parts are and pause and think which model works best? Is there really a problem? Chihiro doesn’t remember everything that happens by the end of the movie. Her problem of moving to a new town isn’t solved like it would be in a Syd Field formula. How she approaches it, also isn’t solved. But there is some core to the movie that grabs your emotions: And that is discovery of memory and questions of how it works. If you watch it this way, then the movie opens up a lot more. (Also, makes me cry more because I’m less invested in feeling anxious or expecting depression.)

And this is where I say, that saying there is more than conflict or problems isn’t a threat to Conflict as a Story Driver. I loved Wandavision for using Discovery and Conflict as the story drivers.

Conclusion

Percy Lubbock’s original treaties was hated for being too reductive: I side with Woolf and Forster on this one. But I also side on Percy Lubbock’s side that it’s good to have academic discourse and tools to talk about the academic discourse. Selden Whitcomb, BTW, demonstrates this very, very well in Study of a Novel (1887). He goes over several novel types in his PoV and looks at the macro and microcosm of the novel. So it’s not saying that the conflict narrative is never true. It’s saying that maybe add more tools to your toolbox and refine your toolbox so you can sort like Selden Whitcomb did. I mean he managed to delineate between braided essays, the main plot, the plot chain, and examine different novel types enough to impress Esenwein, a school teacher and then have Kenneth Rowe plagiarize from both of them. (Still cursing Rowe. You seriously thought you wouldn’t be caught?) If academia can do that and teach signs and reasons, then wouldn’t we achieve Lubbock’s goals better than he imagined?

Knowing about different story structures and ways of doing things helped me to read Aristotle better. I understood where the error about 3 act began because I understood I was originally reading the text wrong. The main points are at the end, because of the QED model. You give lines of evidence, and then the main thesis is at the end. And this is an error a lot of people make when reading Greek texts. But thinking about that, don’t you want to reread the texts in that light and have better discourse? Because the Five Paragraph essay wasn’t invented until the 19th century where the thesis and topic sentence is near the beginning. It’s also saying that humanity is far, far richer than inducing depression and anxiety in people like the Functionalists and Structuralists wanted for people. Sometimes, we want that as storytellers, yes--but why not explore the awesome breath of humanity itself and give yourself more options to explore it when one is writing story? This is what I beg of you and your teachers. Think of humanity as better than only creating problems and conflict. Some of the other stuff are humanities’ greatest weapons and ponders the nature of humanity a lot deeper than saying that humans are all conflict or cooperation (via the 1980′s docs on chimps v. bonobos. They do both, BTW.)? So why not take that journey?

#Story Structure #BUT PEOPLE CONFUSE CONFLICT WITH PROBLEM #conflict #selection bias #cooralation bias #backfire effect #the problem with academics is

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caroloftheshells · 2 years

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long post re theory pedagogy again

the other thing about that vid (and another thing! lol) being that hierarchically a lot of the people doing the more interesting or out-there research and diversifying the field from a content perspective (and, tbh, demographically) are like grad students or early-career people who don’t even necessarily have any pedagogical flexibility & tend to be slotted in to teach lower-level theory courses-- whose outcomes are predetermined not only by general screwy nasm strictures but by whatever the professor down the line in the curriculum is teaching / expects people to know when they get there. and we get paid (much) less also than tenured professors. which is really a generic “thing about all academia” that doesn’t necessarily become a nefarious personal flaw on the part of said scholars and instead ought to be addressed at a structural level bc the scale of the issue exceeds individual instructors’ spheres of influence.

BUT music occupies such a fucked “totally separate from society” space in many ppl’s imaginations that it’s like oh man how dare it have the same issues as every other field of scholarship bc it shouldn’t “really” be a matter of scholarship in the first place. ie music is culturally rendered a “nothing matters just feel it” / “everything is ephemeral and there is only Innate Talent and nothing can be taught” sort of field such that any intellectualizing thereof &/or suggestion of learnabilty / non-innateness is deemed, like, boring & regressive by some people & i’d say especially people raised with a certain awareness of the “composer-genius” culture of wam education. like i’m completely on the “fuck partwriting parallel fifths are awesome” train as a matter of taste (for example) but that does not mean that learning what parallel fifths are-- and why some old european guys didn’t like them *bc they preferred it to sound like there was more than one voice and it’s easier to create that perceptually w/o an overtone effect* (eg)-- is going to like destroy your artistic Essence and make you a worse musician bc now you’re no longer an empty vessel put on this earth to channel brahms or whoever. & plus i think perpetuating the synonymizing of theory-as-field with wam harmonic rules not only is like factually misrepresentative of current research but also is sort of a self fulfilling prophesy such that ppl who would otherwise have completely fascinating things to say & questions to ask are discouraged from non-platitudinous & open-ended (theoretical) inquiry re the content and aims of their own rep & listening, and tacitly learn that composers’ ~~genius~~ descended from the heavens & you either get it or you don’t, you either “have talent” as a composer or you don’t, et cetera

#Which I Maintain is dangerous not bc i think there is a set method of learning all music(s) obviously but bc that's how you get like #weird essentialism & i'm thinking especially abt anecdotes i've heard re: vocal pedagogy where ppl have been subjected to (...)#racial discrimination; gender discrimination; fatphobia / discrimination based on having or not having a certain 'look' to go w your voice #& told they are 'naturally' inclined to sing or study certain genres of music & shouldn't try anything else (not even ranges! whole genres)#which is maybe sort of tangential but i think stems from this same deal of 'you just have to Feel it' & such #the idea of music as ephemeral and quasi-spiritually channeled such that you lose something if you approach it w scrutiny #or if you have to break it down in a way that; in its detail & precision; reads as divorced from immediate aesthetic judgment #the idea that there's some magic there not to be explained; that composition thus is a special ineffable pursuit for special people. bleh #& the... in depth research and nuance and hesitancy to have a snappy take that like ime culturally describes many theorists. is good #& is; again ime; something valued by several music scholars who sought it out as a Way Out Of a certain brand of meritocratic bullshit #toward a different brand of weird pedantry of course but i think it has its place despite being hooked academically 2 a toxic music culture #in the sense that; for sure; there are egregious issues; but the repertoire bias is unilaterally present in wam circles #& it's like well. your problem is 'with' the textbooks but since when has a so called 'voice degree'#at your average som / public institution without enormous fucking tons of money #unlike idk berklee lol #actually regarded choral singing; musical theatre; art song; rock vocals; et cetera with the same seriousness as a wagnerian opera career #and made a variety of music available from a performance perspective as well. i mean my undergrad was vaguely ok here but On The Whole...#bigger fish re funding in notated-music industry and degrees as job prep for shrinking market etc #anyway though...... i value myself too much to be a youtuber lol #imagine me appending that 'just saying things recreationally' post to this post #carol overreacts to life #theorycomp tag

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