Daisy Hildyard’s TLS review of What We Talk About When We Talk About Books, by Leah Price, is mainly about countering the familiar story of “the demise of the printed book: […] the digital medium is killing print and destroying our capacity to read long books”; what I’m posting here, however, is a digression that was of more interest to me:
Elsewhere, when Price steps outside the academy, she expands the sense of what books can be. She attends an event organized by The Reader, a Liverpool-based charity which runs community reading groups. Price describes the experience of reading gratuitously after years of training herself to focus on the formal aspects of texts. In her university seminars, it would be unusual for class members to discuss, for example, how much they like the characters in a novel. Reading aloud, without a syllabus, was eye-opening. “I expected the group to feel cosy. Instead the room felt raw, exposed.” There is a sense that she is somehow chastened by the reminder that books have many extracurricular lives.
This is something I have felt, too. Last year, while teaching at a university, I also took over the running of a reading group in a retirement community and care home. In the seminar room, I would guide undergraduates away from general pronouncements on moral behaviour or on their personal experiences, and towards the words in the text. In the Over-60s reading group, however, I found that we would tend to approach a story by considering how it resonated with our own experiences, and that these discussions could feel raw and exposing, as Price describes. At other times, the readers would ask heretical (to me) questions – discussing, for example, whether they believed the author to be a good person – and when they joked around, as they often did, I couldn’t discipline them. While these discussions could involve misreadings or a drift away from the text, the sessions also felt more urgent and more joyful tha[n] the careful, within-the-parameters approach to literature deployed in educational institutions.
This is yet another example of déformation professionnelle. It is entirely understandable that professional historians and critics of literature have to wean themselves off normal ways of reading — they have other goals than the average reader and need to take part in the current discourse of their profession, whether that revolves around structures, politics, reception, colonial history, or whatever is in vogue at the moment — but it’s sad in a way that a surgeon having to get used to the sight of blood isn’t. It divorces the professional from what everyone else takes to be the value and importance of literature and turns it into a more or less abstract object of study like quarks or mitochondria. Vera Dunham read shelves full of dreadful exemplars of Stalinist “socialist realism” to write her classic book In Stalin’s Time: Middleclass Values in Soviet Fiction
This is all pernicious nonsense. Ordinary readers are right to ignore the formal aspects of texts and focus on how much they like the characters and how a novel resonates with their personal experiences; that’s an important part of what literature is for, and to the extent that writers lose interest in it and appeal exclusively to professional reader-analysts, their writing withers on the vine. The older I get, the more grateful I am that I never got sucked into academia, where I would have had to at least pretend to care more about theory than books; I can read whatever I want and respond to it with disgust or enthusiasm based on its appeal to me personally, though of course my reactions have been greatly informed and altered by my extensive reading of good critics and historians. No offense to my academic readers — I have the greatest respect for what you do, I’m just glad I don’t have to do it myself!
…to the extent that writers lose interest in it and appeal exclusively to professional reader-analysts
Like who? I can’t imagine a writer aiming at critics and at graduate students looking at subtexts. What am I missing?
Horace is supposed to have said that his works were destined to be pored over as school texts (although I can’t find the reference at present.)
But to be fair to Horrible Horace, he regarded this as a Bad Thing.
(Moreover, he was, of course, quite right.)
“I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of insuring one’s immortality.” -attr. James Joyce
Like who? I can’t imagine a writer aiming at critics and at graduate students looking at subtexts.
Writers in the US these days (I can’t speak to elsewhere) have very often been shaped by writing classes and workshops where they are trained “to focus on the formal aspects of texts”: “In her university seminars, it would be unusual for class members to discuss, for example, how much they like the characters in a novel.” This is the audience they are often aiming at. Even reviewers for general publications often seem to pay a great deal of attention to striking metaphors of the sort that get noticed by teachers but not so much by ordinary readers.
Obviously, I exaggerate for effect; this is one of the pleasures of not being a professional.
Also, I probably shouldn’t even have mentioned writers, since they’re not relevant to my main point, which is the sadness of having to read “professionally.” As I wrote in my review of A History of Russian Literature (a great work of scholarship):
I can’t imagine a writer aiming at critics
writers, since they’re not relevant to my main point, which is the sadness of having to read “professionally.”
i think a major effect of the university-writing-workshop as the surest path towards publication has been precisely the creation of a cohort of writers (almost everyone under 60 publishing ‘literary fiction’ with the big five? four? houses in the u.s.) whose work is shaped on the one hand by the demands and preferences of the ‘professional readers’ who hat has anatomized, and on the other by the ‘mass-marketable* narrative’ conventions of the u.s. film industry. this scylla & charibdis situation is part of why so much of the literary fiction those houses put out is not only dull, but dull in the same ways – despite the incredibly varied and vibrant work that’s being written, published (by small houses & antipublishing projects), and eagerly read right now.
whether this was an active part of the CIA’s intent when it funded the Iowa Writers Workshop to create the model (it wasn’t alone: the U.S. State Department & Rockefeller Foundation helped too), is a somewhat related question. vera dunham has actively chosen to work with material that comes from a state project of marginalizing “true literature”, and takes that into account in her analysis; that’s not true of most of the u.s. critics and academics who work on mainstream (read: big publisher / heavily promoted) contemporary literature.
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* in the industry’s eyes, of course: the model** taught explicitly at USC and other industry feeder schools*** excludes precisely the stories, central characters, and narrative strucures that (when they do appear) have much wider appeal than most industry product. those works, of course, are never seen as expanding what’s possible, but presented as flukes never to be emulated.
** basically “a man learns something through an interpersonal conflict but doesn’t have to change his life much”, with some room for variations.
*** my source is a late 2010s USC film school graduate who gave me an earful throughout their time there.
This ties into another issue, which I have probably mentioned before. There is a tendency, especially among professors who may think of research as their primary job, to focus on teaching students to do what professors do in their professional lives, rather than the teaching them about a subject itself. That is, they may teach students how to study field X, rather than the important facts of field X. History, for example, is a fundamentally important topic to learn about—because knowing what has happened in the past is valuable for making decisions about the future. Yet there is an unfortunate tendency, even in many lower-level collegiate history classes, to spend less time on the pertinent facts and focus more on studying the documentation of history. Understanding how we know what we know has its place, of course, but it is easily forgotten that that is a secondary topic. Just because professional historians expend much of their effort dealing with difficult sources and assessing their credibility, that does not mean that learning how to grapple with such sources is the most important part of learning history.
I grapple with this issue in my own teaching. Next week, I start my summer section of Physics 202, an introductory, algebra-based class in electricity and magnetism. In fact, I have taught every E & M class my department offers, from Physics 202 up to the graduate-level courses in classical and quantum electrodynamics. However, the purposes of the classes can be very different. In Physics 202, the students are there to learn about the functioning of simple electromagnetic forces, fields, and circuits. Different parts of the course will be of central importance to different students. For most future electrical engineers, the circuit theory is the most important topic, while electrostatics is more important for the pre-meds; but it is all of practical importance to somebody. (A few summers ago, I did, however, have one pre-med student accost me after class, complaining that the class was too hard, and it was therefore wasting his valuable time, since nothing in electrodynamics was going to be important when he was a doctor. Both his parents were neurologists, and they had told him so.)
Things will be very different when I teach Physics 703 in the fall. This is a graduate course, following Jackson’s Classical Electrodynamics. (It’s a course that almost all physics graduate students in North America, and much of Europe, take, although I never did, since I got my degree in applied math—although it was not required of the physics students at MIT either.) In this class, the students are not there primarily to learn about electromagnetic phenomena, but rather to build a toolkit of mathematical and conceptual strategies for solving unknown problems, because, unlike Physics 202, this is a class for teaching students how to be professional researchers. A few years ago, we even changed the name of the course to Classical Field Theory I, to emphasize that it was about general methods in field theory, with E & M mostly just serving as an example theory. In fact, a lot of the techniques I teach are applicable in quantum mechanics and elsewhere. I saw this in action with one of my current research students. We were looking at a problem in theoretical cosmology, and the expression we had arrived at looked quite ugly. He suggested inserting a complete expansion in spherical harmonics,* and after quite a bit more algebra, that turned out to give us a tractable answer.
This kind of approach was also explicitly discussed in the preface to the Intermediate Quantum Mechanics** textbook written by my advisor and his advisor. They said that the book’s very lengthy discussion of atomic physics, including many different kinds of approximations, was not in spite of the fact that the structure of atoms is an essentially completely solved problem—but in fact because of it. The idea was to introduce and demonstrate the functioning of all these approximations in a realm (atomic physics) that was extremely well understood at all levels, so that learners could then adapt those same approximations to nuclear or solid state physics, where the fundamental problems are not all solved already.
* It’s almost a mantra in quantum mechanics, that if you don’t know what to do, try inserting a complete set of states. Feynman’s derivation of the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics involves inserting a infinite number of complete sets of states.
** Despite the name, it is definitely an advanced text.
I never used these textbooks, but I remember looking at them when I was an undergrad. Jackson was beautifully typeset on beautiful paper. Bethe was typeset with a typewriter or something like it and printed with cheap offset. That to me is a big factor in the readability of any book. And I’m glad Linotype is dead and gone.
Like who? I can’t imagine a writer aiming at critics and at graduate students looking at subtexts. What am I missing?
I’d say: like any recent winner of the Booker prize. I find those things contrived, formulaic (not in the sense of having a predictable plot, but in the sense of having some obtuse meta-game going on, a kind of in-joke with the Booker judges), and peopled with cardboard cut-out characters whose purpose is as ciphers.
Case in point: 2013 The Luminaries, set in colonial New Zealand. I read it not because it won the prize, but because it’s set in NZ. It was turgid. People told me that if you persevered past the first 50 pages, it suddenly woke up. Then they told me the same after the first 100 pages. It didn’t. ” the longest work to win the prize in its 45-year history”. There was negligible NZ content — it could have been set in any Anglo-speaking frontier town. There was some game going on with the Chapter sub-titles that added nothing to the action.
The Luminaries “was begun at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop,” [wikipedia]. No surprise.
Yes, I was recently reading about a book where A was married to B but in love with C who was in love with… and all the significant glances and hidden messages and pregnant pauses and things left unsaid, and I was grateful I was reading a summary with quotes instead of the damn novel, and I thought “Who cares? This has been done a million times! Isn’t there something else to write about?” Which is unfair, there is still music to be written in C major, like the man said, but still. Dare to be different!
there is still music to be written in C major, like the man said…
This is good! What man was that?
(On the other hand, some other wag once said that Philip Glass acts like he invented the C major scale.)
Arnold Schoenberg. (Allegedly said to his advanced composition class at UCLA, ca. 1940. I don’t vouch for its accuracy, but it’s frequently quoted.)
there is still music to be written in C major
And still music to be played in C major. I never tire of Bach’s Prelude 1.
Rather than The Luminaries, I could have used my long-book time much more effectively re-reading Tristram Shandy, or Ulysses, or Gulliver’s travels, or The Divine Comedy, …
I could have used my long-book time much more effectively re-reading Tristram Shandy, or Ulysses, or Gulliver’s travels, or The Divine Comedy, …
A lot of modern web novels actually make for pretty decent long books (though usually not quite as good as the classics you mentioned, but then those are classics for a reason), and most of them make no pretenses of being high-class prose (OTOH, playful chapter subtitles, and/or titles, are extremely common).
And then there’s fanfics…
i’ll second J1M, and say that even on paper, there’s plenty of good stuff being published – just not by the “majors”.
it’s not long, but jackie ess’ Darryl [Clash Books, 2021] is one of the best comic novels i’ve read in a long time, and along the way has a lot more interesting things to say about the trump y”sh years than almost any other work of fiction i’ve read. YMMV, of course, but i think reading a few pages will tell you if it’s not for you, and by me that’s a reasonable crosscheck to do in a bookstore (unlike AntC’s advisors’ suggestions).
The digital medium has single-handedly saved the scientific monograph, which had become unpublishable. The very large (300–400 pp.) open-access papers I know (I wrote one of them) are getting cited fairly often, so apparently somebody is capable of reading them…
the digital medium is […] destroying our capacity to read long books
To the contrary, the digital medium is allowing us to read books much longer than most printed works. War and Peace is considered an extremely long book at 587 thousand words, but this would be (almost) unremarkable by fanfic standards and probably on the lower side by web novel standards; in fact many of the latter reach into the millions (Worm is about 1.7 million words long; its sequel Ward is even longer).
https://xkcd.com/1414/
“web novel” then.
I remember a Chinese boy (or girl? Anyway, a high school student) speaking about net novels, and a bit of googling convinced me that the term is mostly used in China. I tried “web novel” and my impession was that there simply is not an established English name… Was not, back then, several years ago.
Worm is about 1.7 million words long
Previously on LH.
Described as “web serial” by the author though. Wikipedia in turn has one line for “web serial” and one line for “web novels”. And a page for cell phone novel.
I think Chinese net novels are worth an entry at least…
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And where is my clay tablet novel? It was written on palm stalks and turned to dust:(
This tendency to assign analyzable texts instead of readable ones has even infected the Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces. Its selection from the Shahnameh used to be the wonderful Rostam and Sohrab; now they’ve dropped that because it’s supposedly stained with Orientalism (oh sure, all the biology students in my survey course have read Arnold!) and substituted the Eskandar chapter, presumably because you can say cool things about Orientalism with it. (And try organizing a unit on Islamic literature with an anthology that throws medieval Christian and Islamic texts in a bag called “Around the Mediterranean” and doesn’t include Rumi, Hafez, Attar or Sa’di!) And the selection from Cao Xueqin used to be the eminently relatable bit with the unbearable jockboy Xue Pan throwing innuendo at the author-figure Bao-yu because he can’t understand why Bao-yu gets the girls; now it’s, I don’t know, I can’t find a thread in it, you’re probably supposed to talk about the class mentalities or something.
This tendency to assign analyzable texts instead of readable ones has even infected the Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces
Isn’t this kind of problem inherent in a project that pretends to be an “Anthology of World Masterpieces,” a title so completely meaningless that whatever’s in it is bound to offend someone’s sensibilities?
I don’t think you can really group “professional readers” in MFA programs and “professional readers” in literature departments in the same bucket. They very rarely apply for the same jobs, in any event.
Fair enough, but neither of them can afford to read like yer plain man in the street, and that causes unfortunate distortions, which is my point. It’s fine to point out subtleties the ordinary reader is likely to miss — that’s pretty much what criticism is for, if you ask me — but once you start guiding students “away from general pronouncements on moral behaviour or on their personal experiences” you’re failing them and literature both, like a medieval barber draining excessive amounts of blood in a futile effort to ward off sickness.
I read John Barth’s Sot-Weed Factor as a feckless undergraduate and was blow away. I came to reread it recently and was again blown away, this time by its bitterness. This gives me an opportunity to ask others’ opinion, if any, of Barth’s shorter Menelaiad (from Lost in the Funhouse), eg as read by a perceptive copy editor? [It calls out to be punctuated according to the system
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pm-notation/
invented by Whitehead and Russel for their Principia Mathematica …]
When I was a young lawyer I worked briefly at a small firm. There were two senior associates – lawyers with hopes of becoming partners – who worked mostly for one fairly evil name partner. They did what they were told, and they did it with enthusiasm. We junior lawyers called these guys the running dogs.
Actually the word “Masterpieces” was removed from the Norton’s title some while ago, and no wonder, to be replaced with “Literature.”
Fair enough, but neither of them can afford to read like yer plain man in the street, and that causes unfortunate distortions, which is my point.
Yeah, I’m not really sure what my point is beyond “it’s more complicated than eggheads-versus-everypersons.” I agree with the idea that studying literature is different than reading it for fun—this seems as fundamental as the idea that linguists who study language don’t do the same things as people who use language for fun.
There seems to be a rift in university literature departments versus old-skool close readers and digital-humanitarians/big-data-mavens—both factions including people who study hoity-toity writing and those who study mass-market stuff. Many of them look down their noses at MFAs, and definitely scoff at people who get doctorates in creative writing. And everyone is trying to figure out how to get paid for their writing outside of universities because university employment has basically become a pyramid scheme.
Actually the word “Masterpieces” was removed from the Norton’s title some while ago, and no wonder, to be replaced with “Literature.”
I’m not sure that this is an improvement, since the idea of culturally nonspecific (or perhaps, “culturally nonspecific” in the sense of “intelligible to Western university students”) great literature that can be compiled as the Same Kind of Thing is baked in to the project, whatever label you slap on it. I don’t think the problem is that the canon is defined according to incorrect criteria; I think the problem is that the idea of some common ground from which you can assemble Great Literature that is obviously intelligible as such is based on faulty premises.
“Masterpieces” sounds as “Homer, Shakespeare and Ferdowsi”. And, say, Tolstoy. A classification based on reputation. I would not expect a “selection” from Shahnameh, though: a similar Russian edition is 200 volumes and did not include Cao Xueqin for some reason. I never wanted to own it.
But it was an excuse to translate and publish (about 300 000 copies each) some funny stuff. Likely for someone who wants to spend a winter without the Internet and does not have a selection of her own it is a nice thing to have.
Eventually, the question is: are catalogues of any use? Lists like “10 best poems about time travel” or cathegories in Wikipedia, or those poetesses from 19th century Kokand that I once referenced here and then mentioned again – any lists. If you like, a list of all pre-modern books that have ever been translated to English is yet another list similar to Norton (and not too large). I do use lists.
And either the answer is “no” and lists are not useful – or we will have to think what kinds of lists we need.
A “list of books famous in those literary traditions that are famous here” is useful but sub-optimal. What is optimal then?
The problem* with Orientalism was that it was one-sided. Narcissism is not a cure for this.
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* I know, not exactly this and it was a продажная девка империализма. But eventully: one-sided in interpretation and selection.
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P.S., well, I do not know. Maybe colonialism- and imperialism-bashing guys will eventually learn how to live better. I am instinctively suspicious because in USSR we bashed tsarism, imperialism and colonialism more. But our (nominal) tools were marxism-leninism, dialectical materialism and historical materialism, the community was less free and bashing was symbolic. Worse, when it was not symbolic, it involved bloodshed:-/ We did not learn anything, and particularly we did not learn to bash Communism too. We just got fed up.
Oh продажная девка империализма actually works in both contexts perfectly!
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“Around the Mediterranean” evoked an unpleasant memory of reading Mark Twain’s account of his Mediterranean cruise. Jokes like “Moroccan women cover their faces because they are sooo ugly!”. But it was idiocy rather than an -ism.
Your last paragraph, Languagehat, expresses my thoughts/feelings/experience perfectly. I learned a lot in grad school (especially from Gary Saul Morson) but would have been an absolutely miserable academic.
A “list of books famous in those literary traditions that are famous here”
That’s exactly what I want (or did, I retired this spring) to teach working-class young folk in Central Appalachia, “Hey, isn’t this great stuff! They did it everywhere! There are some big names!” Of course, as John Cowley says somewhere, you’re really just hoping that if they run across a name later on, they may remember they heard it already.
*Crowley. No relation to Malcolm.
@Rodger C: I mostly think of John Crowley as “the other guy who wrote a novel called The Deep in 1975.”
I would like to also express relief that I didn’t get further into academia. I am almost certain I could have easily ended up writing “The Tug-Boat: Seminiferous Cetacean Metaphorism and Re-Queering the Queequeg Paradigm of Chapter 43 of Moby-Dick: A Foucaultian Neo-Heideggering” or whatever, and ended up hating the books and myself.
I’m sure you could get “Re-Queering the Queequeg Paradigm” published on the basis of the title alone.
I mostly think of John Crowley as “the other guy who wrote a novel called The Deep in 1975.”
And brought out by the same publisher! Were they all stoned?
But try Little, Big. Or, if your haleine isn’t that longue, The Translator or Four Freedoms are good places to start.
Wasn’t it Daniel Dennett who defined a heidegger as “an exceedingly tough boring instrument” and derrida as “a French nonsense refrain”?
*Crowley. No relation to Malcolm.
Or on the other hand, to Aleister.
@Rodger C: I think one of the early episodes that really defined the tenor of The Colbert Report had right-wing Fox News personality Monica Crowley as the guest. Instead of letting her get started with whatever she was on the show to promote, Colbert immediately started the interview segment by asking her about Aleister Crowley.
Monica Crowley, Season 1 E 9 • 10/31/2005
I am always willing to explain Ralph Waldo. (I just plagiarize Melville in “The Confidence Man”). Elizabeth Emerson (see Google) is more closely related to me,however.
# heidegger, n. A ponderous device for boring through thick layers of substance. ‘It’s buried so deep we’ll have to use a heidegger.’ # The Philosophical Lexicon
Actually thick layers of sein, but one can’t expect the laffotropic crowd to grok that puppy.
quine, v. (1) To deny resolutely the existence or importance of something real or significant.
I just happened to be reading J L Austin and P F Strawson’s takedown of Quine’s “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”, in which WVOQ rejects the distinction between analytic and synthetic statements (the archetypal quinism.)
I could never made headway with Q. Interesting but tough (and, after all, davon kann ich mir nichts kaufen). I had a fling with Austin and Strawson, but that was the 60s. Where do I find the takedown(s) ?
Of course I had too much going on that distinction, in that it is the basis of the equivalence mnemonic I forged to maintain my sanity:
POSIS PRIDA
POSIS: a posteriori, inductive, synthetic
PRIDA: a priori, deductive, analytic
R.M. Hare was the only one of those guys I cherished.
Where do I find the takedown(s) ?
I have grievously misled you, fellow Hatter. What can I say? There are no excuses.
When I said Austin, I meant Paul Grice.
I got this from Grice’s Studies in the Way of Words.
It is a joint essay with Strawson, though. Ch 13, “In Defense of a Dogma.”
[In principle, yes. However, it was not J L Austin, but Paul Grice. And it was not Sense and Sensibilia but Studies in the Way of Words. And it was not a car, but a bicycle.]
Foucaultian.
One of those words (alongside with names of Greek letters) a person who knows English only from texts does not know how to pronounce:( /fuko-ʃən/ ?
Ahem. It’s Foucauldian (per some dictionary).
No it’s not. The word exists for pompous people to lord it over other pompous people with. Either spelling or pronunciation are suitable for that purpose.
(Says the dictionary on my computer, Oxford American Dictionary I think: “Fou·caul·di·an | fuˈkoʊdiən, fuˈkoʊiən | also Foucaultian | fuːˈkəʊɪən |”).
For the record, I don’t have any idea what Foucault or Derrida have to say about anything, and I never will, even if I’m in solitary confinement and have nothing else to read.
Well, /fuko-ʃən/ was not as much as a honest guess, as a description of what happens in my mind. When I read English, I need to ascribe some phonology to the text. So I did when I only began reading in English, and it has not evolved much since then (less than my actual accent). I see Foucault- in French, -tian in English, they clash and my eyes are hovering over -l-.
Wiktionary aslo has “Foucaldian”. French Wiktionary has foucaldien \fu.kal.djɛ̃\ De Foucault, nom de famille du philosophe Michel Foucault, ou de Foucauld, nom de famille du bienheureux Charles de Foucauld..
Strangely, no mention du physicien et astronome Léon Foucault.
I’ve no doubt but that the man himself would have preferred Foucauldic.
Well, /fuko-ʃən/ was not as much as a honest guess, as a description of what happens in my mind. When I read English, I need to ascribe some phonology to the text. So I did when I only began reading in English, and it has not evolved much since then (less than my actual accent). I see Foucault- in French, -tian in English, they clash and my eyes are hovering over -l-.
I think in my (very similar) case it did evolve a little, but mostly only through sufficiently frequently encountering otherwise contradictory examples. Sometimes the weirdness crosses into production; my ascribed phonology for digit-form numerals (e.g. “2021”) is based on Russian*, so when I want to put an article before a digit-form numeral (e.g. “a 2021 coin”) the resulting distribution is almost entirely unrelated to the actual distribution in English.
I have no idea what (if anything) happened to my accent; I did not have much opportunity to compare. I’ve been told that I have a very strong one.
For “Foucaltian” I would probably have /fu’koʊʃən/ (rhymes with “ocean”), give or take some minor phonetic details; as far as I can tell my mental model does the same thing as yours to arrive at /fuko-ʃən/, but finds the resulting join to be an affront to phonotactics and tries to fill things up with something familiar.
For “Foucaldian” it would be… something like /fu’koldiən/, I think (which I would have represented as “fu-COLD-ian”**); the -d- makes it look a lot less French.
*) it’s a bit more complicated than that, but a detailed description would run fairly long
**) TIL that “hold” and “holed” are homophones in standard English. I don’t think they’re homophones for me: they’re approximately /hold/ and /hoʊld/ respectively.
I have never seen “Foucaltian”; the universally accepted adjective is Foucauldian, apparently normatively pronounced /fuˈkoʊdiən/, though I myself tend to mentally say /fuˈkɔldiən/ (I doubt I’ve ever said it out loud), because that’s what it looks like to me and I don’t hang out with the kind of people who use the word and might say it in my presence.
the -d- makes it look a lot less French.
Au contraire, French gentilés routinely contain consonants that aren’t in the base form, sometimes involving -d-; cf. Meaux/Meldois, Rhône/Rhodanien, Comtat/Comtadin, Puisaye/Poyaudin. Nothing feels more French than a nice (pseudo-)Latinate consonant variation.
You can write Foucault-oid or Foucault-ish if you are unsympathetic. Both are rather tricky phonetically.
Au contraire, French gentilés routinely contain consonants that aren’t in the base form
I’m not denying that it’s more authentic as French. I’m just saying that it looks a lot less Frenchy to my mental phonological rendering engine – as apparently also true for yours.
For “Foucaltian” in my comment of 8:02 am, read “Foucaultian” (the pronunciation would probably have been the same though); I was confused by drasvi’s spelling “Foucaldian” [sic], which is apparently an alternate form.
I’m not entirely sure what would happen to “Foucauldian” spelled thusly; your /fuˈkɔldiən/ seems plausible, though I’m not sure if my idiolect distinguishes /o/ from /ɔ/, so (yet again) it would be essentially the same thing anyway.
You can write Foucault-oid or Foucault-ish if you are unsympathetic. Both are rather tricky phonetically.
The former would trigger liaison: /fuko(l)ˈtɔɪd/ (or thereabouts). Dunno about the latter.
In those other gentilics, the d makes etymological sense. Is that true for Foucauldian?
I was confused by drasvi’s spelling “Foucaldian” [sic], which is apparently an alternate form.
Yes, “aslo” in “Wiktionary aslo has ‘Foucaldian’ ” meant “in addition to Foucauldian and Foucaultian”.
It is close to French foucaldien \fu.kal.djɛ̃\ .
In those other gentilics, the d makes etymological sense. Is that true for Foucauldian?
No idea, but it doesn’t make much difference — the alternation feels right anyway. That’s why I wrote “(pseudo-)Latinate.”
It is close to French foucaldien \fu.kal.djɛ̃\
Which is, I presume, the source of the English words.
And it was not a car, but a bicycle.
That’s what comes of reading unprofessionally. I coulda known: Austin died in 1960. But as an unprofessional reader, I have exercised my right not to read anything by The Implicature Man. Only now do I find that his opus in focus first appeared sometime after 1967.
Paying undue attention to names is bad enough in a writer. Worse is not paying due attention to the original publication dates when citing works. Just try, on the ‘net or in Wikipedia or at Amazon, to find when Studies in the Way of Words first appeared. Go on, I challenge you ! Implicature coughed up only enough for me to conclude “sometime after 1967”.
If you “look inside” the book on Amazon, there is a list of first publication dates for each essay on the copyright page. The essay #13 “In defence of a dogma” was written with P.F.Strawson and first published in “The Philosophical Review” (vol. 65, April 1956). The first copyright for the whole collection is 1989.
Thanks. I found no “look inside” link anywhere I looked outside.
So the co-author could have been Austin, as far as dead or alive goes.
Anyhoo, I have had no use for these synthetic/analytic Begrifflichkeiten for decades. Just say no !
H. P. Grice and P. F. Strawson, In Defense of a Dogma, The Philosophical Review, Vol. 65, No. 2 (Apr., 1956), pp. 141-158.
You can write Foucault-oid or Foucault-ish if you are unsympathetic.
In that case you probably want to pronounce the t. as in toilet-oid or court-ish.