Is there anything I omitted to write before? ..that I think is important, I mean.
Right now I've been reading about machines, at least some modern and postmodern kinds, read George Dyson's Engineers' Dreams (http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/dysong08/dysong08_index.html) referring to Turing and Ulam and von Neumann, after hearing yesterday Neil Baldwin lecturing on William Carlos Williams quote "a poem is a machine made out of words," continued less famously," in which every part is related to all the other parts and every part is dependent on all the other parts," ties it all together. Read also about Lakoff vs. Chomsky back in the day. Before hearing they were bitter rivals in academia for several years I'd felt Lakoff's ideas come across as too generalized while Chomsky's too overspecific. And both believe in the political importance of linguistics. Seeing some description about the points of linguistics that drove them to conflict and drama--Lakoff the semanticist insisting on connecting language and therefore mental phenomena to the experiential world and Chomsky the mental syntax guy, both seriously ambitious scholars --I realized why each seemed to me in his own very different way interesting but also really boring. Linguists understand the structure of language far too well to ever be able to write an interesting story.
Narrative is how text is best understood.
Just as understanding of psychology enables marketing to be effective, understanding of literature enables a text to convey psychological meaning: literal language does not make for compelling text any more than reciting policy facts constitutes exciting political rhetoric.
Metaphor and Machine is the title of this post. Or not.
(I got to say "narrative" again. I feel smart and contemporary.)
Right now I've been reading about machines, at least some modern and postmodern kinds, read George Dyson's Engineers' Dreams (http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/dysong08/dysong08_index.html) referring to Turing and Ulam and von Neumann, after hearing yesterday Neil Baldwin lecturing on William Carlos Williams quote "a poem is a machine made out of words," continued less famously," in which every part is related to all the other parts and every part is dependent on all the other parts," ties it all together. Read also about Lakoff vs. Chomsky back in the day. Before hearing they were bitter rivals in academia for several years I'd felt Lakoff's ideas come across as too generalized while Chomsky's too overspecific. And both believe in the political importance of linguistics. Seeing some description about the points of linguistics that drove them to conflict and drama--Lakoff the semanticist insisting on connecting language and therefore mental phenomena to the experiential world and Chomsky the mental syntax guy, both seriously ambitious scholars --I realized why each seemed to me in his own very different way interesting but also really boring. Linguists understand the structure of language far too well to ever be able to write an interesting story.
Narrative is how text is best understood.
Just as understanding of psychology enables marketing to be effective, understanding of literature enables a text to convey psychological meaning: literal language does not make for compelling text any more than reciting policy facts constitutes exciting political rhetoric.
Metaphor and Machine is the title of this post. Or not.
(I got to say "narrative" again. I feel smart and contemporary.)
posted by rich solomon at 10:58 PM
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