Comment by muhfuhkuh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by muhfuhkuh | Hacker News Reader

While I should just shrug it off and say "haha, you got us, we're certainly stuffy", look at the things we often are trying to discuss in Literature.

Now, it's one thing to question the artistic merits of literature studied in academia, such as the almost impenetrable "Finnegan's Wake". It's not all because of its vernacular (I can't really read too much of it at a time because it blurs into almost gibberish after awhile and I lose track of stuff I'd just read a line prior), but because it seriously doesn't make any damned sense sometimes, which is common when alot of it is written stream of conscious.

But, I get the argument: literary criticism is self-perpetuating, self-congratulatory stuff in many cases. But, just as for every solid software developer who understands the art and science of software construction in the tradition of Fred Brooks or Steven McConnell, there is the spaghetti coder with terrible habits (pushing broken code to the repo, no code commenting, etc.). The same laziness and idiosyncratic behavior is rife in litcrit as well. For every Harold Bloom and James Wood, there's alot of hacks that toss off their "deconstructions" rife with tautologies and dense nonsense. It's part of any discipline to separate the good from the bad; the humanities is no different.

Sorry, but that does not make sense to me.

A discipline either establishes common criteria to distinguish good stuff from bad stuff or it doesn't. And these should not be arbitrary otherwise the judgment remains subjective and therefore worthless.

Since you admit that "there's alot of hacks", it seems literary criticism has no criteria or they are mostly subjective. Otherwise, you wouldn't have such a lot of hacks, but just a few.

It obviously produces hardly anything worth knowing, no?

I like Radiohead. I don't much like the Spice Girls. Any criteria I could give you for why this is true, for me, is ultimately subjective.

Oh, there is structure. Criticism comes in the following best practice, and you'll see this construct throughout most all litcrit (except for, you guessed it, the page-padding hacks who talk around the topic rather than about it):

1) Establish the "text" in question as well as the "context" of the text (certain themes, symbolism, diction, universality, etc.)

2) apply culturual congruity (whether you are applying the criticism to the time when the text was written or to modern times),

3) Establish your point of argument and/or analysis.

4) Apply argument to the text

5) Connect the evidence of this argument.

6) Conclusion

The fact that I use Bloom as a shining example of "good" criticism should steer you in the direction that there is quality there. His just one example of good work.

Is there an API to access Plato's Republic's quality hooks? No, but there are best practices. Just because you refuse to see them as common criteria doesn't diminish the task at hand. If you refuse to accept it as legitimate, you might as well refuse to accept there are such things as great literature and creation beyond the programmatic kind.

I have spent a ridicules amount of time reading everything from trash to the classics and most well respected works are terrible. I blame the form of "Criticism” you just described because it does nothing of the sort. Then again I might be the only person who morns all the interesting works never created because the echo chamber effect that infects the literary world. Everyone is to afraid say anything of substance lest they be accused of “not getting it”.

"There is no great literature, there is old literature and moving literature, but they are not the same thing."

And when most people talk about great literature, they aren't talking about either thing. Most people mean something like Adler's Great Books criteria when they talk about great literature:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_books

Are you kidding? Compare to software: There is a lot of bad code in the word. This code was written by hacks, who in my experience, seem to have no idea why their code is bad -- to the point of justifying it beyond absurdity\. Showing these people beautiful, well factored, well commented code frequently has no impact on them, they say "Oh, that is nice", but don't understand what makes it different than their hacky version.
This is within the field. From the outside, this is even more dense and impenetrable, and probably looks almost masturbatory. Despite this, there is a fairly strong correlation of "good style" and "good software" so there is at least some objective measure there.
Of course, since there are hacks in the software world (arguably the majority of them, since very few HNers run in the circles of bank software engineer or .Net programmer, and those people are the majority of programmers), the discussions on what makes good software probably don't result in anything worth knowing, or barely anyway.
I am not commenting on your overall conclusion, I don't know if lit. crit. is a worthy pursuit, but your argument is definitely lacking a sound basis.

\ I worked with a guy who would copy and paste program, with many many repetitions of blocks. After of getting a barely working result, would seemingly decide "oh functions are important in programming" and randomly break the code into a few functions, which each took 10+ arguments to carry state over from chunk to chunk. Since these were essentially just chaining the calls, none of the functions would be called elsewhere, no repetition was avoided, and extra cognitive load was added to reading the results. When this was done, the original author could not understand how it was different, let alone better.

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