Twentieth Post / Unimpressive Yields

I have got a lot of work to do if I want to live up to my blogging goal for this semester, but I have so much work to do elsewhere...

I am finding that the most remarkable feature of literature studies is its endlessness. The finality of mathematics has always been a comfort to me. As far as concrete calculations are concerned, one should eventually come to an answer beyond which you cannot go. There are fundamentals, truths that, once proven, cannot be denied except through ever-more rigorous calculations.

The best word I have for the study of literature is "bullshit," but this word does not capture my feelings accurately. The reasonable possibilities for interpretation have a finite limit, but that limit is often far above the limits of human patience and perseverance. What's especially interesting is that this vaulted ceiling of possibility is, itself, mirrored; you have the nearly infinite intentions of the author, who is working within a space that has few true resctrictions, and then you have the less permissive but still vast space for coming to understand, not only the author's first intentions, but any unconscious schema that have found there way into the text.

Literary analysis, when veiwed as a sort of "black box", can be used to produce any quasi-logical conclusion you want. As long as you avoid putting words into the mouths of sentient beings (ie. the author), nearly anything goes. I could not, for instance, say that "Cash" by Johnny Cash expresses the author's love for homosexual men, while advocating a re-initiation of the Holocaust of the Jews. I could, however, suggest that Marlowe in "Heart Of Darkness" could be reinterpreted in the modern era as a chronic public masturbator, trying to compensate for his impotence through sexual overexpression and denying the sexual nature of his obsession with Kurtz.

The sheer power of it. It's intoxicating.

That is all, for now.

-Vlad