Leavis starts "The Great Tradition" saying exactly this: that he is misinterpreted as dismissing authors other than those he considers "great".
Can you expand? What is the misinterpretation and what is the correction?
I do not understand why this Lewis/Leavis disagreement is relevant to this conversation (I had never heard of either before as far as I know). From what some have said the one dismissed the long-term importance of the analysis of the other. But exactly what they are talking about is hard to work out as often posters in this thread use shorthand and coded language.
For someone who claims to be influenced by dictionary definitions, it would be helpful if you could appraise yourself of the dictionary definition of dogmatism, and its origins. Unless you're being ironic.
I do not understand your point. A religious person has faith in their holy book
It seems rather more likely that the entity Leavis had faith in was himself. I don't see his faith as emanating from the books of the novelists he considered to be "great". As far as I can work out, his selection best exemplify the values he considered to be most worthwhile or worthy. His central criterion for great writing was that it had "a vital capacity for experience, a kind of reverent openness before life, and a marked moral intensity".
and the dogmatic person insists that the truth within is to be accepted more than the truth without.
I'm not sure what you mean by "within" and "without". A dogmatist is a person who is stubbornly committed to their own opinion.
As others have illustrated above there are some critics who say dogmatically one thing and some who say another.
That is the case in all walks of life, not just religion or literature.
You also wrote:
I think the model of seeing meaning within the pages of a holy book comes from religion.
I presume you're using quotes around "holy" there. What about The Communist Manifesto, or Clause IV of the Labour party Constitution, or the Constitutions of various countries?
Dogmaticism insists that one isolate oneself from any other influence outside of the text.
Which I can't see any justification for. Why does there have to be a text to be dogmatic about to the exclusion of other influences?
In any case, I don't get the impression that Leavis isolated himself from the influence of other texts; he just didn't accept that they were as "great" as the ones he identified.
I think the way Marx used language is within the Western tradition and is the ideas are heavily influenced by religion. I do not think you get to Communism as an idea without the Roman Catholic church.
Dogmatism itself grew out of the dominance of a certain kind of religion in the West.
Dogmatism itself grew out of the dominance of a certain kind of religion in the West.
Source please?
“Dogmatism,” per the dictionary, simply means “the expression of an opinion or belief as if it were a fact,” “positiveness in assertion of opinion especially when unwarranted or arrogant,” or “a viewpoint or system of ideas based on insufficiently examined premises.” The primary meaning of “dogma” (from a Greek word meaning simply “that which one thinks is true”) is “something held as an established opinion.”
Dogmatism itself grew out of the dominance of a certain kind of religion in the West.
Source please?
“Dogmatism,” per the dictionary, simply means “the expression of an opinion or belief as if it were a fact,” “positiveness in assertion of opinion especially when unwarranted or arrogant,” or “a viewpoint or system of ideas based on insufficiently examined premises.” The primary meaning of “dogma” (from a Greek word meaning simply “that which one thinks is true”) is “something held as an established opinion.”
Tom Holland: Dominion - the making of the western mind
Plenty of other books have been written on this topic too.
Dogmatism itself grew out of the dominance of a certain kind of religion in the West.
Source please?
“Dogmatism,” per the dictionary, simply means “the expression of an opinion or belief as if it were a fact,” “positiveness in assertion of opinion especially when unwarranted or arrogant,” or “a viewpoint or system of ideas based on insufficiently examined premises.” The primary meaning of “dogma” (from a Greek word meaning simply “that which one thinks is true”) is “something held as an established opinion.”
Tom Holland: Dominion - the making of the western mind
Plenty of other books have been written on this topic too.
Thanks, but can you be more specific? A quote or the like?
I’m finding it hard to believe that dogmatism hasn’t been around as long as people have been around. A particular expression of dogmatism I can see, but dogmatism per se, I have trouble seeing.
Dogmatism itself grew out of the dominance of a certain kind of religion in the West.
Source please?
“Dogmatism,” per the dictionary, simply means “the expression of an opinion or belief as if it were a fact,” “positiveness in assertion of opinion especially when unwarranted or arrogant,” or “a viewpoint or system of ideas based on insufficiently examined premises.” The primary meaning of “dogma” (from a Greek word meaning simply “that which one thinks is true”) is “something held as an established opinion.”
Tom Holland: Dominion - the making of the western mind
Plenty of other books have been written on this topic too.
Thanks, but can you be more specific? A quote or the like?
I’m finding it hard to believe that dogmatism hasn’t been around as long as people have been around.
There's something very Christian about the idea that there is some kind of objective/godly truth "out there" and the history of the west is largely dominated by the idea that societies could be managed and/or rearranged to be godly. There's this mix of ideas of extreme power exercised by the Roman empire mixed together with this religious imperative to "be right" which developed European societies that we different in the detail but united in the basic idea that they were right and others were wrong. This notion of dogma filters into the "western mind" and flows into western imperialism, Marxism and scientific/medical thinking. It is somewhat challenged by the thinking of Mill, but even he self-acknowledged that his mind and thinking developed from within this way of thinking.
I am pretty certain that the idea of some kind of objective truth “out there” significantly predates Christianity. I rather think the idea can be found in Plato, for example.
I am pretty certain that the idea of some kind of objective truth “out there” significantly predates Christianity. I rather think the idea can be found in Plato, for example.
I think Christianity largely is Platonism. Although influential prior to the adoption by the Christian neo-Platonists, I do not see that it dominated the thinking of the whole "empire" or continent or however you want to describe it, until Christianity became the dominant idea in the West.
Dogmatism itself grew out of the dominance of a certain kind of religion in the West.
Source please?
“Dogmatism,” per the dictionary, simply means “the expression of an opinion or belief as if it were a fact,” “positiveness in assertion of opinion especially when unwarranted or arrogant,” or “a viewpoint or system of ideas based on insufficiently examined premises.” The primary meaning of “dogma” (from a Greek word meaning simply “that which one thinks is true”) is “something held as an established opinion.”
Tom Holland: Dominion - the making of the western mind
Plenty of other books have been written on this topic too.
Thanks, but can you be more specific? A quote or the like?
I’m finding it hard to believe that dogmatism hasn’t been around as long as people have been around.
There's something very Christian about the idea that there is some kind of objective/godly truth "out there"
This is a very impressionistic argument, Enlightenment and scientific rationalism also developed in opposition to established religion, even if there were attempts at rapprochement later on.
It's starting with the present day and then trying to reason backwards from a sample size of one by finding antecedents for some set of liberal values.
Dogmatism itself grew out of the dominance of a certain kind of religion in the West.
Source please?
“Dogmatism,” per the dictionary, simply means “the expression of an opinion or belief as if it were a fact,” “positiveness in assertion of opinion especially when unwarranted or arrogant,” or “a viewpoint or system of ideas based on insufficiently examined premises.” The primary meaning of “dogma” (from a Greek word meaning simply “that which one thinks is true”) is “something held as an established opinion.”
Tom Holland: Dominion - the making of the western mind
Plenty of other books have been written on this topic too.
Thanks, but can you be more specific? A quote or the like?
I’m finding it hard to believe that dogmatism hasn’t been around as long as people have been around.
There's something very Christian about the idea that there is some kind of objective/godly truth "out there"
This is a very impressionistic argument, Enlightenment and scientific rationalism also developed in opposition to established religion, even if there were attempts at rapprochement later on.
It's starting with the present day and then trying to reason backwards from a sample size of one by finding antecedents for some set of liberal values.
As discussed previously, the Popperian version of the Philosophy of Science implies the existence of a truth that is approachable by the techniques of science. Which in itself implies something about the "true" Platonic nature of reality.
These discussions when one talks about science become very difficult on multiple levels.
I am pretty certain that the idea of some kind of objective truth “out there” significantly predates Christianity. I rather think the idea can be found in Plato, for example.
Indeed.
@Basketactortale, can you clarify what exactly you mean when you use the word dogmatism?
I am pretty certain that the idea of some kind of objective truth “out there” significantly predates Christianity. I rather think the idea can be found in Plato, for example.
Indeed.
@Basketactortale, can you clarify what exactly you mean when you use the word dogmatism?
I am pretty certain that the idea of some kind of objective truth “out there” significantly predates Christianity. I rather think the idea can be found in Plato, for example.
Indeed.
@Basketactortale, can you clarify what exactly you mean when you use the word dogmatism?
The OED differentiates between the sense of "dogmatic" as senses 2 ("of relating to or of the nature of dogma; doctrinal") and 4b ("that asserts or imposes dogmas or opinions in an imperious or arrogant manner; inclined to lay down principles as undeniably true").
I assume 4b arose by giving sense 2 (along with sense 1) a pejorative spin. Nevertheless conflating them is a fallacy of ambiguity.
I note that the Wikipedia to which Baskeractortale links describes dogmatic theology as adopting a "scientific and critical method" in its introduction, which does not at first glance fit with how Baskeractortale has been using the word "dogmatism".
I note that the Wikipedia to which Baskeractortale links describes dogmatic theology as adopting a "scientific and critical method" in its introduction, which does not at first glance fit with how Baskeractortale has been using the word "dogmatism".
First I did not write the Wikipedia page. Second at least one of the Wikipedia editors is using "science" in a different way to me when they quote Torrance "Christian dogmatics is the pure science of theology in which, as in every science, we seek to discover the fundamental structure and order in the nature of things and to develop basic forms of thought about them as our understanding is allowed to be controlled by them from beyond our individualism."
The point is that there is a "fundamental structure and order in the nature of things" and that these can be discovered within the framework of the dogma.
In contrast, perhaps, to a community of ideas where an idea is offered as an option for ones life. If that philosophical school was to appeal to you then you might reorient your life around the principles.
I think the way Marx used language is within the Western tradition and is the ideas are heavily influenced by religion. I do not think you get to Communism as an idea without the Roman Catholic church.
Dogmatism itself grew out of the dominance of a certain kind of religion in the West.
Thanks for getting back to me, Basketactortale.
What you seem to be saying is that the source of your dogmatism is Christianity. There's a lot to like about Tom Holland, but why do you consider him to be authoritative about this?
The mentions of apologetics in a number of reviews about Tom Holland's book suggested to me there might be something of C S Lewis about him. It seems I'm not alone in this:
In some circles Holland is seen as a modern-day C.S. Lewis, the brilliant British author whose defense of Christianity made him popular with American audiences. He’s debated prominent atheists, humanists and skeptics. These debates often turn into YouTube segments and stories with headlines such as, “Tom Holland is taking on secular humanists. And he’s winning.”
I don't consider him authoritative. Someone asked for a source for the idea that western dogmatism as a thing in itself came from Christianity. There's a source amongst many others.
The mentions of apologetics in a number of reviews about Tom Holland's book suggested to me there might be something of C S Lewis about him.
According to Tom Holland's wikipedia article he attends church but doesn't believe in anything supernatural. Dominion is a secular historical argument about the influence of Christianity on Western thought, not an apologetic for Christian faith. I found that Tom Holland's Dominion more persuasive that some other arguments along the same lines in that he doesn't let his overall argument prevent him from telling a good story that runs against it.
I note that the Wikipedia to which Baskeractortale links describes dogmatic theology as adopting a "scientific and critical method" in its introduction, which does not at first glance fit with how Baskeractortale has been using the word "dogmatism".
First I did not write the Wikipedia page. Second at least one of the Wikipedia editors is using "science" in a different way to me when they quote Torrance "Christian dogmatics is the pure science of theology in which, as in every science, we seek to discover the fundamental structure and order in the nature of things and to develop basic forms of thought about them as our understanding is allowed to be controlled by them from beyond our individualism."
I didn't think you did write the article. You did however link to it.
While it's unfair to expect a person to only link to articles with which they agree on all points, one at least expects that a poster either regards articles that they link to as respectable and defensible points of view or that the says so up front.
I note that the Wikipedia to which Baskeractortale links describes dogmatic theology as adopting a "scientific and critical method" in its introduction, which does not at first glance fit with how Baskeractortale has been using the word "dogmatism".
First I did not write the Wikipedia page. Second at least one of the Wikipedia editors is using "science" in a different way to me when they quote Torrance "Christian dogmatics is the pure science of theology in which, as in every science, we seek to discover the fundamental structure and order in the nature of things and to develop basic forms of thought about them as our understanding is allowed to be controlled by them from beyond our individualism."
I didn't think you did write the article. You did however link to it.
While it's unfair to expect a person to only link to articles with which they agree on all points, one at least expects that a poster either regards articles that they link to as respectable and defensible points of view or that the says so up front.
I think the phrase "adopting a scientific and critical method and taking into account the contemporary situation" is a contradiction in terms when referring to religion. It appears in the first paragraph of a Wikipedia page I did not write, the rest of which does not appear to me to be referring specifically to this specific citation.
If you have a point, then I have no idea what it is.
Moreover the argument that religion sees itself as scientific, meaning logical and deductable, would appear to support my use of the term given it is self-evident that religious dogma fairly obviously is not.
alongside all the debates about structuralism and semiotics
I despised that and deconstructionism and such so very much as a grad student in the 90s, it drove me away from academia for years. As well as the sense that great works of literature (and art, etc.) are not mainly worth talking about because they have anything of value in themselves or what the author meant to say. There were many times in those classes in which I felt like I was the only one there who actually cared about the literature we were reading for its own sake or what it actually had to say about things. When you have professors basically put down the idea that a great work of literature like the Faerie Queene has anything to say about religious matters, because (I’m not making this up) educated people don’t believe in Christianity anymore (I quietly said, “I do”), it tends to make one think that academia isn’t a welcoming place. (I gather things are different now, though I’ve not looked into the current lit crit trends…)
Another one used the beginning of Milton’s Paradise Lost to show us what the pre-Romantic approach to things was, and I seemed to be the only one in the class who actually liked it—everyone else, including the professor, talked about how God was horrible and there was an unpleasant sense of “heaviness” in the depiction of God imposing His will on Adam and Eve in the garden, etc. etc. etc. The tone of that part of the class seemed to be to show us how much better Romanticism was in comparison.
I should have added this: if it's necessary for PhDs to be in touch with primary sources, it's all the more important for undergrads and even high schoolers. They have less time to give to the subject.
I found that Tom Holland's Dominion more persuasive that some other arguments along the same lines in that he doesn't let his overall argument prevent him from telling a good story that runs against it.
That said, Holland is not a trained academic historian, and I gather his use of sources is often partial or hasn't kept up with current scholarship.
Tom Holland, the historian, is the co-presenter of The Rest is History, a podcast with 11 million downloads a month which earns him a fortune, apparently a million dollars a year. I have never missed an episode and know lots of trained academic historians and classicists who are fans.
I really enjoyed both Millenium and Dominion, original and compelling works, and have just started his translation of Suetonius. He may not have completed his doctorate but he is clearly a very talented and knowledgeable historian.
I have no idea what the other Tom Holland even looks like.
(ETA the wiki page link wants to default to the actor!)
Tom Holland, the historian, is the co-presenter of The Rest is History, a podcast with 11 million downloads a month which earns him a fortune, apparently a million dollars a year. I have never missed an episode and know lots of trained academic historians and classicists who are fans.
I really enjoyed both Millenium and Dominion, original and compelling works, and have just started his translation of Suetonius. He may not have completed his doctorate but he is clearly a very talented and knowledgeable historian.
I have no idea what the other Tom Holland even looks like.
(ETA the wiki page link wants to default to the actor!)
Tom Holland the actor has actually been on an episode of Tom Holland the history presenter's podcast during the promotional tour for the Odyssey movie.
Also, as eny fule kno, Dogma is a Kevin Smith movie starring Alan Rickman.
Wrt literary criticism - I was a post-structuralist before I even knew the term post-structuralism, because as a concept it made a lot of sense particularly from my perspective as a neurodivergent person and constructing meaning in a text being a lot like neurodivergent code-switching (or indeed other forms of code-switching like queer code-switching). That doesn't mean that authorial intent is irrelevant, just that it's not the only meaning. The reader imparts meaning into the text just as much the author does, and the text reads us back. I haven't read Paradise Lost so can't comment on that!
Also on literary criticism vs just enjoying a text for its own sake - I think it is possible to do both. Personally speaking, it doesn't take away from my face-value enjoyment of a text and if anything enhances it. But that's just me personally and some people don't enjoy it, and that's fine. I don't think that takes anything away from literary criticism as an academic subject though, it's just not for everyone just as that goes for any subject. I personally enjoy cooking but wouldn't enjoy studying (formal/classical Western) culinary arts - food history yes, but not cooking in a kitchen classroom unless it's something ancilliary like knife skills because that's just not how I like to cook. However, I can still enjoy the fruits of other people going to culinary school and appreciate their training if I go to a restaurant.
alongside all the debates about structuralism and semiotics
I despised that and deconstructionism and such so very much as a grad student in the 90s, it drove me away from academia for years. As well as the sense that great works of literature (and art, etc.) are not mainly worth talking about because they have anything of value in themselves or what the author meant to say. There were many times in those classes in which I felt like I was the only one there who actually cared about the literature we were reading for its own sake or what it actually had to say about things. When you have professors basically put down the idea that a great work of literature like the Faerie Queene has anything to say about religious matters, because (I’m not making this up) educated people don’t believe in Christianity anymore (I quietly said, “I do”), it tends to make one think that academia isn’t a welcoming place. (I gather things are different now, though I’ve not looked into the current lit crit trends…)
Another one used the beginning of Milton’s Paradise Lost to show us what the pre-Romantic approach to things was, and I seemed to be the only one in the class who actually liked it—everyone else, including the professor, talked about how God was horrible and there was an unpleasant sense of “heaviness” in the depiction of God imposing His will on Adam and Eve in the garden, etc. etc. etc. The tone of that part of the class seemed to be to show us how much better Romanticism was in comparison.
Sorry, I hope I didn’t make this Hellish.
I think it is a fairly common experience of graduate studies to grow to despise the subject.
I am interested to know what you thought the course was going to be about. Did you not know that it would be about literary criticism of the texts?
I have not studied English literature at all, but could one not have countered the professors with a well built argument? I assume you had to write essays, would you not have been awarded marks for disagreeing with the professor with citations and argument? I assume given everything which everyone has said on this thread that there is more than one way to read Paradise Lost so even a professor challenging perceived shibboleths is really expressing an opinion which many others disagree with. No?
I do not understand why someone would sign up to a course which must have been advertised as being heavy on literary criticism when what you wanted was to enjoy reading books.
All of that said, in my context with the benefit of hindsight there are some things I could and maybe should have challenged within my degrees. I lacked the vocabulary to understand the philosophy beneath what was being taught and maybe the lecturers would have been uncomfortable if I knew then what I know now!
Personally I think Tom Holland is nothing like CS Lewis. Holland regards Christianity as important and desirable because of its civilizational and cultural effects, beneficial in his view. Lewis thought this was fundamentally to miss the point and that the only good reason to accept Christianity is that you believe it to be true.
Moreover the argument that religion sees itself as scientific, meaning logical and deductable, would appear to support my use of the term given it is self-evident that religious dogma fairly obviously is not.
If functional adults disagree about something it's not self-evident.
Saying your position is self-evident is, well, dogmatic (= "that asserts or imposes dogmas or opinions in an imperious or arrogant manner; inclined to lay down principles as undeniably true").
Until such time as your posts become less dogmatic, I don't think it's worth my time to engage with you further.
On the structuralism/post-structuralism thing, I think sufficient water has gone under the bridge for things to settle down.
Back in the day there was a kind of 'star-struck structuralism' thing going on - as one wag put it, themselves a 'structuralist' - and dare I say it, a rather 'fundamentalist' form emerged.
What @ChastMastr describes sounds to me rather like that.
I can't speak for or from the neuro-divergent angle but agree with @Pomona that there's certainly a vital insight there in terms of what we, as readers, bring to the text alongside other valuable contributions.
I wrestled with it all at university as I felt it was undermining values like 'absolute truth' and looking back suspect it was one of the reasons why I took refuge in a verging on fundamentalist form of evangelical charismatic Christianity by way of reaction.
That said, I did adopt what might be described as a structuralist/post-structuralist approach in essays, exams and dissertations.
There was a mismatch of course when it came to my reading of scripture which was far less nuanced.
But then, many of us are a mass of contradictions.
I came to the conclusion that these critical tools and stances were less of a 'threat' if you didn't take a rigidly fundamentalist approach to scripture or to the written word in general.
I think it is the case that critical theory - of whatever kind - can smother or squash our enjoyment of literary texts, films, plays etc.
But they can also enhance our enjoyment and appreciation.
As with anything else there's a balance here. I do think that an overdose of arcane critical theory can cause problems- it can make you almost unemployable outside of academia for one thing.
But an understanding or appreciation of different critical perspectives can help us get under the skin of novels, plays, films and so on.
It probably plays out differently for different people.
I think structuralism comes undone when it thinks it can reduce everything to binary oppositions, as opposed to a web of contrasts. The binary form of structuralism is generally the form of structuralism employed by post-structuralists on texts before deconstructing them. I'm not saying that post-structuralism is wrong, but it does seem sometimes that all the interesting stuff happens in the bits of the text that it ignores.
As an aside, I would put C S Lewis in the anti-intentionalist camp with the post-structuralists. Roughly paraphrasing his position in The Personalist heresy, he thought Keats' intentions and subjectivity and attitudes were interesting because he produced Hyperion, rather than Hyperion being interesting because of what it showed us about Keats' intentions and attitudes.
(I used to be a fairly hard-line anti-intentionalist; I'd now say I think it's ok to talk about authorial intention but one can't use authorial intention to veto a reading.)
IMHO it's a mistake to put "just reading books" in opposition to literary criticism. I would argue that literary criticism exists to facilitate "just reading books." If it does not improve that experience, or facilitate the creation of more and better works of literature, what's it for, then?
Quite a few people seem to think its main purpose is to do what philosophy or sociology do, and they bend every text to suit those intentions. Me, I'd rather have such people go where their true interests lie (that is, the departments of philosophy or sociology) and let those actually interested in books, poems, etc get on with their work.
I don't know that the boundaries between literature on the one hand and sociology or philosophy on the other are sufficiently clear-cut to allow that. Imagine trying to read Dante without doing philosophy. And I think Dante is just an extremely explicit case.
(I would declare an interest: my thesis was on literature and philosophy.)
I don't have a problem with obvious crossovers. My frustration comes in when reading people who seem to read ALL texts through a single lens (and that something normally outside the field).
alongside all the debates about structuralism and semiotics
I despised that and deconstructionism and such so very much as a grad student in the 90s, it drove me away from academia for years. As well as the sense that great works of literature (and art, etc.) are not mainly worth talking about because they have anything of value in themselves or what the author meant to say. There were many times in those classes in which I felt like I was the only one there who actually cared about the literature we were reading for its own sake or what it actually had to say about things. When you have professors basically put down the idea that a great work of literature like the Faerie Queene has anything to say about religious matters, because (I’m not making this up) educated people don’t believe in Christianity anymore (I quietly said, “I do”), it tends to make one think that academia isn’t a welcoming place. (I gather things are different now, though I’ve not looked into the current lit crit trends…)
Another one used the beginning of Milton’s Paradise Lost to show us what the pre-Romantic approach to things was, and I seemed to be the only one in the class who actually liked it—everyone else, including the professor, talked about how God was horrible and there was an unpleasant sense of “heaviness” in the depiction of God imposing His will on Adam and Eve in the garden, etc. etc. etc. The tone of that part of the class seemed to be to show us how much better Romanticism was in comparison.
Sorry, I hope I didn’t make this Hellish.
I think it is a fairly common experience of graduate studies to grow to despise the subject.
I am interested to know what you thought the course was going to be about. Did you not know that it would be about literary criticism of the texts?
I have not studied English literature at all, but could one not have countered the professors with a well built argument? I assume you had to write essays, would you not have been awarded marks for disagreeing with the professor with citations and argument? I assume given everything which everyone has said on this thread that there is more than one way to read Paradise Lost so even a professor challenging perceived shibboleths is really expressing an opinion which many others disagree with. No?
I do not understand why someone would sign up to a course which must have been advertised as being heavy on literary criticism when what you wanted was to enjoy reading books.
All of that said, in my context with the benefit of hindsight there are some things I could and maybe should have challenged within my degrees. I lacked the vocabulary to understand the philosophy beneath what was being taught and maybe the lecturers would have been uncomfortable if I knew then what I know now!
Because we had to take lit crit classes as part of the degree.
I did indeed speak up. I’m happy to report that my MA thesis paper was on notes toward a metaphysically essentialist model for literary criticism, though I don’t remember the details very well almost 30 years later.
My gripe with the various modern lit crit models, first and foremost, as many here might guess, was and is over the “there is no objective reality, let alone a moral, spiritual, or metaphysical objective reality” worldview that many of these models hold, or such was the consistent approach taken by my professors in the 1980s and 90s, which is a worldview I consider both false and my mortal enemy. That doesn’t mean that as fallen mortal limited humans we can know everything 100%, of course.
As for the classes in general, I had to pick the best options which were available to me during any given semester.
I don't have a problem with obvious crossovers. My frustration comes in when reading people who seem to read ALL texts through a single lens (and that something normally outside the field).
Amen!
I think I should also say that I’m not just talking about “enjoying books” – to me one of the values of old books is that it tells us things that I believe are truths, wisdom, etc., especially in works like those of Dante, Milton, and Spenser. Perhaps especially the kinds of things that we are less likely to hear nowadays. But enjoying books is also worth doing for its own sake as well.
There’s a line in Lewis’ Screwtape…
Only the learned read old books, and... now... they are of all men the least likely to acquire wisdom by doing so. ...[G]reat scholars are now as little nourished by the past as the most ignorant mechanic who holds that "history is bunk..." [for] ...when a learned man is presented with any statement in an ancient author, the one question he never asks is whether it is true. He asks who influenced the ancient writer, and how far the statement is consistent with what he said in other books, and what phase in the writer's development, or in the general history of thought, it illustrates, and how it affected later writers, and how often it has been misunderstood (specially by the learned man's colleagues) and what the general course of criticism on it has been for the last ten years, and what is the "present state of the question." To regard the ancient writer as a possible source of knowledge-to anticipate that what he said could possibly modify your thoughts or your behavior-this would be rejected as unutterably simple-minded.
Well, I'm one of those awful people. As soon as I started studying critical theory during my degree, my thought on reading the bible was "it's a text". This meant that it was susceptible to examination in all of the ways I was being exposed to. This excited me greatly, and I still think it was a useful and valuable insight. I am completely incapable of ascribing any value to the bible that is not true of any other creatively produced text. All have the capacity to reveal the divine to us, and therefore of being the word of God, because they are all the products of both creation and creativity. Genre and history have their place in this exploration, but they are not all there is.
I'm not even going there with the Bible--I think it's just going to muddy the waters more. But Chastmastr, I got into trouble with my department chair for a very closely related reason--apparently I said something about The Tempest that he held to be "essentialist" (God knows what, I wasn't discussing religion or eternal verities) and he refused to accept a paper based on such an unfashionable point of view. Note he did not say "wrong" or untrue! After questioning, I discovered that he'd be satisfied if I faked a more popular literary theory, regardless of whether I thought what I was saying about the work was actually true of it. I duly submitted a steaming pile of something else, and received an A. From which I concluded that the only way I'd ever graduate under this man was to find myself a doctoral advisor who outranked him (being a world-class scholar, and thus capable of protecting an unfashionable idiot student who couldn't bring herself to bullshit her entire dissertation. )I was right. It worked, though he still did his best to force me out.
Well, I'm one of those awful people. As soon as I started studying critical theory during my degree, my thought on reading the bible was "it's a text". This meant that it was susceptible to examination in all of the ways I was being exposed to. This excited me greatly, and I still think it was a useful and valuable insight. I am completely incapable of ascribing any value to the bible that is not true of any other creatively produced text. All have the capacity to reveal the divine to us, and therefore of being the word of God, because they are all the products of both creation and creativity. Genre and history have their place in this exploration, but they are not all there is.
I don’t think you’re an awful person. ❤️ The people who hold such views as I’ve described aren’t the same thing as the views themselves. ❤️
I'm not even going there with the Bible--I think it's just going to muddy the waters more. But Chastmastr, I got into trouble with my department chair for a very closely related reason--apparently I said something about The Tempest that he held to be "essentialist" (God knows what, I wasn't discussing religion or eternal verities) and he refused to accept a paper based on such an unfashionable point of view. Note he did not say "wrong" or untrue! After questioning, I discovered that he'd be satisfied if I faked a more popular literary theory, regardless of whether I thought what I was saying about the work was actually true of it. I duly submitted a steaming pile of something else, and received an A. From which I concluded that the only way I'd ever graduate under this man was to find myself a doctoral advisor who outranked him (being a world-class scholar, and thus capable of protecting an unfashionable idiot student who couldn't bring herself to bullshit her entire dissertation. )I was right. It worked, though he still did his best to force me out.
And this is why, once I got my MA in 1997, despite my original plan to become a literature professor, I decided not to—I thought I’d basically spend the rest of my life arguing with deconstructionists, or else have to go to some kind of academic ghetto at some small right-wing religious school where I wouldn’t fit in either. It was years after that (2009) when I applied to teach English Composition at a local community college, and that’s basically what I’ve been doing ever since. For good or for bad, I’m not really dealing with current trendy critical theories as much (some of this is likely not only because of the subject, but because I’m an adjunct teaching online at multiple community colleges, rather than a bigger college or university). And I gather the fashions have changed regarding critical theory, though I still see the old standbys (Marxist, psychoanalytical, feminist, etc., but not semiotics or Derrida) pop up from time to time when students have to write papers about literature. I do offer them the option of writing about it in a non-lit-crit approach when I can, and/or I point out that they don’t have to believe in the implied worldview of any given theory to use it to analyze the poem/short story/etc. But that doesn’t necessarily even come up in the classes I have this semester.
I will say that one thing I deal with is what’s happened to basic education in the US over the decades. It seems that things my generation was taught (I graduated high school and entered college at 18 in 1985) have fallen out of favor, including basic reading. Even then I was rare in having studied sentence diagramming. But over the year is phonics went out of favor, which has become something that has alarmed various people and now phonics is making a comeback. In my Zoom classes, I have students read instructions aloud (because basically otherwise they don’t really stay very engaged if they aren’t actually interacting and I was told to do this by the person over me and it’s worked really well) and it’s jarring to see how they don’t know how to pronounce words or even how to sound them out. And while some of them are people for whom English is not their first language, a lot of them are people who were born and raised speaking and reading English and they just… Don’t know how to sound out words. No one ever taught them to do that. Sometimes I do that and it seems to help. I really believe that “no child left behind” with its emphasis on standardized tests has done a great deal of damage here over the last 20-something years.
The way that I sometimes put it is that the soldier does not pick the battlefield that they are sent to, and if the front lines of education are, at this point, where I have to teach people things that my generation knew once we graduated high school or possibly (God help us all) junior high school or middle school (age 11-13, generally), well, those are the front lines we’ve got, rather than what I thought we’d have in the 21st century. I even expose them to sentence diagramming (in my Zoom classes) because it helps show the structure of the sentence and how different words have to agree with each other, because otherwise many of them really seem to have trouble grasping how that works. I don’t give them any tests on that that you know they have to pass or what have you but at least I expose them to the concept, and point out where they can find out more if they want to. (And we don’t even really get to direct versus indirect objects…)
I know, some of this may be because I’m dealing with community colleges, and you do have some people there who are there because they cannot get in anywhere else academically, and don’t get me wrong, some of my student students are very bright, but still, somebody has to do it.
(At one college (I won’t say what state, but it is not where I live, in Florida), in my first semester there, I was horrified that so few of my students were turning in their work at all, and I asked someone who was a colleague that was kind of mentoring me there what I needed to do to get them to do it, and she said, “Well, our state has a really poor educational system, so I’m afraid this is kind of what you deal with here.”)
I’m also admittedly dealing with Comp I and occasionally Comp II, and in the first case, as it’s a required course, you get everyone—the students who are only taking it because they have to, the students who are going to drop out after a semester or two, the students who are only in college because their parents said they had the option of going to college on their parents’ dime, getting a job, or moving out (yes, really), the students who have sort of coasted through school doing minimal effort and are not prepared for college, plus of course the ones who actually want to try (and those are the ones who make me feel like this is really worthwhile, God bless them, whatever their skill levels are, even if I have to help with really remedial stuff).
Comments
Can you expand? What is the misinterpretation and what is the correction?
I do not understand why this Lewis/Leavis disagreement is relevant to this conversation (I had never heard of either before as far as I know). From what some have said the one dismissed the long-term importance of the analysis of the other. But exactly what they are talking about is hard to work out as often posters in this thread use shorthand and coded language.
I think the way Marx used language is within the Western tradition and is the ideas are heavily influenced by religion. I do not think you get to Communism as an idea without the Roman Catholic church.
Dogmatism itself grew out of the dominance of a certain kind of religion in the West.
“Dogmatism,” per the dictionary, simply means “the expression of an opinion or belief as if it were a fact,” “positiveness in assertion of opinion especially when unwarranted or arrogant,” or “a viewpoint or system of ideas based on insufficiently examined premises.” The primary meaning of “dogma” (from a Greek word meaning simply “that which one thinks is true”) is “something held as an established opinion.”
Tom Holland: Dominion - the making of the western mind
Plenty of other books have been written on this topic too.
I’m finding it hard to believe that dogmatism hasn’t been around as long as people have been around. A particular expression of dogmatism I can see, but dogmatism per se, I have trouble seeing.
There's something very Christian about the idea that there is some kind of objective/godly truth "out there" and the history of the west is largely dominated by the idea that societies could be managed and/or rearranged to be godly. There's this mix of ideas of extreme power exercised by the Roman empire mixed together with this religious imperative to "be right" which developed European societies that we different in the detail but united in the basic idea that they were right and others were wrong. This notion of dogma filters into the "western mind" and flows into western imperialism, Marxism and scientific/medical thinking. It is somewhat challenged by the thinking of Mill, but even he self-acknowledged that his mind and thinking developed from within this way of thinking.
I think Christianity largely is Platonism. Although influential prior to the adoption by the Christian neo-Platonists, I do not see that it dominated the thinking of the whole "empire" or continent or however you want to describe it, until Christianity became the dominant idea in the West.
This is a very impressionistic argument, Enlightenment and scientific rationalism also developed in opposition to established religion, even if there were attempts at rapprochement later on.
It's starting with the present day and then trying to reason backwards from a sample size of one by finding antecedents for some set of liberal values.
As discussed previously, the Popperian version of the Philosophy of Science implies the existence of a truth that is approachable by the techniques of science. Which in itself implies something about the "true" Platonic nature of reality.
These discussions when one talks about science become very difficult on multiple levels.
@Basketactortale, can you clarify what exactly you mean when you use the word dogmatism?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogmatic_theology
Just for the record, dogmatic theology/dogmatics and dogmatism are not the same thing and don’t mean the same thing.
I assume 4b arose by giving sense 2 (along with sense 1) a pejorative spin. Nevertheless conflating them is a fallacy of ambiguity.
First I did not write the Wikipedia page. Second at least one of the Wikipedia editors is using "science" in a different way to me when they quote Torrance "Christian dogmatics is the pure science of theology in which, as in every science, we seek to discover the fundamental structure and order in the nature of things and to develop basic forms of thought about them as our understanding is allowed to be controlled by them from beyond our individualism."
In contrast, perhaps, to a community of ideas where an idea is offered as an option for ones life. If that philosophical school was to appeal to you then you might reorient your life around the principles.
What you seem to be saying is that the source of your dogmatism is Christianity. There's a lot to like about Tom Holland, but why do you consider him to be authoritative about this?
The mentions of apologetics in a number of reviews about Tom Holland's book suggested to me there might be something of C S Lewis about him. It seems I'm not alone in this:
While it's unfair to expect a person to only link to articles with which they agree on all points, one at least expects that a poster either regards articles that they link to as respectable and defensible points of view or that the says so up front.
I think the phrase "adopting a scientific and critical method and taking into account the contemporary situation" is a contradiction in terms when referring to religion. It appears in the first paragraph of a Wikipedia page I did not write, the rest of which does not appear to me to be referring specifically to this specific citation.
If you have a point, then I have no idea what it is.
Moreover the argument that religion sees itself as scientific, meaning logical and deductable, would appear to support my use of the term given it is self-evident that religious dogma fairly obviously is not.
As you were.
I despised that and deconstructionism and such so very much as a grad student in the 90s, it drove me away from academia for years. As well as the sense that great works of literature (and art, etc.) are not mainly worth talking about because they have anything of value in themselves or what the author meant to say. There were many times in those classes in which I felt like I was the only one there who actually cared about the literature we were reading for its own sake or what it actually had to say about things. When you have professors basically put down the idea that a great work of literature like the Faerie Queene has anything to say about religious matters, because (I’m not making this up) educated people don’t believe in Christianity anymore (I quietly said, “I do”), it tends to make one think that academia isn’t a welcoming place.
Another one used the beginning of Milton’s Paradise Lost to show us what the pre-Romantic approach to things was, and I seemed to be the only one in the class who actually liked it—everyone else, including the professor, talked about how God was horrible and there was an unpleasant sense of “heaviness” in the depiction of God imposing His will on Adam and Eve in the garden, etc. etc. etc. The tone of that part of the class seemed to be to show us how much better Romanticism was in comparison.
Sorry, I hope I didn’t make this Hellish.
Amen!
Ditto!! 😂😂😂
I really enjoyed both Millenium and Dominion, original and compelling works, and have just started his translation of Suetonius. He may not have completed his doctorate but he is clearly a very talented and knowledgeable historian.
I have no idea what the other Tom Holland even looks like.
(ETA the wiki page link wants to default to the actor!)
Here he is! The actor, anyway…
https://variety.com/2026/film/global/tom-holland-spider-man-4-filmed-new-scenes-more-humor-villain-1236711205/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Holland_(author)
Also, as eny fule kno, Dogma is a Kevin Smith movie starring Alan Rickman.
I think it is a fairly common experience of graduate studies to grow to despise the subject.
I am interested to know what you thought the course was going to be about. Did you not know that it would be about literary criticism of the texts?
I have not studied English literature at all, but could one not have countered the professors with a well built argument? I assume you had to write essays, would you not have been awarded marks for disagreeing with the professor with citations and argument? I assume given everything which everyone has said on this thread that there is more than one way to read Paradise Lost so even a professor challenging perceived shibboleths is really expressing an opinion which many others disagree with. No?
I do not understand why someone would sign up to a course which must have been advertised as being heavy on literary criticism when what you wanted was to enjoy reading books.
All of that said, in my context with the benefit of hindsight there are some things I could and maybe should have challenged within my degrees. I lacked the vocabulary to understand the philosophy beneath what was being taught and maybe the lecturers would have been uncomfortable if I knew then what I know now!
Saying your position is self-evident is, well, dogmatic (= "that asserts or imposes dogmas or opinions in an imperious or arrogant manner; inclined to lay down principles as undeniably true").
Until such time as your posts become less dogmatic, I don't think it's worth my time to engage with you further.
Back in the day there was a kind of 'star-struck structuralism' thing going on - as one wag put it, themselves a 'structuralist' - and dare I say it, a rather 'fundamentalist' form emerged.
What @ChastMastr describes sounds to me rather like that.
I can't speak for or from the neuro-divergent angle but agree with @Pomona that there's certainly a vital insight there in terms of what we, as readers, bring to the text alongside other valuable contributions.
I wrestled with it all at university as I felt it was undermining values like 'absolute truth' and looking back suspect it was one of the reasons why I took refuge in a verging on fundamentalist form of evangelical charismatic Christianity by way of reaction.
That said, I did adopt what might be described as a structuralist/post-structuralist approach in essays, exams and dissertations.
There was a mismatch of course when it came to my reading of scripture which was far less nuanced.
But then, many of us are a mass of contradictions.
I came to the conclusion that these critical tools and stances were less of a 'threat' if you didn't take a rigidly fundamentalist approach to scripture or to the written word in general.
I think it is the case that critical theory - of whatever kind - can smother or squash our enjoyment of literary texts, films, plays etc.
But they can also enhance our enjoyment and appreciation.
As with anything else there's a balance here. I do think that an overdose of arcane critical theory can cause problems- it can make you almost unemployable outside of academia for one thing.
But an understanding or appreciation of different critical perspectives can help us get under the skin of novels, plays, films and so on.
It probably plays out differently for different people.
As an aside, I would put C S Lewis in the anti-intentionalist camp with the post-structuralists. Roughly paraphrasing his position in The Personalist heresy, he thought Keats' intentions and subjectivity and attitudes were interesting because he produced Hyperion, rather than Hyperion being interesting because of what it showed us about Keats' intentions and attitudes.
(I used to be a fairly hard-line anti-intentionalist; I'd now say I think it's ok to talk about authorial intention but one can't use authorial intention to veto a reading.)
Quite a few people seem to think its main purpose is to do what philosophy or sociology do, and they bend every text to suit those intentions. Me, I'd rather have such people go where their true interests lie (that is, the departments of philosophy or sociology) and let those actually interested in books, poems, etc get on with their work.
(I would declare an interest: my thesis was on literature and philosophy.)
Because we had to take lit crit classes as part of the degree.
I did indeed speak up. I’m happy to report that my MA thesis paper was on notes toward a metaphysically essentialist model for literary criticism, though I don’t remember the details very well almost 30 years later.
My gripe with the various modern lit crit models, first and foremost, as many here might guess, was and is over the “there is no objective reality, let alone a moral, spiritual, or metaphysical objective reality” worldview that many of these models hold, or such was the consistent approach taken by my professors in the 1980s and 90s, which is a worldview I consider both false and my mortal enemy. That doesn’t mean that as fallen mortal limited humans we can know everything 100%, of course.
As for the classes in general, I had to pick the best options which were available to me during any given semester.
Amen!
I think I should also say that I’m not just talking about “enjoying books” – to me one of the values of old books is that it tells us things that I believe are truths, wisdom, etc., especially in works like those of Dante, Milton, and Spenser. Perhaps especially the kinds of things that we are less likely to hear nowadays. But enjoying books is also worth doing for its own sake as well.
There’s a line in Lewis’ Screwtape…
I don’t think you’re an awful person. ❤️ The people who hold such views as I’ve described aren’t the same thing as the views themselves. ❤️
And this is why, once I got my MA in 1997, despite my original plan to become a literature professor, I decided not to—I thought I’d basically spend the rest of my life arguing with deconstructionists, or else have to go to some kind of academic ghetto at some small right-wing religious school where I wouldn’t fit in either. It was years after that (2009) when I applied to teach English Composition at a local community college, and that’s basically what I’ve been doing ever since. For good or for bad, I’m not really dealing with current trendy critical theories as much (some of this is likely not only because of the subject, but because I’m an adjunct teaching online at multiple community colleges, rather than a bigger college or university). And I gather the fashions have changed regarding critical theory, though I still see the old standbys (Marxist, psychoanalytical, feminist, etc., but not semiotics or Derrida) pop up from time to time when students have to write papers about literature. I do offer them the option of writing about it in a non-lit-crit approach when I can, and/or I point out that they don’t have to believe in the implied worldview of any given theory to use it to analyze the poem/short story/etc. But that doesn’t necessarily even come up in the classes I have this semester.
I will say that one thing I deal with is what’s happened to basic education in the US over the decades. It seems that things my generation was taught (I graduated high school and entered college at 18 in 1985) have fallen out of favor, including basic reading. Even then I was rare in having studied sentence diagramming. But over the year is phonics went out of favor, which has become something that has alarmed various people and now phonics is making a comeback. In my Zoom classes, I have students read instructions aloud (because basically otherwise they don’t really stay very engaged if they aren’t actually interacting and I was told to do this by the person over me and it’s worked really well) and it’s jarring to see how they don’t know how to pronounce words or even how to sound them out. And while some of them are people for whom English is not their first language, a lot of them are people who were born and raised speaking and reading English and they just… Don’t know how to sound out words. No one ever taught them to do that. Sometimes I do that and it seems to help. I really believe that “no child left behind” with its emphasis on standardized tests has done a great deal of damage here over the last 20-something years.
The way that I sometimes put it is that the soldier does not pick the battlefield that they are sent to, and if the front lines of education are, at this point, where I have to teach people things that my generation knew once we graduated high school or possibly (God help us all) junior high school or middle school (age 11-13, generally), well, those are the front lines we’ve got, rather than what I thought we’d have in the 21st century. I even expose them to sentence diagramming (in my Zoom classes) because it helps show the structure of the sentence and how different words have to agree with each other, because otherwise many of them really seem to have trouble grasping how that works. I don’t give them any tests on that that you know they have to pass or what have you but at least I expose them to the concept, and point out where they can find out more if they want to. (And we don’t even really get to direct versus indirect objects…)
I know, some of this may be because I’m dealing with community colleges, and you do have some people there who are there because they cannot get in anywhere else academically, and don’t get me wrong, some of my student students are very bright, but still, somebody has to do it.
(At one college (I won’t say what state, but it is not where I live, in Florida), in my first semester there, I was horrified that so few of my students were turning in their work at all, and I asked someone who was a colleague that was kind of mentoring me there what I needed to do to get them to do it, and she said, “Well, our state has a really poor educational system, so I’m afraid this is kind of what you deal with here.”)
I’m also admittedly dealing with Comp I and occasionally Comp II, and in the first case, as it’s a required course, you get everyone—the students who are only taking it because they have to, the students who are going to drop out after a semester or two, the students who are only in college because their parents said they had the option of going to college on their parents’ dime, getting a job, or moving out (yes, really), the students who have sort of coasted through school doing minimal effort and are not prepared for college, plus of course the ones who actually want to try (and those are the ones who make me feel like this is really worthwhile, God bless them, whatever their skill levels are, even if I have to help with really remedial stuff).
Er, anyway, back to literature…