- National Slow Down Week!: Wish I’d known ’bout this earlier in the week…. A fun animation from adbusters (via Worsted Witch)
- Switch to native-plant lawns! A v. informative piece about California’s water situation
- Where do gently-worn soccer balls go? Hopefully to World Vision Gifts’s “Get a Kick Out of Sharing” program –
- Despite considerable proof Freud doctored up his “case studies,” many scholars still buy Freud wholesale. Sez Allen Esterson: “My best guess is that Freud’s extraordinary gifts as a story-teller and rhetorician cast a kind of spell over many readers, so much so that they find it almost inconceivable that what he reports are not authentic accounts of his historical and clinical experiences.” I too am often baffled by how seriously Freud’s theories are often taken by academics in my English dept. (via 3quarksdaily)
January 18th, 2007 at 10:34 am
Siel, did you get my e-mail or call? I’m sick, realllll bad. You can delete this comment after you see this.
January 18th, 2007 at 10:40 am
I’ve always found people who still followed Freud to be an odd bunch. It’s not just that he doctored his results, but that there are better explanations of his findings possible through behavioralism.
That said, given the cultural impact, it does make sense to take Freudian ideas into account in literary criticism (although I think that the validity is not there in works written before Freud’s influence had grown). The model to use would be to take into consideration, Christian doctrine in writing criticism of Milton or Graham Greene.
Although writing this, I can see a case made for Freudian analysis of, say Shakespeare, not because it’s a valid model for Shakespeare, but because it provides some insight into how Shakespeare may have helped shape Freud’s ideas.
When I got my BA in English, there were no Freudians that I was aware of in the English faculty. Mostly we were dominated by New Critics, and to a lesser extent deconstructionist theory. Me, I tended more towards a hermeneutic analysis with a touch of Marxism. Until I had my intellectual crisis: I could see why I would want to write literature, and I could see why I would want to write critical theory, but criticism itself seemed to be devoid of a purpose (and simultaneously was the bulk of what I was doing). Needless to say, this was disastrous to my continuation as a literary scholar.
January 19th, 2007 at 10:13 am
I totally agree — Freud’s interesting to study with a cultural impact perspective. Sadly, some of Freud’s theories are still bought wholesale (for ex, feminist film theory is inexplicably attached to Freud’s theories about fetishes). The practice seems so ingrained that people don’t even ask WHY they’re using these theories or if they’re even appropriate or effective –
Thus ended my flirtation with feminist film theory.
January 20th, 2007 at 2:34 pm
The World Vision Gifts and their soccer ball program, seem like a great Idea! Thanks for sharing the video -P
January 22nd, 2007 at 9:55 am
Sure! Thanks for dropping by :)