Poll: The study of Literature

All right, fair enough. You know what answer to provide in the poll, then.

 

I do think that the study of literature is important and worthy of academic inquiry, but that the jobs prospects for the field are limited. Doing what you love is great, but you still need to pay rent at the end of the month.

 

*sighs*

It stands to reason, then, that if some literary knowledge is good for everyone, then it would be functional and beneficial to society to have a few people who devote their whole lives to the study of literature so that they can disseminate it in a timely fashion to the rest of society, would it not?

 

sigh,
1. if it was illegible it wouldnt be literature.
2. if it is personal unsourced and biased, great, thats what it is. that doesnt negate it's relevance
3. fiction is not all made up nonsense, your statement is an opinion and nothing more.
4. it tells you fucking goddamn PILES about humanity, provided you are flexible in what you are looking for.
5. omfg "one of the most useless pursuits imaginable"? what about insight into the human soul? the nature of art? beauty? existence? - and before you say that this falls under "philosophy" - countless works of literature are also philosophy.

tldr version: your first paragraph is completely backwards because anything that falls under your definition of "literature" is NOT literature. what you are describing is "writing".

also, damn you sure do have a contrarian stance to just about fucking everything dont you?

 

That's an idiotic touchy feely perspective, and we invented science because idiotic touchy feely crap turned out to be absolutely shit at finding things out, and science requires things like observable evidence and unbiased documentation and repeatable results.

Any conclusions you draw from reading someone's diary which aren't formed using tried and tested psychology are just mindless conjecture and of absolutely no value because there is no rational basis for them to be correct, and anything you do find by applying science to it is only applicable to that person, so as I said, it can tell you plenty about how much of a fucktard the person writing it was, but nothing else.

 

I love this one:
"The rigorous, academic study of literature, being a discipline of humanities, is by definition also a study of humans."

Because these same people are the ones who write the definitions

 

meh, theres just no room in your purview for any opinions other than your own.

you're still not really talking about literature. almost ALL WE KNOW about greek and roman societies (for example) comes from the writings of the likes of Homer, Aristotle, Plato, Aeschylus and company. why dont you go science up some information about roman civil society. blah blah blah here comes the "archeology" "carbon dating" science stuff that I'm sure will serve as a suitable distraction from acknowledging that there are non scientific methods of inquiry, but that's your prerogative at this point I guess.

and this ^ is the definition of circular logic.

 

Actually, you're absolutely right. English professors are the ones that decide the definitions for every word in the English language.

 

You are treating literature as a "scientific source"

problem is, while a book may be a "scientific source" and a "literary work" at the same time

using that book for science makes it a "scientific source", while using it for literature studies make it a "literary work", and you cant use it as both at once without risking the areas of pseudo-science

so in short, you cant say literary works are important because of all the scientific information we got from them, same as you cant say scientific sources are important because of all the literature they often contain... still both are important!

unless of course you wanna call "lists of roman weapons stored in the barracks" a literary work while all it contains is a title and a long list of names with amounts and weight per 1

then again, i wont call the letters from a Roman soldier to his mom, (telling her about how he fell in love with a local girl and decided to settle in her native village) a scientific source, true its a cool and emotional archaeological find... and its pretty cool as a literary source because we get to know the informal letter of that day and how they used literature in common use but there is hardly anything newly scientific that can be subtracted from it

i could be wrong about this, but this is how i believe it is handled in academic circles

 

If you equate science and literature to the difference between logic and emotion, then you have to think a little about what you're saying.

It seems to me that that is what is trying to be said, but something being less than logical doesn't make it any less worthy, or useful. The point about science is it is reliable and you can use it as a stable platform to build a world out of things you don't understand...but that doesn't mean it should be the only thing you should use to get by...and indeed, people who try are pretty boring, because life is only a box to them.

Maybe I like to dabble in philosophy debate sometimes, but that makes me a richer individual, not poorer.

 

There is plenty of logic in literature. Logic is one of the three major elements of persuasion and any literary work attempting to persuade (very few literary works do not attempt to persuade in some capacity) is inevitably going to be using a lot of logic. Logic didn't originate from science, science originates from logic. To claim that scientific inquiry has some sort of exclusive domain over logical thought is quite absurd and you're doing yourself a huge disservice in stating so.

In fact, the rigorous, academic study of literature is by definition logical and dispassionate. enjoying a book and feeling happy about something you read, for instance, is outside the scope of the study of literature.

Emotion, too, is an important element of literature in some cases, but making the conclusion literaturecience -> emotion:reason is really quite foolish, especially considering that much scientific writing is also literary in nature.

To summarize, there is logic within literature and logic is used when you analyze or study literature so your explanation simply does not work at all for me.

 

Mmm...I was going on the assumption that like logic is more like a cube, a regular object that is clearly visible to be equal on all sides. Literature contains both logic and emotion, so it is more like a box wrapped in bubblewrap, where you can't really see the shape of the box clearly - is it a cube, a rectangle, or something other?

Science doesn't have an exclusive domain over logical thought, but is purely logical, which means it can be relied upon to be a method of logic - scientific method is a way to apply logic to provide a hypothesis, theory, or result. I know philosophy applies logic as a form to postulate other than you can perceive, but because science applies logic to things we can obtain real world results from, it is more concrete, rather than purely theoretical.

To your last statement I would say, just because the barrel contains fish, doesn't mean that the statement "the barrel has only fish" is true. Indeed, that may be what you are trying to point out to me, but because I consider science grounded in logic, I consider it a logical construct and therefore comparable as logic.

Anyway, i'm not all that logical, and I will tend to be freeform unless i'm specifically looking to counter someone. If there is a gap in the logic that I am using, it is because i'm not very good at applying 100% logic

 

Just to clarify, the scientific method is a philosophical construct, and therefore science is, in fact, a specific type of philosophy. You can't use the scientific method to arrive at the conclusion that you should use the scientific method - for obvious reasons. However, further discussion here is outside the scope of this thread.

I don't have any particular problems with anything else you posted; if that's the way you view literature then that is your perogative. My only responsibility is ensuring that you know that some literary works and some investigations of literature are primarily or exclusively logical in nature and the vast majority of all of them contain some degree of logic.

 

Literal psychology would be an interesting field of study, to see if you can apply psychology to literature to deduce motives and common patterns indicative of moods.

Might have a use in criminal investigations, but it would have to be approached from a psychological background as much as a literature based perspective.

 

Good point. I know both are of logic, and are quite similar in nature, so I see them as children of the same parent. I don't think I was trying to use scientific method to justify itself, but if that's what it looks like, then fair enough.

 

I would posit that philosophy is actually the parent of science, rather than being a sibling. My point in invoking the circular logic fallacy of proving the scientific method with the scientific method was that any considerations we have about the utility of the scientific method must be done outside the scope of science and this consideration precludes the application of the scientific method in the first place.

 

I thought this would be a cute quote for this thread:

"I believe that there never was a creator of a philosophical system who did not confess at the end of his life that he had wasted his time. It must be admitted that the inventors of the mechanical arts have been much more useful to men than the inventors of syllogisms. He who imagined a ship, towers considerably above him who imagined innate ideas." -Voltaire

But I think literature is a great thing to study and keep alive. Science is great , but at the end of the day its literature and poetry that matter most.

 

who are you to rank those subjects in that order?

 

A human.

 

Exactly. And trust me, I'm majoring in Chemistry.