I think I should tell you something about Miss Evans...

[oursin]

There's a lively debate going on over in academics_anon about how you deal with theoretical perspectives that you don't agree with. Which is being interesting and engaging and raises some significant issues.

However, I have a serious problem with the OP complaining about having to engage with the analyses of godless atheists like Freud or Marx, and wanting to get back to 'moralism and George Eliot'.

Yes, I have made a comment enquiring how they deal with Miss Evans's atheism and adultery.

But how can you read Eliot and miss the point that it's about (among lots of other things, because Eliot is after all a rich and complex writer) finding moral meaning in a universe without a deity and without religion?

And, as far as feminism goes, while Eliot was really, really ambivalent around a number of women's issues, she did throw her support behind several of the major campaigns quite apart from being an exemplar of achieving woman herself. Oh yes, and foregrounding female concerns (the kinds of things that still sometimes get dismissed as petty and trival) in her novels.

The Victorians are not a cozy retreat of the problems of today.

(I am rather proud of this particular comment of mine: ah, the vanity of me!)

Comments

[liadnan]

I've been following the post with some interest, though I'm not inclined to comment. I don't really see the enormous problem but suspect it rather depends on discipline and also on which side of the Atlantic you are.
Having said that, not quite the same thing, but the OP's basic point does remind me, in one of my own fields of interest, of various old arguments about understanding 5th-6th century Byzantine positions on (a) christological controversies and (b) chariot racing teams in marxist terms, or similar. Which arguments are rather blown out of the water by the evidence (cf Averil Cameron on the latter subject). But then, that's not so much about disagreeing with marxist historical theory in the abstract (though I largely do) as about the evidence showing it isn't much use in dealing with the question.

[liadnan]

Also rather depends what kind of "traditionally religious" they mean. Literalists in terms of religion are going to find any kind of arts/humanities subject a bit unswallowable at higher level I suspect: I don't personally accept "traditionally religious" as a decent description of same, unless you accept that Augustine for a start wasn't traditionally religious. Those who take a more abstract and intellectualised approach to religion rather less so, indeed, they're quite likely to be applying similar techniques to their own religious beliefs.

[oursin.livejournal.com]

The whole think reeked of not-remembering-history and thus doomed-to-repeat-it - or possibly just not knowing much about history in the first place, like, e.g. the Victorian tradition of doubt and unbelief; or indeed, the origins of their own 'traditional' system.

Martin Luther: I'm on ur cathedral steps attacking ur traditions..., versions of which could apply to so many religious leaders.

[hafren.livejournal.com]

And our Marian was the first to write about the social effects of convenience food (in Brother Jacob).

But there you are; I've met people who think Silas Marner recovers his belief in God at the end of the book....

[oursin.livejournal.com]

Because that is what narratives of redemption are always about...

[daegaer.livejournal.com]

Oh good God. That person is far too much like some of my own pet horrors for me to even think of commenting over there.

It's interesting though, how so many people who think they're all in favour of Victorian virtues cry like little modern crybabies when it's suggested they might want to look into the Victorian virute of doing some bloody work, even if they find the work hard.

[oursin.livejournal.com]

While there have been, perhaps, too many examples of recent years of academics being deliberately 'playful' (visions of the dancing hippos in Fantasia spring to mind) the element of playing with ideas ('let's run it up the flagpole and see if it dances the macarena') is really rather central to scholarly enterprise. I can't remember where I saw this - something on the medieval rediscovery of Aristotle's Logic, which had all the learned doctors at European universities going around playing with syllogisms (for all the world like they'd discovered Suduku) - 'Socrates is purple, Socrates is a man, therefore all men are purple', etc.

[egretplume.livejournal.com]

I wondered if the OP over there wasn't a troll, but apparently not.
I've been tempted to post about how the OP should take advantage of political timing and apply to all those Bible Belt schools that demand a "faith statement" for employmen, or schools anxious to show that they *do* hire conservatives. Ze might also secure hirself some grants for "faith-based" research in the humanities. It is just another example of the dominant rightwing whining about how it's oppressed and its religion is disrespected. But I have so far kept out of the thread.
Your comment was good.

[oursin.livejournal.com]

Person has now gone on to claim Mary Wollstonecraft (dec'd 1797) as a C19th feminist, and alleges that 'Butler' (I assume Judith, though I've thrown Josephine into the mix just to be snarky, bad hedgehog) is, much to my astonishment and doubtless Butler's own, an ecofeminist.

Sometimes sheer unadulterated ignorance is barely distinguishable from trollery.

[adrian-turtle.livejournal.com]

I think the OP is just very, very, young. I looked up the profile just now, and the birthdate in 1984 surprises me a little. I had thought the person was even less experienced than 23, from the post. But for a person who did undergraduate work within the same sheltered community that he or she grew up in, the first year of graduate school can be confusing. On my way back from reading the OP's profile, I read a bit of hir journal, and noticed "worldliness" being mentioned as if it were a bad thing. I suspect this person came from an extremely sheltered background, and is just beginning to confront the full range of academic discussion.

[oursin.livejournal.com]

In one of the subthreads of that explosion I think OP said something about fearing their faith would be 'contaminated' by exposure to all these various views in academe. Which suggests a certain insecurity of belief? Unlike those students in some UK survey who said, yeah, yeah, they had to regurgitate the approved line on Darwin and evolution because it was expected, but they didn't believe it. Which may just be a rather British cynicism in an unexpected place.

[adrian-turtle.livejournal.com]

There is a subculture that calls itself "conservative" and "Christian," and I would not have believed it myself if I hadn't seen it. Even then, I didn't take it seriously until I had made repeated, weeks-long, visits to areas where it is the dominant culture. Many churches (which call themselves "ecumenical," and lead their members to belive their fundamentalist faith is the only way to be Christian at all) actively preach against enlightenment values.

Homeschooling is a big deal for a lot of this conservative Christian subculture. There are homeschooling organizations -- they print books, make lesson plans that comply with state requirements, and support parents in the staggering job of acting as teachers without teacher training. Many of them include the message that homeschooling is *necessary* to preserve faith, because conventional education teaches evil values. If you send your children to public school, they'll learn atheism and evolutionism, and turn away from the Almighty. People really believe this! They don't just believe their children will leave a familiar church where their parents worship, where they would be guided by familiar clergy (presumably the best clergy)...they believe those doubting, rebellious, children would be turning away from the divine tightrope over the Abyss, and thus they would be literally Damned.

I've visited Bob Jones University. It calls itself a liberal arts college, without perceptible irony, but they just mean they don't teach engineering or the performing arts. They used to have letters to parents of prospective students on their website, warning of the dangers of sending their dear children to secular schools (or even Catholic schools, which everyone knows are not truly "Christian" in the language of this subculture.) I was going to quote, but apparently now you have to write and ask for such things to be sent individually.

The original poster looks like a young person who grew up in that subculture. I'm an outsider and can't be sure, but it seems more likely than anything else I can think of. Because the subculture can be so closed and insular, it produces young adults who use words oddly, and have trouble breaking far enough away to get much perspective. I condemn 50-year-olds teaching that sort of nonsense (either in academia, or to their children), but not people in the 15-25 age group who may be just figuring out how much their parents and trusted advisors may have lied to them.

[serrana.livejournal.com]

How do I deal with theoretical perspectives I don't like?

Crude jokes, mostly. ;>

[hartleyhare.livejournal.com]

I am boggling slightly at the idea of someone who is supposedly serious about doing postgraduate level work resenting the energy and commitment they might have to invest in a 25-page seminar paper. It's all reminding me somewhat of the student I taught a few years ago, who wanted to apply to Oxford to read English but was reluctant to do any reading outside the A-level syllabus in case she didn't get in (in which case her extra reading would all have been a waste of time, as far as she was concerned). Yes, it's all a long hard slog, but as you say in your comment, that's how you build intellectual muscle. The metaphor of investment (which may well have been unconscious on the OP's part) smacks far too readily of a sense of entitlement to some kind of instant result.

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

I didn't want to read closely enough to find out ... but was someone saying that Freud's theories shouldn't be applied to any text written before Freud's theories were written?

Into the bucket goes OEDIPUS REX would be not worth saying. I'd rather jump in from the other side and cite Ayn Rand saying that to be 'conscious' means to be 'conscious of something', and how could Freud make a theory that wasn't a theory about something, which would have to be a something written before he wrote his theory....

Of course there could be a good point about applying Freud's theories differently to texts written after his theories because their writing may have been infuenced by his (perhaps self-fulfilling) theories....

[retreats, covered by ellipses]

[liadnan]

While I take and agree with your broad point, and playing devil's advocate a bit, the Freudian analysis of the Oedipus story is not the only, or even necessarily the best, prism through which to read Oedipus Rex. In that it's highly debateable whether the audience for whom it was written would have seen it in quite that way or whether the Oedipus Complex is really applicable to classical Athenian society (let alone any earlier society in which they might have understood the play to be set).

Whether Freudian analysis is of great value outside the limited frame of reference of the class and time of people who were his subjects is another question...

[redbird]

You have reason to be proud.

Me, I think I'm just irritable:

"To the extent that Freud's writing--or Locke's, or Aquinas's--is useful and valid, it isn't useful only when talking about people who had read the theory. The assertion that, say, Freud or Foucault are irrelevant to Beowulf because they wrote after the Beowulf poet implies that nothing in your religious beliefs is relevant to anyone who has not been taught those beliefs, or anyone who lived before your religion was founded. I don't know what religion you follow--though people here have been guessing--but I suspect that most Christians, Jews, or Muslims would call that idea nonsense if not heresy. (Yes, you can reasonably argue that people aren't responsible for following teachings they don't know about; arguing that G-d exists only for people who have heard of him, or that if we didn't teach children morality it would be acceptable for them to murder, is another matter entirely.)"

[redbird]

And yes, I suspect that if the "G-d" spelling doesn't irritate the original poster, the lower-case "him" will. The latter was unconscious, but comments aren't editable.

[thera-flu.livejournal.com]

Thanks for highlighting the incongruity. Now back to my godless first chapter.