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Re: Boyd on Lolita, science, pattern
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RE: [NABOKV-L] Boyd on Lolita, science, patternNabokov's answer to Jacob Bronowsky [ "I think it all depends on what scientists or novelists you have in view. Darwin or Gauss were as deeply and rapturously involved in their work as Browning or Joyce."] doesn't pair "Darwin and Browning" or "Gauss and Joyce": scientists and artists in their rapturous involvement are not being compared then. When Nabokov writes ( through Kinbote) "from the treeman to Browning, from the caveman to Keats" his sets are fed by misleading vicinal hints [ from evolution/involution, as implied in the parody about "The seven ages of Man"], but they remain unrelated to a scientific perspective on the biological theories of evolution. Kinbote expressed how he reached his artistic vision, not what he saw: I can do what only a true artist can do - pounce upon the forgotten butterfly of revelation, wean myself abruptly from the habit of things, see the web of the world, and the warp and the weft of that web.
Jansy Mello
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B.Boyd: A couple of responses to this thread:
I agree with Stan Kelly-Bootle and am introducing next semester a cross-faculty course in Literature and Science partly to awaken those in the humanities to the glories of science (I hope Stan will point me, off-list, to something that can explain Lie Group E8). We will probably begin with Flatland (the 1884 novella) and Flatland: The Movie (2007).
VN certainly had as much respect for science as for art. When Jacob Bronowski asked him on 1963 "Do you think scientists are as deeply and personally involved in their work as the novelist is?" he answered: "I think it all depends on what scientists or novelists you have in view. Darwin or Gauss were as deeply and rapturously involved in their work as Browning or Joyce. On the other hand, in both camps we have those crowds of imitators, those technicians and administrators and career boys who cannot really be called scientists and artists. They, of course, dismiss their minds from their work after office hours." (N's Butterflies 566)
I don't think E.O. Wilson (who by the way warmly recalls the lepidopterist's occasional visits back to the MCZ in the 1950s when the hymenopterist was just beginning there) wants to colonize the humanities and arts. After all he draws on the arts with glee and gratitude to amplify many of his points about science, and he is perfectly aware that the arts offer a huge repository of information about human minds and interests that science can mine, and that science keeps on opening up new possibilities for the artistic imagination.
I have read and admired Raymond Tallis for decades and think he's right about A.S. Byatt on Donne. But on attack he can discharge very broad broadsides. Far from minimizing difference between author and author, as he claims of the approaches he critiques, I use my own evolutionary approaches to argue for the individuality of the artist, the uniqueness of art and of particular works of art, and the uniqueness of those in the audience, and their particular situation on, say, a first or an nth reading, in ways that supplement and extend common-sense suppositions. Like Tallis I want nothing to do with an approach that homogenizes literary works, as some moronic evolutionary work he has in mind has indeed done.
Better to judge by the best in an area, not the worst. Tallis critiques "overstanding" rather than "understanding": "The capacious frame of reference in which the work is located--evident to the critic but not the author--places the former in a position of knowing superiority vis-a-vis the latter. The work becomes a mere example of some historical, cultural, political, or other trend of which the author will have been dimly aware, if at all." I agree with his critique but challenge his reference to the kind of approach I take. The best critic working in a cognitive and evolutionary vein is film scholar David Bordwell. On the jacket of Brodwell's latest book, The Poetics of Cinema, James Mangold, the director of Walk the Line and 3:10 to Yuma, writes: "Film Theory, rightly or wrongly, makes most filmmakers cringe. We rarely see processes, collaborations, technologies, or underlying motivations thoughtfully examined in such writings. David Bordwell's work is radically different. Whether examining Hollywood cinema, Hong Kong, Independent, New Wave, silent or sound, high-grossing or unknown, he addresses film with a clear mission-to understand how a film works, how it's made and why-and to discuss his findings in a direct style that embraces intellectuals and non-academic readers alike." Deep understanding, not "overstanding."
Brian Boyd
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Jansy Mello
...........................................................................................................................................................................................................................
B.Boyd: A couple of responses to this thread:
I agree with Stan Kelly-Bootle and am introducing next semester a cross-faculty course in Literature and Science partly to awaken those in the humanities to the glories of science (I hope Stan will point me, off-list, to something that can explain Lie Group E8). We will probably begin with Flatland (the 1884 novella) and Flatland: The Movie (2007).
VN certainly had as much respect for science as for art. When Jacob Bronowski asked him on 1963 "Do you think scientists are as deeply and personally involved in their work as the novelist is?" he answered: "I think it all depends on what scientists or novelists you have in view. Darwin or Gauss were as deeply and rapturously involved in their work as Browning or Joyce. On the other hand, in both camps we have those crowds of imitators, those technicians and administrators and career boys who cannot really be called scientists and artists. They, of course, dismiss their minds from their work after office hours." (N's Butterflies 566)
I don't think E.O. Wilson (who by the way warmly recalls the lepidopterist's occasional visits back to the MCZ in the 1950s when the hymenopterist was just beginning there) wants to colonize the humanities and arts. After all he draws on the arts with glee and gratitude to amplify many of his points about science, and he is perfectly aware that the arts offer a huge repository of information about human minds and interests that science can mine, and that science keeps on opening up new possibilities for the artistic imagination.
I have read and admired Raymond Tallis for decades and think he's right about A.S. Byatt on Donne. But on attack he can discharge very broad broadsides. Far from minimizing difference between author and author, as he claims of the approaches he critiques, I use my own evolutionary approaches to argue for the individuality of the artist, the uniqueness of art and of particular works of art, and the uniqueness of those in the audience, and their particular situation on, say, a first or an nth reading, in ways that supplement and extend common-sense suppositions. Like Tallis I want nothing to do with an approach that homogenizes literary works, as some moronic evolutionary work he has in mind has indeed done.
Better to judge by the best in an area, not the worst. Tallis critiques "overstanding" rather than "understanding": "The capacious frame of reference in which the work is located--evident to the critic but not the author--places the former in a position of knowing superiority vis-a-vis the latter. The work becomes a mere example of some historical, cultural, political, or other trend of which the author will have been dimly aware, if at all." I agree with his critique but challenge his reference to the kind of approach I take. The best critic working in a cognitive and evolutionary vein is film scholar David Bordwell. On the jacket of Brodwell's latest book, The Poetics of Cinema, James Mangold, the director of Walk the Line and 3:10 to Yuma, writes: "Film Theory, rightly or wrongly, makes most filmmakers cringe. We rarely see processes, collaborations, technologies, or underlying motivations thoughtfully examined in such writings. David Bordwell's work is radically different. Whether examining Hollywood cinema, Hong Kong, Independent, New Wave, silent or sound, high-grossing or unknown, he addresses film with a clear mission-to understand how a film works, how it's made and why-and to discuss his findings in a direct style that embraces intellectuals and non-academic readers alike." Deep understanding, not "overstanding."
Brian Boyd
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
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