For I Will Consider My Cat — And that’s my point. Comic Book Guy isn’t having...

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And that’s my point. Comic Book Guy isn’t having any fun. He’s bored — and he’s boring. Bart and Milhouse are having fun. They’re excited and interested. They get it — it’s about being a kid again. The whole point of a comic or a book or a movie or a TV show is to be a kid and have fun. It’s about trusting the author/filmmaker to take you on an exciting journey — not a dark ride, but a journey of discovery. You can’t do that if you’re watching the lighting, the editing, the camera angle, the dialog, the acting — you gotta let go and be a kid again.

You want me to be a big bad grownup and analyze it critically? Pay me. I don’t work on spec.

How Criticism Destroys Enjoyment—And how to get Past It (via rianvdm)

I really couldn’t disagree more with this quotation as it stands. It seems to confuse two meanings of criticism: the popular meaning of “saying what’s wrong with something”, and the technical meaning of (to quote Wikipedia) “the practice of judging the merits and faults of something or someone in an intelligible (or articulate) way.”

There can be a real joy and pleasure - excitement, interest, fun - in thinking about and discussing “a comic or a book or a movie or a TV show” to find out what else it has going on within it, beyond the immediate surface impression. Sometimes (often), that can greatly enhance your enjoyment of the original work. Sometimes, you realise there’s nothing beyond the surface, and that’s fine. Sometimes, the work falls to pieces in your hands on closer inspection. But those occasions are more than paid for by the deep, positive gains of a critical appreciation for the things you enjoy. 

The whole point about Comic Book Guy is that he isn’t “critical”. He’s negative. His besetting sin is the deadly sin of acedia (“sloth”): the sin whose fruit is Marie-Antoinette Syndrome, where “nothing tastes”. But the cure for this cultural acedia isn’t just “let go and be a kid again” (though that has its place), but learning that true criticism has, as its goal, the increasing of one’s enjoyment of things worth enjoying. 

I said at the start of this response that I disagreed with the quotation “as it stands”. That’s because, reading the post from which it comes, the writer is a bit more nuanced. In the preceding paragraph he contrasts Comic Book Guy’s “criticism” with the “appreciation” you can develop over time as you engage with a genre:  

Eventually, you can go back to being an appreciative audience — but now as an informed reader or filmgoer, you can appreciate the skill of a job well done. Or you can understand why something is “meh,” or you can recognize the parts that worked and the parts that didn’t. But you don’t have to invest a lot of time and energy being Comic Book Guy.

I think that is a good point, but the writer’s mistake remains to make a false dichotomy between being “critical” and being “appreciative”.

All this calls to mind the times when my father has come across my wife and I discussing a film we’ve just watched and asked, with exasperated bemusement: “Why do you always have to analyse everything? Why can’t you just enjoy it?” Well, because analysing it is part of how we enjoy it… 

criticism profound literary criticism no idea where that last tag came from but it autocompleted and i couldn't resist it

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I have come to see that imagination is the capacity to entertain, host, trust, and respond to images of reality (God and the world) that are out beyond conventional dominant reason. Its has slowly dawned on me that biblical exposition cannot be, in the context of the church, a scientific enterprise designed to recover the past as historical criticism has attempted; it is an artistic preoccupation that is designed to generate alternative futures.

Walter Brueggemann, A Pathway of Interpretation (preface). Hence, Brueggemann writes, his “interest in method is to take historical criticism seriously, but not to linger over it” – and instead to move on to “serious theological interpretation.”

Historical criticism, though, is still “an important resource by which to fend off ideology posing as interpretation” (preface, n.13). 

theology walter brueggemann a pathway of interpretation historical criticism
Novels set in the past now compete with the historical record in a way that has no precedent. … Anyone with internet access can acquire in a minute or two the smattering of expertise that would once have taken hours in a library, in a way that supplements non-fiction but hollows out the experience of reading a novel. … ‘Novels arise out of the shortcomings of history.’ It’s not necessarily that history has excelled itself as a discipline, but an invading army of facts has set up camp outside the gates of the historical novel.
Adam Mars-Jones, reviewing Rupert Thomson’s novel Never Anyone But You, which is based on the lives of Claude Cahun and her partner, Marcel Moore. London Review of Books, 2 August 2018.
adam mars-jones london review of books literature literary criticism
Scripture scholars are preoccupied with ‘getting the text right,’ and so engaging in textual criticism. While this is an important matter, most serious readers of the Bible are not competent to engage in textual criticism, for it is a highly technical matter. While there are occasionally textual issues that need to be adjudicated, for most readers the best procedure is to find a good, reliable translation and to stick with it. Where there is a textual matter of great import, consultation with a critical commentary is the best resource.

Walter Brueggemann, A Pathway of Interpretation, p.34. Brueggemann continues:

Attention to the interface of text and context is important, but it should not take too much time and energy; the really important matter is the text itself.

Focus on the specific text need not be without intentional discipline, nor need it be anti-intellectual or anti-critical. Such a focus on the text itself, however, is to be clearly differentiated from the older historical-critical methods; for the texts, I suggest, require no learned apparatus beyond a sensibility that is alert and discerning, and which benefits from the accumulated awareness of reading large numbers of texts carefully.

Note that Brueggemann isn’t dismissing textual, historical or canonical criticism here, but saying that once we have listened (so far as we are competent to do so) to these disciplines, the most important task remains to attend to the text itself (“rhetorical criticism”).

walter brueggemann a pathway of interpretation theology
Finished #reading An Introduction to the Old Testament: The Canon and Christian Imagination, by Walter Brueggemann. This is an excellent overview of the Old Testament from a “canonical criticism” perspective: a perspective that, while broadly...

Finished #reading An Introduction to the Old Testament: The Canon and Christian Imagination, by Walter Brueggemann.

This is an excellent overview of the Old Testament from a “canonical criticism” perspective: a perspective that, while broadly accepting the findings of historical and textual criticism, prefers to focus its attention on the “canonical” text as we have it now. The canonising process which resulted in what we now call the Old Testament was, Brueggemann argues, one marked by a strong “theological intentionality” (one of his favourite phrases): so that to read and interpret the “finished” text is to engage with the intentionality(s) that formed it. Equally, though, Brueggemann argues – against other “canonical critics” such as Brevard Childs – that the texts which “don’t quite fit into” the overall canonical message, the awkward, dissenting, contradictory texts, have to be taken with equal seriousness rather than simply being smothered under a harmonised interpretation. 

Brueggemann covers the books of the Old Testament in the order found in the Hebrew Bible, rather than that used in Christian Bibles. The Hebrew Bible ordering reflects the gradual building up of the canon in a series of layers over time: 

  • the Torah: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy
  • the Prophets: 
    • the Former Prophets: Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings
    • the Latter Prophets: Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the “fourth scroll” of the twelve “minor prophets”
  • the Writings: 
    • the “wisdom” writings: Psalms, Job, Proverbs
    • the “five scrolls” (Megilloth): Ruth, the Song of Solomon, Ecclesiastes, Lamentations, Esther
    • Daniel
    • Ezra, Nehemiah and Chronicles 

Given the range of material being covered, in a succession of relatively short chapters, some chapters are stronger than others. As you’d expect, Brueggemann is particularly strong on the Prophets. As I certainly didn’t expect, his chapter on the Psalms is rather weak: 15 pages just isn’t enough to do justice to this book, or to Brueggemann’s distinctive contribution to its interpretation. 

I also found his chapter on Job helpful (especially the emphasis on Job being no less trapped in the “reward and punishment” mentality than his friends – until YHWH answers out of the storm and points Job towards a wider world in which the “reward and punishment” mechanism so dear to humans is not so much refuted as rendered irrelevant), and also his emphasis on Esther as a model of how to balance integrity and accommodation in the face of a hegemony that is alternately indifferent and hostile towards the claims of faith.

For Brueggemann, the aim of biblical interpretation is not to find the “one true meaning” of the text – an exercise that can easily harden into ideology – but to read the text as an exercise in “imaginative interpretation”, a process of redirecting our imaginations away from the all-pervading “imagination” of our societies, orientated as they are around “militaristic consumerism”, to the alternative, liberating “imagination” that formed the canonical text and which re-forms us as we engage with it. 

reading finished reading in 2017 walter brueggemann theology old testament an introduction to the old testament
The proletarianisation of the lower salaried bourgeoisie is matched at the opposite extreme by the irrationally high remuneration of top managers and bankers (irrational since, as investigations have demonstrated in the US, it tends to be inversely proportional to a company’s success). Rather than submit these trends to moralising criticism, we should read them as signs that the capitalist system is no longer capable of self-regulated stability – it threatens, in other words, to run out of control.
Slavish Žižek, The Revolt of the Salaried Bourgeoisie. Žižek’s discussion of the “surplus wage” by which the “new bourgeoisie” has appropriated surplus value - and whose threatened removal lies behind many of the strikes and protests of the past year - is particularly useful.
Praise and blame are aspects of the same thing. The capacity for criticism is the capacity for enjoyment. They don’t have to be kept in touch with each other. They are a single propensity that has to keep in touch with itself.

Clive James, in his essay on G.K. Chesterton from Cultural Amnesia. 

Heartening for those of us who have endured lifetimes of people saying “Why do you have to analyse everything? Why can’t you just enjoy it?”

thirstygargoyle
The process of growing up is to be valued for what we gain, not for what we lose. Not to acquire a taste for the realistic is childish in the bad sense; to have lost the taste for marvels and adventures is no more a matter for congratulation than losing our teeth, our hair, our palate, and finally, our hopes.

C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism, 72. (via thirstygargoyle)

See also: a desire for justice. To say “It’s not fair!” may be childish, but the worldly-wise shrug of “Well, life isn’t fair” is horrible, a kind of premature death.

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