4 ms·

I enjoyed the piece but the conclusion is weak and so broad as to be meaningless. >So, what of the two cultures today? Well, Snow won of course. Removing Lati

I enjoyed the piece but the conclusion is weak and so broad as to be meaningless. >So, what of the two cultures today? Well, Snow won of course. Removing Latin and Greek in favor of more science and engineering? Teenagers used to read Thucydides. What was that study recently, that fifty-eight percent of English majors at two universities couldn't read the opening paragraphs of Bleak House and that only five percent could read it acceptably? "Industrialisation is the only hope of the poor"? Science and engineering will bring us material comfort? We are living in Snow's world! >Above all, this style of thought valued analysis and exactness, and it was just this drab preoccupation with exactness that bothered Leavis, for it neglected what he considered should be the true focus of serious thinking: ‘life’. The idea of life haunts Leavis’s thought. It is central to it and yet maddeningly opaque. He believed the mark of great literature – or rather, what it is that makes great literature great – is its ability to manifest life, to summon it and make it exist for the attentive and dedicated reader. Literature is the locus of life. If a piece of writing does not make the close reader somehow sense life, then it can fairly be denied the status of literature. The absence of life is the most common cause of Leavis’s derision, with which he was so generous (even extending once to a rant against Jimi Hendrix, of all people). So: what did he mean by it? What is life? To me this comes to mind: feeling, intuition, thinking, active, moving, creative, danger, the highs and the lows. Not-Life is the efficient modern world, the commoditized, reactive, standardized, efficient, safe, low-risk, smooth featureless extrusions of a massive system. n.b. Dresser has things mixed up here about Jimi Hendrix. Interesting read which, of course, gets to Life: http://review31.co.uk/essay/view/5/confessions-of-a-lapsed-leavisite http://review31.co.uk/essay/view/5/confessions-of-a-lapsed-l... >It involves, in the Laurentian manner, life, lived, with intensity, experienced with full consciousness in a real, a very real, organic and intense way.

ai_critic 1mo ago
For anybody who hasn't had the pleasure of this delightful bit of English: London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes —gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foothold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.
- jimbokun 1mo ago
  Delightful indeed, and shocked that an English major would struggle with that text.
  - kurthr 1mo ago
    Exactly, what exactly is an English major going to do, if YA novels are the pinnacle of reading achievement? I'm baffled, and reading more about it, concerned.
- Levitz 1mo ago
  English is my second language, with that in mind, I felt it may be interesting or amusing to some the parts which were "hard" for me to understand. >Michaelmas term lately over I had no idea that "Michaelmas" was even a thing. Nor do I think I have ever encountered the formulation of "term lately over" >As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth This puzzled me, as I'd imagine, if there's no water, there surely would be no mud. Apparently a reference to the great flood which makes it make sense. >and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus This one was funny since I properly understood (I think?) that it's meant to give a feeling of the savage, untamed, natural feel of the elements taking over London. But then I thought a reference to a Megalosaurus couldn't possibly be that. And it seems it is? The rest was way easier, although I had to make sure what "Dogs, undistinguishable in mire" meant.
  - butvacuum 1mo ago
    It's not presently on scihub (also, $25 for access? fuck off...), but the whole study stinks of "dickens scholar checks modern reading comp, vastly overestimates familiarity with victorian england and dickens' prose.".... .... here's the bio of the first author of the paper > SUSAN CARLSON is a professor of English at Pittsburg State University, where she teaches courses on nineteenth-century British literature,
- mock-possum 1mo ago
  I guess I’m going to go ahead and pat myself on the back for being able to easily read through this aloud. What exactly would people struggle with here?
kurthr 1mo ago
I've talked to a few high school and young college students in the last few years to get a feeling for what pandemic and LLMs have done to education, but this seems near apocalyptic to me. An inability for a majority of English majors to read 19th century literature, or for their teachers to even bother teaching with books? I think the students I've been talking to have given me a false sense of hope. https://nataliewexler.substack.com/p/struggles-with-bleak-house https://nataliewexler.substack.com/p/struggles-with-bleak-ho... the "soft bigotry of low expectations" has come for AP classes and college curriculums.
- kurthr 1mo ago
  I have to say that after reading other commentary about the 2015 paper this was based on, it seems to be far less relevant, even if it comes up very high in tehGoog search rankings.
amiga386 1mo ago
> What was that study recently, that fifty-eight percent of English majors at two universities couldn't read the opening paragraphs of Bleak House and that only five percent could read it acceptably? Yeah about that, that was a tiny study. 85 undergrads from two Kansas universities. Kansas isn't renowned for its universities. And this study was done in 2015 (11 years ago!), only published 2 years ago. "58%" is 49 undergrads. "5%" is 4 undergrads. I think it's massively unrepresentative of students at large. abstract: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/922346 https://muse.jhu.edu/article/922346 full paper: https://www.scribd.com/document/868947219/project-muse-922346 https://www.scribd.com/document/868947219/project-muse-92234... It's a very entertaining paper, as it goes into the juicier parts of the subjects' think-alouds, and analyses why the problematic readers were problematic readers. What's especially infuriating is they were told they could look up the internet if they wanted, and many chose to guess wrongly what something meant, rather than look it up. Perhaps they're not only bad at reading but also bad at searching. Today I suspect those people would be heading straight for the AI to tell them what to think.

ai_critic 1mo ago

For anybody who hasn't had the pleasure of this delightful bit of English: London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes —gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foothold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.

jimbokun 1mo ago
Delightful indeed, and shocked that an English major would struggle with that text.
- kurthr 1mo ago
  Exactly, what exactly is an English major going to do, if YA novels are the pinnacle of reading achievement? I'm baffled, and reading more about it, concerned.
Levitz 1mo ago
English is my second language, with that in mind, I felt it may be interesting or amusing to some the parts which were "hard" for me to understand. >Michaelmas term lately over I had no idea that "Michaelmas" was even a thing. Nor do I think I have ever encountered the formulation of "term lately over" >As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth This puzzled me, as I'd imagine, if there's no water, there surely would be no mud. Apparently a reference to the great flood which makes it make sense. >and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus This one was funny since I properly understood (I think?) that it's meant to give a feeling of the savage, untamed, natural feel of the elements taking over London. But then I thought a reference to a Megalosaurus couldn't possibly be that. And it seems it is? The rest was way easier, although I had to make sure what "Dogs, undistinguishable in mire" meant.
- butvacuum 1mo ago
  It's not presently on scihub (also, $25 for access? fuck off...), but the whole study stinks of "dickens scholar checks modern reading comp, vastly overestimates familiarity with victorian england and dickens' prose.".... .... here's the bio of the first author of the paper > SUSAN CARLSON is a professor of English at Pittsburg State University, where she teaches courses on nineteenth-century British literature,
mock-possum 1mo ago
I guess I’m going to go ahead and pat myself on the back for being able to easily read through this aloud. What exactly would people struggle with here?

kurthr 1mo ago

I've talked to a few high school and young college students in the last few years to get a feeling for what pandemic and LLMs have done to education, but this seems near apocalyptic to me. An inability for a majority of English majors to read 19th century literature, or for their teachers to even bother teaching with books? I think the students I've been talking to have given me a false sense of hope. https://nataliewexler.substack.com/p/struggles-with-bleak-house https://nataliewexler.substack.com/p/struggles-with-bleak-ho... the "soft bigotry of low expectations" has come for AP classes and college curriculums.

kurthr 1mo ago
I have to say that after reading other commentary about the 2015 paper this was based on, it seems to be far less relevant, even if it comes up very high in tehGoog search rankings.

amiga386 1mo ago

> What was that study recently, that fifty-eight percent of English majors at two universities couldn't read the opening paragraphs of Bleak House and that only five percent could read it acceptably? Yeah about that, that was a tiny study. 85 undergrads from two Kansas universities. Kansas isn't renowned for its universities. And this study was done in 2015 (11 years ago!), only published 2 years ago. "58%" is 49 undergrads. "5%" is 4 undergrads. I think it's massively unrepresentative of students at large. abstract: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/922346 https://muse.jhu.edu/article/922346 full paper: https://www.scribd.com/document/868947219/project-muse-922346 https://www.scribd.com/document/868947219/project-muse-92234... It's a very entertaining paper, as it goes into the juicier parts of the subjects' think-alouds, and analyses why the problematic readers were problematic readers. What's especially infuriating is they were told they could look up the internet if they wanted, and many chose to guess wrongly what something meant, rather than look it up. Perhaps they're not only bad at reading but also bad at searching. Today I suspect those people would be heading straight for the AI to tell them what to think.