In his argument for biopoetics and against the old guard, Brian Boyd begins with what may seem a truism, if not in some English departments: “We love stories, and we will continue to love them. But for more than 30 years. . . university literature departments in the English-speaking world have often done their best to stifle this thoroughly human emotion.” Our desire to form patterns, to weave a net that has a structure we can sense if not always see, is central to our human understanding. We love plots and characters, we love them in gossip and in great literature, in soppy romances and classic drama. We loved them as children in fairy tales and we love them as adults whether we read history or literature.
Academia
Biopoetics: Brian Boyd Argues His Case
Last June, Shannon Love began a post: “I am myself an agnostic and a rabid evolutionist,” moving on to describe how those beliefs help him structure his understanding in broad ways: “I am a free-market advocate and a Chicagoboy because I believe the free market is a Darwinian process that reaches better solutions quicker and less selfishly than political systems. In short, an evolutionary viewpoint forms the foundation of my entire world view.”
I thought of that when listening to Brian Boyd last fall; he gave a talk here and the small classroom that had been set aside couldn’t hold the audience, which spilled into the next room (the door was opened, so students could still peek at him) and into the hall. His literary criticism, like Joseph Carroll
In his “Getting It All Wrong: Bioculture critiques Cultural Critique,” Boyd writes with a clarity and directed passion we are grateful for in literary criticism. Introduced in an earlier post, he teaches at the University of Auckland in New Zealand; his American Scholar essay was linked on Denis Dutton’s Arts & Letters Daily.
Languages – What Extinction Can Mean
John McWhorter, the linguist, is always a bit of a maverick. And he is also quite often right. In “Dying Languages”, he argues:
In the end, the proliferation of languages is an accident: a single original language morphed into 6,000 when different groups of people emerged. I hope that dying languages can be recorded and described. I hope that many persist as hobbies, taught in schools and given space in the press, as Irish, Welsh, and Hawaiian have.
However, the prospect we are taught to dread — that one day all the world’s people will speak one language — is one I would welcome. Surely easier communication, while no cure-all, would be a good thing worldwide. There’s a reason the Tower of Babel story is one of havoc rather than creation.
(Thanks to A&L, as usual.)
Critical Thinking
While my colleagues point to the Nobel Prize winners, my e-mails suggest why the Nobels in the future might not be American. Scotus sent the department the following passage from “Samantha Shrugs,” a short piece in the September 2006 Touchstone, not surprisingly concerned with reactions at a Catholic school by an honors student.
Academic Prose
As a scientist and teacher, I was often confronted with the task of communicating very complex ideas to people who, while intelligent, did not have all of the relevant information necessary at the forefront of their consciousness to understand the concepts I was trying to convey. For that reason, scientific writing strives (not always successfully) to be as clear, simple and concise as possible. I was fortunate to have good teachers – that article was required reading in our lab.
One of the (many) problems with scientific English is that so many non-native speakers publish in it, and they bring a lot of baggage to it from their native languages. But the main barrier to understanding is that scientific prose is that it is dense with new ideas. If you do not know the precise definitions of the terms the author is using, you will be lost, no matter what your level of skill. If you have not worked out the math before, you will need to do that when you encounter an equation, or the words that follow will make little to no sense. For this reason, simple, declarative grammar is the byword for a scientist the ideas make things hard enough as it is.