Favorite thing about Dracula Daily so far is that yesterday I read a post that had in-depth, well-researched analysis that could easily be mistaken for a published literary criticism of Dracula, except it casually makes a passing reference to "the polycule" without feeling the need to elaborate

fictional character discourse would be more fun if we all internalized the fact that characters are narrative tools, not people. once we have that basic fact down, we can start talking about what story the author is trying to tell using these characters, whether they’re successful, whether the story itself is successful and by what means we are measuring success—which are all really fun and interesting things to discuss! but we simply cannot get to that point unless we first accept that fictional characters simply do not have thoughts, feelings, opinions, or any agency on their own. a fictional character has more in common with the fictional chair theyre sitting on than with a real person

Some one explain this to me like I’m five

I’ll try:

The way we talk about characters in stories would be better if we really understood that characters are just tools that writers use to tell a story.

Once we understand that, we can start talking about how the character is used to tell the story, about whether we think it’s an interested story, and about what makes something an interesting story to us.

Which are all really fun and interesting things to talk about.

But we can not do that unless we accept that characters are not people. They do not have thoughts. They do not have opinions. They do not make decisions. They only exist as tools to tell the story.

Other tools in a story are things like a chair in a story where people sit, or a palace in a fairy tale, or the sun in a story about a hot dessert. A character is like that chair, that palace and that sun: only a tool to tell the story.

A character is not like a real person. A real person can be ‘good’ or bad’ (or both) because they do good or bad things (or both), a character can only be a useful tool or a not useful tool to tell a story.

So when we hear something like “I like this character”, what we should hear is “I like this tool because it is an interesting tool to tell an interesting story”, we should not hear “I like this person and approve of their actions and would do similar actions”.

This.

And it’s not that you can’t relate emotionally to characters. Of course you can. If I’m reading a book for pleasure, I’m going to be relating to the characters as if they’re people; otherwise it would be a pretty joyless experience.

But you need to be able to grasp the fact that they’re NOT people, that they do not have thoughts and feelings and motivations and histories independent of the text. An interpretation of a character’s motives when not specifically described on the page, for example, can be supported by the text or not, and you can debate that endlessly (welcome to English lit classes lmao), but it cannot be factually correct or incorrect. The character is not real. They don’t exist outside of the text.

Was talking to my dad yesterday and.

Hm.

Apparently my dad is (still?) disappointed that I didn’t get my PhD in English Lit (and tried not very subtly to convince me to apply to grad school) because he’s very certain of the fact that I am exactly the right kind of person to fixate on tiny details and do a lot of research on them and write a dissertation on them and he’s not *wrong* it’s just that I don’t know how to tell him that I have channeled that energy into writing 300k words of pornographic fanfiction because I would *much* rather do that and work at a computer store than work with academics.

But also we both agree that it’s bullshit that nobody adapts the conservatory scene or the banquet scene in Dune, so that was a nice chat.

I should point out that my dad was a college professor, before he retired. I don’t know if this was him going “my kid should be a college professor too” or if this was him going “one of my kids should attain a higher level of education than I have and the other one is a functional human being so it’ll have to be you” but I did point out to him that I’m neck deep in writing approximately twelve essays about hierarchy, community, and liberation in the works of Jane Austen and he was like “but you’re not going to publish it” and. The thing is, I *am* going to publish it, I’m just going to publish it for free and while I might pay someone to copy edit it and ask some people to review the individual essays, I’m not going to attempt to get it peer reviewed.

Also he’s never sure whether or not I’m fighting with my sister when we talk about Austen.

(to be fair, neither am I)

My sister owns like twenty extremely twee and photogenic editions of Austen books and went on a Jane Austen vacation where she went to the Austen house and went somewhere else and did an Austen tea but *GOD FORBID* we talk about class and how naval commissions worked in the Georgian era. No, Austen was never writing about *class.* English authors would never write about anything so gauche as *class* /s

There’s a definite possibility that Bingley’s father got rich through the slave trade, but Austen leaves out specifics in that regard and the vague way she describes the family’s wealth (so new that their father didn’t live to buy a mansion, but no so new that his daughters were only educated at home, and belonging to a family in Northern England) could mean that their wealth came about from the slave trade or could mean that it resulted from the beginnings of industrialization and the cotton trade (which, of course, would still have had some profits derived from slavery but is not quite on par with Sir Bertram’s ownership of a plantation in Antigua in Mansfield Park).

As to the Gardiners, they don’t actually appear to be spectacularly wealthy, just *more* wealthy than the Bennets, and there’s no special speed connected with the way Mr. Gardiner raised himself from being the son of a lawyer to someone who lives in a part of town that Caroline Bingley mocks him for (which is to say, he doesn’t appear to have raised himself particularly high in society). Mrs. Bennet married slightly up, which is the Bennet daughters are tenuously part of the landed gentry but are still fairly poor, and Mrs. Phillips married a lawyer like her father; she seems to be better off than Mrs. Bennet but worse off than the Gardiners. But the source of Mr. Gardiner’s income is pretty clear:

Working in trade and keeping warehouses in London means that while Mr. Gardiner may have traded in goods that were made or made possible by slaves, he was not directly involved in the transatlantic slave trade. Living close to his warehouses indicates that he is not wealthy in the way that the Bingleys or Darcy are wealthy - he is wealthy enough to keep a house in London and take vacations, but not so wealthy that he can live off of the interest of his wealth.

Given few direct references to slavery in Austen, which are uniformly negative, I think that it is unlikely that she would intentionally write sympathetic characters as engaged in the slave trade.

Austen was not an abolitionist, and it’s important not to color her as one. I don’t want to whitewash the Austen family connection to slavery - it did definitely exist (her father was the trustee of a plantation in Jamaica for some time) - but there has been something of an upswing in people attributing all of the wealth in Austen’s work to the slave trade, and that isn’t accurate.

Darcy, for instance, isn’t contemptible for his wealth because he was a slave trader. He’s contemptible for his wealth because he was a *landlord.*

(I’m joking, kind of.)

@ms-demeanor I agree with you for the most part, but I’m kinda curious why you say that Austen’s references to slavery are uniformly negative.

I can only think of two instances where slavery is mentioned directly:

The first is in Emma where Mrs. Elton thinks Jane Fairfax is making a reference to the slave trade, and says that she and Mr. Elton are abolitionists– to which Jane replies that she wasn’t talking about the slave trade, but the governess trade. It’s an interesting exchange, because the Eltons are portrayed as being nasty, petty, annoying people, and they’re the only people in Austen’s books (as far as I remember) who explicitly say they’re abolitionists. At the same time, the way Mrs. Elton phrases it kind of makes it sound like she assumes that being an abolitionist is not only accepted, but expected of her– and no one else, including Emma, seems to think it worth remarking upon that she is an abolitionist. I guess if you squint it’s maybe implied that Jane is an abolitionist? But I don’t think it’s stated explicitly; rather it’s an assumption made by Mrs. Elton (who makes a lot of other misguided assumptions).

The second is in Mansfield Park, which you mentioned. Sir Thomas Bertram explicitly gets his money from slavery, and while he’s portrayed as being rather domineering at times, he’s certainly not the bad guy in that book by any means. Pretty much no one in that book treats Fanny well, but Sir Thomas is kinder to her than almost anyone other than Edmund, and also admits he was wrong to pressure her to marry Henry Crawford. His connection to slavery, as far as I can recall, is portrayed pretty neutrally.

I don’t know what Austen’s personal views on slavery were, but her books seem to be deeply ambivalent about it– honestly, my impression purely from her books is that she considers the subject rather taboo, or at least distasteful. When Mrs. Elton talks about abolition, it’s treated as embarrassing/awkward, rather than as a moral issue, and Sir Bertram’s failings don’t have anything to do with him owning slaves.

I’d love to be corrected, though– maybe I missed something!

The scene in Emma actually strongly implies that Mrs. Elton’s family is connected to the slave trade and that she is extremely defensive about it. She hears a mention of slavery and immediately says “if you mean a fling at the slave-trade, I assure you Mr. Suckling was always rather a friend of the abolition,” Mr. Suckling being her brother-in-law.

It’s phrased in a very “the lady doth protest too much” kind of way, because she hears someone mention the concept of trading in human flesh and immediately assumes it’s a jab at her brother-in-law - which suggests that her brother-in-law (not her husband, father, or sibling, very specifically this one person she is connected to) was involved in the slave trade before abolition.

It’s like Ivanka Trump hearing someone mention the border wall and turning around to say “My father is the least racist person you’ll ever meet!”

This is also emphasized by the fact that her family name is Hawkins, the family name of the man who introduced the slave trade to England, and that she is from Bristol (with Liverpool and London it was one of the three main hubs of slavery in England) but pretends to be from Bath.

Fanny Price’s one mention of the slave-trade is met with dead silence. She asks Edmund if he heard her ask her uncle about the slave trade, he says that he had hoped she would ask him more questions, and she responds that she would have if her question hadn’t been met with dead silence. There are several interpretations to this, but honestly my feeling is that Fanny asked a question that she thought was apt and it went over like a lead balloon.

Fanny is a *fascinating* character because she is so completely broken by her family that you have to approach her as an unreliable narrator. Fanny looks at the world like a kicked dog and it makes Mansfield Park absolute torture to read sometimes, and part of that is in her devotion and generosity toward her *awful* relatives.

I would actually argue that Sir Thomas Bertram is one of the worst of several very bad men in Mansfield Park. When, after years of abuse at the hands of the Bertram family and constant reminders of how much she owes them for allowing her into their home to be abused, she refuses to marry Henry Crawford and tells her uncle that she could not like him enough to marry him, he criticizes her for essentially talking back, saying that he thought she was free of the independence of spirit that infected young women these days. (This paper is good overall, but look specifically at pages 10-11 for how poorly the Bertrams generally and Sir Thomas Bertram in particular treated Fanny). My general takeaway is that everyone at Mansfield Park is terrible enough to deserve each other and that Fanny and Edmund are lucky to get away and be happy and poor together.

There’s actually a TON of academic writing on slavery in Mansfield Park. There are several the points that academics can get deep in the weeds on (particularly whether or not the names she used were allusions; I tend to believe they were) but the “slavery” section of the Mansfield Park wikipedia page has a decent, if quick, overview.

There are plenty of people who see Austen as an apologist for slavery, there are plenty who see her as an abolitionist. I don’t think that Austen was an abolitionist in an activist sense, I do think that she was likely very sympathetic to abolition.

Reading through Austen analysis is interesting because you stumble across a lot of people who have no idea what is going on. Austen was relatively subtle in her own time, and now seems so subtle that she is opaque. If you want to get a feel for that, look at the Jane Austen Fandom Wiki, where nobody who has spent more than an afternoon with a Jane Austen book has ever written a description of any of the characters. Their description of Sir Thomas is so anodyne that it becomes revisionist.

Genuinely, there is a lot of context that modern readers have lost when reading Austen. There are a lot of references and allusions and turns of phrase that fly right over our heads unless we spend a lot of time catching up with them. It’s a thing that happens in literature as time passes, it’s why Shakespeare nerds and Chaucer nerds are slightly crazy - they know all these excellent in-jokes and they can’t explain them to normies without writing a dissertation. Austen is very similar, and because her books are often presented as comedies of manners it is easy to overlook the fact that nearly all of them also contain tremendous tragedy.

Anyway, if anyone ever wants to read up more on Austen and Austen criticism, Persuasions is an online journal of Austen criticism that is at least partially free to read. It’s pretty awesome.

The thing I don’t get about people who aren’t into overanalysing books and films is that the subtext is a whole other text for free!!! I love a bargain!!!

please stop reblogging sylvia plath poetry 

For ppl asking why she’s an anti black, anti Semite. She has used the n word and compared her depression to the holocaust

Even not counting her poetry her private journals are full of disgusting, overblown antisemitism. She didn’t just use Jewish people for her metaphors, she outright hated them irl and yet decided to use their suffering for her own gain

here’s a source with some quotes

okay, I’m Jewish and I appreciate this sentiment. and if someone wants to cut out Sylvia Plath, go for it, I get it.

But. by this logic we’d also need to stop reblogging TS Eliot, Oscar Wilde, and Shakespeare quotes. Virginia Woolf wrote anti-semetic things in her private journals, too. If you only want to read classic poets who liked Jews and black people, that’s fine, but like. good luck? Sylvia Plath isn’t an exception.

idk. Tumblr’s attitude of “consume nothing problematic” just doesn’t work if you’re part of a group that most culture-creators over the last few centuries have hated by default. For people actually in those groups, it’s not like the only two choices are 1) worship authors who hate you or 2) completely cut the majority of literature out of your life. You learn to read critically and acknowledge flaws where you find them.

anyway, as a Jewish woman, I would much rather see a version of this post that said “please read Sylvia Plath poetry critically because she’s anti black and antisemetic” than just “stop reblogging Sylvia Plath poetry.”

IMO, reblog Sylvia Plath all you want, just not unthinkingly.

I’m reblogging this now because I’m seeing anti-Virginia Woolf discourse lately due to the antisemitism in her journals and like… as a Jewish person who loves Virginia Woolf’s writing and an English teacher who knows that pretty much every writer of the classics is Problematic just…chill pls

The point isn’t to never consume media that isn’t ideologically pure. That’s never the point. Were that the goal, we would NEVER be able to consume any media. Nothing is ever ideologically pure, especially as time goes on and our social consciousness expands.

We should be telling people instead, “Be critical as you read this person’s work. They held bigoted views. Understand how that is reflected in their work, and be mindful of it. Be critical, be thoughtful”

Compelling others to not engage with something at ALL on ideological grounds is in the same vein as burning books. We should be compelling others to be critical and mindful, not narrow and willfully ignorant.

“Understand how it is reflected in their work, and be mindful of it.”

Some people have gotten so attached to Death of the Author as a lens of literary criticism that they seem to have forgotten that all fiction is a series of choices made by writers.

Death of the Author is just one lens of many (and in fact, some people take Barthes’ essay that coined the term as a satirical argument against the then-new wave of disregarding context as part of literary analysis). Authorial intent should not be required in order for the audience to understand—the work should speak for itself—but works exist in a context.

Eurus Holmes being as smart as Sherlock but her smartness making her crazy exists in a world where a woman with the same or better qualifications than her male colleague gets paid 78% of his salary and gets promoted less often.

The flood of LGBT character deaths in 2016 happened in a world where LGBT youth are more likely to struggle with mental illness and suicidal ideation than their straight counterparts.

Jon Snow kissing Daenerys and stabbing her was aired to a world where a woman who is murdered was probably murdered by an intimate partner, someone she should be able to trust.

It is entirely fair to criticize things that have logic within the plot, because the characters do not make choices for themselves. Writers make choices. I keep banging on this drum, but the author isn’t THAT dead.

This.

Okay, here’s one that’s been bothering me for a while.

The epistolary novel is a mode of storytelling in which the story is communicated in the form of a series of fabricated documents ostensibly authored by the characters who inhabit that story. Letters, diary entries, and newspaper articles are traditional, but contemporary examples of the type may also include emails, chat logs, social media threads, and video transcripts.

If we switch from literature to cinema, one popular equivalent is the found footage film. The framing is usually a little more immediate, and the plots tend to be constrained by the need to restrict the action to situations where one or more of the characters involved would plausibly be recording video, but it’s the same basic idea.

So here’s the question: what would the video game equivalent of the epistolary novel be?

It can’t be a game where you read letters or watch videos authored by characters in the game – that’s just using the gameplay as a framing device for conventional epistolary storytelling. It’d have to be something where the gameplay itself constitutes a found document.

I’ve run into attempts at the form where the game is presented as having been coded by a fictional character, so there’s a metatextual layer where the game you’re playing is part of the fiction, but that’s not quite there, I think.

a heavily story-based game, the kind with lots of story choices that get saved and significantly affect the plot, where you start with a savefile that’s already in the postgame. you can go back and speak to old NPCs and study their reactions to the player character to determine what story choices the old player made.

You know, I think you’ve hit upon it precisely: the video game equivalent of the found document is someone else’s save file. You could even have multiple save files, each ostensibly belonging to a different person in the same social group (a family sharing a game console, perhaps?) and work in something of their relationships that way. Building a game in which the postgame is all there is and the game proper leading up to it is merely implicit in the choices whose consequences you’re now able to examine sounds like a fascinating writing challenge – and not one I’m sure I’d be up to! – but at least I’m not going to be bothered wondering how it would work.

I think the real difficulty there would be framing it so that the information you’re given tells you useful things about the hypothetical player whose save file you’re creeping, rather than the fictional character they portrayed.

Presumably you’d have to be like, a forensic analyst trying to solve some mystery through clues available in the savefiles? Like the family has disappeared, but their game console was left behind…

Every book in the History of Literature summed up in a single sentence

top five literary fuckboys in chronological order

1. hamlet

2. mr. collins

3. victor frankenstein

4. st. john rivers

5. heathcliff

How does Theseus not make this list?  I feel like ditching the woman who saved your life while she sleeps is pretty fuckboy.

um Holden Fucking Caulfield?!?! And what about Mr Wickham???

Okay, we need a Literary Fuckboy Bracket, is someone already on this or do I have to do it?

Sheenagh Pugh, The Democratic Genre: Fan Fiction in a Literary Context, p. 219 (via nihilistelektra)

Hamilton isn’t perfect. But it’s *perfect.* I couldn’t write for a month after I saw it. (Vox)

beautiful combo of show analysis & personal essay, worth the long read

(via thefederalistfreestyle)

I’m reading Don Quixote for my world literature class and apparently when it was first published in 1605 it was world-changingly popular, one of the first “popular novels” as we know it today, and there were all sorts of people who were writing and publishing their own unofficial fan-sequels to Don Quixote which was basically the first fan-fiction, and then in 1615 the original author wrote an official sequel in which Don Quixote reads a piece of fanfic about him and sets out on a quest to beat up the author who mischaracterized him

This is all true. What happened more specifically is that one fan fiction got really really popular and since people weren’t all that familiar with how novels worked (because there weren’t really any other novels in Europe yet), a lot of people just took this as a valid sequel. Cervantes (the original author) had pretty much stopped working on any kind of sequel to the original at point, but he got really pissed that people were reading this fan fic and assuming it was as legit as his canon. So he got off his butt and wrote this sequel, which academics call big words like “meta-textual” when really it was Cervantes trying to make sure people understood his canon correctly and didn’t get carried away with their silly fan theories based on this one fic writer’s interpretation.  Now-a-days, the “true sequel” is normally just lumped in and stuck onto the end as a “part II,” in case you are wondering why you’ve never heard of a Don Quixote the Sequel. By all accounts, the fan fic was pretty bad, which makes it’s a perfect beginning to the grand tradition of fanfiction. Calling this the first instance of fanfiction, though, comes from the fact that this was the first time, as far as we know, that the author of the original stepped in to officially denounce fan work as not canon. For most of history (at least western history) there wasn’t really an idea that stories had ownership. Most famous greek plays and poems are based on other works. Virgil’s Aeneid can easily be called Homer fan fiction (we have no real way of knowing how much of the story existed in folk tradition and how much he made up). Most of the versions of greek myths you know come from Ovid’s Metamorphosis, which is largely his short fics about other myths. Moving out of the classical world, bible fic constitutes a lot of what literature is for a while. Dante’s  Inferno, specifically, (which is, lets be clear, a self insert fic where the author meets his fave author - so it’s also RPF - and they take a tour through a crossover fic between the Bible, historical fic, and greek myth) was so popular that it’s kind of crossed over into fanon (quick - biblically how many cicles does Hell have? Answer: none, they all come from Dante and in turn Virgil, and eventually Homer…) On the run up to Don Quixote, we have Shakespeare, who adapted most of his plays directly from other works by other people, from which he asked no permission (nor was he expected to.) The real move that makes this false sequel the first official fan fiction is that the author of the canon material asserted his ownership of the intellectual property that was the characters and the story. Not in the legal sense - there was nothing illegal about this sequel - but in the sense that you could call this sequel “unauthorized.” It’s the beginning of thinking of characters and stories as belonging to a specific person, rather than simply being created by said person.

Read them all here, I felt like this should be remembered somewhere because it’s really good.

YOO. 

If you try to tell me the Hunger Games isn’t good enough to go toe-to-toe with shit like 1984, Lord of the Flies, and Farenheit 451 then we are gonna have to throw the fuck down

This. All of this. It applies to shoujo manga and anime as well.

YES YES YES!!

i remember reading about gothic literature in the 18th century, and how these novels all started off being called romances (borrowing from the french term) and a lot of their authors were women. when men entered the game prominently, they started calling their works novels—which were more ‘logical’ and based in more ‘honourable’ traditions of classical works, to give a distinction from the sentimental gothic works of women authors*.

and actually (and i hope i’m right here, i’m going off memory) gothic fiction was coined that rather early on and was meant to be an insult. because  when gothic fiction got its start, gothic architecture was so passé (this was well before the victorian gothic revival) and everyone was doing, i think, like neo-classical. which was a big cultural thing, w the age of enlightenment digging up classical greek and roman works & getting back into philosophizing etc etc. so calling it gothic after gothic architecture was meant to be a huge insult to a genre of these romances that were being written by women, and then men strolled in and gave their gothic works the classical distinction of novels.

so anyway. yeah. sexism.

—-

*but anyone who’s read gothic fiction, by men or women, knows that it’s just a huge vat of seeping, garish absurdity (and it’s marvellous.) so really, who were these dudes kidding.