by Travis Prinzi on February 2, 2010
Knowing about my love for character development and layers of meaning in story, friends of mine urged me for a long time to watch LOST. One friend in particular said it was right up my alley. If I had my own alley, yes – this indeed would be up it.
Tricia and I spent this last summer watching all 5 seasons of LOST, and Season 6 starts tonight. Too many demands have kept me from diving into the layers of meaning in LOST, but I intend to begin doing so, because I think they’re there. Jeff Jensen of EW.com began writing about the series back in Season 2, and I plan to start with his materials. His stuff on the parent-child set-up of LOST is definitely worth your time.
Look for LOST posts in the coming week. I’ll be watching tonight’s episode with Tricia, but I might try to tweet a bit as well.
by Travis Prinzi on January 30, 2010
While there are areas I differ with John Gardner, and I’m still trying to thoughtfully digest his debate-provoking book, On Moral Fiction, I can resonate with this sentiment from early on in the work:
The language of critics, and of artists of the kind who pay attention to the critics, has become exceedingly odd: not talk about feelings or intellectual affirmations — not talk about moving and supporting twists of plot or wonderful characters and ideas — but sentences full of large words like hermaneutic (sic), heuristic, structuralism, formalism, or opaque language, and full of fine distinctions — for instance those between modernist and postmodernist — that would make even an intelligent cow suspicious. Though more difficult than ever before to read, criticism has become trivial.
The iconological criticism of S.T. Coleridge, Ruskin, MacDonald, Tolkien, Lewis, L’Engle has gone exactly the way of all belief about supernatural and religious thought: keep it private, or else. More than that, this way of approaching literature has been so sidelined that it’s about as noticed as the water boy (i.e., not at all). Instead of transformative story, a book is that thing over there, and the words are those objects to be dissected and laid against our enlightened views of science and justice, and separated from anything sacramental that might point to a reality greater than our five senses can perceive.
Christians are as guilty, and the practice of reading and responding to story on a spiritual level has been lost, and trite systems of belief have won the day. As such, the Christian faith in America has lost much of its depth and ability to think and relate to other human beings. Great literature trains us in morality; it teaches us to love and receive love. Current criticism teaches us to criticize.
In the university, “This text is oppressive because…” is the basic operating thesis of the approach to literature. In the church, “This text is dangerous/Satanic/should be avoided by Christians because…” is the approach. Both miss the symbols pointing to the greater reality.
