Meme

[felis_ultharus]

I like this quiz. It came out very accurate for me. What it calls "cultural creative" is what I think of as "humanism," which definitely isn't a new philosophy but an old one that's evolved gradually over the centuries:

You scored as Cultural Creative. Cultural Creatives are probably the newest group to enter this realm. You are a modern thinker who tends to shy away from organized religion but still feels as if there is something greater than ourselves. You are very spiritual, even if you are not religious. Life has a meaning outside of the rational. </td> Cultural Creative 94% Idealist 69% Romanticist 63% Existentialist 56% Fundamentalist 38% Postmodernist 38% Modernist 19% Materialist 13% What is Your World View? (updated) created with QuizFarm.com

Comments

[felis-ultharus.livejournal.com]

I like pop literature. The postmodernists sometimes approach it with an air of cultural superiority, the way the first anthropologists discussed what they called "primitive" cultures.

A favourite philosopher of mine (one I quote ad nauseum) has argued that genre literature is actually the legitimate inheritor of the great novels of the past.

He argues that science fiction (dealing with the possibilities of where we're going) and spy novels (dealing with dangers of modern politics and technology) are more relevant than the "serious" novels out there that are really just experimental literary masturbation, or the author's attempt to transcribe their dull family drama onto a page.

His theory is that novels become popular because of the ideas they play with -- ideas that the public is thinking about -- and they can't be dismissed as drivel as many intellectuals do. While postmodernists no longer believe novels "say" anything, the public knows differently, and become attached to things generally because of what they're saying.

Thus a badly-written novel like The Da Vinci Code is popular because people are increasingly questioning church-received dogma, while still not willing to give up on spirituality. And the Da vinci Code represents those things. Doesn't matter that it breaks all the rules dished out in creative-writing classes.

And meanwhile, creative writing students are writing just to be writers -- they rarely have something to say. They just want to be famous.

This philosopher -- John Ralston Saul -- takes a more Jungian approach. Rather than judging, we should be asking, "What does the popularity of a novel say about us? What are the ideas we feel the need to explore right now...? why are we exploring those ideas?"

It's a worldview I've taken to heart ^_^

"I consider the group I hang out with (IRL and online) to be pretty hard-core intelligentsia, and we spend most of our time discussing the mythological roots of names and relationships in Final Fantasy games. XD"

I've done that. I'm actually more interested in some of the mis-translations by English translators (and sometimes the original Japanese writers). For instance, how badly the French was screwed up in Final Fantasy ix >_

[yumemisama.livejournal.com]

For mangled languages, you can't beat Vagrant Story. Many of the names of people, places, spells and items are some form of twisted Romance... something. A lot of them look almost-French. The main location of the game is a city called Leà Monde, which makes a lot of sense when they begin talking about the runes that line the city walls. ^_^ Plus, and this may be either an incentive or a sign to avoid it, everybody in the game looks like they go clothes shopping at Bondage Supplies 'R' Us. The hero, Ashley Riot, wanders around in a very manly pair of assless leather shorts. I would almost wish I were joking, except I have developed a taste for Squaresoft weirdness ever since playing Xenogears, and eagerly anticipate whatever bizarre epic plot they come out with next.

I'm so glad someone else thinks Dan Brown is a poor writer. I read Angels & Demons once and thought, "Well, it would get a B+ as Internet fanfic, but a C- in any English class I ran, with a note to the effect that if I saw one more set of ellipses, I would scream." You also make me feel a lot better about the box of Doctor Who/Star Wars/Saint/Laurie R. King novels I just had to haul halfway across campus, topped off with one loose paperback novelisation of Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Father. ^_^;;