[ExI] Literary Criticism Technique

Lee Corbin lcorbin at rawbw.com
Sun Jul 20 15:23:46 UTC 2008


Harvey writes

> Lee [wrote],
> 
>> Charles Murray's book "Human Achievement" is not only impressive
>> and amazing for the descriptions of human history and achievement
>> it discloses, but also for his methodology. But see the reviews at
>> Amazon or somewhere for that.
> 
> Charles Murray's methodologies have always been unscientific and 
> controversial.

It's been a long time since I've read "The Bell Curve" if
that's what you're thinking about, but I'm speaking here
only of "Human Accomplishment". You may wish to
check it out of a library and take a serious look at his
methodology. 

There are many occasions where he refrains from giving
interpretations that you might think "favorable" to some
preexisting ideological viewpoint you might suspect he
has.

> He went through Eurocentric reference books, counted the 
> numbers of entries and pages devoted to each historical
> figure, and concluded that Europeans contributed the most
> to human history.

He spends page after page attempting to correct for not only
Eurocentric biases, but gender biases and ethnic biases. For
example, exactly why would Murray have a reason to inflate
Jewish accomplishment?  Or for that matter, why try to deflate
the accomplishments of non-European peoples in general?
If you do yourself have preexisting ideas that this is just
the sort of thing that white males do, then please, again,
take a serious look at the book.

> I wouldn't take any of his "methodologies" seriously.  His
> statistical "methods" are likewise suspect.

Have you actually closely examined "Human Accomplishment"?
Are there people or researchers that clearly themselves do not
have any clear biases that you have confidence in who disparage
his methods?

>  None of his research seems to derive from a truly neutral 
> investigative stance intended to measure reality.  Instead, he
> always seems to have a predetermined goal for he contrives
> methodologies and statistics to support.

I don't know, but I suspect that your usage of "always" here
reflects a reluctance to critically but objectively examine his
findings and how he got them.

Anyway, you might wish to change the subject line; I wanted
to inquire about literary criticism and one of its particular textual
methods.

Lee




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