http://www.popmatters.com/pm/column/...eurocapitalism
It's a bit terrifying. I doubt there's a scientific formula for writing a good, popular novel; but marketers are always second-guessing the market, and jumping onto the latest bandwagon (which usually fails). Our free market is actually pretty inefficient, and it's because we must invent these schemes. I point to the many Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings rip-offs that bombed.
Quote:
| The assumption is that literary criticism should surrender its subjective interpretations and its parasitic attempts to function as an art form in itself, and adopt a scientific approach. As Bill Benzon suggests in this useful post at the Valve, an academic blog, neuro critics aspire to be like Martian anthropologists, pursuing an objective understanding of the idiosyncrasies of the human species and its weird propensity to stare at words and engage in pretend stories (“Literary studies hermeneutic insiders and naturalist outsiders”). ... -the market (also evolving with humans by the same processes) must be understood as just a better technology for unearthing our evolutionarily conditioned desires. Once those desires are revealed, we can use that data to make cultural products that will work better (we can deduce how and why certain books are destined to please) and hence sell better (an efficient use of society’s resources, to produce only those works that evolution requires). Neurocriticism, then, is the logical elaboration of its spiritual predecessor, neuromarketing. Neuromarketing is the ethically dubious practice of using neuroscience to find ways to control consumer behavior. According to proponent Steve Quartz, neuromarketing, like Freudian psychoanalysis before it, reveals the allegedly hidden reasons behind our desire. |
