Natasha F.
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natashaf.bsky.social
Natasha F.
@natashaf.bsky.social
210 followers 380 following 48 posts
🇿🇦 Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Ancient Greek Literature. Also on a mission to inspire younger students to read more widely than their assigned novels and textbooks.
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natashaf.bsky.social
I try to set at least 6 impossible goals before year's end (6 before breakfast is a bit much)
December 15, 2025 at 4:31 PM
Reposted by Natasha F.
nathansen.bsky.social
In particular, I'm interested in his view that unlike the sciences, replication is not possible in the humanities. In my review, I give some reasons in favor of thinking it is possible. (I've screenshotted the relevant bits).
Kramnick also attributes a dubious virtue to the method of close reading as he understands it: unlike the human sciences that have suffered from a replica- tion crisis in the twenty-first century, the work of liter- ary studies is not replicable, ‘because there is no result independent of perspective that could be replicated’ (p. 91). But the idea that the sciences produce results or run replicable experiments that are ‘independent of perspective’ is a myth. No two experiments are conducted in exactly the same conditions; participants differ, time has gone by , the mode of presentation of the experimental materials changes. The philosopher of science Edouard Machery has argued that the notion of a replication itself has so far not been well under- stood, and that the right way to think of replications is as ‘resampling the … components of an experiment’ (Machery 2020: 547). In a ‘direct’ replication of an ex- periment using humans as participants, only partici- pants are resampled (different people encounter the same materials in the same experimental design), but experimental materials themselves can be resampled in the same way: you could give participants relevantly similar prompts to make sure they are not just respond- ing to idiosyncratic features of the original experimen- tal materials, for example. Understood in that way, replication is possible in criticism. The art historian Michael Baxandall says that his explanations of what is happening in paintings should be repeatable and open to testing by other people in the sense that if his explanation ‘does not prompt other people to a sharper sense of the pictorial cogency of Chardin’s A Lady T aking T ea, then it fails: I reported an experiment and it has been found not repeatable’ (Baxandall 1985: 137). The idea of the replicability of critical judge- ments by other judges is part of the venerable philo- sophical idea that aesthetic judgement aims at agreement. For example, Cavell says that the vindica- tion of a critic’s judgements can only come from get- ting the audience to see, hear, or taste what they find in the object being judged (Cavell 1976: 87). Contrary to Kramnick’s claim, not only can you repeat someone else’s reading of an object, but you need to, to see if it rings true (p. 24).
December 11, 2025 at 7:18 PM
Reposted by Natasha F.
johannawinant.bsky.social
How can we sleep for grief?

By counting our stock. Seven plays from Aeschylus, seven from Sophocles, nineteen from Euripides, my lady! You should no more grieve for the rest than for a buckle lost from your first shoe, or for your lesson book which will be lost when you are old.
November 29, 2025 at 7:27 PM
natashaf.bsky.social
Thanks for the link! I've saved it to read it properly once my marking is finished - looking forward to it!
November 3, 2025 at 7:18 AM