This is my first time using this post thing so please, bear with me. Alrite, to keep a long story short my english teacher (I'm in highschool) gave us all an assignment back a few weeks ago and I'm in need of some help. As luck would have it I came across this and decided, what the heck! I'll see if this is the answer to my question. The question: What sorts of commentary (I've managed to find a few) but going into even greater depth, what are some types of commentary found within PR? Hopefully someone out there can help... thank you... kd393

Has commentary acquired a new meaning since I was at school?

I cannot think of any examples of the following in PR:
1 an explanation or criticism added to a text
2 a spoken account (usually on radio or tv) of an event

I would suggest that kd393 is referring to social commentary - that is - observation/criticism of perceived flaws and problems within a given society. If I remember my Profs correctly, you can also apply other adjectives to it as well: political commentary, religious commentary, etc.

Hope this helps.

Gil, scaring newbies since 1856

Hey, I wasn't trying to scare the little guy. I just felt that his teachers were beginning to stretch the meaning of a word into uncharted realms.

I shall add Jester's excellent definition to my list.

As for kd393, I guess I'm not helping much. Despite the fact that I've read the book in full twice, and dipped into for references etc., I don't think I could identify any commentaries without trolling (or should that be trawling?) through it again with that target in mind.

Same here. It seems like there is some commentary in there, but I'd really have to comb through the book again to find them, I think.

I'd also say it's easy to mistake observation for commentary. Take, for example, the remark Cayce makes (internally) about gun culture in America being the same sort of thing to the English as class is to Americans: intrisically wrong and incomprehensible from the outside, and fundamental to the point of being almost impossible to change from the inside. Some people read that as commentary, about both guns and the class system, but I think it is more observation about how deep, basically non-sensical attitudes are ingrained by the culture you grew up with. Commentary somehow involves judgement, I think, and WG is fairly light on the judgement, usually, in my opinion.

(Note that I believe WG might have been implying that gun culture and the class system are basically both bad ideas, but very lightly, and secondary to the main point of that passage.)

Oh my, I seem to have spilled a bottle of commas over my post...

Thank you for your "push in the right direction". Yes, when I was asking about commentary I was referring to the social, religious, economic types, the only problem is that I'm still finding it really hard to pin point where those are found within the novel. If anyone has any ideas it would be greatly appreciated... thank you again...

This may be too late, but I've just stumbled over this thread. I agree with Colin that commentary in this sense implies judgement by the author, which we are intended to recognise as representing the views of the author - views that author wants us to share. Classically, this was a characteristic of 19th and 20th century realist fiction and drama from Dickens to Upton Sinclair, as well as avowedly political works like Brecht's plays. I don't think Gibson is interested in this kind of didactic stuff at all. But there is another way of looking at commentary, which is implicit rather than explicit. All authors select, and they deal with themes in very different ways. So for example Gibson has elected to deal with themes of advertising, branding and so forth. Can you draw any conclusions from the way he treats these subjects, the kind of characters who are depicted and so forth?

Let's consider themes to be "under erasure" (as Samuel Delany does "Neither the First Word nor the Last," an essay on deconstruction and SF) and try to think simply that:

Gibson is writing about a world very much like our own, in which advertising is a site of: 1) the gathering of money, 2) cultural production (branding, trends, general social milieu, making people desire objects). I'd argue that they're not so much themes (or, rather, from in a certain critical technique, they're themes) but that they're simply aspects of the work in question--and here I'm stealing shamelessly from Delany; he argues that themes, in no small measure, need to be recognized as simply another cog. Gibson's work, therefore, is less a commentary on certain themes and more an exploration of how a world works if its rules work in a certain way--making Pattern Recognition SF, even if it doesn't do any of the traditional "themes" (the Alien, Outer Space, Technology, Time, Utopia/Dystopia) that purport to be how literary critics tend to define SF, even as SF's practitioners do not recognize them as themes as merely settings or even ingredients in a given story.

The danger of dealing with "themes" is that they can serve to, as Delany writes, "stop analysis in its tracks." The example Delany gives:

quote:

"SF text X or Y should, it would seem, have something interesting to say about Time/Space/Technology/etc., since self-evidently that's what the text is about. But, oddly, it doesn't seem to..." This is by far the most common form of criticism that appeals to any of them <--critics, I think-->. In brief, these "themes" are imposed on science fiction in the mood of legitimization, and are actually employed to delegitimize us through inadequation.

Watch out about those "themes." The "themes" are not monolithic, but rather "dispositions." As such, they need to be "dissolv(ed) into their greater problematics" (Delany). So, how might we dissolve the problem of Advertising or big business? Agent2508 is on to something as he gets more specific, but he needs to go further in the analysis, or the potential of the analysis, and be careful re: the terms of that analysis.

Well I think Gibson himself said the book is about how, in his perception 911 changed the world. In that sesne the whole book is commentary on a macro level. Thought what I think he means by that is far less important than what you think he means.

I think the point is to draw conclusions for yourself from the text. Reading is, of necessity about what you find in the text, rather than what is put there. Its dance between writer and reader.

There are a lot of questions raised within this work. A lot of why's and what next. I think finding some of these questions is part of the broader commentary made by the work.

I can't spoon feed answers, and by now your assignment is done. I am curious how it turned out for you. What did you find?