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Drake Greene's avatar

Strikes me as a false dichotomy.

And I see far too many graphs of things that probably shouldn't be graphed.

Dostoevsky, at least in the Brothers Karamazov, has many religious and philosophical discourses, and at the the same time much of the dialogue is of a high emotional (batshit crazy?) pitch.

Same with Melville and Moby Dick.

It was once said about the brothers William James and Henry James, that William was a psychologist who wrote like a novelist and Henry was a novelist with the insights of a psychologist. Now, that's interesting.

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Holly A.J.'s avatar

oh, I don't know. It depends on the subject of the painting. Monet was very good when he was painting boats. I deeply dislike Cezanne's dancers, but the colour in his still lifes and landscapes is gorgeous. Then there is Renoir, whose domestic scenes are charming. It is Manet who leaves me entirely cold.

I think the ChatGPT analysis is too shallow, too easy, too 'safe', as it were.

For example, most people are probably thinking of Charlotte Bronte's 'Jane Eyre' when evaluating her work. Those of us who have read 'Villette' know 'Jane Eyre' only shows Bronte at the beginning of her powers. The 'intellectual' novelist George Eliot wrote after reading 'Villette': "Villette! Villette! There is something almost preternatural about its power." The balance between emotion and intellect in 'Villette' is almost perfect.

Charles Dickens' 'Hard Times' is an example of how classifying him as an emotional novelist doesn't cover his breadth. 'Hard Times' is on an entirely different emotional plane than most of his novels. The eccentric casts of characters is there, the blistering commentary on social ills is there, the message is read loud and clear as always, yet the story triggers analysis more than emotional response. There are multiple instances in his other novels where his description is vivid as ever, yet he quite deliberately pulls the reader back from emotional entanglement with the scene, encouraging analysis instead. 'Our Mutual Friend' does that frequently, but so does 'Dombey and Son', 'Little Dorrit', and 'Bleak House'.

George Eliot is not that easy to classify. What of the emotionally satisfying 'Silas Marner', what of the emotionally turbulent 'Mill on the Floss', what of the clash between head and heart in 'Adam Bede'?

In short, it is like ChatGPT has taken high school or first year college papers on these auhhors to give a facile response for an easy grade.

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