the literary critter

Reading of strangers

2008-05-02T14:18:00.004-04:00

Earlier I was looking through an archive of Postsecret, and there was a secret on it that referred to a significant characteristic of literature. Postsecret, by the way, is a project created by Frank Warren where anyone can anonymously mail him handmade postcards that display a secret of theirs, and he posts them on the Postsecret blog and publishes them in books. Here was someone's secret:
I liked this postcard--and the idea of Postsecret in general--because it plays on one of the important elements of literature; it provides us easy access to the insights and stories of strangers. In the book The Message in the Bottle, Walker Percy discusses the way that when an alienated man reads a book about an alienated man, this provides him with the means to move out of his alienation. Literature offers a connection between people who will probably never know each other, but just the knowledge that others are experiencing similar life circumstances provides a certain comfort in them.

In the beginning was the Word

2008-04-30T17:14:00.029-04:00

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;

wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry
—the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says

we are for each other:then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis

-e. e. cummings

I've been reading the book The Message in the Bottle: How Queer Man is, How Queer Language is, and What One Has to do with the Other by Walker Percy, and it has me thinking a lot about the way that we understand the phenomenon of language. Percy discusses the fact that although we see everything through our use of language, it is so much a part of us that we have no real understanding of language itself. We don't understand what we actually do when we refer to an object with a word and someone else understands it. To try to understand how an understanding of language develops within a person, Percy looks at the case of Helen Keller and the instance when she first learned the symbol for water. Most people learn to use language when they're too young to remember it happening, but Keller has the unique experience of being able to recount her first experience with understanding language. Keller describes, "Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten--a thrill returning to me. I knew then that 'w-a-t-e-r' meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set if free!" (35). Percy attempts to examine what happened at the instant when a new relationship developed between Helen, the word water, and the liquid she felt. He argues that the new relationship developed between the three things in that "ah ha!" moment changes the nature of all three of them. He also claims that this must have been the type of experience that occurred at people's first use of language: "Helen's breakthrough must bear some relation to the breakthrough of the species itself" (38).

I've thought a lot about this view of language in my philosophy class, and something I read in Augustine's The Trinity seemed to provide me with an element that was missing from Percy's view of language. Augustine creates a beautiful analogy between the way that our word functions and the way that Christ functions:

"Hence, the word which sounds without is a sign of the word that shines within, to which the name of word more properly belongs. For that which is produced by the mouth of the flesh is the sound of the word, and is itself also called the word, because that inner word assumed it in order that it might appear outwardly. For just as our word in some way becomes a bodily sound by assuming that in which it may be manifested to the senses of men, so the Word of God was made flesh by assuming that in which He might also be manifested to the senses of men. And just as our word becomes a sound that is not changed into a sound, so the Word of God indeed becomes flesh, but far be it that it should be changed into flesh. For by assuming it, not by being consumed in it, this word of ours becomes a sound, and that Word becomes flesh." (19)

While Augustine's analogy doesn't fulfill Percy's task of understanding the phenomenon of language, it seems impossible to actually understand language in the way that Percy wants to and aspires for. Percy's ideas are extremely interesting to think about, but Augustine's analogy is good enough for me.

To live sin fronteras

2008-04-29T10:43:00.010-04:00

To survive the Borderlands

you must live sin fronteras
be a crossroads.

I recently read Gloria Anzaldúa's book Borderlands / La Frontera and found that it addresses a lot of the issues that seem prevalent in discussions of authorial identity. The book is an autobiography of sorts. Anzaldúa grew up in Southern Texas along the U.S. and Mexican border, and she distinguishes herself as Chicana, Mexican-American. Due to the physical location of her home, she discusses the idea of a border that separates a first-world country from a third-world country, which leads her to examine her personal cultural placement and the various kinds of borders that form binary oppositions.

In her chapter "La conciencia de la mestiza / Towards a New Consciousness," Anzaldúa discusses that reaction is both "limited by, and dependent on, what it is reacting against" (100). As a Mexican-American and lesbian woman, she feels that she has had to resist aspects of white patriarchal society for much of her life, but she creates the image that she cannot place herself on the riverbank opposite from these cultures. Instead, "on our way to a new consciousness, we will have to leave the opposite bank, the split between the two mortal combatants somehow healed so that we are on both shores at once" (100). The important approach to resolving such divisive dualities is to act, not react in ways that only reinforce the opposition. Anzaldúa develops the idea of the mestiza consciousness, a way of thought that makes the borderlands its home instead of allowing itself to be categorized on one or the other side of the borderline. She distinguishes that her experience of living on the border of nationality, gender, and sexuality, give her a unique perspective about the way that dualities created by these concepts can be overcome:

As a mestiza I have no country, my homeland cast me out; yet all countries are mine because I am every woman's sister or potential lover. (As a lesbian I have no race, my own people disclaim me; but I am all races because there is the queer of me in all races). I am cultureless because, as a feminist, I challenge the collective cultural/religious male-derived beliefs of Indo-Hispanics and Anglos; yet I am cultured because I am participating in the creation of yet another culture, a new story to explain the world and our participation in it, a new value system with images and symbols that connect us to each other and to the planet. Soy un amasamiento, I am an act of kneading, of uniting and joining that not only has produced both a creature of darkness and a creature of light, but also a creature that questions the definitions of light and dark and gives them new meanings." (102-3)

This position sheds new light on the way I think about people and texts because in class we've talked about ethnicity, economic status, gender, and religion, all in their own respective categories. But Anzaldúa combines all the various aspects of her identity in order to show that the interplay between the differences provide a person's identity and the hope for "kneading" and uniting.

A unique aspect of the book is that Anzaldúa's writing style echoes her ideas about inhabiting the borderlands. The language switches back and forth between Spanish and English, enabling her to use the words from both languages to more fully express herself. Her writing also transfers between poetry and prose, which prevents her text from fitting neatly within one genre. Also, she weaves her personal history together with the history of her people to demonstrate restrictive mentalities and offer hope for change. Her writing style and her lifestyle seem to exemplify the new mestiza consciousness that she describes.

Because I, a mestiza,
continually walk out of one culture
and into another,
because I am in all cultures at the same time,
alma entre dos mundos, tres, cuatro,
me zumba la cabeza con lo contradictorio.
Estoy norteada por todas las voces que me hablan
simultaneamente.

The need to read

2008-04-25T00:08:00.010-04:00

We've talked so much in class about the questions what is literature? and what is reading? While I was reading Professor Power's essay "Reading Ethnic Literature Now," I realized that the existence of a reading crisis where fewer and fewer people actually take the time to read indicates more than just a problem for ethnic literature. If no one reads, then the power of literature cannot stem nearly as far as we theoretically perceive it can. All the great things it offers will never come into fruition in most lives. Powers writes, "We have arrived at a period in which we justifiably celebrate canonical triumphs even as fewer and fewer people care that canons exist at all." While it seems worthwhile for readers and writers to consider the success of increasingly canonical ethnic and women writers, are the ideas and successes limited to the sub-culture of readers? Can they affect society as a whole?

I read an article by Andrew Solomon called "The Closing of the American Book" to investigate the reading issue further (I found that many essays and articles have been written about the growth of a reading crisis in America, and I couldn't help but think of the irony that only readers will access them). Solomon focuses on the inconsistency that this creates between our academic system and our actual lives: "We have one of the most literate societies in history. What is the point of having a population that can read, but doesn't? We need to teach people not only how, but also why to read." I began to think of the things that I had to learn in school, and I realized that we learn a lot of things that don't carry over into practical life application. I have knowledge and abilities in subjects like calculus, but I don't spend my spare time working on calculus equations just because I am capable of doing so. Thus, why should anyone separate out reading as the skill that they continue to use in life when so many other skills taught in school are readily discarded? Admittedly, reading is quite different from any type of mathematical or scientific skill. It connects more with daily life than something as theoretical and objective as calculus, and this seems to make it more universally accessible to people. But in such a fast-moving culture where electronic entertainment is used to increasing extents, how can we salvage the value of reading? Solomon provides a quote from Walter Pater that expresses the value of reading, or other artistic appreciations which may take more time and effort, over other forms of quick entertainment: "The service of philosophy, of speculative culture, towards the human spirit is to rouse, to startle it to a life of sharp and eager observation. . . . The poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for its own sake, has most; for art comes to you professing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass.''

Abolishing the English Department

2008-04-22T22:00:00.010-04:00

When I spent a semester abroad at Uganda Christian University (UCU), most of the Ugandan students who I met were at University studying law, journalism, or social work. Whenever anyone asked me what I studied, I felt a bit odd telling them that I studied "English." They had certainly studied English growing up, and when I said I studied English as my major, it sounded too much to me like I was saying that I went to college to study my own language. So, I began to respond to inquiries by informing Ugandan students that I studied literature (saying li-tra-ture to make myself more understandable through my thick American accent). But even when I said something like that, it made me question the value of what I was studying. It seemed like most of the Ugandan students I talked with were studying something that had a more apparent practical application than literature, and even with those studies it's not the easiest task to obtain a job in Uganda even with a degree. And people still seemed a little confused when I told them I studied literature. I eventually resorted to telling people that I studied journalism.

After reading Ngugi's essay "On the Abolition of the English Department," I was interested in exploring more of the courses at Uganda Christian University to see if they actually have something like an "English" department. Ngugi proposes, "

A. That the English Department be abolished;
B. That a Department of African Literature and Languages be set up its place.

I went to UCU's website to discover that they do have a Department of Language and Literature. The mission states that the department wants students to develop appreciation for "all languages, particularly English and the languages of Uganda, as well as French and other regional languages." I wonder how an educatin can encourage students to appreciate all languages. The primary language used in the educational environment in Uganda is English--and it's considered the official national language of the country--which is something that has stemmed out of colonialism, but it is nevertheless an important part of the culture. Besides that, there are 45 languages spoken in Uganda, and some of the students at Uganda Christian University are acutually from other African countries like Kenya or Tanzania. However, the department offers, "We have access to experts in many of the Ugandan languages, and can organise individual instruction or design courses for groups." This type of approach allows for students to guide their approach to language based on what they desire to learn more fully.

Within the long mission list of the department, which hits on several poignant points, one of the mission statements that I find most relevant to the discussion of Ngugi is UCU's goal to "promote language and literary study, so as to increase understanding across ethnic and linguistic barriers, and across historical periods." This makes the department something of a cultural studies department. It also includes the goal rooted in the Christian purposes of the college to "provide Christian believers, lay, ordained, missionary and local, with the linguistic means to spread the Gospel of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ, and to communicate effectively in English and other languages." This aligns it with a Christian culture as well as an African and English cultural studies department. This follows Ngug's recommendation that "The primary duty of any literature department is to illuminate the spirit animating a people, to show how it meets new challenges, and to investigate possible areas of development and involvement" (2094).

I also looked at the course listing for the MA in Literature degree at UCU. It includes courses in Ugandan, African, and oral literature, as well as American literature. It seems to include a diverse number of approaches to literature in several cultural and historical contexts, and I wonder if Ngugi had influence on such a course offering. It certainly isn't an "English department." I would suspect that the UCU literature department is not one of the most popular in the university, but it has very specific goals that seem to centralize both African culture and literary tradition with other literary contexts and Christian service.

What literature is within us?

2008-04-21T21:56:00.010-04:00

I recently read the essay "No Name Woman" by the Chinese-American writer Maxine Hong Kingston. It was not a traditional essay by any means, and I found it a little difficult to follow, but there was one section in it that addressed some issues I've wondered about quite a bit recently, having read several different kinds of criticism that all seem to focus on rooting texts in writers' identities. As Kingston tells stories of her childhood experiences, she questions, "Chinese-Americans, when you try to understand what things in you are Chinese, how do you separate what is peculiar to childhood, to poverty, insanities, one family, your mother who marked your growing with stories, from what is Chinese? What is Chinese tradition and what is the movies?" In our class, we've moved from Marxist to Feminist to Ethnic criticism, and it seems like all of them are so similar in some ways although they deal with different qualities that define groups of people.

In Langston Hughes' essay "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain," he talks of the way that an African American's poetry must be rooted in their African American identity. When Hughes encounters a young poet who wants "to be a poet--not a Negro poet" (1313), Hughes takes this to mean that the poet is trying to put aside his own identity so that he can better assimilate into the white culture. Hughes despises this attitude, responding, "But, to my mind, it is the duty of the younger Negro artist, if he accepts any duties at all from outsiders, to change through the force of his art that old whispering 'I want to be white,' hidden in the aspirations of his people, to 'Why thould I want to be white? I am a Negro--and beautiful!" (1316). This is such a different idea than what we read earlier from Emerson about the way that a poet should transcend him/herself in some way in order to tap into a truth that applies to all people. Instead, Hughes seems to think that a removal of the racial identity from African American poetry is a removal of truth from the poetry. According to him, African Americans "have an honest American Negro literature already within us," and it is their duty to expose that literature that exists within (1316). This works well for the type of poetry that Hughes wants to right. In poems such as "I, Too," he embodies his racial identity with lines like "I, too, sing America. // I am the darker brother." But it seems almost like a restriction in some ways on the African American writer to say that they must write in a way that is perceived as embodying their own seperate culture from the white culture.

Helene Cixous, in "The Laugh of the Medusa," seems to share some of Hughes' ideas about writing according to one's identity, but her focus centers on gender rather than race. She writes, “I write woman: woman must write woman. And man, man” (2041). Reading Cixous' ideas gives me a different perspective than I can have with Hughes because--while I've never experienced the life of an African American--I am a woman. However, it wasn't until I came to college and began reading feminist writers that I even thought about gender differences in writing. I had to be educated as to what these feminist writers mean by instructing all women to “write woman." Cixous even has a difficult time articulating what feminine writing is in any concrete manner even though all of her ideas revolve around it. In the same essay where she prescribes that women should “write woman,” she claims, “It is impossible to define a feminine practice of writing, and this is an impossibility that will remain, for this practice can never be theorized, enclosed, encoded—which doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist” (2043). So basically, she's saying that something about women's writing makes it the same in some way even though it doesn't seem apparent that it all shares some womanly writer quality. Although I feel that it's not necessarily right or helpful to determine a type of feminine writing that is completely separate from that of males, perhaps in saying this, I'm over-generalizing to ignore a difference that is there.

I tend to wonder if classifying literature into groups like "African American literature" or "women's literature" tends to lead to the creation of more stereotypes. When Langston Hughes was writing, he was addressing a particular problem in society: the African American writer didn't seem to have a voice apart from the adopted style of white American culture. And a woman writer such as Virginia Woolf also addressed the societal issues that affected her during her life as a woman writer; women were literally not allowed to be writers. But is it still worth discussing literature within these labels today as society becomes more diverse and moves toward greater equality? While these ideas about race and literature do make points about the way things have been--and the way that some things stilll are--focusing on these issues almost perpetuates them in some way because it forces people to view literature in categories based on the author's identity.

Encountering resistance

2008-04-14T22:42:00.005-04:00

During my first Womens' Literature class of this semester, I walked in to see three words written on the board:

Resistance, Revision, Re-imagine

I was already skeptical after receiving the booklist for the class because I had never heard of any of the authors before, but this all-too-neatly alliterated list seemed like too much for me. I wasn't sure how well I would get along with the study of all women writers. Over the course of the semester, I've realized that this course is run in quite different ways from other classes I've taken. Today I figured out why. Professor Corey was talking to us about the essay and/or final project that we have to complete for the class, and she explained that she wants to establish as few restrictions as possible for the assignment because she wants to provide us with every possible opportunity to resist the academic system of organized and strict essays. She talked about the way that an essay can be difficult form for bringing several voices into conversation and condensing ideas into such a formulaic structure. Instead, she encouraged us with examples of a past student who had choreographed a dance as her final project. She also foreshadowed the enjoyable final that we will have that will also resist and revise the traditional academic structure in some way.

Having recently read the works of feminist critics, the idea of resistance started making sense to me. My womens lit class has been rather unorthodox in the way that we read, discuss, and complete assignments, and I realize that it is created in such a way that allows us the freedom to enjoy texts in ways that we cannot in other classes. And it assigns texts to read that no other classes would. If I'm receiving such a good chance to study and engage with womens' literature, does it perpetuate the separate nature of womens' writing by placing it in its own distinct class that functions through different academic teaching styles than other more traditional classes?

Dancing with mines

2008-04-10T15:24:00.012-04:00

As I read Annette Kolodny's "Dancing Through the Minefield," it made me think about the fact that no one really created literature with the intention of privileging men over women. It wasn't that Shakespeare intentionally thought, "Hey, I'm going to focus on the male heroes and only portray women in my plays as they exist in relationship to men." And no literary theorist way back in the day wrote an essay about the way that men deserve to dominate literature. Rather, it seems that literature grew out of a reflection of life; the way that women were viewed in life became the way that they were portrayed in literature.

Kolodny addresses idea such as these by claiming that "all literary history is a fiction which we daily recreate as we reread it" (2155). She argues that without access to some kind of magical time machine to take us back to speak with Shakespeare or Milton, there really is no way to know the meaning of what they wrote in the context in which they wrote it. Despite what we believe we're doing when we study literary works and their contexts, Kolodny thinks that "we never really reconstruct the past in its own terms" (2154-5). Instead, our supposed reconstructions turn out to be only "an approximation of an already fictively imputed past made available, through our interpretive strategies, for present concerns" (2155). Although I understand that we only have the capability of viewing literature from our present context, there is something to be learned about the past in studying literature that was highly regarded in the past. Although we can't see England as George Eliot did, we can get a better idea of her England than we might through a history book. I think this is one of the most vital aspects of literature; it reflects the context of the life in which it was written--perhaps not perfectly, but in some way, it does. So we can wonder why Shakespeare didn't create plays based around strong female roles and relationships, but from this we can also see that culture at that time did not envision stories in that way. However, if most of the works in the literary cannon display a male "sense of power and significance," then I agree that it makes sense to increase the width of the cannon to include works by women that portray women in different kinds of ways.

I found Kolodny's writing much less approachable than Cixous' and Woolf's, and it could be related to the fact that they write in a more feminist fashion while Kolodny constructs her argument through a patriarchal tradition of clear-cut argumentation. However, I really appreciated her title image of "dancing through the mine field." It sums up well the types of freedom that women need to have to function in a literary field that always holds some kind of restrictive danger for women. I found these wonderful Banksy images of a woman hugging a bomb and a group of women dancing around a bomb. They seem to illustrate the quote that Kolodny ends on well:

It is a fine thing for many of us, individuals, to have traversed the minefield; but that happy circumstance will only prove of lasting importance if, together, we expose it for what it is (the male fear of sharing power and significance with women) and deactivate its components, so that others, after us, may literally dance through the minefield (2165).

Repainting our half of the world

2008-04-10T10:35:00.006-04:00

As a reference back to an earlier blog I wrote about Virginia Woolf's and Alice Walker's question of whether thwarted creativity results in madness or self-destruction in women, Cixous has something to offer to the question. She writes about her desire for a certain woman to create a world of words out of her unique past so that all the other "unacknowledged sovereigns" of women would realize that they, too, have powerful words and songs within them. However, she describes the current state of reality as something more along the lines of women questioning themselves. Although she has felt full to the the point of bursting to "repaint my half of the world," she pushed her explosive creativity to the side in a way that she believes many women do: "And I, too, said nothing, showed nothing; I didn't open my mouth, I didn't repaint my half of the world. I was ashamed. I was afraid, and I swallowed my shame and my fear. I said to myself: You are mad!" (2040). She considers herself mad for resisting the urge to write, and she feels that women need to embrace both their bodies and their power for using language in writing. She writes, "And why don't you write? Write! Writing is for you, you are for you; your body is yours; take it" (2040). For her, the act of thwarting creativity is a mad act in itself because it involves suppressing what is inherent to the individual, and it removes an act that is essential for developing the feminine identity.

"The rhythm that laughs you"

2008-04-08T10:37:00.017-04:00

Helene Cixous' "The Laugh of the Medusa" had a lot of imagery and ideas in it that reminded me of Alice Notley's The Descent of Alette, the epic poem that I wrote about for my literature seminar paper. In her essay, Cixous writes,

"If woman has always functioned 'within' the discourse of man . . . it is time for her to dislocate this 'within,' to explode it, turn it around, and seize it; to make it hers, containing it, taking it in her own mouth, biting that tongue with her very own teeth to invent for herself a language to get inside of." (2050)

This central idea to Cixous' essay seems similar to Notley's premise for writing The Descent of Alette. Notley wrote it as a feminist epic, and the story involves a woman hero, Alette, traveling into deeper levels of the physical world in order to reclaim her own body as a woman from the Tyrant, an abstract creature who seems to own and control everything she knows. Cixous claims that "women must write through their bodies," and this seems very much what Alice Notley attempted to do by subverting conventional ideas about the epic poem (2049). Notley created her own meter for the poem because she wanted to use language in a way that gave her a new kind of voice outside of traditional and patriarchal forms. In her essay "Epic and Women Poets," Notley writes, “I didn’t want a ‘male’ line—& that category seemed to include every line I knew about, those used by women as well. I wanted, as I always do, to try to begin as if at the beginning of the world, before things were male & female in the ways they are now." I think this idea of the way that things are male and female now has to do with the binary oppositions that have been created. Neither Cixous nor Notley seem interested in inverting the binary in such a way that privileges the female half. Instead, they question the very logic of the binary mentality and want to find some way to escape it. Cixous makes this very clear in her writing: "She will do more than modify power relations or toss the ball in the other camp; she will bring about a mutation in human relations, in thought, in all praxis" (2046).

To give an idea of how Alice Notley uses language and images to develop her feminine voice in The Descent of Alette, here's a section from it:

"I walked" "into a car where" "everything was membrane- like" "thin-membrane petal-like" "& veined" "Fetus-like" "fetus-flesh-like" "In shades of pink" "purple black &" "brown" "Thin" "reddish veins" "Fetal flower" "soaked in

subway light" "The car walls were translucent" "orchid- flesh" "The seats were & the floor--" "All was naked flesh" "We were naked" "A fetus" "delicate" "tiny-faced," "eyes closed, concentrating" "curled" "almost spiraling," "floated high" "in the

air." "We sat naked on our" " membrane-like" "tan benches" "All of us" "smooth & wrinkled" "brownish, or" "darker," "or paler," "palest" "were as if" "within a flower" "as if" "within us" "This" "This is" "simultaneous," "I understood"

"Uncontrolled by" "the tyrant" "Someone else" "in all of us" "is this lovely" "fetal flesh," "flower skin" "We are being this" "this flower" "And then" "the flower vanished" "I was clothed, there was" "no fetus" "Gray subway car

of people" "riding quietly some sleeping" "Someone's earphones" "turned up too loud" "buzzing wire" "vaguely song"

The Tyrant of the poem loosely represents patriarchal socitey, and now that I think of it in terms of man/woman binaries, it could represent the binary structure that Notley and Cixous view as dictating so much of the world's structure. Alette's epic quest is to destroy the Tyrant with the view that “from dreams,” “from dreams we” “can change, “will change” (144). At the end of the poem, Alette succeeds in killing the Tyrant, but Notley ends it by presenting the question of how to possibly create a new world out of the Tyrant's corpse. It's interesting to think about, because in destroying such a binary, what does the world look like without it when developed in new ways? I think Notley's poem presents a good picture of what issues and questions we must examine that relate to the man/woman structures of our culture.

Finding Hope in Literary Study

2008-04-04T16:28:00.006-04:00

It was interesting to hear Tiffany Everly Kriner's discussion about her connection between literary scholarship and Christian faith. This is a prevalent issue for an English major at Messiah. I always find that my greatest questioning of the practical value of this major arises when I'm writing a paper that critiques literary works. Such a great deal of scholarly literary papers have been written that I begin to question if they hold real importance in life. Kriner's emphasis on the theological virtue of hope within literary scholarship shed some meaning for me. She described the way that texts and language are incomplete in a way that acknowledges the brokenness of the world, but they have a place in the world's redemption. I appreciated her image of texts as fragments that will become final in the whole of creation. We are participating in the knitting up of the fragments of language, but we are incapable of doing it with completion. God can and will.

Woolf and Walker

2008-04-03T22:51:00.006-04:00

I was interested in on of the questions which Virginia Woolf's essay addresses: Does thwarted creativity result in madness and/or self-destruction in women? Woolf clearly thinks so. Her imagined outcome to her character Judith Shakespeare's life is a suicidal end. She writes: "Any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at" (1023). It certainly seems true that women existed in the past who had great artistic potential which was suppressed by their retrictive gender roles.

This idea reminds me of Alice Walker's "In Search of our Mothers' Gardens," which she writes in regard to the restricted creativity that must have existed in black women who lived in the South during slavery.She describes the period of waiting that they went through--waiting for a time when the creative potential in them would be recognized and embraced:

They dreamed dreams that no one knew-not even themselves, in any coherent fashion-and saw visions no one could understand. They wandered or sat about the countryside crooning lullabies to ghosts, and drawing the mother of Christ in charcoal on courthouse walls.
They forced their minds to desert their bodies and their striving spirits sought to rise, like frail whirlwinds from the hard red clay. And when those frail whirlwinds fell, in scattered particles, upon the ground, no one mourned. Instead, men lit candies to celebrate the emptiness that remained, as people do who enter a beautiful but vacant space to resurrect a God.

This isn't exactly the suicide of Judith Shakespeare, but it is self-destruction in the sense that the woman was forced to empty herself and become an object to be used by men. Walker further describes the mental breakdown of "our mothers and grandmothers" who were artists in their natural state but were restricted from becomming artists of society because of their gender roles. She writes that they were "driven to a numb and bleeding madness by the springs of creativity in them for which there was no release." Walker even references Woolf in her article as accurately capturing the essence of what a woman goes through when she must suppress her artistic tendencies. It seems that this idea of thwarted creativity resulting in some kind of self-destruction proves true in both contexts among very different groups of women. Walker argues in her essay that we should accordingly alter our view of literature; we should look "low" where we've previously looked "high." We should notice the ways that women have expressed their artistic abilities through their chores and daily work because, although suppressed, women managed to maintain a creative spark that they passed through generations.

It seems that thwarted creativity leads to negative results. At first, I wondered if someone like the Judith Shakespeare character would have only been driven to suicide because she had the example of her brother to show her the potential for what creative outlet could look like. Would the drive to suicide or insanity be a result of the comparisons to men and their freedom? Or is creativity something that needs a natural outlet regardless of the example of men?

Oral Literature and Peace

2008-03-31T22:30:00.007-04:00

I attended Peter Wasamba's lecture tonight, which focused mostly on the political and ethnic conflicts in the history of Kenya, and it was really interesting. He described some of the problems that developed out of colonialism when land was divided up unfairly between the different Kenyan tribes. It developed an insider/outsider way of thinking based on what tribes received greater advantages than others, and this resulted in many ethnic clashes among the people. The recent political unrest that has taken place in Kenya developed out of the ethnic tensions that tend to arise to a greater extent at the time of elections because the politicians take advantage of their ethnic identity and try to gain support from their ethnic groups to achieve their own political motives. He also said that if a president doesn't come from your ethnic community, then you will end up being a marginalized group.

Although Wasamba didn't focus on his literary role during this discussion, he briefly described his work with oral literature in Kenya in the context of the country's historical background. He undertook the task of visiting Kenyan communities in order to collect their songs, proverbs, stories, and testimonies. He said that he never failed to travel to any place and listen to oral literature of a specific ethnic group despite the fact that ethnic divides existed between them. From this work, Wasamba was able to see very clearly how the different ethnic groups could learn from each other's differences rather than allow them to result in ethnic conflicts. He said that their ancestors had been able to move peacefully from one community to another despite their ethnic differences because they knew that when isolated, no community can survive. He finds these ideas within his oral literature.

It was interesting hearing Wasamba describe his work with literature knowing the ethnic tensions that exist in his country. It sounds like the role of literature in this situation is to bring people together. It can be a peacemaker of sorts. The oral literature of the different communities reflects snippets of their humanity, and the fact that they all have values for certain proverbs and songs shows their similarities. Literature humanizes people in a way that ethnic classifications simply don't. It kind of reminds me of a quote from Stalin that goes something like "The death of an individual is a tragedy, the death of millions, a statistic." Literature can bring attention to the person as an individual where they would otherwise get lost in the classification that blends them into with the group.

Literary Excellence

2008-03-28T15:40:00.006-04:00

I always thought it was interesting in classes like Victorian Lit or Romantic Lit when we learned about trends that occurred during these time periods, and it was always a footnote that these trends really only applied to the intellectuals of the period. I always wondered, who are these intellectuals that dominate what we learn about in history? And what is everyone else doing while the intellectuals are busy setting trends? Although I like to think that my education led me to study the best novels from these time periods, the question arises as to what makes them the best and whose values they really reflect. In Richard Ohmann's "The Shaping of the Cannon: U.S. Fiction, 1960-1975," he writes, "To answer that the best novels survive is to beg the question. Excellence is a constantly changing, socially chosen value" (1885). It's interesting to think that we read things that we may not personally consider excellent because we want to learn to recognize excellence that may not echo our own.

Ohman further discusses the qualities that are necessary in order for a novel to enter into our literary cannon: "I am suggesting that novels move toward a canonical position only if they attained both large sales (usually, but not always, concentrated enough to place them among the best-sellers for a while) and the right kind of critical attention" (1886). It makes sense to have both of these criteria because, as Ohmann uses the example with Love Story, it is completely possible for something to be considered a best-seller and have it's big trendy entrance into literary culture and then it will slowly drift away as the trend passes. At that point, "who will read it tomorrow, except on an excursion into the archives of mass culture?" (1886). Sounds kind of reminiscent of things like the mullet haircut or parachute pants. In this way, literature seems to fit in the category of any cultural trend like fashion or pop music. It gets popular for a while, and then it passes on into the literary archives when it loses its cultural trendiness. However, the unique factor of literature is that we select certain pieces of it to keep around and study. These "elite" pieces never go out of style. Actually, they tend to set the style for the future, because if you drop the name of certain "classic" works, it can make you seem quite intelligent. Ohman makes a good point in establishing that a book must experience both cultural popularity and strong critical reviews in order to make it onto that list of canonical books.

Story time, anyone?

2008-03-27T21:05:00.004-04:00

It was a bright day at Sipi Falls, Uganda, and despite the fact that I had recently sprained my ankle, I was determined to enjoy the scenery by hiking out to a waterfall with a few friends. We had to walk through the local village to reach the trail, and as we walked, our skin color performed Pied Piper magic by attracting all local children to follow us in parade fashion, singing, "mzungu, mzungu!" The parade skimmed out until just a few children were left in tow as we reached the mountainous part of the hike that required us to climb quite a bit. A Ugandan friend led the way, and while he moved forward, or rather upward, at a rather quick pace, our exhaustion from climbing and my throbbing sprained ankle helped us persuade him that we should stop for a break. As we gathered together to rest, our Ugandan leader told us that this was the time for a story, and he asked us which of us had a story to tell. I looked around nervously at my group of five American friends, and it seemed that all of us echoed each other's uncertain faces. What kind of story was fitting for a situation such as this? I hadn't had story time since I was a child, and I only vaguely remember the stories. Not to mention the fact that we were all old enough to be considered adults, and a fantastical children's story hardly seemed fitting. As we attempted to explain to our Ugandan friend that none of us really had a story to tell, he didn't really seem to believe us. However, he proceeded to tell us a story of his own as if storytelling were the most common of daily activities. And perhaps in his culture it was, but I can't say the same for my own.

As I read Walter Benjamin's "The Storyteller," it seemed that he was describing this very moment when our Ugandan friend asked us to tell a story:

Less and less frequently do we encounter people with the ability to tell a tale properly. More and more often there is embarrassment all around when the wish to hear a story is expressed. It is as if something that seemed inalienable to us, the securest among our possessions, were taken from us: the ability to exchange experiences (1).

It's rather odd now that I think about it. When I was a little kid, I came up with all kinds of fantastical stories, and yet that inclination to tell stories sort of dwindled down as I grew up and learned to read and write stories on my own. The process of learning how to read and write almost trains us how to not tell stories to one another, because reading novels on our own and then discussing them is the much more appropriate-seeming thing to do. But that doesn't require actual story-telling skills. Looking through the lens of Marxist literary theory, it's interesting to note that our industrialized culture adopts the novel as its preferred literary form, whereas in less-developed Uganda, storytelling is an essential part of community.

Différance and Deconstruction

2008-03-25T23:41:00.008-04:00

I've always been interested in learning about the concept of deconstruction, and so I recently read the essay "Différance" by Jacques Derrida. He uses this French word "différance" (he purposely spells it with an A because you can read the A but can't hear it when spoken) to develop his idea of deconstruction.Derrida notes that in the system of language, “there are only differences” (11). He uses the word différance , which he declares is neither a word nor a concept, to acknowledge the play in language and demonstrate that there is no clear origin or beginning from which language develops. He usesdifférance to refer to two distinct meanings: defer and differ. According to the idea of différance in terms of the word "defer," words are signifiers that cannot summon their full meaning, but they develop meaning by their relation to other words. This creates a chain of meaning, which is comparable to the analogy of looking up a word in a dictionary only to find more words that can also be looked up in the dictionary, and the process can carry on infinitely with no apparent starting point of meaning. The "differ" aspect of différance refers to the way that words are defined against one another, and this furthers the idea that complete meaning is always delayed and never indicated through words. However, because différance directly means neither of these, it exemplifies the play that works within language. Derrida develops this concept of deconstruction from his critique of Edmund Husserl’s idea that there exists a pure origin of meaning: “Différance is the non-full, non-simple, structured, and differentiating origin of differences. Thus, the name ‘origin’ no longer suits it” (11). The differences within language which have been produced have no specific subject or thing that causes the differences. Therefore, this idea cannot even be contained in the word différance, because there is no name that exists for the origination of meaning in language. However, the play of the word gives the effect that Derrida wants to use to refer to his ideas about language.

It was interesting to read a primary source to learn more about Derrida's concepts of deconstruction, and I'm interested in reading more about the influences that Derrida's ideas have had on our perspectives of language and literature.

To clarify a bit

2008-03-08T14:58:00.003-05:00

In response to a comment on one of my previous posts where I complained a bit about structural analysis views of texts, a classmate advised, "I don't think that you have to allow criticism to destroy your enjoyability of the text." I guess that's not really the argument I was going for. I enjoy reading about the different kinds of criticism, and I think that knowing critical views for examining a text are beneficial for the reader. I even see the rationale and influence that structuralism has on our mindsets about literature. However, I guess I'm basically disagreeing with the specific approach of over-objectifying texts. The prospect of studying literature as a science makes me cringe. I guess the aesthetic qualities of the texts strike me as more worthy of discussion than the categorical makeup.

"You Can't Spill Mustard on a Blog"

2008-03-06T15:30:00.004-05:00

When I recently signed onto Facebook, the first thing I noticed was a large advertisement in the "News Feed" section for Wordclay, which described its services as "DIY Self Publishing on your own terms. What could be better?" I went to the website to look around a bit, and it allows you to upload your book and market it on your own in just six simple steps.

I wondered what would posess someone to publish their book in such a way, especially since this ad was on Facebook and therefore possibly targeted at college students? I recently read a rather entertaining article called "The Transom: You Can't Spill Mustard on a Blog" by William W. Savage, Jr. His article focused mostly on the way that people write on internet blogs (and it was published in 2006, so I'm not sure how big of a difference 2 years can be in the world of internet writng), but he made a comment that I think could apply to any type of website that allows people to publish works online. He writes that "One may write about whatever one pleases, without fear of vetting, editing, or anything else destructive of one's ego." This is interesting because one main difference between a person writing on a blog or on a site like Worclay and a person publishing something through a publisher is the process. If you "publish" something online, it is not subjected to the process of submitting it to an editor or having to rewrite it to meet certain standards. And it saves you from the criticism that you might get elsewhere. I found one quote from this article particularly entertaining:

I have come to the conclusion that academic blogging is a great deal like talk radio, albeit for intellectuals. Listen long enough to talk radio and you might--and I emphasize the conditional--hear an intelligent remark. But, for the most part, the medium seems to exist to encourage nitwits and crackpots to believe that somebody out there truly cares about their opinion. As a reader, I suspect that I shall continue to prefer the printed page over the monitor's glowing screen. It's easier on the eyes and better for the posture, don't you know.

This quote has some truth in it, although that nitwits and crackpots comment doesn't apply to our literary criticism class, of course. But although Savage seems quickly turned off by blogs, I think that sometimes the type of reading that a blog provides is just what interests me. I can enjoy the way that blog entries have that personal touch of someone's thoughts even though they are written for an abstract internet audience to read. However, I noticed that the way I read a blog differs a lot from the way I read something in print. When I read a blog or online article, I have a tendency to scan quickly through it and often I end up following some link that takes me to some tangent website and sometimes distracts me from the ideas of the blog. But I can hardly ever pick up a book to read without also picking up a pencil. Printed texts allow for more interaction and, for me, more focus. They just seem more real. I don't know if that perspective is changing though with more and more writing appearing online.

Is the map more valuable than traveling?

2008-03-05T00:02:00.012-05:00

I remember some painful English classes (somewhere around elementary school? middle school? both?) where the teacher decided to draw plot diagrams on the chalkboard. She made us learn words like exposition and denouement, and we were somehow supposed to force the colorful and diverse events of every story into the lifeless categories of this ugly line. When we finished reading a book and had a test, there never failed to appear a question about the climax of the story. This question bothered me to no end. I understood the story and how the events worked together, but I could never identify the climax of the story correctly. Furthermore, I didn't really care whether or not I was able to identity the exact event that someone had decided to label as the climax, because it seemed irrelevant to the story itself. I don't ever recall learning why it was important to know exactly which portion of the story counted as the climax; I just knew that it was a word that appeared on all our tests.

Well, after reading Tzetan Todorov's article "Structural Analysis of Narrative," it's all starting to make sense. Structural analysis seeks to "discover in each work what it has in common with others . . . or even with all other works . . . it would be unable to state the individual specificity of each work" (2100). When I read that Todorov's stuctural analysis wanted to "inquire about the possibility of a typology of plots," I couldn't shake that chalkboard image out of my head (2105). It wipes out the all-too-important uniqueness from each work and instead scientifically categorizes how all works fit into certain structures of discourse.

I recently read Kierkegaard's "Concluding Unscientific Postscript," and it was really interesting to see how he regards objective and subjective knowledge. He differentiates subjective knowledge as that which focuses on the relationship between subject and object, and it notes the motivation of an individual's passion in regarding everything else. Subjective knowledge, Kierkegaard argues, is the only way that we have the possibility of attaining truth. Objective knowledge focuses on making things documentable and repeatable, and therefore the person fails to even matter. If a person conducts parts of a scientific study well (in quest of objective knowledge), someone else will be able to take over with all their recorded information and start exactly where they left off. The object matters, but the subject is replaceable. With subjective knowledge, however, we can't separate the subject and object. Their relationship is where truth lies. In this case, if an artist is to die, no one can possibly repeat their technique and the way they created their art. Kierkegaard's ideas seem relateable to the idea of structural analysis because in a way, this process seems like it's objectifying literature. It's looking at literature in terms of the systematic way that anyone can create literature, but I think literature is too subjective for that. Yeah, maybe people can create a similar structure, but who cares about the structure? It's the story, creativity, and style that one person is able to bring together into their literary creation that matters. I see more importance in examining literature subjectively as a craft and a little less as a science.

We can look at the stars and marvel at how lovely they look up there in the sky at night. But the second someone comes to me to talk about how a star is really only a "massive, luminous ball of plasma" (as says Wikipedia), it loses a little bit of its wonder. I would rather focus on how it looks, and maybe even the various shapes that the stars form, than on its scientific composition and its approximated distance from the earth. And I feel the same way about literature.

The question of what we read

2008-02-29T15:00:00.010-05:00

In class Professor Powers posed the question as to whether we have a responsibility to appreciate the things that we don't like, based on the thoughts of Wimsatt and Beardsley. It seems that a lot of college is spent sort of guiding our reading tastes. I've made my way through a good deal of stuff that I didn't like while at college because of its literary value. And truth be told, I have come to appreciate a lot of it (mostly because I'm proud that I got through it anyways and now at least understand it). Then I think about writers like Tennyson, who sounds just like the type of poet that an English major should read. But when I took Victorian Lit and had to read Tennyson, let's just say he wasn't my favorite. His writings embody so much of the Victorian era that I understand why his works are important, but I didn't enjoy some of them. Even though I didn't love them, I do appreciate them, but do I have a responsibility to do so? I've always wondered who decides what writers from each time period are the ones that we study in school and the ones that become most popular. Is it the public? The anthologies? Maybe my opinon differs from the decider of the main literary canon. Do I still have a responsibility to appreciate their selections?

Right now I'm taking Womens Literature, and it was interesting that when I first got the class book list, I realized that I had never heard of any of the authors on the list. In past literature classes I read names that everyone knows like Tennyson, Wordsworth, Twain, Hopkins, Eliot, and a whole slew of names that I always felt like I should read because I'm an English major, and those are the names I had always heard talked about. But in my current womens lit class, I'm reading books by women of different races and backgrounds, and I have never heard of any of them before.

A few other people have blogged about Barbara Christian's article "The Highs and Lows of Black Feminist Criticism." It's applicable to my thoughts because it discusses the need for us to look low, at the creations of those who are typically excluded from the main literary canon, because there we find suppressed voices that need to be heard so we can hear ourselves. Christian writes, "I wonder if we critics read stories and poems, or, if as our language indicates, our reading fare is primarily that of other critics and philosophers? . . . Why are we so riveted on male thinkers, preferably dead or European?" She asks some valuable questions because on entering into my womens lit class, I had the assumption that the writing would somehow be less valuable than more classic works I had read in other English classes. I guess I'm not sure if I should have to appreciate works that I don't particularly like. But I have to admit that my English education has taught me how to appreciate works that I don't like.

A variety of perspectives

2008-02-27T13:55:00.010-05:00

Whenever I stumble upon a poem that I really like, I have this instinctive obsession to transform into search mode to discover if my idea of the poem is consistent with that of others. I search for all articles and scholarly opinions that I can find regarding the poem. Since we've been discussing poetic authority in class, I thought about instances where I had been disappointed by studying other people's interpretations of poems that I liked. I remembered writing my "favorite poem project" for Professor Downing's intro class. I chose Gwendolyn Brooks' "The Preacher Ruminates: Behind the Sermon:"

I think it must be lonely to be God.
Nobody loves a master. No. Despite
The bright hosannas, bright dear-Lords, and bright
Determined reverence of Sunday eyes.

Picture Jehovah striding through the hall
Of His importance, creatures running out
From servant-corners to acclaim, to shout
Appreciation of His merit’s glare.

But who walks with Him?—dares to take His arm,
To slap Him on the shoulder, tweak His ear,
Buy Him a Coca-Cola or a beer,
Pooh-pooh His politics, call Him a fool?

Perhaps—who knows?—He tires of looking down.
Those eyes are never lifted. Never straight.
Perhaps sometimes He tires of being great
In solitude. Without a hand to hold.

I did the assignment, carefully composing my paragraph about why I chose this as my favorite poem and ensuring that I used enough complex sentences and rid it of all the "to be" verbs. I liked the poem because of its perspective; it contemplates God through similar standards which we use to evaluate other people. He has the whole world in his hand, but there is no being with whom he can affectionately intertwine fingers. Yet, I searched articles to find out about other people's perceptions of the poem. I found an article which speculated that in writing this poem, Brooks intended to address the problem of people valuing formal religious doctrines and practices above compassion. I found that really interesting, but it was almost disappointing to find that the element that drew me into the poem was only the surface of something deeper that Brooks might have intended. But at the same time, it added an extra element that I could also appreciate. I guess I can only conclude that the matter of intention is a blurry one, and so is the matter of interpretation.

Where authority lies

2008-02-26T15:02:00.013-05:00

In reading Wimsatt and Beardsley's formalist ideas, my instinct is to regard them skeptically. First they establish that the author's intentions in writing poetry are absolutely not valid criteria on which we can judge a poem. Alright, so once the poet crafts their words and presents them to the public, then the words must stand on their own. I suppose I can go along with that. Words can be manipulated in interpreted in so many ways, and so by releasing their recorded words to the public, I can see how an author also signs away their rights to controlling the interpretation of their words in a way. But Wimsatt and Beardsley go further with their Affective Fallacy to declare that the readers emotive response to poem are also not worthy criteria that we can use to judge poetry. I'm left with the blaring question, "Where does poetic authority come from!?"

Apparently, it lies within the text itself. But what is the text if it's not a transfer of words between one person's creative intentions and another person's response to those? Sure, a lot of intention might get lost in the transfer, and some interpretive or emotive inclinations in the reader might interfere with their reading of the poem, but I think those things are perfectly valid. The formalists are trying to objectify poetry and transform writing into some kind of scientific process. But so much of poetry deals with manipulating language and using it in unconventional ways, and that seems to indicate the need for us to regard it subjectively. If we disregard the role of the people in dealing with the text, then it becomes nothing but a lifeless set of words.

When Wimsatt and Beardsley claim that asking the author their intention of a writing a poem is not a critical inquiry ("Critical inquiries are not settled by consulting the oracle"), I had to question this idea. While the idea of intention is blurry because a writer may not even be able to clearly verbalize their intention, and it's something which we can only speculate about on our own, I think that the writer has as credible an input on the poem as any other person who reads it. They offer a different perspective, which Wimsatt and Beardsley may distinguish as a psychological inquiry that has nothing to contribute to a critical analysis of the poem. But I think it adds another dimension to the poem, and I don't know that it should be held completely separate from the poem itself.

I found two videos on youtube that have distinctly different takes on Dunbar's "We Wear the Mask," and I thought it was interesting to watch them together. This one ties into a sort of African identity at the root of the contemporary African American's life:

This second video seems like it's relating the idea of the mask to the American political system, specifically George W. Interesting...

These interpretations seem like they're taking the underlying emotion and the words from the poem and creating their own context for it. Is this them falling victim to the affective fallacy and thus making the meaning of the poem relative to their own interpretations? Obviously, the poem's text doesn't mention "the modern African American business man" or "the president that took us into war in Iraq." But since the poem has this lovely quality of vagueness to it, is it acceptable to apply it to these very specific contexts?

That which we know

2008-02-23T10:57:00.008-05:00

T.S Eliot's ideas about tradition which he expresses in "Tradition and the Individual Talent" have led me to contemplate a few things. He discusses the importance of tradition as something that we must obtain "by great labour" (1093). It takes not mere marination in the fact that tradition is what brought us where we are today, but it requires intentional studying and reading of writers of the past. This idea resonates with why I chose to be an English major with a literature emphasis. I chose to be an English major because I enjoy writing a decent amount, but I felt that my writing was ill-educated because I hadn't read enough. As I've progressed though four years of literature classes that focused on studying other people's writing, it has often left me itching to write something of my own that isn't simply in response to what other people have written. But after reading so much, I feel much better equipped to write anything on my own.

While studying poetry and literature of the past has its benefits, there is so much literature to be read. Eliot even notes, "The objection is that the doctrine requires a ridiculous amount of erudition" (1094). And while he dismisses it by saying that other people have done it so it can be done, over time more and more literature comes about. We're living about a century after Eliot, and that means an extra century of literature that exists as tradition to us.
I still have to agree with Eliot's general idea of studying and reading the writer's that make up our tradition. He writes, "Someone said: 'The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did'. Precisely, and they are that which we know" (1094). It's true that regard a lot of really old writing as just painful to read because it's so far removed from where we are today, but I guess it really is part of what we are today.

The question of context

2008-02-22T18:56:00.007-05:00

When we were presented with the poem "We Wear the Mask" in class without any authorial context and were told to freewrite about it, I felt a slight sense of panic. I enjoyed the poem and I thought it expressed an understandable emotion. But one thought lingered even as I wrote about what I thought the poem communicated: Who is the "we"?! It made me feel like I could only make up what it was about, but it wouldn't be valid until I knew the "we" based on the author's identity. When we were informed with the poet was written by Paul Laurence Dunbar, a son of slaves, I couldn't help but view the poem differently. It suddenly seemed exclusivist and non-applicable to me.

Last semester I studied Alfred Lord Tennyson in Victorian class, and I remember stumbling across lines in his poetry that I had heard people quote elsewhere. As I read "In Memoriam A.H.H.," I remembered when my sister told me about one of her many high school break-ups, and she said her new favorite quote was "Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all." And in reading "Ulysses," I recognized a line that a friend of mine had posted on her facebook page: " I am a part of all that I have met." I was studying Tennyson through the lens of the Victorian era, and I wondered if people like my sister and my friend who quoted these lines knew anything about the Victorian faith crisis or Tennyson's striving to create his own meaning in what he saw as an otherwise futile existence. I wondered if my sister knew anything about the heart-wrenching loss Tennyson experienced with the death of his best friend. Does it matter if they didn't? Is it okay to take text out of the context in which it was written and attribute it with our own personal meanings?

"The world is nothing, the man is all"

2008-02-17T19:05:00.011-05:00

[If you wish to understand others, you must first intensify your own individualism.]

I'm pretty sure that I remember Professor Downing teaching that the word "autobiography" first developed in the Romantic period. After reading something like Emerson's "The American Scholar", I can definitely see hints of ideals that would motivate a person to record their life story because they were convinced of its importance. But I have trouble seeing why he would suspect anyone would want to read it. Emerson seems so absorbed in his own thoughts that he wants to share them with anyone willing to listen. But he’s also so deafened by his blaring ideas that he can’t hear anyone else.

"The American Scholar" boasts of individualistic ideas. He begins the thing by declaring an end to American dependence on any kinds of foriegn thoughts; the people of this country "will sing for themselves." By the end of the essay, he concludes, "Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close. The millions, that around us are rushing into life, cannot always be fed on the sere remains of foreign harvests. Events, actions arise, that must be sung, that will sing themselves." Hello, American individualism! And it extends farther than just establishing our country as its distinct body of people; he also declares that each man should realize the importance of himself:

Another sign of our times, also marked by an analogous political movement, is, the new importance given to the single person. Every thing that tends to insulate the individual, -- to surround him with barriers of natural respect, so that each man shall feel the world is his, and man shall treat with man as a sovereign state with a sovereign state; -- tends to true union as well as greatness.

Our society today seems all too based on that type of idea. When each man pursues his own self interest, it turns out to be the best for everybody. Apparently it works for both economics and for our literary pursuits.

This idea of individualism is something I often think about in regards to reading and writing. They are such solitary activities that require the readers and writers to pay a great deal of attention to themselves and their own thoughts. It creates a world of people participating in solitary activities. I guess I find solace in the fact that literature is also a form of communication. It's not just for the individual to gain inspiration and independence; it's also a way to express their ideas with others.

The inconstant wind and the ever-changing veil

2008-02-15T19:42:00.021-05:00

Emerson has a sense that poetry falls short of his divine ideals, and that poetry, despite its best attempts, usually forms "a corrupt version of some text in nature." There's a similar idea in Shelley's "A Defense of Poetry." Shelley distinguishes poetry as very different from any rational act that a person can intentionally perform. He describes the type of inspiration necessary for creating poetry: "The mind in creation is as a fading coal which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness" (713). This idea of the mind constantly seeking to grasp a "transitory brightness" or reach some divine realm of the sublime is very Romantic and much like Emerson. I like Shelley's imagery that some kind of wind, which acts as a strong and influential external force, works together with the imagination within the poet's mind to create poetry. It's like only the right combination of internal and external force allows the poet to glimpse the brightness he seeks.

Another image that Shelley used to describe the poet that I really liked was the veil. Poetry "strips the veil of familiarity from the world, and lays bare the naked and sleeping beauty which is the spirit of its forms" (714). What we see when we look at the world is something like Plato's shadows on the cave wall, but Shelley describes it with the image of the veil. We see things through this veil, or "film of familiarity", that hangs over our eyes and our thoughts, but true poetry suddenly pulls the veil back slightly or rips a little hole in it so we can get a glimmer of the essence of truth. However, even the clarity that comes through the breakthrough of one veil only reminds us that there exists something like an infinite number of veils. Shelley writes, "Veil after veil may be undrawn, and the inmost naked beauty of the meaning never exposed" (710). This makes poetry sound so frustrating. It tries so hard to uncover the truth and real meaning, but it can never break through the endless layers of veils. It never shows us the object in distinct clarity rather than its hazy outline, and we never can fully "see things as they really are" (as Matthew Arnold would say).

But Shelley also describes a way that poets create veils of their own: "[Poetry] arrests the vanishing apparitions which haunt the interlunations of life, and veiling them or in language or in form sends them further among mankind, bearing sweet news of kindred joy to those with whom their sisters abide" (714). So in some cases, poets create their own veils that can cover times of despair with some type of beauty or meaning. The veil dictates the type of light that can penetrate through it, and it controls the clarity of the objects that exist on the opposite side. Poets are the veil-changers. That must be why Shelley considers them “the happiest, the best, the wisest, and the most illustrious of men” (715).

The intrusted treasure of the poet

2008-02-14T15:53:00.011-05:00

I've been reading Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling, and a passage in it addresses the way he views the significance of the poet. In the section "A Panegyric upon Abraham," Kierkegaard writes,

If a consciousness of the eternal were not implanted in man; if the basis of all that exists were but a confusedly fermenting element which, convulsed by obscure passions, produced all, both the great and the insignificant; if under everything there lay a bottomless void never to be filled what else were life but despair? If it were thus, and if there were no sacred bonds between man and man; if one generation arose after another, as in the forest the leaves of one season succeed the leaves of another, or like the songs of birds which are taken up one after another; if the generations of man passed through the world like a ship passing through the sea and the wind over the desert—a fruitless and a vain thing; if eternal oblivion were ever greedily watching for its prey and there existed no power strong enough to wrest it from its clutches—how empty were life then, and how dismal! And therefore it is not thus; but, just as God created man and woman, he likewise called into being the hero and the poet or orator.

I realize that's a relatively long and intricate passage, but basically, Kierkegaard is addressing the meaninglessness that could have existed in life if God had not created the relationship between the poet and the hero. He compares the relationship of poet and hero to the relationship that exists between man and woman: they exist as distinctly seperate beings, but they have an important interdependence between them that creates essential meaning in the world.

Kierkegaard describes the poet as someone who happily admires the hero but lacks the capability to take on the role of the hero. He is the "genius of memory" who can recall and admire only what has already been done. Also, the poet "contributes nothing of his own, but is jealous of the intrusted treasure." That idea of jealousy interested me because in some of the Romantic writings we've been reading about the poet, the writers seem almost to have a jealousy for the the fact that they've been intrusted with this intuitive gift to seek eternal truths, and yet they so often fail at capturing them with words. Emerson talks about the way that the poet is representative; his ideas do not belong to him. In fact, he writes that when the poet finally produces something new and orginal, "it is as strange and beautiful to him as to you" (737-8). So while Kierkegaard's discussion of the poet is a more relational description of the poet in terms of the concept of the hero, I think it's insightful into more of the ways we can view the role of the poet.

Mass Graphomania

2008-02-13T13:49:00.016-05:00

As I thought about what it means to be an author, I remembered a discussion of the idea of graphomania from the novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera. A character in the story listens to his cab driver talk about his life, and he thinks, "My talk with the taxi driver gave me sudden insight into the nature of a writer’s concerns. The reason we write books is that our kids don’t give a damn. We turn to an anonymous world because our wife stops up her ears when we talk to her" (91).

According to Kundera, graphomania (an obsession with writing books) is bound to only grow worse in the type of society we've established. In class we talked about how the notion of "author" didn't come into being until the invention of the printing press, and the word has taken on a plethora of meanings ever since. Kundera writes, "The invention of the printing press originally promoted mutual understanding. In the era of graphomania, the writing of books had the opposite effect: everyone surrounds himself with his own writings as with a wall of mirrors cutting off all voices from without" (92).

I thought about Kundera's remarks in regards to what we read from Emerson's "The Poet," because Emerson writes so much about the value of a poet's expression. Since Emerson's ideas about the poet were so distinct and basically exclusive, he most likely wouldn't consider a man who writes because his kids don't care about him and his wife won't listen to him a poet. But is there value in other people's stories even if they fail to tap into an eternal truth? This is the passage in Kundera's novel that intrigues me the most:

The proliferation of mass graphomania among politicians, cab drivers, women on the delivery table, mistresses, murderers, criminals, prostitutes, police chiefs, doctors, and patients proves to me that every individual without exception bears a potential writer within himself and that all mankind has every right to rush out into the streets with a cry “We are all writers!”

The reason is that everyone has trouble accepting the fact that he will disappear unheard of in an indifferent universe, and everyone wants to make himself into a universe of words before it’s too late.

Once the writer in every individual comes to life (and that time is not far off), we are in for an age of universal deafness and lack of understanding. (106).

Although he's addressing something pretty different than Emerson, I think Kundera provides good insight into the way that it has become so easy for anyone to be an "author" with the developments of the printing press and now the internet. His idea of mass graphomania results from the fact that people are so anxious to become poets or authors that they stop reading and listening. While writing offers potential for self-exploration and searching for truths of humanity, it seems there's a need for a balance with listening to other people's ideas and stories.

I'm interested in reading more about Emerson's ideas about reading. It sounds like Emerson doesn't think too highly of reading unless it inspires readers to become their own poets. But if everyone does set out on a quest to become Emerson's inspired poet, will we enter into an "age of universal deafness" toward each other? Does this idea relate at all to Emerson?

Here's an interesting article about how Kundera's graphomania appears in our society.

Kundera, Milan. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. New York: HarperPerennial, 1994.