Is Language Infallible?

What I mean to say is, does language save us? Does it unite us? St. Thomas Aquinas grapples with the problem of how to reconcile the indeterminacy of figurative language with belief in the ability of language to guarantee stable reference and access to truth and reality. When there is an obscure passage in the Bible, we must believe that deep down, under heavy exegesis, the truth exists, waiting for us to discover it. I could wonder if maybe some of the figurative language in the Bible is meant to be illusive and enigmatic for readers until they die and go to Heaven and can ask God, What did you mean by this? Or maybe God likes all the diverging and varied interpretations of His word, allowing for healthy debate and discussion about His guide to life...but I dont know if I believe this. I believe in multiple truths, but I also believe there is one ultimate Truth and that brings us to God and His love. So, the Bible then, and what it has to say, is one Truth because the Bible is the Word and the Word is God. So then I question along side Aquinas when he asks in his essay, How can language function as vehicle of knowledge if it cannot be understood? Wow, thats a tough question!

I know that Aquinas was a devout follower of Jesus, but I wonder what his true thoughts of the Bible were. I mean, I wonder if he got frustrated often with the problem of multiple interpretations. If he walked into my local Christian bookstore and saw all the different Bible translations, what would he think? Similarly, what would he say to the now tens of thousands of denominations that all fall under the religion of Christianity? He followed in Plato's disgust for poetry, based on the absurdity of the multiple meanings one poem could have, so did he approach the Bible in the same way?

I think it is interesting that I scoffed at the Romantics idea of the one, true Poet who would be the bearer of Truth (with a capital T) and Beauty (with a capital B) and he alone would impart meaning to the masses and they would unquestioningly believe what he had to say. Isnt that like my acceptance of the Bible, and even more particular, my eager willingness to choose an NIV translation above all others. I have made an authority for myself and submitted to it unquestioningly, but I wonder on what grounds? Maybe I think I understand parts of the NIV Bible, but then someone else comes along and tells me Im wrong and they understand it differently. Who is write? See, when Aquinas asked how a language could function as vehicle of knowledge if it couldnt be understood, I wonder if he meant that the language had to be understood universally, that is, everyone understood in the same way because I dont think that ever happens. And what of the meaning of "understand"? To what degree does one have to understand a text? Can we take into consideration our own assumptions and preconceptions of our realities when we are reading and interpreting to find the Truth? Does this Truth consist of multiple experiences, in multiple readers because, after all, we all bring something different to the text when we read it.

I just think that language is so broad, so open to interpretation by its very nature. I like to think of Roland Barthes essay "The Death of the Author" and how he wrote that the authority an author has over his words is lost as soon as they leave his mouth or are written on the page. Language enters this immense space, when it leaves our mouths, where anyone can grab at it and fit it into their own minds for interpretation. We are not alone in the world, though existential philosophy will say we are. Someone will always understand the language that comes out of our mouths and take some degree of knowledge from it. This is what we do with the Bible and its figurative passages; we take what we can from it, thinking that we are gaining knowledge for our spiritual lives. But is there more? Are we right in our interpretation? How would we ever know?

Signs and Language and Augustine

I am a Christian. And I dont read the Bible....ok, I do read it but I dont read it enough. I could pile on the excuses, but the one prevailing excuse is that it is too difficult to read and so therefore, I give up. That difficulty, I think, stems from the very argument Augustine is trying to make in his essay. He stated that there was a need for authorized interpretation of the Scriptures to stablize the unity of the Christian religion, yet interpretation proved to be difficult when trying to bridge a sign and a signifier to find meaning. He questioned, How do you know when a meaning of the text is literal or figurative? I ask this very question and still I am not certain if there is an answer. Sure, Augustine is an excellent systematic theologian and philosopher, but even he admits that faith is the only thing that can bridge this gap between sign and signifier. We must have faith that the Bible truly is the Word of God, and how we interpret it is the right way....but sometimes I am frustrated with chalking all problems in Christianity up to just having faith. No, I say! We must talk about it and argue and question...

Augustine writes in his essay that things written are obscured because of unknown or ambiguous signs. I see this when I read passages in the Bible about revelation with the 24 elders dressed in white clothes or the seal on the scroll or the pregnant woman with the fiery crown. I see this when I read Jesus' extreme teachings about selling all I have to be a part of the Kingdom of God. The literal and figurative language of the Bible has always been such a huge topic for Christians because we could ask which type of language it truly is for many many passages. Was the world created in six days really? Did Jesus really heal a blind man by touching his eyes with spit or mud? Some people say it is not imperative to know these things, but I feel like it is. If this is the book we must live by, dont we want to understand it fully? If God truly is speaking to us, can we really listen and will we know it's His voice when we hear it? Somtimes I think that when I die, there will be no afterlife. Like Emily Dickinson's poem, I might just hear a fly buzz, the stillness in the room, and nothing more. I might then realize that the Bible was nothing more than a piece of propaganda, written by real human men who imposed their own assumptions and emotions into what they wrote, as Annette Kolodny explored in her essay on interpretation. I know I sound a bit blasphemous, but dont you all wonder about the validity of the Bible. I dont personally believe in speaking in tongues, so I wonder why God does not work so explicitly through us to produce some tangible work like a book or painting. Does God have an agenda anymore? Sure, artists say that their works were inspired by God maybe, but few say that their work is God-breathed, is in fact God Himself. Why does that not happen anymore? And at the time the Bible was being written, what did the writers' contemporaries think of them? Did people accept these separate, varied passages as the Word of God? Did they only accept them after the passages had come together and writers had (most definitely) manipulated the original texts to fit together nicely with the other texts, to form some cohesive work? I dont know much about the Apocrypha, but why was it left out? Did it not fit in with the other works of the Bible? But what if those writings were also the Word of God? It seems sometimes there is too much humanness in the Bible.

Kind of a side note, Augustine writes of the importance and necessity of knowledge of the ancient languages of the Bible. He writes that the Greek meaning of a text in the Bible should not be taught to someone ignorant of Greek through one biblical passage, but that person should learn the language fully and then tackle the original language of the Bible. I think we are proud of ourselves when we think we know the meaning of some Greek word in the Bible, and yet we fail to realize that that word was probably translated a thousand different ways from the more inaccessible Hebrew or Aramaic. We think we are getting back to our roots, understanding from the beginning, but no. I do wish I knew these ancient biblical languages. I took conversational Hebrew at Temple University and I like how they made you take this class and two others before taking biblical Hebrew. We don’t do that at Messiah. We should. Maybe then we would know what was meant in a certain passage, if the writer intended it to be literal or figurative, but wed still have that problem of if the word is really the Word. I guess were left with faith...

The Power[ful] Paper

How do I even begin to criticize a paper written by the professor? That would be like walking on thin ice....I truly want to do well in this class and not fall through into the freezing water of a "C" on my transcript. Yikes! But as I read the essay, typically looking for things I could disagree with, I found that my points of rebuttal were assuaged as I read more and more. Powers, you covered it all! But I suppose I'd just like to muse on the topic of reading, as prompted by this essay.

So, Powers obviously thinks that reading is important, particularly in a time when the act of reading is declining in the US, and when multi-ethnic culture must be understood through its literature, though this not being the only way. But I still want to go back to that question of reading and its value...why is it important? I guess when I ask the question, Im not implying that we should perpetuate illiteracy, but I am questioning why Powers wrote a whole essay on why understanding other cultures through reading is so important. I would like to ask why we truly cant understand them through other means. Why through their literature and not through their music or visual art....or even knowing them and interacting with them personally. Do we think reading other cultures is so important because we are English professors and students? Would the art major or international business major or music major agree that we reach other cultures through literature primarily? I think maybe not. And I also wonder about reading being a construct of the upper class, the educated class, the intellectual class. Once again, when I read my words, I feel like Im advocating for illiteracy, but really I just want to understand what reading is, what is its essence, why does it exist...(I might be spacing out a bit seeing that its past my bedtime) but can an individual understand and become enlightened by multi-ethnic culture without reading it? I understand that in today's society, it is only obvious that literacy means power; we can go places and be who we want to be when we can read and write, yes, I know this, but can we have this mobility through other means as well, like I stated previously with other disiplines?

Oooo, I wanted to comment on something else mentioned in the essay. Powers writes, "Readers of Toni Morrison in Beijing, Schenectady, Caracas, San Antonio, Fresno, and the Bronx belong to one another in a particular and important way, a cultural communion they share with one another that they don’t share with the neighbor in the next apartment or across the back fence, however much they may share a life in other respects." I was intrigued by this quote because I dont often experience this connection with anyone, though I am an English major and read at least five or six novels a year. At least. And I believe they are good ones. I dont believe I have the kind of experience Powers is referring to because I seriously do not have book discussions with anyone outside of class. Maybe I will tell a friend about the plot of the current book Im reading or even ask a foreigner I know if he or she has read a book Ive read, possibly making that connection Powers talks about, but it never goes beyond these surface literary interactions. I think Im to blame but so are my other literary-minded friends. Why dont we want to talk about literature? Is it just for the classroom? Frankly, I think this is true for me sometimes. Sometimes Im afraid Ill seem too scholarly if I talk about what Im reading, even if its with a friend who read the same book. I wonder why this is? Youd think Id be proud of my education, but Im even more self-conscious of looking condescending and pretensious to the people I encounter daily, some of them students. I wonder if this is just my problem, or others can relate...

African is to Africa as Native American is to United States

I think Ngugi wa Thiong'o's essay presents little to be argued. I completely agree with him that African universities should dismantle the dominant emphasis there is on their English departments and instead focus on their own indigenous national literature and languages. I do agree with Ngugi when he writes that literature is not natural, nor does it impart truth and beauty, instead the content of our literature syllabus, its presentation, the machinery for determining the choices of texts and their interpretation were all an integral part of imperialism and domination in the colonial phase and now in the neo colonial phase. I believe this, especially for African countries. He is even more agreeable when he says that Africans should not discredit European or English lit and language, but that they should not be the dominant emphasis in that continent. Where things get interesting is when we bring this issue back to our country, the United States.

We are quick to present the issue of expanding our English departments to include (with significant emphasis) Post-colonial and World lit, but I think the issue really deals with Native American lit if we are going to talk about recognizing the literature and the languages of an oppressed minority in a country where white Europeans had invaded and colonized. Hello, what about the Native Americans? Did we forget them? They are our Africans, so to speak, if not in much smaller numbers. Yet even then, this shows the extent of how much weve oppressed them and then forgotten them; I dont even know how many Native Americans are still living in the US. It is easy to say that there probably isnt a lot of them because thats imperialistic thinking-- we have wanted to be rid of them and forget it-- but our own indigenous groups need to be recognized too, possibly before the Africans and Asians and Indians. I would be all for expanding our English departments to include Native American literature, and not just as this cute little side note of a week in appreciation for our indigenous groups, but rather a comprehensive panorama of how our ancestors shaped our country today. Truly, I feel like they have more than they are given credit for. We seem so sympathetic to the Africans and their literature-- there are whole schools devoted to it--but why dont we talk more about the Native Americans? That's what I want to know.

Are All Black People the Same?

Whenever I talk about racial issues, particularly between black people and white people, I feel uncomfortable. Even now, I feel uncomfortable writing the title to this blog and using the word "black" to refer to African Americans. Why do I feel so uncomfortable saying "black people"? Im sure most black people dont feel uncomfortable saying "white people." They dont trip over long titles like "African American" by saying "Caucasian" or "Western / Eastern European" or "Anglo saxon" when referring to my race. Why is this? Is it because we realize the immense impact slavery in the US has had on generations of blacks? Is this our way of perpetually apologizing to them, being so careful not to offend them when in their presence? Surely, I am not the only white girl who feels this way and is baffled by it!

I am particularly interested in the way we generalize races when we talk about them, even our own race. In reading Langston Hughes essay, I was interested to see that he had this need to unite the black population as one, to have them all band together to fight white supremacy and appreciate their own Negro Artist. I wondered if this is inherent in Post-colonial and ethnic literature, where a group that has been oppressed feels a need to unite, because I think I can say that no white writer ever wrote to unite all whites in some display of art. Does this only come from a minority group that has had to fight oppression? If this is so, I dont think Hughes does such an adequate job of uniting all blacks. He lets his own assumptions and prejudices get in the way.

Near the end of the essay, he seems to imply that the best art will please neither the black or white audience. He seems to believe such problems as pleasing the white majority in art production are best solved by developing an indifference to both audiences, cultivating an art that is true to itself. But throughout the whole essay, I dont think he does this. His writing is inextricably linked to his race, clearly. He is proud of his race, saying that Negro is beautiful, but then he seems to not want to be defined by his race at the same time, especially not by white people. I think it is particularly presumptous of him to say that the young Negro poet, in saying that he only wanted to be a poet apart from being a Negro poet, was really saying that he wanted to be a white poet. I think that black artists can achieve without being defined by their race. It is possible, though I do realize that racism is still strongly present in our country and blacks are still defined by their race in many instances. But I do think black people dont need to be defined by their race, and then also that doesnt mean that they are then running into the arms of the whites. Cant that black poet be defined by other factors before his race, like his sex or maybe his religion or maybe his education?

I also think Hughes works against uniting blacks by suddenly siding with the "common folk" though he himself is certainly not one of them. He seems to think that the black middle and upper class are sell-outs, so this theoretical Artist must come from the common folk depths if Negros will be appreciated. I think Hughes has a romanticized view of the sell-out Negros and the common Negros. He severely stereotypes them into these nice little portraits, playing with imagery and phonetic language like a poet would do. I dont think Hughes is a very good literary critic. He does not account for the fact that all blacks are not alike; they do not all love jazz music. His solution of appreciation in Negro art is limited and more poetic, than cleverly argumentative and all-encompassing. He writes that he wants to unlease this "dark-skinned individuality" in the common folk, but he is not one of them. He is that separate, educated artist that those very people, those common folk, might label a sell-out to the whites. Ok, maybe Im being a bit harsh here. I dont know much about Hughes and what he was like while he was alive, but currently, he is admired by the whites just as much as the blacks. How would he feel about that, I wonder?

Expandable Canon?

Annette Kolodny writes in her essay that “literary history…is a fiction” or rather a social construction that must be challenged. She writes this because she believes feminist criticism must discover how aesthetic value of literature is assigned in the first place and then evaluate the imputed norms and normative reading patterns that, in part, led to those pronouncements. All that is to say is that specific assumptions about "major" and "minor" works should be contested. Who has the authority to say that one work is better than another, or that one work shall be part of an American Literature before 1900 class, while another is not so imperative to be taught to eager, young minds?

I had really not encountered this idea before I took this class this semester. Of course, in one way or another, I had been taught to speak my mind in regards to my education, MY education. In a society where individualism has come to mean a type of personal isolationism, I have been taught to question things for MY own sake, MY fulfillment and well-being. So this type of thinking manifested itself through petty things like the clothes I wore to school or the "rebellious" poetry I would write for a particular assignment, yet I never questioned those assignments. Like a true potential Messiah student, I readily accepted my school's curriculum without question, got my good grades, was accepted into Messiah on my good grades, and then started the process all over again, now in college.

But maybe I should question what I am being taught. Why study Thoreau and Beowulf and Chaucer and Plato and Donne? Because everyone else has and does? Because they are in the national, if not universal, canon that has already been established? I could say, Cmon! Let's study more obscure artists and poets and authors just for the hell of it, just because maybe they matter too. Why not some more 19th century female writers or maybe some more African American writers and even Native American writers. We want to get back to our roots, dont we? We want to pat ourselves on the back at night and say, we care about ALL artists who have produced art! But do we need to do it when the established canon is the one that is marketable for young college graduates with BAs in English? The working world knows this established canon and functions on it (I guess in the worlds of publishing, editing, writing and the like) so what are they going to say when my education has been filled with obscure Asian literature? Im somewhat at a loss on this issue, but I want the canon to be expanded and I feel deeply for the marginalized, but if we advocate for them, what will come of it? Maybe you and I can appreciate the need for a revised canon, but can every English department in the US?

Kolodny writes that we bring our biases and preconceptions and assumptions to the interpretation of a text, but she wishes that we combat this. A significant criticism to this thinking is that she doesn’t account for the difficulty it would take for readers to recognize their biases and assumptions when reading. That difficulty also lies in getting authors and critics and English professors to expand the canon taught to students. Will change truly come? As a stubborn pessimist, I tend to think, no.

Creativity and Sexuality

In her essay, "The Laugh of the Medusa," Helene Cixous explores binary oppositions and how man and woman are grouped into those oppositions and what implications those oppositions have for female expression or repression through writing and creativity. When we listed different binary oppositions in class and then had to place "man" and "woman" at the top of those lists, our group had placed "woman" at the top of the list which contained words like secular, as opposed to sacred, dark, as opposed to light, passive, as opposed to agressive or penetrating. I think our group jumped at putting woman with the more "negative" terms because of the discourse we have used in our lives to talk about women in history, literature, or everyday life. We see that woman has received the short end of the stick. If they are portrayed as good, then they are domesticated, maternal, an encouragor to the male leading figure. If they are portrayed as bad, they are the temptress, the loose women, the demented monster. The woman never wins. She is always in relation to man.

Cixous tries to combat this by encouraging women to unleash their creativity in writing through physical exploration in Eros love. This doesnt necessarily completely mean sex, though exploration of sexuality is a large part of Cixous' argument. She makes reference to Sigmund Freud’s geometrical concept of castration, refined but not substantially changed by Lacan, which defines woman not in terms of what she has but in terms of what she lacks, this is, a penis. Cixous calls on the assumption that the pen is seen as a phallic symbol which impregnates the page and gives birth to the writing, but women cannot do this. They cannot impregnate but only be impregnated. Therefore, they are only readers, not writers. But Cixous challenges this by encouraging women to explore themselves sexually and not be passive or embarrassed about it. We talked a little bit about this suppression in class, and Dr. Powers wondered if it still existed, if women were still ashamed to talk of their bodies.

I know that Chelsea brought up the fact that Cixous seems to just focus on the sexual aspect of the physicality of women, and she suggested that women can unleash their creativity physically through other means like athleticism, but I think there is something to say about the focus on sexuality. I do believe that sexuality has been a suppressed area of female being, and Cixous realizes it needs to be addressed. I recently read The Vagina Monologues. This series of monologues about female sexuality and empowerment deals with this very suppression. It deals with the words for female sex organs and how society still hesitates to use them in everyday speech, or at least in positive terms. One piece talks extensively about the word "cunt." Even now, I inwardly cringe when I hear the word. You do too, I think. And why is that? Why cant we say the word "cunt" or "vagina" without blushing, but we always talk about penises and what they represent and how they are talked about and interpreted? I wonder why female sexuality is muffled and downplayed in relation to male sexuality. I do not believe, and I dont think Cixous does either, that women lack what men have, that is, a penis. True, we do not have penises, but we do have a whole, complex world of sex organs going on inside us. We have a uterus and fallopian tubes and vulva and clitoris and ovaries which all work for pleasure and life. If anything, the women gives life, not the man. Without the women, "life" on the page would not exist. I think this is what Cixous is saying women must tap into to get back their creativity. Sexuality does matter for Cixous and it should for all women, because I do think it is still repressed. It is still not talked about. Women are still seen as the pure virgin or the slut, both not so well-rounded images. And it is 2008. Why is that opposition still in place? With the women's rights movement and feminism, why can we still not talk about female sexuality? Why do we still think it isnt important?

Is the androgynous mind possible?

Woolf warns in her essay "Androgyny" that consciousness of sex destroys. She quotes Coleridge as saying that the great mind is androgynous, and this is how gender in writing should look. This interpretation of literature can be seen as both feminist and antifeminist. It is feminist in that it is claiming that the male writer needs to be in touch with his "feminine side" or feminine part of his brain to writer well. He cannot do without it. He must be man-womanly. In this sense, women are on par with men; they are not their subordinates. It implies that the women entering literature do more than fill up an absence. They bring their preception of the world to literature, expanding what it is and opening up a whole new reality of it. However, this idea of the androgynous mind can be seen as antifeminist as well because it places a dependence on men for good writing as well. The woman seeks to be woman-manly thus needing the man. Many feminists want to separate completely from men, developing their own reality and identity apart from them. Woolf's androgynous mind does not let this happen. She seems to set a trap for herself in that she relies on men. She urges women to rise to the level men are already at in literature, so as to be equal, yet that is still setting masculinity as the standard. Why cant men rise to meet the feminine standard? Why is it that, with the implication of attainment of the androgynous mind, women need to tap into their masculine side to fully experience themselves? Can they not fully experience themselves without realizing their masculinity? True, Woolf may say that men need to tap into their feminine side to fully experience their reality, but I think the implication is directed at women. In her essay, "A Room of One's Own," Woolf focuses on what could have been for Shakespeare's hypothetical sister, yet she models the sister's potential literary greatness after that of a male, Shakespeare. Judith reads and writes just like Shakespeare but is not socially accepted because of it. She excels in the masculine standard of writing of that time, but why does she not write in her own preception and reality apart from Shakespeare? She is simply trying to mimic the dominant masculine structure already set in place. That is no good, though I think Woolf's argument would be that recognition of sex in writing is no good, though that agrument is weak. Woolf doesnt want Judith to realize her femininity as she writes, though wouldnt she not want Judith to recognize her masculinity as she writes either. Yet this is precisely what Judith is doing when she thinks of the success of her brother and how it is not acceptable to be like him.

My point is that I do not believe the androgynous mind can be attained. I think Woolf is vague in her push for it because how can one be unconscious of one's own sex when she is writing? What on earth does that look like? Who am I in terms of masculinity? What is masculinity? How is its definition, along with that of femininity, a concrete, socially accepted definition? I think gender is so subjective and elusive, unlike sex. Am I writing as masculine when I write about my agression towards others? Am I writing as feminine when I say I want to care for my sick sister or hurting friend? Who defines these things? Also, I think we need to go back to the consciousness of sex thing when writing. Ok, maybe Im not thinking about my sex when Im writing but Im certainly thinking about my gender, right? I write in a circular structure: feminine. I write about my apprehension to have sexual thoughts: feminine. I write about my fear of speaking my mind: feminine. Yet, I feel like Im going in a circle because I just said that gender cannot be defined. So why do I have to label my writing as gender specific? Can we do this? Is it possible? Is the whole school of feminist theory so vague and subjective? How can we really pinpoint gender if we are only going on the social constructs of gender? Should we place value in a social construct? Where else can we look to be informed of gender?

Taste of Bourdieu

I found that Bourdieu is very much like Ohmann in that they, of course, both represent Marxist views of class distinction and reflection of the dominant culture in society. They both believe this. According to Bourdieu's essay, tastes in food, culture and presentation, are indicators of class, because trends in their consumption seemingly correlate with an individual’s fit in society. He isnt suggesting so much that everyone tries to fit into the same dominant culture, but that each fraction of the dominant class develops its own aesthetic criteria. Truly, they all are linked to the dominant class, but they break off into tributaries. A multitude of consumer interests based on differing social positions necessitates that each fraction “has its own artists and philosophers, newspapers and critics, just as it has its hairdresser, interior decorator or tailor.” There is still some standard people must live up to.

I am very intrigued by Bourdieu's interaction with this idea of speaking in "codes." He says that a work of art will have meaning and interest to someone who has the knowledge and "cultural competence," that is, the code, to decipher the meaning in which it is encoded. I wonder to what extent he places meaning and importance in this code. If someone possesses the code in which to talk about art, does that make the art good? What if someone who is educated talks about something that is clearly not art, but he talks about it in this culturally competent code? Does that put value on the bad art? Let's say an intellectual sees a plain chair in an art museum displayed as part of a collection. That same chair, or one similarly like it, is placed right outside the bathroom, providing a place for wary patrons to rest. If the intellectual talks about the chair in a code, saying that the chair is part of the minimalistic art movement and that its form speaks to that movement blah blah blah, does that mean the chair is worth appreciating as art? If he doesnt speak in the same code about the chair by the bathroom, then isnt the code really just a product of discourse developed by the ruling class? He is only talking about the chair in elevated terms because he has been taught to appreciate things in a museum and he probably took an art class in college where they discussed minimalist art. He is simply taking what he learned in institutions that reflect the dominant class and then regurgitating it. Does his code have value then or is he just blowing hot air?

We talked in class about high modernism and how it creates this abstraction of art for the upper class that is completely distinct from the preception of the working class. The upperclass is educated and knows the "codes" of interpreting art and they have "pure vision" while the working class must not know the "codes" and therefore see art as only practical and continuous. I want to know how the upperclass knows they have this pure vision. It sounds a bit Romantic to me and completely unproveable. After all, it is an abstraction. I tend to think that you cannot place a value on being able to speak the "code." What does it matter? One can say a painting is great, another can say the same painting is typical of the Renaissance period in its glorification of man through use of light and positive space in the painting. Who cares? How can you say the one person enjoys the painting more than the other. Maybe one is more informed, but Im sure the one who said it was great has his reasons to. If they both appreciate the painting, why not leave it at that. The work has done something for both of them. To say that the informed one is better, is to say the dominant, upperclass is better. Maybe it isnt.

I am a product of the Dominant Culture.

After reading Ohmann's essay on aesthetic value stemming from class conflict, I wondered if there could be any break away from the dominant culture of our nation. I see that it might not be possible as I think about it now. To say that we could try to break away from the dominant culture would be to say that we would then embrace the minority culture, the most underrepresented culture, but then the minority would become the majority and the dominant culture would surface again, just with a new set of values to ascribe to. It is always a circular process, because we have to value something, we have to value, let's say, some kind of literature or music or art, then more and more people value it and it becomes the acceptable value. Majority and minority are binary oppositions, we have to think of them together, or at least one or the other, but we always have both in mind. They constantly circle one another, threatening to take the lead. I dont believe it is realistic to set yourself apart from the majority or minority. I do not believe one can be completely isolated from their culture and its influence. If I were to go to the library and purposely check out a book I had never heard of, and then continually do that for my object of value, would I really be creating my own sense of value apart from the dominant culture? Would I be able to resist telling friends about my new literary values, urging them to read the obscure literature too? Would I be able to resist the book reviews and criticisms Ohmann writes about, trying not to be swayed to find value in what is widely acknowledged as valuable? I think not. I would be like a hermit, shutting myself off from the world, and that is not possible. Culture always affects us and that culture is the dominant one.

It is in my nature to want to rebel against this dominant culture. We talked in class about how classic literature is taught in our English classes in our institutions because the instructor is simply reproducing the values of the ruling class. That ruling class says that the Classics are worth studying, so we study them. The scientific method is worth studying, so we study it. Classical music is worth studying, so we study it. But why? Why cant I rebel? Maybe I want to be succesful by the dominant society's standards. I want to get that A. But then if I rebel and choose the individualistic, self-taught-type way of life, then I am still reproducing that dominant culture, because like Ohmann explains, my rebellion has roots in dominant ideology; individualism is a dominant value in our society. There is no escape.

Caitlin commented on the value of rap music in her blog, I think, and I found her line of thinking interesting. She questioned why classical music was valued over rap music and who decides it. It seems that nowadays, rap music is more widely listened to than classical music. As we talked in our discussion group in class about this, we grumbled over the importance of Verdi and explained to each other that rap music has its roots in confronting importance issues of race and economic inequality and social justice. We grasped desperately for some importance in rap music, so that it was on par with classical music. I see that this thinking is an example of what Ohmann said when he said that a subordinate but influential class will shape culture in ways that express their own interests and experiences, but then inevitably they will find that their values have roots in dominant thought. We were so quick to find the "intellectual" and "elevated" importance in rap music to put it on level with classical music, music of the dominant class. The dominant class always seems to win, and I wonder if this can ever be broken.

There are revolutions stemming from political, social, and economic issues all the time. They evoke change, but then that change becomes accepted and the new dominant value. Is this a bad thing? Is it bad that I read literature that has been on bestseller lists simply because they have been on bestseller lists? Is it bad that I do my homework and write my papers with the thought in the back of my mind that I have to write to please the teacher so I can get an A? Is it bad that I dress a certain way because I have seen the clothes on other people and have liked how they look? I dont believe anyone can be truly individualistic, and then if he is, he is because society says it is good. We are all individualistic! It unites us. And I think we want to be united. We want to be told what to think and how to act. Who really questions it? Nobody at Messiah College, I know that. We simply take what we are taught because we believe the professors know better, the book review critics know better, the TV knows better. How could we truly separate "ourselves" from the rest of the world? We are products of the world. I dont even know what I would look like apart from what the dominant culture has fed me. Should I question that?

Thoughts on "The Storyteller"

It is my nature to want to question and criticize a text to find its faults and holes, to play devil's advocate to the author. I have to say that I do agree with Benjamin's theory on the whole, but I have questions, always questions.

I agree with Benjamin that the storyteller is rare in present society, that is to say, present society in the US and other developed, capitalistic societies, but now that I think about it, I wonder what the status of the storyteller is in other nations with economies different from ours. Surely there are countries whose printing press has not become so advanced and distributable (sp) as ours. Surely there are societies that have not benefitted or been harmed by the mass distribution of information as opposed to oral tradition-type storytelling. True, I think that more primitive societies must still use storytelling as a means of communication, but I wonder why I suddenly think "primitive." Benjamin is right in that storytelling is archaic; we do not value it anymore, so that leads me to ask why. Why is it not valued and does that matter? Benjamin puts "narrative" and "living speech" in opposition of one another, so I also wonder about the presence of narrative in our current times. I think that narrative still exists, but maybe in a different form than what Benjamin was writing about. I think he was literally talking about oral narrative, the art of vocally narrating an experience, but I question why narratives today have to be so different. We hear in class, Dr. Powers talking about narratives and titles of English Symposium presentations declaring "narratives of African women writers" or "narratives of Holocaust survivors," which is interesting because Benjamin believes that storytelling began its decline when men came back from wars like WWI without anything to say, silenced by the horrors of war. But narratives do exist in writing. I believe this.

Benjamin said that the true storyteller takes his own experience with the experience of others and then tells his story and the listen benefits from this, find counsel in it, finds wisdom. The author, on the other hand, isolates himself and tells a story completely fabricated in his own mind. It is not a narrative and the reader does not gain wisdom from the story. I disagree with this. Novels can be plural, interwoven narratives of perspectives just as oral stories are. Maybe the first novels, along with many present ones, are completely fiction, but doesnt the author has to draw from some personal experience to write his tale? And doesnt he interweave the stories and perspectives and happenings of his friends and acquaintances into his tale as well? I think so. There is no divine outpouring from the author, like the Romantics may have you believe. The author can be that travelling seaman or the local color writer, writing about the traditions and happenings in his town in which he lives. The novel may not be so much an immediate connection between teller and listen as the story which is told orally, but doesnt it have the same function sometimes? Benjamin said that wisdom is not so much gained from a novel anymore and that explained information is more important nowadays than a story open to interpretation, and that may be true in mass media-type settings, but literature is still produced that must be interpreted by the reader and thus lends some wisdom to the reader. Just as Barthes had written in "Death of an Author," the words of the novel have their own meaning in and of themselves and it is up to the reader to extract meaning from them, not the author. The author has done his job in expelling the words and then the reader must do the rest. Isnt the storyteller somewhat like this? We say that they operate in different economies, particularly in different mediums, but arent they telling the same story?

I do not believe that society has a lack of interest in hearing a good story, and I do not believe that there are no storytellers to tell it. I have heard that people like to read less and less when they can just watch TV or a movie instead, but a story is still being told, whatever the medium. We do not just want the cold, hard facts. We want the characters and the setting and the minute details and the dialogue and the conflict. It is still enjoyable, at least to me.

Foucault Afterthought

P.S. After seeing Foucault in action in video form, I realize he looks like and has the same mannerisms as my fiance's dad.

Noam Chomsky vs. Michel Foucault

Note: I do not know how to post a video on my blog yet, but I will post the video I am responding to as soon as I know how.

The video to which I am referring is a conversation between Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault about justice vs. power. It seems that enhancing our literary theory knowledge by surfing Youtube is the "in" thing to do, so I thought I'd give it a try as well. I was particularly interested in this clip because I recognized both names in the video's title. I learned about Chomsky in my Spanish Linguistics class, specifically his push for a "gramatica generativa" or a general, universal grammar, just like the structuralists love. He wanted to find an explicit, mechanical set of rules to govern the construction of sentences. He wanted to find an underlying structure to language, just like the structuralists and poststructuralists we learn about in Lit Crit. I just love when the topics I learned in different classes overlap. It's really quite magical!

So Foucault is also associated with structuralism and poststructuralism. After reading and discussing "What is an Author?" we see that the text has a structure that is dependent on the discourse that has been developed out of our particular culture. The text does not stand alone in what it means to us, we view it and talk about it and analyze it based on the discourse we use for it. I think Chomsky would agree with this line of thinking, this structuring, if you will.

So, the video. It is only a six minute clip of a larger discussion, but I think some meaning can be gaged in and of itself from both men. They are basically in agreement with one another, yet Chomsky seems a bit more idealistic in his idea that the fundamental element of human nature is free creation and how that will, if realized, rise above our oppressive systems and institutions. He seems to want to find a quick, though idealistic, answer to societal problems, while Foucault simply states what he believes and does not offer a solution because he does not know if there is one. I think this is why Foucault is so gripping and evocative. He does not claim to know all the answers, yet he is REALLY brilliant. His ideas about power and its nature are fascinating and so true (just look at the enthusiasm of the audience to clue you in!).

But seriously, I find his thoughts on power so interesting. Chomsky seems to want to compartmentalize power as oppressive, whereas Foucault says it is productive because it produces knowledge, at least the knowledge that counts. He says in this video that political power is exerted by independent, private institutions apart from the government that should not be exerting political power. Foucault directly attacks the educational system by saying that this power-- this knowledge-- is held in the hands of a certain social class and is excluded from another social class. His views have a Marxist...coloring to them. His focus is on power and social class and how that plays out. Who has the power? And how is it exerted?

I took Comparative International Education last semester and we analyzed international education through all the schools of theory, including Marxism. We talked about how society will represent the dominant culture (whether that be a social majority or minority) in all its institutions, including schools. The dominant society welds the power, the power produces acceptable knowledge, whoever cannot latch onto that accepted knowledge is pushed to the margins, we then just go on and use that accepted knowledge to talk about whatever, literature let's say, and that's the way it's done. So what I want to know is, why is that?

Foucault exclaims in the video that the institutions which weld that political power must be challenged or else they will reconstitute themselves and the process will never end. So I wonder if discourse can be changed? What does change it if it can be changed? Would Foucault think Messiah College was an oppressive institution, welding its undeserved poltical power as a representative of the dominant society? Should we challenge the dominant society? I think, maybe yes. For example, if I decided to speak Ebonics in my classes at Messiah (or let's say an African American friend at Messiah) wanted to do that, would she be accepted? I can't help but believe more than one professor would be appalled. Or let's say we petitioned the English department to teach obscure Medieval Renaissance and 19th century writers for such prescribed requirements of the major. If we had a solid case, would they agree to it? I think not. What about all those high school students who didnt have the proper SAT scores to get into Messiah? Certainly they couldnt bring much of value to the school if their grades werent evidence that they could be groomed for intellectualism.

There is a discourse already applied to Messiah College. It is embedded in the campus and I feel like we could never change it. I hear Cumberland Valley school teachers were going to strike. What if Messiah students decided to strike on the grounds that we shouldnt have to believe that what we are learning and, more importantly, how we are learning is so essential to what it means to be educated in our society? Would we have a shot at being heard? Could we get some answers?

Death of the Author

I have to say I really enjoyed this piece. Barthes' views on the relationship between author, reader, and text are innovative and engaging. He makes such bold statements so that you'd think theyre just waiting to be ripped apart and criticized horrifically, yet I have to say I agree with them. I see it.

He writes that writing is the destruction of every voice on pg. 1466. The voice loses its origin, though I dont think he would say that this statement means the voice has no origin in tradition. I think Barthes would agree with the theories of Eliot rather than Emerson if we decide to talk about tradition. When he says that the voice has no origin, I think he means that the meaning of a produced work, the voice from which the text speaks, is not definite. He gives the example of Balzac's Sarrasine where a particular sentence about femininity cannot be analyzed to find out exactly who the speaker is. Barthes says it could be the actual author's voice or maybe the author's voice imbedded in the text or maybe the protagonist in the story's voice. It is unknown. So the author and his own thoughts and assumptions and intentions has "died" in a sense when the words actually come out on the page. I like to think of the image of a pebble hitting a smooth surface on a pond where the ripples undulate outward or maybe a window cracking and fracturing into a million pieces. As soon as the words are written, interpretation and meaning can go anywhere. Now this line of thought leads me to wonder if Barthes could be for postmodernism, for this immersion of diverse interpretation and meaning. Now I know Barthes was all for the push for the universal grammar of narrative but then I learned that in his work S/Z, he has grown bored with structuralism and its search for common structure. The biography in The Norton Anthology seemed to paint him as this contradictory, quirky guy, so I wonder what he thinks of this idea of "anything goes" in the way of intrepretation and meaning.

But I do digress. I meant to write about Barthes' thoughts on tradition. I do not believe he thinks a work is a production of sheer imagination and originality, a perfect embodiment of Truth and Beauty in poetry that has already existed before time. Rather, I think Barthes does value tradition like Eliot does in that it impacts present work just as that present work impacts the past. But then Barthes gets even more particular then that. He's focusing on what actually happens when thoughts materialize into words. And I understand this. It's the whole thing about how no one can truly know another. A bit existential, yes. But it's true. One's thoughts can never entirely be known by another. All we have to communicate are our imperfect words, and those can be intrepreted in a million ways. Barthes puts the Author and the Text on a linear timeline and says the Author comes before the Text on pg. 1468. They cannot exist together. Rather, a scriptor with no origin is birthed within the text. He (or she) does not know himself. It is his language that simply knows a subject, not a person.

I do wonder about this last thought, though. Yes, I realize a whole person cannot be known simply through a text, but what if that piece of literature is wrapped up in that author's own personal experience, and the reader knows this? I just finished Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking and it was clearly about her very personal account dealing with her husband's death and her daughter's continuous hospitalization. I understand that the underlying themes of dealing with death and overcoming self-pity could be interpreted in any number of ways and could have been the voice with no origin, but the plot of the book was most certainly the voice of Didion. Would Barthes agree to this?

Structure and Todorov

I tend to want to tear apart these critical essays, seeking to critique them and to critique them harshly, but with Todorov's essay on the structural analysis of narrative, I saw that his argument was convincing and he did not neglect the arguments that might be risen against his piece.

Todorov truly believes in his structural approach to literature, and I think I understand the importance of this linguistic, scientific-like approach. At first I thought Todorov might be alluding to the Romantics in his exaltation of the literature itself. I know the Romantics stress importance in the Poet, but there is also this idea that the poem-- the work of literature is Truth and Beauty, and it will bring enlightenment to the masses. Todorov is not preoccupied with this. He wants to study structure. In fact, I do not believe he is like the Romantics at all. He seems to be all about a scientific approach, and why is that bad. He even speaks to those who may want to separate science and literature by acknowledging their objection and saying that the novel is a "living thing, all one and continuous, like any other organism...[he] thinks that in each of the parts there is something of each of the other parts" (2101). There is a structure where parts make up the whole and those must be studied. And why is this hard to accept? How can anyone deny that literature has a structure? And then that that structure can be studied to understand the whole work of literature in relation to others? Really, isnt all study we do in college, in some way, scientific? Think about it. How else can you study some subject without empirical evidence of some sort. We need something tangible, something real to study something else. Even in our religion classes, we study books, we study famous ministers and theologians. We think about and discuss abstract ideas, but do we really study them? I am proposing that the word "study" in and of itself connotes scientific inquiry. Yes, Todorov allows for the importance of theoretical and, say, psychological "study" of literature, but he says there is a hierarchy among them. Ok, I dont know if I agree with this, but I do agree that study of structure is essential and scientific because we study the concrete of poetics. Todorov says on pg. 2105 that "literature becomes only a mediator, a language, which poetics uses for dealing with itself." We can clearly use poetics (ex. of plot in Decameron) to understand an organic connection, similarity, unity in structure of many plots in literature. We understand this. As I read about the examples in Decameron I thought to myself, This is exactly what I've done in all my English classes. This is how we talk about literature.

But then I asked, Why is it important? I already know this stuff. I already know that structure is important.

Maybe I asked this question because I live in a postmodern 20th century world where structuralism has come.....and still remains. At least traces of it, I think. We never just talked about our "feelings" towards this poem or that novel in my English classes. We studied the structure, and, let's hope, it was an objective study like Todorov demands it must be. So, yeah, we've already been doing this, and maybe because of Todorov and the other structuralists.

But... the one major thing I can think to criticize is his search for a universal grammar of narrative. I like the question Karen brought up in class about what Todorov would say to postmodern literature, with its fragmented and experimentative structure. With time, comes change, naturally, but did Todorov realize this? It seems that after the Tower of Babel happened (I believe it did, yes), humans have had this idealistic desire to become unified once more, and we have tried this in different ways. Todorov is doing it with a push for a universal grammar of narrative. Did he really believe it would work? Was he formulating it with an ethnocentric approach, only through the lense of his own education and his own experience, even that of his own circle of intellectual contemporaries? What would he say to how different Africans approach literature analysis? Or the Chinese? Or Native Americans? Do they matter?

Emerson's "Nature"

I know we read "The Poet" and "The American Scholar" a school of literary criticism ago, but I kind of like Emerson, and I found his essay Nature quite interesting, though I do believe his writing is a little opaque sometimes because he tries to reason the abstract. Sometimes I'm with him, other times I say, "Huh?"

Either way, he presents some interesting thoughts on humans' relationship to nature. On pg. 28 of his essay he writes, "Nature is thoroughly mediate. It is made to serve. It receives the dominion of man as meekly as the ass on which the Saviour rode." Surely, he believes Man is higher than nature; Man can overcome nature or at least use nature for his own ultimate understanding of existence. And I think it is interesting, too, that, in drawing out this analogy, Emerson is essentially equating Man with the Messiah. We can be like God. We can fully comprehend God and we use nature to do this. At one point, on pg. 10 in his famous edict about being a "transparent eyeball," Emerson states that he is "a particle of God," which I love, and then he says later, among other things, on pg. 45 that "man is a god in ruins." He seems to believe that we have the potential to be great though we are flawed at present. He writes on pg. 42 that "we are as much strangers in nature, as we are aliens from God." There is potential, though. That potential.

In reading "The Poet" I thought Emerson to be extremely arrogant and stuffy like lots of intellectuals are, but I want to think that he believes all men to have this potential to comprehend the unity of the universe and our connection to it and all that. He does, however, mention the figure of the poet in this particular essay and this essay was written before "The Poet" so I may have to admit that he places so much stock in the figure of the poet. I keep wondering about this? Why one exalted poet? Where are the concrete examples of what the poet does and how he helps humanity's enlightenment? Emerson writes in Nature that the poet conforms things to his thoughts, things like "the sun, the mountain, the camp, the city, the maiden." He writes that the poet's power is to "dwarf the great, to magnify the small." He brings everything into unity. Ok. But how? I constantly wonder this. What experience will bring this kind of enlightenment, and then what do you do with it once you possess it? It's all fine and wonderful that Emerson is writing all this philosophy and reason about what should be, but when is it going to happen?

Should I not be asking these questions? Is the important part of comprehending this essay to dissect what he is saying and ponder the philosophy in and of itself? Please tell me, I'd like to know! Am I being too pragmatic in my thinking? Can I truly read a piece of criticism or philosophical work with a pragmatic, practical lense? Is there a school of criticism for that? Can I align my lense with that of the Marxists and Feminists and Formalists? Should we read literature as an isolated text where we study its structure, not its content, kind of like what Wimsatt and Beardsley might say? Is all this--all this blogging that I'm doing-- just some linguistic, structural study? I have taken Eliot's criticism on tradition to mean that tradition is living and breathing. It can be manipulated and reformed with works of the present. If you could call this blog entry a present work (let's just stretch our imaginations on this one), then could I say that my personal thoughts on Emerson's Nature are, in fact, valid to the meaning of Nature as a living work in tradition?

The Affective Fallacy

In Wimsatt and Beardsley's "intentional fallacy" the intentional is the confusion of the poem with its origins while in the "affective fallacy," the affective is the confusion of the poem and its results. The authors occupy themselves with what is to happen once a poem is read. What are we to do with a poem?

On pg. 1388, they talk about separating the emotive from "referential meaning" in the poem. They seem to look unfavorably toward an emotive response to a poem because, I think, they believe an emotion may not be tied to the meaning of the poem. An emotion can be wrong for a poem. A reader could be bringing his or her own emotions to a poem that doesn't intend to evoke those emotions. They quote I.A. Richardson from his work Practical Criticism when he said that we project our emotions and feelings at objects innocent of feelings. They further quote him in his work from Science and Poetry when he claims that science is a statement and poetry is the "psuedo-statement" that plays an important role in making us feel better about things than statements would. It seems to me that the authors are taking quotes from men who critique our society's response to poetry as subjective and psychologically remedial to back up their own arguments. I don't think you can lump all of society together into one way to interact with poetry. We don't all use it to alleviate the woes of our lives. Poetry isn't this pathetic, self-serving remedy for us all. Some do appreciate poetry for what it is. Some do clearly see the anguish or rage in poetry where we cannot put our own emotions. Poetry does speak to us. I don't believe we always speak to it, and that's what I feel like the authors were criticizing, then again, it was difficult to follow their logic at times.

They stated that they believe analysis of poetry to be a linguistic study, and that's exactly what they did on pgs. 1389-93. They meticulously wrote about how words intrinsically have meaning but they can suggest another, often this being a social or cultural product. They talked at length about emotive import and how it depends on descriptive meaning and also descriptive suggestion at times. They argued that what a word does to a person isn't necessarily what the word means, and all this time I'm reading this detailed, labored-over linguistic study of the affective quality of poetry, I'm thinking, "Does this matter?" I understood all their arguments and I agreed with them, for the most part, but I agreed with them in and of themselves. I thought to myself, "Yeah, so? Why do we need to apply this to poetic rules? Why so many rules?" What does it matter that the words used in poetry really signify their true meaning instead of just existing for a certain emotive response from the reader? Maybe a poet doesn't want his words to convey their true meanings. That's the beauty of poetry to me. Poetry is a play on words, a game, a manipulation of words with hidden meaning and emotion behind it all. What's all this talk about the Truth? All poetry must point back to the Truth!

Wimsatt and Beardsley seem to make all these assertions of how poetry must be treated-- all the other authors we've studied do the same thing-- and they assert that we all must get back to the Truth, but then they never give concrete evidence of what that is. That is why theory and philosophy frustrate me so. Where's the evidence? Wimsatt and Beardsley claim that people testify to what poetry does to others and what it does to themselves, so the question arises of the sincerity of the critic as well as the poet. They talk of sincerity like they talk of the Truth, but then they don't tell us how to measure these things. How are we to know if the critic is sincere or the poet for that matter? To what standard do we measure them against? Emerson never did find the Poet who would bring us the Truth. I don't think we ever will.

The authors write about the affective state on pg. 1397 and they say there is not much room for synaesthesis or for "the touchy little attitudes of which it is composed." I think this whole reading was just the touchy little attitudes of Wimsatt and Beardsley, but then again, I'm just bringing my false emotive response to the piece.

The Intentional Fallacy

The "intentional fallacy” claims that we as readers cannot use the author’s own intention for the work at hand to accurately and sufficiently judge it, but rather the poem's intended meaning should be like a public utterance that doesn’t depend on the one author for its meaning. The poem should stand alone. The authors claim that the meaning of the literary work is not equal to its effects, so however the reader wants to interpret the work is not equal to the work's intrinsic meaning. The authors proclaim that analysis should focus on the text only, and I see a little bit of romanticism in that belief. Wimsatt's and Beardsley's formalist analysis is part of New Criticism, and I think that they would align their thinking with Eliot more than Emerson, but I also see shades of romanticism in their worship of the text as almost sacred. They definitely don't exult the poet, but it seems they place that same degree of exultation on the poem, the glorious poem!

They claim that the critic's task is to examine the linguistic structure and aesthetic unity of the poem, not the poet's intended meaning for what the poem was supposed to be about. Now I agree when they argue on pg. 1383 that the reader could never fully know what Donne's intentions were for a particular poem he wrote, but then I think that part of the allure of analyzing and interacting with poetry is the interpretation part. What was the poet trying to say in this stanza and with this tone? In all my years of taking poetry classes, the teacher has always tossed that question at us, and it became ingrained in me to think that the art of studying poetry was to study and analyze the work at hand so as to make an educated inference about what the poet intended. I never learned about the exalted text which stands alone.

The authors seem to be reducing poetry to science (and, yes, i believe that is reducing! ha!). They want to study its structure, the linguistics of it, and that is a science. They seem to relate it to the study of a building or specific plant, simply desiring to comment on what is already there, right in front of them. I wondered about the substance of interpretation and what they would say about it in class, and I'm still wondering about it now. Wouldn't interpretation to them simply be observation? If they don't believe in self-discovery within the text or research on the biographical and historical info about the author, then how does one interpret a poem? I know the authors write on pg. 1372 that if any historical or biographical information is relevant to the poem itself, it will already be in the poem. This is a tricky thing to say because then it presupposes that every reader's epistemology in acquiring knowledge is relatively the same. We must all be able to understand a poem's intrinsic meaning without outside help if the poem is of any value, right? What if a handful of people don't understand the meaning of a poem? What if readers come up with different meanings? Does that make the poem trash? Well, if a poem's worth is truly measured by these standards, then all poetry is trash. All poetry is unable to be understood. I think it was Plato who said all written poetry is failure. Well, he must be right by Wimsatt's and Beardsley's standards. I think they set themselves up for this. We are all taught to find the poet's intended meaning. Our minds are trained to do this. And is it wrong?

On Eliot

I have a feeling that I am going to be very fickle in this class. I wish this werent so, but I find thatI'm embracing both Emerson and Eliot, and I think they were in opposition of one another. Emerson embraced romanticism while Eliot rejected it for modernism, yet I do see both of them putting emphasis on the importance of the mind, and the mind's role in producing art. This is something I agreed with of Emerson's thinking in my last post. I just didnt agree with the emphasis he put on one poet being the voice of the masses, bringing true Beauty and Art to all, and I didnt agree with him that true art could be completely original and pure and divine and separate from influence of the past.

This is where I agree with Eliot. On pg. 1092 he writes that we should criticize our own minds within a work of criticism, and that we should articulate what passes through our minds when we read a book and what emotions it evokes. This seems to me to be a very grounded view of criticism, and it places much expectation on the author and his or her thought processes in criticizing poetry. He doesnt immortalize poetry as this glorious thing to be revered and worshipped. Rather, it is something to be studied and worked and analyzed and interpreted. I agree with this.

I also appreciate the attention he gives to tradition, though he does use it in an interesting way I would not have thought of. He writes on pg. 1093 that tradition must be laboured for. Just as we cannot ignore it, we cannot simply use it as immovable, historical fact. Eliot claims that literature of the past and the present contain simultaneous existence and order. This comment seems absurd at first, but then it makes sense to me. On pg. 1098, he writes that the poet must live in the present but he must also live in the present moment of the past; he must be conscious of what is already living. I get the sense that Eliot views the past as living because it influences the present. He says that the past and present are influenced by each other, not just the solidified past influencing the present. So the past cannot be a dead thing if it is influencing something, can it?

Eliot then goes on to explain how the present can influence the past. He says on pg. 1093 that the old is modified when the new is created. The ideal order of the past is modified with the new. I like this idea because I have never seen the past in this light, but I think it makes sense. Eliot is saying maybe that the present builds on the past so that works of the present become part of the past, just as the past influences those works of the present. Both periods of time are simultaneous; they are working together. For example, a present work about Gerard Manley Hopkins' poems will modify Gerard Manley Hopkins' actual poems because something is being added to those poems by this present work. Now, the poems will be seen a little differently in light of this new work. And then, of course, the new work was influenced by the actual poems. Past and Present work together.

I do have to say, though, I was unsure about Eliot's thoughts on the mind and its relationship to the man who inhibits it. He says on pg. 1095 that the mind of the poet and the man who experiences are separate things. The more separate they are, the more perfectly the mind will digest and transmute the passions which are its material. Now I know he doesnt see the mind like the romantics do, but I cant help but think he is being a bit transcendental. Does Eliot believe that emotions and feelings are separate abstractions from the man? On pg. 1098 he says that significant emotion is emotion which has its life in the poem not the history of the poet. He also says that the emotion of art is impersonal. So are we dealing with just abstractions? I know he compares these thoughts to a scientific chemical reaction, saying that "the mind is a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, and images which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together" (1096) so then I think he discounts the role of the man. I mean, I understand that the past and present work together, but what about the role of the man in the equation? Isnt the man the one who has these emotions and feelings to work into the poem?

Now I think I understand his distinction between the mature poet and the immature poet in how they use their emotions in the poems they write. Eliot writes that the mature poet can comprehend all the different combinations that can be used in the poem with his emotions, so he uses them effectively and expertly, while the immature poet just gets his emotions out in a flush without closely thinking about how to mold them into art. I just dont understand why the emotions cannot be the poet's own, but rather are compared to combustible elements outside the poet's or artist's own being.

More on the Scholar

Sometimes I will be sitting in this literary criticism class, listening to all the discussion that is going on around me about how poetry can improve society and how some poet, some true poet will be able to express to the world what true Beauty and Art truly are, and I want to get out of my seat and proclaim, "What are we really talking about here? Why is this so important? What really is this Poetry (with a capital P) we are tossing around so effortlessly? What is Beauty (with a captial B)?" I want to scream these things, because I want to know them. I get the feeling that we discuss these essays to critique the authors' arguments and style, but I tend to want to know the philosophy behind the concepts. I want to understand the the Transcendentalists were trying to understand. I want to try to comprehend their thoughts.

So I tried to do this with this particular Emerson essay. I think he was much more clear and practical and easy to understand in this essay than in "The Poet." Emerson tries to describe his philosophy when he writes:

"The astronomer discovers that geometry, a pure abstraction of the human mind, is the measure of planetary motion...The ambitious soul sits down before each refractory fact; one after another, reduces all strange constitutions, all new powers, to their class and their law, and goes on for ever to animate the last fibre of organization, the outskirts of nature, by insight."

I think I understand that he is saying we can conceive of abstractions by understanding that the concrete, testable, tangible examples of such abstractions are, in fact, examples of them. If we can separate the two, then we can say that our minds--and our minds only-- can conceive of abstractions. Then Emerson goes on to say that the school-boy, the scholar can then preceive Nature and realize that "he and it proceed from one root; one is leaf and one is flower; relation, sympathy, stirring in every vein. And what is that Root? Is not that the soul of his soul? -- A thought too bold, -- a dream too wild."

I love that Emerson knows his thoughts are "too bold" and "too wild" but he proposes them anyway because, well, what if...? In my preceptions of his explanations, I think he is saying that the abstract stuff binds us together with Nature. The stuff that makes a flower a flower and a human a human are only examples of the abstract, and maybe that abstract is Beauty or respiration or knowledge or just life, and then that, in turn, is the soul. The Root is the soul, and the soul connects everything. (I swear I'm not taking drugs as I write this...)

Then Emerson writes that this realization is "the beauty of [the scholar's] own mind. Its laws are the laws of his own mind. Nature then becomes to him the measure of his attainments. So much of nature as he is ignorant of, so much of his own mind does he not yet possess. And, in fine, the ancient precept, 'Know thyself,' and the modern precept, 'Study nature,' become at last one maxim." Emerson is saying that if we do not know Nature, then we do not know ourselves. at first, I find this argument absurd because nature and humankind seem to be two completely separate things, but if we truly are connected in our most organic form, in how were bound by the abstractions of ourselves, then maybe this makes sense.

I know, Transcendentalism is completely egotistical if we really believe that we can be completely enlightened and understand the infinite wisdom of the universe soley through our minds, but isnt that how it goes? How else are we going to understand our purpose in this thing called "Life"? Is God going to reveal His mysteries to us? Well if He does, then how does He do it? Through our minds, of course! We are "Man Thinking." We are naturally thinking individuals. This is how we survive and thrive. This is what sets us apart from animals and nature, yet, it is also what brings us back to them. How else are we going to understand our situation? We think, therefore we are. We think so much that we start to understand abstractions of this world, and then we realize it is those abstractions that bind all of creation together. Particularly, it is The Abstraction that binds all of creation together. God.

American Scholar

I have to say I really enjoyed this essay by Emerson, maybe this is even Emerson at his best, though I am not an Emerson scholar. He presented his thoughts clearly and cleverly and they really resonated with my own thinking. I'm sure this was Emerson's point all along, to help me uncover my own enlightenment through his, though I don't think he would consider himself the true Scholar or Poet. Anyways, I have many thoughts about this essay, so I think I might post a few times on this one.

Emerson brings up the issue that we were to ruminate on for class, namely whether or not poetry can save the world. He writes, "Who can doubt, that poetry will revive and lead in a new age, as the star in the constellation Harp, which now flames in our zenith, astronomers announce, shall one day be the pole-star for a thousand years?" This is a huge, multi-layered issue to tackle. It seems easy to jump to a conclusion of "yes" or "no" with arguments that, of course, poetry has endured through the centuries and it is beautiful, or that poetry is too idealistic and just a bunch of lines on paper. How could it possibly save the world?! But then I think "poetry" is deeper than these two opposites. If this poetry that Emerson talks about is a way of thinking, a way of searching for the Truth through processed art or whatever you want to call it, then that means poetry might be significant to everyone, not just the pretentious English scholars sitting in a isolated classroom talking elevated talk, and that people may try to attain it, and in doing so, make the world better. Are you buying this?

I'd like to think like Emerson, but I can't do it. I keep reading his work with all these different lenses that make me me, and the one I think about now is my Christian lense. I want to say that poetry can't save the world because the world is unsaveable, at least until the Second Coming. We will never see peace and unified enlightenment because all humans are sinners. We are flawed by nature. Where Emerson writes that "out of an unknown antiquity" conveys an "unlooked-for wisdom, that the gods, in the beginning, divided Man into men," I see only one God shaking His head in disappointment when Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge. We are flawed because it is in our nature, our inherent being. Emerson hints that there is an innate scholar in all of us, that we can all comprehend the mysteries of the universe, but you know, I'm not sure how that all pans out.

I like Emerson's description of the unity of Man. He writes that for a man to "possess himself," he "must sometimes return from his own labor to embrace all the other laborers." Truly, we are all human and there has to be something that connects us all, but then Emerson so eloquently points out the problem with this unity when he writes, "the state of society is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters, -- a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man." Oh, I do love his descriptions. But what he says holds true. He talks of the mechanic only being likened to a machine and the sailor to a rope on the ship. Though I believe in Original Sin and the fact that we are all natural sinners, I also believe we were meant for more and we can try to attain that "more" in our lives. I agree with Emerson when he says that we are spiritual beings as well as earthly ones. It is the spiritual, or the divine, that we must seek in our lives because that is the aspect that is not so apparent or easy to come by in our day-to-day living. Yet we know that we do, in fact, have a spiritual side to ourselves and that when we engage it, we will be fulfilled to some degree, more of life will be revealed to us.

Emerson calls this possession of the self "Man Thinking." But he says this possession has become a "victim of society." The Man Thinking "tends to become a mere thinker, or, still worse, the parrot of other men's thinking." Man Thinking is a person who is active. He is not a philosopher pondering the intricacies of life in a cave or someone who cannot think his own thoughts. He is intentional about living. That is the key word, I think. Intentional.

I hesitate to use Emerson's words about his society for our society because I feel like he wouldnt want that and I dont think he intended for his work to be timeless, but hey, I'll do it anyways. How can I not? So I think maybe our society in general is not intentional about thinking in this way that Emerson describes. We are too caught up in the material, in this world, in our day-to-day lives, though Emerson later writes in his essay that he is able to find beauty in the ordinary and plain. Maybe my thoughts are far-fetched, but I really don't think that we are Man Thinking and Woman Thinking. If we truly personified this to the point of enlightenment, thenwe surely would have had a Poet or Scholar by now to help us uncover our own truth and beauty and then we would be unified as one and the world would be sunshine and rainbows, right?

No, I think thinking and ruminating and meditating are the stuff of idealized Platos and Buddhist monks. I mean, do we really have time to find enlightenment when we are so in this world. Like, I'm thinking about things at this moment but it is for a class assignment. I am not truly free in this thinking. And then when I'm not thinking like this (which is basically the rest of my day) I'm doing trivial things like thinking about what I'm going to have for lunch or searching profiles on Facebook. Awww, will I ever be able to grasp the infinite mysteries of life? Will any of us? What does that mean anyways?

The Convolution of Shelley

I have to say that I do not like Shelley as much as I like Emerson in the way of style and content. I would have to agree with modernist poets like T.S. Eliot and Allen Tate when they claimed he was too dreamy and self-absorbed. I also think he is even more long-winded than Emerson and his allusions, though intelligent, lose me in their density. I was able to see the similarities in his thought to the romanticism of Emerson, but Shelley also presented a different view of poetry and beauty as well.

Shelley also believed that poetry was divine. Does every poet think this? And is that because they are certainly biased, being poets themselves? How would these essays turn out differently if, say, Emerson was a merchant or Shelley was a shoemaker? Would these essays exist at all? I keep trying to convince myself that these men werent just stuffy old intellectuals sitting around in their houses, smoking cigars, completely cut off from the "common folk." They seem to have a lot to say about society and what is right or moral or purposeful living, so I hope a wide variety of people have been touched by their writing if they are, in fact, meaningful writers. I want to know if only college students, professors, and other intellectuals are the only ones reading this stuff, or if it could reach people on the streets of innercity Harrisburg or maybe the ex-cons I work with at a halfway house. Does this stuff really matter to society at large, or only the intellectuals of the world, whoever they may be.

But anyway, I digress. So Shelley believes that poetry is divine like the other poets, but he seems to be different from Emerson in that he doesnt place so much emphasis on one sole poet figure-- though he does talk about a poet or group of poets in the end of his essay. His emphasis seems to be on the political and social moral good or everyone, a utilitarian kind of approach. He says that poetry kindles the imagination to the degree that we can "locate ourselves in the place of another." This then unites individuals by breaking down the differences among them. He writes on pg. 700 that "poetry strengthens the moral nature of man" so it seems that poetry serves as an equalizing, practical medium for change.

But then Shelley goes back to the figures of the set-apart poets and says on pg. 714 that "poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds." This statement stuck out to me as a fluffy, simplistic assertion. I dont know why, but I just think Shelley's use of the word "happy" is so trivial when he could have used "joy" or "signficant" or "rich." It's like, Who cares that the poets are happy? Why does that matter?

Another thing....I'm confused by Shelley's emphasis on Drama. Is he talking about performed plays and how they exhibit poetry in the most authentic way. He writes at length about drama, particularly Athenian drama, and I wondered why drama would be a better representation of poetry than real life. I mean, maybe acting stimulates the imagination more than living day-to-day, but what about writing in other forms? Why drama?

Also, I tried to understand Shelley's view of religion, taking into account his biography as an atheist and non-conformist to societal institutions like marriage. I get the impression that he believes Christian doctrines have become evil through human manipulation in the form of "despotism and superstition" pg. 707 but he still believes in the "sacred and moral truths" as preached through Jesus Christ. I think he believes poetry can be found in religion, yet he ties social issues like personal slavery and freedom of women to that religion. His emphasis seems to be on social and moral good as the purpose of poetry, not the praise of the God he always rejected.

More Thoughts on Emerson

I had written down so much to say about this essay that, now, I dont think 1000 words is all that much for one week, though I may be eating those very words soon. Anyways, I have moved onto Thoreau's Walden and Civil Disobedience in my other class. I can see how he, also, resembles a writer of the Romantic period with his attention to individuality and rejection of knowledge of the past. He goes on at length in the beginning of Walden about rejection the knowledge his forefathers try to pass down to him. He boldly asserts, "Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new." He is a firm advocate for doing while he is leery of reading, that is, reading someone else's ideas and thoughts.

Similarly, I see how Emerson warns against reading. He sees merit in reading for its "transcendental and extraordinary" purpose. He will read a man's papers if that man is so "inflamed and carried away by his own thought, to that degree that he forgets the authors and the public." But he will not read if it has no transitive value for himself. He rejects the "arguments, histories, and criticisms" in reading probably because they are just someone else's work from the past, they do nothing for him. I think Thoreau would feel the same about this quote.

What is interesting is that both authors quote past philosophers and authors numerous times within their work, and thats not to say they criticize them or put down their work. Rather, they praise their work and use it to back up their own. Thoreau quotes Confucius, Hypocrites, and Evelyn while Emerson quotes Plato, Pythagoras, and the actions of the Greek god Pan, to name a few. I don't know if this makes both authors hypocritical in such a way as to discount their work or if it was fairly common to contradict one's self when they were alive and writing these things. Should we view these kinds of writers as credible voices from the past? Are they all we have to gage what are history is like through the medium of literature?

Emerson's "The Poet"

I approached this Literary Criticism class in which I am reading Emerson's work with much trepidation and nervousness, much to Dr. Powers delight, I'm sure. But then after reading Emerson's extremely eloquent and also long-winded essay on Art and Beauty as our first assignment, I realize that this class may not be so bad. I've found out, through this reading, that I am in fact a very critical person. Let's hope I do flourish in this class.

Seeing that I am a tride and true procrastinationist, I feel it may be excessive to write about what we have already discussed in class on Tuesday, so I'll start with my thoughts on Emerson as relating to William Bartram. Emerson writes that there is some "phlegm in our constitution" which prevents us from articulating the beauty of nature. He writes, "Too feeble fall the impressions of nature on us to make us artists. Every touch should thrill. Every man should be so much an artist that he could report in conversation what had befallen him." He goes on to claim that men do not have the speech to report such beauty. Now when I read the part about how every touch should thrill, I immediately thought of Bartram's extensive and precise catalogue of his travels through America in Travels of William Bartram. Each page is coated with praises of specific vegetation, each delicately crafted sentence is puncuated by an exclamation mark to the point of excessiveness. Can the man really not grow tired of the grammatical mark? Yet as I read Bartram's piece, I have to appreciate how much he knows of nature and I do have to appreciate his grandiose, lofty style in writing of it. The man really loves nature. Now I know-- at least, I think Emerson and Bartram were contemporaries, so I wonder what Emerson thought of Bartram. I gather from "The Poet" that Emerson still believes there is no suitable Poet for the time period in which he writes, but did he think Bartram was close to accurately and successfully writing of nature and beauty for the masses? Truly, Bartram wasnt writing for himself when he wrote his extended piece. He was writing for everyone back in England who would come to this foreign land called America. He was basically the man everyone relied on to tell them what America looked like, if it had a history, what the Indians were like, and if they could thrive and prosper there apart from their mother country. It seems Bartram was kind of the voice for the masses like the Poet is supposed to be. I know Bartram was just as much influenced by romanticism as Emerson was, with a strict belief in the importance and beauty in nature, but maybe Emerson wouldnt believe Bartram could be the Poet because Bartram's writing wasnt divine.

Emerson suggests in numerous places in his text that writing about art and beauty is something divine. On page 726, he claims that all poetry was written before time and that actual words and deeds-- supposedly the words and deeds of the poet-- are "indifferent modes of the divine energy. On page 738, Emerson says again that speech and song are "ejaculated as Logos or Word." To me, this seems to suggest that the words of the Poet are God-breathed. They are not own's one. They could essentially be regarded as holy and suitable for some kind of poetry bible. But then I wonder, how are we going to know our words arent our own. How will the Poet know? How does the Poet know he is the Poet? What if the Poet is female? Who's going to decide? I think this essay is very much a piece of its time and quite clearly and obviously, an Emersonian piece. Can we read this essay today and take it to heart for our own present time period? Surely, Emerson was wondering who this Poet could be for his time period only, not really for all of time in the present and future. He guesses that a poet could have arose in the past, but he says that "Milton was too literary, and Homer too literal." Emerson is then looking for a poet who is male, a romantic, an intellectual, and one who is knowledgeable of the social and political issues of that current time. He is looking for a poet who speaks and writes as he does, with such lofty sentence structure and diction. As I read the essay, I kept wondering if every contemporary of Emerson's really thought and spoke like him. Did anyone agree with his argument or was he some sappy recluse alone with his thoughts? If Emerson lived today, would we revere (sp?) him and agree with his thoughts, or is he just a product of his time? How then, I wonder, should I really read this essay and then apply what Ive read?