Claire Nagode's Eng 300 Blog

The End of English 300

2008-12-12T13:00:00.000-08:00

I have already said that I learned an unsurpassed amount this semester from Dr. Sexson, but I have also learned a lot from my fellow students. We are all here, as English major and minors, to celebrate the world of literature and of the word. I know I'm here because I love words and the ingenious ways they are put together to form sentences and phrases.

Language sticks in my head, that's how I know I wanted to be a writer. For some people it numbers, for others it's the science and formulas that make up our world and our planet. And for others, like my parents, its music; notes and rhythms that shape the world that they see and love. For us it's words, letters that build art, paint pictures of different worlds that anyone can visit at any time...as long as they can read.

I was thinking back to Jiwon and Douglas's individual presentations on their defenses for poetry and how they each talked about the barrier of different languages put up when you're in a country that doen't speak your antive language. I can't imagine how crippling it would feel to not be able to even read street signs, to have to import or bring whatever books you would need. I probably wouldn't be able to survive without being able to read. I'd probably withdraw into my own head, where I could write and experience my own stories. And then I'd become that crazy girl who's always talking to herself to never says anything and endlessly stares off into space, reading a novel that's not there.
And yes, I bet even dinosaurs liked to read.

The End of Don Quixote

2008-12-12T12:41:00.000-08:00

This is a very sad day. No longer will I be able to sit for an hour and listen to the poetry that is Dr. Sexson and his knowledge of literature. No longer will escape to the fantastical world of Don Quixote and the mad adventures of the Knight of the Lions, formally The Knight of the Sorrowful face. Don Quixote...and Don Quixote has come to an end in many ways on several levels.

One, I have finished the grandiose and epic novel Don Quixote. I will no longer be sharing any adventures with our brave knight and his ever faithful and endlessly humorous squire Sancho Panza. The book is done, the text has run out...there is no more. Oh, woe is me. No more. This is my love/hate relationship with a great work of fiction. I start out greedily gobbling up every page, sentence phrase and word of the story and end up creeping along through the last chapter or so. Because, like a child, I don't want the story to end. I want to forever ride with Don Quixote across the perilous earth of ancient...ish...Spain, defending the weak and righting wrongs...but maybe not so much of the beating.

The second way Don Quixote is coming to an end is his return to sanity and his old idenitity of Antonio Quixote. In his last few days of life, Don Quixete supposedly returns to sanity and casts out his books of chivarly as well as condems his past actions of "madness". The Ironic thing here is that all of his friends and family who wanted so desperately for Don Quixote to be sane, wanted him mad again. Carrasco went to such great lengths to "save" Don Quixote from his madness, he probably killed him; physically with his lance and spiritually with his banishing him from knighthood. The seem to realize that his madness was the only thing that was keeping him alive; through the endless beatings and perilous injuries. Knights don't die until they have achieved their goal, and Don Quixote was deprived of his goal...which was really to die as a knight. He was forced to die as Antonio, in the world of reality, forced into sanity.

And finally, Don Quixote is over because, frankly, he dies. The author gives a final farewell and leaves us with a lesson and instructs us to trust in his Don Quixote and no other after Don Quixote finishes his will and condems his madness. It's an ending that's expected, but I can't help but feel disappointed at Don Quixote's surrender to death and reality. I'm still mulling over his true motivations and what is means that he returned once again to Antonio and cast out Don with such heartless freedom.

Well, now it's done. I think I'll start another classic novel. I've been inspired by Kari to look into The Three Musketeers. I feel that now I'm in the mode of epic romantic adventures and want to continue. To be honest, I've never read anything like Don Quixote before and I've fallen in love with it. I feel like I'm reading something delicate, refined, and epic. Something that has run through the veins of literary history and connects readers from all generations and times. It's like how reading Shakespeare makes one real inspires this sublime sensation, well, at least it does for me.

Apology of Defence

2008-12-11T12:14:00.000-08:00

This post is a little late, but I was thinking back to our individual presentations on our person Apologies of Poetry. I was thinking about how a number of students forgot what we learned from Aristotle and literally apologized for being English majors. I think it would be impossible to apologize for being the person that you are; a lover of literature, because it can't be helped not to mention warrant any apologetic feelings.

But the phrase apology for poetry can be very deceiving, because neither of the two key words in the phrase mean what they traditionally mean to us American speakers of English. This reflects on the genius of words and language and what the "truth" behind words go. You're not apologizing for the seemingly pointlessness of poetry, but defending a life of literature and you're devotion to it. The genius of the confusing meaning and meanings that words hold is part of the defense. Language as well as writing can be either a maze or a field, it's up to the author as well as the reader which one.

I think the different reaction and interpretations of the assignment stemmed from the individual's perception of literature as well as their friends and families' perceptions. I found that there was a correlations between the literal apologies and the students confession that their parents or friends had a problem with them becoming a English or Literature...person. Where as, say my paper, was more of a defense and a tying together of my major and minor, and I know at least with me, my parents acceptance and encouragement of my scholarly choices, had something to do with my position.

Presentations

2008-12-11T11:59:00.000-08:00

I have to say that the last group that presented on Wednesday did an awesome job. Well, both groups did. I'm amazed at how many closet actors and actress he have hiding in the English department. What I've always liked about taking classes in the English world, is that the students of literature never seem afraid to have fun with any assignment, be it a 12 page paper or a free oral presentation. Not only did they do an outstanding job of embodying their school of criticism, but they embodied the element of fictional fantasy that is in Don Quixote as well as in our hearts as students of literature, language and writing.

Shooting a video that told a story and also innerweaved the fictional quality, as well as the fantastical quality that all these different critics from different places and times interact IN the story that Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are partaking in.

Group 6, also did an amazing job with psychoanalysis theory and had me giggling the whole time.

I love th notion of intertextuality. That all texts are connected and share and intimate if not invisible relationship. There are strings tying all pieces of literature together, and to be able to see, or find them all, one has to wear many different criticism spectacles. For you can't see all possible ties, themes, ideas, or...basically EVERYTHING without looking at a text in every possible way.
But I also think that a text can and should be read as merely a text. To be read for enjoyment, before analysis. Because if we concentrate on only what a text means, or what it is trying to say, I feel we forget why we started reading in the first place; to experience the joy and wonder of a world outside the reality we are rooted in.

So a balance between study and joy must be found, and I think as English majors and minors we are doing just that. For we all started out reading for the pure fun of it, and now we wish to delve deeper into the world of words and stories.

D.Q. ( and not Dairy Queen)

2008-12-11T11:18:00.000-08:00

I've come a long ways in reading Don Quixote since my last post. I am now on page 934, and have literally the very last chapter of six or seven pages to read. But, like so many a great book I have read before I put off finishing it. I have always had trouble closing a work of fiction that has taken me on so many adventures and and had be experience so many emotions. I can't bare to part with the fabulous fantasy of knights, dukes and duchess, enchanters and madmen. Another example of a favorite book of mine that I have yet to fully read is Douglas Adam's Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. True it's about 6 books long, but I can't bare for it to be over and go on my "read" shelf.

Now, many a thing have happened in the grand adventures of Sancho and our hero over the course of the last 162 pages. Sancho, even though he was succeeding and expressing the dazzling and mystifying depth of his wit and intellect, gave up being a governor. "Naked did he arrive as a governor and naked did he leave" after a stages attack on his insula. Sancho, in his wisdom, decided he wasn't able as a governor and was more suited to live as a father, husband and squire. So his family got their more impossible dreams answered, even after much protest did Sancho's wife Teresa burst with happiness and pride when she received the letters from her husband and the Duchess.

While Sancho was having his adventures, Don Quixote had his own with the staff of the Dukes estate. Cruel tricks of illusionary lovers scorned and evil cats plagued him while he stayed in the Fun House of Knights Errant. They test and tease his honor and valor and are disappointed by his grandiose responses or his shrieks of pain when they attack him.

And on page 832, I found a wonderful insight to Don Quixote's motivations to be a knight errant:
"Freedom, Sancho, is one of the most precious gifts heaven gave to men; the treasures under the earth and beneath the sea cannot compare to it; for freedom, as well as for honor, one can and should risk one's life, while captivity, on the other hand, is the greatest evil that can befall men."

I see this as not only as the core of Don Quixote's motivation and adventurous quests of a knight errant, but also as a confession of the author Cervantes himself. If we take the psychoanalysis approach we see this as Cervantes reflecting on the time he spent in prison as well as a kind of moral to live by. Live free and be happy, but live locked up and live a stunted and...not free life.

And Alas! Our hero is defeated by the vengeful Knight of the Moon, who is also the Knight of the Woods and the Knights of Mirrors, who is none other that the scurvy knave the bachelor, Senor Sanson Carrasco. So Don Quixote returns home to live a year not as a knights, as were the terms of his defeat. Sanson believes he is saving Don Quixote from the peril of living as a knights, but he is doing nothing more that sentencing Don Quixote to a prison sentence and the choking off of his freedom will very well kill him I believe.
By the end of it all Don Quixote seems more sane ever, and thus more miserable.

One of my favorite things about this novel is it's Metafictional qualities. On page 914, is the most perfound moment of metafiction I believe.
"Cide Hamete goes on to say that in his opinion the deceivers are as mad as the deceived, and that the duke and the duchess came very close to seeming like fools since hey went to such lengths to deceive two fools, who, one sleeping soundly and the other keeping watch over his unrestrained thoughts, were overtaken by daylight and filled with the desire to arise..."
I think this goes goes straight to one of the core themes of the novel, true madness. Who is more mad, the old man who lives his fictional fantasy in a world of hard reality, of the supposed sane person who goes mad over trying to either make Don Quixote sane or those who obsess over his suffering and "foolishness". In the end I see the duke and duchess as bigger fools and mad-people than Don Quixote or Sancho will ever be, for their excessive cruelty and extravagant lengths of torture.

Well, I'll end it here so I can more to write about to fill more entries :)

On a Life of Literature

2008-12-09T16:30:00.000-08:00

I have to say that Dr. Sexson's Survey of Criticism is one of the most important English classes of my school career. I'm sure all students say this after their first Sexson class, but it's true. When I first started off the semester I thought maybe it would pertain as much as it has to my life of and in literature. Sexson, with the help of Dr. Downs, have opened my eyes to a whole other side of writing I never thought about exploring before; one being poetry and the other the "professional" essay. Now, I've Poetry in Creative Writing, and dabbled a little when I was younger, but I don't mean just poetry in the literal version, as all the critics of this semester past have taught us. I mean words that move the reader in some significant way. Words that warrant repeating. But, I suppose that's all our dreams. But before I was preparing to write in the world of film, now I'm thinking about...well, everything.

Being a good writer also means being not only a good reader, but an inventive and engaged reader. It's a popular saying in screen writing that there are no new stories, just new spins on the old ones. So what better world to immerse myself in than the one of stories and fictional inspiration. For, as I have said before, reality is boring and I'd much rather live in a fictional worlds of awesomeness. And now I want to do nothing more than lock myself away with the gargantuan mountain of books that has backed up on my "To Read" list I've been compiling since high school. But responsibility and reality keep me firmly rooted to the ground...for now. I'm hatching a scheme as we speak...

That all said and done, Monday in class when we started to talk about the different school of criticism we've covered (New, Deconstructionism, Feminism, and Reader Response) and how we, as critics, wear different glasses or see through different lens when we read and/or analysis a text in a certain mode of criticism.

I personally believe that it is impossible to read a text and bring nothing of yourself to the "literary table". I could never be a New Critic because I can't help but be inspired by what I read. This inspiration, or epiphany if you will, sticks with me when I analyze the text more deeply and that's not text centric. Deconstructionism is something I might have an easier time seeing eye to eye with. Being that my thoughts that were inspired by reading the text are part of the text themselves.

I do have to say it was interesting looking through the eyes of a feminist critic and even though I loved Don Quixote for what it was and never really thought of it as anything else. When I looked at the novel through the feminist lens I saw things and viewed characters in a way I never had even thought about before. And again, my love of the novel goes unchanged, but I feel as if my insight has deepened a wee smidgen.

Results of Literature

2008-12-01T17:25:00.000-08:00

First...
http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/marvell/coy.htm

When results of literature was mentioned in class today, my foggy mind finally woke a little. I thought almost immediately of a book I read in my high school senior AP English class; Life of Pi by Yann Martel. It's one of my all time favorite books. Not only for the bizarre/impossible/amazing/frightening realism along, but the emotional turmoil it creates at the end. Not to mention the lengthy and often heated arguments that result. But what I really love is how differently people react. I wish I could tell you more but I insists that anyone who hasn't read it, do so and tell me what you think. All I can tell you is that it involves a little boy getting stranded out at sea in a life boat with a tiger. Well, not just a tiger, but he ends up with only a tiger. Interest peaked? I sure hope so. It is a touchstone in my literature life, and it rocks my socks off.
I enjoy all kinds of literature; science fiction to Shakespeare and everything in between. But literature that tests the core morals of one's very soul (dun, dun, duuuun) just fascinates me. It shakes people and makes them think not for hours or days, but months to years. It sticks with you for life and becomes a part of it. Neat, huh.

Oh, and I was thinking of the question of who my favorite place traveled with a character in a novel and I have to say I think it would have to be Middle Earth with The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

Don Quixote

2008-11-24T08:15:00.000-08:00

I am now on page 772 of Don Quixote. Don Quixote and the house maid (or maiden), Senora Dona Rodriguez were just flogged in the middle of the night in the dark by unknown assailants. Sancho has been sent to govern his insula by order of the tricksers, the Duke and Duchess. Just after he arrives Sancho is confronted with several tests, or more accurately jokes. The Duke sent peasants to mock and try and confuse our poor Sancho, but Sancho surprises us all by showing us his hidden wisdoms of the hundreds of proverbs he has stuffed into his meaty brain. He uses his madness and simplemindedness to excel at ingenious unveiling of frauds.
When Sancho discovers the truth behind the mystery of the money lending between the two friends the secret of the older man's cane I was reminded of the myth of the two women both claiming to be the mother of the same child. The king solves the argument by saying that they should just cut the child in half so they both could have a part. One woman agreed and the other refused and said the other woman could have it. Thus the king knew that the woman who refused was the true mother because no mother would allow her child to get cut in half...one hopes.
To go off on a small tangent, in the third paragraph on page 738 and interesting line said by none other than Cervantes started my mind wheels a-turning.

"...for there can be no humor where there is no intelligence..."
This is but one of Cervantes little interjections that makes this book not only a Metafiction but oh so delightful to read. Sometimes these little inserts are clever, ironic, or just add to the story. This one provoked me to think about true humor opposed to comedy. Something can be comical, like a Stooge getting slapped with a carp, but not humorous. Humor requires insight and knowledge because humor often involves irony or the mockery of something higher
than ones self. If someone doesn't have the intelligence, the worldly knowledge that revolves around irony they won't get the humor and can't produce it.

The Greeks, crazy philosophers that they are, believed that "humor" was a sort of "human sap" that controlled human health and emotions which derived from the theory of Humorism. It's really quite interesting so here's a Wiki link.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humorism

The other day when Sexson brought up Metafiction in class I was very excited because the interjections of Cervantes had been fascinating me ever since I begun reading the novel. The books is riddled with metafictional delights and tidbits but the most recent one I ran across was on page 738 at the beginning of Chapter XLIV. Cervantes is yet again commenting on the previous versions of Don Quixote and the debates over the possible discrepancies. Don Quixote is such an old story it is alterations along the way because it essentially started as a orally produced and passed on story.

And finally at the end of the adventure of the Wooden Horse in which Sancho shows his desire to be just as mad as Don Quixote and succeeds at being his own enchanter. There's a line uttered by Don Quixote that I've wrestling with for a few days. It brings into question Don Quixote's madness and if he truly is as mad as he leads us to believe.

"Sancho, just as you want people to believe what you have seen in the sky, I want you to believe what I saw in the Cave of Montesinos. And that is all I have to say." - Don Quixote
-pg. 727

It seems to me that Don Quixote either believes Sancho and sympathizes with him and his experience with people doubting him and what he says, or Don Quixote is hinting and both Sancho's and his own madness and fabrication of wonders for the sake of knightly adventures. It seems like Don Quixote is trying to persuade Sancho to believe him, but at the same time I sense an underlining irony of truth vs desired or poetic truth. The poetic truth is that Sancho really saw what he saw in the sky and Don Quixote really did experience his three day adventure of enchanters and enchantment down in the cave and the irony is that we know Don Quixote is mad but I feel more compelled to believe Don Quixote's madness over Sancho's.

My Apology

2008-11-24T08:13:00.000-08:00

Claire Nagode
300 Survey of Criticism
“Apology for Poetry/Literature”

“Reason respects the differences, and imagination the similitudes of things” (Percy Shelly). Shelly is where I find my support and inspiration for this Apology for Poetry, or more specifically, for being a student, writer and lover of literature. I write this paper not as a Literature Major, and not even as a English Major, but as a film major minoring in writing. Film and literature are very similar in that they both tell stories, one with words and others with images. But don't those words in the novels and poems we love so dearly paint images in our minds? If some one, not an english minded individual, looks at films and literature they see the reasonable differences; the medium, the device, the production, the consumer, but if one looks with the imaginative mind, with poetry seeing eyes if you will, they see only ways of telling a story, of reflecting the images of reality through characters, plot and words. Literature and film belong in the same boat, so to speak. They entertain, delight, and inform, even if not on the same level. No one can argue that the poetry of Wallace Steves is more “sublime” than Dumb and Dumber, but which holds more irony? And another thought to chew on is how much more sublime is Steves' poetry when compared to a film such as Hero? A film in which the very images hold their own beauty and poetry and consequently moves a person towards inspiration. But can a film really do that? Can a film “awaken and enlarge the mind itself by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought.”? (Shelly). I think so, or well, I hope so.
I've always loved storytelling, whether I was the one doing the telling or whether I was the one experiencing the telling. Stories create opportunities to experience things you might not even get the chance to in real life. Take Don Quixote and his tragic/comedic/romantic/ironic adventures, he is the perfect example. In his day in age, the time of chivalrous knights and epic quests was long gone, and possibly mostly fictional to begin with. But he imitated the fictions that imitated the life of a knight errant. Take a moment and think about the last time you let go of all your social inhibitions and just pretended, played make-believe, with the staggering freedom in which Don Quixote does. Don Quixote is like a child, playing the make believe game of knights errant. However, even a child, who even though they believe with all their heart that they really are a world famous knight, saving with world from evil and injustice, in their heads, they still know it's just a game. Now Don Quixote believes that he is a knight, his is no longer merely imitating the heroic knights from his novels, he is one of those knights, no matter how mad they say he is or how confused he gets when the people he meets appear to believe him. Don Quixote is a child of imagination and imitation in a “man's” world of reality and reason. Just as we lovers of literature are somewhat blinded by the romance of it all. We chose the hazardous quest of art, beauty and storytelling over the stability of business, medicine, or law. We chose to continue the tradition of imitating the potential of the world and people around us instead of weaving the fabric of the real world we have to live in.
As lovers of literature , English majors, and even film majors ,we choose the path of something higher. When we read the works of artists past, we step out of the 21st century and into another. One that always seems to hold more poetry and beauty that our own could ever dream of. And thus the spark of the chase to catch that dream of beauty. No matter what story we tell, what poem of beautiful words we compose, we are creating something higher than ourselves. “Poetry is indeed something divine. It is at once the center and the circumference of knowledge; it is that which comprehends all science, and that to which all science must be referred. It is at the same time the root and blossom of all other systems of thought.” (Shelly). We strive to capture the golden inner beauty of the brazen world and chip away the outer shell that is reality. Reality is obtainable while we strive to create verbal equivalent of the unreachable divine. Poetry is the stepping ladder to the divine.
As students of language and stories we see the world differently. We see more then the face value, more even than the reality of something. We see deep inside, all the way to the potential magnificence someone or something holds. In Don Quixote, during our valiant knight's conversation with Sanson, a light reflected the heart of our literary dedication, as english majors, or minors. “ 'That is true' said Sanson, ' but it is one thing to write as a poet and another to write as a historian; the poet can recount or sing about things not as they were, but as they should have been, and the historian must write about them not as they should have been, but as they were, without adding or subtracting anything from the truth.' ” (476). When we write a story or a poem, we aren't chained down by silly things such as realism, accuracy, or absolute truth. And we have the concept of “suspension of disbelief” to support our wandering from the path of “true”. It's interesting to me because I first heard this phrase in a film class when discussing how films and stage plays defy what the audience might consider “right', “true” or “normal” and it's the audience's participation in their suspension that makes fiction possible. I don't know of anybody who could watch a film, go to a stage play, or read a novel and become upset because the hero jumped a motorcycle off a plane, lived a life time in two hours, or traveled around mid evil Spain fighting injustice. Sure the action sequence was ridiculous and repeatedly defied gravity, but that's not the point. The story is the point. The experience reading, watching or hearing whatever is was/is that our fellow story lover has to say. The point is the experience of the imitation, not the accuracy of it's truth. Why would we take the time to travel to another world that has to follow all of the same rules as our own? The goal one has in mind when sitting down to experience a fictional story isn't one of historical accuracy, but divine escape, enlightenment, entertainment, and if nothing else to experience something new.
The truth is, no matter how much someone may resist it, we all need poetry. And I mean poetry in the sense of all fictional storytelling genres or mediums. We need an escape from our boring world and what better escape than to see the potential beauty of that world. We're here, in English 300, to carry on the tradition of the divine beauty of storytelling, in whatever form. We see more merit in pursuing the mysteries of language, of literature, storytelling, fiction, poetry and art than pursuing financial gain ( because we all know how much there is to be found in writing) or some other science. Poetry and literature encompass the entire breath of human and superhuman experience, so in essence we study and pursue all things human, and even stretch upwards towards the divine. When you write, you can go anywhere; philosophically, spiritually, emotionally , scientifically even physically. Have you ever read something that described something so well it was like someone had inputted the image straight into your mind? It's like you're really there seeing, smelling and experiencing the story being told.
Don Quixote embodies our goal as english majors/minors. He's living the impossible dream of pure fiction, that we, or at least I, aim and dream for. He sees the world at and in it's full potential, all the time. He lives it while we struggle to embody it in words, mere letters of representation. Don Quixote is that representation. He's a fictional character in a fiction about him being in a fiction where the author reflects on it's fictionalness, but one can't help but feel a little whimsical about the possible meanings behind Don Quixote imitating past fictions and taking them as reality. As a lover of stories I'm obliged to imagine the possibility that Don Quixote is in fact an actual history about a crazy old man who wandered around Spain as a knight errant. I think the funnest part of experiencing a work of fiction is imagining beyond the “letteralness” of the words and what they are saying, and play the “what-if” game. What if this was true? And why not? What is fiction if not a catalyst to think outside and far beyond the box of reality? Just look at Don Quixote. He wasn't merely content with thinking outside the box of reality by only reading the fictions about knights. No, he went as far as to become part of that world, a world of romance, adventure and glory. He kept the journey one experiences while reading a fiction alive by becoming part of that fiction himself.

Genre of Van Winkle

2008-11-17T18:27:00.000-08:00

During lecture Monday Sexson brought up the literary genre of a character dreaming a whole lifetime in the matter of a few hours or less. This being found in all fictional storytelling entertainment mediums; film with the eternally classic Dorthy's quest to the Wizard of Oz, literature with Alice and her magical trip to Wonderland, and even television with Captain Jean-Luc Picard and the episode of the "Space Probe".

Walking out of the classroom the tale of Rip Van Winkle popped into my head. This literary genre of sorts seems to stem from this classic story of a lazy, slothful farmer who gets drunk with a bunch of enchanted bowlers and falls asleep for twenty years. However, the literary genre talked about in class is more of a reverse of this tale, the world imagined possessing the drastic time leaps, not the real world as in Rip Van Winkle. And another thing is that Rip Van Winkle is more of a moral cautionary tale. Don't be lazy of ghosts will bowl you into a twenty year coma. And the happy ending of Rip being accepted again and learning from his evil slothy ways. Perhaps this explains the occasional epiphany a character achieves, or obtains while away in their unconscious, dreamy timeless world. They learn from their Cave of Montesinos adventures about themselves of whatever quests they are on.

Now, I am now on page 693 of Don Quixote and all hell is breaking loose. Don Quixote has fallen into the clutches of the Dutches and her Duke their entire household is having way too much fun at Don Quixote's madness's expense. A horde of demons is now descending down upon our white knight , The Knight of the Lions with a somewhat Sorrowful Face . The Knight's face is Sorrowful, not the Lions mind you.
I see Don Quixote's innocence being mocked and threatened at the same time. All this time he has been wondering about believing in his own madness and then the Duchess and Duke come along. They're like two mean adults who take the child's game of pirates too far and drive out to the lake to strand their kid on the beach. And poor Don Quixote is the child wondering why his father has replaced his hand with a hook and keeps referring to his mother as a wench. They're playing along with his game of Romantic Golden Knights and Don Quixote, and Sancho, don't know whether to believe it themselves or take them all for mad.

Touchstone and Frye

2008-11-06T17:20:00.000-08:00

Well, I think it's impossible to pick out merely one or two so called "touchstones". And I don't think I've read enough of the literature that is (supposedly) produces a moment of sublime...ness. I read as a writer, not a literature major. When I come across a passage that is cleverly worded and beautifully elegant, I feel this "sublime" moment of inspiration and pleasure. But here are a few of the touchstones that I remember most and never get tired of rereading.

From one of all time FAVORITE books Bored of the Rings (which is, if you don't know or couldn't guess it, a parody of The Lord of the Rings):

The company stood rooted to the ground in terror. The creature was about fifty feet tall, with wide lapels, long dangling participles, and a pronounced gazetteer.
"Aiyee!" shouted Legolam. "A Thesaurus!"
"Maim!" roared the monster. "Mutilate, mangle, crush. See HARM."

and

...At last the fighting was over and the long-parted friends ran to each other with joyful greetings.
"Joyful greetings!" cried Moxie and Pepsi.
"The same and more to you, I'm sure," said Goodgulf, stifling a yawn of recognition.
"Hail fellow well met," bowed Legolam, "May your dandruff worries be over forever."
Gimlet limped over to the two boggies and forced a smile.
"Pox vobiscum. May you eat three balanced meals a day and have healthful, regular bowel movements."
"How comes it," said Arrowroot, "that we meet in this strange land?"
"It is a tale long in the telling," said Pepsi, pulling out a sheaf of notes.
"Then save it," said Goodgulf..

If you haven't read this book, you should. Even if you don't like Lord of the Rings...actually, especially if you don't like Lord of the Rings. Me, I love it, it's one of my all time favorites and this small crazy book makes it all the better. The entire book is a touchstone...for me.
I love the madness of the language and the ridiculous use of the Thesaurus, which I adore and probably use everyday.

Next, is my favorite thus far, of Shakespeare's plays, Titus Andronicus. I've never figured out why this is my favorite. It's the first film version of a Shakespeare play I've ever seen and I think the powerful performances make it stick out in my mind. I love the gothic and morbid tone of the entire play. There are lines that strike me as ingenious or moving, but my favorite send the string of shivers down my spine, arms, and legs.

TITUS ANDRONICUS
Who doth molest my contemplation?
Is it your trick to make me ope the door,
That so my sad decrees may fly away,
And all my study be to no effect?
You are deceived: for what I mean to do
See here in bloody lines I have set down;
And what is written shall be executed.

This is from the last act in the play, when Titus has descended fully into madness. Tamora has come to his house, disguised as Revenge and her sons as Rape and Murder. And even though Titus is mad, he knows it Tamora and her rapist sons, so he tricks her into leaving her sons with Titus and consequently leaves them to their death to be baked in a pie.
I think the fact that this is one of Shakespeare's darkest and most morbid plays, makes me like it even more. It's so different from my other favorites; Midsummer Night's Dream, As You Like it, Othello, and Henry V.

TITUS ANDRONICUS
I am not mad; I know thee well enough:
Witness this wretched stump, witness these crimson lines;
Witness these trenches made by grief and care,
Witness the tiring day and heavy night;
Witness all sorrow, that I know thee well
For our proud empress, mighty Tamora:
Is not thy coming for my other hand?

I couldn't think of any touchstones from poetry that didn't come from songs. But hey, I'm not a literature major so I don't think like one. I'm a film major who loves to read and write.

Now moving on to my "Woo woo" moments from Frye's Mythos of the Seasons.
From the Mythos of Summer: Romance, I found this light bulb line:

"The central form of romance is dialectical: everything is focused on a conflict between he hero and his emeny, and all the reader's values are bound up with the hero...hence the opposite poles of the cycles of nature are assimilated to the opposition of the hero and his enemy."
-187

Since the conflict of the hero takes place in our world, the world of cycles and seasons, the arch or shape of the story and the characters follows the same patterns as nature does with the seasons. The villain is the cold and darkness of winter and the hero embodies the youth, strength, and light of spring.
Then: The Mythos of Autum: Tragedy

"In it's most elementary form, the vision of law (dike) operates as lex talionis or revenge. The hero provokes enmity, or inherits a situation of enmity, and the return of the avenger constitutes the catastrophe."
-209

When read this, I sat and tried to think of all of the tragic stories I know and how many revolved around or even merely involved the theme or aspect of revenge. And let me tell you, there are more than a fair few. Now, that doesn't mean that any story in which there is revenge is automatically a tragedy, it depends on the fate of the hero and the other characters as a result of the revenge or the quest for revenge. And another woo woo from this section:

"Tragedy, in short, seems to elude the antithesis of moral responsibility and arbitrary fate, just as it eludes the antithesis of good and evil"
-211

Finally, the Mythos of Winter: Irony and Satire.

"The chief distinction between irony and satire is that satire is militant irony: it's moral norms are relatively clear and it assumes standards against which the grotesque and the absurd are measured."
"...whenever a reader is not sure what the author's attitude is or what his own is supposed to be, we have irony with relatively little satire."
-223

"Hence satire is irony which is structurally close to the comic: the comic struggle of two societies, one normal and the other absurd, is reflected in it's double focus of morality and fantasy. Irony with little satire is the non-heroic residue of tragedy, centering on a theme of puzzled defeat."
-224

Before this, I was actually a little unsure what the real difference between irony and satire were. But now, thanks yet again to Frye, I understand that they can work together but are different types of stories and hold different themes.

Don Quixote

2008-11-05T17:57:00.000-08:00

I am now on page 657 in my readings of Don Quixote. I found many an interesting and "woo woo" filled moments whilst reading but I'll concentrate of the few I thought were the most relevant to our class discussions and other readings.
But first, I'd like to start off by saying that we ALL need to work together at bringing this phrase back into popular use:

"The tambourine's in just the right hands." - Sancho pg. 602
This of course means that "matters are being handled by someone competent." Just imagine the literary and vocabulary fun and adventures you could have!

Anyway...I found several delicious bites of irony in reading this section, one being in the conversation between Don Quixote, Sancho, the cousin. On page 600, the cousin is explaining what we writes about and is convinced that his books containing irrelevant facts, such as who got the first cold ever, are masterful works full of "allegories, metaphors, and transformations that delight, astonish, and instruct, all at the same time."

After hearing this, good ol' D.Q. responded:
"You have said more, Sancho, than you realize. For there are some who exhaust themselves learning and investigating things that, once learned and investigated, do no matter in the slightest to the understanding or the memory." The day was spent in this agreeable conversation, and others like it."
-601

The cousin is one of those investigating and leaning all those things that do not matter and yet he agrees with Don Quixote when he says this. I want to believe that Don Quixote knew what he was saying and was giggling to himself as the cousin went on heartily agreeing with him. I can't really tell if that was intended irony, or if I'm just trying to read too much into it, but I'm leaning more towards intended than not.

The next piece of irony I found on pages 630 and/through 632. This is the section containing the puppet show performed by a disguised escaped gallery slave that D.Q. had freed earlier. ( I love how past characters keep showing up to help confuse and baffle poor Don Quixote). Before Don Quixote takes it upon himself to avenge the menaced puppets, he's commenting, loudly, on the realism, or truthfulness of the show. First:

"Boy, boy,' said Don Quixote in a loud voice, 'tell your story in a straight line and do not become involved in curves or transverse lines, for to get a clear idea of the truth, one must have proofs and more proofs."

Then on page 632, when Don Quixote objects again to the straying from the concrete truth by objecting to the Moor's use of bells instead of drums:

This was heard by the Master Pedro, who stopped the ringing and said, "Your grace should not concern yourself with trifles, Senor Don Quixote, or try to carry things to far that you never reach the end of them. Aren't a thousand plays performed almost every day that are full of a thousand errors and pieces of nonsense, and yet are successful productions that are greeted not only with applause but with admiration?"

And Don Quixote agrees. The irony lies in that before, Don Quixote was screaming the Platoian cry of Truth! Truth! But then he accepts it for what it is, a play. A imitation of events and people for the sake of enjoyment. But then Don Quixote turns around yet again, just a few lines later, and sees the play's attack on the innocent puppet characters and ,even though he just a puppet version of Don Gaiferos, D.Q. can't take such injustices acted upon such a knight so he wipes out not only the puppets but the whole play and stage. The ring of irony runs full circle; from desire of actual truth, to suspension of disbelief, back to the "actual" truth of the offenses acted upon a great knight, a puppet version of that knight, but still an embodiment of that knight. And that was enough for our valiant Don Quixote of La Mancha.
The irony lies in the wishy-washy foundation of when truth is necessary. And to begin with, the whole concept of truth is grotesquely skewed by Don Quixote's pick and choose, then fabricate and then maul kind of mentality . And then he wants accurate truth (like the truth found in his books of chivalry) but is then able to accept the events as a play, a showing of imitations with the intent to entertain and delight, and then goes back to his mad truth and stops the vicious attacks on the puppets, that he had just accepts as being imitations that entertain. But thus is the madness of madmen.

Now, this brings me to my big Woo Woo. In the beginning of Chapter XXIX, specifically on 647 and 648, Don Quixote and Sancho come upon a small fishing boat pulled up on shore. And the first thing Don Quixote says and thinks is hey, this was put here for me to partake in a fabulous and chivalrous adventure. It (finally) hit me, in a very woo woo like fashion, that Don Quixote is like a child. He embodies the innocence a child holds before they experience life and learn from it. Now Don Quixote has experienced life, drank deep from it's cup, if I may. But he has completed the circle of experience, only in a new, mad way. Instead of starting at innocence, rounding to experience and knowledge, and finishing on the "innocence" (or lack of thought that couldn't be innocent) of death, Don Quixote begins at innocence as an innocent child, rounds into an experienced adult, but then circles back to childlike innocence through the his migration to the fantasy world of Romance.

When a child sees a lone boat, parked in the middle of no where with no one to be found, you can bet they're gonna play in it. They're going to pretend the boat was sent to him by Zeus in order for him to sail to the Underworld to retrieve a bolt of fired earth so Zeus can rekindle his fire of sky and lightening ...or something like that. A child will pretend, just as Don Quixote does, that they are in some magical world of fantasy and dragons. And like Don Quixote with his oh-so-special madness, a child can rope others, adults (the supposedly sane) into playing along in their worlds of make believe and can even get other children (crazies) to believe in the very world itself.

Finally, this brings me to a few passages I found in Frye that relate directly to my ideas of Don Quixote as an innocent child.
"The perennially childlike quality of romance is marked by its extraordinary persistent nostalgia, it's search for some kind of imaginative golden age in time or space."
-Frye 186

Does that not embody Don Quixote to his very core? Is he not trapped in a "persistent nostalgia" searching ,or maybe it's better to say, living "some kind of imaginative golden age"? You can imagine my excitement when I found this passage? Everything that Don Quixote is and all that he represents, neatly packaged and tied up with a bow in a single sentence. Don Quixote stays true to his innocence. Everything we, or Sancho, sees as normal or ordinary, Don Quixote sees as fantastical and full of impossible possibilities. He is forever living in the romantic traditions of yesteryear. This entire (almost) 1000 page novel is about the saga of Don Quixote as he struggles to stay innocent in his madness, despite all of the best efforts of his friends, family, and even strangers, surrounded by a world of experience and experiences.
And just when I didn't think it could get any better...

"In romance the central theme of this phase is that of the maintaining of the integrity of the innocent world against the assault of experience."
-Frye pg. 200

Don Quixote maintains the integrity of his innocent under the endless assaults of reality and its experiences rained down upon him by Sancho, the barber, the priest, and basically everyone else Don Quixote has ever met. He even experiences his folly when he mistakes a windmill for a giant, a statue for a captured damsel, and suffers the very physical consequences. But our valiant knight perseveres, and stays the innocent, mad knight we all know and love. His will shall never wavier in his conviction, his innocent marriage to the Romance of the Golden Age of knights.

I think we all need to take a few moments and really remember the innocence of our childhood. In doing so, we all realize that each and everyone of us was once a tiny Don Quixote. Rowing our enchanted boats, storming our blanket fort castles, saving our favorite stuffed dog Scruffy from blood thirsty kitty pirates. However we played as a child, we were, without a doubt, in the realm of romance, where innocence ran supreme and experience was just a proverbial notch on our belt, or plane, or sword, or maybe even a wand. Depends on one's preferences.

Jung

2008-11-05T08:09:00.000-08:00

I am Carl Jung and my theory of the Collective Unconscious consists of archetypes of the human psyche, and they are the Shadow, the Anima and the Animas, the Divine Couple, The Child, and the Self.

http://dresdencodak.com/cartoons/guest_stig.html
-for a better view

Fryed

2008-10-30T19:08:00.000-07:00

Well, as I was reading Frye's third section on Myth I grew more and more alarmed because I felt that nothing was really hitting home. No light bulbs were flashing. And this made me sad, (and a little frustrated) But then I reached the section entitled Theory of Archetypal Meaning: Demonic Imagery. And finally I came across a passage that reminded me of Kevin's blog and our previous class discussion on baseball.

"We met in the first essay the principle that the transmutation of act into mime, the advance from acting out a rite to playing at the rite, is one of the central features of development from savagery into culture. It is easy to see a mimesis of conflict in tennis and football, but, precisely for that very reason, tennis and football players represent a culture superiors to the culture of student duellists and gladiators."
-Frye pg. 148

Here again Frye uses a very well known analogy of sports. The evolution of the spectator sport from deadly barbaric display to civilized competitive sport concreted the formation of civilization. And one may argue that Rome was a great civilization with all their great buildings and inventions such as the aqueducts, but I agree with Frye. There was very little that was civil about Rome, for they forced innocent people into the deadly slavery of gladiators and the arena. But I digress...

"The turning of literal act into play is a fundamental form of liberalizing of life which appears in more intellectual levels as liberal education, the release of fact into imagination."
-Frye pg. 149

So just as Kevin discussed in his blog; in baseball the umpire is the "play" version of the scapegoat, the emperor is the umpire of the gladiator arena. The crowd boos the umpire for making a "bad" call as they would jeer the emperor, or what have you, if they gave a "thumbs up" when the crowd wanted a "thumbs down". And the "arena" has never really left our culture no matter how "civilized" we have become (or think we have). There will always be a sudo-sacred place, be it an arena, field, court or table, where the grand ritual of competition and defeat will take place. A crowd will flock and much-a-ruckus will be arisen by the throngs of avid fans of challenge and blood pumping spectacle that competition produces.

Sports have replaced our thirst for barbaric competition. We still get our violence with football, hockey, and rugby and with our growing ( and depleting, but that's a different blog) "civilness" we are entertained with less violent but still competitive sports such as tennis, golf, table tennis along with the many other sports that I don't pay attention to. The ritual of athletic entertainment no longer requires the blood sacrifice of death. The losers now only hang their heads when defeated instead of losing them all together.

Don Quixote

2008-10-29T17:50:00.000-07:00

I have now reached page 576. I'd like to start off with Chapter XI and Don Quixote's odd encounter with the wagon of traveling actors. I felt this encounter was very much unlike all of D.Q.'s previous ones because he believed the actors to be actors instead of the ghastly and mythical creators and beings they appeared to be.

"By my faith as a knight errant, " responded Don Quixote, "as soon as I saw this wagon I imagined that a great adventure was awaiting be, and now I say that it is necessary to touch appearances with one's hand to avoid being deceived."
-pg 523-524

The key word here is imagined. Don Quixote openly admits he had imagined that a wagon full of demons and sorcerers, just as he had imagined a giant instead of a windmill, a group of thugs kidnapping a woman instead of a collection of holly men carrying the Virgin Marry. I was greatly troubled when I first read this because it was so outside and foreign to the Don Quixote we have all grown to love and cherish...well at least I do. And then the actors attacked Sancho's donkey, Sancho, and Don Quixote in such a nonsensical and unprovoked manner it seemed as if they were the ones plagued with the madness of chivalry and knights errant, and thought Sancho's donkey to be a giant Minator ready to eat them all alive.

But then, oh, but then a thought stuck me. Actors, like Don Quixote live physically in the low mimetic world of realism but belong spiritually and mentally to the world of Romance. Both
actors and our beloved knight prefer a world of romantic adventures, evil enchanters, courageous knights, and Devils driving wagons over steady paying jobs, madness, crazy old men, and rushed, costumed actors. So Don Quixote was able to accept their ghastly appearances because they were just like his suit of armor; a tool in which to transport them into the Romantic world. Like him, actors are on a quest to better the world; calm mobs, aid widows, and save poor, sad children. But instead of a lance and a squire, the actors are armed with entertainment in their imitations of life, death, and of the beyond.

This next part isn't deeply profound or anything, but I just loved the subtlety in Chapter XIV in the changing of the name of The Knight of the Wood to The Knight of the Mirrors. It happens seamlessly, so much so I had to read read it to make sure I got his name right in the first place. The subtle change of the name unconsciously prepares the reader for the character change. And more importantly, the name builds to the climax of the revealing of Senor Sanson Carrasco. His unveiling answers the mysterious question as to why Senor Sanson was encouraging Don Quixote and Sancho to go back out on their adventuring in the first place, at the beginning or part 2. It was all smoke and mirrors, to employ a favorite cliche. The Knight of the Mirrors was just that, he looked like a knight, lamented and was in love like a knight. He was so convincing that Don Quixote knew he was a knight just by listening to his poem. The Knight of Mirrors was so exquisitely imitative that he was a mirror held up to Don Quixote. Quite letterly since Sanson was using all he knew about Don Quixote's adventures and personal traits as a knight to form his imitation in an attempt to convince Don Quixote to return and stay at home.

This brings me to my last major light bulb moment in my reading Don Quixote.

" A poet is born; that is to say, the natural poet is a poet when he comes from his mother's womb...The natural poet who makes use of art will be a much better and more accomplished poet than the one who knows only the art and wishes to be a poet; the reason is that art does not surpass nature but perfects it; therefore; when nature is mixed with art, and art with nature, the result is a perfect poet. "

And because it's beautiful: "The pen is the tongue of the soul."
pg 557

Ding Ding Ding! Light Bulb! If you've ever tried to write a poem you'd understand my enthusiasm. You aren't a poet by choice. You can write poetry all you want but it doesn't make you a poet. When you read a poem by some one who wasn't born a poet, you can tell that it's a poem about nature instead of a natural poem embodying and beautifying the truth that is nature. A natural poet will embody the beauty and fury of the sea and the intrinsic frailty of a flower with their mere employment of letters. They don't try to make nature something it's not, they just take all the beauty of it and stick it under a magnifying glass. Together, a poem should be nature and art; a unified wording of nature's potential and existing beauty.
A unnatural poet; a poet not born but self created, will try and take nature and only write of the art of it. Instead of a colorful Impressionist painting we get a black and white Polaroid.

Links

2008-10-26T17:33:00.000-07:00

http://mr.pcvs.org/delirium/pater_-_conclusion_from_the_renaissance.html
-Walter Pater

http://67.104.146.36/english/Romantic/Rm-Ks.html
-Keats

http://www.bartleby.com/28/5.html
-Arnold

Keats

2008-10-25T17:33:00.000-07:00

And I thought understanding Frye was a stretch. I found some of the passages from several of Keats letters to be almost impossible to decipher. I don't know if it was the writing style of one ling sentence, without much real punctuation, the fact that they were merely excerpts from a larger whole, or what. But I found it very difficult to find never the less understand the point he was trying to make. I could only hold on to a few sentences here and there and I'm not sure if I even understand them correctly.

Well, there were a few parts of Keats' letters that I actually understood...I think. I do believe that this will be a piece that I will need to revisit over and over again. and possibly with the company of others, before I can really understand what Keats is saying.

"Every man has his speculations, but every man does not brood and peacock over them till he makes a false coinage and deceives himself."
-Dear Reynolds pg 3

This line however immediately set off my light bulb. This line echoes Frye, and especially Frye in his article The Archetypes of Literature. Frye's whole motivation to writing the article was to set the faulty critics on the right path. The critics who "broods" and "peacocks" his own interpretations of texts. Interpretations that are based on flakey values pertaining to opinions and personal feelings about the author of the Work. It's about the work, not the author, and definitely not the critic who only "wants to brighten the corner in which they are in".

"Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself, but with it's subject."
-Dear Reynolds pg 3

This was actually a pretty big light bulb for me. Not too much in the sense that it directly relates to something specific from my previous readings (although I'm sure it does and I'm not seeing the connection), but it gives me something to mull over when I think about poetry. I used to always think of poetry as an organization of beautiful words that describe something, and I emphasized the pretty words more than the subject. Now when I look at poetry, I'll think about how effective of a description it is. If I can feel the sensation or see the scene. A poem is less about the author's ability to string interesting, beautiful, or provocative words together, and more about how they are stringed to embody it's subject. The poem is not about the beauty of the strategically organized words; "She sang beyond the genius of the sea", but what those words mean about the she, about the sea, and what it means when she sings "beyond the genius" of it. Are we actually talking about a girl singing quite loudly on a beach, so that the shrill tone of her voice carries over the deafening crashes and whooshes , or is there something deeper? A creation myth perhaps? Keats has another line that adds to this thoughts;

"Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by Singularity--it should strike the Reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a Remembrance."
-Dear Reynolds pg 3

Poetry should be a description of an experience that anyone has or could have experienced. But I'm having trouble with wrapping my mind around the concept of "fine excess". I'm not sure what that means. I get what he means in the last part, that poetry should describe an event/ thing as well as not overly describe in a scholarly or typically "poetic" way. But "surprise by a fine excess". Hmm. I wonder if I might need another day to ponder this.
Maybe fine excess really means details. Everything needs to be in a poem that surrounds the subject. But these details, these descriptive words, need to fine tune the beauty and truth of the subject. The reader must get the sensation that where were there; standing by that waterfall, reading that book, hearing those sounds, but at the same time these details cannot be so specific, so Singular to the poet and their experience that any random reader couldn't pick up the poem and really experience the subject of the poem without really being there themselves.

Film and Books

2008-10-23T19:25:00.000-07:00

I'll start off by saying I really loved this little film. Being both an English and a Film student I loved seeing how they could be used together to support one another. I can't help feel a little amused when I see or hear about a film about books (and they are few) To me, it seems that these two fictional mediums are sometimes at war with one another; film can seem to turn books or reading into an assignment or chore. But that's a whole different blog.

The first thing that happened to me as I watched this film was I was brought whooshing (yes, whooshing) back to my childhood years of playing dress up. Whenever I played dress-up, (which let me tell you, was often) I always had these two old books tucked in my purse or rolled up in a scarf. You know those real books, those old cloth covered books with tiny print and old sketched pictures. Well, to this day I don't know what they were about, but by god I can remember their colors and what parts they played in my magical little girl world. Old books carry with them a sense of mystisism. Like they might be the spellbook of some old wizard or the diary of a queen...or maybe I have problems with growing up. But what I do know is, when ever you place an old, tattered book in someones hands, they hold it as if it was the most delicate spun glass. And, even if they don't admit it, they feel a surge of pure romantic power tingle through their finger tips as they carefully turn the yellow-old pages.

The second thing I thought about was the innocence of children question. What are we expecting our children to be, or to become. It seems so shocking to us to see how the books for and directed at children (because, yes, there is a difference) focus on the issue of death and other bodily harm. I heard a-many a gasps during the dark limericks and poems. But think about television and if people of the past saw how, instead of death, we hurl sex and violence at our youth. True death was much more prominent and "in your face" back in the day, what with poorer living conditions, medical care, and shorter life spans, but does that mean sex is more prominent now? Do children have to deal with the sexual acts of their family like they do a death? (ok that's a weird way to go...but it's too late now!)

Society has always been telling our youth what do think, how to act, and what to believe in. And fear used to be a pretty darn good way of doing it. Fear the wolf , the stranger, the trouble maker, the inconvenience. Save the heathen; teach they our way, and much like how poetry should imitate the worse to prove a point of illustrate a moral, do those little children's tales those fables, show the naughty child as wrong and the goody two shoes as an angel.
The fact that this was a film on books, on lost literature, plays nicely with my evolution of the tools of propaganda But a books on films doesn't hold the same tiny jewel of (nerdy) irony as does a film on books.

Light bulbs and don Quixote

2008-10-14T18:59:00.000-07:00

First I'd like to jot down a few light bulbs I had light up while reading Frye's section on the anagogic phase:

"The anagogic view of criticism thus leads to the conception of literature as existing in it's own universe, no longer a commentary on life and reality, but containing life and reality in a system of verbal relationships."
pg. 122

I think I used this quote when I was investigating Wallace's poem or if not I thought about it or wish I had (Wow you can't tell midterms are getting to me or anything). Now I'm thinking, since the anagogic has a connection with the divine and the line:

" And when she sang, the sea, whatever self it had, became the self that was her song, for she was the maker."

She, the maker, the poet, sang her poem, her song, of a world with a sea. And while she sang, she walked on an ordinary beach by an ordinary sea. But her sea was like no other sea. A sea so grand in a world so beautiful that the sea envied her poem and it wanted to change itself, and so did those who heard it. And so they did change, and saw the world of her song what was a poem, much like the one containing this very line.
That's just a little rant on what anagogy made me think while was trying to cram all the words from the poem into my squishy brain.

Anyway, this I just found interesting:

"The literary critic, like the historian, is compelled to treat every religion in the same way that religions treat each other, as though it were human hypothesis, whatever else he may in other contexts believe it to be."
pg. 126

This leads me to Don Quixote and it's delightful relevance and joyous freedom from "theory". I'm now on page 498 with the miraculous pearls from Sancho. But what I found most interesting was on page 476.

" 'That is true, ' said Sanson, 'but it is one thing to write as a poet and another to write as a historian: the poet can recount or sing about things not as they were, but as they should have been, and the historian must write about them not as they should have been, but as they were, without adding or subtracting anything from the truth.' "

Aha! This rings of Sidney, Shelly and of course Aristotle/Plato. ( It's hard to keep straight who said what.)I can just picture the glee on Dr. Sexson's face if he saw me reading that and making the connection.
Short sad blog, but midterms are hovering.

Sidney quotes of importance

2008-10-08T10:13:00.000-07:00

"Among the Romans a poet was called 'vates', which is as much as a diviner, foreseer, or prophet, as by his conjoined words, vaticinium and vacticinari, in manifest; so heavenly a title did that excellent people bestow upon this hear-ravishing knowledge."
-pg 3, paragraph 7

The philosopher therefore and the historian are they which would win the goal, the one by precept, the other by example; but both not having both, do both halt. For the philosopher, setting down with thorny arguments the bare rule...For his knowledge standeth so upon the abstract and general that happy is that man who may understand him, and more happy that can apply what he doth understand...The historian, wanting the precept, is so tied, not to what should be but to what is, to the particular truth of things, and not to the general reason of things, that his example draweth no necessary consequence, and therefore a less fruitful doctrine.

Now doth the peerless poet perform both; for whatsoever the philosopher saith should be done, he giveth a perfect picture of it in some one by whom he presupposeth it was done, so as he coupleth the general notion with the particular example....he yieldeth to the powers of the mind an image of that whereof the philosopher bestoweth but a wordish description, which doth neither strike, pierce, nor possess the sight of the soul so much as that other doth.
-pg 7, paragraph 22-23

But he cometh to you with words set in delightdul proportion, either acconpanied with, or prepared for, the well-enchanting skills of music; and with a tale, forsooth, he cometh unto you, with a tale which holdeth children from play, and old men from the chimney-corner, and, pretending no more, doth intend the winning of the mind from wickedness to virtue...
-pg 10 paragraph 36

More on The Idea of Order and anagogy

2008-10-08T09:26:00.000-07:00

In the anagogic phase, literature imitates the total dream of man, and so imitates the thought of a human mind which is at the circumference and not at the center of reality.
-Frye 119

In it's anagogic phase, then , poetry imitates human action as total ritual, and so imitates the action of the omnipotent human society that contains all the powers of nature within itself.
-Frye 120

As I was revisiting my thoughts on Steven's The Idea of Order at Key West, I found some new and interesting connections. It starts with the idea presented on page 119. This passage was another sort of light bulb in that the human dream, which is a kind of all seeing all knowing powerful representation of human life and interaction, is not at the center of reality projecting out, but at the edges holding it all together. We take out dreams and thoughts and wrap them around the reality that is presented before us, either to understand or to control. This poem demonstrates through out it's entirety how it's not only she, the singing maker, who is involved in this changing of reality, but also the bystanders who experience the effects of her reality altering song.

"But it was more than that, more even than her voice, and ours, among the theatrical distances, bronze shadows heaped on High horizons, mountainous atmospheres of sky and sea."

But is was more than both her and the regular human onlookers. The reality, the dark sea, outer voice of the sky, and of the summer air are more than the human persona, or society. It, the reality, the world in which the poem breaths was more than the onlookers, more even that that of she who sang it's creation or alteration. They, the human society is not at the center of this reality, but at the edges, holding this dream, thie other reality of Key West together.

In regards to the second quote from Frye : In it's anagogic phase, then , poetry imitates human action as total ritual, and so imitates the action of the omnipotent human society that contains all the powers of nature within itself.

This second passage from Frye embodies the entirety of what the poem is I think. She is singing, as a maker, a poem. This poem not only imitates the omnipotent human, in all her powers of creation, but it contains all the powers of nature within itself. The entire third verse contains and imitates nature.
If it was only the dark voice of the sea
That rose, or even colored by many waves;
If it was only the outer voice of shy
And cloud, of sunken coral water-walled
However clear, it would have been deep air,
The heaving speech of air, a summer sound
Repeated in a summer without end
And so on.

She, the maker, contains all the secrets and powers of nature otherwise how could she alter the reality of nature around her and her audience?

Now for something completely different...
I have reached page 472 in Don Quixote and have successfully started part two in this impressive novel. It began with the author defending his second section of Don Quixote because it seems there was some controversy whether the second installment was as authentic as the first. But all that aside, the story picks up where it left off, with poor old Don bedridden and staying true in his madness despite the efforts of the barber, the priest, his niece, and the housekeeper. And poor Sancho still striving to achieve is promised insula.

"And no doubt this was a kind of prophecy; poets are calledvates, which means they are soothsayers."
-468
Don Quixote says this when defending his books of chivalry ( and his madness of believing them a reality) and I think it ties in beautifully with what we've been discussing in our readings of Phillips and Frye.

Light Bulb..again

2008-10-05T16:20:00.000-07:00

"The reason for producing the literature structure is apparently that the inward meaning, the self-contained verbal pattern, is the field of responses connected with pleasure, beauty and interest."
Frye-74
This simple sentence can sum up a good 10 to 15 pages of what Frye is trying to get across, and it's lovely and friendly in it's simplicity. The bottom line of Frye's book, his arguments, and his criticism is that we must not look at the surface (the author, our tastes and opinions, or even literally just the cover) of a piece of literature, but the internal patterns, rhythms, and different phases.

And broken down even more, this passage is like the secret of literature that is being whispered around the exam room. Everyone wants it even if they don't know it's available. Everyone wants to know what to look for when judging, or not even judging, when interpreting a piece of literature. For if you know how to correctly look at a piece of literature critically you can not only fully understand it, but enjoy it's beauty for what it is.

This passage not only subtly tells you what really matters when critically looking at a piece of literature but it tells you that it was written simply for the beauty and intricacy of the words themselves. And when you read them, you don't realize that you're enjoying the book is because the writing as that particular repeating pattern and combination of irony and comedy.
What makes someone enjoy a piece of literature has to do more with the subtleties of the verbal patterns and rhythms then the fetching hero or fearless heroine, even though those characters are contributing factors.

Just a quick short post on my thoughts.

Light Bulb

2008-10-05T15:32:00.000-07:00

"When we pass into anagogy, nature becomes, not the container, but the thing contained, and the archetypal universal symbols, the city, the garden, the quest, the marriage, are no longer the desirable forms that man constructs inside nature, but are themselves the forms of nature."
Frye-119

" This is not reality, but it is the conceivable or imaginative limit of desire, which is infinite, eternal, and hence apocalyptic [or] the imaginative conception of the whole of nature as the content of an infinite and eternal living body which, if not human, is closer to being human than to being inanimate."
Frye-119

As I read this second entry from Frye I had a little epiphany about Wallace Steven's "The Idea of Order at Key West." Or more specifically I had an epiphany about the first verse in the poem:
She sang beyond the genius of the sea
The water never formed to mind or voice
Like a body wholly body, fluttering
It's empty sleeves; and yet it's mimic motion
Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry
That was not ours although we understood,
Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.

This made me ask myself, what if she was this infinite eternal living body, either human or not, that embodies the imaginative concept of nature? And then it all became all the more clear as I read is lines such as, But it was she and not the sea we heard, It was her voice that made the sky acutest at it's vanishing, She was the single artificer of the world.

This poem is what Frye calls apocalyptic in the world of anagogy, because there is this "She" singing and creating or altering the reality, or the world around the speaker in the poem. In this poem "she" is the image in the anagogical sense because she sort of represents what Frye names as a characteristic of anagogy; "the sense of unlimited power in a humanized form"
The poem never explicitly describes this "she" as being a goddess or of possessing any obvious magical or higher powers other than an exceptionally powerful singing voice, but it is implied in the last two concluding verses what she did indeed project some sort of power or change over them or the world. Something changed : "The maker's rage to order words of sea, Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred, and of ourselves and of our origins"

It almost sounds to me that the Maker, this "she" somehow altered language, or words themselves. And in changing the word base of a thing (sea, fishing boats, what have you) the entirety of the thing now is seemingly completely different. I like to imagine that when the speaker of the poem turns around he doesn't understand any of what he sees because this She has changed around the order of everything and now nothing is as it was. "In ghostlier demarcations" What was one way is now another and only the ghost of "ourselves" and/or the sea remain while the newly sung version stands in it's new ordered place.

Aristotle and Don Quixote

2008-09-30T11:51:00.000-07:00

Aristotle defends poetry, and the art of writing in general, by laying down the laws of imitation. First off, there are three differences that determine exactly what kind of imitation it is. There is the medium "of color, form or again by voice", which is basically the form the imitation is in; a tragedy, prose or verse, even a dance, thus "taken as a whole, the imitation is produced by rhythm, language, or harmony, either singly or combined."

Then there is the objects. These are generally men, or types of men "in action". These men are either higher than, the same as, or lower than us. So Aristotle argues here that poetry doesn't lie, but represents and imitates the different levels of people that are actual, that are real and breathing. The purpose is not to give a complete accurate history about a specific person, but to represent the level of a person who exists somewhere and everywhere.

Finally there is the mode or manner in which the objects, or people, are imitated. What is meant by this is how the poem is written/told. Like narration, or how Plato told his stories through Socrates (because there's no proof that Socrates was his own person because Plato was the only one who ever wrote down what he supposedly said). Thus the poet is imitating through narration, first person, or whatever have you.

Aristotle also argues that imitation is natural and rooted in human nature from childhood. In fact all living creatures rely on imitation to learn. Key word here, LEARN. Without an example, irrelevant if it's historically accurate or true, no one would know how to do anything.
So basically, Aristotle argues that poetry is no more a lie than reality is. It is an imitation based on the history of man kind. It may not be historically accurate, matching up perfectly with specific names and dates, but poetry imitates the actual, the possible. It's no more a lie than the imitation of this computer is. There could be the perfect computer out there, ideal in form and process, but I still have this computer here, imitation the perfection of the perfect computer form. And it's no less real.

"If one were to reply that those who compose these books write them as fictions, and therefore are not obliged to consider the fine points of truth, I should respond that the more truthful the fiction, the better it is, and the more probable and possible, the more pleasing. Fictional tales must engage the minds of those who read them, and by restraining exaggeration and moderating impossibility, then enthrall the spirit and thereby astonish, captivate, delight, and entertain, allowing wonder and joy to move together at the same pace; none of these things can be accomplished by fleeing verisimilitude and mimesis." - Senor Canon

First fleeing verisimilitude : fleeing appearance of being true or real.

This brings me to the section I just read in Don Quixote. It starts on page 411 in chapter XLVII and continues into chapter XLIX. I'm referring to the conversation that mainly goes on between the Priest and the Canon that the meet of the road, and to some extent that of the Barber and Don Quixote as well. They are discussing the books of chivalry and the Canon and the Priest pretty much agree that they are "foolish stories meant only to delight and not to teach, unlike moral tales, which delight and teach at the same time."

Basically they argue in this section what Plato and Aristotle argue, the worth of fiction. The Priest /Canon side agree with Plato where the Don Quixote side agrees with Aristotle. Don Quixote believes the fictions are true in that there were actual knights of errant who completed deeds like those in the books. He takes is a step further that Aristotle and instead of believing that the poems/books are imitations of knights and their feats, but that they are actual histories. He knows that there were once knights, and thinks there still is, so why aren't these histories true, and not just imitations.

The Canon and the Priest argue that even though where were knights errant, the books are pointless lies because they only delight and even lead the mind astray in believing their lies are actual histories.
So yeah. I'm up to page 432 in Don Quixote and I found these chapters extremely relevant to what we have been discussing in class.

Thinking...and then rethinking

2008-09-28T12:51:00.000-07:00

I was checking up on the class notes, cruising Rosanna's blog when I read her entry; "Pregnancy of Poems." My attention was caught by one sentence: "if poems are born, then there must be a universal poetic language. And what is that?"
True all literature shares patterns and rhythms, so in essence they all speak the same speak, but I don't see how the metaphor of a piece of writing being "born" has to do with it.

I think my biggest problem with this simple concept is basically that people are born and we by no means have one universal language, literally or figuratively. We're all people, so we share the various patterns and rhythms of the type, or mode, of person we are. Poems, or pieces of literature also have patterns and rhythms in themselves that make up what they are. They are also are born from the artists womb of a brain in the same sense that when a child is born. And similarly, once the poem/child leaves the womb/hands of the artist it's severed all ties. It's its own person, in a sense. It's one self as a piece of writing, even though it is still so-and-so's piece of writing, just as I am my parents daughter. It doesn't make me them, or even the essence of them. They just typed up up and sewed my pages to my spine.

The only thing that gives insight into who/what the poem/child is, is in itself. To understand the poem, the answers are in the words. In how it's written and what it says about who or what. The same goes for a person; the outside can be altered by the opinions and tastes of others, but that's on the inside, what's in the text itself, is what or who the person is. The patterns of behavior and rhythms in which they live out their lives is in a sense their language of being, of existing as a person...

Wait a minute, that's kinda what Rosanna said. Aha! So maybe now as I'm writing I'm understanding more of what Rosanna was saying. So the patterns and rhythms are the universal language because they can be found in all things written...almost.

What an odd entry. But as it has happened before, as I write about something I supposedly don't understand, I work it out through the thinking process of writing. I was too stuck on that once sentence that I couldn't step back and really see the whole idea of what Rosanna was saying. And as tempting as it is to restart this entry and have a writing topic that is actually coherent, I'm going to keep it as is and hope it wasn't too confusing (or pointless).

I am Carl Gustav Jung

2008-09-23T17:13:00.001-07:00

I am a Swiss psychologist and founder of analytical psychology who likes to hang around with Freud and discuss the unconscious. But unlike Freud I believed there was a second and deeper unconscious, the collective unconscious, which is like a holding tank for all of the past experiences of our species.

This ties in with my own theory about archetypes, and guess what their called...the Jungian Archetypes. In this theory, archetypes are inherited psychic dispositions that form the base in which from human life emerges. Evidence of these archetypes can be seen through out history in myths, symbols, rituals, and basic human instincts.
And all of these archetypes are a part of our collect unconscious.

I may have also been responsible for the foundation of Alcoholics Anonymous by admitting to an American patient that their case of alcoholism was so bad that only turning to spirituality would save them.
There are also rumors that I am a Nazi or a Nazi supporter, but pay no attention to that. It's all a big misunderstanding.

To learn more!: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jungian_archetype

Anyway, Claire is now on page 410 in "Don Quixote". Poor Don Quixote was once again tricked by the barber and priest and is now riding in a cage on the back of an ox cart believing himself enchanted. From chapter XLIII the story has take up many Ironic Comedy traits. Poor Don Quixote is the butt of everyones jokes and he is even tied by the hand from the tower of a castle by the wicked and bored Maritornes! He is definitely the the center of the innkeepers, and to some extent of Don Fernando, Dorotea, Cardenio and all of his other friends. Except Sancho, who will always be blunt with his master for he knows of his madness but accepts it and even believes it.

These chapters also hold gobs of juicy low mimetic comedy with a little possible tragic romance regarding the forbidden love between Don Clara and Don Luis.
I'm very much enjoying "Don Quixote".

Key West and Abrams

2008-09-22T07:48:00.000-07:00

Well, as I see it, The Idea of Order at Key West incorporates all four of Abrams' classes of literary theory. First there is the Universe. The relationship between the poem and the theory of the Universe is evident in the poem's own creation myth. This "she" is singing the to the sea which inspires it into a new existence, that is why they see the town differently after she sings. She's not creating the Universe but changing it into her own creation. And that creation is sublty bigger than just the sea:
"But it was more that that, more even than her voice, and ours, among the meaningless plungings of water and the wind., theatrical distances, bronze shadows heaped on high horizans, mountainous atmospheres or shy and sea."
The sea is everything, the Universe.

Next, The Idea of Order at Key West incorporates Abrams' theory of the Artist. This is perhaps the most obvious of Abrams' theories, thanks to a few lines in the poem:
"She was the artificer of the world in which she sang. And when she sang, the sea, whatever self it had, became the self that was her song, for she was the maker."
Nothing could be clearer. She sang thus she created. An artist creates, whether through voice, painting, or writing and She created a Universe in the sea. At least that's how I see it. Without this She, there would be no song, no changing sea, no poem at all. Because of her artristy, and that of the poet Stevens, a Universe was created in and out of the sea.

Thirdly, The Idea of Order at Key West incorporates Abrams' theory of the Work, because quite honestly, the poem it's self is the work, according to Abrams' pyramid. Universe, Artist, and Audience all branch off the work, because they couldn't exist without it as their center. One might find it taxing to call a poem a "work", but I guess that's irrelevant. The Idea of Order at Key West is the expression of the artist, of the worker of the Work. Stevens wrote this poem that contains the elements of Universe, Artist, Work, and Audience and analyzing it thusly makes the poem a Work.

Finally, The Idea of Order at Key West incorporates Abrams' theory of the audience in two ways. One, right now I'm doing an indepth, intense study of the Work. I'm analyzing it's possible meanings and reading into it's so called hidden or encrypted texts. So I am an audience member who has formed a relationship with the poem.
There is also the second audience in the poem, the We:
"It was the spirit that we sought and knew that we should ask this often as she sang...As we beheld her striding there alone..."
She has an audience in the poem, an unidentified group of ordinary humans who observe her as she sing-creates the new Universe. The author of the poem itself can also be part of the audience, because the poem is written in first person. It seems as if the author himself was walking on the beach, observing as She sings her song that she sang.

On to Don Quixote. I am on page 368. The captive just finished his story of how he escaped prison and the adventure of saving Zoraida. This tale was a tragedy where as the previous reuniting of Cardenio with his Luscinda and Dorotea with her Don Fernando leaned more towards a Romance, maybe even a Romantic Comedy.
I never fail to be amused by how many audiences there are in this book at any given time. There is always me, but at times there is a whole herd of people playing the part of the audience, listening to various stories at various times. I have to giggle at the layer cake of audiences woven through-out the story. I'm the audience observing the audience who is observing the teller, who if he is crazy enough, might even have his own private mid-evil audience inside his own head. And I'm not naming any names.

chart post

2008-09-19T08:18:00.001-07:00

You are all better off NOT trying to struggle with the Html way of posting your chart. It's ridiculously complex and time consuming. Sorry and good luck!

"Going to town"

2008-09-19T08:18:00.000-07:00

I chose the High Mimetic Thematic mode to "go to town on" as they say.
This mode focuses on epic events that center around nationalism, or pride of one's nation. The society of people in this type of literature usually revolve around a capital city. The perfect example of a high mimetic thematic mode is the tale of Odysseus in The Odyssey. Odysseus fights numerous battles to return to his city while his wife battles with intruders to protect her home and city. Both are heroes who fight and live their lives centered around their city, their home which holds all their joys. It is what they fight for, making them patriotic.

Another characteristic of the high mimetic thematic mode is what Frye calls the centripetal gaze, which is like when the audience watches the actors or when a court gazes upon it's king. And this is usually addressed by the hero to a friend, god, or some other sort to mentor of confidant.

In an odd off beat kind of way, I can see a little bit of Don Quixote being high mimetic thematic in that Don Quixote insists on being called "Don Quixote of La Mancha" and likewise calling his lady "Dulcinea of Toboso". These attributes don't make the book a complete work of the high mimetic thematic mode but it reflects a little bit of the nationalism. It matters very much to Don Quixote that the name of their hoe city be included in their title because it not only verifies their good lineage but lets everyone know what great and grand city he and his lady are from. So in Don Quixote himself I can see a little of the high mimetic thematic mode, but there is a decent amount of romance and irony as well.

Another little thing I can somewhat clumsily tack on to Don Quixote is the centripetal gaze. If I understand it correctly this theme is very much like the many little mini stories that are told within the novel. At different times in the story there are different audiences gazing upon a sort of a performer as they tell their story. And as they gaze upon their performer of stories we gaze upon them as they tell their story of being told or telling a story. Lots of stories.

Chart of Modes

2008-09-16T17:08:00.000-07:00

	Tragic	Comic	Thematic
Myth	Dionysiac. Pertaining to the Greek god of wine, madness and ecstasy.	Apollonian. Pertaining to classic beauty. Joyous artful, and musical.	Religious.
Romance	Elegiac. Lyric poem of mourning.	Pastoral. Pertaining to rustic life - shepherds and their sheep.	Order of factual events. Purpose of recording.
High Mimetic	Classic Tragedy. Art of human suffering for an audience.	Comic Drama. Strong central hero who fights and wins.	Pride of and pertaining to the nation.
Low Mimetic	Pathos. Appeals to emotions of the audience.	New Comedy. Principle love plot. Stock characters - bragging solider/ angry old man.Rising through the ranks.	Moral stance of individuality. Opposition of the norm.
Ironic	Hero as a victim. Takes the blame for others.	Helpless victim. Mockery of society, satirical, and ostracized protagonist.	A break in the continuity of characters, plot, and events.

“The criterion and rule of the true is to have made it. Accordingly, our clear and distinct idea of the mind cannot be a criterion of the mind itself, still less of other truths. For while the mind perceives itself, it does not make itself.”
- Giambattista Vico

Aha. I do believe this sounds familiar. What I think Vico is saying here echoes in the ideas of Frye. Criticism is true in it's self even if it isn't precisely accurate to the piece of literature and the authors so-called intentions. What I'm getting from Frye is that there is no right or wrong way to go about criticism, there's just more to it than a simple matter of taste and opinion. There is a formula, a pattern of truths that form a piece of literature into what it is and more importantly, how it is; mythic, packed with pathos, or hurling stones of irony at our tragic hero. The truth is in the words; the sentences and phrases that make up the literature, not in the manner it is scrutinized.
So back to Vico, we can't understand a piece of literature by knowing it's criticism , or the resulting reactions to it. The only way to know the literature is to read it and see the truth in the words themselves.

Fryeing

2008-09-12T10:05:00.000-07:00

"Hence every work of literature has both fictional and a thematic aspect, and the question of which is more important is often simply a matter of opinion or emphasis in interpretation...[ The History of Tom Jones, a Founding and Sense and Sensibility] are strongly fictional in emphasis compared to Uncle Tom's Cabin or Grapes of Wrath....They in turn are fictional in emphasis compared to The Pilgrim's Progress..." - Frye 53

I think I grasp an idea that I believe was professed in this small section of Frye's Theory of Modes. What I think this basically means is that any piece of literature can be fictional in emphasis when compared to another piece of writing. For instance, the Bible is a piece of fiction when compared to a math textbook or a scientific article of the mating habits of the hairy-nosed wombat.

When a person reads a something, whether a novel or a scrap of a note they found on the sidewalk, they are mentally comparing it to all of the other things they have read, to be able to categorize what they are reading. Does it resemble Poe more than Dickens, or maybe even King? (A perfect example is when I am reading Don Quixote, I am often reminded of Douglas Adam's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, with all of his nonsensical witticisms and odd jargon.) It's impossible to read something and not allude it's texts or ideas to those that you have already read. Or at least it is impossible for me.
A piece is always read in some form of someone's opinion and how they read or interpret the text can even change depending on their mood. Maybe it reminds them of a novel they disliked to automatically they dismiss it as being "bad" or at least not in their tastes.

So in closing how a work is perceived changes drastically from person to person and can even shift one way or the other when compared to other different works.
-Claire

2008-09-09T14:44:00.000-07:00

I found this image pertinent to English 300 ever since Sexson uttered the word "Netiquette", for it was this image that popped into my Monday brain.
The youth of today is practically born and bred not only on the internet but by it as well. In their (and their parents) rushed and time intensive lives, the internet is an essential source of "now". Get your research homework now, get your directions now, get your music and movies now, get everything you'll ever need NOW! They may not be able to tell you which side the fork goes on or whether it's "will" or "shall", but by god they know their netiquette.

"What it means it what it is."
What a comforting thought. In my reading of Frye, I've started to understand the sort of scientific order there is in literature. You can actually figure out whether a piece is a high mimetic tragedy or a low mimetic tragedy by deciphering if there's any pathos in the equation or not. Though it may take a little longer to fully grasp what any of that actually means, it's fascinating that you can trick a mathematician into loving literature by just simply showing them the equation.

Frye

2008-09-07T10:32:00.000-07:00

In reading "Archetypes in Literature" I got my first taste of Frye, and was honestly not as overwhelmed as Sexson frightened me into expecting I would be. True it was dense and very intellectual, but I feel that I was able to grasp what Frye was trying to communicate.

I've always had a problem with criticism when we attempted it in my high school classes, but now I understand were weren't practicing actually criticism, just trying to guess what the author meant (or what the teacher thought the author meant) in their writing. In Frye's comparison of literature to music and painting I grasped what I think to be a key factor in critically looking at a work; patterns and rhythms. Frye points that a large part of criticism is finding the corresponding patterns between one piece of work and others to uncover exactly category and genre a particular piece of writing falls into.

I was also pleastly surprised when Frye wrote about the myth and the archetypes that were interpreted into each season. I recognized many of the representations (Summer as comedy and romance, fall and sunset as tragedy and death) from my previous high school AP English class.

Frye

2008-09-05T12:22:00.000-07:00

Could anyone tell me where I could find Frye's Archetypes of Literature. I can only find an article written about Frye's article by Richard Clarke. Thanks!

Blogging

2008-09-05T12:06:00.000-07:00

Well, this is my first time ever using this whole Blog thing. I never saw the appeal in posting a national journal of thoughts, but now I guess I see the classroom advantages. Unfortunately, I know nothing about using a blog and can't figure out how to bookmark (or whatever) all of my fellow 300 English student's blogs. Any help would be greatly appreciated.