The End of English 300

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

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

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

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)

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

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

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.