Final Blog

Well after an entire semester of reading more material then I would like I am finally glad to be done, but realistically are we ever done? Yes I am glad to be done with assignments but I will never be done with literary criticism. When this class first started I was completely scared. I had heard horrible nightmarish stories about this class and when I saw we would be reading the almost 1,000 pg book of Don Quixote it only reaffirmed my fears but its now December and I am glad to still be enjoying the class. I think I will always be reading things critically but now I'll be able to actually read them with multiple critical glasses.

There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Touchstone

So, sadly I have not found a specific touchstone that I can remember. There have been so many times that I have read something that opens my eyes to something and makes me see things in a completely knew way, but after a while they become completely lost to me. I get so caught up in the rest of the reading I rarely remember what had just opened my eyes. Even though I cannot think of a touchstone there was a time when I was reading that so many connections came together for me and everything began to make since. When I was reading Phillip Pullmans, His Dark Materials there was a part in it when Mary Malon has to enter a new world. She asks Dust where it is and he tells her the portal is on Sunderland Ave. I was completely excited because in Children's lit Sunderland and Wonderland are major themes in our class and I had no Idea how His Dark Materials was connected. Then as soon as I saw Sunderland in the book so many connections started appearing. I saw how Lyra was like Dorothy and Alice and how there was so much more to this book then what first appeared.

I remember it being really late at night and having no one to share my excitement with. I know that this isn't something that has changed my life or altered my view on the world but it was definitely and moment where so many things just came together and made since to me.

Romance Box

For the box that I chose to write more in depth about was the Romantic Box in the Tragic section.
This is the Elegiac section.
that features elegies morning the death of Heroes.

This is my favorite box mainly because I really love the heroes in this section. I love Beowulf and King Arthur and the sad endings.
These people are people that are higher then normal people as in that they are stronger or more intelligent and closer to being godlike. They may have more strength then normal men, like Beowulf who has the strength of twenty men in each arm and can hold his breath for hours and Arthur who is much more noble then the rest. yet even though they are stronger and set on a higher plane then normal humans they are still human and still must come to an end.

But one thing that I wanted to add was the female hero. I think in this box would be Joan Of Arc. She was a hero who was higher then mere mortals. She was closer to God, or the gods then we will ever be and she sacrificed her life and became an immortal hero.

Marxist

Marxist view of Don Quixote

Some of the important key points of Marxism:
The upper class is taking advantage of the lower class which can be seen in the treatment of the characters in the story.
No Imagination in Marxism. They don't focus on the poem or the beautiful images. Its not as important as the underlying message of the text.
They focus on the economic status surrounding the text and who is involved in the story.
They look at the text to determine which class is being valued above the other and which class is being taken advantage of.
Time period of the era is more important then imagination. Not about the artistic quality.

You can find and interpret what a Marxist will chose to point out in a text by looking at the social class of its characters.
Don Quixote is an upper class person who doesn't pay for anything while Sancho is a lower class poor man who takes the blame and beatings for Quixote.

Depends on what type of glasses you wear as you read. If you put on Feminist glasses you will see the text in a feminist way, new Criticism glasses you see it as a New Critic.

Group Presentations

Freud's Phallic hour

Under every Text there is a sexual meaning that can only be found if your not looking at it. Ha Ha

Starring!:
The host Sigmund Freud, informing his guests that their lives were completely different then what they thought.

The original Oedipus who killed his father and married his mother and poked out his eyes. What a tragic story!
The Dark depressed Hamlet who killed his uncle murdering his father and went crazy!
The Little Girl in Red who delivers cookies to her beloved Grandmother.
The original crazy man who thought Halloween was everyday!
Cervantes the author of the famous Don Quixote!

Freud reveals his guests ulterior motives they were unaware of themselves.

Don Quixote

As I was reading Don Quixote one of the things I think is so funny about it is how every one seems to humor him by going along with all of his crazy quests. Like the part when Sancho leaves Don in the woods to give a letter to his love and meets with the barber and the priest and they dress up like women to convince him to come home. Then they meet up with a few others who also help pretend to be who their not so they can help Don Quixote. I just think how silly it is that they think that by going along with his fantasy they are helping him. I do understand that Don Quixote is completely insane some times and I would also humor him because I know that he would try and kill me if I told him he wasn't a real knight.
And also another thing. Even though Sancho knows that the people are pretending and he knows they are openly lying to Don Quixote he still falls for everything they say. He was right there when the barber and the Priest decide to dress up to fool Don Quixote but he still believes them when they lie to Don Quixote. I feel so bad for Sancho, he thinks that he is going to get all this land from Quixote and doesn't doubt him the entire book.

I think my favorite line in the book is when Sancho is worried there wont be any islands left, so Don Quixote turns to him and says something like, well if there are no more islands left then there is always Denmark. Like he can just give away a country.

I still do have a few more hundred pages left but Don Quixote is always surprising me and inventing some crazy way become the best knight he can be. I wish that I could be as determined as Don Quixote is about something that I really do have to be good at.

Individual Presentations

Eve Sedgwick
Paranoid reading
as critics and readers people need to be open minded

Stanley Fish
Milton scholar yet has never taken a class in Milton
Has been called a maverick and a sophist
to the question
None what so ever

Susan Gubar and Sandra Gilbert
The mad woman in the attic
angels and monsters
either pure
rebellious unkempt crazies

Homi Bhahba
English professor in Harvard
Questions of Cultural identity
signifies and signifier are not unified
cope with reality

Presentations

Annette Kolodny (Kayla)
Probing questions
wilderness of Adam
land as a woman
not text paradimes

Henry Louis Gate Jr. (Maggie)
"Skip"
the root.com
what you shouldn't do
over reacher cannot be a doctor

T.S Eliot (Doug)
American
faked his accent
wrote in England
Modernist
"in my beginning is my end and in my end is my beginning"

Presentations

I. A Richards (Judson)
Ordinary statements are true or false
Literary statements are mostly sudostatements

Carl Jung (Claire)
Analytical psychology
underlying human nature in dreams and myths
archetypes
collective unconscious

Mikhail Bakhtin (Rosanna)
Carnival
PHD was taken away
unusual dangers
nothing is an island
laughter is great "Little piece of wang"

Paul De Man (Jon)
Studied romantics
deconstructionism
when we use metaphors we rely on readers
didn't think Jews helped literature

bell hooks (Jessika)
Wrote about white supremacy
used the media to help teachings
wanted to help them think critically
there is a reason Darth Vader was voiced by a black man
Black thief

Presentaions

Helene Cixous (Heather)
Feminist
"It is impossible to define"
Father was a Jew mother was a German

Wolfgang Iser (Brittini)
Hermnetics
liked to talk about the classics
reader response critic
reader important

Sigmund Freud (Kyle)
Sexual desire
Id, Ego, superego
unconscious falic symbols
did they find joy in writing

Edward Said (Jiwan)
dichotomy of self and others
western humanization's

Presentations

Giambattista Vico (Lisa)
New Science
Truth construction

Eric Auerbach (Danielle)
Er ist Deutsch
Jewish
Got his inspiration from Dante and Shakespeare

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Chelsea)
Born in England
Would much rather use his imagination
Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner
Willing Suspension of disbelief

Hayden White (Lisa)
Doesn't remember much about her life
Known was born for greatness
The writing of history is up for interpretation

Presentations

Oscar Wilde (Kyle)
Lie, Lie, and Lie some more
Art is better then life
Life Imitates art

Walter Benjamin (Ben)
was often disregarded because he was too confusing.
sense of awe and amazement.

Henery James (Kelsey)
Great novelist
Interested in people but never really liked them
Love and Morality

Samuel Johnson (Dustin)
Had a strange tick
Poetry should be simple and easy to understand
Your part that is original is not good and your part that is good is not original

Longinus (Kari)
The authentic aim which literature is to reach is the sublime
The sublime is that cannot be expressed
Exalted expression of metaphor
Homer and Sapho
"Flash of Lightning"

Michael Foucault (Ericka)
French F. Prison interviews , hates laves
3 volumes History of sexuality

Julia Kristeva (Jake)
Psycho analysis
Structuralism similar to frys
Signifier has meanings
Semanalysis says how it sounds and what it means

Dantes Four Meaning

1. Polysemus
Poly meaning many, semus is meanings
2. Literal
3. Moral
4. Anagogically

Class Notes

Phillip Sidney
1. The poet presents us with a golden world and nature only gives us a brass one.
2. The poet never affirms anything so the poet never lies. The reason is because he deals with the hypothetical and unreal situations.

Aristotle says
The poet improves upon nature.

William Blake tells us the poets powers.

Historian and Philosophers have to state facts.

Treason on the Clerks

Literature produces tolerance-detachment where you use imagination the writers beliefs are on the backburnner to what the character says. Let the character develop as it does.

19th Century Naturalism
Zola tries to describe life how it really is. wants to record it as faithfully and desperately as possible.

Truman Capote "In cold Blood" examination of real people. Trick us into thinking it is a novel but shows us its the real world.

Journalists ask "is it true" a true artist would say they took aspects from her and others because it is a hypothetical situation

Rosie the Riveter
by Del "Abe" Jones

During World War Two
All around this Nation
Women took up the Battle
Beyond all imagination.

Over six million of them
Traded aprons for coveralls
And answered like true Patriots
When their Country calls.

They worked in every industry
To build the tools of War
From guns and tanks and planes
To ships and so much more.

A key part of our Defense
To free the Men so they could fight
Showing they could do it all
They worked the plants day and night.

Could we have won without them?
Some say it would have been tough
And we never gave them credit
Or at the least, not near enough.

So many years have passed by
With so many changes in our life
Thanks to what all those Ladies did
Who were Sister, Mother, Friend or Wife.

Feminism
Hollywood Squares
Cast:
Mary Wollstonecraft Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
bell hooks know for her Feminist thinking.
Rosie the Riveter culture Icon
Pat (?)

Four Phases of Feminism
1. 1180's- 1928 woman's suffrage
2. 1960-1980 said to have started in the 1940's with the thought but never took any action till the 1960's
3.1990's
4. Under construction.

Reader Response

Reader Response
Reader Response gives complete control to the reader to interpret a text in any way they seem fit. They believe the reader should be allowed to interpret what they read without any body else telling them what they think is right.

I think that this group did a great job and I don't think I stopped laughing the entire time they were presenting.

A good example of Reader Response was the different interpritations of The Flea by John Dunn

Deconstructionism

Deconstructionism is basically the opposite of New Criticism.
In New Criticism they encourage the readers not take any outside influence but deconstructionism claims that there is no outside the text. They claim that no one can begin reading with a complete empty slate and that everything around is important to the text. They say that the reader should take into account the Author and their history.

New Criticism

New Criticism
New Criticism is basically dependent on the reader looking at the text without any outside influence. It relies on the reader looking closely at the text without taking into account the Authors history, beliefs, race class or gender. The reader cannot be biased in anyway. Its almost like reading something without the name of the author or any extra information.

When we talked in class about New Criticism the best example that we had was when a person looks so closely at a painting all they see is the paint strokes. They cannot see anything but the small pieces they are completely focused on.

I think this is a great way to look at criticism yet there is always something that people take with them when they read.

For our presentation we decided to do Celebrity Jeopardy SNL style. It was so much fun and I think that we did a great job.

If you want to see some real actors check these out.

SNL 1

SNL 2

Aristotles's Poetics

Aristotles Poetics

I posted a link to read the entire thing but I just decided to post a few of his important peices.

I propose to treat of poetry in itself and of its various kinds, noting the essential quality of each, to inquire into the structure of the plot as requisite to a good poem; into the number and nature of the parts of which a poem is composed; and similarly into whatever else falls within the same inquiry. Following, then, the order of nature, let us begin with the principles which come first.


Epic poetry and tragedy, comedy also and dithyrambic poetry, and the music of the flute and of the lyre in most of their forms, are all in their general conception modes of imitation. They differ, however, from one another in three respects - the medium, the objects, the manner or mode of imitation, being in each case distinct.

The differences between man and animals is imagination.


All the elements of an epic poem are found in tragedy, but the elements of a tragedy are not all found in the epic poem.

Tragedy, then, is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude; in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament, the several kinds being found in separate parts of the play; in the form of action, not of narrative; through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of these emotions.

Philip Sidney

Philip Sidney
The essence of his defense is that poetry, by combining the liveliness of history with the ethical focus of philosophy, is more effective than either history or philosophy in rousing its readers to virtue.

“is no art delivered to mankind that hath not the works of nature for his principal object” (Leitch, Sidney 330). The poet then does not depart from external nature. His works are "imitation" or "fiction," made of the materials of nature, and are shaped by the artist's vision. This vision is one that demands the reader's awareness of the art of imitation created through the "maker," the poet (Kimbrough 45). Sidney's notion of "fore-conceit" means that a conception of the work must exist in the poet's mind before it is written (Harvey 3). Free from the limitations of nature, and independent from nature, poetry is capable of "making things either better than Nature bringeth forth, or, quite anew, forms such as never were in Nature"

"For Blake the true aim of art was to tune the senses and the imaginative faculties to the higher pitch of a spiritual reality, not to the natural world."

The other day we were talking about William Blake and children's literature and I decided to look at some of his Poetry he wrote about children. He was such an advocate for rights for children and his Poems Songs of Innocence and Experience. "They are testimony to his acute sensitivity to the realities of poverty and exploitation that accompanied the "dark satanic mills" of the industrial revolution"

The Chimney Sweeper was definitely an example of that.

The Chimney Sweeper William Blake
When my mother died I was very young,
And my father sold me while yet my tongue,
Could scarcely cry weep weep weep weep,
So your chimneys I sweep & in soot I sleep.

Theres little Tom Dacre, who cried when his head
That curled like a lambs back was shav'd, so I said.
Hush Tom never mind it, for when your head's bare,
You know that the soot cannot spoil your white hair

And so he was quiet. & that very night.
As Tom was a sleeping he had such a sight
That thousands of sweepers Dick, Joe, Ned, & Jack
Were all of them lock'd up in coffins of black,

And by came an Angel who had a bright key
And he open'd the coffins & set them all free.
Then down a green plain leaping laughing they run
And wash in a river and shine in the Sun.

Then naked & white, all their bags left behind.
They rise upon clouds, and sport in the wind.
And the Angel told Tom, if he'd be a good boy,
He'd have God for his father & never want joy.

And so Tom awoke and we rose in the dark
And got with our bags & our brushes to work.
Tho' the morning was cold, Tom was happy & warm
So if all do their duty, they need not fear harm.

I met a traveller from an antique land

Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown

And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.

And on the pedestal these words appear:

`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:

Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

I really do like Percy Shelly. I love his poems and I thought his defence for Poetry was great. I remember having to read this when I was in Brit Lit and I think he is the only defence I liked. My favorite line is "A poem is the very image of live expressed in its eternal truth"

This also made me think of The Idea of Order at Key West, where the woman was the maker of the world she sang and Percy says
" There is a difference between a story and a poem, that a story is a catalogue of detached facts, which have no other bond of connexion than time, place, circumstance, cause and effect; the other is the creation of actions according to the unchangeable forms of human nature, as existing in the mind of the creator, which is itself the image of all other minds. The one is partial, and applies only to a definite period of time, and a certain combination of events which can never again recur; the other is universal and contains within itself the germ of a relation to whatever motives or actions have place in the possible varieties of human nature. Time, which destroys the beauty and the use of the story of particular facts, stript of the poetry which should invest them, augments that of Poetry and forever develops new and wonderful applications of the eternal truth which it contains."

Ozymandias

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!
'Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

The best poetry is what we want; the best poetry will be found to have a power of forming, sustaining, and delighting us, as nothing else can.

Everything depends on the reality of a poet’s classic character. If he is a dubious classic, let us sift him; if he is a false classic, let us explode him. But if he is a real classic, if his work belongs to the class of the very best (for this is the true and right meaning of the word classic, classical), then the great thing for us is to feel and enjoy his work as deeply as ever we can, and to appreciate the wide difference between it and all work which has not the same high character. This is what is salutary, this is what is formative; this is the great benefit to be got from the study of poetry. Everything which interferes with it, which hinders it, is injurious. True, we must read our classic with open eyes, and not with eyes blinded with superstition; we must perceive when his work comes short, when it drops out of the class of the very best, and we must rate it, in such cases, at its proper value.

And yet Chaucer is not one of the great classics. His poetry transcends and effaces, easily and without effort, all the romance-poetry of Catholic Christendom; it transcends and effaces all the English poetry contemporary with it, it transcends and effaces all the English poetry subsequent to it down to the age of Elizabeth. Of such avail is poetic truth of substance, in its natural and necessary union with poetic truth of style. And yet, I say, Chaucer is not one of the great classics. He has not their accent. What is wanting to him is suggested by the mere mention of the name of the first great classic of Christendom, the immortal poet who died eighty years before Chaucer,—Dante. The accent of such verse as

‘In la sua volontade è nostra pace…’

Without poetry, our science will appear incomplete; and most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry”.

I just picked a few key things out from Mathew Arnold's Study of Poetry that I thought were important and down to the point. What I basically got from Arnold is that poetry should be beautiful and be meant to delight us and transcend us. But its damned hard to be a good poet and match his standards. He is pretty picky about who can be counted as one of the classic poets and not even Chaucer can meet them. And eventually everything will be replaced by poetry.
It was really long and kind of drawn out but I thought for the most part it was rather intelligent and even pretty. But I don't think many people could meet his standards.

William Wordsworth

After my research on William Wordsworth I never realized how artistic he was.
Things to remember

1. William felt that Nature was a measure to see if the poets feelings were genuine.
2. He felt that Nature was an inspiration to man and made then better people.
3. Encouraged people to experience nature and use it in their poetry.
4. Felt that poetry should use language used by men.
5. Poetry should be beautiful