Franco Moretti

Franco Moretti

Moretti presents a new idea to us. He proposes the idea of distant reading. What that means is instead of reading the whole literary text, we only read a small amount and focus more on secondary sources of the text. We look to things that other people wrote about the text. In doing this, we will be able to focus more the theme and other literary devices that are in the text. We will be able to learn more about the text. Moretti points out that the US is known for doing close readings. He says it would be hard for us to change but it would be beneficial. I would have never thought about doing it the way he suggests, but I actually think it might be a good idea. When I think about it, I learn way more about a piece when I do a paper on it than I do if I just read it. So, it does make sense. Here is an article in the New York Times about distant reading.

http://tinyurl.com/7vvo3br

Martha C. Nussbaum

Martha C. Nussbaum

Martha Nussbaum believes that reading literature will help us move to a better world. She thinks that multi-culturism is bad because we stop identifying and relating to other cultures. We are no longer empathetic with them. This is why Nussbaum says that literature is good. We can read literature and relate to other cultures. We can put ourselves in their shoes. With multi-culturism, we have a biased judgement of people. We expect them to act and think a certain way. But, if we read literature, we can see what different cultures are like. Our views could be changed. She also says that literature is important when dealing with politics. She said anyone who is involved in politcs should be involved with literature because it makes people more compassionate and it also helps people deal with the hardships of life. If children read more literature, then they will be better prepared for life. If something bad happends to them, they will be better prepared because at least in some way they have experience it before, even if it was only in their mind.

Stephen Greenblatt

Stephen Greenblatt

Greenblatt says that old historicism views include thinking that history is a process that man cannot change. He says this is not true, that man can and does change the process. Greenblatt believes that history is contigent. What that means is that things could have happened differently. It is accidents that change history. Think about all of the accidents that has changed our history. First, Columbus finding America was an accident. The following site has five accidental inventions that has changed history. Some of them are surprising.

http://tinyurl.com/bqryyg



Greenblatt says that in "old" historicism, critics cannot judge a piece of work based on the time that it was created in. He argues that "new" historicism judges the work based on the time they were created in. Some things we would have to judge something based on the time it was created in. Now, whenever you see a movie or tv show about the past or the future it is really about what is going on right now. I believe that is true of some shows that are about the present. For example, Family Guy comes across as a comedy, but it really is making fun of and addressing the politcs that are going on in our time right now.







Edward Said

Edward Said

Edward Said explained Orientalism as a view or perception of the Eastern people made by Western society. He explains that usually these views were negatice or incorrect. Said said that Western society usually got their ideas and perceptions of the Eastern people from romanticized images of them. More often than not Western views were completely wrong and completely stereotypical and racist. He said that Western society pretty much invented Orientalism and the negative views of the Orient. "The Orient is not only adjacent to Europe; it is also the place of Europe's greatest and richest and oldest colonies, the source of its civilization and languages, its cultural contestant, and one of its deepest and most recurring images of the Other." Said is describing the Orient and the places where it became itself away from itself. People migrated out of the Orient bringing its culture and civilization with them.  He warned to Orients not to play into the stereotypical views of the Western people. Said talks about how people will judge other people just based on their ideas of them. They really do not know them, but they will still pass judgement on them. This makes me think about myself in some ways. I have two chronic pain diseases. I have fibromyalgia and endometriosis. There are some days that I am not able to get out of my bed. On those days, I will have to miss class. Most of the time I do not tell my teachers why I missed, because really what can they do? But I know that some of the teachers that do not know about my condition probally thinks I am being lazy and just cutting class, when that is really not the case at all.

This is a wonderful video that shows Said being interviewed and talking about Orientalism.



Stanley Fish

Stanley Fish

Stanley Fish believes there is no formal way for interpreting or deciphering a text. He says that readers don't read text, they write text. For example, when we read a poem, we are writing the poem ourselves by bringing our own interpretations and experiences to the poem. So what exactly does a writer do then? A writer issues an invitation to the reader to bring their rules and set of conventions to the text. We all live by unsaid rules of conventions. Think about it. When we go to a restaurant, we usually assume that we should be seated by a hostess, unless there is a sign. If someone seats themselves at a restaurant that they are supposed to wait for a hostess, people don't know what to do. This is an example of interprative community.

Fish introduces us to the term anti-foundationalism. Anti-foundationalism says that theory is just a description after the fact that we make sense of things, instead of actually applying the theory to everything else. We have theories and then we apply them to the text. But Fish believes that is not what is actually happening. He believes that our theory is just us describing what has happened. It does not have any consequences. There is a good article about anti-foundationalism at http://tinyurl.com/c3wx2h4.

This video really doesn't have much to do with this blog post but I wanted to include it becaues I really enjoyed Fish's speech about Liberal Arts.





Jean Baudrillard

Jean Baudrillard

Baudrillard says that our society has replaced all meaning and reality with signs and symbols.  Places and things like Vegas are reality for people now. Reality TV isn't just TV for some people. It is life. This makes  me think of when I went to Disney World and they had a rollercoaster simulater there. You put into a computer what kind of turns and flips you would do, then you would get into this circle machine that looked like a rollercoaster on the inside. There would be a huge screen in front of you showing you the track you made. The machine you were in would actually do every flip and turn you typed in. But it didn't actually roll anywhere. It felt just like a real rollercoaster.

Below is a video comparing Baudrillard's theory to the Matrix.



Gayatri Spivak

Gayatri Spivak

In A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, Spivak uses a story to illustrate the subalter. Bhubaneswari Bhaduri killed herself because she was entrusted with a political assassination and she could not go through with it. She killed herself while she was menstrating so people would know she wasn't pregnant. However, her message is silenced by her family because no one will tell or talk about why she killed herself. Her family tells people they can look that information up in the records. This illustrated the subaltern even though she technically wasn't truly one. Her death is an example of ad hoc. She tries to give a message through it, but she is still silenced. This is why she is related to subalterns. She feels she cannot have her voice heard, so she does something extreme to make it heard. She makes sure no one misinterprets her death to be because of an illegitimate child.

Below is a video of Spivak being interviewed.

Frantz Fanon

Frantz Fanon



"Every effort is made to bring the colonized person person to admit the inferiority of his culture which has been transformed into instinctive patterns of behavior, to recognize the unreality of his "nation" and, in the last extreme, the confused and imperfect character of his own biological structure." What is Fanon trying to say here? Fanon is talking about the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized. One group of people are dominating another group. They make the other group feel inferior. They tell them that they need to be more culturized. This book, The Wretched of the Earth, is now knows as the handbook to the black revolution to many people. It goes hand and hand to what African- Americans had to go through. This article talks in detail about Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth.

http://tinyurl.com/872ceyq

 

Northrop Frye

Northrop Frye

Frye believed that most criticism is commentary. It has notes and it needs to be explained. He says that criticism needs to be scientific. But then he says that literature is not a science, it is only the criticism that is. Later on, though, he says that literature has to be a science  in some ways. He believed that we can group each kind of literature into Summer, Fall, Spring, and Winter.

Summer- this is the marriage or the triumph phase. A good example of this would be A Midsummer Night's Dream. In A Midsummer Night's Dream Hermia and Lysander want to be together and Helena wants to be with Demetrius. However, they have spells put on them and everything goes crazy. In the end though, Hermia marries Lysander, Helena marries Demetrius, and Hippolyta and Theseus marry. So there is a triple wedding at the end.



Autumn- this is the death phase. There is usually violence and sacrifice. A good example of this would be Romeo and Juliet for obvious reasons.



Winter- this is the dissolution phase. Example of this would be Hogwarts in Harry Potter when the school is being destroyed.

Spring- This is the birth of rebirth of the hero or heroine. An example I like to use for this is the rebirth of the phoenix in Harry Potter.





Adrienne Rich

Adrienne Rich



For Adrienne Rich, life as she knew it was an inventive thing that society told people was natural. For example, Viriginia Woolf was not able to go to college because she was a female, and society dictated that this was normal. To be heterosexual was the normal thing. If you were not heterosexual, you were not normal. However, do we not find homosexual and asexual creatures throughout nature? Why is it that it is pretty much our own species that have a problem with it and no other species? Below is a site I found that talks about Rich's theories.

http://tinyurl.com/23dpz3q

Cleanth Brooks

Cleanth Brooks

When reading Brooks, we are introduced to the word heresy. Heresy is going against something sacred. For example, if you go to church, but you don't believe with what their views are.  We are next introduced to the term heresy of a paraphrase. Well what does that mean? It means that paraphrasing poetry is  a heresy. It is a heresy because the experience of reading the poem is what makes the poem. You cannot get the meaning of the poem through paraphrasing.  We need to be able to see the whole structure of a poem. Brooks says, " The structure meant is a structure of meanings, evaluations, and interpretations; and the principle of unity which informs it seems to be one of balacing and harmonizing connotations, attitudes, and meanings." Brooks is saying that a good poem is one thats structures harmonizes and balances. A good poem represents a unity. It pulls it all together.

Below is a video of Alfred Lord Tennyson and his poem "Tears, Idle Tears." Brooks says "When the poet is able, as in 'Tears, Idle Tears', to analyze his experience, and in the full light of the disparity and even apparent contradiction of the various elements, bring them into a new unity, he secures not only richness and depth but dramatic power as well."





Mikhail Bakhtin

Mikhail Bakhtin

Bakhtin introduces the idea of heteroglossia. Heteroglossia means many different tyoes of speech and languages. Different languages could include languages between professionals, trade, generation, and slang. When I think of trade language, I think about restaraunt language. As a server, I know that there are many words that someone who does not work in the restaurant buisness would not know. Bakhtin said that the novel is what ties all of these languages together in a way that works. It actually becomes a work of art. There is a good article about Bakhtin and his views at http://tinyurl.com/7d9h34h.

 

Bakhtin also discusses the term dialogical. He says that each and every word is already in a dialogue in which it already has a meaning surrounding it. It is hard to put our own meaning to it. Usually, people are never more than half successful at doing this. I never really thought about this until this class. It makes sense, though. Words are way older than we are, so there is really no way to use a word and be able to put only what we want to mean into it.

Erich Auerbach

Erich Auerbach

In "mimesis" Auerbach gives two different styles of reading. There is Greek, or Helenic, reading and there is Hebrew, or secular, reading. With Greek, it is precise. The present moment is all there is. There is nothing to interpret. The characters do not develop. However, with Hebrew, the reading lacks visual specifactions. But it shows more foreground and depth. The characters will develop. Auerbach said, "Let no one object that this goes too far, that not the stories, but the religious doctrine, raises the claim to absolute authority; because the stories are not, like Homer's, simply narrated "reality." Doctrine and promise are incarnate in them and inseperable from them; for that very reason they are fraught with "background" and mysterious, containing a second, concealed meaning." What he is saying is that secular reading always has another meaning, like in Dante. It has a deeper meaning beneath the surface.

John Crowe Ransom

John Crowe Ransom



John Crowe Ransom believed that criticism is a kind of anaylsis for literary technic. It is an uncovering of an art by which a writer achieves cobbled together metaphor, sound, and meaning. He believed that representation was just re-representation. For example, when you say to someone "guess just what happened to me?" Then  you re-tell the story.  One of my favorite quotes in Criticism, Inc. was when he said " the critic should regard the poem as nothing short of a desperate ontological or metaphysical manuevre. The poet himself, in the agony of composition, has something like this sense of his labors. The poet perpetuates in his poem an order of existence which in actual life is constantly crumbling beneath his touch. His poem celebrates the object which is real, individual, and qualitatively infinite." What Ransom is trying to tell us is that art is better than life. A poet captures art in language and language never fades. It will always be concrete and beautiful. The poem captures beauty and joy for forever. If we are having a bad day, art will still be beautiful. It will still be able to take our breath away and that is something that will never change.

Below is a great article on Ransom published by the Poetry Foundation

The video that I have put below is one of Ransom's poems. I thought it was a very beautiful, powerful, and sad poem.



Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf

In the first selection of A Room of One's Own,  Woolf invents a character, Judith Shakespeare. Judith has the same abilities and talents as William, but is denied the chance that William had because she is a woman.  Judith is a talented, adventourous women who was not able to express herself and that led to her suicide. It is sad to think about that women back then were not allowed to express themselves. We have come along way since those days.

In Androgyny, Woolf talks about how she feels that literature should be androgynous. It should not have a completely male feel and it should not have a completely female feel. It should be both. I agree. Every book that I have read and enjoyed was wrote in and androgynous way. I do not like completely female "chick" novels. And I definitely do not like completely male novels. It is better when there are both of both worlds in it. Below is an article that I found very intersting about Virginia Woolf's androgyny



Zora Neale Hurston

Zora Neale Hurston

Zora Neale Hurston had an essentalism view. She takes an essential post to both black and white. She believes that due to biology, you are what  you are independent to cultural influences. She believes in what is called cultural construction. Cultural Construction means that you are what you are just due to assimilation or upbringing or condition. You do not have any nautral tendencies.  There is a good article where cultural construction is applied to twin studies at http://tinyurl.com/dxvsmy7.

One of the things that I found interesting in the reading on Hurston is the way that African-Americans have affected standard english. Hurston says, "In this respect the American Negro has done wonders to the English language. It has often been stated by etymologists that the Negro has introduced no African words to the language. This is true, but it is equally true that he has made over a great part of the tongue to his liking ans has had his revision accecpted by the ruling class." Hurston is saying that black speech has affected standard English. Black Americans at a time where they were not fully free made these contributions and it should be recognized.

Dubois

W.E.B Dubois

Dubois had a very strong view on propaganda. He believed that not only does art have a practical value, it is nothing without propaganda. Dubois could not see something as beautiful if it did not have truth and justice in it. Dubois said, " Such is beauty. Its variety is infinite, its possibility is endless. In normal life all may have it and have it yet again. The world is full of it; and yet today the mass of human beings are choked away from it, and their lives distorted and made ugly." He is saying that it is made ugly by injustice. That is why beauty to him is justice. This is why art can be used to obtain justice.

Dubois talks about the color line. The color line  is a line dividing communites based on color. It is often a physical line but for most part it is an imaginary line. When I read this, it made me think of that scene in Remember the Titans  when the players go to celebrate after winning a game and one of the white players brings the African-American players into a dinner that is only for whites. The white boy was from the North so he did not understand as much about the South. This video is of poor quality but it was the only one I could find and I really wanted to be able to at least here the exchange.



Saussure

Ferdinand de Saussure

 

Sassure introduces us to the term semiotcs and semiology, which is the study of signs. Sassure believed that signs are totally arbitrary. He believed that there is no connection to a sign and what it refers too. Below is a video on semiotics.

 

 

Freud

Freud

In Freud's The Uncanny, he explains the uncanny as being familiar yet unfamiliar at the same time. This causes the person to have a feeling that something is stangely familiar or uncomfortably strange. This video is a good representation of this feeling. It takes images that we recognize and distorts them in a way.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche

Truth and Lying

Nietzsche said that our whole lives are made of lies. However, it is not lies in a moral sense. To lie in a moral sense is to lie in a dishonest way. It is the type of lying that we are most familiar with. To lie in a non-moral sense is actual or precise. Nietzsche uses different terms in Truth and Lying such as metonymy's and metaphors. Metonymy's are figures of speech. For example, "the white house issued a statement today" or "lets hit the road." Metaphors are substitutions. Examples of metaphors include "you are my sunshine" or "you are my rock." Nietzsche explains that what we see in the world is not the actual world. We see things that are byproducts of our experiences. Nietzsche explains that we actually have no idea what the world really is. Nietzsche says, " Nature has thrown away the key, and woe betide fateful curiosity should it ever succeed in peering through a crack in the chamber of consciousness." What he is saying is that we don't see the wold how it really is and we don't have access to it. He then introduces the tern anthropomorphism. Anthropomorphism means to make the universe into our own idea.



The Birth of Tragedy

In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche introduces the Apollonian and the Dionysian.

The Apollonian represents order, light, clarity, and form. Examples of Apollonian include classical sculptures and monuments.

The Dionysian represents chaos and disorder. Examples of this include choirs, crowds, , mobs, rock concerts, festivals, and carnivals.

Nietzsche believed that art, no matter what kind, brings people together in some kind of unified body. I believe that he is absolutely right. People who would have never been together in any other circumstance will come together to admire art.





Matthew Arnold

Matthew Arnold

Matthew Arnold was a cultural critic and a British poet. He is known for his poem "Dover Beach" and many others. He believed that culture is literature. He said that culture is essential, it  is not decorative. He believed that i would replace the world that was religion. I found a virtual video of Arnold reading one of his poems.

Culture and Anarchy

In Culture and Anarchy, Matthew Arnold is presenting a less critical perspective than he is a spiritual perspective. He says that literature capture the best that has been though and said. Matthew Arnold believes that all literature is not great. It is like the top of a wheat stalk. Only a few of the kernels are good. Arnold says that it is the critics job to sort though and find the good ones.





I found this website to to be very interesting. There are two people arguing about the meaning in life. One blames Arnold for people believing that life has no meaning.

Charles Baudelaire

Charles Baudelaire



From The Painter of Modern Life

Baudelaire talks about how most people only admire the popular things and do not take time to appreciate things that are not as known as others. He thinks it is a shame that some of these works of art gets neglected. He also believes that it is ok for people to admire things that are from the past, but they should also admire things that are from the present. He believes that art shoud not be admire only because it is from the past. I agree with him. I love to read classics and study them, but I also love to read and view things that have been produced in my time and admire them for the content and beauty that they actually have instead of admiring them for how old they are.

He then goes on to talk about Monsieur G. He likes the characteristics in him. He likes his modesty, his originality, and his obsessions with a world of images. He also admires how he wants to be anonymous, how he does not care if people approve of him, and how he does not have an ulterior motive. Baudelaire admires how Monsieur G does not sign his pieces using his name. He believes that people should be able to tell that it is Monsieur G's  because " all his works are signed with his dazzling soul." Baudelaire believes that Monsieur G's talents are a gift. He says that he genius comes from curiosity.Baudelaire also says that genius comes from childhood recovered at will. He talks about how children sees everything in newness. That nothing is more delightful than the way children see the world. I love this. I never thought about this until I read Baudelaire but it makes perfect sense. Everything was amazing to me when I was a child. I found the silliest things beautiful. Children just see the world different than adults do. They appreciate things more and do not take as many things for granted like adults do.

Next, Baudelaire talks about modernity. He says that painters dress their subjects in clothes from the past. He said that painters generations before his time had no choice, but the painters of his day that did this were lazy. He said for a portrait to be good, it must be a whole. And to be a whole, it must have everything from the present so that everything fits together. Even the smiles and facial expression. He says that each generations has their own facial expressions and gaits. Again, I have never thought about this. But now that I do think about it, it makes sense. I look at pictures of my parents and family when they are my age and they looks so different, and it is not just the clothing. It is the actual way they look.

Coleridge Biograpgia Literaria Chapters 13 & 14

 

From Biographia Literaria

Chapter 13

Coleridge considers the imagination to be primary or secondary. According to Coleridge, the primary imagination is "the living  Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I am." The secondary imagination co-exist with the conscious will. It is an echo of the primary imagination. The secondary imagination will diffuse, dissipate, and dissolve in order to recreate.

From Biographia Literaria

Chapter 14

In this chapter, Coleridge talks about how him and Wordsworth decided that a series of poems may be composed of two sorts. The first would be supernatural and the second would be subjects they chose from ordinary life. This is what led them to the idea of the "Lyrical Ballads." Coleridge was the one who focused on the supernatural while Wordsworth focused on the normal or ordinary. Coleridge talks about how his poems were not as successful as Wordsworth. In the first edition, Wordsworth published 19 of the 23 poems. Coleridge said that his poems made the ballads not flow right.

Coleridge also talks about in this chapter what poetry is. He says "What is poetry? is so nearly the same question with what is a poet? that the answer to the one is involved in the solution of the other. For it is a distinction resulting from the poetic genius itself, which sustains and modifies the images, thoughts and emotions of the poet's own mind." Coleridge talks about what the poet is in ideal perfection. He says that an ideal poet would bring the whole soul of a man into activity. He also says that the ideal poet "diffuses a tone and spirit of unity that blends and fuses by that synthetic and magical power, the imagination."

Samuel Taylor Coleridge Background

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

1772-1834

Background

Samuel Coleridge was born in 1772 in a small town located in southwest England. He was sent to London at the age of nine when his father passed away. He attended Christ's Hospital school as a charity student. He enrolled in Jesus College, Cambridge University in 1791. He enlisted in the Fifteenth Light Dragoons two years later. He was drove to do this because he was in so much debt. He enlisted under an alias, calling himself Silas Tomkyn Comberbache. Luckily, his family rescued him from this. They returned him to the university. However, in 1794 he left the university without completing his degree.

Coleridge went on a walking tour in June 1794. While on this tour he met the poet Robert Southey. The two decided to come up with a plan to have a society ruled by equals. They called this pantisocracy. Part of their plan included Coleridge marrying Southey's fiance's sister, Sarah Fricker. The plan they came up with never worked, but Coleridge still married Sarah in 1795.

Coleridge's first poetry appeared in late 1794. His first poetry was sonnets addressed to men like William Godwin and Joseph Priestley who were contemporary political radicals. In 1795, while working as a journalist and lecturing on politics, history, and religion, Coleridge met William Wordsworth. They were considered to be good friends. Coleridge left his wife and two kids in 1798 when he left with Wordsworth to go to Germany. Coleridge's life began to take a turn. He was not in love with his wife. He fell in love with Mary Wordsworth sister, Sarah Hutchinson. He became addicted to laudanum (opium dissolved in alcohol). He left his family behind again for two years when he travelled to the Mediterranean. He came back and lived with Wordsworth for a couple of months still an addict and the relationship suffered. The two went their separate ways and were no longer friends. Surprisingly, Coleridge was still productive after this. He wrote and published The Friend in 1809 and 1810. It was a twenty-eight issue periodical. In 1816 to his death, he lived with a doctor, Dr. James Gillman, who helped keep his drug problem under control. He died in 1834



Samuel Johnson

Samuel Johnson

The Rambler No. 4

Samuel Johnson talks about why fiction is not as good as nonfiction in the Rambler. He talks about how if you take away the imaginary things; you are left with nothing that means anything. He believes that the authors of these books do not worry about being criticized because they are making everything up. I do not see how these authors would not worry about being criticized. If anything, I would think that they would be criticized more because they are doing something different. He also believes that these books are only for the young and ignorant. Johnson says that authors should take the upmost care to not include anything that is indecent in their novels. I understand that this type of novel would appear more to the younger group, but I think educated people like it as well. I know I have to remember that this was at a different time than we are in now, but it is still hard for me to believe that only young and ignorant people liked fiction novels.

Horace



Horace



In Ars Poetica, Horace is giving his guidelines on writing poetry. While I think that many of the points he makes are valid, I also feel that he is being way to strict. It just seems like with all of the rules there would never be any type of different poetry. It seems like it would all sound the same. It would have to get old after awhile.

Plato

Plato

The Republic was a Socratic dialouge written by Plato. He talks about why there should be justice and what good comes from it. In the following video is Robin Waterfield telling us why we should read the Republic. Robin Waterfield is the editor of the Oxford World's Classic edition of the Republic.

Aristotle

Aristotle

Aristotle was a physician and a teacher. He believes that everything has a beginning, middle, and end. His ideas about the of unities of Greek tragedy and tragic flaws are a few of the things that he is famous for. The unities include time, place, and action. Time is when the tragedy tries to stay withing a 24 hour time frame, or one revolution of the sun. Place is when the tragedy sticks to one location because of the time frame. Action is when having action keeps you in that one intense place. Too many actions would be hard to keep up with.

Aristotle's tragic flaw, or "hamartia," is when a character is destroyed through some flaw they have. For example, Hamlet over thinking things. A more modern example would be Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman.

I've included the following video because I found it to be pretty funny. It is not very professional, but it does explain Aristotle pretty well.