the tragic low-mimetic

According to Wiki the tragic low-mimetic is:

"Pathos (pronounced /ˈpeɪːθɒs/) (Greek: πάθος) is one of the three modes of persuasion in rhetoric (along with ethos and logos). Pathos appeals to the audience's emotions. It is a part of Aristotle's philosophies in rhetoric. Not to be confused with 'bathos' (βάθος) which is an attempt to perform in a serious, dramatic fashion that fails and ends up becoming comedy.
Pathetic events in a plot are also not to be confused with tragic events. In a tragedy, the character brings about his or her own demise, whereas those invoking pathos often occur to innocent characters, invoking unmerited grief.
Emotional appeal can be accomplished in a multitude of ways:

• by a metaphor or story telling, common as a hook,
• by a general passion in the delivery and an overall amount of emotional items in the text of the speech, or in writing.

For example, in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Mr. Darcy persuades Elizabeth to reconsider her disposition of him through pathos in his letter when he informs her of Mr. Wickham’s offenses."

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

This reference to Pride and Prejudice is what caught my attention and attracted me to this box. I LOVE P&P! Yes, I'm one of those girls. I am a very passionate person, and I get kind of emotional, so the 'pathos' box is right for me. Passion and emotion are very important to a story, it really can make or break a couple. Part of the reason that Darcy and Lizzie were so perfect for each other was because they were both so passionate, not simply for each other, but for life as well. That passion is important to share.

Don Quixote

As I am discovering, although DQ is an easy read, it is hard to motivate myself. The poems at the beginning are hilarious and wonderful. I hope that the rest of the novel turns out as great. Here's hoping... 940 pages is sure a lot if you don't like what you're reading.

Archetypes of Literature

While reading the 'Archetypes of Literature' I was struck by how scientific sounding it was. I felt like I was reading Darwin's 'Origins of Species' but about literature. This is not a bad thing, because I find it fascinating to read about something in a variety of ways, but strange none-the-less. It is scientific, but also poetic, this is a strange idea to me, one that I had never pondered before this class. That something can talk about science in a poetic way is brilliant. I'm sure that if Milton or Shakespeare would have written about the periodic table or blood cells I would have learned it so much better! And I'd probably even like it. I understand that as an English major I have a bias towards literary works such as these, and that scientist would 'goff' at this, but I really think that Frye had something going. Lines like: "Art, like nature, is the subject of a systematic study, and has to be distinguished from the study itself, which is criticism," "If such a pattern exists, then criticism would be to art what philosophy is to wisdom and history to action," and "The only weakness in this approach is that it is conceived primarily as the antithesis of centrifugal or 'background' criticism, and so lands us in a somewhat unreal dilemma, like the conflict of internal and external relations in philosophy." Before my biological anthropology class in community college, I would have read this and instantly fallen asleep. But like I learned then about Darwin, and now about Frye, patently waiting for the author to get to the point is generally worth it. My absolute favorite line from this essay was "we hear or listen to a narrative, but when we grasp a writer's total pattern we 'see' what he means." When Frye describes this moment of epiphany that will inevitably follow any in depth reading of literature, he described the truth. In an epiphany you actually 'see' what the words mean. It is much more than a moment of understanding, it is a moment of clear vision.

My grid

for the life of me I cannot figure out how to get this grid on my blog. and my scanner is not working... bummer.

my critic:

WOLFGANG ISER

Wednesday, September 24

"Poetry can kill a man" ~ Dead Man

alphabet song and video (with Patrick Stewart!!)

"Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knew IT was the spirit that we sought and knew That we should ask this often as she sang. 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 sky And cloud, of the 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 sound alone. But IT was more than that, More even than her voice, and ours, among The meaningless plungings of water and the wind, Theatrical distances, bronze shadows heaped On high horizons, mountainous atmospheres Of sky and sea."

• What is IT?!

scripture: either the bible or something that you take so seriously it becomes your bible.

"On the mythical plane there is more legend than evidence, but it is clear that the poet who sings about gods is often considered to be singing as one, or as an instrument of one. His social function is that of an inspired oracle; he is frequently an ecstatic, and we hear strange stories of his powers. Orpheus could draw trees after him; the bards and ollaves of the Celtic would could kill their enemies with their satire; the prophets of Israel foretold the future. The poet's visionary function, his proper work as a poet, is on this plane to reveal the god for whom he speaks. This usually means that he reveals the god's will in connection with a specific occasion, when he is consulted as an oracle in a state of 'enthusiasm' or divine possession. But in time the god in him reveals his nature and history as well as his will, and so a larger pattern of myth and ritual is built up out of a series of oracular pronouncements." ~pg 55 of N. Frye

chronicle: names of people who are really important

incantatory

'The Sotweed Factor, or A Voyage to Maryland' by John Barth is a satire of the national poem "The Sot-Weed Factor' by Ebenezer Cooke, which is a horrible poem

The poet is a recorder, not a participant

the muses, the daughters of Mnemosyne:

1. Calliope- chief muse and muse of epic or heroic poetry
2. Clio- muse of history
3. Erato- muse of love or erotic poetry, lyrics and marriage song
4. Euterpe- muse of music and lyric poetry
5. Melpomene- muse of tragedy
6. Polyhymnia- muse of sacred song, oratory, lyric, singing and rhetoric
7. Terpsichore- muse of choral song and dance
8. Thalia- muse of comedy and bucolic poetry
9. Urania- muse of astronomy

you can kill your enemies with satire! like in Dead Man

Poems are very powerful in the world of thematic myth

a chant killing someone: From Peter Pan. I do believe that the chant of "old, alone, done for" kills Hook in the end.

enthusiasm: divine possession


ARISTOTLE'S POETICS:

* Plato: was his teacher, and he was making fun of poetry because poetry (art) has no place in his ideal republic

*he throws them outside the door of his city

*they are liars because they engage in an imitative art

*imitation of a bed is not a literal bed

*Plato believed that even real things are a representation of the divine that are above us, not making them real either

*so he believes that poets or all artists imitate and imitation

*poets are deranged, which makes them in the thematic myth category because they are possessed

*Frye spoke of this too, but used a cat as an example instead of a bed

My cat Tigger

"The poet is an empty vessel in which the imagination flows" ~ Romantic viewpoint

Monday, September 22

"You can tell by the way people speak if they are great readers or not" ~Dr. Sexson

Blog Assignments:

1. intro to your critic: photos, central contribution to lit crit and wiki info
2. connect 'Idea' to 4 elements
3. link 'Idea' to N. Frye's 2nd chapter
4. talk about where you are in DQ and what you think about it
5. talk about what you understand from N. Frye
6. write about other people's blogs
7. become obsessed with a box from the grid
   

comedy section: 'A Midsummer Night's Dream'

William Blake is ESSENTIAL to understanding N. Frye

"Sancho, my friend, know that I was born, by the will of heaven, in this our iron age, to revive the one of gold, or the Golden Age, as it is called. I am he for whom are reserved dangers, great deeds, valiant fears. I am, I repeat, he who is to revive the Knights f the Round Table, the Twelve Peers of France, the Nine Worthies, he who is to make the world forget the Platirs, Tablants, Olivants, and Tirants, the Phoebuses and belianises, and the entire horde of famous knights errant of a bygone age, by performing in this time in which I find myself such great and extraordinary deeds and feats of arms that they will overshadow the brightest they ever achieved" pg 142 D. Q.

• he wants to revive the Romantics
• quixotic figure: like Oscar Wilde- completely dedicated to an ideal
• create through imagination a world that is not really there
• it has a 'dark side' though: living in a different world, creating something that is not there, turning yourself into a fool- or 'tilting at windmills'
• "mad as a hatter" ~Lewis Carroll
• "not making fun of someone is worse, because then you have to 'humor' people" ~Dr. Sexson
• 'humoring' them is one of the worst things that you can do "We laugh at something that points out another's errors, lack of intelligence, or unfortunate circumstances; granting a sense of superiority." ~wiki humor article

"'I'm of the same opinion,' said the barber. 'And so am I,' added the niece. 'Well, then,' said the housekeeper, 'hand them over and into the corral with them.' They handed them to her, and there were a good many of them, and she saved herself a trip down the stairs and tossed them all out the window." pg 47 of D. Q.

• burn the books! Like Ray Bradbury

An example of a great reader: "Miss Eliza Bennet," said Miss Bingley, "despises cards. She is a great reader, and has no pleasure in anything else." "I deserve neither such praise nor such censure," cried Elizabeth; "I am NOT a great reader, and I have pleasure in many things." ~Pride and Prejudice chpt 8

80-90% of people didn't read a single book last year

Book banning:

1. Harry Potter books by JK Rowling
2. The Joy of Gay Sex by Edmund White
3. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
4. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
5. for a complete list of books challenged between 1990-2000

*The people that ban these books decide to throw out certain books that they didn't like

*If literature is ever banned the only way to know it is to memorize it

Fahrenheit 451

a very funny episode of Friends with Joey's 'air quotes'

Ramon Fernandez from 'Idea'

Wallace Stevens on Ramon

Audiences in 'Idea':

1. she is the sea's audience
2. the people in the poem are watching her
3. us as readers are also an audience

when the singing stops, the world is changed

Wallace Steven's '13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird'

innuendos: you live in irony all the time, words are suggestive

Lolita's first lines: "Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, stating four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita." ~Vladimir Nabokov

elegy: form of poetry that speaks about tragedy
Aristotle: all of the pieces fit together, if you remove one part, it all falls apart


special effects:

• aren't organic
• shallow outlook
• plot is the most important

Frankenstein's monster evokes pathos because he wants a family and friends but never can

tragedy according to Aristotle's Poetics: isolation from a community

Pathos: heroic, but not pathetic

trashy lit:

Wednesday, September 17

"Oedipus does something very bad" ~Dr. Sexson

Emerson Eye

Mariners- Richie Sexson

Umbrage dialectical process

Pharmakos

"There is certainly no evidence that baseball has descended from ritual of human sacrifice, but the umpire is quite as much of a pharmakos as if it had: he is an abandoned scoundrel, a greater robber than Barabbas; he has the evil eye; the supporters of the losing team scream for his death. At play, mob emotions are boiled in an open pot, so to speak; in the lynching mob they are in a sealed furnace of what Blake would call moral virtue" N. Frye pg 46

fallacy of misrepresented concretement

William Blake: visionary poet that inspired Frye

Bill Bruckner "Good thing we do baseball, or we would literally kill the umpires" ~Frye

catharsis- feelings of pity and fear
mob-crowd violence: lynching 'To Kill a Mockingbird'

Vladimir Nabokov on Quixote:

"We shall do our best to avoid the fatal error of looking for so-called “real life” in novels. Let us not try and reconcile the fiction of facts with the facts of fiction. Don Quixote is a fairy tale, so is Bleak House, so is Dead Souls. Madame Bovary and Anna Karenin are supreme fairy tales. But without these fairy tales the world would not be real. A masterpiece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader."

'Man of La Mancha' -Impossible Dream

Quixote: idealist vs the realist
Plato criticized literature and Aristotle defended it
Violent works of literature:

• Oedipus: is the most violent of all novels because he "does something very bad" ~Dr. Sexson
• Procne, Tereus and Philomela
• Titus Andronicus
• King Lear

These stories are what my mother calls 'ugly,' anything displeasing to her is termed as such and she refuses to watch them or to understand what I love them so much.

If you are depressed because of a novel, movie, etc there is either something wrong with you or the book, said Frye. There are only 3 emotions that you should feel- illumination, delight and joy.

'If you read 'King Lear' and aren't joyful when Cordelia dies, there is something wrong with you because it is an excellent piece of literature." ~Dr. Sexson on Frye

Aristotle can be explained in a nutshell using Goldilocks and the 3 Bears:

1. too long, too short, perfect
2. too hot, too cold, perfect
3. too hard, too soft, perfect

Some like it hot: quintessential comedy

1. methos- story
2. ethos- emotion
3. dianoya- theme

"the experience of the work of art is more important than the art"

"buckle your seat belts, it's gonna be a bumpy ride"

1. ancient world: elements of 'the world', what's it about? mimetic: imitation of the world
2. neoclassical: audience is important, pragmatic
3. Romantics: artist focused, expression
4. modern: the work is most important 'text', objective

Monday, September 15

"Trust the tale, not the teller"~ T.H. Lawrence

Term Paper:

• defend or 'apologize' for literature or literary criticism
• defend against non-English majors
• entitle it: 'your name's apology: What's the use of stories that aren't even true?'
• 3 pages long
• must include:

1. Idea of Order At Key West
2. Don Quixote
3. Anatomy of Criticism
4. your critic

A Call to Arms:

• Matthew Arnold's defense of poetry
• Thomas Love Peacock was mean to poetry and Percy Shelley defended it
• N. Frye too of course
• "Biggits and finatics have no use for the arts..." N. Frye
• The first step in a courtship is "what's your major" - it's quite the pick up line
• 'Haroun in the sea of stories' defends children's lit, it's a book about reading books
• USE is the key word, what does it mean?

Horace

• myth: there are many definitions
• lie- apperances are reality
• a collections of stories that help people w their lives

ME-

• where do you get ideas from?
• They don't pop into our heads, they are put there
• shows that something in our history touched us and put it there
• analogy:
• lets step back from what we are doing
• the farther we step back, you begin to see its origin and the big picture instead of the small one
• logos-> log-> logic
• the power to create, the power of the spoken word creates a world
• you can't read things innocently- you have to step back
• you you rather know too much? or know too little?
• ignorance vs wisdom
• Adam and Eve- knew too much after they ate the fruit
• children, like prefruit A & E know too little and are content
• cosmogony: creation or birth of the world
• myth- through the agency of voice
• open sesame: you speak it when you know it and make it real
• many times the critic is shocked at what the critic finds in their work
• IOOAKW: the singer sings the world into being. she beats the sea because she knows more than the sea. What is she singing?!

Birds song:

• thrushes:
  
• chickadees
• the music of nature is usually more beautiful than anything else, but yet she sings more beautifully still
• the relationship between humans and nature, when nature is "just a body fluttering its empty sleeves"
• rap contests: metaphors usually win
• lil' Wayne lyrics
• genius: demonic spirit takes over our body


• the daemons from the Golden Compass:
• mimic: copy
• mimesis: most of history believed that art is an imitation of nature
• realistic or impressionistic? Monet
• we are being separated from the music of the sea because we want to make our own music
• poesis: creative "as a painting so is poetry"
• "Aristotle thought of drama as being "an imitation of an action," that of tragedy as of "falling from a higher to a lower estate", and so being removed to a less ideal situation in more tragic circumstances than before."
• imitation vs creation of poems, songs and literature
• greenworld: pastoral- goats and sheep, shepherds

Friday, September 12

"The Tragic Vegetable?" ~ Dr. Sexson

4 essays:

1. theory of modes: historical


2. theory of symbols: ethical


3. theory of myths: archetypal


4. theory of genres: rhetorical


5. why Quixote?

• all light bulbs should be put into writing


• what do I yearn for? I want to be like Peter Pan, eternally young.

Ages:

1. Golden


2. Silver


3. Bronze


4. Iron

20 questions

• the metals become progressively inferior


• the world started out perfect, but then got progressively worse


• intentional fallacy

'cut to the chase' metaphor. What does it mean?

• the best part of the movie is the chase scene


• the climax is when they race through the town knocking over the vegetable stands, hence the tragic vegetable


• myth and ritual are VERY important to Frye


• "patterns of imagery are... direct references to time" N. Frye


• Frye is intelligent, but confusing


• pompous Frye:
  

alazon: impostor in 2 forms:

1. soldier who brags


2. professor who is pedant

like the presidential election: McCain- soldier, Obama- professor

Scapegoat

• oral stories to 'high brow lit' to 'low brow lit' are all literature


• allegorical children's rhymes like 'hey diddle diddle'


• as adults we can't help ourselves, we read into EVERYTHING


• Don Quixote


• myth


• ritual
  
• quest: the center of literature (concerning myth) is the quest


• Cliff'sNotes: you get the frosting but not the cake


• vico: Finnegan's Wake is base upon this philosopher/ historian. He wrote not literary history, but poetic history

"The entire human race is in a stage of decline since the beginning"

1. gods- hieroglyphic language


2. heroes- sophisticated literature


3. men/people- commerce, practical utilitarianism, mercantile, economic


4. chaos- not intelligible, gibberish: 1) like, 2) dude, 3) awesome, 4) cool

Shakespeare's sonnet 18:
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this and this gives life to thee.

this poem will make an ordinary day extraordinary, simply because of its beauty

"The Internet is a series of tubes"

imagination: the ability to form mental images, or the ability to spontaneously generate images within one's own mind.

W. Stevens

Wednesday, September 10

"The purpose of this class is to make you more interesting" ~ Dr. Sexson

Literary criticism is interesting, YOU are boring.

• Centripetal: goes in (inside the text)
• centrifuge: goes out (outside the text)
• New Criticism: centripetal focus

Literature has something to do with the rhetorical form it takes

groups:

1. Deconstruction
2. feminism
3. Marxism
4. psychoanalysis
5. reader-response
6. post colonialism

Harold Bloom hates Frye because he was:

1. a devout christian
2. ordained Methodist minister
3. he believed that all of these things were right at the same time

• cadences
• 'The Golden Bough' ~Frazer
• survival of the psyche

• "All literature is displaced myth" ~N. Frye
• 'whether it is good or bad is not important it is a question of taste, which means NOTHING' says Frye.
• He says not to think about what it means, but WHAT IT IS.
• Frye believed that the bible is both literally true and myth at the same time
• "If you put lipstick on a pig, it's still a pig" ~Barak Obama
• bad interpretations aren't the same as making the poem mean whatever you want
• convincing is the most important part

Frye's states of criticism:

1. myth
2. romantics
3. high mimetic mode
4. low mimetic mode
5. ironic

When Autumn comes:

" You like it under the trees in autumn,

Because everything is half dead.

The wind moves like a cripple among the leaves

And repeats words without meaning.

In the same way, you were happy in spring,

With the half colors of quarter-things,

The slightly brighter sky, the melting clouds,

The single bird, the obscure moon--

The obscure moon lighting an obscure world

Of things that would never be quite expressed,

Where you yourself were not quite yourself,

And did not want nor have to be,

Desiring the exhilarations of changes:

The motive for metaphor, shrinking from

The weight of primary noon,

The A B C of being,

The ruddy temper, the hammer

Of red and blue, the hard sound--

Steel against intimation--the sharp flash,

The vital, arrogant, fatal, dominant X."

~The Motive for Metaphor By Wallace Stevens

"All of life is an affair of the weather"' Wallace Stevens

Literature is corresponding with the seasons:

• melancholy in winter
• happiness in summer

CREATION MYTH:

• The rape of Europa
• Genesis
  
  

Monday, September 8th

"Improvisation is key to us" ~ Dr. Sexson

Important Dates:

• Oct. 17th- Quiz #1- 100pts
• Nov. 14th- Quiz #2- 100pts
• After Thanksgiving- group presentations and individual presentations
• Dec 18th 8-10 am- Final- 50 pts

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Sir Philip Sydney said that literature should:

1. instruct
2. entertain

• rhetoric: tries to persuade us, which makes it different from poetics
• provocation
• flyting: is an act of insulting people with rhetoric
• shakespeareinsults.com
• Alice's Restaurant by Guthry lyrics

"the Internet is like a genie, you can get anything you want" ~Dr. Sexson

easy rhetoric: "naked as a jaybird"

NORTHROP FRYE:

• the master of obstruction (absurdity)
• focus on what you do understand not what you don't understand
• what they think the author means
• LITERATURE DOES NOT MEAN WHAT THE AUTHOR SAYS IT MEANS!!!!
• you don't know what they think anyway their and our opinions mean nothing
• intentional fallacy
• so... what about what we think?
• literature is not detachable from the work its self
• "what it means is what it is, and what it is is a structure of words" Frye
• Joyce said that he wrote Finnegan's Wake to keep the critics guessing for years

"If I have read the last chapter of Finnegan's Wake correctly, what happens there is that the dreamer, after spending the night in communion with a vast body of metaphorical identifications, wakens and goes about his business forgetting his dream, like Nebuchadnezzar, failing to use, or even to realize that he can use, the 'keys to dreamland.' What he fails to do is therefore left for the reader to do, the 'ideal reader suffering from an ideal insomnia,' as Joyce calls him, in other words the critic. Some such activity as this of reforging the broken links between creation and knowledge, art an science, myth and concept, is what I envisage for criticism. Once more, I am not speaking of a change of direction or activity in criticism: I mean only that if critics go on with their own business, this will appear to be, with increasing obviousness, the social and practical result of their labors." ~ Frye pg 354

• Joyce believes that we must suffer from an 'ideal insomnia'

4 works that we are covering that deal with the defence of poetry:

1. Aristotle's Poetics
2. Dante's Letter to Can Grande
3. Sir Philip Sydney's An Apology for Poetry
4. Percy Shelley's Defence of Poetry

Friday, September 5th

"Literature is like a hallucinogen" ~Dr. Sexson

• Dane Cook on being a movie critic WARNING!! EXPLICIT LANGUAGE.
• all rhetoric is performative

"We can get a whole liberal education simply by picking up one conventional poem and following its archetypes as they stretch out into the rest of literature. An avowedly conventional poem like Lycidas urgently demands the kind of criticism that will absorb it into the study of literature as a whole, and this activity is expected to begin at once, with the first cultivated reader. Here we have a situation in literature more like that of mathematics or science, where the work of genius is assimilated to the whole subject so quickly that one hardly notices the difference between creative and critical activity." ~N. Frye, pg 100

• It has been said that critics are parasites of literature or frustrated artists

"Are you good men and true?" Dogberry from Much Ado About Nothing

• gauntlet: an armored glove thrown down to challenge someone to a fight
• tropes: to turn, a figure of speech
• criticism: it isn't simply being negative, but an activity in its self that is important ~Frye
• "not and archetype, but ecstatic: bliss, euphoria 'ec'= out, 'stas'= stand, to stand outside yourself ~ Frye

Dante's 4 levels of criticism:

1. literal
2. analogical
3. moral
4. anagogical

3 things VERY important to class:

1. Wallace Steven's poem
2. Northrop Frye
3. Cervantes

Wednesday, September 3rd

"Where's the literature here?" ~ Dr. Sexson

"The argument of our last essay, however, led to the principle that all structures in words are partly rhetorical, and hence literary, and that the notion of a scientific or philosophical verbal structure free of rhetorical elements is an illusion."
~Northrop Frye

Lecture notes:

• all words are literary because they are rhetorical, "science is really literature"
• ongoing class assignment: keep our ears open for literature in everyday speech
• "where did this interest in similes come from?!" Dr. Sexson on the word 'like'
• "there is nothing that is boring, only people are boring"
• Always ask yourself: wheres the literature here?
• epiphany: a sudden manifestation of the divine
• the idea of order at key west by Wallace Stevens
• "how do I know what I think until I see what I say?" ~ E.M. Forster
• 'Archetypes of Literature' by N. Frye
• a helpful AoL (Archetypes of lit) site