final thoughts...

I was really worried about taking this class when I first started. I had heard really horrible things about literary criticism and didn't want to take it at all. Then, when I bought my books and saw that we not only are reading Don Quixote (which is rather hefty), but also N. Frye I have to admit that I panicked a little. THEN, when we had to memorize all of 'Idea of Order' I'll admit that my palms started sweating and I began to have heart palpitations...

Flash to 4 months later, the good news is I'm still alive! I've given hours of my time to reading N. Frye, Don Q, the critics and memorizing Idea. I am a better person because of it, not only in re-reading DQ and re-memorizing Idea, but revisiting the beauty of the critic's apologizes. In spite of all the work, I really did enjoy this class and am sad that it's ending.

Friday, December 12

INDIVIDUAL PRESENTATIONS:

Chris:

• Dream about the power he has
• Chronicles about a man that falls through the cracks, finds a ruby and chooses stairs

John:

• Wrote a depressing story
• Presentation a poem: about autumn taking away, but finding life

Alex:

• Doesn’t want to apologize because the non-English majors should apologize to him
• If you listen to music, you listen to poetry
• Learn even through fiction
• Write down what you know, and make others know it
• Writing is the best way for him to live and help others learn
• Likes the fiction, not the reality (literature creates other realities)

_________________________________________

TEST QUESTIONS:

1. new criticism: ‘formalism’ values technique; the text itself; stay inside the text; likes unity in works; no irrelevant personal associations
2. deconstruction: no absolute meaning to any text; contrasting new: there is no outside the text; everything is a text; counters unity: everything works towards: ‘the well wrought urn’ by cleanth brookes; STC: form and satisfaction in every part, like the whole; ‘everything is partially rhetorical, and therefore literary… if so then our literary universe has expanded into a…’ said Frye (pg 350), Frye was one of these
3. feminism: reductive: looking at the text w/ spectacles that see author, characters and how they should be thought of: throw away if not there. expansive: bell hooks, what kind of literary work and understandings about gender
4. reader-response: classroom metaphors of the spectacles: ‘see everything differently w/ different glasses’ you see what you want to see; ‘irreverent’ connections are important; you see what’s there and yourself too; Santa= death to Sexson; it doesn’t mean that you can make a poem mean whatever you want it to mean, but you can see things that are connected
5. psycho-analysts: don’t make fun of Freud, he was one, YOU created by him, great inventors of the modern age because the truth is unseen
6. Marxism: don’t see what’s around us; look at social cultures and relationships; class struggles; Fight Club fits everything
   
   1. Criticism vs complaint: (pg ? DQ)
   2. In Harold Bloom’s intro Edith Grossman was the __________ of translators. ~ Glen Gould
   3. What secret enchanted thing does Don Antonio and DQ that can tell the truth? ~ the enchanted head
   4. What is the English translation of DQ in Spanish? ~DQ of the stains (stained glass windows)
   5. What happens to DQ in the cave of Montesano’s? ~years were added to his life- genre of literature where time is irrelevant (long and short)
   6. Name of Knight? ~knight of white moon
   7. Who really was the name who put on the knight of the mirrors, moons and woods? ~Bachelor Carasco
   8. pg 804 DQ “to believe that the things of this life will remain unchanged is to believe the ________?” ~the impossible
   9. pg 346: Frye, he’s a spectacle-wearing fool “the culture of the past is not only the memory of man-kind, but our own buried life, and the study of it leads to a recognition…in which we see not our past lives but the …reader is … make it new” to make it new you have to make it old, back to the origins
   10. Ezra Pound: ‘make it new’
   
   *Only 25 questions, 2 points each
   *NEED TO KNOW: the poem, DQ, and criticism schools

Wednesday, Decemeber 10

GROUP PRESENTATIONS 3:

Group 6: psycho-analysts

FREUDIAN PHALLIC HOUR:

• Freud: Kari
• Oedipus: Dustin
• Hamlet: Erica
• DQ: Kelsey
• Cervantes: Jake
• Little Red Riding Hood: Victoria
• author analyzed as well as work
• main ideas:

1. symbolism
2. unconscious desires
3. intertextuality

• my favorite part: When DQ challenged Cervantes to MORTAL KOMBAT!

__________________________________

Group 5: Marxists

MARXIST THEORY AND DON QUIXOTE

• Marx: Kyle
• Walter Benjamin: Ben
• STC: Chelsea
• Sancho Panza: Sarah
• DQ: Heather
• George Lukas: Lisa
• Narrator: Danielle
• Marxist vs STC were against each other
• Marxists: no imagination and artistic quality, all about social class and economic (value and devalue), time, author's social class and economic stance into writing
• STC: all about imagination and artistic quality

Frye's Archetypes of Literature

To me, reading Frye is like reading Darwin. Both are brilliant, but so scientific! Or perhaps it is my ignorance that makes all things intelligent sound scientific. Maybe I should get some 'intelligent-reading eyes' so I can understand more of what he is talking about. It's not that I dislike his writing, or Darwin's (I actually like them both) but I struggle. But I guess that the best things in life don't come without struggle, so it's probably right. He does say a few things that are really profound and stood out to me though. Like "art, like nature, is the subject of a systematic study, and has to be distinguished from the study itself, which is criticism." This is beautiful, but I guess I got spoiled by Shelley and Keats and have to look a little harder to see the appeal. I also love the way he talks about poets "the fact that revision is possible, that the poet makes change not because he likes them better but because they are better, means that poems, like poets, are born and not made." I really agree with this because it is hard work to be a writer, and I think many times people take all the work it actually takes for granted when they see the finished project.

Walter Pater

I'm pretty sure that I found my new favorite author. Walter Pater is so elegant and profound. I was so excited when I read his 'conclusion from studies in the history of the renaissance' that I not only highlighted practically the entire excerpt, but also I read it to Jessi and called both my sister and mom to read them my favorite parts. Although both of them claim to be too stupid to understand what I talk about, they both thought it was pretty. Frustrated as I was with their lack of enthusiasm, my love is not squelched. The last paragraph is my favorite, so I will only quote that because it's rather lengthy.

"Victor Hugo says: we are all under the sentence of death but with a sort of indefinite reprieve... we have an interval, and then our place knows us no more. Some spend this interval in listlessness, some in high passions, the wisest, at least among 'the children of this world,' in art and song. For our one chance lies in expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time. Great passions may give us this quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, the various forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterested or otherwise, which come naturally to many of us. Only be sure it is passion- that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness. Of this wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for art's sake, has most; for art comes to you professing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments' sake."

I think this is just perfectly said, and so clear that it really doesn't need explanation.

Percy Shelley's Defense

Shelley's defense is poetry, not prose. He was such a beautiful writer, and clearly so intelligent that it amazes me that people say they don't like to read. What they are missing! It makes me want to be a poet myself, just to be able to write like he did. I really love his similes: "A poet is like a Nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician, who feel that they are moved and softened, yet know not whence or why." And also "Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar; it reproduces all that it represents, and the impersonations clothed in its Elysian light stand thenceforward in the minds of those who have once contemplated them, as memorials of that gentle and exalted content which extends itself over all thoughts and actions with which it coexists." The lines are so beautiful and enlightening that I must stop myself from quoting the entire defense. He was a god among men.

Aristotle's Poetics

I have read this at least 3 or 4 times in the last 3 years that I've been at MSU and yet I cannot retain the information!! This is really frustrating because that means every time it's assigned I actually have to reread it, which is frustrating, especially if it's only a month previous. But I guess in a twisted way I get to read it for the first time every time, which is what I long for in other stories. I wish that I could go back and reread the Harry Potter books or Twilight for the first time and re-feel the raw emotion I felt. But alas, it is only for The Poetics.

Monday, December 8

GROUP PRESENTATIONS 2:

Group 3: Feminists

• Mary Wollstonecraft
• Rosie the Riveter
• bell hooks
• Pat
• feminism in time (20's, 60's, etc) and in DQ (or lack of)
• pg 99: shepherdess
• resignification: gender equality in education
• 4 waves of feminism by bell hooks:

1. civil war- suffrage
2. 40's- 80's- thoughts but no actions
3. 90's- better
4. not defined, post-feminism including race/ class

• Idea- ambiguous
• 'feminine mystique' by Betty Friedman
• Margaret Fuller 'man vs man,' 'woman vs woman'

_________________________________________

Group 4: reader- response

TELEPHONE GAME :

“My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin.”

This shows the plethora of understanding that makes up the reader response criticism.

INFOMERCIAL:

M: “Hey you!”
K: “Me?”
M: “Yes, you! Are you board with your old version of literary criticism?”
K: “What?!”
M: “You look like you could use a new variety of literary criticism!”
K:“Um… ok?”
M:“I thought so. Do I have a deal for you! For just 29 easy payment of $42.88 (plus shipping and handling) you could have at your disposal the greatest way to read since, well… reading.”
K: “What? Only 29 easy payments of $42.88? Tell me more!”
M: “Well… Reader-response criticism is a school of literary theory that focuses on the reader (or "audience") and his or her experience of a literary work, in contrast to other schools and theories that focus attention primarily on the author or the content and form of the work. Or in other words, IT’S ALL ABOUT YOU!”
K: “It’s all about me? Sounds great!”
M: “YES! It is great! Reader response criticism allows the reader to create the story just as much as the author does. Without the reader the text is only words on a page.”
K: “I’m important!”
M: “Yes you are!”
K: “Where do I sign?”
M: *Attention. This offer is only for a limited time. If you order within the next 30 seconds get a hardback copy of ‘Green Eggs and Ham.’ Call our toll-free number at 1-800-888-8888, operators are standing by.

THE 600 CLUB:

MC: me!
Jiwan: herself (average person)
Alex: Freud (sex)
Kyle: southern Baptist minister (religious)

MC: Welcome to the 600 club, tonight, we will be discussing the poem ‘The Flea’ by John Donne. Our panelists include: a hologram of Sigmund Freud, Reverend Leghorn from Jackson, Mississippi and Jiwan. The Flea by John Donne. To open our discussion I will ask Freud to start. What do you think is the deep underlying meaning of Donne’s poem?

Freud: This text is riddled with sexual innuendos. The blood of the flea represents mans need to reproduce and their innate inability to restrain themselves. The mixing of the blood symbolizes a forced, selfish act of sexual dominance, where the woman is completely helpless. Man’s ego, sexually and otherwise, is a reflection of the act of suppression of the Oedipus complex.

MC: Thank you Freud, and to you Reverend Leghorn.

Reverend Leghorn: The poem the flea is clearly a representation of the holy trinity. God is the flea; now bear with me folks, because he is the I Am. The flea is the one who consecrates the act, in the sucking of the blood, or Jesus. Jesus is clearly the blood, and blood is in all of us, therefore Jesus is in all of us. The spirit is… well, actually the spirit has nothing to do with it, but clearly the trinity is present.

MC: What an enlightening interpretation Reverend, now Jiwan.

Jiwan: Well I think…

Freud: It is not about what you think; it is about what I know.

RL: There goes your ego again Freud, let the girl speak.

Freud: The poem is clearly about a forced and premarital sexual act. The thrusting, the pounding, this is clearly a representation of the man’s phallic…

RL: The act of sex is preordained by God, and it is a post marital act, and not to be taken lightly, therefore it is ungodly for a poem to mention this heinous act. Premarital sex is the devil.

Freud: What does God have to do with this?

RL: God is EVERYWHERE!!!

… [and argument ensues]…

RL: GOD!

Freud: SEX!

MC: Gentlemen! That’s enough from you. Jiwan, please tell us what you think.

Jiwan: Well, I believe the poem is about the symbolic act of flea mixing the blood and the fluids of the woman and the man during intercourse. I do not believe that the ego, the holy trinity, Oedipus, or whether the sex is post-marital or premarital is of any consequence. But rather the poem should be read and interpreted anyway that you want.

Freud: You reader-response critic!

… [RL and Freud continue argument] …

MC: Well, sadly that is all the time we have. See you next time on the 600 club.

_____________________________________________

Finals information:

• all criticisms are at each other's throats, but must work together

NEW CRITICISM:

• IA Richards: practical criticism
• things that are in the poem are ok, but outside NOT OKAY!
• John Donne: 'The Valediction...' is really about a man leaving his wife for a long time and telling her not to be sad
• everyone reads poetry as if the poem doesn't exist
• someone dying: need to pay attention to the words of the poem
• As= simile
• does the life of Donne effect our reading? should it?
• Robert Penn Warren: book on new criticism

DECONSTRUCTION:

• there is outside of the text, because everything is a text

READER- RESPONSE:

• natural association with texts
• personal loves and meanings
• Stanley Fish: like it because it reminds you of something else
• made the students find the poem in a list of nonsense

ALL OTHERS:

• they are a reaction against New Criticism's restrictions
• helps us understand the text as a text

Friday, December 5

Group Presentations:

Group 1: Celebrity Jeopardy

NEW CRITICISM

• Contestants:

1. Burt Reynolds: Derek
2. Keanu Reeves: Jessi
3. Sarah Pallin: Brielle
4. Sean Connery: Kevin
5. Alec Trebek: Carly

• unity in poetry
• 'inside the text only'

______________________________________

Group 2: Case against William Blake

DECONSTRUCTIONISTS:

Maggie, Chris, Doug, Sheryl, Joan

• court case against profanity in 'The Sick Rose'
• meaning is ambiguous
• Freud: all about sex
• Derrida: don't read into things
• Gotemer: deconstructionist: all individual
• Reese's- tons of ways to eat a Reese's
• inside the text only, like new criticism- against the excess of the text
• "there is no outside the text"
• only meaning inside the text: NO YOU, no ultimate meaning, everything is a text

Wednesday, December 3

Individual Presentations 2:

Me:

• everything is a story
• loved reading/ words since childhood

Danielle:

• parents want her to be passionate
• tautological answer not ok
• 'i want to be the dragon-lady'
• great teacher inspired her
• 'reading is a portal into fantasy'

Derek:

• being a professional reader is more practical than being and athlete
• science-fiction/ fantasy are his favorite, so he is defending them against non-believers (Dune, Ender's Game, Harry Potter, Wheel of Time)
• wants to learn to write like these writers

Jessi:

• movies and literature are connected
• how it effects people without them knowing it
• pixar movie-making process

Chelsea:

• who I am as defined by her degree, not her name
• instruct people as to what it means
• English controls the world- you can't have math w/o it
• Shelley: everything refers to literature
• Sidney: nothing can blossom without English

Kari:

• she likes to read, loves it actually
• 'why would you like to read something that someone just made up?'
• the point of stories that aren't 'true'
• the truth: can be found through ways other than newspapers- imagination enables the other truths
• not the way things are, but the way they could be

chaos: is a word used to refer to a form of order that you don't yet understand

Monday, December 1

Individual Presentations:

Jiwan:

• hard to find a job as an English professor
• business is very strong, English is not
• self-perceptions: pleasure from literature
• profound knowledge and pleasure together
• need a literary background to be an artist or good at your job
• limited number of literature translated into Korean- all literature is translated to English

Judson:

• threnody: song of lamentation
• the purpose of today vs tomorrows yesterday
• touchstone: anything before and after doesn't make sense
• Rudyard Kipling's 'if'- just the same
• you don't have to 'get it,' just to like it
• rhetorical significance in today's world is always important

Victoria:

• shouldn't have to apologize because she likes being and English major
• wanted to 'do something more practical like business, but hated it'
• touchstones
• fav: 'catcher in the rye' the whole book

Joan:

• lazy? English major? NO!
• loves words and stories- perfect major
• 'Good Omens' by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
• touch on everything: history, art, math, science
• freest major
• apocalyptic level in Frye

Dustin:

• towards his roommates
• loves lit because he wants to know everything
• apologize for people being jealous of us
• sounded intelligent because of reading
• impacts peoples lives- portal to everything: this is the reason he wants to teach
• express and get feelings from writing
• can do everything, get anything from it

Maggie:

• from a small town- travelled a little
• no life experience but travelled with characters from books
• this is more important than anything we can learn or experience
• sensitive to what we are going to do next
• wants to be a professional reader, MVP of trivial pursuit and jeopardy
• defense: it makes her happy
• favorite is Scarlett O'Hara

We must ask ourselves not 'what would Jesus do?' but 'what would N. Frye do?'

apology: not to say your sorry, but instead to stand up for literature, and make a defense

Wednesday, November 19

"You've lived all these lifetimes, you know all these people, you've lived all these lives" ~Dr. Sexson

Don Quixote 2:

• Glen Gould: variations on Bach
• metafiction: DQ, Pale Fire
• tangents are ok
• cave of montesinos: "To see the world in a grain of sand, and heaven in a wildflower... eternity in an hour"
• Mr. Miyagi: "wax on, wax off": to see the connection between one thing and another- metaphor/ simile
• the business of learning karate is very important, just as important as knowing karate
• there are things that change the way you see things: years, experiences, etc.
• pg 518: no irony in DQ's speech, but in Cervante's presentation of it
• by the end, people change how they speak and how they see things too after being w/ DQ

Friday, November 14

What to think about when reading Don Quixote:

1. cave of montesinos


2. puppet show


3. wooden horse


4. Sancho's governship


5. Don's defeat by Knights of moon


6. homecoming and death


7. DQ and illusion


8. DQ and reality

Wednesday, November 12

"Literature as a religious experience" ~William Blake

Ralph Waldo Emerson (Gabby)

• 'The American scholar' speech
• preacher- quit because of past traditions
• recognized by England
• poet, preacher, essayist
• 182 journals total
• critics of literacy and religious establishments
• New traditions
• transcendentalist thinker

William Blake (Carly)

• Frye based his outlook on him
• anagogic phase- 'literature as a religious experience'
• visionary 'a visionary creates and lives in a spiritual realm'
• meaning and form are the same thing
• 1000 different realities on one topic
• was unrecognized until after his death
• 'marriage of heaven and hell'

my paper

Brittini Reid’s Defense of English Majors

From the time I was very little I have loved stories. I used to beg my mom to read me anything: the newspaper, subtitles, stories, poetry, everything! She got so annoyed that she finally bought me some books on tape. I remember sitting in the bathtub, listening to my Beauty and the Beast read-along tape. Finally, I was old enough to read myself, and I immersed myself into a world that I had never known. The world of literature. I stayed in a boxcar, taught in Cutter Gap, visited Avonlea and lived in a log cabin with Laura Ingalls Wilder. There were places I could go, and experiences I could have without ever having to leave my room. This was when I began to seriously think about being an English teacher someday. When people question this goal it not only is nonsensical, it is absurd! Writers are the ones who create stories, and stories are everywhere.
My obsession with the written word is not unlike Don Quixote’s, except that he went insane because of reading, while I just enjoyed it, “with these words and phrases the poor gentleman lost his mind, and he spent sleepless nights trying to understand them and extract their meaning” (Cervantes 20). For Quixote it was the romance stories, lovers in peril being rescued in the end. Such romantic notions can be difficult to overcome, and sadly Quixote’s condition seemed to be worse than mine. While I was happy reading about them, he actually wanted to experience them, thus leading Sancho Panza all around the country. This story is clearly a ‘mise en abyme’ because most of the story is about the characters from other stories, which follows my theme clearly, because this story is entirely about this novel being a story.
Northrop Frye believed as I that stories are all around you, in everything, waiting to emerge, what I call ‘stories’ he calls ‘archetypes.’ From the life of your dentist, to the poems written by Edgar Allan Poe, each person, film, book and poem contains a tale. Throughout all of ‘Archetypes of Literature’ every point Frye makes is backed up by a story. From The Little Mermaid to The Tempest he categorizes and joys over each plot, each character and each narrative. Although the way in which he presents his case may be considered a little boring, his love of the written word has no match, beating both mine and Quixote’s. A critic’s job is to determine the quality of a work of art, but for the literary critics it would seem instead they are judging the story, not merely the quality of it. It is human nature to look at something and try to make sense of it, we are taught this act from the time we are young, and is that not the same as finding it’s story? Northrop Frye describes Greek New Comedy as such: "the plot structure… in itself less a form than a formula, has become the basis for most comedy, especially in its more highly conventionalized dramatic form, down to our own day. What normally happens is that a young man wants a young woman, that his desire is resisted by some opposition, usually paternal, and that near the end of the play some twist in the plot enables the hero to have his will” (Frye 163). As Frye says, he just described every romantic comedy made since the time of the ancient Greeks. This format of story is so universal that it transcends time, and appears in all works.
As for the poets, each writer obviously believes as I, that there are stories everywhere, but they take it one step farther and create them. Each poem, stanza even sentence of a poem is its own story and can stand alone. Even their defenses of poetry are so beautifully written there is no doubt that they are talented, passionate and completely correct in thinking this way. As Matthew Arnold wrote: "but for poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion, of divine illusion. Poetry attaches its emotion to the idea; the idea is the fact. The strongest part of our religion to-day is its unconscious poetry” (Arnold 358). To him, poetry was everywhere, and it was only through poetry that a person could really live and experience the world around them. And as Stanley Fish said “poetry is that which we see with poetry seeing eyes” therefore, if we get some ‘story-seeing eyes’ then people will see the stories around them, like Arnold saw the poetry surrounding him.

Keats agreed with Arnold and I that stories and poetry are all around you, but he took it one step farther by saying that we need our imagination to see it, and that we can experience something mundane can actually be inspired because of it. He wrote: "Have you never by being surprised with an old Melody—in a delicious place—by a delicious voice, fe[l]t over again your very speculations and surmises at the time it first operated on your soul- do you not remember forming to yourself the singers’ face more beautiful than it was possible and yet with the elevation of the Moment you did not think so—even then you were mounted on the Wings of Imagination so high" (Keats) to describe the way the imagination can make a normal occurrence spectacular. Perhaps because he was so young, he was able to understand the world in a way that many older poets cannot, and that his lack of life experience worked in his favor. This innocence helped him to understand the stories around him and to look at them in a way that was refreshing and exciting.
There are stories all around us, our very lives are stories. Each movie has a story, which is what prompts people to go. The film industry is one of the richest and most popular in the world because people love to be entertained, and what is more entertaining than a story? For these reasons there is no excuse for those nonbelievers from other majors to judge and question why someone would want to be an English major. They unknowingly are English majors themselves, therefore degrading us, is degrading themselves. You cannot escape from stories, so why condemn their authors?

*if anyone wants a detailed works cited page, contact me :)