lit crit blog

final thoughts...

2008-12-12T14:46:00.000-08:00

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

2008-12-12T14:31:00.000-08:00

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:

new criticism: ‘formalism’ values technique; the text itself; stay inside the text; likes unity in works; no irrelevant personal associations
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
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
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
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
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

2008-12-09T23:18:00.002-08:00

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:

symbolism
unconscious desires
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

2008-12-09T22:35:00.000-08:00

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

2008-12-09T22:21:00.001-08:00

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

2008-12-09T21:40:00.000-08:00

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

2008-12-09T21:32:00.000-08:00

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

2008-12-09T19:53:00.001-08:00

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:

civil war- suffrage
40's- 80's- thoughts but no actions
90's- better
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

2008-12-09T19:52:00.000-08:00

Group Presentations:

Group 1: Celebrity Jeopardy

NEW CRITICISM

Contestants:

Burt Reynolds: Derek
Keanu Reeves: Jessi
Sarah Pallin: Brielle
Sean Connery: Kevin
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

2008-12-09T19:51:00.000-08:00

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

2008-12-09T19:50:00.002-08:00

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

2008-12-09T19:50:00.001-08:00

"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

2008-12-09T19:49:00.000-08:00

What to think about when reading Don Quixote:

cave of montesinos

puppet show

wooden horse

Sancho's governship

Don's defeat by Knights of moon

homecoming and death

DQ and illusion

DQ and reality

Wednesday, November 12

2008-12-09T19:42:00.000-08:00

"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

2008-12-07T23:39:00.000-08:00

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 :)

Lars and the real Don Quioxte

2008-11-16T18:15:00.000-08:00

While I was reading DQ I was thinking about how much like 'Lars and the Real Girl' it was. Obviously Lars didn't go on quests or get beaten up, but his friends and family all pretended that his doll (that he thought was real) was actually a real person. They were kinda and attentive of her because they loved Lars so much, allowing him to be able to let her go and be happy with himself and a 'real girl.' Although the characters in DQ only pretended that he really was a knight to make fun of him, the same principles were there. After a while the characters really cared about his welfare and wanted to make sure he was OK. They followed him around and kept him and Sancho alive, which was really kind of them and something that they didn't need to do. Both Lars' and Don's mental problems were evident and the people in both of their lives helped keep them safe.

Study Guide 2

2008-11-13T12:47:00.000-08:00

Frye pages:

119
136-41
147
148
153
156
163
165
187
214-5
223

3 Apologists:

Keats: Negative Capability, Almost a Remembrance, The Vale of Soul Making
Arnold: Lit was a substitution for religion, touchstones
Pater (on this site pgs 35-7 , although the last 5 lines or so of his essay aren't included): 'Art for art's sake', 'The only things worth studying are the things you don't have to justify as being useful'- they add quality to your moments

Book and Heart

Critics:

Longinus: sublime
IA Richards: pseudo-statement, hypothetical
Julia Kristeva: intertextuality- 'every work of lit is in conversation with all others'
Oscar Wilde: Life is an imitation of art
Samuel Fish: humanities and 'that which we see with poetry seeing eyes'
William Blake: imagination, visionary
Mikhail Bakhtin: dirty mind, carnival, lit is body comedy

Idea of Order: Ramon Fernandez to end

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

DQ slices_______? A- wine skins
N. Frye's anagogic level: ______ is the _____ of nature (pg 145)? A- Man, container
H. Bloom compared DQ to _____, and Sancho Panza to ___________? A- Hamlet, Falstaff
Frye suggests that as myth moves to irony __________ moves to ________. A- metaphor, simile
Main theme from B and H: innocence to _________? A- experience
'Not the fruit of the experience, but the ___________ in the end" ~ Walter Pater A- experience
M. Arnold said: "criticism of life, crisis of __________?" A- Faith
Frye compares DQ to ________ on page 225? A- white knight from Alice in Wonderland (Lewis Carroll)
Arnold: "what power does the best poetry have"? A- inform, sustain, delight
Filling up is __________, emptying out is _________? A- pleurousis, kenosis
Is Frye a half empty or half full guy? A- half full likes comedy and romance
Who does DQ believe to 'roam free' during the Golden Age? A- virgins
Two great forms of undisplaced myth in N. Frye? A- Apocalyptic (good) and demonic (bad)
TH Gastor's 4 phases in seasonal cycle:
- Mortification (Autumn)
- Purgation (Winter)
- invigoration (spring)
- Jubilation (summer)
What does 'What's the difference mean?' A- 'I don't care!' deconstructionist
DQ is a mirror held up, not to nature but to _______? A- the reader
(pg 187-93) 3 stages of the mythos of summer/ romance? A- 1) conflict, 2) death struggle, 3) discovery
(pg 148) "in poetry, physical is actual as opposed to the _______?" A- hypothetical- not real
Negative god appeals where? A- demonic (chpt 3)
DQ's squire is named, and it means? A- Sancho Panza and belly
Structural principle of lit are derived from _________ and _________? A- anagogic and archetypal
In which seasonal phase does the 'sense of relief' come on new year's? A- jubilation (#4)
(pg 162) The top half is the world of ______________, bottom is the world of _________? A- Romance, realism
Keats believed that poetry should __________ in excess? A- surprise
The word demonic comes from the word _______? A- daemon, meaning soul
What season does DQ fit into? A- all of them (all of the above)
What Frye page is the 'woo woo' page? A- 119
"In the anagogic phase, literature imitates the total dream of man, and so imitates the thought of a human mind which is at the ____________ and not at the center of its reality." (pg 119) A- circumference
4 master troupes?
- metaphor
- metonymy
- synedoche
- irony
Negative capability: 'The artist becomes _______, so the work becomes ________." A- blank/ empty, everything ex) Shakespeare
What mode would innocence be placed in? A- myth

Monday, November 10

2008-11-11T01:44:00.001-08:00

"We are no longer interested in the truth, but the experience"

Eve Sedgwich (Joan)

paranoid reality
automatic responses to issues
remain open to new ideas
normal/ abnormal, legal/ illegal labels helps this

Stanley Fish (Kevin)

Miltonic scholar without taking any classes on him
wrote a brilliant paper about him
reader-response critic
interpreted communities
relative to critics- convicted in their believes
controversial antics 'maverick'
ambiguous political beliefs
'one smart dude' ~Sophist
New York times blog
"a poem is what one sees when looking with poetry-seeing eyes"

Susan Gubar and Sandra Gilbert (Chris)

'the mad women in the attic' were feminists in the 70's
angels and monsters- men are made it two molds: 1) pure, and 2) rebellious
neither represents women
break away from these ideas
finding yourself is most important

Homi K. Bhabha (Derek)

post-colonial theorist
prose criticised 'too much jargon'
'questions of cultural identity' book
hybrid culture/ partial culture
post structuralism

Virginia Wolfe (Bobby)

not crazy, but mad
bipolar
'a room of one's own' - opinion of a minor point, need money and a room for a woman to write
feminist? publisher and critic
stream of consciousness
modernist movement
not happy, sad life
committed suicide by jumping into the water
'to the lighthouse' book

_______________________________________

Touchstones:

it's ok if it's didactic
Ezra Pound- metro poem= all about the images
'art for the sake of art, not the ideas'

Philip Pullman:

Wallace Steven's 'The Auroras of Autumn'
'the art of memory' by Frances Yeats

N. Frye:

seasonal phases pg 158- 62
the dead day 'totital'

Friday, November 7

2008-11-11T01:43:00.003-08:00

"the church wants to take away your soul- literally" ~ his dark materials

Annette Kolodny (Kayla)

ask probing questions
radical feminist
imaginative, daring of Adam's Wilderness
'Lay of the land'
Eco-feminist

Henry Lewis Gates Jr. (Maggie)

loves Obama
theroot.com is his website
Alice Walker writings
greatly motivated by civil rights movement
was told as a child that he couldn't be a doctor because he was African American in 1929

William Wordsworth (Jessi)

nature has a healing aspect
nature used to see in poetry in general
poetry should be made for the modern man- about the modern person
not to depict nature, but to show them how it affects them

T.S. Eliot (Doug)

born in America, wrote in England
'learned crank' described him well
modernist
used past to show the present
'in my beginning is my end, and in the end is my beginning'
new critic
against Shakespeare- Hamlet is flawed because of the lack of emotions
each word and it's meaning is important

_________________________________

Philip Pullman: Dark Materials

stand back from lit
different than Lewis and Tolkein
ways in which the imagination works itself out
Paradise Lost: instead of looking at the name 'god' look at the character
demonic: Lucifer, demons
Daemon: diomon, alternate part of personality
church wants to take away your soul: literally
shadow in Jung
conflict of content, not of form/ myth
"later poets are more outspoken"= Blake, Shelley, Swinburne, Hardy

Wednesday, November 5

2008-11-11T01:43:00.001-08:00

"What's the difference? Means 'I don't care!'"

I.A. Richards (Judson)

new history- read about the past
recognition of metaphors and symbols
psychological notion of mental institutions
poetry in prose is 'almost' - a pseudo-statement
the poet never lies because they never affirm

Carl Gustav Jung (Clair)

own individual conscious
underlining: dreams, folklore, psychology
archetypes are all definite forms in human psyche
5 archetypal events: shadow, anima/animous, divine couple, child, self
all components of collective unconscious

Mikhail Bakhtin (Rosanna)

exiled by Stalin
one leg
Russian
lost manuscripts because of wars
grotesque realism- degradation
not purely political satire
dialectical imagination: past, present, future conversation- you understand though time
carnival: collectivity

Paul deMan (Jon)

Belgian
figural totalitization
rely on 'unseen metaphor' to give us metaphors: we want meaning so we create meaning even if it's not there
deconstructionist: no absolute meaning
antisemitic: was sympathetic towards Nazis

bell hooks (Jessika)

against white supremacy capitalist patriarchy
media is important to him, used movies to teach about criticism
thinking critically is most important
social activist

_________________________________________

comedy= N. Frye
McCain's consecration speech
Macbeth: 'how was the execution?' your life is what you say right before it ends
Obama speech= Henry V
'I'll be back,' 'Remember me,' 'do this in remembrance of me' are famous last lines
DQ myth: one human being is all human beings
The Golden Bough by James George Frazer
Eucharist
corpus christi
have you ever looked at a painting so closely that you see the brush strokes?
impressionist art: don't want things the way people see them, but the way they are

Monday, November 3

2008-11-11T01:42:00.000-08:00

"What do you want to do right before you die?"

Helene Cixous (Heather)

'to be'
father was a jew, mother was a german
measured the difference between feminism and masculinity
major/ minor, prose/ poem
'it is impossible to define...'

Sigmund Freud (Kyle)

'conscious mind'
'id,' 'ego,' and 'superego'
dreams- 'aware vs sleeping'
phallic symbols are everywhere
psycho-biographic: life and childhood
ego analysis

Edward Said (Jiwan)

western humanization
history is not standardized, but dynamic
unconscious act of persuasion

Wolfgang Iser (me)

reader-response critic
believed that the reader was most important

_______________________________________

Percy Shelley on youtube = sublime

synedoche: meaningful coincidence of 2 things

M. Arnold:

"currency and supremacy are insured to it, not indeed by the world's deliberate and conscious choice, but by something far deeper- by the instinct of self-preservation in humanity." last lines
what to do right before you die? 'The Bucket List'
Jake doesn't like Pullman because of the controversy about the biblical aspects found in His Dark Materials
intentional fallacy
'criticism of life' is the interpretation and evaluation of the meaning of life
'truth is a construction' said Vico
'Dover Beach' is dark and beautiful because of the 'eternal note of sadness'
'Dover Bitch'
all things are a displacement: god vs devil, sheep vs wolf, angels vs demons

The Fall

2008-11-05T19:51:00.000-08:00

We have been discussing how art is what all poets aspire to and I have found a movie that encapsulates this. Yesterday I watched Tarsem Singh's 'The Fall' and I honestly believe that it is the most beautiful film I have ever seen. It was like a fairytale, a story within a story and if you would have stopped it at any moment you would have been able to print it out and put it on your wall. The vibrant colors, outfits and set all worked together to make a beautiful image in each shot. It told the story of a young girl stuck in a hospital with a broken arm. Exploring one day she found a very sick young man, who was very bitter about the world. He began to tell her a story about two brothers in a distant land. One brother is killed, leaving the other and his band of thieves angry and with a vendetta against Odious, the man who killed him. The story goes on, mixing reality and fiction until the end when you realize that nothing was as it seemed, the people, the story and the man telling it. Although it had one of the saddest twists I've ever seen, it was so beautiful that I can't wait to watch it again and again.

my touchstone

2008-11-04T13:06:00.001-08:00

My favorite line, one that I have loved since my freshman year of high school comes to me from Shakespeare's 'A Midsummer Night's Dream.' It is somewhat didactic in content I guess, but it is mainly personal.

"Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind. Therefore is winged cupid painted blind."

This line has helped me remember that it is not what is outside that counts, but what is inside. Whenever I begin to judge someone that is different than me, in looks, speech, clothing or ideas I remember this line and try to stop. It's special to me because of this, and was even my quote for my senior yearbook.

John Keats

2008-11-02T17:02:00.003-08:00

I'm pretty sure that Keats is my hero. He accomplished more in his short life that I will in my entire life and that not only impresses me, but also is unsettling. I love the Romantic era, and a large part of that is because of Keats. That most of his writing comes to us in the form of letters makes me feel as if I am connected to his personal life. Letters then, as emails now, are very personal. Not only do they express the relationship between the sender and receiver, they usually show deep emotions and ideas. I really enjoy that he gained most of his ideas for his writings from the classics. That he described things like 'almost a remembrance' and 'negative capability' so beautifully amazes me. He was only 3 years older than I am when he died. My favorite of all his odes is the Ode to Psyche:

O GODDESS! hear these tuneless numbers, wrung
By sweet enforcement and remembrance dear,
And pardon that thy secrets should be sung
Even into thine own soft-conched ear:
Surely I dreamt to-day, or did I see
The winged Psyche with awaken’d eyes?
I wander’d in a forest thoughtlessly,
And, on the sudden, fainting with surprise,
Saw two fair creatures, couched side by side
In deepest grass, beneath the whisp’ring roof
Of leaves and trembled blossoms, where there ran
A brooklet, scarce espied:
’Mid hush’d, cool-rooted flowers, fragrant-eyed,
Blue, silver-white, and budded Tyrian,
They lay calm-breathing on the bedded grass;
Their arms embraced, and their pinions too;
Their lips touch’d not, but had not bade adieu,
As if disjoined by soft-handed slumber,
And ready still past kisses to outnumber
At tender eye-dawn of aurorean love:
The winged boy I knew;
But who wast thou, O happy, happy dove?
His Psyche true!

O latest born and loveliest vision far
Of all Olympus’ faded hierarchy!
Fairer than Phoebe’s sapphire-region’d star,
Or Vesper, amorous glow-worm of the sky;
Fairer than these, though temple thou hast none,
Nor altar heap’d with flowers;
Nor virgin-choir to make delicious moan
Upon the midnight hours;
No voice, no lute, no pipe, no incense sweet
From chain-swung censer teeming;
No shrine, no grove, no oracle, no heat
Of pale-mouth’d prophet dreaming.

O brightest! though too late for antique vows,
Too, too late for the fond believing lyre,
When holy were the haunted forest boughs,
Holy the air, the water, and the fire;
Yet even in these days so far retir’d
From happy pieties, thy lucent fans,
Fluttering among the faint Olympians,
I see, and sing, by my own eyes inspired.
So let me be thy choir, and make a moan
Upon the midnight hours;
Thy voice, thy lute, thy pipe, thy incense sweet
From swinged censer teeming;
Thy shrine, thy grove, thy oracle, thy heat
Of pale-mouth’d prophet dreaming.

Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane
In some untrodden region of my mind,
Where branched thoughts, new grown with pleasant pain,
Instead of pines shall murmur in the wind:
Far, far around shall those dark-cluster’d trees
Fledge the wild-ridged mountains steep by steep;
And there by zephyrs, streams, and birds, and bees,
The moss-lain Dryads shall be lull’d to sleep;
And in the midst of this wide quietness
A rosy sanctuary will I dress
With the wreath’d trellis of a working brain,
With buds, and bells, and stars without a name,
With all the gardener Fancy e’er could feign,
Who breeding flowers, will never breed the same:
And there shall be for thee all soft delight
That shadowy thought can win,
A bright torch, and a casement ope at night,
To let the warm Love in!

Matthew Arnold's Study of Poetry

2008-11-02T17:02:00.001-08:00

I can honestly tell you that while I was reading this I never once looked at the time or counted how many pages I had left. It was like a portal to another dimension that absorbed and took over me. Arnold was a genius, in both his prose writing and poetry. I LOVE him! I think I highlighted the entire thing, but I promise to only chose a few to illustrate my point. "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." Although this isn't quite as beautiful as Shelley, it is profound and lovely. I really enjoyed how he tore apart and questioned all works, not just certain ones. Everything is fair game to Arnold. Another of my favorite lines is "indeed there can be no more useful help for the discovering what poetry belongs to the class of the truly excellent, and can therefore do us most good, than to have always in one's mind lines and expressions of the great masters, and to apply them as a touchstone to other poetry." His talk of touchstones really fascinates me, because I have had one for years and never known it.

Friday, October 31

2008-11-02T17:01:00.001-08:00

"Hamlet is one of the great procrastinators in literature" ~Dr. Sexson

Giambattista Vico (Lisa)

Italian
humanist melancholy
'the new science'
creations, not investigation
humanization is cyclical: divine (metaphor), heroic (satonomy and synecdoche), man (irony), and chaos (gibberish)
truth is a construction

Eric Auerbach (Danielle)

jewish
rhetorical rep in Odyssey, tyrannical in bible
Dante and Shakespeare inspired
no originality, all writing is based on close readings
history is cyclical, not linear

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Chelsea)

poet, Romantic, critic
lyrical ballad- philosophical and critical approach to literature- begins w/ rhyme
imagination is important to literature
infinite 'I am' in lit
poetic faith
willing suspension of disbelief

Hayden White (Lisa)

historian
nothing about himself- knows he was destined for greatness because born in the same year as famous people (James Dean and Shirley Temple)
figural realism (literary vs historical)
history is poetical

________________________________________

What does 'to do' mean? To act
battlefield of truth: ritual= drama to do
immortality: pg 556 of DQ- man in green "And so the man who uses and treats poetry in the requisite ways that I have mentioned will be famous, and his name esteemed, in all the civilized nations of the world."
neg cap vs immortality
Philip Pullman was a great fan of Keats
pg 22: intro "I return to my question... he sees what we see, yet he sees something else too."
Freud's 'pleasure principle' vs 'reality principle' is present here
immortality: Ovid, Shakespeare and Cervantes
Brian Talbot quoting Woody Allen
Sonnet 18
'no day but today' from rent
'art for art's sake' Oscar Wilde
grasshopper and ant fable
'truth is a construction' said Vico
kenosis: emptying out/ plerosis: filling up

Wednesday, October 29

2008-11-02T17:00:00.000-08:00

"Be one on who nothing is lost..." ~Henry James

Henry James (Kelsey)

great novelist
themes: personal relationship, loneliness, unreliable characters
love and morals
possibly gay?
'turn of the shrew' is a ghost story
interested in people, but never liked them

Ernst Cassirer (Victoria)

jewish historian
'philosophy of symbolic form' book
man as a symbolic animal (domestic)
'transcendental idealism'- Khan
human world created through symbolic form: expressive, representative, and significant

Walter Benjamin (Ben)

work rejected because too confusing
work of art and mechanical reproduction
aura: ability to be unique
sense of awe and amazement by viewer
because of mechanical representation: no auras anymore

Oscar Wilde (Kyle)

doesn't want truth- illusion
art is better than life and truth
cannot tell the truth, make them laugh instead or you will be killed
a portrait done with feeling is not of the sitter, but of the painter

__________________________________________________

Keats of Negative capability:

sounds like Sidney
beauty and truth: 'Ode on a Grecian Urn'
if something is really beautiful, than it is true
Shakespeare didn't write what he felt, he wrote to become everything
Shakespeare doesn't exist, only the world he created does

Don Quixote:

'woo, woo' pages: 429, 556-7
cannon: everything should be didactic
DQ creates an entire Romance novel in his mind
aesthetic
didacticism is being parodied
nonsense writers: James Joyce, Lewis Carroll
Polonius from Hamlet
Walter Pater: "all the arts aspire to the condition of music"
don't ask what it means, experience what it is
'nature is only nature, it needs and artist to portray it'
lobster quadrille
Ovid's final words "I shall have life"

Monday, October 27

2008-11-01T17:31:00.000-07:00

"That's what fairy tales are all about, puberty" ~Dr. Sexson

Presentations:

Samuel Johnson (Dustin):

Liza poet series
poetry should be simple and easy to understand
biography would be only the truth, not prose

Longinus (Kari):

Deeply influential
the Sublime is important to him
authentic aim is to judge and make sure that it's sublime
sublime: that which cannot be expressed because it is so much beyond anything else
control of metaphor
2 that reached this- Homer and Sapho

Michel Foucault (Erica):

postmodernist- doesn't like labels
French
all about relationships
prisoners (voices concerns and feelings)
3 volumes- History of Sexuality
repression hypothesis refuted in the 60's- it is steadily becoming the center of our lives
led to what we know today as sexuality
it is a huge part of us
archeology of knowledge

Julia Kristeva (Jake):

Bulgarian (southern)

psycho-analyst in the 60's

structuralists and semi- audist= signifier/ meaning

didn't like these things so created seminalist: no absolute meaning ex) sarcasm

inter-textuality: applied to text, not words

___________________________________________________________

My Book and Heart Notes for exam:

ideas that are taught (obvious)
'practical advice' then is now common sense
death and rebirth when you start reading
innocence and experience

DQ:

when we learn to read we lose innocence
innocence to experience (Blake to Frye)
death/life, myth/realism, metaphor/ simile
when we read we become critics (Gaby's blog)
"I didn't like a movie/ book because..."= critic
Synedoecha, New York- Film
TS Eliot: "We shall not cease from our exploration And at the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time"
Genesis: A&E ate the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil
intentional lies: first lies?
Frye believed that fairy tales are transparent
Werewolf movies:

Blood and Chocolate (very bad, read the book)
American Werewolf in Paris
The Company of Wolves
Wolfen
Ginger Snaps
Teen Wolf
Underworld
The Howling
Dog Soldiers
An American Werewolf in London

getting of literacy is the loss of innocence
pg 536 of DQ- everyone in part 2 has read part 1, like in Robin Hood Men in Tights when everyone pulls out their script, this is a very post-modern idea of metatheatricality
ever know a simple but good person who creates catastrophes everywhere?
continues from myth (romance) to realism (irony)
Frye says that when you reach the end of a cycle, you start again, you don't go backwards
innocence: "The innocent world is neither totally alive, like the apocalyptic one, nor mostly dead, like ours: it is an animistic world, full of elemental spirits. All the characters of Comus are elemental spirits except the Lady and her brothers, and the connections of Ariel with air-spirits, of Puck with fire-spirits..., and of Caliban with earth-spirits are clear enough." (pg 153)
TS Eliot '4 Quartets': Buirnt Norton, East Coker, The Dry Salvages, Little Gidding
Alice looks through the keyhole into the rose garden
The Rose Garden like in Alice, and Beauty and the Beast represents innocence
courtly love is all idealistic, not physical

Individual Presentations

2008-11-01T17:26:00.000-07:00

Monday, October 27

Dustin
Kari
Erica
Jake

Wednesday, October 29

Kelsey
Victoria
Ben
Kyle

Friday, October 31

Lisa
Danelle
Chelsea
Sarah

Monday, Novemeber 3

Brittini
Alex
Jiwon
Kyle
Heather

Wednesday, November 5

Judson
Rosanna
Clair
Jon

Friday, November 7

Jessica
Douglas
Kayla
Chris

Monday, Novemeber 10

Doug
Joan
Kevin
Derek
Bobby

Wednesday, November 12

Gabby
Carly

Wednesday, October 22

2008-11-01T15:23:00.000-07:00

"We've seen something that makes everything I've ever written look like straw" ~Thomas Aquinas

For Next Exam:

John Keats: Soul-making, remembrance, negative capability
Mathew Arnold: Study of Poetry

when religion no longer works, we go to the poets

JOHN KEATS:

"In Poetry I have a few axions, and you will see how far I am from their center. I think Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by Singularity" ~Remembrance by Keats
if you are going to make a mistake- over do it! Err on the side of excess
Babe: when the farmer is surprised, he dances when caring for the sick piggy

"and appear almost a Remembrance" to remember is the key, and remember you must have forgotten everything

NORTHROP FRYE:

Forms of nature
"Nature is now inside the mind of an infinite man who builds his cities of out of the Milky Way. This is not reality, but it is the conceivable or imaginative limit of desire, which is infinite, eternal, and hence apocalyptic. By an apocalypse I mean primarily the imaginative conception of the whole of nature as the content of an infinite and eternal living body with, if not human, is closer to being human than to being inanimate." Frye pg 119
Wallace Steven's '13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird'
"No grave upon the earth shall clip in it a pair so famous. High events as these strike those that make them; and their story is no less in pity than his glory which brought them to be lamented. Our army shall in column show attend this funeral, and then to Rome. Come, Dolabella, see High order in this great solemnity." Last lines from Antony and Cleopatra
Apocalypse: apo- take away, calypse- veil= remove the veil
like removing the mask, curtain, etc to see the man.
OZ-
Apocalypse Now-

Matrix-

everything is an allusion

Shelley: Hymn to Intellectual Beauty

WW: Ode on Intimations of Immortality

Shelley, WW and Stevens: 'technically' were atheists, but all spoke of a higher power

Tuesdays with Northrop

2008-10-28T12:58:00.001-07:00

Every Tuesday, I sit down to read Northrop Frye. I understand little, am frustrated much, but it's always an enlightening experience. The most amazing part is when I connect to his words and actually understand what he is saying. I feel like he somehow gave me the key to unlock his golden city, and it was only me that stopped me from getting it sooner. Like he has been impatiently waiting for me to finally understand so he can move on to do the things that he has been neglecting while he waited. I picture him scowling, tapping his foot annoyingly then dancing and rejoicing when I finally get it. So thank you Northrop, I will miss our Tuesdays when they are through.

the Idea of Order at Key West

2008-10-28T12:51:00.000-07:00

She sang beyond the genius of the sea.

The water never formed to mind or voice,

Like a body wholly body, fluttering

Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion

Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,

That was not ours although we understood,

Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.

The sea was not a mask. No more was she.

The song and water were not medleyed sound

Even if what she sang was what she heard,

Since what she sang was uttered word by word.

It may be that in all her phrases stirred

The grinding water and the gasping wind;

But it was she and not the sea we heard.

For she was the maker of the song she sang.

The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea

Was merely a place by which she walked to sing.

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.

It was her voice that made

The sky acutest at its vanishing.

She measured to the hour its solitude.

She was the single artificer of the world

In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,

Whatever self it had, became the self

That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,

As we beheld her striding there alone,

Knew that there never was a world for her

Except the one she sang and, singing, made.

Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know,

Why, when the singing ended and we turned

Toward the town, tell why the glassy lights,

The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there,

As the night descended, tilting in the air,

Mastered the night and portioned out the sea,

Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,

Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.

Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,

The maker's rage to order words of the sea,

Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,

And of ourselves and of our origins,

In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.

My book and heart review

2008-10-27T09:27:00.000-07:00

When I first left the theater after viewing this movie, I must admit that I was disappointed. I didn't feel like I learned anything at all, and I was frustrated by the fact that we had already discussed all of the main points. What I didn't realize, until after we discussed it is class, was that there was not fault in the movie, but within myself. I was blinded by my aforementioned feelings and didn't take the time to realize how great the film really was. Although we had learned the information, the presentation of it was much different. Through narration, pictures, and props, the creators got their point across in a way that was fascinating and visually stimulating. This film was funny, serious and educational all at the same time, which is rare. The beauty of the words and pictures helped to show the viewers not only the importance of the little forgotten books, but the importance of reading. When you read you are taken to a magical place all your own, for no two people read the same story the same. The first book that I remember reading over and over again is 'Quest For a Maid' by Frances Mary Hendry. It's about a little girl named Meg, whose sister Inge is a witch. One dark and stormy night she sneaks into her sister's store-room and watches her kill a king with her powers. Inge leaves the next day to become a lady in waiting, and Meg struggles with all that she had seen and heard. The tale is exciting, beautifully written and sad but it has and always will be my favorite. Even now, 15 years later, I still read it every year. I have given tons as gifts and still talk about it to anyone who will listen. The film reminded me of how truly magical it is to read your favorite book for the first time. No matter how many times you read it, inspite of all the new information that you get from it each time, you can never have that first time back. It reminded me to treasure books because you never know when you will read your next favorite book for the first time.

Monday, October 13

2008-10-16T16:12:00.000-07:00

"The muse is a dominatrix" ~Dr. Sexson

Shelley:

Romantic view of the world
imagination trumps reason VS Sidney's belief that reason trumps imagination
"A poet is 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"
Yeat's "how can you know the dancer from the dance?"
The Painted Veil -film
neoplatonism
Plato and his evil twin: kind to poetry bec he is a poet VS mean because he banished them from the Republic
'Sailing to Byzantium' by Yeats
idealist (DQ) vs realist (PP) but switch so you are confused as to whom is whom at the end
they rewire each others brains until they almost switch roles
the tragedy of the poet is that they write about life, instead of experiencing it
this reminded me of the song 'goodbye love' from Rent

Friday, October 10

2008-10-16T15:17:00.000-07:00

"Willy Wonka is one of my heroes..." ~Dr. Sexson

rhapsodic: out of their mind

"Put out the light and then put out the light" ~Othello

"Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world." ~Shelley

"The end all and be all" ~Macbeth

climactic metaphor: for info on culture, politics and religion always turn to the poets

polysemus: having to do with the sea

literally=> letterally from Ben's blog OR as a poem moving together => letters moving together

"with the wonderful ambiguity of the scientist..." ~Nabokov

books on gardening must be clear, but poetry can be ambiguous and murky

"A work of art should do nothing..." Daedalus from JJ's Portrait

Is Don Quixote realistic? Obviously not. So should it be read as realism? nope.

reality: reality tv- not real

american idol

survivor

fear factor

the hills

project runway

America's next top model

the amazing race

John McCain: "My fellow prisoners..."

"The whole point of the poem is not to get your point across, the point is that it is besides the point." ~Dr. Sexson

Monday, October 6

2008-10-16T14:19:00.000-07:00

"Sidney wrote his Defense because of some ass named Stephan Gosson..." ~ Dr. Sexson

"I am I..." from Don Q. mirror "I am the I am"

everything in the newspaper is literature- archetypes are everywhere

'comedy'

'A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum'

"The close resemblance between the conceptions of anagogic criticism and those of religion has led many to assume that they can only be related by making one supreme and the other subordinate." pg 126-7 of Frye

liberate: to free, autonomous structure of numbers and letters...

betrayal of intellectuals (Sir Philip Sidney)

historian is bound to facts, while the philosopher is interested in how something is represented, and it is the artists job to present it differently than it really is to give us both the precepts and the example

bread is a troupe: 'our daily bread' = sustenance and all nutrition that sustains us

synecdoche: disconnected from everything else but themselves

metonymy: a word that means something else

~both are troupes substitutes a part for the whole

"literature is to teach, that is its purpose" ~Sidney (Frye disagrees with this)

poesis: Greek for poet

"When we pass into anagogy, nature becomes, not the container, but the thing contained, and the archetypal universal symbols, the city, the garden, the quest, the marriage, are no longer the desirable forms that man constructs inside nature, but are themselves the forms of nature." ~Frye pg 119

"Only the poet disdaining to be tied to any such subjection, lifted up with the vigor of his own invention, doth grow, in effect, into another nature, in making things either better than nature bringeth forth, or, quite anew, forms such as never were in nature, as the heroes, demi-gods, cvclops, chimeras, furies, and such like; so as he goeth hand in hand with nature, not enclosed within the narrow warrant of her gifts, but freely ranging within the zodiac of his own wit." ~Sidney

nature: brazen; poet: golden

pleasure principle

story vs reality: the story of a picnic can be the perfect day, but the reality may have ants- art does not simply show you the nature of good things, they make you see the reality and plan to learn from it and avoid it

Terrible things in lit:

King Lear
Titus Andronicus
Procne, Tereus and Philomela
Oedipus

If we didn't have poets, and we die, who will write our epitaphs

STUDY GUIDE

2008-10-16T13:49:00.000-07:00

NEED TO KNOW:

Don Quixote discussed in class
Idea of Order
Frye's essays: 1) Archetypes of Literature, and 2) Symbols
Aristotle's Poetics
Plato's Republic book 10
Sidney's Defense
Dante's 4 levels
Shelley's Defense

Questions:

trust the _________ not the _______. A- tale/ teller
centripetal vs centrifugal and formal phase A- goes in/ goes out
In which box is does the pharmakos belong? A- ironic comedy
baseball umpire A- scapegoat
all literature is displaced _________. A- myth
Aristotle's definition of tragedy: A- imitation of an action that is serious, complete and of a certain magnitude
Greek word for something gone: A- dromenon
On page 427 of DQ- What does the canon believe about literature? A- that it should be didactic
didactic means: A- teach us something
definition of logos (which is the myth operating in Idea) A- the power to create through the agency of the word
the sense of ___________ is stronger in tragedy than comedy A- reality
all comedy is directed at who? A- and inflexible person
'Nature only gives us a _________ world, while the poet gives us a _______ world." ~ Sidney A- brazen/ golden
4 elements of Abram's grid: A- word, audience, world, art
According to Frye all structures of words are partly ________ and hence _________. pg 350 A- rhetorical/ literary
Plato's ________ in book 10 banished the poets, why? A- Republic, they are all deranged useless liars
Pathos belongs in which Frye box? A- low mimetic
mythos, ethos and dianoia are? A- plot (story)/ character/ theme
repeat the last line of Shelley's Defense A- 'poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world"
Frye's _______ phrase corresponds to the low mimetic? A- descriptive
According to Sidney the poet never affirms anything therefore_______? A- they never lie
polysemous: A- meanings on a variety of levels
Literally speaking, what the poet means is... A- the poem its self
define tautology: A- it is what it is
In Shelley's opinion, imagination is superior to ___________. A- logic, reason
epiphany: A- a sudden manifestation of the divine or a light bulb
pg 100 of Frye- archetypal criticism phase of symbols, Lycidas A- an entire liberal education by reading one poem
The Alazon: A- an impostor 1) soldier, 2) professor
metonymy/ synecdoche is defined as: A- a part of something that stands for something else

Friday, October 3

2008-10-07T15:35:00.001-07:00

"It's not about who is right or wrong, but about the metaphors you use" ~Dr. Sexson

your mission: to find a light bulb moment in Frye

in the symbol's chapter
something new that you are better for knowing now

pathos: tear-jerking

there is a point in which you repeat something too much (even if it's sad) that it become comedic

sometimes repetition is key to getting a point across

Exercises-

McCain Blinks:

he backed down
he actually blinkes a lot
literal vs metaphorical

Picture:

~3 shapes in an inclosed space:

triangle
rectangle
circle
all inside a square

but it's actually this:

assignment:

highlight 3 passages from Sidney that are important to you

metaphor---> myth---> declining ages: this is all we do in this class

Dante's levels:

literal
allegorical
moral
anagogical

"there is so much time and so little to do" ~ Willy Wonka

Wednesday, October 1

2008-10-07T12:33:00.000-07:00

"Shakespeare created the most, next to God" ~ STC

helpful tips to memorizing poetry:

listen to it
break it down: stanza by stanza
repetition

Antony and Cleopatra and Frye: "The tonality of Antony and Cleopatra is high mimetic, the story of the fall of a great leader. But it is easy to look at Mark Antony ironically, as a man enslaved by passion; it is easy to recognize his common humanity with ourselves; it is easy to see in him a romantic adventurer of prodigious courage and endurance betrayed by a witch ; there are even hints of a superhuman being whose legs bestrid the ocean and whose downfall is a conspiracy of fate, explicable only to a soothsayer. To leave our any of these would oversimplify and belittle the play. Through such an analysis we may come to realize that they two essential facts about a work of art, that it is contemporary with its own time and that it is contemporary with ours, are not opposed but complementary facts." pg 51

TS Eliot: "Time past and time present are both contained in time future, and time future contained in time past. If all time is eternally present all time is unredeemable."

poetry is not descriptive, it doesn't matter if it's true.
centripetally- inwardly
Shakespeare's tragedy is high mimetic
'by reading Shakespeare, you understand it all'

"Truly, Senor Priest, it seems to me that the books called novels of chivalry are prejudicial to the nation, and though I, moved by a false and idle taste, have read the beginning of almost every one that has ever been published, I have never been able to read any from beginning to end, because it seems to me they are all essentially the same, and one is no different from another. In my opinion, this kind of writing and composition belongs to the genre called Milesian tales, which are foolish stories meant only to delight and not to teach, unlike moral tales, which delight and teach at the same time. Although the principal aim of these books is to delight, I do not know how they can, being so full of so many excessively foolish elements; for delight conceived in the soul must arise from the beauty and harmony it sees to contemplates in the things that the eyes of the imagination place before it, an nothing that possesses ugliness and disorder can please us. What beauty, what proportion between parts and the whole, or the whole and its parts, can there be in a book or tale in which a boy of sixteen, with one thrust of his sword, fells a giant as big as a tower and splits him in tow as if he were marzipan, and, when a battle is depicted, after saying that there are more than a million combatants on the side of the enemy, if the hero of the book fights them, whether we like it or not, of necessity we must believe that this knight achieves victory only though the valor of his mighty arm?" Don Quixote pg 411-2

Literature that entertains us vs literature that has a good moral and teaches us

all literature that is didactic: pedagogical

Superheroes:

superman

spoonful of sugar- Mary Poppins

Cartoons that water things down:

disney movies
leaf of death
school house rock
sex-ed videos

"Things that you extract from the text, not the text its self" ~Frye

reality is descriptive, art is something else

"Whenever we read anything, we find our attention moving in two directions at once. One direction is outward or centrifugal, in which we keep going outside our reading, from the individual words to the things they mean, or, in practice, to our memory of the conventional association between them. The other direction is inward or centripetal, in which we try to develop from the words a sense of the larger verbal pattern they make. In both cases we deal with symbols, but when we attach an external meaning to a word we have, in addition to the verbal symbol, the thing represented or symbolized by it." ~Frye pg 73

centripetal vs centrifugal

"protecting us from the horror of the specifics"

stream of consciousness

talking animals:

Dr. Doolittle
Balaam's Donkey
snake in the garden
Caterpillar in Alice
anyone in a folk story

"You should always read with a 'willing suspension of disbelief'" ~STC

you should read literature as an Evangelist read the bible, as it is truth

words are symbols, not the real thing

general semantics

Monday, September 29

2008-10-07T11:08:00.000-07:00

"You cannot go back and read as an idiot, you must move forward and read like an idiot" ~Dr. Sexson

"The poem means the poem"

tautalogical: anagogical phase

from the bible: "I am who I am" the burning bush from Exodus 3:14

"God said to Moses, "I am who I am . [b] This is what you are to say to the Israelites: 'I AM has sent me to you.' "

literal

anagogical descriptive

archetypal formal

literal: 'motif'

descriptive: 'sign'

formal: 'image'

archetypal: 'myth'

anagogical: 'monad'

everything loops in tautology- all are similar

a poem can only mean one thing: "the poem can only mean the poem"

R. Frost: Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

Whose woods these are I think I know,

His house is in the village though.

He will not see me stopping here,

To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer,

To stop without a farmhouse near,

Between the woods and frozen lake,

The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake,

To ask if there is some mistake.

The only other sound's the sweep,

Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.

When someone asked him what it meant, he repeated the poem. The poem means what the poem says

"everyday is groundhogs day" ~ Dr. Sexson

Batman: he is more realistic than other heroes.

Who over does it?
don quixote 'they are fake, but they become real to me'
revenge motivated batman to become who he was
archetype of the hero: Joseph Taylor

Aristotle's layers: powers of the heroes. who is stronger than batman? Many people are stronger. Then why is he so popular?

Sidney's apology: "That imitation whereof Poetry is, hath the most conveniency to Nature of all other, insomuch that, as Aristotle saith, those things which in themselves are horrible, as cruel battles, unnatural monsters, are made in poetical imitation delightful. Truly, I have known men, that even with reading Amadis de Gaule (which God knoweth wanteth much of a perfect poesy) have found their hearts moved to the exercise of courtesy, liberality, and especially courage."

imitation: all that is better than we

"It nothing is real, then wouldn't Batman be as real as everything else that isn't?" ~Chelsey

santa reality---> devestating---> existentialism---> everything is actually real

ARISTOTLE AND PLATO:

recording reality, not actually reality
imitate imitations
if this is true, then nothing is true, making it true?
verbal arts, then dramatic arts
tragedy/ comedy came from phallic rites
poetry
'In the name of the rose'~ S. Connery shows Aristotle's views of comedy
recording vs imitation vs selector of most important things to imitate
'tragedy is an imitation of an action which is serious complete and of a certain magnitude." ~Aristotle
not a crude lie, but an insight into the truth of things- Shakespeare's tellers of truth
history deals in fact
philosophers can only give abstractions
poets give you the truth- sir p. sidney
it is incite, not lying: instead of drying the actions, it makes you soak them up

In reality:

'Gone in 60 seconds' - stealing cars
'V for Vendetta' - v signs on church
'Jackass' - stupid things people do
'don quixote' - imitates art

would you rather have reality or Romantic fiction?

Oedipus Rex is the best example of literature- can we copy it?
how to deal with these passions and urges to behave this way?
Aristotle says: they did it in lit, so we don't have to do it in reality

Aristotle:

imitation is a significant human action
catharsis provided
they did it so that we don't have to
same with video games

~it doesn't matter if they don't know what a cow is, facts aren't important, accuracy is not important, history doesn't matter

the tragic low-mimetic

2008-09-27T19:35:00.001-07:00

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

2008-09-27T19:33:00.005-07:00

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

2008-09-27T19:33:00.003-07:00

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

2008-09-27T19:33:00.001-07:00

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:

2008-09-27T19:24:00.000-07:00

WOLFGANG ISER

Wednesday, September 24

2008-09-27T17:44:00.000-07:00

"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:

Calliope- chief muse and muse of epic or heroic poetry
Clio- muse of history
Erato- muse of love or erotic poetry, lyrics and marriage song
Euterpe- muse of music and lyric poetry
Melpomene- muse of tragedy
Polyhymnia- muse of sacred song, oratory, lyric, singing and rhetoric
Terpsichore- muse of choral song and dance
Thalia- muse of comedy and bucolic poetry
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

2008-09-26T12:57:00.000-07:00

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

Blog Assignments:

intro to your critic: photos, central contribution to lit crit and wiki info
connect 'Idea' to 4 elements
link 'Idea' to N. Frye's 2nd chapter
talk about where you are in DQ and what you think about it
talk about what you understand from N. Frye
write about other people's blogs
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:

Harry Potter books by JK Rowling
The Joy of Gay Sex by Edmund White
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
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':

she is the sea's audience
the people in the poem are watching her
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

2008-09-17T15:07:00.007-07:00

"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:

too long, too short, perfect
too hot, too cold, perfect
too hard, too soft, perfect

Some like it hot: quintessential comedy

methos- story
ethos- emotion
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"

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

Monday, September 15

2008-09-17T15:07:00.006-07:00

"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:

Idea of Order At Key West
Don Quixote
Anatomy of Criticism
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

2008-09-17T15:07:00.004-07:00

"The Tragic Vegetable?" ~ Dr. Sexson

4 essays:

theory of modes: historical

theory of symbols: ethical

theory of myths: archetypal

theory of genres: rhetorical

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:

Golden

Silver

Bronze

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:

soldier who brags

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"

gods- hieroglyphic language

heroes- sophisticated literature

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

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

2008-09-17T15:07:00.003-07:00

"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:

Harold Bloom hates Frye because he was:

a devout christian
ordained Methodist minister
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:

myth
romantics
high mimetic mode
low mimetic mode
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

2008-09-17T15:07:00.002-07:00

"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:

instruct
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:

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

Friday, September 5th

2008-09-17T15:07:00.001-07:00

"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:

literal
analogical
moral
anagogical

3 things VERY important to class:

Wallace Steven's poem
Northrop Frye
Cervantes

Wednesday, September 3rd

2008-09-17T15:07:00.000-07:00

"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