No Basis to Compare

"We want to establish the centrality of Africa in the department. This, we have argued, is justifiable on various grounds, the most important one being that education is a means of knowledge about ourselves. Therefore, after we have examined ourselves, we radiate outwards and discover people and worlds around us."
-Ngugi Wa Thiong'o, "On the Abolition of the English Department"

Lifting this section of Ngugi's essay in his piece, "A Modest Proposal: On The Abolition of the English Department at Messiah College," Powers states, "We want to establish the centrality of the Christian imagination in the department." I am not sure that the same logic can be used to argue the abolition of an English department in East Africa as can be used to argue the abolition of one in the Northeastern United States. On either account, I am also not sure that I completely agree with the idea that self-knowledge precludes the encounter of the world and the knowledge of other people. Perhaps this is true when a natural self knowledge has not been allowed to emerge. However, I tend to think that encountering the world is the very thing that allows for true knowledge of self, for only when we have experienced different ways of living can we evaluate our own culture and lifestyle. Yet, allowing that the premise which both Ngugi and Powers operate upon is correct, I cannot help but believe that it is too much of a stretch to apply Ngugi's argumentation to Messiah College. The argument that Ngugi and his colleagues make to abolish English departments in African universities and reestablish the importance of African literature and indigenous language is the result of and reaction to a profound colonization in African history-- a deeply felt imposition, infringement, and foreign domination which affected every aspect of life for Africans living in colonized countries. The post-colonial state is very unique to the African continent (even among other regions of the world which were also colonized).

The depth and breadth of the effects of European imperialism upon Africa are hard to conceive from our Western context. Some might argue that the historic repression of Christianity (and perhaps even just the repression of Christianity in the States in academic circles within the last century) is somehow comparable to the repression that indigenous culture and language have experienced. Some might argue that the inability to be oneself-- that is, an English department of a Christian school expressing fear at the idea of being explicitly Christian or Africans denying the African part of their post-colonial identity-- is just as harmful and restrictive to one group which struggles with self-knowledge and identity as it is to the next. Yet, I do not believe that these situations should ever be considered as even semi-equivalent. I think that most Christians who find themselves at Messiah College have not experienced the feelings of shame and confusion in regard to their spiritual identity that Africans have who find themselves studying literature at African universities. While the implications of a parallel between Ngugi's writing and our own cultural context may be interesting to explore, the parallel itself is weak and misleading.

The Racial Mountain

In his essay "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain," Langston Hughes writes about how many young black poets desire subconsciously to be young white poets because the white experience has been presented to them by people (both black and white alike) as superior to the black experience. Hughes speaks about how whiteness, especially for middle and upper class blacks, has come to be synonymous with "beauty, morality, and money," and how blacks have not been taught to see the beauty of their own culture and people. Hughes encourages then that blacks embrace the rich fabric of their culture which has been historically denied. He exhorts the young Negro artist to not accept the renunciation of all things black and exaltation of all things white but rather to reclaim the voice of his people and take pride in his blackness. Yet, Hughes demonstrates the imposing height of the mountain that must be climbed, the difficulties of embarking upon this journey which must be made toward asserting Negro identity.

It seems that beyond Hughes' specific message for African Americans in this piece, he encourages people universally to write from their own experience, embrace their identity, and not fear who they are. He opens with this anecdote:

"One of the most promising of the young Negro poets said to me once, 'I want to be a poet-- not a Negro poet,' meaning, I believe, 'I want to write like a white poet'; meaning subconsciously, 'I would like to be a white poet'; meaning beyond that, 'I would like to be white.' And I was sorry the young man said that, for no great poet has ever been afraid of being himself."

This last line struck me as particularly poignant. As I have been processing different thoughts about race, culture, and identity within the past few years, I have come to recognize within myself a desire to be of a different race and different culture. I would never say that my own struggles with racial/cultural identity are in anyway comparable to the African American experience that Hughes describes in his essay, but nevertheless, this last line sparked my thinking. I think that I have so often longed to be of a different race because I am ashamed of the connotations of my white skin; I am ashamed of the abusive privilege and power that it holds when traveling and even within the US, and I am ashamed of how white skin has historically been oppressive in cultures all throughout the world. I am ashamed to be associated with not only my skin color but also with the specific kind of whiteness that Hughes highlights as the ideal which blacks were taught to desire-- American, middle class, suburban, cultural whiteness. I would like to shed the assumptions and stereotypes that come with that association. Having grown up in a mostly homogeneous town in suburban America, I have come to realize that I do not have a strong sense of cultural identity. My racial identity crisis extends beyond the color of my skin to include my culture and nationality. I long to be able to claim a culture which is built upon traditions and a strong sense of community rather than upon a shared experience of making frequent trips to the mall, watching certain television shows, and eating processed foods. Anyway, my own ramblings and cultural critique aside, I wonder how Hughes would respond to my desire to be Hispanic, or black, or Indian...surely, it is unhealthy for any person "to be afraid of being himself." Yet, is this hesitancy to claim and find my identity within my own culture somehow more justified because it is born out of an awareness of how that culture has dominated/colonized other cultures? Is there a different mountain to climb on the other side of the racial coin?

Reconstructing the Past?

According to Annette Kolodny, literary history is a fiction, and we can really reconstruct the past as it really was.

"But we never really reconstruct the past in its own terms. What we gain when we read the 'classics,' then, is neither Homer's Greece nor George Eliot's England as they knew it but, rather, an approximation of an already fictively imputed past made available, through our interpretive strategies, for present concerns. Only by understanding this can we put to rest that recurrent delusion that the 'continuing relevance' of the classics serves as 'testimony to perennial features of human experience.' The only 'perennial feature' to which our ability to read and reread texts written in previous centuries testifies is our inventiveness-- in the sense that all of literary history is a fiction which we daily recreate as we reread it."
-Kolodny, "Dancing Through the Minefield"

When discussing some of the "animating questions of Christian hermeneutics" in class, we debated whether interpretation is primarily designed to understand the meaning of a text in its original context or in our present context. Many agreed that, whether consciously or not, we cannot help but look for application in everything that we read. Whether the text that we are reading is the Bible or the Sunday paper or "The Odyssey," the way that we interpret these texts is inevitably characterized by our search for relevance or connectedness to our own lives. Is this selfish? And if so, is that selfishness avoidable? My first reaction to the question of whether or not we primarily aim to interpret a text in its original context was "yes," but after considering Kolodny's point about our inability to reconstruct the past as it was, I might have to admit that interpretation is radically shaped by our situated-ness in the present time. Perhaps even if we wanted to, we could never fully achieve an interpretation of a text in its original context because we are too far removed.

Thus, we cannot look to "classic" texts either as authoritative portraits of past societies or as indicators of the common threads of human experience because these texts are not fully available to us. Even if we read a text heavily relying upon footnotes and historical data, we can do nothing but invent and imagine the context in which the author wrote. There are too many connotations and meanings engrossed in the language and cultural references of the day that escape us... there are too many elements that compose what it means to live in a specific time and place that render classic works inaccessible to the modern reader. We can only mold historical texts by what we now know; we can only begin to understand through our present lens. But, Kolodny would argue, we must embrace that lens and not fool ourselves about our interpretive abilities. As much as we would like to believe that by reading and studying, we can be transplanted into the world of George Eliot's "Middlemarch," we must know that we cannot interpret that world as Eliot saw it or intended it. We can only translate into our present experience. I wonder if Kolodny's argument might suggest that it is best to read works written in our own cultural/historical contexts, by our contemporaries, because we are the only ones who will ever understand it to the fullest possible degree? In acknowledging where our interpretive abilities lack, what then becomes our driving motivation for reading the "Classics?"

More Thinking On Gender

As I was reading Cixous and reflecting more about Woolf's ideas on the androgynous mind and the distinctions between male and female writing, I came upon this statement:

"I write woman: woman must write woman. And man, man."

I am not sure exactly what this idea implies. Does Cixous mean that, as a writer, she must write out of her experience as a woman? That her writing is characterized chiefly by her femininity? Or that she must write for an audience of women? Or that she must write female characters? Or that only women have the authority to write about themselves? Operating upon the assumption that Cixous means that women should write about the female experience and men about the male experience, I began to think about male authors who write female protagonists and female authors who create male protagonists. Do writers do this for the challenge or does assuming the opposite gender's voice come naturally to some? Is writing a different gender more of a challenge than writing a different race? A different age? What kind of exercises might male writers undergo in order to channel a woman's voice? And what authors have been the most successful in this gender-switching experiment?

I decided to do a google search for authors who had written about characters of the opposite gender. I did not find much organized material on the subject besides a few chatroom discussions, but in the process I came across a very interesting link, and accompanying article in The New York Times Magazine:

The Gender Genie
"Sexed Texts"

The "Gender Genie" is supposed to be able to calculate with surprising accuracy whether the author of any text, 500 words or more, is a male or female. A simplified version of an algorithm developed out of Bar-Ilan University in Israel and Illinois Institute of Technology, the "Gender Genie" completes a word analysis of a text and based upon the frequency of the use of certain keywords, guesses the author's gender. I copied and pasted my last three blog entries into the "Gender Genie," and each time, it guessed incorrectly that I was male. Though I was not overly impressed by the test's accuracy, I was intrigued by the idea that even within the smallest words of our language (with, if, not, the, is, at, me, etc), a difference in usage according to gender might arise. I doubt that Woolf would encourage her readers to be aware of language use to this extent in order to achieve the elusive "androgynous mind." Yet, the question is still an interesting one: how does a woman avoid writing too much like a woman? And what does it mean to write too much like a woman? There is clearly a difference in the way that men and women write, but where does this difference start, if not in the use of the most functional words of our language? The impression that I got from reading "A Room of One's Own" was that Woolf believes that the difference in masculine and feminine writing style comes down to directness and perhaps even structure. Whereas men are more direct and explain in a point by point manner, women (and especially Woolf herself) are more indirect and have a more circumspect way of getting across their point.

In the article "Sexed Texts" which covers the findings of the "Gender Genie" more extensively, author Charles McGrath explains that language use reflects a broader gender difference in terms of what men and women speak about:

"Similarly, what the gender-identifying algorithm picks up on is that women are apparently far more likely than men to use personal pronouns -- ''I,'' ''you'' and ''she'' especially. Men, on the other hand, prefer so-called determiners -- ''a,'' ''the,'' ''that,'' ''these'' -- along with numbers and quantifiers like ''more'' and ''some.'' What this suggests, according to Moshe Koppel, an author of the Israeli project, is that women are more comfortable talking or thinking about people and relationships, while men prefer to contemplate things."

Perhaps these are the sort of things that authors have in mind as they set out to write from the perspective of the opposite gender. I would be very interested in knowing about some other studies that have been done regarding the difference in how men and women use language. I think it would be especially interesting to see if these supposed differences can be found in every language.

On the Androgynous Mind

"...it is fatal for any one who writes to think of their sex. It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly. It is fatal for a woman to lay the least stress on any grievance; to plead even with justice any cause; in any way to speak consciously as a woman... Some collaboration has to take place in the mind between the woman and the man before the act of creation can be accomplished."
-Virginia Woolf

I would encourage you all to go take this gender quiz from BBC right now. It'll take precisely 22 minutes to complete, but it is worth it! It's very interesting in its descriptions of the traditional characteristics of the male and female mind, and provides some food for thought about Woolf's call for androgyny in her essay "A Room of One's Own." My generational norms class took this quiz, and we discussed the intriguing fact that on average, the variety of responses to the quiz was greater within each sex than it was between the two sexes. Essentially, women are more different from each other than they are from men, and the same goes for men! Yet, in general, men tended to score as slightly more analytically brained than women and women tended to scored as slightly more perceptively brained than men (these qualities being attributed to masculinity and femininity, respectively). Nevertheless, one of my female friends proved to have the completely androgynous brain that Woolf aspires to. On the spectrum of 100% female to 100% male, my brain turned out to be 25% female according to the test. Another male friend scored 50% female, so you just never know what your brain sex might be (surely Woolf would say, "that failing is too rare for one to complain of it").

Some conclusions that the quiz draws about the male and female brains:
"Men tend to pay more attention to space and the geometry of the world around them."
"Women are much better at noticing the details of their environment and spotting changes."
"Women tend to be more sensitive to facial expressions. They are generally better at discerning someone's mood just by looking at their eyes. Studies of children's behaviour have shown that on average girls make more eye contact than boys."
"On average, women use 15,000 words a day while men use 7,000."

At the same time as I can understand Woolf's assertion that the fully developed mind "does not think specially or separately of sex," I wonder how plausible it is for a person to write without gender consciousness. Aren't each of us continually made aware of our gender and how that gender plays an undeniable part in our daily lived experience? How could I forget that I am a woman as I sit down to record my perceptions in writing when I am not accustomed to forgetting that fact? My womanliness shapes every aspect of my being. This is not to say that I do not possess masculine traits and that I cannot, as Woolf suggests, achieve a higher state of consciousness by blending my masculinity and femininity. Yet, how much work would this entail? On what assumptions are we operating when we use the terms "masculine" and "feminine?" Woolf seems to draw one conclusion about the difference when she characterizes masculine writing as more blunt and organized from point to point and feminine writing as more exploratory and meandering in its movement between ideas. It is dangerous ground to start naming certain qualities as exclusively masculine or feminine, for as the gender quiz shows, there are women who left-brained and men who are right-brained. It seems to me that the task that Woolf calls her readers to would prove exhausting in the amount of thinking required to do it. I could picture myself attempting to write with an androgynous voice and stopping to evaluate whether every turn of phrase I create is "masculine" or "feminine." Furthermore, why must the feminine voice in women or the masculine voice in men be suppressed? I, unlike Woolf, am not convinced that gender-conscious writing is fatal.

Cultural Codes and...Facebook?

Disclaimer: The following may be indicative of the fact that I have begun to live much too much of my life in a cyber reality.

As I was reading Pierre Bourdieu's article, "Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste," I found myself thinking again and again of the infamous social networking website facebook.com. Bourdieu writes,

"Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier. Social subjects, classified by their classifications, distinguish themselves by the distinctions they make, between the beautiful and the ugly, the distinguished and the vulgar, in which their position in the objective classifications is expressed or betrayed."

Bourdieu argues that taste is representative of social class and that the difference boils down to form and function. While the more educated class tries to distance itself from the common, ordinary function of everyday things and instead establish a stylized version of life and art which must be decoded and which operates through representations, the working class values functionality and the things being represented more than their representations. Distinguished art, dress, food, and music seeks as much as possible to remove itself from ordinary emotion and experience and to become purified and refined. Conversely, Bourdieu makes note of the fact that when working-class audiences watch movies or read novels, they reject formal experimentation which they do not know how to decode and which prevents them from fully identifying with characters. Additionally, when interpreting art, the working class instinctively looks for images to be functional, often making judgments based upon morality or agreeableness.

Though it is easy to say in hindsight that Bourdieu's observations were something I had already understood, the truth of the matter is that I had not before thought about taste and distinction in this way-- as a distancing from the natural and necessary and as an reinforcer of class and educational differences. I realized as I was reading Bourdieu that I often pride myself on my taste in music, movies, books, etc, but that the only real reason I enjoy these things is because I have been taught how to enjoy/decode them (and perhaps I seek out that distinctiveness?) Had I been exposed to an independent or indie film without having been taught what to appreciate (the way it is filmed, the symbols, the acting, the strength of the dialogue, etc), then I would surely not have immediately loved it the way I now immediately love this type of film when I see one. I would have been confused by the detachment from reality, by the emphasis on form above functionality, and by the elusiveness of the meaning. It is impossible that works of art can produce in us an experience of "love at first sight" unless we have been trained in the cultural codes that are necessary to decipher them.

Anyway, returning finally to my original point relating Bourdieu to facebook. I believe that facebook functions primarily as a means for people to display their tastes and celebrate their distinctiveness to the approval or disapproval of the broader facebook world. There are different profile categories which encourage facebook users to list favorite movies, music, books, and television shows, thus betraying their social class and probable level of education. I shudder to think that as I scan through my friends' profiles, I am merely discerning whether or not they reject the functionality of popular culture and embrace the stylistic concerns of the cultural elite. Why should we find our identities in our ability to decode and appreciate elevated art, music, and movies? Why should we market ourselves as lovers of "ethnic food" or of the reality series "Top Chef" when this signifies above anything else that we can afford luxury and do not subsist on more economical foods? How much do any of these silly distinctions actually communicate about us as individuals? Can we believe our tastes to be indicative of our personalities or merely of our culture, upbringing, education, and social class? Why do we put forth such time and effort into both developing and displaying our distinctive tastes?

Class Values and Taste

One of the points that I found most intriguing in Richard Ohmann's essay "The Shaping of a Canon: U.S. Fiction, 1960-1975" was that the American professional-managerial class of the 20th century has promoted their own interests by having the status, positions, power, and sheer numbers to select which literary works would become best sellers (some of which would eventually be canonized). What particularly interests me is Ohmann's discussion of the type of literature that drew in these "intellectual gatekeepers":

"...stories of people trying to live a decent life in contemporary social settings, people represented as analogous to 'us,' rather than as 'cases' to be examined and understood from a clinical distance, as in an older realistic convention. They are unhappy people, who move toward happiness, at least a bit, by the ends of their stories."

Ohmann also suggests that the needs and values of this class, this group of people who "went to the same colleges, lived in the same neighborhoods, talked about the same movies, had to work for their livings (but worked with their minds more than with their hands)" were influenced by novels that provided a moral landscape and advice for how to live. Thus despite their ignorance of the continued problems that existed for the working class and poor in American society (racial, class, and economic injustice), this white collar class sought out novels which provided their lives with meaning in times when they were shaken by events or personal crisis. Ohmann does a good job of tracing the historical and cultural factors which shaped the attitudes of the "intellectual gatekeeper" class: post-war affluence, American domination of the "free world," the muted sense of social conflict and inequality, increased feelings of independence and weakening of community, etc. Essentially, this class was privileged and comfortable (though curiously unhappy, or at least they identified with unhappy protagonists), and there was no one telling them that the rest of the world looked any different than it did from their limited middle class perspective. As a result of their dominance as producers, consumers, and "intellectual gatekeepers" of literature, the U.S. literary canon was formed in their time according to their aesthetic tastes.

What sorts of stories might have inspired the working class? What voices would have resonated with them, spurring best sellers had they had the power and means to control the formation of the literary canon? Stories of struggle and social injustice? Stories of the rural and urban poor trying to make ends meet from day to day? Stories that promised a better tomorrow? Stories that promoted finding fulfillment in community and familial relationships? Love stories? Rags to riches stories? It is interesting to acknowledge that we do seek out literature which illuminates our own values and concerns. We search out what is most relevant to life as we live it. And, as both Ohmann and Benjamin suggest, for those who find themselves situated in an individualistic, industrial-capitalist world, one of the most sought out themes is how to deal with loneliness and isolation.

Walter Benjamin and Tim Burton

"In telling the story of my father's life, it's impossible to separate fact from fiction, the man from the myth. The best I can do is to tell it the way he told me. It doesn't always make sense and most of it never happened... but that's what kind of story this is."
-Big Fish

Watch "Big Fish" finale

When I think of storytellers, I think of both my grandfather and Albert Finney's character from Tim Burton's 2003 film "Big Fish." "Big Fish" is a tale of a father/son relationship in which the son must come to grips with the scattered pieces of his dying father's life. A perpetual storyteller, Edward Bloom (Albert Finney) raises his son Will (Billy Crudup) upon stories- marvelous, fantastical stories that are based in truth but leave Will feeling as if he only knows a fictionalized version of his father. Ultimately, Will comes to uncover the complex man behind the larger than life stories, and father and son reconcile their relationship in a heartwarming final scene where both engage in the act of storytelling. I believe that Burton really gets at the essence of storytellers and what their stories mean in "Big Fish," and the movie echoes some of the themes that Walter Benjamin develops in his essay "The Storyteller."

In the outset of his essay, Benjamin describes how there have historically been two types of storytellers: the "resident tiller of the soil" and the "trading seaman." In other words, storytellers who draw on the lore of the past and their own rootedness in a place or storytellers who draw on the lore of faraway places and their own travels. Edward Bloom is most definitely of the later variety, for the movie chronicles his travels out of small town Alabama into the wider world. Benjamin characterizes the storyteller as one who promotes the communicability of experience, counseling his or her listeners with the great well of wisdom arising from oral tradition. Storytelling, according to Benjamin, is at its' heart, a communal endeavor, while the novel, as a form, embodies isolation:

"The birthplace of the novel is the solitary individual, who is no longer able to express himself by giving examples of his most important concerns, is himself uncounseled, and cannot counsel others. To write a novel means to carry the incommensurable to extremes in the representation of human life. In the midst of life's fullness, and through the representation of this fullness, the novel gives evidence of the profound perplexity of the living."

Burton does a good job of capturing the community that shapes Edward Bloom's stories and the communicability of experience that characterizes his life. The colorful characters that enter Bloom's life at different stages provide the wisdom and "counsel" that Benjamin attributes to the storyteller, and the viewer very much gets the sense that Bloom has led an existence that is far from alienated. Despite the separation between Bloom and his son, it is evident that his stories are born out of human connection rather than out of isolated, industrial capitalist experience- the experience that gives birth to the novel.

The most clear parallel that I can draw between Benjamin's description of the storyteller and Burton's portrayal of Edward Bloom is the idea that stories are not expendable. Unlike information, which proves relevant only in a transitory instant, stories go on gathering new meaning with age. Benjamin writes that a story "preserves and concentrates its strength and is capable of releasing it even after a long time." In a similar way, the stories that compose Edward Bloom's life develop renewed value for his son as an adult. As a child, Will loved the stories that his father spun, cherishing them for their magical characters and impossible outcomes. Yet, as he grew older, he began to despise the fictionalization of life that his father made his craft. He wanted real information, a way of relating to his father in an authentic way based upon truth. As Will finally comes to embrace his father's makeup as a natural born storyteller, he can see the old stories from a new perspective-- see them for their deeper meaning that negates the need for factual information. Somehow the fabrications hold more insight into his father's life than the simple truth.

Personal Economy and the Ability to Perceive

I really resonated with Barbara Herrnstein Smith's opinions about interdependency and the radical contingencies of value. I had the feeling as I was reading her essay that it was dense with important material and that many different sections could be the subject of an interesting discussion. (However, according to Smith's own words, I must be careful when discerning why I found such value in her work. Due to the countless factors that influence one's ever-changing personal economy, I could attribute my appreciation for her essay to my appreciation for a clear and concise article in the Norton Anthology after having read so many that I did not fully grasp, to my desire as I reread her article to find thought-provoking material to blog about, to my preconceived notion that as a modern American author I would more easily understand what she had to say than I could understand the older, foreign authors that we have read, to my remembrance that the article had made solid sense the first time I read it, etc, etc. These factors unquestionably influenced my thought process as I read, and if I were to read Herrnstein Smith's article again in another six months, my personal economy would be drastically different).

That being said, I would like to reflect on a small point that Herrnstein-Smith made that I felt was particularly insightful:

"Moreover, the subject's experiences of an entity are not discrete, or strictly speaking, successive, because recollection and anticipation always overlay perception, and the units of what we call 'experience' themselves vary and overlap."

The idea that recollection and anticipation cover up or conceal our ability to perceive struck me as true. When we enter into experiences, be they reading a novel or simply meeting an old friend for a cup of coffee, do our expectations make a stronger impact upon our perception than what actually takes place while reading or conversing? Are we so consumed with past and future impressions and ideas intersecting that we cannot accurately read what is happening in the present moment? How often do I read a piece of literature with a notion in my head of what I should be looking for as I experience the text? How often are these notions colored by my recollections of past experiences and by my anticipation of what the text will be? Are our experiences ever really isolated in the present when they are supposed to be taking place, or are they, as Herrnstein-Smith suggests, representative of boundless intersection and overlap?

I have wondered before about my own perceptive abilities. I am asked all of the time to perceive, to opine about my impressions of what has taken place just a minute before or within the last year of my life. So often I assume that I am capable of perceiving and of perceiving accurately, yet, is this really true? As experiences blur and build upon one another, I am forced to process quickly, and I sometimes wonder if I have drawn the right conclusions about what has happened even within my own small life.

What matters who's speaking?

Of the three scenarios which we considered in class while discussing Foucault's essay, "What is an Author?", I was most drawn to scenario two, which involved the celebration and subsequent denunciation of a book which attempted to chronicle a Native American boy's experience with cultural assimilation. I think this scenario proved most thought-provoking for me because it was not just hypothetical but actually based off of a real-life situation involving author Asa Earl Carter (writing under the pseudonym of Forrest Carter) and his book The Education of Little Tree. Though the book was initially trumpeted as representative of Native American themes of simple living, tradition, and love of nature and though the book was thought to help revitalize Native American literature, when it became known that Carter had been a white supremacist and Ku Klux Klan member, controversy colored the book's reputation. There were several issues at the heart of the controversy: the fact that what was a fictional work had been presented as a factual memoir, the gap between the descriptions of Cherokee culture promoted in the book and actual Cherokee traditions and language recorded by experts, and the disconnect between the uplifting messages of the book and the author's racism early in life.

While Foucault would analyze this situation and find it fascinating how we expect consistency and coherence in the collection of an author's work, and while it is ironic that the same work can be both glorified and repudiated depending upon our perception of the author, I cannot help but believe that particularly in this case it does matter who is speaking and the meaning of the work is affected by the author's intention. How could even the most staunch Formalist or Structuralist who advocates for the death of the author honestly hold to their belief that any knowledge of the author is extraneous to the meaning of the work given this scenario? I would not be content doing a formalist critique of the unity between the book's form and content when I knew in the back of my mind that this author who wrote about the Native American experience had, in fact, as a white man, promoted racist attitudes thorough out his lifetime. There is no question in my mind that The Education of Little Tree must be reread and reexamined for the possible existence of white supremacist tones. When a work is believed to be representative of a people, then the author makes all of the difference. I'm sure that the argument exists that no literary work can truly be representative of the lived experience of many individuals, but when these individuals claim the work as representative, then this is a different story. I believe that the meaning of The Education of Little Tree must lie partially outside of the text. Foucault would also make note of how we expect an author to be authentic, trustworthy, transparent, and representative and how so often our concept of an author functions in this way. While this may be merely a cultural construct and an illegitimate expectation to put on authorship, I believe that it is permissible to ask about the author's intentionality and transparency when the integrity of a group of people that has been historically oppressed is at stake.

These questions regarding the role of the author in the realm of literary theory have clearly been relevant for Oprah Winfrey as she has both composed and edited her famous book list. Although she promoted The Education of Little Tree on her television show in 1994, calling it "very spiritual," she removed the book from the list of recommended reading on her website in 2007 due to the controversy surrounding the author. In another infamous case regarding the question of whether an author is allowed to present a fictionalized memoir as factual, Winfrey lambasted author James Frey of A Million Little Pieces for lying and exaggerating about many parts of his supposedly real memoir, which Winfrey had promoted in her book club. Check out video coverage here:

Oprah Winfrey and James Frey

The Function of Authorship

"The function of the author is to characterize the existence, circulation, and operation of certain discourses within society."
- Michael Foucault

Given Foucault's many different and important ideas about how "authorship" functions according to cultural criteria and how author's names are not proper names, I thought it might be interesting to investigate how Foucault's name functions in the field of literary theory. With the death of the author and Foucault himself as a victim, how does his name become an "object of appropriation?" Does his name suggest a certain level of quality? Are some of the texts he has written excluded from the body of work he is said to have "authored" because they do not demonstrate a "conceptual or theoretical coherence?" Or because they are stylistically different? Do readers seek to classify his "author-function" by examining the plurality of egos in his work (works narrated in the first person)? Are his writings more highly valued than others because they bear his name? Does his name hold productive power because of the knowledge he represents as an "intellectual gatekeeper?"

By merely browsing through Foucault's English-language Wikipedia page, we can draw some conclusions about the author-function of his name. Immediately I notice that on the right hand side of the web page, there are two lists: one of names of people that influenced Foucault, another of names of people that he influenced. His influences include Nietzsche, Marx, Borges, Kant, and others, but of course, these influences only include other notable intellectuals (nowhere on the list is his father, Paul Foucault). Foucault may interpret this data as indicative of the way in which the author functions always as a member of a larger group or school of thought. Authors must be linked to other authors and thinkers and thus their names function in order to represent larger ideas and periods of time. The name of the author has nothing to do with the individual person behind that same name. This is further evidenced by how the Wikipedia article classifies him by "school/tradition" and by "main interests": "Continental Philosophy, Structuralism, Post-structuralism," and "history of ideas, epistemology, ethics-political, philosophy," respectively. The author is now a product of consumption, manipulated by labels to function within specific cultures and societies. It is also interesting to note that the opening paragraph in Foucault's biography in the Norton Anthology states:

"Michael Foucault is arguably the most influential European writer and thinker of the second half of the twentieth century. His unclassifiable work (is it history? philosophy? cultural theory?) is controversial and has attracted much criticism, but the questions he raised, the topics he addressed, and the positions he took have become central features of today's intellectual landscape."

Clearly, Foucault's name is functioning here as one which bears much power due to the loftiness of his designation as "most influential European writer." The use of his name bears authority, the type of authority that would not be so readily attributed to a lesser-known or less highly regarded author. The way his name functions in relation to literature is much different than the way Stephen King's name functions in relation to literature. Additionally, though the Norton Anthology designates some of his work as "unclassifiable" (suggesting that the way that authorship functions in our society necessitates the classification of an author's work), it is interesting to note that these "unclassifiable" pieces are still considered part of the main body of his intellectual work. Foucault the person has no say in the way that his name functions or the way in which his work is characterized.

The Death of the...Person?

This semester in Spanish Linguistics class, we learned an important distinction between the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistic relativity and the vision of cognitive linguistics: while the Sapir-Whorf theory holds that language determines our way of seeing the world, cognitive linguists believe that our way of seeing the world determines the language that we use. To me, this distinction seems difficult to determine, almost in the same way as the old adage: "Which came first, the chicken or the egg?" Do we first have cognition, or a way of seeing and understanding the world, or do we first have language which then shapes the way that we see and understand the world? Roland Barthes in his essay, "The Death of the Author" seems to firmly plant himself in the Sapir-Whorf camp, suggesting that language is our point of origin. Not only does language determine our perception of the world, in Barthes' opinion, language precedes the author. Barthes desperately attempts to recreate the way in which we talk about the author; it is not that he strips the author of all importance by boldly pronouncing his death, but rather that he refuses to continue subordinating both the text and the reader to the author. Instead of limiting the meaning of a work to the life, passions, tastes, and vices of the person who produced it, Barthes believes we must conceptualize the author as merely a location or "instance writing," a thing which "creates" language only in that it utters the words in the here and now.

I find it difficult to embrace Barthes' radical ideas about the death of the author given my situated-ness in a cultural context which, due to its capitalist ideology, has glorified the author as an individual who "reigns in the histories of literature, biographies of writers, interviews [and] magazines." My instinctive response is, "If we don't have the author, than what works exist to be read? If we don't have the author, who through his or her creativity and perseverance has put forth a work to be analyzed and understood, than what are we left with but a colorful, mismatched swirl of cultural elements, forces, and influences that shape our unique time and place?" At the same time as I feel put immediately on the defensive by Barthes' assertions, I can appreciate his arguments. Is it not true that authors are "eternal copyists" who can only mix writings from their already-formed dictionaries? Is it not true that every person is immeasurably shaped by a variety of factors- parents, friends, relatives, peers, society, class, race, nationality, language, religion, media, geography, education, etc, etc? How capable is anyone of "expressing himself", and as Barthes suggests, is he or she not essentially expressing the infinite well of influences which his or her life has unquestionably drawn from? Is then the author no more than a channel, a means through which pre-formed ideas can be re-paired and compared?

As I was reading Barthes, I found myself questioning whether or not Barthes believes the author to be capable of self-awareness. Since the whole focus of his essay is upon the author's death, or the non-consideration of the author in literary theory, this question may be beside the point, but I think the question of whether or not any one of us can be fully cognizant of the cultural forces that shape our identities is interesting. Is it possible that an author could pinpoint the influences that form how he or she thinks and writes? If this were possible, than could an author reach that elusive mark of true originality? Is it possible for us to distinguish what we believe from where those beliefs originated, not unconsciously claiming them as our own? Do we not already do this to some extent, attributing ideas that we have to things that we've read or thinks that we've seen on TV? Or are we more absorbers than creditors? I think that Barthes might suggest that no person or author is capable of complete self-awareness which could produce authenticity, and I tend to agree with him. I have come to realize that I am incapable of ever fully disengaging from the aspects that I dislike about the culture in which I was raised. They shape me on a subconscious level, and thus, as Barthes says, the process of knowing who I am is more of a disentangling for influences than a deciphering for meaning.

Todorov and The Typology of Plots

Tzvetan Todorov states in his essay "Structural Analysis of Narrative" that structural analysis "seeks no longer to articulate a paraphrase, a rational resume of the concrete work, but to propose a theory of the structure and operation of the literary discourse, to present a spectrum of literary possibilities, in such manner that the existing works of literature appear as particular instances that have been realized." Structuralists, according to Todorov, search out in a near-scientific manner those elements that compose the underlying systems upon which the body of literature operates. Rather than narrowing their critical focus to the thing in and of itself as the Formalists demand, the Structuralists are not so much interested in specific works of literature but in the larger schema into which these works fit. Todorov illustrates Structuralist critique through his assertions about the plot structure of Boccaccio's Decameron. After summarizing the plot sequence of four tales within the Decameron, Todorov constructs an outline of the basic plot that he believes repeats itself in each story: "X violates a law-- Y must punish X-- X tries to avoid being punished--either A) Y violates a law or B) Y believes that X is not violating the law-- consequently, Y does not punish X." Having established this schema, Todorov continues with a more detailed structural analysis of what meaning could be understood from this structure. Ultimately, he makes clear that, "Our goal is not a knowledge of the Decameron (although such analysis will also serve that purpose), but rather an understanding of literature, or, in this specific instance, of plot."

In Todorov's structural analysis of the Decameron, he boils down the essential plot structure from his initial, specific outline of characters "X" and "Y" navigating the violation of laws and the (non) consequences of those actions to what he calls "the shift from one equilibrium to another." Defining an equilibrium as "the existence of a stable but not static relation between the members of a society," Todorov classifies the basic plot structure of the Decameron as two equilibriums separated by a period of imbalance, "which is composed of a process of degeneration and a process of improvement." Cannot all plots be simplified to a shift in equilibriums? As the embodiment of a change in character's lives? Essentially that "stuff happens" and things change? I remember a friend once telling me that she had learned that there were only two basic plot structures behind every story: 1) Someone leaves town and everything changes. 2) A new person comes to town and everything changes. (Some might even argue that the two are one in the same) At the time, I thought that many of the books and movies that I was familiar with could be reduced to that schema. Let's examine this further with a look at some of the top 10 movies that Messiah students list as their favorites on facebook.com (I can only include the ones I have seen, of course):

2). Anchorman- Christina Applegate's character joins Will Ferrell's news team and everything changes.
3) Remember the Titans- Denzel Washington's character is the new coach in town who changes the spirit and attitude of the town's beloved football team.
7) Hitch- I'm not sure that either of the main characters definitively enter or leave town, but both Will Smith and Eva Mendes' characters are changed by the presence of a "new" type of person-- for Smith, it is a woman who he cannot charm with his typical tricks, for Mendes, a man who proves halfway decent.
10) Beauty and the Beast- Belle and her father move to a French Provincial village, and Belle is perceived by all to be a strange, eccentric beauty. When she leaves town to search for her father who has become lost while travelling, she encounters the Beast and everything does indeed change for them both.

I'm not sure if trying to categorize recent films under this "someone comes, someone goes" schema can be considered structural analysis in the same vein that Todorov promotes, but it is interesting to conceive of the idea of a universal plot structure. Here are some links that provide further insight into the matter and perhaps affirm the verse in Ecclesiastes which says, "There is nothing new under the sun":

The Movie Site
Four Common Plot Structure
1, 3, 7, 20, 36?

Cleanth Brooks is a Convincing Formalist

I found Cleanth Brooks to be a breath of fresh air after having read some of the other formalist critics. I enjoy his style of argumentation because, rather than deny the obvious objections that people might have to the ideals of formalist criticism, he raises these concerns himself and provides a convincing defense of formalism. Just as I felt myself objecting to what he had written, Brooks seemed to always say something like, "But some readers might object to this because..." He points out that non-formalist critics might be scandalized by what seems to be a "bloodless and hollow" severance from the author and the reader but affirms the formalist belief that consideration of the author or the reader's response does not allow for true criticism. Additionally, his writing style is very clear and concrete, and I did not find myself struggling to understand as I so often did while reading Wimsatt and Beardsley. I have wondered in previous posts about the formalists' opinion of whether or not literature should serve as a tool in helping us to understand the human condition, and Brooks seems to directly address this issue:

"It is unfortunate if this playing down of such responses seems to deny humanity to either writer or reader. The critic may enjoy certain works very much and may be indeed intensely moved by them. I am, and I have no embarrassment admitting to the fact; but a detailed description of my emotional state on reading certain works has little to do with indicating to an interested reader what the work is and how parts of it are related."

The responses that Brooks references are critical responses that would take into account an author's "sincerity" (or the intensity of his feeling as he or she composed a work) and also the intensity of a reader's reaction when reading a work. Once again, the Formalists acknowledge the validity of an author's experience or a reader's emotional response but deny their objectivity in determining the meaning of a work. Judging by Brooks' writing, it seems that he might suggest that literature does promote understanding of the human condition but that this understanding is perhaps beyond or beneath the realm of formal criticism.

I found Brooks' assertions about the necessity of formalist criticism above any other school of criticism to be interesting. He writes that all critics are "forced to adopt" formalist criticism and consider only the work itself given the "desperate" alternatives:

"Either we say that one person's reading is as good as another's and equate those readings on a basis of absolute equality and thus deny the possibility of any standard reading. Or else we take a lowest common denominator of the various readings that have been made; that is, we frankly move from literary criticism into socio-psychology. To propose taking a consensus of the opinions of "qualified" readers is simply to split the ideal reader into a group of ideal readers."

Are these really the only alternatives? Must criticism only consider the work alone lest it become totally subjective, stripping the text of any objective meaning to be derived? Is any one reader's take on the meaning of a poem equivalent to any other reader's take, barring the existence of an "ideal reader?" In our class discussion of some of these questions in relationship to how we read the bible as a work of literature, I think that instinctively many of us wanted to believe that both an informed and uninformed reader could come to the bible and derive significant meaning. This instinctual response represents our collective world view as members of an egalitarian, postmodern society. Yet, maybe we must seek out some sort of "ideal" reader or student of the text in our pursuit of either biblical or more general literary criticism. Or perhaps we must categorize the types of meaning that can be derived from criticism: objective, subjective, personal, societal, historical, psychological, sociological, etc. Perhaps the Formalists do make a good argument that the best sort of criticism focuses upon a text's unity between its form and content and that this type of criticism must remove itself from the subjective concerns of an author's intention or biography and a reader's response. Perhaps.

The Art of Appreciation

We have discussed in class the question of whether or not we have a responsibility to appreciate things that we do not initially like in order to expand and multiply our pleasures. Since the Formalists believe that it is the readers' job to "fit" a poem or work of literature, to repress their immediate reactions or personal experiences of the poem and focus instead on becoming dedicated students of its' forms and literary structures, they would probably encourage the appreciation of objectively good literature, music, and art. Yet, are music and art objectively good in the same way that the Formalists believe that literature can be objectively good? Based solely upon the work itself, the unity, the literary devices, the elements that can be evaluated using exegetical methods? Wikipedia defines the concept of formalism in art in the following way:

"In art theory formalism is the concept that a work's artistic value is entirely determined by its form--the way it is made, its purely visual aspects and its medium. Formalism emphasizes compositional elements such as color, line, shape, and texture rather than realism, context, and content. In visual art, formalism is the concept that everything necessary in a work of art is contained within it. The context for the work, including the reason for its creation, the historical background, and the life of the artist, is considered to be of secondary importance."

Similarly, the formalist theory of music ascribes meaning to music depending upon its physical properties: melody, harmony, polyphony, form, rhythm, etc, rather than upon musics' expressive qualities or potential to evoke emotion in the listener. Realizing that formalist theory is concerned with the same measurable, objective characteristics of a piece whether it be a poem, painting, or concerto, we can further analyze this question of obligation to appreciate works which one does not instinctively like.

I would like to dissect the question a bit. What is the aim of working to appreciating art that we do not instantly appreciate? In class, we assumed that this aim was "to expand and multiply our pleasures." Who or what suggests to us that we should learn to appreciate said art? Friends? Intellectuals? The literary canon? What exactly is our true motivation when we persist in reading books or listening to music that is not instantaneously pleasurable for us? In a way, are we attempting to adhere to societal norms? If we are English majors, and we do not love Emily Dickinson, do we worry that we will be considered less scholarly for admitting to such? In the same breath, do some people voice their dislike for/disenchantment with a particular author or work just for the sake of being nonconformist? I know that I have felt pressure to appreciate a certain musical artist because the majority of my peers found his or her music to be deep and beautiful. Is the expansion and multiplication of pleasure that we receive when we finally come to appreciate opera or A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man truly rooted in understanding the inherent worth of that art? Or is that reward of a new vision of beauty also paired with the feeling that we now belong to a sophisticated group of people who like something untraditional? Also, is that reward supplemented by the pride we feel at the time we spent trudging through our dislike, willing ourselves to see what others had told us we might see? I am not trying to suggest that we are indeed not responsible for appreciating novels, pictures, and songs that we do not like, but rather to suggest that the motivations behind acquiring this appreciation may vary, as well as the authenticity of the outcomes.

The Internal, the External, and the Intermediate

In their essay, "The Intentional Fallacy," Wimsatt and Beardsley contend that an author's intention when writing a work cannot be studied and therefore the question of intentionality is not an appropriate question to ask in the field of literary criticism. They define three types of "evidence" that critics seek out in order to find the meaning of a poem:

1) Internal/Public: "discovered through the semantics and syntax of a poem, through our habitual knowledge of the language, through grammars, dictionaries, and all the literature which is the source of dictionaries, in general through all that makes a language and culture"

2) External/Private/Idiosyncratic: "not a part of the work as a linguistic fact: it consists of revelations (in journals, for example, or letters or reported conversations) about how or why the poet wrote the poem- to what lady, while sitting on what lawn, or at the death of what friend or brother"

2) Intermediate: "about the character of the author or about private or semi-private meanings attached to words or topics by an author or by a coterie of which he is a member"

While the formalists primarily emphasize the search for evidence which is internal or public, it is interesting to note that they seem to allow for a certain amount of intermediate evidence as well. Wimsatt and Beardsley distinguish between literary critics who concern themselves with either "evidence of type (1) and moderately with that of type (3)" or with "type (2) and with (3) where it shades into (2)." At the end of their article, they establish that in attempting to study allusions in poetry, such as in the example of whether Donne references exists in Eliot's "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," it is acceptable to perform poetic analysis and exegesis but not to go directly to the author himself and ask about intention. I believe that Wimsatt and Beardsley might consider the scholarly search for connections between Eliot and Donne in order to discern the meaning of "Love Song" to be a search for this intermediate evidence, which is neither completely public nor private and which seeks to understand the associations that authors have in their use of words. The formalists critics would encourage the inclusion of intermediate evidence insofar as it contributes to the reader becoming a scholar of the poem. Far from contemplating or questioning the author's intention, the scientific study of some forms of intermediate evidence allows for a deepened understanding of the objective meaning of the poem. So, instead of imagining what woman inspired Eliot's "Love Song," or examining Eliot's personal life history in the year that he wrote the poem, or even wondering what the author intended with his inclusion of a specific line, the true literary critic limits him or herself to the study of the poem's form, language, and unity. This study might include a rigorous look at the history and meaning of the words, or the intermediate evidence: "The meaning of words is the history of words, and the biography of an author, his use of a word, and the associations which the word had for him, are part of the word's history and meaning."

The Formalists and the Human Condition

One of the questions that we posed on the very first day of class was, "Does literature help us understand what it means to be human?" Does studying literature allow us to reflect on the condition of our shared humanity? My instinctual response to this question after reading the work of some of the formalist critics is "no," but I hope to explore this idea more deeply through reflecting upon it.

In Eliot's essay, "Tradition and Individual Talent", he describes how poets both actively acquire and create tradition through training and the catalyst of the poet's mind. While the romantics envisioned the creation of a poem as the bubbling over of the poet's deepest thoughts and emotions, or "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings from emotions recollected in tranquility" (as Wordsworth famously said), Eliot conceives of the process in a completely different way. When tradition and experience combine in the receptacle of the poet's mind, a poem emerges, pressurized and transmuted into a whole greater than the sum of its two parts. Eliot almost seems to advocate a sterilizing of the poet's true, embarrassing emotion and experience so that a loftier, more meaningful significance may come out. Is this new emotion then a reflection of the human condition, or is it only significant because it enlightens us beyond the confines of our humanity?

Eliot writes, "There are many people who appreciate the expression of sincere emotion in verse, and there is a smaller number of people who can appreciate technical excellence. But very few know when there is an expression of significant emotion, emotion which has its life in the poem and not in the history of the poet. The emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done."

Does this impersonality which Eliot aspires to automatically negate the suggestion that poetry could help us understand what it is to be human? Or, conversely, is this impersonality the only means by which we might get at the human condition-- when we separate our subjective selves from our words and allow a deeper meaning to take root? Is the "significant emotion" that Eliot writes about reflective of true human emotion and experience, or is it somehow greater than the usual limitations of our humanity?

I tend to think that formalists would not concern themselves with the question of whether or not literature helps us understand the human condition. For this very reason, I struggle to appreciate formalist critique as I feel that it takes the excitement of discovering human connectedness out of reading. C.S. Lewis' words ring true to me: "We read to know that we are not alone." It is that feeling of deep soul-satisfaction that one gets when reading someone else's words and relating to an experience, or observation, or thought process. It is one of our only ways of confirming our sanity, our normalcy-- of confirming that what goes on in our own heads actually goes on in other peoples' heads too. When the author and reader are removed from the equation and the work stands alone, it seems inevitable that this process of recognizing our shared humanity becomes constrained.

The Active Life

In Emerson's address, "The American Scholar," he outlines the three major ways in which he believes a scholar should be educated: "by nature, by books, and by action." He exhorts his audience to not consider themselves mere thinkers but rather "Men Thinking" (or "humans thinking", if he had lived in our linguistically inclusive world). Emerson wants the scholars of his day to nurture active souls, which see and utter absolute truth, create, and do not rely solely on past ideas in the continued search for brilliance and revelation. I found it interesting that Emerson places high importance on scholars getting out and living life, being "covetous of action" and not wasting the precious daylight studying "other men's transcripts of their readings" when they themselves "can read God directly."

Emerson writes:
"Action is with the scholar subordinate, but it is essential. Without it, he is not yet man. Without it, thought can never ripen into truth. Whilst the world hangs before the eye as a cloud of beauty, we cannot even see its beauty. Inaction is cowardice, but there can be no scholar without the heroic mind. The preamble of thought, the transition through which it passes from the unconscious to the conscious, is action. Only so much do I know, as I have lived. Instantly we know whose words are loaded with life, and whose not."

and

"If it were only for a vocabulary, the scholar would be covetous of action. Life is our dictionary. Years are well spent in country labors; in town, -- in the insight into trades and manufactures; in frank intercourse with many men and women; in science; in art; to the other end of mastering in all their facts a language by which to illustrate and embody our perceptions. I learn immediately from any speaker how much he has already lived, through the poverty or splendor of his speech."

I really tend to resonate with Emerson's insistence on the dual worth of an active and contemplative life. So often our mental image of a scholar or a writer is that of a person chained to his desk or library table, pouring over books and manuscripts: the stereotypical recluse. Yet, Emerson seems to believe that living life and interacting with people and nature are essential to the scholar's ability to perceive. In the moment in which we are living life, we are unable to know the meaning of what we are feeling and absorbing. It is only later, in contemplation, that that truth begins to take form and observation unfolds into insight. Emerson says that without action, a scholar is "not yet man" and that "the true scholar grudges every opportunity of action passed by, as a loss of power." Perhaps then, our shared humanity is only understood in our experiences and our action; only in these moments are the farmers linked to the tradesmen, and the priests, and attorneys, and mechanics, and sailors. Once scholars takes their places in "the ring to suffer and work", they begin to assume the necessary vocabulary of life lived in order to fulfill their roles as seers, thinkers, and creators.

My personal vision of how scholars, poets, or writers become thinking men and women who provide words of beauty and truth is much aligned with Emerson's. I believe that the American scholar should not only set out to study, but also to garner as many life experiences as possible. Scholars should be drooling for opportunities to travel, to challenge their world view, to meet people from every different station of life, to hold various occupations, to daily place themselves in new and stretching settings in order that their words might possess profound perspective. I also believe that in the United States we tend to narrowly define the sectors of society, or the types of people, that we can learn from. While intellectuals, experts, and historical greats encompass an invaluable base of knowledge, often the people that we least expect to learn from provide us with the most piercing words of wisdom: children, the homeless and disenfranchised, the mentally ill or disabled, etc. So, if I were writing a similar address concerning the modern American scholar, I would, like Emerson, encourage a life of action, but I would also stress a keen attention to our potential to learn from every single person that we encounter.

Shelley, Adorno, and Zimbardo: Poetry After Auschwitz

After several failed attempts to find an online copy in English of Theodor Adorno's 1949 essay, "Cultural Criticism in Society" in which he asserts that "to still write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric," I write this post with the knowledge that I am terribly uninformed about the actual meaning behind Adorno's words. I am also ignorant to the history of the discussion which has taken place about poetry after Auschwitz, but I will foolishly forge on in an attempt to further reflect upon the question that was raised in class.

In "A Defence of Poetry," Shelley asserts that, "The presence or absence of poetry in its most perfect and universal form has been found to be connected with good and evil in conduct and habit." Shelley believes that when a people are unethical, it is because they are not reading poetry. Poetry innately has the ability to enlarge and awaken the mind, "rendering it a receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought." Shelley grants to poetry the enormous responsibility of being the barometer by which we measure the health of a society. Since poetry teaches us to use our imagination, it essentially teaches us to live, giving us a new ethical foundation.

Yet, the Nazis, the executors of one of the most horrific genocides in the 20th century, were men "enlightened" by poetry (that which, according to Shelley, "makes immortal all that is best and most beautiful in the world"). How is it that men of high class cultivation, exposed to the classics and the refining, redemptive words of poetry, could commit unimaginably atrocious acts against humanity? How is it that these people, the ones which Shelley trusts are subject to the majestic, transformational power of poetry to develop and inspire, have exemplified evil and depravity? In this sense, Adorno's assessment that it is nothing less than "barbaric" to seek out meaning in the reading and writing of poetry seems validated.

In another sense, I don't think that poetry has to be abandoned after Auschwitz for falling short of its understood aim of bettering humankind and expressing "the best and happiest moments of the best and happiest minds." We only need to reevaluate the lofty societal role that Shelley places upon poetry. While poetry may ultimately still have the potential to save the world, reflect the condition of a civilization, and inspire in us an imagination which leads to critical thinking and ethical living, it is not the sole medium which can achieve these things. The shortcomings of poetry cannot be held responsible for the horrific atrocities of the holocaust. The problem of evil, and the question of why good people can be led to do evil things, surpasses the power of poetry to provide our moral compass. I believe that poetry still possesses the potential for good and is not immoral, as others would suggest, but that it does not govern the health of a society. By all means should we continue producing and studying poetry for some of the very reasons that Shelley points out, but in pursuing the truth and beauty of poetry, we must not mistake poetry's role. It leads us to enlightenment, it enlarges our minds, and it develops imagination, but it does not solve or account for the problem of evil. It is not the sole measure of the goodness of a society. It cannot save us from ourselves or from the manipulable human condition.

In another class I am taking this semester, we read the introduction to a book by Philip Zimbardo, the famous psychologist behind the Standford Prison Experiment, entitled The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. I thought immediately of this text when we began discussing the notion of "After Auschwitz: No Poetry," and I believe that the situational forces that Zimbardo identifies behind evil do more to diagnose the health of a society than the presence or absence of poetry. In this introduction, Zimbardo lies out his thesis that people are motivated to do evil often times because of situational, rather than dispositional, forces. Whereas the traditional view assumed in order to understand the reasons behind evil acts has focused on "genetic makeup, personality traits, character, free will, and other dispositions," Zimbardo emphasizes the strong situational forces at work that may compel anyone to do evil. These forces include the transmission of powerful, top-down, dominant ideology through corruptive systems and the creation of an imagined "enemy" or "other" through stereotypes and dehumanizing techniques. While it may seem strange to mention Zimbardo while discussing Shelley's "Defence of Poetry," I think that it is important to acknowledge that even if poetry fulfilled the grandiose, essential societal role that Shelley ascribes to it, it alone could never overcome human weakness and susceptibility to manipulative situational forces. Poetry still might indeed have been "[adding] beauty to that which is most deformed", in Shelley's words, in the educated and elite Nazi society which produced the unthinkable evils of Auschwitz. Yet, the presence of poetry was not an adequate reflection of that society's health, let alone the sole, most important barometer which Shelley suggests. Any ethical foundation or imagination that poetry instills us with is subject to change under the correct combination of corruptive situational forces.

Emerson and Wilde

Last semester in Victorian Literature class, we studied Oscar Wilde's The Decay of Lying, and Wilde's belief that life imitates art left a deep impression on me. It seemed like such a counter-intuitive yet strangely intriguing notion, and I think of it now every time that I see a sunset, a sight traditionally revered as beautiful and awe-inspiring. Wilde contends that natural sunsets are "quite old-fashioned," falling far short of the remarkable renderings of colorful skies painted by artist J.M.W. Turner. He asserts that a modern sunset is "simply a very second-rate Turner, a Turner of a bad period, with all of the painter's worst faults exaggerated and over-emphasized." In Wilde's opinion, which reflects the belief of other authors who wrote during "The Decadence," or the end of the Victorian age, Nature is vastly inferior to Art, and Art expresses itself alone, not some shallow mimicry of imperfect and uninspiring Nature.

I could not help but remember this interpretation and note how drastically it differed from Emerson's understanding of the relationship between the poet and nature in his essay "The Poet." While Emerson represents a voice of the transcendentalist movement, a current of thought which holds that every single thing that we experience is a symbol or opportunity to see through to an ideal world, and while Wilde speaks as a representative of the Decadence, which glorifies experiencing art and exulting in the sensual effect that it has upon you, these authors promote completely contrasting opinions on the worth of nature in the life and work of an artist.

Emerson seems to see nature as an invaluable and unifying source of beauty and inspiration which humankind does not sufficiently appreciate. The poet is the one who can interpret nature for us, who can use nature as a muse that continually renews, amazes, and points us to deeper truth. Nature contains endless symbols which lead us to divine understanding, and Emerson would suggest that we all can sense this mystical potential within nature. He writes:

"...every man is so far a poet as to be susceptible of these enchantments of nature; for all men have the thoughts whereof the universe is the celebration. I find that the fascination resides in the symbol. Who loves nature? Who does not? Is it only poets, and men of leisure and cultivation, who live with her? No, but also hunters, farmers, grooms, and butchers, though they express heir affection in their choice of life and not in their choice of words. The writer wonders what the coachmen or the hunter values in riding, in horses and dogs. It is not superficial qualities. When you talk with him he holds these at as slight a rate as you. His worship is sympathetic; he has no definitions, but he is commanded in nature by the living power which he feels to be there present. No imitation or playing of these things would content him; he loves the earnest of the north wind, of rain, of stone and wood and iron. A beauty not explicable is dearer than a beauty which we can see to the end of. It is nature the symbol, nature certifying the supernatural, body overflowed by life which he worships with coarse but sincere rites."

Thus, for Emerson, nature provokes an innate reverence even within the more simple-minded men that do not hold the esteemed position of seer, interpreter, and poet. Yet the poet, in all of his perceptive genius, falls short of perfectly expressing or transcribing the truth that he is privy to, for "poems are a corrupt version of some text in nature." I believe that Wilde would stand in direct opposition to this conception of humankind's inability to fully understand or express the truth and beauty inherent in nature. He would instead say that nature is the one which, crude and corrupted, does not measure up to the complex and limitless beauty of making and experiencing art. Wilde's character of Vivian scoffs in "The Decay of Lying,"

"Enjoy Nature! I am glad to say that I have entirely lost that faculty. People tell us that Art makes us love Nature more than we loved her before; that it reveals her secrets to us; and that after a careful study of Corot and Constable we see things in her that had escaped our observation. My own experience is that the more we study Art, the less we care for Nature. What Art reveals to us is Nature's lack of design, her curious crudities, her extraordinary monotony, her absolutely unfinished condition."

Another interesting difference between Emerson and Wilde lies in their understanding of what it means that imagination might stem from natural inspiration. Wilde goes on to say in this passage which I just quoted, "As for the infinite variety of Nature, that is pure myth. It is not to be found in Nature herself. It resides in the imagination, or fancy, or cultivated blindness of the man who looks at her." It seems that Emerson would embrace this imagination which envisions the infinite variety of nature. While Wilde conceives of this as a "cultivated blindness," Emerson believes imagination aroused by nature, or imagination that would allow for interpretation of nature's infinite varieties, to be liberating, emancipating, exhilarating, and ultimately the key to ascension, or "the passage of the soul into higher forms." Thus, Emerson might look upon the same sunset as Wilde and imagine the symbols therein to point to a surpassing ideal or truth while Wilde would see merely a bad imitation of Turner's art.

the etymology of an author

In exploring the question "what is an author?", one of the most interesting points of discussion for me is whether or not an author must produce written works. One can conceive of the "author" of a piece of art, or the "author" of an idea, but why is it that authorship is most commonly associated with writing? How did author and writer come to suggest the same idea (although there are some clear differences in how we use these terms)?

I decided to search for the etymology of the word author, and according to the online etymology dictionary:
"c.1300, autor "father," from O.Fr. auctor, from L. auctorem (nom. auctor) "enlarger, founder," lit. "one who causes to grow," agent noun from augere "to increase" (see augment). Meaning "one who sets forth written statements" is from c.1380. The -t- changed to -th- on mistaken assumption of Gk. origin. The verb is attested from 1596."

From the Old French, we can understand author to mean "father," while Latin gives us the idea of "enlarger," "founder," or literally "one who causes to grow." We see from this site that the meaning of author as "one who sets forth written statements" emerged around the year 1380, which predates the invention of the printing press by 60 years. It is also interesting to note that enlarger is not a commonly imagined synonym for our modern use of the word author. In class, we discussed words such as poet, writer, creator, inventor, artist, journalist, composer, and scribe as substitutes for the word author. "Enlarger" would have been a questionable addition to that list. While "founder" still rings true for our conception of an author as an inventor or originator, and while "father" lends itself to our idea of author as creator, "enlarger" seems to have lost its' original meaning. I wonder what the word enlarger might have indicated in the Roman context. In what sense is an author an enlarger? What exactly does an author increase, or cause to grow? Ideas? Understanding? Literal words on a page, as they expand in length? If an author is a creator, who creates something out of nothing, than does he also inherently enlarge what he has created into something worthwhile, enlightening, and edifying? Is an author one who causes our minds, our points of view, to broaden? In this sense, is that the author's responsibility?

If we focus upon the idea of an author as an enlarger, that meaning does not necessitate that the author write something. Nor does the idea of a founder or father, for that matter. I would be interested in exploring more of the history behind the development of the word author and exactly how it came to mean what it means for us today in our historical and cultural context.