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.