No title yet.

Just because.

This too. http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20228603,00.html

Abrams and Idea of Order Poem

My chart would be as follows (chart because the poem could function on more than one level, as mentioned in class already):


Ramon Fernandez is described here:
http://udgewink.blogspot.com/2004/11/ramon-fernandez.html

Another photo of bell hooks, my critic:

Don Q update

I just got to Chapter 10, page 70. I am 1) surprised by how much violence has occurred thus far and 2) the amount of meta-references to literature and criticism. Part of the latter is the frame narration, which I find confusing so far, at least inasmuch as to why it deepens Don Quixote's adventures.

I cannot fathom how the fact that Don Q and Pancho are repeatedly beaten the hell out of. I didn't realize how often this would happen, as they're basically 5 for 5 as far as I've read. That's a lot of beatings.

I got just past the windmill scene, which was as humorous as all the adaptations I've seen or read would suggest. I liked that.

Thematic ironic (pages 66-7)

Ezra Pound, James Joyce and T.S. Eliot, as the "direct opposite" of Wordsworth are part of the vast number of modernists who write in the thematic ironic style of Frye's. Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust are also in this group, who tend to "avoid direct statement" and who are "simply juxtaposing images without making any assertions about their relationship." These writers also regularly ignore conventional punctuation, such as the use of apostrophes. They are "an initiated group aware of a real meaning of behind an ironically baffling exterior." Their texts are fragmented and more difficult to follow than more conventional writers, because plots are thin or hidden, characters sometimes never reveal their inner thoughts, and sentences can often last for pages at a time without a pause or period. The narrator or observer of the text can be unreliable or confused, not actually aiding in telling the tale, but complicating it further.

The ironic writer often writes of a return, the reincarnations of old ideas. Rimbaud's recreation of Promethius or Yeat's Lead and the Swan replacing the dove and the virgin. The ideas concerning apocalypse seeming overwhelming, but at the same time hint at a future renewal. Modern texts, especially, are the most confusing and fragmented out of all of Frye's Modes, but they can also be the most fun for an English major to wade through, then to conquer.

bell hooks

No caps, just wikied her.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_hooks

I am happy to have a critic to investigate who's still kicking.

bell hooks

No caps, just wikied her.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_hooks

I am happy to have a critic to investigate who's still kicking.

Poetics

I like that the beginning starts out with the thought that imitation is an instinct of our nature, and thus poetry was born. Like one of my professors last semester was fond of the quote that goes "Poetry is what was once thought, but ne'er so well expressed." Poetry is the drive that makes us aspire.

"Defective plots: Of all plots and actions the episodic are the worst. I call a plot 'episodic' in which the episodes or acts succeed one another without probable or necessary sequence. Bad poets compose such pieces by their own fault, good poets, to please the players; for, as they write show pieces for competition, they stretch the plot beyond its capacity, and are often forced to break the natural continuity."

I actually almost laughed over this quote. I happen to enjoy modernist poetry very much, and it is by definition episodic and fractured and seems to please the poet more than the audience. I love the challenge, however, and I think it makes smarter readers by having plots that aren't so easy to follow.

"The second thing to aim at is propriety. There is a type of manly valor; but valour in a woman, or unscrupulous cleverness is inappropriate."
Ahem. I enjoy being a woman and am not ashamed that I am pro-woman in most areas. This idea that women can or can't be certain types of characters is unnatural and untrue. I think this breaks his own next rule that characters types should be true to life.

Archetypes Chart

I wikied the archetypes chart and did alright, I think.

VPs and Schools of Criticism

I think what I got from class today was a lot of generalizations pertaining to criticism. Prof. Sexton summed up Frye by saying that "All literature is displaced myth." He also said that critic is an arbiter of taste, much like in Ratatouille. I take this to mean that on the whole, literary criticism is so multifaceted that it's going to take a team of a dozen diamond miners a dozen weeks to finally exhume the true essence, the perfect diamond truth of lit crit. Meaning very much that it's going to take a lot of persistence and patience to really get at what lit crit is, that it's going to take many approaches and attempts to understand.

In lit crit, rather than a being a question of taste or a popularity contest, Frye is calling for a system of analysis. What he calls "literary chit-chat" and "casual value judgments" should be far less weighted than identifying and appreciating archetypes, themes, use of language and relationships between an author, a work and the audience.

The example that came to my mind during class was the Everlasting Battlestar Galactica Debate at home. My mom is a fan of the 1978 series and I'm a bigger fan of the 2004 reimagining. Our argument is centered around her insistence that Starbuck is a man, Boomer is not an Asian female and the new one is too dark, while I focus much more on the intelligence and social commentary of the latter. None of these characteristics of the shows actually matter in reference to the actual shows. They are casual value judgments that aren't engaging true criticism. While the characters and tone are part of what makes them good or bad, this kind of viewer response isn't addressing archetypes, themes, or intentions on the part of the producers, actors, networks in order to understand why the shows are important or what meaning is contained therein.

Also, as a side note about the lipstick pig comment:
(Original reference here: http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2008/09/obama-says-mc-1.html, as mentioned in class)






Links to the original webcomic (NSFW Language, but only minor):

http://www.sinfest.net/archive_page.php?comicID=2918
http://www.sinfest.net/archive_page.php?comicID=2923
http://www.sinfest.net/archive_page.php?comicID=2924

Aristotle, Dante, Sidney, Shelley

Poetics
http://www.leeds.ac.uk/classics/resources/poetics/poettran.htm

Letter to Can Grande
http://www.english.udel.edu/dean/cangrand.html

An Apology for Poetry
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Defense_of_Poesy
Or
http://www.bartleby.com/27/1.html

A Defence of Poetry
http://www.bartleby.com/27/23.html

Archetypes of Literature, Frye

This immediately popped up before I got to the full text of Archetypes of Literature:
http://edweb.tusd.k12.az.us/dherring/ap/consider/frye/indexfryeov.htm
Which is a visual of pages 104-110 of my version, which is extremely helpful.

I don't know if my link to the text will help, but here it is.
http://www.jstor.org.proxybz.lib.montana.edu/stable/pdfplus/4333216.pdf
If you can't find it otherwise, go to the MSU library site, click on Articles. Under J-L, JSTOR is there and you can access it via the library site if you have a library account set up online.

On to my first draft of my thoughts on the actual text so far:

"It is therefore impossible to 'learn literature': one learns about it in a certain way, but what one learns, transitively, is the criticism of literature" (Frye 92).

I think what Frye is driving at right from the beginning is that learning is done in most part progressively, systematically, except for with literature. Lit itself cannot be Learned as much as Inferred, via the process of literary criticism: criticism is the system for which you can learn from lit.

"He finds that literature is the central division of the 'humanities,' flanked on one side by history and on the other by philosophy [....] [F]or the systematic mental organization of the subject, the student has to turn to the conceptual framework of the historian for events, and to that of the philosopher for the ideas" (Frye 93).

Frye's really questing for a systematic and uniform approach to criticism, which he attempts to lay out for his readers. The first part borrows from other humanities, such as the mental faculties concerning events and time from history and others such as understanding and thought from philosophy.

"Criticism, like nature, prefers a waste space to an empty one" (Frye 94).

There are a bunch of unworthy works of literature out there, but as in life, in criticism, there is also the good and the bad. (At least in Frye's estimation, which sounds a LOT like his hated value judgments to me).

"I suggest that what is at present missing from literary criticism is a coordinating principle, a central hypothesis which, like the theory of evolution in biology, will see the phenomena it deals with as parts of a whole. Such a principle, though it would retain the centripetal perspective of structural analysis, would try to give the same perspective to other kinds of criticism too. The first postulate of this hypothesis is the same as that of any science: the assumption of total coherence" (Frye 96).

Frye addresses the central struggle of literary criticism by pointing out the basic tension, which is that there is no single approach to learning about literature. There are many generally accepted schools of thought, but even those divisions aren't strictly one or the other. There are so many approaches that the reader almost needs more than one approach to even learn about how to approach lit, which makes everything seem rather daunting.

"We may call the rhythm of literature the narrative, and the pattern, the simultaneous mental grasp of the verbal structure, the meaning or significance. We hear or listen to a narrative, but when we grasp a writer's total pattern we "see" what he means" (102).

I think this last bit sums up the recurring comment of Prof. Sexton, that "how do you know what you mean unless you see what you say?" As readers come to understand the underlying structures through lit crit, we can "see" how literature works and therefore, understand it better. This understanding is better and deeper than just hearing the words and liking them, because the pattern to understand is much clearer.

Ooops.

I had to work today, instead of being a model student (Sorry!!) I'm definitely catching up more here tomorrow, swear.

http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/donne/song.htm
This is the John Donne poem I was referencing in class on Friday. The line about mermaids singing was the main part I meant to point out, as it's similar to the feel of the Wallace Stevens poem.

WOO HOO!! I figured out where to make a blog!!

Well, here it goes. I haven't really been internet savvy, except on Gaia Online. If you know what that is already, then I think that this is the start of a wonderful friendship.

And thanks to Gabryelle for posting a link to the Wallace Stevens poem. That was awesome.

P.S. If you would like to know why I renamed my blog yet again, just watch the short show linked below.

http://www.hulu.com/watch/28343/dr-horribles-sing-along-blog