Well, we've reached the end of the line, classwise. I have actually been very stimulated by this course and have learned a great many things about literature, and life in general. I began this semester pondering the status of critics, wondering if they were comparable to people who wanted to be artists but couldn't draw. I'm not sure if this observation is completely untrue(particularly regarding much of the idiocy that attempts to pass for authentic criticism), but I have to understand that there are different possibilities for what criticism can be: attempts to articulate why art and beauty and stories matter like they do, and how it is possible to be touched by them.


But the class closed with an important observation that both critics and those who disparage critics(which means the rest of us)would do best to note: You cannot make something mean whatever you want. Meaning must be able to have some bearing or relation upon the work itself. Because then that results in anarchy, in which nothing has any order. And if there is anything which one has learned this semester, it is that rage for order is blessed.

Harold Bloom describes Edith Grossman in his introduction to Don Quixote as the "Glen Gould of translators". It was nice to learn that Glen Gould is a pianist well-known for his very precise, very detailed treatment of classical composers, particularly Bach. The analogy is therefore made clearer.

Having a very precise translator certainly helps with a book which is one of the first(if not the first) works of meta-fiction(that is, where the narrative is constantly exposed as fiction and discussed as such), which might also be described as tangent texts, being as tangents make up a great deal of the content; in fact the tangents can sometimes tell more of the story than the story proper. The Manuscript Found at Saragossa and Tristram Shandy are other examples.

These are often thought of as literary approaches that one would find in Post-modernism, which privleages irony above all else. And yet we find them in Don Quixote, but with an interesting dimension: Don Quixote has no irony in him, but there is irony in how Cervantes regards him.

The incident on pg. 518, with Sancho attempting to mislead Don Quixote into beliving that Dulcinea del Toboso is a coarse peasant girl(being unable to find the real Dulcinea, since she doesn't exist) is a case in point. Eric Auerbach wrote an essay about this episode entitled The Enchanted Dulcinea. A point he stresses as being of great importance is that Sancho Panza picks up and uses the rhetoric of chivilary from Don Quixote; the modes and language of storytelling obviously is being passed on and learned.

A few quick notes; for the test, which we will be preparing on Wednesday, we need to have one question about the first part of Don Quixote, which should also be quoted/refrenced at least once in our 3-5 page Apology, along with some reflections on the previous Apologists. The Apology is due the same day that we deliver our short oral report on it.

I also think that I ought to see The Fall now, and know that Philip Pullman recommends Wallace Stevens' poetry and The Art of Memory.

And I'm a bit late on it, but here are two of my touchstones, with more potentially up for bloggage.

"O God, I have an ill-divining soul. Methinks I see thee now thou art so low as one dead in the bottom of a tomb. Either my eyesight fails or thou lookest pale."

-- Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, Act 3 scene 5.

"Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns."

--Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, last paragraph chapter 1.

Today was a very stimulating day, I thought. We mentioned Frazer's The Golden Bough as an important text in the history of studying literature(though it's technically an anthropology text), particularly in regards to rituals relating to the story of dying/resurrecting God.


This lead into a discussion that has recieved a great deal of (shallow)discussion in the press at large, the debate between Philip Pullman and CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien. But is there really a point of debate to be had on the level of form? Most discussions/comparisons of these writers tend to become dualistic in nature, and dualistic argument gets us nowhere. Northrup Frye would say that Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia have an Apocolyptic view of religous archetypes(that is to say positive) and that His Dark Materials has a Demonic view(that is to say negative)of religous archetypes. Which ties in intriguingly with the use of the "daemon".

It's been talked about how daemon is the component of one's soul that is the better angel of our nature; but suppose it were one's evil twin instead(I find this is certainly the function of Mrs. Coulter's golden monkey daemon in His Dark Materials) ? Or really, that it is both of them at once, and that trying to rid oneself of the potential dark side of your nature will not lead to anything good(exemplified by the General Oblation Boards intercision operations in The Golden Compass). Also, I did not know that this same notion was to be found in Egyptian mythology; there the word is the ka.

And this leads into the discussion of the necessary co-existence of the good God and the wrathful God(which Frye would say is necessary for the good God to exist). William Blake's evil God is called Nobadaddy, but is also the same as the "good" God, Urizen. After all, the Satan that appears in the book of Job is presented as a cynical member of the heavenly court, and inflicts all of the torments upon Job with God's permission.

And really, Pullman is really more like a Gnostic, who saw God(the creator of the material world) as the Demi-urge, and views the Serpent as the real God. The reason for this is that the Serpent broght liberation from ignorance; and Gnostics believe that holiness arises from knowledge, in fact privelaging knowledge over belief.

This was something that piqued my interest as I was reading Frye's Myths chapter, especially regarding how we touched on religon yesterday. It's in the passage where Irony is being discussed.

"The satirist may feel with Lucian that the eliminating of superstition would also eliminate religon, or with Erasmus that it would restore health to religon. But whether Zeus exists or not is a question; that men who think him vicious and stupid will insist that he change the weather is a fact, accepted by scoffer and devout alike. Any really devout person would surely welcome a satirist who cauterized hypocrisy and superstition as an ally of true religon. Yet once a hypocrite who sounds exactly like a good man is sufficiently blackened, the good man also may begin to seem a little dingier than he was." (Anatomy of Criticism, pg. 231--232)

This actually makes me wonder if perhaps there are what Frye would call "really devout" people today practicing "true religon". If there are they're being crowded out by those who cauterize hypocrisy and superstition. But there probably are, and then I get to thinking "Then what is 'true religon'?" perhaps true religon arises from the same level of conciousness where anagogy is begun to be comprehended. I don't know what that level exactly is or could be designated as(and I'd probably doubt anyone proclaiming at the top of their lungs that they were the ones who knew). But if authentic faith can be helped by those who poke moking fun at human constructs, then let's bring out some more noble wits to do just this.

Or I could just be babbling.

The four critics who spoke today were Helen Cixous, Wolfgang Iser, Sigmund Freud and Edward SaId. We all have to post on our blog at some point in time the one essential thing about our critic(courtesy of the exam).

After a brief timeslot allowing for thoughts on the election(during which I voiced my general-but-hopefully-still-pertinent opposition to stupidity), we discussed the the importance to our lives of intellectual excitement and adventure, two of the main springboards for finding which are art and song.

We then went on to Matthew Arnold, who described poetry as "criticism of life", and felt that poetry as a substitute for religon. This naturally leads into intriguing discussions of what is or is not provided by religon in the first place, but if Arnold is talking about a feeling of the Sublime, or of something greater than ourselves and yet at the same time of ourselves, then I'd say just from my own experiance I tend to have such encounters through art rather than institutional religous avenues. But this is another story for another blog perhaps. But there was a quote from Nietzche today that I think ties into this in an interesting way : "Truth is a mobile army of metaphors."

We also have been assigned by Friday to come up with a touchstone piece of literature, for us. Or principly a passage that we find ourselves always coming back to and enlightened by. I see what I can find(or have already found rather).

The critics presented in class today were Giambattista Vico(the "truth is constructed guy again), Eric Auerbach(who greatly influenced the perception of realism), Coleridge(who, among other things, coined the phrase "willing suspension of disbelief)and Hayden White(who was influenced by Vico, and dealt in master tropes).

There was a discussion of the by now some-what stereotypical view of the artist as a raging ego-maniac who desires primarily to live forever through literary fame, but how this can be thrown together with the Keatsian notion of negative capability, whereby the creation of authentic art dissolves the individual ego. Philip Pullman, author of His Dark Materials(of which I am a big fan), apparently digs negative capabilty, which actually doesn't suprise me that much. He writes some of the best fantasy literature to come along in ages, and has been quoted elsewhere that he himself isn't a big fantasy fan.

The Freudian idea of the fight between the pleasure principle(what we want to do) and the reality principle(what we know we ought to do), and how it relates to Don Quixote was brought up, as was the two big things that are necessary components of myth for Frye: the Apocolyptic and the Demonic. One of which is positve and the other of which is negative. We also talked about the displacement principle, which for Frye is what characterizes Romance; striving for things the way they ought to be rather than the way they actually are.

And to conclude, two interesting words: kenosis, which means emptying out and plerosis, which meand filling up.

I've been reading through Frye's chapter on Myth(which is proving easier to comprehend then the previous material in Anatomy of Criticism, or at least it seems to me), with its discussion of the distinction between Comedy, Romance, Tragedy and Irony and the archetypes that make up each of these states. And I've also seen a film recently entitled Robin and Marian(I've been on an Audrey Hepburn binge lately. And she's lovely in the film incidentally), and it actually got me to thinking about how Fryes' mythic archetypes and mythos can(or perhaps don't) blend together.

We have a hero from the world of Romance, Robin Hood(played in this film by Sean Connery), but we find him and the other characters from the story--which most of us are at least cursorily familar with-- having to confront, in a low-mimetic world, the consequences and implications of his own legend. And, while there are a great many elements in the film that are comic in nature or representation, the film also moves between the Romantic archetypes(a brave hero who will defend the poor and helpless), to the low-mimetic reality of the situation(he and his men have gotten older, and he will probably end up losing the woman he loves), and then, at the conclusion moving to high-mimetic tragedy(I won't disclose exactly what occurs, but it involves the necessary passing of Romantic legend from the low-mimetic world).

I found that almost all of the original critical reivews of this film when it was released (1976) were almost all negative in their assesment. Uh-huh. They apparently didn't see a comment on mythic/Romantic/low-mimetic mythos. I for one thought it was wonderful, which I may have thought even if I hadn't been reading Northrup Frye. But since I had been, it added that much more to my appreciation of it.

We had four critics today: Henry James, Ernst Cassirer, Walter Benjamin and Oscar Wilde. The last has so many delightful quotes that I think I'll just put down the one mentioned today that I had never heard previously--" Every portrait is a portrait of the painter." And I also really loved Henry James' -- " I've always been interested in people, but I've never liked them."

We then discussed what Keats meant by negative capability, and it is this: when the ego disolves so completely that things which are created can encounter any sort of persona, situation or what have you; the world created is what's relevant. Shakespeare is the main example of this, which is why trying to assign what Shakespeare personally believed from the content of his characters philosophy's is pointless, because it is the characters who say them. Which is why he can have wise words ("To thine own self be true.") in the mouth of an alazon (Polonius).

And this tied in with the notion of nonsense(ie. Lewis Carrol, Finnegans Wake , Wallace Stevens), which we have because it short-circuits the need or impulse to didacticism. It can reach the point where one experiances what it is, rather than asking what it means. Which is what Walter Pater was attempting to say when he said "All the arts aspire to the condition of music." Because music doesn't really have a peg-downable meaning. It is what it is, what it is.

First day of our two-minute critic presentations today, I feel thankful to have been second. Longinus in between Samuel Johnson and Michel Foucault, followed by Julia Kristeva. It was a very informative four minutes.

The rest of the class was spent discussing the idea of innocence, particularly the change(or is it a change?) from innocence to experiance, which so much of the literary landscape in concerned with. It provides a rather thorny(and I use this word deliberately)paradox, because we lose what we once had when we first learn to read, and then we end up--hopefully-- back where we started when we learn how to comprehend anagogy(or the Sublime, as Longinus would call it). Which lead into the last lines from TS Eliot's Four Quartets, and also the beginning of that same poem which contains the description of peering into a rose garden. Gardens, particularly rose gardens in the West, have associations with innocence.

We also noted the dialogue between Sancho Panza and the false squire on page 536 of Don Quixote, where Sancho defends Don Quixote by describing him as rather child-like --"He's simple and innocent. He has no malice."--. This is interesting, given how earlier in the novel Don Quixote describes Sancho as simple and child-like, and goes to show once again how these two characters come to comprehend the world and each other differently because of literature(the influence of it, and the need to embody it).

We also discussed briefly Frye's discussion of the apocolyptic world, and the Romantic world, and the world in which we live. In the world in which we live most everything is dead, the Romantic world most things are living but not all, and in the apocalyptic world everything is alive because everything is metaphor. Or something like that.

I attented the Emerson screening of My Book and Heart Shall Never Part last night, as did the rest of English 300. My filmmaking sensibities were impressed by the general polish brought to this low-budget endeavor, particlarly the photography and sound(I especially enjoyed the house made out of books. Great image). My literary sensibilities were intrigued by the presentation of a three-fold state of mind that necessarily attends reading a book; you're seeing the story the book is telling, while being aware in some other corner of your mind that you are reading, and being aware in still another part of your mind that there are other aspects of life which are or can be informed by the reading of this book.

I also found the theme of the utilization(in fact in certain instances, flat-out distortion of )of nature for the sake of indoctrinating children with moral points of view. It opens up an intriguing discussion of what nature is, and how humans can "humanely" relate to it. Of course there is such a thing as artistic license(which is why in fairy tales and through-out the pantheon of children's literature when can find talking bears and wolves and all the rest of it), because it is in service of a metaphorical statement, and nobody really likes a pure Descriptive phasesist(if that is a word, probably not). But is there any sort of question of respect or sense of otherness regarding nature to be considered as well? Perhaps, perhaps not.

One recent, and for me rather refreshing literary take on sentient animals is Pullman's Golden Compass and the treatment of Iorek Byrnison the armored bear. He speaks and is very noble and intelligent, but at the same time is distinctly and unequivocally a bear, distinct in manner and being from humans. It worked for me. And this may be somewhat off-topic from the film we saw last night, but it does connect, as most everything does eventually.

The ideas in Keats' letters that will be pertinent to us are Negative Capabilty, Almost a Remembrance, and the Veil of Soul-making.

There was also a great quote by Blake mentioned: "the road of excss leads to the palace of wisdom." So it's not a question of there being too much, but how much is one able to take in. Bacause the more one can take in the wiser one becomes, for the more one knows. Which is somewhat akin to a description of the state of mind when we begin to grasp anagogy, which I'm thinking Heather is very close to doing, whether she realizes it or not. What is the "it"? The Creator, from which the maker of the song was shaped? But then "she was the maker", so the Creator was her/in her the whole entire time. As it is with pretty much everyone. We simply don't realize it, and only dimly become aware of it when we sing or write poetry or do other transcendan things. Perhaps this is when we are being guided by the "it". Perhaps the daemon is the "it"? It's a guiding inner force which exists in everyone, so why not?

Ben says a few similar things much more eloquently in his blog. At a later point I will pursue this discussion of the Divine it, when perhaps I can try to reach the very high bar that has been set.

We only graded the test today in class, so I will simply reiterate some very pertitnent information. Individual critic presentations begin next week, which should be about two minutes in length each.

Also our final readings for the class will be an essay by Matthew Arnold entitled The Study of Poetry and selected letters of John Keats( I'm suddenly reminded of a great line of dialogue from the film Carrington about how Keats' letters are very poignant on the subject of virginity. Wonder how the subject of poetry fares).

This is a rather pithy blog but, alas, its that kind of day.

We had a discussion centered largely around Shelley, who defines poetry in his Defense as "the expression of the imagination.", which is itself greater than reason. This is coming from the Romantic standpoint, where everything is an emanation of the divine reality. The Romantics were heavily influenced by Neo-Platonism, which arose in the Renaisance(under the foundation of Platonus) as a contimuation of the ideas of the "good" Plato(not the "bad" one who wanted to banish poets from the Republic).

We have the two opposing views of the world, the Romantic and the the realist, embodied in the personages of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. But they are not simply contrasted opposites; they learn from each other and are inextricably bound together, Sancho buying into the Knight's fantasies(or the idea behind them) and Don Quixote displaying great rationality and practicality at moments when you would least expect him to.

I also have decided to check out Yeats' Sailing to Byzantium , which Frye refers to often and which is apparently rather brilliant.

And I rather loved, or was intrigued and heartened by, the notion that the more original a poet is, the more they imitate and borrow. Feeling a malaise of not being able to perfectly come up with something ex nihilo when I write poems, suddenly I'm confronted with the oddly epiphanic notion: mabye this is okay. Just maybe.(really since one of my favorite movies is Baz Lurhmann's Moulin Rouge its rather obtuse of me not to have realized this sooner). Because everything is due to some extant with what has come before, and the more one acknowledges this, the more freed up one is enabled to be. Somewhat paradoxical but there we are?

The word "rhapsodic", which could be used to describe Shelley's style in his Defense of Poetry, derives from "rhapsody", which in itself is derived from the Greek term rhapsode, which meant a singer, and later came to be associated with one who sees something others do not see. This notion of seeing what others do not see is actually a big part of Longinus' theory of what makes up the Sublime.

We continued the discussion/comparison between the Descriptive phase and the poetic phases, a big one of which is the use of denotative(which says something) and connotative(which suggests something)language. Descriptive employs the former, the poetic phases the latter.

I was also struck by the observation today(courtesy of Frye and Robert Frost) that good critical commentary uses what is right there. Because employing what is right there in the poem/book etc. is all that should be necessary. If it isn't, either the poem is weak, the critic is bad. Or maybe both. It should originate from what is in the text, not from an outside set of criteria being applied to it. But it seems to me that a vast majority of what is popularly called critiscism operates under the application of inappropriate systems or theories onto art works.

So once again, it just goes back to this: there need to be smarter critics.

Class today opened with a brief discussion of a line from Othello, which Gabryelle is reading. "Put out the light, then put out the light." This is an example of an intelligent and poetic tautology, which one would expect to encounter in a writer like Shakespeare, and would not expect to find in half-baked modern politicians.

There are two big things to know about Sir Phillip Sidney's argument.
1. Poetry's is a golden world, Nature's a brazen(brass) world
2. Poetry provides models of virtue, models of what should be shunned.

And then there is Shelley(whose apology I got to reading the other night and which I actually enjoyed a great deal), who goes a step or two beyond Sidney, granting god-like powers to the poet, to the point where nature virtually disappears.

And there was this great quote(which I'm probably not putting down accurately) from Northrop Frye: "Bigots and fanatics have no use for the arts, because they are too preoccupied with their beliefs." This ties in with what Mikhail Bactein(sic?) said about the "dialogical imagination", whereby the artist stands back from their beliefs or agendas when creating. This prevents the characters from being simply mouthpieces for a particular point of view. But how would you judge this? You'd have to have some sort of knowledge of the artist's beliefs to know for certain that they were injected into the work. Which brings into question potentially the possiblity of taking the work completely on its own. Or I could be entirely off-base. Literature is after all polysemous, having many meanings.

And I think my interest has been piqued about the "School of Night" now.

We had a very amusing mix-up today in class, where Carly accidentally attributed a lovely passage from Sidney(..." freely ranging in the zodiac of his own wit.")to Shelley. It's a simple mistake--they have essays of the same title and names that start with an 'S'--but I wonder if perhaps Shelley and Sidney will end up intertwining in their arguments. I haven't read Shelley yet, and will be interested to see if this is the case or not.

And this great french phrase employed by Frye trahison des clercs-- treason of the clerks. The context Frye was using it in was of intellectual declination, but I have to confess that the first thing that popped into my mind when I heard this phrase was the Monty Python short about office clerks who revolt and turn their building into a pirate ship. Anyway.

And two very cumbersome but interesting words. Motonomy, where you say a word that means something else other than what you are directly refering to and synectequa, which has the same function, but moves in a different direction. At least that's what I think it means.

We were assinged the task of selecting three pertinent passages from Sidney's Apology for Poetry for discussion. Here are the ones that really jumped out at me.

"Poesy therefore is an art of imitation, for so Aristotle termeth it in his word mimesis, that is to say, a representing, counterfeiting or figuring fort--to speak metaphorically, a speaking picture--with this end, to teach and delight."

Here Sidney is laying out the purpose that poetry serves, it's raison d'etre if you will. It sounds very much that he aligns, at least at this point in his essay and perhaps only on a superficial level, with the didactic application of literature. Interesting.

" The philosopher therefore and the historian are they which would win the goal[the best commendation], the one by precept and the other by example. But both, not having both, do both halt. For the philosopher, setting down with thorny argument the bare rule, is so hard of utterance and so misty to be concieved, that one hath no other guide but him shall wade in him till he be old before he shall find sufficient cause to be honest... On the other side, the historian, wanting the precept, is so tied, not to what should be but to what is, to the particular truth of things and not to the general reason of things, that his example draweth no necessary consequence, and therefore a less fruitful doctrine."

Sidney feels that two schools of learning which are often named the best that can be done, philosophy and history, actually aren't the best way to learn. The philosopher because everything gets so dense that one's energy will all be spent attempting to even understand the argument before applying it to ones life; the historian because history is bound to the facts, and therefore allows no real application for general things, or things of the imagination.

And then this phrase, which may or may not be one of the most important to the overall argument but which certainly stuck out to me.

"It is already said(and, as I think, truly said)it is not rhyming and versing that maketh poesy. One may be a poet without versing, and a versifier without poetry."

I found this strangely heartening. It suggests that poetry is a mindset, an approach, rather than a genre. This may explain why certain passages of prose fiction or nonfiction can seem more authentically poetic than certain poems read on NPR.

A signifigant portion of today's class involved discussion of the vice-presidential debate, and the use of rhetoric and metaphors employed by both participants. The big thing that we came away with is yet again the realization that metaphors are where the power resides; now it's a different case if one is able to wield this power effectively or not.

And the discussion of repitition(both of words and images) and how it relates to literature(and presumably all the rest of life). It is a great tool, but must be employed with caution. Because if you repeat something too much, even if it's tragic, it can become comic. This may be one's intention and it may not be. Repitition must be used accordingly.


It's also been pointed out that the Myth of Declining Ages has appeared in everything we have read for class. And it is strangely circular and endless just as Frye's symbols and Vico's Ages are. It all goes on and on endlessly...repeating and repeating...

And I also think I'd like to see Hans the Hedgehog now.

Today in class we talked about some of the differences between Frye's types of symbolism, paying particular attention to the Descriptive, which is the one that poetry cannot be. The reason for this is that the Descritive(sign) type is concerned with the factuality of what words convey, and acts centrifugally, as opposed to the other types of symbolism which poetry can fall under and which act centripetally. Facts are of utmost importance in journalism, not so much in literature.


We also discussed the discussion found on pg. 411-12 of Don Quixote where the canon is talking about literature, and he expresses his certainty that literature must be morally instructive in order to be good and truthful. The canon feels that literature's primary aim should be didactic. His argument(rather similar to Plato's) denotes literature to the merely ornamental, rather than the essential or vital. So when someone asks you "What's it about?" its quite possible that your answer will belittle the book's actual contents.

I'm thinking it's a great thing if you learn something from a book; but having this as the motivating purpose behind the book makes me rather leary. For one, how do you know(unless one's style and storytelling are mind-numbingly blunt) that people are going to learn from the story what it is you want them to learn? Like someone saying that they've learned from Don Quixote "Don't read too much." or from Les Miserables "dont' steal, the consequences could be dire" Attempting to control meaning, more often than not, doesn't succeed. And for those who set their minds on attempting to succeed at controlling meaning, that spills into censorship. Which those of us who do read and think it is important to learn things don't want.

I came upon this passage from Anatomy of Criticism that got me to thinking about some of the things we talked about on Monday.

" The reason for producing the literary structure is apparently taht the inward meaning, the self-contained verbal pattern, is the field of the responses connected with pleasure, beauty, and interest. The contemplation of a detached pattern, whether of words or not, is clearly a major source of the sense of the beautiful, and of the pleasure that accompanies it. The fact that interest is most easily aroused by such a pattern is familiar to every handler of words, from the poet to the after-dinner speaker who digresses from an assertive harangue to present the self-contained structure of verbal interrelationships known as a joke. It often happens that an originally descriptive piece of writing, such as the histories of Fuller and Gibbon, survives by virtue of its 'style', or interesting verbal pattern, after its value as a representation of facts has faded." (p. 74-75)

In a previous class the question arose "what does make something last?", which clearly for Frye is a hallmark of authentic literary merit. Well, what does make something last? From the above passage I glean(rightly or wrongly) that style is a major factor. If by style we mean the way the words are arranged and ordered(there's that pesky word again!) and employed to convey the writer's subject or story. Which is why Frye thinks Gibbon and Fuller survive, rather than for their historical merits.

Which also deals with something we mentioned last class: how facts and art aren't wedded together, at least not essentially. In At first Looking into Chapman's Homer Keats has a line about Cortez looking out on the Pacific, but Cortez didn't discover the Pacific. Its still a good poem, but it has an inaccurate fact. But the perceptions of facts themselves can date and change, at least if we are to believe Frye that Gibbon and Fuller matter now because of their style rather than their content. Part of me wonders if this grants some kind of leg-up to fiction over non-fiction, but I think I'll continue to examine this topic later.

me We had a very enlightening discussion today about Palin(read plain)speak, which rests very heavily upon tautology(ie. circular reasoning), and how this is indicative of a conflict between the literate and the oral culture. How then does one point this out and try to aim for more intellectually developed public representatives without being accused of elitism? Getting everybody else to read books and attempt actual reason and understanding of metaphors I suppose. Because whoever's in control of metaphors has the power. Which also relates somewhat to the fact that "realistic" needs to be reexamined as a positive word. Often, it really isn't; its just a shorthand term for folk who don't have a confident grasp of metaphor.

We also learned today the definition of metonomy: using something to stand for something else. Which Plato lambasted poets for doing(rather than something useful), but did himself on multiple occaisons throughout his work. Hypocrisy or paradox? Hmmm.... probably the latter, since hypocrisy has a more deliberate malafaction at work. But anyway.

I wish to begin by stating that all of this is purely speculation on my part. I could very well be off-the-radar with this.

Here are a couple of passages from Frye's discussion of Anagogical criticism in the theory of symbols.

"In the greatest moments of Dante and Shakespeare, in, say The Tempest or the climax of the Purgatorio, we have a feeling of converging signifigance, the feeling that here we are close to seeing what our whole literary experiance has been about, the feeling that we have moved into the still center of the order of words.Criticism as knowledge, the criticism which is compelled to keep on talking about the subject, recognizes that there is a center of the order of words." pg. 117-118

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

The order of words? Like an idea of order at Key West? The sea could be described as an archetypal universal symbol, at least "when the singing ended and we turned the town" and saw "The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there/As the night descended, tilting in the air,/Mastered out the night and portioned out the sea/ Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles/Arranging, deepening, enchanting night." Maybe this is one way how "But it was more than that."

Anyway...

We were presented in class today with an intriguing revelation(thank you Kevin): Ramon Fernandez, that random name in Wallace Stevens' poem, was a French literary critic whom Stevens felt had misunderstood his work. Or was he in fact a Filipino basketball player who hadn't even been born yet? Or was it just a name with no real signifigance as Stevens said? Or is the poet simply being ironic? These are questions which do not have a ready answer, at least from me.

Two interesting words: Tautology, which is basically just the fancy way of describing the state of being interested in something because you find it interesting. And incantatory, which describes something that doesn't need to be understood to be believed, like chronicles of obscure Biblical names(this could launch into a thorny discussion of the nature of belief, but never mind right now). The mere act of speaking them makes them become real through a hyponotic power.

And we are all required to see a film on literacy on Thursday October 23 at 7:00 in the evening. Sounds piquant.

And we have been asked to consider possible explanations for a phrase from Idea of Order at Key West: "it was more than that."

Here is my somewhat belated connection between Abrams' four key elements with The Idea of Order at Key West.

She sang beyond the genuis of the sea.

The water never formed to mind or voice,

Like a body, wholly body, fluttering

Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion

Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,

That was not ours although we understood,

Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.

In this first part we find the elements of the world(the sea), and the idea of mimesis which the ancient world thought so vital. But we also have the artist, who is able to create something that exists seperately from the natural world. And then there is also the first introduction of "we", the audience watching the girl singing by the sea.

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

The song and water were not medleyed sound

Even if what she sang was what she heard,

Since what she sang was uttered word by word.

It may be that in all her phrases stirred

The grinding water and the gasping wind;

But it was she and not the sea we heard.

For she was the maker of the song she sang.

The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea

Was merely a place by which she walked to sing.

Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knew

It was the spirit that we sought and knew

That we should ask this often as she sang.

And in these two stanzas we see further emphasis upon the Artist, and the Artist's work(a song or text) upon the audience. So throughout this poem--I don't think I will comment upon the last couple stanzas right now simply because I am congenitally lazy-- we have all of Abrams' artistic approaches dealt with: the mimetic, the pragmantic, the expressive and the objective(this last is perhaps the most elusive and yet the most integral).

I must also make a note that we are to link this poem to Frye's anagical phase of the theory of symbols by sometime next week.

And I have recieved further evidence today of why I must read Frankenstein and watch Au Hasard Balthazar. Occaisonally I feel overcome by panic thinking of all the books I haven't read and all the films I haven't seen. Then I remeber to relax, and remeber that I will get there eventtually. Unless of course the censor-people who don't read get their way and make this an impossibilty...

We have been assinged the task of connecting all four of MH(not MA) Abrams's literary perceptions within The Idea of Order at Key West. After this we learned a few things, among them that, according to Northrop Frye, there are two kinds of Romance: the secular(stories of knights) and the religous(lives of saints). Don Quixote obviously ascribes to the former, which is somewhat problematic concerning that he lives in a low-mimetic world.

We also learned that A Midsummer Night's Dream illustrates every one of Frye's Comic modes, from mythic to ironic. In fact, the mythic and ironic meet up in the herosgamos(marriage of the sacred) that occurs in the sexual union between Titiania the fairy queen, and Bottom the weaver who has the head of an ass. So when you hit bottom, you go up.

This lead into the observation that tragedy, unlike comedy, doesn't like sex at all. Hamlet after all says "there shall be no more marriages." I confess I immediately wondered where this would place Romeo and Juliet(which I have always had a real thing for), since it is what Harold Bloom called(if I remember rightly) "a high song of the erotic", and a tragedy. I realize that its considered minor Shakespeare and not even an authentic tragedy by some critics, but still... I think there sex is throughout the text in both obscene and transcendant fashion. So did obscene win out with the young lovers deaths? This is all probably a topic best suited for another time and place.

Instead, I will deal with my Frye box(or try to)...
Low-mimetic thematic , which is concerned with the individual writers perceptions and feelings of creation. This is where the Romantic poets and Jane Austen come onto the scene. They are of course very different but that is the point. Individuals don't create or percieve the same.

If any erroneous notions are spied, I'd be grateful to have them pointed out.

Today came the discussion of the Frye grids, which lead into a discussion of the real purpose of sports, which is to purge or displace the desire to kill or practice ritual sacrifice(it isn't often that one actually sees the umpire get killed). The notion of the purging of a scapegoat(pharmakos) from the community as atonement for the community's sins. Whether or not the scapegoat is deserving of expulsion is typically irrevelant; he/she may be expelled or done away with because they can be. It's a very terrifying thing, this instinct to mob violence. It brings up certain things that one feels might be beyond the scope of literature to explain or deal with. Things that are distressingly real and cruel and horrible. Now Northrop Frye has said that if a book is depressing there's either something wrong with you, or something wrong with the book. Having encountered a few books that have made me depressed due to their handling of their subject matter and/or how the subject matter was dealt with(Joyce Carol Oates' Foxfire is an example), and having read books with equally cruel content but somehow managing to pull through without feeling despaired about the state of the human race(Toni Morrison's Beloved could be an exampe here), I think there is some validity to what Frye says. But it is a troubling question: at what point is something impossible to be dealt with artistically, and still be genuine art? This is not a question I have any pretentions to knowing the answer to.

On a somewhat lighter note, we where presented with MA Abrams schema for how literary criticsim has evolved through time.

Ancient world which is focused on Nature and with the mimetic prinicple

Neo-Classical which is focused on Audience and with the pragamatic principle

Romantics who were focused on the Artist and with the expression principle

Modern which is focused on the text and with the objective principle

I also think it might be worthwhile to check out what Vladimir Nabokov has to say about Don Quixote.

We've been told what the topic for the class term paper will be: an apolgy for literature, subtitled : What's the Point of Stories That Aren't True?" This shall prove doubtless to be a challenging, intriguing paper. Doubtless one will pick up some of the quatations from Northrop Frye that are availble online.

We were also presented with a quote from DH Lawrence that is rather pertinent to the class: "Trust the tale, not the teller." Yet again this assertion that the work be judged by itself, not for the author or what the author intended. But if one is a teller of good tales, people do end up being more inclined to trust you, in addition and because of, the tales. Oddly paradoxical it seems to me, like a great many other things in this world.

We also discussed Idea of Order at Key West, and its relation to myths of cosmogony, or the birth of the world. In particular the creation myth contained in the very beginning of the Bible , wherein the act of speaking brings about creation(the almighty Logos is wielded, and then there was light). This lead to an interesting comment about how metaphors can be applied to nature, by logic. The sea, or sun or moon or whatever other natural entity that one can think of, doesn't really stand for might or pain or limiltess possibilty or whatever else is being applied to it. No; it is one's imagination and language construction that makes it have this meaning. And when the singer stops singing, the sea-waves continue to go in and out continuously, as they always have and how they will ever afterward.

Really quite a fascinating notion.

We have been assinged the authors we will appear as to teach others the gist of their theory and/or approach. I've gotten Longinus. I'll confess I was secretly hoping to get Virginia Woolf(the truth is I have a massive intellectual crush on her), but perhaps it will prove to be more advantagous to do a writer whom I am deeply familiar with.

I learned today that Northrop Frye was a fan of the radio show "20 Questions", which often involved the question "Is it animal, vegetable, or mineral?" Frye obviously picked up on this for the diagramming at the conclusion of "The Archetypes of Literature."

And also the figure of the alazon, which means "imposter" and of which there are two types: the braggart soldier and the pedant(profesor type). And from the revealtion that both Presidential candiates could be described as both types came the other revelation that we are all characters in literature. This automatically made me wonder what kind of character I would be, but then I wondered if perhaps we can't truly be aware of what literary stamp we fall under, because then we might become something other then we were by false design or affectation and then where woud we be?

Or I could just be rambling.

I knew nothing about this Vico character(an 18th century Italian philosopher) who apparently was instrumental to the forming of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. He apparently felt that civilization arose from a clap of thunder, and had a poetic view of human history which went, in order:

1. Age of Gods(when there was no language, only pictures)
2. Age of Heroes(when there was the language of epics)
3. Age of Men(when there is the langauge of commerce)
4. Age of Chaos(when there is/will be nothing but gibberish)

His is a myth of declination, just like Frye's theory of modes is. I find it rather intriguing that the worst state there could be(the Ironic for Frye, and presumably the Age of Chaos for Vico)is the age one is currently in. This is just so fascinating, how throughout the ages, people always long for the past rather than the time they are in. I think I can understand why, but it still just seems very intruging to me.

And on this note, we will stop.

The following is from the first part of Northrop Frye's "The Archetypes of Literature".

" ...I say only that the principles by which one can distinguish a significant from a meaningless statement in criticism are not clearly defined. Our first step, therefore, is to recognize and get rid of meaningless criticism: that is, talking about literature in a way that cannot help to build up a systemic structure of knowledge. Casual value judgements belong not to criticism but to the history of taste, and reflect, at best only the social and psychological compulsions which prompted their utterance. All judgements in which the values are not based on literary experiance but are sentimental or derived from religous or political predjudice may be regarded as casual. Sentimental judgements are usually based on nonexistent categories or antitheses( "Shakespeare studied life, Milton books") or on a visceral reaction to the writer's personality. The literary chitchat which makes the reputations of poets boom and crash in an imaginary stock exchange is pseudo-criticism."

Dedicated as Frye is to lay out criticism's scientific method, he bluntly rules out appraisals of a book that do not spring from a knowledge of literature but from the reviewers personal likes or dislikes( "casual value judgements" again). If this, which a great many of us probably associate with the critical profession, is indeed pseudo-criticism as Frye asserts, then criticism is in need of a serious re-vamp.

Perhaps I'm too engrained in the notion of typical criticism(I read lot's of film reviews, which are positivley soaking in pseudo-criticism), but I find it a bit difficult to wrap my head around completely doing in with value judgements(Harold Bloom evidently feels the same, judging from portions of his Anatomy of Criticism). Undoubtedly this is for the best, since they are ultimately futile. But does that reduce the critic to merely tracing patterns and similarities and dissimliarties? And I can just imagine Northrop Frye protesting "And what's wrong with that?!"

At some later time perhaps I will look into this a bit more, but I think I've run out of stamina right now.

Today we learned the archaic use of the word "apology", such as Sidney's An Apology for Poetry. In this sense it means a persuasion or an argument for the validity of something. Such as poetry. Or criticism as a profession, which is what the Anatomy of Criticism could probably be described as. An Apology for Criticism.

We were also broken up into our groups, each of which will focus upon a certain school of criticism. I am in group 6, the School of Pyschoanalysis. This will probably prove very amusing, provided we can supply more than the notion that if it's a straight line it's a phallic symbol(after all, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar).

And we also know how to encapsulate Northrop Frye in a nutshell: All literature is displaced myth. And things work down gradually from there in like fashion:

1. Myth
2. Romance
3. high-memitic mode
4. low-mimetic mode
5.Ironic

Frye feels that this is the study of literature, working from mythic modes on downward, and keeping the question of whether or not something is any good or not on the side. Such things are a question of taste and we really don't go anywhere with taste, accept for arguing about why so-and-so is dumber for venerating such-and-such, or vice-a-versa, or both or neither.

Shorly to follow will be a discussion of a passage from Frye which one actually does understand. I'll see what I am able to do. Not much probably, but it will be something.

I learned today in class the definition of the word "flyting", which is insulting others, but in ways that are very entertaining. Shakespeare is considred the premier literary example of this, along with most everything else.

We also ended up discussing the merit(or lack thereof) of many high school English teachers, who simply put forward to you what they thought the author intended. This approach operates under what Northrop Frye would call intentional fallacy. He would say that what it means is what it has in it, which can be discerned by the patterns to be found within a text. Basically what this means is that what an author "meant" or "intended" ultimately doesn't really matter. Rather, it is the piece of work and what it contains within it that speaks.

This probably will have a great deal of relation to another question that the class will be dealing with: what is the difference between rhetoric and poetics? This is probably too soon to be putting out ideas for a reply but, judging from what Frye says and various peoples' interaction with folk who like to consider themselves English teachers, this is somethig: Perhaps rhetoric has an underlying point of persuasion beneath it, while poetics is concerned with the structure of art which considers persuasion or a particular grinding ax irrelevant.

Or I could be off-base. It certainly wouldn't be the first time.

I'll say it wasn't my intention to throw down the gauntlet(tropologically speaking), but if that's what I've done... way for the class to start.

Northrop Frye is(to use the venerable, knowlegadable and oh so egotistical Harold Bloom's phrasing) an ecstatic critic, who seeks to stand outside of literature as literature makes him stand outside himself. Just like it made Don Quixote stand outside himself, and set up a paradigm for what he could make of himself: No longer an impoversished gentleman, but a knight errant battling cruelty and injustice.

Frye also was inspired by Dante's levels of perception.
1. the literal
2. the ontological
3. the moral
4. the anagogical

This fourth and most hallowed level(recognition that comes when everything comes together) was represented for Dante by a rose.

All of this seems to suggest a possiblty for what healthy, authentic criticism could be. Not the petty things Northrop Frye would refer to as "value judgements", but intermidearies between art and those who come to it, like the sea and the singer in Idea of Order at Key West.

Or something like that.

The blogging decorum is rusty, but I'll probably fall in with it again here. Isn't much to say for this first day of class, but I can say that I think I know what to say when people complain that something is boring(no, YOU are boring).

I confess I hold a somewhat hard-to-shake the idea (coined by paraphrase my brother in-law of all people) that a critic is someone who wanted to be an artist but couldn't draw. i'm reminded also of a great couple of lines from a song by my beloved Rufus Wainwright called As in Happy : "Maybe the critic was right/And my work is just sterile pee/ Or maybe the critic was wrong/Now stretched on the rack feeling slightly icky".
I'd be most intrigued to see if this notion will be corrected in the course of this class or not.