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.