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March 26, 2007
Like A Pack Of Pitbulls...I Mean Postmodernist
Postmortem for a Postmodernist, Berger
Love? What's love got to do with it? Love us a modernist abstraction. Postmodernists are more concerned with sex
Violence, sex, power...
Just like a bunch of territorial pitbulls, the characters in this book are really brutal. In a way, there are the true definition of postmodernists. There were all looking out for numero uno and they were willing to do anything to get it. The fact that we did not realize that the book was (like Pale Fire) was written by a fictional autor, Basil Constant, and the "murderers" never see justice is very "poststructural postmodernistic". It teaches us about the roots of postmodernism via all the shady characters of this book. A lot of people in the class had very different views about the book other that I:
While I don't think it was sexually based, I do think that the elements of the sexual relationships in the book were putting the whole focus of the book off-kilter.
Karissa
What a weird creation- people need hobbies
Vanessa
So there may have been a negative consensus about the book and I do believe that it was overdone, but it is supposed to show the "Postsructural Postmodernist"...people who just don't care.
Posted by KevinHinton at 11:34 PM | Comments (1)
March 25, 2007
Center Is Not The Center
Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences, Derrida
...anyone with a different perspective can create a contradiction with anything anyone is asserting. This leaves the door open for poststructuralists to question everything.
Dave Moio
I agree with Dave. It seems that this literary approach has the ability to produce a lot of interpretations, which is a double edged sword. Derrida had some interesting ideas about the subject. He said that the center is not the center. What we think is the answer "ain't necessarily so."
Derrida stated that "the structural schemata are always proposed as hypotheses resulting from finite quantity of information and which are subjected to the proof of experience." Proof of experience? From who? The reader? The author? Maybe the characters? There is a lot of questions you can asked about poststructuralism and maybe I'm personally weary that one structure (under poststructuralism) of literary criticism can be thrown out of the window.
Posted by KevinHinton at 9:03 PM | Comments (1)
Slave- Master Complex
The New Psychoanalysis and Literary Criticism, Wright
Okay, I’m still having a hard time with poststructuralism. Nevertheless, I think I understand how to apply it with the infamous story of Benito Cereno.
Wright writes about the relationship between slave and master. With a poststructural standpoint, Babo is suppose to be the slave, yet is smart and strong enough to be the master of Cereno as well. That’s strange isn’t it? Even though everything is against Babo and the rest of the slaves (the narrator seemed to be on the side of Captain Amasa “Happy” Delano), it is obvious that they have the upper hand. There is a big difference from what the characters of Benito Cereno do and from what the characters of Benito Cereno are supposed to do. That I think is what poststructualism means, and as how Wright put it:
Literary critics are committed to the concept of ambiguity as product of an omniscient authorial consciousness.
Posted by KevinHinton at 5:22 PM | Comments (3)
March 24, 2007
Mitchell Steele and I Are On The Same Boat
Ch 6 Intro, Keesey
Like Mitch, I was little confused about the Keesey reading for this week. I found this incredibly odd due to the fact it is usually an easy read. I had a feeling that I have to look at the definiton of the word poststructuralism. The definiton states that it is a general attempt to contest and subvert structuralism and to formulate new theories regarding interpretation and meaning. I think in basic terms, forget about everything that we learned before poststructuralism.
Keesey, I think, believes that language is yet another way to critique literature. However, when I think about this form of criticism, I think formalism. So what is the big difference between formalism and poststructuralism. I mean both means to look at the language in the work, right? Maybe poststructuralism means not to look at the work itself. But I am in a quagmire right now, or am I?
Posted by KevinHinton at 6:42 PM | Comments (3)
March 23, 2007
Kelo The Great's Definition Of The Week
The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms
Due to the recent readings and the idea I have for my term paper, I must do this definition:
postmodernism: Certain radically experimental works of literature and art produced after World War II....
The postmodern era, with its potential for mass destruction and its shocking history of genocide, has evoked a continuing disillusionment similiar to that widely experienced during the Modern Period. Much of postmodernist writing reveals and highlights the alienation of individuals and the meaninglessness of human existence.
Postmodernists think of the human race as two rabid pitbulls going at it. They are very reluctant to believe that human beings are very nice at heart. It is shown through literature by author such as John Ashberry. Postmodernists pass a threshold that everyone else will not cross. So when you find a text that describes how horrible human nature is...the believe that it cam for the postmodern era.
Posted by KevinHinton at 6:13 PM | Comments (0)
March 18, 2007
Who Is Human, Who Is Replicant, Who Cares
Blade Runner, Scott (dir.)
Watching this movie, I think was an adventure in itself. On a cold, Sunday night, I joined some of my peers in watching this brainstew called Blade Runner. Watching this, I thought:
Why am I watching this in an English course.
And it suddenly hit me, there is a lot of intertexuality and mimetic (yeah right) aspects to the movies. We see the desires of the Replicants to be human and the real humans desire to kill the replicants. I found it ironic that it was the Replicants that seem to be more human than the humans sometimes. I think the novel as well as the movie received the inspiration from the novel Frankenstein.
Why?
Dr. Tyrell ( creator of the Replicants) had the biggest god-complex I have ever seen. He was extremely proud of his creations. An example is Rachel, and how Dr. Tyrell input his neices memories to give her a "past". If you play with fire, you will get burned. Dr. Tyrell was killed by Roy (another Replicant) when he refused to expand his life.
And then we have Deckard, one of those shoot now, ask questions later kind of guy. Of course he would be a true hero, right? Deckard has been hunting the Replicants down, for what? Money? Revenge of some sort? He has no other known purpose that to "retire" the Replicants. Is that very human?
There is a quote that Gaff (aka the oragami dude) said close to the end of the movie:
"Too bad she won't live, then again who does"
The Replicants are really tools of humanity, then again who is not. We work and sometimes speak for someone else, aren't we all just tools. If you think about life that way...humanity seems to be cheapened.
Posted by KevinHinton at 10:47 PM | Comments (2)
March 17, 2007
Is It Too Uncanny For You?
The Uncanny, Freud
May I be frank in this blog?
I think that Freud became good at his job for a reason. Maybe he is the uncanny one. To connected certain acts to sick thoughts had to be performed by someone insane.
Freud said that the uncanny things is actually a meaning of something else that is a lot sronger. He mentioned how Oedipus gouged out his eye for killing his father and marrying his mother. Freud had compared the eye gouging to castration, which I think is a little extreme. However, it show the motives behind the act...an uncanny, unfamiliar act. Just look at a story that we have been studying, The Tempest, filled with magic, spirits, and creatures. There is a quote I cannot forget:
...we must bow to his decision and treat his setting as though it were real for as long as we put ourselves into his [Shakespeare] hands.
As long as we are reading the text, we are under the control of the author and the story. Of course, when the reading stop the griphold of the author stops.
Naturally not everything that is new and unfamiliar is frightening, however; the relation is not capable of inversion
This quote also got to me. Most horror has severe intertexuality and this is the reason. The fear of death and monsters will always be with the human nature. The long lasting fear of the Evil Eye still haunts people. ( Here's a clip from Scrubs mocking it.)
One more quote:
We also call a living person uncanny, usually when we ascribe evil motives to him.
Real people can be uncanny, so if that is the case than characters in a book can be as well. And maybe when we see eye gouging and compare it to a deeper meaning of castration, maybe there is a deeper meaning of the reader. A Freudian Slip.
Posted by KevinHinton at 4:20 PM | Comments (0)
March 16, 2007
Kelo The Great's Definition Of The Week
The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms
Since we are about to watch Blade Runner in the near future, this term seems the most appropriate.
dystopia: Usually set at some point in the author's future and describes a society in which we would not want to live. Writers presenting dystopias generally want to alert readers to the potential pitfalls and dangers of society's present course or of a course society might conceivably take one day.
1984 and The Machine Stops are famous examples of a dystopia. There is also a movie that had just hit theaters called Children Of Men. Based on the novel of the same name, it is about a dying society no longer able to reproduce. The movie begins with the youngest person on Earth (18 years old) dying. For your interest, here is a trailer of that movie:
Posted by KevinHinton at 3:53 PM | Comments (0)
March 9, 2007
Starting The Pale Fire That Burned Me
Pale Fire, Nabokov
During one of our classes, Dr Jerz stated that as English majors we can't shy away from books that we think are confusing and disinteresting. So this is my attempt to do an agenda item on this confusing poem.
Nabokov took me to a lot of places in this poem. The main character, John Shade, is a complex character who devouts this whole poem on the aspect of death and the afterlife.
Infinite afterlife: above your head
They close like giant wings, and you are dead (lines 123-124)
Shade, through out the whole poem, you get a feeling of hopelessness and doom. Most people, especially in 1950's America believes in God. Nevertheless, due to all of Shade's misfortunes, he differs from that point with this phrase:
No free man needs a God... (line 101)
Another character Charles Kinbote (who seems to be an exiled king) even argues with him about this. Anyway he also talks about facination, in his near death experience as a child he describes a white fountain from then on. What dies it represent...heaven...peace. Nabokov created a whole world around Pale Fire (A Poet, An Editor, The Shade family) so what criticism do we place this under?
Mimetic?
Intertextual?
One thing is for certain that the poem (or should I say novel since everything including the commentary is made by a fictional character) is up for intrepretation by anyone.
What criticism do you think would be easy to use on Pale Fire?
Posted by KevinHinton at 10:30 PM | Comments (0)
March 8, 2007
Outside Of The Norm
Whodunnit? Or, Who Did What? "Benito Cereno" and the Politics of Narrative Structure, Swann
"Benito Cereno" is not a conventional detective story. It lacks the explanatory authority the detective provides...
It is not what you would think a detective story would be. But thanks to Captain Happy, Melville made the whole situation of a slave revolt (something that should be obvious) mysterious. What makes this novella a mystery is that the obvious issue is the thing that we should not be worried about. The issue of slavery in this novella is the obvious issue, however, in the world of Benito Cereno is it not the real problem at hand. Personally, I think that this story shouldn't be listed as a mystery story, however, with the sick mind of Melville, it is not necessarily farfetched.
Posted by KevinHinton at 8:27 PM | Comments (3)
March 7, 2007
Kelo The Great's You Tube Moment
You Tube Moment, Hinton
This is what happens when you sit around doing work on spring break...you find cool things on you tube. I think whoever done this need one of two things... A career or a hobby. Nevertheless it is cool to watch though...
Posted by KevinHinton at 7:24 PM | Comments (1)
The Gradual Perfection Of Shakespeare
Shakespeare's The Tempest, Frye
Frye made good point on how Shakespeare made The Tempest into a comedy that most readers do not expect from a comedy. He stated that the play is "a comic parody of a revenge tragedy, in which there is repentance, forgiveness, and reconciliation instead of revenge." Here is were our last lesson of mimetic criticism come in. It is a very complicated situation between Prospero and his brother Antonio, not only that humans are complex creatures and seeing that Prospero did not take revenge even though he had a chance is just something that could be connected to real people.
However here is where intertextual criticism crushes that notion. Frye explains that "to expand into the divine world means a reduction of the human one."
Seeing that Prospero is a magican on a magical island, I have one word...
DUH
(OK maybe that wasn't necessary)
It is kind of hard to refer to reality when you see all of these magical elements in the play. But where did Shakespeare get his influences from? Well, Frye stated that a lot of his insprations are just an ability to learn from his old works, such as The Winter's Tale. Other works includeThe Aenied. I am a big fan of Shakespeare's and I found it interesting that he learned from any mistakes that he might have had to create a play as extensive as The Tempest. This play makes contrast between reality (Realipolitik, Antonio plots to kill the sleeping Alonso) and creativity (Arts, preferably magic) via the experiences and influences that Shakespeare had. I agreed with Frye when he stated that "a certain level of credibility demands a degree of sophistication."
Posted by KevinHinton at 6:46 PM | Comments (1)
March 6, 2007
Culler's Building Blocks
Structuralism and Literature, Culler
Structuralism is not a new way of interpreting literary works, but an attempt to understand how it is that works do have meaning for us.
Remember the game Jenga...
Blocks are built to a certain height and you carefully remove a block from the middle and place it on the top. Everyone who call themselves an expert of Jenga should know that you never take a block from the bottom unless you want the whole structure to fall.
Culler's look at the structure of literature is kind of the same thing. Even though we know the language, if we don't know structure, how can we possibly know the difference between prose and poetry. The structure matters in this case. Think of Herrick using the Italian sonnet. Herrick had to know the sturcture in order to make his steamy poems about Julia. Culler explains structurism leads us to "think of the poem not as a self-contained organism but as a sequence which has meaning only in relation to a literary system, or rather, to the "institution" of literature which guides the reader."
Learining how to create a certain type of poem will teach you a lot about the poems itself. We have an expectation to how poems is supposed to look, sound, and feel like. However, the text in a poem could also be a factor in great poetry so here is a question:
What is more important in poetry? Structure or text.
Posted by KevinHinton at 2:53 PM | Comments (2)
March 5, 2007
It's Just The Same Ol' Stuff
The Critical Path, Frye
All of the criticisms we have learned in the past couple of weeks is not the way we should be going in literature, according to Frye. He even quotes Milton in the article:
"an attempt to repair the ruin of our first parents"
We attempt to learn the styles and structures of past poems and poets. Intertextual criticism to him is a "force even stronger than history." Frye cuts even deeper into the integrity of historical criticism when he stated that "the history beyond literature does not cease to exist or to be relevant to the critic." IT DOES NOT MATTER about what was going on at the time the text has been written, it is forerunners of the text that is the important thing. But Frye questions the notion of individuality in a text if we get "inspiration" from previous text... so here is a question.
Is a text really unique and individual?
I had a teacher in high school tell me that "there is no such thing as an individual piece of work." After reading Frye's article, I couldn't agree with him more.
Posted by KevinHinton at 3:48 PM | Comments (1)
March 4, 2007
Kelo The Great's Definition Of The Week
The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms
After reading Benito Cereno and watching Forrest Gump not too long ago, I saw this term and I had to use this...
naive hero : A protagonist, generally the narrator of a work, who consistently misinterprets the events or situations he or she witnesses or experiences becauses of some character trait such as innocence, stupidity, or insensitivity.
This have to be the reason why "Captain Happy' could not realize that he was in a middle of a slave revolt. Or why dear old Forrest Gump did not realized how many historically important events he was a part of. This kind of character give an ironic feel to the story. Everyone know everything except for them.
Posted by KevinHinton at 10:21 PM | Comments (1)
Standing In Long Lines of Influence
Ch 5 Intro, Keesey
Poems do not imitate life; they imitate other poems
That is the basis of intertexual criticism, not looking at reality as the basis of the text...but looking at prior text in the same genre, structure,etc. Keesey called it "genre criticism". Look at the poetry that was being written by Milton and Donne. We could see their infleunce being Arnold, Shelley, Dante, and Homer. And Dante got his infleunce by the bible.
I became extremely excited when Keesey mentioned T.S. Eliot's article. It all begins to blend in. Keesey used the examples of Eliot that I used on my blog entry Not In A Vacuum. "No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone"...
This means that they HAS to be a line of infleunce in text. Especially in poetry, where "a study of poetry should help one understand poems." Looking at a poem and trying to compare it to real life is possible, yet hard. This is because of the fact that most poetry trancends life and creates a world in its own right (just look at Keats's Urn).
Posted by KevinHinton at 10:16 PM | Comments (1)