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February 15, 2006
William Carlos Williams, "Tract"
William Carlos Williams -- Jerz: American Lit II (EL 267)
"I will teach you my townspeople/how to perform a funeral"
I've addressed this same basic point in my entry on Wallace Stevens....
Like everything ese in America, death is just one more excuse for capitalism to go crazy on itself. It's halfway true that funerals are not for the deceased but for the families of the deceased. However, the ritualistic way we mourn - and by that I mean, spend money - actually helps NO ONE get over their grief. We put on a elaborate performance because society says we ought to.
Posted by MeganRitter at 05:03 PM | Comments (0)
Roberts, ch. 13 - Poetic Form
Roberts, Ch. 13 -- Jerz: American Lit II (EL 267)
"Rhyme, above all, gives delight and strengthens interest, and it strengthens a poem's psychological impact."
While I'll bring it in to the discussion if the poem in question is written by someone whose writing I know to be excellent, I place very little stock in rhyme (or in meter, for that matter).
One thing that I've noticed all my life (and that especially irked me in my long-ago days as an editor of my high school's literary magazine) is that many people believe that the single distinguishing attributes of a poem are rhyme and meter. (Especially rhyme, since a lot of the high-school poets whose work I looked at couldn't count well enough to build meter.) These people will, when they try to write poetry, sacrifice all the literature of a poem - all the good, meaty words that mean something - for the sake of rhyme and rhythm. They will use words totally inappropriate to the piece, words that mean nothing or words that mean something waaaay off their intended targets, as long as those words fit in with their rhyme scheme and rhythm. FOr this reason, then, I pay very little attention to rhyme scheme and meter. They just don't matter to me as much as the meanings and connotations of the words that are used. They don't matter because people focus too much on them and not on the real literature of a poem.
Posted by MeganRitter at 04:53 PM | Comments (1)
Roberts, Chapter 10 - Symbolism & Allusion
Roberts, Ch. 10 -- Jerz: American Lit II (EL 267)
"In determining whether an object, action or character is a symbol, you need to judge the importance the author gives it. If the element is prominent and also maintains a consistency of meaning, you can justify interpreting it as a symbol."
Any writer worth his or her weight in salt tucks in a little bit of symbolism somewhere. But every reader brings a different set of experiences and a different frame of mind to the text....
Roberts made the point just before this passage that a symbol may not be a symbol unless the author made it so deliberately. However, everyone who reads a text brings something different to it. Becaus eof my past experiences, water may have a different meaning to me than it does to Onilee, Brenda or Paul, because they haven't shared in those experiences. Someone who almost drowned at the age of five may see water very differently from someone who is a competitive swimmer. I hate, hate, HATE those who would tell you that because the author did not intend a symbol, did not give an object great prominence, that it cannot be a symbol. I have a passion for seeing symbols in everything. Don't ever tell me that something can't be a symbol just because the author didn' intend it so, because I will not rest until I've found a way to prove you wrong.
Posted by MeganRitter at 04:25 PM | Comments (0)
Wallace Stevens, "The Death of a Soldier"
Wallace Stevens -- Jerz: American Lit II (EL 267)
"He does not become a three-days personage/Imposing his separation/Calling for pomp"
Our culture has ritualized the act of mourning to an extent that is a. ridiculous and b. is designed to line the pockets of those who run the show.
If you've never been intimately involved with planning for a funeral and taking care of the other details surrounding a death, you might like to know how many retarded things there are to worry about. Should the casket have steel or brass handles? Should the caket liner be white or pale blue? Mass cards that impart no information about your deceased loved ones other than name, date of birth, and date of death. Condolence books that no one ever looks at again, because nobody cares who came to the funeral. What should the ribbon on the flowers say? Mourning in America has become an orgy of ritual, and all of those rituals involve giving scandalous amounts of money to pasty men in dark suits who refer to your loved one as "the remains." Wallace Stevens point about death in battle strikes a chord. The ritual surrounding most deaths, the pomp and ceremony, places a clear threshhold between the person who has died and the people who are left behind. When a soldier dies in battle, there's no one to go through all this fuss and nonsense. A dog tag wedged in the teeth and a plain pine box and it's done. Somehow it feels more natural that way.
Posted by MeganRitter at 04:12 PM | Comments (0)
February 08, 2006
"The Adding Machine"
Rice, The Adding Machine (1923) -- Jerz: American Lit II (EL 267)
"Daisy: Look at the flowers! Ain't they just perfect! Why, you'd think they was artificial, wouldn't you?"
This quote perfectly captures the modern era that began in the 1920s. If it seems like I spend a lot of time talking about the culture of the 1920s, it's because I'm taking a special topics in U.S. history class right now that focuses entirely on the Roaring Twenties.
Our modern consumer culture really began in the 1920s with an economic boom and the explosion of mass media. Industrialization and urbanization created a ginormous middle class - for the first time in history a significant percentage of the population had actual disposable income. So America shook off the cobwebs of World War I by going on a 10-year orgy of consumer spending. This quote from Daisy points out how exactly how insane America had gone for luxury goods. After all, fake flowers do not exactly warm the heart. But in Daisy's mind, artificial flowers are a marvel simply because they are a material good. She's fascinated by them because they are something that can be bought. This fascination with ---STUFF--- is really the beginning of the modern era.
It's also interesting tha Daisy's name is, well, Daisy - the flower that symbolizes pastoral innocence and simplicity. Daisy, like the rest of 1920s America, rejected the beauty that exists in simplicity. 1920s America was more interesting in purchasing power than in real worth, and this quote symbolizes that perfectly.
Posted by MeganRitter at 12:01 AM | Comments (1)
February 06, 2006
"Bernice Bobs Her Hair"
Fitzgerald, ''Bernice Bobs Her Hair'' (1920) -- Jerz: American Lit II (EL 267)
"Bernice did not fully realize the outrageous trap that had been set for her until she met her aunt's amazed glance just before dinner."
I'm sure FItzgerald wanted us to sympathize with Bernice - after all, this is her story. I know that Bernice's struggles with Marjorie are a symbol of the clash of Victorian innocence with the New Woman of the 1920s. I know that Bernice has to be as naive as she is for the story to work. I know it's just a story. But Bernice is so naive that I can't stand it. I cant sympathize with her at all. She's too much of a simpleton for too much of the story for me to ever make an emotional connection with her.
Posted by MeganRitter at 04:18 PM | Comments (4)
Roberts, "Writing About Character"
Roberts on Character -- Jerz: American Lit II (EL 267)
"But when authors bring characters into focus, no matter what roles they perform, the characters emerge from flatness into roundness."
In quite a huge way, isn't this what literature really is? In my own definition of literature, its enormous main goal is to highlight character for us, and this highlighting of character is accomplished by taking a person and adding or removing layers. Roberts gave us a couple of narrow examples of characters who start as flat and become round in the course of the story, but I think this can be applied to the protagonists of any work of literature. What do you think?
Posted by MeganRitter at 04:01 PM | Comments (0)
February 03, 2006
Food for thought.
"I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation. . . . I am in earnest -- I will not equivocate -- I will not excuse -- I will not retreat a single inch -- AND I WILL BE HEARD."
~William Lloyd Garrison
Posted by MeganRitter at 01:02 AM | Comments (0)
February 01, 2006
After Apple-Picking
Ex 1-1a: Close Reading 1 -- Jerz: American Lit II (EL 267)
I think I screwed this assignment up.
I have three partially unrelated ideas instead of one big argument - an argument about the rhyme scheme, one about personification, and one about metaphor.
Posted by MeganRitter at 08:37 PM | Comments (0)
David Lehman's "The World Trade Center"
"The World Trade Center was an example of what was wrong/With American architecture"
These two lines of the poem were very interesting from a sociopolitical point of view. The first line is very long, actually the longest line in the poem. Then it breaks off abruptly, in a totally illiogical place, and leaves you hanging as to what is wrong until the very next line, the shortest line in the poem. The author then tells us that American architecture is apparantly all screwed up. I think that his sudden line break where he leaves us hanging is meant to infer that somethinng else might be wrong and the buildings are merely a symbol of whatever is wrong.
Does that make ANY sense?
Posted by MeganRitter at 04:50 PM | Comments (0)
Judith Oster's "On Desert Places"
"He once wrote: '[poets] are so much less sensitive from having overused their sensibilities. Men who have to feel for a living would unavoidably become altogether unfeeling except professionally' (SL 300). Whatever the basis, the poem ends with the fear of one's own emptiness, one's own nothingness. To traverse these spaces inside the self is to traverse the barren."
Oster raises a fascinating point - at what point does anyone overload themselves emotionally to the point that they lose the ability to feel at all? It's been suggested that this is why clinical psychiatrists have one of the highest suicide rates of any profession. Maybe the empty spaces within come from overloading our emotional circuits until they fizzle out.
Posted by MeganRitter at 04:39 PM | Comments (0)