Now, I understand literary criticism allows the audience to try on different lenses to approach a text in a new way.  The interpretation aspect is very much involved, but instead of focusing on interpreting every last piece of the literature, literary criticism allows us to focus on a few, very specific “things” in the texts and what they say about a certain gender/group/class, etc.  These “things” can be symbols, similes, metaphors, language, structure and more.  I have found my way in using Rivkin and Ryan to apply to essay both in this class and also in my poetry class.  I have become fascinated with Audre Lorde’s essay “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference” and her concept of the oppressed teaching the oppressor.  Also, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s “The Madwoman in the Attic” and their concept of the “angel-woman” in literature.  Both of these essays are the foundation of my final research paper.  I have been able to weave these concepts together to write an engaging essay on the “angel-women” in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Oval Portrait” and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Birthmark.”

When taking any course, I find great value when I am able to apply what I am learning to other classes.  In my “Reading of Poetry” class with Dr. von Schlichten, we are required to apply a literary theory to song lyrics as well as a poem for our final research paper.  As I said above, I have become so fascinated with both Lorde’s essay, so I used her concept of the oppressed teaching the oppressor in my essay on Maya Angelou’s poem “Still I Rise” and Christina Aguilera’s song “Fighter.”  It was exciting to see how Angelou and Aguilera take on the language and manners of their oppressors– another concept from Lorde’s essay.  Angelou takes a commanding yet sarcastic tone in her poem through her asking questions like “Does my sassiness offend? Why are you beset with gloom?”  In the chorus of Aguilera’s song, she eliminates the use of a personal pronoun and says, “Makes me that much stronger/ Makes me work a little bit harder.”  By disregarding the use of a personal pronoun, Aguilera is reciprocating the act of her oppressor by silencing him.

Literary criticism has made my relationship with literature grow.  I am able to develop interpretations further and apply theories in my essays for other classes.  As an aspiring teacher, I would love to introduce some of the “easier” theories into my higher-level classes, such as feminism and cultural studies.  I understand introducing such theories would be a very bold move, and it would absolutely require much guidance and background information for students.  After supplying students with sufficient resources, I would start them with stories they would be interested in, such as Angela Carter’s “The Company of Wolves.”  Using a story based on a fairytale would make the material less intimidating for students.  Overall, I am anxious to see how I can further my knowledge of literary criticism, as well as how I can incorporate it in my future classroom.

Depth:

For the first blog in this category, I read Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find” through a Marxist lens.  This was not my first time reading the short story as I have read it in other classes.  Already having a familiarity of the story, I found that I was easily able to see the social class structure in the story as the grandmother is quite obsessive with making sure it is known that she is a “lady.”  I noticed the way O’Connor goes into detail to describe the grandmother’s attire, but only briefly mentions what the mother is wearing (which is slacks and a handkerchief wrapped in her hair.)  I also discuss the way the grandmother uses the African American boy on the side of the road along with her story about an African American and a watermelon for her sources of entertainment.  In the second blog, I took a feminist approach to Angela Carter’s “The Company of Wolves.”  I divided the story into two sections: the history of werewolves and the Little Red Riding Hood retelling.  The women in the historical account of werewolves are extremely stereotypical 1950s housewives, while Little Red breaks the stereotypes in the second section of the story.

Timeliness:

The three blogs in this category I have posted early/wasn’t a required post.  In this first blog entry on New Historicism, I discuss the value in researching background information on the author/time period when reading a new piece of literature.  The next blog entry I used to work through my ideas for the difficulty analysis as well as for exercise six.  I read Gwendolyn Brooks’ poem “We Real Cool” through a cultural studies lens using Hebdige’s essay in RR “Subculture: The Meaning of Style.”  The last blog entry was for our last reading in the Barry text “Theory After Theory.”  I discuss the question I still have with literary theory: do these tools add to the study of literature, or do they take away from the author’s intended meaning?

Discussion:

Two of my blogs sparked a discussion.  In the first one, I expressed that I wanted to do a New Historicist approach to Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy,” but I was having much trouble finding a “good” essay in Rivkin and Ryan that would help me write the paper.  Jenna, Beth Anne and I discussed how it is frustrating when you can’t find “the” essay, and they also provided some helpful advice on how to write my paper.  In my blog about Rivkin and Ryan’s “The Politics of Culture,” Jenna and I discussed how we both never really considered politics being a part of culture; through our discussion, we soon came to the conclusion that it is so much part of our culture that we forget that it does play a role.

Intertextuality:

For my blog on Ania Loomba’s “Situating Colonial and Postcolonial Studies,” I discussed Jamaica Kindcaid’s A Small Place which I read in my Topics of World Literature class a long time ago.  After reading Fiske’s “Television Culture,” I had a flashback to my presentation on Stylistics and the discussion we had during my presentation on Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants.”  In the essay, Fiske discusses the female/male dynamic of a television show, which I found to be extremely similar to the characters in Hemingway’s short story.

Coverage:

There are two blogs that don’t exactly seem to fall into any of the other categories.  In the first blog, I discuss Barry’s chapter on “Literary theory– a history in ten events” and the differences between historicists and historians.  In the next blog, I wanted to apply Psychoanalysis to my term paper on the angel-women in Poe’s “The Oval Portrait” and Hawthorne’s “The Birthmark.”  I was hoping to use the essay I read for the optional Rivkin and Ryan reading “On Narcissism” by Freud for my paper, but I’m not sure I am going to take this route.

Reading “Theory After Theory” left me considering the questions: does literary criticism take away from literature?  This is something I have be considering throughout the course, and I’m not sure on which side I stand.  Reading and interpreting literature through different lenses brings something different to the work.  We can look at what the text is saying about culture, women, race, the environment, etc.  We can look at the psychological stability of a character to better understand why they do the things they do.  Do these tools add to the study of literature, or do they take away from literature?  Writers produce literature to provide a message to the audience.  Does literary theory cloud the intended message? Or, does it allow the reader to look beyond the initial intended message? Or, does literary provide an avenue in which to discover the intended message?  Are we just meant to read the words on the page and interpret the figurative language?

We can read The Catcher in the Rye and see the way Holden rejects the “phonies” he encounters all around him and the way he protects his sister and her classmates when he rubs away the swear word graffiti on the wall in the school and see that Holden has reserved feelings about growing up, or we can look through the lens of psychoanalysis and dig deeper into Holden and look at reasons why he is this way… we can look at what traumatic experience has altered his life in wanting to live in the past, how he copes and his different phases of recovery.  The conclusion I have come to is that there is value in doing both.

Here is the poem:

“We Real Cool”

THE POOL PLAYERS. SEVEN AT THE GOLDEN SHOVEL.

We real cool. We
Left school. We

Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We

Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We

Jazz June. We
Die soon.

I read Dick Hebdige’s essay “Subculture: The Meaning of Style.” To put it simply, the essay discussed rebellion. While groups who are rebellious usually seek to wreak havoc and undermine the law, Hebdige interestingly views rebellious groups as being structured around their own laws… which kind of defeats the purpose of revolting. Hebdige says, “…the internal structure of any particular subculture is characterized by an extreme orderliness: each part is organically related to other parts and it is through the fit between them that the subcultural member makes sense of the world” (1263).

I thought this passage definitely spoke to the structure of “We Real Cool.” At first glance, the poem looks a bit odd; each line ends with “We” except for the last line. Brooks is disrupting the natural flow of the line by ending each line with “We” when it is not the end of the sentence. The structure of the poem is an act of rebellion in its own. However, placing the “We” at the end of the line creates a rhythm almost like a song, giving the poem order as Hebdige describes above.

The content of the poem resembles rebellious teens. Hebdige describes the “desired qualities” of rebellious groups like “skinheads” as “hardness, masculinity and working-classness” emulated by “the boots, braces and cropped hair” and another aspects of their appearance (1263). The words are short and choppy, especially in lines three and four with the harsh “k” sound. The hardness of the words and sounds illustrate the hardness of the crowd of drop-outs at the pool hall. The choppiness of the words are mirrored by the choppiness of the three-word sentences. They have dropped out of school and use slang in the first line “We real cool” instead of saying “we are real cool.” Since they have dropped out of school, they are hanging around the pool hall named “The Golden Shovel.” They lurk around the city at night, suggesting they are participating in illegal activity. “The Golden Shovel” symbolizes the death of the black youth, as they “die soon.”

Brooks, an African American poet, grew up in Chicago. She has made many accomplishments in her lifetime: first black author to win the Pulitzer Prize and the first black woman to hold the position of the poetry consultant for the Library of Congress. Her works give insight to young African American culture in Chicago.

“The same impressions, experiences, impulses and desires that one man indulges or at least works over consciously will be rejected with the utmost indignation by another, or even stifled before they enter consciousness…We can say that the one man has set up an ideal in himself by which he measures his actual ego, while the other has formed no such ideal. For the ego the formation of an ideal would be the conditioning factor of repression” (415).

The essay is really short–only 2.5 pages. I feel like I need much more information on the narcissist in order to take this angle in my paper. What I would derive from this reading is that both men in the stories I listed above are narcissists in the way the must showcase their abilities (painting, experimenting) at the expense of their loved one. Freud says men who are narcissists are trying to achieve “this ideal which is now the target of the self-love which was enjoyed in childhood by the actual ego” (415). He is trying to achieve the narcissistic perfection of childhood.

I chose to read Ania Loomba’s essay “Situating Colonial and Postcolonial Studies” for this blog entry. In the above passage, I couldn’t stop thinking about Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place. In her first-hand account told in second person point-of-view, she invites the reader into her story as the unwelcome tourist of Antigua. Kincaid says, “You disembark from your plane. You go through customs. Since you are a tourist, a North American or European–to be frank, white–and not an Antiguan black returning to Antigua from Europe or North America with cardboard boxes of much needed cheap clothes and food for relatives, you move through customs swiftly, you move through customs with ease. Your bags are not searched” (5). The reader instantly feels the hostility of the Antiguan native. In my World Literature class I took a few years ago, I wrote a paper on A Small Place, and I researched the different events and places Kincaid discusses in her story. Her perspective of the events and places differed greatly from the historical articles. Kincaid provides an honest account of the Antigua natives’ feelings toward colonialism.

“My point is not that “the New Historicism” as a definable project, or the work of specific individuals identified by themselves or by others are New Historicists, can necessarily provide even provisional answers to such questions, but rather the term “New Historicism” is currently being invoked in order to bring such issues into play and to stake out — or to hunt down — specific positions with the discursive spaced mapped by these issues” (588).

The “issues” Montrose is speaking of are “the possible configurations of relationship between cultural practices and social, political, and economic processes; the consequences of post-structuralist theories of textuality for the practice of an historical or materialist criticism; the means by which ideologies are produced and sustained, and by which they may be contested; the patterns of consonance and contradiction among the values and interests of a given individual, as these are actualized in the shifting of conjunctures of various subject positions…” (587).

via Any R.

“History is not some unmediated reality out there, some stable background that the literary text reflects or refers to; it is not a context. Rather, it is like the literary text itself — of a different genre, granted, but no less a discourse. Such a view might seem to undo the privilege of the literary text or of “history” … but it does make it possible to study relations between texts both literary and historical and discover how they trace certain patterns and negotiate various kinds of cultural meaning” (Rivkin & Ryan 506).

I find so much value in New Historicism. With almost everything I read, I research the context in which the literature was written. Researching the author and historical events and seeing how these connect and influence the literature produced deepens the reader’s understanding. Another quote from Rivkin and Ryan’s essay that I found to support the previous passage along with my commentary says, “A New Historicist essay will often put the same reading practices into play for all the texts it studies, with the nonliterary subject to the same close reading as the literary” (506). A New Historicist performs a close reading of both the work of literature along with the historical information surrounding the text–this just really spoke to me. For my exercise 6 and the final difficulty analysis, I want to write about Sylvia Plath’s poem “Daddy” from a New Historical approach.

After the grandmother carefully places her white gloves on top of her purse, the distinction between the grandmother’s dress and the mother’s dress is made.:

“The children’s mother still had on slacks and still had her head tied up in a green kerchief, but the grandmother had on a navy blue straw sailor hat with a bunch of white violets on the brim and a navy blue dress with a small white dot in the print” (O’Connor).

The following sentence delves into more detail about the grandmother’s attire, which is important for “in case of an accident, anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once that she was a lady” (O’Connor).  Since the grandmother’s appearance is what would define her as a “lady” at the scene of a car accident, nothing is said about what the mother’s attire would suggest.  The text provides the reader with the conflicting clothing–or social class–but almost ignores what the mother’s appearance means suggesting that a person of a lower social class does not matter.  We could even go as far as to say that the death of the grandmother/person of a high social class would mean more then the death of the mother/person of a lower social class.

When they pass the African American boy on the side of the road, the grandmother degrades him by saying, “‘Oh look at the cute little pickaninny!’ she said and pointed to a Negro child standing in the door of a shack. ‘Wouldn’t that make a picture, now?” she asked and they all turned and looked at the little Negro out of the back window. He waved.

‘He didn’t have any britches on,’ June Star said.

“He probably didn’t have any,” the grandmother explained. “Little riggers in the country don’t have things like we do. If I could paint, I’d paint that picture,’ she said” (O’Connor).

The grandmother uses the boy as her own form of entertainment.  She wants to objectify him by using him as the object of a painting and makes the comment that since he is a minority, he probably doesn’t own underwear.  When the grandmother tells the children a story (another form of entertainment) she tells of another African American boy who stole her watermelon and ate it.

At the end of the story, the brim of the grandmother’s hat is broken, and she eventually takes it off.  The hat symbolizes a superficial meaning of what it means to “be a lady.”  Once she removes the hat and realizes that helping someone else is what makes a truly good lady, it is too late.

via Presentation Slot 10.

The short story begins with the objectification of women. The women are placed under their stereotypical roles as a woman was “once bitten in her own kitchen as she was straining macaroni” and the other girl was “stirring the soup for the father of her children” as her first husband arrived home, and of course, he immediately demanded, “‘Get me my bowl of cabbage and be quick about it.’” In the beginning of the story, the women are submissive and require a man to fight their battles. When the wolf attacked a girl, she “made such a commotion” and the big strong men with rifles had to save her, as well as when a young bride’s groom was stolen from her, her brothers went on a search for him while she stayed at home and cried.

The second part of the story deals with a retelling of “Little Red Riding Hood.” Little Red is the only strong-willed female in the story. She is unafraid and brings her own protection of a knife. Even though she falls for the wolf’s trick, she still holds some sort of power. When she makes the deal with the “huntsman” that he would win a kiss if he made it to grandmother’s house before she did, she manipulates the game by walking slowly to “make sure the handsome gentleman would win his wager.” When Little Red arrives to grandmother’s house, she exhibits her intelligence by taking notice of the oddities in the room. Her grandmother’s bible is closed, the pillow has no indent and she sees a lock of her white hair on a log in the fire. She immediately realizes what the wolf had done but still remains unafraid since she knows “she was nobody’s meat.”