JamesLohr

I cannot believe that i have to write another blog, but here it goes.

For the presentations, I would have to say that i really enjoyed most of them.  The one that I enjoyed the most was the interview with J.D. Salinger.  It was short, sweet, and funny.  I think everyone did well, the 3 little pigs song is still stuck in my head. The makeup for Batman was great, and while I can't say Pride and Prejudice is my kind of story, the presentation went well.  I hope everyone has a great summer, and good luck in the future.  Well done, live long and prosper...and what not. 

Thank the Great Lords in Heaven that my blogging days are done.  I have to admit that despite my growing ability in the field of Literary Criticism, I will not miss blogging.  It reminds me of the root canal without anesthesia that I never had.  If that description is not good enough, please go to youtube.com and look up "Billy's Balloon" in this cartoon i am Billy and Blogging is the balloon.  I feel that this term I most definitely grew in my ability and understanding of Literary Criticism.  There are still questions that i have in what critics were thinking when they came up with certain theories, but these are answers i will have to find on my own.  As far as my blogs are concerned, here are the ones that i believe are the top 5 (in no particular order).

  http://blogs.setonhill.edu/JamesLohr/2009/04/greenblatt_it_is_what_we_are.html

  http://blogs.setonhill.edu/JamesLohr/2009/04/eagleton_we_are_what_we_make_o.html

http://blogs.setonhill.edu/JamesLohr/2009/02/kolodny_remember_to_use_protec.html

http://blogs.setonhill.edu/JamesLohr/2009/03/wright_reading_is_rated_ma_and.html

http://blogs.setonhill.edu/JamesLohr/2009/03/keesey_chapter_4_introstill_a.html

Portfolio 1

http://blogs.setonhill.edu/JamesLohr/2009/02/blogging_portfolio_1_i_blog_th.html

Portfolio 2

http://blogs.setonhill.edu/JamesLohr/2009/04/blogging_portfolio_2_the_seque.html

This is all...take it for what you will.

"Hedges's lengthy afterword aligned "The Yellow Wallpaper" with other "deliberate dramatic indictments, by women writers, of the crippling social pressures imposed on women" (Wallpaper 55), thereby positioning it in the feminist literary tradition then being charted..." (Lots of names 471)

For a list of the names of the writers, please do not look at the quote but rather at the title of this blog.  With that said,  I just have one question, How would the meaning have changed if the main character had been a male? 

"To translate the three-dimensional urn into language is to destroy its circularity, since one of the scenes has to be described first.  Stripping the 'legend' off the circular surface of teh urn and running it comic-strip-wise precipitates its 'still' images into time" (Garson 457).

...Interesting...but doesn't it make sense that if you are to strip the images off of the circular urn on which they were produced, and try to place them into a usable order that on would start with life and work towards death?  I understand that due to the circular object, in the practice of holding the urn, one would move from death back into life, and that this process is changed by the way Keats chose to write this ode. What difference does that make?  No one has of yet found the urn about which Keats wrote, it is speculated that he combined many urns, and if this is the case, this argument seems kind of silly.

"This may seem a strange thing to say about the most notoriously bloated of all critical enterprises, but in fact 'Shakespeare' has been force-fed behind a high wall called Literature" (Barker and Hulme 444).

I have grown very weary of Shakespeare.  Yes, I can see that he has become such an integral part of Western Literature, that without him the whole system might collapse.  I however am not a person who likes to be told what to do, and particularly what I should like.  I am very open to trying new experiences, but I have had enough Shakespeare.  I am tired of being force fed works for no other reason than the fact that some group of unknown people decided that these works are the ones that others must read.  I am sure had i found Shakespeare on my own that things could have turned out differently, but i didnt find him on my own, and i am tired of reading his works.

I am curious to hear how many people disagree with me.

"Art is an important agent then in the transmission of culture.  It is one of the ways in which the roles by which men and women are expected to pattern their lives are communicated and passed from generation to generation" (Greenblatt 439).

Culture is in essence everything that we are, and everything that we are not.  I agree with this quote because i was raised with images that showed me how a man should treat a woman, adn how a man should be a man.  This does not necessarily mean that what on culture teaches is right, and another wrong.  I am sure that if raised on an island of cannibals, i would have no problem arguing how my cultures choices are well founded, and another cultures are not.  However, i believe i have slipped a bit away from what the quote was trying to say.  It is through art that many of our cultural norms are expressed.  Taken literally without literary criticism, Hanzel and Gretel is a story that reminds children to stay close to home, and not to trust strangers.  This is a good message for children to learn because you have to take strangers with a grain of salt, you don't know who that person is, what they want, what their morals are, or whether or not they are going to hurt you.  It is therefore expected in our culture that when we first meet someone, we should be kind, and respectful too them, but not let them get too close until we get to know them.  This is not to say that these are the only messages that can be found in the story, a house made of candy...if something is too good to be true, it probably is.  There are dozens of possible interpretations, but the fact still remains that due to these stories, our society has molded us into people capable of living day to day under the "terms of agreement" that allow us to remain a "unified" society.

"...this world is inevitably a place of sorrow and... the only heroism is a solitary resignation of the spirit" (Belsey 428).

Wow, this quote stuck out for me as soon as i read it.  It reminded me of one that I was told long ago, don't know who said it, but it always stuck with me and it is as follows...  to give to others you must take of yourself.     

"...Shakespeare was not great literature lying conveniently to hand...he is great literature because the institution constitutes him as such" (Eagleton 176).

This is something about literature that has always bothered me.  Why is it that I should love Shakespeare, or Chaucer, or any other author?  When it was determined that these are the people everyone needs to read, I was not asked for my opinion, yet i am most definitely part of that everyone group.  One of my favorite books will likely never be part of any literary canon, the title is "World War Z" and it is written as a collection of interviews with survivors after a zombie apocolypse has taken place.  There is just as much to be found in this work as there is in any play by Shakespear, but why is it not taken as seriously as Shelley's "Frankenstein"?  I hate the powers who be, I constantly have to fight them, but have no chance of winning because i don't know who it is im fighting.  They are without names, and without faces.  Kind of like the group the smoking man belonged to on the x files, they exist without our knowledge, but make our most important decisions for us.

"Similarly, cultural critics' objections to terms such as 'humanism' and 'universal truth' rest not so much on epistemological grounds as on the fact that these terms have historically been used to privelege the views of one small group-white males of European descent..." (Keesey 413).

Well, I'm not the first one to say this...but down with the man.  There is no "universal truth" just as there is no universal language, or even universal emotion, there are similarities, but exact instances that cover each and every person.  I have always been told that history is written by the winners.  I had never taken the time to think just how far this goes.  It is not only the history of war, but the history of everything we know, or at least everything we are told is important to remember. 

"...John is the story's antagonist and the narrator/protagonist succumbs  to a progressive form of madness" (Feldstein 402)

One night while working together I decided to try something interesting with Michelle Tantlinger.  Knowing that she is a feminist, and me always loving to play devil's advocate, I decided to run an idea past her.  What if John is not the antagonist, but simply an unknowing fool who is prescribing this cure for his wife because it is the best cure that he knows?  What if our unnamed main character falls into this madness on her own?  Is it possible that she feels she does not have enough connection to the reality into which she was born, and therefore seeks not solitude, but meaningful relationships to "creepers" or shadow people that she finds in her own mind?  If that is the case, then she becomes not insane, but a part of a reality that her husband, and ourselves do not understand.  Obviously Felstein does a better job than myself, but I was really surprised to come across an article that covered an idea that i already had, although mine is obviously infantile in comparison.