We really do want meaning.

One of the questions asked in class today was, "Do we interpret to find the original meaning in its context, or to find meaning for ourselves?"

I said that the core reason we do it is to find meaning for ourselves, but that this necessarily involves finding meaning in the context.

When I came to this conclusion, it brought me way back to earlier in the semester. When Powers asked,

"Do we read to understand ourselves more?"
"Do we read to understand what it is to be human?"
"Is reading itself what it is to be human?"
"Do we read to find meaning for our lives?"

These questions were attractive to me, and probably to all of us as English majors. But I hesitated. I didn't want to answer too quickly because that put reading on a pedestal. Gave reading the dibs on meaning for humans. What else do we do to understand ourselves? I asked. We also talk. Debate. Play music. Study science. Invent. Analyze. Perform in plays. Does this not also help us understand ourselves, carry what it means to be human, and give us meaning for our lives?

But while I didn't want to be exclusive with the what-it-means-to-be-human factor, I also couldn't throw it out. Because as I thought about reading and meaning and the factor, I realized that when we get to the end of a novel, we think. We let it sit (those of us who read for more than an assignment). And we don't stop until we find a meaning. 9 out of 10 people who read poetry (the following statistic is completely invented but the rhetorical point is true) need to ask, "but what does this poem mean?" much to the annoyance of some poets and some schools of criticism.

The point is, we're not satisfied until we find meaning. If we read a novel and we come to the end and can't put a finger on who we should empathize with, and why, and what we should feel and for what reason, we feel as if we have wasted our time. I'll take a Biblical example first. I hated reading Kings and Chronicles for anything but humor value. Because someone would come to a king, ask for something that seemed reasonable, and randomly get their head cut off because of some huge offense. I'd throw my hands up and say, "What the $#@&* God? This is supposed to have meaning to me?" In my first reading of Brave New World I was frustrated because I didn't know if I was supposed to be paying more attention to Bernard or John. And let's just say I had fun with Mrs. Dalloway. Fun meaning, since it was not an option for me to read something without pulling meaning from it...I just pulled stuff out of the air, it seemed.

For that reason, that profound discomfort and anxiety with a meaningless text (or a text we can't find the meaning in), I necessarily attach our reasons for reading with finding meaning. I won't limit finding meaning to reading, but I know it is necessarily involved.

So you see, sure we need to know a text in the original context. But we don't interpret to say, "I wonder what it meant for them," and stop there. You never stop there. You don't find a string of an idea and then not attach it to yourself. You learn by associations, meaning making connections...meaning applying. Educational psychology teaches us that.

Christian Core Literature

We were asked to take Ngugi's essay today and apply it to our identity as Christians. And he asked how we would react to a suggestion of making our core curriculum focussed on Christian literature with a few secular branches.

All our reactions were vehement "NO"s. First I'll give the reasons that are applicable to the essay...

In Kenya's case, they wanted to embrace what their culture actually was. Danielle brought up geography. They were one country reading the literature of another country. In the US, however, we are composed of a lot of different ideas and religions. So in terms of being able to work together in the real world and being able to relate to the people walking next to us on a sidewalk, we need to have a balance of secular literature, because they are in our environment.

Our professor countered my point that all but a small portion of Christian literature is cheesy. Apparently, aside from theology, apologetics, Lewis, L'Engle, and Tolkien, there is Christian literature out there that is not absolute crap. And I don't mean books about living like a Christian, I mean art. Characters, plot, and conflict. I trust him, I really do.

Another argument we made was that we need to be able to function in literary society (where most of our futures lie). Our colleges will probably have not heard of good Christian authors, but they will know Fulkner, Vonnegut, Orwell, McCarthy, ect. We don't want to look like we're above the agreed-upon world of good literature (not that we don't have minds of our own...it actually is really good literature).

Finally, I wanted to talk about historical context. Let those who are actually oppressed complain about not being recognized. Why should we scream for other people to recognize us as valid human beings when we've spent the last couple centuries murdering people in the name of Christ? I don't mean to say that all Christians are murderers; I mean to say that we need to recognize our situation, and speak about identity with delicate caution. We've been at the top of the food chain for as long as we can remember. And this has less to do with a curriculum and more to do with seeking a place of recognition through literature.

Maybe my biggest issue with a Christian curriculum is that I simply don't want to read that kind of literature. I want to read secular literature. I want literature to bring me to new places, not places I have already been. I know the intention of a Christian-centered literature list would not be repetition, and that it would also want to open its readers up to new worlds. Maybe I just don't have faith that it will do that.

I haven't completely given up on the issue. But for now my leaning is still strongly negative.

Declining readers

From "Reading Ethnic Literature Now"

Touche.

I can't take a lot of pride in the ethnic literature I've read when I read it for a class. I guess I can take a little pride in the fact that I read it instead of just listening to the discussions and bsing my essays based on notes. (At least, I didn't do that most of the time.)

Touche in many ways. I don't even read myself, regularly, and I want to be an English professor; my kind of student is going to put my kind of person out of a job.

Doesn't it just wreak with pungent hypocrisy when my primary concern is my future job and my secondary concern is the fact that readership is declining? I roll my eyes with a philosophically submissive "how can we change this? What can we do and what must I do?" Or even...is there a way to change it?

I can't say I know. Honestly I think readership is going to continue to decline, and a small community of "save the books" fans can read all they want and buy all the books their finances will allow them and we will still degenerate because of the fast indulgence that films and motion picture allow. They satisfy our artistic desire; they allow us to escape our lives, bring us into a story, and can be decently engaging/moving/thought-provoking.

One thing they do not have that books do...that mysterious quiet, where reader determines the tone, and creates all the visuals in his/her head. The miraculous transportation from squiggles on a page to other lives in a physical place created by our imagination.

Movies don't have as magical a transportation method, in my opinion. But they're easier. Which is why they're taking over.

I hope literature stays alive, and I WILL say that people will stop buying books long before people stop writing them, if for no other reason, because the easy-factor comes into play for the writing. It's easier to write prose than a film script. And, like Dr. Powers said about writers who don't read, everybody wants to be heard. People won't shut up anywhere, especially when expressing oneself turns into an art. So I don't think books and literature will ever go away, but the market and taste for them is on its deathbed.

Sorry for such a depressing post.

Liyong's and Anyumba's essay

I don't know much about Kenya, but apparently the essay was written after Kenya gained independence in 1964.

The essay makes sense. Why the heck would I vouch for a Kenyan community to be fluent in and prioritize any culture but their own? Sure, let them dance and have drama as a part of their education! We read and write and discuss to learn about ourselves. And they want other cultures' literature to be intertwined on the side, but not be the focus of the study. Makes perfect sense.

It makes me wonder though...if education is so dependent upon identity, and who you belong to...it makes me really feel for African Americans in modern American culture in a way that I've never felt before. It makes me realize. When those kids in the racial minorities open their textbooks and learn about British colonists and the War of 1812 and the Trail of Tears...what the $#@& do they care? Or, they might care but minorly; not nearly as much as they care about their own ancestry, which is not what they're going to get graded on because it's apparently not important.

And when we learn by sitting and reading instead of singing; and when we learn by memorizing facts because facts are important to us; and when we learn about how democracy is better than any other form of government, ect.

This now leads me to wonder where globalization will take us; if our education will begin to homogenize...

Do we want this? What's your gut-reaction?

Things fall into darkness

Like a marxist, but concerned with culture rather than class (although domination has a lot to do with it), Achebe believes that art reflects the values of the society.

I would agree but not fully. Yes, art reflects society's values. But it reflects these values because the individual who lives in society is effected by these values, and when he or she makes art, these values are reflected. Social psychology teaches us just how influenced we are by the people around us. Even if a man is curled up on a public sidewalk asking for help, most people pass him by, assuming him to be a beggar and not worthy of help. As much as Americans would hate to admit it, we are a community and we are not free to do whatever we wish because we are inhibited by the social structures that we have all built around ourselves. A passerby may want to help a person in need, but no one else is helping that person, so there must be a reason to keep walking.

I used that tangential rant to show that in all areas, not just art, we are affected by each other. Hence, in terms of Achebe's argument, art is not the only thing that reflects society's values, and also, art does other things besides reflect these values.

If I were to do justice to what art does in a person, you would have to come back to this blog in about five years.

But one thing that is important about Achebe's argument is that it draws our attention to the social facts, the facts about dominance in cultures. I remember reading Things Fall Apart, and Foe, and Paradise, and I remember thinking, "Wow. I really was pretty ignorant." You don't know how ignorant you are until you read other people's writing. Which is one of the very good reasons why you should read other people's writing.

where did his voice go...

As we read this feminist theory and women trying to gain a voice (some trying to mimic men, others wanting the social power they have, ect), and how much society oppresses women according to the writers, it really makes me shake my head.

The stereotypes that MALES have to put up with in society are way more strict than those of females. Maybe men have more power but women have more freedom. A woman can cry, not cry, kiss either sex, be aggressive, be nurturing, be aggressively nurturing (the mom that forces herself into your life)...it goes on. Men? They can cry, but only over very few things, such as a close friend or lover dying. They absolutely cannot show affection to the same sex. They can't long, they can't complain about not having a voice. Feminists may think they can do whatever they want, but they can't.

I'll read Bartram or Thoreau, where a man saturates himself in nature and describes the beauty and his passion for it in unrestrained exuberance. Back then it wasn't "pansy." Or maybe it was but they got published anyway; I didn't live back then. Either way, there is something I terribly miss (as if I lived at the time) about romantic writers, and it's not their writing style or technique or content.

It's their freedom. Their freedom to be men and be excited about beauty.

"We've been turned away from our bodies, shamefully taught to ignore them, to strike them with that stupid sexual modesty." (Cixou, 2049) Except we've all been turned away.

I am awaiting, predicting, hoping, for a male uprising against society. Not against women or against other men, but against these ideas that dehumanize us.

Leanne and I were laughing as we were walking to poetry workshop, having just discussed Marxist criticism. Particularly the essays saying that literature and education are formed to keep us locked inside the class structure that we already have. Education and high-level reading/analysis is made by the rich, for the rich, to create more rich.

At this point we look at each other and go "WE'RE NOT GOING TO BE RICH." Because we're English majors. "I wonder what Marxists would say to THAT."

Marxists would say, perhaps, "why do you think they are trying to remove the study of English and the humanities and the arts from high school and general education?"

...bam.

I'm handing to Marxists: they have it down when they talk about class. They are not concerned with literature and writing outside that realm. They look at how class functions in the study of literature, not what literature should do or what readers should do, but how class is perpetuated through it.

Though I would like them to read some postcolonial literature, some "Foe" and "House of Spirits" and "Paradise," and see if their concern/belief widens or changes or if they would not write about it at all.

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I have found that asking questions is SO much more helpful when coming up with a topic than making statements! This is the kind of thing I'm disappointed I haven't figured out already, but I am humbly excited about how much more helpful it is.

Questions I want to explore.

1. Do people who read for leisure have a responsibility to (I haven't thought this second part through) analyze

what the literature does to them
what the literature communicates
the experience of the literature


Responses that popped into my mind, especially thinking about the first part...

Leisure has no responsibilities.
People who think have responsibilities.
Reading is done on the honors system (it is preferable but not required to analyze; it is respectful to the author)


2. Do people who write need to read, and if so, what things do they need to read (how closely must the reading correlate with what they hope to write about)?


3. Something involving people writing with the intention of manipulating into believing false things; or more blatantly, writing something they know is false. (this needs to be more specific, I know)