"Why do I make you read things you don't initially like?"

Because if we only read what we liked at the time, we would be stuck in one time, and only ever like one thing. When we are pushed into strange and unfamiliar territory, our brains assimilate or accommodate; look for connections and clicks. This restructures our brain, which then restructures our tastes. Reading what we don't like is not just for educational purposes; it's ultimately in the best interests of pleasure.

This does not mean that we will at some point love everything we initially do not like. But it does mean that the latter has the potential to change what we like and bring us into new territory.

Does this mean that we must love or should love everything that we have the potential to love (through experience of different works)? I do not know. I will be thinking about this.

benjamin interrupted

K. So, I'm only on the fifth page of Benjamin's "The Story Teller," but I've reached one of his points--perhaps his thesis, but I'll only find out when I'm done--and I had to start posting because I had a thought. Benjamin says in section VIII that a story "precludes psychological analysis" and that it uses "psychological shading" (not bolded in original essay, I added that) to engrain itself into the memory of the listener.

When I read this I immediately thought of Todorov's essay on how reading and properly analyzing (because everyone has an opinion of what is improper analysis) literature helps us to understand its "abstract structure" (p. 2100).

And then, I thought about how I write.

You can learn about craft, which is especially helpful in the editing process, and helpful in the process of recording what you need to tell. And you will fail without this discipline, hands down. But to tell what you need to tell, there is a step that comes before the discipline of recording. And please...excuse my romanticism. As much as I heckle romantic criticism for what it lacks, I do have some very romantic ideas that I would not be complete without.

As a writer you need to get in the moment. You need to close your eyes and feel the spirits around you. When the characters talk, it's not you talking; you need to listen to the voices inside yourself; you need to reach a place in your head. I only know this because I have to ask myself, "what would this character say?" Or when I'm writing a poem and I'm stuck, I need to close my eyes again, and revisit, and see what else is in the scene, or if there is nothing else and I need to end it.

"Herodotus offers no explanations" (part VII). Benjamin is talking about how the story teller, having to tap into this world of a layered story that s/he knows little why and more what and how, brings the listener also into this world. Story telling, like literature (though Benjamin contrasts it with literature but I tend to disagree with the differences he mentions), is not about explaining why, but explaining what and making YOU (you the reader, not you the writer) think about the why. But only if you want to.

Onward to the rest of his essay.

Beginning thoughts on structuralism

Today we talked about the formalists vs the structuralists, especially in terms of how they view literature, the author, and the reader. They both saw the poem as a separate entity, and the author as significant in and of herself, but not as a part of the poetic criticism. However, there is an interesting distinction between the two views, in that structuralists believe in an absolute artistic science, and that the poem helps us understand more about this system. The formalists, however, have not developed this scientific view, and for this reason, they have nothing but the poem to discuss. And it's because of a certain point they make clear that I have a wonder about them...they are quite clear on the fact that we DO NOT TALK about the author or about intent because that information is unavailable, is not public. Well. It made me wonder if some formalists long for that information. It's just that personally, when I am adamant about what I claim because of what information is available, I am adamant because I long for what is not there, because a certain desire is going unfulfilled.

However, I agree with the structuralists in that I do not talk about the author, not because the information is unavailable (with the research and technological access we have to certain records, we at least have enough information to make an educated guess that can be taken with a grain, or a spoonful, depending on your epistemological tastebuds, of skeptic salt), but because that information is irrelevant when you believe in the "artistic system." *takes a breath* The Inklings would have been proud of me for that sentence. No one else is. XD

Anyhoo, I at least mostly agree with the said system. I want to be careful, because there needs to be wiggle room for a mysterious subjectivity when it comes to art. But by and large, there is good and bad art, happy and sad poems, consistent and inconsistent themes, confusing and clear artistic statements. Yes. Art is its own biology. I think so anyway.

Hughes and Beardsley in the ring

So, Langston Hughes writes about the "Negro poet" in "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" (p. 1313). He contrasts the jazzlike, unrestrained, musical voice of the Negro poet to the calm, collected voice of the white poet. To me, skin color is only what started the different cultures, because several African Americans hopped on the Anglo-Saxon culture-train to get more societal acceptance. But for the purposes of brevity I will refer to them as Negro and white cultures, since that is how Hughes (and many others) refer to them as. I would like to stretch my creative juices and imagine what an argument between him and Beardsley would be like:

H: How else can you account for the differences in poems written by the white man and the Negro man besides the fact that it is the poet that we connect to when we read the poetry, that the poet and his life and experiences are intimately woven in with the poem?
B: I did not say the two were not intimately connected, I just said that they are not one and the same. And that when we read a poem, we are not reading an author. We are reading what comes from the author, but we are not reading the author himself.
H: When one author moves with the jazz and is the jazz and his poetry is jazz, and another author buttons up his coat and takes a quiet walk and his poetry is proper, how do you say that we are not reading these men?
B: What comes from the author is like the author. What comes from the author can only come from that author. But, as I said before, what comes from the author IS NOT THE AUTHOR. It is a poem. Are you, Mr. Hughes, a daybreak in Alabama? Or the silver rivers of jazz instruments? Or a river of tears?
H: I am all those things. And I am everything I write about.
B: But are you not also more? And does it not reduce you to a line of verses, and reduce the poem to a single man, a single set of experiences, if you make the two equal? Would you not say that there is more to you as a person than these poems?
H: The poems are the deepest part of me, they encompass me.
B: But "Daybreak in Alabama" does not talk of romance, and you in fact experience romance.
H: It's still a part of me you're reading.
B: But does the poem not also gain power when it is put down onto paper? I am talking to you right now. And you are enjoyable. But when I read what you write, I am moved beyond words; it is an entirely different experience. It comes from you but it gains a power and becomes a...a thing.
H: It's still me. Just because you don't see that "me" when you talk to me. The "thing" that moves you so much when you read my writing is still encased in this body.
B: I will have to trust you on that, because I cannot see inside you, and I do not know you. That information is not accessible to me. The only thing accessible to me is the poem. And what is true of your connection with your writing is not true of all writers.
H: I think it has to be, or else they wouldn't write it.
B: Well, again, I wouldn't know. I can't see into every writer and confirm that.
H: You just have to trust it.
B: You can claim ownership of the poem if you want. You can think that "poem" means "piece of me." I don't really care to be honest. But I am still calling it "poem," no matter where it comes from, because that is all I can prove.
H: Whatever floats your boat.
B: Care for a beer?
H: Budlight, please and thank you.

So, I like when things end happy. Who knows, they might have ended up in a fist fight. Not in my dreams though....(yes..I dream about these things..)

Voice--always there

We were talking in class today about how poems don't describe emotions or have emotion-words in them; but their job is to evoke emotions. Make a person feel a certain way. And thus, Wimsatt and Beardsley use the phrase "emotive import" to describe the transfer from words to emotions. I just...really like the phrase "emotive import."


on voice:
Someone expressed dissent that the voice of the poet, the poet's feelings, should be discounted while reading the poem. This is how I think poems are written, and why I think the background of the author of "We Wear the Mask" shouldn't affect us as readers.

Emotions that are to be evoked, are universal. An author feels something, and then wants an audience to feel the same way. To create that feeling in an audience is difficult because we all have different experiences. There needs to be a universality about the art as well as a specificness about it. And yes, some people might be more closely affected than others because of this, if their backgrounds are more similar to the author's. But by and large, that balance of universality and specificness is crucial to poetry.

To do this is like focusing a microscope on the environment surrounding the feeling. The reader's attention is precious. There is no room for anything beyond the emotive import. Dunbar, as much as his personal background may have made him feel the need to wear a mask (which is complete and utter speculation...he could have just been observing exlovers or family members who hate each other of the same race), did not have time to write about anything except why masks are warn. Here is the poetic microscope; here is the field of vision: masks.

The reader sees this image, subconsciously connects it with his/her own experience, and reacts to the poem. Given that humans have similar motivations and desires, all readers should have similar reactions if the poem successfully accomplishes the author's intent (which of course, the readers have no way of knowing). If the poem is successful, and readers feel the way the author hoped they would, then the audience actually is connecting to a part of the author's experience through similar emotional reactions. In a way, the poet's voice does come through. But it is much more subtle than curious readers want to know. For example, Dunbar could have described masks as ultimately protective and people as invasive. But he doesn't. And neither does the reader thinks so (if the readers reacts the way I do).

Thusly, I do not worry about the poet's voice being lost when we as critics disconnect the poem from the author's life. A poem may stand on its own, but an author has to make it. And a poem will stand according to how it is made.

Criticism...just because we want to.

Though William Wimsatt Jr. and Monroe Beardsley have a very full, rich essay about formalism and internal and external evidence for meaning, and three realms in which to find meaning...I would just like to discuss one statement, because a lightbulb went off when I read it.

"The poem is not the critic's own and not the author's (it is detached from the author at birth and goes about the world beyond his power to intend about it or control it). The poem belongs to the public" (1376).

In terms of criticism, I think you can discuss a poem in whatever realm you desire (realm meaning solely the poem, or from the perspective of the poet, or what the poet intended, ect.) and still have it be contructive/analytical. To me, criticism should not be bound by absolute laws, but should focus on the relationships within the world of the poem. Wimsatt and Beardsley say that the poem belongs to the public, but is it not also important how the poem was formed and how the poem lies in and of itself? Yes, an author wrote the poem and that is not deniable. Yes, that author had a life. Maybe, perhaps, such and such an experience had an impact on such and such a poem, but that does not mean that it ultimately did.

For example, when we read the poem about the masks in class, some people were not influenced by the knowledge that the author was an African American, and others were influenced by that knowledge. If a reader wants to know about the author, research is available for that purpose, but if a reader believes that background knowledge will negatively influence that poem's effect on the reader, it is the reader's choice whether to engage in this knowledge or not. No one tells a reader "you must know how the author's life influenced her choice of writing." We research for one reason: we are curious. If we are not curious we need not research.

Eliot, his own devil's advocate.

article: T.S. Eliot on the limits of criticism: the anomalous 'Experiment' of 1929 (Experiment in Criticism, lecture)

author: Ashley Marshall

Marshall discusses one of Eliot's essays, entitled "Experiments in Criticism." She notes how all throughout Eliot's career, he is conflicted with what exactly criticism should entail: how much criticism on the purely literary, and how much on the "extraliterary," which he defines as moral, social, and political content. In "The Frontiers of Criticism," Eliot says the following:

"It is reasonable, I feel, to be on guard against views which claim too much for poetry, as well as to protest against those which claim too little; to recognize a number of uses for poetry, without admitting that poetry must always and everywhere be subservient to any one of them" (11).

" 'there are limits, exceeding which in one direction literary criticism ceases to be literary, and exceeding which in another it ceases to be criticism' ". (6)

However, in "Experiments in Criticism" (1929), Marshall makes the case that Eliot apparently abandons his typical conflicted blend of criticism in which he struggles to separate the two kinds (literary and extraliterary), but realizes in the end that the two kinds are inseparable. One point that Eliot makes in the essay is that the literary relies upon the extraliterary, and that literary without extraliterary is imperfect and insufficient to understand. So that’s an important move on Eliot’s part.

Marshall is therefore very surprised that this essay has been ignored by critics because she sees it as being a defining moment in Eliot’s literary career. As I am not an Eliot scholar, I cannot say whether this is true or not, but Marshall includes another quote of Eliot’s which warns critics against deriving extraliterary questions from literary questions, that “the appreciation of genius and accomplishment should come first” (pp. 210-11) in the analysis. And to me, this is not a deviation from what Marshall had previously described as Eliot’s style of arguing with himself.

Whether or not “Experiments in Criticism” was a turning point for Eliot, I don’t blame him for being conflicted and trying to find a reliance, a connection, between the two types of criticisms. Even in his essay entitled “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Eliot finds two valid points that could be stretched to battle against each other: the necessary impact of the past on the poet’s work (1093), and also the desensitization (“perverts” is the word he uses) that learning does to a poet’s abilities (1094). If romantics like Emerson and Shelley argued about what in fact poetry IS, Eliot can certainly argue with himself about what we must take from poetry/literature/art.