Eng 101
Do you mean from the eighteenth century? You might try Jonathan Swift's 1726 Gulliver's Travels (that is the twentieth-century title), which is a mock-travelogue satirizing, among many other, mainly political targets, the naïve, fact-obsessed empirical style of Defoe's works and written from the autobiographical perspective of a physician traveling to strange (highly fictional) lands with miniscule and gigantic and twisted and dead people. Whereas Defoe's novels are written from the first-person perspective, later novelists adopted narrators: I'd recommend Henry Fielding's 1742 Joseph Andrews, which begins as a parody of another novel (Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded by Samuel Richardson) but develops into a novel in its own right: it features a detached, omniscient and ironic narrator who relates the action to his reader in a friendly and intimate tone quite unlike Defoe's.
Barbara Benedict
Excellent question! H.F.'s own double-thinking—trusting God yet not—reflects the crisis of faith that led to deism (God as a machine, not a anthropomorphic phenomenon) in Defoe's own time (two generations after the setting of the book): England was still at this point struggling with the remnants of Catholicism that resulted in the Bloodless Revolution of 1688 (when the Catholic James was replaced by the Protestant William and Mary) and Defoe himself was an ardent Dissenter (a branch of Protestantism opposed to certain Anglican rituals). This splintering of religions and the spasmodic attempts to expel or punish one or the other (the Popish Plot [a paranoid plot to prove the Protestant court was poisoned by Catholic spies], the response to Defoe's The Shortest Way with the Dissenters [expel them all, lock him up] etc.) both show the constant anxiety for both people and government about religion and social stability; also, the torrent of sermons and moral handbooks pouring from the press testifies to the overall concern about decadence, opulence, loose living and the decay of morality in general. As for authority, Charles II (the ruler at the time the Journal was written) had been returned to England from exile in France only five years before the Journal was set: his father Charles I had been beheaded by Cromwell in 1649—a shocking act! to murder (as some thought) the direct representative of God on earth, whose body was so sacred it could heal illnesses by a mere touch—so Charles II was only hanging onto power by a thread: writers, notably Hobbes and Locke, questioned the divine right of kings to rule and advocated other ways men are and should be governed, including by contract rather than force. So authority was tenuous. Sorry for the long reply but this is a highly complex question that gets at the root of Defoe's novel about uncertainty, distrust, and fear.
Barbara Benedict
H.F.'s character combines voracious (sometimes hazardous) curiosity with prudent skepticism: this allows him to act as an eyewitness to the plague's devastation and its effect on the people and also as a sensible and scientific judge of its causes, the people's reactions and the government's response. At the same time, he isn't perfect so you, as the reader, have to judge his authority and question his conclusions. So his attitude toward the plague guides the book to its end (which is thanksgiving to God for his survival and an account of the successes/failures of the government's actions). His very qualities of questioning, fearing, thinking, doubting etc. shape the entire narrative.
Barbara Benedict
Honestly, I am not an epidemic expert (think of AIDS, MERSA, H1N1 etc. etc. and all the poxes we mentioned in class!) and we aren't finished with Covid-19, but I would say that the bubonic plague was WAY WAY worse in terms of deaths and long-term cultural trauma. It killed roughly a third of the entire population of Europe, whereas we are fast on our way to forgetting all about the inconvenient, but we persuade ourselves, surely transient Covid-19. And there are scientifically-proven inoculations now. But other effects are harder to judge: the way Covid-19 has sharpened ageism, xenophobia, distrust of government, and individual long-term effects and the resulting social costs (after all, you simply died of the plague, that was that) and degeneration of social customs, manners and regard for others. That We Will See.
Barbara Benedict
No, not at all. Robinson Crusoe itself sprang from the true-life account of a sailor named Alexander Selkirk, a bad-tempered Scot who was stranded on an island in Terra Del Fuego in South America for four years, although Defoe's book is very much a fiction. Furthermore, that book was hugely successful—so much so that 5 months after its publication Defoe wrote a sequel called Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. And although the Puritans derided fiction as lies, that was a fracturing idea, given the rival popularity of works based on Classical myth (obviously not lies and not true, both). So your premise isn't right. Also, Defoe—as I think we mentioned in class—had written Due Preparations for the Plague a year earlier than the Journal to warn people of how to prepare, but no-one paid attention—so he wrote it in fictional form, which was much more effective.
Barbara Benedict
A nonfiction writer can use metaphors to activate the imagination and convey emotions. Metaphors often take an abstract concept and make it concrete. A writer can use an element of their real-life experience figuratively. In Moving Water, Tucson Shumaker uses the water trope to speak to the complications of childhood innocence. The end of childhood can be thrilling and scary, and it is a force beyond our control. She has taken a familiar subject and helped the reader see it in a new way.
Catina Bacote
Durga Chew-Bose is exploring her past experiences as it relates to her need to belong and her efforts to fit in to the larger American society. It's possible she feels shameful about her past actions, but she acknowledges that she is on a journey. Chew-Bose also recognizes how others, and the larger society shaped her actions. She tried to assimilate because other people treated her like an outsider.
Catina Bacote
Some creative nonfiction writers who argue that every detail needs to be exactly as it happened and others argue that they can imaginatively use writing conventions to tell a true story. Some writers believe it is reasonable to compress time (you write about three doctor visits as one visit) and write dialogue that is not exact but captures the spirit of the conversation. I think the important thing to remember is that the nonfiction writer is entering an agreement with the reader. The reader expects the story to be true. However, the reader understands the writer is shaping the story without the intent to deceive the reader. As writers, we make choices at every step of the process, including what we write about, the form of the essay, what scenes to render, and how to end a work. Some writers choose to use speculation and let readers know by saying I imagine or perhaps in an essay. In addition, some writers write about events where they were not present for and help the reader understand how they are arriving at the story (interviews, book research, imagining).
Catina Bacote
The tone of an essay often depends on how the writer feels about the subject matter. The tone can be funny, sad, somber, joyous, heavy, or light. The tone can change in an essay as it does in Moving Water, Tucson. In the opening paragraph, Shumaker writes, "Warm rain felt food on faces lifted to lick water from the sky." Later in the essay, the children face "water so high you couldn't touch bottom, water so fast you couldn't get out of it, water so huge the earth couldn't take it, water." As readers, we can still compare the three essays you read in how they approach their subject matter, structure the story, and create an authentic tale.
Catina Bacote
When writers explore aspects of their identity, they often write about "race, class, gender, religion, culture, and geographical location." You can see how these elements of identity are investigated in the essays you read for class. In some respects, a sense of belonging can be used to exclude and harm people. Durga Chew-Bose talks about feeling excluded because of her Indian heritage, and Walters deals with the exclusion she feels as a Black American in the United States. However, belonging can also be used to bring people together and consider a shared identity or experience, as Shumaker does in "Moving Water, Tucson. A writer can also bring to life a collective to heighten the visibility of the maligned and forgotten.
Catina Bacote
The mixing of classical and religious (Christian) iconography was a Renaissance commonplace even before the Reformation, and you are right to pick up on that mixture in this poem. Henry 8 had his own highly personal and politically motivated reasons for breaking with the Catholic Church/Church of Rome - and he launched an entire century of religious reformation/conflict in England. As for Wyatt - although he is best known for the "love" poems that seem more directly tied to his personal life, Wyatt also wrote his share of religious poems. He wrote a lot of what are known as Psalm "paraphrases," for example - lyric renderings of that part of the Bible. Critics have noted that sometimes (oftentimes) it is difficult to separate out secular from religious concerns in such poems. According to new historicist logic: pleading for the mercy of an allpowerful god could sound a lot like an indirect way of addressing one's situation of powerlessness in relationship to an all-powerful king like Henry 8, who didn't take to direct counsel very well!
Chloe Wheatley
The print publication of short poems like this (on a non-religious or secular theme) was actually not quite a thing yet in England. Religious poetry was being published, and then as you say Wyatt's poems were more widely disseminated, and he became more widely known, when his works were published in print after his death. But this poem actually exists, and circulated basically hand to hand in court, one copy signed by Wyatt himself in a manuscript that could have been created/copied out while Wyatt was abroad, or even while he was in prison (under suspicion that he had in fact had an affair with Boleyn - he got imprisoned but then released while others were executed on these charges). If you are interested in this history, you should read Hilary Mantel's trilogy of books about what it was like to be a part of Henry 8's court - Wolf Hall is the first of those historical novels - they are all great!
Chloe Wheatley
This is where something Prof. Rosen mentioned in class seems pertinent. If you call poetry of this period "Renaissance" poetry, you are emphasizing the way in which writers of the 16th century looked back to older models (often in classical tradition) of writing and models of expressing the self (roots for the word in "re-naissance" or "re-birth"). If you call poetry of the period "early modern" poetry, you are emphasizing our interest in how this period contains glimmers of what we begin to recognize as preoccupations or ideas of selfhood that look more familiar to a modern mind. Both things can be true! If you were to hand me any poem and ask me if it seems like a 16th-century poem, I'd probably look for indicators like use of formal meter and rhyme, and diction, and maybe even (to our ears) overuse of copia (rich amplified style), and then have to take an educated guess. The presence of these formal aspects would make it possible that it is a 16th century poem, but wouldn't rule out its status as a poem of a later time period.
Chloe Wheatley
Your questions inspired me to look up "personalize" in the Oxford English Dictionary and this is how it is defined: a. To represent in or as a person, or as having human attributes; to personify, embody. b. To cause an issue, argument, etc., to become concerned with or emphasize individual persons or personal feelings, rather than general or abstract matters; to make personal. So in relation to definition "a," I'd note that in literary language, when you give non-human things (like the weather) human characteristics ("the sky is weeping rain because I am sad and it feels sorry for me"), that's called "pathetic fallacy." In relationship to definition b (which emphasizes the difference between that which is private, or "one's own," and that which is part of a group, or linked to a general or abstract condition), I'd say that there is no "inherent" thing that "makes something individual or personal." I like to think that lyric poems continue to be read and appreciated precisely because the slippage you describe - between highly specific reference and generalizable relatable truth, say - is always a possibility. One last thing: When you look up "individual" in the OED, you find that the term (as used up through the mid 18th century ) could also mean the opposite of what we mean by it now: One in substance or essence; forming an indivisible entity; indivisible. Of two or more people, things, etc.: that cannot be separated; inseparable. Obsolete.
Chloe Wheatley
(a) I'm not sure what you mean by "a specific message." If a "message" is (as the dictionary tells us) "a verbal, written, or recorded communication sent to or left for a recipient who cannot be contacted directly," I think every book ever written in any language fits that definition. (b) Well, I suppose it depends on how you think the autobiographies we read in class "act." (c) Yes! The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Chris Hager
All literature is a part of history—even an obscure symbolist poem or a fantasy novel can tell you something about the historical moment in which it was written, if only because it's one example of what was (or wasn't) imaginable to a human at that time in that place. And history—whenever it gets written down—is akin to literature, in that the way it was written involves contingencies of meaning and emphasis that can be interpreted in different ways. You could write the history of ENGL 101 on the evening of Feb 15, and I could also write that history, and while I'm confident both our depictions would be accurate, they would, I am willing to bet, not be identical.
Chris Hager
Different, but probably not less. Having additional outside knowledge about the author of an autobiography may even create more opportunity to interpret the text. I bet there are parts of, say, Barack Obama's Dreams of My Father (written before he was president) that, if I read them today, would strike me in a new way now that I know that he ended up becoming president.
Chris Hager
I don't have the statistical information to be able to say exactly what the breakdown by gender would be, but let's say that, in earlier time periods (say, the 18th and 19th centuries), autobiographies by men outnumbered autobiographies by women. I'm sure that's broadly true. Why is that? We could point to many reasons: men generally had greater access than women to education, literacy, and the means of publication. Economically well-off ones may also have had more free time to write. And,, given the division of gender roles in these eras, men were more likely to live lives that were judged "extraordinary" and therefore good subjects for a book. Not just Ulysses S. Grant but also tons of other Civil War veterans published memoirs and autobiographies in the decades following the war. People wanted to hear their stories of the battlefield. There are a few such books by women who served in the war as hospital workers, but just a fraction of the ones by soldiers.
Chris Hager
I think most genres evolve—novels today, though they have unmistakable commonalities with novels from the 18th century, are also quite different in obvious ways—and autobiography is no exception. I've already alluded above to a few sub-genres: the celebrity autobiography, the musician autobiography. And there were important historical sub-genres that largely don't exist anymore: the slave narrative (of which Venture Smith's, Frederick Douglass's, and Harriet Jacobs's autobiographies all are examples), the spiritual conversion narrative (which was actually an entry requirement to early New England churches), and the captivity narrative, which was a popular early-American genre telling the story of someone who had experienced a period of time as a hostage—by pirates or (in the case of one of the best-known, the narrative of Puritan colonist Mary Rowlandson) Native American war parties. (Referring back to Noelle's question, we might say that a captivity narrative is more of a memoir than an autobiography, because it's restricted to one distinct episode in the author's life.) Arguably the captivity narrative does still exist, in a newly evolved form, as the writings of formerly incarcerated people. The Autobiography of Malcolm X is a great book that incorporates multiple of these sub-genres: it tells the story of his time in prison, and it also tells the story of his spiritual conversion to Islam.
Chris Hager
If an autobiography is a representation of a life, then autobiographies can come in as many types as individual human lives. Certainly, a lot of autobiographies are written by people whose lives have been in some way exceptional—whose stories are interesting because they involve things that readers haven't experience or encountered themselves. Sometimes those are trials and tribulations; but they could be anything. Rock-star autobiographies, celebrity autobiographies, autobiographies of expresidents, etc., often are gripping reads not because of the hardships they narrate but because they give a glimpse of life experiences most people haven't had (e.g., what really goes on in the White House) or what famous people are like outside the public eye.
Chris Hager
If there's an experiment you can imagine, there's a good chance someone has done something like it. Gertrude Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, which we looked at briefly in class, is one very unique twist, written from the perspective not of the self but of her partner. But there are many other kinds of experiments, too; there even is now a genre known as "autofiction," which (just like it sounds) merges autobiography and fiction. A Trinity faculty member, Francisco Goldman, recently was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for a book called Monkey Boy that is technically a novel but at the same time narrates the experience of a character named "Francisco Goldberg," whose experiences closely follow the author's own.
Chris Hager
It is not the first or earliest autobiography written by an African-American. Briton Hammon, James Gronniosaw, Ignatius Sancho, and Olaudah Equiano are among several African Americans who produced autobiobraphies before Venture Smith did. (Pro tip: start by asking yourself whether you know something or are only assuming it.)
Chris Hager
Jean Fagan Yellin, the scholar who did that work, did research in various archives, including ones that held letters to and from a family of white abolitionists (the Posts) in Rochester, N.Y., who had played a key role in sponsoring Harriet Jacobs's book for publication. Based on that lead, Yellin was able to research the life of Harriet Jacobs (not "Linda Brent," of whom there were no known records, because it was a pseudonym) and identify a lot of historical documentation—deeds of sale (remember that enslaved people were legally "property"), census records, etc.—originating in Edenton, North Carolina, that exactly lined up with the events of the story in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.
Chris Hager
Probably you could ask 10 people and get ten different answers, and sometimes the distinction is not very clear. But one fairly accepted difference is that an autobiography generally covers an author's entire life, whereas a memoir might be about just one particularly interesting period of or angle on the author's life. When, for instance, Ulysses S. Grant published his "personal memoirs," they were mainly about his time as a general during the Civil War—not his life before that.
Chris Hager
See also my response to #1. Is it "okay"? Well, it depends on what one's expectations are and/or the importance of the book's claims to truthfulness. If a fugitive slave was writing his life story in the interest of advancing the abolitionist movement, it would surely undermine that cause if his descriptions of the conditions of enslavement were found to be untrue. But could I have imperfect recollections of what I was thinking when I was standing on Ventura Blvd. in the 4th grade, and did I possibly fill in certain details in class Wednesday night in order to illustrate what I was asking you all to share about a possible starting point for your own autobiographies? Yes, it is definitely possible. I hope that's okay with you.
Chris Hager
Well, if you impose it, sure. But I think what I said is, it's a good skill to be able to observe something (including a text) and identify its resemblances to, and differences from, other examples. If I observe something that really doesn't resemble an autobiography at all but decide to impose the identity of "autobiography" on it, then I'm either not observing very carefully, or I'm just being intellectually irresponsible. Certainly there can be examples of times when works can get pigeonholed in ways that oversimplify it. Henry David Thoreau's Walden (which a few members of your class have read, I happen to know) is sometimes referred to as a "memoir," which is. . . not entirely untrue (it's Thoreau's account of a period of time he spent living in a small cabin in the woods near Walden Pond), but also overlooks the fact that it is, simultaneously, a serious work of natural history, philosophy, and social critique.
Chris Hager
As I said, the poem initially grew out of the last line of another abandoned poem. So that's a kind of revision. After that, I got the first few moves of the poem pretty quickly (the description of the elephant, of the walk, the reference to Roland Barthes) and then I put in the bit about the martyr of the saint, though I recall trying a few different saints to see what would fit. I think it was the bit about the boy and the birds that came last, and it all took a while to get right in terms of what went where. I wrote this poem towards the end of putting together my first book thinking it would go in my second, so I was at the end of a larger cycle of poems, which meant that I really took my time with it. I think every poet has to learn to enjoy revision because you're going to be doing a lot of it if you're serious.
Ciaran Berry
Certainly, his metaphors can get dense and complex, and might take time to pick apart, but they're usually very clear. In fact, the metaphors are often the most luminous parts of the poems, and even as they depart they often clarify where we've been and signpost where we're about to go. I think one of the deep pleasures of poetry, and of Levis's poetry in particular, is meaningful digression and discursion, a sense of how the poet thinks and moves from thought to thought, association to association. The way his metaphors work is maybe related to T.S. Eliot's idea of the objective correlative ("a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion")
Ciaran Berry
I think 'intent' is probably a dangerous thing to think about when you're writing a poem, or at least it is for me. "Electrocuting an Elephant" began with the last line of a poem about Coney Island that wasn't really working and that I'd grown bored with. I got to the end of that poem and thought, well that's not very good, but what if I started a poem with "Like mourners or men setting off early for a duel" and tried to just focus on Topsy the elephant? So the intent was to follow the promise of that first line and see where it led, though I suppose that first line promises a certain view of humanity.
Ciaran Berry
I think it would be hard to write without feeling that I owe something to the facts of my experience. Even if I was writing biographies of other people, I'd have to use the facts of my own experience to imagine my way into their lives. Of course, what is fact is always a bit tricky, particularly when it comes to writing from memory when we know memory is often more than a little unreliable. I think every writer has experienced that moment where you show something to a parent or friend or sibling and their immediate response is "that's not what happened" or "that's not how that happened."
Ciaran Berry
I think it's the way he uses metaphor, not so much as a statement of equivalence as in A = B or my love is like a red, red rose, but as a means to explore an equivalence. So, for example, that description of the mind as "a place continually/Visited, a whole city placed behind/The eyes, & shining" which he then develops for several lines. Often these elaborate metaphors feel like digressions, but they're digressions that enhance our sense of what's come before in the poem and also of what comes after.
Ciaran Berry
I think the digressions in Levis are really meaningful. As Robert Frost says somewhere, "all thought is a feat of association," and the way in which a poet's mind moves from subject to subject, how they braid different images and thoughts together is one of the things that really excites me about poetry. And it's something Levis does in very distinctive ways. So, no, I'd say definitely don't disregard the tangents. The detours are one of the pleasures of the journey once you figure out how to negotiate them. As for whether I prefer his poems or his essays, I'd say the poems. He was a poet who wrote the occasional essay, as many poets do, and also the occasional short story. I like too though the essayistic tendencies of his poems, how they meditate and reflect as they evoke, how his poems move around in time.
Ciaran Berry
I wouldn't say that landscape is his singular muse, no, though certainly the poems we looked at focused on landscape. Elsewhere, he's written about everything from Josef Koudelka photographs of the Roma people to Walt Whitman to video arcades and jazz clubs, to love, sex, fatherhood, and divorce. Another near-contemporary American poet, A.R. Ammons, was once asked why he became a nature poet and his answer was something like, "because the window in my office faces the backyard." So I think the subject matter is often a happy accident as much as a choice, and a means towards something beyond itself
Ciaran Berry
I'm assuming from Professor Rosen that you mean "Winter Stars" and "Electrocuting an Elephant"? I think probably, a bit like any genre of music we start out listening to ( jazz, classical, pop, rock, rap), a lot of poems probably sound very similar when we first approach them, but less so the more familiar we get with them. There are certainly things I've learned from Levis, he was and still is one of my favorite poets, but I couldn't write like he does even though I've tried to carry some elements of his style into my own. He's just too much himself, and he's lived a different life and read different books.
Ciaran Berry
I'm very concerned about being factual if it's something like, say, the biology of an octopus or the colors worn by a jockey in a horse race that happened twenty years ago. So I'll work very carefully to honor the facts in those cases where the facts are generally known, or researchable. But I might move things around in my own memory. For example, in the elephant poem the boy trying to remember the names of birds was someone I encountered at a different school to the one that's name checked in the poem. But there wasn't room to talk about this fact in the poem and it doesn't seem that important. So small things like that, I might change. Or I might invent a memory of someone else in a situation where I can't have been there. I have a poem where I imagine my mother's birth, for example, which I couldn't of course have been present for. But in a case like that it's apparent the memory is an invention, a reader would know that straight off
Ciaran Berry
Levis was interested in upending time in his poems. In an interview with Michael White, talking about the poems in Winter Stars and his subsequent book, The Widening Spell of Leaves, he says "there's nothing very new... in the obsession with destroying or confusing or annoying Time in a poem. We're still sitting in the glacial shadow of Modernism, a period in which Eliot and Faulkner pummeled Time into whirling dust specks. And it's hard to escape the Time in which one is born, and the ideas that occur inevitably because of that. When Mandelstam cries out "My Age, my Beast!" doesn't he mean that he can do little but cling to the fur of it as it passes through his world, that he has no alternative? But who does?" Certainly, he's mostly a poet of memory, and interested always in what persists and what falls away, and also how what persists is often distorted in our less than total recall of it. And his sense of time is often non-linear, often triggered by his associative response to the present, which frequently takes him back to somewhere in the past.
Ciaran Berry
I think it's the poet, Denise Levertov, who describes the line break as a 'half-comma,' so a little pause that's about half the size and carries half the weight of the punctuation mark. Often Levis's line breaks are designed with semantic intent, with the words at the ends of the lines carrying a little bit more of the narrative. So, for example, if we look at the first three end words of "Winter Stars" we see 'hand,' 'man,' and 'father,' which together give us a strong sense of what Levis is concerned with for the rest of the poem. Similarly, if you look at the first three end words of John Milton's "Paradise Lost" they're 'fruit,' 'taste,' and 'woe,' which signposts very well where the poem is about to go. Obviously, Levis is thinking more about his poems being encountered on the page visually though rather than heard at a reading, since he's relying on the reader being able to see the line breaks, and on that pause on the end words as the reader's eyes travel back from the end of one line to the start of the next.
Ciaran berry
'm not the only reader to make this argument, but we can suggest that her poems are so intertwined with her 'reclusive lifestyle and limited exposure to the world outside her home' that we would be hardpressed to separate her creativity from her existential condition. That is, she produced the volume of poetry as a direct product of her reclusiveness; her themes of enclosure, of visions of the universe expanding out from a window or a room or a garden to encompass the cosmos, her intense digging into the firmament of her own consciousness to explore complicated emotional states - all required her private seclusion. Consequently, we only feel like we have biographical access to her through the poems, written, as they were, on everything from scrap bits of paper to the backs of envelopes. Her use of the lyrical I in her poems invites us to think alongside her as an assumed guide to her perspective on life. I think one of the most impressive feats in her poetic canon is that she could translate so much rich and yet limited experience into such enduring and crystallized documents.
Dan Mrozowski
I don't think anyone has a satisfactory answer for the Capitals & the Dashes in her work. She left no record of her choices, outside of the multiple revised versions of poems we've saved, and she offered no blueprint for her aesthetics, except for a few oblique comments she makes in a few letters. When one reads the handwritten copies, the Capitals & the Dashes become material flourishes that seem to emphasize certain words and phrases; they become engines of energy and verve; they move the eye across the page in ways that speed up or slow down our vision, allowing us to linger over certain points. I share with the critic Sharon Cameron the idea that these points of style mimic or reveal the flow of thought; they represent a consciousness trying to reach beyond stubborn signification towards a more angular and elusive sense of meaning as a function of time and space. I can assuredly say that when her poetry was first published in the 1890s and early 20th century and her first editors erased these Capitals & Dashes and other forms of idiosyncratic style, Dickinson's poetry appeared less vibrant and more inert. I also like to think of them as an inevitable point of personal style that couldn't help but come out; they are deeply meaningful not because they represent some larger key or code in her work, but because they are personal gestures that identify her the same way someone's accent pins them to a particular region.
Dan Mrozowski
I love this question! Few poets invite speculation quite like Emily Dickinson. And though we have a few definitive answers from the poet herself on publication (as a betrayal, as an auction of the mind, as a slow kind of poison), I believe her letters to friends and family often hint that she recognized the extent of her achievement in poetry, to the point that I like to imagine she understood that public taste would eventually catch up to her. I also think she understood, in a fundamental way, that her poetry as she inscribed it - with its looping syntax, off and slant rhymes, elliptical structures, obscured emotions, heretical sentiments, caustic witticisms - could not be published in 19th century venues in a way that would retain her own idiosyncratic and meaningful style. And she deliberately saved her work; she carefully recopied her poems; she precisely sent certain ones to friends and admirers; and she cultivated a private reputation in her circle as an eccentric genius. I think any moral quandary over reading and publishing her poetry today can be answered quite neatly by these points. American poetry would be a far different and perhaps lesser beast without the wide readership of Emily Dickinson - and her example of a kind of thorny, complicated female creativity.
Dan Mrozowski
The question of quality is such a vexed one in a poet's career, and I think we can sometimes learn as much from a poet's missteps as we can from her masterpieces. I'm not convinced publishing can be a sieve for quality though - lots of terrible poetry gets published every year. That said, the lack of an editorial eye on most of her poetry, other than her own powerful vision, suggests to me that many of her poems come to us without a level of revision and polish that is perhaps only possible when we allow other people into our creative processes. But Dickinson has more hits than misses in a poetic career that spans nearly 1800 poems (that we know of), and so she's got a pretty great batting average. Her fallow periods are no worse than some of the other great poets of her generation - I would stack her misses against the worst of Walt Whitman, for example, any day of the week, and he was a profoundly public poet who could not stop publishing.
Dan Mrozowski
This is an interesting problem in studying Dickinson, in part because her isolation was self-imposed, permeable, and likely over-stated as part of the myths surrounding her. She certainly didn't travel, and she wasn't social, but she had profound ties to her family and kept up a voluminous correspondence with friends, and as both her father and her brother were prominent lawyers in Massachusetts, their collective homes hosted many people over the course of Emily's life. But do I think her isolation created the conditions for great poetry? I do. She was freed from the kind of menial domestic tasks and social expectations that dogged middle-class women of the 19th century; this freedom allowed her to pursue her art with a passion and a focus that she likely could not have held if she had domestic responsibilities to a husband and children. She lived a circumscribed yet self-determined life, and this freedom through seclusion is one of the delicious frictions of her story.
Dan Mrozowski
Good question! Personal experience is what makes each person unique. To deny the impact of a personal experience on oneself is to deny something that adds to one's individuality and individual value. I cannot say what someone should or should not do but I can say that my own personal experiences are very much part of my identity. I would add that culture shapes identity (and the opposite can be true, too, I suspect). People in society likes putting folks in boxes but that does not mean one has to stay there or own the label(s). Your question reminds me of the quotation I used as an epigraph in my Trinity College application for undergrad admission in 2001: "To be Black and an intellectual in America is to live in a box. On the box is a label, not of my own choosing" (Stephen L. Carter, William Nelson Cromwell Professor, Yale Law School).
David Brown
I appreciate the follow-up question, Chappy. I'm less interested in comparing genre utility than I am in thinking about the respective value of both genres and what they can do for their audiences. The goals of the two genres are very different, despite their commonalities. Autobiographers tend to write from a place of reflection, of retrospect, of examining how they got to a place in their lives by way of experience so that readers can learn from their life processes. I did some quick digging and it looks like autofiction writers primarily write from the positionality of someone who is in "search for self." Either genre can be effective in terms of utility. I suspect it depends on what a writer needs and, of course, what an audience needs/wants.
David Brown
I don't want to speculate and would prefer to leave the real answer to Boylan herself. What I will say is that acceptance of the true self seems to be what Boylan was after. Boylan needed to feel in alignment with herself; and this is true for many people, regardless of what decade they are born in. People have been challenging social norms for centuries, even in Shakespeare's time! You might find Boylan's TEDxMET talk interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0h7LFvlVwk
David Brown
I'd like to think Boylan presented the figures in her memoir the way she saw them, particularly given that this is a non-fiction work. I like your question because it makes me wonder if everyone stereotypes or? Or if there are people who take the time to unlearn that unreliable, harmful behavior? Every reader does not experience the Speed Racer moment the same way; thus, it seems to me that Boylan stresses there how people have the capacity to stereotype others. In other words, people often stereotype other folks (consciously or perhaps unconsciously), but no one inherently embodies stereotypes, which are myths about groups of people and collective identity. What Boylan shows us in the scene with Speed Racer, then, is the dangers of stereotyping, how people are, in fact, nuanced beings with individual identities. People subvert stereotypes all the time because stereotypes are not rooted in facts about who we are. This is true in my favorite Shakespeare tragedy, Titus Andronicus, in which a Black African character's behavior is crafted in a way that makes him subscribe to certain Black male stereotypes for much of the play. However, late in the play there is a break in his seemingly consistent behavior that disrupts the notion that he, Aaron, is the one-dimensional figure Shakespeare initially sets him up as.
David Brown
Toxic masculinity is, in many ways, connected to stereotypes about male behavior—how men and boys should act based on socially prescribed norms and values—strong, violent, stoic, aggressive, etc. I believe "toxic masculinity," much like "intersectionality," is a term that can sometimes get overused...or improperly used. Toxic masculinity, for those whose behavior adheres to this concept, restricts male behavior. Certain people believe there are atittudes and behaviors men should and should not have/do such as get their nails painted, for example (something I do occasionally!). I'm unsure what you are getting at with the "scapegoat" inquiry and would need to clarification there. However, your question makes me think about how sometimes people attribute the behavior of men who commit sexual assault to toxic masculinity. To that I would say "not always" or "yes and," as it depends on the circumstances.
David Brown
I don't know. What do you think? My guess is that Amy Hempel, who is a true sentence-head, would say that she doesn't compose with any "symbolism" in mind but operates on the level of the line and is most compelled by the way language suggests other language (and, in fact, that if one went looking for meaning, you might have more luck dialing in on the sound of her sentences—how they coil and unwind, pepper and pop). But if I were to dig into "The Harvest" for imagery, I'd split the story in two (right where she pulls the rug on her own work) and lay them on top of one another, and just note the patterns and recurrence - we've got sharks, blood, non-recovery, a high body count, the humor of detachment, and the line that must, must somehow be important, given the story's title ("Aren't we all, I thought, someone's harvest"?). I am not sure I would say that Hempel might have less to say about the difficulty of getting over something and more to say about dramatizing a moment when she began to realize that it is simply difficult to make it through life, period, and that no one really does so intact ("The year I began to say vahz instead of vase..."). It's a story about coming into a certain knowledge about what her experience of the world will be like, I think, and perhaps there is no "letting go" there is only "getting through." That said: it's a funny story, if you squint and hold it up to the light, and there is pleasure in the humor of these carving sentences. It's not all doom and gloom. And anyway, here's something to notice - there is clearly a difference between the "story" and the "truth" as she is presenting them. You can trace this on the sentence level (the language is more coiled in the first section, compressed; it's much more relaxed in the second section - you can see it in the paragraphs alone) or simply by mapping how many relationships are in circulation. In the "story" no one is connecting - one gets the sense of a certain solitude, the relationships transactional, denuded; no coincidences; it feels a bit like an isolation chamber of the self ("this is the condition of being alive, etc."). The "truth" section is full of other people, a whole newsroom, a capable doctor, some compensation for her accident, a view of a mountain, and, most strangely and wonderfully, the reader ("I'm going to tell you ..."). Why do this? And how do you know that the "truth" she is telling us is really "the truth"? But we can't ignore the difference.
Ethan Rutherford
Thanks for this question, and I feel like there are many different avenues this answer could go down. But to keep from blowing your house down with a bunch of long-wind, I would say that for me, writing is an act of discovery. I'm looking for something, but I'm never sure what. Here's Joan Didion: "You know how doctors work with children to get the children to tell stories? And they figure out from the stories what's frightening the child, what's worrying the child, what the child thinks? Well, a novel is just a story. You work things out in the stories you tell." I don't think of the self as vague. I think of the self as "unseen until tested." It seems to me that the "self" is simply you plus experience plus time. It's iterative. It's moment-moment-moment. The self is accretion, accumulation. You are your experience in this world. But you were not born this way, and you don't know who you really are until you are put to the test. And for me, writing is like putting myself to the test. I dive down into the cave of possibility, ask myself: what if? And what would one do in this situation? And then say: how would I tell this? I'm working things out in the stories I tell because I want to understand, better, what it is, and what it has been, and what it might be, like to live in the world (memory, observation, imagination). And in that way, each story, even though made up, becomes an experience I have, in fact, had.
Ethan Rutherford
Well, this is a difficult one! It might take an entire semester to answer this, in fact. But to take a quick stab at it now, I would say that, for me, as a reader, I care deeply for books that work very hard on the level of language (in other words: some thought has gone into creating an aesthetic experience) to help me see a little more clearly how someone who is not me has experienced the world, and perhaps made an attempt at answering the question: what is it that makes life worth living? I like being included in this experience. I like the feeling of thinking with a book. Thinking about these things together, with an author, living or dead. Which brings me to the second part of your question. And yes, I do like feeling connected to what I'm reading - and by that I mean I like feeling engaged, included, with what I'm helping, as the reader, to build (don't forget that in reading you, yourself, with some prompting of course, are actively imagining the world and business of the book in your hands). I don't like being talked at. I like being shown. I, like Hempel, am happy enough with "interesting language and genuine feeling." As for how one goes about writing this, well, it's not easy, I don't think. But one thing to always remember, as you start your own book, is that you aren't only writing for yourself, you are writing to be read. And you need to take the time to create an aesthetic experience for your reader, and you need to understand that you aren't simply putting words on the page, you are inviting someone to imagine with you (this is the "connect" part, I suppose). Words call up pictures. You are asking someone to imagine the world as you see it. And here is Amy Hempel, on what she so admires about the painter Degas: "He didn't paint what he saw, but painted what enabled another to see what he saw." If you keep that in mind - that by suggestion, and careful brush-or-key stroke, compression and elision, you might be able to generate, on purpose, an entire world and emotional response in a stranger—you will write a better book than if you simply say down with the attitude of: I have something to say and you better listen. A book is not an explanation. It is an experience.
Ethan Rutherford
Hmm. I'm going to say something I haven't articulated before, so I'm not sure I believe it yet. But I think I would define a "nature poem" on the basis of how deeply it observes and engages with the physical world, and not on the basis of the particular contents of that physical world. So a nature poem doesn't have to have the streams and waterfalls and trees and hermits we identified in "Tintern Abbey." But it does have to feature a profound interest in those things. I think of the moment where Wordsworth (perhaps a bit performatively) says "hedgerows, hardly hedgerows," as if he is in that moment observing them and re-observing them and correcting his observation of them. As if he's like "aaaaaactually, they're hardly hedgerows, come to think of it," because precise observation is important to him in that poem. Now that I think of it, I want to be more specific than "physical world." Because I don't think a poem about the physical world indoors can be a nature poem. So we have to be outside. Outside + deep observation and engagement with the physical world = nature poem.
Kate Bergren
I don't know about rebellion in "Work," but I certainly think alienation - as in that quotation that caught your eye. We didn't talk about this in class, but I think it's significant that he naturalizes his employer's breasts when he does finally describe them: "I won't look / At the insinuation of buds / Tipped with cinnabar." So he's not looking, but he's describing (that's interesting, how does that work). And he presents his employer's body as a tree, something with "buds," something the color of "cinnabar." And we know from the poem's refrain that this body is off limits - more than off limits. "Taboo, law, creed," all conspire to keep black men away from white women's bodies. By a sort of transitive property, I think the speaker suggests that nature is off limits to him by naturalizing his employer's body in this way - just as she is something he won't look at and won't engage with, so is nature. This dynamic adds a layer of resentment and alienation to what otherwise might be a more standard georgic poem.
Kate Bergren
Oh yes. In general, when analyzing literature, there are things that are up for grabs - things that can be interpreted in multiple compelling ways - and things that are not up for grabs - things that have a factual basis. And then in the category of "things up for grabs," there are countless incorrect ways to interpret them!
Kate Bergren
This is such a big question, and I don't think I can answer it compellingly here. So I'll just say that I see many assumptions and aesthetic preferences today that I would trace to the Romantic era. Things like "literature is valuable as an art form because it reveals the innerworkings of consciousness and human thought" and "Self-knowledge happens most readily in solitude" and "nature is the opposite of culture, and is by definition a place untouched by human influence."
Kate Bergren
Yeah. Lord Byron is probably the main example here. He's an odd duck in the world of famous Romantic poets, because even though he was by far the most famous and popular Romantic poet, he doesn't really fit the stereotype of "Romantic poet" - he wrote mostly long, narrative, satirical poems that I personally find kind of boring so I don't have much to say about them. But religion and spirituality don't play a big role in his poems. In contrast, someone like Percy Shelley sort of fits your bill, because he was an atheist (and very vocal about it). But in typical Romantic poet form, he transfers some of those god-like qualities to secular forces like "inspiration." So he falls into that modern category of "spiritual but not religious."
Kate Bergren
Deep question - and after teaching your class the other night, I came up with the following challenge question you could try and answer yourself. The "French" (= deep, philosophical, out there) interpretation of one detail of what Nick called Hitchcock's sloppiness (the improbable ellipsis between Scottie hanging in the prologue and his sitting in Midge's apartment) is that THE ENTIRE FILM is his past life flashing before his eyes as he hangs from the eavestrough before falling to certain death (meaning the hellish nightmare-daydream is going to continue spiraling past the end of the film - Judy falling to her death - and he'll be in that hell for eternity). If this reading is valid (and I suspect it is) then Midge and Scottie himself are the only real characters in the entire film - and Scottie's prior relationship with Midge (who called off their engagement) becomes relevant to her subplot (trying to help him figure out Madelaine mystery, then frustrated when he shuts her out). Re-watch this shot from the opening scene in her apartment below and then explain the backstory of their relationship and you'll arrive at the "Super-French" interpretation that critics have been seeking for 60 years in vain.
Prakash Younger
From the 1930's forward World Cinema was influenced by every film Hitchcock made and there have been numerous re-makes of Vertigo specifically (Suzhou River, PRC, 2000 is one). I'm not aware of any new or better versions of suspense, though recent films continue to copy him - The Woman in the Window 2021- and also copy the "big twist" formula (the entire film is a dream) that Vertigo pioneered (Mulholland Drive) and which M. Night Shymalan became famous for re-booting with THE SIXTH SENSE.
Prakash Younger
Scottie is in a catatonic severely-depressed state at the trial due to Madalene's death and his inability to save her. Elster could have confessed everything and he would not have got it. But once the makeover is complete and his "sanity" is restored - all it takes is a glimpse of the necklace - he figures the whole thing out.
Prakash Younger
The censor's cut ending where we learn that Elster got killed over the radio = tacked on to show the bad guy get punished - absolutely meaningless in terms of the rest of the film.
Prakash Younger
The initial failure of Vertigo has to do with the expectations of the audience - who viewed Hitchcock as an entertainer who put a lot of comedy in his films as well as suspense - with Vertigo Hitchcock got very serious / explored some very dark themes = not what they were ready for.
Prakash Younger
The viewers knowledge of the film is that of Clarice's, but we also know that Hannibal Lector knows far more about Buffalo Bill, and throughout the entire film there is this feeling of suspense, similar to that of Vertigo. My question is if you are aware that the film makers of Silence of the Lambs directly utilized this, Hitchcock Formula for suspense, and if not if you would suspect that it is probable they took insipiration from Hitchcock or not. Like all ambitious filmmakers who use suspense, Jonathan Demme learned a lot from Hitchcock = developed the idea of a volatile relationship between protagonist and villain.
Prakash Younger
Great question(s)! And let me begin by saying that, in teaching BMK, I often revert to humor (whether successfully or not is up for debate!) in order to engage students with MK, whom they find alienating or inaccessible. I do so in the hope that I don't trivialize her and her experiences, but that I forefront what is for us the strangeness of her experience. So I encourage students to engage directly what they might find funny in this text, so we can get that kind of out of the way, and then engage the text on its own terms, insofar as we can ever begin to hope to do so. In terms of Chapter 11: Despite the fact that they had just come from the York plays and the humor therein, as we enter Chapter 11, I don't think John's statement is meant to be humorous. We need to engage why we think it's humorous almost as a palate cleanser so we as a contemporary audience can appreciate what's at stake in this chapter. And everything is at stake for both of their futures - and, as medieval people, not only in this world but in the everlasting afterlife. This is one of the most tightly and literarily constructed chapters in the whole book, and either the scribe shaped carefully what he heard, or MK had thought long about it as she packaged it for him many years after the event. This is her/their crossroads at the cross at Midsummer Night. When I wrote this up as a chapter of my novel-in-progress on Julian of Norwich and MK, I wrote it from John's perspective. And doing so made me see how he really was sorting through this issue, which he had been mulling for some months, about how to deal with his wife's desire for a life devoted not to him and their family, but to God, which would have been a viable though very problematic choice in his world. And his question and response are the litmus test. When he says she's not a good wife, he means it, and needs to process it. But it's an articulation that's a revelation to him that brings the transformation of their lives and loves. But there are, I think, moments of intentional humor in the text, some of which you didn't read in the excerpt, and some of which you did. Those moments come generally at points where pride needs to be deflated through irony, humor, parable, etc. As you suggest, yes, indeed, the Middle Ages loved humor. Chaucer loved fart jokes and knew how audiences loved them, too, and how they played on the issue of inflation/deflation that can be a core dynamic of humor: what is the root of "flatulence," after all? So intentional humor in BMK, I think, comes when pride needs deflating. We can see this tendency in the excerpts you read for class when MK describes her pride in her own very fashionable dress at the same time that she's pursuing various business ventures that fail. Those failures are meant to have the whiff of humor about them because she's making, in her world, a spectacle of herself. That head of beer that won't rise and spells the end of her career as a brewster is quite an articulation of such a self-ironizing act of "deflation." Another example, which you didn't read, is from Chapter 52, when MK is in the midst of the series of heresy trials she encounters when she returns from her pilgrimages. It's here we hear MK at her most assertive as she speaks truth to considerable ecclesiastical power. Her voice is brave and, though she's scared shitless she'll be burned at the stake like a lot of other East Anglian Lollards, she still speaks strong. And she offers up a parable of a bear who gets to the fruits of a pear tree before the priest who covets the pears does. And then the bear defecates all over the priest. It's a funny story, and, I think, it's meant to be because it deflates priestly pride and acquisitiveness. BTW, This is the next chapter of the last two I have to write for the novel, and I can't wait to get at it. And, yes, there will be humor here. Hope this helps, and please don't hesitate to be in touch with follow-up questions.
Sheila Fisher
I think that the answer is "both," as becomes increasingly clear in the text. Whether you believe that "Kempe" authored the text (Staley essay) or whether you believe the scribe had a significant intervention in its shape and form, what is clear is that the voice of the text wants its audience to be aware of God's power (and especially Christ's power) in transforming human lives, providing love, support, and sustenance, and meting out justice. But she also, as an unconventional voice of religious authority (a wife and mother of 14), needs to justify and authorize herself both to protect herself and make herself a viable and reliable voice to express God's will. According to the proem and later passages of the text, God commanded her to write about her experiences, and God had this twofold "agenda" in mind. Hope this helps, and please don't hesitate if you'd like to end a follow-up.
Sheila Fisher
Absolutely! Rhetoric is definitely tied to the study of law and law-making. Some rhetoricians study how laws are crafted (special focus on writing of laws—see Writing Public Policy: A Practical Guide to Communicating in the Policy Making Process 5th Edition by Catherine F. Smith), some focus on the ethics of laws and how rhetoric shapes a sense of appropriateness of a law (or not). Rhetoricians definitely analyze how legal cases are presented, how meaning-making occurs, how persuasion occurs in court cases (both in times of old and in our current moment).
Tennyson O'Donnell
Definitions of rhetoric are vast and expansive because the term harkens back to the days of ancient Greece and is often bound by context—that means a lot of time and space over the years for contexts (and therefor definitions) of what rhetoric is to shift and change and evolve. Rhetoric started as a way to understand oration (in a narrow political sphere), and then moved to include the written word, and then to include visual. As the contexts of persuasion emerged and grew, so did the definitions that attempted to define what rhetoric is within that context (i.e. digital rhetoric and visual rhetoric—for contexts that their names suggest; as opposed to rhetorical communication, which is more about oration loosely speaking). Think of definitions like empty rhetoric, political rhetoric, or rhetorical question. These definitions all involve some form of definition in use/context to create understanding or meaning of the term rhetoric.
Tennyson O'Donnell
Great connection! Absolutely lots of overlap between rhetorical analysis and semiotics. Semiotics focuses more on nonlinguistic, visual elements of meaning-making. Rhetoric encompasses both linguistic/nonlinguistic, visual, spoken, and alphabetic literacy. Much of what I teach as a rhetorician has to do with signs that signify in a symbol system. The differences have more to do with founding thinkers/scholarship than approach (ie my field harkens back to Aristotle and semiotics is attributed to Ferdinand de Saussure.
Tennyson O'Donnell
I would say that utilizing rhetoric to study texts is universal. "Rhetorical Pedagogy" by William A. Covino - "[A] rhetorical pedagogy consists in encouraging writing that is not restricted to self-expression of the acontextual generation of syntactic structures of the formulaic obedience to rules, but instead keep in view the skills and contingencies that attend a variety of situations and circumstances" (37). Proponents include Edward P.J. Corbett, W. Ross Winterowd, James J. Murphy, and Winifred Bryn Horner (37). More recently this approach has been adapted to address feminist and cultural studies concerns by extending the parameters of traditional rhetorical pedagogy beyond the white, wealthy male assumptions of its roots to include the perspectives of women and minorities. Further, a 2004 edited collection by Charles Bazerman and Paul Prior titled What Writing Does and How It Does it: An Introduction to Analyzing Texts and Textual Practices (2004 Erlbaum) offers an introduction into the educational benefits of reading and writing with rhetorical analysis at the center of such an endeavor. Despite titles like these and many more, it seems the ongoing onus remains intact to teach students rhetorical analysis. Rhetoricians are interested in the production, distribution and reception of texts. Ultimate relativism never prevails; the analysis is relative to interpretive communities, socially sanctioned ideas of appropriateness and the historical moment. This analytical approach seems universal to me (when talking about other majors—it's essentially an epistemological question: how do I know what I know and why?).
Tennyson O'Donnell
I'm not quite sure I understand your question, but I think you are asking about determining the degree and spectrum to consider when examining features that are not there? The responsibility is that of the analyzer to determine and explain how something that is not there is significant. Reading widely, understanding the various expectations of audiences associated with the topic is a good starting place to consider who something that is not there would be critical to understanding how the features function
Tennyson O'Donnell
Let me answer this question by re-employing some of the examples I gave in class. I understand rhetoric through a functional and democratic definition. That is, rhetoric is not only what it says, but what it does. In other words, everything participates in a sign and signified context, an always already relationship to reality. Rhetoric is purposeful, yet not wholly deterministic (undecided, undetermined??). Rhetoric affords the greatest sense of democratic participation through an understanding of the social construction of knowledge. In a less fanciful definition, rhetoric is not only what it says, but what it does and we use rhetorical analysis daily to make sense between the mundane and the magnificent. For example, when we walk into a classroom that is in rows with a rostrum at the center of the room, we do two things: summarize (what it says) and analyze (what it does). We summarize that the chairs are in neat rows facing the podium. We make note of the size of the room, the state of the paint, the age of the furniture, the windows or lack there of, and the list goes on and on. We also review the information for what does. We analyze the power relationship between the students and the teacher by the arrangement of the chairs. We know that the straight rows typify a current-traditional style educational setting; students sit silently, while the teacher cracks their cranium and imparts wisdom and knowledge. How do we know this? We have observed other rooms. In academic nomenclature, we read widely. Maybe another classroom is situated with the desks in a semicircle with the podium at the front, and still another with the chairs in a circle and the teacher sitting in a random spot (not at an identifiable "head" of the circle). These two models suggest different power relationships from the first model. A rhetorical analysis of the chairs in semicircle recognizes a greater opportunity for discussion and sharing of meaning making. A rhetorical analysis of chairs in a circle recognizes how strides have been made to camouflage the authority of the teacher and promote a discourse of community. The power relationship in each of these classrooms is instantaneously read as we enter the room. "Eighteenth century astronomer Maria Mitchell is quoted as saying, 'we have a hunger of the mind which asks for knowledge of all around us, and the more we gain, the more is our desire; the more we see, the more we are capable of seeing." Human beings contain an innate desire to correctly perceive and categorize the differing perspectives of which their reality is defined. The inherent differences that lie in individual's levels of perspectives add to the beauty of a multifaceted reality. These levels are subjective, mutable, and finite, and in order to enhance their ability of accurately discerning between perspectives, people must, in the words of Maria Mitchell, "ask for knowledge." By obtaining as much information as possible surrounding their environment, individuals gain the ability to perceive their realities in a more circumspective light. Mitchel says, "Learning (to rhetorically analyze the world around us) opens the eyes of societies and thus allows them to more fully understand the perspectives of their reality, as well as themselves. As societies evolve, so do their perspectives. Advancements in technology have allowed people access to views of the vastness of other galaxies, as well as the minutia in which the human body functions. People no longer have to solely rely on their eyes to perceive the world around them; unfortunately, with advanced methods of perception, comes the daunting tasks of evaluating and qualifying the myriad of subjective perspectives to how a person should view his or her world." One last word/thought on this: we live in an age where knowledge is part of an information cycle that creates as it repeats. As we access information on the web, in databases, at the library, on television, in advertisements, through social media, and through primary research such as interviews and surveys, we need to investigate how sources serve as mediators of information. We do much more than record and report existing knowledge when we learn about a topic. Through the information cycle, meanings are made. We need to learn to assess sources critically and rhetorically. We need to learn to locate ourselves in the middle of complex and competing claims and advance our collective understanding of how the available information functions in a particular way, in a particular time, for a particular purpose. As we learn to do so, we can more fully and democratically, participate in ways that affect our day-to-day lives.
Tennyson O'Donnell
The eye of the rhetorician is trained to notice not only what something says, but what it does. When I teach general writing courses, or writing to English majors in upper division literature courses, or consider the emplication of literature or poetry, my goal is always the same: to teach students how to read primary and secondary sources like reading for the power relationship between the students and the teacher in the room (example from class); that sources not only says something, but do something. This kind of rhetorical analysis, I think, offers students the best opportunity to actually have something original to say. In the words of James Slevin, I want to teach students that "Academic culture is all about looking and looking for. It is about the hunt for a conclusion, not about conclusions; it's about the making of meaning, not the meaning" (62). There are an infinite number of ways to teach rhetorical analysis to students. What I have found useful is to slow down the process of summarizing and analyzing, before moving toward a thesis about how the sources function. Why, because as, Slevin says, "There is no evidence without a thesis; but, more important, there is no thesis that isn't constructed and made possible by the evidence and penetrated by the evidence" (61). IN other words, I would likely focus more on how we know the poetry (including methodological tools and secondary sources and personal experiences and educational training, rather than to make believe that we are a lone/singular/ interpreter of words without influence of social, cultural, historical and economical influences. For further examples, who hasn't read the poetry of Sylvia Plath or Edgar Allen Poe in terms of biographical information? Was Plath's father, husband or something else the blame for her mental and emotional anguish? Did Poe's darkness exude from his relationships with women or the death of his wife and mother? Or were his poor financial circumstances the source of his dark pain? When students are asked to write about literature and provide an original thesis we are asking a daunting task of them. What could they possibly have to add that has not been touched upon at some point before? In this heightened moment of stress, the dangerous pull of plagiarism becomes difficult for students to ward off. And then, just in time, rhetorical analysis swoops in to save the day. Students are extended a challenge they can actually successfully respond to. When students are taught that literary theories like mythic and archetypal criticism, deconstruction and postructuralism, ethnocriticism and multiculturalism, psychoanalytic criticism, Marxism and feminism to name just a few serve as the aperture through which literature comes into focus, they are given the critical reading-eye they need to write original claims. The can write about any author, any text, and any literary event and have something important to say! (I almost want to shout "hurray!" here).
Tennyson O'Donnell
This is an age old question! So you are showing a lot of intellectual strength by asking this question. The question is still being debated. Another way of asking the same question (isn't everything both expressive and persuasive?) is like asking "isn't everything an argument?" In short, rhetoricians believe that nothing is apolitical. So, to answer your question, that means everything is persuasive even when all one is trying to do is be informative, or communicating to report or express. Example: Pointing out that there is a gravel road in one village and an asphalt road in another village persuades that one village may be more affluent or more rural or more modern or more fast paced.
Tennyson O'Donnell
This is an age old question! So you are showing a lot of intellectual strength by asking this question. The question is still being debated. At the heart of the questions is this: is there an essential self that understands the self and the world around us that can be (more or less) free from outside influences? Or, is the self not so essential and instead a social construction that can never be free from the historical, social, cultural, and economic moments that we inhabit? The essential self debate is often inextricably linked to an idea called expressivism. Expressivism is often criticized across the political spectrum "as arhetroical, atheoretorical, antiintellectual and elitist, or, conversely, standardless, antitraditional, and relativistic" (20). Its critics include James Berlin and Lester Faigley. Christopher Burnham observes, "Berlin and other social rhetoricians view expressivism's primary flaw as a false and other-worldly epistemology of the self that privileges individualism and rejects the material world. Faigley argues that expressivism's romantic view of the self is philosophically and politically retrograde, making it ineffectual in postmodern times. Further, expressivism's concern with the individual and authentic voice directs students away from social and political problems in the material world" (28). Landmark Essays: On Voice and Writing (1994), edited by Peter Elbow, is an essay collection that responds to the atheoretical charge laid at the feet of expressivists with selections by Bakhtin, Walker Gibson, Walter Ong, bell hooks (student of Paulo Freire, and Faigley). The opposing approach is called socio-epistemic rhetoric which posits that whether or not there is an essential self cannot be known because we are not born blank slates and are born "alwaysalready" known in a certain way and come to know in a certain way because of the context we are born into.
Tennyson O'Donnell
You and Aristole, and Plato, and Socrates would definitely get along! Your question is their question. They were concerned with understanding their audience(s) and determining the best way(s) to reach those audience(s). Aristotle found that his audience was fairly limited (politicians) and that he could figure out the means of oral persuasion in a fairly straightforward way, and then determined that all oral persuasion followed the same pattern(s). However, as the sophists went out beyond Athens, they discovered that the same means of persuasion fell apart because the people had different socially and culturally accepted means of persuasion. Thus the idea was born that the art of persuasion was contextually bound and not universal. At least that this a very quick and horribly reductive version. So, in a nutshell, the strategies must be determined by understanding your audience.
Tennyson O'Donnell
