differences

So let's have one last go at this.

Differences.  It undeniably exists in some form or another, whether that be biologically or culturally.  I liked the way toolbox defined interpretation.  "Interpretation is best understood as a response, and certainly that response should be aware of the contexts-race, gender, and class position."  I really want to disagree with the second part, but I know that's not possible.  When we read stories, we usually have to consider the context, but I think the works that need the most grounding in context are those that were created in a time a turmoil for a specific purpose or as a response to a specific event.  For example, "Harry Potter" require significantly less context because J.K. Rowling has constructed the story from her imagination, which can't really isn't a context... Something like the Declaration of Independence or even Huckleberry Finn requires much more context because one deals with the Revolutionary times and the other with slavery and freedom.  We need background to understand these works to the fullest extent.
Having context contradicts the notion that there is "nothing outside the text."  Maybe it varies from piece to piece, but I tend to agree with Derrida more than toolbox.  Books like "To Kill a Mockingbird" and "Huckleberry Finn" are still culturally relevant or at least they still have impact.  They still resonate with people  today regardless of social situation.  People today don't own slaves or paddle down rivers, but they still read the books and understand them.

There's also the issue of essentialism.  Toolbox says that biology is a limitation.  I do believe in essentialism in the sense that we have a core and a set of characteristics that are given to us by what we call "biology."  I think biology IS culturally constructed but only up to a point.  Subjects such as literature have been more fluid as opposed to biology.  It's not a limitation in my eyes, just guidelines, like speed limits are guidelines.
From the time we are born as male or female, dark skin, tan skin, or light skin, we start to branch out.  We start to acquire our identity or mold it.  I do believe the starting line starts with biology, so in that sense, it's not a limitation but a beginning.   We change so much, especially physically, so how can that be a limitation?  I do think some people may follow the guidelines too rigidly.  In this sense, it can hold people back because that's all they've ever know, that's the only context they were given.  At the core of things, I don't think it matters or at least it shouldn't.  Then again differences like race, gender, and class have their merit.  They do create a little trouble and a lot of controversy, but we as humans are what we are today because of those differences.  A world without those conflicts is essentially predictable, routine, and lifeless.       

Time

I'd like to give a little attention to my old friend Time.  We've undoubtedly all been very acquainted with it.
Toolbox talks about how time for us is a social construct as well, and it is determined by our individual actions and circumstances.  The concept of time is difficult to grasp unless we go with what has already been determined like seconds and minutes.  Our perception of time is skewed and warped by the events in our everyday lives.  I think time in it's most "natural" sense though, in it's "organic" form is perhaps a bit more consistent.
While I believe in the cultural construction of time, I cannot abandon my organic perspective of it.  Humans have a naturally instinctive sense of time I believe, but there are factors that change it.  In my mathematics class in high school, we looked at a function that determined how as a person progresses with age, their sense of time shortens.  People of a certain age can more accurately perceive the sense of time in accordance to the set minutes and seconds.    I see the problem that "minutes" and "seconds" are a socially created, so in this sense time can't be completely organic.  Then, consider this: in my biology class in high school, I learned that we have this thing called a "circadian rhythm" that our bodies naturally adjust to.  It's almost like a cyclic 24 hour clock.  Plants and animals can sense the time of day and adjust physically to it.  Plants, like a sunflower can follow the passage of the sun throughout the day, "naturally."  When I say "naturally," it's more like a chemical reaction, but most things in life are chemical reactions of some sort.  We can't change when the sun or the moon moves.  We're too insignificant and powerless to change time as a whole, but in our own little niche, in our own little world, we have somehow managed to do so.  If we only look at "our world" though, I think that's too myopic.  Myopia is close sightedness.  It is zooming the camera in where we only focus on one thing, and it doesn't offer the whole picture.  

I think we as humans make time unnatural. It's not good or bad, just different from what it was.  It would be funny and ironic to think of time as something that changes when it changes things.    

Performative Language and ideology

This week's reading in Culler is about performative language. The basic concept is that the words are the acts themselves.  I've never really thought about making promises as a performative act of language or an act at all.  Usually, making promises were just words that described a future act. "I promise" usually precedes an act or action but, the phrase "I promise" can stand on its own, so it is an act.
The difference between constative and performative are not difficult to understand but more confusing to distinguish at times. From what I see, constative deals more with the past, and a declaration has already been stated.  Performative seems to be more in the present moment since it is the active manifestation of the word.  One of the problems Culler presents is that words aren't always the act themselves.  For example, promising something is an act, but weather or not a person keeps the promise is something else.  Perhaps it becomes constative then when the act of promising is over and the outcome of the promise comes to light. 

Ideology is "the making natural of cultural phenomena." I really liked this definition, and I believe it is one of the easiest ways to understand the different aspects of ideology.  Ideology is man made because like language, they don't exist in the natural world.
I think fairy tales are in general ideological. However, fairy tales may not be as pertinent to today's world. The common thought of today's young women is not to wait for their prince but to develop themselves.
Snow White, in that sense, is very ideological.  She is proficient with household chores and she is the archetypal damsel in distress, at least in the Disney version.  But even if fairy tales are ideological, I think they have something very valuable to offer.  It's tradition and a sort of moral understanding almost.  We learn things from fairy tales, weather they progress our culture or not.  Most people understand that fairy tales aren't an accurate depiction of real life, but that is the purpose of literature I think.  Literature gives us a way to construct an absurd situation that mirrors reality.  Conflicts can more easily be written than acted out, so bringing up problems on the page is less detrimental.  At least the conflict is brought to attention with minimal or not damage to the "real world." 
I don't quite understand ideology as "common sense."  I believe more in common knowledge than common sense.  Common sense connotes more that we all live in the same kind of environment.  I realize that there are natural laws of science that we can't ignore, but our social understanding is much different. I am not convinced that we can have a "common sense." The very dynamics of language makes it difficult for it to exist. "Common sense" is only a part of ideology. Ideology is partially just conjectures on how the world should be.  I think, we as humans, make those sort of guesses everyday.  We might be more ideological than we realize.  Stereotypes, archetypes, patterns, tradition, and culture are ideological in their own ways too.

link: addition to Snow White

I like how things we learn are so relevant to what goes on today and I found this little bit on Yahoo.  I thought "what a coincidence." 

There's a debate on multiculturalism.  There isn't really an equality of culture I think. Subcultures and counterculture are more a part of some people's lives than others.  As someone who passes between two cultures, I think its definitely possible to have part of both.  Being totally in one culture is impossible anyways because one culture influences another. 
Forcing the main culture on a person is wrong.  We give individuals, in this country anyways, the right to choose what to absorb.  Countercultures aren't bad things because I think they're a part of any culture.  Like before, everything is relative and we can't have one without the other. 


http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20101017/wl_afp/germanymuslimreligionimmigration    

Snow White and Her Stepmother

This week's reading was again really interesting.  I had never thought of the good mother and the witch as being metaphors for the two sides of motherhood.  It was also interesting that the books says the witch is the one that is most admirable and that Snow White is actually a very boring and static character, especially in the Disney version. Now that I think about it, she is a bit boring.  She's quite innocent, but in the original versions, she was very young, around 7-13 years of age. I was surprised at how young she was in all the versions.  No wonder she's boring.  She hasn't had enough time to develop, so who could blame her for being "boring."   I don't think older women would be that jealous of such a young girl (and a pre-teen at that), especially if she is also beautiful.  It felt like the stories were playing on the vanity of women; having them look in mirrors all the time and having them be jealous of such a young girl, which would play more into age then beauty.   In most of the stories, the queen/ witch doesn't become malicious towards snow white until the mirror tells her that she is not the fairest.  If the mirror or the husbands or the eachrais urlair hadn't introduced the problem in the first place, the queen wouldn't have hated Snow White so much. 

I find it amusing how many times Snow White can die and still come back alive. The authors really give the protagonists a chance to win, which is a little unfair for the villains who has to concoct a mater plan that will eventually be foiled anyways.  She seems to have a bit of magic all on her own.  She's a bit enchanted even without the aid of fairies and such.

Also, on a side note that I learned in another class.  The suffix "agonist" refers to someone participating in a struggle or a contest. So the antagonist and protagonist are struggling for the same thing essentially.  The antagonist is preventing the protagonist from reaching a goal, so in that sense, Snow White might be the Witch's antagonist.  But that wouldn't really work...  Snow White has to win because she's the "heroine."  A story where evil and vanity win against innocence doesn't really hold well. Although, I believe in equal opportunity, a more equal distribution of the enchantment would be nice.  The queen does have a her own magic though, but she doesn't have magic enough to bring her back to life. 
"The Young Slave" was one of the more violent ones, in my opinion.  The stepmother beat her and starved her, and she also threatened to kill herself, which any 7 year old girl who woke up from a coffin shouldn't want.  "Lasair Gheug" was the most violent one, though, and very strange.  The ending was a bit shocking and a little too sudden.  She ends up with very little and she doesn't seem to care.  However she's still very young, so it might not matter.  She wouldn't know what she lost. 
Anne Sexton's version is much more circular.  It links or foreshadows that Snow White could become her stepmother.  Although, I didn't like the poem version.  It seemed sparse and rushed.  The narrative versions give a much better picture and allow for more character development.   
The apple, according to Dan Brown, represents the original sin of Eve. She was curious and ate the apple and she paid for it.  The apple could also allude to Greek mythology where Juno, Aphrodite, and Athena ( the goddesses of marriage, love, and wisdom) compete for one golden apple.  I just wanted to tie this random piece of information into the blog.   
 

Lyric and self vs. subject

This week's reading was quite insightful.  Culler presented how poetry and lyric achieve its effect as literature and how it evokes emotion and meaning.  Poetry is elegant and it usually achieves the effect of a whole novel in a few lines, usually.  When reading poetry, I find the first few times to be extremely difficult because of the uniqueness in language and the many devices it uses. Poetry has a certain brevity and diction about it.  Novels and short stories have to build more of the setting and the mood, while poetry does it in  one or two words.  I think it focuses on the details that matter rather than elaborating, and the overly dramatic language it uses it times makes up for not elaborating.  It's a trade off between the length of the piece and the weight of one image.  Poetry can do amazing things if we can understand to read them right. I've known many poems that made me stop and rethink things.  Literature isn't very clear any ways.  It's definition is ambiguous.  I think what make poetry is also ambiguous because there are new genres like prose poetry that incorporate elements of both poetry and narrative.  Sometimes, it's really hard to tell which genre it belongs to.  Personification and apostrophe isn't exclusive to poetry nor are any of the other devices.  There's this fluidity to all the genres so I guess we could interpret many things as poetry.  I think what sets poetry apart, though is that it can very closely imitate human emotion: the paradoxes and the periodic rhythm and even the unclear expression or statement.
It's difficult to read poetry objectively since most poetry comes from experience.  Someone who forgot everything they ever knew couldn't possibly read poetry. Memory serves as that background for subjectivity, for opinions.   Reading and dissecting the words will only get the reader so far, so that's where the subjective comes into play.

Reading, any form of reading involves subjectivity.  The toolbox distinguishes the "self" and the "subject."   It reminds me of the scientific form of "nature vs. nurture, " which argues basically the same thing only on a different plane.  We are a product of our surroundings, but we have somethings that come naturally to us.  As infants, we cry when we need something.  To learn language we mimic others, then we comprehend, and produce.  As we grow older, we continue to internalize our surroundings.  This is experience, and I think it could be possible to be unique in the sense that there are so many combination of experiences that it's difficult to have two the same.  I find it sad when I think that we aren't unique human beings, and I realize that our experiences aren't unique.  Other people experience happiness, poverty, or love.   Because we're all humans, there is a collective experience.  I guess it's not very possible to be that individual or even original. 
Anyways, the "subject" interests me very much.  It involves interpellation, which reminds me of when someone says "hey loser" or "hey stupid" in a crowd of people, and many of them will turn.  For whatever reason, people respond.  Maybe because they've done something stupid in their lives or don't feel like a winner.  I guess in a way, we have to accept things because changing context is near impossible.  We live, experience, and internalize it everyday.  It's impossible to avoid. 
The story about the gatekeeper reminded me of "Allegory to the Cave."  There are three doorkeepers of the law like the three branches of government who keeps the countryman or the citizen from the law.  He can't reach the law because of the doorkeepers, so he's a subject.  In the cave, three prisoners are chained to a wall, like the similar barrier of the gates.  One man ventures into the light and comes back and they kill him.  There's something the three gatekeepers and prisoners want to keep out of reach.  I think what both of these teach us is that the law is unavoidable.  We are somehow always prisoners of thoughts or a higher power, and we are taught to obey or be punished. 

Beaty and the Beast

This week's reading gave us an interesting insight to the nature of marriage, I think.  Beaumont's version of "Beauty and the Beast" is one that is most familiar to us.  It is the one that the Disney film is based off of.  I've never really sat down to read any of the fairy tales, but I know the general stories. Some of the details were a bit surprising upon close reading. 
It was briefly mentioned that Beauty being so perfect and beautiful was a bit ironic.  The story no doubt deals with excepting people for who they really are on the inside, despite outward appearances.  Beauty, however is both beautiful inside and outside.  I think if she was not beautiful in appearance, then it would be much more difficult.  The Beast and Beauty would both have to learn to accept inner beauty.  The arrangement of the story makes only Beauty learn this lesson.  One could argue, though, that Beast already knows this with his state of being and he would have fell in love with Beauty regardless.  There is another problem with Beauty being so perfect.  She then would embody everything a man would want in a woman: looks, kindness, and virtue.  She is still an ideal woman, which is not easy to find in any time period.  It is virtually impossible to as perfect as Beauty.  It perpetuates the idea that only perfect, kind and beautiful woman have happy endings.  This is little hope and comfort for woman who are forced to marry a "beastly" man.
A different problem is presented in "The Pig King."  The third daughter of the peasant lady, Meldina still wants to marry the Pig prince, even after he has killed her two sisters.  She sees marrying the prince as a great opportunity.  Regardless if the pig skin was symbolic or metaphorical.  The prince killed her sisters.  He's a murderer and the people around enabled him.  The girl was beautiful and she was desperate enough that she would overlook the murder of her two sisters.  This is quite violent and crude.  It's a messy, complicated portrait of marriage.  The bedroom scene could allude to the piggish nature of men who want sex.  In that case, the murder could also be representative of something like hurting someone else before you yourself is hurt.  It's the physical manifestation of that thought.  Meldina, then could be the "right one"  who accepts her husbands piggish nature and sees passed his brute behavior.  In a literal sense, the story is a bit too violent, but it is effective in delivering a message.
 The "Swan Maiden," I found was humorous.  My interpretation is that the swan is a beautiful creature inside and out, but if she's tricked into marrying someone, she will still fly away. 
"The Frog Prince" was a bit strange since the disenchantment happened after the beautiful but ungrateful princess threw the frog on the wall.  This story deviates quite a distance from "Beauty and the Beast."  The princess isn't that virtuous of a person, and she only does let the frog in to obey her father.  This story teaches more obedience then inner beauty I think.  The throwing the frog against the wall and the disenchantment is not as magical as the typical kiss, but a real relationship doesn't always start so magically nor does it have to to be successful.

This week's "The Theory Toolbox" and Culler present us with Saussure's theories about linguistics.  He makes the argument that words aren't natural things and that they only signify or represent things or the signifier.  His example using the chair reminded me of the way psychology classifies things.  One way is a classical model in which everything has to be true for it to be considered a chair or a bird.  Birds must fly,have wings, and be warm blooded.  In this model, penguins would not be a bird technically.  In the prototype model, it can have most of the characteristics, it can be considered a bird or a chair. Saussure points out that we could have called a chair anything and it still would serve the same function.
Saussure also states that language influences or even determines the thoughts of people.  It seemed a bit like circular reasoning almost.  Of course, we're going to think in the language we know.  But, looking at the different languages, it seems very true.  I heard that in Greek, there are five different words for love.  In Vietnamese, there's a distinction between grandmother and grandfather on the mother's side or the father's side as well as aunts and uncles.  They all have different names.  In Japanese, everyone uses honorifics and polite speech, which is a large part of the culture.  The speech only becomes informal when a person knows the other very well or it's considered rude.  Some words don't exist from one language to the other.  It's always hard to translate poems from one language to another.  They loose their meaning and even structure sometimes as with haikus.  Structure is important in that instance.
There was an explanation of the difference between metonymy and metaphor.  I enjoyed the Beavis and Butthead allusion.  It help in understanding.  Metonymy only replaces the word, but metaphor replaces it with more meaning.  I think this is crucial in writing to be able to use both.  Metaphor alone sometimes is too abstract for people to grasp, but metonymy alone is very dry and the meaning is spelled out, which is boring.  Cliches become too much like a metonymy if they're overused I think.  "I'll give you my heart, " is one example.  Everyone could easily identify that "heart" is a replacement for "love."  The Toolbox did say that metaphor had to start with metonymy but in this case, I think it stays stuck there.            

        

Cultural Studies and Deconstruction

Culler presents interesting ideas about cultural studies and literature.  He states that they almost oppose or conflict with each other.  I have always believed that literature and culture went hand in hand, and literature was the result of culture.  Culler presents the problem of "literary excellence" and the problems it presents.  We are only exposed to a minute, minuscule amount of works from certain time periods in our lives.  It is not logistically feasible to read every "great" work of every period, so the few that we do read represent a certain culture, for the most part.  The canon of literature is always changing, but I believe that our world has a complex, embedded pattern to it, reoccurring themes that will never die, no matter how much time changes things. From history, we can see that things repeat and human nature has relatively been untouched, not to say that context doesn't change things.  We are so rooted in archetypes that even culture has to draw from it.  Literature is a window into culture.  It isn't necessarily traditional or conventional , so I don't see how it could conflict with culture.
  Barry introduces the idea of a "decentralized universe." At first I thought he meant that there was no center to anything, but what I think he actually meant was that it is impossible to find because centers change, so there can't be a center.  Relativity is the only way to know where we are  I guess.  I think it's not as uncontrolled as he makes it out to be.  There is not center but there has to be an origin.  It's not like both relative points were generated on their own. I think ideas and notions are linked to more than just their paradox, so it's a really complicated idea to grasp...
Nietzsche's quote "there are no facts, only interpretation," actually made me question the validity of the statement.  Barry explains the anxiety of language and how it can be misinterpreted and how close reading attempts to erase that. "Facts"  are also and interpretation, I understand.  However, we call them facts because they are grounded.  They are predictable.  I think there are such things as facts because it has grown from being just an interpretation.  Facts are higher forms of interpretation, I think.
I found Derrida's "Grammatology" to reinforce things that I've learned.  "There is nothing outside the text," really resonated with me.  We cannot possible reconstruct intentions because we can only build from what is given to us, which is the text.  He mentions several times "the death of the author."  I have learned that an emotional severance from the author really allows the text to speak in it's own way.  "A Refusal to Mourn" is a great example of how the text can live on it's own, not to say that it spontaneously formed without an author.  By deconstructing the poem, we see that there are contradictions in the language that are similar to real life.  This part of the structure parallels the emotional state of human emotions, which are not clear.  Like in times of death and like the poem, emotion and language are muddled.  This partly connects with the post structuralist "reading against the grain."  It's interesting to see that they look for disunity in a piece.  I think it's hard to find unity simply because so many contradictions exist even within itself.