2010

Education Revolving Around Women

February 2010

 

New-found liberties and increased work output from men caused by the American, French, and Industrial Revolution affected women tremendously. From a sense of identity to their role of work, women writers in effect pitched familiar adages directed at emancipation, equipped for the course of women. These women writers who considered education the prosperous avenue of society in hopes of reform were Mary Wollstonecraft, Margaret Fuller, and Florence Nightingale.  Radical as some may have interpreted their ideas, there was indication from their views that nobody would be able (or even attempt) to justify the claims of inadequate education for the society of women.

The time of the Industrial Revolution was a launch pad for the diplomatic goals and fortified markets to ensure a progressive state of living. Middle-class emergence, especially with newly formed families, was the outcome of rising consumption and capital accumulation (Tilly 118). The genesis of factories and cottage industry brought about a rise of much work for men and relegated women to work with the high demand of clothing and domestic duties. Schooling was secondary to everything else.

According to Mary Wollstonecraft’s sum of ideas in her introduction of “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman”, the female gender belonging to her vision of independence was hindered by the overwhelming privileges of men and the patronizing schemes they devised to separate powers socially, ethically, and religiously. Not only does Wollstonecraft resent men’s despotic attitude, but also the inability for women to fathom true intellect. She avows disgust in her quote, “Unable to grasp anything great, it is surprising they [women] find the reading of history a very dry task, and disquisitions addressed to the understanding intolerably tedious, and almost unintelligible?” (Wollstonecraft 389).

In an article written by Salma Maoulidi, entitled “Challenges of Race and Class in Feminist Discourse”, she verifies Wollstonecraft’s argument with the simplicity of stating, “Wollstonecraft pushes for neutral criteria…virtue, reason, and knowledge” (2). A fundamentally-sound education furthered one’s refinement (on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean) for shifting democratic attitudes, which Wollstonecraft rejected because it was structured only for men. Mary Wollstonecraft’s one comment struck the heart of her case: “The books of instruction, written by men of genius, have had the same tendency as more frivolous productions…they [women] are treated as a kind of subordinate beings…” (Wollstonecraft 373). Maoulidi also reports the necessity of the straying from the act of mimicking mothers and their manners while applying relevant, concrete material to edify the body and mind (3). In my opinion, this meant that young women should have tried to experiment their roles within the realms medicine, government, religion, or literature.

Knowledge was the basis for thriving in a turbulent society. In Michele Cohen’s article “Gender and Method in Eighteenth-Century English Education”, she endorsed, “What women’s education lacked most significantly was order, method and system” (585). Cohen also poses the question: What was the proper school education for an eighteenth-century girl? The treatment of contesting either private or public education was another source of concern. Cohen describes that the hierarchy of professional educationalists opposed boarding schools for girls while revering home education (586). If there may have been a coed public school apprehension of focus for the sake of girls’ education from the professionals, Wollstonecraft advocated in defense. According to Maoulidi, “She [Wollstonecraft] thinks education should be relevant, shaped by the opinions of manners of the society in which students live…an education that is wholesome” (3).

Margaret Fuller was another writer that pushed powerful ideas. A Transcendentalist member of an inner-circle that included Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Thoreau, the gracious tendencies of her well-educated background helped fuel feminism with her book, Woman in the Nineteenth Century. Fuller too lamented how men viewed society with a negative distortion of women’s roles. Fuller urged for the genius of men and women who were able to and break off the ‘arbitrary barriers’ (Fuller 569). These barriers had a way of dissipating if society only embraced Francois Fourier’s theory (Fuller agreed with) that one-third of women had a taste for masculine pursuits while one-third of women had a taste for the feminine (570). Fuller felt that if women relied on influence within their own gender, pushed enlightening ideas into the mix of society, then a gradual transfer of inspiration would develop.

I acknowledge the fact that Fuller’s take on women’s own judgment failed to serve as an expressive medium for representing intellect. Women did not have the aim or at least make it publicly known for definitive career goals to achieve in life. The ‘American Dream’ was thought-provoking in negative facets to them, especially for single, unwed women. Education, tailored to higher learning, was the ultimate route women needed. However, Fuller implored, “[for women] to live first for God’s sake” (571). She wanted to make readers aware of the deficiencies women (and men) inevitably had were not supposed to be scaled by society in different proportions.

The final writer that garnered a sense of what educational roles credited to society was Florence Nightingale. She disregarded the moral and societal limitations that strained the pursuits of education by sardonically lashing at the hypocrisy of institutions (Nightingale 1018). They measured laws of nature rather than measuring their own doctrine that steered women away from progressing. Society, to Nightingale’s perception, came up short in sharpening women’s intellect (1019). By abandoning the oppressive ways of her family, Nightingale stretched new potential and possibilities when she was determined to work with doctors, not to work for them after the consequences of the Crimean War in the 1850’s (Holliday and Parker 486). Opening the door to women for the sciences, Nightingale proved that women were able to sufficiently endure and grow within a competitive job field.

At the turbulent time “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman” was published, men and women were becoming the essential snapshot of disparity. The Industrial Revolution polarized duties between the sexes while government influence from America, England, and France escalated to a new level. In response to this, Mary Wollstonecraft acknowledged how men demonstrated ‘virtue’ without blemishes to the precepts of new government doctrines. Margaret Fuller’s rhetoric inflected a new tone to set for women; a way where their general impulses acted on what they imagined. Florence Nightingale, according to Holliday and Parker, “did not expect much” from boisterous feminism, but had a bedrock principle for expanding the sources of women’s work output, especially her own (486). Like other subversive figures at the dawning of widespread revolution, many refused to interpret their brash and wild ideas. Yet, these three landmark writers justified their claims by endowing pure sensibility in their role of education and literary theory.

 

WORKS CITED

 

 

Cohen, Michele. “Gender and ‘method’ in eighteenth-century English education.”   HISTORY OF EDUCATION 33.5 (2004): 585-95. EBSCO. Web. 9 Feb. 2010.

Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women The Middle Ages Through the Turn of the Century. Boston: W. W.                     Norton & Company, 2007. Print.

Holliday, Mary E., and David L. Parker. Journal of Advanced Nursing 26 (1997): 483-88.

Maoulidi, Salma. “Mary Wollstonecraft: Challenges of Race and Class in Feminist Discourse.” Women Studies Quarterly 35.3/4 (2007): 280-87. ProQuest. Web.               9 Feb. 2010.

Tilly, Louise A. “Women, Women’s History, and the Industrial Revolution.”  Social Research 61.1 (1994): 115-34. EBSCO. Web. 15 Feb. 2010.

 

 

 

How to Tell, How to Instruct, How to Delight

April 2010

 

In the renowned short story, “How to Tell a True War Story,” author (and veteran) Tim O’Brien altered the scheme of hackneyed plots of war and destruction into one enhanced for the intimate, detailed experience between narrator and audience. The protagonists and events are utilized as symbolic ties to O’Brien’s compelling and purposeful narration. Start to finish, O’Brien bent rules of expressivity for the common reader to understand his take on the subject. He evoked facets of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s remarkable prose faithful to nature and life in the essay, “The Poet.” One can also link the design of O’Brien’s story to Horace’s ‘delighting and instructing’ theory of literature (from his discussion in “Ars Poetica”) through sharp, in-depth characterizations, an organic introspection of war, and graphic metaphors that furthered the essence of poetic capability.

Becoming a vicarious bystander and scratching the surface of rampant disorder in the Vietnam War was one of the main goals Tim O’Brien wished to accomplish in his short story. Detailing an external account of a friend’s letter (delivered to a casualty’s sister) helped him introduce the flaws of recapping an ill-fated death of the soldier named Curt Lemon. “It’s a terrific letter, very personal and touching…So what happens? Rat mails the letter. He waits two months. The dumb cooze never writes back” (Metro 350). Aside from the maudlin sentiments written by Rat, O’Brien argued the acceptance of validity the letter tried to forward for depicting a greater sense of the war.

O’Brien’s confessional short story accomplished a relative value of Vietnam by chronicling his knowledge and experience. By fusing the human imagination and memory tied to its events, he demonstrated a catharsis best when he stated, “At its core, perhaps, war is just another name for death…After a firefight, there is always the immense pleasure of aliveness. The trees are alive, the soil—everything” (357). This was the basis for a reader to engross the concept of mortality. While O’Brien’s claims ring true with aspects of nature, he echoes the 19th-century transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Both men harnessed harmony within their text to arrive at a detached attitude to the overbearing conditions of life. The harmony spoke to their universes as a palate, rather than an impending force. O’Brien diminished war’s mechanical and dreadful connotation and celebrated the bliss that transformed him. This overlapped with Emerson when he observed, “Every man is so far a poet as to be susceptible of these enchantments of nature; for all men have the thoughts whereof the universe is the celebration” (The Poet 728).

Emerson encouraged his readers to proliferate their passionate thoughts like a vast memory bank, depositing more each time to adorn something. He also materialized the concept for poetic usage to go beyond the standard meter making (726). As O’Brien’s story refrained from any such meter, it reflected Emerson’s sentiment, “The poet has a new thought; he has a whole new experience to unfold; he will tell us how it was with him, and all men will be the richer in his fortune” (726). War, although far from a serene lens, was chaotic enough to be contingent on the vivid narration by O’Brien to create his own new nature of thought. O’Brien churned out the common, but magnified details serving a purpose. The multiple voices communicating the horrific tales needed believability, and by unfolding Emerson’s mentioned ‘new experience’, O’Brien accomplished the vicarious bystander goal.

O’Brien also configured his story to match Emerson’s view, “The poet, by an ulterior intellectual perception, gives them [symbols] a power which makes their old use forgotten, and puts eyes and a tongue into every dumb and inanimate object” (730). For example, O’Brien tinkered with a yo-yo used by a comrade named Mitchell Sanders. Mesmerized at its rampant motion, O’Brien’s apprehension mixed with desire to latch on to every detail served the reader a significant lens for keeping up with an enhanced marker of realism. The yo-yo itself was subversive in style and bridged the great philosophic thinker Horace’s idea on how the poet functioned proficiently when he acknowledged, “Attractive with its commonplaces and with the characters well drawn gives the people keener pleasure and keeps them in their seats more effectively than lines empty of substance and harmonious trivialities” (Ars Poetica 131).

Living long prior to O’Brien’s time spent in Vietnam, Horace held a high regard to the earliest poets. The abstruse and meticulous workings of his imagination helped endow artists with a greater purpose for their craft. Horace emphasized, “The man who chooses his subject with full control will not be abandoned by eloquence or lucidity of arrangement” (125). Horace’s idea supported how O’Brien strived in his telling without the vague fragmentations of his buddy Rat’s letter describing Lemon’s death. O’Brien retold Lemon’s death four times in his text, and in each time, he eloquently expanded on the significance he felt from it. The audience for the story, either Lemon’s sister or us, gave access (by O’Brien) on his repetition to a new angle in each telling rather than the used up presentation of one narrow narrative. That is why O’Brien chose to build off each occurrence and simplify one aspect but expand on another. He did not want to cheat the reader by posing questions of the subject matter, the purposes of war, and the surreal happenings that one never forgets.

Horace also claimed, “It is not enough for poetry to be beautiful; it must also be pleasing and lead the hearer’s mind wherever it will” (126). This idea synchronized with O’Brien’s text to judge real from far-fetched, especially through the anecdote of Mitchell Sanders. His haunting story paid close attention to activities stirred by the mountainside jungles north of Quang Ngai near a listening post. Sanders’ team was baffled by the strange musical noises that lasted several days. O’Brien effectively pushed away from his reality to crystallize Sanders’ to a gripping impasse of fear and frenzy (353). O’Brien’s style in the text reiterated Horace’s previously mentioned idea as the language spoke to a pure moment. Possessed by enough foreground focus, intimacy, and laconic detail generated a concise human understanding from the teller to the reader, no matter how far it went beyond the truth.

One of the most frustrating elements of storytelling has been guarding its fresh quality and keeping it one’s own. O’Brien assuredly uttered the regurgitated platitudes that always filled the subject of war. O’Brien stated, “War is hell, but that’s not the half of it, because war is also a mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love” (356). He acknowledged that readers with a literary history who have heard war over again like record players have been jaded by its clichés. Horace stated, “I shall make up my poem of known elements, so that anyone may hope to do the same, but he’ll sweat and labour to no purpose when he ventures” (129). This idea supported O’Brien’s commitment to keep on telling war stories. The task of telling a true war story was not a matter of generalizing. The practice of telling war stories were formatted too contained and not related to obscenity or evil (350).  He still urged readers, “In other cases you can’t even tell a true war story. Sometimes it’s just beyond telling” (352). It was actually a matter of finding an answer and taking it with a grain of salt. No audience, not even himself during war experience, was supposed to expect the absurd and believe until they actually listened to the phenomenon like Mitchell Sanders mentioned with the vapors of trees and rocks (354).

Depending on the listener, O’Brien tried to peg down the best emotion afterward based off war stories. His final recollection of Curt Lemon’s death was one that poetically spoke of the intensity and grit in poetic angles of the Vietnam War. This was the description by O’Brien: “Then he laughed and took that curious half step from shade into sunlight, his face suddenly brown and shining, and when his foot touched down, in that instant, he must’ve thought it the sunlight that was killing him…how the sun seemed to gather around him and pick him up and lift him high into a tree” (358).  His accounts channeled Emerson again, engaging in the idea of a poet needing expression.

The overall blueprint from O’Brien was to guide and maintain a subject matter worth listening to repetitively. In this case, it was a war story that he coined in its poetic essence, “A love story” (358). This appropriately echoed Emerson when stated, “Every touch should thrill. Every man should be so much an artist…the poet is the person in whom these powers are in balance” (725).  Fueled by his unique band of brothers for breathtaking conclusions on mortality, O’Brien upheld Emerson’s idea by deeply moving one for the sense of love. He aspired to stimulate and instruct other meditative minds in the heat of war and in the heat of getting a story right. True or not, he adopted a pleasure for readers in communicating the nature of expression. Through the complex but precise workings of “How to Tell a True War Story,” readers gained empowerment on two sides of the coin by poetic enlightenment of war and an unbound, yet, morally sound instruction on how to recite it.

 

 

WORKS CITED

 

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “The Poet”. The Norton Anthology of Theory and  Criticism. Leitch, Vincent B. New York. Norton & Company. 724-738. Print.

 

Horace. “Ars Poetica”. The Norton Anthology of Theory and  Criticism. Leitch, Vincent B. New York. Norton & Company. 124-134. Print.

 

O’Brien, Tim. “How to Tell a True War Story”. Metro: Journeys in Writing  Creatively. Ostrom, Hans, Wendy Bishop, and Katharine Haake. New York. Longman. 350-359. Print.

 

 

 

 

The Chronicles of My Own Literary Reflection

April 2010

 

I’ve paced myself diligently in the library and local bookstores pondering what role my thoughts can play in this well-rounded discussion of literary theory and technique. Skimming pages of concise opinion led to a gradual realization. This realization was that my effort chasing the appropriate topic was a struggle. Historically, it always was a struggle for the multitude of critics. During the research process, I skimmed Bob Dylan’s novel, Chronicles, and found a quote that strengthened my focus: “Folk songs are evasive—the truth about life, and life is more or less a lie, but then again that’s exactly the way we want it to be… A folk song has over a thousand faces and you must meet them all if you want to play this stuff. A folk song might vary in meaning and it might not appear the same from one moment to the next. It depends on who’s playing and who’s listening” (71).  In my mind, this profound quote elucidated how pure artistic expression is conceived by a literary force of Hegel’s spirit theory, Saussere’s signs, and Sarte’s reasons to write, which must be symbiotic with a cognitive position. Dylan celebrated the fact that not everyone in the world can see through one lens. By keeping an open mind on the cognitive positions based on these several theorists, powerful and fresh poetry prospers.

Generations passed tales from bards, revelers of language, and other philosophers planted seeds to the vast world of literature. By understanding creative minds and their philosophic entrenched ideas, one can comprehend literature as the art simply derived by words—potent in thought and emotive by the author or teller. These thoughts and emotions resonated out of the textual subject matter fit together delicately (like a necessary chemical formula) and unite to evoke a tangible message for an audience.

I believe the efficiency of poetic literature (past and present) and its evoking message depended on how a work fit the crux of ‘technique’ mentioned by Hegel in “Lectures on Fine Art.” The technique of a work ultimately reached and nourished the ‘spirit’. Technique’s methods explained the broad terms of human activity, such as creative pursuits and distinctions. Hegel’s technique showed that reflection, industry, and practice fostered literary nature of everyday life best (Hegel 638).  From there, he allowed the innards of the spirit to be uncovered by any reader and spread through guidelines.

Bob Dylan emerged again through my critical thinking as he became one of the masters of guidelines in my ruminations. “If anything, I wanted to understand things and then be free of them. I needed to learn how to telescope things, ideas. Things were too big to see all at once, like all the books in the library—everything laying around on all the tables” (61). As a reader, one must spot ideas and concepts one bit at a time. Expressing an idea that is intended to breed new life has been a norm in literature. On a subject matter specifically, one needed the tools to perform this way and set in motion the guidelines Dylan referred to in hurdling over basic knowledge. One needed to compose and differentiate what is in the text. In order to clarify cognitive positions accepting the artistic functions, I found certain ‘guidelines’ in my readings.

These guidelines, I felt, teetered on Saussure’s famous sign and signified method. His ideas helped us peg down normal semiotics based off senses and psychology. Saussure claimed “Each linguistic term is a member, an articulus in which an idea is fixed in a sound and a sound becomes the sign of an idea” (Course in General Linguistics 967). This means that we do not need to even move our tongues to prepare and synthesize a thought. That is where an imprint of sound is engraved as the signifier in our psyche, such as ‘dogness’ compared to the tamed word ‘dog’ (963).

The ideas of sound and abstractness separated linguistic signs for readers, referring to Dylan’s concern on the way to ‘telescope’ ideas. A relational system of language helps prevent our words and ideas to be lost in what Saussure deemed, “An uncharted nebula where it is devoid of distinctness” (967). By using the aforementioned telescope for signs, one can uncover meaning and accept unique aspects of the spirit.

I also felt the author or teller is the start of it all. Man has been responsible for the transfer of aspects of the spirit by their empowerment as in the words of Jean-Paul Sarte: “One of the chief motives of artistic creation is certainly the need of feeling that we are essential in relationship to the world” (What is Literature 1336). Men and women of authorship were able to manipulate the modes of books, songs, or theatre to insert their creativity on the playing field of poetry. With that, I felt that an author’s literary work has been as useful as the response applicable to the past, present, and pushing towards mapping out the future. One must also be ambitious enough to speak their mind to the masses, yet figure out, according to Sarte, “The writer meets everywhere only his knowledge, his will, his plans, in short, himself. He touches only his own subjectivity” (1338). For an author in his semiotic field to enhance the audience’s senses, the author and reader must synchronize through signs as one becomes a guide for the other, widening the knowledge in the process of reading.

In my experience, there were several works that I unshelled and discovered the essence they provided deep within. The poem, “Goblin Market,” by Christina Rossetti awakened sensual utterances but also harnessed a depiction of how her characters’ actions were amplified by these utterances. The words themselves triggered my mind to separate the two women from accepting urges to eat tempting fruit and refrain from doing so. Such similes on the character “Like a moonlit popular branch, like a vessel at the launch,” helped articulate where an imprint of sound and became a marker in my psyche to interpret a signifier (1090).

Words possessing emotional seeds, embedded in our thoughts, reveal the attitudes, values, and judgments of a reader’s and writer’s community. Unified, words sprout and grow into literature to reach Hegel’s theorized outlook on spirit. Everyone has read and interpreted texts at different ways and times in history. Thus, I supported Bob Dylan’s recommendation to move moment to moment in order to acknowledge distinctions brought on by literature, as deciphering the nature of senses and concepts are brought on by Saussure’s signs.

Bob Dylan’s triumphant career pushed beyond Saussure’s signs as he thrived to create his own. That may be the greater extent to literary theory I’ve also learned. One must chip away and entice new forms of thought. Dylan endorsed the chipping away action by stating, “You want to write songs that are bigger than life. You want to say something about strange things that have happened to you, strange things you have seen. You have to know and understand something and then go past the vernacular” (51). Using the greatest potential a creative mind can hold together, I felt that the poetic art has come a long way and has found newer ways from mature writers able evoke a strong message while still upholding Dylan’s compelling challenge to distill what they’ve already heard or seen and stand out in the crowd.

 

 

WORKS CITED

 

Dylan, Bob. Chronicles. New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2005. Print.

 

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. “Phenomenology of Spirit”. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Leitch, Vincent B. New York. Norton & Company. 630-644. Print.

 

Rossetti, Christina. “Goblin Market”. The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Traditions in English. Gubar, Susan and Sandra M. Gilbert. New York. Norton & Norton Company. 1089-1100. Print.

 

Sarte, Jean-Paul. “What is Literature?” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Leitch, Vincent B. New York. Norton & Norton Company. 1336-1349. Print.

 

Saussure, Ferdinand de. “Course in General Linguistics”. The Norton Anthology   of Theory and Criticism. Leitch, Vincent B. New York. Norton & Company. 724-738. Print.

 

 

SAPIR-WHORF HYPOTHESIS

September 2010

 

From the article “Does Your Language Shape How You Think?”, author Guy Deutscher promotes the enterprise of language acquisition and its uses to denounce a few points of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis while still agreeing with it to a degree.

Benjamin Lee Whorf’s depiction of our minds syncing with our natural tongue was endorsed by many for years. It was reconsidered later on as the hypothesis lacked any concrete evidence of restrictions and how there were any tangible constraints, such as Whorf’s surmise on how Native Americans were unable to grasp concepts of reality compared to an English speaking person. I think Deutscher is trying to illustrate how our minds are open playing fields no matter what language or culture we inherit. There are no fences placed in the field, and everyone has a right to cross any line of thought as the pathways must convey messages among different languages. Language (at least in English), used in the examples from Deutscher, compel us to think about the fine lines of sex or time when using broad statements such as dining with a neighbor. Our minds still have to peel away this (what I think of as) an onion of a statement, to get to the essential core.

On the other hand, the textbook by Fromkin, An Introduction to Language counters with the strongest points of the hypothesis, dissenting with language being imprisoned by our minds because the fallout would be no method of translation or learning a second language. Plotting our minds to the words never used on certain concepts (such as the inside or outside of a corner) means we’re limiting our own power of expression when it really is a free-for-all concept, especially when babies start out.

 

A Linguistic Big Bang 

September 2010

 

The stunning realization that some philosophers stumbled upon took place in Nicaragua after the 1979 Sandinista revolution, as deaf children growing up with no linguistic roots were able to form their own. Children, devoid of any such grammar or syntax in their rapidly growing neurological development, only had access to what the Spanish called “mimacas”, or what we’d call, pantomimes. The scientific detailing of this blossom of language led such researchers as Steven Pinker to assume that children held the keys to language, especially in this language.

Attempts at taming their language proved fruitless from the Managua teachers provided by Soviet advisors to instruct “finger spelling” which was incoherent for the deaf students. Teachers were at a loss, flustered at the lost channels of communication between student and teacher, but were more flustered at what was arising between rapid pace of communication within the student body.

Judy Kegl, an American sign-language expert at Northeastern University decided to tinker with what these deaf children had to offer with this immaculate achievement. She diligently studied basics of hair pieces and fixtures like rolling curlers. When it came to other objects, like a sanitary napkin, it turned out a girl placed out her palm and “sketched a line” down her middle finger and shaped it. The challenge of comprehension increased as their complexities and her attempts of translating went awry.

Kegl also uncovered the spatial agreement that children manipulated with as their communication broadened. Younger children opened their fingers at the position of speaker to start and closed at the position of address. Their examples on the famous Czech cartoon character Mr. Koumal was utilized for a situation in where he used chicken feathers to fly, crashing into a mountain, and falling. Their gestures coordinated with the actions. The contrast of older and younger generations and their use of constructing their idioma (Nicaguaran Sign Language) are indicated by the elders’ elegant and orchestrated gestures, according to Kegl. She adds that each child progressively picks up on elders’ cues and mold their own ways of conveying the language.

In order to synchronize the ‘verbal’ communication of the Nicaraguan children on to a context, the Bluefields school house is using Danish symbolic system to transcribe their signs into written phonemic code. The progress made on narrowing down and pegging the words into a dictionary of 1,600 words has become one of the stepping stones for the children, including an incoming lesson on ‘Moby Dick’.

 

 

 

LINGUISTICS ACTIVITY

November 2010

 

CHAPTER 5–Strategy 1

 

Jay’s mind wandered, detaching from any sort of focus on the drive to his grandmother’s home Friday evening with his parents. Life was fair game for this 10-year-old, preoccupied by these escapes from school.

When their sedan entered the intersection, the screeching echoed in Jay’s ears. Just a split second going by. The car steered awkwardly for another second. If Jay’s universe was contained in an untouched glass orb—it all bursted violently. The car’s front collided with another. His face struck the backseat without warning. Sight went to pitch black and his body sprang back, collapsing lifelessly like a rag doll. Thunderous horns blared. Deafening. Jay startled and was shaken back. What happened! What happened? Jay yelped in terror, thoughts melting and his emotions ablaze. What happened to his parents?

This was like childbirth all over again, unyielding heart beats and frantic hands of his in a surge of confusion. Screaming again, not knowing if his parents were even alive, Jay felt a liquid substance dripping onto his palm. Looking down, trickling down a leaky faucet—blood. Then the rupture stinging in his gums tore at his nerves, pierced at the sharpest of pains. His lower gums were split open by his braces. Blood-curdling screams echoed with the horns blaring. Ambulances soon made their heroic jingle but the pains in his head, mouth, and soul were far from healing.

 

Strategy 2

 

“Tomorrow is another day, but I hope it’s not another day like this one.”

 

*The future of events becomes another matter of sorts, but as long as it’s not the repetition like this current moment.

 

*The expectation in the progress of the next day is just a vicissitude of conditions; however, I wish it’s not makeshift from this one.

 

*The impending day upcoming is the same as others, but I yearn it’s not another iteration like this one.

 

*The succeeding day after this is in line, but I aspire that it is not the addition to this one.

 

*Expectations of hours will become another day, but as long as it’s not a mirror of this one.

 

Throughout a novel such as To The Lighthouse, a reader must pay close attention to how free indirect narration flows within the text. Virginia Woolf concentrated on interweaving relationships in the novel as they emerged at the Ramsay home. Woolf requires us to monitor how a family nucleus matures and behaves through common experiences and interactions.

Geared to a steady pace, moment by moment is seemingly articulated in a section called The Window, where characters illuminate an intense psychological awareness. Each isolated dimension of our set of characters expands from a myriad of verbal and non-verbal cues. The omniscient narrator stands mid-way between the modes of simple expression and narration, enabling reliability and concision of even the delicate moments. As well, the free and indirect narration demonstrates how relationships are never fixed and always needing change– like the brushstrokes of colors upon a canvass.

The novel’s usage of free indirect speech needs no tagging of such terms such as “he thought” at the end of many sentences. This is how the text runs its course and helps purify the human thought process. I feel as though the action builds steadily, relying on active and explicit reflections. A prime example occurs when James is ceased into believing the day will be fine to venture to the lighthouse by his father, Mr. Ramsay:

“Had there been an axe handy, or a poker, any weapon that would have gashed a hole in his father’s breast and killed him, there and then, James would have seized it. Such were the extremes of emotion that Mr. Ramsay excited in his children’s breasts by his mere presence; standing, as of now, lean as a knife, narrow as the blade of one, grinning sarcastically, not only with the pleasure of disillusioning his son and casting ridicule upon his wife, who was ten thousand times better in every way than he was (James thought), but also with some secret conceit at his own accuracy of judgment. What he said was true. It was always true. He was incapable of untruth; never tampered with a fact; never altered a disagreeable word to suit the pleasure or convenience of any mortal being, least of all of his own children, who sprung from his loins, should be aware from childhood that life is difficult; facts uncompromising; and the passage to that fabled land where our brightest hopes are extinguished, our frail barks founder in darkness (here Mr. Ramsay would straighten his back and narrow his little blue eyes upon the horizon), one that needs, above all, courage, truth, and the power to endure” (Woolf 4).

The narrator supplies us with the hate brewing from James directed at his father and thinks his mother “ten thousand times better in every way”. However, by the end of the long paragraph we transition to Mr. Ramsay’s frame of mind: “What he said was true. It was always true. He was incapable of untruth”.  With hardly any signal, besides the parenthesis marker of what James thought, the reader shifts from rage to composed integrity. The narrative voice activates this pendulum of moods within the paragraph, polarizing James and his father’s idea of the lighthouse while artistically drawing a silver lining of unity between them.

 

 

 

The Tarnish of Tamora’s Human Traits in Titus Andronicus

November 2010

 

The chaotic bloodshed in Shakespeare’s tragic plays acquaints readers with compelling characters affected by greed, jealousy, and revenge. From the play Titus Andronicus, the Goth queen Tamora emerges as one of the central figures conducting hasty violence in response to the Roman general Titus Andronicus’s sacrifice of her eldest son, Alarbus. This initiates her pursuit of revenge. Shakespeare invokes the treatment of her as one of the closest characters exhibiting animal traits from aggressions and manipulations, motivating her savage goals to strike among the members of Andronicus family, reflecting best to Titus’s disheartened plea, “That Rome is but a wilderness of tigers?” (Tit. 3.1.54).

Laurie Shannon’s article, “Poor, Bare, Forked Animal Sovereignty, Human Negative Exceptionalism, and the Natural History of King Lear”, magnifies a quote in the play King Lear. During the wretched storm scene King Lear howls this line: “Thou art the thing itself. Unaccomodated man is no / more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art” (Lr. 3.4.105-6). Clearly, Lear’s downtrodden attitude exposes negative qualities of man. Shannon’s purpose from her article is to draw attention to how humans fit under a cosmology of “human exceptionalism.” She clarifies this concept by saying, “Human exceptionalism is a flexible but historically persistent reckoning that singles out ‘the human’ for solitary elevation and apartness…distinguished by the possession of a unique, hierarchizing attribute” (Shannon 171). Her argument is to reveal how someone regarded on a higher level (through human exceptionalism) conveys superiority while Lear’s line stresses the negative application of the term in order to chalk out a primeval image of humans scaled as low as mere animals. I suggest a parallel supported by Shannon’s article that rhetorical animal imagery imposes chiefly on Tamora’s performance in Titus Andronicus. The play reinforces the animal she becomes while diminishing her humanity in the lowest scale of Shannon’s general term of “human exceptionalism.”

In the first instance, Shakespeare constitutes Tamora’s heinous spiral into this animal motif when her sons Demetrius and Chiron stab Bassinius to death. This leaves the helpless Lavinia pleading for her safety. Her cry, “O Tamora, thou bearest a woman’s face–” is futile in Tamora’s vehement response, “I will not hear her speak, away with her!” (Tit. 2.3 136-137). Tamora’s immediate silencing of Lavinia when she references to a “woman’s face” opposes Shannon’s model. Shannon states, “Man normally appears as at once the condensed expression and the ultimate triumph of divine creation” (174). Tamora curtly retrenches the idea of her womanly face as a figure of elevation, which I insist is evidence that the text intended to stray from a human-like quality attached to her character.  In the sequence of events, Lavinia then furthers her plea by asking, “When did the tiger’s young ones learn from the dam? / O, do not learn her wrath; she taught it to thee,” (TA 2.3 142-143). The villainous rhetoric upholding how Tamora and her sons are inflicting upon Lavinia evokes a predator and prey dynamic in this scene.

Shakespeare’s consistent rhetoric underscores Tamora’s human presence throughout the play, channeling the previous line as a sample. This demonstrates another point made by Shannon to inflect Tamora’s role in her violence. Shannon reports, “The extremity of sovereign force doubly requires animal reference to represent it: its ‘subjects’ are made beasts and its extremity is measured as ‘unbridled’” (181). Tamora, as the focal point of unleashing the fulfilling desire of retaliation triggers Titus Andronicus’s deeds in the slaying of her sons and making them pasties. He has resorted to a savage act himself. The completion comes when he coaxes her to consume her sons at his dinner party, as he proclaimed (before slitting her sons’ throats), “Like to the earth, swallow her own increase,” (TA 5.3 191). This ‘unbridled’ measurement extends further into imitating animal infanticide on Tamora’s part, which occurs in a range of species from animal mothers.

In regards to motherhood, Tamora’s unlikely childbirth takes place in the middle of the play. When Aaron, Demetrius, and Chiron openly converse, a nurse enters with a wrapped up baby secured under her arms. She abhorrently describes the baby “As loathsome as a toad / Amongst the fair-faced breeders of our clime,” (Tit. 4.2. 67-68). This product of the Aaron and Tamora affair is treated as a disgrace to the Roman Empire since it clearly does not belong to Saturninus due to its skin color. The birth has no action on stage, and the baby is delivered to Aaron the father with no deliberate regard to Tamora as a tangible mother figure—just a mere performer of the birth like most animals. The baby itself serves no measure for human traits, as Demetrius snarls the threat, “I’ll broach the tadpole on my rapier’s point,” (Tit. 4.2. 85).

The reinforcement of Tamora’s inherent animal influence is brought upon by the unexpected baby as her continuing actions depict the downfall from her humanity. As stated by Shannon, “Period zoography appealed more directly to a proliferative aesthetic, one driven by curiosity and inflected by a taste for the fantastic,” (177). What Shannon says based on King Lear is that Tamora is inclined by instinct to fulfill her desires based on animal activity. Her ways to persuade Saturninus after Titus’s arrows land in the kingdom pertain to assorted animals: “The eagle suffers little birds to sing / I will enchant old Andronicus / With words more sweet, and yet more dangerous / Than baits to fish or honey stalks to sheep,” (Tit. 5.1. 84-92). Her diction tied to the subjects, vocalizing animal character and appealing to their nature corresponds with her own throughout scenes like this in the play.

The final line in Shannon’s definition of human exceptionalism, regarding a “hierarchizing attribute” casts Tamora as a character far from the concept in that spectrum. This makes her affiliation with animals valid. After the heinous violence concludes by the play’s denouement, Lucius and Marcus take a stand for Rome. They announce plans of moving on even after the murders of Lavinia, Tamora, Titus, and Saturninus. Lucius regards no formal service for Tamora as he declares, “but throw her forth to beasts and birds to prey / Her life was beastly and devoid of pity / And being dead, let birds on her take pity!” (Tit. 5.3. 198-200). The principle rites in Rome either involving cremation or burial was a formal gesture of purifying the soul into the afterlife. Shannon facilitates death’s sacraments with her exceptionalism theory based on the human condition: “Having such a soul is a good thing; it provides access to eternity in accord with various theological dispensations of salvation” (175). I believe her idea connects to the play, as entombment is a practice done for humans when souls are bestowed to the great beyond. Lucius’s intent is to keep her unkempt body strictly for the birds, wasting away with the earth she walked on.

Titus Andronicus encourages one to speculate nature of all the characters. Tamora stands out in her diction, on stage and off stage actions, and atrocious violence she devised. I personally feel that Laurie Shannon’s article touches the fine points of how King Lear’s gloomy attitude on how primeval humans can act traces back to Tamora’s deeds. She may not be the archaic and uncommon embodiment of an animal, but more so the externalization of animal’s bloodthirsty instincts and physical manifestation of untamed expression.

 

WORKS CITED

 

Shannon, Laurie. “Poor, Bare, and Forked: Animal Sovereignty, Human Negative Exceptionalism, and the Natural History of King Lear.” Shakespeare  Quarterly 60.2 (2009): 168-96. Project MUSE. Web. 10 Nov. .2010

Shakespeare, William.. The Complete Works: the New Pelican Text. Stephen Orgel New York, NY: Penguin, 2002. Print.

 

 

 

 

 

Painting Life’s Progress

December 2010

 

When Virginia Woolf’s novel To The Lighthouse was published in 1927, the Modernist philosophy dominated art and culture. Ways to exercise and voice objective truth relied on a human’s privileged thought, which chronicles the situational setting of the Ramsays’ summer house. In conjunction with Woolf’s take on Modernism, “Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions—trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel,” (qtd in Jahn 95) she suggests the novel mirrors how one looks at oneself and others in relation to the world; a significant trait to understanding Modernism.

Aesthetically, modern thinkers portrayed the self as a construct. The construct embraced by them influenced bending rules in society. Woolf provides such bent rules through counterbalancing modes of objective force sparring with subjective craft in the quote, “It seemed to her such nonsense—inventing differences, when people, heaven knows, were different enough without that” (8). Online and offline perception encompass the literal interpretations of events in To The Lighthouse. Manfred Jahn’s article “Focalization,” supports how “coloring devices of the reflector’s mind…become witness rather than the narrator’s communicative addresse,” (96).

 

This portrays how each main character engages the novel’s discourse. Variable focalization helps a character dovetail another’s presence with explicit conscious awareness. Fragmented narratives conjured by the Ramsay family and friends make it a struggle to decipher the clashing voices in a radically changing world. However, an omniscient narrator mediates and artistically influences the mind’s eye over instituted objectivity. This method of fluid narration conveys a unified experience in Lily Briscoe’s relationship with Mrs. Ramsay across time.

Sporadic yet constant performance of the characters’ emotions switches on and off through free indirect narration. At the beginning of the novel in a section entitled ‘The Window’, the narrator delves into the hate brewing from James directed at his father and thinks his mother, Mrs. Ramsay “ten thousand times better in every way” (4). However, by the end of the long paragraph the text transitions to Mr. Ramsay’s frame of mind: “What he said was true. It was always true. He was incapable of untruth” (4).  With hardly any signal, the voice’s tone shifts from rage to composed integrity. The narrative voice activates this pendulum of moods within the paragraph. This polarizes the character agency in Mr. Ramsay’s rejection contrasted to James’s hope for the lighthouse. However, this free and indirect narration unifies their familiarity with Mrs. Ramsay as a figure surfacing in and out of their lives.

Events throughout ‘The Window’ disseminate repulsions questions, and recognitions toward the future. Characters collectively search their within self-conscious ambiguities, as the implied author is embedding needs for a cathartic form of contemplation. The argument, “A beholder who lacks the specific code feels lost in a chaos of sounds and rhythms, colours and lines, without rhyme or reason,” (Bourdieu 1810) insists the shortcomings of impractical characters unable to unify their life with aesthetic intuition.

Mr. Ramsay, a devoted philosopher, initially withdraws from others initially in just what he wishes to express. He plunges his mind into the deep existential framework as shown in ‘The Window’, leaving him consequentially farther in terms of physical distance and commonality. Verified by the narrator, “He was safe, he was restored to his privacy. He stopped to light his pipe, looked once at his wife and son in the window…the sight of them fortified them and satisfied them,” (33). The template of his mind familiarizes himself with an energizing working of the alphabetical human progress. More importantly, his vexing take “To pursue truth with such astonishing lack of consideration for other people’s feelings,” (32) paves a way for comprehending scathing disconnections between characters.

These isolated plunges trigger introspection from Mrs. Ramsay. A solemn murmur about the evening from Mr. Ramsay, “Poor little place,” helps Mrs. Ramsay discern “all this phrase-making was a game…she guessed what he was thinking—he would have written better books if he had not married,” (69). The narrator fills in the gaps of communication. Between these two people, the deictic positioning after utterances illustrates the flurry of thoughts that reacted, in this case, to Mr. Ramsay.

Another particular character activating a response to Mr. Ramsay’s alienated behavior is William Bankes, a once friend of Mr. Ramsay until “the pulp had gone out of their friendship,” (21). Bankes’s own limitations of human connection run amuck as his brooding question, “What does one live for?” (89) suggests disorder for the intellectually privileged in attempts to gather wholeness.

Woolf furthers the arsenal of fragmented narratives based on Mrs. Ramsay’s nurturing and charismatic charm in ‘The Window’. Her self-contained position in monitoring and emergence of social relations transiently sees and portrays other effectively. James’s presence in one scene amid lamentations of her dying father in the mountains implies a greater sense of her identity overlapping with his despair when she rebukes him. She reflects, “Never did anybody look so sad…a tear fell; the waters swayed this way and that, received it, and were at rest. Never did anybody look so sad,” (28).

This reflection supports how subjectivity shaped her existence. External events easily stimulated Mrs. Ramsay to the core in the narrative discourse. An example is when she calmly sits for a moment with her children. Then, the narration deviates with her sudden thought, “when her mind raised itself at the task in hand…a ghostly roll of drums remorselessly beat the measure of life,” (16).  The capturing of this vivid moment peers into innumerable sensations that inflict her mind. Mrs. Ramsay’s task at uncovering hidden mortal truths supports her fear of security within her own world. Mrs. Ramsay demonstrates this in her reflection, “When she looked in the glass and saw her hair grey, her cheek sunk, at fifty, she thought, possibly she might have managed things better,” (6).

In Chapter 17 of ‘The Window’, Mrs. Ramsay strives for an intimate affair with the nuclear family and houseguests. In regards to how each character settles down for a dinner, it becomes an intuitive climax. Woolf proves this as the characters’ consciousness harness an overwhelming fine tissue of discourse in this chapter. ‘The Window’s adept yet precarious eyes record compulsively to enhance realism of the situational setting. The narrator reports: “Do you write many letters, Mr. Tansley?” asked Mrs. Ramsay, pitying him too, Lily supposed for that was true of Mrs. Ramsay—she pitied men always as if they lacked something,” (85).  Woolf’s interior narratives cascade into one another in such a tight, magnified setting. These running thoughts from character to character are assembled by Mrs. Ramsay at the dinner table, yet compiled by the implied author.

By transcending the experience of memories and conscious awareness, the portrayal of a split second illuminated every possible thought. This drives deeper questions motivations, warehousing an interwoven contest of various characters in ‘The Window’. They stand apart to hash out memories, ultimately making unconvinced sense orbiting around the social anchor Mrs. Ramsay, in Chapter 17. She becomes a figure remembered but never fully embraced, much like the limitations of characters’ minds and their remote material relationships. Such is the case in Mr. Ramsey’s line, “The very stone one kicks with one’s boot will outlast Shakespeare,” (35).

The emplotment leaps ten years to the section entitled ‘Time Passes’. This becomes a stark vision where seemingly the course of one night streams to an alternative narrative. A cryptic memory of time places an impersonal and eyeless voice (the heterodiegetic narrator) to affirm physical loss of life, like Andrew, Prue, and Mrs. Ramsay. The house itself is shrouded with dust and decay, as illustrated: “Nothing stirred in the drawing-room or the dining room or on the staircase,” (126). This scattered time is devoid of much light except an enduring lighthouse beam and Mr. Carmichael’s candle. This effectively presents a vacant realm, emphasized by the line, “Whatever else may perish and disappear,” (126) to suggest the impressions of change.

The course of the novel’s final section ‘The Lighthouse’ mostly engages the perception of artist Lily Briscoe on a new day, ten years later. Her past recollections in ‘The Window’ offer a stepping stone for conceptualizing change. Correlating to Andrew Ramsay’s description of his father’s books to her: “Subject and object and the nature of reality,” (23).  Mrs. Ramsay’s death meant the end of an age and a perspective. However, the books’ significance piques Lily to contemplate, “The kitchen table was something visionary, austere; something bare, hard, not ornamental. There was no colour to it; it was all edges and angles; it was uncompromisingly plain,” (155) in an attempt to harmonize her relationship with Mrs. Ramsay in a new time.

Lily felt strongly that Mrs. Ramsay holds the ultimate knowledge of life (51). The problem lingers in the course of ‘The Lighthouse’ as Mrs. Ramsay left shades of a resonating yet unfulfilled identity behind, where the narrator indicates, “Life, she thought—but she did not finish her thought,” (59). The constituent events surrounding the past resurface through Lily’s painting to corroborate this narratological void. Mrs. Ramsay’s old vision enhanced Lily’s manipulation of her art to harmonize both periods of time.

The failed marriage of Paul and Minta externalized a shifted reality as noted by Lily, “abusing her…he was withered, drawn; she flamboyant, careless,” (173). The truths encompassing Lily and her contentment denying marriage also assures that her perceptual craft underscores faulty reflections of Mrs. Ramsay’s time. Lily admired the thought, “It has gone all against your wishes. They’re happy like that, I’m happy like this. Life has changed completely,”(175).

Lily’s concentration of her history with Mrs. Ramsay and other characters empowers her desire for “the pure gaze…linked to the emergence of an autonomous field of an artistic production,” (Bordieu 1811). The narration supports this claim when she attempts to harness cyclical perspectives spanned across time with her observation, “Fifty pairs of eyes were not enough to get round that one woman…among them, must be one that was stone blind to her beauty,” (198). Churlish remarks by Charles Tansley, “Women can’t paint, women can’t write…” (48) years ago prodded  Lily’s work. However in ‘The Lighthouse,’ she finds refuge in coalescing temporal segments of the past. This persistence leads her to take part in “the production of an ‘open work’…[to] be understood as the final stage in the conquest of artistic autonomy…” (Bourdieu 1811). The transcendent landscape, completed, leaves Lily  alone. She stands in awe with a better grasp of a somewhat symbiotic and ethereal Mrs. Ramsay, reaching her ultimate “vision” (209).

 “A brush, the one dependable thing in a world of strife, ruin, chaos,” (150) becomes the foundation of comprehending To The Lighthouse. When considering life, transformations of one’s perspective seem to polarize relationships initially in ‘The Window’, establishing the contest between these internally focused characters. Sequentially, bridging time and memory in ‘The Lighthouse’ helps Lily Briscoe harmonize her relationship with the deceased Mrs. Ramsay.

Dramatizing the characters’ consciousness at work within a changing world serves as an apparatus to paging through the novel. Each isolated dimension of the characters expands from a myriad of verbal and non-verbal cues. The omniscient narrator stands mid-way between the modes of simple expression and narration, enabling reliability to delicate moments of temporal impulse. As well, the free and indirect narration demonstrates how relationships are never fixed and always needing change– like the brushstrokes of colors upon a canvass.

 

 

 

 

 

 

WORKS CITED

 

 

Bordieu, Pierre. “Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste.” 1979. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 1st ed. Norton W.W. &, 2001. 1809-815. Print.

 

 

Jahn, Manfred. “Focalization.” The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2008. 94-108. Print.