on Order of Key West

The Order of Key West has obvious relations to the chart thingy we talked about in class.

Acient world- focus on universe

the sea and the sky is the universe, an understandable symbol since it only makes up about 3/4 of our planet. the woman exists in the sea, in the world. Even though it is mentioned that her song affected the universe (... made the sky acutest at its vanishing), I think its meant more in the sense that it changed the audience's perception, not that she actually changed the sky.

neo-classical- focus on audience

The audience is the "we" and "our" that is referred to throughout. It's never clear exactly who the we is, but regardless, it establishes a definite audience. It also possibly changes the poem because it means that we are seeing the woman through someone's eyes and getting their perspective on it, as opposed to a totally objective outside viewpoint. As the reader, we are also the audience since we are seeing the scene through the eyes of the poet.

Romantics- focus on artist

Obviously the woman is the artist. She is the creator of the song. Through her song she creates a whole scene that the audience sees where the sea and sky seem to change as a result of her song. So really she is creating more than just a work or text, she is creating an, I don't know, experience I guess.

Modern- focus on work

You can interchange work with text. In that case it is the song she sang because that is what she created. As mentioned before though, her creation really isn't limited to just her song, because the poet focuses on how her song affects all her surroundings. So really she is creating more than just a song.

The work is the song she sang.

julia kristeva

My critic is Julia Kristeva. She is a bulgarian born critic best known for her work on feminism and cultural theory. She is also considered one of the leading structuralists today. She was trained in psychoanalysis and has applied that knowledge to post-structuralist thought to form a theory she calls the "semiotic". The semiotic is an emotional field tied to our instincts that dwells within the "fissures and prosody of language" rather than the meanings of words. Prosody is the study of rhythm, stress and other related elements of speech. So as far as I can tell, she deals with how our psyche and subconscious deal with the parts and sounds of speech. Easy enough. I'm not sure how I'm going to channel this into a presentation in class. Here is a picture of her. I'd like to thank wikipedia.

Tragic Ironic

I'm focusing on the tragic ironic square of the archetypes chart. Tragic Ironic usually deals with the death of a weak protagonist. This person is seen as very low in society; a misfit or outcast. Jesus is one example Frye gives because he was outcast from society, the irony being that He is obviously not weak at all. Another example I thought of was Lennie Smalls in Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men. Lennie was mentally handicapped and therefore a weak member of society. His death is tragic, given that his crime was an accident and a result of his being handicapped. Frye calls tragic irony the "study of tragic isolation." The victim is also seen as someone unlucky, and his tragedy is that what happens to him was not at all expected or deserved for his character. This implies that the person is innocent and just a tragic casualty of life and society. All of this is true for Jesus or Job, another Frye example. Lennie isn't technically innocent because he did something wrong, yet he fits the tragic ironic mold because his fate was not expected for his character and seems to be an unfortunate victim of circumstances.

chart

this looks truly awful, i made it in paint, it looked better there

yeah so I basically can't figure out how to make a table or upload a table to this stupid thing, I do have a one made though, its really really good too.

on charts

By doing the archetype chart I actually got more out of Frye than I normally do. He makes some valid points about the intersecting themes and genres that we find in literature. I didn't quite get how he figures that the entire process comes full circle; that thematic ironic brings us back to tragic mythic. From the descriptions he gives I think they sound completely different. I also think that to fully understand Frye you have to read a lot of mythology because he makes so many references to different mythological stories. I spent as much time wikiing mythological characters as I did actually making my chart. Perhaps my lack of mythological understanding is why I have a hard time agreeing with or caring about most of what Frye says.

on literature as myth

In Archetypes of Literature, Frye asserts that all literature can be boiled down to several fairly obvious symbolic systems and myths. I call them obvious because I really don't think it takes that much critical ability to recognize the patterns that Frye talks about. He's definately read more mythology than me so I can't say much about the connections he draws between literature and myth, but I can comment on his claim that "all literature is displaced myth." Literature, like all art, is a representation of human experience. Music, painting, and literature all try to capture human emotions and life in a way that people can relate to. The thing is, try as they may, no artist, composer or writer can touch on an emotion that hasn't already been evoked by someone else in their field. They might be able to display the emotion in a different way, but by no means can they create a new emotion or experience. Picasso's cubistic (word?) representation of a man and Da Vinci's ,uh, normal painting of a man are extremely different, but they are still of the same thing; a man. Shakespeare's plays and Passion's Promise II: The Reluctant Iberian Mistress (thats made-up, don't go searching for it) are essentially both about love, if you can call what happens in romance novels love. You get the idea. The point is that OF COURSE all books contain many of the same symbols, because those symbols are universally understood by humans. Plants die during the fall and grow back in the spring, hence the coinciding symbols in literature. We can't see in the dark and terrible carnivorous creatures come out at night so obviously we understand that darkness is a symbol for danger or evil. These symbols stem from our experiences of watching our petunias die and stubbing our toe in the dark. Frye says he can trace all literature back to mythology, but I think I can do him one better and trace it back to human nature. The human experience can be reduced to a handful of emotions and a short list of stories, though they may vary in intensity and appearance. These emotions and experiences existed before mythology, and will continue to exist even if nothing was ever written again. Therefore, I say all literature is displaced human experience, not myth. The myth is that you need to read Northrop Frye to figure that out.

On intentional fallacy

The idea that an author's intent should hold no bearing on the interpretation of his/her work is a reckless concept that leaves way too much room for unreasonable readings. Many critics assert that only what's written in the text can be taken into account when critically examining a work. External evidence, like supplementary notes or an author's explicit declaration of his intent should not be considered in criticism. I couldn't disagree more. I concede that an author's intent should not be the driving force behind getting meaning from a work, but it should not be cast aside either. The beauty of all literature is that it can be interpreted differently by everyone who reads it (the notion of reader-response; I see a red wheelbarrow with chickens, you see a dichotomy of the human spirit, whatever). However, I do think that if people are given too much latitude in their interpretations of a work that it can often be completely transformed into something it's not or lose the meaning it was intended to have. This is where author's intent should come into play, as a sort of guard against people forming outlandish opinions or missing the point completely. For example, a few years ago I overheard a young girl talking to her friend about The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe movie, and she said that, "Yeah, like I guess the whole thing is, like, symbolic of the Bible. I did NOT get that when I read it." Ignoring for a moment the epic failure of this girl's teacher or her apparent inability to comprehend written english beyond the Berenstein Bears, we have to consider what a shame it is to have a book's meaning (a fairly obvious one in this case) lost because the reader was not aware of the author's intention. Similar misunderstandings have happened elsewhere. Huckleberry Finn has been banned numerous times throughout its history and panned as racist because of its use of the word "nigger". Anyone who has any knowledge of Mark Twain knows that he actually opposed slavery and the book was a comment against the racism he saw present during that period. Granted, these examples involve some severely ignorant people (not, persay, English majors), yet one needs only to read the paper or turn on the TV to discover that the number of ignorant people in the world is increasing at an ever alarming rate. To allow everyone who picks up a book to attach their own meaning to it means that a text runs the risk of losing its vision. Robert Frost once said that poetry without meter was like tennis without a net. I think that is how an author's intent should affect the interpretation of a work; like a net, preventing the interpretation from getting totally out of hand and ridiculous. Acting as a guard against the absurd, an author's intent can be one of many factors that help the reader to come to a reasonable interpretation.

working?

is this working