on Philip Pullman

I thought the name sounded familiar and when I googled him I immediately remembered him because I read "the Golden Compass" in my children's lit class a few years ago. I remember him particularly because I gave a very impassioned speech to my peers expressing my distaste for Pullman and his book. I enjoyed the first part of his book and I thought it was a creative story and I particularly liked the notion of the daemon that he had in it. Then I got the second half of his book and began to really dislike it, mainly based on his apparent misunderstanding of Christianity. As a Christian, I am accumstomed to a constant barrage of disparaging remarks and negative ideas about Christianity, in books, newspapers, magazines, movies, etc., so I took Pullman's attack on Christianity in stride. However, my religous disagreement with him is not the main reason I disliked the book. I didn't like the book for several reasons. 1) I thought his interjection of religous ideas was very abrupt. I felt like he started writing his book and then halfway through he realized that the popularity of C.S. Lewis's books had alot to do with their religious undertones, so then he decided to throw in some religion to try to drum up sales. I don't think I'm far off considering there's no moral/religous inkling in the first at least half of the book and after that he jsut throws it in there. So basically I just thought it was poor writing. 2) I don't think people should try to disprove/attack things that they don't fully understand, or in their argument they should at least offer up a sufficient replacement for the thing they are arguing against. Pullman does neither in his book. I don't think he fully understands Christianity even though Wikipedia tells me he is an associate of the National Secular Society which you'd think would warrant an understanding of religion since the foundation truly only exists to dispute the religions it is against. If he had an understanding of Christianity, specifically the Christian view of sin, he wouldn't say that original sin is the source of knowledge like he does in his book. The tree that many people associate with original sin is called the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Pullman and others simply shorten this to knowledge and therein lies his problem. The Bible never says there was not knowledge before original sin, only that humans did not know the difference between good and evil. This is mainly because there actually was no evil in the world yet. After original sin there was evil and therefore Adam and Eve were able to distinguish between the two. If Pullman is "undermining the basis of Christian belief" like he claims, is it too much to ask for him to offer a sufficient belief system in its stead? Ok, so original sin is actually good because it gave us knowledge, then what gives us pain and suffering? death? Since he's an atheist he will presumably say those are just part of life, which is fine, but since his book is critiquing Christianity not just promoting atheism he should have to contest all points of Christianity, not just one. I haven't read the other books in the series and perhaps I should but these are questions that I had just from reading the first, and from what Ive heard from other people, he doesn't answer them in the other two books.

I don't write a critique about Homer or Ovid or Bablylonian mythology because I don't fully understand it. Pullman makes this mistake in his books by misunderstanding the myth he was writing about. I think he did it just to stir up some controversy, boost his sales and maybe get people to talk about him. I've just written for half an hour on him so i guess he succeeded in that respect.

on Julia Kristeva again

I feel I have a better understanding of Julia Kristeva than I did in my original post about her. To reiterate what I said in class, the main things she is known for is her work with semiotics and intertextuality. Semiotics is how words get their meaning (signifier and signified). Saussure believed words pointed to a defined meaning. Kristeva disagrees, insisting instead that there is no absolute truth for a word, but the meaning lies instead in prosody (rhythm, stress) which comes from a person's feelings. An example of this is like the one I gave in class, you can answer yes to a question with its meaning actually meaning no depending on the stress put on it. This focus on a person's feelings in relation to meaning led to the coining of the phrase "semanalysis" which is a combination psychoanalysis and semiotics.
Intertextuality I think is a similar concept to semanalysis in the way that they both assert that there is no definite, absolute meaning. Intertextuality deals with the work as a whole and basically says that it "speaks" to other works and a full understanding is not possible without looking at the other texts as well. Structuralists say that the meaning of a work lies in the inherent structures it adheres to (similar to Frye's archetypal ideas). Kristeva and intertextuality disagree and instead say that the meaning exists outside of the text, in its relation to other texts. I hope this clears up a little what I said the other day, although I doubt it since I have only 4 people following my blog. I feel somewhat inadequate

on the movie

I know this is a little late, but i wanted to mention what i noticed about the movie last week. I found it interesting that old children's literature was so blatent with its message compared with children's literature today. The books that were shown in the movie had very obvious lessons, some practical (like not being crushed by a cart or burning yourself with a candle), some more religous. Even the way the ABCs were taught involved some moral, often relating to Christianity. Today's childrens literature either has no moral and is just for fun, or the moral is not as obvious. Undoubtably this difference stems from the changes in our culture. While we still profess to be a "Christian" nation, religion is often left behind when it comes simple things like teaching children. Obviously you can get Christian children books that still have a strong, clear message, but most children's lit these days seems to stray away from that. The same could be same about all literature in general. Compare some Puritan literature to what is popular today and you will see how marginalized religion has become.

on Don Quixote 3

The other day while reading Don Quixote I reached the part where Cardenio reenters the picture when he meets the priest and barber. I have already mentioned how the description of his song reminded me of Order at Key West, but as he began to finish the telling of his tale to the two men, I began to see other interesting things about his story. If one were to listen to the first part of his story it reads almost like a renaissance play. He is madly in love with a woman, they plan to marry, but then his close treacherous friend tricks him and steals the girl from him. If it were truly a renaissance play Lucinda actually would have killed herself and then Cardenio would have murdered Fernando and then killed himself as well. Unfortunately it doesn't happen that way. Later in the story you see a very similar plot in the novella of the Man who was Recklessly Curious, but I'm not done with that quite yet so I'm not sure how it ends. Cervantes' technique in writing this book allows him to incorporate pretty much every type of story imaginable. Already I can see that this is the frame narrative of all frame narratives, and he uses that to tell different stories in different ways. As I get further it becomes easier to not only connect the text to outside things, but also to connect elements within the text, and that's kind of cool I think.

on Don Quixote 2

I don't know why I called my last blog 4 because it was actually 2. Anyhoo, the passage that struck me recently was on 215 when the priest and the barber first hear Dorotea singing. She sings beautifully and they are both awestruck by listening to her. It says, "The hour, the weather, the solitude, the voice, and the skill of the one who was singing caused both wonder and pleasure in the two who were listening, and they remained quiet, hoping they would hear more." Immediately I thought of Idea of Order at Key West. Even though its a guy singing, I thought it sounded very similar to the poem because the audience is raptured by his song, and it mentions his solitude and voice. All these things are in the poem and the book. It may not be much of a connection, but it struck me almost immediately when I read it.

on Don Quixote 4

I'm further than this now, but one passage that struck me earlier in Don Quixote was on page 50 when the priest and DQ's niece are going through all his books and the priest says that there are some books they shouldn't burn. The niece objects and that they must burn them, otherwise he "will read these and want to beceome a shepherd adn wander through the woods and meadows singing and playing, and, what would be even worse, become a poet, and that, they say, is an incurable and contagious disease." I thought this was humorous when I first read it, but after some of our discussions in class I began to see a connection to other stuff we talked about. For one, this sounds like something Plato would say, given his attitude towards poets and how worseless he thought they were. Secondly, I think it's fits in with the attitude alot of people have against poets and by extension, English majors. People think being an English writer is worthless and is a truly bad thing, which necessitates people like Sidney and Shelley to write their apologies, and why we are asked to write apologies as well. I find it interesing that people have to continually be defending poetry/literature, from Plato's day til now. Some people just won't learn. tsk tsk

on don quixote 1

One thing I keep noticing while reading don Quixote is that Cervantes continually steps out of the text to remind us that we're reading a book. He will often times mention another "historian" whose records Cervantes used to tell his story. He also will say that a specific story will be finished in the next chapter. I know in theaters it's called metatheatricality when the audience is reminded that they are watching a play, but I don't know if there is one for non theater literature. If there is, the term would definately apply to Don Quixote

on psychoanalysis and my hatred of crash

In another english class which shall remain unnamed I just started reading this book called Crash. I find it to be one of the largest pieces of literary excrement that I have ever come in contact with. It's elementary, revolting, stupid, lame, and worthless. While I was wading through this crap the other night it struck me that despite its immense trashiness, the stupid author (who should be psychoanalysed himself) was using psychoanalysis in his story. He draws this connection between car crashes and sex and how erotic car crashes are, all the attempting to use as many different terms for genitalia and sexual functions as possible. He basically degrades humans to the level of animals by making it seem that sexual desires are the only things driving our lives. He removes any notion of love, compassion, care, etc. from humans and makes everyone objects. He mentions planes, gear shifters and a variety of other things as fallic symbols. This guy obviously read Freud once and took everything to heart.
My critic for this class is a psychoanalyst and I'm also in the psychoanalysis group so I noticed this pattern in the book fairly quickly. I'm sure if I went to the romance section of a bookstore and picked up some other trash i could find fallic symbols all over too. This book is much worse than romance novels though, I hate it.

intentional fallacy pertaining to the test

I'm pretty sure I didn't do that well on the test, I drew several blanks on things I should have known. This however can be looked at a different way: just because I didn't know exactly the answer that Professor Sexson had in mind, does that mean that I was wrong? Keeping in mind that Profesor Sexson is the author of the test, shouldn't we then disregard his intentions? What the author meant is not important, it's how it's interpretted that is important, and each student might have interpretted it differently. I know for a fact I interpretted a lot of questions differently than Professor Sexson might have intended, so by his standards I might be incorrect, but thats assuming that his intention should really have a bearing on how I read the test. In this vein, I think leniancy should definately be in order when the tests are graded because to mark certain answers wrong would mean that they were wrong by Professor Sexson's standards, and that goes against what we've been learning in class, which is obviously counter-productive. :)

on anagogical lightbulb

I had several lightbulb moments while reading the anagogic section. Actually its really only one lightbulb but I found a couple different passages pertaining to it. On page 119 Frye says that, "In the anagogic phase, literature imitates the total dream of man, and so imitates the thought of a human mind which is at the circumference and not at the center of its reality." I read this to mean that the poet is commenting from far away, from the edges of reality rather than from the center of it. On page 122 he later describes "the function of the poet as revealing a perspective of reality like that of an angel, containing all time and space, who is blind and looking into himself." This is kind of the same idea of detachment, that the poet's commentary is from the sidelines. He says that literature exists in its own universe and contains life and reality in a system of verbal relationships. I really don't know what thats supposed to mean exactly. I think it kind of goes with that other quote about nature going from being the container to being the thing contained. The poet is the creator and by doing it from the margins, from the circumference rather than the center he can encompass the whole universe. maybe.?

on symbols

I had a lightbulb moment while reading Frye's chapter on symbols. It happened on pages 95-96. We have said in class several times how art imitates life. Frye goes a step further and says it also imitates other art; that a poem is not just imitating nature, it is also imitating other poems. I found this interesting because I think you could tie this in to Frye's archetypal chart and how he thinks everything is cyclical and returns back to where it started. The idea that poems imitate other earlier poems suggests a cyclical pattern as well because the same ideas, emotions, and stories would continually be told. Knowing that poems are connected makes us look at them as a whole (poetry), rather than as individual units (a poem). This is why we can use blanket words like "poetry" adn "literature", because it is all interconnected. sort of a bunch of trees make a forest type of thing. I dunno, just found that kind of interesting