Expressing life experience

I remember reading Washington Square by Henry James just last year. It's crazy how long it takes to think back on stuff which seems clearer the longer it resonates in the brain. James' prose it surprisingly quirky in that old proper sort of way. I'll just say the book ends not how one would think it to end. I'm not very knowledgeable about " the madness of art." I have found that it relates to a psychotherapy- "the need to transform and metamorphose personal experience by means of prose, poetry, or other artistic expression" as in the artist using their depression/rage of life to control the experience of aging without the experiences they wanted to have. That's according to the American Psychiatric Association so it might be a little removed from the "goals" of thinking about it for English 300's purposes. To think about art (literature) as expressions of personal experience surely promotes and endless forum for "transforming" what life is and turns it into everything that's it's not. What I mean by this is expressing life experience in literary works changes what the experience actually was into the experience of feeling the life in the experience. James may allude that the madness about art perhaps might be the irony that art produces more feeling about life that life itself. Sure, this notion can used to psychoanalyze the person producing the experience but in no way can it summarize the feeling of the expression in art.

After Blake

After class today I wanted more. I know the Blakean notion of innocence to experience will continue to label the ideas we refer to in class from time to time but cannot we not dwell just on the experience? I feel like jumping right into talking about Blake to better explain the grand significance of reading as child does have relevance to what learning is but I really want to stop just before we get there. Intertextuality, the sublime, structuralism and biographical accuracy all come from dwelling solely on the experience. Of course, some would say because something is learned from the literature but why not stay there and praise the experience. I feel like cataloguing the experience with innocence takes away from what one thinks about immediately following a reading as the experience. It takes one away from their thoughts and thrusts the Revelation of the "lesson" to be more significant than all others. I may be completely out of my league in trying to separate experience from innocence but I know I'm not alone. If experience an innocence cannot be separable from one another in an overall theme than neither can hope and expectation be. Hope and expectation are two very different things and seldom it is than humans keeps them separate. What I'd like to say about them is that expectation supersedes hope in reading. When the "experience" of reading sets in we're"expected" to learn something not "hope" that we do. Thus experience invokes expectation and innocence demonstrates a hope of something. I want to stick with the notion of experience before taking about going into anything else. I suppose Sancho Panza might operate in a similar way before the end of the novel. He might expect his master to do something before he hopes he does in due time. Maybe that's what I really wanted more from class today. A little willing skepticism about Sancho's "learned" motivations.

Lesson Plans of the Past

The Little film about Little Books I saw not that long ago. I don't think I have laughed so whole heatedly in a while as I did watching moments of the film. Some very intriguing clips from passages in the books and the way in which they represent life at that time was a lesson for me in itself. Noticing how some names where capitalized and others weren't is particularly interesting when some of the books talked about the bible. I remember books growing up and the ones I remember the most had personified animals in them. This seems a very old and successful idea for children lesson plans. I had to laugh about how accurate some of the books lessons where about the dangers in daily life. "Don't drink from a hot tea pot! Don't get crushed under a horse carriage!" I think the illustrations got to me because I cannot think of any type today that can match there "true accuracy" about life danger lessons. I'm not sure at what point a child reads for inquiry beyond what their given to know. The film captures this idea of a child growing in knowledge beyond the letters and pages of early learning. It shows the wanderlust of a world apart from the household. In turn it also shows the construction of the little books and critiques societal thought about that world without saying anything, just showing the pages and clips of passages. It reminds me of reading old national geographic magazines. The spectrum of geographic study is very different from the 1940s contrasted with the 1980s. It's different because we learn more and different because we don't remember what we learn but in fact relearn what was forgotten. A little bit like a centrifugal lesson according to.....what his name again? Well, that's my most prominent thought about the film so far but I'm sure many connections will be made to Don Quixote as I try to read six hundred pages in due time.

(more)

After reviewing what I had scrambled down for notes today I think I could have done pretty well if it were a pop-quiz. True, not much about Don Quixote was said in Lu of questioning for the exam. Frye, sure was. I'm not to the Canon character in the novel yet. I just finished the chapter were Quixote set free the men from in route to the galley's. I thought more would develop from the interest of Quixote in the guy whose history is still being written. For sure, I thought Quixote and that guy were going to team up. In all that Quixote said about the unjustified punishments, it was pretty bold an arrogant. There might be a difference between those two terms but Quixote doesn't make it easy to define the difference. As a character his actions are very bold and his vocal suggestions or more accurately demands, are come off very arrogant to the others characters in the novel. I've seen the musical and one thing I remember most is the expression of Sancho's face while Quixote continues speaking anything and everything that's on his mind to others. While reading I imagine this vividly and it may be something I've brought to the novel but I'm not sure yet. In fact, I'm quite sure a lot of knowledge I have about the world will connect in some kind of way with Cervantes' dianoia's as E.M. Forster has said.

tuesday-

I'm trying to remember all what was said in class discussion yesterday and I got to thinking about what the variety of questions will be for the test. A vast range of interests I'm sure will construct a most challenging exam. Well, maybe not too challenging because I want to pass. I feel like Frye's theory of modes is father back in the semester than it should be. Although we allude to Fyre's graph of modes and strive to place whatever idea we talk about into it, I'm still wondering where Catcher in the Rye would fit. I feel it kind of belongs in the low mimetic/thematic box but I'm not sure. Would that be placing a kind of modernist notion in a low mimetic? I mean if certain texts that we know kind of exemplify a literary idea does it help to place it into Frye's method for understanding modes or not? Again tonight I had Quixote pop into my head while reading for another class. I kind of chuckled about my thoughts too. I tried to imagine what the sum of Don Quixote and the Terminator would be. If Quixote can get beat up constantly and come back to life in a somewhat coherent state then he must posses some kind of super human endurance or android regenerative qualities. If the Terminator comes from the future with apocalyptic news then I'd like to bet (apart from the story in the movie) that the loss of chivalry must have something to do with it. Even though many of Quixote's engagements with the "enemy" seem ridiculous we must wonder how what he actually forecasts in his mind might be more dangerous than the reality Sancho sees him in, for now. Maybe that will be my question- If Don Quixote engaged the Terminator what would happen? Would Quixote accuse him of possessing his amour or would the Terminator surrender and take over Sancho's duties and service Quixote in his exploits? Answer- both

Amost getting it-

Page 119 is rich in Frye- "Rituals cluster around the cyclical movement of the sun, the seasons and human life." "Recurrence and desire interpenetrate" I don't think I understand what Frye means as concretely as he did but in trying to think about how the archetypal phase of symbols works I somewhat get it. The traditions of rituals in conjunction with what is happening in nature surely operate in side by side. It helps to think about the rhetorical political landscape and how words refer to the natural shift in things. Words and phrase captured by the media or more accurately edited by the media play on the "motifs and themes" that are most likely to fuse with a particular human emotion. It almost seems for me that in Frye's theory of symbols the formal stage is really fused more with the archetypal stage before anything else. Although understanding the formal phase or any other stage for that matter requires comprehension of examples it nevertheless operates hidden in daily rhetoric. Well, maybe not hidden but spoken plainly without hinting at what language is referring to directly. So far I may have convincing myself that this happens but not until others might suggest similar instances in class.

How do symbols form?

I understand what Frye has to say in his "Theory of Symbols" from a few examples I've read so far. He mentions that a dictionary would be useless if we did not already have some knowledge of others words. I understand this notion to be explained further in thinking about how we can't totally comprehend the meaning of a word until we picture it. We do not have a complete understanding until the picture or "symbol" gives us an image to base a definition or description of off. Even then it's still a continuing form and shape that floats aimlessly until we attach it the best definition of it we view as the most qualified. Frye uses a cat as a symbol that is broad enough to float through different meanings and different personal attachments to the symbolic meaning. At times a symbol gets confusing in how the text means to show it or how the author of the text meant to use the symbol in relations in textual imagery. "The reality-principle is subordinate to the pleasure-principle" can sum up all that is learned when constructing a symbol in reading literature. It seems that a common reaction to that phrase would be "of course!" It may not be though. If literature at it's most basic operation in the universe "instructs and entertains" then why do we need answers to know which comes first? The pleasure in being entertained surely dominates the recognition of feeling more knowledgeable while reading. In a way it also disguises infusing knowledge while being entertained. In thinking about how we forms symbols or how the symbols form the meaning of what we read I would recommend consulting your consciousness differently. Don't think about how the symbol comes to makes sense after reading, think about how the symbol makes more sense as the reading continues. It makes more sense because a symbol has multiple meanings and it would be impossible to dissect which ones induce the pleasure-principle and which ones induce the reality-principle or the learning principle.