Storytelling Hasn't Completely Lost Its Sting...Not For The Children I Babysit

* Note the picture of Walter Benjamin- not gonna lie, sometimes my head hurts from spinning after studying literary criticism too =P*


By now you might think I have fallen off the planet or at the very least have taken a brief hiatus from this blog. You are correct in your assumption of the later. Last week marked my college’s combined Easter/spring break. I didn’t forget about my blog over break, but couldn’t seem to bring myself to dealing with the turtle speed of the internet connection at home. Furthermore, I was focusing on trying to accomplish some writing for another class, namely, a forty page paper that is due in a few short weeks. Regardless, of all this I am back to this lovely blog and hope to post on a regular basis.
Over break I received an e-mail from a woman at my church requesting that I babysit her six children. Might I add that her six children are under the age of well, I know they are at least under the age of ten. Seeing as I am a poor college student, I really didn’t consider myself to have a choice in the matter. My mother thought it was a grand opportunity that might allow me to consider the realities of having six children. My father apparently must have thought I would struggle to find ways to occupy the enthusiastic children at 6 a.m. (yes a.m.), and got a few tips from their grandmother, who told him that they love to hear stories. My father of course reported back to me telling me that I might want to consider the tactic of storytelling. I panicked ever so slightly as thoughts of our recent literary criticism reading assignment, The Storyteller Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov, filled my mind. After having read this essay by Walter Benjamin, I was unsure whether I even knew what it meant to tell a story, to be a storyteller.
According to Benjamin, we are losing the act of storytelling at large. He suggests that this is because the idea of experience has lost its value. I have to admit that I struggle to agree with this notion. It seems to me that much of our society places a strong emphasis on experience. Nearly any position one might apply to will likely ask of the applicant’s experience. Furthermore, most positions requires experience and interviewees the interviewer of his or her experience. I think that perhaps Benjamin is getting at “something” but I don t think that experience is the correct term for that which he is alluding to.
I hate to keep picking at Benjamin, but I also disagree with his notion that the nature of every real story is that it contains something useful. Benjamin suggests that a real story must have a moral, or give practical advice. What I ask of this suggestions is what of stories that don’t contain a moral, and don’t give practical advice. Are they not stories? It seems to me that many stories that are told orally are simply stories with humor. We tell such stories to provide entertainment. Shall we dispose of such stories?
Benjamin’s statements against the novel are fairly strong. It is almost as thought he is saying that in came the novel and out went real communication. Perhaps Benjamin’s issue with the novel is similar to my present day issues with things like instant messenger and facebook. Seems to me that all with the aim of bettering communication we have made it worse. We no longer no how to communicate in the real sense, as mechanisms like instant messaging and facebook have made to easy to communicate falsely. In my estimation they have so much distorted our way of thinking about communication that we no longer know what it means to truly communicate.
The premise of Benjamin’s essay is largely the idea that storytelling has lost its importance. I think this is to be expected with society’s advances (advances- ha!- oxymoron?). It is obvious that oral tradition will certainly become more and more marginalized as we have more options in regards to communication. However, I don’t think that storytelling will ever completely lose its sting. After all there will always be children, like the six that I babysit, who ask to hear stories.

From Elrena Evans to Michel Foucault

Yesterday author and speaker Elrena Evans visited the senior seminar in which I am currently enrolled. She spoke, among other things, of what she terms her miserable experience as a graduate school student. She earned a full scholarship and pursued her M.F.A, but said that she never felt as though she fit in among those of the academy. She spoke of the academic snobbery and of her pot smoking professors and classmates who could have carried less about the fictional stories she wrote about Bible characters. Snickers aroused from those who are also enrolled in this literary criticism class when she complained about having to study the lofty works of Derrida and Foucault. She asked we had yet studied the works of these two men. Ironically, I had read some Derrida the night before and was scheduled, according to the syllabus, to read Foucault today, which I did. I had read some of the work of Derrida in the past, but this was my first time studying Foucault, and Elrena is correct, correct in deed in regard to the loftiness of his subject matter.

One time I was scolded by an English professor who told me that I write too lofty. He told me that only lofty readers will be able to understand my writing. I don’t think my professor could necessarily have justified his scolding. What did he expect me to write like, when most of what we are assigned to read, within the major is rather up there, in the sky somewhere. Besides I have another excuse to offer, I am also studying religion, much of which is based upon writing that is totally out there, lofty, and high in the sky. Clearly, our reading influences how we write, though I am sure that could be argued on the contrary. Seriously, though sometimes all this lofty reading has me thinking so abstractly that I need someone to grab a hold of my ankles and pull me back down to earth. Ok, so perhaps I am being a bit dramatic and really this is more of a fear that I have, of how I could potentially become because of my choice of academic study. Anyway, I am seriously digressing more and more with every word, so now, onward with the purpose of this post. Foucault’s essay, What Is an Author, yea, from what I could gather he is calling into question what it means for “the death of the author” (thank you Roland Barthe for your infamous phrase). Foucault suggest that we must consider that “function” which the “author” fulfills within a given “discourse”.

The author, according to Foucault, precisely serves as an organizing device. As such the author allows us to group certain texts together. The function of the author is both to organize the vast reservoir of materials of the past, and to anchor a certain way of interpreting those materials. Seems that his ultimate target is that of “humanism”, or the postmedieval understanding of who and what individuals are. Foucault’s essay invites its readers to study the ways in which literary criticism approaches its object, the text, and accords it the prestigious title of literature; this partly through the exaltation of the author.

I’m pretty sure that Foucault loses sleep over questions such as the question of an author is, the one at hand in this essay. I found it strangely humorous that he seems so apologetic of some of his earlier work, which is the reason that he reevaluates his prior assumptions. I think I agree with Elrena, in regards to the loftiness of Foucault, but not to go without saying that Foucault has some interesting lofty ideologies regarding what an author is, even if nothing more.

Elrena Evan's Page:
http://elrenaevans.com/

Responsibility to Appreciate What We Don't Like?

From Dr. Powers blog:

…Well, enough about that. Today I'm also interested in Wimsatt and Beardsley and am wondering about the following question: Do we have a responsibility to appreciate things that we don't like? Or even do we have a responsibility to expand our repetoire of pleasures? In our culture today, we tend to think not. Students get offended when they hear Flannery O'Connor's quotation that undergraduates are having their tastes educated--that is, they are being taught what to like and how to like it. Nothing offends our relativistic and basically consumerist spirit more. Indeed, I suspect that far from literature and art as the great undergirding ideologies of capitalism, capitalism might fall apart in the contemporary world if we dared to assume that there were some things that people ought to seek to appreciate or even like, even if they don't like them natively. I think of opera in my own experience, which was first a vague appreciation, then a mild interest, until it finally became a passion and a practice. But I also think of literature. At the least we ask students to appreciate the significance of certain achievements, the first doorway to actually enjoying those achievements. This strikes many folks as oppressive. What right do I have to tell other people they ought to work at appreciating something? Still, I think there's something to the notion that we have an ethical responsibility to expand our repetoire of likes and dislikes. Maybe more on this later…

My response:

…At the end of class a few days ago Dr. Powers posed the question to my classmates and I of whether we have a responsibility to appreciate things that we don’t like. I think this question is paradoxical by nature. How might we sincerely appreciate something that we don’t like? Perhaps the issue at hand here is more about the qualification of the word appreciate. Perhaps this is more about respecting those things that we don’t like, yet even that wouldn’t work. I don’t think that we are necessarily obligated to respect those things that we don’t like. What if the very reason that we don’t like something is say because it is unethical? Dr. Powers suggests that our culture tends to think that we do not have the responsibility to appreciate those things which we don’t like, but again, I disagree. We live in a culture that seems to strive toward tolerance, religious tolerance, cultural tolerance, ethnicity tolerance, political tolerance, the list could go on. I think it is important that we are, at times, exposed to those things that we don’t like, but this in no way obligates us to appreciate such things. I don’t think it is even possible to wholly appreciate something that we don’t like. Dr. Powers suggests his growth in coming to like opera and says that it started with a vague appreciation. In such a way he seems to support that which I have stated above. We have to have that initial interest in order to arrive at a greater appreciation of that thing which we don’t like. This is why it is important to be exposed to even those things that we don’t think we like. In such a way we might awaken an appreciation that we didn’t know existed. However, this does not constitute a responsibility to appreciate things that we don’t like…

Putting the De in the construction

At the risk of sounding completely odd I really enjoy binary oppositions. I find them rather intriguing and even more so after reading an overview on Structuralism/Poststructuralism and hence forth arriving at a broader understanding of the purpose of such. As you are probably well aware Jacques Derrida is often referred to as the leading figure in deconstruction. Perhaps like me, you have studied his work in your philosophy or religion courses.

Derrida looks at Western philosophy, or metaphysics and proposes the idea that there necessarily has to be a center, or point at which everything comes. In example, this point could be God, human self, the mind, or the unconscious. This of course depends on the philosophical system that is being referred to.

So playing off of this ideology comes the presumption that spoken word guarantees the existence of somebody doing the speaking. Derrida calls this the idea of the self that has to be there to speak part of the metaphysics of presence. Presence is itself a binary opposition. That is right, you guessed it, presence/absence. Of course presence becomes that which is preferred over absence. So this privilege of speech is what Derrida calls logocentricism. Logos, greek for word and centricism of course for center. For once my painful study of biblical Greek comes into practice- yay!!!

All this to say that the basic method of deconstruction is to find a binary opposition. Then comes the importance of showing how each pair is a part of the other. Supposedly then the structure of opposition, which kept the two binaries apart crumbles. The binary is to loose its meaning so that you can’t tell the difference between the two. I say supposedly in the above sentence, because this to me seems like a far cry from reality. Anyway, regardless of what I think this is why the method is called deconstruction because it is a combination of construction and deconstruction. This feels like a lesson taken straight from Intro. to English Studies all over again. Those of you who had the privilege of taking that course probably remember Downing talk about divine construction, on what seemed like a daily basis. Just thought I would refresh your lovely minds, now mine needs some sleep for refreshment. I'm of to sleep and dream divinely of deconstruction, maybe, just maybe.

Link used for above outside research: http://www.colorado.edu/English/courses/ENGL2012Klages/1derrida.html

What up Barthes?

::This entry needs a disclaimer, so here it is: I spent my day typing my senior seminar paper (26 pages thus far) and then taught a tap dance class and now am back writing this blog entry as the clock quickly approaches 12 a.m. so you might have to forgive that which I write that is completely and utterly bizarre:

Ok so I read this assignment over the weekend and perhaps I completely missed something but I’m not exactly positive what the leading French structuralist, Ronald Barthes was trying to express in From Mythologies Soap-powders and Detergents. It seems to me that Barthes makes an effort to show the way in which culture is covered by myths, disguised as truths. Perhaps the way he writes, which left me feeling a bit dumbfounded, is impacted by the reality that he is writing on the brink of structuralism and poststructuralism. Seriously though, what up with the collaboration between science and detergent? I did not just write “what up”, oh yes I did. What a shame, I had an English teacher in high school that used to say “what up” and I thought it was quite disturbing given his position and now his influence just came through in my blog entry. Anyway, can someone please clue me in as to how his essay related to structuralism? My brain is fried.

Annie Dillard on Lit. Crit.

Just came across the following as I was reading over some things I highlighted not long ago in Annie Dillard's The Writing Life:

"My work was too obscure, too symbolic, too intellectual. It was not available to people. Recently I had published a complex narrative essay about a moth's flying into a candle, which no one had understood but a Yale critic, and he had understood it exactly. I myself was trained as a critic. I was a critic writing for critics: was this what I had in mind?"

Thought this related quite well to some of the frustration I have sensed from my fellow literary criticism classmates. In studying literary theory do we risk being able to communicate only to those who, like us, have studied literary theory?

Structuralism: Scientific Study of Narrative- I kind of like it

So, I think I’m a fan of structuralism mainly because I tend to be a realist and one whose reasoning generally flows rather logically. Perhaps this also relates to my perfectionist personality. I like formulas and knowing that there is an objective answer. I’m not particularly a fan of subjectivity. Perhaps given these truths it seems strangely odd that I am an English major, and I admit to finding it strange at times myself. However, I do also have the creative, imaginative brain. Much of my passion lies within the performing arts and I feel most alive when I am dancing, acting, singing, or playing my violin. The logical scientific part of me wants to embrace Tzetan Todorov, who is best know for advocating the scientific study of narrative, modeled in linguistics, for which he coined the term "narratology".

As a student studying English I have often cringed in light of how subjective the interpretation of literature is. For students like me, few and far in between as we might be, Todorov offers us a theory, or resource for objectively interpreting literature. Structuralists apply the scientific model of linguistics to other aspects of human culture, seeking to chart their underlying structures and rules. In Structural Analysis of Narrative Todorov quite interestingly designates the specific elements of each plot, on the model of the sentence, as subject, predicate, and adjective. He works to discern grammar rather than semantic meaning of narrative. In this essay he specifically focuses on that of the plot and suggests that, “there are a certain number of useful categories for examining and describing plots” (Todorov 2102). He then goes on to give examples of plots and a formula for interpreting or understanding the plots.

Though this will appear difficult to understand without having the plots in front of you, this is an example of his formula for interpretation:

X violates a law --> Y must punish X --> X tries to avoid being punished à

--> Y violates a law --> Y does not punish X

--> Y believes that X is not violating a law

I am definitely in love with the objectivity of this notion, though it seems to me that it is subjective in the sense that it seems as though it might only work if we are to entirely rid the work of its author. Structuralist doesn't leave room for authorship. I take issue with this ideology because without the poet we obviously wouldn't have the poem. That is an example of my logical flow of reason (haha). Seriously though, I don't understand how structuralists can comfortably rid a work of it's creator. Is it not apparent that something is missing. I'm uncertain as to how structuralists would respond to this other than to say they aren't concerned with the poet, that it is the text that matters. I beg to argue on behalf of the poet because we wouldn't even have a poem to interpret without the poet.