in reading both barthes and foucault's essays, i couldn't help but they both call upon the storyteller figure of ages ago to make the point that the author/text relationship has not always been what it is now. their reference to these storytellers and the types of tales they told really struck something with me... we hear those stories all the time. they've since been collected, typed up, published.. but we all know them. these are the real timeless texts. the pieces of literature that are so simple, usually conveying a message for society, that were really told instead of read. there was no mind paid toward from who's mind the stories sprung... kind of an agreement between author and listener -- both parties knew what their place in the circulation of the story was. the author was to create and provide, then he or she was to back down and away when they gave their piece to the world. the listener's role was to take what they naturally felt from hearing it and then continue to tell it.. keep it alive.

i will elaborate more and provide a link. my internet at home is fussy, so i wasn't able to do much but read blog posts yesterday...

oh! i want to thank you guys for participating so well in class on tuesday... you guys really made presenting on new historicism a whole lot easier for me. you know what it's like when you think you get it, but you've got that sick feeling that you don't.

i appreciate it.

derrida, derrida, let me come in!

so i made the mistake of treating myself to an early afternoon movie before coming in to talk about the film and derrida himself. i choose to see pan's labyrinth. wrong choice before having to come in and focus on post-structuralism and the way derrida handled himself while on film. it's going to take me some time before i can actually make sense of my response to derrida...

though derrida didn't oppose the interview process, nor the film itself, he surely had strong feelings about the affect of film and his portrayal on film. whether through pictures or movies, derrida talks about the anxiety over this "narcissistic horror". derrida comes right out and says it: he doesn't like looking at his face. to look at the image of his face is to look at it as not being there. it's to acknowledge it's death. to look at a photograph of someone is to acknowledge that they are being supplemented by something else that is not them... to look at a photograph of someone is to bring up memories and emotions regarding the person in the photograph, though this person is no longer because whether or not they are actually dead, who they are in the photograph is and we are reminded that they will die. derrida, like most of us, doesn't necessarily enjoy thinking about himself as being dead...

derrida notes in the film that the documentary isn't about him at all. rather, it's the autobiography of the filmmaker. as soon as he mentions this, it made sense. the movie is not purely him, and for someone else to make a movie purely about him would be impossible. the interviewer poses the questions. although derrida is quite forward about what he will and will not answer and chooses to speak when he wants to, he is still answering someone else's questions. without the film maker, derrida wouldn't have questions to answer. without derrida, the film maker wouldn't have a movie. what if derrida asked himself some questions in front of a video camera? he'd be taking on the role of a interviewer while being the interviewed and in doing so he would screw up who he is at pure.

so there really is no film about derrida. that would be impossible. and me? i'm getting carried about and possibly a little silly. forgive me. i just spent the past two hours watching a completely tortured twelve year old who escapes her harsh reality during fascist fun time in spain by experiencing this fantasy land that you really, really want to exist just so she can catch a break. unlike the dead fairies. check back in with me... i might have to go see it again and do a marxist, psycho-analytical, and feminist critique of it.

back to derrida! anyway, so the other point that he really drives home about how the film is not his, nor is it about him, is the editing process. he's right... the film maker chooses what gets made into an eighty minute movie out of months and months worth of footage. that is not capturing derrida at pure.

i'm going to think some more about derrida's thoughts on forgiveness and reconciliation. i think i have a lot to say about that.

the book of job - god shoots the shit with satan

"One day the heavenly beings came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan also came among them. The Lord said to Satan, "Where have you come from?" Satan answered the Lord, "From going to and fro on the earth, and from walking up and down on it." The Lord said to Satan, "Have you considered my servant Job? There is no one like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man who fears God and turns away from evil." Then Satan answered the Lord, "Does Job fear God for nothing? Have you not put a fence around him and his house and all that he has, on every side? You have blessed the work of his hands, and his possessions have increased in the land. But stretch out your hand now, and touch all that he has, and he will curse you to your face." The Lord said to Satan, "Very well, all that he has in your power; only do not stretch your hand against him!" So Satan went out from the presence of the Lord. -Job 1.6-1.12

i promise you. i'm the last person you need to worry about gettin' preachy. bare with me. let's look at this story as a piece of literature.

in my spiritual lit. class this morning we discussed the book of job. focusing on the beginning of the story, a huge part of the class was dedicated to discussing what it meant for god and satan to be hanging out, talking to each other as equals; the whole idea really hit a nerve with most people. i heard the words "ultimate good" and "ultimate evil" being thrown around. the idea that god and satan could ever be walking around together, looking down at earth and talking about who's life to impact together did not sit well with most. thinking of god as the ultimate good and satan as the ultimate evil; binary opposition, no? god and satan = good and evil = opposites.

someone in class then mentioned that the definition of "satan" at the time that job was supposedly written was not exactly what the rest of us have been accustomed to. in the footnotes of the first chapter it reads "In the book of Job, Satan is not yet the personal name of the devil, as in later Jewish and Christian literature. Rather, the Hebrew (with the definite article) simply means "the adversary" or "the accuser", a reference to one of the members of the divine council who served as a sort of independent prosecutor. " this explanation of was meant by "satan" in the story did not change the class from talking of "good" and "evil".

what does it mean that god is good? what does is mean that satan is evil? assuming that at the time the book of job was written, satan was an associate force of god. this force served on a panel of judges, regardless of how it judged. the way i'm reading it is that at this point, satan was just the otherworldly force looking to pick apart the faults and shortcomings of the earthly world.

i really am trying to make a relevant point, so i'm going to work myself through this based yesterday's lecture.

i read the story of job as being about a ("good") man who's life is constantly afflicted by an agreement of sorts between god and satan. no matter how badly life gets, job's loyalty to god remains strong and true, although he has no answer as to why god is allowing these things to occur in his life. job has three friends; eliphaz, bildad, and zophar argue that the reason for job's awful, afflicted life must be the fact that he is a sinner. job and reader know this is not true. eliphaz, bildad, and zophar represent the status quo of the time. they humanize the belief that god condemns the lives and souls of those who scorn him.

let's think about the story being about morality. since good and evil are words that are juxtaposed as binary opposites, i think its safe to say that good is generally favored over evil... naturally and universally. since good is favored over evil, one could say that good is the center of the structure of morality; good being present.

i must point out that good would not exist without evil. the idea of "evil" is not necessarily less present than the idea of "good", rather its simply socially accepted as the better half. the idea of evil defines the idea of good, and vice versa. and what does it mean to place the name evil on something? as i found out today, the fact that most people have this association with satan as evil is completely irrelavant in terms of the book of job. this force is not mentioned as evil, rather - to humanize the force, he was just doing his job (no pun intended). that job's friends were chalking the unfortunate events of his life up to his sin implies their belief in the center of morality being good. assuming they represent the belief of the general population at the time, the belief is that evil breeds immorality.. which is also saying that good breeds morality. but you can't have one without the other, right?

linguistics.. my second love.

"the bond between the signifier and the signified is radically arbitrary". -ferdinand de saussure, course in general linguistics

let's start at the beginning. the definition of the signifier is the sound or image used to represent a sign. a sign is the actual word. the signified is the concept. to say that something is "arbitrary" without using the word "random" is to understand that something is completely free from a constriction or law. examples:

to look outside and see the sleet today is to understand that the word sleet has been registered, in our language as we know it, as the frozen, sharp rain that falls from the sky. we can differentiate sleet from snow and sleet from hail. the word "sleet" is the sign. to write and spell s-l-e-e-t and to read it on a piece of paper is the signifier. the signified is what we know it to be. saussure argues that the relationship between the signifier and the signified is unnatural. that a sign is without value and is only identifiable through the phonetic and visual image that are culturally assigned to it.

it's all gravy to me. through my overuse of the term "condition" in its various forms in my previous blog post, i cringe at using it again, but; i've been conditioned to automatically respond to a sound, image, and written word with a concept that has been assigned to it based on the culture i was raised in and the language i was raised speaking. this is true of all people, all over the world.

saussure argues that language constructs the world we live in. words, alone, mean nothing without other words to put them in some sort of context. to have an "old dog" and a "rabid dog" is two have two completely types of dogs... but they're both dogs.

structuralism is "the beliefe that things cannot be understood in isolation..." is it safe to say that there are basic meanings for words that allow us to connect a sound, an image, and a spelling to the same basic concept? or would saussure disagree with even the basic meaning of a word? on a most basic linguistic and literary level, these basic meanings have no value outside of allowing the people of a shared population to agree upon the concept of said word.

you've got to back up to go forward

Having a few problems getting things started. But I'm ready to post.

The Marxist critic holds strong to the belief that the social class that a writer belongs to is the greatest influence on their work. From my understanding, the Marxist critic believes that no work of literature is free from the writer's social and political situation (struggle?); that there is no way a writer can see beyond the boundaries of where they were born, the values they were raised by, their political affiliation (and affliction, i suppose, for that matter).

the second tenet of liberal humanism (as listed by barry) points out that a text "...contains its own meaning within itself. It doesn't require any elaborate process of placing it within a context, whether this be: socio-political...literary-historical... autobiographical..." barry then goes on to state that the importance of these contexts are not to be undermined, rather, they are to be studied. a liberal humanist does not necessarily believe that looking at a text within these contexts is all out wrong, rather they believe that "the trained mind" should be able to look at a text without seeing it through such contexts. The third tenet refers to this: "To understand the text well it must be detached from these contexts and studied in isolation. What is needed is the close verbal analysis of the text without prior ideological assumptions, or political pre-conditions, or, indeed, specific expectations of any kind, since all these are likely in interfere fatally and with what the nineteenth-century critic Matthew Arnold said was the true business of criticism, 'to see the objects as in itself it really is'."

you can't make apple juice from oranges. the liberal humanist belief in an "ultimate" autonomous text does not come close to the marxist belief that all texts are rooted in the conditioning of the writer. to a liberal humanist, to be unable to see a text free from such contexts is to read with an untrained mind.

not to interfere (fatally?) with the ideas of the professionals , but contrasting both schools has gotten me in over my head. as a mere literature student, i read. when i read, i take into account many things that have to do with the product. i have a bad habit of researching writers; where they came from and who they were. as a result, as i continue reading the work of said writers and my "untrained mind" can't help but think about the work i'm reading through such contexts. even if the work has nothing to do with the author's conditioning. on the other hand however, i think that assuming that a writer can't create beyond the constrictions of their social conditioning is (for the momentary lack of a better term) crap. to assume that the human mind is incapable of creating with no intention other than to express is incredibly close-minded. going back to liberal humanism, i also have a hard time grappling with the idea of this ultimate, autonomous text. where do they keep it? is it locked up somewhere? do you have to be invited to some sort of secret pizza party to see it? my real question is, who's really to say what has the potential for ultimate greatness and what doesn't? especially taking into consideration the age that we live in; where it is assumed that expression and creativity have no boundaries. sure, there are "masters" that we have all come to know and recognize as masters in art, literature, music and the like. but is that it? are we never going to be graced by another "master"? to say that there is an ultimate of something sounds to me like it is being assumed that there is no more room for another great period of artistic expression and there is nothing to look forward to.

The beginning

I'm bri. Just bri. I've never done this before, so i must say that i'm a little nervous. Excited.. but nervous. I suppose all i can hope for is that i get over my initial feelings of doubt in my ability to actually maintain some sort of intelligent conversation through this blog.. and that the feedback and conversations i start help me to further understand exactly what we're taking on in class. i want to be read, i want to be understand and i want to understand... so i'm going to rest easy knowing this is the first step.

i do not like capital letters very much.

my initial thoughts on "theory" as a tool to study literature are, well, few. in thinking about theory and whether or not i view myself as subscribing to a certain school (or, knowing me, schools), i can't help but be a little overwhelmed at the fact that engaging in a text is no longer what it used to be. reading something, putting it into some sort of context, and understanding it as more than what it appears to be is something that i've been been doing for awhile. however, there's a name for it now. there's a sort of science behind it. this is no longer me just reading and understanding on my own terms. i suppose this is what i signed up for..

again.. i'm nervous. but excited.