“One of the most promising of the young Negroe poets said to me once, “I want to be a poet—not a Negroe poet,” meaning, I believe, “I want to write like a white poet”; meaning subconsciously, “I would like to be a white poet”; meaning by that “I would like to be white.” And I was sorry the young man said that, for no great poet has ever been afraid of being himself. And I doubted then that, with his desire to run away spiritually from his race, this boy would ever be a great poet. But this is the mountain standing in the way of any true Negroe art in America—this urge within the race toward whiteness, the desire to pour racial individuality into the mold of American standardization, and to be as little Negroe and as much American as possible” (Hughes, 1192).
Hughes worries about the longing of black artists to not be black, to be American, and to be taken seriously, but he worries that through this they will lose something.
“But he worries about the price paid for gaining the attention of whites. The perils facing the black artist are so many – from self-loathing to currying the favor of whites to providing a safe window on the exotic world of the racial other – that success depends on an honesty and fearlessness that are almost too much to ask.” (1191)
This reminded me of Blacksploitation roles in film, in the following clip Roscoe Lee Brown discusses the same issues faced by black actors.
Analysis #7 Blacksploitation
Analysis #6/Group Presentation Reflection
Our presentation was on Feminist theory, and I think it went fantastically. We had a great discussion with the class throughout and our slides had a good amount of information on them to teach the class, but not so much as to put them into a coma. Our videos got a huge response, most noticeably “Smack My Bitch Up” which was exactly what we were hoping for.
My personal role in our presentation was to help with the technical stuff, change slides, and gather information for the Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar slides.
Putting the Pieces Together Analysis #5
This trailer is for the movie Memento where the main character Leonard Shelby, has anterograde amnesia, which prevents him from making new memories. Leonard is able to recreate his identity daily, he leaves himself clues to tell him anything important that he needs to know. This enables him to add or destroy memories whenever he wants. The movie is also portrayed scene by scene, in reverse, which helps give off the idea of fragmentation. There are no constants. Lyotard suggests that postmodernism is continually redefined, and this is clearly visible in Memento. The clues Leonard leaves for himself daily are the signifiers and the actually events that they represent are the signified, however the two are not always related accurately. There is no sense of morality, Leonard is only looking for revenge time and again, even though he does not remember his revenge after he achieves it. It’s a vicious cycle, he spends his life reliving the same events, hunting down the same guy, and remembers none of it.
It's all About Marxism Analysis #4
In this clip Lucy and Ethel are the proletariat workers while their boss is clearly the bourgeoisie. Their boss intimidates them and makes them fear for their job if they do not do it quickly enough, without ever doing any of the physical work herself. She is only mental labor, the supervisor. While it is obviously meant to be humorous, it demonstrates the struggle of the physical laborers to keep production levels high. You are what you produce, and if you do not produce enough you are worthless. Your value is your ability to produce.
Another example I found myself thinking about as I learned about Marxism is Animal Farm. Marx could, in essence, be Old Major, the one who showed the animals that they were being mistreated and that they should rebel against their human master. In the beginning all of the animals were going to be equals, all working together. The pigs would be the mental labor and all of the other animals would be the physical labor, but they would be equal. This is Marxism, before things began to go awry. I think Animal Farm is pretty accurate though, it is only a matter of time before greed and laziness set in and begin to disrupt the shared labor and equality.
All workers are equal, but some are more equal than others
Marx describes the work force in Communism. A worker is only as good as their production rate and the value of the item they are producing. “A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social of men’s labor appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labor; because the relation of the producer’s to the sum total of their own labor is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labor. This is the reason that the products of labor become commodities, social things whose qualities are at the same time perceptible and imperceptible by the senses.” (664) The creation of a commodity is only possible if there is someone to labor over producing the commodity, and the labor itself therefore becomes commodified.
“The character that his own labor possesses of being socially useful takes the form of the condition, that the product must not be only useful, but useful for others, and the social character that this particular labor has of being equal of all other particular kinds of labor, takes the form that all physically different articles that are the products of labor, have one common quality, viz., that of having value” (666). If a product is not useful to others the labor is useless and a waste of time.
Footloose and Fancy Free Analysis #3
“Yes, in his mind the woman has got a penis, in spite of everything; but this penis is no longer the same as it was before. Something else has taken its place, has been appointed its substitute, as it were, and now inherits the interest, which was formerly directed to its predecessor. But this interest suffers an extraordinary increase as well, because the horror of castration has set up memorial to itself in the creation of this substitute. Furthermore, an aversion, which is never absent in any fetishist, to the female genitals remains a stigma indelebile of the repression that has taken place. We can now see what the fetish achieves and what it is that maintains it. It remains a token of triumph over the threat of castration and a protection against it. It also saves the fetishist from becoming a homosexual, by endowing women with the characteristic that makes them tolerable as sexual objects. In later life, the fetishist feels that he enjoys yet another advantage from his substitute for a genital. The meaning of the fetish is not known to other people, so the fetish is not withheld from him it is easily accessible and he can readily obtain the sexual satisfaction attached to it. What other men have to woo and make exertions for can be had by the fetishist with no trouble at all” (Freud, 843).
As Freud so eloquently explains, fetishes are a substitute for the penis in women. Born out of the realization that their mother’s do not have a penis, and the subsequent fear of their own castration. The fetish gives them something else to focus on, instead of a woman’s genitalia, which would be a constant reminder of the missing phallus for the fetishist.
Freud also talks about the superiority fetishists feel at the ease of their own self-fulfillment, since the subject that is gratifying it would not know the object of their fetish. I have actually witnessed this firsthand, I was once asked by an acquaintance if they could rub my earlobes. I did not think anything of the request except that it was strange, he explained it by merely saying it helps calm him when he is feeling nervous, and he only brings it up to women because they are less judgmental. In hindsight I realize now that this was probably a fetish, whether he knew it or not.
Fetishes are showcased in mainstream media more than people probably realize. Quentin Tarantino frequently showcases naked female feet in many of his movies. The following clip shows some of the more obvious instances of this.
In an interview where he was directly asked about whether or not he had a foot fetish Tarantino replied “I appreciate the female foot, but I've never said that I have a foot fetish. But I am a lower track guy. I like legs... I like booties... [Laughs] Let's just say, I have a black male sexuality.” He does not deny that he has a foot fetish, just that he has never admitted to saying he does.
Freud, Sigmund. "Fetishism". ed. Leitch, Vincent B. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton &, 2010. Print.
Oh Meaning Where Art Thou?
“The image of literature to be found in ordinary culture is tyrannically centered on the author, his person, his life, his tastes, his passions, while criticism still consists for the most part in saying that Baudelaire’s work is the failure of Baudelaire the man, Van Gogh’s his madness, Tchaikovsky’s his vice. The explanation of a work is always sought in the man or woman who produced it, as if it were always in the end, through the more or less transparent allegory of the fiction, the voice of a single person, the author ‘confiding’ in us” (1322).
Certain writers have tried to distance the text from the author. “Mellarme was doubtless the first to see and to foresee in its full extent the necessity to substitute language itself for the person who until then had been supposed to be its owner. For him, for us too, it is language which speaks, not the author; to write is, through a prerequisite impersonality to reach that point where only language acts, ‘performs’ and not ‘me’ (1323). This is the beginning of the death of the author. Things should not be written for the author themselves, they should be written with the reader in mind, otherwise the work is meaningless to all but the author. Barthes suggests using ambiguous characters to resist writing in oneself. When the author is distanced from the text it becomes more easily accessible and allows readers to find meaning.
Oh Mother
This week we focused on psychoanalysis with Freud and Lacan.
“It is the fate of all of us, perhaps, to direct our first sexual impulse toward our mother and our first hatred and our first murderous wish against our father. Our dreams convince us that this is so. King Oedipus, who slew his father Lauis and married his mother Jocasta, merely shows us fulfillment of our own childhood wishes. But, more fortunate than he, we have meanwhile succeeded, in so far as we have not become psychoneurotics, in detaching our sexual impulses from our mothers and forgetting our jealousy of our fathers.” (816)
The Oedipus complex for Freud is the childhood desire to sleep with your mother and get rid of your father. Children are jealous of their father’s interaction and relationship with their mother, wanting their mother all to themselves.
“This act (of looking at oneself in the mirror), far from exhausting itself, as in the case of the monkey, once the image has been mastered and found empty, immediately rebounds in the case of the child in a series of gestures in which he experiences in play the relation between the movements assumed in the image and the reflected environment, and between this virtual complex and the reality it reduplicates—the child’s own body, and the person and things, around him” (1164).
Here Lacan is commenting on our fascination with mirrors as infants, which even chimpanzee’s realize is insignificant. The child begins to be fascinated by the imitation of gestures that occurs with the mirror. The child goes through a stage of desiring what others desire, in a way, imitating their gestures as if they were a reflection
Say What?
Saussere discusses semiotics, the study of language in relation to its impact on social life. Language is a major part of our lives, and is more involved than I had ever considered.
“Linguistic signs, though basically psychological, are not abstractions; associations which bear the stamp of collective approval—and which added together constitute language are realities that have their seat in the brain. In language there is only the sound-image, and this can be translated into a fixed visual image.”
Language is full of sound-images, words linked to a concept, which bring about a mental picture. When you say toothbrush, someone will have a mental picture of a toothbrush instead of an alligator. While these sound-images may not be completely universal (not everyone will picture the same toothbrush) they are still comparable. We develop these sound-images over time, but many are taught to us at an early age when we are learning language.
“A system of interdependent terms in which the value of each term results solely from the simultaneous presence of the others” (857).
Huge chunks of our language have meaning because of other words, think binaries here. Right and wrong for example, if there was no right, would we have any idea what wrong was? Light and dark, if we never had light would we know dark?
Ferdinand De Saussure. "Course in General Linguistics". ed. Leitch, Vincent B. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton &, 2010. Print.
Word Picture Analysis #2
It’s getting late, the streets are deserted, but they aren’t ready to leave one another just yet. They see a café open and duck in to have coffee and to draw the night out a little longer. They realize almost immediately that this was a mistake, the café is far too empty, the waiter appears far too desperate, but they sit down and order anyway. They notice one other diner, a man sitting by himself completely absorbed in his own thoughts and oblivious to them. The waiter seems to realize this guest is a lost cause, and so he focuses his attention upon them. Hoping they will order something more, and if not, that they will leave him a good tip anyway, it had not been a good night. The waiter miscalculates by attempting to strike up a conversation with the gentleman, he has completely isolated the companion, and she is sitting there studying her manicure out of boredom. He can tell by the stony look on the gentleman’s face that this is a lost cause, he will not be ordering anything else, or receiving a satisfactory tip.
Structuralism is the analysis of a text using signs and symbols from within. “It is the social side of speech, outside the individual who can never create nor modify it by himself; it exists only by virtue of a sort of contract signed by the members of a community” (850). A lot of these signs exist because as a community we agree that they do. If meaning is found through the signs and symbols within a text, and these signs have meaning because of a general agreement, then aren’t we partially responsible for the meaning we draw from the text? I think this is particularly true with this exercise. We look at a picture, and write a story about it, obviously when we write the story it will be based on the signs and symbols we find within the picture. Now we go back and analyze the story written with the signs and symbols that we identified. Therefore we are partially responsible for the meaning we find in it.
Each person in the picture is dressed rather nicely, which provides a stark contrast to the unadorned, simple café they are in. There is no art on the walls; it is primarily empty, except for the bar where all three customers are sitting. This emptiness brings about a sense of loneliness and desperation, especially demonstrated in the lone customer seemingly in the same room as everyone else, but at the same time completely apart from the others. The waiter seems desperate because he is pictured in an awkward, ready to serve you at a moment’s notice, stance. He seems focused on the gentleman, but his lady friend clearly could care less about what they are discussing.
Habitual auto pilot
“If we start to examine the general laws of perception, we see that as perception becomes habitual, it becomes automatic. Thus, for example, all of our habits retreat into the area of the unconsciously automatic; if one remembers the sensations of holding a pen or of speaking in a foreign language for the first time and compares that with his feeling at performing the action for the ten thousandth time, he will agree with us.”
Shklovsky discusses perception becoming habitual or automatic. Think about how many times you’ve heard someone use the phrase “auto pilot” to describe an action. I have this feeling fairly frequently after driving to work or driving home, where I remember getting to my car, and getting to my destination, but do I really remember the drive? The details blend together with the details from all the other times I’ve drove the same route. If I compare the first time I drove that route to now, it is a completely different experience, Shklovsky is absolutely right.
“After we see an object several times, we begin to recognize it. The object is in front of us and we know about it, but we do not see it-hence we cannot say anything, significant about it.”
I applied this to thinking about a toothbrush. When you look at a toothbrush, you think about brushing your teeth--even the name suggests its utility. If I stopped to think about it, I could describe my toothbrush in detail, but we do not do this every day, this general habitualization of our daily perception is what Shklovsky commenting on. The object becomes its utility and loses its own significance.
What I really want to say I can't define
Sublimity
“In ordinary life, nothing is truly great which it is great to despise; wealth, honor, reputation, absolute power—anything in short which has a lot of external trappings—can never be supremely good to the wise man because it is no small good to despise them” (Longinus, 138).
People spend their lives chasing after material possessions and wealth, believing them to be the source of true sublimity. In reality these people are fools, wasting their lives, chasing false happiness. I agree with Longinus here, anything that has a lot of external trappings cannot be sublime. These things are too easily lost, and have no universality to them.
“Real sublimity contains much food for reflection, is difficult or rather impossible to resist, and makes a strong and ineffaceable impression on the memory. In a word, reckon anything those things which pleases everybody all the time as genuinely and finely sublime. When people of all different trainings, ways of life, tastes, ages, and manners all agree about something, the judgment and assent of so many distinct voices lends strength and irrefutability to the conviction that their admiration is rightly directed” (Longinus, 138).
Sublimity is subjective. Longinus argues that real sublimity is ‘those things which pleases everybody all the time’ but this cannot be true. If I find something sublime, but every other person does not agree with me at all times, it does not discount the sublimity I have found in it.
“Sublimity produced at the right moment, tears everything up like a whirlwind, and exhibits the orator’s true power at a single blow” (Longinus, 137).
Longinus. "On The Sublime." ed. Leitch, Vincent B. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton &, 2010. Print.
Analysis #1
I selected a clip from The Big Lebowski to show that Aristotle's Rhetoric Model can be used by anyone. The tone and language used in my clip are not particularly elegant as is usually heard in rhetoric speeches. Walter is using rhetoric throughout his expletive filled speech, and it is shown that rhetoric is no less effective when performed in this way.
First you may ask what exactly is rhetoric? Aristotle defines it as "an ability, in each particular case, to see the available means of persuasion…Persuasion occurs through the argument when we show the truth or the apparent truth from whatever is persuasive in each case." (P.115-116) So rhetoric is used whenever you are speaking to someone and trying to convince them of something, whether it is true or not. There are three main forms of rhetoric: ethos, an appeal based on the character of the speaker; logos, which is an appeal based on logic or reason; and pathos, which is an appeal based on emotion.
There are three characters represented in the clip: Donny, Walter, and the Dude. Walter is using pathos while talking to the Dude about his ruined rug. The Dude was very attached to this rug, he is upset that it was ruined, but he does not think that there is any action to be taken against the man who ruined it. He was going to leave the situation as is, but Walter does not let the subject go, he continues provoking the Dude and his feelings about the rug: “This was a valued rug” and again “That rug really tied the room together, did it not?” (The Big Lebowski). Walter attacks Donny using logos saying he has no frame of reference to enter the conversation or offer an opinion while he continues convincing the Dude that he needs to take action. Walter uses ethos through his appearance, he is on the same level as the Dude, his language also attests to his character, he uses the same language as the Dude. The Dude and Walter are equals. This makes Walter more credible.
Walter is successful in using rhetoric to persuade the Dude that the man he previously considered to be at fault for ruining his rug, is not actually at fault. Instead he shifts the blame to a millionaire and convinces the Dude, using logos, that he should be the one to pay for the rug.
Works Cited
Leitch, Vincent B. et al., ed. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. New York: Norton,
2001. Print
The Big Lebowski, movie
Reflection #2
This week we spent the majority of class sitting in on a lecture by Dr. Kevin O’Neal on Aristotelian Logic. Dr. O’Neal focused quite a bit on the actual structure of rhetoric, which reminded me quite a bit of a Philosophy class (General Logic) I took a few years ago.
I really enjoyed the lecture, and learned quite a few new things. I thought Dr. O’Neal did a particularly good job of breaking down the subject matter into terms anyone would be able to understand. I also enjoyed how he pointed out that the Greeks never made anything; their society was centered on speech--I had never realized this before. The Greeks spent the majority of their time talking and debating. He described how rhetoric’s purpose is to persuade someone of something. This leads into the key of rhetoric, which, as he puts it, is: “keep it memorable, keep it short.” The most effective Rhetoric is short and sweet (Think back to “Encomium of Helen”).
After the lecture, back in class, we watched a scene from Wall Street and analyzed the different kinds of rhetoric used by Gordon Gecko, many of which we had just learned more about in Dr. O’Neal’s lecture, that were used in the scene. I found this to be a good exercise, and listening to everyone’s responses made me notice examples I had missed. It made me feel more confident that I would be able to recognize all of the different forms of rhetoric in the future as well.
Reflection #1
For our second day of class, we primarily focused on Gorgias' "Encomium of Helen.”
I enjoyed the “Encomium of Helen” quite a bit; as it is a really fun and playful piece. “Encomium of Helen” touches on a story most people are already familiar with, the story of Helen of Troy. Gorgias attempts to relieve Helen of any and all guilt she faced for leaving Sparta with Paris and starting the Trojan War. Gorgias strives to dispel Helen of Troy’s bad reputation by using rhetoric.
“Either she did what she did because of the will of fortune and the plan of the gods and the decree of necessity, or she was seized by force, or persuaded by words,
The “Encomium of Helen” is extremely accessible and enjoyable. It really demonstrates the use of rhetoric in a clear and concise way, showing how effective rhetoric can be when used eloquently.
Leitch, Vincent B. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton &, 2010. Print.
A bit about me
