Stephen Greenblatt

The essay by Stephen Greenblatt “The circulation of social energy” explores the idea that a text has a power referred to as social energy that creates it and lets it be relevant regardless of the time period.

The essay ended in the same way it began, with Greenblatt expressing hie desire to speak with the dead. He then spent the first half of the essay asking the question ” how is it possible for those traces to convey lost life” (pg.559) He posed the question a few times, and each time worded it differently, but he never quite answered it, but seemed to simply guide us throught the thought process one would take should they try to find the answer, tho there were a few instances were he said the answer was nonexistant. The next step in the essay was Greenblatt proposing for us a new way to approach, read, and examine a text “the idea is not to strip away and discard the enchanted impression of aesthetic autonomy but to inquire into the objective conditions of this enchantment, to  discover how the traces of social circulation are effaced” (pg.560) . The last part of the essay,and what seemed like a majority of it, was focused on plays, and more specifically Shakespearen plays and how they related to the audience.

Reading back what I have just written it’s easy to notice that the part on Shakespeare is missing examples and a more through explanation. The reason for that tho is that I did not understand it. I think I have a pretty good grasp in the first part of the easy, and the idea of social energy. I think that in some way Greenblatt was using the Shakespearean theater as an example of his idea, and I can understand how the way that the audience reacts is important, and even that the playwright has a certain job and way to bring to life, or not as the case may be his play. But to me the example of the theater seemed somehow limited in that I couldn’t see a clear connection between the theater and other texts as well. On the subject of the social energy, one of the lines that made it makes the most sense to me was “the social energy encoded in certain works of art continues to generate the illusion of life for centuries” (pg.561) I took that to mean that social energy is the power that a text has to hold meaning regardless of time, and also the fact that said power could not have been  created solely by the author, but by the society and every outside force that the author is copying, influenced by, and trying to capture.

Edward Said

In the essay “Crisis [in orientalism]” by Edward Said,  he talks about the way in which textual authority defines the way that people think about what’s written , and how they react to it.

The essay starts off with an easy example of the a lion, and how what we read about it determines how we view it. It then goes more in depth into the fierceness of a lion, and it explain that when a subject is viewed so much, book will arise out of that to try to explain it, to reason it, and to teach us how to deal with it. Said then used another simple example of traveling, and the way that before we travel we read book s of the place we are going to , and the idea that we have of that place, and our expectations of it are determined by what we read. The majority of the essay tho, focused on the greater example of orientalism. Said took us from the very beginning of what people had expected, all the way to how the reading authority formed and influenced politics, and the way that people wanted to colonize it.

It was an interesting reading, if a bit long for the subject. I liked the way that he used the example of Orientalism  to explain his point, but sometimes it was too political and difficult to understand. I was definitely , throughout the text, more focused om the first part. The reason is that I think the first part is where he ,made most of his points, and simply used the rest of the text to show us an example of the points he was making. One of the ideas that really jumped out at me was when he said that “texts can create not only knowledge but also the very reality they appear to describe” (pg.369). To me, that showed how strong a text is, so strong that it can create a reality, and it really made me understand the idea of “authority of texts” that was mentioned throughout the reading. It also made the Orientalism example make more sense to me, and every time I was lost reading it I would come back to this part so I could better understand it.

Feminism and Critical Theory by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

The essay “Feminsim and Critical Theory” by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak discusses the place, and ideas, of feminsim within literary discourse.

The essay starts off with  a map so to speak. In the very first paragraph Spivak gives us the “itinerary” on how to travel through her essay. The essay itself is divided into 4 parts, to which she tells us what they are each about. The first part she says is “a version of talk” that she had given years ago, in it she touchs on the definition of feminism and she talks about how to re-write Marx and Freud in terms of feminism and the roles of women. The second part “represents a reflection on that earlier work”,  and she talks a lot about class- sensitive readings, gender-sensitive readings, and international feminism. The third part is “an intermediate work” and she uses the book The Waterfall by Drabble as an example, tho i’m not quite sure what her example is of. The fourth and last part “inhibits something of the present” and it can be summarized through the sentence that states : “it seems more important to learn to understand that the world’s women do not all relate to the privileging of essence, especially through “fiction”, or “literature”, in quite the same way”. She then talks about a horrible incident in Korea and the way that both Korean and American men dealt with it.

To me, this essay would definitely be considered one of the harder essay to comprehend. An easy way to know this is that for every reading the margins are filled with notes and there are many marks on it, but this one I didn’t even know what to question and what to observe. Hearing a bit of an overview in it in class definetely made it easier to try to grasp a little more about it, but still there is something that i’m not quite understanding, and I don’t even know what it is.The essay seemed to me to be about Spivak telling us what she would not do and talk about, but then going ahead and by making definitions and saying what it could not be, she talked about it. It was like in one of the previous essays that we read that said the meaning is in the unwritten. I felt that Spivak was like that. I understood a glimmer of talking about the ways ion which Marx and Freud needed to be re-written thinking of women and reproduction as surplus-labor, but at the same time she would explain all that and then say that it must be rewritten like that, and it sounded like she was removing herself from that task, but at the same time it seemed obvious that she had already done it. Overall it was a pretty confusing essay, and I need to have a class discussion where i’m an objective listener to understand it better.

Juliet Mitchell

In the essay, “femininity, narrative, and psychoanalysis”, Juliet Mitchell talks about the idea of the history of the novel, but it is particularly the novel by women writers.

In this essay, Mitchell starts off by saying that right off the bat, that even though there are men novelists “the vast majority of early novels were written by large numbers of women”. She goes on to explain how women had a bit growing into the novels, because unlike the men they couldn’t simply publish by their true identity. This growing also involved the written that they did to describe the process of something they were going through, which was the “process of becoming women within a new bourgeois society”. To make herself clear, Mitchell uses the novel “Wuthering Heights” to describe the process she talks about, and she does make it very clear that she is not doing a literary criticism on it but simply using the story and it’s history to prove her point. She ends her essay, after reviewing her [point on hysteric, with asking about the process and what is it that we are suppose to become from it.

This essay was a bit easier to read, mainly because it was shorter and she seemed to stay on her point. It was nice that she didn’t go off in too many tangents (as previous authors had) that used texts and ideas that I was not familiar with. The beginning was very interesting, and I especially liked her point about women having a hysterics voice, which she defined as  “the woman’s masculine language”. To me it seemed that she accepted the fact that women had to work much harder than me to be accepted, and the hysteric was a way for a women to accomplish what she wanted. It was interesting because to me the word “hysteric” had always had a bad connotation, but after reading it in the light that Mitchell put it, it seemed like a good thinmg. It was a tool that women could use to be noticed.

As I read, I remembered the technique we talked about in class about finding one specific term and tracing it throughout the text,m and to me that term was hysteric. It also caught my eye the way she mentioned bisexuality.  That word, like hysteric, had a completely different meaning to me, but seeing it from her point of view, it is a woman writer that must refuse her world but as Mitchell says, construct it “from within a masculine world”. This essay was definitely one of the easiest for me to read, and I think I understood it a little bit better than the previous essays.

Tzvetan Todorov

Tap here to begin writing.

Textual analysis

In the essay “textual analysis: poe’s ‘valdemar’ ” Barthes defines textual analysis and breaks it down to four steps of procedure.

At the beginning of the essay, he starts out by comparing structural analysis to the textual one. He explains that ” textual analysis does not try to describe the structure of a work” (pg 317). He then follows up with what he called “four briefly laid out measures”(pg317), and he numbers them accordingly as he explains it and follows it up with a simple example. The first step is to cur up the text into lexias, the observe the meaning of each, have a progressive analysis and lastly, not worry if some meanings are forgotten.

The beginning of the essay seemed very easy to follow. I understood from his introduction that when doing a textual analysis one should not worry about meaning and simply explore the many possibilities that a text gives. I pinpointed where I got that to the diets page (once again):

“try to locate and classify without rigor, not all the meanings of the text…but the forms and codes according to which meanings are possible”. (pg 317)

So after reading this, I moved on to the rest of the essay and I became quite confused. On the next part he seemed to talk about the opposite of what I had understood, it seemed he was endorsing meaning and how that was why we were supposed to look for. The example he gave of analysis of Poe’s story was also a bit confusing. Indie understand that what he did was show several meanings of each lexia, and that seemed to be more in tune with what I had understood to begin with.
At the end in the “methodological conclusions”, I thought he would bring together all of his points, and it make it a little easier for me to understand the essay, but he kept referring to many “codes” and that lost me. I also couldn’t
help but think that the term codes and meaning ere used in the same way an I kept thinking of how he seemed to change what he was saying, like I had pointed out earlier. It definitely was not my favorite essay, because once again, the author either said opposing things, or by pointing that out it means that I completely did not understand the essay.

Mikhail Bakhtin

In the essay “from the prehistory of novelistic discourse” Mikhail Bakhin discusses the origins of novels to have come from much more than just narrow literary struggles.

Im his essay, he talks about a novelist’s language, the idea of parody, and the function of quotations. He mentions all of those things in relation to how they make up the “prehistory of novelistic discourse”. The essay is divided into three sections, in which each of the above mentioned ideas are discussed. Atthe very end of his essay, in a stylistic manner, he breaks the last pragraph in a different way than the rest of the essay, and uses that as paragraph as the conclusion for the whole. Thropughout the whole paragraph there area lot  of examples. For every idea that he brings up he has an example from an older text to follow.

This essay was definately one of the most difficult to follow. I found myself skimming throughout it and having to go back and re-read when I realized what I had done. As I mentioned earlier, it was full of examples. When I was reading it the examples seemed difficult to understand and unneeded, nut thinking back now I realize the authors’ reasoning. It only makes sense that the examples come from Greek and Roman literature, since what is being discussed is the history of novelistic discourse and those are time periods when it started. It also seemed very interesting to me the title of the essay. “Prehistory” instead of simply “history of…”. I think the answer can be found in the very first line on page 235 “The stylistic study of the novel began only very recently”, to me that means that he author is telling us that because this study began only recent;y, that there is mpore to it than what has been presented.

Also at the very beginning of the essay, in the second pragraph the author gives us a lot of information,which I thought to be different. It had seemed that until now most authors didn’t really get to the meat of the essay until a bit later on, closer to the middle. Bakhtin rights away tells us of “five different stylistic approaches to novelistic discourse” (pg.235). Which was also a bit different the way that the author had so soon in the essay incorporated the title. I liked a lot the conclusion at the end because it brought together all the points and ideas that I had not understood in the essay, which were a lot.

Benjamin

Walter Benjamin, in “the tasks of the translator” explains the meaning of a translation and discuss how a work  has translatability.

Throughout the essay, Benjamin talks about the task of the translator, and what a translator faces when accomplishing such a task. He starts off the essay by questioning the purpose of  a translation and he then introduces a new term: translatability, which he defines as “the law governing the translation” (pg.72) he follows up, once again, with questions to answer and explain the idea of translatability. as the essay progresses he ties in  works of art -for his purpose in the essay written works- and life, or rather life itself and the life of a work of art, and when and how they both come into being. It’s really interesting also the way that Benjamin brings in idea of a philosopher and not just the translator. The last half of the essay is about how the original and the translation are related and “making both the original and the translation recognizable as fragments of a greater language” (pg.78)

This essay was so far the easiest one to comprehend. The language that Benjamin used was understandable and the idea was easier to grasp, that is not to say, however, that I understood the essay in its entirety. What I understood was that a translation will never be the same as the original, and Benjamin underline many of the reasons for that. One of them was that the language itself used is different, which takes away the intended poetics of the original, and also the works “translatability”.  Throughout the essay translatability  is discussed and explained, but I still do not understand it, and I know that it’s something that I will be asking n class. i feel that its meaning is the missing link for me to understand the essay. Another idea that was consistently used was that of pure language, which he defines as “an intention…which no single language can attain by itself but which is realized only  by the totality of their intentions supplementing each other” (pg.75) , which in my own words I understand to mean that pure language is not a single language, but different languages brought together, which in turn confuses me because the word “pure” has the connotation of something untouched and simple, which id the opposite of bringing and combining, in this instance,  various languages together.  The conclusion of what the essay, and my understanding of it, is best summarized by Benjamin on page 80, “the translation must be one with the original in the form of the interlinear version, in which literalness and freedom are united”.

Paul de Man

In “The resistance to theory” Paul de Man explain the history of literary theory and the questions that its criticism and resistance raise.

The essay starts with a brief explain by the author of what he was told to do and his initial opposition to it. He talks about what teaching is supposed to aim to accomplish and how hard that can it. He then jumps right into his essay and tells us how when one has to write about literary theory, one should start with its history. throughout the essay he talks about the New Critical approach and its roots,  the advent of theory, the object of literary theory, how reading affects it, and  he ends his  essay with two ideas. First he says that “nothing can overcome the resistance to theory since theory is itself this resistance” (pg.446) and secondly, he leaves us hanging with: “what remains impossible to decide is whether this flourishing is a triumph or a fail” (pg.446)

This reading seemed a bit easier than all the other ones so far. the only thing that was a bit difficult to me was how at every paragraph where he had an idea, he would start off talking about it and only at the end would he tie it to either the history of theory or the resistance of it. Si it was  a bit confusing to keep track and not be lost. One of the things that helped me a lot, was using what we talked about in class last time. Whenever I seemed to lose the point he was making, I would read the title and remember that it was about the “resistance to theory.” As an example, at the beginning on page 433, when he writes “the most effective of these attacks will denounce theory as an obstacle to scholarship” it wasn’t until a second reading that I understood that “attacks” refered to the attacks on the resistance to theory.

It was a really nice how he actually made reference to the US since it  made it easier to relate to that rather than the way previous authors left their essays talking and referring only to European countries. On page 439 he brought together his ideas:

“Certainly, none of the objections to theory, presented again and again, always misinformed or based on crude misunderstandings of such terms as mimesis, fiction, reality, ideology, reference and, for that matter, relevance, can be said to be of genuine rhetorical interest”

This part helped me to think back of the specific paragraphs where each of those term s were mentioned and it made me have a much better understanding of the text. I did, however, still have parts where I was bit confused. his definition of resistance to theory; “the resistance to theory is a resistance to the use of language about language” (pg.440), still leaves me with the big question mark I penciled in by that paragraph. Even mpre so because there were a couple at other points throughout the essay where he gave us another definition for5 that, and all of them were different than the others.

Overall, it was an ok essay to read, and I found that I had to look up fewer definitions than in other essays, but I am quite curious to talk about it in class because I feel like I don’t completely understand this essay yet, and I’m not sure if my one sentence summary is right or not.

Jacques Derrida

In the essay Structure, sign , and play in the discourse of the human sciences, Jacques Derrida discusses the interpretation and history of structure, sing, and play and the ways in which they relate to the idea of  center.

In the text, Derrida begins with the main idea of structure, and how the structuality of structure has to have a center. He goes into great detail on the explaining of the purpose of center, and the location of it, and leaves us with the idea of the “linked chain of determinations of the center” (pg. 212) He then goes on to talk about the idea of the disruption in the structuality of structure along with sign. That is the beginning of where Levi-Srauss begins to be used as a constant example and point of reference.

To me this essay was interesting. At the beginning of it when the subject was structure, I was following along quite nicely. I understood the idea of an “event” happening in the concept of structure that shook things up. I was even getting it when the center came in the picture. But i began to feel a little bit lost when he said that the center “while governing structure, escapes structuality”(pg. 212) It seemed that at many times in this essay the author would bring forth a point, only to refute it a few paragraphs later, and it was a bit exhausting trying to keep up with his seeming change of mind. Thought I am sure that he explained the reasoning when he switched sides in his arguments, but I think that I was just not able to understand it.

Along with that,  I became lost when he would talk about something, its opposition, and how both needed to exist to create the other. For example, when talking about the concept of sign, he wrote ” the metaphysical reduction of sign needed the opposition it was reducing” (pg 214). The meaning of that seemed completely lost to me. I somewhat understand that he is saying that for the sign to be it needed whatever it was reducing so it could lay against that and be. Now beyond that i have no idea of what he was trying to say, and I also run the high risk  of having what I thought I understood to be correct, to be extremely incorrect; which in turn would put me back in square one.

When he talks about the human sciences he mentions ethnology in particular. And once again he does that thing where he refutes an idea as soon as he says it. “The ethnologist accepts into his discourse the premise of ethnocentrism at the very moment that he dismisses it” (pg 215). i suppose when he does that it  is supposed to make us think ib the way that an idea will always have an opposition and that to understand something we must have ab understanding of its opposite as well. But I must say that they way he does it just simply confuses me.

There was a passage in the text that discussed the “opposition between nature and culture” (pg215) In my own words, and hopefully I understood this correctly, the idea is that if something does not depend on norms it belongs to nature, and if it does depend on norms it belongs to culture. The example that Derrida used to show this idea was incest prohibition because according to him, that is considered a scandal; which is when something that “no  longer tolerates the nature/culture opposition” (pg.216). I don’t understand how that can be both because he goes on to say that incest prohibition is both universal and thus natural and also cultural.

I guess it all goes along with the way the whole text seemed to be written of bringing together and combining ideas tat had been  before defined in such  a way that they could not be combined. The text , when I could understand it, was interesting at times because it showed a lot of new ideas that I was not familiar with like bricolage and how the word play can be used at various situations with different meanings. The one idea that i thought was reoccurring throughout the text was the idea of center. At the beginning of the text he made me thing that a discourse needs a center and by the end of it he left me questioning the location of such  a center and if it really did exist.