I've never been a math or science person because I am terrible at both; but I always liked how there was a definite underlying truth.
heh
that gets annoying after a while once you realise that yeah there is, but you can never actually know exactly what it is, just better and better approximations of it
Ha, yeah I know. Just . . . the principle of it, you know?
Orik, I think you'd make for an interesting English teacher. Our small group of AP kids is just trudging through the course material with gritted teeth at this point. Many of us stopped reading for leisure as our English classes wore on.
Running joke:
Teacher: "So what is the book really about?"
Us: "Humanity"
i really like teaching. a couple of kids seem to have responded to it. maybe it's all the allusions to argumentative flow as gangsta rap that did it. but i remember undergrad, and i remember why i didn't like undergrad, and i try to fix those problems for them.
pity i can't stand the actual research and publication part of academia.
the work can be enjoyable and still have social commentary and theorist-friendly material. look at house of leaves. or, if you want to get fancy, lolita.
Oh, I'm not saying there aren't exceptions; The Great Gatsby's the most prominent one that comes to mind.
It's just the majority of the work I've studied in high school and college has just not really felt legitimately interesting to me.
I'm guessing that's because most of the time, the teacher's so busy focusing on the subtext, that there's not a lot of discussion of the surface text, which is what I think needs to carry the bulk of the work; subtext is great, but if the surface story sucks, who's going to be interested?
Anyway, rather than discussing the entire text, we only discussed some very limited aspects, all of which were open to individual interpretation.
I just never found that very stimulating with some of the work.
I guess what I'm saying is that the majority of my teachers sucked at picking books that were interesting, at least to me.
I think this is really dumb, and I think that the fact that you see "enjoying a work" and analyzing it as mutually exclusive says more about your capability to be a good reader than it does anything else
also I'm interested to hear which books you thinks have "painfully obtuse" narratives
Chill out, I'm just venting some frustration.
I'm not saying that analyzing literature is mutually exclusive from enjoying it, I just tend to enjoy analyzing a book more when I actually find the plot to be legitimately interesting, rather than a collection of bit characters used to shove a point down the reader's throat.
Take Hamlet for example; I like talking about Hamlet, both in terms of surface text and subtext, because I find the characters and the narrative legitimately interesting.
In contrast, I cannot stand stuff like The Awakening, because the characters, the plot, and the setting are all custom built to emphasize a single, painfully obvious point. I'm not saying the point is bad, but I am saying that I'm not going to enjoy it as much as Hamlet, since it's basically tailor made to make the point.
The Great Gatsby's an exception to the Painfully Obvious Point Rule, because the narrative actually feels entertaining, and not one giant social criticism, despite the fact that it basically is one.
Then there's stuff like Forster, where damn near everything has some hidden meaning. It just irritates the fuck out of me when banal objects like blue curtains and bedsheets constantly take some deeper psychological meaning, rather than just being simple objects decorating a room.
I guess I just haven't been exposed to a large enough bank of literary works to accurately gauge how I feel about it, but I do know that after doing it for six years straight, I really wish that I could read a novel where a dog is just a dog, and the characters don't constantly espouse on the plight of their tea cozies.
Also, as far as painfully obtuse literature goes, stuff like Tennyson, Chopin, Forster, and some parts of Austen come in on that list. There's more to it than that, but I can't remember it off the top of my head.
It's not about enjoying the work, it's about scouring it for theories and social commentary.
And, of course, the novels that are studied are entirely composed of theories and social commentary, so the narrative is painfully obtuse, and not very fun to read.
That's a pretty big absolute there. Which novels?
Yeah, I guess that was poorly phrased.
What I should have said is that it feels like the majority of novels studied are composted of painfully obvious theories and social commentary, and because they become the focus of the novel, the narrative becomes obtuse and not fun.
And like I said, stuff like Chopin, Tennyson, Forster, and some of Jane Austen's work just really annoyed me to no end.
This is my view on everything from literature to film to any form of entertainment
Like a poet.
The thing about poetry is that, generally, it's very HARD to enjoy and appreciate without looking for the deeper meaning.
I think that part of my brain which would be responsible for liking poetry is broken.
I can't 'hear' it. Even the stuff that rhymes. I can't hear it. I 'hear' poems out of order, putting aural emphasis on words I already like or that have a specific structure that I find visually appealing, ruining whatever flow is meant to be constructed. So poetry, no matter how carefully composed, 'sounds' janky to me. And I can not figure out how people make it sound right. I know enough about it to figure out how to do so, on a technical level . . . but it is like taking something apart and not being able to put it back together again.
wow it's so weird that your "painfully obtuse literature" list contains no contemporary works written in a modern and familiar tongue
And everything has hidden meaning. Every work. That is a false dichotomy, differentiating between works where everything has meaning and works where some things have meaning. It's not like some works have deeper referents and some don't; every single thing ever written with words has been an amalgamation of signs and signifiers, of constructs relating to a priori meaning and the phenomenal indicating the presence of the noumenal. You can babble all you want about having done literary analysis for "six years," but you don't seem to grasp a very simple tenet of critical theory; everything has a meaning that exists in tension between the author and the reader (or just the reader in poststructuralist thought). There is literally no book ever written that is not a series of "hidden meanings," because there does not exist a word that is itself devoid of them.
This is my view on everything from literature to film to any form of entertainment
Like a poet.
The thing about poetry is that, generally, it's very HARD to enjoy and appreciate without looking for the deeper meaning.
I think that part of my brain which would be responsible for liking poetry is broken.
I can't 'hear' it. Even the stuff that rhymes. I can't hear it. I 'hear' poems out of order, putting aural emphasis on words I already like or that have a specific structure that I find visually appealing, ruining whatever flow is meant to be constructed. So poetry, no matter how carefully composed, 'sounds' janky to me. And I can not figure out how people make it sound right. I know enough about it to figure out how to do so, on a technical level . . . but it is like taking something apart and not being able to put it back together again.
Poetry really did not click for me, both on the level of understanding it and being able to enjoy it, until I started reading it as it was meant to be read. I used to pause at the end of lines, and it just never clicked for me until I started reading through.
That's why I have such a hard time with Dickinson, she inserts all of these weird hyphens and it makes it sound so, to steal your word, "janky."
As a sidenote, I love that we can find words visually appealing. I think it's so odd that certain words just...
I can't explain it. They click. They fit. For me, some words, whether I'm looking at them or hearing them or thinking or speaking them...they give me the same feeling that you get when you put the last piece into the puzzle, and it just fits perfectly. Some words are just...perfect.
This is my view on everything from literature to film to any form of entertainment
Like a poet.
The thing about poetry is that, generally, it's very HARD to enjoy and appreciate without looking for the deeper meaning.
I think that part of my brain which would be responsible for liking poetry is broken.
I can't 'hear' it. Even the stuff that rhymes. I can't hear it. I 'hear' poems out of order, putting aural emphasis on words I already like or that have a specific structure that I find visually appealing, ruining whatever flow is meant to be constructed. So poetry, no matter how carefully composed, 'sounds' janky to me. And I can not figure out how people make it sound right. I know enough about it to figure out how to do so, on a technical level . . . but it is like taking something apart and not being able to put it back together again.
Poetry really did not click for me, both on the level of understanding it and being able to enjoy it, until I started reading it as it was meant to be read. I used to pause at the end of lines, and it just never clicked for me until I started reading through.
That's why I have such a hard time with Dickinson, she inserts all of these weird hyphens and it makes it sound so, to steal your word, "janky."
dickinson is basically all about the rhythm of language and how the hyphens interrupt the structure and add spaces to open up the poem for interpretatoin
it's pretty airy, but it can be quite down to earth and accessible
My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun—
In Corners—till a Day
The Owner passed—identified—
And carried Me away—
And now We roam in Sovereign Woods—
And now We hunt the Doe—
And every time I speak for Him—
The Mountains straight reply—
And do I smile, such cordial light
Upon the Valley glow—
It is as a Vesuvian face
Had let its pleasure through—
And when at Night—Our good Day done—
I guard My Master's Head—
'Tis better than the Eider-Duck's
Deep Pillow—to have shared—
To foe of His—I'm deadly foe—
None stir the second time—
On whom I lay a Yellow Eye—
Or an emphatic Thumb—
Though I than He—may longer live
He longer must—than I—
For I have but the power to kill,
Without—the power to die—
Muse Among MenSuburban Bunny Princess?Its time for a new shtick Registered Userregular
edited April 2011
Confession: Not hot on Shakespeare
I don't know quite how to explain it . . . but I've a mental repository of visual and aural representations of very broad archetypes. When I start reading something, I assign a basic 'voice' and 'face' to each character; if I am unable to do so adequately, I have trouble enjoying the book (this happened with Harry Potter, I could never find the right voices or faces for any of the characters).
I've specific voices for Shakespearean works . . . and I don't like the sound or cadence of these voices.
you really have to read shakespeare actively. it's almost impossible to read and figure out based on the words on the page. sound out the words, imagine how the staging would happen, what the implied actions for the characters are, get up and try to deliver a monologue and feel the flow of the language without worrying about the meter.. Shakespeare really understood how plays worked on the stage. Part of the fun of studying him is figuring out your personal casting decisions for each character.
(i admit, i always go to patrick stewart for lear, but often these decisions are more amalgams of how you imagine your lear to act, rather than a specific person)
This is my view on everything from literature to film to any form of entertainment
Like a poet.
The thing about poetry is that, generally, it's very HARD to enjoy and appreciate without looking for the deeper meaning.
I think that part of my brain which would be responsible for liking poetry is broken.
I can't 'hear' it. Even the stuff that rhymes. I can't hear it. I 'hear' poems out of order, putting aural emphasis on words I already like or that have a specific structure that I find visually appealing, ruining whatever flow is meant to be constructed. So poetry, no matter how carefully composed, 'sounds' janky to me. And I can not figure out how people make it sound right. I know enough about it to figure out how to do so, on a technical level . . . but it is like taking something apart and not being able to put it back together again.
Poetry really did not click for me, both on the level of understanding it and being able to enjoy it, until I started reading it as it was meant to be read. I used to pause at the end of lines, and it just never clicked for me until I started reading through.
That's why I have such a hard time with Dickinson, she inserts all of these weird hyphens and it makes it sound so, to steal your word, "janky."
dickinson is basically all about the rhythm of language and how the hyphens interrupt the structure and add spaces to open up the poem for interpretatoin
it's pretty airy, but it can be quite down to earth and accessible
My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun—
In Corners—till a Day
The Owner passed—identified—
And carried Me away—
And now We roam in Sovereign Woods—
And now We hunt the Doe—
And every time I speak for Him—
The Mountains straight reply—
And do I smile, such cordial light
Upon the Valley glow—
It is as a Vesuvian face
Had let its pleasure through—
And when at Night—Our good Day done—
I guard My Master's Head—
'Tis better than the Eider-Duck's
Deep Pillow—to have shared—
To foe of His—I'm deadly foe—
None stir the second time—
On whom I lay a Yellow Eye—
Or an emphatic Thumb—
Though I than He—may longer live
He longer must—than I—
For I have but the power to kill,
Without—the power to die—
Like, I start reading this, and I get into it, and I start really liking it, and then I just lose all my patience for it. I get past the third stanza, and then I have no idea what she's on about.
As a sidenote, I love that we can find words visually appealing. I think it's so odd that certain words just...
I can't explain it. They click. They fit. For me, some words, whether I'm looking at them or hearing them or thinking or speaking them...they give me the same feeling that you get when you put the last piece into the puzzle, and it just fits perfectly. Some words are just...perfect.
And some words are just terrible. Like 'can'; I dislike that word and do not like saying it. I don't like 'salon' either.
I really dislike 'TV' and 'Television'. In writing I shorten it to 'tel'. Perfect, a single syllable.
And do I smile, such cordial light
Upon the Valley glow—
It is as a Vesuvian face
Had let its pleasure through—
Like, I start reading this, and I get into it, and I start really liking it, and then I just lose all my patience for it. I get past the third stanza, and then I have no idea what she's on about.
Maybe I'm just stupid.
it's a really metaphorical way to think of muzzle flash. Vesuvius is a famous volcano, so a Vesuvian mountain face letting its pleasure through is about ejaculation. of lava. still ejaculation, though. the fun of the poem is changing the way you think about the relationship of guns to their owners, instead of just tools, having a life of their own
I don't know quite how to explain it . . . but I've a mental repository of visual and aural representations of very broad archetypes. When I start reading something, I assign a basic 'voice' and 'face' to each character; if I am unable to do so adequately, I have trouble enjoying the book (this happened with Harry Potter, I could never find the right voices or faces for any of the characters).
I've specific voices for Shakespearean works . . . and I don't like the sound or cadence of these voices.
So I don't like Shakespeare.
Yeah, Shakespeare is really difficult, even though you're not really talking about the difficulty of it.
I kinda get what you're saying, though, and seeing as how all of the action in Shakespeare literally needs to be created by you, that must amplify the difficulty you have enjoying it.
I must say though, Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet is divine.
you really have to read shakespeare actively. it's almost impossible to read and figure out based on the words on the page. sound out the words, imagine how the staging would happen, what the implied actions for the characters are, get up and try to deliver a monologue and feel the flow of the language without worrying about the meter.. Shakespeare really understood how plays worked on the stage. Part of the fun of studying him is figuring out your personal casting decisions for each character.
(i admit, i always go to patrick stewart for lear, but often these decisions are more amalgams of how you imagine your lear to act, rather than a specific person)
We rarely do that in class much. And I can not understand so much of it on a superficial level without annotations, I am stupid that way.
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Zonugal(He/Him) The Holiday ArmadilloI'm Santa's representative for all the southern states. And Mexico!Registered Userregular
As a sidenote, I love that we can find words visually appealing. I think it's so odd that certain words just...
I can't explain it. They click. They fit. For me, some words, whether I'm looking at them or hearing them or thinking or speaking them...they give me the same feeling that you get when you put the last piece into the puzzle, and it just fits perfectly. Some words are just...perfect.
And some words are just terrible. Like 'can'; I dislike that word and do not like saying it. I don't like 'salon' either.
I really dislike 'TV' and 'Television'. In writing I shorten it to 'tel'. Perfect, a single syllable.
I'm a big fan of words that really work in an oratory fashion. Conjugate is a pretty good one.
Moist is another, it just works so well as a word.
it's less than you're stupid than shakespeare literally made up a language for his characters to speak. a lot of it made its way into modern language because he's a badass, but if you're reading unannotated shakespeare then i have no idea how you've managed to understand any of it, and i'm surprised you haven't thrown the book out the nearest window
who doesn't teach shakespeare in an annotated edition? that's just ludicrous.
And do I smile, such cordial light
Upon the Valley glow—
It is as a Vesuvian face
Had let its pleasure through—
Like, I start reading this, and I get into it, and I start really liking it, and then I just lose all my patience for it. I get past the third stanza, and then I have no idea what she's on about.
Maybe I'm just stupid.
it's a really metaphorical way to think of muzzle flash. Vesuvius is a famous volcano, so a Vesuvian mountain face letting its pleasure through is about ejaculation. of lava. still ejaculation, though. the fun of the poem is changing the way you think about the relationship of guns to their owners, instead of just tools, having a life of their own
see, there's where I made my mistake. I didn't think of the gun thing as an extended metaphor. I figured that it was local to that first stanza.
Also, I was unclear, my bad. I get the first three stanzas, and lose it on the last three. Now that I'm rethinking it in terms of the gun metaphor (or technically simile, I guess?), I really like the Vesuvius allusion, especially because of the destruction that Vesuvius wrought.
As a sidenote, I love that we can find words visually appealing. I think it's so odd that certain words just...
I can't explain it. They click. They fit. For me, some words, whether I'm looking at them or hearing them or thinking or speaking them...they give me the same feeling that you get when you put the last piece into the puzzle, and it just fits perfectly. Some words are just...perfect.
And some words are just terrible. Like 'can'; I dislike that word and do not like saying it. I don't like 'salon' either.
I really dislike 'TV' and 'Television'. In writing I shorten it to 'tel'. Perfect, a single syllable.
See, I don't like "tel." It seems to leave itself open, in a way. I like words that finish themselves. They put a lid on themselves. They sound complete.
I can't think of any specific examples right now, but if I saw a word that really exemplifies that, I would point it out.
Edit: I am now painfully aware that my last two posts started with "see,"
and then after you've got the extended metaphor figured out, recall that the first line is 'my life had stood as a loaded gun' - although it's all about a gun and its owner, the gun itself is a metaphor for her life. how does it change the reading of the poem? who would her owner be? etc etc
i realize this started to read like an exam question but i really love this poem and i get excited
wow it's so weird that your "painfully obtuse literature" list contains no contemporary works written in a modern and familiar tongue
And everything has hidden meaning. Every work. That is a false dichotomy, differentiating between works where everything has meaning and works where some things have meaning. It's not like some works have deeper referents and some don't; every single thing ever written with words has been an amalgamation of signs and signifiers, of constructs relating to a priori meaning and the phenomenal indicating the presence of the noumenal. You can babble all you want about having done literary analysis for "six years," but you don't seem to grasp a very simple tenet of critical theory; everything has a meaning that exists in tension between the author and the reader (or just the reader in poststructuralist thought). There is literally no book ever written that is not a series of "hidden meanings," because there does not exist a word that is itself devoid of them.
Either I'm phrasing this poorly, or you are just not reading what I'm saying.
I'm not saying there's a dichotomy at all, I'm saying that there are some works where the symbols make sense, and others where the author basically has to spend a paragraph describing a curtain to make the symbol work; some integrate with the novel in a way that feels organic and believable, and others where the author basically shoehorns it in so hard that they break the entire pace and narrative just to make it work.
If you want to make a point, fine, but if you're going to break your entire novel for five minutes just to make it work, I really don't see why you used it like this to begin with.
And I get that analysis is entirely dependent upon the tension between author and reader. Hamlet wouldn't be as much fun to analyze if Shakespeare had just come out and said "It's not an Oedipus story, you sick fucks," nor do I think that should be the case. I'm not criticizing the use of symbolism at all in a novel, I'm just saying that, in my mind, some authors did a better job of it than others.
And I'll admit that it's easier for me to enjoy a work if I don't have to spend five minutes parsing the Ye Olde English dictionary to find out that Hamlet just told Ophelia to go work in a whore house. But that's not the only criteria by which I judge a work, and I think it's disingenuous of you to say that. I'm sure there are contemporary works that I have studied, I just can't remember them off the top of my head right now, which is a dilemma that's been exacerbated by studying Victorian and Romantic literature for the last three months, so if I remember some of them, I'll get back to you.
I really don't get why you're making this personal. I'll be the first person to admit that some, if not all of this, is complete bullshit in the context of legitimate literary discussion. I'm just venting some perceived frustration about the nature of academic literature. I'm not saying that Forster, Tennyson, Chopin, or Austen were bad writers, or that their works aren't worth the attention the receive. I'm just saying that they really didn't pique my interest, and studying them for days or weeks at a time really did not help that.
but I also really, really like direct authorial or narratorial presence in works
so I really like when he or she intrudes upon the piece to highlight something or speak to the reader directly (less so when he feels the need to explicitly call attention to the thing's existence as fiction, but nonetheless)
so "flow" in that sense has never been a big concern of mine
And regarding Shakespeare, I love his work, but that may be because I had an awesome AP Lit teacher who basically put everything into plain English for us.
Also, get thee to a nunnery remains one of my favorite literary quotes.
and then after you've got the extended metaphor figured out, recall that the first line is 'my life had stood as a loaded gun' - although it's all about a gun and its owner, the gun itself is a metaphor for her life. how does it change the reading of the poem? who would her owner be? etc etc
i realize this started to read like an exam question but i really love this poem and i get excited
dude, fuck yes for getting excited about certain pieces. When I get excited about something I just can't wait to tell everyone I know that's interested in this stuff about it. I did a project on William Ernest Henley and I had to teach one of his poems for forty minutes in class, and my teacher commended me for stripping a relatively simple poet's work basically BARE. I left not a stone unturned in that poem.
And that first line is what threw me off, because I was ready for the poem to be about her life, but not ready for it to be about her as a gun. I knew where I started, and where I was going, but I didn't understand how the road in between went.
Ima go back and read it with this understanding now, and then I'll post that Henley poem
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Muse Among MenSuburban Bunny Princess?Its time for a new shtick Registered Userregular
it's less than you're stupid than shakespeare literally made up a language for his characters to speak. a lot of it made its way into modern language because he's a badass, but if you're reading unannotated shakespeare then i have no idea how you've managed to understand any of it, and i'm surprised you haven't thrown the book out the nearest window
who doesn't teach shakespeare in an annotated edition? that's just ludicrous.
Our textbooks were rather lightly annotated in the bottom margins, and with my piebald knowledge of historical trivia I could see some places where I personally would have placed an annotation; not because it fundamentally changed the meaning of the words but because hey, here is something cool that really makes the setting/characters/etc 'pop'.
The teachers had to do extra legwork, pausing to do the job of an annotation. So it was slow reading too.
When in groups, there was usually someone with a dictionary or smart phone out, to essentially translate the text.
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get your shit in order. don't end up like shoe. they will press you on it coming back in. my mom works for CBSA. they will press you coming back in.
The thing about poetry is that, generally, it's very HARD to enjoy and appreciate without looking for the deeper meaning.
i really like teaching. a couple of kids seem to have responded to it. maybe it's all the allusions to argumentative flow as gangsta rap that did it. but i remember undergrad, and i remember why i didn't like undergrad, and i try to fix those problems for them.
pity i can't stand the actual research and publication part of academia.
I might agree towards some forms of poetry, while others offer a rhythmic joy.
Like limericks.
I was always uneasy with people digging Emily Dickinson
bitch ain't want people to read that shit, or she'da published it
Oh, I'm not saying there aren't exceptions; The Great Gatsby's the most prominent one that comes to mind.
It's just the majority of the work I've studied in high school and college has just not really felt legitimately interesting to me.
I'm guessing that's because most of the time, the teacher's so busy focusing on the subtext, that there's not a lot of discussion of the surface text, which is what I think needs to carry the bulk of the work; subtext is great, but if the surface story sucks, who's going to be interested?
Anyway, rather than discussing the entire text, we only discussed some very limited aspects, all of which were open to individual interpretation.
I just never found that very stimulating with some of the work.
I guess what I'm saying is that the majority of my teachers sucked at picking books that were interesting, at least to me.
Chill out, I'm just venting some frustration.
I'm not saying that analyzing literature is mutually exclusive from enjoying it, I just tend to enjoy analyzing a book more when I actually find the plot to be legitimately interesting, rather than a collection of bit characters used to shove a point down the reader's throat.
Take Hamlet for example; I like talking about Hamlet, both in terms of surface text and subtext, because I find the characters and the narrative legitimately interesting.
In contrast, I cannot stand stuff like The Awakening, because the characters, the plot, and the setting are all custom built to emphasize a single, painfully obvious point. I'm not saying the point is bad, but I am saying that I'm not going to enjoy it as much as Hamlet, since it's basically tailor made to make the point.
The Great Gatsby's an exception to the Painfully Obvious Point Rule, because the narrative actually feels entertaining, and not one giant social criticism, despite the fact that it basically is one.
Then there's stuff like Forster, where damn near everything has some hidden meaning. It just irritates the fuck out of me when banal objects like blue curtains and bedsheets constantly take some deeper psychological meaning, rather than just being simple objects decorating a room.
I guess I just haven't been exposed to a large enough bank of literary works to accurately gauge how I feel about it, but I do know that after doing it for six years straight, I really wish that I could read a novel where a dog is just a dog, and the characters don't constantly espouse on the plight of their tea cozies.
Also, as far as painfully obtuse literature goes, stuff like Tennyson, Chopin, Forster, and some parts of Austen come in on that list. There's more to it than that, but I can't remember it off the top of my head.
I am someone that likes and appreciates poetry, although I haven't read much of it
I hate Emily Dickinson so effing much
STOP USING HYPHENS, EMILY, IT MAKES YOUR POETRY SOUND CHOPPY
it is a book you would enjoy
Yeah, I guess that was poorly phrased.
What I should have said is that it feels like the majority of novels studied are composted of painfully obvious theories and social commentary, and because they become the focus of the novel, the narrative becomes obtuse and not fun.
And like I said, stuff like Chopin, Tennyson, Forster, and some of Jane Austen's work just really annoyed me to no end.
fuck you, emily dickinson rules
kpop appreciation station i also like to tweet some
I think that part of my brain which would be responsible for liking poetry is broken.
I can't 'hear' it. Even the stuff that rhymes. I can't hear it. I 'hear' poems out of order, putting aural emphasis on words I already like or that have a specific structure that I find visually appealing, ruining whatever flow is meant to be constructed. So poetry, no matter how carefully composed, 'sounds' janky to me. And I can not figure out how people make it sound right. I know enough about it to figure out how to do so, on a technical level . . . but it is like taking something apart and not being able to put it back together again.
And everything has hidden meaning. Every work. That is a false dichotomy, differentiating between works where everything has meaning and works where some things have meaning. It's not like some works have deeper referents and some don't; every single thing ever written with words has been an amalgamation of signs and signifiers, of constructs relating to a priori meaning and the phenomenal indicating the presence of the noumenal. You can babble all you want about having done literary analysis for "six years," but you don't seem to grasp a very simple tenet of critical theory; everything has a meaning that exists in tension between the author and the reader (or just the reader in poststructuralist thought). There is literally no book ever written that is not a series of "hidden meanings," because there does not exist a word that is itself devoid of them.
Poetry really did not click for me, both on the level of understanding it and being able to enjoy it, until I started reading it as it was meant to be read. I used to pause at the end of lines, and it just never clicked for me until I started reading through.
That's why I have such a hard time with Dickinson, she inserts all of these weird hyphens and it makes it sound so, to steal your word, "janky."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWgvGjAhvIw
I can't explain it. They click. They fit. For me, some words, whether I'm looking at them or hearing them or thinking or speaking them...they give me the same feeling that you get when you put the last piece into the puzzle, and it just fits perfectly. Some words are just...perfect.
dickinson is basically all about the rhythm of language and how the hyphens interrupt the structure and add spaces to open up the poem for interpretatoin
it's pretty airy, but it can be quite down to earth and accessible
My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun—
In Corners—till a Day
The Owner passed—identified—
And carried Me away—
And now We roam in Sovereign Woods—
And now We hunt the Doe—
And every time I speak for Him—
The Mountains straight reply—
And do I smile, such cordial light
Upon the Valley glow—
It is as a Vesuvian face
Had let its pleasure through—
And when at Night—Our good Day done—
I guard My Master's Head—
'Tis better than the Eider-Duck's
Deep Pillow—to have shared—
To foe of His—I'm deadly foe—
None stir the second time—
On whom I lay a Yellow Eye—
Or an emphatic Thumb—
Though I than He—may longer live
He longer must—than I—
For I have but the power to kill,
Without—the power to die—
I don't know quite how to explain it . . . but I've a mental repository of visual and aural representations of very broad archetypes. When I start reading something, I assign a basic 'voice' and 'face' to each character; if I am unable to do so adequately, I have trouble enjoying the book (this happened with Harry Potter, I could never find the right voices or faces for any of the characters).
I've specific voices for Shakespearean works . . . and I don't like the sound or cadence of these voices.
So I don't like Shakespeare.
(i admit, i always go to patrick stewart for lear, but often these decisions are more amalgams of how you imagine your lear to act, rather than a specific person)
Like, I start reading this, and I get into it, and I start really liking it, and then I just lose all my patience for it. I get past the third stanza, and then I have no idea what she's on about.
Maybe I'm just stupid.
And some words are just terrible. Like 'can'; I dislike that word and do not like saying it. I don't like 'salon' either.
I really dislike 'TV' and 'Television'. In writing I shorten it to 'tel'. Perfect, a single syllable.
it's a really metaphorical way to think of muzzle flash. Vesuvius is a famous volcano, so a Vesuvian mountain face letting its pleasure through is about ejaculation. of lava. still ejaculation, though. the fun of the poem is changing the way you think about the relationship of guns to their owners, instead of just tools, having a life of their own
Yeah, Shakespeare is really difficult, even though you're not really talking about the difficulty of it.
I kinda get what you're saying, though, and seeing as how all of the action in Shakespeare literally needs to be created by you, that must amplify the difficulty you have enjoying it.
I must say though, Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet is divine.
I love the words "cinema" and "curious"
We rarely do that in class much. And I can not understand so much of it on a superficial level without annotations, I am stupid that way.
I'm a big fan of words that really work in an oratory fashion. Conjugate is a pretty good one.
Moist is another, it just works so well as a word.
who doesn't teach shakespeare in an annotated edition? that's just ludicrous.
I dislike how 'Molly' sounds, but I think 'Mali' sounds/looks beautiful even though they sound the same.
see, there's where I made my mistake. I didn't think of the gun thing as an extended metaphor. I figured that it was local to that first stanza.
Also, I was unclear, my bad. I get the first three stanzas, and lose it on the last three. Now that I'm rethinking it in terms of the gun metaphor (or technically simile, I guess?), I really like the Vesuvius allusion, especially because of the destruction that Vesuvius wrought.
See, I don't like "tel." It seems to leave itself open, in a way. I like words that finish themselves. They put a lid on themselves. They sound complete.
I can't think of any specific examples right now, but if I saw a word that really exemplifies that, I would point it out.
Edit: I am now painfully aware that my last two posts started with "see,"
i realize this started to read like an exam question but i really love this poem and i get excited
Either I'm phrasing this poorly, or you are just not reading what I'm saying.
I'm not saying there's a dichotomy at all, I'm saying that there are some works where the symbols make sense, and others where the author basically has to spend a paragraph describing a curtain to make the symbol work; some integrate with the novel in a way that feels organic and believable, and others where the author basically shoehorns it in so hard that they break the entire pace and narrative just to make it work.
If you want to make a point, fine, but if you're going to break your entire novel for five minutes just to make it work, I really don't see why you used it like this to begin with.
And I get that analysis is entirely dependent upon the tension between author and reader. Hamlet wouldn't be as much fun to analyze if Shakespeare had just come out and said "It's not an Oedipus story, you sick fucks," nor do I think that should be the case. I'm not criticizing the use of symbolism at all in a novel, I'm just saying that, in my mind, some authors did a better job of it than others.
And I'll admit that it's easier for me to enjoy a work if I don't have to spend five minutes parsing the Ye Olde English dictionary to find out that Hamlet just told Ophelia to go work in a whore house. But that's not the only criteria by which I judge a work, and I think it's disingenuous of you to say that. I'm sure there are contemporary works that I have studied, I just can't remember them off the top of my head right now, which is a dilemma that's been exacerbated by studying Victorian and Romantic literature for the last three months, so if I remember some of them, I'll get back to you.
I really don't get why you're making this personal. I'll be the first person to admit that some, if not all of this, is complete bullshit in the context of legitimate literary discussion. I'm just venting some perceived frustration about the nature of academic literature. I'm not saying that Forster, Tennyson, Chopin, or Austen were bad writers, or that their works aren't worth the attention the receive. I'm just saying that they really didn't pique my interest, and studying them for days or weeks at a time really did not help that.
but I also really, really like direct authorial or narratorial presence in works
so I really like when he or she intrudes upon the piece to highlight something or speak to the reader directly (less so when he feels the need to explicitly call attention to the thing's existence as fiction, but nonetheless)
so "flow" in that sense has never been a big concern of mine
Also, get thee to a nunnery remains one of my favorite literary quotes.
dude, fuck yes for getting excited about certain pieces. When I get excited about something I just can't wait to tell everyone I know that's interested in this stuff about it. I did a project on William Ernest Henley and I had to teach one of his poems for forty minutes in class, and my teacher commended me for stripping a relatively simple poet's work basically BARE. I left not a stone unturned in that poem.
And that first line is what threw me off, because I was ready for the poem to be about her life, but not ready for it to be about her as a gun. I knew where I started, and where I was going, but I didn't understand how the road in between went.
Ima go back and read it with this understanding now, and then I'll post that Henley poem
Our textbooks were rather lightly annotated in the bottom margins, and with my piebald knowledge of historical trivia I could see some places where I personally would have placed an annotation; not because it fundamentally changed the meaning of the words but because hey, here is something cool that really makes the setting/characters/etc 'pop'.
The teachers had to do extra legwork, pausing to do the job of an annotation. So it was slow reading too.
When in groups, there was usually someone with a dictionary or smart phone out, to essentially translate the text.