Presentations and a Class Reflection.....

Over the past couple of class periods I have had the privilege in seeing some amazing presentations. I just wanted to briefly go over some of the ones that stood out to me. I guess I will start with Rosa.....it was just a beautiful written passage that she read us. If you honestly were to ask me what it was about I am not sure, but I remember the creativeness as well as honesty in her voice. Honestly, I will not forget her three minutes in which she read us her paper.

Kasidy had an extremely interesting way in connecting all of the names in Lolita back to their origin. One name to note is the name RITA. Rita is the pearl of the book.

Valarie displayed a gothic version of the abduction stories we see throughout American Literature. She used examples of Daizy Miller, Patty Hurst, and Lolita, saying that is it a women's choice to be abducted. She ended with saying that Lolita is AMERICA, and got this information from "Love and Death in the American Novel" by Leslie Fieldler.

Jesse made me realize just how much we all go nuts over these novels trying to find connections. He made his connections through South Park, the Simpsons, henry James, Citizen Kane, Hemmingway, need I really go on.....

Serena brought in a bunch of American Gothic photos, giving us an idea into her thoughts on the painting. She talked about all of the different parodies and how Nabokov states that parody is just a game.

Gosh there were just so many great ideas that have come up in the past couple of class periods. I know that there were more, but ya'll were there. These were just ones that stood out to me!

I have learned so much about myself in this class. From realizing that the little things in the book matter, to realizing my innocence and invisibility in American Literature....I feel that I have truely grown up over the course of the semester. I would have to say that exploring the mind of Wallace Stevens has led me to many sleepless nights and epiphanies that I dreamed I could never possibly come up with. Before, Lolita was just a name. Now it is not just a name but a meaning of metamorphasis. Lolita is a beautiful butterfly and I would have never come up with that on my own. Now....maybe. I have realized the importance of aesthetic bliss and how everything and anything can be connected through art with curiosity, tenderness, kindness, and ecstacy.

The Wizard of Oz is no longer just a movie to me. It is a replication of all stories, and the attempt to find oneself over a period of time. It is a projection of the real world. I would have to say that there are so many things that I know now that I did not know yesterday that it would be useless for me to go through them all. I will tell you this, I will not longer be looking at just the words of a text.....but the lines that are between the texts. There is so much meaning in everything that we read....and I think it ultimately comes back to us, and our understanding of ourselves and the life we live.

I have had a most amazing experience in this class and thank all of you for going along with me and sharing it :)

Kim

Soul Searching.....

I have posted below my final paper. I hope you all enjoy it and maybe my presentation will make a little bit more sense to you once you read my final piece.....

Soul Searching:
A Deeper Look into the Invisible Characters of Our Time

Life is one of the hardest equations a person can attempt to solve. It can take a year, or eighty years, but it is one of the most difficult problems to try and sort out. Whatever the case, life is something that every person goes through, as well as struggles throughout to find out who they really are. As a twenty-year-old college student, I have asked myself many times what my purpose on this earth is, as well as who I am, and I have yet to find the answer. One thing that is for sure, I am not alone in this situation by any means. True identities are incredibly hard to come by, especially in a world where society pushes people to conform to such common interests. People continue to search for their individual soul everyday, no matter what age. We are all ‘invisible’ people amongst one another, who are trying to figure out who we are and what we are doing. I have come to the understanding, that the theme of my American Literature class, and of the everyday lives that we as people, is exactly that word – invisible.
In the great American novel Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison, the story of finding one’s true self takes place. Here, the unnamed character (who does go by the Invisible Man throughout the book), strides through his awkward stage of life not knowing exactly what is happening to him, and not knowing how to take it all in. He functions in what is called a ‘bildungsroman’, encountering multiple everyday life experiences that somehow, though he may not know it, lead to the development of his inner self (Carey 59). This novel is centered only on the Invisible Man, and all of the unfortunate things that happen to him, which in the end only help him in his discovery of his inner self. This was a hard concept for me to grasp, because I did not quite understand how ‘finding out who one is’ can be related to the word ‘invisible’. However, the meanings all came together for me towards the end of the book.
As the Invisible Man continues through all of his encounters, he keeps one thing in his arms. This comforting object is his briefcase he won, containing all of his most prized possessions. Even though he was involved in a riot, chased by Ras’ men, and was almost burned in attempt to save the actual briefcase, it is a vital part of his life to him. He holds onto this because all of the things that he has gone through are what is most important to him – they make up what and who he is – and the briefcase has gone with the Invisible Man throughout his endeavors. Through his briefcase, he is able to create his own identity. His identity is what makes him invisible, for no one can actually see who he is. There is not one other person in this world that went though what the Invisible Man went through, making his identity invisible to others, but not to him, which in the end is something everyone strives for.
This idea of being invisible is seen throughout some of the greatest novels of our time. One of those novels is Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. Huck is as invisible a character we as readers can get. However, he is invisible in a different way. Huckleberry Finn thinks that he knows who he is, but we as the reader are quite aware that he does not. Throughout the beginning of the story, we see that Huck feels that he is extremely superior over Miss Watson’s black slave, Jim. But once Huck runs into Jim, while both of them were attempting to escape from their lifestyles, his attitude toward Jim begins to slightly altar (Twain, 1994). Huck begins to see Jim in a different light, and soon realizes that it is wrong for people to be treated the way that slaves were dealt with. However, this is a intrapersonal conflict for him, as he knows that thinking of this is in a way ‘sinning’, and going against everything he was ever taught. We see that Huck has always been one that, deep inside, knew what was right in the situation he was put in. It was just a matter of time before he not only escaped from his father and his structured society, but from himself to his invisibility.
Confused characters are something we often see in novels, and Huckleberry Finn was definitely no exception. What I mean by escaping from himself to his invisibility is that he became an individual. At that point in time, he used all of these previous experiences to shape himself as a person. Huckleberry Finn becomes ‘invisible’ right before our eyes.
Another way in which we see a person struggling to find their true identity is in the movie “The Wizard of Oz”. Dorothy, a farm girl who grew up on her aunt and uncle’s ranch, is taken into the fantasy Land of Oz. Here, it is said that she needs to get to the Emerald City in order to get ‘home’. That raises the question of what really home is. Sure one would argue that it is that big brick structure with windows and bedrooms and a kitchen, but I would argue that home is something completely different than an object.
Dorothy struggles to find her way home. She is an innocent, southern girl who was taken from her family, and has to find her way back. Ladies and gentlemen, Dorothy is about to encounter a bildungsroman. It is at this time in her life where she has to grow up and find her way not only back to Kansas, but find her way to herself. To me, Dorothy was always at home, she just needed to realize it. Home is Dorothy. Every person has a heart, in which everything that happens to a person throughout a life time is collected in that heart. By taking a good look inside of her heart, and allowing herself to realize that the experiences she bumped into were only creating her identity, she eventually ended up at the place she began at. However, when she came back from Oz, she was now invisible. She had created her identity which got her back to where she came from in the first place. Home is Dorothy’s invisibility.
If a person looks hard enough, they can see that there is a little bit of soul searching in every story that we read. In the story Daisy Miller, by Henry James, one might argue that Daisy is just a flirt, and a girl who is as conniving as they come. It is hard to conjure up this argument, for I see her as a lost little girl, trying to escape her label in attempt to find her true identity. Daisy Miller, though she may appear so on the outside, is anything but a flirt on the inside. Daisy goes from a handsome Italian, to an extremely nice Winterbourne, and not because she can, but because she is attempting to find out what she really wants in life, and in a sense that completes her. Daisy’s only difference is that she is not trying to discover her identity through her experiences, but she is attempting to unveil her inner self through people. Whatever the case, this is just a part of the bildungsroman. The said thing about Daisy’s case, is that she passed away before she had her chance to become invisible, but she was well on her way to reaching that invisibility and finding her true identity.
Humbert Humbert, in the novel Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov, was an incredibly invisible character. Humbert knew exactly who he was throughout his entire lifetime, and we were the only ones who had the privilege in seeing how his invisibility worked through his journal writing. Humbert lost his first love, Annabel, during his adolescence. Humbert never quite recovered from that experience. To him, this first love stuck with him throughout his entire life, and when he did encounter her doppelganger, Lolita, he loved her like he was still seventeen years old. Humbert was a lover of Annabel, and used this experience to achieve his identity through Lolita. Humbert Humbert was so invisible that I might as well not even have read the book! He was aware of what he was doing and understood who he was and why he needed Lolita – to complete his identity.
In the story The Invisible Man, it takes him a while to realize that he is an invisible person and accept that fact. Of course, this is a problem that not only the Invisible Man goes through, but every person in time encounters. One of the most central metaphors in this novel is that of the Invisible Man’s blindness to his many experiences before he allows himself to step out of the darkness (Carey 60). This creates a metaphor for people in the everyday world. This man, who states that he was once blind, but at the end of the story states that he is not blind anymore, says simply, “Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you” (Ellison 572). It becomes very clear that this man realizes that all of his experiences are definitely something that others experience in their everyday lives. Maybe not exactly his personal experiences, but each person in the world experiences what it is like to grow into themselves, as well as the need take off the blinders that are preventing people from seeing the truth within their hearts (Wiki 3).
It goes without saying that attempting to find the light in one’s life is one of the hardest things for a person to do. There are many things that people can be, such as innocent, naive, hardnosed, or grotesque. However, one cannot be any of these without being invisible, and understanding that being invisible is a good thing. By using all of our past experiences to shape who we become and ultimately are, we accept the fact that we are invisible. It is funny how lives can change through the realization of different humanistic aspects through literature. By being invisible, we recognize who we are and why we are exactly that without any person tell us different. Achieving an identity is the ultimate goal for characters in movies and books, as well as characters in life.
Our identity is invisible to every other individual but ourselves and that is why through novels such as the Invisible Man, Huckleberry Finn and Lolita, I now understand that in order to claim such an identity, I must allow myself to be invisible. To my roommate, to my sister, and to my teacher, I am invisible, because I have taken all of my past experiences in life and used them to shape my own identity. Only I know what has happened to me, allowing me to think what I want and how I want to, letting no outside influences effect the way I view myself and my individually. That is exactly what makes me ‘invisible’. Inevitably, if we allow ourselves to be, we all are an Invisible Man

Why Should I Keep Reading.......?

Over the past couple of weeks I have been making my way through the novel Lolita. The first time around I just read it like I would read any other novel, and the second time I looked at it from a more scholarly approach. I guess you could say that the first time I got through the book, I was disgusted. Of course, I just read a book which entailed a ton of child malestation.....which is sick. That's all I got out of it. But that was the first time......and the second time I read it, I saw beauty. I fell in love with the words on the page. This book is beautifully written, and every time I turn the page there is something that takes me back a little.

Now....I want you all to know that I am by no means 'smart' when it comes to connecting novels and art and songs together. For those of you that don't know, I write for the Exponent in the sports section, talk on a Sports radio show, and dance on the MSU dance team. Think about it, this book should by no means entertain me because it has nothing to do with my interests in life. But it does do one thing, and why I continued to read this book was because of the way that I made connections, in my own world. Vladimir Nabokov has so many different attributes to his story that even this cheerleader can find enthrawling things to talk about....to learn....and to definitely think about.

One of the passages that inspired me the most to keep reading was the passage beginning on page 57. Actually, the whole section (13) is moving to me. I think it is so moving because at first Humbert Humbert was a sick and perverted man. NOW I see that he is anything but (well okay, still a little weird), but he is in love. He had lost his first true love in Annabel and has never been able to recover from that. Humbert says things like, "She was musical and apple sweet. Her legs twitched a little as they lay across my live lap; there she lolled in the right hand corner, almost asprawl, Lola the bobby-soxer, devouring her immemorial fruit, singing through its juice, losing her slipper, rubbing the heel of her slipperless foot in its sloppy anklet, against the pile of old magazines heaped on my left on the sofa". What a child Lolita is......just a child who has captivated a man. I think the reason for this captivation is because of the connection Lolita and Annabel have. To Humbert, Lolita is the Dopplegangar to Annabel.....the love he lost and has suddenly found in a new life.

I found this clip of the exact scene I just noted up above and it is a pretty good visual as to what was going on in the book. I hope you like it....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyuhaJMIAaI

This is a love story, and an amazing read.......and I will still continue to read....

The Invisible Girl.....

It is that awkward stage a young person goes through. A 'bildungsroman' is something that is not uncommon in the life of most adolescents. In particularly, the story that most youngsters go through pertaining to multiple encounters which untimatley contribute to the development of this person. This story is exactly what the Invisible Man is about. However, not only is it about just the Invisible Man, it is about me. I am the Invisible girl, going through this crazy thing called life. But wait, not only is this story about the Invisible Man, and about me, it is about every person who takes the plunge into adulthood, and not knowing any idea as to what direction they are going. We see this crazy style a lot as the 'awkward' boy is growing up. Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, Earnest Hemmingway's Nick Adams stories, and William Faulkner's Intruder in the Dust are just to name a few stories featuring young people trying to find themselves in life.

Everything that happens in this novel is central in the IM's development, just like everything that happens in my life is important in my growth. I think that most of these problems that the IM faces, ordinary everyday people face as well....and I believe that is why this book hits close to home with many. For the most part, this novel's main idea is the narrator's attempt to discover his true identity. One of the most important ideas to remember is that through his journey he makes connections between his nature and his society, his own self and his relationships with others, and the actual importance of invisibility. All of these factors contribute greatly in the attempt for the IM to find out who he is, what he is, and where he is going.

I guess my point is that this is a novel that I can see myself.....even though I am NOTHING like the IM himself, and I think that this is the importance of the story. Where there are 'road movies', there are 'growth books'. It is some what dumb, so many stories take place within the self, just like life. Life takes place within the self.

So until next time, I will continue to discover myself.....then again do we ever stop discovering?!?!

Class Notes....11/16

Let's be creative for a minute.......who would you think that I look like here? I actually came across this picture yesterday and when I first saw it I said, Lolita! And I did not think that it was me. I believe I am Lolita in this picture because it is a gothic picture that shows hardly any emotion at all on the outside.....but if you look further there is much more there.....

I was extremely interested in today's class lecture, and I hope everyone took careful note of the beautiful butterfly that I drew on the board! Here are some notes to reminise on before we meet again....

--The Beautiful name LOLITA has come to mean a very sexual girl...and young girl at that...

--Mac McCullough was a man who Dr. Sexon worked with who first introduced him to the novel Lolita, and Dr. Sexon addmitted that he read the book because he thought it was 'dirty'....

--The 7 Aspects of a novel according to Nabokov:

-Parody

-Coincidence

-Patterning

-Allusion

-Work within a Work

-Staging of a Novel

-Authorial Voice

--A Nymphete is an immature but sexually attractive girl

--Pupa is the Latin word for Doll. and one of Lolita's names is Dolly.....

--One of the themes found in Lolita is the chaning into something beautiful....like a caterpillar metamorphing into a butterfly...

--Our psyche is something withing our sould or mind...

--On page 314 of the novel Lolita, Nabokov reminds us of the use or art and how aesthetic bliss is connected with art.....it's curiosity, tenderness, kindness, and ecstacy...

I thought that these were some of the more memorable points from the lecture today....

If any of you read my blog I wrote yesterday, I talked about a passage by Northrop Frye that really made me think of the way I read into things. Well after a discussion in my other class, I have found that I am no longer confused. We talked about the story Alice in Wonderland, and how if we questioned every little thing that happened in the story literally, then we would get no where in literature. According to Dr. Sexon, in order to take things literally you MUST buy into the story and accept it on it's own imagionative terms....

Interpretation can often lead to false ideas and that is why it is important to accept what is written on the page and appriciate it as well as experience it.....

How Far is too Far....

I also take Dr. Sexon's Biblical Foundations for those of you who do not already know and I am beginning to see how much they parallel one another. It is crazy because I just got done reading a chapter in my Northrop Frye book talking about reading things literally. He states that, 'The only time you can take the word 'literal' seriously is when you read something in the same way that you read a poem, where you accept every word that is given to you without question but do not make any premature association between every word and something in the world outside. That is, your whole attention is directed toward putting the words together.

I guess part of me agrees with him that you can't take the term literal very seriously, but part of me is a little confused and thinks that he is contradicting. When I was reading some of the Wallace Stevens poem in the anthology, I looked up almost every word. I took every word out of context to try and find some specific meaning that i thought that I was over looking, but is Frye saying that we should not look that far into something to find the meaning. I have mentioned this idea on my blog before, but this caught my eye and I thought it could be something interesting to talk about.

I had the understanding that poets were to look into things, that is how good poetry is written. OR is it? Is good poetry the stuff that we can physically see written, without having to grab a dictionary to find out what is the REAL meaning? I hope that people read this passage and clear me up, because I am not sure how far we need to read into things to find the real idea....

I wanted to comment on Marilyn's blog....I think that she does an exceptional job of keeping track with the notes as well as some of her own ideas in class. We were told to pick out a blog for the 211 class that I am in, and I thought that I would do the same for this class. Good job Marilyn! Keep it up, and I'll keep readin'......

Based vs. Inspired

I have always been one to try and look into things, and try to find some underlying meaning...whether it is there or not. Recently I wrote on whether people read way too far into things or not. I think that I show the balance between reading into material because I can really dig far, or I can just look at the surface to find the idea. I have been studying the structuralist critics as well as the deconscructionalist critics.....especially Jacques Derrida. I thought that I would share my insights on 'reading into things'......I really think this piece can be applied to this class.

Is There a Difference on the Movie Screen?
When the credits roll at the beginning of the motion picture Remember the Titans, it tells the audience that the following movie is ‘based’ on a true story. The theatrical trailer for the movie, Dreamer, states that it is ‘inspired’ by a true story. To most people, the two words, based and inspired, seem extremely similar. To others, the two words could not have a more different significance. The dictionary definition of based is, that it means to establish as a fact or conclusion. The meaning of the word inspired is, to give rise to, to bring about, or to cause (Dictionary 1). They are two different words, which happen to have similar meaning. Or do they have a similar meaning? The words could quite possibly arouse an interesting discussion between an everyday average person, a poststructuralist like Jacques Derrida, and one English major.
When asked what she thought the difference in meaning of the words inspired and based, my college roommate looked at me as though I had gone off the deep end. For in her eyes, there hardly seemed to be a difference at all. They both are relaying a message of a true story to an audience, though some aspects of that story may have been left out or added. When she made her main argument, she stated that the only idea that might lead her to believe that there was a difference was that ‘based’ might show a slight bit more truth in the word. To an everyday person, who has no connection to an English class or to a critic, the two words only differ slightly. In her closing statement, she said that she honestly would not think anything of the difference if she heard one or the other. They are two words that share a similar meaning, therefore making it hard, or unimportant, for one to eek out all of the reasons why or why they are not parallel.
Now if a poststructuralist, such as Jacques Derrida, were to be asked this same notion, there is no question that he would answer in a different way. Because of Derrida’s idea of freeplay, that everything can be broken up and rearranged, the words could not possibly mean the same thing or remotely close to the same thing. If Derrida were to begin to deconstruct the word ‘based’, he would have to start at the center, also known as the Bricolage. Where this word came from and how is it used in the context would be an ideal central place. Derrida says, “This field is in fact that of freeplay, that is to say, a field of many substitutions in the closure of a finite ensemble” (Derrida 886). He would break down the word and see the many patterns or ideas that come from the word’s core, as well as its history and function, and then put it back together in bits and pieces to create an extremely fine definition. This means that once he got this definition, it is safe to say that he would look at the language that surrounds the word. When Derrida can understand the relationship the word has to the surrounding language, he will put it back together in a way that makes total sense to him with information to back up his analysis.
The only way that ‘based’ and ‘inspired’ were to be the same to Derrida is if they were able to be broken down and put back together similarly based on their center, which is next to impossible. This is impracticable because if the words have slightly different definitions to begin with, affirming their freeplay as like terms is not possible. The word ‘based’ comes from the thought of factual information, and ‘inspired’ comes from bringing about an idea. Two words would allow Derrida to say that these movies were not in the same category, and these words are factual and idea. They are the root of the word, and once it is broken down there is a huge difference. A poststructuralist would say that there is an extreme variation in a movie that is based on a true story and one that is inspired by a true story.
The English Major writing this paper would also have a more poststructuralist view to the two words. I believe that when looking at the roots of the words and breaking them down, the differences are obvious. I do not know how far I would take the matter, but I would say that though they do share similar definitions, the similar is too different to put the two movies in the same category. I would have to classify the movie based on a true story as very accurate with a few hits and misses here and there. On the other hand, a movie inspired by a true story would simply be a vague telling of something that was found to be affirmative. Similar does not make the words the same, and that is why the movies are unlike one another.

There are many arguments that arise when depicting two words such as the ones discussed above. As mentioned before, poststructuralists would have a hay-day deciphering the definitions of the words, and everyday people might see a few differences here and there. Reader-response critics would state that people can make what they want of the words, for it is what their background and knowledge comprise of that make up their thoughts. Others might merely state that the two words are the same and we are reading way too far into these simple letters thrown together. Whether we are or not, one thing is for sure, and that is that these words do not look the same on a page, so making the statement that they mean the same thing would make no sense. ‘Based’ on the things that I have been ‘inspired’ by, I believe that there is a huge difference between movies that are based on true stories, and ones that are simply an inspiration.

How Far is TOO Far.....

There are a lot of days that I leave class (219, 211, and my English 300 class) thinking the words "What in the heck just happened?" This creates a problem for this simple mind I have because I often don't read into things. It was mentioned on Tuesday that sometimes people take things way to far out of context and the real meaning becomes extremely far removed from the truth. But is that really the case? I noticed this when I was reading some of the Wallace Stevens poems for the Pod-Cast today.

My Poem is titled "The House was Quite and the World was Calm", and I find it to be very simple. OR is it? I think that it is saying that not matter what happens in the world, reading a book always brings you back down to reality. It calms you and creates a sense of inner peace. Reading a book before one goes to sleep creates calmness, like the words your mother wispers in your ear before bedtime. When you open a book, it is only you and the book.....or you IN the book....or you being the book! By doing this, you are untouchable for that instant, and nothing can break the silence and calmness created.

So! Is that really it....or did i not read enough into it? Does the word book mean something else like war? Or does the line 'The access of perfection to the page" relate to something other than the fact that it is talking of a group of beautiful words? I guess we won't know because it is how I interpret it.

Bottom line, I do not think that there is no right or wrong in poetry, whether we read into it or not!

Notes in class:

Music is something where you never have to ask about referentiality.

Three things that Luke must leave in THE BEAR:
-Rifle, Compas and Watch (notice they are all devises of technology)

Imagination is integrated an promotes forces of the mind.

Two Forms of Imagination:
-Creative and Decreative

Have a great day....hope ya'll don't read too far into your day!

The Reader's Response...

First off, I want to thank Valerie for her insight on Dead Man. Though it was only her last little group of sentences that made total sense for me. I am a simple minded person, and many things do not register in my head the way that they would some one else's. Valerie mentioned that it is what you bring to the table, what influences you, has a great deal to do with how you would view a film such as dead man. This is also called a Reader-Response Critique.

In my English 300 class I am beginning to leard about Reader-Response. I have come to the conclusion that English 219 should be based on RR. There is so much going on in every piece of literature we as a class view or read, but we are ALL going to have DIFFERENT oppinions on it. By her saying this, I was able to be at peace with the fact that I am not going to see the movie like any of my other classmates and that is OKAY.....

Other topics brought up in class:

The Invisible Man.....learning the ambiguity or language. The Invisible Man does not have an identity, resluting in the fact that he must create one. I think that we are all 'invisible' then, because aren't we all searching for an identity????

Picoresque is when we follow an adventurer through long and crazy journeys.

Verbal Battles! I have these all the time....in fact, my roommate and her boyfriend got into one last night, and boy was in entertaining! Look on page 238 in the Invisible Man to get the real idea of a verbal battle.

**Everything is connected and we are all living as something that has come before us, and we know this unconsciously!!!!