My Touchstone

In my opinion, I feel it is dificult to come up with only one touchstone. Now I'm not sure if this touchstone has to be strictly related to literature...so I have a combination of music and writing. Yes, it's a little embarassing, but I happen to be a huge fan of Enya. Enya is a form of music that is meant for relaxation. Sometimes in my spare time, I'll listen to Enya and read for class or simply for leisure. This summer, I read one of the most amazing and thrilling works. It was called, "One Man's Wilderness." This book was a true story of a man who is tired and irritated with the world and all of human civilization. As a result of his frustration, he moves to the middle of no where in Alaska. He builds a log cabin, lives off the land, and documents everything in a journal. This one particular day, while reading this story, I put on some Enya. As I gradually progressed into the story, I felt as if I had some how spiritually transformed into this desolate and frustrated human being. Once my reading session was over and I thought about my experience...I came to the conclusion that I probably wouldn't have been able to feel as connected to the character if the Enya was not playing.

Don Quioxte, a Superhero?

So far from my reading of Don Quioxte, I've wondered if this novel was simply a representation of our everyday superhero. Is Don Quioxte a superhero? Lets do the math: Don has read nearly every book on chivalry and is definitely familiar with the history of knighthood. It's stated on page 138, "...I am a knight from La Mancha, named Don Quoioxte, and its my occupation and profession to wander the world righting wrongs and rectifying injuries." So there's a couple arguments for D.Q. representing a superhero. Now lets analyze why he isn't a superhero: He's always looking for a battle, and when he finds something or someone to interigate, he's often beatin' up or out numbered. He imagines things! On page 128, "And in this fasion he named many knights from the two hosts, which he was imagining, and for all of them he improvised armor, colors, legends, and devices, carried along by the imagination of his unheard-of madness, and without pausing he continued,..." Simply based off this argument alone, I am convinced that Don Quioxte is not a superhero but an 'imitation of an imitaion of a superhero.' An imitation of a superhero (as brought up in class) would be those such as: Batman, Spiderman, Superman, The Hulk etc...But as I continue reading, Don Quioxte appears to me as an imitation of another superhero.

Plato's Philosophy: Stories & Story-tellers

Plato's Philosophy:
-Our senses in this world, are simply an imitation of other imitations
-All stories are re-tellings of other stories
-He believed storytellers were either:
1. Liars
2. Derangers
3. Antifesturs
-Northrop Frye would strongly agree with this statement
-Plato also speaks poorly of the Gods

Example: If someone were to draw a picture of a chair, Plato would say that is an imitation of a chair. And the chair that the individual was imitating, is also an imitation.

If I could ask Plato a question: How would you draw a chair, and from what source would you base your imitation from?

Thematic-Myth

According to Northrop Frye, a poet or writer will devote the main character to 'sing to the gods'-who interchangably, through this art, becomes one with God. The poets visionary function is to reveal the God to whom he speaks. The character is therefor an oracle and is often depicted as being possessed by this divine figure. An example of this can not only be found in literature such as various biblical stories but also in present day films; such as The Exorcist. Although the portrayal of this is represented as an evil possession, the concept still applies.

A Biography of Virginia Woolf

In 1926 Virginia Woolf contributed an introduction to Victorian Photographs of Famous Men & Fair Women by Julia Margaret Cameron. This publication may be seen as a springboard from which to approach Woolf’s life: Virginia saw herself as descending from a distinctive male and female inheritance; Cameron was the famous Victorian photographer and Woolf’s aunt; Woolf’s friend Roger Fry also contributed an introduction and leads us to the Bloomsbury Group; and the book was published by the Hogarth Press which Virginia had started with her husband Leonard in 1917.
Adeline Virginia Stephen was born on 25 January 1882 in London. Her father, Leslie Stephen (1832-1904), was a man of letters (and first editor of the Dictionary of National Biography) who came from a family distinguished for public service (part of the ‘intellectual aristocracy' of Victorian England). Her mother, Julia (1846-95), from whom Virginia inherited her looks, was the daughter and niece of the six beautiful Pattle sisters (Julia Margaret Cameron was the seventh: not beautiful but the only one remembered today). Both parents had been married before: her father to the daughter of the novelist, Thackeray, by whom he had a daughter Laura (1870-1945) who was intellectually backward; and her mother to a barrister, Herbert Duckworth (1833-70), by whom she had three children, George (1868-1934), Stella (1869-97), and Gerald (1870-1937). Julia and Leslie Stephen had four children: Vanessa (1879-1961), Thoby (1880-1906), Virginia, and Adrian (1883-1948). All eight children lived with the parents and a number of servants at 22 Hyde Park Gate, Kensington.

Long summer holidays were spent at Talland House in St Ives, Cornwall, and St Ives played a large part in Virginia’s imagination. It was the setting for her novel To the Lighthouse, despite its ostensibly being placed on the Isle of Skye. London and/or St Ives provided the principal settings of most of her novels

In 1895 her mother died unexpectedly, and Virginia suffered her first mental breakdown. Her half-sister Stella took over the running of the household as well as coping with Leslie’s demands for sympathy and emotional support. Stella married Jack Hills in 1897, but she too died suddenly on her return from her honeymoon. The household burden then fell upon Vanessa.

Virginia was allowed uncensored access to her father’s extensive library, and from an early age determined to be a writer. Her education was sketchy and she never went to school. Vanessa trained to become a painter. Their two brothers were sent to preparatory and public schools, and then to Cambridge. There Thoby made friends with Leonard Woolf, Clive Bell, Saxon Sydney-Turner, Lytton Strachey, and Maynard Keynes. This was the nucleus of the Bloomsbury Group.

Leslie Stephen died in 1904, and Virginia had a second breakdown. While she was sick, Vanessa arranged for the four siblings to move from 22 Hyde Park Gate to 46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury. At the end of the year Virginia started reviewing with a clerical paper called the Guardian; in 1905 she started reviewing in The Times Literary Supplement and continued writing for that journal for many years. Following a trip to Greece in 1906, Thoby died of typhoid and in 1907 Vanessa married Clive Bell. Thoby had started ‘Thursday evenings' for his friends to visit, and this kind of arrangement was continued after his death by Vanessa and then by Virginia and Adrian when they moved to 29 Fitzroy Square. In 1911 Virginia moved to 38 Brunswick Square. Leonard Woolf had joined the Ceylon Civil Service in 1904 and returned in 1912 on leave. He soon decided that he wanted to marry Virginia, and she eventually agreed. They were married in St Pancras Registry Office on 10 August 1912. They decided to earn money by writing and journalism.

Since about 1908 Virginia had been writing her first novel The Voyage Out (originally to be called Melymbrosia). It was finished by 1913 but, owing to another severe mental breakdown after her marriage, it was not published until 1915 by Duckworth & Co. (Gerald’s publishing house). The novel was fairly conventional in form. She then began writing her second novel Night and Day - if anything even more conventional - which was published in 1919, also by Duckworth.
From 1911 Virginia had rented small houses near Lewes in Sussex, most notably Asheham House. Her sister Vanessa rented Charleston Farmhouse nearby from 1916 onwards. In 1919 the Woolfs bought Monks House in the village of Rodmell. This was a small weather-boarded house (now owned by the National Trust) which they used principally for summer holidays until they were bombed out of their flat in Mecklenburgh Square in 1940 when it became their home.
In 1917 the Woolfs had bought a small hand printing-press in order to take up printing as a hobby and as therapy for Virginia. By now they were living in Richmond (Surrey) and the Hogarth Press was named after their house. Virginia wrote, printed and published a couple of experimental short stories, The Mark on the Wall and Kew Gardens. The Woolfs continued handprinting until 1932, but in the meantime they increasingly became publishers rather than printers. By about 1922 the Hogarth Press had become a business. From 1921 Virginia always published with the Press, except for a few limited editions.

Nineteen-twenty-one saw Virginia’s first collection of short stories Monday or Tuesday, most of which were experimental in nature. In 1922 her first experimental novel, Jacob’s Room, appeared. In 1924 the Woolfs moved back to London, to 52 Tavistock Square. In 1925 Mrs. Dalloway was published, followed by To the Lighthouse in 1927, and The Waves in 1931. These three novels are generally considered to be her greatest claim to fame as a modernist writer. Her involvement with the aristocratic novelist and poet Vita Sackville-West led to Orlando (1928), a roman à clef inspired by Vita’s life and ancestors at Knole in Kent. Two talks to women’s colleges at Cambridge in 1928 led to A Room of One’s Own (1929), a discussion of women’s writing and its historical economic and social underpinning.

The 1930s was a less happy time for the Woolfs as the deaths of friends and the prospect of war increasingly overshadowed the decade. Virginia produced Flush (1933), a fictional biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s dog; The Years (1937), a family saga (more unconventional than that sounds) which was a best-seller in America but had been a long and painful time in the writing; Three Guineas (1938), in a sense a successor to A Room of One’s Own; and in 1940 a biography of her friend Roger Fry who had died in 1934. She had practically completed her final novel Between the Acts when she committed suicide by drowning in the River Ouse near Monks House on 28 March 1941.

Vocabulary Words Thus Far...

Literary Criticism: is the study, discussion, evaluation, and interpretation of literature

Critic: one who expresses a reasoned opinion on any matter especially involving a judgment of its value, truth, righteousness, beauty, or technique
Function: noun

Trope: to turn, a figure of speech
Function: noun

Ecstasy: to stand out; stand outside
Function: noun
(ec)-out
(sta)-stand

Flyting: rhetoric, act of insult
Function: noun

Centripetals: in-stay inside the texts
Function: adjective

Centrifugues: out
Function: adjective

Alazon: imposter
Function: noun

Myth: a usually traditional story of ostensibly historical events that serves to unfold part of the world view of a people or explain a practice, belief, or natural phenomenon; a person or thing having only an imaginary or unverifiable existence
Function: noun

Cosmogony: birth of the world
Function: noun

Mimic: to copy or imitate
Function: noun

Mimesis: art is in imitation of nature
Function: noun

Poesis: creation
Function: noun

*This is what I have so far...if there are any changes that need to be made, please let me know.

Making Connections

While reading the "Anatomy of Criticism" by: Northrop Frye, I have noticed a connection between Don Quixote and one of Frye's criticisms. On page 54, Frye says, "In fiction, we discovered two main tendencies, a 'comic' tendency to integrate the hero with his society, and a 'tragic' tendency to isolate him." So far from my reading and observation of Don Quixote, the main character seems to have this trait. Don is portrayed as a man who is briliant when it comes to the knowledge and understanding of chivalry and acts heroic. However according to Don, the people in his enviornment seem impressed by his attributes, but when he is not present, his peers speek of him with a sour tounge and brutally criticize him. Although this is probably just a small connection I made, I'm sure I'll be making more connections as I gradually progress through both books.

Memorizing Poems

I'm sure it's not a suprise...but I can't stand memorizing poems! However there is one huge benefit. Based off of my memorizing in the past, I have understood the true meaning of what the author is trying to depict to the reader. Perhaps I'm just not the biggest fan of poetry. Reading them is one thing, but memorizing is another. I've also found in my past that while I have been reading poems, my mind tends to wander and I think about other subjects that have absolutely nothing to do with my assignment. So through this blog, I just revealed to myself that memorizing can be a huge pain in the ass, but in retrospect, I'll have a solid and concrete understanding of the poem. Bring it on Wallace Stevens!

What I Understand From Northrop Frye

On page 7 in Northrop Frye's, "Anatomy of Criticism," Frye discusses literary criticism as not only an art but also as a science. "If criticism exists, it must be an examination of literature in terms of a conceptual framework derivable from an inductive survey of the literary field. The word 'inductive' suggests some sort of scientific procedure. What if criticism is a science as well as an art?"

I agree with Frye. Not only is literature a literary art form, but it is also a form of science. If you take away what the "scientists" are studying (regardless of the study being focused on literature or science), one can ultimately conclude that there is definitely a procedural form of research and critiquing in both fields of study.

My 1st Opinion of the Readings

When I first began reading Northrop Frye's, "Anatomy of Criticism" I felt very intimidated by his style of writing. However once I got past the intial shock and truly started to comprehend the message Frye is trying to portray, you ready for it...I actually found it interesting and different! In class today a couple students reflected back on their past high school english teachers and how they insisted that the students' agree with that particular author. Perhaps I am a sheep, and I too am being led by a shepard, but there have been plenty of times in the past where I was told to have the same opinion as the author. And being the confidence-lacking high schooler I was...I fell into the same rut that these other students got involved in. But that was a long time ago! Now I feel that I have the capability to think as I want. And I found Frye interesting. I felt that his message was simply saying to comprehend the text the way you want. Whatever message you get out of the reading is the correct way to interpret the authors ideas.