Helene Cixous: Post-structuralist Feminist

“… explore the idea of what the language that women speak would really be like if no one were there to correct them…”
-Helene Cixous

Good thing I took French, except for the part where the professor told me daily that my accent was terrible. So I guess that doesn’t really help too much since she obviously speaks English.

Comic Ironic

“In ironic comedy we begin to see that art also has a lower limit in actual life. This is the condition of savagery, the world in which comedy consists of inflicting pain on a helpless victim.” -Frye, 45

“But the element of play is the barrier that separates art from savagery, and playing at human sacrifice seems to be an important theme of ironic comedy.” -Frye, 46

I am finding more and more that I can relate Frye’s thoughts to my everyday life, which, since I am in fact not an English major, usually consists of one or two movies. When I started reading the section about the comic ironic and I reached the section that contains the aforementioned quotes I immediately thought of Harold Crick, the protagonist of the film Stranger than Fiction. In the movie Crick’s life is being narrated by a womans voice. The voice also happens to be a real author (at least in the movie) by the name of Karen Eiffel. Eiffel is writing a novel and in the middle of the movie Crick realizes that Eiffel’s eventual plan is to kill him, so he spends the rest of the film trying to find Eiffel and then convince her not to kill him.

Harold Crick is the victim, who is being inflicted with pain in the form of an authors voice. He cannot stop the voice, or talk to the voice, and therefore he is helpless unless by some miracle he can find the origin of the voice. The entire movies plays at human sacrifice, since half way through, the audience finds out that Karen Eiffel is going to kill Harold Crick. To our society this is very funny. Watching a man being tortured by a voice and then nearly sacrificed is what entertains the majority of the population (based on this movies gross income.) I think this movie, is clear proof we are in the comic ironic stage of literature… if you can judge the state of literature by a movie…

Chart for “The Theory of Modes”

Alright. There is my hand-written, old school chart. It’s a bit blurry but if you just read it with a magnifying glass its pretty clear. Just kidding I will fix it later, for now I am pretty impressed that I knew how to use a scanner still.

OH MY GOSH! If you click on it, it is full size. No updating necessary.

Class Notes IV

Northrop Frye Quotes: http://www.frye.ca/english/northrop-frye/frye-quotes.html

You can also buy a t-shirt from this site proclaiming and advertising your love for Frye to everyone… I know what I want for Christmas.

Logos: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logos “It derives from the verb λέγω legō: to count, tell, say, or speak.^[1] The primary meaning of logos is: something said; by implication a subject, topic of discourse, or reasoning. Secondary meanings such as logic, reasoning, etc. derive from the fact that if one is capable of λέγειν (infinitive) i.e. speech, then intelligence and reason are assumed.”

Logic: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/logic “the science that investigates the principles governing correct or reliable inference.” “a particular method of reasoning or argumentation: We were unable to follow his logic.”

The definition for logos says that the secondary meaning of logos, or logic, derives from the assumption that if one can speak, then one must speak intelligently and with reason. Honestly, I hardly ever feel like I am speaking with very much intelligence or reason and I feel content knowing that someone else can actually decipher what I am attempting to say. But, since neither definition gives an estimate for the amount of intelligence and reason necessary for logic to exist, that means that no matter how un-intelligent or un-reasonable I feel like I sound, I am still speaking logically, because I have some intelligence, and some sense of reason because I am capable of speaking.

And by the way, I have now read the Theory of Modes…

Class Notes III

Naked as a jaybird: http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Where_did_the_term_’naked_as_a_jaybird’_begin

Alazon: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alazon OR http://www.reference.com/search?q=Alazon (Oddly enough they say the exact same thing…)

Giambattista Vico and Ovid

In Scienza Nuova Vico names three stages of humans that we are constantly cycling through, divine beings, heroic beings, and men. Vico’s stages of the human race correlate strongly with Frye’s five theories of modes, myth, romance, high and low mimetic, and irony. Divine beings being the main characters in myth, heroes in romance, and men in high mimetic, low mimetic, and irony. Considering Frye wrote Anatomy of Criticism long after Vico finished Scienze Nuova, I think it is safe to assume that in order to write the Theory of Modes Frye must have at least studied a little of Vico’s work and then expanded on the idea that if the “human” race is in a constant cycle going from divine beings down to men and back again, that the literature they have written must be doing the same.

Ovid, before Vico, also created an order of the descent of man. In the Golden age, men lived like God’s, the lives of each were almost indistinguishable except that men died. In the Silver age men were demoted by Zues into mortals who lacked the intellectual and physical power of the God’s, however they still lived very long lives. Upon their deaths these mortals were banished to the underworld. In the bronze age, men were more like the men of today, or the men in 300. They were made by Zues from ash trees. These men made homes an armor of bronze. lastly came the iron age, or, our current age.

I just realized these are all theories of creation, or creation myths. Good thing it only took me a week.

Class Notes II

Centripetal- proceeding or acting in a direction toward a center or axis

Centrifugal- proceeding or acting in a direction away from a center or axis

Frye’s stages in the Anatomy of Criticism

1. Myth 2. Romance 3. High Mimetic 4. Low Mimetic 5. Ironic

I didn’t realize until I googled these that I didn’t actually read that essay, since I thought we had replaced it, but really didn’t. So I wikied it and got the summary. Myth, the first mode, deals mostly with Gods. The tradgedy of myth is the downfall of a god, while the comedy of myth is the acceptance of a new god. In romance, the second mode, the main characters are fictional heros who have done great deeds. In the third mode, high mimetic, the standards of main characters are lowered once again, this time to noble humans. In low mimetic the main haracters are downgraded to ordinary human being, and finally in ironic mode the main characters are the protagonists. Frye then states that these five modes are cycling and now that society has reached the point of irony it must return to myth.

The Golden Bough

http://www.bartleby.com/196/

Woo. I am not reading that right now.

Class Notes I

Netiquette– http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=netiquette

Netiquette refers to the forms, manners and actions established by the Internet community as acceptable or required behavior in social interactions via e-mail. In other words, being polite to your fellow list subscribers. It is absolutely imperative that you familiarize yourself with the rules of netiquette before you launch headlong into participation in any sort of e-mail discussion list.

Flyting- a dispute or exchange of personal abuse in verse form (www.meriam-webster.com)

Trope- a word or expression used in a figurative sense (www.meriam-webster.com) The major figures that are agreed upon as being tropes are metaphore, simile, metonymy, synecdoche, irony, personification, and hyperbole.

In class today we talked about how it is alright to have an opinion about an authors work other than what the author may have intended. In “Archetypes of Literature” Frye says, “The assertion that the critic should not look for more in a poem than the poet may safely be assumed to have been conscious of putting there is a common form of what may be called the fallacy of premature teleology.”

I think my aspiration of finishing Don Quixote before mid-October may be a little lofty. I know. I set the bar high…

The Monster of Obsfucation/Ecstatic Critic

“In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face, is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is more meaningful than our criticism designating it so.” -Anton Ego Ratatouille

“Most of the central area of criticism is at present, and doubtless always will be, the area of commentary. But the commentators have little sense, unlike the researchers, of being contained within some sort of scientific discipline: they are chiefly engaged, in the words of the gospel hymn, in brightening the corner where they are. If we attempt to get a more comprehensive idea of what criticism is about, we find ourselves wandering over quaking bogs of generalities, judicious pronouncements of value, reflective comments, perorations to works of research, and other consequences of taking the large view. But this part of the critical field is so full of pseudo-propositions, sonorous nonsense that contains no truth and no falsehood, that it obviously
exists only because criticism, like nature, prefers a waste space to an empty one.” -Northrop Frye “Archetypes of Literature”

Yep. This is happening, I am about to compare Northrop Frye to a Disney/Pixar Films character.

After a few painful hours of Northrop Frye this weekend I needed to downgrade my thinking level to at least that of a ten year olds for a few hours, so I decided to watch Ratatouille. Who would have guessed that my attempt to forget about English 300 completely would result in a blog post for the class. In the movie, Ego says that the average piece of junk is more meaningful than the criticism that designates it as junk. That critics have a relatively easy job compared to that of the people that they criticize and that their jobs generally rely on negative criticism which is much more fun for the general public to read. When I very reluctantly returned to reading Frye I realized that Frye, in a much more baffling way, says something similar. He says that much commentary is sonorous nonsense that contains no truth and no falsehood, that rather than writing nothing most critics would rather fill pages with “fluff”… very wordy fluff based on “judicious pronouncements of value” and etcetera. What I took out of both of these quotes is that most criticism only exists to please the majority of the people reading it. That people would much rather read a negative review or the pseudo-propositions of the critic than the critics actual review.