Helene Cixous- Most Important

écriture féminine

Hélène Cixous first uses this term in her essay, “The Laugh of the Medusa” (1975), in which she asserts, “Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies.” Elaine Showalter defines it as “the inscription of the feminine body and female difference in language and text.”^[2] Écriture féminine places experience before language, and privileges non-linear, cyclical writing that evades “the discourse that regulates the phallocentric system.”^[3] For Cixous, écriture féminine is not only a possibility for female writers; rather, she believes it can be (and has been) employed by male authors such as James Joyce.

Écriture féminine was especially well developed by French and other European feminists. It is now widely recognized by Anglophone scholars as a sub-category of feminist literary theory. Hélène Cixous, Monique Wittig, Luce Irigaray^[4] and Julia Kristeva^[5],^[6] were foundational theorists of the movement, and also other writers including Bracha Ettinger^[7] and psychoanalytical theory ^[8] joined this field in the early 1990s. ^[9] The book Laughing with Medusa (2006) analyses the work of Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous.^[10] Collectively these writers are sometimes referred to by Anglophones as “the French feminists,” though Mary Klages has pointed out that “poststructuralist theoretical feminists” would be a more accurate term.^[11] Madeleine Gagnon is a more recent proponent.

-Wikipeadia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89criture_f%C3%A9minine

Touchstone

What god drove them to fight with such a fury?
Apollo the son of Zeus and Leto. Incensed at the king
he swept a fatal plague through the army–men were dying 
and all because Agamemnon spurned Apollo’s priest. 

This is my touchstone. It is from The Illiad (yes The Illiad by Homer.) I realize it is pretty didactic and I wasn’t sure if that was against the rules or not, I just overall like the lines.

More Soul Making

Keats says that we are born with intelligence but that we have to create our own soul, “Do you not see how necessary a World of pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a soul!” So our experiences make us what we are, they form and shape our soul, without a harsh world we would have no pain and no empathy and without pain and empathy you cannot have hapiness. We would all be intelligent robots. In his conclusion Patersays something similar, “to such a tremulous wisp constantly reforming itself on the stream, to single sharp impression, with a sense in it, a relic more or less fleeting, of such moments gone by, what is real in our lives fines itself down. It is with this movement, with passage and dissolution of impressions, images, sensations, that analysis leaves off-that continual vanishing away, that strange perpetual weaving and unweaving or ourselves.” It seems that both of these men have made up their own idea of creation. That our souls and who we are constantly change and grow.

The Vale of Soul Making

“Call the world if you Please ‘The vale of Soul-Making'”

Who creates and how? Why are we here and how the heck did we get here? What is life? ‘What is Life’ is the title of a liberal studies class I am taking and we are reading a book about astrobiology called Lonely Planets (I highly recommend it, expecially if you think aliens might exist in a very serious way.) Anyway, at one point in class we discussed the difference between intelligence and ‘human being’ intelligence. Dolphins are intelligent, chimpanzees are intelligent. Would we be disappointed in finding just ‘normal’ intelligent life? I was reminded of this discussion by a quote in Keats, “…I say ‘soul-making’ Soul as distinguished from from an Intelligence-There may be intelligences or sparks of the divinity in millions–but they are not Souls till they acquire identities, till each one is personally itself.” I related this quote to my own ‘creation story’ (involving the Cosmos) and then I realized I could relate it to other creation stories, such as… Idea of Order at Key West. Keats says there a three thigns needed for soul making: intelligence, world or elemental space, and mind and heart. She must have some intelligence because she is singing and usign language and in a former blog I definded intelligence as any ability to string together words, sense or no sense. She is definantly in a world and its ours, and she is by the sea, so she has a setting, and to have intelligence you must have a mind. So she has all the ingredients for creating herself a soul. She is creating her it.

Finding Ourselves on Both Sides of The Page

I think, out of all of the quotes in the film, “My Book and Heart Shall Never Part” this one made me think the most. That as we read, we usually find ourselves on both sides of the page. It has always seemed really strange to me how I can start reading a book, and gradually I move from seeing words, to seeing a kind of movie in my head and eventually everything flows together, and as I became a better reader growing up I could make longer and longer movies in my head, just by stringing letters together.

Theory of Myths

On the bottom of page 139 and the very top and very bottom of page 140 in Frye, he has written a very brief (and I think incomplete) two paragraphs describing the rest of “The Theory of Myths.” I am going to make an attempt to use this information to my advantage and make a quick outline of the next theory here in my blog, in hopes that when I get lost in Frye I will be able to refer back to my blog and the aforementioned pages to get back on track.

Undisplaced Myth: Gods and Demons. Heaven and Hell. Desirable and Undesirable.

The general tendency called romantic: “the tendency to suggest mythical patterns in a world more closely associated with human experience.

The tendency of realism: “Ironic literature begins with realism and tends toward myth…”

THE LAYOUT OF THE ESSAY:

Dianoia: the first structure of imagery. 1. Apocalyptic 2. Demonic

The two intermediate structures of literature

Mythoi: Following the seasons, “structures of imagery in movement.”

It…

Ever since Dr. Sexson asked us what we thought “it” meant, thats almost all I have been looking for in everything we’ve read (and for connections to Don Quixote and the little I understand from Frye.) I have to admit before going further in this blog, that I just finished reading Dante to Cangrande tonight.

What really caught my eye was a passage near the end, “If therefore one takes the last thing in the universe, not just anything, it is obvious that it has being from something else, and that from which ‘it’ has being, of itself or from something else…All essence, except for the first, is caused, otherwise there would be many things which would exist by necessity of being themselves, which is impossible, for the cause is either by nature or by intellect and that which is by nature is consequently caused by the intellect, since nature is the work of intelligence.”

Because The Idea of Order at Key West is a creation story, doesn’t the life given to the creation have to come from somewhere? So “it” (being the being) must come from God. The poem says, “If it was only the outer voice of sky/ And cloud, of the sunken coral water-walled,/ However clear, it would have been deep air,/ The heaving speech of air, a summer sound/ Repeated in a summer without end/ And sound alone. But it was more than that…” The sound of singing, rather than the voice of sky, or the speech or air has something more to it, something that only a being can produce. It as far as I can tell must be what makes the singing the singing of a human, her being or essence.

I feel like I am running across a chasm on a spider-web, is anyone following?

What I Underlined in Frye (Theory of Symbols)

So far I have underlined the same passages we have discussed in Frye on the “Theory of Symbols,” as everyone else has. This probably doesn’t mean much because I have underlined almost the entire book since I have based my underlines on ten dollar words (that I Google later.)

Page 77 (Literal): “And if a poem cannot be literally anything but a poem, then the literal basis of meaning in poetry can only be its letters, its inner structure of interlocking motifs. We are always wrong, in the context of criticism, when we say ‘this poem means literally’- and then give a prose paraphrase of it. All paraphrases abstract a secondary or outward meaning. Understanding a poem literally means understanding the whole of it, as a poem, and as it stands.” Ben’s blog has much more concerning this quote.

Page 79 (Descriptive): “Literature deeply influenced by the descriptive aspect of symbolism is likely to tend toward the realistic in its narrative and the didactic or descriptive in its meaning.” (Judson)

Page 84 (Formal): Writers typical of the formal phase… are sure that they are in contact with reality and that they follow nature, yet the effect they produce is quite different from the descriptive realism of the nineteenth century, the difference being largely in the imitation involved.

Page 95 (Formal): In the formal phase the poem belongs neither to the class ‘art,’ nor the class ‘verbal’: it represents its own class. There are thus two aspects to its form. In the first place it is unique, a techne or artifact, with its own peculiar structure of imagery, to be examined by itself without immediate reference to other things like it…In the second place, the poem is one of a class of similar forms.”

Page 100 (Archetypal): “In short, we can get a whole liberal education simply by picking up one conventional poem and following its archetypes as they stretch out into the rest of literature.”

Page 105 (Archetypal): “In its archetypal phase, the poem imitates nature, not (as in the formal phase) nature as a structure or system, but as a cyclical process.”

Page 119 (Anagogic): “When we pass into anagogy, nature becomes, not the container, but the thing contained, and the archetypal universal symbols, the city, the garden, the quest, the marriage, are no longer the desirable forms that man constructs inside nature, but are themselves the forms of nature.”

I guess I missed this blog…

The Four Elements: World, Audience, Work, Artist

World:(mimetic-ancient)

“She sang beyond the genius of the sea…” “The meaningless plungings of water and the wind,/ Theatrical distances, bronze shadows heaped/ On high horizons, mountainous atmospheres/ Of sky and sea.” “It may be that in all her phrases stirred/ The grinding water and the gasping wind;/ But it was she and not the sea we heard.”

In these lines, the world is literarly described, the ocean is ancient, as are the mountains and the atmosphere, but because she sang beyond the genius of the sea she seems more ancient, as if she has been there longer than the sea to witness something older than it. The mimicry in the poem is not of her mimicing the sea, but of the sea mimicing her, the grinding water and gasping wind seem to be trying to acheieve something that she can, but that they can’t attain.

Audience: (pragmatic: (relating to matters of fact or practical affairs often to the exclusion of intellectual or artistic matters : practical as opposed to idealistic (Meriam-Webster.com))-neo-classical)

(More to follow…)

Lightbulb

“Biography will always be a part of criticism, and the biographer will naturally be interested in his subject’s poetry as a personal document, recording his private dreams, associations, ambitions, and expressed or repressed desires. Studies of such matters form an essential part of criticism.” -Frye, 110

This passage in Frye reminded me of an assigment that my AP English teacher gave me in high school after I wrote a short essay on Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.”  The assignment came about because my teacher was part of the group of critics that believe that what the author feels while he writes the poem, should not be considered in the analysis of the poem, and in my essay I included what I thought to be relevant habits and behaviors of the author in the analysis of this poem. My English teacher then gave me the task of figuring out how William Carlos Williams may have been feeling while writing “The Red Wheelbarrow.” Considering the poem is only sixteen words long I am pretty sure my teacher thought he had nothing to worry about. I can’t recall everything I included in my second essay but it was longer than the original.

This quote was more of a lightbulb for me than the rest because it put into perpective something I already knew. That whether or not we, as readers, want to include the psychological profile of the poet in our analysis’, it is a very hard thing to ignore once we have been enlightened of it and its relevance to the poetry.