The process of reading Ovid, Lucretius, Genesis, the translation of Metamorphoses, and Paradise Lost became somewhat tedious. Although each had different authors and were written in different styles, the repetitive subject matter began to dilute the impact of the writing. I read until I came across a powerful phrase or sentence that I wanted to write or draw in my commonplace book. However, because there were so many moments that caught my eye, they lost some of their value. For example, when I began reading, a simple metaphor or moment of personification would astound me, draw me into, make me think more deeply about the passage, but by the end of Paradise Lost, the figurative language became more mundane. Taking more breaks in between passages would have helped this situation. Maybe reading one, then discussing it in class before moving on to the next piece of writing. I was intrigued with Ovid’s prose, describing in vivid detail the creation of the matter in the world. Because of my participation in the Fall play Metamorphoses, which was based on Ovid’s stories, I continuously noticed similarities between the script’s prologue and the passage assigned. The mention of “bodies” and “chaos” and “man” being born, all hold strong resemblance to the play. More than ever, however, I began to see masculine pronouns in every line. He, his, men, man (in fact, every assigned reading over Thanksgiving break had a strong lean toward masculine words). Ovid’s writing drips with figurative language, my favorite being antithesis. “Hell broke loose in heaven” (276). The juxtaposition of heaven and hell is powerful in this passage, for this comes soon after the story of both heaven and hell being created. Ovid gave them physicality, legitimacy. So stating that “hell broke loose in heaven” holds more substance than can be interpreted from the first read-through. My favorite quote in Ovid’s passage was when he wrote about the flood in the story of Noah’s Ark. He writes “the wolf swims among the sheep” (421). It shows the forced evening of the playing field throughout Earth. God saw the evil, greed, anger taking over the planet and decided that a global cleansing was the only answer. Enemies and friends died together. Below are pictures of my commonplace book. The first shows my page on Ovid’s passage where I drew the stones turning into humans, the man and woman alone on Earth, and Triton’s iconic trident. The second shows the notes I took on each of the nine books in Genesis. “God” is written across the page in various places, showing how His name is everywhere in the passage. Ovid, Lucretius, Genesis, the translation of Metamorphoses, and Paradise Lost all tell the same stories that have been told for centuries in homes, churches, temples. It is astounding how so many can read the Bible and the Torah and all walk away with a different interpretation, a different message they will then live their life in light of. I can’t help but think of Steven Greenblatt. Religious works like the Bible self-fashion everyone and everything in society both directly and indirectly. Even an atheistic cannot live their life without feeling the affects of this phenomenon. The question is how you are self-fashioned and how it will affect your life and the lives around you.
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Over the past few months, we have dove head first into literature by A.O. Scott and Stephen Greenblatt, analyzing each paragraph, each sentence, and each individual word. The discussions we have in class not only provide a space to understand the writing better, but also pushes me to think deeper and more open mindedly. I write and draw in my commonplace book during class whenever I get a strike of inspiration, which is often thanks to our thoughtful conversations. Although I was very confused over the summer when I had to read Scott and Greenblatt on my own. It was a struggle to continue reading when I did not completely understand the text, but I feel more confident now. In the first and second pictures are the first and second drafts of our purposes per audience. We outlined who Greenblatt’s many audiences and discussed what aspects of the writing appealed to each of them. It was very helpful to go back and revise them because we kept uncovering more perspectives to take into account. The wording of the purposes improved as well, for we began using more advanced vocabulary in class like “dialectics.”
The third picture shows my first attempt at illustrating the process of self-fashioning as it is explored in Greenblatt’s 10 governing conditions. The top left depicts the relationship between a self and an authority. When the self looks at itself in the mirror, it sees itself being willingly controlled by the authority. The top right depicts the relationship between the authority and the alien. When the authority looks at itself in the mirror, it sees itself struggling with the alien as it is being controlled. The drawing on the bottom shows both of these relationships plus more. In the sections where the self and the authority overlap and the authority and the alien overlap have a check or an X showing whether the relationship is willing or reluctant. The arrow pointing from the authority to the alien shows that the authority tries to destroy the alien, but accidentally threatens itself in the process due to excess power (as depicted in the arrow from the alien to the authority). A circle labeled “power” is also separating a portion of the self to represent the tenth condition requiring a “loss of self.” The fourth picture shows one of my more recent pages of my commonplace notebook. At the top are my overall questions about both Scott and Greenblatt. One of which has been pinging around in my head for weeks: Is learning about self-fashioning self-fashioning us? We began discussing it yesterday in class and the conversation has grown to reveal more and more questions. Do we have agency? Did Greenblatt give us agency or did he simply make us aware of our agency? Was his purpose for writing Renaissance Self Fashioning to self fashion his readers? On this same page is a drawing of an alien. I began drawing it when Elizabeth mentioned how everyone has different authorities and aliens. So could Renaissance Self Fashioning be Greenblatt’s alien? Or our alien? These are questions that I hope we continue to explore. I do not believe there is a single answer for each of them, but I also don’t think the answers are subjective. I hope that through what we talk about in class, I will be able to not only understand the text, but also understand Greenblatt himself. Our personal identity is the one thing in our lives that we have grown up believing is ours to control. We decide who we are, what we like, what we want. However, in Renaissance Self-Fashioning, the author Stephen Greenblatt explores the concept that “family, state, and religious institutions” (1) shape who are are supposed to be. Self-fashioning, according to Greenblatt, is the perpetual cycle that we all experience in which we continuously shape ourselves to fit society’s standards of how we should look and behave. At the dawning of the 16th century, there was an awakening of this alien sense of self– of identity. People from all over began to realize that they could mold themselves as they would mold a lump of clay. Apart from altering themselves physically, the most intriguing self-fashioning came in the way they revised their personalities. A major point that Greenblatt discusses is that in order to understand a work of art, it is important to consider where and when the author lived, as well as who the intended audience was. For example, Romeo and Juliet is regarded around the world as the most tragic love story ever written. However, if this story had been written today, it would be disregarded due to its complex diction and improbable situations. “But rather that we may interpret the interplay of their symbolic structures with those perceivable in the careers of their authors and in the larger social world as constituting a single, complex process of self-fashioning and, through this interpretation, come closer to understanding how literary and social identities were formed in this culture” (6). Another interesting point Greenblatt makes is the realization that the attention we give a work of art gives it its meaning. We create meaning for a piece of writing simply by reading and discussing it. Haven’t you ever been analyzing a book like The Great Gatsby or Fahrenheit 451 in class, and you are discussing the powerful impact of the author’s choice to do this one specific thing, and you think to yourself, “did the author actually intentionally do this or are we just reading really far into this sentence?” On one of my commonplace pages, I drew a hammer beating a nail into a piece of wood. This represents an he excerpt from the passage in which Greenblatt confesses that the material in his book are shaped by the questions he asks of himself. He believes that such approaches are “impurities,” and he counterbalances by returning to real life: materialism, societal norms (5).
In another one of my commonplace pages, I drew a human silhouette in which I wrote various words pertaining to society. Surrounding this body I wrote a quote from the passage in a way to make it look like underbrush. This shows how authors try to be the embodiment of their time period. All artists strive to represent their era through their writings. They boil every societal norm regarding religion, culture, political discourse, and steep their pages in it to form their art. “…Who seem to drive themselves toward the most sensitive religions of their culture, to express and even, by design, to embody its dominant satisfactions and anxieties. Among artists the will to be the cultures voice […] is commonplace” (6-7). Reflecting on the passage as a whole, Greenblatt’s book reads less as if he is trying to pass on information, but more this book is simply his long train of thought written down on paper– as if he is writing to himself. I found this interesting and unique to Greenblatt, for his style of writing is less invasive on the reader and more inquisitive. I think the purpose of reading this passage was to remind us that we need to keep the author and the author’s intended audience in mind when we read in class throughout the year. We need to witness how these authors experienced self-fashioning and how we can see it in their writings. We are taught from a young age when we are allowed to speak and when we are not. We are told to not talk during class. From the teacher’s perspective, this means “don’t have side conversations,” but to a young learner, this means “don’t talk during class.” This juxtaposes what children are naturally inclined to do: ask questions. From ages two to five, it is estimated that the average child asks 40,000 questions. Kids ask, “why this?” and the answer opens up another opportunity for them to ask, “why is that?” Past a certain age, however, this ongoing cycle of curiosity is frequently met with parents or teachers telling them to stop. Unfortunately, the repercussions have proven to be far worse than a child’s incessant asking. Creativity is down. Curiosity is down. Engagement in a classroom is down. Instead of providing a space where children feel comfortable raising their hands, “many educators and learning experts contend that our current system of education does not encourage, teach, or in some cases even tolerate questioning” (Berger 46). Students do not want to raise their hands because they see more consequences of getting the answer wrong than rewards for getting it right. “[They] penalize incorrect answers” (Berger 46). When teachers were asked why their classrooms operate this way, they complain that state standards are forcing teachers to push as much information at the students as possible, leaving no time for questions. Berger explains that as society changes, the way children need to learn changes with it. A learning environment deprived of questions may have been beneficial decades ago when the jobs the children would eventually go into did not require such skills. However, in this age of entrepreneurialism, creative capabilities are more important than ever. Allowing kids to pursue what they are genuinely interested in, not only gives them more freedom, but makes them easier to control. It is harder to make a child sit and listen to something that does not interest them. The school system does nothing to make sure children are receiving the best education to prepare them for their futures, for all students learn in school is to memorize. Even Berger approaches the concept that not giving children tests may produce better students. This passage especially reminds me of a great spoken word poem by Prince Ea called “I SUED THE SCHOOL SYSTEM.” (Video at the bottom) The most intriguing point that Berger made was that “children may be self-censoring their questions due to cultural pressures” (Berger 58). Groups of people who are attached to well-known stereotypes (such as girls cannot do math) are less likely to ask questions because subconsciously they realize that if they raise their hand, they are upholding the stereotype by not knowing something. This means that these students aren't asking questions and, in turn, are negatively affecting their cognitive development. On one of my commonplace pages, I drew a human head being squeezed by a giant hand that is labeled: EDUCATION SYSTEM. There is a thought bubble coming from this student’s head showing them picturing a failing grade on an assignment. The purpose of this drawing was to depict the school system from the point of view of the children. It is true that it is the job of schools to hold us in their hands, but they do not realize how tight they are squeezing our heads. And while we feel that pressure, we also feel the pressure of doing well. We do not go to school to learn, we go to school to get good grades. Another page in my commonplace book shows a student raising their hand and asking, “Can I ask a question?” I drew this because I hear my peers ask this on a daily basis. “Can I ask a question?” This goes to show that “even in the most progressive schools, questioning is still primarily the domain of the teacher” (Berger 60). I think that we read this passage to make us aware of the importance of asking questions– open questions, closed questions, stupid questions. They are all vital to helping us learn, become more effective learners, and succeed later in life. “Better Living Through Criticism” by A.O. Scott attempts to tackle an overwhelming question: Why do we like what we like? Have you ever found yourself looking up the top charts for music to listen to? Maybe looking at the most popular movies? Maybe you do something as simple as ordering the same thing as your friend at a restaurant. A.O. Scott examines why certain likes and dislikes are not accepted in society. Why do we like what we are supposed to like? We are taught to do this from everything and everyone around us. Netflix shows you your Top Picks, Amazon insists on what else to buy, and your friends teach you how to act without receiving criticism. However, criticism holds the power to move the world. And any one person can hold the power of criticism. Not conforming to societal norms can be isolating. Personally, I am often teased about my music taste, for I listen to music from the 1960, 70s, 80s, 90s instead of rap. Because I prefer the Talking Heads over Travis Scott, Billy Joel over Drake, and Fleetwood Mac over Chance the Rapper, I somehow become that piece of the puzzle that doesn’t quite fit. (Yes, I did have to ask a friend who some famous artists are right now in order to write that sentence) Criticism is an outlet to express oneself in the most personal, emotional, vulnerable of ways. It is like swimming upstream; you have to fight the current of society pulling you back into formation. Criticism is its own form of revolution. It starts with a single person– any person. And it grows into a movement and then it grows into social acceptability. On the first page of my commonplace book, I chose to document the quotation, “But is that really a kind of person at all?” (Scott 45). Scott writes this sentence after discussing how the internet often dictates what we like and what we have. It is almost as if these sites are creating a digital person and you are forcing yourself into that mold it made for you. Do these suggestions accurately depict the living breathing human sitting in front of that screen with a credit card in their hand?
On the second page of my commonplace book, I drew a picture of a hand (labeled “criticism”) holding a string that is connected to the Earth. In my opinion, I believe that this perfects represents the power criticism has over how the world spins. If criticism wanted the Earth to spin the other way, it would. If criticism wanted the Earth to be flat, it would flatten it like plato. The string represents this fragile relationship criticism has with society. Although influential, too much can cause society to drop into an endless free-fall of chaos and argument. I imagine in this class, we will be pushed to question what we are told to think; we will be encouraged to speak out if we disagree with a comment given by a classmate or an idea we will read. This is an important skill to learn and feel comfortable with, for there will be times in our lives where not contradicting someone has more consequences than staying silent. |
AuthorJo Palisoc Archives
November 2019
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