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.
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AuthorJo Palisoc Archives
November 2019
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