-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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“Self-trust is the first secret of success. “
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson is perhaps one of the greatest American writers ever to put a pen to the page with great pieces shared all across the country. The language used by Emerson is seen as dense and at a high level of intellectual thinking. To an average reader, the phrases and paragraphs have to be broken down to be read repeatedly until obtaining a full comprehension. After reading through “Emerson’s Prose and Poetry” I have come to conclude that the core of all his values comes from within “The American Scholar” with the idea of “Man Thinking”. The way to define “Man Thinking” is to see the difference between a true scholar and a piece of a system that achieves one goal in the end which can be demonstrated through Emerson’s example of the man on the farm. In this instance, a man can be on a farm providing multiple skills to maintain an entire piece of land that expands and grow while many today are simply labeled farmers only having particular skill or chore. Several workers come together to maintain an entire piece of land that is able to do many different tasks such as grow various crops and maintain numerous animals. Before the domestication of land it was few humans within a group where individuals not only took care of themselves but the clan, tribe or family just like animals in the wild still naturally do. Our world is spoiled and so condensed that our order of necessities has changed from the basic needs of shelter, food and belonging to the complexity of self-actualization and self-esteem issues. Emerson has taken the whole man and labeled today’s society with many specialized human beings working together. It is in his work where he defines what man truly is as an intellectual in society and brings up the fact that in today’s world man is falling apart into separate components of what man used to be known as. He uses the example of each man becoming like the pieces of a whole man, the human body is supported by multiple parts that come together to work as one unit.
“The old fable covers a doctrine ever new and sublime; that there is One Man, -present to all particular men only partially, or through one faculty; and that you must take the whole society to find the whole man. Man is not a farmer, or a professor, or an engineer, but he is all. Man is priest, and scholar, and statesman, and producer, and soldier.“ (57)
Ralph Waldo Emerson and his lecture The American Scholar preaches about the intellectual thinking of mankind. After reading and discussing the overall writing of Emerson I was caught on the phrase, “Man is not farmer…but he is all.” (57) The point he is making here is the fact that no ‘man’ should be caught on one label as an individual but expand with every aspect of living. The scholar shouldn’t be contained in a career setting but should always seek new knowledge and the experience that comes with it. The intellectual learns how to do many skills, like the example of a farmer, he or she is well rounded enough to maintain the multiple tasks that comes with a task in which is put together by many smaller tasks that builds the whole but as the world grows the responsibilities are spread out to be shared with the community and society. The growth of society has caused the speed of manufacturing and developing increase exponentially at a pace where not one man can carry the weight of the people.
“In the divided or social state, these functions are parcelled out to individuals, each of whom aims to do his stint of the joint work, whilst each other performs his. The fable implies, that the individual, to possess himself, must sometimes return from his own labor to embrace all the other laborers. But unfortunately, this original unit, this fountain of power, has been so distributed to multitudes, has been so minutely subdivided and peddled out, that it is spilled into drops, and cannot be gathered. The state of society is one in which the members have suffered amputations from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters, – a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man.”
Emerson believes the essence of being man is shifting into separate pieces of a forward moving society each with one task to do repeatedly working together to become an industrial unit conforming to Henry Ford’s accredited Fordism. Henry Ford used the assembly line to mass produce his automobiles to maximize sales and profits by paying people to do one job to piece together multiple products. Industrialized communities contains multiple branches of people that have jobs that keep it alive like all the service companies that include police, bankers, lawyers, landscapers and so on. Society is organized into pieces of a puzzle that represents what man used to be, a universally capable animal that was self-reliant. He sees a distinct difference between being “a farmer” and being “Man on a farm.” The difference being the intellectual part of the brain where being universally prepared to do any type of work becomes obsolete because Man stopped thinking and started conforming to the comfort of simple tasks that are controlled in which are consistent and predictable.
“In this distribution of functions, the scholar is the delegated intellect. In the right state, he is, Man Thinking. In the degenerate state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a mere thinker, or, still worse, the parrot of other men’s thinking.” (57)
The American Scholar proceeds with the Man Thinking idea by describing the great influences he sees along his educational path, first being the nature around him. Humans tend to forget how connected we truly are to nature by splitting the human world from the earth in its entirety making much of what we are connected to directly unimportant. Emerson believes that in order to be inspired or mentally intrigued a scholar must look into the world around him for ideas. Through nature, theories develop from the simplest of objects covering the earth or upward in the sky but the ignorance of man is the downfall for the starting process of Man Thinking.
His next “great influence” is remembering the past event recorded in history and the ideas and notions that are past down by each generation. He believes that through books and teachings a scholar will evolve into a better thinker and grow knowledge that will forever expand so long as man finds its roots to build off of yet in order to grow, the scholar must also record his ideas in books for himself and others who seek the experience which leads to the notion of the root meaning of “genius”. Emerson believes to build oneself into this notion of genius by using a metaphor of building circles. The idea is that from the beginning of our lives to the end, our intellect evolves with the experiences that fill into a theoretical circle that is continuously overlapped by new circles as time moves forward, so long as the individual is still being a scholar and not a conformist to constant ideas. The scholar requires the exploration of new things and new ideas found not only between the pages of books within a library but from new physical experiences found only out in the world, and like a farmer, can evolve and gain more traits or understanding. Emerson sees a true scholar as someone who endlessly will pick up a book and read through it to its fullest extent while also being capable of spending hours trapped in literary confinement in that library to learn. To my own understanding, since the education system has been previously proven to be influenced by Emerson, the schools have kept the same notion of how a classroom setting should generically be at all times containing desks in rows or circles, teacher at front with a desk, flag hanging and with pencils and paper for script.
The classroom design does more harm than good for the scholar. Students are basically locked within four walls with a large group of students being taught by, in most cases, a single instructor who assigns work to be done sitting at each students respective desks. Having this experience growing up I know how restricting it felt for those who didn’t like to sit still and have the information crammed into my head. The method of lecturing to the students is an example of Emerson’s Quotation and Originality because students are never given much else besides the words of past author’s in quotations and tend not to be given original theories. The assignments tend not to be about what the student’s opinion or theory is but rather the facts put into textbooks that are required to be pulled out to be reworded in the scholar’s work so our educators learn more about our students writing skills rather than the student truly learning the material at hand. The quoting of the post authors leaves no real thinking room because there is already a known right or wrong answer leaving the scholar with room to think on their own and grow towards the answer.
“Old and new put their stamp to everything in Nature. The snowflake that is now falling is marked by both. The present moment gives the motion and the color of the flake, Antiquity its form and properties. All things wear a lustre which is the gift of the present, and a tarnish of time.
Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests and mines and stone-quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.” (Quotation and Originality, 319)
When using quotation we are reusing our ancestors words and by doing this keeping their spirit alive. Without a doubt we learn from our past and should reuse our records of the past to help evolve and grow, but at the same time we cannot become comfortable with the ideas from years past. Just because a fact has been true and has worked for an extensive amount of time does not mean we conform to it and accept it for all of time, doing this is the easy way out of challenging your own mind halting the Thinking Man. The need to work a mental sweat has become less necessary as technology and literature has become vital sources of information that can instantly be obtained in moment’s time replacing the time it takes to solve a common problem. Computers can spit out information at high speed in which can easily be accessed globally for all eyes to see through a monitor relieving the hard thinking that comes with building concrete theories from analysis and actively experiencing the world around us. Rather than trying to decipher a question at hand or the solution to a problem, we turn to the search engines easily accessed on mobile or stationary devices and having the thinking processes done for us in fear of being wrong. The intellectuals who lose motivation, which is increasing as society grows, has become lazy and unmotivated to push themselves in curiosity towards the state of originality of Man which will keep Man in a quotation driven state. Of course knowledge is power and our past can teach us a lot about the world today but with that individuals have to build from that and continue moving forward by creating hypothesis and theorems.
“If we confine ourselves to literature, ‘tis easy to see that the debt is immense to past thought. None escapes it. The originals are not original. There is imitation, model and suggestion, to the very archangels, if we knew their history. The first book tyrannizes over the second.” (320)
Man can take the past and build from or alter it. Using the knowledge from our past makes it easier to formulate new more revolutionary ideas for the recent times so long as the scholar has the capability of questioning and reasoning with previous concepts of our ancestors minds, otherwise in a way it is only plagiarism in its simplest form. To me writing a paper on the facts of any author from our past is just taking something that has already been said and just putting in their own words therefore making the idea a quotation in work while finding new ways to write a previous conclusion made. The thinking is taken out so all that is left is to alter the wording to make it their own and use a citation. The research to write is a way to grow as a scholar and the paper is a good reflection, except many readers tend not to reflect and question the pieces they write about, instead they move along onto the next project.
The people of the world need to resist being institutionalized by any higher powers or be contained in that comfort level where all the answers are simply given to them. If mankind becomes too lazy to think independently and then psychologically fold into themselves becoming drones of society only performing day to day work required by their job. In an extreme circumstance, the government may be the one to control jobs and in that case they would choose the job, design its requirements, set the salary and decide when you become obsolete to the job, which is if the people give up being the scholar and become the label given to them by society. Now the question is, would you be the farmer on the land or the farmer?
“Now shall we say that only the first men were well alive, and the existing generation is invalided and degenerate? Is all literature eavesdropping, and all art Chinese imitation? our life a custom, and our body borrowed, like a beggar’s dinner, from a hundred charities?” (324)
Rational thinking is a sign of life and without being able to think within oneself as a self-reliant being then you become lesser of Man. Man in nature adapts, learns and survives by becoming more than a simplistic being, he evolves with time into Man and scholar but fear is a factor in which holds back the movement forward for the scholar because of the limitations we may face along the way. Emerson takes Fate and sees it popularly as the limitation of man. He goes on to say in his piece Fate, “The element running through
entire nature, which we popularly call Fate, is known to us as limitation. Whatever limits us, we call Fate. If we are brute and barbarous, the fate takes a brute and dreadful shape. As we refine, our checks become finer.” (Fate, 269) Overall the message is clearly each individual creates his or her own fate but how fate affects the individual is based around the intellectual of the minds of all. If man is conscious enough he can travel in the direction of good fate with a fulfilling life or he can act ruthless and arrogant to his life and fail to reach the entirety in which is Man.
“Thus we trace Fate, in matter, mind, and morals,- in race, in retardations of strata, and in thought and character as well. It is everywhere bound or limitation. But Fate has its lord; limitations its limits; is different seen from above and from below; from within and from without. For, though Fate is immense, so is power, which is the other fact in the dual world, immense.” (268)
Now, although Emerson has a vivid way of writing and often times can be confusing from the language he uses, his ideas are extremely valuable to human nature. Today many students who read or come upon such readings of Emerson do struggle with understanding his lessons and theories at first glance and he forces the reader to break down his words into separate pieces to simplify what he implies. Each paragraph tended to make me feel as though as I was taking on a new challenge as I read my way through his lecture. By the end of The American Scholar there was the question of does this still become relevant to today’s society? Is the way our educational system functions work for the modern day scholar?
All in all, writings like Emerson help society remember its roots, our literature is always going to be vital for the improvement of our future and leave footprints in books of what each generation accomplishes as a whole. Record keeping is important but being self-reliant is much more important to humanity, we are all given separate brains to grow on their own, and when healthy, starve for information to process and store. We must focus on being the scholar that can generate independent ideas to become the very idea of Man Thinking. To sum up the difference between a scholar and someone who uses quotation, “In the right state, he is, Man Thinking. In the degenerate state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a mere thinker, or, still worse, the parrot of other men’s thinking.” (The American Scholar, 57)
Citations:
Porte, Joel. II., and Saundra Morris. Emerson’s Prose and Poetry. First. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001. Print.
Ralph Waldo Emerson was an author, idealist, philosopher and poet through many years of questioning and reflecting on his various observations. Of all the writing he has compiled over time I find myself drawn into the The American Scholar with the theories about “Man Thinking.” Overall I see it as the core value to all of what Emerson is preaching in his speeches. “In this distribution of functions, the scholar is the delegated intellect. In the right state, he is, Man Thinking. In the degenerate state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a mere thinker, or, still worse, the parrot of other men’s thinking.” A value of man solely begins with the intellect of man, meaning if an individual chooses to conform to his society then he fails to be man and became just a piece of a whole machine. Emerson uses the imagery of those people being components of a human but never themselves being a whole when he says, “the state of society is one in the in which the members have suffered amputations from the trunk and strut about so many walking monsters,-a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow but never a man.” As “man” we must see the difference between our originality and when we merely are using quotations of the words of our past which is a major topic from the section From Letters and Social Aims. As we grow we grow we learn from our experiences and the knowledge we receive from the literature around us which helps us build to our original ideas but it takes time to get there.
For many years scholars have read into the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson because of the intellectual mindset he had put into his writings. Each passage he put on paper can be broken down into some of the most well thought out concepts any reader could dig into. His language is a bit old fashion yet the core meaning of it all seems to apply to even today’s world in instances. Reading his work is insightful while also eye opening at points that spark the intellectual of academic minds.
“The old fable covers a doctrine ever new and sublime; that there is One Man, -present to all particular men only partially, or through one faculty; and that you must take the whole society to find the whole man. Man is not a farmer, or a professor, or an engineer, but he is all. Man is priest, and scholar, and statesman, and producer, and soldier.“ (57)
Ralph Waldo Emerson and his lecture The American Scholar preaches about the intellectual thinking of mankind. After reading and discussing the overall writing of Emerson I was caught on the phrase, “Man is not farmer…but he is all.” (57) The point he is making here is the fact that no ‘man’ should be caught on one label as an individual but expand with every aspect of living. The scholar shouldn’t be contained in a career setting but should always seek new knowledge and the experience that comes with it. The intellectual learns how to do many skills, like the example of a farmer, he or she is well rounded enough to maintain the multiple tasks that comes with a task in which is put together by many smaller tasks that builds the whole but as the world grows the responsibilities are spread out to be shared with the community and society. The growth of society has caused the speed of manufacturing and developing increase exponentially at a pace where not one man can carry the weight of the people.
“In the divided or social state, these functions are parcelled out to individuals, each of whom aims to do his stint of the joint work, whilst each other performs his. The fable implies, that the individual, to possess himself, must sometimes return from his own labor to embrace all the other laborers. But unfortunately, this original unit, this fountain of power, has been so distributed to multitudes, has been so minutely subdivided and peddled out, that it is spilled into drops, and cannot be gathered. The state of society is one in which the members have suffered amputations from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters, – a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man.”
Emerson believes the essence of being man is shifting into separate pieces of a forward moving society each with one task to do repeatedly working together to become an industrial unit conforming to Henry Ford’s accredited Fordism. Henry Ford used the assembly line to mass produce his automobiles to maximize sales and profits by paying people to do one job to piece together multiple products. Industrialized communities contains multiple branches of people that have jobs that keep it alive like all the service companies that include police, bankers, lawyers, landscapers and so on. Society is organized into pieces of a puzzle that represents what man used to be, a universally capable animal that was self-reliant. He sees a distinct difference between being “a farmer” and being “Man on a farm.” The difference being the intellectual part of the brain where being universally prepared to do any type of work becomes obsolete because Man stopped thinking and started conforming to the comfort of simple tasks that are controlled in which are consistent and predictable.
“In this distribution of functions, the scholar is the delegated intellect. In the right state, he is, Man Thinking. In the degenerate state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a mere thinker, or, still worse, the parrot of other men’s thinking.” (57)
The American Scholar proceeds with the Man Thinking idea by describing the great influences he sees along his educational path, first being the nature around him. Humans tend to forget how connected we truly are to nature by splitting the human world from the earth in its entirety making much of what we are connected to directly unimportant. Emerson believes that in order to be inspired or mentally intrigued a scholar must look into the world around him for ideas. Through nature, theories develop from the simplest of objects covering the earth or upward in the sky but the ignorance of man is the downfall for the starting process of Man Thinking.
His next “great influence” is remembering the past event recorded in history and the ideas and notions that are past down by each generation. He believes that through books and teachings a scholar will evolve into a better thinker and grow knowledge that will forever expand so long as man finds its roots to build off of yet in order to grow, the scholar must also record his ideas in books for himself and others who seek the experience which leads to the notion of the root meaning of “genius”.
Although Emerson has a vivid way of writing and often times can be confusing from the language he speaks, his ideas are extremely valuable to human nature. Today many students who read or come upon such readings of Emerson do struggle with understanding his lessons and theories at first glance and he forces the reader to break down his words into separate pieces to simplify what he implies. Each paragraph tended to make me feel as though as I was taking on a new challenge as I read my way through his lecture. By the end of The American Scholar there was the question of does this still are become relevant to today’s society. Is the way our educational system functions work for the modern day scholar? The answer is still unclear but it’s a piece of the past to start my own theories as Emerson believes a young scholar should, through the readings of our past.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Emerson’s Prose and Poetry. Ed. Joel Porte and Saundra Morris. New York,
New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Incorporated, 2001. Print.
The language we use in literature varies with the task at hand. Great poetry is written in such a way that each line draws a vivid image to the reading using metaphors. The poem uses pieces of imagery to create an illusion of sorts to use one thing and have it represent another. The easiest way to put this concept in terms for me was the “A is B” idea given to me by my professor in Literature Analysis along with another professor in Prose Poetry and Short Stories. Depending on the writer and the basis with which he or she writes the language can be very vivid and unclear or straight forward like a poem from a children’s book. As an audience member you must read carefully and quite possibly multiple times to full grasp the idea of the poem as a whole.
After reading “Great American Prose Poems: From Poe To The Present”, it has been proven to me that the best of poems sometimes must be read over again and on many occasions at times to actually understand the entire piece. For a prose poem, it is written a bit differently. The poem is a continuous flow of words with almost no breaks. A theme in most of the poetry I’ve read had acts of building climax to the end of the passage as well as repetition of words and ideas. A prose poem by Lydia Davis illustrates this well in “The Thirteenth Woman”.
“In a town of twelve women there was a thirteenth. No one admitted she lived there, no mail came for her, no one spoke of her, no one asked after her, no one sold bread to her, no one bought anything from her, no one returned her glance, no one knocked on her door; the rain did not fall on her, the sun never shone on her, the day never dawned on her, the night never fell for her; for her the weeks did not pass, the years did not roll by; her house was unnumbered, her garden untended, her path not trod upon, her bed not slept in, her food not eaten, her clothes not worn; and yet in spite of all this she continued to live in the town without resenting what it did to her.” (Lehman, 191).
This piece has a repetition of using the phrase “no one” which goes from the beginning until the near end. She uses this idea to build suspense to the end that has the audience suspecting a dramatic finish. For me after reading I felt as though the girl within the poem never really existed, it gave me the sense of the girl was imaginary and was created by the minds of the town, almost as if she were a myth of sorts. So this specific woman of the town was used to represent something else for the poet and is in a way open for interpretation by the audience.
Although “The Thirteenth Woman” seemed to be out of the ordinary there are plenty more pieces that bend reality and go into a direction that creates fantasy. There is a sense of freedom in writing poetry because it allows the creativity to flow to page and the writer can make the realest of ideas into something new. One of the better examples I found was from a prose poem written in 1977 by Russel Edson titled “The Taxi”.
“One night in the dark I phone a taxi. Immediately a taxi crashes through the wall; never mind that my room is on the third floor, or that the yellow driver is really a cluster of canaries arranged in the shape of a driver, who flutters apart, screaming from the windows of the taxi in yellow fountains…
Realizing that I am in the midst of something splendid I reach for the phone and cancel the taxi: All the canaries flow back into the taxi and assemble themselves into a cluster shaped like a man. The taxi backs through the wall, and the wall repairs…
But I cannot stop what is happening, I am already reaching for the phone to call a taxi, which is already beginning to crash through the wall with its yellow driver already beginning to flutter apart…” (Lehman, 119)
Again the poet uses vivid language, repetition in language but here Edson creates a whole new reality. What was real had become something new. Although the characters and items where from reality, they acted in a way that would seem impossible to ordinary humans, if that were to happen in a real apartment building on the third floor there would be a major shock to those who are witnessing the events. But poetry can be written like this, there are no rules to what the writer can imagine up and put on the page. There are a number of types of poems out there but since these are all prose poems there is no real structure to any of the writings. Rhythm is never required since the poems are just move continuously in one direction when you read the passage, even if the ideas aren’t parallel.
Many of the poems were also dedications to other artists whether they were writers, singers or simply icons. “Dear Boy George”, written by Amy Gerstler was all about the song writer and icon Boy George. Gerstler rights an obsessive letter to the artist that compares him to some of the finer things in life as well as expressing fantasies of time spent with the icon. Although they never occurred, Amy Gerstler describes these occasions with such fine detail it is as though she were reflecting on real past times.
“Only three things on earth seem useful or soothing to me.
One: wearing stolen shoes. Two: photos of exquisitely
dressed redheads. Three: your voice on the radio. Those songs
fall smack-dab into my range! Not to embarrass you with my
raw American awe, or let you think I’m the kinda girl who
bends over for any guy who plucks his eyebrows and can make
tight braids – but you’re the plump bisexual cherub of the
eighties: clusters of Rubens’ painted angels, plus a dollop of the
Pillsbury dough boy, all rolled into one! We could go skating,
or just lie around my house eating pineapple. I could pierce
your ears: I know how to freeze the lobes with ice so it doesn’t
hurt. When I misunderstand your lyrics, they get even better.
I thought the line I’M YOUR LOVER, NOT YOUR RIVAL, was I’M
ANOTHER, NOTHE BIBLE, or PRIME YOUR MOTHER, NOT A LIBEL,
or UNDERCOVER BOUGHT ARRIVAL. Great, huh? See, we’re of like
minds. I almost died when I read in the Times how you saved
that girl from drowning . . . dived down and pulled the blub-
bering sissy up. I’d give anything to be the limp, dripping
form you stumbled from the lake with, wrapped over your pale,
motherly arms, in a grateful faint, as your mascara ran and ran.” (Lehman, 260)
Overall from what I read from the book was that poetry is based on simply the idea of metaphors and similes. My experience with poetry has taught me that most poetry follows some sort of pattern or rhythm while this book focuses on the prose poetry and also short stories. Prose doesn’t have strict guidelines besides the use of the vivid language and the continuous flow of words and phrases. The idea of “A is B” is quite obvious in most poems but very discreet in others. These poems hold stories but having the characteristics that are held within more stereotypical poems that many grew up knowing such as Dr. Seuss or Shel Silverstein where rhyming was the most notable aspect of the writing, only in my book, was a flow of repeats and playing of words to attract the readers attention.
Literature is used as a form of expression which uses representations of a group of ideas to form a singular concept and with the writings of history comes an audience to break these apart to critique every line. Literary Criticism is considered a “reflective, attentive consideration and analysis of a literary work,” according to The Bedford Glossary which comes from all different angles from various groups of people. These groups are led by powerful voices that are motivated by concepts of psychology, theory and gender. With each of the rising critics breaks off another separate concept that critiques its predecessor. Sigmund Freud applied his theories of the brain being influenced by unconscious part of the mind which was built off previous ideas of the mind not always being conscious and sane but he expanded into the idea that the unconscious part was the motivational though processes of human nature. As Freud developed his psychoanalytic theory he applied it to humans through therapeutic methods and eventually took the works of writers and authors to break down deeper meanings of the metaphors and metonyms (referred as condensations and displacements).
He saw deeper meanings between the texts seeing symbols used to disguise the artist’s sexual urges; these urges are derived from the id that is a part of the human psyche. Our id seeks the human desire while the superego in a way selfishly demands sacrifice for the individual’s well-being leaving the human ego to censor from the unconscious id and superego in everyday situations. Under the Freudian principal, the only way we express the unspoken desires is subliminally through Freudian slips where the desires are revealed in dreams, neurotic behavior and in the case of literacy criticism our language or art. The Oedipus complex was a well-known idea from Freud having the theory that each person had the urge to replace the parent of the same sex because of affections for the parent of the opposite sex. These theories have been applied to stories, narratives, and poems, but surprising to me was the appliance to the Bible. Ilona Rashkow took the Freudian theory and other theories in which he inspired and applied it to the Bible and its messages. Gender was a direct influence on the religious storytelling and considering the fact most of the societies were patriarchal at the time every piece glorified the male interests. In the Bible, the penis was a direct link to God and the community while woman possessed nothing of that kind of caliber.
Doctor Sigmund Freud opened new doors for the future for analyzing literature through the human psyche by influencing arguments from Norman Holland, Alfred Adler, Carl Jung and R.D. Laing. Norman Holland was an American literary critic would once broke down Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall,” while using the childhood stages of development from Freud; oral, anal, urethral, phallic and oedipal. Holland would agree with Sigmund Freud on the idea that the unconscious does in fact have an influence on an others work in creativity had shifted focus on to the reader rather than the writer. This shift created the “reader-response criticism,” it focused on the reader and how he or she reacted to the writers work and also if the meaning was the same to the audience as was intended. Arguments of resistance have risen from critiques from feminist and gay and lesbian critics claiming that several of the readers have been influenced by the author in his or even her beliefs. The feminist’s believe that the male author from years past have tended to “immasculate” women making the writings patriarchal with sexist remarks. But on the other hand, another feminist critic by the name of Nancy K. Miller believed that men and women will read differently from one another picking up countless different ways of interpreting the meanings, this being highly controversial.
Although many critics broke off of the Freudian theories in places of disagreement there was those who continued his work by going further or adding in pieces believed to be missing. A French psychoanalytic theorist named Jacques Lacan extended Freud’s work by adding a new sense of language. He viewed a dream as a discourse rather than the Freudian repression. Lacan found that there was a pre-Oedipal stage where the child doesn’t recognize it has its independence from his or her mother while also lacking any form of language. At this stage the child will also go through the mirror stage of which the child finally sees itself and others, first differentiating from its mother. He then claims that no father needs to be present to trigger the Oedipal stage, but in order for the stage to start, language must be developed so the child can distinguish gender and differences. The child realizes who the mother is but initially has no idea who the father might be, this information is given by the mother figure.
After extensively reading through books and passages all the critics seem to tie into one another. The reasoning for picking the Psychoanalytic Criticism was the influence of Sigmund Freud and his theories of deeper meanings behind the human mind. He believed writers used their writings as a mask to expose secretive or unconscious thoughts hidden away in the human brain and the best way to share these ideas were subliminally through condensation and displacement revealing wishes and fears of the individual. My ego won’t allow the sexual desires out while also balancing liberation and self-gratification. The comparisons we use in our creative processes are directly related to how we feel internally and are used as an escape for our unconscious mind. The following citations are books in which are good to look further into reading to see the directions in which Freudian principles have inspired and grew into new concepts or innovative areas, such as film.
Ellens, J.Harold, and Wayne G. Rollins. Psychology and the Bible. Volume 1. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2004. 33-74. Print.
Brown, Kathleen L. Teaching Literacy Theory Using Film Adaptions. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 1947. Print.
Camden, Vera J. Compromise Formations: Current Directions in Psychoanalytic Criticism. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1989. Print.
English is having the knowledge to put together our language into intellectual and sophisticated ideas to make phrases of representation. It is literature being used to describe something with the upmost detail to make a vivid point or even using creativity within a story to draw a mental picture in the audiences mind. Grasping the English language is a powerful capability in which a writer can draw in a reader from start to finish and leaving individuals in a deeper thought of imagination and curiosity of a deeper meaning. What makes it true English Literature is the ability to make a connection from the brain to paper directly into the mind of the onlookers.
Worldwide are universities and institutions in which offer further education in various spectrums of professions. The degrees we can earn help us move forward into our careers and help us get involved with our passions by showing our experience and knowledge. With certain degrees you are able to achieve several levels of jobs by opening doorways with a diploma from a credited institution. Each of these degrees has specific titles and purposes into which makes the individual of more value to potential ‘investors’ in that branch of work. One of the majors offered across the country that is of interest to many students is the English Studies which is taught differently in unique styles. But what exactly does the English major give you after graduation? What is so special about it and why would one pursue it to help get a career?
Quite often there are those that doubt the English major route is truly a secure route into the professional world because not too many people know what jobs are offered with its background. Studying literature and the art of writing opens up many possibilities in many different areas. For example, you are able to do most professions that involve a form of writing such as journalism, storytelling or even creative writing for such things as film. The English major is also a great candidate for being an editor since they are well rounded around the English language which also mean the door is wide open for communications, public relations and research analyst, opportunities that aren’t too obvious to those who aren’t fully involved in the program. But the more obvious of the professions that an individual can pursue is part of the educational side of the spectrum. For instance, my goal is to become an educator, which doesn’t mean specifically in the English classroom but going through the program makes me an experienced communicator to my students for the elementary and secondary levels.
So here at Keene State College I am involved in the English B.A. with the writing option. This option is designed to first help understand the English language and how it is properly used in literature in not only American writing styles but all influential pieces. Stereotypically, most people think of any class involving literature involves works just as Shakespeare created which is not only far from the truth, but only a piece of American literature. After being introduced to my first English course at Keene State I learned the basic history of their own built program in my Literacy Analysis class with Professor Mark Long. Here I found that the evolution started with literature from overseas from British novels, play writes and poetry most famously written by William Shakespeare. As time passed the evolution of American made writings were beginning to show up in courses in academic classrooms from such authors as Henry David Thoreau, Emily Dickinson, Edgar Allen Poe and so many other rising talents of the early years of American History. But teaching the American side of literature wasn’t enough to help a new writer understand the art of writing from a variety of talents and styles so the department altered the college expectations to a more world oriented teaching of literacy.
But the question still remains, “what is literature?” There are various theories of what exactly literature is. In the reading by Terry Eagleton, he brings up the question with the idea of different ways to separate the styles of fiction and non-fiction writings but also historical writings as well. Some of these historical pieces are viewed differently by other groups making stories both fiction and non-fiction. Which then leads him to the question of is literature a creative writing style inspired by ones imagination. Eagleton follows this up by stating,
“Perhaps literature is definable not according to whether it is fictional or ‘imaginative’, but because it uses language in peculiar ways. On this theory, literature is a kind of writing which, in the words of the Russian critic Roman Jacobson, represents an ‘organized violence committed on ordinary speech’.”
By this quotation alone there is a representation of what literature stands for, an organized verse of words used, in Eagleton’s words, an intensified and deviated fashion. A novel or statement in which creativity plays with words to make it rich and powerful to the reader or listener in a language that pulls you in to raise an individual’s curiosity. Simple sentences can be altered to make it part of the literature value but giving it more passionate language and rhythm. But there are still many others who have their own opinion on what literature truly is. Many universities include courses that are introductions to the understanding of the literacy theory.
While researching different schools on how they view literature through what courses they offered I found quite a few different results. Purdue University introduces literature from the B.C. era in one course and follows up in different spectrums in the remaining ten from the early nine-teen hundreds on from Formalism to Gender studies. Most of the trends taught are just in the last century leading up until today. At Yale, ‘Introduction to Theory of Literature’ is posted online with Paul H. Fry with all the lectures of the course. Fry began the course with an introduction of introducing a breakdown of the title of the name of the course where he states it is ‘full of big words’ referring to theory, literature and even introduction. He states that literature may possibly be undefinable for the simple fact that the word is defined by the community using it. As time moves forward the word is redefined by groups of people and how they feel the evolution is occurring with the language. So therefore the word is defined by the human psyche. (http://www.udemy.com/english-300-introduction-to-theory-of-literature-with-paul-h-fry/)
Most theories I found were quite similar in idea but each university separated themselves from the one another by making different guidelines and courses offered for the intended major. Nearly everywhere has a specific required course for the American style of literature and its history but then moves into the international direction of literature found all over the Earth, so literature is becoming global. But as the world comes together and shares their different idea of what literature is won’t that mean the definition will change and alter to fit the needs of every cultures different theory? So I have to ask yet another question to help move forward with my first, can literature be narrowed down into a definite definition? After looking into it I can’t be sure if I can. I’ve come to believe that literature is defined by current history and existence and will never settle to one specific way of being. Eternally, the word will be shaped and formed into a new and more current meaning to the styles of the people who perform it.
Terry Eagleton ends his introduction of his novel with having this to say, “If it will not do to see literature as an ‘objective’, descriptive category, neither will it do to say that literature is just what people whimsically choose to call literature. For there is nothing at all whimsical about such kinds of value-judgement: they have their roots in deeper structures of belief which are as apparently unshakeable as the Empire State building. What we have uncovered so far, then, is not only that literature does not exist in the sense that insects do, and that the value-judgements by which it is constituted are historically variable, but that these value-judgements themselves have a close relation to social ideologies. They refer in the end not simply to private taste, but to the assumptions by which certain social groups exercise and maintain power over others. If this seems a far-fetched assertion, a matter of private prejudice, we may test it out by an account of the rise of ‘literature’ in England.”
With experience of the English language comes to help an individual with his speaking abilities and with experience in the history of literature gives one the knowledge of what literature could possibly be. It is my belief that taking the courses offered by Keene State College with help me understand the foundations of where literature is going in the future and the best way to view the word ‘literature’ as a scholar and profound writer. Although I cannot define the word literature with absolute certainty that I am correct I can tell you how it is possible how you can spot it out from plain text and societies less rich writing. Literature is the language in which draws you in and reveals your emotions from within. It is beautiful, ugly, scary, exciting and can be tragic. The essence of good writing that tells a story with the most certain of details between each statement reveals true literature whether fiction or non-fiction. We define literature as a whole as it evolves into the next big thing.
During my years writing I’ve learned the structure and format of how to construct essays, stories and various write ups for my class work and personal matters. Between each project taken were events and individuals that reflect off of every line used in my script. From personal experience the inspiration comes from some of the past tense of one’s life but more than anything the current time and lifestyle. Everything started from the days of learning how to read and write where I began to form facts into a single string of a story, beginning, middle and end. This led to some of my most frustrating years of beginning to write my own stories and summarize class readings in my black and white notebook to be graded by my teacher. Year after year new challenges arose of various styles of writing were introduced which opened new doors of stating fact and also opportunities of expression. Up until middle school writing wasn’t particularly my strongest of passions and even to this day I always feel I struggle to put words to paper.
Starting school was a very emotional experience for me. My mother basically dragged me through the doors and set me in the middle of the classroom so she had enough time to run out the door to leave. Some days I looked forward to going to class while some days I would kick and scream for her to take me back home to avoid doing work and all the boring books that go along with it. My biggest fear truly was revealing what was within my writing, the fear of another human being picking apart every line trying to find errors and tearing it apart. I was embarrassed to express myself even when the facts were laid out in front of me because being wrong was the end of the world to me. But along the way I grew confidence because I was sharing with teachers I could trust which were essential for me to move forward. My early writings were summaries of individual short stories which soon led to full books. These summaries were restricting the joy of creativity and freedom by only asking about the facts and not allowing the writing party of it to be original. All that ran through my mind was thoughts of rebelling against writing facts that were previously written, I found it to be tedious and repetitive. So for many years I didn’t take my English or history classes serious when it came to paper’s by putting them off, lacking stern effort or simply not doing them. From the fifth grade to my freshman year I basically did half the work with half the effort putting me in major hole in my life. My teachers were boring plus the subjects of the papers were on books that didn’t interest me making each project painful to get through.
When high school started things started to turn around for me once I met my English teacher, Ms. Daykun. The class started out with interesting events in which gave me a head start for the year to come. This was the year I was excited to write and learn about various English topics, even though this same year was where we started William Shakespeare, which everyone I knew dreaded to go through. But I took an interest into it so every class I would participate and every paper I would get involved with more closely helping me tune up my writing skills. Following my freshman year I had the same teacher again to assist me on all my writing in or out of her class as long as I stayed after school. The support helped tremendously enormously to let me express my own feelings of topics and sometimes my own personal ideas.
The second half of my high school years were challenging to me because we began doing major research papers that were much longer in length that needed many citations and sources. No longer did we do any creative writing of sorts but opened books and searched the web for various areas of useful information to take to put into our own words for grading. Our teachers were preparing us for yet another leap into a whole new world of academic achievements on another level. College was right around the corner so choices needed to be made and the pressure was on all the students and everything felt tense. Unfortunately, I don’t have any of the works I did from high school with me at school because of the fact I never had this lap top until I graduated so I can’t fully reflect on anything I wrote from that long ago. But I took a step in between secondary school and college at Bridgton Academy in Bridgton, Maine.
Bridgton Academy was a school that only took seniors and graduates of high school into their school. Our class size was one hundred seventy five student athletes scattered in a minor college environment of dormitories on a hill. The academy is “The Year That Makes A Difference,” and its intentions was to help young men to move forward academically and athletically into the schools of their choices. Each student is motivated by separate goals with completely different backgrounds from all over the country. My purpose and motivation was to become a better scholar and find a better way to manage my time with academic success. Lucky for me not only did I spend a lot of time on the ice with my coach but he also ended up being my English teacher for the year. Coach Michael Meserve was very influential in just about everything I did on campus in Bridgton, he gave me new things to write about that were new to me academically while also making them enjoyable to go through the process of learning the fresh techniques. But even beyond the material he was an outstanding and interesting guy. Graduating from Norwich College where he was a cadet that moved on to bigger things in the Army that forced him to go overseas during our nation’s conflicts. He motivated me to do bigger and better things on and off the ice by leading by example.
Some of the works I did during my year at Bridgton were poetry, research papers, story writing and even writing my own eulogy, which was by far the most interesting piece of work I have ever done. The project forced me to see myself as an individual from the outside in so I could imagine what people will think of me when I eventually pass away. So I looked into my own future of how I imagined my life to be years from now and it amazed me after writing the eulogy how conceited it sounded to write about myself in such a high standard. The opening line, “Ryan Dooley, a man who lived a truly meant a lot to his family, peers, wife and his community,” made me wonder if any of that would be true by the time I pass away since time has changed and life moves along so rapidly away from us. The part I questioned the most from any of this was the community part because I don’t feel as though after college the meaning of the word changes. For a hand full of years it was a number of classmates until we move forward to another part of life. So from that moment on I had a new outlook on how I talked about myself and others and really tried to reflect on how I set forward my views.
But the eulogy was only my first assignment of the course and this led to more exciting reading and writing. The class discussed such things as the assassination of Kennedy and the whole magic bullet conspiracy breaking down all the facts like who was there, areas of interest and the entire route of the automobile. After all of this discussion we needed to conduct an interview with Lee Harvey Oswald to ask him about his background and sort out whether or not he was the shooter of JFK. After moving onto watching Hannibal Lector in “Silence of the Lamb”, was a research project of notorious serial killers and the studying of their psychiatric problems that arose as they grew up from a young age. I was assigned “The BTK Strangler” or better known as Dennis Rader of Kansas. For the entire month of February I was forced to look into his entire life and his potential nine murders of families and innocent victims. As disturbing as it all was I did learn a lot about the psychology behind studying the clinically insane and basic concepts of how it tends to start. But of all the different pieces of work I did my favorite was the deserted island project.
In the beginning of the year Coach Meserve wanted to get to know about how we wrote and the way we put together ideas so he had us get involved in a small project. For homework we all had to make a list of ten things we would have with us if we ever were left on an island alone and with this we were going to write a story of how these things would keep us alive. The catch was we couldn’t use our list and we were forced to exchange with people around the room. Our limitations were there was no means of communication to the outside world with electronics and at the end of the story we had to decide whether or not the person in the story would survive or not. For this he wasn’t entirely concerned with the grammar and punctuation but more so the creative thinking and story line.
Although most of my writing and influence was derived from with the walls of my academic classrooms no one inspired my writing more than my own mother. She was a graduate in English and substitutes as a high school teacher. For many years my mother would write something special to me and my brothers and leave it in our rooms for us to find. She was an outstanding writer that moved me with what she wrote. This inspired me to do my own writing for her so every Christmas I write her a poem within my Christmas card so she has something to read each year. It has come to the point where she doesn’t want a materialistic gift, she only wants a card and her family around.
In conclusion to this essay I want to improve my writing skills and make it more of a habit to construct my papers and even personal works on my own in a fashion that not only makes sense but I can be satisfied with. Although I am not always the best writer I know there is plenty of potential behind me to become an excellent writer as long as I can effectively use transitions to help move along with the point I am trying to get across. I’m looking forward to practicing and being challenged to write with my peers.
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