La chica bon bon.

Touching on Luce Irigaray’s “Sexual Difference” essay, she expresses that “it is man who has been the subject of discourse…for women, there remain the so-called minor art forms: cooking, knitting, sewing and embroidery; and in exceptional cases, poetry, painting and music” (Rice and Waugh 236). Is it possible then to categorize ‘gender’ based on the subject’s experience such as the tasks just mentioned? With gender, comes an amount of power that is implied. Power may be conceived as gender based and gender specific and with having a certain amount of control. There must be then, a central point to that power that moves from the most powerful to the least. Where on this scale of power does ‘gender’ lie?

Palomita (Anita)

The album ( ) [that’s really its title] by the Iclandic band Sigur Rós, completely eliminates an authorship. The album ( ) lacked a title because of their belief that the “listener is free to make up his/her own title since there is essentially none” (Sigur Rós). The album also contains no lyrics, instead Sigur Rós’s lead singer Jónsi sings in a made up language, which they call “Hopelandic” (Sigur Rós). The insert of the album contains a series of blank pages. The blank pages are meant to assist the listener while he interprets the sounds into infinite possibilities of interpretation. The listener fills in the lyrics according to their own perception. Thus, Sigur Rós kills the author in their ( ) album. The lack of lyrics and the use of a non language allow the music to internalize in all listeners by lacking a linguistic barrier and thus also makes for the listener to create his or her own original work.

If the picture doesn’t work here is the link:

http://jandemessemaeker.net/music/albumcovers/Sigur%20Ros-(%20).jpg

And the link to the youtube music:

An Invaderbean that loves Sigur Rós because they might be original after all! Or at least my allies in this war against the author ☺

My conclusion: I’m an intimidator? I study this to become the bully of my literary affluent friends? Well before I sentence myself to death for such egocentric views of myself I will try to save myself from this conclusion. I, after all, sweet me (at least I think Im sweet, but now I don’t know so much since I have been labeled an “intimidator”) Professor! Save me, please tell me you are not teaching me the tools to becoming the number one bully in my very tiny circle of friends! I don’t want to be that!

From what we defined the critic as “el descreído, el que duda, el que cuestiona”

¡Yo la descreída! Maybe sometimes, I mean that’s what makes this world ever so interesting. If we don’t question everything we read, know or are taught then how do we know our faith for such things is actually true? I can see myself as the one who doubts, and questions. But I don’t see the harm in any of this, why does Culler want to brand me an “Intimidator”?

Depressed Invaderbean

Starting with a post I posted on Facebook and Ben’s comment and Invaderbeans response:

Originality has died! ‘Do you wish to express yourself, you ought at least to know that the inner “thing’ you think to ‘translate’ is itself only a ready-formed dictionary, your words only explainable through other words, and so on indefinitely’ (Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author”).
Ben Cluff: But there is only one Aileen Zamayoa – therein lies originality.

Response: Thanks Ben for being an idealist! But we must succumb to the fact that our dictionaries have already been pre-written! Maybe we can apply all this literary criticism into our own life’s, then we could all just sit in silence forever and have others materialize us, mis-interpret us! That, I believe would be the only way of achieving originality again (doing it through others)! Remember “only by saying nothing can they prevent us from thinking that they mean something. Even to summarize their views itself implies their failure in this respect” ( 187). I refuse to assert my failure! Therefore I will just make sounds from now on, I will stop writing, leave grad school, sit in a chair and make little beeping sounds for the rest of my life. I wont ever point out my views! lol! Hmmmm Maybe not

Anyhow I think the overthrowing of the authorship is a lot more fascinating and fun sounding than that of overthrowing my own being! I love revolutions!

Nunca antes había pensado de la literatura de esta manera. Al leer esto estoy completamente de acuerdo con Foucault y las relaciones de poder que han existido a través de la historia. No sólo con la literatura pero con la manera de vestir, las instituciones educativas, los organismos religiosos, inclusive podemos encontrar esta relación de poder en lugares tan simples como la relaciones entre padres e hijos donde el anterior siempre está investido de todo el poder. Ya que, en mi opinión, Foucault tiene toda la razón mi pregunta es, ¿Se pueden evitar estos atraviesos de poder? Y si se podría, ¿cómo? ¿Podríamos vivir en una sociedad donde todos tengamos poder por igual, o será esta una utopía para Foucault (ya que en mi opinión es inalcanzable)?

11/1/09
El autor y la intención
En la última clase estuvimos hablando del autor y como un texto debe ser leído para que verdaderamente se considere un texto. Sartre escribe: “it is not true that one writes for oneself… the operation of writing implies that of reading as its dialectical correlative and these two connected acts necessitate two distinct agents. It is the joint effort of author and reader which brings upon the scene that concrete and imaginary object which is the work of the mind. There is no art except for and by others” (What is literature? 1338).

Inmediatamente después de leer este párrafo en el que Sartre asegura que el texto debe ser recibido por otra persona para que sea literatura, pensé si verdaderamente debería de haber una intención detrás de todos los textos. Ya que el autor escribe para otro/s, eso quiere decir que siempre debe tener un propósito al escribir, una finalidad en su literatura. Al seguir madurando esta idea pensé en poemas póstumos y si los poetas verdaderamente hubieras querido que éstos se publiquen. Tal vez el mejor ejemplo de esta idea es el famoso “Diario de Anne Frank” donde ella no tenía un objetivo más que el desahogarse, escapar su realidad y así hizo de su diario una forma de expresión a causa de toda la represión que atravesaba. Después de reflexionar en estas ideas me pregunto: ¿Hay en todos los textos una intención por parte del autor que el lector es responsable de encontrar? ¿Y siempre un escritor/a tiene que escribir para otro/s?

-La perlita andina aka Vicky

Following Derrida’s paper on ‘Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’ this notion of ‘structure’ and ‘center’ caught my attention since it made me question its many aspects and how they are actually defined. As discussed in Santiago’s class, one must question the circumstances, as well as recognize the fact that concepts such as ‘deconstruction, logocentrism, discipline and supplements’ are among those that are problematic due to the difficulty of their ‘definition.’ What then defines structure and center when the game is finally OVER and there are no longer any students sitting in a circle?

Palomita

-Ben

"El chérrida"

Topics from Week 3’s discussions included the ‘strangeness’ of literature and literary language, the literary object, the artful as artifice, narratology, elements of the narrative (subject, happenings, receptor, space, time, etc.)…

As an inquisitive person myself, I appreciated the very thought-provoking string of questions that Santiago enumerated while considering Gérard Genette. When theorizing about literature, Genette’s first questions apparently run along a thread of various “categories of narration”: voice, focus/point of view, mode/method, and space/time.

Who speaks? Who narrates? Who sees? Who shows? How is this related to the reader? When and where?

While reading the introduction to the section including Gérard Genette in Modern Literary Theory, “The first question raised by Genette is who speaks?” (47) stood out to me for its direct echo with an Erich Auerbach essay on Virginia Woolf’s 1927 To the Lighthouse, titled “The Brown Stocking,” from his book, Mimesis.

In my opinion, Woolf is the queen of making strange within a narrative frame/setting that still resembles our reality (by this I mean: doesn’t cross into the realm of the absolutely fantastic). In my opinion, Woolf’s style in general and To the Lighthouse in particular would also give Gérard Genette either a headache or an orgasm, who knows. Here, I reproduce the smallest sliver of the text that Auerbach studies:

***

     “Stand still. Don’t be tiresome,” so that he knew instantly that her severity was real, and straightened his leg and she measured it.
     The stocking was too short by half an inch at least, making allowance for the fact that Sorley’s little boy would be less well grown than James.
     “It’s too short,” she said, “ever so much too short.”
     Never did anybody look so sad. Bitter and black, half-way down, in the darkness, in the shaft which ran from the sunlight to the depths, perhaps a tear formed; a tear fell; the water swayed this way and that, received it, and were at rest. Never did anybody look so sad.
     But was it nothing but looks? people said. What was there behind it—her beauty, her splendour?
…

***

Who speaks??? Who narrates??? Who sees??? Who shows??? When and where???!!! Who are these “people” who say things and are quoted without the use of quotation marks?! Who is quoting “them”? Virginia Woolf?

To quote Auerbach at length, since I find the uncertain, frantic tone of this passage so hilarious…

“Who is speaking in this paragraph? Who is looking at Mrs. Ramsay here, who concludes that never did anybody look so sad? Who is expressing these doubtful, obscure suppositions?—about the tear which—perhaps—forms and falls in the dark, about the water swaying this way and that, receiving it, and then returning to rest? There is no one near the window in the room but Mrs. Ramsay and James. It cannot be either of them, nor the ‘people’ who begin to speak in the next paragraph. Perhaps it is the author. However, if that be so, the author certainly does not speak like the one who has a knowledge of his [or her] characters—in this case, of Mrs. Ramsay—and who, out of his [or her] knowledge, can describe their personality and momentary state of mind objectively and with certainty. Virginia Woolf wrote this paragraph. She did not identify it through grammatical and typographical devices as the speech or thought of a third person. One is obliged to assume that it contains direct statements of her own. But…”

…and the panic continues. I mean…how truly strange is this passage?? We can understand why it makes poor Erich’s head spin.

Woolf’s writing flows between “the poetic and non-real to the practical and earthly” as the novel is narrated from “an undefinable scene beyond the realm of reality” (Auerbach). At any given moment, one of the narrative tones is undertaken anew, “suddenly and with as little transition as if it had never been left, as though the long interruption were only a glance which someone (who?) has cast from it into the depths of time” (Auerbach).

According to Derek Attridge in his The Singularity of Literature, “Some degree of inexplicability is often taken to be definitive of creation.” The creative introduce something he calls “alterity” in artistic form—otherness, newness, uniqueness. He claims, “To be truly creative is to wrest from the realm of the familiar the hitherto unthought” by finding, employing, and recreating the “gaps in the material,” in the medium of language, the “strains and tensions that suggest the pressure of the other” and exploiting them to create the strange experience of the text. Reading is a “paradoxical experience…—one we are all familiar with—…of recognition and immediacy at the same time as strangeness and newness.” As Attridge would have you believe, “a work is not an object but an event” and “all reading is an event as much as it is an act.” Megasuperfans of Virginia Woolf like myself will know exactly what it feels like to get sucked into the vacuum of unreality and beautiful prose that define her books and want to go right back to the first page after the turn of the last, so as to relive said “event.”

And while on the subject of the event of reading, Wolfgang Iser would argue that a final reading is unachievable. And for that, I am very very grateful.

***

I am so sorry for monopolizing this blog for the past couple of days, I just really wanted to cross a few things off my To-Do list and get these out of my head. Plus I like blogging. If you got to this point, thank you for reading.

And scene.

-Emmi