Drake's Notes to 10/10 Evening Lecture

Ways of thinking about representation, communication, literature and literary analysis

KEY EXAMPLES:
● Quail in flight
● The Three Little Pigs, Little Red Riding Hood
● Medusa (Ovid/Cixous)
● Beowulf (oral legend, Anglo Saxon transcript, Seamus Heaney's Translation
● Grendel (oral, Anglo Saxon, Heaney, Gardner)
● Frankenstein (Mary Shelley, James Whale)

1) What is Literature?    Why do people DO it?

2) What is Analysis?      Why do we have to do it?

1) What is Literature: 

-- Best answered by first asking why do people tell stories and sing songs?

 -- Language structured to express, represent and communicate The Human Experience.

-- Literature attempts to ask and answer the question: What does it mean to be in this world? What does it mean to be: Alive, In love, Having sex, Giving birth, Taking another's life, Oppressed, Victorious, Witnessing Beauty.....and so on...

-- Language/Literature is best as representing emotional concepts: My wife Joan is beautiful. My father's last hour were beautiful. (A picture might not express that emotional information)

● Art communicates aesthetics: emotion

What does the Minstrel or Shaper do in Beowulf and Grendel? (he makes meaning out of meaninglessness: he structures experience through cultural values and language).

2) The Process of Making Meaning: Things are meaningless; books are meaningless; meaning is an act: we MAKE meaning.

Ex: (Beowulf's minstrel, Grendel's Shaper: the Shaper determines history and molds it according to his own will, the King's and Thane's will (power) and their common cultural values)

A) The Source/Signified/The Thing Itself: That which is being represented.

Sources may be one or a combination of:

-- Ideas (Frankenstein "what if"; I love you, Beowulf/Grendel "A monster/hero is...")

                    -- Experiences (things happening:  being alive, hunting, killing, going to war, Hrothgar's history...)

                    -- Emotional Experience (hating, loving, lusting...)

-- Aesthetic/Sublime (quail in flight...)

-- Ideologies/Philosophies/Arguments (Greek Myths, Beowulf, Grendel, Frankenstein: A monster is X. "That was a good king." Y creates monsters. A is the correct way to deal with B. You should act and believe X,Y,Z or you'll become Medusa or Prometheus. Little Red Riding Hood, The Three Little Pigs)

        "A novel is never anything but a philosophy put into images."
                       -- Albert Camus

B) The Author (Sender -- Communications Model: The author attempts to represent/communicate the source through language.

The author's perception of the Source/Signified is shaped by:

                    --  His cultural situation: biases and beliefs, cultural values, political agenda (Ideology)
                    -- His psychology: note the differences in Greek stories; how they added or subtracted elements
                    -- His emotions
                    -- Desires and motivations

C) The Creative Act:  Representation is determined and controlled by:

                    -- Choice of mediums: writing, photography, film, music
                    -- Choice of genre: drama, poetry, novel, essay, journal, diary
                    -- Restrictions inherent to medium itself:

● Language's inability to directly represent (printed words represents spoken word, spoken words represent vague concepts, concepts are in people's heads... compare to photograph; my wife is beautiful)

-- Current technology
-- Budget and time
-- Author's technical competency. How well he writes
-- Editors and publishers

D) Historical Contingencies: Meanings change over time.

-- The author grows older, matures, changes her mind, writes other works, life happens/new experiences...
-- The meaning of any given sign changes (Swastika: Henry Ford, Disneyland)
-- The language changes (Beowulf, Shakespeare)
-- History: years, decades, centuries pass and "times change", generations change, historical memory changes (Viet Nam), cultural values change (Alexander the Greek was homosexual...)
-- The Source/Signified itself changes (Greek Gods and Godesses; expectations of what it means to be a man in the world, a woman in the world. Frankenstein: Science/technology)

E) The Reader/Audience/Receiver: Repeat list from Sender/Writer

? The audience is equally captured by his own culture, history, psychology

● Cixous on Medusa vs. Ovid on Medusa

● You guys watching Frankenstein

● Audience's biases and emotions/psychology

The Reader's/Critic's Must Make a Choice of What to Privilege determines his or her reading.

● Is the reader most interested in:
   -- The Aesthetic: The qualities of the language; is it pretty, well crafted, how does it work?
    -- The Emotional Experience (reading a scary book, falling in love with characters)
   -- The Cultural Values and Information the story portrays
   -- The Text Itself: how does it convey Theme on its own using: Plot, Character, Style?
   -- The Signified: what does the text actually tell us about the "thing itself"?   
    -- The relationship of the ideas in the text to general philosophies on the idea (ex: what is a monster, what makes 
    a monster)
    -- Specific representation in terms of:
                -- Gender: Cixous on Medusa
                -- Class
                -- Social Construction and History of Ideas: HOW the stories contributed to my own cultures/other cultures             (THAT'S WHAT THIS CLASS DOES) (Foucault, Cixous)
                -- Power/Knowledge: who controls ideas; who decided what was good and bad, heroic and monstrous, who decided who gets to tell what stories (Beowulf's minstrel, Grendel's Shaper: the Shaper determines history and molds it according to his own will, the King's and Thane's will (power) and their common cultural values)