Does your education and class distinction affect your tastes? I believe Bourdieu would say yes, and so would I.

Let's face it folks, I am not the sharpest tool in the shed, and when I read some novels or essays (like these highly interesting oh so amazing literary theory essays...) I need some help understanding them. Once I understand them fully, I can learn to appreciate and like them. I can develope a taste for them. This appreciation of mine I fear was made possible only by my educational background. Yeah that's right, if I had decided not to go to college I would not even have known that Marxist literary theory even existed! (Like I said, I'm not the brightest light bulb in the pack).

I think you have to be exposed to something before you can develop a taste for it, and I think a lot of that exposure comes through education. People who do not have access to higher eductation may not be familiar with the works of Flannery O'Connor let alone appreciate them.

Are the highly educated defining society's view of good literature? Are some works considered classic just because "they" categorize them as such? Who decides what books should belong to the literary cannon? I really am curious to know why certain books are considered so great.

Take, for example, Cathcher in the Rye. Now I read this book in high school and though I may not remember all the details, I do remember that I was not impressed with it. Of course is was part of a summer reading assignment, so I was not inclined to read it from the beginning. But even so, I thought it was stupid and kind of annoying to read about some bratty teenager (was he a teenager? I don't remember exactly) being upset with the world.

I'm sure if I read the book now I may find different qualities to enjoy which were not so apparent the first time around. (Because my personal economy has now changed ;)). Yet I can't help but wonder if I would even think of returning to this novel if it was not so highly esteemed by literary circles.

I guess this kind of comes back to the question of must we as English majors learn to appreciate different works of literature even if we don't like them? If I was a good and proper English major I would probably say yes, but now that I am staring at graduation which is less than two months away I am going to say no. Inspired by my bout of senioritis, I declare that I will make my own canon of literature which will include all the books I actually like to read. Among them will sit great writers like Jane Austen or William Faulkner, but I will also include childhood favorites such as Beverly Cleary and Zane Grey from my middle school western novels phase.

No more of this pressure to try to like and appreciate authors and books that I don't really care about (Sorry Emerson, this includes you). Still, I must refer to the ultimate literary canon for suggestions of what to include in my own creation; exposing myself to new literature is still key, but if I don't like something or don't understand it, I am not going to feel guilty about it.

Sometimes I feel like to be an English major one has to appreciate and like everything that is considered good literature and hate everything that is "bad" literature. Some say that is too much to ask and only require you to appreciate without having to like it but still hate the bad literature. I say just expose yourself to it and learn about it and leave it up to yourself to decide if you like it or not. If it's good and you don't like it or appreciate, fine. If it's bad but you still like it, I say embrace the badness of the plot and style and its overused cliche's. As long as you can recognize it and understand your own tastes, I think you're justified.

Intellectual Property

Intellectual property dominates English majors' lives. We constantly have to be aware of what we are writing and being aware of any potential plagerism problems. Especially when writing research papers. We constantly have to cite where we found information and who provided it. Any concept that we paraphrase also has to be properly cited. I have no idea how a writing world without intellectual property functions.

I know in some Eastern cultures intellectual property still does exist. My brother works for a big engineering firm, and he said that his company has to be careful when they hire somebody from Asia because they have no problem with taking any confidential ideas and sharing them with any other company they work with.

I also experience this within my internship. I edit news articles for a website news company and they use an Asian freelance writer. I always have to double check his sources to make sure he does not plagerize because plagerism is not a crime in his country.

The idea of intellectual property is definitely a Western one. I think this concept definitely feeds into our culture's emphasis on the individual. As writers we are always trying to come up with unique and original ideas or writing styles. I think it is more difficult to be a successful writer in a Western culture than it probably is in Eastern cultures.

I wonder if in third world countries storytelling is more prominent than it is in first world countries.

Storytelling does not have the same meaning in our culture today as it did in cultures existing before the technological age. As we talked about in class, storytelling today usually revolves around family or friend get-togethers. My family is not really big on storytelling, but I have a number of friendships that have grown closer based on times spent hanging out and telling stories.

When I studied abroad, our group of American students became really close through telling stories (usually about embarassing moments or hilarious situations) to each other. I remember this one story my friend told to a group of us about getting his foot stuck in an escalator back in middle school when he went with his friend to a toy store. He started screaming and everyone looked at him as the escalator stopped and the mechanical display of toys jammed because it ran off the escalator's power. He was also wearing his infamous stinky purple windbreaker and bowl-cut hair-do.

Obviously writing about this story on this blog does not nearly have the same impact as it did hearing the story first-hand. The inside joke of the stinky purple windbreaker does not translate to an outside audience, and there is no way I can adequately describe in writing the imitation my friend did of the mechanical toys stopping and the escalator becoming jammed. I feel like storytelling is no longer an artform. It does exist today but I feel that if our society was more of a storytelling one I might have better succeeded at relaying the above story. Of course I am only speculating and may just be trying to blame my poor storytelling ability on an outside source.

If we lived in a storytelling culture, I might feel inclined to pass my friend's story off as my own. I might substitute myself for my friend's character and no one would really care. I always feel like a failure whenever I try to repeat a funny story that someone else told and no one really thinks its funny. It's kind of like telling a joke and then forgetting the punch line. It just doesn't work as well unless it personally happened to you.

I read another blog about poetry that came from someone who is outside of our class blogs. His take seemed a little biased against poetry as he gave a small history on poetry. This blogger made the observation that poets usually have some sort of neurotic disorder or have a "tortured soul." The sarcasm behind the observations saved this blog from becoming a rant against poetry, but I think it makes light of what people perceive poetry to be. He jokes about how a poet needs to die in another country like Italy to truly become famous.

He runs down the list of different periods of poetry, picking out a few poets from each. For the Romantic period he writes, "This era begins when Jean-Jacques Rousseau finds that he cries more than other people, especially in forests. Lots of people live off their parents' estates, have mistresses that are close relatives, wear their collars open, catch colds and die young." As I read how he has stereotyped the Romantic era, I couldn't help but laugh because it pretty much sums it up (if disregard all the intellectual stuff).

It was refreshing to read something lighthearted and not really serious related to our class. And although it's interesting reading all the theory, at times its fun just to read another person's theory about poetry.

Barthes talks about the death of the author not in a way that means the author is not important but in a way that means when you associate a work with an author, that work is limited by that author's name. The text has lots of different meanings; it's not just a voice for the author. I think he has a valid point because sometimes I read books just because a certain author wrote them, and then they don't live up to my expectations. I always wonder who decided which authors were the authority on literature.

We kind of discussed this in class about Shakespeare and J.K. Rowling. Culture has dictated that Shakespeare is an authority while Rowling is still just considered a children's author (a popular one but still a children's author. Who knows who will be a great authority fifty years from now?

Tzvetan Todorov's "Structural Analysis of Narrative" essay seems to take a stab at the New Critics who only focus on the work itself. The New Critics only look at the internal things of the poem and nothing external like the author's life or reader response. Todorov reduces the work of the New Critics to a paraphrase of the original poem: "the result of his efforts will be a paraphrase of the work, which is supposed to reveal the meaning better than the work itself" (2100).

I think this may be a little harsh considering that the structuralist statements he's been making seem to not go much further. From how I'm understanding it, the structuralists look for common, universal links that connects works of literature. He seems to put a lot of emphasis on the science behind it. They concentrate on the methods behind the work. The example Todorov explores is the plot. But how does this bring more meaning to the text? Is this way of looking at things still valid for today's audiences? We always seem to put a lot of importance on what makes a work different or what makes it unique. Does structuralism address these things or does it only look for the common links behind works?

I have read an article about Monroe Beardsley and his criticism of Kilmer's famous opening lines of one of his poems: "I think that I shall never see / A poem lovely as a tree."

Now I'll have you guess what Beardsley thought of this. Yeah, he didn't like it so much. He thought it too simplistic as it placed nature over art (a very Romantic thing to do). He of course valued art more than nature. Kilmer's poem epitomizes the outpouring of emotion that the Romantics are known for, so I can imagine how Beardsley would criticize him. I think he would disdain him for putting nature above art.

I think Wimsatt and Beardsley and other formalists kind of echo the decadence with Oscar Wilde and his art for art's sake. All they seem concerned about is the poem itself and nothing outside of it kind of like Wilde and his obession with beauty. For Wilde, it's only about the beauty of things. And I wonder if for Wimsatt and Beardsley it is all about the beauty of the poem or at least the poem as it is (whatever that means)? Maybe that's not exactly the right language, but I am still trying to figure out what they would say makes a poem.