STILL More on Story Telling "Styles" and Preferences
... Categories?
Britt: this whole idea of "male narrations" and "female narrations" (or male/female brains) means very little....Why does our society insist that we lump together such unrelated categories so that we can create an "orderly" world?... humans like categories because it helps them to order other people, but at the same time humans dislike them because it allows them to be ordered around...
Arshiya: The whole dilemma, drama arises because none of characters in the stories fit into these two categories....What about our story-telling brain prefers two categories rather than a set of infinite possibilities?...the categories are inherently there, and not necessarily created by external social determinants....are categories, taxonomies simply rules and limitations that we impose on our stories because it provides us with more stability ? ...how exactly...?
Political Diversity: Red, Blue, Purple: "There are votes, and there are views." Not everybody who votes the same is the same.
genre, n. [F. genre kind: see GENDER.]
1. a. Kind; sort; style.
b. spec. A particular style or category of works of art; esp. a type of literary work characterized by a particular form, style, or purpose.
gender, n. [a. OF. gen(d)re (F. genre) = Sp. and Pg. genero, It. genere, ad. L. gener- stem form of genus race, kind = Gr. , Skr. janas: Aryan *genes-, f. root - to produce; cf. KIN.]
1. Kind, sort, class; also, genus as opposed to species. the general gender: the common sort (of people). Obs.
2. In mod. (esp. feminist) use, a euphemism for the sex of a human being, often intended to emphasize the social and cultural, as opposed to the biological, distinctions between the sexes.
Sleeping Hermaphrodite, The Louvre, from ArtServe at the Australian National University
From Foucault's Ideas (Dangerous and Otherwise):
A Meditation on Categorization
Photograph by Simran Kaur, BMC '04
| Genre | Gender |
|---|---|
| Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: taxonomy of phrase space-- five "modes" of fiction, each defined by the agency of the central character:
|
Sex I.D. from the BBC: Empathisers are better at accurately judging other people's emotions and responding appropriately....women in general are better at empathising.... Systemisers prefer to investigate how systems work. A system...can be...anything that follows a set of rules....Men in general are better at systemising.... Scientists believe that people with lower testosterone levels tend to take fewer risks.... those with higher testosterone levels tend to drive a harder bargain and are less compromising. Might this mean that the "more emotional/empathizing feminine" mind tends towards tragedy? Might this mean that the "more en-distanced/systemitizing masculine" mind tends towards satire?(Or towards science????) Might this mean that the "more laid-back androgynous" mind tends toward the comedic? |
| hoax? fiction? murder mystery? diary? memoir? history? science? | male? female? hermaphroditic? pseudo-hermaphroditic? |
| Michael: this woman...is trying to construct a narrative which...justifies the pain of her life....initially this made me think it was a hoax Lauren : I've been thinking about the book as idealizing her life....A lot of people...idealiz[e] what they don't remember clearly. Annie: To me, Barbin's narrative... unfolds as a 'murder-mystery'-like story.... Maureen: I think it is benificial...if the book is read like a diary....the emotion, because it is so excessive, is better understood ....conflict...needs to be personal and emotional. Brittany: The last third of book seems to "fall apart"....her depression overwhelmed her narrative cohesiveness. Her book unraveled...and in doing so actually jumped categories from "memoir" to "suicide note." Haley : Being able to read the actual medical reports...from a different point of view was refreshing....to take a step back from the overwrought emotion... and understand what happened to her through the eyes of an "outsider"...think about it as a real text and not just a piece of fiction. |
Austin :
The idea that there are different gendered brains makes sense to me, but the narration of Herculine Barbin doesn't seem to quite follow that idea in my opinion. Michael: ...the most essential, unchanging component of s/his personality was a certain analytic stoicism which lent itself to the book's strange brand of comedy....this voice was decidedly un-gendered....details sound like excerpts from some vulgar comedy. Yet...it becomes oddly tragi-comic... "Stuck in the Middle: An Interview with Jeffrey Eugenides" (via Ghazal): I liked the idea of having a hermaphrodite narrate the book because the nature of the novelist is already hermaphroditic. You're supposed to get into the heads of both sexes and to travel back and forth with ease....What I'm saying is this: the act of reading that novel puts the reader into a state of gender confusion. You move back and forth from the male realm to the female..... Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own : ...a great mind is androgynous. It is when this fusion takes place that the mind is fully fertilized and uses all its faculties....without some mixture of the kind the intellect seems to predominate and the other faculties of the mind harden and become barren....one must be woman-manly or man-womanly....Some collaboration has to take place in the mind between the woman and the man before the art of creation can be accomplished. Some marriage of opposites has to be consummated. The whole of the mind must lie wide open....The writer...must lie back and let his mind celebrate its nuptials in darkness.... |
From Herculine Barbin: Science was unable to find an explanation for a certain absence....(39).
"I must not only see for myself, I must also know everything you can tell me"....science conceded that it was convinced (81).
O princes of science, enlightened chemists...analyze then, if that is possible, all the sorrows that have burned, devoured this heart down to its last fibers; all the scalding tears that have drowned it, squeezed it dry in their savage grasp! (103).
Lauren Z : I especially liked the themes of morality and religion....Herculine is called a devil...Later...Herculine claims that her relationship with Henriette is beautiful and pure. The Abbe...has a hard time separating what he considers divine, and what he considers sinful....Both Middlesex and Herculine Barbin's memoirs force us to question what seem like clearly dichotomous categories...the divine and sinful.
From Herculine Barbin: ...a moral code that was pitiless, disheartening, and diametrically oppposed to that of the divine Master (45).
Though I am a sad disinherited creature, I can still lift up my eyes to You, for You at least will not reject me! (93).
Anjali: ...all the classical references, again. Somehow the ones in Herculine Barbin are harder for me to figure out from context than the ones in Middlesex were. I'm confused about Ovid's Metamorpheses, for instance- which he keeps bringing up.
From Herculine Barbin: I confess that I was extraordinarily shaken when I read Ovid's Metamorphoses (8).
Doesn't the truth sometimes go beyond all imaginary conceptions, however exaggerated they may be? Have the Metamorphoses of Ovid gone further? (87)
...like Achilles...enter the lists, armed with my weakness alone and my deep inexperience of men (89).
I, who am called a man, have been granted the intimate, deep understanding of all the facets, all the secrets, of a woman's character. I can read her heart like an open book. I could count every beat of it....I have the secret of her strength and the measure of her weakness, and so I would make a detestable husband....I would cruelly abuse, perhaps, the immense advantage that would be mine (107).
Anjali: They both have that odd quality of premonition in hindsight. Herculine Barbin is filled with it....there're sentences scattered throughout that imply that he always knew he'd have a bad life. And Middlesex had something similar... That idea of fatedness (like Becky said)- in Middlesex Cal/lie singled out in his life those things which pointed towards what would ultimately happen to him. He/she could never have known what was coming, but by singling out those foreshadowings it feels like it was fate....I guess it's just, again, that whether something was fate or chance just depends on your perspective- whether you're looking forwards or backwards (as someone mentioned in class, I think).
(From the Beauty course:) Beauty is not the enemy. The enemy is the narrowing to a particular standard.
Virginia Woolf, from A Room of One's Own (again):
I do not believe that gifts, whether of mind or character, can be weighed like sugar and butter....All this pitting of sex against sex, of quality against quality; all this claiming of superiority and imputing of inferiority belong to the private-school stage of human existence where there are 'sides', and it is necessary for one side to beat another side, and of the utmost importance to walk up to a platform and receive from the hands of the Headmaster himself a highly ornamental pot. As people mature they cease to believe in sides or in Headmasters or in highly ornamental pots....delightful as the pastime of measuring may be, it is the most futile of all occupations, and to submit to the decrees of the measurers the most servile of attitudes. So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters.... it is much more important to be oneself than anything else....Think of things in themselves.....if we...see human beings not always in their relation to each other but in relation to reality....if we face the fact, for it is a fact, that there is no arm to cling to, but that we go alone and that our relation is to the world of reality and not only to the world of men and women, then the opportunity will come....
"There are times in life when the question of
knowing if one can think differently than one thinks, and perceive
differently than one sees, is absolutely necessary if one is to go on
looking and reflecting at all."
Michel Foucault, The Uses of Pleasure
"sex is good for thinking....Levi-Strauss argues
that many people do not think in the manner of philosophers, by
manipulating abstractions. Instead, they think w/. . . concrete things from
everyday life . . . some things are especially good to think about.
They can be arranged in patterns, which bring out unsuspected
relationships and define unclear boundaries. Sex, I submit, is one of
them. As carnal knowledge works its way into cultural patterns, it
supplies endless material for thought, especially when it appears in
narratives--dirty jokes, male braggadocio, female gossip, bawdy
songs, and erotic novels. In all these forms, sex is not simply a
subject but also a tool used to pry the top off things and explore
their inner works. It does for ordinary people what logic does for
philosophers; it helps make sense of things."
Robert Darnton, "Sex for Thought." Sexualities in
History: A Reader
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