literature

Links for your perusal that may or may not be relevant to class. Add your own! No seriously, add your own.

The H-Word was a series on Bitch Magazine's blog done by a former sex-worker on a variety of issues. I haven't read all of the articles, but I thought the ones I did read were really interesting and worth reading. I would suggest reading most of their series, actually, so go check it out.

Prism Comics is the comic book company mentioned in class. 

-There was a very interesting exhibit at Drexel last fall (fall '11) called Half the Sky: Women in the New Art of China full of Chinese women artist's work. I remember reading interviews/articles quoting the artists themselves and how they interacted with/thought of feminism, but I can't remember where I left it at the moment.

Will be edited later. This computer doesn't have my zillions of bookmarks. Also, why don't we have more conversations here? I understand I'm a broken record, but really I just like talking about things with people and this is a convenient (sort of?) way to do it. I know we have more thoughts in class than what we say.

            I have enjoyed the discussions we have had these past couple of weeks. What I think works best for the benefit of the class is using Serendip as a tool to establish discussion topics for upcoming classes. In addition to that, I like the fact that Anne is a part of our discussion and encourages us to come with additional thoughts and questions to the next class. What I would like to format from the course’s structure is the amount of time we spend discussing a text, I think it would be best if we reduce the amount of texts per week to analyze them further. This format would allow us to re-read a text if necessary and give room to multiple interpretations based on class discussions. If I had the opportunity to go back and spend more time discussing texts, I would like to read Margaret Price’s ”Mad at School”(especially after having her in class).

 Virginia Woolf calls every woman to join a society that is separate from the society in which men operate – the Outsiders’ Society.  She says that we cannot operate within the society of men, because there is “something in the conglomeration of people into societies that releases what is most selfish and violent, least rational and humane in the individuals…” (124). The Outsiders’ Society, Woolf states, is “the kind of society which the daughters of educated men might found and join outside your society but in co-operation with its ends” (126).  She indicates that there is power in being outside of the insiders’ society: “the power to change and the power to grow… can only be preserved by obscurity…” (135).  Existing and working in this Outsiders’ Society will give women power by obscuring them and separating them from the “limelight which paralyzes the free action of the human faculties and inhibits the human power to change and create…” (135).  Virginia Woolf believes that being outside of men’s society will “shroud” women “in darkness.” 

Last semester I took a course entitled “Reading Popular Culture: Freaks” with Suzanne Schneider, in which we discussed at length what it means to me marginal and why people in the so-called “Outsiders’ Society” are put there in the first place.  The idea of existing outside of society according to what we discussed in Freaks is very different from what Virginia Woolf seems to think about being an “outsider.”

At the beginning of this class we were shown The Dinner Party by Judy Chicago, an art display immortalizing women Chicago thought were the most influential to the feminist movement. I felt there were many problems with this kind of depiction, but after reading Three Guineas I felt an even greater negative reaction to it. Chicago's Woolfe plate made Virginia Woolfe seem like the climax of a great tradition of feminist thought- not an evolution in the scientific sense of the word, but a slow build up to a lauded, supposed-perfect feminist. And not just any kind of feminist, but a feminist explicitly defined by and given such status by her [white] ciswoman body. This hardly felt appropriate to me. Virginia Woolfe's writings exclude more than they embrace, and attempt to instruct women what they should do with themselves (to be what, precisely?) in a way that can be especially harmful. Why should she remain such an iconic representation of feminism when feminism as a movement, as a word, as a lifestyle and perception has moved beyond what she imagined or, maybe more importanty, deemed appropriate? There are, however, pieces of Three Guineas that I believe can still be found useful. So what is Virginia Woolfe now? Who is she meant to be to us?

I've thought about that, and I've come up with my own imagining of The Dinner Party. I consider this an initial draft of what it will become, and have many ideas for its next incarnations.

I was sort of musing after class about the phrase, "a word is worth a thousand pictures" and am not sure I fully agree with that statement. The phrase agrues that a picture can be more directive for the imagination, invisioning for the onlooker, while words leave room for the imagination. However, I would partially disagree. Firstly, imaginative thought inspired from words or pictures isn't necessarily reproduced as just a vision or reciprocal image in the mind, but also in words. The way words may inspire an image in the mind, a picture may inspire words; which is also of an imaginative kind. Secondly, words aren't always so vague as to inspire just any interpretation; they contain associations, connatations, and produce feelings within a reader, just as a symbol in a painting holds a particular layer of meanings to the person observing. I always felt that word choice within a text was anything but random; specific to whatever statement or meaning the author desires to convey. Perhaps a word is worth a thousand pictures in terms of it's significance in transferring meaning to a reader, but I am not so sure words have so much less control that they are unable to strongly direct and influence the reader into a particular frame of mind or imaginative state.

As an English major, the college essays that I have thus-far written for my field have all been based on other people's work.  The topic may be as specific as a single poem, or cover several different works of literature, but the point is to make an argument about a specific idea or theme found in the work(s) being written about.  The style is very detached; while I am putting forth my own opinion, I still need to write in an unemotional way, basing my statements on quotations and facts.  The paper is my own interpretation of the work(s) involved, and it is written to be -- if not outright persuasive -- at least a sound argument.  Still, everything is far more clinical than, for example, the Jonathan Lethem essay that we read in class, "The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism."  Like an academic essay on English literature, Lethem made an argument and supported it with literary examples, but his tone was far warmer and more informal that both anything I have found myself called upon to write and the vast majority of academic essays that I have read -- though it was similar to non-fiction books, which generally have more of their authors' personalities than do essays.