What have you learned in English 215?

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Photo credit: Walt Whitman, “Notes on Dante,” Notebook LC #94 (Library of Congress)

In February we reviewed the English department’s learning outcomes:

Students in English 215 will demonstrate the ability to 1) read closely and analyze complex texts; 2) identify productive questions or problems in the reading; 3) use textual evidence to articulate ideas; 4) use the vocabulary of the discipline to discuss the texts and write evidence-based essays that effectively incorporate textual references; 5) understand literary elements (such as character, plot, theme, narrative, imagery, setting, figurative language); 6) use MLA style of citation and documentation correctly; and 7) select and evaluate different forms of research sources to support your critical ideas.

All of you demonstrated in our conversation about learning “incomes” (the skills and competencies that you bring to the course) that you know how to do these things. Our strategy was for each of you to improve these skills and competencies during the semester as you begin your College course of study in English.

Then, in February and March, you wrote about the discipline of English, and we contextualized the department’s program objectives in the recent history of English as an area of study:

The English Program emphasizes the study and practice of close reading, critical thinking and effective writing.

Production and Reception: The program considers how historical, social, and cultural contexts shape literary works, including those works in literary and expressive traditions produced by cultures whose collective humanity and aesthetic identity have been historically devalued, denied, or dismissed

Language and Poetics: The program expects students to study at least two genres of literature, understand how literary works relate intertextually, and appreciate the ways in which the history of language has affected the development of literature 

Criticism and Theory: The program expects students to understand the history of criticism and critical theory, its application in literary analysis as well as current scholarly debates in the field of English studies

Reading and Writing: The program teaches the conventions of critical analysis-including careful reading, the use of literary vocabulary, an orderly critical approach, and the use of writing for a range of expressive and persuasive purposes

Finally, in late May you generated a list of more specific learning outcomes together:

  • How to support a claim within an essay
  • There is a difference between reading as a reader and reading as a writer. I hesitate to say I’ve learned fully what that difference is, but knowing it exists has been eye-opening all on its own.
  • How to create more worthwhile annotations
  • When reading a text, it can be genuinely fun to explore the many ways you can analyze said text. For me, I explored psychoanalysis the most, and it was abundantly fascinating. It made me want to read all of my favorite books all over again just to see what I would discover.
  • How to make meaning in an essay
  • There is more to English than reading and writing; we can learn about culture, intonation, interpretation, etc.
  • How to write in a way that is directed towards the audience of a blog.
  • How to look for parallels and metaphors within writing. Ex. Calvino’s “Black Sheep”
  • How to support our ideas with quotes and evidence. 
  • How to look past the information that you are given on the surface of a text
  • How to find evidence that will properly backup your claim
  • How to find a writing pattern when reading multiple pieces of work from one author.
  • I’m slowly coming to terms that not every paper needs to have a definitive ending. I’ve learned that writing one can feel like closing the door on advancing one’s thinking, and that is anything but helpful. Admitting there’s still more to know, more to study, more to question, is both scary and exciting.
  • My mind changes all the time, so I need to embrace the ability of going back and rewriting what I’ve written. There is nothing wrong in doing so, but there is something wrong in not. Changing one’s mind is a good thing, and this class has shown me not to shy away from that. Don’t be afraid to contradict yourself, it shows growth.
  • From an English teacher’s perspective, I’ve learned a lot of fascinating ways to approach certain topics, and I look forward to attempting to integrate them into my own teaching.Different methods of analyzing + reading + criticizing a piece
  • How to manage an active blog + how to share ones work with the public
  • How to engage the audience while still writing in a unique style
  • How to have a meaningful and productive conversation about a piece of writing + author that includes healthy criticism rather than just the absorbing of knowledge 

Emerson on History and Reform

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“Language has lost all its meaning in the universal cant. Representative government is really misrepresentative. . . . Manifest Destiny, Democracy, Freedom, fine names for an ugly thing. They call it otto [attar] or rose and lavender––I call it bilge-water.”

–Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Speech on Affairs in Kansas”

“There is a relation between the hours of our life and the centuries of time” (113), Emerson remarks in the inaugural essay in the First Series, “History.” His argument that we need to learn the art of reading history “actively and not passively” is the germinal idea behind Emerson’s understanding of history and social reform.

The proposition that most of what we know is not fixed but fluid was unsettling in Emerson’s time––as well as in our own. “I unsettle all things,” Emerson writes. “No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker with no Past at my back.” And in Circles, “Nothing is secure,” writes Emerson, “but life, transition, the energizing spirit. People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.”

What it really means to “live amid hallucinations,” to use Emersonian phrase, is to live a life in transition––to know that our knowledge is incomplete and that one of the joys of life is to pursue the incompleteness at the core of Emerson’s proposition. When he says at the end of “History” that a person is “a bundle of relations, a knot of roots, whose flower and fruitage is the world,” he means precisely what he says. The active and dynamic relation of self and world implies an understanding of what we know as provisional––constructed and reconstructed by the mind in perpetual interaction with itself and the world.

For Emerson, we read history to know our selves. To read sympathetically, and to read morally, is Emerson’s way of reminding his readers of the obligations of history. But to know our selves is to understand that any mediation on freedom or justice, any affirmation of a liberal democracy, must begin in the soil and with the roots. Here is a passage from the essay Fate in which he is thinking through the consequences of Manifest Destiny, and in particular the question of race:

The population of the world is a conditional population not the best, but the best that could live now; and the scale of tribes, and the steadiness with which victory adheres to one tribe, and defeat to another, is as uniform as the superposition of strata. We know in history what weight belongs to race. We see the English, French, and Germans planting themselves on every shore and market of America and Australia, and monopolizing the commerce of these countries. We like the nervous and victorious habit of our own branch of the family. We follow the step of the Jew, of the Indian, of the Negro. We see how much will has been expended to extinguish the Jew, in vain. Look at the unpalatable conclusions of Knox, in his “Fragment of Races,” — a rash and unsatisfactory writer, but charged with pungent and unforgettable truths. “Nature respects race, and not hybrids.” “Every race has its own habitat.” “Detach a colony from the race, and it deteriorates to the crab.” See the shades of the picture. The German and Irish millions, like the Negro, have a great deal of guano in their destiny. They are ferried over the Atlantic, and carted over America, to ditch and to drudge, to make corn cheap, and then to lie down prematurely to make a spot of green grass on the prairie.

The race question was central in Emerson’s time. He had read Robert Knox’s The Races of Men and was familiar with other nineteenth-century accounts of the idea of race. When these lines cited above are fully contextualized in the history of Emerson’s time, as one of Emerson’s readers, Eduardo Cadava writes, it is difficult not to read them as referring to the violent history of American colonization and imperialism. “For they put before us the violence, the inequality, the economic oppression, and colonialist and racist exclusions that affected, and continue to affect, so many human beings in the history of not only America but the earth” (The Other Emerson 106).

The question that Emerson raises in the first passages of Fate is “how shall I live?” might be answered, then, by acknowledging that we might choose to become more aware of the of the “illusions” or the “hallucinations” that insulate us from what Emerson calls the “guano” in the history and destiny of human beings. This is the central argument of a book by the writer Barry Lopez, The Rediscovery of North America, I am reading with another group of students this semester. Lopez speaks to the need to develop a recognition, much like what Emerson is calling for, of a historical and material and spiritual and psychological dimension of geography—of the place where we find ourselves, as Emerson might say. It follows that any (Emersonian) meditation on freedom and justice, or any endorsement or affirmation of the ideals of liberal democracy, must begin with the (violent) history of colonization.

What emerged late in the nineteenth-century, and persisted through the middle of the twentieth century, was an understanding of Emerson’s life and work as disengaged from the social and political and moral questions of his time. What we now know, and can now read in his writing, is the nature of Emerson’s engagement. In An Address on the Emancipation of the Negroes in the British West Indies (348–59 in Norton) and Address to the citizens of Concord on the Fugitive Slave Law (359–72 in Norton) Emerson makes the case for what he calls in the Concord address a “Higher Law.” His belief in a moral universe that transcends existing laws begins in the idea that there are unjust laws. In other words, as he says at the opening of his essay Politics,

In dealing with the State, we ought to remember that its institutions are not aboriginal, though they existed before we were born: that they are not superior to the citizen: that every one of them was once the act of a single man: every law and usage was a man’s expedient to meet a particular case: that they all are imitable, all alterable; we may make as good; we may make better.

Emerson believes in the fluidity of institutions based on the conviction that they are constructed or made. The expediencies of laws led Emerson’s quarrel with Daniel Webster, for example, who supported the Fugitive Slave Law to preserve the Union. What Emerson sees and is willing to make visible is that the law is a product of the materialism Emerson abhorred. The institution of slavery was perpetuated (both in the South and in the North) by the expediency of sustaining economy; and material prosperity and individual comforts are valued more than social justice. Emerson’s dissent is clear: morality is not subordinate but primary. As he says of institutions (including slavery): “all are imitable, all alterable; we may make as good; we may make better.” As Emerson wrote elsewhere, “If resistance to this law is not right, there is no right.”

Photo credit: Mark C. Long

Writing With Sources

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“We are as much informed of a writer’s genius by what he selects as by what he originates. We read the quotation with his eyes, and find a new and fervent sense; as a passage from one of the poets, well recited, borrows new interest from the rendering.”

––Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Quotation and Originality“

“The alert reader can discover, and take much pleasure in discovering remarkable verbal strategies, metaphoric patterns, repetitions and developments of sound, sense, and image throughout Emerson’s writing.”

—Joel Porte, “The Problem of Emerson”

Literary analysis involves discovering, selecting, summarizing, paraphrasing and quoting primary and secondary sources. In the coming weeks, as we read Emerson–and think and talk and write about his words–we will be working on the art of quotation. Here are some simple protocols to begin a larger conversation about writing conventions:

  • Quote only to provide evidence to demonstrate a claim or to develop the argument
  • Introduce the quotation so that a reader understands your reason for quoting

The most succinct summary of Emerson’s philosophy of education appears in a journal entry dated September 13, 1831. “Education is the drawing out of the soul” (490).

Or, use signal phrases is an introductory clause to signal to the reader a shift from your point of view.

In a journal entry dated September 13, 1831, Emerson defined education as “the drawing out of the soul” (490).

  • Follow the quotation with a discussion of what you want the reader to take away from the quotation.

Calling explicit attention to the root of the Latin word Educare, to draw out or forth, Emerson once again locates learning in a continuum. “Because the soul is progressive,” Emerson begins his essay “Art,” “it never quite repeats itself, but in every act attempts the production of a new and fairer whole.”

  • When you introduce a quotation with a signal phrase, the quotation becomes part of your sentence. Make sure that the sentence is grammatically correct. If you are having difficulty, you can use brackets or ellipsis
  • The choice of verb in a signal phrase will help you indicate to your reader information about the disposition of the source. Here is an example from an essay about Emerson’s writing by the literary critic Barbara Packer:

“In the late essay ‘Poetry and Imagination,’ published in Letters and Social Aims, he argues that all symbols were meant to hold only for a moment, and that it is the poet’s capacity to transfer significance endlessly from one symbol to another that makes [the poet] the emblem of human thought. ‘All thinking is analogizing, and it is the business of life to learn metonymy’” (732).

  • Continue to read as a writer. Pay attention to how critics use signal phrases. The models will provide you with examples of the conventions for citation in English studies.

Signal phrases need not all be the same. This injunction is a matter of structure and style. Rather than repeat “Emerson says. . .” or “Emerson writes. . .” use words that indicate what you take to the be the tone of the essay. (Emerson “insists,” or “suggest to the contrary,” or “notes that.” Consider “argues,” “adds,” “contends,” “points out,” “admits,” “comments,” “insists.”) Or, consider the use of a transitional phrase:

“In an apparent contradiction, Carlyle goes on to argue that. . . .”

  • Embed a quotation as a complete sentence in your essay. Or begin a sentence with Emerson’s prose and then add the signal at the end:

Emerson even goes so far as to say that the poetry we once admired “has long since come to be a sound of tin pans” (317).

Emerson is firm about the need to reinvigorate poetic form. “What we once admired as poetry has long since come to be a sound of tin pans” (317).

“What we once admired as poetry has long since come to be a sound of tin pans,” Emerson submits, for “many of our later books we have outgrown” (317).

  • Enclose short quotations (fewer than four lines) in quotation marks. An embedded quotation (that is, a quotation embedded into a sentence of your own) must fit grammatically into the sentence of which it is a part.

A simple formulation of this argument in favor of comparative thinking is provided by Arthur Kleinman, a psychiatrist and medical anthropologist at Harvard University. Kleinman’s “Eight Questions” do more than merely guide the medical practitioner toward the step of gathering information about cultural background. The questions prompt a reevaluation of one’s own cultural perspective as one that is not universal. As Kleinman explains, “If you can’t see that your own culture has its own set of interests, emotions, and biases, how can you expect to deal successfully with someone else’s culture?” (Qtd. In Fadiman 261). This position requires a radical reorientation from simply considering “the other” as outside the norm to understanding one’s own normative cultural conventions.

  • Set off long quotations (more than four lines) in what is called a “block quotation.” To set off a long quotation, begin a new line, indent ten spaces from the left margin, and double space throughout. Do not use quotation marks. Block quotations need adequate introduction and are most often immediately preceded by a full sentence ending in a colon. Too often the reader will get lost as you transition from your own writing into a long quotation. It’s better to use a short introductory tag (as described above) and then follow the quotation with your discussion.

Whitman Ah Sing’s resistance to a “hyphenated identity” is further illustrated near the opening of the final chapter in the novel, One-Man Show”:

There is no East here. West is meeting West. This was all West. All you saw was West. This is The Journey In the West. I am so fucking offended. Why aren’t you offended? Let me help you get offended. Always be careful to take offense. These sinophiles dig us so much, they’re drooling over us. That kind of favorableness I can do without. They think they know us—the wide range of us from sweet to sour—because they eat in Chinese restaurants. . . .  I’ve read my Aristotle and Agee, I’ve been to college; they have ways to criticize the theater besides for sweet and sourness. They could do laundry reviews, clean or dirty. Come on. What’s so ‘exotic’? (308)

Here Whitman is offended by the “sinophiles” who consider themselves knowledgeable about the experiences of the “Chinese.” Of course as the language of this passage suggests, Whitman is performing—he is on stage, speaking to the audience, waving the reviews in his hand. His veiled reference to Wu’s The Journey to the West reminds his audience, as he puts it elsewhere, that “we all the same Americans” (282). His rambling monologue therefore has a very particular rhetorical end” to challenge his audience to see how easily they construct a binary opposition that forces him (“I’m common ordinary”) to be either American or Chinese.

  • Check your quotation for accuracy at least twice. If you intend to add or substitute a word in the quotation, enclose the words in square brackets. Indicate omissions of material with ellipses (three periods, with a space between each). If you omit words at the end of sentence, indicate the omission with three periods (an ellipses) and end punctuation (a period)
  • MLA Persnickities: Commas and periods go inside quotation marks. Semicolons and colons go outside quotation marks. Question marks, exclamation points and dashes go inside if they are part of the quotation, outside if they are your additions.

Photo credit: Mark. C. Long

Reading Emerson: Criticism and Theory

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In the first few weeks of this class we talked about the English department’s four program objectives:

Production and Reception: The program teaches how historical, social, and cultural contexts shape literary works-including those works produced by cultures whose humanity and identity have been devalued, denied, or dismissed;

Language and Poetics: The program introduces students to the major genres of literature, rhetorical and literary strategies, and the ways in which literary works relate intertextually.

Criticism and Theory: The program introduces students to historical contexts and critical theories that shape literary analysis and inform scholarly debates in the field of literary studies.

Reading and Writing: The program teaches careful reading, the use of literary vocabulary, an orderly critical approach, and the use of writing for a range of purposes.

All of these program outcomes are in play in English courses all of the time––at least to some degree. But at this point in the course, our case study of Emerson is moving in the domain of literary production and reception. On the one hand, reading (and studying) Emerson’s writing is our primary work. On the other hand, your study of Emerson’s writing can become more as you learn more about Emerson and his milieu, gifting you with a more capacious appreciation for his contributions to literary and cultural history; that is, as you join other readers in the study of Emerson, you will find that your reading will become more informed and your writing about (and with) Emerson more productive.

I recommend that you think about our work in the coming weeks in two ways. First, you are continuing to read in the primary work:  Emerson’s journals and letters, as well as his lectures and essays and poems. There is an argument to be made that Emerson’s essays are examples of literary criticism and theory, too, and we can talk about this idea. Second, you will be reading in the history of commentary on Emerson’s writings, what we call the secondary materials. The goal is for these two areas of reading and study to come together in your thinking and writing.

The Norton Critical Edition gives you a glimpse of the vast corpus of materials in the vast archive of secondary writing on Emerson’s works. We will be sampling Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Reviews and Impressions––by practicing poets and essayists; people trained in history and historiography or literary and cultural studies; and philosophers, theologians, literary critics, sociologists and political scientists.

Last week, for example, the literary historian Perry Miller’s “New England Transcendentalism: Native or Imported?” asked you to think about the “ism” in its title. Miller’s question helps us to understand Emerson’s “heresy” in the mind of his mentor in the Harvard Divinity School, Andrews Norton—that is, his pupil’s “trust in intuition, in direct perception of truth” (668). One suggestion Miller makes is Emerson’s 1842 lecture, “The Transcendentalist,” in which he exclaims in the opening to his audience at Boston’s Masonic Temple, “What is popularly called Transcendentalism among us, is Idealism; Idealism as it appears in 1842” (93). Another recommendation was to return to Emerson’s essay “Nature.” The “Contexts” section in the Norton (573–83) lists four additional resources, comments by Madame de Stael, William Wordsworth, Frederic Henry Hedge, and Sampson Reed. Have a look at Russell Goodman’s entry Transcendentalism in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The Table of Contents of this Encyclopedia will also lead you to other entries if you become interested in the philosophical context for reading Emerson, such as “Idealism” and “Materialism.”

The Reviews and Impressions from Emerson’s contemporaries will be useful fas well. So will the reception of these ideas in the next generation of American writers and thinkers. Perry Miller, along with Steven Whicher, Joel Porte, and F. O. Matthiessen reset the terms of the critical discussion of Emerson; and excerpts from this body of commentary is included in the “Criticism” section of the Norton––from the 1930s (Firkins) to Hyatt H. Waggoner’s assessment of Emerson as a poet in the 1970s. These writers make up the historical contexts and critical theories that shape literary analysis and inform scholarly debates in the field of literary studies that we describe as criticism and theory.

In the coming weeks, reading the primary and secondary work offers you the opportunity to place your own experiences and assessment of Emerson’s writing into the arc of commentary by other readers. The pleasures of reading may even become the pleasures of reading about reading. From words to words about words. Then comes the important questions that arise in any course of reading and reflection in a community of readers, the pursuit of which some people call theory, or what might be described as words about words about words.

As you continue your writing about Emerson, consider developing your first thoughts (or first impressions) into second thoughts (more developed thinking). One way to do this is to follow the strategy Emerson himself used in the essay Quotation and Originality: make a case and then argue the opposite of the case. That is, Emerson may offer in one sentence or section of an essay what you think is a position or case; but then, and this happens again and again, the position becomes less reliable, more uncertain, even difficult to hang on to. “I take this evanescence and lubricity of all objects, which lets them slip through our fingers then when we clutch hardest, to be the most unhandsome part of our condition,” Emerson says in his essay Experience.

Photo credit: Aurora Borealis, Sarkijarvi, Finland. Mark C. Long

A Ritual to Read to Each Other

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If you don’t know the kind of person I am
and I don’t know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dike.

And as elephants parade holding each elephant’s tail,
but if one wanders the circus won’t find the park,
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider—
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give — yes or no, or maybe —
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.

––William Stafford, from The Way It Is: New and Selected Poems (1998). Rpt. in Indivisible: Poems for Social Justice (2013)

Reading as a Writer

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In class on Wednesday I mentioned a set of terms that readers use to talk about how we read and the forms of notations we use, especially when we are reading as writers or studying a text for one reason or another.

The activity of reading is a complex process: it involves the formation of and testing of inferences about the internal relations of the work and about the external relations between the work and the world. Much of the activity of reading remains tacit; that is, we do it for the most part without being conscious of what we are doing.

Reading as a Writer most often involves putting the process of reading to work in writing. This is why you will hear people say, when talking about a critical essay, “that is an insightful reading of Hart Crane’s book-length poem The Bridge.”

The process of reading includes general comprehension (summary), analysis (recognition and use of features of text), interpretation (construction of meaning from a text and assumptions about and ways of reading), and evaluation (identifying and analyzing assumptions and judgments). All readers are prone to oversights and errors and so the process of reading involves a tolerance for uncertainty and a willingness to not settle too quickly on one judgment or another.

marginalia
Marginal notes and annotation on section XLVII of Ezra Pound’s Cantos

Summary: the reader formulates a brief restatement that omits concrete details, in the case of a narrative, in order to isolate the significant actions and formal divisions in the work. We summarize a text so that we have a sufficient understanding of the character(s) and action(s) of the work.

e.g. (exempli gratia or for example) here is a schematic summary of Hart Crane’s The Bridge (a seventy-six page poem): The poem begins with an introductory proem and then is divided into eight parts. In the poem, a young man awakens at dawn, gazes out over the harbor and city, and then spends the day wandering in the metropolis, gradually becoming involved in its corruption, and, after agonizing disillusionment and drunkenness—a kind of spiritual descent into Hades—comes, in the final part of the poem, to an apparently illuminating vision of order or transcendence.

Marginalia: the reader is focused on her response to the work—what springs to mind and into body in the course of your reading. Its purpose is to register your feelings and thoughts as you read to examine, deepen and perhaps change them. We respond to texts in the mode of marginalia when we draw on our own emotions, life experience and intellectual competencies

isaac_newton-marginalia
Isaac Newton’s marginal notations

Annotation: the reader brings to the work factual information from an external source. Its purpose is to clarify apparent ambiguities, obscurities and references. We annotate—or at least we should—when a term or reference in the text slows us down, confuses us or presents an interpretive problem

1880_marginalia2
marginal notes and annotation

Explication: the reader proceeds word-by-word, phrase-by-phrase, line-by-line, with the intent of describing the work’s formal features—the lexical, grammatical, syntactic and sequential choices of an author. Its purpose is to generate awareness of the formal features of a work so as to be more accountable to how the work is put together. We explicate to make explicit the immediate indices of our attention—the lexical, grammatical, syntactic choices of an author; we analyze, relying on all the previous modes—marginalia, annotation and explication—to communicate to your reader something interesting and significant about the passage(s) under discussion

Analysis: the reader isolates one or more elements of the work for closer attention. We use analysis to separate the work into parts, or into cause and effect relations, in order to probe different relations, to generate questions, and more fully understand the whole.

Interpretation: the reader sets forth one or more meanings of a work according to a programmatic set of assumptions or ideological beliefs. We interpret in order to make a persuasive case for a meaning of the work.

Intertextuality

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Reading Michel Foucault’s “What is an Author?” is an opportunity to consider the ways texts are made out of other texts. The range of references in his essay are a good reminder of how we think with others––how, metaphorically speaking, we are in thought rather than thought being in us.

Intertextuality is a useful term to describe this fact, in part, because it unsettles commonplace assumptions about authorship and originality. Remarkably these ideas about texts and other texts were circulating in the nineteenth century. Here is how Ralph Waldo Emerson, who we will be reading together in a few weeks, approaches this idea in his late essay “Quotation and Originality”:

Our debt to tradition through reading and conversation is so massive, our protest or private addition so rare and insignificant, — and this commonly on the ground of other reading or hearing, — that, in a large sense, one would say there is no pure originality. All minds quote. Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands. By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. We quote not only books and proverbs, but arts, sciences, religion, customs, and laws; nay, we quote temples and houses, tables and chairs by imitation.

At about the same time Emerson was writing his literary essays the natural historian Charles Darwin’s writing was proposing that the essences of things were by definition relational. Darwin’s research led people to become more aware of how things are connected with other things, whether animal, vegetable, or mineral. John Muir makes a comparable comment in his journals during his first summer in the mountains of California. “When we try to pick out anything by itself,” he writes, “we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe” (My First Summer in the Sierra 110). Whether it is Emerson writing about quotation, or Darwin or Muir reflecting on the natural world, the study of relationships between things—and of things as sets of relationships—offers a useful analogy for the study of language and literature.

The Latin term intertexto means to intermingle while weaving. The French semiotician Julia Kristeva uses the term(1) in the essay “Word, Dialogue, and Novel” to describe the constitutive process. Working with ideas from the writer Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin (1895-1975), she argues that any text “is constructed of a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another” (66). Here is how another literary theorist, Roland Barthes, puts the case:

Any text is a new tissue of past citations. Bits of code, formulae, rhythmic models, fragments of social languages, etc., pass into the text and are redistributed within it, for there is always language before and around the text. Intertextuality, the condition of any text whatsoever, cannot, of course, be reduced to a problem of sources or influences; the intertext is a general field of anonymous formulae whose origin can scarcely ever be located; of unconscious or automatic quotations, given without quotation marks. (“Theory of the Text” 39)

As Emerson suggests, the very existence of a text implies coexistence with other texts. Film adaptations of books, cultural references in television and film, remix and sampling in music—all of these practices are intertextual.

Endnote

1. Literary and cultural theorists that discuss the concept of intertextuality include Vladimir Volosinov, Mikhail Bakhtin, Julia Kristeva, Roland Barthes, and Gerard Gennete. Volosinov’s Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (1986) is a study of the relationship between language and society. Genette’s The Architext (1992), Palimpsests (1997), and Paratexts (1997) elaborate 1) the ways a text relates to other texts (transtextuality); 2) explicit quotation or allusion (intertextuality); 3) prefaces, interviews, publicity, reviews (paratextuality), commentary (metatextuality); 4) the play of one text off another (hypertextuality), and 5) generic expectations (architextuality).

 

Go Figure

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“All thinking is analogizing, and it is the business of life to learn metonymy.”

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Poetry and the Imagination”

“The apparition of these faces in a crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.” 

––Ezra Pound

Metaphor and Metonymy

“They are different kinds of processes. Metaphor is principally a way of conceiving of one thing in terms of another, and its primary function is understanding. Metonymy, on the other hand, has primarily a referential function, that is, it allows us to use one entity to stand for another. 

But metonymy is not merely a referential device. It also serves the function of providing understanding. For example, in the case of the metonymy THE PART FOR THE WHOLE there are many parts that can stand for the whole. Which part we pick out determines which aspect of the whole we are focusing on. When we say that we need some “good heads” on the project, we are using “good heads” to refer to “intelligent people.” The point is not just to use a part (head) to stand for a whole (person) but rather to pick out a particular characteristic of the person, namely, intelligence, which is associated with the head. The same is true for other kinds of metonymies.

Thus metonymy serves some of the same purposes that metaphor does, and in somewhat the same way, but it allows us to focus more specifically on certain aspects of what is being referred to. It is also like metaphor in that it is not just a poetic or rhetorical device. Nor is it just a matter of language. Metonymic concepts (like THE PART FOR THE WHOLE) are part of the ordinary, everyday way we think and act as well as talk.  

For example, we have in our conceptual system a special case of the metonymy THE PART FOR THE WHOLE, namely, THE FACE FOR THE PERSON. For example:

She’s just a pretty face.
There are an awful lot of faces out there in the audience.
We need some new faces around here.”

—from George Lakoff & Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (1980), 36–37

What is a Metaphor?

Understanding and experiencing one thing in terms of another

The pale-gray granite spires pierced the evening sky like needles.

The thought beneath so slight a film—
Is more distinctly seen—
As laces just reveal the surge—
Or mists—the Apennine. (Emily Dickinson)

All the world’s a stage. (Shakespeare)

Presentiment—is that long shadow—on the lawn—
Indicative that the sun goes down (Emily Dickinson).

What is a Metonymy?

Using one part or an aspect of an experience to stand for some other part (or the whole) of that experience. (Unlike metaphor which involves two domains of experience, metonymy (lit. “change of name”) only requires one. Unlike metaphor which is based on similarity, metonymy uses contiguity, i.e. ‘closeness’ of association.

pen for author; the bench for law, the ballot box for democracy
Head of cattle (used for counting number of cattle in a herd)
The buses are on strike today
Paris has dropped hemlines this year
The ham sandwich is getting impatient for his check
Hollywood is producing terrible movies these days

“The book is moving right along” contains an instance of a common metonymy of PRODUCT FOR PROCESS, in which the book, the product of the activity of writing, stands for the activity itself. Without the metonymy of the book for the writing of the book, one would say “the writing is moving right along.”

—Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh (203)

Other metonymies

PRODUCT FOR PRODUCER
    He bought a Ford.
    He’s got a Picasso.

OBJECT USED FOR USER
    The sax has the flu today.
    The buses are on strike.

CONTROLLER FOR CONTROLLED
    Napoleon lost at Waterloo.
    A Mercedes rear-ended me.

INSTITUTION FOR PEOPLE RESPONSIBLE
    Exxon has raised its prices again.
    You’ll never get the university to agree to that.

THE PLACE FOR THE INSTITUTION
    The White House isn’t saying anything.
    Wall Street is in a panic.

THE PLACE FOR THE EVENT
    Remember the Alamo.
    Watergate changed our politics.

—from George Lakoff & Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (1980), 38–39

What is Conceptual Metaphor?

So called “figures of speech” are perhaps better understood as figures of thought, as ways of saying one thing in terms of something else to reflect an understanding and experience of one kind of thing in terms of another. For example,

love is conceptualized as a process or journey: “Look how far we’ve come,” It’s been a long, bumpy road,” “We’re at a crossroads,” “We may have to go our separate ways,” “Our marriage is on the rocks,” and “we’re spinning our wheels.”

Contrary to what we might think, such conceptualizations of the experience we call love actually constrain how we think creatively and express our ideas about love in everyday and literary discourse. In this view, figurative thought allows us to use language to see something in terms of something else; however, closer inspection often reveals not so much a new metaphorical mapping between dissimilar domains but in fact the making manifest some of the possibilities about love that are suggested by the standing metaphorical concept “love is a journey.”

One may conclude that the constraints on how we speak and think are not imposed by the limits of language but by the ways we actually use figures of thought to think of our ordinary experiences.

Love is a journey One abstract domain of experience (love) & a concrete domain (journey)
Look how far we’ve come!
It has been a long, bumpy road
We are at a crossroads
They went their separate ways
Our marriage is on the rocks
We are spinning our wheels

Love as a natural force
She swept me off her feet
Waves of passion overwhelmed him
A whirlwind romance
Waves of passion

Love as magic
She cast a spell over him
He was entranced by her
She was spellbound
The magic is gone

Love as unity
We were made for each other
She is my better half
We belong together
They are inseparable

Theories are buildings
That theory needs more support
The foundation of Darwin’s theory is shaky
Her theory collapsed

Figures of thought are everywhere: an overeager funeral director is a “vulture”; a dishonest card player is “sly as a fox”; and a professor summing up a point begins a sentence with the phrase, “In a nutshell. . . .” I will not discuss here the related and overlapping relational figures such as, analogy, homology, and so on.

Definitions (and examples)

Simile: an explicit comparison between two things by using words such as “like,” “as,” “than,” “appears,” “seems.”

The pale-gray granite spires pierced the evening sky like needles.

The thought beneath so slight a film—
Is more distinctly seen—
As laces just reveal the surge—
Or mists—the Apennine. (Emily Dickinson)

Metaphor an implicit comparison based on an implied resemblance between two unlike things. In a metaphor two conceptual domains are brought together, as opposed to metonymy in which the relation is within a single conceptual domain.

(“Earth’s Eye” Henry David Thoreau’s figure for Walden pond)

“All the world’s a stage,” (Shakespeare)

Presentiment—is that long shadow—on the lawn—
indicative that the sun goes down (Emily Dickinson).

Implied metaphors are less evident (“He brayed his refusal to leave”)

extended or controlling metaphors keep the comparison alive in successive lines of poetry or in stages of a narrative.

His art is eccentricity, his aim
How not to hit the mark he seems to aim at,
His passion how to avoid the obvious,
His technique how to vary the avoidance. (Robert Francis).

Metonymy (“change of name”): functions by way of association (through physical or temporal contiguity). Metonymy substitutes the token for the type, or a particular instance, property, or characteristic for the general principle or function.

The ham sandwich is getting impatient for his check.
Hollywood is producing terrible movies these days.

Synecdoche: a part substituted for the whole; and as such, synecdoche functions as a form of metonymy. In synecdoche the terms of reference are concrete, as opposed to metonymy, in which the terms of reference often bridge the gap from abstract to concrete. It can be expressed as species for genus, material for thing made, abstract quality for thing possessing it (cf. microcosm and macrocosm relationship, wherein an individual entity is seen as recapitulating the nature and structure of the universe, or cause and effect).

Elizabeth lives four doors down
They’re taking on hands down at the factory.

Irony: In irony proper, the speaker is aware of a double meaning and the victim unaware. (As opposed to sarcasm, where both parties understand the double meaning).

In modern terms, irony can be understood as 1) verbal irony and 2) dramatic irony. Verbal irony is a form of speech in which one meaning is stated and a different, usually antithetical meaning is intended.

If I say “Wonderful day, isn’t it,” looking up at a concerned friend after I slip and fall on a patch of ice, the statement is understood in an ironic sense.

When Hamlet rejects the idea of suicide with the remark, “Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,” his remark is unconsciously ironic because conscience is a sacramental word associated with moral goodness, whereas coward has pejorative connotations.

Dramatic irony is a plot device according to which a) the spectators know more than the protagonist; b) the character reacts in a way contrary to that which is appropriate or wise; c) characters or situations are compared or contrasted for ironic effects, such as parody; d) there is a marked contrast between what the character understands about his acts and what the play demonstrates about them.

Building on the romantic sense of irony as a means of expressing the paradoxical nature of reality (since it expresses two meanings simultaneously), the modern critic Kenneth Burke has argued that verbal and dramatic irony are especially prevalent in twentieth century literature. He reasons that in any historical period when stable values are undermined, irony provides an appropriate (although perhaps not sufficient) attitude.

The Work of Knowing

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Reading in English is more than finding information as you might, say, in a biology textbook or in a book that describes the major theories of psychology. Reading in English is also more than the act of recording information or summarizing main ideas.

Consider what happens when you are faced with reading a poem. To read the following poem, Ezra Pound’s  “In a Station of the Metro,” is to become aware of the occasion of reading:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

This poem invites a reader to note its particular parts and to ask how they might come together. Who is speaking? In what context? What about the language? Why “apparition”? What about the two lines of the poem? How do I make sense of the second line of the poem? One of the ways to read the poem would be to write about it. Working on a text by writing about it is a way of reading, or rereading, that will help you practice becoming aware of how you are reading, and consider the consequences in the choices you have made in the act of reading.

Or consider the short poem by Margaret Atwood that we read together in class:

You fit into me
like a hook into an eye

a fish hook
an open eye

The two stanzas are readily understood to be similar. The hook and the eye, however, are common terms in two different domains of discourse. In the first stanza we are asked to consider the “fit” of two people (“you” and “me”) using the clasp that holds a garment together; in the second stanza, the speaker of the poem reorients the two terms and we are offered a quite different attitude toward the relationship we were given to understand in the first stanza.

Writing becomes a powerful tool for reading texts that do not easily summarize—texts that present readers with striking, surprising, even troubling uses of language–whether one is citing the philosophical dialogues of Plato or the writing about economics by Adam Smith. Consider the following passage from a lecture by the philosopher William James delivered at the Lowell Institute in December of 1906:

We live in a world of realities that can be infinitely useful or infinitely harmful. Ideas that tell us which of them to expect count as the true ideas in all this primary sphere of verification, and the pursuit of such ideas is a primary human duty. The possession of truth, so far from being here an end in itself, is only a preliminary means towards other vital satisfactions. If I am lost in the woods and starved, and find what looks like a cow-path, it is of the utmost importance that I should think of a human habitation at the end of it, for if I do so and follow it, I save myself. The true thought is useful here because the house which is its object is useful. The practical value of true ideas is thus primarily derived from the practical importance of their objects to us.

Or consider the opening of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay on the creative process he titled “Circles”:

The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end. It is the highest emblem in the cipher of the world. . . . [E]very action admits of being outdone. Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth, that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens.

Most readers can follow these passages. But this is not language readily summarized. In fact, placing these excerpts back in the context of the lectures from which they are taken requires the reader to do some work. Marking the text in the margin, or underlining or bracketing phrases or sentences that are particularly difficult or recalcitrant, continues the process of making meaning. What does James mean that we live in a world of realities? Why the plural? What does it mean to say that these realities are “infinitely useful or infinitely harmful?” Can I begin with an analogy to a situation that translates the “we” into “me”?

The point here is that the reading begins with your encounter with the text and acknowledging the work of knowing. Sure, you could go to a book that summarizes James’ essay (and theory of truth) for you. But in doing so you merely repeat what someone else has concluded from her or his way of reading. More importantly, you miss an opportunity to learn how to read. Working on a text that challenges you is like mastering a sequence of chords on a guitar or learning how to throw a Frisbee. After spending time going over the passage you will be able to do more with that passage. With texts that are well put together, which deserve this kind of attention, you will most likely feel a sense of incompleteness, of not quite being able to sum it up. Not to worry, though, as this feeling is common in an experience of reading texts that matter.

Literary texts are texts that have mattered to readers. Literature, Ezra Pound quips, is “news that stays news.” The literary texts that remain news in a community of readers are texts that imagine ways of thinking about or being in the world that are useful in some way to readers. Literary texts, in this sense, might be understood as forms that we use to reason—to think with, or imagine, our selves and the world. “Literature is a point outside of our hodiernal circle,” Emerson writes in “Circles,” “through which a new one may be described. The use of literature is to afford us a platform whence we may command a view of our present life, a purchase by which we may move it.”

A comparable case is made by the poet Adrienne Rich in an essay I’m not sure I could live without,  When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-vision: “We need to know the writing of the past, and know it differently than we have ever known it; not to pass on a tradition but to break its hold over us.” Such a use of literature, or a need to know, begins in the act of reading—attentively, as well as with generosity and humility—as well as in the critical activity of thinking and writing that might follow.

Photo credit: Mark C. Long

Consider This

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What is English? This gnarly question has a complex history that I asked you to think about as we began the semester.

We have been using the term “English” to refer to a field of study—a body of material (literature, writing, texts), method (ways of reading or approaching texts) and theory (the questions that arise in the practice of criticism or the assumptions that underwrite particular methods, or a theoretical approach, such as structuralism).

So, where to begin? You might start, as many do, with Wikipedia:

In the past an academic degree in English usually meant an intensive study of British and American literary masterpieces. Now, however, an English Major encompasses a much broader range of topics which stretch over multiple disciplines. While the requirements for an English Major vary from university to university, most English departments emphasize three core skills: analyzing literature, a process which requires logic and reflective analysis; creativity and imagination with regards to the production of good writing; and an understanding of different cultures, civilizations, and literary styles from various time periods. Prospective English Majors can expect to take college courses in academic writing, creative writing, literary theory, British and American literature, multicultural literature, several literary genres (such as poetry, drama, and film studies), and a number of elective multidisciplinary topics such as history, courses in the social sciences, and studies in a foreign language. To the end of studying these disciplines, candidates for a Major in English attain skills in rhetoric, literary analysis, an appreciation for the diversity of cultures, and an ability to clearly and persuasively express their ideas in writing.

We looked at what other people have done with the question, including Terry Eagleton’s chapter What is Literature. Or Listen to Eagleton discussing the questions about the literary in his book, The Event of Literature (Yale 2012). Another path is to examine the table of contents of anthologies that define the field of study at the level of the course syllabus—a more instructive path, perhaps, than the Wikipedia, or at least the next step in a genuine path of inquiry leading out from the question. I will use here the examples from the Norton anthologies of literature: American, English and World. (There are also anthologies published by Norton on poetry, African American Writers, and so on, designed for courses that have a narrower generic or thematic approach.)

The Norton Anthology of English Literature is using mostly historical periods to divide the material into digestible units. The Middle Ages, The Sixteenth Century, The Early Seventeenth Century, Restoration and the Eighteenth Century, Romantic Period, Victorian Age, Twentieth Century. You can link to the web page and pull up the Table of Contents. Close readers will also note that the volumes in the set are organized not only by century but also by other categories that refer to a period (“Medieval”) a political era (“Restoration,” or the reign of King Charles II) an intellectual and artistic movement (“Romantic”) or a queen (“Victorian”).

The Norton Anthology of American Literature (Beginnings to 1865) organizes the material  chronologically. The Norton Anthology of American Literature (1865 to the present) Consider the Table of Contents for The Shorter Norton Anthology of American Literature. This condensed survey text selects from the selected works in the multi-volume edition (already a selection in and of itself) and organizes literary history chronologically, as well as by author and by theme. It starts with transcriptions of oral creation stories from the Iroquois and Pima to the early writings of exploration and puritan writings all the way to a selection of poems by Sherman Alexie and Jhumpa Lahiri’s short piece of fiction “Sexy.”

The Norton offers one representation of a consensus in the field of study “American Literature.” (Over the years, I have used this edition, and the longer version, in my courses, and have offered comments to the editors on texts that I think might be included or discarded.) The point here is that a table of contents is a dynamic list that changes as the field is shaped and reshaped. The Norton American Literature is now in its ninth edition.

There is also The Norton Anthology of World Literature. Have a look at the table of contents to this volume and see how time (chronology), space (nation, hemisphere), genre (orature, lyric poetry, drama).

These anthologies are a good starting point for students interested in literature and literary history.  If you don’t have them, pick them up and read in them over the summer months. (They are cheap on the used market.) One can build a broader range of literary and cultural reference and experiences as a reader when you have an anthology on the shelf.

As we talked about during the first few weeks of class, and as you explored in your writing, the bodies of writing and texts that now fall under the purview of “English” as a field, and of the English major, cannot be reproduced in a ten course undergraduate major. Still, the anthology represents a consensus—an always imperfect but useful configuration—of literary history that is worth knowing. It is also a convenient way to discover texts that will lead you to other texts and writers who you want to know.

Photo credit: Mark C. Long