Course Materials 2- Electric Bogaloo

A lot of what I remember from the days after the last course materials response is a blur of handouts that were frantically annotated and bickered over. I'm not sure mine were even legible, but I constantly found myself moving out of DIDLS and instead going towards conclusions, or I'd find something notable that I wasn't sure where to place. Where did alliteration go, exactly, or the other poetic devices in the DIDLS frame? How about color symbolism- details, maybe? DIDLS themselves are clear enough, but there are things that work beyond and outside the frame of diction-imagery-details-language-syntax that I'm not sure what to do with. I know they're relevant and I have comments to make on them. Regardless of that particular headache, I found myself with fascinating insights into different works. Two of them I had read and one that I haven't but now want to. I know for a fact that, had I not tried to purge my mind of past influences, I never would have thought that Alice was dying as she fell down the tunnel, but think about it. "Light at the end of the tunnel" sound familiar? I found that dialogue was harder to pull apart than narration, because it's too easy to imagine it simply as part of a character or as a forwarder of the action and completely gloss over it, which made Little Women patently difficult. It was unfortunate, though, that I missed the day we covered syntax, because I have a feeling it would have been difficult for me anyways. On the long, long list of things I don't pay attention to when I read, sentence structure is right at the top, and I have no reference for what it means to a work that it is 'subject verb object' or vice versa or some oddball combination of the three. I suppose I'll just have to feel it through based on what feels odd or noticeable. In general, if I could just read text excerpts and bicker about their meaning for the rest of the year, I'd be completely happy.

Then, at least according to my notes, we moved on to literary theory, which I found absolutely fascinating because I am a geek. By and large I walked out of it with a bit of a crush on Aristotle, and from there it was largely a rehash of things we'd gone over in Brit Lit previously, and AP World before that (at least with regards to the Dark Ages, Renaissance  and the age of reason (although we didn't go very far into that)). I hope I wont' be called upon to name specific authors from each period, though, because boy howdy are there a lot of them. I can pick out the notable ones, ranging from Beowulf's nameless author to Dante to Shakespeare to Blake and on and on and on. Funnily enough, the stuff about the earliest theory (Plato) and the newest postmodern stuff was really the only new information. None of my lit classes previously ever talked about a simulacrum idea of the world, or about Plato's cave, which I found fascinating, if a little harsh to authors. Thus, the crush on Aristotle. I found myself agreeing with a lot of Postmodernist thought, which is hardly surprising, considering we're living within it- although I am skeptical of a generation's ability to name the period they're living in. Let my great-great-grandkids decide whether postmodernism even exists; history written as it happens is hardly accurate and unbiased.

Critical lenses, by and large, were a review. Since I took both Am Lit and Brit Lit, I had already been drilled into the ideas, although I can definitely say that this particular mode of information transport was definitely new, but not necessarily in a bad way. Seeing the lenses actually applied to the same subject (even if it was just a urinal) was very helpful in comparing them and seeing what the real differences were between them. The two new ones were very closely related- postcolonial and Literary Darwinism. Thank god for last minute crash courses, because I had Literary Darwinism totally backwards from what it actually is- rather than the culture with the strongest literature being the ones remembered, I thought it was the dominant culture's affect on the literature- which is actually postcolonialism! Confusing stuff! I think it would have been better to go over these in class, but I understand that time was of the essence.

Speaking of massive time-sinks, the allusions presentations were absolutely bafflingly long. Luckily, they were all engaging. As a child, I had a big yellow book of greek myths that I read until the cover fell off, so a lot of the stories were review- but a lot of them weren't. And yes, sometimes it hurt me to have things confused or fumbled or mixed up, but I learned a lot of stories that I hadn't had the full background to- especially the backstory to the Trojan War. Who knew it all started because of a cranky goddess? That's what I truly love about Greek myths- there's an overarching story of a war in Troy, but there are a million other stories that all happen concurrently. Odysseus  Philoctetes, Circe, all work within that story, but they each have a story of their own. Greek myths are an immense stretching entity that weaves itself over history so cleverly that I can't help but appreciate it. The Bible had a lot more new territory- although more of it was familiar than I thought originally. Also, please please please know that the people of God are the IsraelITES not the IsraelIS. One is correct now, one is correct biblically. I know that giving my presentation was fun, although I always forget how nervewracking presentations are until I'm up there and no one is giving any feedback because everyone is taking notes at the speed of sound.

I have to admit to being that guilty good kid who dishonored her family when we didn't have enough copies of The American Dream to start reading on time. I also have to admit to kind of loathing the beginning, as I suspected I would dislike the Theater of the Absurd when we read the article about it claiming that previous literary movements had somehow had aspects of the Absurd as opposed to the other way around. All that aside, the first part of it is awkward to read through, seemingly empty, and essentially perfectly in keeping with the style of Theater of the Absurd. It was only after we moved on from that, as the article we read afterwards suggested, that the play got really good. While I'd contest him on Mommy being 'eager to get rid of grandma' or 'vicious and emptyheaded' (at least, not entirely) the author of the article had a lot of solid, salient points- most of which I had already picked up on, at least in part. What I'm wondering now, and what I was wondering as I read it, is what other meanings are to be found beyond the obvious and apparent. That's always where the real analytical gold is; hiding behind the overarching obvious point. There are subtle little things hiding in there, and I hope we get to them in class, because otherwise we're doing ourselves an intellectual disservice.