I had a graduate student once, in a course on literary theory. In the course I had been explaining some basic background relating to Saussure and structuralism. We covered some Chomsky in this course: his idea of universal grammar. I am not a linguist, but I thought it would be useful to explore some of this background to see where some key concepts of modern literary theory came from. We explored the idea of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which most people are interested in debating. Almost everyone has an opinion about whether language influences the thoughts we have, or not. This was just basic material I thought every educated literary critic ought to know about. So this student in my office one day says "i hate linguistics." Nothing in the course had been of interest to him so far.
Thanks a lot. It really helped me to know that you were an idiot right from the beginning. Why would you think your emotions about linguistics were interesting to me? Your dislike for the discipline is a fact about you, not a fact about linguistics. It shows you are lacking in intellectual curiosity, for one thing. Some things are going to be more interesting to you than others, but I don't really care. Please keep it to yourself because nobody else is going to really going to take your opinion seriously.
You complained that nobody else cared about the one issue of importance to you. But when you wrote about this issue, you turned in a piece of crap to me. So I guess you didn't care either.
15 feb 2011
More Zambrano
To know enough about María Zambrano to write about her with confidence, I will have to know much more about her than I need to know to support my basic points. Only a small fraction of what I learn will fit in the 30 pages I am writing about her. I cannot even estimate a percentage, but let's just say I'll have to go through a few thousand pages of secondary material in addition to understanding what she is about in several of her own works. She is not a verbose writer, but she wrote quite a bit and her prose is dense. I will have know her at the capillary level just to be able to make a point confidently at the level of veins and arteries.
Now here's the interesting thing: I actually like learning more than I need to. That's one of the pleasures or luxuries of my profession. The pleasure of mastery. If I just studied and thought enough until I could barely fill 30 pages, then I my work would not have the depth that I want it to have.
I will know when I know enough because I will reach the point where everything I am reading about her falls into the category of dejà vu.
Now here's the interesting thing: I actually like learning more than I need to. That's one of the pleasures or luxuries of my profession. The pleasure of mastery. If I just studied and thought enough until I could barely fill 30 pages, then I my work would not have the depth that I want it to have.
I will know when I know enough because I will reach the point where everything I am reading about her falls into the category of dejà vu.
Beethoven and Unamuno, Basho and Me
Between us and Unamuno, we might count 100 years. Unamuno was active 100 years ago (and before and after too, of course). Between Beethoven and Unamuno, there are another 100 years. Here's the thing, though. For me, Beethoven occupies a different world from my own, whereas Unamuno is more or less modern. On the older side of modern, yes, but still modern. The 100 years between Unamuno and me (he was born about 94 years before me, and Beethoven 90 + years before that) is much shorter than the 100 years between him and the composer of the Eroica.
My own lifespan of 50 years is about 25% of the time span I am talking about. So in my lifetime, we have travelled half the distance between Beethoven and Unamuno or between Unamuno and me. Those fifty years seem shorter to me than the fifty years right before i was born. The perception of time, then, is influenced by one's own position within time. There is a telescoping effect. Time speeds up as it goes along.
***
Let's see who would be 100 years before Beethoven? We're looking for someone born around 1660. Nobody's coming to mind, so in this case the distance is so great that I don't even have easy points of reference. Someone between Calderón de la Barca and Alexander Pope? Basho? I might be interested in figures from this period, but I wouldn't see them as close to me in time or sensibility in the least. So from this perspective Beethoven is starting to look pretty modern again. His way of taking one musical idea and beating it to death in some movements of the late string quartets starts to look similar to a minimalist composer of the 1960s.
***
From an "orientalist" perspective I know that Basho lived many centuries after Li Po and Tu Fu. Yet I perceive them as strangely equidistant from me. We are talking about the difference between the Chinese T'ang dynasty (8th century) and seventeenth century Japan. Perhaps language creates even more distance, or a Westernizing orientalist viewpoint does not recognize the modernity of Basho.
My own lifespan of 50 years is about 25% of the time span I am talking about. So in my lifetime, we have travelled half the distance between Beethoven and Unamuno or between Unamuno and me. Those fifty years seem shorter to me than the fifty years right before i was born. The perception of time, then, is influenced by one's own position within time. There is a telescoping effect. Time speeds up as it goes along.
***
Let's see who would be 100 years before Beethoven? We're looking for someone born around 1660. Nobody's coming to mind, so in this case the distance is so great that I don't even have easy points of reference. Someone between Calderón de la Barca and Alexander Pope? Basho? I might be interested in figures from this period, but I wouldn't see them as close to me in time or sensibility in the least. So from this perspective Beethoven is starting to look pretty modern again. His way of taking one musical idea and beating it to death in some movements of the late string quartets starts to look similar to a minimalist composer of the 1960s.
***
From an "orientalist" perspective I know that Basho lived many centuries after Li Po and Tu Fu. Yet I perceive them as strangely equidistant from me. We are talking about the difference between the Chinese T'ang dynasty (8th century) and seventeenth century Japan. Perhaps language creates even more distance, or a Westernizing orientalist viewpoint does not recognize the modernity of Basho.
Embrace
I was a teaching my graduate course the other day, and I decided to embrace the fact that most of the students had very little experience with poetry. In the past, I would have been frustrated, thinking that graduate students, by definition, should know certain things. Once, I had a class in which not a single graduate student could give me a definition of irony. I almost just sent them home.
What I did yesterday was to decide to be open to the level the students were actually working at. I recommended some undergraduate level textbooks on poetry and I showed them how to look at a poem from a "New Critical" pedagogical perspective.
You develop a set of questions. Who is the speaker of the poem? The addressee? The tone? The relation between the metrical structure and the pragmatic function of the poem (is it an elegy, a piece of propaganda?) What kind of tropes are used? What are the dominant images? Does the poem address the nose, the eye, the ear, the tongue? There is no set list of questions, but you need enough of them to address the main stylistic features of the text.
Once you have answered the questions, you can look for anything that catches your attention and seems problematic or interesting. The result of the analysis is not the answers to those first set of questions, but the other, more interesting questions you discover in wondering why certain things in the poem are one way and not another. For example, in "Rosario, dinamitera," a celebration of female munitions worker by Miguel Hernández, we could look at the joyful, exuberant images used to describe the fabrication of an explosive substance, dynamite, used in war. We could ask why the poem is written in a series of décimas.
So the class went extremely well. I explained the meaning of metonymy, a trope unfamiliar to the majority of the students. It was fun to see them realizing that they already knew how to use metonymies in their everyday lives, but did not know the definition of the trope.
What I did yesterday was to decide to be open to the level the students were actually working at. I recommended some undergraduate level textbooks on poetry and I showed them how to look at a poem from a "New Critical" pedagogical perspective.
You develop a set of questions. Who is the speaker of the poem? The addressee? The tone? The relation between the metrical structure and the pragmatic function of the poem (is it an elegy, a piece of propaganda?) What kind of tropes are used? What are the dominant images? Does the poem address the nose, the eye, the ear, the tongue? There is no set list of questions, but you need enough of them to address the main stylistic features of the text.
Once you have answered the questions, you can look for anything that catches your attention and seems problematic or interesting. The result of the analysis is not the answers to those first set of questions, but the other, more interesting questions you discover in wondering why certain things in the poem are one way and not another. For example, in "Rosario, dinamitera," a celebration of female munitions worker by Miguel Hernández, we could look at the joyful, exuberant images used to describe the fabrication of an explosive substance, dynamite, used in war. We could ask why the poem is written in a series of décimas.
So the class went extremely well. I explained the meaning of metonymy, a trope unfamiliar to the majority of the students. It was fun to see them realizing that they already knew how to use metonymies in their everyday lives, but did not know the definition of the trope.
Annual Review
Even though I'm a full professor and there are no raises in my university this year anyway, I still stress out over the annual review. Having to figure out how many exes I whyed or how many zeds I doubleyoued is just not that easy for me. Nothing is at stake in the evaluation, and i did very well in some categories by any objective measure, but I still don't like to be scrutinized.
14 feb 2011
Sound And Sense
I realized that my graduate students don't have much experience reading poetry at all. I'm recommending them some really basic books of poetic analysis, like Sound and Sense by Laurence Perrine or Western Wind by John Frederic Nims. What is the best of this genre? Ciardi's How Does a Poem Mean seems a little dated to me.
There's nothing like this in Spanish that is very good. The idea of Comentario de textos literarios seems to mechanistic. I also think it would be a good idea for them to be able to do it in both languages, since they are mostly native English speakers.
***
In high-school French I was taught "explication du texte." This was a series of very specific questions that could be asked of any text.
There's nothing like this in Spanish that is very good. The idea of Comentario de textos literarios seems to mechanistic. I also think it would be a good idea for them to be able to do it in both languages, since they are mostly native English speakers.
***
In high-school French I was taught "explication du texte." This was a series of very specific questions that could be asked of any text.
Y
Ramón is known by his first name. His most famous invention is the greguería, the short humoristic aphorism in his own characteristic style. "When a woman orders fruits salad for two she perfects original sin." or "The Y is the champagne glass of the alphabet." "The baby grabbing his foot is greeting himself.' When he writes longer works, he has to rely on this genius for short aperçus to sustain him over the course of many pages.
This gives rise to an interesting structural problem. How does the aphorism become a novel?
This gives rise to an interesting structural problem. How does the aphorism become a novel?
Novel and Poetry
Most of the best-known critics in my field write on the novel, not on poetry. Poetry is a sub-field with a few scholars of note, in contrast to the domination of narrative and, to a lesser extent, film. Most people have a much easier time writing on the novel, because it is easy to talk about characters and their actions. We all now how to talk about real people and what they do, so talking about people in books is not so hard. When faced with a poem, many otherwise intelligent students (and colleagues) throw up their hands and wonder what they can possibly do with such a text.
Poetry requires a special expertise beyond what is required for reading novels. Once you have that expertise, things tend to even out. What really distinguishes a good critic of the novel, after all, is not the capacity to talk about characters as though they were real people, but a higher degree of responsiveness and critical contextualization.
Since other people are very comfortable talking about novels, I feel I don't have to be a critic of novels too. There are enough people already doing that. I like teaching prose fiction, and have spent considerable hours reading Galdós, Beckett, Cervantes, Unamuno, Ramón Gómez de la Serna, Soseki, Virginia Woolf, Clarín, Paul Auster, Murakami, Kawabata, Tolkien, Vonnegut, Updike, Sorrentino, Flann O'Brien, and many more.
Poetry requires a special expertise beyond what is required for reading novels. Once you have that expertise, things tend to even out. What really distinguishes a good critic of the novel, after all, is not the capacity to talk about characters as though they were real people, but a higher degree of responsiveness and critical contextualization.
Since other people are very comfortable talking about novels, I feel I don't have to be a critic of novels too. There are enough people already doing that. I like teaching prose fiction, and have spent considerable hours reading Galdós, Beckett, Cervantes, Unamuno, Ramón Gómez de la Serna, Soseki, Virginia Woolf, Clarín, Paul Auster, Murakami, Kawabata, Tolkien, Vonnegut, Updike, Sorrentino, Flann O'Brien, and many more.
Ramón
Ramón Gómez de la Serna has always been one of my favorite Spanish novelists. Today I am beginning to teach El novelista, a metanovel from 1925 featuring Andrés Castilla, a novelist, and numerous novels-within-the-novel. I think I may have taught this book in the early 90s at Ohio State. It fits my plan nicely of teaching Niebla, El cuarto de atrás, and Obabakoak.
I freely admit that Ramón is not a great novelist in the conventional sense. He is mostly known for his metaphorical inventiveness, not his mostly forgettable characters and non-existent or digressive plotting. Yet I still like him better than almost any twentieth century Spanish novelist.
I freely admit that Ramón is not a great novelist in the conventional sense. He is mostly known for his metaphorical inventiveness, not his mostly forgettable characters and non-existent or digressive plotting. Yet I still like him better than almost any twentieth century Spanish novelist.
13 feb 2011
Wearing Heels and Walking Backwards
Ginger Rogers reportedly compared herself once to Fred Astaire, saying she did everything he did: “...but I do it backwards and in heels!”
Essentially, what the Spanish major does is to require students do what students in other liberal arts disciplines do, but with a certain "handicap." Analyze this novel, this poem, develop a thesis about it and write it up in a well-developed essay. Do all of this, but in a foreign language. The novel is written in Spanish, class discussion takes place in Spanish, writing takes place in Spanish.
Now a couple things might happen. The education might take place at a lower level when students are mostly concerned with figuring out the plot and looking up unfamiliar words in the dictionary. Yet I believe most students are also doing advanced critical thinking and research as well, on the level that an English major would achieve in English. This is an extraordinary achievement.
Essentially, what the Spanish major does is to require students do what students in other liberal arts disciplines do, but with a certain "handicap." Analyze this novel, this poem, develop a thesis about it and write it up in a well-developed essay. Do all of this, but in a foreign language. The novel is written in Spanish, class discussion takes place in Spanish, writing takes place in Spanish.
Now a couple things might happen. The education might take place at a lower level when students are mostly concerned with figuring out the plot and looking up unfamiliar words in the dictionary. Yet I believe most students are also doing advanced critical thinking and research as well, on the level that an English major would achieve in English. This is an extraordinary achievement.
12 feb 2011
Culturally specific
Hay guateque en el bohío
del compadre Don Ramón
Ya está en la púa el lechón,
ya está llegando el gentío.
Hoy viene abajo el bohío,
es santo de Don Ramón.
Y llegando bailadores, comay,
por los caminos atascados
El bongó, el triple y el güiro
no han cesado de tocar
porque asi son los guajiros
no tienen cuando acabar,
Es costumbre campesina
desde el tiempo colonial.
In this lyric from Cuba almost every substantive word is culturally specific. A guajiro is not just a peasant, but a "typical" Cuban peasant. They are celebrating not the birthday, but the Saint's day of this particular guajiro. They are playing instruments that would be found in that context. A guateque is not just any old party, but this particular kind of celebration with the roast suckling pig (lechón) and the music played on typical instruments.
The message of the lyric seems to be that the party is a typical one. It is a kind of metafolkloric poem, then. It is the custom of the guajiros to do this since colonial times. The lyric only makes sense, then, when sung in a particular way accompanied with these instruments.
Private Language
I don't believe poetry speaks in a private or recondite language, or that literary critics are those people better at finding deep or hidden meanings in poems. I don't believe that I am better at interpreting a text than the average critic. I wish I was even worse than I am!
A very clever critic concluded that Machado's famous line "a distinguir me paro las voces de los ecos" (I stop to distinguish between voices and echoes) meant the opposite of what everyone else has always thought. Everyone thinks that voices are authentic and echoes inauthentic, and this critic decided it was the opposite. There is only one small problem here: Machado could not have expected anyone to read the line this way. Even if he meant it in this way (which I don't think he did), he would not have expected his readers to understand him. The meaning is what the words mean, not what some investigator uncovers in some letter Machado wrote. If a poet uses private imagery, then I feel free to interpret it as I want to, according to my own private scale of values. I don't really care what the poet meant. On the other hand, if a poet is using symbols the same way everyone else does, then I have full access to those meanings because I understand what those public symbols are. The winter is barrenness, the sun is the source of life, a tree is a person, a fire is passion, up is good and down is bad, a road is a person's life, Autumn is maturity and plenitude, or the anticipation of winter, twilight is the end of something, wings are freedom of movement and other types of freedom by extension, coldness is lack of emotional warmth, the nightengale is the poetic voice of nature. These are symbols that I understand and that everyone understands equally well. The only people who don't think they do not understand are those so intimidated that they think meanings are hidden in the poem, and so refuse to believe what they are reading with their own eyes. When Quevedo writes "mi báculo, más corvo y menos fuerte," we understand that his staff is more curved and less strong. We know what his stick and sword represent.
There is a kind of poetic difficulty which is all on the surface. Take Góngora's "Repetido latir, si no vecino / distinto oyó de can siempre despierto." Take it, please! Once you've figured it out, you've figured it out and the difficulty disappears. "He heard the repeated barking (if not close by, loud enough the hear) of the always wakeful dog." The difficulty is in calling the dog can instead of perro, and some tricky syntax. He does manage to use more suggestive language: distinto is both loud and distinctive, vecino is both near and neighborly, latir is both barking and pulsating, rhythmical, but we have no problem seeing what he is saying.
A very clever critic concluded that Machado's famous line "a distinguir me paro las voces de los ecos" (I stop to distinguish between voices and echoes) meant the opposite of what everyone else has always thought. Everyone thinks that voices are authentic and echoes inauthentic, and this critic decided it was the opposite. There is only one small problem here: Machado could not have expected anyone to read the line this way. Even if he meant it in this way (which I don't think he did), he would not have expected his readers to understand him. The meaning is what the words mean, not what some investigator uncovers in some letter Machado wrote. If a poet uses private imagery, then I feel free to interpret it as I want to, according to my own private scale of values. I don't really care what the poet meant. On the other hand, if a poet is using symbols the same way everyone else does, then I have full access to those meanings because I understand what those public symbols are. The winter is barrenness, the sun is the source of life, a tree is a person, a fire is passion, up is good and down is bad, a road is a person's life, Autumn is maturity and plenitude, or the anticipation of winter, twilight is the end of something, wings are freedom of movement and other types of freedom by extension, coldness is lack of emotional warmth, the nightengale is the poetic voice of nature. These are symbols that I understand and that everyone understands equally well. The only people who don't think they do not understand are those so intimidated that they think meanings are hidden in the poem, and so refuse to believe what they are reading with their own eyes. When Quevedo writes "mi báculo, más corvo y menos fuerte," we understand that his staff is more curved and less strong. We know what his stick and sword represent.
There is a kind of poetic difficulty which is all on the surface. Take Góngora's "Repetido latir, si no vecino / distinto oyó de can siempre despierto." Take it, please! Once you've figured it out, you've figured it out and the difficulty disappears. "He heard the repeated barking (if not close by, loud enough the hear) of the always wakeful dog." The difficulty is in calling the dog can instead of perro, and some tricky syntax. He does manage to use more suggestive language: distinto is both loud and distinctive, vecino is both near and neighborly, latir is both barking and pulsating, rhythmical, but we have no problem seeing what he is saying.
11 feb 2011
Miguel Hernández
The "Elegía" of Miguel Hernández contains quite a few uncommon (or slightly less common) derivatives from very common words.
hortelano (huerto)
estercolar (estiércol)
colmenera (colmena)
sedienta (sed)
pajarear (pájaro)
manotazo (mano)
hachazo (hacha)
desamortazar (mortaza)
angelical (ángel)
dentelladas (dientes)
And so on. There is one of these in just about every stanza.
So by figuring out this poem when I was 19, I was really giving myself a complete workout in Spanish morphology. Estiércol is dung, estercolar means to fertilize with dung. Mano is hand, manotazo is blow with the hand. Colmena is a beehive, colmenera is an adjective derived from it. Mortaza is a shroud, des-a-mortaz-ar is to unshroud, Pájaro is a bird, pajarear is to fly around like a bird. I was not just learning words, but morphological rules, how to create new derivations from scratch. If manotazo is a blow with the hand, then hachazo is a blow with an ax.
The poem has some syntactical complications as well: you have to be able to figure out some inversions and why some adjectives precede their nouns rather than vice-versa. It's written in terza rima, in classic sounding 11-syllable lines and contains many rhetorical figures. It participates in a genre (the elegy) and brings generic conventions into play as well. For example, the topos that the body of the dead one fertilizes the ground and thus produces new life, or the reference to Hamlet (besarte la noble calavera): to kiss your noble skull.
So the poem offers a wide-ranging lesson in prosody, morphology, syntax, rhetoric, poetics. By memorizing it and simply knowing what each word meant and how it related to other words in the same family, I was really learning an enormous amount and having a great time doing it. The poem is powerfully hyperbolic in its rhetorical staging of the speaker's emotional response.
it seemed to take a long time to memorize, but it was really quite time-efficient work, as it turned out. I didn't think of it that way until just now.
hortelano (huerto)
estercolar (estiércol)
colmenera (colmena)
sedienta (sed)
pajarear (pájaro)
manotazo (mano)
hachazo (hacha)
desamortazar (mortaza)
angelical (ángel)
dentelladas (dientes)
And so on. There is one of these in just about every stanza.
So by figuring out this poem when I was 19, I was really giving myself a complete workout in Spanish morphology. Estiércol is dung, estercolar means to fertilize with dung. Mano is hand, manotazo is blow with the hand. Colmena is a beehive, colmenera is an adjective derived from it. Mortaza is a shroud, des-a-mortaz-ar is to unshroud, Pájaro is a bird, pajarear is to fly around like a bird. I was not just learning words, but morphological rules, how to create new derivations from scratch. If manotazo is a blow with the hand, then hachazo is a blow with an ax.
The poem has some syntactical complications as well: you have to be able to figure out some inversions and why some adjectives precede their nouns rather than vice-versa. It's written in terza rima, in classic sounding 11-syllable lines and contains many rhetorical figures. It participates in a genre (the elegy) and brings generic conventions into play as well. For example, the topos that the body of the dead one fertilizes the ground and thus produces new life, or the reference to Hamlet (besarte la noble calavera): to kiss your noble skull.
So the poem offers a wide-ranging lesson in prosody, morphology, syntax, rhetoric, poetics. By memorizing it and simply knowing what each word meant and how it related to other words in the same family, I was really learning an enormous amount and having a great time doing it. The poem is powerfully hyperbolic in its rhetorical staging of the speaker's emotional response.
it seemed to take a long time to memorize, but it was really quite time-efficient work, as it turned out. I didn't think of it that way until just now.
9 feb 2011
Five Ideas for a Graduate Course
I found pad of paper where I had written out some ideas for the beginning of the semester:
(1) Subject-matter / theme is raw meat for the watch-dog. Once you begin studying a "theme" like violence or drugs, you don't know where you will end up. The theme is not the end-point, but the beginning.
(2) Students must bring in their ideas for each class meeting. Those are the ideas we will be discussing, not my own.
(3) Students will learn the classic form of the scholarly article, writing sestinas, not free-verse poems, in their papers.
(4) I will assign paper topics randomly. I'll come up with fourteen ideas and hand them out to the seven students. They will then trade one of their two topics with someone else in the class. The next day, they will come into class with two additional ideas for a paper, and trade one of those with another student. Each student, then, will have four possible topics for a paper. Then they can use one of those four or a fifth of their own invention.
(5) Prose style is a responsive instrument, as you might speak of a responsive musical instrument or automobile. It needs to be supple in order to allow the ideas to come out.
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