Humantities Lit Blog!

Modernizing the Invisible Man

2005-04-17T12:24:00.000-07:00

Are the questions and issues of identity, group membership, ethnic ties, etc. still current? How would this novel need to be rewritten if it were set in 2004?

I think that most of these issues are most definitely still current. Just as the invisible man searches for his identity within his group memberships with the college and the brotherhood, we all still do this exact same thing. When you are younger, your parents enroll you into sports programs and other clubs in order for you to "make friends" and determine "what you like and what your interests are". Both of these concepts help define a person's identity. Who you are is largely determined by what you choose to do and those people you are associated with and around all the time. When you enter high school and are now able to pick your own clubs, sports, and activities, you take the place of your parents in determining what your identity is, or I guess it would be determining what you WANT your identity to be; to change your identity you simply have to change what clubs you are associated with and what group of people you choose to hang out with.
Ethnic issues are still as prominent nowadays as they were when this book was written, yet people choose to ignore them and pretend they are not still present. Since the events of September 11, muslims and arabic peoples have been under scrutiny and been discriminated against, yet no one wants to correlate these issues with the racism of post civil war times because "it's different" somehow to those people, but really it is no different at all, it is still discriminating against an ethnic group.
I think to update this movie, it would be simple: make the invisible man an immigrant muslim that recently moved to the US (instead of an african american moving from the south to the north) and have him join an anti-war/anti-discriminatory group that is mainly made up of U.S citizens (black and white and of all races) and other muslims. All of the events could happen almost exactly the same, and the invisible man could still be a motivational speaker and the issues and situations would still be the same and still apply in the updated 2004 version of Invisible Man.

Ideology and Allende

2005-03-29T20:34:00.000-08:00

WELL THIS WAS A LOT BETTER BUT THE BLOG DECIDED TO ERASE MY POST SO NOW IM ANGRY AND MUST TRY TO RECREATE IT GRRRRR!!!!!

In what ways does Allende's novel present to us "foreign" ideologies that render our own "common sense" visible or even throw it into question?

Allende presents to us "foreign ideologies" that call our own "common sense" into question by simply presenting us with stories about a family's life and the details and stories are so emotional and detailed, that they make you think of your own beliefs and happenings in life and start to examine your ideologies and thoughts not just to question them (as if they are right or not) but also just to realize them.

One example that encompasses more than one ideology would be the subject of marriage in this novel. The concept that makes the most sense to me, is finding a significant other that you spend time with and love and then eventually marry. In this book, the marriage isn't as much arranged for the girls as it is more a man comes to the house and says "give me one of your daughters" and the parents agree. Another concept would be, if a young girl gets pregnant, most fathers would want the daughter to marry the father of her child, but in this case, Blanca's father would rather she marry a man that she doesn't love and who really doesn't have money, but has a "good" name. I could not imagine any of this, but it really makes me wonder why they do things this way, and I start to try to see things from their point of view as to why this is "common sense" for them.

Another example would be all of the superstitions present in the novel. Alba doesn't have to go to school and can just learn reading and writing at home, because she is a child of the stars, and this makes perfect sense to the characters in the book, yet to me, common sense says that everyone has to go to school. Also, they are very quick to analyze astrological charts and read charts and palms and live their lives by what these predictions say. To the characters, this is perfectly normal, but my common sense says that this is all a hoax and is purely for entertainment. Allende presents these stories so well and presents us with the amazing Clara that can move things with her mind and it starts to make me wonder, are these signs and charts really so ridiculous or could they possibly work? Does anyone really know?

Allende def does a fantastic job of presenting us with the characters ideologies and allowing us to bring our own under examination.

Question for Duplessis

2005-03-13T16:00:00.000-08:00

I think the most important question I would have for her, would be what is her inspiration or motivation for most of her pieces. For example, did they come from life experiences or her thoughts and views on the world or just random thoughts or what?

Antigone WOOHOO!

2005-03-01T09:25:00.000-08:00

I first read this novel whenever I was in high school and I read the classical version. Although there were some differences (why Polyneices was killed and also spellings etc) the main plot of the play was still the same. Girl goes against evil, evil condemns her, evil tries to save her, she kills herself, end of story. I thoroughly enjoyed this play, as I enjoy most greek literature that I have read at this point. I think its fascinating how they put emphasis on the gods and refer to them in all of their plays; they use characters to teach life lessons to the people of Greece and you can really learn alot about their beliefs and culture of that time period. I studied a lot about their culture and history in connection with the novels and plays I had read and I find it to be one of the most interesting cultures that has ever existed.
I think that the Theory Toolbox brings up a lot of good point about culture and how it to is subjective to surrounding cultures and to labels from all different types of people and situations. Culture is a very situational and relative variable; it is very complex yet that is how we define ourselves from other people. The toolbox def gives you another angle at which to look at literature. It makes us aware that we can't always take the literature that we read within the context of our own time and culture, that we must instead look beyond to the culture and time in which it was written.

Cortez and Subjectivity

2005-02-21T05:54:00.000-08:00

I wasn't sure if we were supposed to be doing a blog for Cortez or not, so I just did one in case. I never really put the time into thinking about subjectivity and how "authors" lead the reader into assuming certain positions as they read the novel, poem etc. Some authors put you in the lead character's shoes by the way they right, or as in the case of Cortez, the authors will lead you to take a certain position and they did in Variant E that my group had for class. They separate from the action by saying "they" when referring to who was chasing after Cortez, not grouping you with the those people. The authors give you suggestions on what to feel or who to identify with. Also, in Cortez, depending on who told the story, the tale changed. Suddently Cortez became exactly like whoever was telling the story and was from the place where the story was being told etc. I think subjectivity is an interesting and good thing. It allows us to identify with the story and the characters in the story; it makes it a little more personal and in a way I think personalizes and magnifies the meaning of the story.

Blood Wedding and Context

2005-02-10T10:22:00.000-08:00

I believe that the mother was somewhat selfish and wanted pain and suffering like she had felt come to the Felix family at any cost for what they had put her through; it just happens to cost her son's life. I also think that she was a hypocrite for not wanting her son to go out into the vineyard with his knife at the beginning because he would be killed, yet at the end she wants him to go out and confront Leonardo with a knife. Also, she had made a joke of wishing her son was a girl, because it is obviously that it was just not "womanly nature" to kill anyone or be killed; this was proven by the fact that at the end, the bride is the only one to return alive, and the mother will not kill her even though she wants to so badly. I am very angered by the bride, because she doesn't HAVE to marry the bridegroom, yet she marries him and them leaves him like 2 seconds later, why marry him at all then?
I definitely think that the context in which you read this play is very important to the meaning you get out of the play. If we were to have read this play in the 1930's in Spain, I believe we would have got a different meaning out of it, than we did reading this play in the present day time. Also I think that if someone were to have read this in America during the 1940's they would have interpreted a different meaning from the "indeterminate" places in the book because of the different cultures and upbringing of the people in each region and time period. Those who read the play in Spain in the 1930's would have gotten most likely the "most accurate" interpretation of the play and we have to strain more in the present day to extract that meaning because we didn't grow up during that time or in that country. In Theory Toolbox it mentions that meanings are a social thing, and that would provide a reason or explanation for why we have different readings; we all have different upbringing and cultures and beliefs and we have no choice but to let those influence how we "read" plays and pieces of literature.

Personal thoughts: I thoroughly enjoyed this play and all its symbolism and "indeterminate" places. It really makes you think about the play and the hidden meaning. I think that this would have to be my favorite piece of reading that we have done this semester.

The Awakening

2005-01-31T05:28:00.000-08:00

Hmmm.....Well, I must say that this book was interesting to me and made me really think about what was going on and what the author was trying to entice me to think. One thing that I noticed, was that all along Edna was trying to get out from under her husband's control and wanted to be her own person and not let a man control what she was doing, but in the end, thats exactly what she let happen. Though she clearly wasn't letting her husband make her decisions for her, she was unconsciously letting Robert guide and influence all of her decisions. He sparked this change in her to "become independent" and do what she felt like doing and express her true self; yet in most of what she did, she was reflecting her true self with a little Robert added in. She constantly thought of him and what he would think about Arobin; she lusted after him day in and day out. When he finally returned she waited and waited to see if he would come to see her. She didn't know she was letting Robert have such an influence and in turn, he had no idea he had this power over her either because he was thinking about her all the time as well, but he stayed away in hopes to make it go away. There is a point on page 108 where she is talking to Robert about her husband "setting her free" and she tells Robert that she is not Leonce's possession, so we can see she has def started to make changes in her life and become her own person, but she is replacing one man with another and I'm not sure if this self we see is 100% Edna, or maybe just 80% Edna and 20% Robert's influence.
Towards the end, Mrs. Ratignolle gets sick and when Edna comes to see her she reminds her to "remember the children" and everything should start to make sense here, yet she decides to go off into the ocean and well basically just never come back, it's kind of strange, as if she is doing the EXACT oppposite of what is good for her children

The Yellow Wallpaper

2005-01-24T05:25:00.000-08:00

The one question I wanted to address was posed by Dr. Sherwood of:
How would we need to reframe our thinking about Gilman's story if we were to focus on the narrator as a female writer?
The main message that a reader gets from this story is about a woman who is going insane after having a child and her husband just wishes to keep her locked up in her room with no contact with the outside world. After reading Gilman's take on why she wrote this story it is much easier to focus on the narrator as a female writer and push the plot to second place. During the time this story was written, 1891, women were just housewives, and the men were the learned "productive" part of the population. When Gilman began to go crazy, her physician told her to get rest and lead as "domestic a life as possible, and get little intellectual stimulation" just as they were doing to the narrator. After escaping insanity, she wrote this story which I believe makes a definite statement of what women can do. Women weren't supposed to write or basically be intellectuals, but not only did this woman escape going insane, but she wrote this book and it helped her and many others out; the narrator made people open their eyes of what they were actually doing to women. To reframe our thinking, we would have to take a step back and push aside that we think she is crazy from the beginning and really look at what she is saying in her passages about how John doesn't want her to write and she has to sneak to do it. When you do this, you can see that the stimulation is actually one of the only things keeping her sane while she is going crazy. If we begin to look at the story in this manner, the meaning gets deeper and the story gets less confusing and more clear on the message it is trying to send.

Author/ity and Douglas

2005-01-20T05:34:00.000-08:00

After the discussion of authors and power in class, I realized how much of an impact knowing that Douglas was the author of our first reading assignment had on our interpretation of the narrative. If we were told that this narrative was actually a work of fiction, I don't believe that it would have had the emotional impact on me that it did knowing that an actual slave composed this piece about his life as a slave. Most of my emotions and anger toward slavery came from knowing that this man actually had to endure everything that was in the narrative; if this were simply a work of fiction, I know that I would not have felt as strongly as I did. I still would have been angered by the actions of the slave owners and overseers but it would not have been as emotional for me and I wouldn't have thought as much about the slaves as I did.
Although I feel it helped to know who the author of the piece was, I also believe that perhaps it caused some restrictions on the opinions I could have had about the narrative. If I hadn't known the author was an actual slave, I would have been forced to come to more of my own opinions rather than take his at face value. If the author was unknown I could have imagined that perhaps it came from an abolishionist during this time and that by writing the piece of fiction, he or she was trying to get the message out about what slavery was subjecting people to. When an author of a work of literature is unknown, it allows a person to gather their own meaning from the text and often times that leads to a more emotional or personal interpretation that means more to a person that it does when the author is known.
Overall, I believe that knowing the author of the narrative was Douglas had a positive impact on my reading experience. It allowed me to see what happened from the perspective of someone who actually experienced the events and it pulled at my heart strings and put more emotions and feeling into my reading.