What struck me most throughout all these excerpts was the differing beings that each author/piece believed created everything. Most of the pieces, both the Metamorphoses, Genesis, and Paradise Lost, explicitly stated that some powerful being created everything. Lucretius wrote that it might have been a god or it might simply have been Nature itself, not as a good but as itself. Even within these self-placed restrictions, each piece was further different in how each being created the earth and Heaven. In Metamorphoses, there was still room for natural order, with divine intervention and guidance from numerous gods, to take its course. It described the separation of the regions: Heaven, air, Earth, and water with a more natural feel, while the Bible states that God created everything. Even Paradise Lost and the Bible differ with how they portray this omnipotent entity. The Bible doesn’t delve into the psyche of God and the thoughts that He is thinking while making His decisions about Adam and Eve’s punishment and creating the world. In Paradise Lost, and yes, the Bible discusses this later on but not in the same way, the idea and ramifications of free will are brought into action. But it doesn’t stop there. Milton creates a conversation between God and His Son about the action required after Adam and Eve will eventually eat the forbidden fruit. Jesus presents the dilemma that if God takes away free will He is going against Himself and the reason it was established in the first place, and if God destroys them, he is destroying His creation that He made in His image, or will He let it pass and let Satan corrupt good forever? And this idea of free will is discussed in terms of the angels and even Satan himself. In Satan’s internal monologue, he flashes back to how he thought he could become even greater and that led to his downfall, and God even said previously, in book three, “sufficient to have stood, yet free to fall” (3.98). Each piece has its own take on power and where it (being everything) comes from. There are similarities such as a great flood, and the separation of Earth from Heaven, but it was great reading each of these short excerpts together because it showed the thought process and beliefs of the authors. Even if they only immortalized previous myths, each author/piece has its own take on creation and where we come from and where we have room to grow. One of the answers the Bible and Paradise Lost provides is how man can grow and adapt and change ourselves even if created by an omnipotent being how knows our future.
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Throughout the course of these past months, my feelings about this class’s different, yet interconnected topics and excerpts have varied drastically. For the first month, and into the second, I had a rough time adjusting to reading and writing through a new viewpoint. A viewpoint that accepted input from the class’s ideas and their questions and used those as a springboard to elevate my thoughts further. During this time, I was trying too hard to maintain my vision of what I thought this book, “Better Living Through Criticism” was saying, and not letting new ideas flow in to fill in the shortcomings of my views. However, since then, and by reading and discussing Greenblatt’s “Renaissance Self Fashioning,” I have truly realized that these texts are way too challenging to go about it rejecting my peers’ input and insights. As a class, I believe we have all grown in our critical reading skills and we have all become much better in interpreting how the author would answer a certain question, backing it up with textual examples.
When I first read Greenblatt over the summer it was extremely confusing. I barely understood the topic he was presenting, much less any argument. But I grabbed hold of the idea of freedom he mentioned throughout the preface and epilogue. (This is image one, my commonplace page where I made connections between self-fashioning and freedom.) I went into the class in the first week saying this book was my favorite probably simply for this fact: that understanding this topic more will give better or a unique insight into the idea of freedom, which interests me. Greenblatt’s strategy of setting this idea up as a vital human craving and then providing the outcome if we choose to ignore this craving worked. I was hooked. The first time we reread it, I looked a little bit beyond freedom and instead noticed that we continuously used accidentally when talking about writing the book. And he also wrote about how there was a theme of hope that was “ineradicable,” and no matter how many times it was outweighed by the pessimistic and discouraging topic he was presented, hope springs eternal. This was fascinating and so I wrote it down (second image) but then got caught up in class discussion over the next month that I forgot about both of these revelations that I had about the text. Recently, we were wrapping up our work on the 10 Conditions of Self Fashioning and in answering one of my QTTAs, that I wrote way back before our in-depth discussion, and which was about hope, it finally clicked to me how these ideas tied in together. The only hopeful idea I could think of from this book was “autonomous agency.” This was then immediately proclaimed to be only a dream. Then I answered the question: why does this matter that it is a dream or not? Greenblatt explicitly said that this idea was only a dream, and then in the next sentence, he brings up that his “voice could not float free of [societal] forces.” For the rest of the preface and the whole introduction, he brings to light how these social forces interact and shape us. And then in the epilogue, he suddenly related everything back to this one idea, this one dream of autonomous agency. He ends the book as if he was trying to say: “I know that autonomous agency is not real, but here is what truth comes out of it: hope, a selfish and stubborn hold upon our personal selves. And this hold is vital. I know it is an illusion, I just wrote a whole book about how we don’t have autonomous agency. But if you believe in yourself, the idea of your self, then you won’t lose it.” I landed on the fact (and my final images are on this) that, just like with the “perception of a change,” the actual change isn’t as influential as the perception that it happened. Our mindset based off of our dream that we control our lives gives us the interest in our own future to choose the best paths and the best authorities/aliens to align ourselves with to become truly better selves. If we believed that we didn’t control anything about our lives, then why would we care about our selves? We would lose interest and our appreciation for our selves, and in turn, we would lose our selves, and not in the #10 loss of self, but in the “no control over our lives and we become a passenger in our own life story” loss of self. I believe that looking into Greenblatt and understanding our identity better was a vital step in pursuing a course in adaptation. Now, we can better understand the factors at play that shape the lives of the authors and characters we will read about as well as understanding what is at stake in each of the lives: author, character, and ourselves if we fail to recognize or appreciate the complexity of the situations and forces influencing them. In the publication of a book about self-fashioning, Greenblatt included a preface, an introduction, and an epilogue. This book was about his research of sixteenth century writers fashioned characters and themselves within the character. But within the preface, introduction, and epilogue, Greenblatt discusses the process of writing the book and the reasons why he wrote the book. These pieces of his story on an unspoken level, tell of how the book was fashioned and how it came together, almost fashioning itself. He took the idea that there was no such thing as human nature without some outside controlling element and he extended it into an inanimate object that is now self-aware because he made it be. And now we arrive at a downward spiral or logic. If you believe that something, whether it is the universe, or some form of a God, gives you the ability to self-fashion yourself or mold yourself into whatever you want to be, is it truly self-fashioning, and in this moment of self-awareness, why can’t we have done this on our own entirely? This passage was the one that tripped my mind the most because it caused me to be a little more self aware of the actions that I do to myself and also to others. Greenblatt noticed that the words that we utter have a weight upon us and once we realize that weight we become self aware of what we are doing to ourselves. With this self-awareness and the possibility of changing ourselves comes freedom. We no longer allow ourselves to be changed by outside forces and instead take matters into our own hands. But this is inherently selfish, and hypocritical, and deceptive. We are now too focused on ourselves and the newfound freedom that we have to worry or care about others that are still trapped within their own mind. Freedom, in and of itself, is selfish. That is the harsh truth. It is the only way to liberate the mind of outside influences, but it encloses the mind within itself to which it stops caring about others and focuses on the betterment of only itself. This excerpt from Greenblatt’s book is a great way to understand the minutiae and the relationship between the mind and freedom. Through discussing this passage in AP Lit, I believe that the class will be working towards a better understanding of the freedom we take for granted but also how to free our minds and become a little more open-minded to criticism.
This piece by Warren Berger perfectly sums up my educational career. My dad is a lawyer, who, at times, appears to know just about everything. Ever since my four siblings and I have been very young, we constantly badger him with questions at the dinner table such as: “how quickly does food coloring take to diffuse in water and where does it go first the top or the bottom?” and (before we took Galloway’s APUSH class) “Were Abraham Lincoln and George Washington friends?” This is a routine that every child has with their parents. Berger talks about a bit from Louis C.K. and his daughter and eventually stopping the flow of questions and creativity because it was too much. From this incessant questioning at the dinner table, all of us would become rather quiet in school, learning what was taught but not branching out and asking bizarre questions because they never seemed to quite fit, except for the small fact that it would still be learning, just not math, LA, social studies/science, and reading. And as we got older we lost that creativity in the public schools that we all went too, and only asked the, less frequent, bizarre question at home. Just like Berger describes, the classroom, and “teaching to the test” stifles young curiosity. When we got to the point in each of our lives that we could understand when a conversation or stream of questioning was tiring, we subconsciously changed our tactics. We were now asking an ever increasing number of law questions: about wills and estates, employment law which was his specialty, and anything else that he knew the intricacies of. We learned what we wanted, he taught what he was passionate about and it encouraged the questions to keep coming as we got even older. Berger says that there is potential for humanity if we encourage questioning and that is what my father always did. He never stifled our creativity, which is why we all felt too suffocated at the public, “teach to the end of year test” schools and had to move to smaller, more creative schools like Galloway. The hope in the future, for the sake of the next generation and the next generation, is an increase in tolerance. An increase in tolerance for questions by parents and teachers alike and the opportunities as a community to ask burning questions to professionals who are passionate about that subject. The community needs to stimulate and nurture the inquisitive nature of young children and instill in them not just passive learning for a test but a “productive obsession” with learning more about what is interesting to them. Based on this piece, I might assume, in AP Lit, we will explore the realm of specialty schools and havens and cliques of writers that nurtured an inquisitive look of the world that manifested itself in their writing.
In this excerpt from A.O. Scott, the concept of artist against critic is explored. In my commonplace book, I scribbled down the seemingly random and crazy multi-jump conclusions that A.O. Scott makes. Most of these revolve around the idea of circular reasoning and what something is or means comes about only because everyone thinks so but everyone believes so because it is. This is extremely confusing but A.O. Scott quotes Edmund Burke using the analogy that a beautiful creature is agreed to be beautiful by a decent sized crowd. Since the creature is said to be beautiful, the crowd has to agree, but because the crowd agrees, the creature has to be beautiful. Whichever piece of information you start out with lands you in the same place, back at the same piece of information. This is an important concept to grasp because it is extremely confusing with real life examples that should have both yes and no answers are thrown into the mix. This will become apparent shortly. The bulk of the beginning of the selection is discussing artists and what Art is and what it means. But that is where the beauty or ugliness lies: Art can be anything and it can mean anything to anyone and that is when it becomes art. He says, “Art is whatever an artist says it is.” This is both satisfying and extremely frustrating and seemingly pointless. If art is anything, then this stick is art. Because I have just said that this stick is art, that makes it so, and that makes it meaningful in some sort of way. In some way that a teacher will tell their students to discuss my mind’s twists and turns and what I was thinking when I pronounced the stick, Art. But it isn’t meaningful to anyone who knows that this is just an ordinary stick. But to come out and say that I am wrong about what I choose to make art is an affront to the very nature of art, that it can be anything to anyone. And this is where the critic falls into place. A critic’s job is to critique. But what happens when they attempt to critique something that is untouchable? Immune to harsh speech or bad reviews because of the nature of itself? Because in its definition, it cannot be critiqued from the eyes of others? Art is subjective. Depending on what the author or sculptor or painter was feeling at the time, it is either art or not. This subjective view of art, when contrasted with the almost scientific, methodical, even stroked, borderline objective critique based on logic and reasoning, becomes something more. It now becomes a scientifically reputable or acceptable piece of work that means everything now not because it was simply decided as meaningful, but because it was determined to be so. Art is meaningful because critics are able to deem it as meaningless. This is the confusing paradox between idea and subject and this is why I, personally, am not a big fan of art; it can be anything, yet I only see nothing in it. This paradoxical thinking, I assume, is necessary for a class devoted to studying masterful language that, at times, can seem paradoxical if done correctly and throughout this school year, I think that we will be looking to compare and contrast and see how much different strategies rely and play off of each other.
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