"We have supped full with heroes..."

Time out of mind strength and courage have been the theme of bards and romances; and from the story of Troy down to to-day, poetry has always chosen a soldier for a hero. I wonder is it because men are cowards in heart that they admire bravery so much, and place military valour so far beyond every other quality for reward and worship?

This passage from Thackeray's Vanity Fair makes me wonder what it is about the figure of the hero that makes him or her so very attractive. The hero - whether literary, romantic, filmic, or theatrical - nearly always manages to acquire the respect and even worship of his or her audience. Why?
Is a hero a hero because he or she is capable of doing something greater than the mere mortals in the audience? Is it because the hero lives in a world that is somehow more raw, more primitive, more visceral - a world that requires heroism in a way that ours (for all its violence and tragedy) does not? Do we respect and worship heroes because we believe they are better than we, or because we see ourselves in them?

I think, perhaps, the circumstances make the hero. In reality, heroes do things that must be done if we are to hold out hope for our species - hope in both the psychological and biological sense. If someone were incapable of risking their own life to save others, our species might die out due to excessive fear, but the presence of heroes also allows us to recognize the human capacity for ethical justice.
In literature, the circumstances are controlled in such a way that someone must become a hero or the story would fail. Certainly, some Post-Modern works attempt to argue that there are no heroes, yet they most often focus on an individual who manages to mean something or at least mean nothing (which itself means something). But the focus makes them heroic because they represent the public acknowledgement of the more unpleasant, boring, seedy, and even embarrassing sides of human nature. They are heroes because they are in the public eye, drawing its sympathy, and making us question our own purpose in relation to our own realities. We may not like them, but they force us to think of them as heroes (even as anti-heroes), nevertheless.
But heroes we respect, heroes we worship, Achilles, Odysseus, Buffy, Frodo, Aragorn, Harry Potter... they are heroes in a far more Classical sense. They are heroes because somehow they take elements of the average human being and make them greater, more powerful, longer lasting. They are not perfect, but neither are we. Their imperfections make them somehow greater for their flaws because we can see that they are capable of overcoming those flaws. Perfect heroes - Galahad the pure and lily-white - are irritating because we have no hope of becoming them. Not only that, but they do not - they cannot - belong in our world. Perfect heroes die tragically because they are "too good" to live among the corruption of reality.
I would rather be Percival any day. Maybe he doesn't always get the Grail, but he gets close enough to begin to understand it and he gets to go home at the end of the day.

Poetic Musings

Today, in the midst of putting together the reading packet for my course this fall, I began to seriously think about what it means to teach poetry - specifically, what it means to teach poetry to an introductory class.
My students are freshmen and a sophomore - essentially without exposure to the kind of difficult poetry I will be asking them to read - and I have set for myself the goal of not only making them read it, but of trying to get them to take something meaningful away from it. I want to somehow impart my love of complex poetry to them - at least enough so that the experience of reading T.S. Eliot, H.D., Yeats, Wandor, Milton, and Tennyson is not painful.
So these are my thoughts.

Teaching poetry is essentially the art of making the connections between the obscurity on the page - especially with something like "The Waste Land" - and the things that have meaning in a more quotidian context. What this means, for me anyway, is that I have to make the link between contemporary context - literary, mythic, and even something as basic as life - and these mysterious works of literature that, to most freshmen, have no real basis in the external world.
To so many students, the only type of writing that has bearing on reality is journalism - and occasionally biography - though they're often jaded enough to recognize the fictionalisation of much of that. They have trouble - or at least are resistant to - connecting the world within the text to the world in which they live. Eliot's shanti, shanti, shanti means nothing to them because they don't have the context nor, once given the history, do they have a way to relate that context to something meaningful.
My goal - as a teacher, but more specifically with my course - is to get them to apply the same basic interpretive path (religious myth) across "classic" and contemporary works, and perhaps, by doing so, to get them to realize that older, "harder" works (Milton, Eliot, Tennyson), are, in fact, not so different from contemporary poetry and (even) contemporary science fiction (we're reading Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett).
What I want to be able to do in this class is to teach my students, god forbid, how to think. Yes, I'll be teaching them writing, interpretation, and close reading skills, but if they can think, and I mean really think, by the time they leave my classroom, I will consider myself successful.
I just hope it works.

Classical Aspects

Recently, I've been doing a bit of thinking and a lot of reading (shocking, I know) and I've come to realize that there is something about literature that I'm having trouble pinning down. It's an old question, but I don't think it's ever been answered to my satisfaction.
Put simply: what makes a work of literature a classic?

The thoughts that dragged me back (because I've been here before) to this ever-pervasive question (especially in my field) follow.
We have classic works of literature, and, by and large, anyone even remotely familiar with a high school English class can identify at least a few of them. Jane Eyre, Moby Dick, Great Expectations, Pride and Prejudice, Wuthering Heights, Mrs. Dalloway, Middlemarch, Oliver Twist, Crime and Punishment, The Scarlet Letter, Ivanhoe, Vanity Fair... and so on and so forth. (Authors as follows: Charlotte Bronte, Herman Melville, Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Emily Bronte, Virginia Woolf, George Eliot, Dickens again, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walter Scott, William Makepeace Thackery.) And those are just novels. Chaucer, T.S. Eliot, Tennyson, Blake, Byron, Yeats, Keats, Pound, Spenser, Milton, Browning, Barrett Browning, Wordsworth, Longfellow, Whitman, Stein... well, we've got poets coming out of our ears, too. Not to mention playwrights like Wilde, Shakespeare, Marlowe...
But why them? And why do we know their names any better than those of H.D., Mina Loy, Jones Very, Sarah Morton, Adah Menken, William Hill Brown, Charles Brockden Brown, Ellen Glasgow, and so on?
Proliferation doesn't make sense. Nor does lifetime fame. Jones Very wrote constantly. Admittedly, he thought he was the Second Coming of Christ, but you'd think that would add to his interest. Sarah Morton was the most famous American poetess during her lifetime. Associates? H.D. and Djuna Barnes were colleagues (and, in H.D.'s case, a suspected lover) of Pound, Eliot, Lawrence, and co. How well they were liked? Well, okay, so Dickens and Melville had some big hits. Tennyson was poet laureate of England. But. Mellville's books (pretty much other than Moby Dick) flopped. Scott and Dickens both understood the pressure of having to write to eat. Whitman was ostracized from society. The Brownings were actually exiled. Milton, for all his fame, went blind in a closet. Wilde was sent to prison in France.
That said, do you really think Stephen King (yes, Beth, I know) or Dean Koontz is going to be the next Melville or Dickens? I'm sorry, folks, but Tom Clancy isn't ever going to appear on a course syllabus. Nor are Danielle Steel and John Grisham (though, honestly, he'd go on before some). Oprah's Book Club will not be - in all likelihood - producing many great literary giants (Toni Morrison aside). But they are popular.
So what makes literature worth study?
And, to go off a bit on another path, does study necessarily preclude enjoyment? (Because I know some of you are groaning and saying that it has to be dull or intellectual.) To be honest, I enjoy Austen. I enjoy the Brontes. I even enjoy Hawthorne and Dickens. I could do without Spenser, Milton, Faulkner, and Melville, quite happily, most of the time. But I can see the merit in studying all of them (even if I don't personally want to do it).
But. I also see merit in studying genre fiction - the sensationalist kind of literature that Wuthering Heights, Northanger Abbey, The Mystery of Udolpho, and The Turn of the Screw were at one time. Ghost stories (like Beloved, if you want something more contemporary), romances (Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Jane Eyre), and yes, even science fiction (hell, I'm teaching Good Omens - Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman - in the fall), all have - when written by the right people - literary value.
Fortunately - I think - these are beginning to emerge in academia - courses on Bradbury, Tolkien, gothic fiction, Agatha Christe, detective fiction.
Then again, I'm a big fan of thinking while you read; I think people should learn while they enjoy something - whether it is learning something about the world, society, or themselves, but, to quote (or perhaps misquote) Einstein, "the important thing is to never stop questioning."

Emma, you dirty girl

From Jane Austen's Emma.
Mr. Woodhouse was almost as much interested in the business as the girls, and tried very often to recollect something worth their putting in. "So many clever riddles as there used to be when he was young-- he wondered he could not remember them! but he hoped he should in time." And it always ended in "Kitty, a fair but frozen maid."
His good friend Perry, too, whom he had spoken to on the subject, did not at present recollect any thing of the riddle kind; but he had desired Perry to be upon the watch, and as he went about so much, something, he thought, might come from that quarter. It was by no means his daughter's wish that the intellects of Highbury in general should be put under requisition. Mr. Elton was the only one whose assistance she asked. He was invited to contribute any really good enigmas, charades, or conundrums that he might recollect; and she had the pleasure of seeing him most intently at work with his recollections; and at the same time, as she could perceive, most earnestly careful that nothing ungallant, nothing that did not breathe a compliment to the sex should pass his lips.
They owed to him their two or three politest puzzles; and the joy and exultation with which at last he recalled, and rather sentimentally recited, that well-known charade,
My first doth affliction denote, Which my second is destin'd to feel And my whole is the best antidote That affliction to soften and heal.
-- made her quite sorry to acknowledge that they had transcribed it some pages ago already. "Why will not you write one yourself for us, Mr. Elton?" said she; "that is the only security for its freshness; and nothing could be easier to you."
"Oh no! he had never written, hardly ever, any thing of the kind in his life. The stupidest fellow! He was afraid not even Miss Woodhouse"--he stopt a moment-- "or Miss Smith could inspire him."
The very next day however produced some proof of inspiration. He called for a few moments, just to leave a piece of paper on the table containing, as he said, a charade, which a friend of his had addressed to a young lady, the object of his admiration, but which, from his manner, Emma was immediately convinced must be his own.
"I do not offer it for Miss Smith's collection," said he. "Being my friend's, I have no right to expose it in any degree to the public eye, but perhaps you may not dislike looking at it."
The speech was more to Emma than to Harriet, which Emma could understand. There was deep consciousness about him, and he found it easier to meet her eye than her friend's.
He was gone the next moment:--after another moment's pause, "Take it," said Emma, smiling, and pushing the paper towards Harriet--"it is for you. Take your own."
But Harriet was in a tremor, and could not touch it; and Emma, never loth to be first, was obliged to examine it herself.
To Miss--
CHARADE.
My first displays the wealth and pomp of kings, Lords of the earth! their luxury and ease. Another view of man, my second brings, Behold him there, the monarch of the seas!
But ah! united, what reverse we have! Man's boasted power and freedom, all are flown; Lord of the earth and sea, he bends a slave, And woman, lovely woman, reigns alone.
Thy ready wit the word will soon supply, May its approval beam in that soft eye!"
 
For those of you who think Jane Austen is a nice girl, consider the following:
Syphilis makes one loose ones memory. Mr. Woodhouse has trouble remembering the riddles he used to know as a young man.
"Kitty" is a term for a prostitute... if "it always ended in 'Kitty, a fair but frozen maid,'" wouldn't it imply that "it" (perhaps syphilis?) ends with the death of beautiful prostitutes.
And do I have to say more: "I have no right to expose it in any degree to the public eye, but perhaps you may not dislike looking at it"?
Just some food for thought. :)

For whom the pen?

In reading another friend's livejournal this afternoon, I realized something specific about the way I write.
 
Some people write for themselves, for their own pleasure and/or vilification. They write because there is an inner demon struggling to get out. They write because they love the way their own words sound (and not necessarily in an arrogant fashion - it's a love of language). They write to feed the beast. I understand this. I even experience it from time to time, though not as often as one  might think. But I'll get back to this.
 
Some people write for other people. Nothing wrong with this, either, but if I try to write for someone else, I end up sounding forced or like a demented Hallmark card. Now this isn't to say that, as writers, we should ignore our impled audience. That's not what I mean at all. When I say people write for other people, I mean they write with the express purpose of getting the acclaim/attention/praise/censure of the other party and they tailor their writing for that specific purpose.
Needless to say, this can get rather complicated.
Many people write papers for their teacher/professor. By this I mean that they specifically tailor their language and argument for an A. They don't necessarily write what they really think, or write in their own style, but they mimic what they think their teacher/professor wants to read.
Personally, I find this to be a load of crap and my students suffer for it if it's too obvious. I assign them a paper to hear what they think, not to have them vomit my own words back to me.
This isn't always the case, of course. Sometimes writing for someone can produce original and even beautiful work. I just think that's the exception rather than the rule.
 
Now as to my personal theory.
I write - whether an academic paper, a story, or a poem - for the subject: for the work itself, for the subject(s) of/in the work, for what needs to be said rather than what I think someone else (even myself) might want it to say.
When I write, I try to allow the story/argument/characters/ideas to speak through my hands rather than forcing the words to articulate something external to the patterns of those ideas. As a result, I often go back over a page and am only able to recall writing about one quarter to one third of it. It's very much like what I imagine automatic writing to be. Only I'm not going to claim to be channeling some long-dead author (W.B. Yeats, are you listening?).
Regardless, I think the subject (story/character/idea/argument) of the writing should speak louder than the desires of the audience or the imposition of the author. Naturally, the author must choose the subject (at least to a certain extent), but he or she - I believe - should also not attempt to force a subject to go contrary to its nature.
I think this is probably a great source of frustration for many "failed" writers. They have this idea of where their work is going to go and they mean to make it go there, even when the work needs to go in an entirely different direction.

And it begins...

The purpose of this particular blog is to catalog my literary and philosophical musings - especially those regarding my current classes - and my thoughts and writings. Hence the "Musings and Imaginings." Not particularly creative, but truth in advertising, at least.

My livejournal will continue to operate and will occasionally link here, but it will contain more personal posts and this blog will be more academic.

As for me, my credentials (for those of you who don't already know me) include a few degrees in English (read: literature) and several years of teaching (jr. high, high school, and college, both theatre and English). I'm no expert, certainly, but I am an able scholar. I, of course, appreciate anyone who would care to engage in discussion, whether you agree or disagree.