Hell in a Handbasket

What fascinates us about Satan is the way he expresses qualities that go beyond what we ordinarily recognize as human. Satan evokes more than the greed, envy, lust, and anger we identify with our own worst impulses, and more than what we call brutality, which imputes to human beings a resemblance to animals ("brutes"). Thousands of years of tradition have characterized Satan instead as a spirit. Originally he was one of God's angels, but a fallen one. Now he stands in open rebellion against God, and in his frustrated rage he mirrors aspects of our own confrontations with otherness... Satan has, after all, made a kind of profession out of being the "other"; and so Satan defines negatively what we think of as human.

Elaine Pagels, The Origin of Satan.

No doubt due to a fairly devout Catholic upbringing, the concept of Satan has always fascinated me. As a child, I expressed a disbelief in the very concept of evil - and along with that, disbelief in sin or Hell. That said, I suppose I've had to reevaluate that over the years.

Now I certainly don't believe in Hell as a physical place with devils and little red pitchforks; I'm a confirmed secular humanist (read atheist for those of you who don't want to look that up) and I think the notion of either god or a devil rather absurd in most senses. I think they're very interesting semiotic referents, however.

The very sense of divinity and devilry - of a god and a devil - is one that intrigues me so deeply that I've decided to dedicate my life to it. I believe not in the literal nature of such things, but in the symbolic value of them. Evil - and Satan - is something that human beings use as a scapegoat: "he's evil, that's why he did it," and that sort of thing. Now evil in the sense of abject cruelty, sociopathic behavior, murder, and so on I can believe in. People who are intentionally sadistic and whose behavior does far more harm than good - if any good at all - most certainly fall under the domain of "Evil."

But that isn't the evil of Satan.

Satan's evil is far more abstract than that and, as my students suggested while reading Paradise Lost, is an evil that arises from the ideology of subjugation. Satan is evil not because he is cruel, but he is evil because he chooses to rebel against godhead. The oppressive state apparatus - to borrow a term from Althusser - of religion uses Satan as a means by which to enforce obedience to their institutional ideology. Of course, there were devils and dark gods long before the rise of the Church, so naturally that isn't where it all begins, but they all seem to serve the same purpose.

But I digress. Pagels' point in the above paragraph is that we see in the figure of Satan a kind of kinship that is - whatever Milton may say about it - not one of superior beings to a lowly and base creature. Satan is not a "brute"; Satan's allure is that he is as human as we are, and yet more than human. He was an angel, the greatest of them, and his disobedience to god caused his demonization. Semiotically speaking, Satan is what we risk becoming when we risk rebellion; any act of subversion or tactic of defiance creates in us a mirror of Satanic behavior. Yet, Pagels suggests, Satan is more than human, as well. He is "a spirit" whose strength springs from "intense spiritual passion... strength, intelligence, and devotion" (xvii); Satan is more than humans can become because he begins as more than we are. Satan is both like us and Other to us; as god - since humans are ostensibly made in god's image - is both like and unlike us, so Satan is both like and unlike us.

Satan seems to me the more interesting of the two. But then, as my advisor tells me, I "do evil." Not brutality or cruelty, of course, but rebellion. And it strikes me that in a nation founded on the fundamental principles of freedom enforced by rebellion, we'd be a little less wrapped up in our righteousness, but that's a rant for another day.

Honestly, though, if you had to choose between godhead and defiance, which would you choose? Me, I'll go with defiance, thanks. Makes things a hell of a lot more interesting.

Besides, who says Satan isn't part of the whole ineffable plan?

The Doctrine and Discipline of Milton

A reaction to John Milton's Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, Of Education, and Areopagitica. The first is a defense of divorce, the second elucidates Milton's ideas on Education, and the third is a defense of publication freedom.

In the excerpt from Writing the English Republic, Norbrook suggests that Milton, “Finding that the government was dealing well with liberty in the state… turned to domestic liberty, in which he included marriage, education, and freedom of speech. This is a very broad category; but one of Milton’s aims is to span conventional distinctions between the political and the religious, the public and the private, authorship and citizenship” (109). In reading Milton’s treatise on Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, Areopagitica, and Of Education, one cannot help but notice the way in which Milton conflates these dichotomies; each treatise implies the natural conflation of all three of the pairings Norbrook mentions, especially as they concern authorship.

Milton’s frequent use of “Author” in Paradise Lost to imply the master in the relationship – both for god and Adam – is an apt demonstration of the way in which Milton seems to suggest the power of the written word. His eloquent defense of free speech in Areopagitica implies the necessity for the citizen-author to the freedom of both individual and nation. The figure of the author-citizen, as the use of “Author” in Paradise Lost implies, is a figure of considerable authority and, naturally enough, represents the image of the authoritative scholar Milton projects. This author-citizen was a synthesis not only of public and private, but of a modern man and “a return to that lost civic virtue and purity of language” (Norbrook 113) that Milton valued in Classical writing and government. As author and citizen, Milton’s suggestions, especially in treatises that could be construed as somewhat controversial, resonate with his image of the ideal nation; he desires England to be a nation of rationality and the author-citizen is the ideal member of that nation.

However, the author-citizen figure so staunchly defended in Areopagitica is already present in both Doctrine and Of Education. The rational tone that combines the language of legal and religious discourse in Doctrine attempts to argue the value of the author-citizen as more valuable to the public sphere if he is contented in the private: “The republican male must be fit of rthe public sphere, and ideological antagonism in marriage disrupts that fitness” (Norbrook 115). This conflation of the two spheres – which had hitherto and would thereafter often be kept completely separate – completely embodies Milton’s republicanism in which, Norbrook says, “he wants to destroy… a hierarchy in which power is handed down from above” (110). Although Norbrook focuses on Milton’s early defense of monarchy, specifically in Of Reformation, the ideas contained therein continue to apply to Milton’s later ideas, and Norbrook suggests that these ideas were always more compatible with republicanism than monarchy: “[Civill Government mentioned in Of Reformation] is a commonwealth in which all the parts are subordinated to the whole rather than the body’s being subordinated to the monarchical head” (113). Milton, Doctrine’s author-citizen, refuses to accept either religious or political authority that would attempt to dictate rules that suffocate the private person, rendering him unable to participate in the public sphere.

Of Education seems to be a synthesis of Milton’s republican attitude of defying authority with an understanding of self-discipline that would enable the educational system to produce more author-citizens. Following these, Areopagitica is rather unsurprising; the figure of the author-citizen – a man educated in a republican fashion and allowed to escape the strictures of a religious authority that does not have his happiness and peace foremost in mind – must have the freedom to be an author-citizen and must not be stifled by an oppressive government whose irrational fears have begun to lead it away from republic and back toward tyranny. The fundamental element of the author-citizen, as Norbrook suggests, is that he is a synthetic figure; he fuses both the public and the private, the religious and the political, and, most important of all, the citizen and the author.

The questions that arise from the depiction and articulation of the author-citizen relate to the contradictions inherent in the act of synthesis. As Norbrook points out, Doctrine is rife with contradictions both to itself and to Of Education: “As in his relations with democracy, a certain opening in the direction of wider communication creates an abrasive effect when it is then sharply limited. He expected wives to converse, but the ideal curriculum he set out in Of Education… made no mention of women” (118). Other contradictions that are complicated rather than resolved by Milton’s synthesizing appear in his desire to limit Catholic publications – “Milton then does not object to the suppression of royalist opinions in a time of war” (Norbrook 120) – while speaking against the limiting of publication in Areopagitica. At what point do we listen to the author-citizen and at what point to we ignore the strictures he sets forth? When is the authority of the author liberating and when does it cross the line it professes to defend between freedom and tyranny, especially in light of Norbrook’s observation that “Areopagitica would have been still less accessible to the artisans who were enthusiastically entering political debate. It speaks for, rather than to, them; the community it speaks to is that of intellectuals deeply versed in literary culture” (125)?

Norbrook, David. Writing the English Republic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Signifying Nothing

And again I post a bit of my Macbeth paper. This is the conclusion, which doesn't fully do the paper justice in that it doesn't give a nice tidy overview, but it does give the conclusion I came to while writing it... which, surprisingly enough, is where I thought I was going. So cookies (mmmm... peppernuts) for me for getting it right this time.

Macbeth is a play whose complex and amphibolic language leads only to more complexity; the inability of character or audience to interpret language or action invests the play itself with prophetic agency. The theatricality of the lines, the roles, and the sense of prophetic predestination that hover throughout the text can only be comprehended from a position of hindsight; Macbeth’s words and deeds, like the prophecies of the Weird Sisters, culminate only in a return to themselves. Like the play, Macbeth’s speech is self-reflexive; just as the play must return to its beginnings –since it returns to the same field of battle on which it begins – the language of the play haunts itself. Characters repeat linguistic patterns, words, and images found earlier in the lines, actions – battle, murder, and prophecy – recur again and again, further complicating a play already dark and murky with the equivocation of political prophecy. Self-destructive treason and the haunting discourse of amphibology reduce the play to the strutting and fretting of a poor player upon the stage of political battle, ultimately, in its amphibolic circularity, full of sound and fury, but signifying nothing.

When the battle's lost and won

The current project is on Shakespeare's Macbeth and the language and performance of treason - not only how treason is depicted in Macbeth, but how Macbeth himself is forced into committing treason (and ultimately destroying himself) by his inability to fully comprehend both the prophecy of the Weird Sisters AND of the text of the play itself.

The following is my working introduction.

In the context of London, 1606, William Shakespeare’s Macbeth offers an imagined world inverted by the “hurleyburly” (1.1.3) of war, treachery, and treason. The prophecies of the three Weird Sisters set the stage (literally) for the action of the play, infusing the text (performed and written) with the discourse of political treason and equivocation. Historically situated after the Gowrie plot and the discourse of equivocation espoused by the Jesuits, Macbeth’s amphibology resonates with the political ideology of James I’s England. However, Shakespeare’s play does not limit its textual ambivalence to a discourse of treason grounded entirely in the figures of the Weird Sisters; magic is not entirely to blame for the disintegration of Scotland in the play. In fact, the language and actions of the play itself contain more amphibolic complexities than the brief and often unintelligible (at least to the other characters) scenes containing the Weird Sisters. The body of the text – characters, roles, actions, and language – performs its own prophecies, ultimately determining Macbeth’s fate itself – the Weird Sisters’ presence seems almost superfluous and serves only to reinforce the amphibology of the text in human form. Concerns of treason and equivocation run rampant through the hurlyburly of the play, ultimately culminating in Macbeth’s self-destruction qua his own inability to read himself; the amphibology of both body (role and action) and text (language) are inaccessible to Macbeth (and to Lady Macbeth), destroying them both because they are incapable of fully accessing the multivalent meanings of their own treachery.

Byron and Prophetic Fragmentation

For a course in Romanticism and the Orient - for those of you who have any familiarity with Edward Said, his book is a central focus of the course - I have decided to write on Lord Byron's The Giaour and the politics of poetic fragmentation.
If you'd care to comment, I'd be happy to take either suggestions, comments, or questions of any sort. Or you can simply read for your own personal amusement... if such a thing could be amusing.

Lord Byron’s The Giaour textually creates a fragmented Oriental space that articulates a poetic instability simultaneously performed for and by the Giaour himself. Written out of a tradition of Romantic Orientalism in which the Oriental fragment poem – like Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” and others – Byron’s poem creates its own illusive history, lodging itself within an invented context of incompleteness. The Giaour – like its titular central figure – uses its Oriental history as a site of Otherness; the Giaour himself is as Other within the context of the poem as the poem itself. From this place of Otherness, the Giaour is spoken of and speaks textual self-division; the place and voice of the Oriental fisherman and the monk highlight the dual Otherness of the Giaour while the Giaour himself declares his own fragmentation in his final confession. Locked in a relationship of self-reflection and destruction with both Hassan and Leila, the Giaour ultimately condemns himself to incompleteness – mentally and spiritually –through an inability to reconcile the levels of hatred and Otherness within his own identity. Byron’s The Giaour performs the self-fragmentation of its central figure through spatial Oriental division and duality, creating within its broken lines of text an inescapable prison of reflective instability secured by the parallels between the alien self and the familiar Other of English-Oriental text, finally culminating in a prophecy of Occidental self-destruction qua the unquenchable desire for the imagined historical – and unattainable – Orient.

King, Cawdor, Glamis, all

It is truly amazing how much I can tweak out of a few scant lines...

BANQUO: “Thou hast it now – King, Cawdor, Glamis, all / As the weird women promised, and I fear / Thou played’st most foully for ‘t” (3:1:1-3)

Banquo’s speech at the opening of Act three carries several interesting implications about both the theatricality of Macbeth’s roles – “King, Cawdor, Glamis” and the fates associated therewith – and the fate proclaimed by the Weird Sisters. The enjambment of Banquo’s lines forces secondary meanings into the words. “All / As the weird women promised” is somehow less bizarre and prophetic than “King, Cawdor, Glamis, all,” with the subsequent implication that the enacting of one of them – in Macbeth’s case, Glamis to Cawdor to King (listed, interestingly enough, in reverse order) – enacts “all.” Shakespeare’s lines – spoken through Banquo, the fictitious (though believed) root of the Stuart kings – force Macbeth’s performance. Macbeth himself is subject (literally and figuratively) to the lines spoken about both himself and his titles; Banquo, Ross, Duncan, and even Lady Macbeth speak the roles that Macbeth must play, and “[play] most foully.” Secondary to the listing of Macbeth’s roles – in order, but not importance – is Banquo’s fear: “I fear / Thou play’st most foully for ‘t.” The enjambment of the line truncates the remained of Banquo’s sentence, transforming his judgment of Macbeth into an emotive indication: he fears. The addition of the remainder, unlike the previous line, which clarifies the source of Macbeth’s fortune, acknowledges Macbeth’s lack of power in the face of his naming: “Thou play’st most foully for it.” Not only has Macbeth “play’st” a foul role in murdering Duncan, but he has (and is, and will) “play” his own role to a foul end.

This is a chunk of notes that will, by the end of December, be placed in a longer seminar paper on the ideas of fate and theatricality in Macbeth (yes, dear, Macbeth). The basic premise is that Macbeth is forced into his position of regicide through the language of the play itself. Certainly, our friends the Weird Sisters have a cackling hand in it - they are the mouthpieces of the Fates, after all (three and three... think about it) - but the overarching hand MUST be that of our loveable author's Will (sorry about the punning, folks, but it is a Friday afternoon and I need dinner). The long and short of it is that Macbeth has no agency of his own, but that his character is predetermined by the lines of the play from the moment it opens.
Now, I can hear you saying "Well, duh. Shakespeare wrote it, so he could decide what to write." That's not what I'm talking about. What I'm talking about is that the language of the play predetermines the character (and yes, I'm sure our dashing William did do that intentionally, but I don't care if he did or not), and since Macbeth is predestined to become the things he becomes (and to do the things he does), it isn't his fault. Whether or not I assign any blame to the sisters or his wife, I've yet to determine.

An Apple a Day...

So after a few weeks of Genesis-filled class time, we've moved on to some of the contemporary feminist representations of the story. I'm particularly fond of Michelene Wandor's "Gardens of Eden," especially the opening poem, "Eve in the Morning."

So God created man (sic) in his (sic) own image?

'Male and female he created them' Genesis 1:27

Look
it was only a tree, for God's sake
a nice tree
nice shade, green leaves
an apple

You eat one apple and they remember you forever; you
only want to be left in peace, make
chutney, compote, dried apple rings
on a string

a snake? don't be silly
knowledge? you read too many Good Books
naked? so I like the sun. I tan easy.

Hava. Eve. Me (3)

The poem continues, but this is the part that strikes me as being especially emblematic of the Revisionist Mythology movement in feminist women's writing, particularly in poetry. I'm particularly fond of the opening line; the "(sic)" is an editorial indication that the original text being quoted contained an error - though usually reserved for a spelling or punctuation error, I find it rather poignant that Wandor uses it in this case. She not only questions the gender of deity, but also of whether it was man, woman, or both that were supposedly created in the image of god. It also implies that, ideologically, the entire conception of patriarchal dominance and authority is drawn from human error in Biblical narrative.
I also like the way Wandor has Eve minimize the Fall itself - "Look / it was only a tree, for God's sake" - by reducing the importance of the Tree of Knowledge. The almost neglectful way Eve says "for God's sake" - though clearly Wandor's use of the phrase is very deliberate - downplays the 'sin' of eating the fruit and practically scoffs at the way the temptation is figured in Genesis (and in subsequent texts, like Milton's Paradise Lost).
Wandor's Eve is also very domestic (in contrast to Lilith, the other figure in the sequence "Gardens of Eden," who is exotic, sexual, powerful, and worldly), desiring to make "chutney, compote, dried apple rings / on a string." However, domestication - the language of cooking - is also a tool of minimization; the "apple" is symbolically reduced from a signifier of sin and feminine weakness in regards to temptation, becoming instead a series of foods: things to be consumed in comfort, things which are homey, things that have no mythic significance whatsoever. Eve's domestication of the Genesis myth laughs in the face of the serious and somber temptation and Tree, creating instead an image of domestic simplicity that is nevertheless both intelligent and witty, empowering Eve as woman, as mother, and as autonomous speaker.

Reign in Hell

My class - the one I teach - is reading pieces from John Milton's Paradise Lost this week. I've always been especially fond of Satan in this poem, and I have a few thoughts about how the poor guy just gets co-opted into spouting all sorts of self-defeating religious ideology in Milton's poem.
Satan in Paradise Lost I:249-263 - "Farewell, happy fields,
Where joy for ever dwells! Hail, horrors! hail,
Infernal world! and thou, profoundest Hell,
Receive thy new possessor--one who brings
A mind not to be changed by place or time.
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.
What matter where, if I be still the same,
And what I should be, all but less than he
Whom thunder hath made greater? Here at least
We shall be free; th' Almighty hath not built
Here for his envy, will not drive us hence:
Here we may reign secure; and, in my choice,
To reign is worth ambition, though in Hell:
Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven."

Power, knowledge, etc. seem to inversely impact goodness - "While they adore me on the Throne of Hell, / With Diadem and Scepter high advanc't / The lower still I fall, only supreme / In misery; such joy Ambition finds" (Milton IV:89-92). The ideology of power would seem to dictate that the higher one ascends in power, the less one wishes to be challenged; in an ideological system based on the struggle for power, it makes sense for religious ideology to encourage humility rather than ambition. The desire for power is curbed with threats of hell and the educated elite are left with power, knowledge, et al. Ironic, isn't it?

Satan seems to be attempting to escape this ideology by reversing it - "Evil be thou my Good" (ibid IV:110) - however, by constructing attempted escape as a reversal, Milton ensnares Satan within the discourse of that same ideology: "So farewell Hope, and with Hope farewell Fear, / Farewell Remorse: all Good to me is lost; / Evil be thou my Good" (ibid IV:108-110). Even in rebellion, Satan is trapped - and Milton traps him intentionally in the snare of his own discourse - in an Althusserian vicious cycle in which he must always perpetuate the divine ideology, regardless of if he strives to do evil or to do good.

"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.