This reading started off with Ovid, which I love to read thanks to Latin. I think it’s interesting how each translation of Ovid is different, but they all try to spread the original message of his stories. The “Proem” at the beginning was a variation of my first lines in the Fall Play Metamorphoses, so it was interesting to see how Mary Zimmerman adapted those lines. These first few lines seem to set up the theme for Ovid’s stories: transformation and change.
Ovid used a lot of personification in his creation stories. One of the themes that I recognized in not only Ovid, but the other texts as well was water. Ovid personifies water in the beginning of his Creation story, but water is also what destroys man. Water plays a role in Lucretius, Genesis, and Paradise Lost as well. The contrast between Lucretius and Ovid seemed obvious because Ovid’s is more storylike, while Lucretius’ seemed more scientific. It focused on the universe and not so much on man. While there are analogies about humans or bodies, Lucretius never really mentions the creation of humans--something the other stories focus on tremendously. Another connection I saw was between Ovid and Genesis. They both made distinctions between specific ages of Gold, Silver, Bronze, and Iron. These distinctions showed how humans evolved, which led to the gods/God to send a flood down to punish mankind. One thing I noticed about Genesis was that it had a lot of repetition. In Genesis 2, “his work which he had made” was repeated a lot at the beginning. Genesis 5 was the most repetitive one to me because it was stating how long people were living in the same way over and over again. Another theme in these stories was submission. They spoke about humans submitting to a higher power whether that is God, the Greek gods, or something else, submission was mentioned either directly or indirectly in pretty much all of these stories. This reminds me of Greenblatt and submitting to an authority. Chaos is also a frequent word in these stories. It’s interesting to think of chaos in this sense after thinking about it for so long with Greenblatt. Before God created the universe, it seemed to be what Greenblatt called “unformed or chaotic (the absence of order)”, and then God put it in order. But after a while, it turned into the “false or negative (the demonic parody of order),” and God created the flood, so the Universe could start over. The hardest story for me to read was Paradise Lost. I hope that when we dive deeper in class together I can make more sense out of it, but right now it’s hard for me to reflect on it because I’m not sure I fully understand it. The order of things is confusing me because it seems like God mentions the flood in Book III, but Adam and Eve haven’t even sinned yet. I can’t tell if it is more like Genesis or Ovid. I think it’s more like Genesis, but there seem to be so many more characters, which makes it hard to keep up. I’m excited to go more in depth about the connections I found and the questions I have during class, and I hope to find more of both as I reread these stories in the future.
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So far in AP Lit, we’ve discussed A.O. Scott’s Better Living Through Criticism (BLTC) and Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self Fashioning (RSF), and we are now putting the two in conversation with each other. We spent what felt like forever trying to figure out Scott’s argument. I think I have approximately five pages in my CPB titled “What is Scott’s Argument?” each with a different definition. One of the most rewarding moments in class so far was when we finally figured it out. After months of discussing the key terms in BLTC, the definitions of those terms, how Scott writes, and a plethora of other topics, we, as a class, eventually came to the conclusion that Scott’s argument is “we should all be critics because our responses to art/aesthetic experiences are just as important as the art itself → our responses/reactions give those experiences meaning.” What helped me personally reach the satisfying point of defining Scott’s argument was when I reread parts of BLTC over and over again. With the texts we’re currently encountering (and I’m sure with the texts we will encounter in the future), reading them once is not enough. In order to fully understand and define the argument, you must fully understand everything else Scott says. One of the most challenging parts of this process was defining the key terms how Scott would define them as a class. I believe we spent at least five class periods defining thirteen terms. I was very proud of my art definition, which is that art “is a powerful, mobile, boundariless category of creations intended to evoke feeling/emotion in the viewer that invites criticism and opens itself to cycles of interpretation and counterintepretation.” After figuring out Scott’s argument and defining the key terms, I started trying to connect them. I made a triangle with the points being subject, creator, and object. The sides were aesthetic experience (connecting object and subject), criticism (connecting subject and creator), and the good (connecting creator and object). Eventually we arrived at what was the most confusing text for me to read over the summer: RSF. What helped me really get an understanding of it was when we had to do the sentence by sentence reading and analyzing. Going slowly helped me and I was able to pinpoint what each sentence was saying, which led to me being able to pinpoint what each paragraph was saying. The class discussions were a huge help in understanding Greenblatt and self-fashioning as well.
I think we’re about to move on to Ovid, and I can’t even explain how excited that makes me. Having studied and translated these stories for the past five years in Latin, I can’t wait to talk about them in a new light and hear fresh thoughts and ideas about Ovid. Also, since I was just in Mary Zimmerman’s “Metamorphoses,” I’ve had the opportunity to experience and tell these stories in a different way than I have before. I’m really enjoying AP Lit so far. The structure of the class is something I was unsure of at first, but once I decided to commit, I learned that I truly love it. I think the work we are doing both in and outside of class is important and worthwhile, and I’m always excited to share my thoughts while hearing those of my classmates. I imagine we will continue to dive deep into texts and discussions, and I’m sure there will be more challenging moments, followed by very rewarding ones. I can’t wait to continue growing as a reader, writer, and thinker in AP Lit this year. At this point, I have finished all the reading, but most recently I finished “Renaissance Self Fashioning,” which I will refer to as RSF, so I don’t have to continuously question my spelling of “renaissance,” by Stephen Greenblatt and five of the BrainPickings by Maria Popova. RSF was the most confusing piece I’ve read so far. It was complex, it hurt my head, I gave up many times in hopes that when I would return it would be easier to read, but I know that the point of this summer work is to get out of my comfort zone and be okay with being uncertain, which I certainly was when reading Greenblatt’s writing. So, I continued reading even though I didn’t fully understand it. I expect that I will feel this way many times during this class, and I hope that in the future I can face these moments with confidence rather than frustration.
Now onto the BrainPickings. For the most part, I actually enjoyed reading these pieces. It took awhile for me to decide which ones I would read and analyze, and I think I ended up reading at least a little bit of each. I ended up fully reading six of them, but only analyzing five because “Kierkegaard on Time, the Fullness of the Moment, and How to Bridge the Ephemeral with the Eternal” went completely over my head. Hopefully, one day I will be able to read it, understand it, and enjoy it. The five other ones that I read and actually wrote about were “A Stop-Motion Love Letter to the Power of Curiosity,” “Descartes on Wonderment,” “Nietzsche on Truth, Lies, the Power and Peril of Metaphor, and How We Use Language to Reveal and Conceal Reality,” “Philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft on the Imagination and Its Seductive Power in Human Relationships,” and “Ursula K. Le Guin on Redeeming the Imagination from the Commodification of Creativity and How Storytelling Teaches Us to Assemble Ourselves.” I’ll start with “A Stop-Motion Love Letter to the Power of Curiosity.” This was one of the pieces I enjoyed most. The moment that struck me most was the line that said “... we seem to have lost our appetite for this singular human faculty that propels us forward. We’ve lulled ourselves into a kind of complacency, where too often we’d rather be right than uncertain or-- worse yet-- wrong…” This was very relatable to me because I often find myself scared of being wrong. If I don’t think I have the right answer, I’m not going to raise my hand in class. If I don’t think I have enough knowledge on a certain topic, I’m not going to get into a debate about it. If I don’t think I know how to do something correctly, I’m not going to volunteer to be the example. And I think that everyone feels this way. But what Popova is trying to prove is that we need to learn to be okay with being uncertain, with being in the unknown. Because then we can learn and then, we can know. And the more we know, the more curious we will be and the more connections we can make between thoughts and ideas to eventually create our own. Another interesting piece to me was “Descartes on Wonderment.” Similarly to the previous BrainPicking I discussed, it focused on curiosity, and it introduced the idea of wonderment. It says that wonderment is something that happens when we see something that is new and exciting, something that sparks our curiosity. But as I continued reading, it became more of a warning of being overly curious rather than guiding us on how to use our curiosity and wonderment to our advantage. If we marvel at everything we see, we lose the true sense of wonder that occurs when we see something deserving of our wonderment. By now, I have read Warren Berger’s A More Beautiful Question, and, boy, do I have more questions. The title made me curious: what is the more beautiful question the author is going to ask? But even in the first few pages, I realized there wasn’t just one question that would be asked-- there were hundreds. I noticed it was sort of like a snowball; once the ball starts rolling, more snow would stick. But instead of snow, it was questions.
Berger begins by talking about childhood and how annoying it is for parents when their children ask “Why?” to everything. While this might be frustrating for the parents, it’s even more frustrating for the children. They just want to understand the world around them and why certain things happen or don’t happen. Berger then breaks down the steps that a child goes through to ask a question:
I never thought about this process before. Knowing that you don’t know something is an interesting concept and a seemingly difficult one for a child to grasp. And while it might be tempting to brush off children’s questions because we feel like they are “trying to bother us,” it’s extremely important to encourage them to keep questioning because this will help them later in their learning and their life. Berger than discusses how our education system is not geared to our current time. It is built on factory model, which is not the kind of model kids need to be following if we want them to ask questions and be creative. Berger emphasizes the importance of kids being comfortable in order to ask questions, and if they are afraid, they are more likely to be less curious. He says, “fear is the enemy of curiosity” (page 58), which I 100% agree with, but I will come back to this point later. It was around page 60 that I stopped and finally asked myself and wrote down in my CPB, “Why are we reading this?” Well, probably to prompt me to ask that very question. But I asked it, so now what? I thought about this for a while, and then realized that this is the way that I need to be thinking. I need to be thinking in questions and curiosity in order to succeed in AP Lit, in school, in life. I can’t be afraid to ask questions now because that will limit my abilities and my creativity later. Luckily, I learn in an environment that encourages me to ask questions and makes me feel comfortable to do so. Some children are not so lucky, which is unfortunate. Berger says, “Being comfortable with not knowing-- that is the first part of being able to question” (page 80). This goes back to what he was previously saying about fear playing a role in children asking questions. If we are afraid we will be judged for not knowing, we will definitely not be comfortable to ask questions. At this point, I have finished reading A.O. Scott’s Better Living Through Criticism. It has opened my mind to questions I never thought to ask and made me think in ways I never imagined I should. The first quote that struck me, and the first quote that is written in my CPB was: “There is no argument, but then again there is only argument” (page 43). I read this line at least three times, trying to wrap my head around its meaning. How can we argue about taste when it is supposed to be subjective? But then again, how can we not? It was at this moment that I realized this reading was not going to be and was not supposed to be easy.
As I continued reading, and Scott began to talk about beauty, I thought about how taste and beauty compare to one another. He brought up the difference between “I like that” and “That is good,” which is something I hadn’t given much thought to before. “I like that” is subjective; it is a personal opinion. “That is good” is objective, and it is no longer personal. This made me think about the kind of language I use on a daily basis. For example, when I walk out of a movie theatre claiming that the film was good, or when I take a bite of food and declare it bad. Instead, I should be saying “I liked the movie” or “The food tastes bad to me” because these things are opinions. Scott also brought up the idea that if something is popular, it must be good. And if something is good, we will like it. This idea seems to be true in our world today. If there are 100 5-star reviews for a restaurant, it is probably a good restaurant, and people will probably like it. But like the author says, beauty is entirely dependent on the eye of the beholder. When he gives the example of 100 people saying a bird is beautiful, he writes that “we might be led to ask not what kind of fowl is inherently pleasing, but rather what kind of bird was likely to appeal to a cross section of the British public in the mid-eighteenth century” (page 53). I had never thought about something like this. Instead of considering what one thing 100 people could find objectively beautiful, we need to look at the people, the time, the place, and what might appeal to their commonalities. The conversation of art is always a difficult one, and one that I find myself in quite often. A question that I commonly hear and am asked to answer is “what is art?” I think this question is entirely unfair. I actually think I might hate this question, and I think the best way to answer is with more questions. Who is to decide? The viewer? The artist? Does art have to be beautiful? Can it be disturbing? Disgusting? The one thing that I know for sure about art is that it moves people. It makes us feel something. Art is powerful, infinite, necessary, inspiring, emotional, boundaryless; it is all these things and more. So, how does criticism tie into art and taste and beauty? To be honest, I’m still not entirely sure that I know. But I think that’s the point of this reading and this upcoming year; to try my best to understand, but when I don’t, to accept that and keep an open mind to thinking and wondering. I understand that real art should invite criticism. It should open its arms to interpretation and counterinterpretation. I’m going to end by responding to a quote that I originally thought had little to do with art, beauty, and criticism, but with the way that Scott thinks and the way he makes the reader think, I am now thinking that it has absolutely everything to do with art, beauty, and criticism. “It also struck me as horribly unfair that, in the course of my lifetime, I would only ever get to occupy a single mind. I would only ever think and feel within the arbitrary limits of who I am” (page 86). I think about this a lot. That’s probably why I believe, or hope, rather, that there is an afterlife, and we are born into another body. That we get to live an entirely different life and experience entirely different things and think entirely different thoughts and feel entirely different feelings. Because it would be “horribly unfair” if we didn’t. |