The Poet

As I was reading Asch, I noticed that the characters seemed to be in constant movement.  They drove from one scenario to the next:  "along the street in Texarkana, Texas"; "a house that was whole"; "the shack" where the man from Minnesota lived.  All of these constructs generate a poor image of America--and the main character seems to lack agency as he moves from scenario to scenario.  I often view him as an audience member observing the living conditions in which the poor Americans inhabit (clearly of the Dust-bowl).  This reminded me of Ong a little in his explanation of the audience member as fictive.  "The writer must consctruct in his imagination...an audience cast in some sort of role," he says.  While reading In Search of America, I often equated the main character with the audience--which begs the question of the audience member as actually real?  Which is a bit of a stretch considering the main character is fake, but considering he functions as a catalyst for the reader with his constant "walking," "driving" to different cities across America.

If no one has ever read Sherlock Holmes, the character of Watson works the same way.  His character serves as a bit of a narrator from which the audience can view the text in words they understand.  Asch's narrator describes America as he wanders about the land.  But his character lacks agency because he doesn't arguably 'do' anything.  He asks questions that create the characterizations of the people in the story.  As he interacts with the farmer with the poor tenants he asks "How did they live on through winter"  He asks the woman with the bad back why "she didn't go to the doctor that owned the land they lived on."  And he asks the poet at the end if he could read his writing.

Of all the characters in the story I feel the poet relates to us and the author the most.  He works as an odd parallel between audience, agency and the question of authorship. 

I'm silly and I forgot to bring my binder containing all of our reading materials to BH before class.  I'm going to just sum up my points now then elaborate later. 

As I was saying...I definitely think there's a parallel between the narrator and the poet in terms of agency.  As in, the poet has agency because he writes everything down.  The narrator lacks agency because he observes as an audience member (although he definitely facillitates thought by asking questions).  This suggests that the writer, the author if you will, possesses the power in America.  TBC

Revisiting and Trying to Understand Barthes

In this post, I wanted to back track a little. I've had trouble with Barthes concept of an "author cancelling himself out." I want to use this post tot try and explain his concept to myself.

Barthes was a structuralist. In structuralism, a text's meaning is found through the signs and conventions of the text's language. Bedford gives the example of the word tiger. A reader will read about a tiger and picture a tiger, but the text is merely a symbol for a tiger, calling on the reader's own knowledge of tigers (Bedford). Structuralists often find that readers organize these signs into binaries: madwoman vs. angel, hero vs. villain, white vs. black, etc.

Structuralism reminds me of Aristotle’s On Rhetoric. Aristotle said that a rhetor's job was merely to elucidate the "means of persuasion."  His job was to point to common knowledge pertinent to the case. An example of this may be, "murder is bad." This is commonly accepted and is pointed to in order to relate a particular case to that common knowledge.

Structuralists, similarly, thought the common signs and conventions were the foundations for a text's meaning. For example, Barthes says, “the writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original. His only power is to mix writings, to counter the ones with the others, in such a way as never to rest on any one of them...life never does more than imitate the book, and the book itself is only a tissue of signs, an imitation that is lost, infinitely deferred." (877) An author does not create original work because he is constantly referring back to already established signs. He does not invent the idea of a tiger but instead calls on the already accepted sign of a tiger. The text is constantly deferred because the common signs that founded the meaning of the text are always referring back to real life objects. The text can only defer; it can't make the objects real.

 Barthes refers to the modern "author" as a "scriptor" because he doesn't call on his life's history to write. He uses the "performative" form. Barthes explains that this is like a king saying "I declare." He is performing a declaration. The meaning of the word and the action itself are the same. He is both saying "declare" and performing a declaration. This confuses me because I don't see how modern works are performative. Perhaps, the kind of performative writing he is speaking of can be seen in the media better than in modern novels?

What does it mean, then, for an author to cancel himself out? It was written on the board in class that the kind of writing Barthes proposes "cancels or removes an archetype." Barthes’ writer defers himself. He mixes signs and symbols up in a way that cannot possibly be structured into a classic literary form. He borrows from all literary archetypes, but he does not allow the writing to rest on one of those archetypes. By doing this, by using the archetypes and mixing them together, he cancels them out. The modern scriptor's antecedent explicitly referred to his personal life in his works. The modern scriptor writes, mixing together all these conventional signs, but he himself does not organize those signs into an intentional form. For example, let's say an author wrote a dream poem and simply wrote down everything that happened in his dream in the order that it happened. He doesn't explain that it's a dream. Instead of trying to make sense of a narrative, the reader's job becomes deciphering the dream’s symbols. Why might these relate to each other? How do they relate in terms of language, in terms of how they sound together? The words he uses in his dream poem are derived from the signs and symbols he's learned from studying literature, but none of these take their usual forms; they don’t form into an archetype. The reader finds a way to connect the images because the writer is not providing any help to him. Through the act of writing, the author makes himself unnecessary. He writes without any intent of meaning and therefore it's up to the reader to place that meaning.

I think I might understand Barthes' concept better now, but I can't think of any examples of this kind of writing. Maybe Lady Gaga's lyrics?

Frances Grange, Dialect and Authorship

I would like to propose, belatedly, that instead of having no "author," one does, in fact, exist. I am approaching this from a writer’s point of view. To begin with, I will start with Barthes, who proposes that the author is dead. Barthes proposes that it is “language which speaks, not the author” (Barthes, 875). However, I do not think that this is entirely correct. Language is a tool used by authors to form meaning, which is an obvious definition and also perfectly demonstrated by Campbell’s article about Sojourner Truth.

The simple fact that Frances Grange changed the language in which Sojourner was represented offers a demonstration on the tool-like nature of this aspect of language. Historically we know that Sojourner did not speak in the dialect that Grange placed upon her (Campbell, 13). However, this dialect was used and it can be presumed, since it was invented by a woman who knew Sojourner well, that this was done with some kind of purpose in mind. Otherwise Grange would have just tried to approximate the accent of Sojourner as-is, which might have even been easier.

The point, of course, is that an author must exist. If no author exists there remains only four people: the writer, the reader, the character and the narrator. The narrator and character can be seen as inventions of the writer, so they may be dismissed for the purpose of this point. What remains are the writer and the reader (or a readership). I agree with Barthes in that it lies on the reader to create an interpretation of the text (Barthes, 877). So we may see readers as something like a projector at a movie theatre. They take the film, filter it and interpret it, often sharing at least a portion of this interpretation.

This leaves the writer. What is a writer? Can we answer the question of authorship and agency if we do not know who or what the writer is? It must be assumed that the writer is the person or persons who actually write the text, who use language to craft an idea. At what point, however, does a writer become an author? Foucault points out that the “author-function is linked to the juridical and institutional system that encompasses, determines, and articulates the universe of discourses” (Foucault, 910). This seems to suggest that an author defines what discourse and what rules of the universe are acceptable for any given work. But where does that place the author? If the author is he who defines the universe of a piece, then he must be an extension of the writer in some capacity. Frances Grange most certainly didn’t speak in the same dialect she used for Sojourner (and neither did Sojourner for that matter), but that does not necessarily release Frances from authorship. It shows that Grange is able to define a set of rules for her work’s “universe.”

Serializing Author Agency

In reading Campbell's essay, I found that the most intriguing concept she discussed was this notion of "serialization" (a theory posited by Iris Young). Campbell summarizes it as this: "Individuals in a serial relationship have no set of attributes in common except their shared relationship to an external object, even or, in other cases, to a law, an institution, a norm, a stereotype and so on"(4). This concept helps do away with essentialism, not only as it relates to women but to many other groups and individuals as well. For example, if we were to try and understand gender during Shakespeare's time in order to analyze a play such as "The Twelfth Night", it would not be advantageous to compare the play's gender roles to a twentieth century drama like "Death of a Salesman". While there may or may not be underlying themes uniting the two works, we have to take into account the relationship between gender, cultural norms, and laws during a respective period.

Serialization has tremendous effect on the agency of authors as we try to understand them and categorize them. If we take each author on their own terms, we can no longer lump them into convenient categorizes that can sometimes ignore the characteristics that set apart authors from other authors. Campbell writes "subjectivity and agency can be understood as the ways in which individuals accept, negotiate, and resist the subject-positions available to them at given moments in a particular culture"(4). Thus, the author gains agency from their reaction to the positions offered to them by the culture they inhabit, and by our understanding of the serial relationship between the author and his or her contemporaries.

In Search of Truth? America? Friendship? Meaning?

Asch seems to use the terms interchangeably… or at least I thought so.  There is no question that the protagonist is searching for something, but I am not sure that even he knows what it is that he is searching for.  I suppose that is the question I want to explore with this post: is this a search for America, truth, purpose, or something else.  

One aspect that I found particularly interesting in regarding this overarching question was the protagonist’s agency and the way he filled the roll of a ghost throughout his adventure.  In other words, I found it interesting that the extent to which he enforced his ability to control his journey was through the asking or answering of the occasional question.  Questions, both rhetorical and otherwise can be found in great number in Asch’s tale and are the foundation upon which I believe one must focus if they wish to gather anything in terms of a greater meaning from this adventure.  

Whether assessing the role of work (Asch, 286), religion (Asch, 285), women (Asch, 287), children (Asch, 287), race (Asch, 288), immigrants (Asch, 296), camaraderie (Asch, 305), or poetry (Asch, 306), Asch can be found using questions to draw attention to aspects of focal importance.  These moments of development are separated by lengthy physical description that, I suppose, helps the reader to contextualize the action (questioning):

“We asked if we could meet his wife, and he took us inside. The shack had four walls, with newspaper stuck in the cracks, and two beds and a stove and newspapers stuck in the cracks, and two beds and a stove and a packing box at which the wife was standing and ironing.”

Asch p. 286

The questioning of the wife that results in her demonstration of the importance of education for her children is, without a question (pun not intended), enhanced by the reader’s understanding of her environment.

                The protagonist’s journey could easily be categorized into experiences that follow the formula: protagonist ponders about something, protagonist randomly encounters a person with some knowledge regarding what he was just thinking about, protagonist describes the surroundings in a way that draws attention to the condition of the person he is questioning, the protagonist sits back and watches as events transpire that seem to be uninfluenced by his ghost-like presence in the background. 

                Anyway, I don’t know if the role of the question intrigued anyone else.  Just thought I’d throw it out there.  What do you guys think?

Finding America in "In Search of America"

Ash's "In Search of America," highlights the same two golden principles our country's work force has long lived by: hard work as their only sense of agency, and their American dreams that push them to continue. These two principles are never separated they work in collaboration to ensure corporate slavery will always be in existence, where one might see pitiful blue collar workers, Ash sees the heart of America.

Ash's work is divided in this fashion. In each place he visits he begins by explaining the hard work expected from the workers in that community, and in explaining this process highlights what these workers dream of, what forces them to continue despite the deplorable conditions of their working environment. How this hard work brings them closer to their dreams which gives them a sense of purpose, their only agency. He summarizes his purpose when trying to convince the manager of the lumber company to let him live in one of their lumber camps, "I'm from New York. I've been traveling all over the country trying to find our what makes things run" (298).

Ash find that these two principals are in fact what make things run, not just the labor force, but the labor forces determination to someday overthrow the oppressive system they strain every day for. Among the sharecroppers in Texas, the workers can only afford to dream of the small things they might be able to afford after the credit they accumulated to feed their families have been settled out of the share their owner decides to give them. A black man whose family was waiting on the lawyer who owned their land to show up to establish their share for the year, dreamt of having enough money "to buy the children a pretty for Christmas" (288). Among the oil rigs in Oklahoma, Ash finds workers who are striving to dig deep enough in the ground to find a spring of oil in order to pay for their next bottle of Bourbon (290). In northern Colorado, among the primarily mexican beet labor force, the common dream of not being deported and being allowed to stay and work is their only dream incentive, but it is powerful enough to keep them at work at a job " no natives in America wanted to do" (294). And finally in the lumber towns the workers dream of saving enough money for their families, or at least making enough money so that they can afford to get drunk and stay up at a hotel on the weekends when they are forced to leave the lumber yards (302). Each of these dreams are fairly small, but without them there would be no sense of agency among the work force in America, nothing to keep our country running. The American Dream is played out in every hollywood movie, it is a cliche embedded so deeply in our culture its source can is traced down into the lowest of our societies' income brackets. By the end of Ash's piece "In Search of America" we find it staring back at us from the pit of our labor forces dreams, on which this country feeds, nourishes, and continues flourishing.

Hate, Resignation and Agency in Asch

     "What do you think of this for an idea:'The worse you exploit somebody, the worse you hate him'" (286). There seems to be a continual theme of hate and resignation in Asch's story. Both between those with agency and those without. This quote is a reflection on a landowners' poor treatment and resentment of his tenants. The story doesn't mention any reciprocated hate except "Peder said, 'if I was his tenant I'd shoot him'" (286), but he is only speaking hypothetically. Here, it seems, he who has agency also hates.

     We move on to a farming family in Texarcana. This family rents land from a lawyer every year and every year the lawyer threatens them with eviction if they don't buy a mule from him. They refuse every year. Here agency seems to be shared between the lawyer and the family. The lawyer owns the land and sets the price but the family has the agency to refuse his attempted exploits and remain there. The lawyer and the family don't share in hate, however. They tend to each resign themselves to each other. The lawyer resigns his threats and the family resigns any discontent saying "we don't live here. We're just here" (288). Another man in a similar situation said "I know my place and I keep it" continuing this trend of resignation in their demographic.

     When Chiver and Aragon rally a bunch of Mexican workers together to try to arrange a sugar union, an interesting interplay between hate, resignation, and agency arises. Aragon is able to successfully draw the Mexican workers' attention with a speech spoken in Spanish and so its content is unknown. When he finished, Chiver spoke. His speech ended with "once the beet plants are peering out of the ground they can't do a thing without us.... And if they don't listen... We can go at night, with hoes; five hundred hoes in the dead of night can do an awful lot of damage to a beet field" (296). After this little speech the crowd loses interest and dissipates. Chiver suggested a way for them to gain agency via hate and the result was the crowd resigning again to their plight.

    The continued presence of hate, resignation and agency throughout the story seem to imply some interesting relationship between them. The poet at the end seems to sum up resignation nicely, at least, when he says "no. It would be too much like showing my insides. I guess not. Let's go in and have another beer." Here, he who has no agency also resigns. Although he still has agency over himself clearly. But that's a whole other story.

Attempting to Verbalize Gilbert and Gubar Arguments

Okay, I wasn't able to convey my points on this reading as well as I would have liked....so here's me trying to do so again!

Gilbert and Gubar's argument was fundamentally a battle of the sexes.  Right from the beginning, G&G discuss the Snow White fairytale with the angel/monster binary.  What initially intrigued me to their argument was the idea that "If the Queen's looking glass speaks with the King's voice, how do its perpetual kingly admonitions affect the Queen's own voice?" (G&G 449).  Now, I annotated that agreed with the first point offered by G&G, that the Queen tries to sound like the king, and as such, becomes a monster.  The vengeful Queen wages a battle between Snow White, acting (in my opinion) like a King would in trying to protect territory.  The aggressive nature of this "monster" comes from her trying to sound like her main influencer--the King's voice.  Though G&G then shift their argument to predecessor problem, they have shown that women in 19th century literature are easily categorized into one of these two binaries, depending on who they allow to influence them.  Women that take on male characteristics are portrayed as monsters (Maleficent from Sleeping Beauty is another example of a woman in power), and woman that stay feeble and helpless become angels (all fairytale princesses).

Now let's make a parallel: if male authors "consciously or unconsciously affirm or deny the achievements of their predecessors" (G&G 449), could female authors then consciously or (more likely) unconsciously affirm or deny stereotypes of their literature counterparts?  That is, I think that women will read literature and hold themselves to a certain set of values and actions that will somehow define them as the women they want to be.  [Yes, I know some reading this are thinking "no way!" (dont we all love to think we're the exception)...yet, there are women out there who grew up reading fairytales and want that fantastical "happy ending".] So if we (as women) are trying to model ourselves after these "predecessors", then we stray away from independent, bold choices.  However, perhaps there are some that are the exception to this idea, and they do not follow the "woman model of literature".  These women, then, would have no other set of standards to hold themselves to than the male model.  (If not one, then the other...gotta love binary relationships)

This is where I started to stray from G&G.  They state that "Bloom's male-oriented theory of the "anxiety of influence" cannot be simply reversed or inverted in order to account for the situation of the woman writer" (G&G 451).  Why not, exactly?  Why can't it simply be reversed?  I would say that they do not think it can because they think that women hold themselves to standards different from those of men (as they say when they split hairs to create the different anxieties that plague each sex), so women have to fit into some other binary.  However, as all things are not black and white, I'm sure that some women out there hold themselves to standards of men, or feel like they can relate to males more than females, so that they do follow this inverted male-oriented theory.  For them, they see this as a struggle to "invalidate [her] poetic father" (G&G 450) by writing something original.  I really think it's possible....so why the whole talk about the eating disorders, then?

Female writers would not feel this "anxiety of authorship" if it weren't for critics like G&G (assuming they're probably not the first who think this way) that think women and men cannot be grouped into the same category as authors.  Critics create the tensions of female authors--by pointing out all these differences, they create a problem that was unbeknown to female author, this notion that she cannot be grouped with all authors, only female authors, so that she has to find another way to prove herself to her peers, critics, and suddenly superior, male counterpart.  This is why (yes, finally bringing it back up), I mentioned the phallus in class.  G&G state, "both children desire to be the phallus for the mother.  Again, only the boy can fully recognize himself in his mother's desire. Thus, both sexes repudiate the implications of femininity..." (G&G 451).  The act of writing as a female, and neither expecting nor wanting to be compared to female authors, but rather, authors as a whole--that is, accepting the "anxiety of influences" and saying that yes, you can invert situations for males and females, is the female author's way of being recognized as the phallus to the mother.  Her actions create her gender--so that if she wants to be gendered "male", then she does so.  After all, women published under male pseudonyms and were then subjected to the same "anxiety of influences" the *real* men were subjected to.  G&G mention on page 453 that the "'anxiety of authorship' [is] an anxiety built from complex and often only barely conscious fears of that authority which seems to the female artist to be by definition inappropriate to her sex".  Yet, we still have female authors, and we still had females pretending to be men in order to get their work published.  The fear was created by publishers not wanting to publish female works if they were not of a certain type of writing--again, this created problem is what has affected female authors.  However, that is not to say that they are unable to be categorized as men--for they are if they chose to be...and again we end up at the point that yes, Bloom's theory can be inverted.  The only reason it can't be is because other authors (like G&G--female authors, interestingly enough), have determined it can't be.  There's always room for change, though.

There's still so much of this piece that I can comment on to help my argument, but overall, I'm hoping this made more sense than my statements last week!

Lost in translation?

In thinking about Soujourner Truth's text, I started to wonder about the challenges that one faces in trying to translate a verbal oration into text.  There are so many different variables to each speaking and writing.  The audience is different, the timing is different, the motivation is different and even the speaker/author's voice is different.  Among all these changes, what gets lost in translation?

Although Gage was the writer, it was important to keep Soujoruner's voice.  She wrote as close to Truth's dialect as possible, using incorrect grammar and incorrect spellings.  Showing the reader that Truth was uneducated gives even more power to her words, because it shows that an uneducated woman still had the confidence to get up in front of a crowd and speak up in a thoughtful way.

In a speech, the speaker is able to interact with the crowd.  However, a writer is unable to do that with a reader.  Still, Gage includes (authentic to the speech) the intereaction that Truth had with her audience.  Perhaps that is a tool to bring the reader in and allow them to feel a part of the time when this speech felt more necessary. 

Is it important to note that the author of the text isn't actually Soujorner, but Gage?  The speech wasn't recorded, but taken from memory.  How good can one's memory be?  Even though Truth helped Gage to recreate her speech, that doesn't mean that it is word for word exactly what she said at the time of the speech.  However, I don't think it was the words that were important in the original speech or the copied speech.  It was the emotions and relatability that it evoked in the audience/reader.  She found a way to "speak to all" (13).

Anxiety of Influence or Authorship, Which more Dramatic?

I believe it was in Wednesday's class that this question was posed: Which is a more dramatic issue -- anxiety of authorship or anxiety of influence? I starred this question in my notes as it is something I would like to explore more. Anxiety of influence is an author's fear that "he is not his own creator and that the works of his predecessors, existing before and beyond him, assume essential priority over his own writings" (450). A woman do not experience "anxiety of influence" in the same way a man because by and large, precursors are men, and "significantly different from her" (451). Instead, "anxiety of authorship" is "a radical fear that she cannot create, that because she can never become a 'precursor' the act of writing will isolate or destroy her" (451). It seems that through the language used, Gilgert and Gubar would likely make the argument that "anxiety of authorship" is more troublesome. "Anxiety of influence" is said to be "even more primary," meaning that anxiety of authorship is more complex (451). Furthermore, the anxiety of authorship states that the act of writing could potentially "isolate or destroy" a woman (451). This long segment is evidence of the complexity of the anxiety of authorship:

"Thus the loneliness of the female artist, her feelings of alienation from male predecessors coupled with her need for sisterly precursors and successors, her urgent sense of her need for a female audience together with her frear of the antagonism of male readers, her culturally conditioned timidity about self dramatization, her dread of the patriarchal authority of art, her anxiety about the impropriety of female invention -- all these phenomena of 'inferiorization' mark the woman writer's struggle for artistic self-definition and differentiate her efforts at self-creation from those of her male counterpart" (452).

As "male writers seem increasingly to have felt exhausted by the need for revisionism," I can imagine that someone could argue that the "anxiety of authorship" is less problematic because women have a nearly clear slate and have to create themselves. Men, on the other hand, have to create a self that is entirely unique and original, which is more difficult since there are so many more precursors. However, Gilbert and Gubar's argument serves to say that "anxiety of authorship" is more troublesome because of the ways this effects a woman's writing and personal life.

With "anxiety of authorship," women have to create themselves. With "anxiety of influence," men do not need to create themselves, but simply fear that they will be too heavily influenced by their precursors. Women

The Feminist Within

I've never thought of myself as a feminist, but reading Gilbert and Gubar made me feel moments of "girl power!" and "solidarity sister".  These moments in the the text where I felt my feminist outrage surfacing made me wonder: 1.  How are Gilbert and Gubar able to use their words to evoke this emotion from me?  And 2.  If I were a male, would I feel such disgust at their claims?

I responded heavily to the section of their chapter where they focus on "the ways in which patriarchal socialization literally makes women sick, both physically and mentally" (454).  They use hysteria as their first example.  I've always thought of hysteria as being a gender netural word that can affect men and women alike.  Today hysteria doesn't necessarily have a negative connotation, however that depends upon the context.  Gilbert and Gubar claim that at the time hysteria was thought of to be a mental illness "caused by the female reporductive system" (455).  Excuse my frankness, but what do men know about a woman's cycle?  Perhaps there is an inbalance of hormones during a certain time of the month for most women, but that doesn't mean all women are this way.  And, even if they do have a slight temporary imbalance, this does not mean their mental capacity should be disregarded or discounted.

Essentially this illness (among other "illnesses" that Gilber and Gubar use as examples) is constructed by a patriarchal way of labeling and understanding the world.  "The complex of social prescriptions these diseases parody did not merely urge women to act in ways which would cause them to become ill; nineteenth century cultrue seesm to actually admonished women to be ill" (455).  Men created roles for women that encouraged "illness" in them .  Then, the male figures would belttle women for being ill.  It's a vicious cycle of abuse! 

To make matters worse, on the other hand "a thinking woman was considered such a breach of nature that a Harvard docter reported during his autopsy on a Radcliffe graudate he discovered that her uterus had shriveled to the size of a pea" (456).  So, if a woman was smart then men didn't understand that either and diminished those women for not fitting into a patriarchal construct of feminity.  However, if they were to fit into the patriarchal construct, then men would still diminish them for being "ill".  There is no winning!

I think Gilbert and Gubar relied heavily on facts to evoke such emotion from me.  You can't argue with facts.  Gilbert and Gubar showed their research where men actually made hypocritical, contradictory claims regarding how they wanted women to fit into literature.  Reading evidence of people thinking such thoughts that I know from personal experience to be false makes me feel frustrated for those women in the 19th century.

Now I wonder if any current male readers feel as strongly about these issues as I do.  Is it just my individual reading of this text?  Is it because I'm a female, and I have the female experience?  Is it fair to group male readers as one type of audience, or is it just based on each individual and their experience with the topic? 

-Alessandra

Gilbert and Gubar- What about Women?

There is a point that Gilbert and Gubar made right in the beginning of their piece that I just cannot get over. I want to explore it a bit more than we did in class, because it ties in so well with other classes I am taking right now, and also, I find it really interesting.

So the section I am referring to is this: "If the Queen's looking glass speaks with the King's voice, how do its perpetual kingly admonitions affect the Queen's own voice? Since his is the chief voice she hears, does the Queen try to sound like the King, imitating his tone, his inflections, his phrasing, his point of view? Or does she "talk back" to him in her own vocabulary, her own timbre, insisting on her own viewpoint? (Gilbert and Gubar 449)

I cannot help but think of this whole King and Queen analogy in terms of what it means for gender and writing. There is a concept that has been discussed in my gender and sexuality classes that I think really applies here: The concept that viewers (men and women alike) view things in terms of the way a male might view them, and thus women judge themselves in the way they think men might and articulate themselves to account for that. The idea that women have to think of themselves in terms of the way men think of them is intriguing to me.

So here's the connection: Does a woman as a writer have to compare herself to her male equals? Does she speak in her own manner, disregarding her male colleagues, or does she articulate relative to her male equals? These are questions that I find very hard to answer, but I do think that one thing can be said. It seems to me that the male sex, the "Kings" of literature, provide a sort of standard for the "Queens." Whether this standard is necessary or real, I am not sure. But I do think that even if it is not "real" and there is no concrete standard as laid down by the "Kings," it is at least imagined. And even when things are imagined, if enough people put stock in them, they seem to be more fact than fiction.

Tying in Religion, Ecology, and the Self

In class on Friday I tried to connect my reading of Cambell's "Agency: Promiscuous and Protean" to concepts being discussed in my Religious Studies class.  Sorry if that very broad look at agency threw or put anyone off. The relationship between the two conversations simply seemed unavoidable and massively important to my understanding of each.  So here I will try to explain myself better in text.

My class has stressed the importance of the concept of the "self."  The class began with a lecture which laid out the ecological crises our planet faces today which have been caused by the exponential increase in population and consumption over the last couple of centuries.  It was pretty depressing.  As the title of this L371 course suggests, we live in uncertain times.  Two books we read for this class after that first lecture explored concepts of the self and the impact the various concepts of reality have had on the problems we now face.  We concluded that the egocentric worldview mainstream Western society has promoted is a source of the issues we face.

An alternative concept of the self has been offered up in my class which views the individual as a unique manifestation of life which is inextricably connected to the stuff of the universe and subsequently the history of the universe.  Here is where the connection to our class comes in.  On page five of her article, Campbell draws from Chani Marchiselli to describe authors as not "originators" but as "points of articulation" which highlights the connection of an author to the society which produced and continually surrounds him.  The concept of the self discussed in REL-D250 is thus very similar to the concept of authorship provided by Campbell: both view the individual as merely a unique point on the whole which has the ability to impact the whole.

The Role of 'Power' in Asch's "In Search of America"

The array of characters that are introduced in this piece by Nathan Asch surprised me as to how these characters could spill out a certain aura of sorrow in which the reader would seek to empathize with.  Being the first 'case' to be read for the class, it was different from the previous pieces that were read.  The narrative given by Asch first introduces the character of Peder who is a farmer and decides to follow the narrator in "search of America."  With this new knowledge that the reader has been introduced to, the term 'power' comes to mind in trying to make sense of this narrative.  As Professor Graban states, "Power implies knowledge, while knowledge is constitutive of power: knowledge gives on power, but one has the power in given circumstances to constitute bodies of knowledge as either valid or invalid, truthful or untruthful."  While this term 'power' can be used to relate with other pieces that have been read in class, I think the term comes handy with this narrative.  Through the narrative, the reader (you+I) are given these stories of encounters with the people of the west.  By doing so, 'power' is circulated to the reader and the necessity of deciding whether to decide these stories as true or not is given.  Nathan Asch takes on this job to document these encounters with the various individuals he meets.  The circulation of power is first given to Nathan Asch by the individuals he meets for without these individuals, there is no "search" to be done.  The power gained by Nathan Asch is then given to the reader for it is our decision as to whether or not to believe the words he has written.  The implication that knowledge represents power is true for this circulation of power can also be considered the exchange of truths.

Asch Social Critique

As other bloggers have mentioned, I also was impressed by the realism in Asch's fictional writing. His characters and situations are believable and moving to the point where the piece could serve as an impetus towards social change. Of the other possible readings of the piece mentioned in the discussion questions, the most obvious to me is the social critique. The narrator says in the beginning, "I wanted to see the most isolated, the deepest cotton country, untouched by the world not knowing the outside world" (284). Later he says, "Let's really find out how they live. What they eat and how they sleep, and what they talk about" (285). It doesn't take long for him to discover that such people suffer from abuse, low standards of living, corruption, racism, and other deplorable conditions. Asch enlightens the reader to the reality of the world, and this could serve as a call for change.

The piece explores these situations in a candid way; it does not come off as preachy. It shouldn't be too hard to convince readers that there is something wrong when it is stated that the future for these people will be "junk" (302). This is evidenced through the bar in the end. Men who hang out there "hate people that wear white collars and shirts. They take their meanness out in drink there' and when they're drunk they're dangerous' they'll think nothing of smashing you in the jaw, or of stabbing you" (305). But the tragedy is that these people are victims of their situations. The man in the end tells the narrator that in privacy he is a poet. "I'm alone a lot. And I get to thinking about things. It comes out in words, sort of" (306). Perhaps this man is writing about his unhappy condition. In terms of reading this as a social critique, I feel like the fact that the man turns to poetry is indicative of genuine problems, but it is also sort of heart-warming to learn that this rough guy confides in poetry. I am interested to hear what other people made of this ending and other possible readings of the piece.

Asch's Power of Agency

While reading Nathan Asch's "In Search of America," something occurred to me. There is power in agency. The way that Nathan Asch was able to give a voice to these people is extremely impressive. I found this story not only compelling and moving, but also telling of the real meaning of the word agent. This story is so raw and human, and it is hard to ignore some of the rather depressing details of the lives of the people Asch describes. The technique that Asch has employed to write this story is one that I cannot exactly give a name to. I can only describe what this piece did to me as a reader.

This story felt so personal to me. Not because I can relate to the impoverished workers living in subhuman conditions in shacks. I will not feign some sort of connection to these people on the basis of lifestyle, because really I cannot relate. But I can; however say this: Because of the way Asch described the struggles and hardships these people incurred, I could not help but feel for them. I feel connected to them on a very human level. As I was reading, these people were not just statistics of the working poor for me, they were real people capable of feeling real pain. I think the moments of interaction Asch describes with these people are responsible for my feeling of almost closeness to these people that couldn't be farther from me.

The ending of the story is so haunting. It lingered with me, and it really reinforced what I previously knew, but in a different way. There is a lot of power in agency. But more than that, there is power in the way an agent chooses to perform agency. "No. It would be too much like showing my insides. I guess not. Let's go in and have another beer." (306) This bit of dialogue resonates with me. For me, it was these moments of human interaction that struck me. This poor man, burdened by poverty and pain, had only poetry to turn to. And even that, he could not share with another human being. That is so tragic. This story made me really feel for and long to understand and help these people. I felt outraged and sad for them. I felt sad and scared for them. And prior to reading this story, I had never given these groups of people too much thought to be honest. After reading this story, though, my mind is reeling. I am obsessing over their struggles, and feeling a sort of guilt for my luxuries. As I am snuggled in my nice warm bed, typing this blog for a class that I have the privilege of taking as a white, middle class American, I am also sitting here pondering the groups of people that have absolutely nothing. And I am feeling their pain, as I am sure many of Asch's other readers are doing. All because Nathan Asch positioned himself as their agent and advocate. Well done, Asch. There's a lot of power in that.

"I'm a poet" and the social implications of voice and agency

I started "In Search of America" without really knowing what I was reading.  Part of the way through I made my way over to the blog to find the discussion questions.  I was so taken by the reality projected by the narrative that I hardly wanted to accept that this piece was fiction.  Because the narrator labeled himself as a writer from the East, concerned with the conditions of the workers in the West, I had a hard time imagining this story as being complete fiction.  None of it seemed like fiction; the first-person, objective point-of-view read like Hemingway's third-person objective POV.  (I now read on this interweb thingy that they were both part of the famous expatriate community in Paris.)

I was reading for agency, linking the narrator to the author--perhaps too much, but it's really hard not to with such a story.  I was looking for that discerning prism or lens of the author to reveal itself through the narrator, and it did.  Surely it could be found in every word by definition, but it appeared to me most boldly in some subjective, evaluative details provided by the author, particularly in distinguishing between the characters Chiver and Aragon as speakers and organizers.  The narrator inserts his evaluation of their efforts quite boldly when the situation cannot be made obvious through plain objective narrative: "though Chiver was the leader of this expedition it was Aragon that led" (293).

Yet here I still found it hard to believe this story belonged wholly in the realm of fiction.  I couldn't imagine that the author of this piece had not actually experienced what he was writing about.  It was all too real; he couldn't have taken too many authorial liberties in building characters.  I still imagine that Asch experienced most of what happened in this story.  But the end tied it all together so well with a single interaction with a single character, that I finally had to admit to myself that there must have been significant design at play in this piece, and by that I mean theme.  My reading experience began objective and without clear direction and ended with a new idea planted in my mind, substantiated by the body of the story.  Clearly, that's how Asch wanted it.

The theme I found was in voice.  "In Search of America" is a story of a narrator's interactions with others through their voices.  Each secondary character has a unique relationship to voice, both as individuals and as part of collectives.  Asch's narrator helps us sort through these voices and their significance, and the reader is given (at least) two important idea: an individual's voice is the product of the individual's condition, and every individual has a voice, regardless of his condition.  I haven't really expanded my idea of "voice" for you; my apologies for not doing it sooner.  By "voice" I mean the ability to make one's condition and thoughts known to others, a capacity derived from one's individuality and thinking mind.  Asch illustrates this in the very powerful ending in which a common, working man tells the narrator that he is a poet.

This scene returns to an objective lens; the character, his actions, and the setting of the dialogue is enough for the reader to draw the necessary meaning.  The agency of Asch as an author comes in, among other things, the fluctuation of the narrative lens between objectivity and subjectivity.  The strategic oscillation of the lens with regard to the examination of the voices of characters and the social circumstances of the voices is what makes this story a social criticism.  In Texarkana the narrator needed only to have eyes to see the conditions of the sharecroppers and needed only to hear their reluctance to be interviewed and the position of the owner in order to get his message across.  In Colorado the social implications of voice required that the narrator evaluate Chiver and Aragon in order to give the reader greater complexity of theme.

This story thus allows us to learn about agency as an author and agency in society.  In the narrator's search for answers about the conditions of the impoverished workers of the West, Asch both illuminates the injustices at hand and simultaneously reveals the social implications of voice.  The final section is particularly telling.  The narrator is warned by the voices of white collars not to visit the rough and tumble workmen's neighborhood, yet he courageously ignores them and finds a suppressed voice amid the chaotic barroom scene.  That the self-declared poet refuses to share his poetry reveals quite acutely the environmental suppression experienced by the working class.  The man's shaky articulation, though it may simply be reflective of his inebriation, more likely also displays his oppressed condition, particularly a significant lack of education.

OK, that was an update, and now the update is done.

Campbell's Communal Agency in Relation to Gilbert and Gubar

In Karlyn Campbell's essay, Agency: Promiscuous and Protean, she talks in depth about the idea and function of agency. I found myself particularly interested in what she has to say on Michelle Ballif's critique of communal agency. Campbell writes, "agency is constrained by externals, by the community that confers identities related to gender, race, class, and the like on its members and by doing so determines not only what is considered to be 'true,' but also who can speak and with what force." (Campbell 3) I find it to be a really powerful, well articulated claim about agency, and it caused my mind to immediately make reference to Gilbert and Gubar's Infection in the Sentence. This idea of agency as constrained and contingent upon stereotypes to define "truth" or a certain standard reminds me of the idea that a woman's "anxiety of authorship" (Gilbert and Gubar 451) is the result of this constrained agency. Eighteenth and nineteenth century women's struggle to "find," or "release" their agency is marked by a distortion of what is "normal," or "true."

Although Campbell's first point on agency was not part of the assigned reading, I'd like to incorporate it into my analysis: "...agency is communal, social, cooperative, and participatory and, simultaneously, constituted and constrained by the material and symbolic elements of context and culture," writes Campbell (3). I think these claims Campbell is making about agency, basically that it functions within a given society, according to and constrained by the social norms, really resonates Gilbert and Gubar. Especially the idea of constraint. Throughout their essay, I think Gilbert and Gubar really emphasized the notion of social constraint on the woman and how it affected their articulation and agency. I am definitely engaged and in agreement with Campbell on this idea of communal agency, and the gendered repercussions for the female author are evidence of its impact.

I like to think of myself as a young Hemingway

"I consider whether the phoenix of agency can emerge out of the ashes of the dead male author" (Campbell 1).

I want to explore this line further.  I feel like we didn't discuss it enough, and it seems to be the strongest line of Campbell's text.  If not, at least the most aesthetically evocative.  As I mentioned in class, when I first read that line I first thought of Gubar and Gilbert.  What a pair!  As I'm sure many of you recall, their text questioned feminine agency in Bloom's "intensely (even exclusively) male, and necessarily patriarchal" literary universe (Gilbert and Gubar 452).  Men suffer from the "anxiety of influence"--constantly trying to outdo or "invalidate" their literary forefathers.  I feel as if this theory evokes a sense of Roland Barthes The Death of the Author.  Barthes claims "The Author, when believed in, is always conceived of as the past of his own book:  book and author stand automatically on a single line divided into a before and an after.  The Author is thought to nourish the book" (Barthes 876).  If what Barthes says about the author "nourishing" the book is true than when applied to Gilbert and Gubar, the question of the Author's life depends on those male writers who come after the author.  

When a contemporary male author "invalidates" his forefather, the audience therefore no longer "believes" in the precursor who therefore dies at the hand of his modern counterpart.   Gilbert and Gubar suggest with their opener that women authors therefore "emerge out of the ashes of the dead male author."  I forget who it was, but someone in class suggested that the meaning of this line derives from the image of women as pioneers in the literary world.  I agree.  Campbell explains that "Woman is a serial collective defined neither by any common identity nor by a common set of attributes that all individuals in the series share" (4).  The notion that woman lack "any common identity" is not new.  Gubar and Gilbert say "woman writers participate in a quite different literary subculture from that inhabited by male writers, a subculture that does not have its own distinct literary traditions" (452).  In not having "its own distinct literary traditions," Gilbert and Gubar reinforce Campbell's ideas on the "serial collective" of women lacking a "common identity."

But what's the relevance?  Well...assuming that women "can emerge out of the ashes of the dead male author," and all the "male authors" are busy killing their forefathers...suddenly the women replace the men in an "intensely male and patriarchal" literary society.  Gilbert and Gubar call women "pioneers" in creative rhetoric.  I feel as though that is to what Campbell refers when constructing women as the phoenix of literature.  The constant deconstruction of masculinity in literature reconstructs femininity as the new "literature."  Food for thought.  

Agency and the "Girl"

Ellen Barton's "Textual Practices of Erasure" deals with the way disabled persons are represented in United Way advertisements, and the loss of individuality they suffer through them. She also describes the United Way's infantile image of disabled persons as either children or dependent, childlike adults.

One such case is in the advertisement on page 181 of the article, a blind woman with a helper dog. While most of the ads created between 1949 and 1964 (21 out of 32) "featured children, with able-bodied adults as  parents, caregivers, or volunteers", "only two ads from this set actually focused on adults with disabilities" (178). Now, it is the verbiage here that I really take issue with. Barton introduces the advertisement by describing the image as "a young woman with a leader dog". Clearly, the illustration does depict a young woman. Mature of face, but not aged, with developed breasts. We know what we're dealing with here. Then comes the text: "You can see for yourself, and so can I, for now I have Pat, the smartest leader dog a girl ever had!" Girl. 

A girl is a child. A woman is not a girl. This advertisement does not depict a child, it depicts a grown woman. Not a woman of any venerable age, but a woman regardless. Speaking of the United Way's persistent depiction of children rather than adults in their ads, Barton writes: "Not only does it effectively erase the complex experience of disability by adults whose legitimate interests in independence and autonomy are therefore never represented; it also definitively establishes a binary distinction between the able-bodied and the disabled, spearating and distancing the disabled from the abled" (173).

If we apply that sentence to the advertisement's verbal infantilization of the woman, it is effectively saying A: Women have no "legitimate interests in independence and autonomy" and since the woman is reduced to girlhood while the men of the advertisements retain manhood, B: There is a "binary distinction" between men, who are adults, and women, who are children.

We have seen already some of the effects of the infantilization of women in  Gilbert & Gubar, where in the pursuit of superior femininity women develop severe cases of the nerves, to the point of hysteria, and "for women in particular patriarchal culture has always assumed mental exercises would have dire consequences"  (156) which has been a thinly-veiled attempt to keep the mind of a woman like the mind  of a child. Margaret E. Sangster wrote in her 1900 manual Winsome Womanhood: Familiar Talks on Life and Conduct, that "the best training of the school and of the home... makes woman patient, gentle, forceful and spontaneous, which keep in her, intact amid all changes the child-heart". The socially inflicted "female diseases" of hysteria, nervousness, anorexia, etc. all serve to make women  more fragile, more delicate, and more in need of care, just like a child. In John Harvey Kellogg's 1891 text on "Invalid Women" in The Household Monitor of Health, he suggests treating a woman with a history of nervous problems with "careful nursing" and in the case of a fit, says "the patient must have the most vigilant watchcare, not being left alone for a moment". Of course we are all familiar with S. Weir Mitchell's infamous "rest cure", which involved confining a hysterical woman to her bed for extended periods of time, with no mental exercise whatsoever.

We may call men "boys" on occasion, but even when we do it does not have the same effect, because men are not already marginalized in the same way as women. Calling a woman a "girl" takes us right back to the Victorian period. It demeans and infantilizes her, and by treating her like a child, denies her agency, "independence and autonomy". I've been making an effort never to say "girl" when I mean "woman", and I feel this small attention to diction is important in changing the way society views women.

If You Want to Know, Asch

What is Asch's "In Search of America"?  Is it a bildungsroman, a social commentary, or perhaps a migration narrative?  When viewing a text, I think it is important to maintain a broad understanding.  However, one should not only hold a broad understanding of a text, but also be engaged in deriving, and developing, as much meaning as desired.  That is to fully understand a text is impossible, but to view and explore the various facets involved, we are often forced to choose between the magnifying glass and the naked eye.  We should invest our time in both.  This brings me to my point concerning the labeling of Asch's "In Search of America".  Is it a bildungsroman?  Certainly, it explores the development of a nation and the growth of a narrator in his relation to the working class world.  The work is almost autobiographical, but not intended for that purpose.  However, it is also definitely a social commentary, as it discusses the battle between social classes, race, and nature.  The greatest issue in the piece is the effects of the Great Depression on the working families in America.  Is it a migrational narrative?  How could it not be?  The story follows the migration of the narrator at the surface, the migration of the working class in America in the middle, and the migration of society at the root.  It follows the dynamic of change across the plains and planes of time.  So, what is Asch's "In Search of America"?  I think it is whatever you decide to make it out to be.  The nature of a text is not in the words on the page or the mind of the author, but in your mind, in your unique generative process.  Certainly, many people see a work as bildungsroman, social commentary, or migration narrative, but no one sees it quite the way you do.  I think that is part of Asch's lesson for us, at least the way I see it, in the abruptness of the story's end.  It is what we learn from our journey that matters, and not where we end up at the end.    

Brain Agency: A Neuronal Model Following the Path of Influence

While discussing the different roles and definitions we place on "agency" and "agent", I came to the idea that these descriptors we use to explain the creation and transfer of ideas follow much the same processes as neurons in the brain.  For starters, the central agent in the creation of an idea or text, which we call the author, is very similar to the body of a neuron.  The body allows for the generation of the cellular machinery, which carries out the organization and transfer of information.  The body makes creation possible.  The dendrites of a neuron receive input and excite the neuron to a threshold, at which it will generate a signal.  The dendrites in terms of agent and agency could be viewed as all of the influences acting on the author.  Almost limitless influences such as previous authors, society, or basically any external or internal stimulus.  These influences add up to reach the threshold, at which point the the author relays the created idea, or pulse, down the axon.  The axon of the neuron serves in for the process of creating a text or media.  The axon exchanges sodium and potassium, like the author exchanges time and energy, to move the signal along, or create a text.  The signal eventually reaches the terminal button, or the completed text.  At this point the work is distributed to the next neurons' dendrites, influencing future works, ideas, and decisions.  Not all neurons will react the same to a transmitted signal, the same as not all people react the same to ideas.  Some neurons allow for feedback, allowing for the signal to be revised.  Just as some media, such as blogs and some texts can be revised.  Basically, the neuron serves as a great model in the representation of the transfer of agency.  The act of creating an idea or text can viewed as the culmination of inconceivable amounts of information into the stimuli which influence an author, altering the dynamic through a singular path, which is then available to become yet another stimulus for future authors to draw upon.

Trying to Understand Agency/Artistry Using a Prism.

  In class on Friday, we talked a lot about the various agents involved in the Sojourner Truth case study (as recalled by Campbell). So far, the prism analogy that Campbell quotes from Burke at the beginning of part II (Campbell, pg. 5) has been the most helpful for me to understand how agency operates on an individual basis. And though I'm inclined to contemplate "the light" I see from the prisms around me, and to attempt to trace each of them back to some original source, which is essentially what I see as the heart of the struggle highlighted in Gilbert and Gubar (i.e. the anxiety of the author), I will try to focus primarily on Campbell's case study of Sojourner Truth / Dana Gage.

   If we consider the speech Truth gave at the 1851 woman's rights convention as a sort of "original source of light" (though it is, of course, just one of an infinite procession of earlier refractions), it seems relatively clear to me that if there was no transcript of the event, the immediacy of the audience, each member of it an individual prism, becomes a potential source of reflecting the least filtered account of the event. Now, what each "prism" reflects will be based on an impossibly complex number of variables, and will change from person to person. In other words, people will remember different things, emphasize different aspects, etc. This, to me, is at least partially what Campbell is talking about when she refers to a "performance that repeats with a difference" (Campbell, pg. 7). It's important to remember that in her view, "artistry is not limited to a canon of masterworks but emerges equally in apt vernacular speech and everyday talk" (Campbell, pg. 7). Therefore, one could argue, even the simple recounting of events can contain a level of artistry, and certainly a degree of agency.

   So the question came up in class: Why, if it is common knowledge that the speech by Sojourner Truth was fabricated by Gage, do people still connect with the fictive work? This is where the role of artistry comes in. I'm reminded of Hunter S. Thompsons' Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which was originally meant to be an account of a race in the desert for Sports Illustrated, but ultimately turned into a tale of Thompsons' own drug-filled adventure, which we all surely know by now (or should!). That, to me, is a perfect example of the role artistry has in a situation like this. Truth and accuracy has much less to do with the matter than, perhaps, we are comfortable admitting. (Keep in mind part V of Campbell's work, in which she points out that agency can be a source of evil and harm.) What I mean to say is that in the end, we don't care what really happened at that race in Las Vegas, just as we don't really care what accent Sojourner Truth spoke with, or what words she used. Dana Gage captures the moment with a level of artistry that, for better or worse, continues to resonate with readers.

   The one thing that troubles me about using this prism analogy to understand agency, is that while it's a beautiful way to understand an otherwise slippery concept, it does very little for me in terms of solving that puzzling relationship between the author and the audience. In fact, it seems like the more I come to understand how much agency everyone has in this equation (Sojourner Truth, the audience, Gage, Campbell, this blog post, etc.), the less I understand where one agent ends and another begins.

How do you create a viable tradition?

I wanted to explore how Campbell's theories on agency in "Agency; Promiscuous and Protean"  speak to Gilbert and Gubar's theories on agency in "Infection in the Sentence: The Woman Writer and the Anxiety of Authorship."

First, I would like to point to Campbell's third definition of agency: "techne understood broadly is linked to iteration with a difference and with citation that exploits the past, and opens up possibilities for resistance. Here is the agency of stylized repetition that has ironic overtones; the citation that appropriates and alters. Agency emerges out of performances or actions that, when repeated, fix meaning through sedimentation. Agency equally emerges in performances that repeat with a difference, altering meaning. "

This definition of agency reminds me both of Burke, and Gilbert and Gubar. Burke claims "proverbs are strategies for dealing with situations" and these "strategies" inform what kind of  "attitude" would best be appropriated in a given "situation" (296) This is similar to Campbell's claims on "meaning through sedimentation." A certain phrase which proposes an attitude is repeated to the point that it becomes a  tool to be used in dealing with a situation--a proverb. Campbell agrees with this idea that repetition is a device used to make phrases and literary works into usable tools; a phrase may not have comprehensible literal meanings, but after being repeated enough times, it can become common knowledge and therefore accepted as a universal symbol for an action or situation. Campbell, however, adds further onto Burke's idea. Campbell says agency is created when a form is repeated and disrupted. For instance, I read a sonnet once where the author used the strict rules of the poetic form, but the content of the poems were disjointed images of violence. The poet repeated the form but altered the expected content therefore "altering [the] meaning" of the sonnet and its capabilities. In relation to Gilbert and Gubar, I want to look particularly at Campbell's idea that certain repetitions can "exploit the past, and open up possibilities for resistance."

I would like to look closely of Gilbert and Gubar using the following three statements: "all these phenomena of 'inferiorization' mark the woman writer's struggle for artistic self-definition and differentiate her efforts at self-creation from those of her male counterpart" and "women writers participate in a quite different literary subculture from that inhabited by male writers, a subculture which has its own distinctive literary traditions, even--though it defines itself in relation to the 'main', male-dominated literary culture" and "today's female writers feels that she is helping to create a viable tradition which is at last definitively emerging."

Campbell might say that women of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries claimed agency in their works by repeating the forms passed down to them by male antecedents (borrowing from the male literary tradition) and altering that form in some new way exclusive to female writers. This was the female writers was of "exploiting the past, and opening up possibilities for resistance." They repeat the traditional female angelic character but also through in a disruptive mad woman. Gilbert and Gubar claim that the struggles of these women helped contemporary female writers to create "a viable tradition."

I guess this brings me to ask what is the meaning of "a viable tradition"? Would we say that Bronte and Austen's repetition  and disruption of male-created literary forms is a "claiming" of agency (the struggle), and the tradition in which contemporary female writers compose is the product of that struggle, agency claimed? If a disruption of classic literary form is an emergence of agency, then eighteenth and nineteenth century authors possessed agency in their works. Are contemporary female writers, then, disrupting their female antecedents? As I understood it, Gilbert and Gubar were saying that contemporary female writers were "answering" their antecedents' pleas for agency in their writing. Could we say that one set of authors merely has a greater degree of agency? Nineteenth and eighteenth century authors disrupted the tradition form. Do contemporary female writers completely reject it? No angels or muses exist in their works?

It's hard for me to quite pull together what I'm trying to ask, but let me try.  According to Campbell, agency comes out of repetition of literary tradition and disruption of tradition. Contemporary female writers are not disrupting a tradition; they are creating a new one entirely. Eighteenth and nineteenth century writers disrupted male tradition and therefore claimed agency. They gave contemporary writers the power to write as they pleased.

I suppose I'm saying that it seems to me, in order to create a new tradition, agency must first be claimed from the old traditions by antecedents. Then, contemporary writers are free to use that agency. It becomes a co-construction between the past and present. Contemporary writers may have created the new tradition, but their antecedents provided the means.

I think I'm having a hard time thinking that a new tradition can really be possible with nothing borrowed from the male tradition. What really makes this tradition a "new" tradition?

OK, well, I think I've argued myself into confusion enough  for one post.

Agency & Literature. What Does it Mean?

  I really wanted to talk about agency as a concept in and of itself and to step outside of our discussion of Sojourner Truth and Frances Gage. Agency, as discussed in our class references a kind of linguistic agency, as in the agency of self-expression through the use of language. I will be exploring this through the works of Ong, Campbell and Gilbert and Gubar. It is also important to note that this must not be the only form of agency and I think that understanding the very specific nature of the definition we are talking about will help further illuminate and clarify the theories and ideas presented in this section.

To begin with, I would like to look at Ong's article "The Writer's Audience is Always a Fiction." This article is critical to understanding exactly what linguistic agency is and what it means for literature, both of which are very salient issues for our class. Ong proposes that writers create an audience for themselves when they go about writing anything and this created part must then be assumed by the reader (Ong, 12). This implicates questions of the reader's agency because "they have to adjust when the rules change" (Ong, 12). Is also raises a second question about the author: "If and when he becomes truly adept, an 'original writer,' he can do more than project the earlier audience, he can alter it" (Ong, 11). This proposes that the writer must struggle to both propose his own agency in regards to the control of his own work (creating a truly original approach) and also in the control of others (how others are forced to perceive or read a piece). With this information, two things again become important: First, that agency in this sense is entirely linguistic. It involves asking others to accept a certain form of speaking and meaning. Second, that agency is limited to an extent. As Ong mentions later in his article, the demands of a given author (Hemingway in this case) can exceed the linguistic bounds of their actual audience (say a 16th century one) and result in a refutation of legitimacy (Ong, 15). This would then mean that linguistic agency is highly contextual, which agrees quite strongly with both Campbell and Gilbert and Gubar.

Campbell proposes five aspects of linguistic agency which are that it "(1) is communal and participatory...(2) is "invented" by authors who are points of articulation; (3) emerges in artistry or craft; (4) is effected through form; and (5) is perverse, that is, inherently...open to reversal" (Campbell, 2). It is important to note that by her third point Campbell is specifically referring to Aristotle's proposition that "Art is...a reasoned habit of mind in making...things that can be other than what they are" (Campbell, 6). However, what is really salient out of all this is the first, second and fifth points of Campbell. Linguistic agency is communal and participatory. It must be, otherwise language would be utterly useless. A simple thought experiment is to imagine yourself face-to-face with an alien who has never before been to earth, let alone heard its languages and you must communicate with him. To establish any kind of meaning you would have to work together to find gestures that might translate. The same is true of language as a whole, though it is not often thought of in the same way. The minds of individuals are, to a certain extent, aliens that work together to form an understanding of "gestures" that have, over thousands of years, translated into words and later into letters. This covers both points one and two while implying the fifth. If language is constantly being agreed upon, certainly it can be changed. Here, I think, is where the issue of agency begins to form. Who has the power to change language? Who has the power to re-frame how a reader reads a text or an audience hears a speaker?

These are the central questions of linguistic agency and vital, I believe, to our analysis of the theory we read about this kind of agency. Gilbert and Gubar highlight this concern beautifully in the chapter "Infection of the Sentence: The Woman Writer and the Anxiety of Authorship" of The Madwoman in the Attic. The concern of these two women over the "anxiety of influence" or even of authorship becomes a very legitimate concern when viewed in light of the previous questions and I think it is through these kinds of lenses that the rest of the texts should be analyzed if not done so already.