SURF woes

[readingredhead]

It's always so much harder to interpret the texts that I really really like and engage with, because I feel the need to come to some kind of point that equally satisfies my intellectual and emotional responses to the text. I don't think that the emotional response can be discounted. When my emotional response is less dramatic -- when I'm working with a text that I don't engage with as much, or perhaps even don't engage with at all -- it's ridiculously easy to figure out what I think it "means."

And then, there's Pride and Prejudice, and I'm sitting there staring at my pages and pages of notes and while they all sound intelligent, none of them actually account for the way that the novel makes me feel -- about the characters, about their situations, about the whole process of falling in love or writing novels. And that, as far as I'm concerned, is a big problem.

I have all of these ideas that, from a purely analytical standpoint, make perfect sense. I feel like I'm approaching the text from a sort-of interesting/unique angle that's yielding credible and interesting results. But none of the results deal in any way with why I am so in love with Pride and Prejudice and why it matters. My analysis is all about books and men as commodities that circulate, but my gut's telling me that this is only really tangential to the substance of the novel, which is that sometimes they don't and how do you deal with that and why don't they?

(Forgive me. I'm making no sense -- not even to myself. But I can't stop.)

I have things to say about P&P, but they either feel so obvious, or not at all in line with my overall thesis topic, or not at all in line with the way the novel makes me feel. I feel like this novel represents a major learning experience for both Elizabeth and Darcy (because obviously it does) but my interpretation isn't getting anywhere near the core of the beautiful complexity of their relationship. I know it's about re-reading, re-evaluating each other, but why does Austen think re-reading matters and how does this show up elsewhere in a novel where people are literally taken at face value and libraries are socially-charged (if not always social) spaces? How does the large argument about private vs. public that's going on intersect with the personal learning experience of these two characters?

(Why am I even writing this on LJ? Answer: I need an audience, and the only alternative is to talk to myself. Which, they tell me, is not healthy. But which I will probably resort to anyway.)

Comments

[hodgetopodge.livejournal.com]

If this isn't my area of expertise, it's certainly one of my keenest personal and academic interests. On a personal level, I like to say I have the same relationship with my emotions as Nietzsche has with Socrates. On an academic level, I need to know how emotions are or aren't rational, and how that plays into meaning making. Not to mention that relations between objects and concepts is one of the most important things to me, right next to the scale and boundaries of the investigation and the metaphors we use in it. I would love nothing more than to talk to you about this problem, partly because I think I can help sort it out, and partly because I need to know if I can / need to refine my concepts. One of the most common bogus remarks I hear about literature is that it's purely what a particular reader makes of it. That said, literature is meaningless if it doesn't stand in relation to some audience.

Short answer: everything you wrote here makes perfect sense, and if you answer your own questions and doubts you're going to find something better than any new "analysis" of P&P.

[readingredhead.livejournal.com]

On an academic level, I need to know how emotions are or aren't rational, and how that plays into meaning making.

YES. This actually brings me back to my experience of re-reading Jane Eyre in a course focusing on postcolonial criticism. All of a sudden people were telling me Jane Eyre wasn't a love story, despite the fact that that particular reading of JE was the most powerful one I'd had to that point. Suddenly, instead, I am being told that it's actually a story of the middle-class white woman's complicity in empire-building and slavery and racism and that even Bronte herself should be included in this criticism (rather than considered as a potential author of this criticism, or at least of some strain of it). I spent so much time trying to figure out why I was so angry at these new ideas about the text, and trying to work past the surface anger/frustration at having my romantic notions shattered in order to realize that I did actually have problems with these postcolonial critics' methods of argumentation.

I think I may have gotten somewhere with P&P simply because I decided to let myself operate under the idea that the love story really is important, and that perhaps Austen is saying something about how love can still matter, and can be based upon more than appearance and wealth in an increasingly commercialized world. I still feel like there's some question I'm not thinking to ask myself but I'm also realizing that I need to stand back and take a few deep breaths. After all, this is a thesis that doesn't have to be written until March or April!

One of the most common bogus remarks I hear about literature is that it's purely what a particular reader makes of it. That said, literature is meaningless if it doesn't stand in relation to some audience.

I got a book from the library the other day that I haven't had time to start reading yet but am looking forward to -- it's called Is There a Text in This Class? and it's about attempting to engage with a lot of the academic arguments about different possible sources of a text's meaning (or lack of meaning). I suspect you may also find it interesting though I can't say so for certain as I haven't read beyond the introduction. It looked like it was going to deal with this divide between meaning generated by the reader or the writer.

[http://Jordy/Chigaijin/ (from livejournal.com)]

I've left this post marked unread since it first came up in my newsfeeds because I wanted to say something about it, but didn't know what to say. I still don't have it worked out, but at this rate I will never respond.

I think this is what turns kids who like reading off of literary analysis, and (gasp!) what makes kids who don't like reading not like reading in the first place. I was in the former camp until English 4AP; now I'm still wary.

It's because it's so obvious that there's more to the novel than [whatever's being discussed]. Some novels really are just vehicles for their messages, but clearly there is a difference between good fiction writing and bad fiction writing beyond the clarity.

I recently came across this Calvin and Hobbes comic in a re-read of the Homicidal Psycho Jungle Cat collection. I hadn't thought about it much before, but having recently watched a few old movies, I realized there was something to that last line. Movies these days are heavy with attempts to "manipulate" emotions, but I prefer that to the dry "here's what happened" style of some old movies. Yes, we get things like Avatar where they go overboard, or cases like this SMBC comic where they have to hit you over the head with the emotions, message, and plot. But as a director/cinematographer myself, I have to say manipulating emotions is a skill, an important one.

And that's true in books as well. How a book makes you feel is a testament to the skill of the author, and may indeed be an important part of the message. And are definitely why it matters.

A book is not good or important because someone says it is.

(More on this in a future blog post.)