Blog Paper for April Fools' Day

Jeremy J. Armstrong
EN 342—Modern British Literature
Dr. Paula Friedman
http://jj-killerbunnyblog.blogspot.com/
2 April 2009

The World, the Text and Me

I was looking forward to this assignment since last semester to see how far I have evolved on my literary journey. I have read a great deal both for academic reasons and personal and wanted to see if I have moved into a new stage of literacy awareness. I was mired in the text-self stage a year ago, and I feel as if I am in this stage still.

After reflection, I concluded I do not like the hierarchical nature of how these stages are framed. It seems as if #1 is for beginning readers and #3 is for master readers. If you are not on your way to Stage 3 Literary Awareness, then you are not making progress. Literary critics assure readers, “it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author” (Barthes, 1470). My reading of this approach is the text must always be answered from the “I-centered” perspective before the other connections may authentically be made. The movement from stage to stage is a fluid affair of multiple stages through any reading experience—not a fixed linear progression.

While acknowledging the necessity of “the death of the author,” my first entry focused on the intertextuality I saw in the T.S. Eliot poem, “The Hollow Men,” Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird and the Civil Rights’ Movement in the United States during the 1960s. “I thought of that story [To Kill a Mockingbird] from high school and how hatred and racism make usually decent people into hollow shells of themselves” (Armstrong, 1/24/2009). Viewing my world as interconnected and interdependent has been an evolution in my own literacy since entering higher education. I viewed most of what I read in isolation from what I experienced in life. As I have grown as a reader and embraced a more holistic view of culture and literature, I have noticed the connections between academic reading and writing has infiltrated my personal worldview. I now approach text in a more comprehensive way using all forms of media and experience to inform my opinions.

On 2/13/2009, I wrote of the “hypocrisy of words” and “the anguish of her generation’s forlornness” found in Lady Chatterley’s Lover (Lawrence, 50, 115). This reflects both a text-text and a text-world approach to literacy. World War I’s impact on the literature’s content and form is undeniable. As Willa Cather mused, “The world changed.” The wholesale destruction of a World War destroyed the assumptions the Romantics had about life and the meaning of art. Those horrific reverberations were felt to the very core of the literary imagination and produced waves of cognitive dissonance which are still extending to the marginalization of art today. This entry helps illustrate the fluidity of the nature of literacy when taking into account the interconnectedness of all things. The grand explosion of popular culture has aided the impact of this dissonance by infiltrating every facet of life through the monumental technological advances of the last hundred years.

A further example of literature extending beyond the simple text-self stage to encompass the text-text and text-world stages is the profound line from “The Second Coming.” “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world” (Yeats). I reflected on the death of the hero in the Modern Age, yet the heroic act remains as a powerful motivation in our world. Yeats embodies the stages of literacy and their fluid nature. He writes of his personal dislike for the “drunken, vainglorious louts” while simultaneously raising them to the stature of the epic heroes of Rome and Greece who will be sung of in poetry. His personal feelings are illustrated through the text-self element of literacy and personal biases towards men and women he drank with and competed with romantically. Despite his personal jealousies, Yeats’s moving words immortalize the Irish martyrs for future generations through poetry to highlight the text-text dimension of literacy. Finally, his political aims of Irish independence and spreading awareness of the Irish plight clearly motivate his art. This final dimension is encompasses a text-world reading of “The Second Coming.”

Drawing on Stephen Dedalus as an archetype of the modern artist and as a spokesman for Modernism, I draw my fluidity between the different stages of literacy. "By his monstrous way of life he seemed to have put himself beyond the limits of reality. Nothing moved him or spoke to him from the real world unless he heard in it an echo of the infuriated cries within him" (Joyce, 93). Joyce implies that the interior voice of the artist must be heeded before the conventions of society or definition of “art.” Stephen is “I-centered” throughout the text; his external actions merely mirror his inner turmoil. The reader as the interpreter of literature is that “I” and must take a primary role in forming the connections between other texts and the world in which he finds himself. In other words, the “real world” is only real in relation to the reader’s “limits of reality” which may include anything and everything from that reader’s experience.

To answer the question posed by this assignment requires a hierarchy to be established as to which stage of literacy is pre-eminent. I maintain that all three stages are equally valid. Instead of placing them in a linear fashion from 1-3, I would align them in a triangular arrangement in much the same way the rhetorical triangle of ethos, pathos and logos is traditional depicted. In much the same way as reason and argument fall apart when one of the legs of the triangle is removed, the stages of reading development are undermined when all three aspects are not equally respected for their validity.



Works Cited

Barthes, Roland. "The Death of the Author." The Norton Anthology of Theory and
Criticism. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001. p. 1466-1470.

Joyce, James. The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. London: Secker & Warburg,
1992.

Lawrence, D. H. Lady Chatterley's Lover. London: Penguin, 2006.

Yeats, W.B. “The Second Coming.” Class handout. Published 1912.