David Herman – “I don’t know what sort of genre this is”

David Herman – “I don’t know what sort of genre this is”

·         part memoir/part family history/part cultural criticism, all anchored in the fascinating history of a European banking dynasty

·         a hybrid – a mix of the personal, the historical and intellectual history

·         This new hybrid genre is more interested in the personal voice, in crossing boundaries rather than policing them

·         It is his history and what academic history tends to suppress is the personal.

·         a more ‘personal’ kind of book, a book that moves between genres rather than confining itself to the single genre of conventional literary criticism (Daniel Swift)

·         The book follows the story of these objects, and the people who owned them, from fin-de-siècle Paris to pre-war Vienna, into exile in Tunbridge Wells, then to post-war Tokyo and finally to present-day London

·         He is interested in a kind of thick description, mixing the personal, the historical and the cultural

·         pulling it all together are two central narrative devices – the collection and de Waal himself

·         The grasp of the thingness of things. The importance of objects for us all. The connection between their continuity and the discontinuity in our lives. The Japanese objects in de Waal’s book stand for the history of a family, which is itself caught up in a dramatic and fascinating larger history

·         objects and memories are central to this story of loss

·         a history of objects and fragments. Instead of grand systems of thought, we increasingly think about our lives and our past, in particular, in a fragmented way

·         The past is never finished. Sometimes it erupts into the present. Sometimes it has been brought to life and then fades away, as loss

·         They all mix it up: the personal and the critical; the present and the historical; the very specific (the Green Line bus, the flowerpot, the hare with amber eyes) and the very big (a life lived in the twentieth century, bombing and warfare, the fate of the Jews in modern Europe)

This text captures the complexity of such books as The Hare with Amber Eyes, and how complicated it is to classify them correctly because they mix so many aspects of different genres that it is almost not possible. Because of that I sometimes disapprove that everything has to fit into clear-cut categories, especially when some works really transcend that notion.

Rocío G. Davis – A Graphic Self

Reading Journal – Session 11 – 17/01/2017

Rocío G. Davis – A Graphic Self

·         as contemporary transcultural autobiographies negotiate renewed forms of experiences, these texts become experimental and revisionary narratives, which challenge textual authority and prescriptive paradigms

·         the increasingly dialogic nature of life writing reflects a multi-voiced cultural situation that allows the subject to control and exploit the tensions between personal and communal discourse within the text, and signify on a discursive level

·         her memoir explains in particular ways the present self, and reasserts how the past can only be known and understood through narrative – in her case, a multilayered form of narrating

·         the reader accompanies the writer as her self-as-child learns about heritage culture and experiences historical events, fashioning a seemingly artless insider perspective that is, nonetheless, complexly layered

·         the study of comics operates a significant link between textual and visual studies

·         comics as a sophisticated and developed medium, a set of cultural signifying practices in which the intersections of culture, history, ethnicity, and gender can be effectively negotiated by cartoonists and their adult readers

·         the potential of the graphic narrative as a highly dynamic text, as opposed to the more static single-image narrative painting or plain text, determines the dialectic between text and image, providing creators with a wider range of artistic and imaginative possibilities

·         flexibility of the comics to literally represent memory, dreams, possibilities, and engage the idiosyncrasies of the present

·         cartooning as a form of amplification through simplification. When we abstract an image through cartooning, we are not so much eliminating details as we are focusing on specific details. By stripping down an image to its essential “meaning,” an artist can amplify that meaning in a way that realistic art can’t (McCloud, 1994: 30, emphasis in original)

·         I propose to read Satrapi’s transcultural graphic autobiography as a literary and cultural site for the negotiation and management of the memory of childhood perceptions and positioning, family, history, politics, religion, and social transformation

·         Graphic narratives contain more gaps than a traditional autobiography – even those written in as separate stories – and we must therefore read the design and intention behind the textual destabilizations and the cultural implications of such fragmentation

·         Satrapi uses the conventions of Western perception of Iranian culture to criticize it from her transcultural position

·         By giving her memoir Iran’s historical name, she posits the text as a doubled narrative of memory – that of a country and a childhood lost, as well as the intricate connection between the two

·         Marji’s story is one of contradictions, of a child finding herself between cultural, political, religious, linguistic and social demands and impositions

·         “I cannot take the idea of a man cut into pieces and just write it,” she explained. “It would not be anything but cynical. That’s why I drew it. People are not ready to read a book about all the misery of the third world, and I don’t blame them” (Bahrampour, 2003: 1)

I am not a reader of comics or biography, so both are still new and interesting genres to me and after last session with Prof. Packard I am still fascinated by the different opportunities drawings present to tell a story, and especially this story. Everything on the page is intentional, more than with movies or books is something that I have not considered before he said it on Tuesday, as well as the fact that a comic often depicts the absence of an action instead of the action itself. Combining these things with the information from this essay – that Satrapi would have been unable to write a text about her memories without sounding overly cynical, but was able to draw her memories with a humor that would have been absent otherwise – is really telling of the power and opportunity that a graphic memoir possesses. She is able to share her memories and juxtapose the different aspects and influences in her life in a way that seems effortless, humorous, truthful, but never too much. It highlights the good and the bad for Western audiences unfamiliar with this part of Eastern history in an easily accessible way without being either too funny or too horrific.

Gilbert and Gubar - The Madwoman in the Attic

Reading Journal – Session 7 – 6/12/2016

Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar – The Madwoman in the Attic: A Dialogue of Self and Soul: Plain Jane’s Progress

·         Matthew Arnold: Charlotte Bronte’s mind contains nothing but “hunger, rebellion and rage”

·         “alarming revolution” following the “invasion of Jane Eyre”

·         contemporary critics shocked by “anti-Christian” refusal to accept the forms, customs, and standards of society = rebellious feminism

·         Jane’s anger perceived as horrifying: a heroine who wishes to escape society’s conventions far more dangerous to the audience than one interested in sexuality (as was another point of critique)

·         example for female Bildungsroman: problems encountered by the protagonist as she struggles from the imprisonment of her childhood toward an almost unthinkable goal of mature freedom are symptomatic of difficulties Everywoman in patriarchal society must meet and overcome:

o   oppression (Gateshead)

o   starvation (Lowood)

o   madness (Thornfield)

o   coldness (Marsh End)

·         Jane’s encounter with Bertha is the books central confrontation, it is an encounter not with her own sexuality but with her own “imprisoned hunger, rebellion and rage”, a secret dialogue with self and soul

·         metaphor of fire and ice to represent Jane’s experiences

·         escape through flight or escape through starvation, or escape through madness

·         deliberate allusions to pilgrimage

·         both Miss Temple and Helen Burns are something like mothers to Jane, feeding her, embracing her, counseling her

·         Adèle Varens, Blanche Ingram, Grace Pool all serve as negative role models for her

·         Jane and Rochester set up as spiritual equals

·         Rochester with secret of masculine potency and male sexual guilt and through this is her superior instead of her equal

·         Bertha as the most threatening avatar of Jane, doing what Jane wants to do, being her truest and darkest double

o   not only acts for, but also like her

·         “true” relatives with names from the Bible

·         Rochester’s proposal as fire of passion, St. John’s as ice

·         only through Rochester’s injuries can they shed society’s restraints on their different ranks and finally see each other as equal

This text certainly raises important points concerning Jane’s journey throughout the text, the important stations she has to live through as well as the meaning and purpose of the people she encounters in these symbolic settings. Analysis of the prominent metaphors of fire and ice, prophetic dreams and female sexuality and yearning for freedom are interwoven with the prominent position of Bertha Rochester as Jane’s darker evil double, living out the secret desires that Jane has to suppress. The text gives a comprehensive account of the most important aspects of the book. I especially like the interpretation of the function of Bertha Rochester. While the book itself subjects her to the most cruel treatment, physically, mentally and verbally, reducing her in a way that can only be done because she is a racial other, her role seems more profound through this interpretation, as a representation of Jane’s deepest and darkest desires.

Susan Sniader Lanser – Jane Eyre’s Legacy: The Powers and Dangers of Singularity

 

Reading Journal - Session 6 - 29/11/2016

Susan Sniader Lanser – Jane Eyre’s Legacy: The Powers and Dangers of Singularity
 

·         novel only not a failure because it was promoted as autobiography with a strong narrative voice, impersonal narrator wouldn’t have had the same effect

·         female personal voice took form in the early 19^th cent. by merging two different genres: courtship novel and spiritual autobiography

·         governess novels preceding Jane Eyre: retrospectively told by a woman who has been a wife for some time, with the goal being instruction

o   silence a condition for the position of the governess, as well as an expectation of womanhood

o   restlessness with their own submissive and pious femininity

·         Jane Eyre exposing earlier governess narrators as only fictively female and singular, occupying the ideological positions of men

·         most crucial to the development of Jane’s character is the preservation of her right to speak

·         proceeds as though she must not only have a voice, but be the voice

o   vanquishing the verbal authority of men

o   becomes her own spiritual authority, instead of accepting the assumed connection btw. God’s authority and man’s

·         addressing the reader directly as form of public epistolarity

·         to tell is to exist

·         Jane Eyre as a starting point for a tradition of fictional autobiography by women

·         but in order to be so effective, Jane must silence all other voices (especially Bertha Mason Rochester, Jane’s silenced double), subjugation the Victorian Empire demands

o   racialized other, defeminized, dehumanized, assures Jane’s own femininity

o   compared to Bertha’s uncontrollable voice, Jane’s outspokenness is ultimately safe and unthreatening to social order

·         just as Romantic narrative constructed authority as essentially masculine, Jane Eyre legitimates female authority as essentially white

This essay raises interesting points concerning the narrative voice in Jane Eyre that made the novel so different and successful in the history of English literature. It explains how it becomes the starting point of fictional autobiography of female voices and the importance of Jane’s outspokenness throughout the whole piece. But it also takes into account that for Jane to be as outspoken as she is, everyone else has to be silenced, the men she interacts with as well as other women who threaten her position. While Jane Eyre is an important work of fiction in the context of feminism by making her voice equal to men in the narrative, it is also important to consider the unequal notions by silencing all the other women. In a racial context, this becomes even more severe in the person of Bertha Mason Rochester who is silenced, dehumanized and killed to further Jane’s own narrative. It is no wonder that she received so much attention later on through the “Mad Woman in the Attic” as well as the prequel of the book Wide Sargasso Sea for “The Empire Writes B(l)ack” that deals with Bertha’s story. It is an instance that very well shows that feminism for white women and feminism for black women mean very different things and need to be considered differently to reach some kind of equality.

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