This reading was perplexing to me but also made me think. That may sound vague, but don’t worry, we’ll get there. When I first started reading Ovid, I was taken a little aback. I had heard the story of Creation before, but never in text only from a Sunday school teacher or two. As Ovid began to describe how “chaos was given form” and everything was created I was captivated by the methods he used to illustrate all of this while never bringing God into it. I had only heard the story of creation as is told in Genesis (although I did not know that is the book of the Bible it was from until I did this reading because I am not an incredibly devout Catholic). Ovid refers to the gods more as the “general” for lack of a better word, “gods”.
Some of the parts that struck me about Ovid was when the creation of man took place. Man was created to be “more intellectually capable and able to control the other beasts”. Man was made upright. I don’t know exactly how to explain this in an eloquent way, but the way Ovid described man and man’s place in the earth made it seem that man had a sense of entitlement from the beginning. Man was made to be more capable than anything else “of his own divine substance.” As I continued reading and the story progressed, the occurrence of violence and destruction of earth did not come as a surprise to me. I made a note in my CPD that simply states: “Where does the greed come from?” Man from the beginning was made elite to everything around him. So when man began exploiting the natural gifts of the earth and causing disruption it seemed right to me. He was superior so everything around him belonged to him. The gods had to intervene to restore some sort of balance. This text became easier for me to comprehend when I thought about it in comparison to our present world. Man is still greedy and exploits the resources of the world. Although I personally may think the idea of gods is a little far fetched, I do think there are going to be repercussions for man in order to restore balance.
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So far this semester in AP Lit we have continued to contemplate and analyze our summer reading. We started the year reading AO Scott’s A Better Living Through Criticism. When I first read this text, to say I was lost would be an understatement. I got lost in Scott’s examples and alternating perspectives, and the argument went completely over my head. But through our close reading process in class, his words gradually gained more meaning for me. Although it seemed overly tedious at times, the work we did with A Better Living was all the more meaningful. Scott argues that we ought to all be critics because our responses to art are just as important as the art itself. Our thoughts give it meaning. Scott encourages viewers to practice criticism in order for our appreciation to grow. Criticism informs all aspects of life. We carefully defined Scott’s common vocabulary, a list of about 10 words. At the risk of sounding too casual, this took forever. Our class argued for what seemed like weeks about hot to adequately define Scott’s words. How could we possibly define such powerful vocabulary in a synthesized way? Once we finished, however, the list was beautiful. If you read them, you can see a compilation of the ideas of all members of my class. This activity allowed us to foster even more meaning from A Better Living. When we finally “completed” our work with Scott, we moved on to Steven Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning. When I first read this during the summer, I was impacted immensely by the epilogue of Greenblatt’s text. So when didn’t focus on the epilogue until about a week ago, I was very thrown off. I extensively re-read the preface and introduction, desperately trying to fight through my confusion. As I did the close-reading assignments, my understanding began to expand. We followed a similar process as we had with Scott: clearly defining Greenblatt’s vocabulary, examining each paragraph individually, and discussing who the intended audiences are. Similar to defining the vocabulary of Scott, defining the audience took an extremely long time. Everyone was saying the same thing in different words. This only escalated as we began to discuss the Conditions. Greenblatt laid out 10 conditions for self-fashioning. Some of them were easy to understand and took our class a few minutes to discuss, but others (I’m talking about condition 5) took multiple classes periods. This process was difficult, but once we got to the end, I was impressed my not only my classmate’s but my own ability to comprehend the text. I felt this way again when we did finally discuss the epilogue. After going through the preface and spending so much time on the introduction, the text as a whole became more comprehensible to me. As I mentioned, the epilogue was the most impactful piece of the text for me. The idea that we have no control over identity was extraordinarily upsetting to me. Here are photos of my analysis of the epilogue from the summer (blue writing) and this week (highlighted writing). My notes on the epilogue are highlighted in pink.
What we essentially discovered that considering ourselves as autonomous is illusory. The epilogue serves as a near immediate example of how Greenblatt himself grapples with self-fashioning. We learned all of these conditions and necessary things for self-fashioning to happen, but we had not seen how it actually happens through a concrete example. Until this point, we had like a self-fashioning checklist. Alien? Check. Authority? Check. Self? Check. But all of a sudden we were seeing in a very raw way the impact that self fashioning had on the person that coined it. As you can see, my reflection in the summer recognized that we don’t have any autonomy over out identity. But I didn’t understand at the time why this made sense with the rest of Greenblatt’s work. The latter commonplace entry is essentially a more eloquent explanation for what I was trying to say in the summer, combined with the ideas of my classmates. This supported my original statements over the summer, but also answered the question of why the epilogue functioned as it did. The work we have done with Scott and Greenblatt has not been easy. In fact, it has been anything but. But it has been powerful and impactful for me. I feel that I have a better understanding of their work but also I have bettered my own ability to close read and analyze difficult works like these. I am looking forward to continuing this process throughout the year and hopefully continuing to grow in my ability to understand. This first section stimulated a lot of thoughts for me. I was particularly intrigued by the concept of Subjective Universality. Why is it because one person finds something to be a certain way, whether it is beautiful, enjoyable, or awful, it can be found beautiful to all? Is this thing really beautiful, or are we all in agreement that it fits an aesthetic, thus suggesting anything else would be asinine.
This all circles back to the concept of taste. I liked the author’s inquiry that there are three levels of taste: agreeable, beautiful, and good. “Agreeable” is the first, least structured level of taste. It is intent on an enjoyable experience. This would fall under the category of “just for fun!” The author questions if something “agreeable” even counts as an aesthetic experience at all. An example that I can think of for something in my routine that is agreeable would be watching “Friends” while I get ready for school as background noise. It does not provide any sort of inspiration to me, nor does it do any harm. The next level the author identified is “beautiful”. Something falling in the realm of beautiful invokes pleasure but not in as fun of a capacity as something “agreeable”. Beauty is an aesthetic experience and it fulfills an impulse that is higher than a neutral sensuous experience. The final level is “good”. This is the most exclusive standard, so to speak. This level was the most interesting to me. One point the author brought up that perplexed me was that if everyone has their standards for what “good” taste is, is there even such a thing as “good” taste at all? Something that is “good” is supposed to inspire admiration and respect, but, as humans, don’t we draw inspiration from varying places? What’s considered to be “good” to me may be completely polar to what is “good” to you or the next person. So if what is “good” is really determined by our individual standards, then there really is no standard. But this does not sit well with us. It is in our nature for there to be things of superior nature, of higher standard. It is how we define class. If we have no standard then we would all be equal. Perhaps this would solve our problems. Another pattern that I noticed in the reading was the use of the word “tautological” or variations of it. This word essentially means saying the same thing twice but using different words. I found this ironic considering this is essentially what the author does throughout his work. He repeatedly reworded the same rhetorical questions, and he continuously went off on tangents. I was fascinated by this word and the irony of it’s repeated presence. This was particularly prominent in the second chapter, which highlighted the author’s inner monologue. He would also often refer back to anecdotal characteristics from his childhood. This reading, to me, was as much about tackling greater philosophical questions as it was becoming acquainted with the author. This book raised a lot of questions regarding the role that art plays in modern day. Art evokes emotion by crossing cultural norms and bounds. But the act of going to an art museum speaks to the development, or rather depleting, ability of humans to foster connections. |
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December 2019
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