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.
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