“As the wife acts under the command and control of her husband, she is excused from punishment for certain offences, such as theft, burglary, housebreaking, etc., if committed in his presence and under his influence.” (Pg. 4) This law implies that the wife really has no independent thought and idea, and would simply go along with said crime simply because her husband said she must, removing her own opinion on the matter and turning her status in the crime into one akin of an item such as a getaway vehicle or a weapon. How could there be such a gross oversight of simple justice in a law that through reducing the person actually overprotects them and doesn’t even treat them like an accomplice?
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Framing Statement:
As an English major, literary criticism is inherent to my major. However, it is highly applicable in the world today as it fulfils the goals of the UNE English department as filling in for analytical skills, critical thinking, and the capacity to understand multiple perspectives, thus it is truly a key and informative course for all English majors to tackle.
Script:
Since the dawn of time, we have always had a need to communicate. As highly social beings, we communicate everyday through a variety of ways. It is inherent to the human experience. But in parallel, interpretation is required to make communication work. Without interpretation, communication is no more than a one-sided conversation. But also inherent in communication is an idea of theory, where one cannot say anything without having some form of specific idea and way of thinking, as that is the way we process things. Alongside that, each person who interprets has their own theories they work with, as their own thoughts will, to some degree, be different than the communicator. So when someone writes something there is inherently theory behind it, and when someone reads it there is theory behind it. Therefore, no reading or writing can ever be truly devoid of theory. Furthermore, theory is useful for interpreting things that we see and read, and can truly enhance everything we interpret in that way. That is the idea behind critical theory as it allows us to further understand the text that we are reading and trying to interpret. There are a plethora of different forms of critical theory, as there are many, many ways to work through a piece of writing, but I have selected two critical approaches highlighted in Robert Dale Parker’s book How to Interpret Literature that stand out to me in particular. The first theory put forward in the book is the theory of New Criticism. Now new criticism is an example of a theory that time has passed over. As Parker says, “new criticism is now the old criticism and the bogeyman that every later critical method defines itself against”. (Parker, Pg. 11) But in its time, new criticism was a fresh concept, as critical analysis in this way had not truly been articulated in this way yet. It was a revolution of writing. Prior to new criticism, writing was contextualized in regard to its history, looking at influences on the author and the construction of language before actually interpreting the piece as itself. New Criticism seeked to reshape that into a greater emphasis of the piece itself, adding more meaning to the text and laid down the very meaningful groundwork for literary interpretation today. For example, prior to new criticism, reading was simply about the merits and appreciation of the work, not so much about the criticism or pushback on the work. It was more or less taken at face value. But with the addition of the methods of new criticism, an emphasis was placed more on dissection of the work as opposed to merely looking for an overarching lesson in it, seeking to look at work in isolation instead of more in context. But inherently, it is a challenge to isolate a piece of work entirely from its influences and meaning, and that’s where the ideas of new criticism started to give. For example, a piece that truly irked new critics was the poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn by John Keats. While most of the poem can indeed be left up for critics to analyze in a vacuum in a sense, the last lines “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know” caused new critics to grow upset. Why was there a lesson in a piece otherwise devoid of lesson? Another piece that could be similarly viewed this way would be The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, a tragedy about triumph, loss, and unfulfilled hearts and lives ends with the statement “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” Once more, a lesson-like statement “ruins” a piece full of interpretation. But if a simple lesson derails the entire process of criticism, then clearly the line of criticism is not willing to acknowledge certain aspects of the world that are taught without interpretation. Moving along, another line of criticism that is now often seen as outdated and unevolved is the line of criticism known as Structuralism, but this concept laid the groundwork for future criticisms to such a degree that Parker admits that “it is often hard to tell where structuralism ends and many of the later methods begin.” (Parker, Pg. 43)As opposed to new criticism’s view of looking at this in isolation, structuralism seeked to view things in comparison to other concepts, allowing one to view things in the way one might view up from down, warm from chilly and so on. Therefore, it is more about the concepts creating themselves as structuralism has a deep basis in the idea of the “death of the author”, or that no author can truly create all the ideas themselves, merely putting together the bits and pieces pre-established by ideas before them. With this structuralist lens, we are able to look at all literature and determine what it is exactly trying to get at, but also where it breaks the mold of those same conventions that all pieces of literature are bound to in one way or another. In the Sherlock Holmes novel The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton by none other than Arthur Conan Doyle, we read along as Sherlock Holmes uses his detective skills and chance encounters to determine the solution, but the twist is that Holmes and Watson observe the murder of Milverton, but choose not to act on it. In fact, when asked to help on the case of the man’s murder, Holmes replies that his “sympathies are with the criminals rather than with the victim” and refuses to take the case. (Doyle, Pg. 10) When one views this with an original structuralist lens, one finds that the simple binary comparisons are lacking. So, the structuralist position evolved to figure out how to deal with the complexities of the real literature difficulties that accompany these challenges. Personally, I do believe that, while new criticism structurally helps one interpret all literature, the evolution of these ideas found in structuralism is more applicable outside of class, as it furthers the idea of how things can be viewed in parallel to each other, and where conventional molds do get broken to recontextualize that as well. Through all these readings I have put forward, there are a plethora of different ways to define, criticize, and re-examine everything that has been and ever could be written. Even if one were to write simply the word “mortgage” alone on a page, there may be no context provided with it but there was an idea that went into that, and therefore there is theory and criticism behind writing the word “mortgage” alone on a page. Whether we like it or not, theory is inherent to communication, and is therefore inherent in every piece of reading and writing, and this has certainly been taught throughout this course to the extent where it appears to be a logical certainty to me.
Podcast itself:
Works Cited:
Doyle, Arthur Conan. The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton. Miniaturbuchverlag Leipzig, 2017.
Keats, John, et al. Ode on a Grecian Urn. Editions Koch, 2003.
Parker, Robert Dale. How to Interpret Literature: Critical Theory for Literary and Cultural Studies. Langara College, 2022.
West, Clare, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Great Gatsby. Oxford University Press, 2013.
The IPAT model is a model that is designed to base environmental impact, the “I” in the model, in relation to Population, Affluence, and Technology. Therefore, the greater numbers in those columns, the greater the impact on the environment will be. As such, the equation is formulated like this: Impact equals Population multiplied by Affluence multiplied by Population. Population, as defined by the equation, is the number of people in a place, and the more people there are, the greater the strain on the environment, as each person takes up more space in the environment, uses up natural resources, as well as generating waste from those actions, further impacting the environment. For affluence, the higher the number means that the place has a greater per capita wealth, which works in conjunction with resource consumption as an illustrator of how much is consumed by a population over a period of time. The final factor, technology, can be the most impactful factor of all, as humans have found ways to utilize technology that not only very, very effectively increases impact on the environment, but severely outweighs the environmental impact of the number of people that are in that place, becoming possibly the most impactful factor. There is another factor, Sensitivity, that is not officially a part of the IPAT model, but takes into account the environmental “carrying capacity”, or the ability for the place to take the population, affluence, and technology not only successfully but sustainably, greatly altering whether or not the place can actually take the factors being forced upon it.
The case given is a difference between two towns that have different environmental impacts on the land. Town 1 has a population of 100 people, and has an average income of 50,000 dollars. Town 2 has 500 residents and an average income of 25,000 dollars. At face value, town 2 already has a greater impact, given that when calculated through the IPAT model, town 2 has a greater value than town 1. But the last value, technology, is not easily calculated from the information of the towns, as it only provides that town 1 uses efficient heating and town 2 uses inefficient heating, but still points to town 2 having a greater environmental impact. The IPAT model is useful when calculating these numbers, but can run into some issues when the technology aspect of it is not so easily calculated as there is no figure that can be plugged into technology, only ideas of efficiency and inefficiency. However, if one found values for those, then the IPAT model would work quite well, and is generally a pretty good judge in practical usage.
On November 5 I went and participated in the Open Mic Night, where I got to listen to a variety of other very talented singers as well as a comedy routine, along with singing “Mac the Knife” myself. A very fun night all around!
This semester I have been a member of the UNE newspaper, the Bolt, as we have covered various stories ranging from sporting events, to film reviews, even to dogs coming to the campus!
During the fall semester I was a member of the UNE Players as we worked to put together our production of the play Humbletown. During this experience I learned to grow and become more skilled as an actor, and just how to put on a show at the university, even if we don’t have a stage to work with yet!
During the first week of the term, my roommate, who is a Marine Biology major himself, and I went on a full tour of the Marine Science Center where I got to see and learn about the various projects and equipment used in the center, such as the crab treadmill used to measure oxygen used in their movement.
I am a member of the UNE Tennis team, which has been a very fun and rewarding experience this first semester of college. Although I was unfortunately unable to participate in any competitive games between other colleges, hopefully I should be able to play during the spring semester as there will be more games then.
On November 19, I went to a Women’s Basketball game between UNE and Regis College, where UNE won 64 to 44. It was quite an enjoyable experience as I got a great, if not all that close, of a game between the two teams, and got to see UNE get a very nice and solid victory in four quarters.
In Solid Objects/Ghosts of Chairs by Graham Fraser, the author explores Virginia Woolf’s fascination with inanimate objects disconnected from human attention when they are not observed or outright abandoned, and how she dives into the world nearly entirely devoid of human connection thus sparking a somewhat lifelike reality in these objects, further trivializing human presence and highlighting that all humans, who we view as rightfully important, as profoundly fragile in our world. Furthermore, the author goes on to describe that in Virginia Woolf’s “The Lady in the Looking Glass”, the objects in the room are not only anthropomorphised, but wrapped up in an ecological world of their own as well, creating a deeper sense of meaning in the world of the objects. Then, the author goes on to describe a sense of domestication in the room in the story, as the character Isabella has carefully curated the items that are in there, but also in a sense linking all her items to her in a realm of her making where “sometimes it seemed as if they knew more about her than we”, and in those items lie the real Isabella (Pg. 3). Thus the overarching idea posed by the author is that the “objects in this story are outside human attention in the sense of being unwitnessed (except to the unseen narrator-naturalist), yet they are nonetheless inscribed within the larger human attention of being domesticated—taking the order of their existence within the inhabited space of the tidy and well-arranged house” (Pg.4) The author goes about illustrating these vast ideas about the life and death of objects by taking examples from Virgina Woolf’s works, and interpreting them in a way that goes beyond simply stating that Woolf intends to make these objects seem alive, but to more fully comprehend that not only are they alive, they are controlled and curated by humans but have their own world that can neither be fully seen nor understood by humans, thus creating that idea that humans are fragile even in the worlds they think they have made and mastered. This whole concept is important because it really makes one reconsider just what it means to be human, and how we influence the things and objects we have, and how they not only know us but influence us back.
I found this analysis not only fascinating but in some way deeply unsettling. The idea that we can only control the things we own to the point of arrangement, or that they may know us better than anyone feels very correct in a way, but also isolating. How much does any individual matter if they can’t even be the most important thing in their room? But, it’s also an interesting test in willing to acknowledge that while indeed we may not be any more valuable than our objects, how can you process that? Thus, it in a way highlights how valuable our whole world is, that even your objects exist in a fragile ecosystem of their own reality, and when abandoned or forgotten they too can fall into decay and in a way die. With the analysis by Graham Fraser, I don’t really see any real places I would push back or increase the substance for that matter, then again I am still reeling from this profound realization that we, in a way, are truly no more than the sum of the items we have and the connections we make with others on the way,simply a ghost in our own world trying to leave something behind or find what will make us whole.
