Others

Literature & IT Review

My thesis, currently under the working title “Binaries, Images, & Symbols: The Other in Their Eyes Were Watching God,” aims to examine the depiction of Janie, the story’s heroine, as an (gendered) Other in her own narrative and to filter a scholarly understanding of the way Zora Neale Hurston authored Janie as an Other through the use binary images and symbols in Hurston’s text. I also propose to contextualise the novel, and Janie’s Otherness, in reference to Hurston’s own life experiences.

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Chapter One, page one, in my own copy of Their Eyes Were Watching God

For my thesis, my main text is Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). However, I also intend to look at other Hurston writings, specifically at her folklore collection Mules And Men (1935) and her autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road (1942). I find her folklore collection useful to my thesis in that it also depicts certain animal images found in Their Eyes Were Watching God. Hurston’s biography will be a practical source in order to glean details of her personal life from Hurston’s own point of view.

I will rely heavily on two collections of critical essays by Harold Bloom, both his Modern Critical Views: Zora Neale Hurston (1986) and also, Modern Critical Interpretations: Zora Neale Hurston’s ‘Their Eyes Were Watching God’ (1987). I will use several essays out of these collections, which look at a wide range of images, interpretations, and stigmas and terms attached to Hurston’s work overall. Of particular interest to me are essays that look at images/symbols in Their Eyes Were Watching God and/or look binary ideas contained in the novel, such as ideas of sexism and sexuality or communal spaces and private spaces which are addressed in Missy Dehn Kubitschek’s essay”‘Tuh de Horizon and Back’: The Female Quest in Their Eyes Were Watching God“–an essay in Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations: Zora Neale Hurston’s ‘Their Eyes Were Watching God’. As another example of the types of work in these collections, Roger Rosenblatt’s essay in Modern Critical Views: Zora Neale Hurston, titled simply “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” looks at the Other to Self journey for Janie in the novel. At one point he says “she begins as a minor character in her own life story” (29). I’m extremely excited about this essay in particular, as the marginalisation of Janie as an Other in the novel will be part of my thesis. While most of these essays topically address Their Eyes Were Watching God, others address some of her lesser known works–such as, her folklore collections or her autobiography.

Robert E. Hemenway’s Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography (1980) will also serve me well, in addition to Hurston’s own biography, as it examines the general reception of Hurston’s work during the Harlem Renaissance, reactions to Hurston herself, looks into influences on her writing style. For example, the chapter entitled “Ambiguities of Self, Politics of Race” discusses personal experiences like her brief and failed second marriage to Albert Prince III, who Hurston would later use as a type-and-shadow for Janie’s third husband in Their Eyes Were Watching God, Tea Cake. It also provides interesting insight into Hurston’s mid-life and late career, especially into her own doubts and depressions about the results of her life and writing career.

I am also using chapters out of The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (1989). This work benefits my thesis because of its address on the idea of signification in African-American literature: “It presents a number of illustrative examples of Signifyin(g) in its several forms, then concludes by outlining selective examples of black intertextual relations” (Gates 98). As of now, I’m not certain how intertextuality will surface in my thesis, if at all, but for the sake of responsible scholarship, I think it bears looking into at least. This text also looks at Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God as a speakerly text and addresses literary devices Hurston used to narrate her novel.

Along with scholarship specific to Hurston and her work, I intend to look at a couple of theorists who were largely influential to the idea of the Self and the Other, since it plays a significant role in my thesis. I will look at Jacques Lacan’s work on the mirror stage, specifically using the chapters “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience” and “On the Subject Who Is Finally in Question” out of the collection Ecrits: the first complete edition in English (2006). In simple terms, Lacan’s work suggests that the mirror stage is when children recognise themselves in relation to others for the first time, and it is at this point that they form an “I”–a sense of themselves as the Self or Subject.

Of course, I would be remise to address a gendered Self and Other without looking a feminist theory, so I will also rely on excerpts from Hélène Cixous’ “The Newly Born Woman” and her essay “Sorties” out of The Hélène Cixous Reader, edited by Susan Sellers (1994). In this ground breaking essay, Cixous used binary language to juxtapose terms such as Activity/Passivity, Culture/Nature, and Man set over Nature. These language binaries play into Cixous’ idea of l’ecriture feminine (feminine writing) and in her idea of the ways out of male centric authorship. Her essay will feature largely as I discuss Hurston’s use of binary images to create a Self and Other in Their Eyes Were Watching God and to also examine her  narrative techniques.

Beyond these print sources, I will use online databases, such as Academic Search Complete and JSTOR to access scholarly journals, articles, and other materials that I may need during the months I work on my thesis. Also, as I included in a previous blog post, there is a film documentary on Hurston by PBS which I may look into as supplementary research and to engage in a different medium of scholarship around this amazing author.

Reflections On Our Textualities’17 Mini-Conference

First off, I’m sorry for the delay in a reflective post about the mini-conference; however, after all the stress and exhaustion caused by preparation for, and even on, the conference day, I needed some distance.

After all was said and done though, the mini-conference was entirely enjoyable.

The Textualities’17 mini-conference was not my first nor my second academic conference. I’ve had the absolute pleasure and privilege of presenting at the annual international Sigma Tau Delta convention in the States. (You can actually go view the website for this year’s convention, if you want: http://www.englishconvention.org/2017/) However, UCC’s mini-conference was perhaps the most stressful academic conference I’ve attended. I think that’s part and parcel to the fact that we students organised and ran the conference, and that it’s presentation style was wildly different than what I’ve encountered before.

When preparing for Textualities’17, there were a couple of things I felt concerned about, as well as a couple of things I was excited for.

The conference was set up in six different panels throughout the day with breaks for lunch and coffee. Each panel had an assigned student who acted as the Chair to introduce presenters and facilitate the Q&A session following each panel. We also were told to live-Tweet about the conference and different panel throughout the day.

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An example of what my Twitter feed looked like on the conference day.

I can say with certainty, the prospect of live-Tweeting and, for some of us, live-blogging the conference was significantly less stressful than focusing on our own presentations.

Mainly, my concern–and I think most of my cohert’s–centered around the presentation style of the mini-conference: Pecha Kucha.

Pecha Kucha is a presentation style that prescribes a 20×20 formula. The 20×20 stands for using only twenty slides and spending only twenty seconds of the presentation on each slide; this makes for a presentation that lasts only 6 minutes and 40 seconds. The style also recommends that you don’t use text on your slides, and if you do, it recommends that you only use small amounts. Essentially, the idea is that you use images which will speak to the presentation you’re giving, but not act as the presentation. (If you’re interested in learning more about the Pecha Kucha style, you can follow this link to Pechakucha.org.)

The task of presenting on (what we hope will be) our thesis topics in such a short amount of time seemed incredibly daunting. However, I was also kind of excited about the presentation style, as well. The kind of forced concision that Pecha Kucha demands made me hopeful that it would bring into focus more of what I want to address in my thesis.

Update: it totally did!

My preparation for the Pecha Kucha presentation started out with me writing down long rambling sentences that vaguely addressed ideas of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God as a text on the Self and the Other. I had way too many ideas and not enough direction.

On the mini-conference day, after loads of practice, revision, more practice, and more revision, I actually had what I felt was a solid direction to move with in my research.

My thesis will focus on Hurston’s use of symbolism and binary images in the text to address the (gendered) Other. I will look at her work through the lens of French feminist theory, as well as the work of Jacques Lacan, and with attention to her personal life–so, looking at Hurston’s work in anthropology, her work with folklore collections, and also the social climate of the time when she was writing.

In my presentation, I tackled a brief history of Hurston and introduced her book to my fellow students and the faculty members in attendance. I also addressed the theorists (Jacques Lacan and Helene Cixous) I want to look at during my thesis process and outlined a few different reasons I’m interested in their work. After that, I felt it most effective to only look at one of the binary images I see in Their Eyes Were Watching God and use it as an example for my interest in the Other of Hurston’s work. For the presentation, I chose to focus on the image of the mule in Hurston’s work, binary to the image of the master.

After the presentation ended came the part I think we all dreaded most: the Q&A.

Of course, we definitely didn’t have reason to be so flustered. The questions we all received were lovely and, I think, we each answered intelligently.

All-in-all, the day was a great success and I’m proud of my third experience in an academic conference!

You are welcome to view my presentation slides through the Prezi website. However, do remember that the presentation slides are mostly images, so don’t be alarmed if you don’t exactly follow what the slides  represent.

 

It’s Kind of Like Turning on Christmas Lights: You Can’t Unsee It

First off, tomorrow is Christmas*, so a very Happy Christmas to you all! Here’s a reimagined “Twelve Days of Christmas” to reward you for bothering with me.

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Second, I need to have a working title prepared for my MA thesis in just over a month! There may be small amounts panic happening already… (Eep!)

In an effort to better prepare myself for that eventuality, I’ve been revisiting some thoughts on the Self and the Other. In a recent research essay I was working on, one author/psychoanalyst/theorist I really couldn’t seem to escape is Jacques Lacan.

For those unfamiliar with the name or the man, Lacan was a French theorist born in Paris (1901) to a Catholic family. He elected to study medicine and psychiatry, and eventually, he went on to work in psychiatric institutions. His doctoral thesis was on paranoid psychosis. His psychoanalytic studies caused him to become well renowned and widely disputed. He was even excommunicated out of the International Psychoanalytic Association and formed his own schools for analytics. He was a great admirer of Sigmund Freud as well, which shouldn’t be neglected, as Freud’s work greatly influenced him and his application of psychoanalysis.

One of his concepts which appears important to my idea of Self and Other is his Mirror Stage theory.

Lacan’s article “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I” (1936, 1949) has  become a kind of post-structuralist motto. The essay presents the idea that human identity is “decentred.” His theory is born from the behavior of infants when they first become capable of recognizing their own mirror image. If you’ve spent any time around a baby at this age (6ish months to about 18 months old), you can attest to the baby’s excitement and near fascination with seeing itself. To Lacan, this experience is a testimony of how recognizing its mirror image gives the infant its first affirmation of itself as a “unified and separate individual.” Before this, Lacan sees the infant as pieces of a body not fully put together; it is unable to determine a Self (I) or an Other. (Sharpe)

Essentially, he implies that the Self, the I, isn’t organic. It’s wholly an Other, because we have to rely on outside input to form the idea of Self. Odd, right?

(This is probably the part where Saussure rolls his eyes and waits for the rest of us to catch up.

Also, if you’re experiencing confusion, I would like to say that trying listen to Lacan lecture is scarcely  less confusing. If you’re interested in listening to a lecture of his, I’ve embedded a YouTube video below, which is an hour long. May the odds be ever in your favour, because I did not last even ten minutes.)

Back to business…

In his Mirror Stage theory, Lacan cites language as part of his evidence for the Self as Other. He uses pronouns that allow us to refer to ourselves in the third person as indicators that identity or ego is based on objects. It is “an artificial projection of subjective unity modelled on the visual images of objects and others that the individual confronts in the world” (Sharpe).

I’m certainly not equipped to take apart Lacan’s work or to really affirm it, but I will say that, at least in part, his mirror image theory makes sense to me.

Lacan’s use of language calls to mind Saussure. When thinking of Saussure, I very willingly concede that language is a social fact and it is changing all the time. Saussure teaches that language is made up of  a set of “signs,” and each sign is made of the union between a signifier and a signified. Saussure further divides language to distinguish langue (language as a system) from parole (an individaul’s speech).

So, depending on parole and the sign used, someone could, for example, call the tall objects that grow outside and have leaves, trunks, and roots “cars,” and it would mean the same thing to them as it does to us when we say “trees.”

Applying that to identity and Self, if my Self is made of what I understand it to be then that is an ever changing image. Its meaning is split between the Self given (similar to Saussure’s langue) and the Self I emphasize (parole). My fragmented lived bodily experience and ideal image of identity/ego can be subsumed in Others or embodied in specular images of Self.

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Thus, just as language is suspect, so is the Self. Subject. I. Me (a name, I call myself. Fa, a long, long way to run! …Forgive me).

And although Subjects desire stability and order for identity, our identities are fundamentally divided. I would argue that that divide becomes a resting place where each Subject’s desire for alterity resides (Lacan 73). And it is for individual alterity that we create Others.

How’s that for a headache on Christmas Eve?

*I’d just like to point out that I didn’t forget what day Christmas is. I posted this entry from New Mexico, where it was Christmas Eve; my blog is still stuck in Ireland’s timezone, where it was already Christmas.

Works Cited: 

Lacan, Jaques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book 1: Freud’s Papers on Technique, 1953-1954. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. John Forrester. Norton, 1991.

Sharpe, Matthew. “Jacques Lacan (1901—1981).” The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. http://www.iep.utm.edu/lacweb/

Gothic Detour: Others and Authors in Joyce’s The Dead

Alright, confession time.

I may be working toward an MA in Modernities and researching various Modern/Postmodern literatures, but my favorite genre of literature is generally Gothic. Hands down, no contest. Give me a Bronte sister or Stoker any day. So, having an opportunity to combine my love for Gothic with my research interests is an opportunity I’ll happily take.

In one of my courses, we recently read James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ from his book The Dubliners (you can read ‘The Dead’ online here). I will be the first to concede and agree that Joyce is a modernist writer–he hugely influenced modernist writing in Ireland. However, one can read ‘The Dead’ and easily identify Gothic elements throughout, especially if one considers spatiality in the work.

Joyce makes use of Gothic spaces several places in ‘The Dead.’ Gothic spaces often involve closed doors/rooms, long or secret passageways, old and/or haunted living areas, and images of dark vs. light. He adheres to these ideas when he plays with enclosed, claustrophobic spaces–such as the downstairs pantry and, later, the drawing room, which must have its door kept closed so there was room for dancers: “[Gabriel] waited outside the drawing-room door until the waltz should finish, listening to the skirts that swept against it and to the shuffling of feet” (Joyce 203).

He also makes the home Gothic in other ways, likening it to House of Usher– nodding to Poe’s ‘Fall of the House of Usher’–and describing dark stairwells and long, empty hallways.

The hall though is perhaps the only translatable element of the Gothic into Joyce’s modernist meaning in ‘The Dead.’

Joyce uses the hall as a liminal space (something which Gothic writing relies on) in the story. He presents audiences with a moment between a married couple, Greta and Gabriel, occurring in the hallway which raises questions of Authorship.

In the scene, Gabriel stands in a “dark part of the hall” and gazes up the staircase at his wife (Joyce 240). She, too, stands in shadow so that Gabriel recognizes her from her terra-cotta and pink skirt, which seems black and white because of the dark:

She was leaning on the banisters, listening to something. Gabriel was surprised at her stillness and strained his ear to listen also. […] He stood still in the gloom of the hall, trying to catch the air that the voice was singing and gazing up at his wife. There was grace and mystery in her attitude as if she were a symbol of something. He asked himself what is a woman standing on the stairs in the shadow, listening to distant music, a symbol of. (Joyce 240)

The idea of Authorship here concerns Gabriel’s reading of his wife. In his mind, he moves her to a symbol, a muse. He creates her as an object which he could project his own meaning on. [As a question outside of what we’ve been discussing, do you think that Joyce might be parodying or commenting on the woman symbolic of Ireland?]

Reading further, as they walk to the hotel they’re staying in for the night, the idea of Greta as an object seems to excite his sexuality:

The blood went bounding along his veins and the thoughts went rioting through his brain, proud, joyful, tender, valorous. She was walking on before him so lightly and so erect that he longed to run after her noiselessly, catch her by the shoulders and say something foolish and affectionate into her ear. She seemed to him so frail that he longed to defend her against something and then to be alone with her. (Joyce 243-244)

To me, these lines are both painfully awkward and a little creepy. But academically, they only pose problems as far as Authorship and Others are concerned.

Gabriel interprets Greta’s grace and mystery to suit the fiction of his own mind. He does not consider, does not question what might cause her to put on the attitudes he observes. Later in ‘The Dead,’ Joyce forcefully makes Gabriel realize Greta’s alterity when she presents to Gabriel her own fiction.

After they reach their room, Gabriel senses Greta’s preoccupation and attempts to draw her out of her melancholy to adhere to his fiction. He finds that she’s been dwelling on the memory of a young man from her past who she thinks died for her. This swiftly causes him to have a realization of the Other (as one might imagine, Gabriel wasn’t exactly enthusiastic about his wife pining over another man). This encounter with the Other causes him to examine her history, to wonder what it was apart from him. He also begins to dwell on other histories, on the vast number of the dead, and his own mortality in the grey winter of Ireland…

And that’s where Joyce ends ‘The Dead.’ We don’t know what the longterm consequences of Gabriel’s moment with the Other are, but I applaud Joyce for letting that future remain unauthored.

Hopefully, this post has intrigued a few minds. If you have unanswered questions, I’m sorry–I wrote this post more as a discussion than as an argument or a critique. Please do feel free to comment or contact me with any questions, though.

Also, there is a movie adaptation of ‘The Dead.’ I’m not sure how accurate it is to Joyce’s writing, but it certainly captures a feeling for the Gothic in this clip of the film!

 

Works Cited:

Joyce, James. Dubliners. 1914. Paladin Grafton Books, 1989.

Imagination, Authorship, Others: Atonement

As a research blog, I can think of no better way to begin than to examine and explain my research interests as they now stand. Mainly, I’m concerned with Otherness and Others, specifically in literature, along with the idea of an ethical authorship attached to them.

How much artistic liberty may Authors, fictitious or actual, apply to Others in their fiction? How does one “ethically” imagine and author an Other? And as Authors in our own lives and, thus, our own fictions, can we even attempt to answer that?

These questions first occurred to me while reading Ian McEwan’s Atonement. His book remains one of my favorite pieces of 20th Century literature, and also, remains the best way I know how to explain my Author/Other fascination.

McEwan’s Atonement follows the tragedy of a young couple, Robbie Turner and Cecilia Tallis, parted because of faults within Briony’s (Cecilia’s younger sister) imagination and Authorship of certain events. At the time of her crime-of-imagination, young Briony had already been identified by McEwan as a prolific writer. We also understand that she had complicit access to adult codes of her time and social class through her father’s library, which she perused at her leisure and which we are to assume, caused her imagination to grow. As a writer, and a child, the fact that she had imagination certainly doesn’t present itself as a problem or a crime; however, at her young age, she didn’t understand the way in which her world functioned well enough to form true interpretations of adult codes or to invent accurate fictions according to those actions. Due to her readings, she was most familiar with stereotypes of social orders within fictitious literatures. This caused her to recreate people, to recreate Others, according to her imagined motives for each.

McEwan illustrates this confusion early in the novel by having Briony witness her sister and Robbie interacting by the fountain on their estate. She read the scene incorrectly, thinking:

There was something rather formal about the way he stood, feet apart, head held back.          A proposal of marriage. Briony would not have been surprised. [….] Robbie Turner, only a son of a humble cleaning lady and of no known father, […] had the boldness of ambition of ask for Cecilia’s hand. It made perfect sense. Such leaps across boundaries were the stuff of daily romance. (McEwan 48)

What appeared to Briony as a possible proposal was actually a quarrel —definitely not the stuff of daily romance, I’d say.

Briony’s misunderstanding of the fountain scene and her authorship of it projected later that day onto a note from Robbie to Cecilia, which she read as an unintended audience. In the note, Robbie explicitly described what he would like to do to Cecilia–causing Briony to encounter an adult sexual code, which in her youth she did not comprehend.

[In an effort for concision, and to prevent this from reading anymore like an essay than it already does (which I am actively trying to avoid!), I’m going to summarize the next points of action quite quickly.]

Briony’s mind created a fiction around the note, because she didn’t understand it, and she concluded that Robbie must mean to hurt her sister. A scene which she later saw in the library compounded this assumption, causing her to accuse Robbie later in the evening of committing a crime of sexual violence against one of her cousins.

Unfortunately, her Authorship was accepted and became her most successful fiction.

McEwan makes sure that as an audience we understand that Briony was functioning under a fiction when she accused Robbie as her cousin’s attacker. The events of that day on a whole caused Briony to cast him as “evil incarnate” in her own melodrama (McEwan 147). Her understanding of upper-middle-class English society (another adult code) prevented her from considering her brother or his equally privileged friend, Paul, as the rapist.

Later, as she matured, Briony realized and fully understood the consequences of that fiction, but by that time, it was too late. Robbie and Cecilia died alone, far apart from each other, during World War II and Briony dedicated her life to “atoning” for her crime.

Essentially, life stinks and we all die. Woo. (Should I have said **spoilers** before now?)

So…

My stance on this is that Briony practiced unethical authorship toward an Other. I classify Robbie as an Other based on his social status in regards to Briony’s own. In the quote I provided from McEwan’s novel, she cites him as the son of the gardener at her family’s estate–social standing is a factor that can identify Others. Her immature categorization of Robbie caused Briony to create a biased fiction.

Trying to agree on or define what an ethical authorship is, at this point, too lengthy and unclear an endeavor to take up. However, my assertion for Authors is that fiction rests on possibilities, not certainties, and that fiction comes from what Others may be. To that end, I suppose this is what I hope to write on for my thesis.

For those who haven’t read this book, I highly recommend it! It was one of the most enjoyable texts I had the pleasure of reading during my undergrad work, and even though I may have ruined a couple of plot points (so sorry), it’s well worth the read!

 

Thanks for reading! Feel free to comment about the post or contact me with any questions you have. 

Works Cited:

McEwan, Ian. Atonement. New York: Anchor Books, 2002. Print.