Hey everyone! This is my first blog of the semester. Some of what I write might not make much sense, but I'm just allow my rambling thoughts to have a place to escape. Stick with me and I hope that by the end of my entries some sort of idea or question will form.
After reading Emerson's work, The Poet, I find myself re-evaluating my thinking about the relationship between reading and authorship. Emerson really stresses the poet, or writer, as being the one who articulates the world around us. These writers provide us, the reader, with symbols and images that transpire into a better understanding of our universe. He writes, "The poet...gives them[thoughts/symbols] a power which makes their old use forgotten, and puts eyes and a tongue into every dumb and inanimate object. He perceives the independence of the thought on the symbol, the stability of the thought, the accidency and fugacity of the symbol."
This image makes sense. The job or the goal of the writer is to create these new schools of thought and ideas. And in conclusion the reader perceives the world around them differently, be that good or bad. The rule of authorship is to "turn the world to glass" so that the reader can look through and be changed. An author seems to be the medium through which a reader can comprehend the world and nature. So we as readers need literature, need authorship, in order to grow and be challenged in our thinking. The author takes what is old or common to the reader and transforms it into something new. Something as simple and rather dull as "southern planting" can be brought to life and "sung" for the reader. The author has the power and ability to take anything and make it beautiful. That is their gift. I think Emerson's ideas on this are very insightful in that it redefines what a writer is; it gives writers a bigger role. So often people don't give enough credit to the talent and skill it takes to be a good writer. It's hard work, not an easy task to say the least. Writers are constantly pursuing beauty, pursuing truth, pursuing the write words, styles, and examples to present to their readers. I truly believe that Emerson was getting at this, that the relationship between the author and the reader is like that of a teacher and a student, a mother and a child. One is always seeking to bring truth and understanding to the other in order for them to grow and learn.
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This blog is strictly for literary theory and discussing different aspects of theory in various texts I will be reading throughout the semester. I hope reader's will find my thoughts and ideas englightening, challenging, or even insightful.
2 comments:
An author /really can/ make absolutely anything beautiful. An author is witch-like in that way. And interestingly, after reading a story/description where something I never really took interest in (pioneers, pirates, space exploration) is "art-i-fied," I'll look on it with newfound pleasure and enjoy something as tasteless as a documentary about it. Visa versa, when I WATCH a documentary, I start THINKING about stories that I could write using the same setting.
I don't know how much of a pedestal I would put the author on (as Emerson does)...usually it depends on my mood, to be honest. Authors are types of artists, and though everyone is responsible for their own thoughts, opinions, actions, and passions, authors definitely do help us to be bold in those thoughts, to be shameless. (If we are not already.)
In what sense does Emerson make us reevaluate what reading really is. Emerson has multiple senses of reading. To the degree that it is imagined as passive or as the mere gathering of someone else's information, the reception of someone else's imagination, reading is bad. It makes your experience derivative. Emerson is an evangelical of the imagination (or perhaps it is the case that evangelicals are romantics of the spirit). it isn't enough to experience the world imaginatively through someone else. You must have an original relationship with the world (as an evangelical would say you must have a personal relationship with god). Conventional relationships aren't relationships at all.
Thus reading can be bad and deadening. But there is an active kind of reading that can be creative and imaginative. This is reading as a kind of writing, reading that brings the self and the book into relationship with one another and with the world of the reader. This is a kind of readerly poetry.
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