What you feel.
What you think.
From the Watercolors of Sharon Burgmayer
this is a course about experience, not judgment
(about direct? unmediated? experience? is that possible?)
about reading out of your experience, adding to it with others', getting a fuller picture
the painting is a representation; our stories of the painting are further representations, productive of further stories/representations...
the point is not to end/preserve the story, but to produce more/better/fuller ones...
an evolutionary process
American literary canon is a selection out of a huge range of particular stories,
which we use to make sense of our own lives;
which we can also re-write/use to remake the future
this is why we read the books we do
since I began reading American literature in the '60's,
the field has recognized our need to learn a far broader range of conventions, histories, subjects...
and I have done nothing since them but examine the limits of my training,
as Am Lit expanded to give access to all living cultures of 21st century America
these professional changes were rooted in movements for racial justice and sex equity
they aimed to present an accurate picture of development of the (literary) cultures of the U.S.
for a couple of years, I taught Northamerican Migration Narratives
(Jewish-, African-, Lakota-, Japanese-, Mexican-American texts)
no "Great River" theory of literature, no mainstream
(a fundamentally misleading model for heterogenous society)
need comparativist model, accounting for multiple streams
(Bethany Schneider's Native American lit, Juana Rodriguez's Chicana lit,
Linda-Susan Beard's African and African American lit, Theresa Tensuan's Asian American courses)
during our last search, for Bethany, I volunteered to go back and
read interrogatively/critically the Big Old Books I first fell in love with:
not to give you a map to territory, but
inviting you to re-trace/explore with me what these great/grand old books tell us:
why they were written, where they came from,whether we should keep on reading them--
and what stories we are telling about ourselves if we do
really an open experiment:
in this world of multiple texts: which few to choose?
interested in your thinking independently about them:
what you see/how you feel when you read them: what they do to you
art helps form us as social beings
Coupla points...
History of course: derives from (at least) three tributaries
(marriage, child-bearing, dropping in and out of school)
--and my current psychoanalysis: thinking about my emotions/working on changing them
--as per Aryeh Kosman's essay on "Being Properly Affected: Virtues and Feelings in Aristotle's Ethics" (1980):
"the feelings are not chosen; but one does have control over the actions that establish the dispositions....There is no way to come to feel a certain way...our feelings are not in our control. But it is nonetheless possible to engage in a certain range of conduct deliberately designed to make one the kind of person who will characteristically feel in appropriate ways...in this sense, feelings are deliberate and chosen...since the actions...are deliberate and chosenÉto make one the kind of person who characteristically will have the appropriate feelings....choice for [Aristotle] is not a concept having to do with individual moments in an agent's life, nor with individual single actions, but with the practices of that life within the larger context of the character and intentions of...one's life plan."
The Role of Emotion in Thinking and Reading |
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Classic |
Counter-strand |
Our Revisions? |
|
Thinking | "I think, therefore I am" (Descartes)
emotions as threat to rationality
value objectivity/endistancing/ |
"I feel, therefore I am" (Averill)
"emotions as intelligent responses
value subjectivity/engagement/ |
|
Reading | Affective Fallacy | Reader-Response Theory |
In current psychology (thanks to Kim Cassidy)
emotions are conventionally divided into