Saturday, November 30, 2019
After spending almost the entirety of the first semester pulling apart and dissecting the works of A.O. Scott and Stephen Greenblatt from the summer homework, we've come to a close on that chapter. While I'm sure it's still important to keep what I've learned from that in mind as I move forward, the time spent diving deep into those works is in the past now. Now it's time for a new focus with these new readings. Coming into this, I felt more confident than I did the summer work. Having done all the hard work we did in class understanding some of these complex pieces, I felt more ready to tackle these new pieces. Additionally, I was excited for Ovid having done a ton of work with him in my Latin class. I came into these new readings with some themes in mind that were relevant from Scott and Greenblatt: loss of self, aesthetic experience, alien/authority/self relationship, the beautiful/agreeable/good dynamic, criticism, self-fashioning, hope, reflection, observation, and choice. After reading the new readings, I found that many of those popped in the pieces. The ones that stuck out to me the most were the alien/authority/self relationship, hope, reflection, and choice. A lot of the pieces seemed to be dealing with creationism or the beginnings/ends of things. Sometimes it would mention what happened beforehand or the chaos that was before. I’d sometimes think that this chaos was the disorder before being self-fashioned/created and that creationism gives structure to the chaos. Additionally, in a lot of the stories, I felt like whoever was the creator was the authority in the relationship between alien and self in those situations. A few moments stuck out to me during my reading when I had a realization either of an underlying theme and a viewpoint I hadn’t thought of. One of those was during my reading of Genesis Chapter 1, and as I read the famous line “let us make man in our image” I had a thought: are humans the aliens interfering with God as the authority and the world as the self? Maybe the human race isn’t the self, or maybe we never have been. I’m not sure how right that is, but for some reason that line stuck out to me and gave me that thought, especially relating to the SF condition about the alien being a distorted version of the authority, and being made in the image of could technically be distortion. Most of the rest of my observations deal with those ideas of determining that, alien/authority/self relationship in the scenarios written.
I’m not quite sure exactly how this new reading relates to what we’ve learned, but I’m sure it’ll all be woven together in a way that develops us as readers and as people. Maybe it’ll be about recognizing what we’ve learned in literature and how that can apply to us today. I think the best thing for me is to continue being engaged in class to better understanding where these readings are coming from, and to always be thinking about why this is important and how it relates to what we’ve learned.