February 17, 2007

Scylla and Charybdis 

When I read through Petrarch´s sonnets, I got the impression they were very much where Shakespeare must have drawn influence.  Number 189 seemed a little bit different to me.  I made the comment during class that it was hard for me to distinguish some of these from being humanist or romantic.  Now that I have refreshed my memory some on romanticism, I can further elaborate using number 189 as an example.  The emotions expressed by Petrarch in this sonnet are strong and violent resembling none of the gentle desire and longing we had just read before .  The sea is “bitter” and it is an “eternal moist wind” that assails the ship.  The ship seems to be the centerpiece of the work as it “full of oblivion” and “cruel eager thought[s]” are found at each oar.  The setting is “winter’s midnight”and “reason and art” are being drowned by the waves.  The Enlightenment’s reason is being attakced by the unexplainable forces of nature.  The ship seems to be a personification of a lover that is woeful for not having his beloved.  But instead of finding the presence of some divine influence in the sonnet, it seems to be completely absent.  The “Lord” he makes mention of may be his beloved’s husband for he is his enemy.  Nature is an extention of human emotion as the rain is “of tears” and the mist is “of disdain.”  The protagonist is hopeless and full of despair because he has no where to go with his love.  He is caught between Scylla and Charybdis and if he goes forward he will find his enemy as an obstacle.  Obviously without intention, Petrarch combines some of the classical references of humanism and some of the boundless emotions and lack of reason of romanticism to provide a wonderful example of how these works cannot be neatly labeled into one single category. 

February 10, 2007

Historical narrative as a literary artifact

 

Whenever I think about history as a literary artifact, nothing comes better to mind as the chronicles of the New World exploration.  These accounts are filled with mythical references with specific intentions for its audience.  Hayden White discusses the creation of historical narratives as an unlikelyliterary genre that has been used to express certain points of view as and objective reality.  This argument could most certainly be applied to those chronicles of the Conquest of the Americas.  The authors of those chronicles would relativize their experiences in order to better relay what it was they were seeing in this new environment.  Vocabulary for these new things was not available so thus the new American wonders were subjected to European terminology.  The work becomes a sort of verbal artifact as the current reader can distinguish the verbal codes and tendancies stated within the work as contextual clues ofthe author’s influences and possible purpose.  White’s theory is very applicable to the new world chronicles but when it comes to more contemporary works, his theory more difficult to apply.  The modern historian has in some way become more conscious of the subjectivity of history and recognizes that finding an objective point of view is impossible.  This is why as we discussed in class it is so easy to find thousands of works on the same historical event.  The decision though of a wide-encompassing historical view point is up to the reader ultimately Thus the focus shouldn’t be on reforming the historical narrative process but rather on creating an educated audience that must ultimately decide which point of view or combination thereof it chooses to believe.   

Introduciónes February 8, 2007

Hi everybody.  My name is Claudia and I am a spanish graduate student just in case you didn’t know.  I am currently half way through the graduate program and I think this is my third class with Dr. C.  My focus is literature especially colonial and latin american.  I also have an addiction of fantastic literature.  I have my bachelors in french but it’s been almost three years since I’ve had to speak any of it.  Donc s’il avait quelqu’un qui voudrait pratiquer avec moi, je serais tres heureuse!