10 Years After

Okay I'll Admit That I Really Don't Understand

Just one class today; Milton & His Time is cancelled since we will be meeting Sunday to present our papers. Which, btw, I still haven't completed. I wanted to do something simple, like expand an already existing piee I'd written for the class. I had been thinking of my journal entry comparing Lucan's Lycidas with Milton's poem of the same name. The problem I was having was how to more than double the length of what I originally wrote. This morning I think I came up with a solution. I an keep my original thesis, that Milton draws a contrast betwen Lucan's Lycidas chartacter and his own use of the figure as a persona for Edward King. However, the body of the paper can be divide into two portions. I can start by arguing what Lycidas isn't - this will go into the arguments that it is a very unemmotional poem. The second half can then be a sttement of what the poem actually is. Not terribly orginal, I know, but I just want a decent grade.

I did have my morning class, Literary Criticism. First, we received our tests backs. I scraped by with an A (91). He said the average grade was an 80. I know the grades of two of the three people I studied with. One scored a 78 and the other a 70. Both seemed pleased with their grades, but I looked over my wishing I had done better. I did well on the essay. He gave me 37 out of 40 points. His endnotes stated that I had a strong paper, but that my deconstruction reading was flaky. His only comment within the paper was that some of my reader-response stuff was biographical/historical criticism. On the definition portion of the test I did okay. I scored a 54 out of 60. I don't have my essay on hand, so I'll add in my mistakes later on.

The second half of class was interesting. We watched a 1960's interview with Jung. The interviewer was horrible, but Jung's comments made it interesting. The film was an abridgement of 4 hours of footage and we didn't watch all of the abrgidged version. After the film we talked about his comments - how Jung differed from Freud, etc. We worked our way to talking about Jung's view of literary criticism (mostly archtypes) and then discussed his student, Joseph Campbell.

We applied Jungian (sp?) criticism to GoldieLocks (breaking taboos & returning to society with the wisdom of BabyBear) and then discussed Little Red Riding Hood (fear of sex- the actions in the bedroom & the domination of the women by the wolf. The woodsman, whom I understand to be a later addition to the story, could be a father figure). Someone mentioned the wolf cross-dressing and being indicative of psychologial problems. I find it amusing when people employ pop psychology. Somehow we ended the class talking about Wile E Coyote. The instructor new that coyotes were an archtype for native American Indians, but couldn't think of what... I reminded him that it was the Trickster archtype.

While interesting, I think Jung and Campbell have fatally flawed ideas in their concept of the archtype. It seems impossible to hold with Jung's idea that archtypes are some sort of genetic (or even evolved) beliefs.