10 Years After

lunch Break: Peak Hour

I walked over to the student center to pick up some lunch. After grabbing a chicken sandwich I found a booth to sit in. I pulled out my Riverside Milton and read while eating. A classmate from my Milton class was eating nearby and, after we said hello, she asked to join me. Of course I agreed. Though in truth I was a bit tentative. I really wanted to get some reading done and not spend the time chatting idly. After a few minutes of idle chat, during which I finished my food, I set my tray to the side and pulled forth my book.

Of course it need not be said, she still wanted to talk. I tried to mutter agreements to whatever she was saying whie i read. After she finished her sandwich and we both sat there reading for a while. After a few minutes of much desired quiet she broke it to comment that Milton wasn't making his view immediately known in his Areopagitica. I brought her intention to the subtitle.

A few more minutes of quiet and then she wanted to talk about Paradise Lost, which we haven't reached in class yet. She then commented that, while she hadn't read any of Paradise Lost, she once had a conversation with some English teacher about the appearance of Satan. The end result was that her own view of Satan - due to him being an Angel and so close to God - resembles that image that Milton puts forth. My comment was that in most Mythologies a character's physical appearance mirrors aspects of that character's personality. She seemed puzzled by this and I tried to soften the possible upsettling comment of Christianity as being a mythology. I tried to place it in some sort of literary historical context, that biblical era works didn't usually have the modern idea that a person's physical appearance had no part to play with his emmotions or mental ablities. I even managed to bring in Sherlock Holmes as an example of how modern such a view is. She commented she and Milton view Satan as vain and thus require a beautiful physique. While I didn't disagree I mentioned that it seems to me, in part, that rather than being vain, he is rebellious - he seeks independence. "Better to rule in Hell than to serve in Heaven."

we walked to class.

Stabbing A Star

When I took World Civ last Fall it toook a while for me to warm up to the professor. However, by the end of the course I came to appreciate him. He was hard on the area and on religious people. Well, at least biblical literalists.

After my Lit Crit class I ended up in what amounted to an unexpected defense of the instructor. Yes, he is very harsh on students. However, I think that too many people look at history as being whatever stories one wants to accept. This is, I believe, entirely the wrong focus of history. Or, at least, histor as it has been for. . . the past century? Now it is a scientific field.

I guess, I ended up being more of an apologist than an actual defender of his practice in class of demeaning bible literalists. However, this is a hot topic for me and it has taken me many years to come to some concept of faith without literalism.

Literary Criticism itself was enjoyable. I think I am finding the moderate reader-response critics to be very much to my liking. They serve as a happy medium between the tediousness of the New Critics (with their verbal objects and disregard for the reader) and the more extreme reader-response critics who see interpretation as purely subjective. This purely subjectiveness seems just as injurious to studying literature as the New Critics.

One thing I like is the moderate's concept of reader communities. This balances the subjectivity of the individual and the idea the Formalist idea of the text as a verbal object. People get various things out of reading a text, but the text not only reflects back onto the reader, but, also, what is important about these various interpretations is the negotiations that occur in communities.

"I'm hungry. Let's get a taco."