10 Years After

I Get The Message

I fell asleep last night reading A Reader's Guide to contemporary Theory. I had left my satchel out in my car and was too tired to go out so I could take notes on the index cards for my presentation. Instead I convinced myself that I would just read the section on reader-response theory and then I would add in some index cards in the morning before leaving for school.

Of course that isn't how things worked out.

Instead I woke up at 7:30 and then went back to sleep until 9am. Working that double shift the other night has my internal clock on the fritz. I made it to class on time and finished reading the section (I had fallen asleep half way through the section) before class started.

My presentation went well, I think. I received some laughs when I made some jokes. So that was nice. I wasn't nearly as nervous as last time. I didn't feel like I had enough quotes, but after listening to over half the class use the same quotes I find it hard to force myself to do the same. At the end of class he handed back our evaluations. I did better than last time, overall. It was 100 points overall broken into 4 equal groups:

• Persuasiveness of the speaker's argument.
• Fluency and conciseness of the reading.
• Mastery of critical terminology
• Performance of the story

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In order of the categories I received 24, 24, 24, and 22 points. His only comment was for Performance of the Story: "Good strong voice. "Issue a reward" British pronunciation - isshuu - sounds like a sneeze."

His summary (overall) comment was : Good choice of tale. Tao of Pooh - were you interested in Chinese philosophy & religion? Good use of personal experience. Interesting thoughts about spelling, linguistics. Homosexual reference even more interesting.

The story was "Eeyore Looses a Tale. Pooh Finds a Tale." I broke my response into three epochs. First was as a kid when I identified with Christopher Robin and desired to have companions like he does in the story. I commented on imagining that my stuffed animals were capable of such during that time. Then I discussed the persuasiveness of Benjamin Hoff's Tao of Pooh. How this caused me to view the animal characters more as individuals than merely one dimensional companions. How I looked then at Owl's verbal emptiness as being similar to my view of my father at times when I was an adolescent. The third response was when I went to read this story again in preparation for the presentation. Instead of an identification with the characters I was interested in the story for the construction of logic (such as the self-undermining statement that Christopher Robin as the only one who can spell and, in the next sentence, how Owl can spell. Then we notice that Christopher Robin also spells things incorrectly.) and the linguistic issue. Why does Eeyore use the word "how" as he does? Why does Pooh and Owl argue over "issue" being a sneeze? Is this an example of the Sapir-Worf hypothesis of language controlling/influencing how we perceive the the world? I added, to illustrate the value of Fish's reading communities and interpretive strategies that I had asked friends what their responses to the story was. I commented that one saw the reference to Christopher Robin hammering the tail back in place as a veiled allusion to homosexuality. I commented that without a community of readers that Fish was diminish the value of this reading over interpretations that have a collection of people who similarly read a story. (note: no such friend actually said this, but I felt it was plausible that some might make this comment. You know who you are! :)

Now to write my Milton journal entry for book 2 of Paradise Lost. I spoke with him at the end of last class about the connection between Satan, Sin, and Death to non-classical mythology such as Loki and his progeny in Norse Mythology. He commented that he had never thought of that before and encouraged me to write an entry on this. So, I will be rehashing my commentary from Book 2 from my British Lit class.

It feels like a beautiful day!