Gloria Anzaldua: Borderlands / Chapter 7
Exegesis

References Jose Vascocelos, Mexican philosopher, who calls for a new race:
“a fifth race embracing the four major races in the world” (2212).
“From this racial, ideological, cultural and biological cross-pollinization, an ‘alien consciousness is presently in the making - The Mestiza: “a product of the transfer of the cultural and spiritual values of one group to another” (2212).
Multiple messages from living in more than one culture:
“The coming together of two self-consistent but habitually incomparable frames of reference cause a cultural collision.

Dualities: Positioning of binaries
White culture v Mexican culture as example: “… and both attack commonly held beliefs of the indigenous culture, “…which results in the “counterstance,” unless we decide to “act instead of react” (2213).
Other dualities: White race v Colored races; males v females; white Anglo males v Chicano / Mexican males; white Anglo females v Chicano / Mexican females; homosexual v heterosexual males; Latinos v Native Americans

Creation of Mestiza culture: the Feminine New Consciousness faces ‘psychological borders,’ beginning with ideas that are ‘habits’ and ‘entrenched’ behaviors (2213).
“The Mestiza constantly has to shift out of habitual formations; from convergent thinking, analytical reasoning that tends to use rationality to move toward a single goal (a Western mode) to divergent thinking, characterized by movement away from set patterns, toward a more whole perspective, one that includes rather than excludes” (2213).

The New Mestiza: “learns to juggle cultures,” “has a plural personality, develops a tolerance for ambiguity and turns that tolerance into ‘something else’ (2213).
“The self has a third part: a mestiza consciousness”
“…its energy comes from continual creative motion that keeps creaking down the unitary aspect of each new paradigm” (2214). The mestiza “straddles cultures;” she breaks paradigms (2214).

How does “she” become the Mestiza? Learns histories of different cultures, communicates the struggles, documents the struggle, shapes the myths, reinterprets histories, and ‘ruptures’ old ways of thinking. “She learns to transform the small ‘I’ into the total ‘Self’ ” (2216).

“Today’s ‘machismo’ is the result of low self esteem caused by white male dominance. (See dualities)
“From the men of our race, we demand the admission / acknowledgement / disclosure / testimony / that they wound us…..” (2217). “Only gay men have had the courage to expose themselves to the woman inside them and to challenge the current masculinity” (2217). “Homosexuals link people with each other (transfer ideas from one culture to the next).”

‘Whiteness’ “Many women and men of color do not want to have any dealings with white people. It takes too much time and energy to explain to the downwardly mobile, white, middle-class woman that it’s okay for us to want to own possessions…” (2218).
The White ‘Double-Consciousness’ Hegelian Master-self / Slave dialectic: Dominant must oppress to assert identity;
Gringo, accept the doppelganger in your psyche” (2219).
“The dominant white culture is killing us slowly with its ignorance” (2219).
“The whites in power want us people of color to barricade ourselves behind our separate tribal walls so they can pick us off one at a time with their hidden weapons” (2219).
“The struggle is inner – our psyches resemble the bordertowns – the struggle has always been inner and is played out in the outer terrains” (2219).

“Nothing happens in the real world unless it first happens in the images in our heads” (2219).
What is the role of the mestiza? Look, identify, acknowledge, recognize, gather the splintered and hold…” She calls for a reshaping of spiritual dignity, much like the children planting seeds: “The soil prepared again and again, impregnated, worked on. A constant changing of forms” (2223).

Simone de Beauvoir
Exegesis

In The Second Sex, de Beauvoir makes a sweeping condemnation of the status of women, the roles relegated to women as ‘the other.’ She equates the role of the woman to the role of the slave. In the Hegelian Master-self-Slave dialectic, which de Beauvoir references, she points to the psychology behind the Master’s assertion of identity or self. The Master, or Man, must exert his power and authority through the other he is sublimating, in order to create his own self-identity.

Interestingly, she condemns women, as well, for their stations in life by indicting their passive natures. “Women,” she says, “fail to do anything”; they wonder indefinitely what they could have become…” (1411). Any changes in the role of women, then, must begin with a women’s willingness to ‘act’ instead of passively accept. She must assert herself and her identity, by making herself more functional in society. She says, “But while normally a woman finds numerous advantages in her relations with a man, his relations with a woman are profitable to a man only in so far as he loves her” (1411). Writing in 1950, de Beauvoir painted a very different picture of the world for women and opportunities than today. Or did she?

Some of de Beauvoir’s claims still seem pertinent. She points to the duplicity of men with regards to their willingness to accept women as “fellow beings.” Even then, they “still require her to remain the inessential” (1413). This seems a prophetic remark with regards to the numbers of single, working moms of today who are called to work, pay the bills, run the home, etc… and who are still subjected to inequalities in opportunities and pay. de Beauvoir also references the idea of the ‘aggressive woman,’ the one who has “independent successes,” and is consequently in “contradiction with her femininity, since the ‘true woman’ is required to make herself object, the Other” (1414). This type of woman is certainly in existence today, as de Beauvoir’s remark references that certain precarious balance a woman is positioned with, and that a man is not bothered with: Men can be aggressive and mean and still be respected, while women are qualified as “b-----” when they imbibe in the same behaviors. A woman must learn to kick a-- like a lady.

Criticism of The Antithetical Critic: Harold Bloom / Anxiety of Influence
1. Clinamen: Poetic misreading, “poetic prison” (influence)
Second poet reads first poet’s poem by executing a ‘swerve’ that appears as a corrective measure in his own poem. (This implies that the first poem went “accurately” up to a certain point, but then should have swerved…”).
Question: How is the ‘swerve’ measured?

2. Tessera: Completion and Antithesis
Second poet antithetically reads first poet’s poem; he then completes the first poet by retaining enough of the first poet’s terminology, but “to mean them in another sense,” as though the first poet did not “go far enough.” Poet continues in the footsteps of the first poet.
Question: How are the distinctions in language measured?

3. Kenosis: “a movement toward discontinuity with the first poet, (similar to defense mechanisms we employ against repetitive compulsions”).
Second poet “humbles himself as though he were ceasing to be a poet.”
His afflatus, or divine creative impulse, is repressed. This “ebbing” (humbling)
“is so performed in relation to the first poet’s poem-of-ebbing that the first poet is emptied out also, and so the later poem of deflation is not as absolute as it seems.”
Question: How is purgation measured? How is absolution measured?

3. Daemonization: A personalized Counter-Sublime
Second poet opens himself to the power of the first poet’s poem that does not belong to the parent; instead, it belongs to a range of being just beyond the first poet. The second poet does this in his poem by stationing it in relation to the parent-poem as to generalize away the uniqueness of the earlier work.”
Question: How is a movement to the sublime measured?

5. Askesis: (“Movement of self-purgation which intends the attainment of a state of solitude”)
Second poet yields up part of his human and imaginative powers to separate himself from others, including the parent-poem as to make the parent-poem undergo an askesis, too; the first poet’s poem is also truncated; (The poet sacrifices himself as an artist to the spirit of the predecessor. The sacrifice is a separation from society and the work of the predecessor, but in such a way that it is in fact different and original when placed in comparison).
Question: How is this isolation measured?

6. Apophrades: Return of the Dead
Second poet’s poem is held open to the first poet, where once it was open…
And the uncanny effect is that the second poem’s achievement makes it seem that the second poet wrote the first poet’s characteristic work
Question: Form, style, meaning? Being first doesn’t win?


Criticism: Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence:
“A theory of poetry that represents itself as a severe poem…” (Bloom 1802).

“The view that poetic influence scarcely exists, except in furiously active pedants is itself an illustration of one way in which poetic influence is a variety of melancholy or an anxiety-principle” (Bloom 1798).

• Isn’t that charging all poets with some sense of awareness of poetry that precedes? What about poets who do not read others? Do all sons know their fathers and are thus engaged in battle?

• Is there no such thing as the organic genius? If lack of awareness/ negation of poetic influence is “anxiety,” does this mean that the poet who does not subscribe to one of those tenets, (the revisionary ratios), is ‘anxious’ while writing? Where is the logic in denying what Wallace Stevens says about his own work, and the influences he says he purposely avoided in order to not be influenced? (1798).
So everything that is written by one who claims a lack of influence could be viewed as written from a potentially neurotic state?

• If the strong poets compose in order to be termed “immortal,” doesn’t the end desire compete/conflict in some way with the art and process of composing?

• How can subscribing to the revisionary ratios not make a poet less original?
(A continuation, an antithetical approach, a conscious nod to subtlety, a conscious pairing to move away from the original, and a conscious continuum of ideas, style and forms)

• Bloom’s theory positions everyone into a competition with regards to creating, reading and writing (criticism), where those efforts are contrasted to his ‘strong’ precursor. What is the distinction between the drive for immortality and the drive for fame?

• In the wake of Bloom’s “purported return to humanism, in the wake of the ‘anti-humanist ethos’ of the deconstructive world,” what does this theory say about the way Bloom perceives the world? (Eagleton 159).

from Eagleton….
“Whether a critical reading ‘succeeds’ is in the end not at all a question of its truth-value but of the rhetorical force of the critic himself” (160).

“The strenuous, embattled, apocalyptic tone of much of his own writing, with its outlandish spawning of esoteric terms, is witness to the strain and desperateness of this enterprise” (160).

Lacan: “The Unconscious Language”

Lacan’s connection between language and psychological development seems very logical to me. His theory that language gives rise to the unconscious can very well be seen, I think, by anyone closely watching a child grow from infancy. More specifically, the diagnostic tests that have to do with a child’s development revolve around language. Pediatricians are trained to ask children at certain stages, to make them verbalize what they mean by given words. I would think that his work had profound influence on child psychology. It is interesting, too, that developmental problems, like autism, seem to first be diagnosed through one’s (in)ability with language. The autistic child, ironically, often has skills, intelligence that is latent; while he or she may have difficulty with language, other areas of development seem to (over)compensate for a lack of language development.

It seems Lacan is breaking the psyche in two worlds: ‘reality’ and the ‘real,” and like Freud, the development of our perceptions of these worlds begins in infancy and early adolescence. Specifically, the ‘mirror stage starts at about six months old, (depending on the individual person). It is the middle stage of this development that we first distinguish ourselves as separate individuals, when the child sees himself in the ‘mirror.’when we first begin to discover the world in its relative regards.

Our abilities to distinguish between ‘reality’ and ‘the real’ mark our potentials, most times, as language is a default to psycho-social traditional civilization. “Reality” for Lacan is the fantasy world we create and ‘the real’ is the world we begin to discover that is beyond language. Language is instrumental, therefore, in giving us the ability to understand the world outside because it gives words to our thoughts and our unconscious.

Performance text: An Intertextual Nightmare
Informed by Kristeva, Barthes (and a few others)
“Three Dogs and a Bloom”

The pretty blonde is already seated when I plod in and drop my books next to her. It is the beginning of another five week session, the beginning of listening and reading and writing and listening and reading and writing and questioning and reading and writing and trying and reading….
I am, as illustrated, prepping myself for those processes, when someone mentions something about children. It isn’t the teacher; she hasn’t yet arrived.
It is the lady on the other side of the pretty girl.
“I have two sons” the neighbor says. “I don’t have dogs. I’m a cat person.”
The pretty girl turns her head from the neighbor. I hear a distinct mumble that she is a “dog” person.
“A dog person?” I ask. “Me, too. I love dogs. I miss my dogs. I have two; what about you?”
The pretty girl beams. “I have one,” she begins. “She’s a Labrador named ‘Emma.’”
“A lab named Emma!” I exclaim. “I have a lab, too, and an ‘Emma.’”
“You have a lab named Emma?” She asks. “What color?”
“No, not a lab. An Emma,” I say. “She’s black,” I continue.
“My Emma is yellow,” she says.
“No, no,” I exclaim. “My Emma is Rosie; she’s the black one. I had a yellow one once.”
“A yellow Emma? Your lab is rosie… like…. colored? I’ve never heard…”
“No, a yellow Lucy,” I say. “My Emma is not a lab. She’s a corgi.”
“Oh, a corgi,” she says. “Is she the rosie one?”
“No,” I say. “She’s a tri. My yellow lab passed away. Now I have a black English lab, and her name is Rosie.”
“Oh, okay,” she said. “An English Emma.”
“No,” I say. “An English Rosie.”
“I’m confused.”
“An English lab named Rosie and a tri corgi named ‘Emma.’”
She thinks a minute. “How is the lab ‘English’ and not the corgi? Emma sounds ‘English.’”
“Oh, she is English, really. Emma is much more ‘English’ than Rosie. She is very much an ‘Emma.’ Do you know corgis? Is your Emma ‘English?’”
She looks discouraged.
“Aren’t they those squatty-looking little foxy dogs with short legs and big ears?”
“Ah, yes, the queen’s choice.” I tell her.
“Well, my Emma is named after Austen, not the queen” she says.
“What queen?”
“Whatever queen it is you’re talking about that has pink Labradors.”
I laugh. “My Emma thinks she belongs to the queen,” I tell her, “like Elizabeth, you know, but she doesn’t; she belongs to me. Actually, she thinks she is the queen. And yes, she is an Austen Emma. Actually, I think it’s a family name, too.”
“Really? She asks. “Is she bossy?”
“That’s for certain. Just like an Emma should be” I say. “She’s the boss of the lab, who is black, not pink. She herds Rosie around the yard, into the flower bushes, out of the house, and wherever else she decides to go. She masterminds Rosie’s actions. She sets her up. And Rosie is so sweet that she lets her get away with it.”
“Well, how,” the pretty blonde asks, “is your Lab English?”
“Not how,” I contend. “I mean she’s not English like Austen.”
“What?” she asks.
“A new breed,” I answer. “Not really new,” I contend, “but a little different than standard American.”
“Did you get her in England?” She asks.
“No,” I say. “The American ‘English’ breed is attempting to imitate the original confirmation patterns. She’s all pedigree. You know like Bloom is really English, but he’s not English. And he’s not female, or black. I don’t think.”
“Wasn’t Bloom Irish?” She asks.
“What?” I was thinking of the critic, the American, you know, the one that’s not dead and not English.”
She hesitates. “You’re Lab is like Harold Bloom?” She asks.
“Sorta. Except I’m sure she’s a lot sweeter,” I tell her. “You know how Bloom can’t seem to look beyond the pedigree, always defending the elite. And she is a Rosie.”
“And Harold Bloom has something to do with Rosie’s name?” she asks.
“No,” I tell her. “Bloom is more like Emma, who is all Woodhouse, manipulating and sweet at the same time. Truly, she spends all of her time guarding the house, defending her territory, and showing her teeth whenever she feels threatened. Is that the way it is with your Emma?” I ask. “Somehow I picture Bloom showing those teeth…”
“She manipulates,” she interrupts. “She’s even found ways to open the pantry to get to her treats. You know she will do anything for a treat. She stays hungry all of the time.”
“My Emma, too,” I exclaim, “except she’s found a way to coerce Rosie, the black Lab, into doing it for her. I bet Harold Bloom eats a lot, too.” I say.
“Is she fat?” she asks.
“Who? Emma? Or Rosie? They’re not. They get lots of exercise. But I don’t know about Bloom. Somehow, though, I see him eating lots of custard with rich, heavy cream poured over it.”
“Have you had 752,” she asks?
“No,” I tell her. “Am signed up for it. Don’t you think I need it?”
The pretty girl shakes her head and smiles. “I’m going there next,” she says. “If you want, we can go together.”
“Thank heavens. I was worried I wouldn’t know anyone.”
“Good,” she says. “We’ll have to run because I’ve heard Dr. So and So always keeps you late, and you know Eberly is all the way across campus.”
“I hope he’s not one of those who shuts the door and makes a big deal about opening them for people who are late.”
“I don’t think so,” she says. He leaves the door open.”

Micro-Lesson
Psychoanalytic Criticism/ “A Rose for Emily”

Purpose: To engage students in the Introduction to Literature classroom with Psychoanalytical Criticism and to show them a way to form opinions based on textual and/or intertextual evidence

Note: Instructors should discuss with students a working definition of the following concepts outlined below in order to clarify the direction of their inquiries.

Concepts Informing Miss Emily’s Behaviors: Find textual evidence to support or deny:
Selective Memory: Modifying memories or forgetting painful events entirely, so one doesn’t feel overwhelmed by them
Repression: Expunging from consciousness unhappy psychological events
Denial: Believing the problem doesn’t exist
Displacement: Taking it out on someone or something less threatening than the person/institution who caused fear
Avoidance: Staying away from people who are liable to make one anxious
Regression: The temporary return to a former psychological state

Other Psychological influences: Find textual evidence to support or deny:
Oedipal influence: Competition with the parent of the same gender for the affection of the parent of opposite gender
The Death Drive: Fear/Fascination with Death
Fear of Abandonment: (as associated with fear of death)
Sexuality/ Fear of intimacy (as associated with fear of death)

1. Taking key psychoanalytical terminology, have students find evidence in the text that supports or denies the each term’s application to the character of Miss Emily.
2. Students should write out quotations, or paraphrase those points that show evidence of the concept.
3. After students complete this assignment, take their collective opinions regarding ‘which’ concept most informs Emily’s actions.

Writing Suggestions: Discussion can facilitate conclusions regarding Miss Emily’s psychological state, or state of ‘awareness.’ You may ask students to put the character of Miss Emily on trial, using evidence discovered in this discovery to support or deny the claim that she is a victim of her circumstances. This process helps students understand how to look for psychological influences and gather evidence from the text in order to formulate writing opinions.

Genealogy of a Genealogy of Literature:
“Marxism and Literature” Raymond Williams

Defining Literature:
Aristotle: the “abstractions” associated with the term; the “form”
Deconstructs the word from its 14th century origin: “of being able to read and have read"; Williams traces it through the 20th century
17th century: “Reading ability and experience”
18th century: "Rhetoric and grammar"
Marx: "Literature" became associated with ‘production,’ the workplace, the worker, “a category of printed works of a certain quality” (1570).
Arnold and Gramsci (the Elitist, the ‘traditional’ intellectual): Literature became associated with ‘polite’ and ‘humane’ learning.

Three complications arise from shifts in meaning:
1. Shift from learning to taste or sensibility as a criterion defining literary quality;
‘Taste and sensibility’ are associated with class position. (Marx)
2. Increased specialization of literature to include creative imaginings; and
3. Development of literary tradition – National Literature

Defining Criticism:
17th century: Criticism meant “commentaries on literature within the learned”
Term shifted: Structuralist view – deconstruction of term
Marx and Gramsci: (‘hegemony,’the consent that occurs between the Superstructure and the Base; traditional intellectual)
“Literacy caused “literature” caused “production. “Criticism became [due to its] residual hegemony, a new conscious discipline in the universities, to be practiced by what became a new para-national profession,” and it retained class concepts” (1571).

Creative Works added abstractions to the definition of Literature:
Dialectic: Truth and beauty with relation to everyday reality or truth and beauty with relation to language?
Identity and emergence of a National literature: “Not all Englishmen belonged to the English literary tradition…” Barthes and Foucalt: (naming of the author)
“Practical consciousness” applied to literature: Lacan, Althusser

Conclusion: Writing is a means of production . Marxist theory; Lukacs, The Frankfort School including Adorno, Horkeimer, Benjamin, Goldmann, and....“literature is a changing practice that is moving beyond its old forms” (Too bad, Aristotle) (1575).

Walter Benjamin: "The Work of Art..."

Walter Benjamin addresses the authenticity of art and its role in a culture that is changing its identity from one that sees aesthetics for its sense of history and space to one that understands the cost-driven forces to produce.

Mechanical reproductions are removed from the original’s history and time; therefore, the original’s history and time can be used to assess the validation method.

Process validation is (ironically) the technical employment of outside mechanisms to authenticate a work’s originality. It enlists the aid of materials, mechanics and devices to aid in revealing distinctions between the original and the reproduced. For example, one may use a magnifying glass to look at the art in question, to judge it according to what is known about it historically, in hopes of uncovering any irregularities as opposed to the regularities of the original. Photographic reproductions can zoom in on the work to highlight such irregularities. But this presupposes that the nuances of the original had to have been documented at some time. Reproductions discount the “aura,” or that element of the art that is considered unique.

What has reproduction done? Benjamin says, reproductions “substitute a plurality of copies for a unique existence” (1169). It creates “collective” experiences for what were once “singular” experiences. In his analysis of photography and later film, Benjamin addresses the role politics has played in the “reproduction of art,” as representative of the dual need to read art as a sign of political expression. He concludes that art can be predetermined by the political enterprises that inform it.

Further, he says, “To pry an object from its shell, to destroy its aura, is the mark of a perception whose ‘sense of the universal equality of things’ has increased to such a degree that it extracts it even from a unique object by means of reproduction” (1171). This idea sheds more light on Benjamin’s perception of the universal. It speaks, as well, to the role of the literary critic in society: to reconfigure works in terms of doing the most good – value - ? for the most people discounts the work’s value.