Dear English majors

Talk about anything under the sun or stars - but keep it civil. This is where we really get to know each other. Everyone is welcome, and invited!
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Dear English majors

Postby elfprince13 » Sat Aug 29, 2009 4:31 pm

Apologies in advance for any toes that may feel stepped on by this, but I need a straight answer, because I'm genuinely fed up with the absurdity of this situation.


Our whole freshman class had to read Metamorphosis over the summer and we have a (double spaced) 2-3 page paper on it, due Tuesday, that we have to tie in to one of 5 faculty essays, and "the most memorable part of the book." After reading the 5 faculty essays, and listening to panel presentations on it today (both from the faculty, and the students) I am being driven more and more to the conclusion that the entire field of literary analysis is one giant bullshit fest, and everyone partaking in it is too worried about reputation and the possibility that the other people involved actually believe the BS being spewed in a giant self perpetuating cycle. I love a good story more than most, and any good story has themes worth being discussed, but most of the time I find these to be so self evident that they aren't worth writing a paper over, and I can never bring myself to stoop to actually typing out the sort of pulled-straight-from-my-arse nonsense that everyone else seems to be writing about. Do I need to just bury my intellectual honesty and spew the BS? Is there some secret to this that I'm missing, and there are actually people who find the location and number of the doors leading in and out of a protagonists bedroom significant on any level deeper than ease of access and perhaps noteworthiness by virtue of strange architecture? Or is it an acquired taste, a case of gradually slipping into a mindset where the BS flows so habitually and freely that I don't really think about it anymore?
Many thanks,
Thomas


p.s. I was originally going to turn my paper into a rant on destroying a good story through overanalysis and how my favorite part of Metamorphosis was the absurdly blasè narrative style, but I could force it into 2-3 pages, and I didn't want to start the semester by pissing off my FYS professor. So now I'm writing on Demosthene's Hierarchy of Foreignness as applied to Metamorphosis. Hopefully the OSC-inspiration will help ward off any overly analytical BS. Or just make it that much more ironic.
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Postby chromesthesia » Sat Aug 29, 2009 7:36 pm

I must say I loved English Writing but I didn't like analyzing literature for the most part. It was annoying when they made me take advanced literature classes.
I just want to read stuff and enjoy it and analyze it only if I want to.
I wish I at least had better grammar. And I also wish I had majored in Making Lots of Money instead of English.

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Postby Syphon the Sun » Sat Aug 29, 2009 9:04 pm

Image

Yes, it's one giant BSfest, particularly with the postmodernist and deconstructionist crowds, where 'critics' are allowed to simply make things up, wrap it in literary jargon (I hope you bought a Super Secret English Department Decoder Ring!), and cull quotes and passages without regard to context in order to prove their preconceived interpretation of something they hadn't (or possibly still haven't) read yet.

ETA: That's not to say that all literary criticism is bogus or all critics are dishonest; I've just seen an abnormally high percentage in the English field and, what's worse, they're not only being published, they're being taken seriously and their criticism is being taught by other professors.
Last edited by Syphon the Sun on Sun Aug 30, 2009 9:46 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Postby Young Val » Sat Aug 29, 2009 9:25 pm

Ehhhhhhhhhh I don't have the energy to get into it but, yeah, some people (students, professors, whoever) BS. Just like they do in any field. In any walk of life. And those people are always immediately identifiable.

But, "bury your intellectual honesty"? No. Not necessary.
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Postby powerfulcheese04 » Sun Aug 30, 2009 11:39 am

I have a BA in English and a BS in Bioengineering.


That said, there are definitely people/classes where BS is the ruling order. There are also others that will call you on that. My favorite English professors wouldn't put up with it. And they really enjoyed when I would cross-over my degrees. (I wrote a hilarious and awesome paper using a benzene ring as a model for character relationships in Gravity's Rainbow because of Jamf's insistence on replacing Carbon with Silicon as the basis for life. It was great.)

You're being just as elitist and full of yourself and BS-ish with the claim that you should "just bury your intellect." It does probably mean that post-modernism isn't for you (I had a really hard time with the pretentiousness in postmodernism.)
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Postby chromesthesia » Sun Aug 30, 2009 1:59 pm

What is postmodernism?

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Postby locke » Sun Aug 30, 2009 2:12 pm

You're being just as elitist and full of yourself and BS-ish with the claim that you should "just bury your intellect." It does probably mean that post-modernism isn't for you (I had a really hard time with the pretentiousness in postmodernism.)
This, I agree with.

I also agree that yes, some stuff is BS. But post-modernism and deconstruction is not the BS Syphon claims, I'd say there is far less BS in Lacan and Derrida, for example, than there is in Barthes, Metz and the modernists.

modernism has the greater tendency, imo, to have the critic rework unresistent texts in order for the critic to present their criticism as an artwork equal to (or surpassing) the artwork they were criticizing. This was originally promulgated by Oscar Wilde, who formally laid out this manner of criticism in writing. But I think what he formally laid out is from a broader tradition of back and forth criticism reaching back to the newspaper wars, and certainly, Mark Twain takes the oppurtunity to show how much more brilliant a writer he is than James Fenimore Cooper in his critique, "On the LIterary Offenses of James Fenimore Cooper" before Wilde ever explicated his theory of criticism.

in college I had the experience of rarely writing some BS, most of the time, the BS writing occured in my freshman year, I needed to learn how to come up with a thesis I could believe in, rather than a thesis I myself personally mocked. The vast majority of my college writing, however, was not BS, can you pick out which of the following examples of opening paragraphs from my college writings are BS?

In Ovid’s story of Iphis and Ianthe the psychological problems of reconciling a masculine identity with a feminine form are thoroughly explored—especially as they relate to sexuality. Ariosto is also interested in reconciling identity and form but to different conclusions. Both Ovid and Ariosto use the intrinsic connection between form and identity to achieve distinctly different ends. In Ovid, Iphis attempts to reconcile her self with her form but finds that her gender suppresses her masculine identity, while in Ariosto, Richardet discovers a dominant identity supplants form. Ariosto’s tale of Bradamant, Fiordispina, and Richardet takes the premise of Ovid’s story of psychological trauma and comes to a different conclusion about the human capability to sidestep a problem to solve it.
In her essay “Narrative Structure(s) and Female Development: the Case of Mrs. Dalloway” Elizabeth Abel argues a psychoanalytical interpretation of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. Echoing Freud, Abel argues that “no woman escapes unscathed” (Abel 421) from the transition from a pre-Oedipal state to an Oedipal state. Abel suggests that Clarissa’s obsession with and attachment to Sally Seton is because Clarissa fails to make the developmental leap—the transition—because of her mother’s and sister’s early deaths. It is Sally who shows and teaches Clarissa much more about the world than she ever would have learned herself. Clarissa Dalloway’s homosexual passion for Sally Seton is not a result (or lack) of pre-Oedipal to Oedipal trauma, but a deep, abiding first love for the person who awoke her—brings her out of her shell.
Both Marx and Weber see important social and economic consequences of the widespread adherence to ‘otherworldly’ religious doctrines. Marx is broader in his assertions, criticizing religion in general for the negative effects he perceives. Marx sees religion as a parallel alienation factor (to work) of capitalism, and as an economic inhibitor towards a communist society. Weber is much more specific, more analytic than critical. Weber is looking for why industrial capitalism was only successfully born in Western Europe, despite most of the World’s generally equal, but fluctuating, pools of knowledge. He finds the rise of ascetic Protestantism to be a unique regional factor, and upon close examination, created an ideal atmosphere for the rise of capitalism. Both Marx and Weber treat religions influence on social and economic issues very differently, Marx by criticizing religion’s role, and Weber by analyzing it.
In “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Laura Mulvey argues that scopophilia is an instinct coded into our society. Scopophilia, the pleasure of looking, is one of the basic instincts of sexuality according to Freud (as attributed by Mulvey [Mulvey 748]). Scopophilia affects the cinema by co-opting the male/female socio-sexual imbalance. The imbalance is exacerbated by the projection of fantasies which privilege the male gaze onto a theatrical screen for group consumption and pleasure. Film is the filmmakers’ fantasy and it shared and consumed with an audience; the medium is inherently scophilic because spectators take pleasure in the voyeuristic activity of looking and identifying their gaze with the gazes from within the film’s diagesis. The male gaze is almost always privileged in cinema. The male gaze is active and easily identifies with the privileged male gazes in film. The female gaze is passive but to identify with the male gazes of a film, the female figure must also accept sexual objectification of her sex’s image (751). When fantasies (stories) from the male gaze are portrayed on film, women become objectified and fetishized—they are there to be looked at, not to be active agents in the plot and narrative. Women are placed in the position of being objects to be desired and won; their presence disrupts films, focusing the spectators’ gaze on erotic contemplation of the woman-as-object. This “to-be-looked-at-ness,” as Mulvey calls it, is encouraged by film techniques such as composition and editing (750, 753). These techniques (along with many others) further focus the spectator’s erotic contemplation of the woman and her phallic lack. Part of the male fear of sexual objectification arises from a castration complex. Women lack a penis; they must be contained by either fetishizing them or controlling their guilty (of lacking a penis) status (753). Both methods subordinate women to men beneath the active gaze, establishing women’s dependence on the males’ portrayal of her sex as fetishized or guilty—active agency for women is prevented.
ETA: doh, I got carried away looking at old college essays and wasn't paying much attention to how many (far too many) I'd copied and pasted into this post. :-p
Last edited by locke on Mon Aug 31, 2009 10:57 am, edited 1 time in total.
So, Lone Star, now you see that evil will always triumph because good is dumb.

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Postby powerfulcheese04 » Sun Aug 30, 2009 3:31 pm


But post-modernism and deconstruction is not the BS Syphon claims, I'd say there is far less BS in Lacan and Derrida, for example, than there is in Barthes, Metz and the modernists.

I would agree that not all the postmodernists are equally bad. I was actually pretty OK with Lacan.

I think my problem with postmodernism mainly stems from the professor I had... In protest to his class, I ended up writing my final paper for the class on the ways America's Next Top Model serve as evidence and counterpoint to Lyotard's essay “Answering the Question: What is Postmodern”.
-Kim

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Postby locke » Sun Aug 30, 2009 3:40 pm



I would agree that not all the postmodernists are equally bad. I was actually pretty OK with Lacan.

I think my problem with postmodernism mainly stems from the professor I had... In protest to his class, I ended up writing my final paper for the class on the ways America's Next Top Model serve as evidence and counterpoint to Lyotard's essay “Answering the Question: What is Postmodern”.
Hah! I didn't include the essay I wrote on Lyotard above because it wasn't really an essay, we had a group presentation on that essay (to teach it to the class) and I wrote out the notes for it:
Jean François Lyotard’s Introduction to The Postmodern Condition clearly lays out a post-modern worldview. He explains how this view is encompassing, but can never be specific or containing of the totality. Rather post-modernism acknowledges the failures and inabilities of totalizing structures and seeks to expose their inherent hypocrisy. Post-modernism is even untenable in a denial centric or negation focused worldview, it is “a stranger to disenchantment”—simply contradicting everything as impossible. Non-conformism is its own way of conforming to specific standards and codes of behavior that impose their own limitations on that worldview.

Lyotard begins by discussing how modernism relies on metadiscourses—totalizing structures—such as narratives, themes, or culture. These metadiscourses function as means to encode certain modes of cultural behavior in distinct categories. I like to think of these metadiscourses in terms of literature praised for its “universal themes.” To Kill A Mockingbird, as it was taught to me, is a great novel because of the power of its universal themes. Discussing, or even remembering the actual themes is unimportant, what was significant was the discourse—the ideology—motivating the instruction. It relied solely on this common sense and modernist notion that universal themes are somehow describable and desirable. And as Lyotard simplifies, “I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives,” or universal themes (in this instance).

Lyotard’s postmodern existence denies any traditional structure or system, instead, everything is just another language particle; nothing can contain every aspect, institutions that attempt to actually contain a limited amount of language particles. Problems with postmodern discourse arise when postmodernists attempt to treat the institutions they’ve created (to explain postmodernism) as somehow applicable to every element. Merely acknowledging the complexity of the issue isn’t good enough. The fact of discussing postmodernism within explicit structures necessarily excludes and even represses those not privileged to be in the structure. This is the problem that Rosalyn Deutsche attempts to explain in her essay “Men in Space.” Various males are expanding postmodern theory into more and more fields such as architecture, art history, and urban spaces. The problem is that although they are approaching these topics in a postmodern manner, they are attempting to create a totalizing thesis when the subject of their studies are necessarily very limited—every source they quote is male, and the new conclusions they reach do nothing to escape the male dominated world feminism opposes. Although these authors may make concessions to women’s issues, they are simply trying to contain the controversy of feminism; they don’t actively engage with any of the ideas of feminism. Their new, totalizing theses are ignoring, even repressing, feminist discourse. They fail to recognize that the post-modern institutions they are developing are highly local rather than all-encompassing. Deutsche does not like this at all and her essay is about exposing the problems of these post-modern theories that fail to engage a completely post-modern, and highly chaotic, worldview.
Last edited by locke on Mon Aug 31, 2009 11:08 am, edited 2 times in total.
So, Lone Star, now you see that evil will always triumph because good is dumb.

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Postby locke » Mon Aug 31, 2009 11:07 am

more in line to the original post, I should point out that responding to a prompt was more likely than not to cause me to write a BS paper. Mostly in my first semester of my freshman year because I still didn't know how to write (I had so many bad habits from well meaning high school language/communication arts teachers). As my writing skills developed, I learned to work through prompts as well as how to write about topics that were open ended. Even still, there was a particular film class that was built around two long essays, a mid term and a final as your graded material and the two essays were both supposed to be chosen from two separate prompts. I loathed, loathed, loathed those prompts they were so very stupid and limiting. By my senior year, I read the prompts in disgust, went straight to the professor's office hours and asked if I could write one long research paper instead and then pitched him the paper I wanted to write. He let me do it and I got to enjoy pretty much everything about the class without having to worry about the damn regular essays with the stupid prompts. And I worked my ass off on that longer paper too, it has some very good writing in it, though its not my best work and I've reread it more than any other college writing and I think I could do much better. but for undergrad work it was pretty good (and it got the grade I wanted, so yay, though it's a good thing I wasn't grading it as I would have graded myself a hell of a lot harsher).
So, Lone Star, now you see that evil will always triumph because good is dumb.

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Postby elfprince13 » Tue Sep 01, 2009 9:29 pm

Hmm, so, I finished my paper, I'll post it here after it gets graded. I'm not entirely satisfied with it, but by the time I was done, I was too fed up to want to put any more time into it.

Note that I didn't say "bury my intellect" but rather "bury my intellectual honesty." Obviously I could apply my intellect to BS production (something which I've unfortunately done on many an occasion), but that doesn't mean that writing BS and passing it off as brilliant insight is an honest pursuit. The A's I've gotten on those papers indicate that my teachers seem to think that I had a some sort of brilliant insight or that they just don't care enough about their subject to grade me honestly. Or maybe my BS is just superior in it's prosaic form to the rest of the BS they get fed. Who knows? My point is that I don't like doing that, and if there's actually some real substance to the field of literary analysis as a whole that I'm not picking up on, I'd like it explained to me so that I don't have to keep doing so.

Locke: the last 3 essay selections in that big post look more like summary of someone else's analysis rather than actual analytical work. Obviously this isn't BS, but it's also exactly what I was talking about when I said that some things seem way too blatantly obvious to bother writing a paper about. The first selection seems like actual analytical work, but I quite honestly can't understand why anyone would care. Is an understanding of how 2 different authors view reconciling differences in gender identity and physical sex going to have any sort of impact on the way you lead your life? Or have any effect at all, except applying technical terminology to a story with an already clear message?
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Postby Caspian » Thu Sep 03, 2009 6:53 am

Well as an English grad student...

locke, Val and pc have mostly brought up what I would say on this subject. What I might add is that, as Val said, some people BS in any field. I'd add to that that in academia, and especially in Arts there are many approaches to scholarship in general. For some people scholarship is about intellectual honesty and getting at the truth for its own sake. For some people it's about enlightening others. For other's it's just about play. Oh, and then of course there are people who just want a paycheque/promotion, whatever.

Now in English, "truth" is particularly ambiguous. So much so that branches of criticism like deconstruction deny that getting at the truth is a goal of criticism at all. But there are two things to note about that. Firstly, just because they aren't trying to uncover the secret truth behind Metamorphosis doesn't mean that what they are doing isn't intellectually honest, as long as it's internally coherent, and internal coherence rather than reference to the outside world becomes a major goal. Secondly, though this is a fashionable approach to criticism right now, it's very definitely not the only approach, and it's definitely not the one you have to use.

I'll just add to that that often people have a lot of trouble with actually criting about what they're supposed to be writing about. What I mean by that is that good English criticism is about the work you're talking about. So a rant about destroying a good story through overanalysis (for example) is literary theory, not literary critiicsm. And there's a difference. And a big part of the difference is that, especially at first, theory is a lot easier than criticism (GOOD theory is very difficult, but also hard to spot so bad theory is easier to hide, even from yourself). Talking about the STORY is hard to do without either slipping into grand overarching statements about life in general (As Romeo and Juliet illustrates, true love is the greatest thing in the world) or devolving into minutia (how many doors does the protagonist's bedroom have?).
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Postby steph » Thu Sep 03, 2009 11:25 am

(As Romeo and Juliet illustrates, true love is the greatest thing in the world)
Except for a nice MLT: a mutton, lettuce and tomato sandwich, where the mutton is nice and lean and the tomato is ripe. They're so perky, I love that.
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Postby Caspian » Thu Sep 03, 2009 11:53 am

I was hoping someone would notice that.
It's not "noob" to rhyme with "boob". It's "newbie" to rhyme with "boobie".

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Postby Olhado_ » Thu Sep 17, 2009 6:53 pm

Have you tried logarithms? :?
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Postby elfprince13 » Tue Sep 29, 2009 9:45 pm

So I got my paper back, full of comments that it was "illuminating" and full of "very good writing." Now that it's been graded and handed back, I'm curious to hear what people have to say.
Gregor Samsa: Raman or Varelse?
Metamorphosis illustrated by Demosthenes' Hierarchy

Perhaps the most memorable moment in Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka's classic work of science fiction, is when Grete first identifies her brother, in his arthropod-esque state, as an “it” rather than as “him” or “Gregor.” (p. 138). Until this point it seems that she had continued to view Gregor as her brother. Grotesque and transformed? Yes, but still her brother inside. The interruption of her performance and the scaring of the tenants (p. 136-137) seem to be the proverbial last straws in convincing Grete that nothing of her brother remains, only a dumb beast which has taken his place. From this moment onwards, rather than being his sole protector, she becomes the loudest voice calling for his demise. Reading this story, and in particular the events of these few pages, I was struck by how Grete's gradual shift in her perception of Gregor seemed to be a sort of mirror image of humanity's gradually shifting perception of the alien race known as the Buggers in another classic work of science fiction: Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game, and it's sequels. Demosthenes, Card's fictitious political-pundit-turned-historian describes a “Hierarchy of Foreignness” which we can apply as a lens to better understand the characters and events of Metamorphosis.
Demosthenes' Hierarchy describes four orders of foreignness; however, only two of these are really relevant to a discussion of Metamorphosis, and so I will not take the time to explain the others. Demosthenes' Hierarchy defines the term raman as someone, who though they are of a different biological species, we still recognize as human. In other words they may look like us, they may look like little furry pigs, or they may look like giant insects but their core motivations, their will, their desires, and most importantly their ability to communicate provide common ground through which we can recognize them as people. The other relevant classification, varelse, is used to describe the truly alien, with whom no conversation, no common ground is possible. We can't guess their purpose, and we don't even know if they are truly intelligent or self-aware. With the Hierarchy providing a framework for analysis and discussion, I will now turn to the question which is the inspiration for this paper's title: into which of these categories does Gregor Mensa fall? Obviously any classification assigned based on the Hierarchy is subjective to the one assigning it, so to reach a more complete conclusion, we must look at three sub-questions. How does our perception of Gregor evolve through as the story progresses? Likewise, how do his own perceptions about himself, as well as his family's perceptions of him change throughout the story?
In many ways our own perception of Gregor must remain linked to his perception of himself, as Kafka has granted us access to Gregor's thoughts and feelings. Clearly at the moment of transformation we must consider him to be raman, for though he is no longer biologically human, his thought process most decidedly is. Gregor even manages to communicate with human language (p. 90), albeit human language badly distorted by his new body; however, he quickly loses even this rudimentary ability. At some level we must believe that Gregor remained raman throughout his ordeal and until the time of his death. After all, we remain privy to the details of his thought-life, and we can see that while his thoughts become less and less human over the course of the story, they at least remained intelligible to us, and we are able to understand his motivations and desires. However, we must remember that were we to be inserted into the events of the story we would no longer have such special access to his thoughts and motivations and would be forced to rely on our observations of his behavior to make our decision. His increasing reclusion, and desire to do nothing but hang from the ceiling or hide under the couch would be utterly incomprehensible to a normal human observer. Eventually Gregor even ceases attempts at communication, he just does what he feels will cause the least trouble to his family. His single attempt at communicating his desire to keep the picture of the woman with the fur coat (p. 122) is a complete failure and misinterpreted as an attempted attack, signaling the end of any diplomatic relations between himself and the family. In the face of such failure it seems to me that from the reader's perspective Gregor's slow descent into apathy leads him down the path from raman to varelse. Perhaps not varelse in the strictest sense, for we know that he still possessed human intelligence and I have to believe that were there a community of similarly afflicted individuals, they would manage to work out a method of communication with humanity. Nonetheless, as the story stands, Gregor remains incommunicable and truly alien to all whom he encounters.
I will next direct your attention to the second of our three sub-questions: how does the Samsa family view Gregor starting from the time of his transformation, and leading up until the time of his death? This is perhaps the most clearcut of the questions, for we need only deal with the perspectives of those who are not privy to Gregor's thoughts and feelings. We know that at the beginning they clearly perceived him as raman, going so far as to talk to him through the door. The decline of his vocal abilities is the first major blow to their perception of him as being a human, but it's clear that they hang on to some shadow of hope that the real Gregor remains inside and that he might recover until the events of the violin fiasco. Even in the aftermath of his ill-fated attempt to protect the picture frame, Grete directly addresses him as Gregor (p.122). Once he appears during her performance for the tenants, it is made clear that they have abandoned any shred of hope that Gregor remains or that they might communicate with the thing that has taken his place. Instead they view him as nothing more than an animal, varelse, and interestingly, this is also the clear climax of the story. Shortly thereafter the conflict is resolved by the event of his death, and the family feels free from the terror that has dominated their lives for so many months.
The last question, and perhaps the most interesting, is the question of how Gregor perceived his own relationship with his family. Professor Miller's suggest in his essay on Metamorphosis that perhaps Gregor's physical symptoms were a reflection of psychological stresses he was already experiencing. In light of his new-found difficulties in verbal communication, and if we accept Professor Miller's interpretation of the link between psychological cause and physical effect, than I think we are to understand that Gregor Samsa already viewed himself as something foreign to his family and unable to communicate with them. In other words, while he may have been biologically human, he had long since stopped viewing himself as a person and been imprinted with his family's perception of him as a money-making device. The idea of a biological human who is utterly foreign to even their family and who is no longer even able to communicate their desires and motivations, is not touched upon by Demosthenes' Hierarchy; however, I have to think that Gregor Samsa viewed himself as varelse long before his physical transformation took place. Already isolated by work and family pressure, becoming the cockroach was at that point nothing more than a cosmetic change, and we can see this reflected in Gregor's initial reaction to the situation—wondering whether or not he should get up and go through the motions for yet another day as if nothing had happened. If that's not a tip off that feeling inhuman was not a new sensation for him, I don't know what is.
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Postby zeroguy » Tue Sep 29, 2009 10:34 pm

Now that it's been graded and handed back, I'm curious to hear what people have to say.
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Postby locke » Wed Sep 30, 2009 12:39 am

So I got my paper back, full of comments that it was "illuminating" and full of "very good writing." Now that it's been graded and handed back, I'm curious to hear what people have to say.
I think, five paragraphs (!) but need carriage returns to read it on crappy forum software.
Gregor Samsa: Raman or Varelse?
Metamorphosis illustrated by Demosthenes' Hierarchy

Perhaps the most memorable moment in Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka's classic work of science fiction, is when Grete first identifies her brother, in his arthropod-esque state, as an “it” rather than as “him” or “Gregor.” (p. 138). Until this point it seems that she had continued to view Gregor as her brother. Grotesque and transformed? Yes, but still her brother inside. The interruption of her performance and the scaring of the tenants (p. 136-137) seem to be the proverbial last straws in convincing Grete that nothing of her brother remains, only a dumb beast which has taken his place. From this moment onwards, rather than being his sole protector, she becomes the loudest voice calling for his demise. Reading this story, and in particular the events of these few pages, I was struck by how Grete's gradual shift in her perception of Gregor seemed to be a sort of mirror image of humanity's gradually shifting perception of the alien race known as the Buggers in another classic work of science fiction: Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game, and it's sequels. Demosthenes, Card's fictitious political-pundit-turned-historian describes a “Hierarchy of Foreignness” which we can apply as a lens to better understand the characters and events of Metamorphosis.

Demosthenes' Hierarchy describes four orders of foreignness; however, only two of these are really relevant to a discussion of Metamorphosis, and so I will not take the time to explain the others. Demosthenes' Hierarchy defines the term raman as someone, who though they are of a different biological species, we still recognize as human. In other words they may look like us, they may look like little furry pigs, or they may look like giant insects but their core motivations, their will, their desires, and most importantly their ability to communicate provide common ground through which we can recognize them as people. The other relevant classification, varelse, is used to describe the truly alien, with whom no conversation, no common ground is possible. We can't guess their purpose, and we don't even know if they are truly intelligent or self-aware. With the Hierarchy providing a framework for analysis and discussion, I will now turn to the question which is the inspiration for this paper's title: into which of these categories does Gregor Mensa fall? Obviously any classification assigned based on the Hierarchy is subjective to the one assigning it, so to reach a more complete conclusion, we must look at three sub-questions. How does our perception of Gregor evolve through as the story progresses? Likewise, how do his own perceptions about himself, as well as his family's perceptions of him change throughout the story?

In many ways our own perception of Gregor must remain linked to his perception of himself, as Kafka has granted us access to Gregor's thoughts and feelings. Clearly at the moment of transformation we must consider him to be raman, for though he is no longer biologically human, his thought process most decidedly is. Gregor even manages to communicate with human language (p. 90), albeit human language badly distorted by his new body; however, he quickly loses even this rudimentary ability. At some level we must believe that Gregor remained raman throughout his ordeal and until the time of his death. After all, we remain privy to the details of his thought-life, and we can see that while his thoughts become less and less human over the course of the story, they at least remained intelligible to us, and we are able to understand his motivations and desires. However, we must remember that were we to be inserted into the events of the story we would no longer have such special access to his thoughts and motivations and would be forced to rely on our observations of his behavior to make our decision. His increasing reclusion, and desire to do nothing but hang from the ceiling or hide under the couch would be utterly incomprehensible to a normal human observer. Eventually Gregor even ceases attempts at communication, he just does what he feels will cause the least trouble to his family. His single attempt at communicating his desire to keep the picture of the woman with the fur coat (p. 122) is a complete failure and misinterpreted as an attempted attack, signaling the end of any diplomatic relations between himself and the family. In the face of such failure it seems to me that from the reader's perspective Gregor's slow descent into apathy leads him down the path from raman to varelse. Perhaps not varelse in the strictest sense, for we know that he still possessed human intelligence and I have to believe that were there a community of similarly afflicted individuals, they would manage to work out a method of communication with humanity. Nonetheless, as the story stands, Gregor remains incommunicable and truly alien to all whom he encounters.

I will next direct your attention to the second of our three sub-questions: how does the Samsa family view Gregor starting from the time of his transformation, and leading up until the time of his death? This is perhaps the most clearcut of the questions, for we need only deal with the perspectives of those who are not privy to Gregor's thoughts and feelings. We know that at the beginning they clearly perceived him as raman, going so far as to talk to him through the door. The decline of his vocal abilities is the first major blow to their perception of him as being a human, but it's clear that they hang on to some shadow of hope that the real Gregor remains inside and that he might recover until the events of the violin fiasco. Even in the aftermath of his ill-fated attempt to protect the picture frame, Grete directly addresses him as Gregor (p.122). Once he appears during her performance for the tenants, it is made clear that they have abandoned any shred of hope that Gregor remains or that they might communicate with the thing that has taken his place. Instead they view him as nothing more than an animal, varelse, and interestingly, this is also the clear climax of the story. Shortly thereafter the conflict is resolved by the event of his death, and the family feels free from the terror that has dominated their lives for so many months.

The last question, and perhaps the most interesting, is the question of how Gregor perceived his own relationship with his family. Professor Miller's suggest in his essay on Metamorphosis that perhaps Gregor's physical symptoms were a reflection of psychological stresses he was already experiencing. In light of his new-found difficulties in verbal communication, and if we accept Professor Miller's interpretation of the link between psychological cause and physical effect, than I think we are to understand that Gregor Samsa already viewed himself as something foreign to his family and unable to communicate with them. In other words, while he may have been biologically human, he had long since stopped viewing himself as a person and been imprinted with his family's perception of him as a money-making device. The idea of a biological human who is utterly foreign to even their family and who is no longer even able to communicate their desires and motivations, is not touched upon by Demosthenes' Hierarchy; however, I have to think that Gregor Samsa viewed himself as varelse long before his physical transformation took place. Already isolated by work and family pressure, becoming the cockroach was at that point nothing more than a cosmetic change, and we can see this reflected in Gregor's initial reaction to the situation—wondering whether or not he should get up and go through the motions for yet another day as if nothing had happened. If that's not a tip off that feeling inhuman was not a new sensation for him, I don't know what is.
Good essay, nice presentation and succinct and to the point. my one criticism might be that it seems that a good chunk of the essay is taken up by the device you're using--the Hierarchy of Strangeness--and with that much attention you run the risk of clouding whether you're more interested in the text or in the device you found to explain the text. You don't do this, but as someone who has over-used devices in the past to get through an essay I had no interest in writing in the first place it's something to be considered to be wary of. My only other comment would be that you have great possibility to develop your paragraph transitions. It's a superb skill to work on (and your transitions are perfectly fine right now) where the final sentence of a paragraph completes the idea(s) of that paragraph and plants a seed for the next idea/paragraph. then the opening sentence of the next paragraph takes the flow from the seed planted just before and develops the main idea you'll be supporting inside this paragraph. This is the way I learned to gradually discard essay 'landmark words' as I call them, like, "Next" "Firstly" etc It's a style thing, in some ways, instead of telling my reader where I'm at in the essay, the hope is that they'll known implicity from the strength and focus of the argument that they've completed one idea and are now moving on to examining the next one. Done right, this sort of transitioning can give writing a tremendous sense of flow and clear focused thought that becomes very persuasive, despite the goal of essays such as this not being explicitly a 'persuasive essay' (but you just might persuade an A every time, lol).
So, Lone Star, now you see that evil will always triumph because good is dumb.


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