Live • Learn • Create
Greenblatt-Scott Reflection Paper
COVER LETTER
This has certainly been one of the more rewarding papers I have ever written. Starting from totally, blank-faced confusion and getting to at least modestly understanding some pretty tough readings has been extremely gratifying and worthwhile, especially given the subject of Greenblatt and Scott’s works. I begin my paper with a quote that highlights how I felt throughout the writing process this time around. Going back through the texts was more time-consuming than I anticipated because I started to pick up on many more connections and I came to many more revelations. Experiencing this has reminded me of the importance of rereading.
Through the process of college essay writing, I have really embraced my writing style. I have learned to relax into my natural tendency to write prolific phrases, even if the subject does not deserve it, but have learned to compliment them with solid build up and occasionally a dose of humor. I have learned that I prefer to be more creative and that I prefer to approach a prompt from a unique angle. Not only does it make the writing more interesting and therefore keeps the reader more engaged, it is also more fun to write, letting me enjoy the writing process more. I sincerely look forward to reading, thinking, and writing more in class this year.
“This feeling, before the actual difficulties of writing set in, has always been for me the happiest moment in the composition process: you become alert to everything, including things that everyone including you had long regarded as boring or unimportant, and everything you encounter, however accidentally, seems potentially rich with significance.”
Stephen Gleenblatt
How to Take Control of Your Life
with A.O. Scott and Stephen Greenblatt
It has been a recurring joke in my literature class that Better Living Through Criticism by A. O. Scott and Renaissance Self-Fashioning by Stephen Greenblatt are both self-help books. As absurd as that might sound, they really are trying to improve our lives. Though Scott achieves this goal quite roundaboutly and Greenblatt more enigmatically, at the core of their writing is an undeniable urge to help. And the number one tip they both prescribe, really the only tip they provide, is to reflect.
When Greenblatt first came out with his work, many saw it as an educated pessimist’s manifesto, and it is not hard to see why with lines like “the dream of autonomous agency, though intensely experienced and tenaciously embraced, is only a dream” (xi). I too was among the many who read those words and gave a little mental “yikes” before moving on. On the face of the statement it sounds like we have no control over what we do; however, if you keep on reading, you will find that Greenblatt starts to argue to the contrary: that while we may not have complete, self-governing control over ourselves, we can have at least some and there is a way to get more.
Farther into his preface, Greenblatt discusses his opportunity encountering Foucault—a burgeoning philosopher of the time—and in particular a certain seminar of his that he attended. Greenblatt synthesizes Foucault’s argument as “the innermost experiences of the individual… were called into being and shaped by the institution that claimed only to police them.” Furthermore, “the hidden place into which one might hope to retreat in order to escape a totalizing institution was itself created by that institution” (xv). This was another one of the “yikes” moments for me. But in this argument, Greenblatt saw something beautiful and existentially crucial: hope. “It was possible to see how it was done and therefore it was in principle possible to see how it might be undone” (xv). Through the rest of his book, Greenblatt teaches us to undo the structures of these institutions—in the language of a self-help book: he guides us to taking control of our lives.
So how do we do it? How do we reclaim our lives from the institutions that govern them? We think, and more specifically, we reflect. We take a step back to carefully analyze our place within the complex cultural matrix of our world and identify the structures that influence us—our authorities and aliens, as Greenblatt puts it. By reflecting and becoming aware of these structures and their places in our lives, we are able to see that we in fact have agency—the capacity of action and/or the action itself—in our lives, that we have the potential for making change. From this realization comes a flood of power. We possess the power to act on our agency, to affect change, to reject the structures we do not want in our lives and embrace those that we do, to change ourselves and others.
I have spent awfully many words on Greenblatt here because I think of his writing as a manual and Scott’s as an example. The titular theme of Scott’s book is criticism—the practice of reflecting upon aesthetic experiences—and in order to perform it well, we have to ask ourselves some pretty tough questions: “How do we know what we know? Why do we feel what we feel? What are we talking about?” Yes they seem daunting, but “these questions,” Scott affirms “rather than any set of rules or criteria, form the foundations of criticism” (46). But dear god why? Why do we have to think about all these infuriatingly impossibly questions?
Reflecting upon our aesthetic experiences lets us understand why we like the things we like and not the things we do not. Identifying the structures that lead us to our particular dispositions makes us aware of not only our taste itself but also the agency we possess that gives us the power to shape it.
You are now probably asking yourself, as honestly I am asking myself too, “so what am I supposed to do with this?” You’re supposed to stop, take a minute, and reflect. You could even start by deciding whether or not you like what I have written here. If you don’t, maybe ask yourself why not and see if you can figure out what that says about who you are. Then think about whether or not you like what that says about who you are and go from there.
Then, maybe read this again.