Reflection on the Year, So Far
This class has turned out to be EXACTLY what I thought it was going to be. To be fair though, my guess was rather vague. From what I had heard (and later distilled) and from my interactions with Dr. Holt before this class, I assumed that AP Literature was going to be a challenging class, that it would have me questioning some of the “essential,” grand questions that arise from being bound by the peculiarities of the human experience. So far, I have come up against challenging questions about taste, why do I like what I like?; identity, who am I and what is identity?; consciousness of self, can we know ourselves without other people around?; and so many more riveting, mind-boggling subjects. This class has pushed me to think about author’s intention more keenly, to make myself aware of the structures surrounding me, and to keep moving forward as a thinker.
I expected nothing more.
First, I am going to discuss some of the connections I have made between this class and the other parts of my life. I have thoroughly enjoyed having my intense focus broken by a revelation that what I am doing is connected to what we have been doing in class. The first that comes to mind is with my Spanish independent study. My subject of study this semester is Flamenco, so I began by reading a book called Archeología de lo Jondo. The author, Antonio Manuel Rodríguez Ramos, writes with such beauty and passion that it almost brings me to tears. Flamenco is more than just a style of dance and music, it is a way of life and a culture to be lived. Its history of persecution and perseverance is so ripe with powerful and visceral emotion that it becomes difficult to describe in mere simple language. Conscious of this, Ramos uses intricate and intense metaphor to convey his knowledge of Flamenco. He uses such language so frequently that it often becomes difficult to distinguish between what is metaphor and what is plain language. I caught myself asking, “why cloud the message in so much figurative language when it could so easily be said in more direct words?” It then dawned on me, having been examining the rhetoric of Scott and Greenblatt so closely, that Ramos was using metaphor not just to make his writing sound nicer but because the metaphors were essential to understanding the message. Something was lost without the metaphor. As for the quantity of them, it became clear to me that the inundation of metaphors was intentional, that he used so many not despite but because he knew that many readers, like myself, would see it as excessive. Flamenco is overflowing with a great legacy of stories and emotions. Those born into Flamenco are, from the beginning, fashioned by this rich inheritance; they live, breathe, and sing the stories they were told. Ramos wants to give the reader a glimpse of what it is like to be a part of this life, to have your existence and world view be almost entirely composed of stories that are as real as they are devoid of reality. Without AP Lit, I may not have noticed this when I did and may have stayed frustrated at this brilliant author.
The next two connections are much less involved than the first.
One of the connections I made was with the sociology class that I audited over the summer. When we were first assigned to pick a QTTA from Greenblatt and then to put Greenblatt and Scott in conversation with one another about the question, I used a diagram from my summer class to help me understand the situation of the question. See the first commonplace-page picture for this diagram.
The last connection I will talk about occured when I was watching “Vox—Explained” on Netflix. The episode was about cults, and part way through the narrator said, “many [cults] arose not to exploit their followers but to help them survive in the face of an extreme threat,” which was followed by a scholar saying, “the collective’s very sense of self is under attack by the world. The only way to salvage one’s identity is to come together under the leadership of this charismatic authority to rebuild from scratch.” The threat is in our words the “alien,” which Greenblatt describes as a “threatening Other.” This was so interesting to me and ties fairly well with what are discussing in class.
I have also included a picture of a very recent page from my common place book because it was a really good day that ended with me having a more clear understanding of the relationship between self, authority, and alien. Instances of clarity are extremely gratifying in this mirky material we are swimming in, so I felt that this moment was important to include here.
I imagine that in the coming weeks we will wrap up with Stephen Greenblatt as we did with Scott, keeping them both on retainer for when we need them. We will possibly move on to reading one of the texts for the year, and we will start to apply some of the concepts from Scott and Greenblatt to these works. Whatever lies ahead, I’m excited for it.
