• Is Brenda and Neil’s rockiness in their relationship caused by Brenda seeing her brother and Harriet, and finding herself to feel guilty?
• Why does Mrs. Patimkin like Harriet so much more than Brenda?

To begin with, lets discuss “Death of the Author.” I actually agree with the message of this essay. Sure, it comes off a little pretentious. And sure, Barthes makes his point in a very dramatic way. However, I understand what he’s trying to convey quite well.

I am someone who is very big on assigning ones’ own value to art. I write myself, and my favorite thing is when people have different viewpoints on my works than I do. I love when people interpret things that I wrote differently than I intended.

That being said, I think having an author’s message and intent plastered all over something really takes something valuable away from it. It strips any potential room there is for interpretation and tells you “No, this is how you’re supposed to see it.”

I used this example in class, but 1984 is a good example of this. My teacher prefaced the book by telling us all about George Orwell. She told us about how much he hated authoritarianism, and how all of his works are a critique of it. And sure, his books make it pretty obvious that that is his message. But, if someone didn’t know that, maybe they wouldn’t be so focused on it – maybe they would even derive something entirely different from it, and I think that’d be very valuable.

In the Goodbye, Columbus excerpts that we had to read, the thing that stood out most to me was that upon Neil’s “vacation” (which it being called a vacation in of itself is pretty classist) the relationship between him and Brenda has gotten rockier. This could be for a number of things.

• Being more engrained in the day-to-day life of those “above” him has made Neil frustrated, both in his relationship and in his life. This could lead to more questioning of his love (which we see) and more nastiness toward Brenda.
• Having Harriet and Ron together is illuminating to Brenda what a “traditional” relationship could be like, and Brenda’s moms’ love for Harriet could be making Brenda reflect on what she wants. Perhaps she is beginning to associate Neil with her mothers lack of love for her, considering Harriet is sort of the counterpart to Neil, in being a spouse of the siblings.
• Perhaps Brenda and Neil are starting to realize how shallow and baseless their love is for each other.

I could go on and on, but I’m far past the word limit. I’m extremely intrigued to see how their relationship develops though.

• “The Death of the Author” and “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” both deal with art as their primary subject. I wonder how the two messages could coincide, and if the authors of each would agree.
• Are the terrorists pictured, who were described as being portrayed as “forgivable”, and the man in the gallery being painted as parallels? Is the aim of the story to entertain the idea of forgiving even the most wicked of people?

To begin with, TWAAMR (too long of a title) was a very confusing read but I generally get the gist. And while I understand it, in its totality, I don’t necessarily agree. Granted, this was written in a very different time. This was written in a time before the internet, and before art could be digitalized and even more mass produced. But even still, I think art to this day still has immense value. People around the world every day go in scores to see the Mona Lisa. Why? They have Google. They can just look it up. But the art itself holds such cultural power and identifiability that people want to go see it. Art that is renown remains renown. Though, there have been a fair share of people who I’ve interacted with that do hold the sentiment of “Why would I go see art when I can just look it up?” I don’t think the majority of people who care enough about art to even have an opinion feel this way, however. I know I don’t. I really enjoy seeing pieces in person, it totally changes the experience.

• Why does Candace only adhere to routine sometimes and other times wishes to break away from it?
• Will Candance continue to rely on her routine as an emotional crux, a way to center herself?

Perhaps I’m leaning too far into the routine angle here, but I can’t help but think of every major moment in this book from this angle. Especially in this section of it, routine has become entirely too pivotal to Candace. We see her repeat the phrase “I got up. I went to work in the morning. I went home in the evening. I repeated the routine.” at least 5 times in this section. We see it after the positive pregnancy test, we see it after the Jonathan situation. We see it in normalized situations, just describing her day to day life. It seems to be her normal, her backbone that she can rely on when things go awry.

• The current theme of Severance, or reoccurring idea, is repetition. Will this repetition ever be broken? Will Candace continue to get swept in the wave, even post-apocalyptically?
• If art is thinking in imagery, and narratives attempt to convey imagery, is imagery the root of all thinking? Is imagery the only true way we can convey ideas?

Victor Shklovsky’s Art as Technique paints poetry in a very new light for me. I, as most people of my age and generation I would wager, am not the biggest fan of poetry. I find it pretentious, often uninspiring, and sometimes really unnecessarily confusing. But that being said, some poetry is good and can be really intensely emotional in very few words.

That being said, beginning this essay and seeing poetry being painted in this light of being theoretical and inspiring all different movements and such made me sigh, roll my eyes, and think “Poetry being pretentious, again!” But, I did gain something interesting from this essay. Maybe it’s a bit plain, but the idea that poetry is imagery, that it is thinking in imagery, has me thinking of the poetry I’ve read previously and how I can look at it in a new light. Someone’s written word is their mental image, it’s the way they perceive, understand, and think about something. And that, I find, pretty refreshing.

As for Severance, I see the themes being spelled out now. The capitalistic repetition of a day being decoyed as a virus taking over the world. It’s clever, for sure, and a little tongue-in-cheek. I’m excited where this story will take me, late as I am, and I think it will be an enlightening experience, and help me change my view on the world.

Culler starts off the text on what can be interpreted as a rather mundane topic with an interesting and charming approach. He begins the book with giving us many working definitions/ideas of what theory means or what it represents. He tells us what a theory must be, “A theory must be more than a hypothesis: it can’t be obvious; it involves complex relations of a systematic kind of number of factor.” (3) Culler then tells us that theory is a way to describe a genre in which works “succeed in challenging and reorienting thinking in fields other than those to which they apparently belong… Works regarded as theory have effects beyond their original field.” (3) This I found rather confusing, and hard to really sink my teeth into. It honestly felt like I was reading something above my grade level, something I haven’t felt in a while.

By this point, we have established that theory is difficult to define by this point, due to the nature of the multiple meanings of the word itself. It can be used in so many ways, and it in of itself is an attempt to describe a niche idea. Halfway through the first chapter my thinking was, “Can theory even really be defined?” The closest answer I felt I reached so far in the reading was through the four main points that Culler defines on page 14. The most interesting of the four points to me, is that “theory is thinking about thinking” (15) That was truly the “A-ha!” moment I’d been waiting for up until that point. It brought a sense of clarity to the rest of the ideas that Culler introduced to us, and brought them together in my brain like a puzzle.

And to touch upon chapter 2 in the limited words I have left, as someone who greatly enjoys literature, the idea that literature is truly embedded in everything we read was quite an exciting point to read about.