I was in a car with a friend listening to some his favorite old school jazz. He discussed the irony of a happy lilt and melody blended with lyrics about some lovers' suicide pact. The dark side of popular music, he said. I thought about it for a moment and mentioned Death Cab for Cutie's song "I'll Follow You into the Dark." The line, "If heaven and hell decide that the both are satisfied / And illuminate the "no"s on their vacancy signs / If there's no one beside you when your soul embarks / I'll follow you into the dark." It was an interesting remediation of a very human pain - the longing for connection in a big, dark world.
Professor Wexler implied that even speech itself is a form of media, our speech is a method by which a Composer creates a Message to their audience. If we are to reflect Aristole's triangle of argumentation, this assumption is clearly relevant. The Composer is the Media is the Message. An example I suggested was one's use of a personal Twitter feed. Someone may be more honest or less honest, depending on their relationship to their audience. Another student suggested that this relationship forces larger news corporations like CNN to forge those relationships over social media to remain relevant to their audience. The news is no longer in print, it's in pixels.
Discussed also were to concepts of immediacy and hypermediacy. Immediacy purposes to make the viewer forget the medium or form of delivery of the message. A news station might use a high definition photograph of a "disaster area" for a pathos pull on their audience. They might also attach hotlinks to the Red Cross to express urgency and reality. Hypermediacy forces the audience to mark the media of their message. The professor used the example of a Jackson Polluck painting; the message is subliminal to the method and format of the work itself.
This is a news article that uses hypermedia links to emphasize it's point. The use of hypermedia in everyday texts changes the linear methods of communication that written language has been structured on for centuries. It's rocking the boat of academics as far as what to teach students in the classroom. There is emphasis on "back to basics" using books, grammar, and work books further students' learning.
I think its the millennial responsibility to construct the future curriculum that bonds technology and text.
But the questions remain: Perhaps in future classrooms where we are the teachers, how do we work with the ideas immediacy, hypermediacy, and remediation so that each term is understood? How does writing on a blog affect the written text?
Apart from formatting, I don't see much departure from academic writing in blog writing. To effectively communicate one's point of view, it's still necessary to learn the skills of rhetoric and argumentation as well as ensure argumentative credibility with grammatical strength and thorough research. However, there is stronger emphasis on audience because the audience is no longer a single bored teacher reading essays, but the whole of those with access to the internet might take up parts of an argument.
Showing posts with label argumentation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label argumentation. Show all posts
Monday, April 14, 2014
Monday, February 10, 2014
A Grief, Observed or Embelished? - John Milton's 23rd Sonnet On His Deceased Wife
Grief is the heaviest void for a heart to bear. The esteemed C. S. Lewis poignantly pens the mourning of his own late wife, “Is anything more certain than that in all those vast times and spaces, if I were allowed to search them, I should nowhere find her face, her voice, her touch? She died. She is dead. Is the world so difficult to learn?” At the loss of one dearly loved, the one left behind must cope with the world upside down, almost a child again – a child who has to learn to breathe, crawl, and walk all over again. John Milton was no stranger to this burden: before his own death, he had experienced the death of a child, spousal separation, the death of his first wife, the death his son, the loss of his sight, and the death of his second wife. While the sonnet is largely autobiographical, through an exploration of the author’s syntax and uses of metaphor, all of Milton’s grievances and losses are dramatically represented in the fourteen short lines of his twenty-third sonnet on his deceased wife.
For his twenty-third sonnet, John Milton uses the Petrarchan or Italian style sonnet. Babette Deutsch describes in the Poetry Handbook that a sonnet is usually a non-lyrical poem (not meant to be sung), composed at the length of fourteen lines. The first eight lines of a Petrarchan sonnet are called an octave; traditionally, an Italian sonnet’s first octave conceptually introduces a problem to the reader. The last six lines are called a sestet, and, in the sestet, the solution to the problem is found. In historical context, this formula worked best for the sharing of many ideas regarding political turmoil and leadership critique, which, according to Thomas Wheeler’s article in Studies in Philology, Milton was no stranger to. (512) Highly involved with political criticism under the reign of the elected Oliver Cromwell, Milton possesses an inexhaustible repertoire of written publications spanning from apologetic theology to this small, unusually intimate sonnet.
What makes his twenty-third sonnet separate from the rest is the complex emotionality of grief. Instead of introducing some sort of political or theological problem in the first octave, the speaker describes a vision of his “late espoused saint”, “vested all in white”. While many others might summon bumbling paranormal exterminators to rid themselves of ghosts, the speaker of the sonnet articulates desire to be close to his Wife again saying, “I trust to have / Full sight of her in heaven without restraint.” These are two factual autobiographical elements expressed: Milton’s loss of his wife (an event he experiences twice and a half) and the loss of his sight. This complicates poetry’s usual tactic of embellishing the truth. William Riley Parker observes that the sonnet was historically taken literally given Milton’s context of loss; both his first and second wives died due to complications with childbirth. (235) Parker posits the challenge that Milton might not be mourning the loss of one specific wife, but instead this is the voice of a lonely man craving the pure companionship of a beloved woman.
Eva Feder Kittay would name the speaker of the sonnet a man dependent on woman. Kittay posits that creative Man makes Woman the other, and uses her as a metaphor for to define all his life experiences. (70) She becomes “the vehicle for the self-conception and activities of man, [who is] the subject, the topic.” (66) Milton’s sonnet explores the problem of a man’s loneliness after he is separated from his wife by death. Both quatrains in the first octave begin with the speaker’s self “Methought I…” and “Mine”. The apparition of Wife is written as illusory and antagonistic. She is “washed from spot” and “pure as her mind”. The blind speaker says he can visually perceive the “Love, sweetness, goodness” radiating from her twice hidden face: hidden by a veil, and hidden by his recent physical blindness. This blindness may have a third layer as this idyllic visage is based on Milton’s proposal of companionship and marriage, as Thomas Wheeler suggests, “Milton's habitual practice in writing about real people is to present them in idealized forms. He sees in them the embodiment of learning, piety, chastity, wisdom, or whatever.” (512) The sonnet in poetry and Milton in his mind have done what dreams in every mind do: express reality and emotion in its own (and in Milton’s case, dramatic) way through metaphor. After all, poetry does not have any restriction to represent accurate facts. (511)
Most emphatic of the speaker’s loneliness is the closing sestet. As previously mentioned, the goal of the last six lines of Italian sonnet is to propose the solution to the problem built by the first eight lines. Here, again, Milton expresses his grief by upsetting the usual pattern of things. The speaker of the sonnet says, “Her face was veiled…” He is separated from this woman by death, idealistic virtue, his own blindness, and this veil that covers her face. Theordore Ziolkowski explains the history of veils in metaphor: "veils themselves bear no meaning; is is their only function to conceal that which lies behind them." (66) He talks about the biblical story of the Temple curtain, a veil that concealed the Holy of Holies from the unholy masses. Perhaps this same concept Milton reflects in giving the amorphous wife a veil while describing her virtue. His unholy, living state separates him from love, sweetness and goodness.
Eva Kittay claims that "Man identifies that which he wants and desires, or has acquired or fears acquiring, as Woman," even to identifying Woman as "Death itself." (63) This spirit of acquisition is reflected in how the speaker possessively claims his wife "Mine" in the second quatrain. Even choosing to cut off the line "And as such as yet once more I trust to have" before completing the phrase in the next line "Full sight of her" implies acquistion over spousal partnership. Thus, the true subject of the sonnet is not Milton's wife but Milton himself and the void he needs to fill with images of her. A fanciful solution to the problem of separation is brought the sonnet’s first quatrain in an allusion to Heracles’ rescue of Alcetis. If only some hero could unite the sonnet’s speaker to his virtuous, angelic spouse.
The real, pitiful loneliness of the sonnet is embodied in its composition. It is wholly the expression of void, a man who "has nowhere to live but in his mind", says Wheeler, "he has not even the remembrance of an ideal marriage, only the ideal itself which he cannot seize in the midst of his darkness." (514) The closing of the poem is far from the solution to loneliness, it is the underlining-punctuation-emphasizing-bolding-hashtaging of grief.
"But O as to embrace me she inclined,
I waked, she fled, and day brought back my night."
Excuse me as I lose all semblance of academics but, fuck, damn, and shit. If those last two lines do not reduce you to a primordial mush of emotion and loss, we need to have a talk about pathos. Says William Riley Parker, "The last line, with its syntactical flurry of excitement followed by a dreary march of monosyllables, contains perhaps the most affecting ten words in all of English poetry." (238) This is affect of grief, expressed as simply as possible. If joy and unity is fullness, loss is so much more empty and dark. The dream, the ideal, the sight of virtue in dreams is cut off by the daytime. For one night, one dream, Milton regains figurative vision and the presence of his Wife. Daylight, usually a symbol of joy, fertility, and happiness is condemned for severing this union. Even as the poetic ideal of Wife and Woman is exclaimed for the first part of the sonnet and Milton waxes on about his full experience in loss, this last line, with its single-syllabic tone of defeat is completely full of cold, hard reality.
Deutsch, Babette. Poetry Handbook: A Dictionary of Terms. Fourth ed. New York, NY: HarperPerennial, 1982. Print.
Kittay, Eva Feder. "Woman as Metaphor." Hypatia Summer 3.2 (1988): 63-86. JTSOR. Web. 5 Feb. 2014.
Lewis, C.S. A Grief Observed. New York: Harper & Row, 1961.Print.
Milton, John. "On His Deceased Wife." 100 Best Loved Poems. New York: Dover Publications, 1995. 15. Print. Dover Thrift Editions.
Parker, William Riley. "Milton's Last Sonnet." The Review of English Studies July 21.83 (1945): 235-38. JSTOR. Web. 5 Feb. 2014.
Wheeler, Thomas. "Milton's Twenty-Third Sonnet." Studies in Philology July 58.3 (1961): 510-15. JSTOR. Web. 5 Feb. 2014.
Ziolkowski, Theodore. "The Veil as Metaphor and as Myth." Religion & Literature Summer 40.2 (2008): 61-81. JSTOR. Web. 5 Feb. 2014.
For his twenty-third sonnet, John Milton uses the Petrarchan or Italian style sonnet. Babette Deutsch describes in the Poetry Handbook that a sonnet is usually a non-lyrical poem (not meant to be sung), composed at the length of fourteen lines. The first eight lines of a Petrarchan sonnet are called an octave; traditionally, an Italian sonnet’s first octave conceptually introduces a problem to the reader. The last six lines are called a sestet, and, in the sestet, the solution to the problem is found. In historical context, this formula worked best for the sharing of many ideas regarding political turmoil and leadership critique, which, according to Thomas Wheeler’s article in Studies in Philology, Milton was no stranger to. (512) Highly involved with political criticism under the reign of the elected Oliver Cromwell, Milton possesses an inexhaustible repertoire of written publications spanning from apologetic theology to this small, unusually intimate sonnet.
What makes his twenty-third sonnet separate from the rest is the complex emotionality of grief. Instead of introducing some sort of political or theological problem in the first octave, the speaker describes a vision of his “late espoused saint”, “vested all in white”. While many others might summon bumbling paranormal exterminators to rid themselves of ghosts, the speaker of the sonnet articulates desire to be close to his Wife again saying, “I trust to have / Full sight of her in heaven without restraint.” These are two factual autobiographical elements expressed: Milton’s loss of his wife (an event he experiences twice and a half) and the loss of his sight. This complicates poetry’s usual tactic of embellishing the truth. William Riley Parker observes that the sonnet was historically taken literally given Milton’s context of loss; both his first and second wives died due to complications with childbirth. (235) Parker posits the challenge that Milton might not be mourning the loss of one specific wife, but instead this is the voice of a lonely man craving the pure companionship of a beloved woman.
Eva Feder Kittay would name the speaker of the sonnet a man dependent on woman. Kittay posits that creative Man makes Woman the other, and uses her as a metaphor for to define all his life experiences. (70) She becomes “the vehicle for the self-conception and activities of man, [who is] the subject, the topic.” (66) Milton’s sonnet explores the problem of a man’s loneliness after he is separated from his wife by death. Both quatrains in the first octave begin with the speaker’s self “Methought I…” and “Mine”. The apparition of Wife is written as illusory and antagonistic. She is “washed from spot” and “pure as her mind”. The blind speaker says he can visually perceive the “Love, sweetness, goodness” radiating from her twice hidden face: hidden by a veil, and hidden by his recent physical blindness. This blindness may have a third layer as this idyllic visage is based on Milton’s proposal of companionship and marriage, as Thomas Wheeler suggests, “Milton's habitual practice in writing about real people is to present them in idealized forms. He sees in them the embodiment of learning, piety, chastity, wisdom, or whatever.” (512) The sonnet in poetry and Milton in his mind have done what dreams in every mind do: express reality and emotion in its own (and in Milton’s case, dramatic) way through metaphor. After all, poetry does not have any restriction to represent accurate facts. (511)
Most emphatic of the speaker’s loneliness is the closing sestet. As previously mentioned, the goal of the last six lines of Italian sonnet is to propose the solution to the problem built by the first eight lines. Here, again, Milton expresses his grief by upsetting the usual pattern of things. The speaker of the sonnet says, “Her face was veiled…” He is separated from this woman by death, idealistic virtue, his own blindness, and this veil that covers her face. Theordore Ziolkowski explains the history of veils in metaphor: "veils themselves bear no meaning; is is their only function to conceal that which lies behind them." (66) He talks about the biblical story of the Temple curtain, a veil that concealed the Holy of Holies from the unholy masses. Perhaps this same concept Milton reflects in giving the amorphous wife a veil while describing her virtue. His unholy, living state separates him from love, sweetness and goodness.
Eva Kittay claims that "Man identifies that which he wants and desires, or has acquired or fears acquiring, as Woman," even to identifying Woman as "Death itself." (63) This spirit of acquisition is reflected in how the speaker possessively claims his wife "Mine" in the second quatrain. Even choosing to cut off the line "And as such as yet once more I trust to have" before completing the phrase in the next line "Full sight of her" implies acquistion over spousal partnership. Thus, the true subject of the sonnet is not Milton's wife but Milton himself and the void he needs to fill with images of her. A fanciful solution to the problem of separation is brought the sonnet’s first quatrain in an allusion to Heracles’ rescue of Alcetis. If only some hero could unite the sonnet’s speaker to his virtuous, angelic spouse.
The real, pitiful loneliness of the sonnet is embodied in its composition. It is wholly the expression of void, a man who "has nowhere to live but in his mind", says Wheeler, "he has not even the remembrance of an ideal marriage, only the ideal itself which he cannot seize in the midst of his darkness." (514) The closing of the poem is far from the solution to loneliness, it is the underlining-punctuation-emphasizing-bolding-hashtaging of grief.
"But O as to embrace me she inclined,
I waked, she fled, and day brought back my night."
Excuse me as I lose all semblance of academics but, fuck, damn, and shit. If those last two lines do not reduce you to a primordial mush of emotion and loss, we need to have a talk about pathos. Says William Riley Parker, "The last line, with its syntactical flurry of excitement followed by a dreary march of monosyllables, contains perhaps the most affecting ten words in all of English poetry." (238) This is affect of grief, expressed as simply as possible. If joy and unity is fullness, loss is so much more empty and dark. The dream, the ideal, the sight of virtue in dreams is cut off by the daytime. For one night, one dream, Milton regains figurative vision and the presence of his Wife. Daylight, usually a symbol of joy, fertility, and happiness is condemned for severing this union. Even as the poetic ideal of Wife and Woman is exclaimed for the first part of the sonnet and Milton waxes on about his full experience in loss, this last line, with its single-syllabic tone of defeat is completely full of cold, hard reality.
Works Cited
Deutsch, Babette. Poetry Handbook: A Dictionary of Terms. Fourth ed. New York, NY: HarperPerennial, 1982. Print.
Kittay, Eva Feder. "Woman as Metaphor." Hypatia Summer 3.2 (1988): 63-86. JTSOR. Web. 5 Feb. 2014.
Lewis, C.S. A Grief Observed. New York: Harper & Row, 1961.Print.
Milton, John. "On His Deceased Wife." 100 Best Loved Poems. New York: Dover Publications, 1995. 15. Print. Dover Thrift Editions.
Parker, William Riley. "Milton's Last Sonnet." The Review of English Studies July 21.83 (1945): 235-38. JSTOR. Web. 5 Feb. 2014.
Wheeler, Thomas. "Milton's Twenty-Third Sonnet." Studies in Philology July 58.3 (1961): 510-15. JSTOR. Web. 5 Feb. 2014.
Ziolkowski, Theodore. "The Veil as Metaphor and as Myth." Religion & Literature Summer 40.2 (2008): 61-81. JSTOR. Web. 5 Feb. 2014.
Sunday, February 2, 2014
Thoughts on Dr. MLK's "Letter from Birmingham Jail"
This is NOT English 495 related, but I had a few thoughts on an assignment for my English 406 Advanced Composition for Teachers course. We were to analyze some of the rhetorical strategies in Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Letter from Birmingham Jail. I remember once briefly reading an excerpt in high school. Now, with Dr. Clark's Rhetoric, Literacy and Culture class in mind, Dr. King's work revealed itself to be a beautiful force of persuasive argumentation. I loved it.
Dr. M. Jimmie Killingsworth discusses a specific argumentative structure in his book, Appeals in Modern Rhetoric. It's a triangle: in one corner is the audience, and in another is the speaker or author of the argument. What closes the triangle together and connects the first two points is shared values between (we'll go with) author and audience (I like alliteration). Enclosed within the triangle is the purpose of the speech, the call to action that the body of the persuasive speech is built towards.
I noticed immediately that Dr. King uses the same structure to appeal to his audience and call them to action. Specifically, Dr. King addresses eight congregational leaders who published a statement in support of the police officers who arrested King and subdued the anti-segregation movement. He addresses and admonishes them directly at least eight times in the course of the letter, and he has the credibility to do so. He opens his letter with a statement of his ethos: like his audience, he is part of the clergy; and he's the president of the Southern Christian Christian Leadership Conference. He expects to be addressing his equals in rights, understanding and knowledge.
Dr. King heavily relies on the idea of shared values with these men to turn their heads toward his purpose. He repeatedly uses the name of Jesus Christ and aligns himself with Paul the apostle, who wrote half of the New Testament from various cramped jail cells. Without that shared value, the credibility of King's logos wavers; were he writing to an wholly atheistic audience, he would have had to change his tack.
Because of the shared values, pathos in the argument should be already understood - if the audience (clergymen) have been fully convicted by King's reminders of what is already in their own knowledge (the commands and demands of humility, justice and equality in the Christian faith), then they would have no choice but to feel the compassion they must feel to Dr. King's mission. When Dr. King does bring in his pathos argument, it reads as if the only reason someone could not feel for the plight of the black American was if they had put their own humanity away. As clergymen, it is their job to be beholden to their flock, and their flock is everyone. Dr. King's audience is a group of highly educated, distinguished community leaders; they shouldn't need a man in jail to tell them what their job is, but in the early 1960's, they apparently did.
I want to say that the United States has gotten better at appreciating each others' differences and holding up the values of equality, but the residue of hundreds of years of racism and classism still remain, especially in the church. As a Believer myself, it's painful to see members of the church scoff at, or worse, ignore and deplore someone's struggle.
I see one of our current challenges as a faith is what to do with homosexuality and the rights of a homosexual couple to marry and raise a family. We're not lynching people in the streets for being gay, but so many young people have taken their own lives because of a lack of acceptance and love from their families and communities for being broken or wrong. Our complacency as a church is just as much of a wrong as the complacency of the church Dr. King addresses during the Civil Rights Movement.
I don't know who we need to throw in jail to shake this system awake again, but it has to be soon. I'm tired of the church abandoning its own instead of fulfilling its first mission to love.
Dr. M. Jimmie Killingsworth discusses a specific argumentative structure in his book, Appeals in Modern Rhetoric. It's a triangle: in one corner is the audience, and in another is the speaker or author of the argument. What closes the triangle together and connects the first two points is shared values between (we'll go with) author and audience (I like alliteration). Enclosed within the triangle is the purpose of the speech, the call to action that the body of the persuasive speech is built towards.
I noticed immediately that Dr. King uses the same structure to appeal to his audience and call them to action. Specifically, Dr. King addresses eight congregational leaders who published a statement in support of the police officers who arrested King and subdued the anti-segregation movement. He addresses and admonishes them directly at least eight times in the course of the letter, and he has the credibility to do so. He opens his letter with a statement of his ethos: like his audience, he is part of the clergy; and he's the president of the Southern Christian Christian Leadership Conference. He expects to be addressing his equals in rights, understanding and knowledge.
Dr. King heavily relies on the idea of shared values with these men to turn their heads toward his purpose. He repeatedly uses the name of Jesus Christ and aligns himself with Paul the apostle, who wrote half of the New Testament from various cramped jail cells. Without that shared value, the credibility of King's logos wavers; were he writing to an wholly atheistic audience, he would have had to change his tack.
Because of the shared values, pathos in the argument should be already understood - if the audience (clergymen) have been fully convicted by King's reminders of what is already in their own knowledge (the commands and demands of humility, justice and equality in the Christian faith), then they would have no choice but to feel the compassion they must feel to Dr. King's mission. When Dr. King does bring in his pathos argument, it reads as if the only reason someone could not feel for the plight of the black American was if they had put their own humanity away. As clergymen, it is their job to be beholden to their flock, and their flock is everyone. Dr. King's audience is a group of highly educated, distinguished community leaders; they shouldn't need a man in jail to tell them what their job is, but in the early 1960's, they apparently did.
I want to say that the United States has gotten better at appreciating each others' differences and holding up the values of equality, but the residue of hundreds of years of racism and classism still remain, especially in the church. As a Believer myself, it's painful to see members of the church scoff at, or worse, ignore and deplore someone's struggle.
I see one of our current challenges as a faith is what to do with homosexuality and the rights of a homosexual couple to marry and raise a family. We're not lynching people in the streets for being gay, but so many young people have taken their own lives because of a lack of acceptance and love from their families and communities for being broken or wrong. Our complacency as a church is just as much of a wrong as the complacency of the church Dr. King addresses during the Civil Rights Movement.
I don't know who we need to throw in jail to shake this system awake again, but it has to be soon. I'm tired of the church abandoning its own instead of fulfilling its first mission to love.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)