Course Blog

After some initial biographical research on the life of Virginia Woolf, who is one of my options for primary texts, it became clear that she had grown up with a fascination for natural history and the taxonomic ecology of the time. In his biography of her, Nigel Nicholson mentions that, “Virginia Woolf was a keen hunter of butterflies and moths. With her brothers and sister she would smear tree trunks with treacle to attract and capture the insects, and then pin their lifelike corpses to cork boards, their wings outspread.” Later, with the transition in scientific thought, Woolf’s eco-consciousness shifted as well to reflect a culture turning away from taxonomic classification to holistic ecology (Alt). This consciousness of the natural world comes through in her writings, as well as an emphasis on space/place as a whole. The historical context in which Woolf was writing also contributes to her feminist writings, with the growing suffrage movement and her interactions with “radical” feminists throughout her education at King’s College. 

Woolf’s childhood also greatly informs her passion for the natural world. She grew up summering in natural locations in England, when her family wanted to get away from Kensington. For example, since she was born in 1895, her family would summer in St. Ives in Cornwall, a retreat from city life and the blooming industrialization and modernization of the turn of the century (“Virginia Woolf”). These early memories of the pastoral escape and summers by the sea informed her later novel To the Lighthouse. Woolf experienced a long list of childhood traumatic events, from losing a parent, dealing with deadly infectious diseases, and sexual assault from her two half-brothers. These tragedies within the home and struggles with mental health may also contribute to her interest in writing and the outside/natural world as a place of literary imagination and perhaps safety. 

Alt, Christina. Virginia Woolf and the Study of Nature. Cambridge University Press, 2010, doi:10.1017/CBO9780511762178. https://dickinson.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/permalink/01DICKINSON_INST/1d86qtd/cdi_proquest_ebookcentral_EBC554749  

Nicolson, Nigel. “Virginia Woolf.” The New York Times: on the Web, The New York Times, 2000, archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/first/n/nicolson-woolf.html?scp=4&sq=virginia%2520woolf&st=cse.  

“Virginia Woolf.” Biography.com, A&E Networks Television, 27 Mar. 2020, www.biography.com/writer/virginia-woolf. 

Søren Kierkegaard, a Danish philosopher, lived from 1813 to 1855. In his work, Fear, and Trembling, he engages with the story of Abraham and the sacrifice of his son Issac. 

Scholars point to Kierkegaard’s exploration of literary figures like Don Juan, the wandering Jew, and Faust during his time as a student as an early pretext for his desire to find existential models for his own life. He is now widely considered to be the first existentialist philosopher. His theories and ideas contributed largely to Western philosophical thought. 

However, his existential beliefs revolve in large part around his love Regina Olsen. Scholars believe that Kierkegaard’s experience of love and the loss of love directly influences Fear and Trembling. 

In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard says that “I am convinced that God is love…” (Fear and Trembling). He takes Abraham and Issac’s story as metaphorically tied with parts of the human experience rather than being a literal anecdote on the necessity of physical sacrifice. In this essay, I will connect Abraham’s intention to sacrifice Issac to Kierkegaard’s wrestling with the idea of love from his own experiences. In conjunction, these two scenarios serve to illuminate the more significant concept of selfless love in the Bible. 

In the first part of the book, Kierkegaard gives alternative examples and auxiliary stories of what happened on Mount Moriah. In the first interpretation, Abraham scolds his son and tells him that he desires to sacrifice him rather than God’s. Shortly after that, he cries out to God: “Lord in heaven, I thank you; it is surely better for him to believe I am a monster than to lose faith in you” (Kierkegaard 9). Thus, Abraham portrays to his son that he is assuming responsibility for killing him instead of leaving the responsibility to fall on God. In doing so, Abraham prevents his son from losing faith in higher sovereignty by making the decision a personal one. 

Kierkegaard’s existential views spur significantly from the sense of loss and despair he felt after his separation from Regina. Thus, this quote reflects Kierkegaard’s plea to humanity not to blame the love itself for its failure but instead blame oneself through the mouth of Abraham. 

The second section of the book is titled, A Tribute to Abraham. On the surface, the passage speaks to the moral perfection of Abraham. Yet, it more generally describes the qualifications for a perfectly righteous man and the force of love and its significance to humanity. He ties the genuine struggle with God to achieving greatness over all others. “For the one who struggled with the world became great by conquering himself, but the one who struggled with himself became great by conquering himself, but the one who struggled with God was greater than everybody” (Kierkegaard 13). 

His struggle with his loss of love allowed Kierkegaard to see the finitude of life. Similar to Abraham, Kierkegaard wrestled with God, or love, in the surrendering of that thing in which they loved. For Abraham, it was Issac, and for Kierkegaard, it was Regina. Abraham struggled with God, Kierkegaard with love by coming to terms with the idea of love in its most brutal state. They both loved the one whom they were ready to lose. Kierkegaard believed that love in its purest form was utterly unselfish, an idea repeated in the Bible repeatedly. For Abraham to be willing to sacrifice his son reinforced the concept of this selfless love. To love someone dead, or lost, would mean that you can not receive anything in return. 

Kierkegaard’s writing on Abraham in Fear and Trembling shares parallels to his own life. The willingness of Abraham to sacrifice his son, one of his most loved possessions, represents the highest form of love. Likewise, Kierkegaard’s love of Regina, who he lost, is also the highest form of love he could give her. Thus, in Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard’s life is paralleled to Abrahams by the metaphor of sacrifice and selfless love. 

In Beloved,  Morrison sets her novel up in a particular way so the reader can follow right along. Using flashbacks she captures the moment of the speaker expressing his/her feelings of event while narrating them. This use of patterns and motifs creates a seamless telling of the story so that the flashbacks of the memory do not separate the reader from the character. Instead, it synthesized the two so that both felt the same effect together.  This style indirectly allows the reader to identify with the character and the action at the same time to weave the character together in order for the reader to associate with the feelings that each character felt during that time period. Morrison uses a rhetorical element of colors to introduce the reader to the political connotations between black and white and more importantly the social reality of this time period.  Morrison uses color to show feelings or lack thereof is through Baby Sugg’s. She is the mother-in-law of Sethe and also was affected by the horrifying death of Beloved. After this incident, Baby Sugg’s “was suspended between the nastiness of life and meanness of the dead. Her life was anything but forgetfulness, she used the little energy left for pondering color”. Similar to Sethe, Baby Sugg’s was stripped of her rights. Her life revolved around giving and not taking. Hence, when the whites demanded Beloved, Sethe’s reaction was to protect the child. After the death of Beloved, Sethe and Baby Sugg’s become vulnerable to their frightening world through the lack of color. Objects become blurred or uncolorful. As a result, Baby Sugg’s died “ starved for color” and Sethe continued to confront the reality of survival and subjugation.

Morrison incorporates political realities through the use of color and the character Paul D. Color connotes many expressions and feelings for Paul D. Unlike Sethe and Baby Sugg’s, Paul D. never knew about the death of Beloved. Therefore, he never understood the outrages the ghost had in the house on Bluestone Road. His appearance was welcomed by Sethe and Denver. However, as he strode through the house, a reflection of a light appears before his eyes. This aura was the shadow of death haunting Sethe and Denver. For Paul D, it was a remembrance of him being a slave. The red symbolizes power in society and this “pulse of red light hadn’t come back and Paul D. had not trembled since 1856 and then for 83 days in a row” .For the first time in seventeen years Paul D. felt this red light of fear penetrating through his legs. Usually his hands would shake of fear, but his reaction this time was trembling in the legs. This power is the abuse Paul D. ran from when he was a slave. This illusion of red makes the reader remember this history of slavery and Morrison wants the reader not to forget the unacceptable. The function of color describes the pain Paul D confronted everyday of his life.  Indirectly, Morrison provides his emotions and the influence of white supremacy through the penetrating color of red.

 

 

 

 

Toni Morrison communicates empowering life lessons through her characters’ personalities. Baby Suggs, being Sethe’s mother-in-law, is a mother figure for her but for the reader as well. She has a passage about loving oneself that begins prominent to their situation and then broadens and becomes relatable to all people. The context that Baby Suggs talks about is white people not loving black people, or their skin and hands. A person’s skin represents who they are and their history. A black person’s hands were a threat and a means of expressing themselves. They could use their hands to work hard and advance in life, theoretically. After this, her passage about loving oneself shifts and reads like she is speaking directly to the reader. “You got to love it, you!” Baby Suggs shouts (Morrison 104). She mentions flesh again, “flesh that needs to be loved”, breaking down the body: feet that need rest, backs that need support, and arms that are strong. Strength, resting, and support and all connected as are feet, arms, and the spine of the human body. The spine, which is the center of the body, needing support emphasizes that people cannot make it through life alone. Community and lifting others up is important, as is lifting oneself up in times when they feel alone. The passage wraps up narrowing the target audience again and specifying back to its original. “The dark, dark liver—love it, love it…”, Caucasian skin is prized and the darker of a skin tone that someone has the less human he was treated. The less a person is like the well-off Caucasian family, the harder of a time others and life would have given him which is all the more importance to love himself deeply. Repeating the words “dark” and “love” curate the message of value. A person who loves their self is never alone and always with a friend. Feeling supported and strong, able to rest when needed. Baby Suggs teaches the reader about strength. She encourages laughing, crying, and dancing. Flushing one’s emotions out. Keeping everything in and seeming unaffected is a false sense of strength in humans. Feeling and facing emotions is courageous and that is how to move past them.  

Slavery by definition entails that the self unwillingly belongs to someone else. Toni Morrison demonstrates how that lack of ownership over one’s self impacts the psyche of more than just those who experienced it. Throughout her novel Beloved, Morrison weaves the traumatic disruption that slavery causes into the thoughts of her characters. She uses the way in which they long for belonging and possession of other things to display the initial and inherited trauma of slavery.
In the first third of Beloved, we learn about the complicated relationship between the characters and the past life that the older generation experienced at the Sweet Home plantation. When Paul D first arrives at 124, Sethe is thrown back in time to Sweet Home in Kentucky. Instead of remembering the plantation for what it was, a horrific institution of human captivity, she remembers it with a sense of nostalgia and beauty. She admits that “although there was not a leaf on that farm that did not make her want to scream, it rolled itself out before her in shameless beauty”(Morrison, 7). Trauma develops when the brain is unable to release the feelings of fear associated with an event. Thus, every time the brain recalls the memory, it assumes the same mode of fear and sends the body into a state of fear. Rather than put herself through those emotions again, Sethe’s brain has been so scared that it will not allow her to return to that mindset, rather it creates a filter over her memories so that they do not register as those same ones that scar so much of her life.

Neither Sethe nor Paul D belonged to themselves when they were at Sweet Home, so they are forever searching for a feeling of belonging. This is why they are so eager to have sex when they interact for the first time in years. They want to belong to one another in the biblical sense because they were robbed of belonging to themselves for so long. However, it is not just those who lived on the Sweet Home plantation who struggle to belong and to own in a world that has owned them. Denver never lived on the Sweet Home plantation, and yet she is caught in the life that resulted from it. She is haunted by ghosts in the literal and figurative sense. Because all those around her did not belong to themselves, they do not belong to her and she has developed a need for what she lacks. When her mother and Paul D reunite, she instantly feels distant from them because “they were a twosome, saying ‘Your daddy’ and ‘Sweet Home’ in a way that made it clear both belonged to them and not to her” (Morrison, 15). Then later when Beloved appears at 124, Denver feels a “love and breakneck possessiveness that charged her” (Morrison, 64). When someone knew and without a past interacts with Denver, she jumps on the opportunity to fill that void of belonging and to possess her. All of these possessions slowly turn bitter, as Paul D continues to remind Sethe of her enslavement and as Denver starts to question Beloved for possibly choking her mother. These possessions are not enough to replace the bitterness of their enslaved past which still haunts them all.

New media has the interesting dynamic of audience and author interactions. Unlike traditional texts, author and audiences have a different relationship in new media: and it revolves around the way they engage with the work. Thinking about video games for our example in contrasting this binary, how do we define who has creative ownership of the video game?

Usually there isn’t a single name attached: we often tie the creative expression of the game to a studio, publisher or a group of creators but rarely ever is a single name responsible for a whole video game. Keywords for Media Studies talks about this idea of what authorship means in context of new media like video games.

“But in analyses of television, video games, social media, transmedia, and other forms, some media scholars have set aside the preoccupation with singular authors that is commonplace throughout literary and film studies. In doing so, we have regularly instead made visible the interplay of corporate imprimatur, creative and technical personnel, and active audiences. And yet other media scholars have engaged with author theories in a limited manner, adapting them to television’s mode of production, and focusing on a small set of individual auteurs. Why is the author so categorically emphasized in regard to some media texts and products—and not others? That is, why is an author?” (“Author”, Chris 23).

The role of authorship is tricky in relation to audience because of how the medium of video games interact. As Chris puts it, “Following Hall, scholars have found the authoring roles of the viewer/player/user particularly conspicuous in interactive and narratively open-ended forms such as video games and those dependent on user-generated content. In the former, the player makes narrative-twisting choices within a defined universe” (Chris 23). We are now presented with the binary that author and audience are not explicitly separated in other media such as novels or poetry, but instead they are simultaneous and engaging the other via the text. Going back to the previous quote, the idea of ‘active’ audiences is interesting because new media like video games requires more on the part of audiences to interact with what the ‘author’ has put forth, whereas one might argue novel readers are more ‘passive’ and cannot respond beyond the words on the page. Similarly, having an ‘author’ figure to point to means audiences can engage with them. Be it an actual auteur-creator or a PR head for a studio, there is a direct connection through social media and other outlets to be able to discuss the work and its mechanisms.

The interesting point of unpacking this binary is that it redefines what it means to engage with a creative expression where the author-audience relationship is changed. Media like video games rely on this dynamic to make it work as a form of entertainment because both participants are so closely linked they cannot engage with the work without engaging with the other. Video games are designed by anywhere from a singular individual to multiple people with a certain kind of player/audience in mind. The relationship would fall apart if the traditional presentation of creative expression was maintained. Instead, we get a new kind of expression that can only function with the willing consent of both author and audience’s active involvement.

Works Cited
Chris, Cynthia. “Author.” Keywords for Media Studies, New York University Press, New York, 2017, pp. 21–23.

Ocean vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is an epistolary novel written from the perspective of a Vietnamese American son to his illiterate mother; the narrator recounts his life together with his mother and grandmother as refugees in America after the American war in Vietnam; it is also a queer coming-of-age story where the narrator negotiates his racialized intimacy with an American whiteboy, Trevor, in suburban Connecticut. In On Earth, the narrator employs the trope of animality (in the evocations of monarch butterflies, dog, cat, bees, macaque/monkey, buffalo/veal/heifer)—as detour, metaphor, analogy—to make sense of his people’s migrating history, of his loved ones’ character, and to evoke the environmental disaster. The narrator aptly claims at the end of the novel: “What we would give to have the ruined lives of animals tell a human story—when our lives are in themselves the story of animals” (242).

The southwards migration of monarch butterflies from Canada or the United States to Mexico for refuge in the winter is juxtaposed next to the recount of Vietnamese refugees’ presence in America. Vuong uses the metaphor of this monarch migration to think of the migration of Vietnamese refugees to the United States as (temporally) precarious and dangerous: “It only takes a single night of frost to kill off a generation [of monarchs]. To live, then, is a matter of time, of timing” (4). In the middle of the novel’s section I, we are told that the men in the village, where the narrator’s grandma is from, enact the custom of splitting live macaques’ skulls wide open and feed directly from the animal in order to enhance their virility; at the same, the narrator’s mother, Hong, is also born in the year of the monkey–she characterizes herself as such: “I’m a monkey,” she says (240); amid the violence of war, bestiality, and the violent American working-condition upon Hong’s body, we cannot help but see the history violence subsumed and embedded into the metaphoric animality.

Beyond evoking the characteristic migration of another species to parallel that of humans, the animal can also merge with or is attached to the human’s character. Once, in the middle of the night, the narrator wakes up to “the sound of an animal in distress”; he traces the sound, speculating that it might be “a cat wounded,” but finds out it is actually his (adopted) grandfather crying in the kitchen; “There are no animals here but us,” the narrators says (45-6). Moreover, Trevor, the narrator’s lover, is characterized as “the hunter,” “the carnivore” but who would never eat veal because “ the difference between veal and beef is the children [; t]he veal are the children”–Trevor’s toxic masculinity embedded in the “carnivore” is offset/destabilized by his (homo)sexuality in his refusal to eat “veal”  (155). The narrator’s real name is never revealed—instead, he is referred to as “Little Dog,” a term of endearment as well as of protection his maternal grandmother fashions for him, so that the evil spirits (who only hunt for pretty and strong children), will hear it and think him diminutive and leave him alone. Thus, the narrator is also characterized by the animal.

Alongside the human history of migration and the human character, the evocation of animality is also the warning for environmental disasters.  The narrator’s grandfather laments that the bees “are dying and how, without them, the country would lose its entire food supply in less than three months” (53). When Trevor and Little Dog first have anal sex, it was outside the barn; amid coitus, hovering above them were moths; however, “[t]he pesticides left over from the fields killed [the moths] soon as they placed their mouths on the leaves” (203). So, the act of human pleasure exists alongside the destruction of animals. In the trope of animality, the narrator doesn’t just use animals to think of humans’ life, but he highlights also the violence humans have enacted upon animals’ life, and subsequently the Earth they inhabit.

Work Cited: Vuong, Ocean. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. Penguin Books, 2019.

I looked at the article, “How to Make a National Cuisine: Cookbooks in Contemporary India”, written by Arjun Appadurai and identified the conflicting binary of a national and local cuisine in Indian cooking. Appadurai notes the growth of a national cuisine in India that “permits the growing middle classes of Indian towns and cities to maintain a rich and context-sensitive repertoire of culinary postures, whereas in the matter of marriage, there is the stark and usually irreversible choice between staying within the ambit of caste rules or decisively, permanently, and publicly breaking them” (Appadurai 7). The transcendence of recipes across class systems has allowed the distribution of food and knowledge amongst specific groups to others, causing there to be more freedom amongst the culinary repertoire that a woman has, but also easily complicates the usage of more traditional recipes. Wives are caught in this predicament of learning new recipes and implementing old ones to please the multitude of members in their families. Appadurai asserts that “[f]ood in India is closely tied to the moral and social status of individuals and groups. Food taboos and prescriptions divide men from women, gods from humans, upper from lower castes, one sect from another” (Appadurai 10), so the appearance of a national cuisine grants more social mobility and tolerance towards class systems in India.  

Appadurai then goes on to describe the local cuisines that are present in India and their importance. Local cuisine is something that is featured in the more common of food culture in Indian history, due to its strict view on the act of eating. Local cuisine includes the entirety of all of Indian’s different religious, classist, and other demographic factors in specific foods to certain geographical locations in India. Local cuisine in cookbooks allows for its authors to indulge in sharing their own experiences and a unique outlook on food and cooking, but national cuisine pushes these specific foods and experiences into one category, which “does not mean that the humbler traditions have no cookbooks (theirs are frequently in the relevant vernacular), but they are losing in the struggle for a place in the cultural repertoire of the new national (and international) middle classes” (Appadurai 18). This causes complications for the writing and proliferation of Indian cookbooks, as it negates or does not feature a crucial aspect of Indian food culture, which are the oral accounts that has been passed from mother to daughters, aunt to niece, and most women who reside India or who are of Indian descent. 

This tension between these two different cuisines is also relevant as it connects to postcolonialism, as the newer stride towards a national cuisine appeals to a westernized audience as it encompasses the whole country of India in a single entity and therefore eliminates so much history present in the country by becoming more manageable for its foreign readers of Indian cookbooks. Appadurai speaks of this point at the end of his article, but to expand on his thoughts, by ignoring the rich culture of differences in India and apply that to cookbook, reinforces a colonialist narrative as the cookbook author is changing aspects of themselves and their culture to suit Western readers. 

Appadurai, Arjun. “How to Make a National Cuisine: Cookbooks in Contemporary India.” Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 30, no. 1, Cambridge University Press, 1988, pp. 3–24, doi:10.1017/S0010417500015024.

Throughout Beloved, Toni Morrison uses the supernatural to trigger moments of Sethe’s past that simultaneously haunt and heal her. Specifically, she does this by fashioning Beloved as a ghost, who haunts Sethe and her home at 124 until she is resurrected into a physical, embodied representation of her dead child at the age she would have been in the present time. Denver hypothesizes that “Beloved was the white dress that had knelt with her mother in the keeping room, the true-to-life presence of the baby…” (140-1). However, it is unclear whether Beloved is necessarily “real,” as she is described several times as frankly creepy and bizarre in mannerisms. For example, there are repeated sounds of a baby crawling even though there isn’t one in the house, and Sethe notices that when Beloved walks, “they ought to heard her tread, but they didn’t” (118). There is an ominous and almost “witchy” presence associated with her, especially when considering her resurrection. Beloved is also violent at times, as she possesses Paul and attempts to choke Sethe in the clearing scene. Morrison writes that Beloved feels frustration that “she had been so close, then closer,” in murdering Sethe, implying that she is there with some kind of malicious intent (118).

However, upon Beloved’s mystical entrance, Sethe immediately sympathizes and feels a connection to the girl, providing her care and shelter while she regains her health. Beloved is able to gain Sethe’s trust, and is able to somehow unlock memories that have been repressed by Sethe for so long as a means of coping. It is clear that Beloved has some means of manipulating the emotions of others in ways that can be toxic and forced, like in the case of Paul, which makes me wonder if this immediate trust Sethe has for Beloved is forced and for some ulterior motive or authentic. Regardless, because of this sense of trust, Beloved is able to get the story behind Sethe’s diamond earrings out of her, even though she had never been able to tell Denver about the earrings before. After Beloved chokes Sethe, Beloved is also the one that soothes her; “… she was feeling so fine letting Beloved massage away the pain, the fingers she was loving and the ones that had soothed her before they strangled her had reminded her of something that now slipped her mind” (115). She triggers memories through questions and instances such as this one often for Sethe, similarly to how Paul begins to trigger memories of Sethe’s past at Sweet Home. Overall, Beloved simultaneously serves as a violent and ominous ghost of Sethe’s past, but also allows her to reckon with the past in a way that is (hopefully) healing by forcing her to literally face and vocalize memories that have been blocked away.

One major pattern I’ve noticed in Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved is the emphasis on questions surrounding bodily autonomy.  The work questions whether the characters have control over their own bodies and also whether some seem to exert control over other characters’ bodies as well as their own.  A clear example of this emphasis appears when Baby Suggs describes being free for the first time.  She states, “‘These hands belong to me.  These are my hands’” (Morrison 166).  Morrison continues this thread saying, “Next she felt a knocking in her chest and discovered something else new: her own heartbeat” (166).  When Baby Suggs truly acknowledges her own freedom, she feels in control of her own body for the very first time and can claim it.  As an enslaved person, she had little control over her body and therefore, feels a physical difference once free.

There is a complex relationship with bodily autonomy in this work.  Morrison emphasizes bodily control in passages like the one mentioned, while also highlighting how other characters seem to lack control or lose control in brief moments.  When Sethe sees Beloved for the first time, she is suddenly overwhelmed with the urge to pee and can barely control her body.  She describes this sudden problem as “unmanageable” (Morrison 62).  Again later, Sethe feels as though she is being choked.  With no one around her, she cannot seem to force her own airway to clear.  This can be attributed to ghosts or supernatural behavior, but even still, Morrison emphasizes a helplessness that characters seem to face in terms of their own body, while others have more freedom.  Perhaps, the question of bodily autonomy can be taken even further to follow the main mystery of the novel, which surrounds the death of the baby.  At the end of the reading for this week, we learn that Sethe killed her own child, Beloved, and had planned to kill the other children when the white men arrived.  Children are in a sense an extension of the parents, a piece of a mother lives inside her child.  Therefore, when Sethe kills Beloved, she is partially killing herself, or a part of her own body.  This can be extended further to question whether the act changes Sethe’s physical appearance somehow.  When Paul D looks at the newspaper, he repeatedly states, “That ain’t her mouth” (Morrison 181).  He may be in denial about Sethe’s actions, but he does claim that the mouth of the woman photographed looks different than the one he remembers.  The actions Sethe took against her child, an extension of her own self, perhaps, altered the state of her body.  The forced control Sethe enacts perhaps leads to her future feeling of helplessness and lack of bodily autonomy, such as the moment when she is strangled.  Her body seems to have agency, yet rebel against itself, and change without her control.