Thanks to the texts I’m reading this semester—specifically Pynchon and Yeats—I’ve had to pay more attention to phallic imagery than ever before. I started to pick up on some of this imagery in Toni Morrison’s Jazz, but I also noticed another kind of imagery, one that I didn’t immediately have a word for. I began to wonder what the female equivalent was of “phallic.” I expressed this curiosity to Brianne and she beat me to the Google-search-bar, sending me a few different links to websites discussing this exact topic. It seems that the choices we’re given are either the word “yonic” or “yoni” which originates in Sanskrit, or the currently more common word “vulvic.” Continue reading “The Yonic and the Phallic”
Meter in Paradiso – Emphasis on the _____?
Hi all!
We have been talking a lot about how Dante is constantly romanticizing Beatrice, constantly proclaiming his love for her. A great example of this occurs pages 213-214 when Dante says:
“Those loving words made me turn round to face/ my Solace. What love within her holy eyes/ I just saw then–too much to be retold.”
Dante calls Beatrice his “solace” defined by dictionary.com as: “something that gives comfort, consolation, or relief.” Therefore, Beatrice allows Dante to feel calm. While looking up this definition, I notices that the stress for the word “solace” is at the beginning of the word: sol-is. Continue reading “Meter in Paradiso – Emphasis on the _____?”
Nicodemus
Today in class Dr. McCoy brought up the town Nicodemus. This really sparked my curiosity, what did it have to do with Paradiso, with Paradise?
Nicodemus is a region of land that is not governed by its own local government but rather by larger administrative divisions. It was founded in 1877 and was named after Nicodemus. Nicodemus was a name of two people a biblical figure and an African slave prince. Nicodemus, the biblical figure, after the crucifixion brought the customary spices to prepare Jesus’s body. Nicodemus also had a discussion with Jesus about being born again. Because of this conversation with Jesus he was a model of rebirth to African Americans after the civil war. Nicodemus was also the name of a legendary figure who came to america on a slave ship and then later was able to purchase his freedom.
Nicodemus Kansas was settled by free slaves after the civil war. Most of the slaves that came were from Kentucky, and their goal was to establish the first all black settlement of the great plains. The town thrived in the beginning but then rough winters that killed crops led them to decline in their population. Today the population of Nicodemus Kansas is only 52 people, which was surveyed in 2000. Clearly a small town, but it is very cool to see that the first ever town created by freed slaves still exists.
Humanities for the Hood
Since the first day of class when I found out that Toni Morrison claims to write for Black people, I have been dissecting her works in search of any indications as to why. I wondered if Morrison’s claim to write for Black people was a way of turning her work into forbidden fruit for non-Black people, especially White people, enticing them to read it. I also pondered on the possibility that Morrison makes Black people her target audience to eliminate the notion that reading is a White thing, and to get them to read.
On my quest, I have landed on another theory. Continue reading “Humanities for the Hood”
Interdisciplinary Connections on the Limits of Language
** preface – this is about the inability of language to accurately capture and convey ideas, which really comes through in the writing of this post, so please bear with me**
As I sat in my political science class discussing postpositivist international relations (IR) theory, I was struck by the similarities to the conversation that we had on Wednesday about the inability of language to capture concepts/beliefs/ideologies. Continue reading “Interdisciplinary Connections on the Limits of Language”
Touching on the Importance of Numbers in Dant3’s Divin3 Com3dy.
I’m going off of a lesson on Inferno when I took Hum I back in the summer of 2014, but I feel this is an interesting aspect worth sharing.
Dante is big on numbers throughout The Divine Comedy, especially with the number 3 and the “Perfect Number” (100). Almost everything is in sets of 3. The Divine Comedy is split into 3 books (Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso), each consisting of 33 cantos (With the exception of Inferno, which has 34, but I’ll get to that in a moment), with each canto made up of lines in sets of 3. That’s 99 cantos overall, and with the aforementioned introductory canto of Inferno, which, as it’s only an intro and doesn’t technically count as a part of the whole, existing almost outside of the work, the count is brought to 100.
One of the most surprising aspects of this, however, is the syllable count. Every line of Inferno was 11 syllables (That’s 33 syllables for every set of three lines now) and the translation (At least the Mark Musa one I had at the time) was respectful of this. That being said, the trend seems to be less prevalent in Paradiso, and I’m having some trouble finding reliable (Not on Wikipedia) information to develop this further. If anyone knows anything else about this, feel free to chime in. I found it fascinating, and I haven’t really had a chance to study it since the last two years.
In any case, it highlights Dante’s meticulousness when it comes to language, which we mentioned in class. I’m also curious if we’ll see anything similar in Morrison’s Paradise–specifically with numbers, as the attention she pays to words is startlingly apparent throughout her work.
Shadows and Lights
While reading the first nine Cantos of Dante’s Paradiso, I was reminded of shades/ombras/shadows by the contrasting lights.
When he spoke with us, Dr. Herzman referenced the biblical Paul’s letter to the Romans, how it mentioned that God left traces of himself in the universe to lead us back to him. With this, we were discussing the first few lines in the first Canto:
The glory of the One Who moves all things
penetrates all the universe, reflecting
in one part more and in another less. Continue reading “Shadows and Lights”
(Re)mobilizing Death: Ghosts, Zombies, and Memory as Biopolitcal Dispositive
After a helpful discussion with Dr. McCoy regarding my last post—specifically my comment about Tupac in The Devil in Silver—in which Dr. McCoy suggested that I consider similar strange intertextualities as “ghostly allusions,” the specifics of my research project have seemingly fallen into place. At first, I wasn’t entirely sure what to make of these “ghostly allusions,” so I went home and did some research on the significance of ghosts in literature; I found a dissertation titled “Ghost Novels: Haunting as Form in the Works of Toni Morrison, Don DeLillo, Michael Ondaatje, and J. M. Coetzee,” and although the essay focused on ghosts as a postmodern reproduction and repetition of images created by various visual technologies, its focus on the theoretical discourse of ghost narratives and hauntology was supremely insightful, and synthesized many sources that I otherwise would have had to labor over on my own.
Continue reading “(Re)mobilizing Death: Ghosts, Zombies, and Memory as Biopolitcal Dispositive”
Tony Morrison teaches us Humanities
On Monday Dr. McCoy put us into groups and asked us to discuss any remaining questions we had about Jazz, after we had finished reading the last chapter in class and finishing the novel. We began talking about who/ what the narrator was in the story, we came to the conclusion that the narrator was actually the book talking to us. At one point in the beginning of the novel when the narrator is introducing itself to us it says something along the lines of being used to not being used until after dinner, and when it is used the person often falls asleep before they can finish using it (I can’t remember the exact page we found this evidence on). Also when we finished reading the final chapter aloud it finishes with the words ” But I can’t say that aloud; I can’t tell anyone that I have been waiting for this all my life and that being chosen to wait is the reason I can. If I were able I’d say it. Say make me, remake me. You are free to do it and I am free to let you because look, look. Look where your hands are. Now.” (pg. 229). As a group we believed that this was the book telling us that we are the ones with the power to change who we are the book will forever ever the same words it can never be changed, but the book can change us as people. Alpha had the thought that Toni Morrison writes black humanities. She puts stories that can help to show us the defaults in humans, and what we can do to change it. She is the modern day Sophocles, Dante.
Because Morrison wrote her Trilogy based on Dante’s divine comedy, I decided to do some research on how Dante’s Divine Comedy has been related to humanities. I found an article in the Wall Street Journal titled ” The Ultimate Self-Help Book: Dante’s “Divine Comedy”, written by Rod Dreher. The author said that calling “The Divine Comedy” a self- help book “is almost the point of blasphemy”, but he goes onto say that Dante believed this himself which was shown in a letter he wrote to Can Grande Della Scala, in the letter he said “to remove those living in this life from a state of misery and lead them to a state of bliss.” How Dante does this according to the author is he makes us reflect upon our own life’s when reading it, which I believe can also be said about Toni Morrison’s Trilogy.
The article:
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303663604579503700159096702
On the discourse of punishment…
Bryan Stevenson is a lawyer and activist that fights for what goes unnoticed in our justice system. But alongside this, Stevenson works to reteach American history… Stevenson forces his audience to remember the amount of black bodies that have been lynched and enslaved in our country’s history by demanding that we build them memorials and museums. One of the ways I was introduced to him was by watching this TED Talk at the museum I worked at last summer. It motivated me to rethink the ways that my education has been framed and I hope it will do the same for those of you who choose to watch it as well.