Over the past week, I have been reading and working through taking the first look at the texts we will start working on in AP Lit throughout the next chunk of the school year. It was a very different approach I had to take while reading these texts than it was with reading Scott and Greenblatt earlier this year. With Scott and Greenblatt, they were talking about other pieces of art, and analyzing it and trying to teach the reader how to interact with art they find and also how to interact with their lives. They had a point that however difficult to discover, was placed carefully in the text. It was helpful going into these texts with pointers on how to interact with art, but it was a completely different approach that had to be taken, as these are raw texts without context, just the art to be interpreted by us. I had to make sure to read it less closely, and instead of paying attention to specific words, I tried to connect with overall concepts, and how they formed the stories told in the texts.
I think it was very interesting to actually read in-depth about the stories I had heard more on a surface level. It was much more compelling to actually understand the stories more. I found the story of Paradise Lost especially interesting. I have heard the story of Adam and Eve before, but this rendition of it gave more than I had before. I now was able to understand the multiple viewpoints at work during this story, like God, Satan, Adam, Eve, the angels, and others. Seeing those viewpoints and how they work together to create the story we all know made me able to connect with every one of the figures discussed and realize how full of substance the story is. I found it interesting to look at a few different versions of a similar general story, as I could pay attention to what remained similar throughout each of them. Each of the stories discusses the earth's creation, and what happened after this with regards to man and god. I discovered a structure that remained true in most of these stories. It begins with the unformed, as the earth his not been created yet. Then with the help of God or gods, Order is created. With the order, there is joy and beauty everywhere. Then what some of these texts discussed which others did not was that there was some sort of corruption. The corruption is lead by some sort of desire, evil intent, or even through the workings of Satan. This corruption turns into chaos, which includes war and death. Then God intervenes, either by confronting satan or creating a flood to destroy the evil. After this, there is Order again until corruption ensues. This structure is logical for finding an explanation for our universe. It teaches the lesson to remain ungreedy and uncorrupt in order to maintain what we have on earth that is so beautiful.
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This year in AP lit so far has been interesting and taught me a lot about close reading difficult text. Throughout this school year, I have been able to attain new skills of reading comprehension that will be helpful to me to read the next texts we will encounter throughout the school year. I am excited for what to come in the rest of this year in AP lit because I have enjoyed looking at all of the texts so far. This year I have realized that going back and trying to retain more meaning from a text when rereading can be incredibly valuable when studying complicated texts. I loved starting the year off talking about A.O. Scott’s Better Living Through Criticism because of the rich concepts that our class was able to find while looking at it beyond the surface level. Over the summer when reading Scott, I found that I understood a good bit of what he discussed on the surface level, but going back over it, again and again, allowed me to understand his underlying intentions. I believe the way Scott uses concepts from across history to teach his audience about criticism, how criticism is used, and how to criticize, is compelling. I find the way he does this to be interesting because he never comes right out and says what he is attempting to do, but instead leaves clues for the readers who are truly determined to find his arguments. One concept Scott went into which I found particularly interesting was his discussion of the good, beautiful, and agreeable, which I have included a picture from my commonplace book about. The structure represents the three different categories of aesthetic experience, and how a piece of art or moment can affect someone. At the bottom of the triangle is the agreeable, which represents superficial experience and just regular fun. This is at the bottom because it does not warrant any real thinking or response. Then in the middle is the beautiful, which represents pleasure and finding beauty and having a response to art at the moment. Then at the top is the good, which is when an aesthetic experience warrants a moral or ethical change and causes someone to change their life. One distinction he made which I found interesting was that the good might be less enjoyable than the beautiful or agreeable, but it is nevertheless more important. After we moved on from talking about Scott, we went on to talk about Stephen Greenblatt’s Better Living Through Criticism. When I read Greenblatt over the summer, I was completely lost, and could not derive any real meaning from it by myself. Even the first couple of days we were looking at it as a class, I was not able to understand much of it but as we went over it more I was able to pick up on more and see the importance of the book. Just within the past week though, once we have started to talk about Greenblatt’s true meaning behind the writing, I have finally started to truly respect and enjoy Greenblatt’s work. I have included my first drafts of the diagrams representing the relationships happening in self-fashioning. The first diagram is what I believe to be a representation of the process of self-fashioning and the rest represent the relationships between the specific parties involved in self-fashioning. The diagrams are all based off of the ten conditions of self-fashioning that Greenblatt lays out. I believe these drawings give an interesting look at self-fashioning although they are not a final product that fully represents every one of the conditions.
As school is approaching, I have completed all of the reading in the commonplace book in addition to five of Maria Popova’s Brain Picking Pieces. I have greatly enjoyed the reading in this section as most of the sections have inspired me to take a step back and think. I loved “A More Beautiful Question.” It helped me realize that is not only ok, but actually helpful to ask questions in order to learn more about the world. Being curious and willing to admit that you don't know everything is important so that you can learn more and be a more meaningful thinker. The part of this chapter that impacted me the most was the story of the creator of Polaroid cameras. The fact that a question from his daughter was what inspired him to create a camera that instantly processed images. It was important to see the world from a more naive standpoint in order to create something so revolutionary as the polaroid camera. I also thought the conversation about children's learning was particularly fascinating. It is devastating to hear that the way school's are continuing to be taught is in fact squandering children's curiosity. I believe it is important to teach in a way that encourages the asking of questions and discovering new things through experimentation and freedom. This is especially important for children who are learning to discover themselves and the world around them
I included two of the commonplace pages I wrote about A More Beautiful Question in this blog post. The first includes some quotes I found important from the chapter in addition to a chart included in the book that I found somewhat concerning. The chart I included depicts how engaged on average students are in a school setting. The first plot point is elementary school children. These students were actually found to be the most engaged, with an average of 76% engagement. THe numbers went down to 61% in Middle School and then 44% in High School. I found this chart to make sense as I have experienced this change among my peers as this has happened. Although it does make sense, I do not believe it necessarily should, as all points in education prove important to the progress of students in their lives. If changes were made to the education system that encouraged questioning and discovery, I think these numbers would prove to be a little better. The second page I included began with something I wrote that I gathered from the reading, which is that school was created to make workers and perform like a factory. I found this to be interesting and also true in many cases. Much of school feels like the preparation for the next step, instead of truly staying where it is and learning what is actually important. At this point in the summer I am getting excited for the year to come. I have enjoyed all of the reading, and hope the reading later in the year will be similar in style and in how much it makes me think. I cannot wait to learn about more of these writers and read new styles of literature that I have not before. Since I completed writing the previous blog post, I have since completed the selections from Better Living Through Criticism by A. O. Scott. I found the chapters included in this selection captivating and interesting to read. I had an especially strong connection to the chapter Lost In The Museum while reading it, as I had just recently visited The Louvre. Being able to make a comparison to Scott’s opinions about The Louvre and my own made the chapter easier to relate to than the other selections in the reading. Scott explains that “we are here because everyone else is here too, and has already been here,” meaning that the main reason anyone ventures into The Louvre is to be included into what most people have already seen and what is talked about all around the world. Free will is perhaps only an illusion for some people visiting The Louvre, as they are driven to see only the famous pieces like the Mona Lisa, and only visit The Louvre because of its fame. This section makes me wonder how many of the people in The Louvre everyday are actually motivated by themselves to see art they enjoy or motivated to see the famous pieces that they have heard about from the popular world. His considerations of different types of art was also particularly interesting. Scott talks about music as the purest form of art, because it evokes emotion without using words, it is only abstract. Other art forms like poetry and writing still bring out emotion, but in a less abstract way and with more structure, are sometimes considered less pure.
The first page out of my commonplace book I am including in this blog post was one that I was creating based on the idea artistic treasures of our civilization. In this page I included a few quotes from A. O. Scott as well as a sketch I created. The sketch I drew has “Treasures of Civilization” in the center, and is surrounded by the words, domination, exploitation, appropriation, objectification, money, and power. I created this because in many of the pieces we might see in a museum that are considered the treasures of our civilization have these things connected to them. So many of the things that have stayed in fame throughout the years were created by powerful members of society using these motivations. I included a few quotes on the page that contribute to this idea. The second page from my commonplace book include a few more quotes about art from Living Through Criticism. One I find interesting is “We vote online or at the box office, and our hive-mind tendencies are collated and packaged and fed back to us.” This is referring to how societies decide what attains popularity and what art is created. A movie that gains a lot of attention from viewers and critics is more likely to have a sequel than one that received less fame. I also found Scotts comparison of peoples reactions in The Louvre interesting, which is why I included the sketch at the top, which shows that someone who visits The Louvre might experience aesthetic bliss, boredom, neither, or somewhere in between. At this point I am getting excited for what is to come in AP lit. I have enjoyed the reading so far and hope to enjoy what the rest of the packet has to offer. I want to learn in AP lit how to better process my reactions to text and use that knowledge to delve deeper into the texts we encounter later in the year. = At this point in my reading, I have made my way through the chapter of Better Living Through Criticism by A. O. Scott titled “The Eye of The Beholder.” The reading has impacted me in the way that it has taught me to rethink the way society, myself included, experience art in its many shapes and forms. Pieces that are considered art are not considered that because of what they are, but instead because of the way they make people feel. I enjoyed the way Scott went into Marina Abramovic's The Artist is Present, where Abramovic was stationed in an art gallery for visitors to sit facing her for a short amount of time. The reason it was considered art was because of the way people reacted to it. Many had incredibly emotional reactions to it and some started to cry. Although there was such simplicity in sitting across from a seated woman, the way it caused people to feel made it quite complicated. I also find Scott's commentary on emotions and feelings compelling. It is interesting to think about what people like, as the things that I like could be and are completely different than many other people in the world. A song that I find compelling or emotional could bore many and be hated by others. Although I have always known taste is unique to everyone, I have never thought about it's extremely personal and unpredictable nature. One day I could enjoy one thing and the next I could dislike it completely.
In this page of my commonplace book, I decided to write a few quotes that spoke to me from the reading. The first quote I chose was “It’s beautiful because everyone thinks it is, and everyone thinks so because it is beautiful.” This discussion of beauty is interesting, as it suggests that everyone sees the same things as beautiful, and although this can be mostly true in some situations, overall it is false. Everyone has different standards of beauty and what one person could find stunning could leave another without any positive thoughts. The next quote, “we laugh, cry, declare ourselves moved or troubled or seduced, but why? And to what end?” left me particularly intrigued. It made me think about the great number of people who react in these ways to pieces of art or experiences. It also made me wonder if their reactions are genuine, and how and why pieces of art can affect people in these profound manners. In the other page of my commonplace book that I will talk about for this blog post, I drew a simple drawing including stick figures (I am not the best artist) that depicted what much of what the chapter was talking about. I drew two rectangles, which represent pieces of art. For the purposes of this drawing, it did not matter what the pieces looked like. The piece on the left is surrounded by people while the piece on the right had no one next to it. Around the page, I posed questions about which is beautiful and which is art. According to Scott, the one on the left would be considered art for the reason that it moves people. People are attracted to its subjective beauty and are therefore compelled by it, rendering it a piece of art. This first section of the reading has made me excited for this year in AP Lit. Throughout the year, I would like to analyze texts such as this and find a deeper meaning in it, with the help of a teacher and peers. In the classroom, I feel we will be able to delve deeper into the specifics of the writing, in order to analyze it completely. |
AuthorIsak Wall |