Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Defamiliarization

The extensive piceous compressed passage weaves in and out of the structures that appear in many different shapes and sizes. Most are box shaped but some are rectangle or round like a circle. Some are very very tall making them appear like they could maybe reach heaven they are so high. And in these different shaped structures many different size and shaped creatures go to and from them. Some very high, some low, some wide around the perimeter, and some threadlike around the perimeter. And besides the different amount of mass that these creatures possess, they also come in many different iridescence. Some are very aphotic in their iridescence, like they’ve been grazed from the golden sphere that sits high about the many shaped structures and many different masses of the multiple iridescent creatures. Some are almost lucent like they have never seen a day of the golden sphere in their existence. Others are a tinge between both, that appear to be somewhat grazed by the golden sphere above them. The creatures also have millions of fibers coming out from one side of the orb shaped ends of their frames. On the other side of the orb there appears to be two smaller orbs that vary in hues of each creature, just like the fibers and the outer covering of these creatures’ frames. The two small circles move around a lot, especially when the other creatures holler to them in their native language that involves a clacking and a clicking of the orb below these two colorful circles in what appears to be an opening. In which the creatures place many different objects into, such as other smaller creatures and substances that become larger, when liquid drawn from a body of hydrogen and oxygen is taken and descended onto the substances. And when the golden sphere spreads its irradiation upon the substance they evolve much faster. Above the opening on the orb of the creatures is an area of the creatures that protrudes outwards. It too contains two holes in which the creatures use to inhale the substances that appear from the crumbly dark entity below them.



Analysis # 2 - Sassure's Theory of the Sign

If Sassure were to view this blog on defamiliarization it would prove his theory of the sign. We all have a picture in our head of what a word means to us. We hear a certain word (the signifier) and think of an automatic picture (the Signified) in our mind of what that word means to us. The words I used in this blog such as creature (for human) and orb (for head) was not the usual signifier that we use to process the pictures of a human and a head that we associate with. Our associations of words and pictures make it so we tend to block out any other possible associations with the word. For example, “…it is clear that only the associations sanctioned by that language appear to us to conform to reality, and we disregard whatever others might be imagined” (Rivkin 61)

Formalism and its movements

The reading in Rivkin on formalism and how two significant movements in history during the twentieth century impacted literary criticism was very fascinating to me because I had not realized that language was not looked closely at. In fact I would have thought that language would have been the priority with all of the rhetorical influence of Shakespeare and many others authors before, compared to the content. It just would make more since that the priority would be on language structure and technique over content. However that was not the case apparently before these two movements. For the first movement they now placed literature as a separate entity from all the other forms of writing because it was not the same. Literature would now not be lumped in with all other writings but have its own separate means of criticism. For example, “The first movement was to attempt on the part of philosophers of science like Edmund Husserl to isolate objects of knowledge in their unmixed purity” (Rivkin 3). The second movement in criticism that changed was in looking at literature as a different kind of truth than the kind of scientific truths that could be measured by scientific methods. The idealist philosophers claimed that this kind of truth that literature provided was a kind of truth that could not be measured with scientific methods like they had tried to previously, due to the fact that they are what they considered connotative language. For example, “The second movement was the attempt on the part of idealist philosophers like Benedetto Croce to develop a new aesthetics, or philosophy of art, which would rebut the claim of science that all truth is grounded in empirical facts knowable through scientific methods” (Rivkin 23). These two major movements gave literature the respect that it deserved. It also developed the idea of defamiliarization which completely revolutionized the way of writing in that it defamiliarized the familiar words that we know by heart. This was accomplished by describing these familiar items and words in ways not done so before. Causing the reader to think harder to figure out what the author is trying to convey to his reader. For example, “Perhaps their most famous general claim is that literary language consists of an act of defamiliarization, by which they mean that such literature presents objects or experiences from such an unusual perspective or in such unconventional and self-conscious language that our habitual ordinary, rote perceptions of those things are disturbed” (Rivkin 4).

Wednesday, February 3, 2010

Analysis # 1- Aristotle's Aesthetic Theory

Aristotle’s Aesthetic Theory can be applied to the YouTube video “Fireflies” by Owl City through “…prescriptive criticism and description…whose object is to understand how poetry operates and the way in which it achieves its effects” (Murray xxx). It carries out this goal by invoking the audience that watches and listens to interpret or notice the world around them in order to really experience life and to question the dreams that we have so as to experience pleasure or pain. Aristotle finds our emotions that can be triggered by aesthetic appreciation of beauty as an advantage because we as human beings learn and grow through imitation or mimesis. For example, “…according to Aristotle, the ability to engage our emotions is an essential feature of tragedy, and one that is positively beneficial in its effects” (xxx). For example the singer is provoking the audience by saying “You would not believe your eyes if ten million fire flies lit up the world as I fell asleep” (fireflies). He is expressing to his audience the beauty that surrounds him that he is experiencing being apart of. Throughout the video everything is moving so quickly with the music as the chorus shouts, “That planet earth moves slowly”, maybe indicating to the audience that the singer is overwhelmed with life because it is moving by so quickly. The singer/songwriter is an imitator who has the freedom to express his/her ideas in many different ways that do not have to be exactly reality. In the video the singer is talking about his dreams that he sees and his thoughts which cannot be verified as real for his audience. For example Aristotle talks about this issue, “The artist can present things as they are, as they seem to be, or as they ought to be…hence what he offers is a re-fashioning of nature or experience rather than a straightforward copy” (xxxi)

Works Cited
Murray, Penelope. Classical Literary Criticism. Penguin Books: New York, 2004