Chartier
I enjoyed reading Chartier's The Practical Impact of Writing because it dealt a lot with the social aspect of reading and how writing influenced people. The first couple pages were a lot of figures to absorb, and I found myself scanning over the numbers. He illustrated a good point about writing and reading somewhere in all of those figures though, something I guess I never really thought of before - that someone can write something and not necessarily be able to read and vice versa - that someone who knows how to read does not necessarily know how to write. This was quite a shocker to me, I thought the two came hand in hand! It's hard to remember back to kindergarten and first grade, but I guess the two subjects were taught as two distinct things, but it's hard for me, personally, to seperate the two. In school, we are asked to write about what we read a lot, and I guess this has really affected my perception of the two subjects - its hard for me to seperate them, but when I really think about it, I guess I could get through life (in the 1500s-1800s) without knowing both.
Unequal Skills
I also liked how Chartier brought up differences between the sexes when it came to writing. As readers of the classics, the canon, whatever you wanna call it, this difference has been brought up, realized, and has become knowledge. As Chartier states, "writing was held to be a useless and dangerous skill for women to acquire." Dangerous!?!?! Men were probably afraid we'd expose their true nature... but I digress. Within this section, he doesn't only focus on men/women differences, but recognizes social rank and geographic location as well. Those who were higher up on the social scale had more access to literature than those who ranked lower and those living in cities were also more likely to be able to read and to write.
Family Reading & Reading Out Loud
When I was younger, I used to go to my grandparents' house once a week. They are lucky enough to posess a library in their house filled with all sorts of books. They really like poetry. Anyway, at least once every time I visited, either my brother or I would have to read something out loud to everyone. He really hated it; I kinda liked reading out loud. We also read privately while in each others company in the library. I really think these experiences contributed to my love of books and reading, for had it not been for my grandparents, I don't think I would have cultivated this taste for literature. Well, now my grandparents are both around 90 years old, and every night they still read to each other, mostly poetry, but I think they read novels aloud to each other as well. Reading out loud serves many purposes, but for us it was a way to just spend time together. We didn't always discuss the reading afterwards, but what mattered more was that we all were together. With the advent of television, and now the ultra-individualized computer culture, many lose these moments of pleasure shared with family. Sure, we share stuff on the web, but nothing compares with a quiet room ringing with one person's voice as the others are circled around, enraptured with what the person is reading.
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Fairy Tales & Children
Fairy Tales
I am currently in the process of reading the posted material for Thursday's class and feel the need to go ahead and comment on what I've read so far, even though I'm not quite finished yet. One of the points that Darnton brings up in Chapter 1 of The Great Cat Massacre, entitled "Peasants Tell Tales: The Meaning of Mother Goose" is the nonexistance of childhood as we know it in seventeenth and eighteenth century France. I took a children's literature course with Danielle Price over the summer of '08 and this concept of childhood was something that we studied in that class, also. There was no such thing as childhood for this period, no special literature or schooling or clothing or even a sense that children were more frail than adults and needed special care. This notion of childhood is something that has evolved over the centuries, and may have begun with Perrault's collection of fairy tales.
What is interesting to me, as it was in my previous class, is this distinction and while re-reading many of the old fairy tales, the sexuality and vulgarity of the stories fascinates me because today, many people would never think to expose their children to the original fairy tale texts. I had a personal experience with this one day while my older sister was at my house and brought her seven year old daughter along. While my sister was using my computer (she had just been released from her job and was using my pc for a job search) I felt compelled to amuse the 7 year old with reading out loud rather than just putting Nickelodeon on the television and letting her numb her mind. I don't have much children's literature in my collection, so I grabbed The Classic Fairy Tales, edited my Maria Tatar, a leftover collection from my Children's Lit. class. As I began to read some of the tales, my sister slowly turned from the computer and informed me that she really didn't appreciate me exposing her daughter to some of the content of the fairy tales. I explained that this is what people in previous centuries considered acceptable for kids. However, in this age of speciality, where everyone belongs in a category, sometimes overlapping, "the child" is a phenomenon that has specialized literature and has become a very large demographic that marketers bombard on an everyday basis. Children are targeted for sales and parents are especially aware of what their child is exposed to (or at least they try to be - with the internet, they have access to much more than their parents may be aware of).
I am not a parent, so my feelings towards coddling children are different for me than someone who is a parent, nevertheless children, in my view, should be exposed to some things. I think that we as a modern culture should be able to see children not as dumb little humans who need to be protected from all at the expense of their own knowledge, but explain why things are the way they are. They deserve that much from us- to recognize their capacity for understanding.
Oral Traditions
Now, back to the readings...
One of the most fascinating points I gathered from the readings was that although oral narratives have traveled through generations and throughout the world, much of the basic content stays the same. I think this says something for humanity - that we are all much more alike than we may think. The basic need for food comes up a lot in the oral traditions, even between the fairy tales and the slave narratives. Most of the narratives are centered around the acquisition of food. I guess I never really noticed this before...
My only complaint is that in Lawrence Levine's Black Culture and Black Consciousness, Chapter 2: "The Meaning of Slave Tales, in the section "The Slave as Trickster" he seemed to re-tell the stories and not really get into what they meant to him. I enjoyed learning some of the tales, don't get me wrong, but it seemed as though he was just telling us the stories again.
My favorite part was how he acknowledged that different races and cultures use scripture for their own purposes. I am taking a course concerned with Jewish representation right now, and the same topic has come up. The African view that Cain was so scared of God finding out that he killed his brother that he turns white was amusing, yet totally plausible in its own way. In my Jewish representation class, we have touched on other scriptures that different cultures translate to fit their own set of values, like the story of Noah's three sons being used to uphold the practice of slavery (which was also mentioned in Levine's text).
I am currently in the process of reading the posted material for Thursday's class and feel the need to go ahead and comment on what I've read so far, even though I'm not quite finished yet. One of the points that Darnton brings up in Chapter 1 of The Great Cat Massacre, entitled "Peasants Tell Tales: The Meaning of Mother Goose" is the nonexistance of childhood as we know it in seventeenth and eighteenth century France. I took a children's literature course with Danielle Price over the summer of '08 and this concept of childhood was something that we studied in that class, also. There was no such thing as childhood for this period, no special literature or schooling or clothing or even a sense that children were more frail than adults and needed special care. This notion of childhood is something that has evolved over the centuries, and may have begun with Perrault's collection of fairy tales.
What is interesting to me, as it was in my previous class, is this distinction and while re-reading many of the old fairy tales, the sexuality and vulgarity of the stories fascinates me because today, many people would never think to expose their children to the original fairy tale texts. I had a personal experience with this one day while my older sister was at my house and brought her seven year old daughter along. While my sister was using my computer (she had just been released from her job and was using my pc for a job search) I felt compelled to amuse the 7 year old with reading out loud rather than just putting Nickelodeon on the television and letting her numb her mind. I don't have much children's literature in my collection, so I grabbed The Classic Fairy Tales, edited my Maria Tatar, a leftover collection from my Children's Lit. class. As I began to read some of the tales, my sister slowly turned from the computer and informed me that she really didn't appreciate me exposing her daughter to some of the content of the fairy tales. I explained that this is what people in previous centuries considered acceptable for kids. However, in this age of speciality, where everyone belongs in a category, sometimes overlapping, "the child" is a phenomenon that has specialized literature and has become a very large demographic that marketers bombard on an everyday basis. Children are targeted for sales and parents are especially aware of what their child is exposed to (or at least they try to be - with the internet, they have access to much more than their parents may be aware of).
I am not a parent, so my feelings towards coddling children are different for me than someone who is a parent, nevertheless children, in my view, should be exposed to some things. I think that we as a modern culture should be able to see children not as dumb little humans who need to be protected from all at the expense of their own knowledge, but explain why things are the way they are. They deserve that much from us- to recognize their capacity for understanding.
Oral Traditions
Now, back to the readings...
One of the most fascinating points I gathered from the readings was that although oral narratives have traveled through generations and throughout the world, much of the basic content stays the same. I think this says something for humanity - that we are all much more alike than we may think. The basic need for food comes up a lot in the oral traditions, even between the fairy tales and the slave narratives. Most of the narratives are centered around the acquisition of food. I guess I never really noticed this before...
My only complaint is that in Lawrence Levine's Black Culture and Black Consciousness, Chapter 2: "The Meaning of Slave Tales, in the section "The Slave as Trickster" he seemed to re-tell the stories and not really get into what they meant to him. I enjoyed learning some of the tales, don't get me wrong, but it seemed as though he was just telling us the stories again.
My favorite part was how he acknowledged that different races and cultures use scripture for their own purposes. I am taking a course concerned with Jewish representation right now, and the same topic has come up. The African view that Cain was so scared of God finding out that he killed his brother that he turns white was amusing, yet totally plausible in its own way. In my Jewish representation class, we have touched on other scriptures that different cultures translate to fit their own set of values, like the story of Noah's three sons being used to uphold the practice of slavery (which was also mentioned in Levine's text).
Sunday, September 13, 2009
My Howsam Dillema and the Ensuing Enlightenment
Our text for this week served as an introduction to book history and as we all are seeming to figure out, this is going to be complicated. Her attempt to present us a view of book history from three perspectives served as an organizing tool, yet this structure proposed differing views and sometimes things got murky and as a reader it all seemed very untrusting of itself. I'm sure she knows a lot about what she's talking about and her text was informative, yet as a student and possibly not the most informed person, I found it to be more about what other people thought than what she thought. As a historian, her view of book history is different than that of the bibliographers she talks about and other scholars too. But I think the way that she offers differing views shows just what is so hard about this discipline. I liked that the reading offered the different perspectives and I gained more insight into just what bibliographers do and also realized that book history isn't just about the cultural impact of books (as I thought) or just the dry information about what book was written when and by whom. As I am learning, it is about so much more, even about the history of printing and the mechanical process of creating a binded text. Yet the term "book history" in itself is misleading because its not just about the historical aspect of a book, because as Howsam states, the book is ever-changing.
I guess right now I could be writing a book of a sort.
The utter vastness that encapsulates the history of the book is something that I will personally be grappling with over the next 14 weeks or so, and I am excited to be taking this journey with so many other newbies.
I guess right now I could be writing a book of a sort.
The utter vastness that encapsulates the history of the book is something that I will personally be grappling with over the next 14 weeks or so, and I am excited to be taking this journey with so many other newbies.
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