Mrs. Dalloway is a novel written by Virginia Woolf in the early 20th century, after the first World War, detailing one day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, in which she prepares for a party.  We also learn of the struggles of Septimus Smith, a war veteran struggling with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, an infliction that eventually causes his suicide.  This subject matter is especially heady, since Woolf’s own death was a suicide, and her struggles with bi-polar disorder and depression is as researched and looked at as her work.  Deborah Kuhlmann, a literary critic, makes the argument that Septimus Smith and Clarissa Dalloway are leading parallel lives.  Their personalities contrast each other’s.  Clarissa is full of life and light, while Septimus is drowning.  Both, however, are struggling to find meaning in their lives.  Both Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Smith seem to be parts of Woolf.  Clarissa is an artist, in the that she revels in the world around her, almost sensually.  She has a tepid relationship with her husband and feel sexual feelings for Sally, a woman who attends the party.  She connects with the world as she cannot connect with the people around her.  Septimus is the darker side of that.  He is unable to connect with much of anything in the real world, instead remaining in his head and speaking to those already dead.  There are imperative similarities between them, though, which connect them and drive home the resolution of the novel, in Clarissa’s feeling of connection with Sepitmus. Continue reading →

I’m listening to a George Carlin bit about phrases that we use everyday, but don’t really comprehend the meaning.  This makes me think of postmodernism.  If you ask someone what postmodern means, you’ll probably get a weird look from them, a scoff, and then the word “meta” thrown in a couple times (meta being another one of those words that we all assume we know without really looking it up and studying it).  This chapter was especially funny for me to read, because they ask the very poignant question, “When did the modern period begin, much less end? Why weren’t we informed?”  (Something that sounds like it could have been coming out of Carlin’s mouth, by the way.)  In a way, as time goes on, we’re going to feel really silly for naming a period the “modernist” period.  What can we name the period after the “postmodernist”?  My money’s on the “hoverboard period,” because it’s 2011 and I was promised a hoverboard by now.

I also enjoyed the idea that “postmodern artwork foregrounds the complexity of our epoch, thereby remaining an elitists diversion for a leisure class of overeducated white folks who ‘get the joke.’”  (Seriously, did Carlin help edit and spruce up this chapter?)  In a way, it’s almost irritating to be apart of this postmodern world, where we are all so damn clever and funny and if you don’t understand the complexity of our references and symbolism, you need to study the list of awesome pop-culture (which consists of Doctor Who, Stephen Fry, Zooey Deschanel, anything by Joss Whedon, Kurt Vonnegut, etc).  I feel like postmodernism today, with shows like Community and Arrested Development, is turning into what happened when Rent first came out.  It was overblown and overexposed and all the white, yuppy people who were criticized by the play were seeing it, and making it into a big sensation.  It’s no longer a cool club.  It’s hipster culture.

I’m going to end this, because it’s turned into a clusterfuck of words and ideas.  Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go watch A Very Potter Musical and laugh at all the subtle little jokes no one else will get.

I love the quote by Howard Zinn in the back of hour history chapter, where he states what history can do to us.  It’s almost disparaging to think that even our own past can subjective instead of clear cut.  There was a woman, Meredith Maran, years ago, who accused her father of molesting her while she was a child.  She was a reporter at the time who had been doing news stories about molestations, and figured somehow then that she must have also been a victim.  She had nightmares about it, divorced her husband to marry a woman who was also an incest survivor.

She eventually realized that she falsely accused her father or molestation in the exact same way as she accused him.  She saw stories about fathers being released from jail, and realized she falsely accused her father.  This idea has always bothered me.  My father’s always been a shit-head to me, so it’s scary think that someone can completely mistake their own history and falsely accuse people.

It’s even more terrifying on a bigger scale, with entire countries could have completely skewed views on their own history.  We tell our kids about how we defeated those British bastards, when in fact it isn’t so black and white.  The conflict between Israel and Pakistan still is mind-boggling today.  I couldn’t fully explain it myself, but even the idea that one nation is unable to recognize the other, and disregard all of the history that has happened in that nation.

It’s interesting that one of the working questions in the ideology section is about conflicting roommates just are unable to see eye to eye.  In my Hinduism class, I recently wrote a paper on a personal and political situation, and how Hindu concepts apply to them.  For the personal, I wrote about my crazy-ass roommate from freshman year.  Long story short, she had admitted anger problems and somehow managed to convince herself that bringing in a random guy to our room at 2 in the morning when I’m sleeping is not only okay, but it’s rude of me to ask them to be quiet.  It still boggles my mind why she would think that, and the only explanation I can come up with is that she was using a defense mechanism because she was embarrassed…

Back to Hinduism.  There is a concept, “maya”, that says that everyone has a separate illusion of the world, and that illusion is our projection of our personal selves.  Essentially, nothing that we see in the world is actual truth, but projections that we create.  Before reading the ideology section, I had always thought that is was a concept that I couldn’t really apply to my life, since it mostly is an obstacle that one has to overcome in Hinduism, and that seems ridiculous to me.  But when reading about ideologies, it popped back into my head that we are essentially looking at an illusionary concept.  Everyone has a different ideology, and everyone has a different illusion that is projected on the world.  It’d just be interesting if someone could give us a straight answer as to how we could see past it, because it seems to be the root of most conflict and contempt in the world.

I also would like to point out that, despite us recognizing ideology, it’s still what we think before we think.  It’s

I have chosen “Mrs Dalloway” by Virginia Woolf for my research project.  The novel was first published in 1925.  “Mrs Dalloway”, as well as many other works by Virginia Woolf, are considered to be firmly in the canon, and Woolf herself is recognized to be one of the most prominent female authors in the canon.  Woolf’s notoriety is a big reason why I have chosen this work to study.  The text delves into many themes, including feminism and mental illness, the latter of these themes was very prominent in Woolf’s own personal life, with her struggle with bi-polar disorder.  The parallels between her own life and her works are fascinating, and I hope to explore it in my paper.

I have not studied this text formally, or done any research on it before, so I am looking forward to looking up the background of the text alongside a re-reading of the text.  “Mrs Dalloway” famously describes one day in the life of the middle aged Mrs. Dalloway as she prepares to host a party that night.  I would describe it as being more of a character study, looking at the protagonist’s life, as well as those around her (including those she never actually meets) in this post-war era of mis-treated mental illnesses and middle-age.

This was not my first choice of novel to study (my first choice being The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath) but upon trying to research my first choice, I was unable to come up with enough information dealing more strictly with the original text.  While there are plenty of texts to read concerning Virginia Woolf, many of which will come in handy while trying to fully understand the text itself, there are many sources to be found concerning mainly “Mrs Dalloway”.

I really enjoyed reading Bressler’s essay this week.  In the way it was structured, I had immediate answers to the questions he proposed (of course a text can have more than one goddamn valid interpretation!) but those quickly turned into questions where I wasn’t so sure (no, you don’t have to be a literary critic…except sometimes, when you do).  I appreciated that he went into the more specific definitions of the different houses of literary criticism, and even the psychology of it, where he delves into how our preconceived notions would change how we receive a text.

We discussed a little bit of this in class, which helped me understand what he meant a little more, though I still don’t understand how our preconceived notions really come into play when studying texts in college classes.  In most of the books I read for fun, I can definitely see how books I’ve read before affect my reading.  When I read The Hunger Games, I was predicting which characters would die and how it would all play out.  But when I first read The Stranger, my first brush into existentialism, I was completely clueless as to how the book would turn out.  It’s possible that the bit about preconceived notions was less about being able to tell how a book would turn out and more about how we respond to a book, but it just struck me as an unfair generalization to new experiences.

Literary criticism is almost described as a curse.  The text states that a “well-articulated literary theory” doesn’t believe in casual readings like I don’t believe in Santa Clause.  Other might believe in them, but they’re just young or stupid.  Suddenly, when I read a book and get pissed off, I have to look at why I was pissed off instead of just getting mad that the author decided to kill off main characters for no reason (screw you, Mockingjay!)  Instead of just feeling our feelings, regardless of the genre of reading, it’s expected to look at the underlying feelings.