Blog Report 3 - Zach Vance
In the last two blog reports that I wrote, I examined "The Lottery" and "Slaughterhouse Five" and gave my own interpretations of their meaning, somewhat in the style of the reader response school of criticism. Overall, however, I haven't directly related either of these pieces of literature to a form of criticism or a passage within Robert Dale Parker's handbook. In this report I hope to use passages and ideas from the textbook and connect them to a passage from the Walt Whitman poem "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry."
At the very beginning of the poem, Whitman (or whoever the narrator might be) says "Flood-tide below me! I see you face to face! Clouds of the west-sun there half an hour high-I see you also face to face." Here he gives personification to natural phenomena by claiming they have faces, with which they can be "face to face" with the narrator. Immediately following these lines is the sentence "Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes, how curious you are to me!" So we see Whitman address and give personal qualities to non-human things, such as water and clouds, but finds the actual persons within this story to be "curious." If one were looking at this from a New Criticism perspective, one might focus on the apparent paradox that these statements provide. Non-persons have personal qualities, and the actual persons are non-personal, in the same vein as Shakespeare's "Fair is foul, and foul is fair," referenced in the textbook on page 18.
A Structuralist critic would be able to glean something from this passage as well, as it demonstrates the quality of "binary opposition." Here, the natural is in opposition to the personal (clouds and flood-tides opposed to men and women), and the known is in opposition to the unknown (that which is directly addressed vs that which is "curious") within the same passage.
At the very beginning of the poem, Whitman (or whoever the narrator might be) says "Flood-tide below me! I see you face to face! Clouds of the west-sun there half an hour high-I see you also face to face." Here he gives personification to natural phenomena by claiming they have faces, with which they can be "face to face" with the narrator. Immediately following these lines is the sentence "Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes, how curious you are to me!" So we see Whitman address and give personal qualities to non-human things, such as water and clouds, but finds the actual persons within this story to be "curious." If one were looking at this from a New Criticism perspective, one might focus on the apparent paradox that these statements provide. Non-persons have personal qualities, and the actual persons are non-personal, in the same vein as Shakespeare's "Fair is foul, and foul is fair," referenced in the textbook on page 18.
A Structuralist critic would be able to glean something from this passage as well, as it demonstrates the quality of "binary opposition." Here, the natural is in opposition to the personal (clouds and flood-tides opposed to men and women), and the known is in opposition to the unknown (that which is directly addressed vs that which is "curious") within the same passage.
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