To write without an audience in mind. You could be friends, strangers, or my future self reading this. How interesting.
Students are taught to analyze their audience before they put words on a screen or page.Writers are labeled as selling out if they write for their audience.
I
I am just writing. Opening up a conversation with you, with words, with the other personae in my mind.
So Wilkommen.
I suppose introductions are in order.
I am.
You are.
But to be more concrete--
I am wearing pajama pants, a black button down with a red silk tie, and a fauxhawk.
I am female.
I use words when they don't escape me.
I am listening to Oomph!
I took a break from reading Winesburg, Ohio when I saw a note to myself to start a blog.
What about you?
What do you want as a reader? What am I supposed to blog about.
I blog. You blog. He/She/It blogs.
What a funny word. Say it out loud, externalize it.
I am not quite sure what a blog is, but this is mine and input is welcome.
Hello Theresa,
ReplyDeleteI am interested in your answer to a specific question:
From a postmodern perspective, why do you believe we study literature?
Oh, postmodernism.
ReplyDeleteCan't that mean basically anything? A free for all, but somehow it has to hold up to an aesthetic undefined.
I think the basic answer is that we believe it shows us humanity.
Words get in the way of that though. Try looking through a text. You see a lot of words.
I study it for the tradition of words and ideas. Nothing really new can come out of humanity. We just survive to the best of our ability, trying to live how we see fit. It would seem that Post-Modernism was the "shock value" to literature. The Moderns wanted to "Make it new!" (Pound). The Post-Moderns kind of said "Fuck it" to everyone, including each other, and wanted to make parents cringe, professor search for meaning fruitlessly, and students to ask questions.
We do it because there is a drive in us to stabilize words, control them, because that is all we have. We look at our gods, the authors past and present, for answers we cannot find. We want to flip ahead in our own books of life, see the ending, and go back and change the plot.
We feel the same need as the Moderns and Post-Moderns to keep literature elitist, damn canon. We don't want the self (and media) deified scientists to pretend to learn of humanity. They can cure what plagues us but our own minds. Only we can find the cure, we the select few who wonder "Do I dare disturb the universe?"
Does that make sense? Or should I organize it better and into a blog?
Sincerely,
Theresa