fractured rigidity

As ridiculous as this is going to sound, I never really thought the literary world was so gender-biased. Perhaps it is because I have seen a great deal female authors topping the bestsellers list that I never really thought to dig deeper into the history of the written word in regard to male and female contribution. Of course, since I started a Gender-Studies minor, I have learned a lot of things that I really never knew about.
Personally, I am quite excited that Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar's "Infection in the Sentence" manages to merge the two fields I enjoy into one argument. Issues surrounding gender are hot-button topics for me and I found the Gilbert and Gubar piece fascinating and appalling at the same time.
A single line (though there were many other potent moments as well) within the piece stood out to me. Gilbert and Gubar assert that "[The female writer's] battle, however, is not against he (male) precursor's reading of the world but against his reading of her" (452). This jarred me from the comfort and safety of 2011, and reminded me that how it is now is not something that simply occurred overnight. Because of what the societal social norms were, women were seen in an inferior light in contrast to men (an ideal that has not totally gone away, I feel inclined to point out) thus, female writers posed a challenge to those norms and threatened to upset the balance. Yet, to do so was quite difficult as Gilbert and Gubar point out, saying "Unlike her male counterpart, then, the female artist must first struggle against the effects of socialization [...]," which means that before she can even explore herself as an artist, she has to explore herself as a woman according to the socialization her society implements (451). It is challenging when a woman tries to break into a field dominated by men and governed by a male (patriarchal) mentality (for an example, women in the military). Of course, it is a struggle that has to start somewhere and usually, such bold attempts are usually hardest when they are first introduced. For this fact alone, I feel a great deal of respect for the female writers who pushed their way through, fracturing an old-school, rigid way of thought.

The Economical Need to Produce Hate

Nathan Asch's In Search of America is different from many of the polemical essays I have read from turn of the century authors because he gives attention to understanding why workers are being treated as poorly as they are.

One point I found insightful was his hypothesis that "The worse you exploit somebody, the worse you hate him. You have to. Your conscience wouldn't let you alone," (Asch 286). He puts the complex nature between people within a hierarchical system in simple terms, which makes it hard to argue against. When his audience reads that there are people living in houses without roofs in order to help the burgeoning capitalism of America they are going to want answers, and this explanation, in part, gives it to them. A common thought among those in support of capitalism is that there are always the haves and the have-nots, and this is okay because if you work hard enough and long enough you can have your fair share of the pie.

Asch's insight complicates that assertion when he quotes one of the owners of a large farming plot as saying about his tenant farmers, "'Those sons of bitches can live through anything. They've got hides like hogs,'" (Asch 286). His attitude is not one of fairness, but of superiority. When the owner dehumanizes his tenants in this way he is justifying the poor treatment (hatred) in order to maintain what would otherwise be seen as his unfair share of the fruits of their cooperative labor.

Descriptions of Bodies in Asch's "In Search of America"

One thing I found troubling in Asch's In Search of America was his descriptions of some of the workers he met.

Beginning in his descriptions of those he met in Garland, AK Asch has a pattern for what he is looking to show his readers. He consistently describes the reactions to his questions of those he meets, describes their working conditions, their housing conditions, and if he is able to go inside their homes he describes the make up of their family as well. This changes some, however, when he meets workers who are non-white. The same focus is given to the previously mentioned attributes of their lives, but he goes a step further with non-whites and goes into detail about their physical and genealogical differences from whites.

He describes the Mexicans he meets at a bar in Denver as having "Spanish eyes set in Indian faces, with strong hook noeses, high cheekbones, and always even on overalls and cheapest dresses a touch of color," (Asch 292). What image does "Spanish eyes" elicit for Asch's reader? What is an Indian face? Asch continues and describes another man, Aragon: "To me, everything about Aragon was amazing; this man whose face was of red copper, whose head was like an eagle's, whose shoulders were so wide that when he spread his arms to prove a spoken point he looked like an eagle with the wings outstretched..." (293).

Asch's descriptions of non-white bodies troubled me because I cannot tell whether it comes from a need to describe for a white audience, who may have never met a minority before, the workers he wishes them to sympathize with, or from racism. It seems to me to be partly both, because he certainly wishes for the reader to understand the people he describes, and uses the problematic language (describing a person using animal qualities) to show admiration for those he is meeting. Maybe a better question to ask would be why does he have to describe their bodies at all? What is Asch anticipating from his white audience?

Hierarchy and Complacency

When reading Nathan Asch's In Search of America I noticed a repetition of sentiments among the different classes of workers interviewed. One commonality Asch mentions is that the workers do not hate those who employ them. He says, "It wasn't the purchasing agent the men hated so much. It was the fact that the pay was small, and the week had been shortened to five working days, and the season was short, only a few months, and there were too many loggers for the work to be done..." (303). Early in the piece Asch explains that while the beet growers seemed to be disenfranchising the Mexicans they hired, they too were victims of the larger sugar companies who they worked for.

It seems that Asch went out in hopes that he would be able to show the rest of America a picture of the hard working class that would cause outrage and change in their treatment. The workers hated their bosses because they were evil, greedy men out to get theirs, and America needed to rally behind the poor. What Asch found, however, was more complicated than that. The reality of the situation was not only that corporations were stealing rightfully earned money from the poor (they were) and government intervention would save the people from poverty, and it wasn't that the people needed to be reminded of the fact that they are at the bottom of a food chain that does not have their best interests at heart.

One worker, a black man, helped illustrate this point when he said, "'I was trained by Southern white folks, and I know my place. Maybe if I had been trained up North, I'd have been different. but I'm here, and I know my place and I keep it," (Asch 288). The reality that Asch was confronted with shows how difficult it is for people to rise out of disadvantaged positions, and how difficult it is for outsiders to truly appreciate this.

Writers Fictionalize Themselves For Effect

Fictionalized writing, as Campbell calls it, is a "performative text", that is a text that through is fiction gains the agency to become effective (13). In her example, Gage fictionalizes the voice of Sojourner Truth by giving it an "African dialect" in text. This deformed narration was not intended to debase the speech of Truth but was rather necessary "to express the feelings of an angry, contemporary black women" (13). In this way Gage is not only fictionalizing her audience but also playing a fictional writer role.

Ong states that the "reader has to play the role in which the author has cast him" (12). This is obviously true, or else how could someone reading say Crime and Punishment relate to Raskolnikov without first placing themselves in 19th century Russia. The reader is constantly forced to "play the game of being a member of an audience that 'really' doesn't exist" (12). But mustn't the writer play this same game? Mustn't too the writer fictionalize himself as the speaker in an audience that doesn't really exist?

Writers must adopt the voice of their narrator, it must become their voice for the span of the book. For Gage, this meant narrating Truth's speech in the voice of a stereotypical black slave. As opposed to a plain narration of the speech, which would only attest to Truth's wit and speaking skills, Gage's adaptation becomes a "vehicle" for a meaning much more important and effective. "The stereotypes that gave rise to penning the speech in this demeaning argot ironically give the text special force" (14).

Often writer fictionalization is necessary for the piece to be effective. It gives the text that"special force". And if the reader is assumed to be a fiction then the writer should assume this same fiction to create a better writer-reader companionship of which Ong stresses. The Truth speech is a great example of this. Through this fictionalization, Truth becomes not the voice of herself but more importantly "the experiences and history she most embodied, that are rendered more perfectly in language that expresses so painfully the terrible costs of slavery" (14). Gage's rendition is necessary for the reader to experience this "loss". The writer must fictionalize himself in the act of writing to create a work worthy of and effective in reader fictionalization.

Showing the Insides

In Nathan Asch's "In Search of America," the narrator's journey is an educational one. His goal to "really find out how they live... What they eat and how they sleep, and what they talk about" refers not only to the sharecroppers he is seeking at that particular moment, but all of the people struggling in arduous circumstances whom he meets over the course of the story (285).

The narrator's notion of "them" initially puts distance between himself and the very people he attempts to understand. This is made especially clear as he converses with a laborer: "I said, 'I don't see how you people can live here.' The Negro said, 'We don't live here. We're just here.' " The narrator, too, is not living here where destitute families work for poor pay and uninhabitable conditions but is merely "just here"; rather than this being a point on which the narrator can connect with the laborers, both fail to engage.

As he travels, the narrator learns more about the problems and hardships of Depression workers, including hired beet harvesters, Mexican laborers, and loggers. He learns all of the things about him that he first set out to discover from visiting places where "if I stayed there another hour I didn't want to live" (302). But it is not until he ventures to Grand Coulee -- a place where he is assured he will be hated, and possibly assaulted, for being in a better state than the people there -- that he learns the true way these poor people live.

Instead of meeting with danger, the narrator meets a drunk who confides in him: "I'm a poet...I'm alone a lot. It comes out in words, sort of" (305-306). This is precisely what the narrator has been doing; traveling by himself and writing about his impressions and opinion of what he sees. But he writes for a newspaper, meaning that every word is intended for the eyes of others. This poet declares that his writings are "for nobody to read...I do it for myself" and that allowing others to read his work would be "too much like showing my insides" (306).

The drunk in Grand Coulee may work "with a shovel eight hours a day outside in the coulee," but in spite of his job, he views his true self as a poet (304). Asch ends the story with the lesson that narrator ultimately comes to learn: In learning about how these people live in America, he is not necessarily learning about the people of America themselves.

Interpreting Agency

In Agency: Promiscuous and Protean, Karlyn Kohrs Campbell writes that our present-day knowledge of Sojourner Truth is "filtered, framed, transformed, and translated" (9). It is now known that her famous "Ain't I A Woman?" speech from 1851 "is a fiction created some twelve years after the event by a white woman, Frances Dana Gage" (9).

Gage built this fictive text upon fragments of things said and done by Truth, fragments that "illustrate the communal basis of Truth's agency" but ultimately combine to form a rhetoric that is not authentically Truth's (12). It is successfully stirring in its drama, which may account for Truth's "pragmatic decision" to include Gage's text in her Narrative (9). Nonetheless, the rewritten aspects (including a stereotypical southern black dialect that, according to Campell, Truth did not even speak) and embellishments of Truth's speech is, if not a misquotation, a misrepresentation. Gage has essentially put words into the mouth of someone who has become a historical figure.

So what does misrepresentation do to agency? By attributing to Truth an inaccurate dialect, Truth's "most powerful arguments and apt metaphors were by this language deformed, even ridiculed" (13). The closest comparison I can think of would be Hamlet's "To Be or Not To Be" pronounced in a stereotypical Valley girl dialect - the words in the soliloquy would lose a great deal of its command of an audience.

Because her text is interpreting Truth's point of view, the onus is on Gage to properly deliver Truth's agency on her behalf. If Truth's agency is transferred from her to Gage, why then should we continue to admire Truth still today? If someone is not the author of words attributed to them, are they even worthy of attention? Perhaps agency gained more flexibility in 1863 than it had in the days of Aristotle.

Patriarchy at the Source

"What does it mean to be a woman writer in a culture whose fundamental definitions of authority are, as we have seen, both overtly and covertly patriarchal?" asks Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar as they examine the struggle of women writers' "eighteenth- and nineteenth-century foremothers" (449/453). I am fascinated by these notions of overt and covert definitions of authority, particularly in where they might be discovered. If Gilbert and Gubar seek the struggle of women in nineteenth-century literature, it would not be unreasonable to search for examples of male domination in the same place.

Last year I took a class at the University of Kent called "The Literature of Terror," in which we read spooky Victorian classics by H.G. Wells, Oscar Wilde, Wilkie Collins and others and analyzed the social implications within each text. In particular, Bram Stoker's Dracula surged to the front of mind while reading this excerpt from The Madwoman In the Attack.

Although Dracula is largely overrun with male character, the few existing female figures are clearly products of "a society where women are warned that if they do not behave like angels they must be monsters" (454). Stoker demonstrates this idea in a stark way. The Weird Sisters (or brides of Dracula) who attempt to seduce Jonathan Harker early in the novel are vampires and highly sexual. But their sexuality does not stem from their monstrousness; rather, it is suggested that they are more monstrous because of their sexuality.

The two more important female characters, Mina Murray and Lucy Westenra, are Englishwomen often described by Stoker with terms like "sweet," "gentle" "pure," or "angelic." They are regarded highly by male protagonists for their submissive qualities. When Lucy falls prey to Dracula, however, her angelic nature gives way to monstrous sexuality that some critics interpret as making her a child predator -- and for her actions, she is killed. Likewise, through the course of the novel as Mina falls deeper into Dracula's thrall, her reticence and purity are seen to wane.

Other literature written by Victorian men takes up this theme. Such works could likely provide details about the patriarchal view of women's freedoms and creativity in the past, leading up to today. These would actually prop up the notions of constraints upon women in the works of female authors like Dickinson and the Brontes.

Qualities of Agent/cy

Towards the end of class, the significance of the title of Karlyn Kohrs Campbell's piece was addressed: Agency: Promiscuous and Protean. After looking at a number of definitions for promiscuous, the best operative definition I can come up with is lacking standards or regulations of selection; and this attaches with it, as mentioned in class, moral and judgmental ramifications. Being classified as promiscuous in society is rarely positive, with amoral associations and inferiority. It is interesting that Campbell chose this word along with "protean" to describe the topic of agency. Protean is taken to describe something mutable. At first, I was skeptical of her title choice, wondering if Campbell chose the two adjectives for more of an alliteration over function purpose, but the connection becomes much more clear after reading and discussing her piece.

Campbell delves into the heavy topic of Sojourner Truth's speech at a woman's rights convention in the mid-1800s, a speech that has caused an earthquake of emotion throughout the history of women's rights and the abolitionist movement. While agency is extremely important in fiction and literary history, it truly comes to life in this case study. The blend of truth, fact, and presentation of the two through indirection sources is absolutely reflective of the title. Campbell seems to come to this conclusion after reinterpreting the speech. She writes, "I now believe that it was wrong to do so, although it could not and should not have been published as originally written without the kind of analysis done here. But agency is perverse: the stereotypes that give rise to penning the speech in the demeaning argot ironically give the text special force"(14). Campbell realizes and shares with readers the corruption of blending agencies, but also the inevitability of the practice, which is where I believe she derived the title of her essay. Agency is emotionally charged when dealing with words that come from equally emotionally charged speakers. This brings out the promiscuous nature that she speaks of as well as the protean quality. Both the agent and the agency are subject to these adjectives, then relating back to audiences the responsibility of wading through the waters of interpretation.

Foggy Agency

The other day in class, while talking about the subject of audience, we considered the question of how the audience should interact with the text and what the relationship between author and reader should be. Campbell provides through her piece Agency: Promiscuous and Protean five key elements of agency that help to answer this question of relationship between sender and receiver. Campbell separates the five elements into the following categories: communal and participatory, "invented" by authors who are points of articulation, emerges in art/craft, effected through form, and perverse (1). These direct identifications help to materialize this "agency" that we have been dancing with these first three weeks of class.

Campbell' mention of agency being communal and participatory is important to address in terms of how the writer interacts with the audience. In this case study of Sojourner Truth, audience is an incredibly vague concept as it crosses not only time, but race and gender with powerful statements with the power to move and offend many. Truth's original audience was in fact very slim due to her illiteracy. Her true audience was limited to only those who heard her speak the words at the conference in Akron, Ohio in the 1800s. The authorship then moves into the hands of Francis Gage, mutating both the form and function of Truth's words. This enters in to the realm of fiction that now has the power to choose and manipulate its audience, which highlights the perverse aspect of Campbell's theory of agency. As Gage takes hold of Truth's words into a written form, the truth is taken away (both literally and metaphorically).

Audience then, after slipping through the hands of Sojourner Truth, Francis Gage, and finally Karlyn Kohrs Campbell; remains a ghost of intention, fictionalized to the point where its veritable nature is questionable. Is it possible that then the audience becomes the agent of interpretation? This would complex the already paradoxical concept of agent compared to agency; but that is the loveliness of language, to make intricate the complex and to push the already vague into deeper fogs of thought.

Escaping the Shadow of Man

In A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf posits, "Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of a man at twice its natural size." Woolf's work and thoughts concerning the female in literary history overlap with much of the ideas of Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar. Woolf's short novel explains the role of a woman as a writer as well as what she needs to understand and possess before she can begin her craft. The novel as matched with the excerpt from The Madwoman in the Attic, I began to rethink some of my ideas about the struggles women possess in creative thought.

Gilbert and Gubar address more of the issues of the complete lack of presence of women in history, as they write, "the woman writer substitutes what we have called an "anxiety of authorship," an anxiety built from complex and often only barely conscious feats of that authority which seems to the female artist to be by definition inappropriate to her sex"(453). This seemed to me to be the crux of their argument. While Gilbert and Gubar's view of a patriarchal past is extremely well developed, it would be much more whole and a little less defeatist if it were laced with tones of Woof's thoughts about women.

The idea that women did in fact have a role in literary past is very true, and Gilbert and Gubar state this in their imagery of the woman as Snow White or the evil Queen as they write, "It is debilitating to be any woman in a society where women are warned that if they do not behave like angels they must be monsters"(454). I loved this metaphor that was carried throughout the piece, but I would suggest the added function of women in relation to men be added to the exegesis. As Woolf explains in the quote above, women have been a function of the male ego, and women can only begin to fight that when they realize the challenge they are up against. Not only are women faced with a relatively blank slate of writers to look back on for inspiration, but they are also faced with the destruction of the male ego.

Campbell and the Author

Karlyn Campbell's essay Agency: Promiscuous and Protean is loaded with a lot of the issues we raised today about agency: who has agency, what are the roles of the agents of writer, reader, and text, who has authority, and more. There's a lot in Campbell that still needs to be unpacked (50 minutes isn't very long to discuss all of these heavy texts!), and a lot that I haven't really processed fully yet. One of these issues that I still have some questions about is the issue of who is 'allowed' to be an author, and who decides that allowance.

On page 3 of her essay, Campbell states that "agency is constrained by externals, by the community that confers identities related to gender, race, class, and the like on its members and by doing so determines not only what is considered to be 'true,' but also who can speak and with what force" (3). She then complicates this notion by introducing Louis Althusser's concept of interpellation, a process in which the individual is created as the subject through dominant ideologies. Through interpellation, then, the individual is constructed to a certain extent by the society in which she lives- whether or not she chooses to be. So, our agency is limited/shaped by the categories we are assigned by our category-obsessed culture. This relates well to Gilbert and Gubar's article about female authors, as these authors are interpellated as females, giving rise to a whole set of assumptions based on how our culture understands the very category of 'woman' (which in itself is problematic on multiple levels!). So, Campbell can help to answer several of our questions:

-Can you choose to be constructed?
--I think that you can choose to be constructed in the sense that you, as a reader, can choose to fictionalize yourself as the author's intended audience, or not. BUT- you are ALWAYS constructed at least to a certain extent just by being a member of society.

-Who can be an author?
--According to Campbell, it is the community who 'decides' the LEGITIMACY of an author- whether or not their text is considered to be 'true,' and the legitimacy of the speaker herself. BUT, this cannot be universal, because even speakers/writers who are seem as ILLEGITIMATE authors can break through these presuppositions and create meaningful text that provoke the community to evolve its notions of legitimacy. This can be seen in the work of such historically disenfranchised groups as women and minority writers who have broken through the socially imposed boundaries containing them.

These are just a few of my thoughts on Campbell... Id love to hear what others think about these issues, as they are definitely complex and multi-layered.

Derrida and Rhetoric

As we have discussed rhetoric- what it is, the roles of the different actors within it, etc- we have discussed the historical transformation of western rhetoric from focusing on the spoken word (as in Aristotle's time) to its modern focus on the written word, and how this transformation has complicated our own handling of rhetoric.

In her introduction to Derrida's Dissemination, Barbara Johnson writes, "Derrida's critique of Western metaphysics focuses on its privileging of the spoken word over the written word. The spoken word is given a higher value because the speaker and the listener are both present to the utterance simultaneously" (viii). As I see it, this is a historically contingent privileging; had rhetoric begun with the written word rather than the spoken, then written rhetoric rather than spoken would have the privileged status.

As it is, however, the privileging of spoken rhetoric is problematic for us now that most rhetoric is not spoken. Because, though the immediacy of spoken rhetoric "seems to guarantee the notion that... we know what we mean, mean what we say, say what we mean, and know what we have said" (viii), there are certain advantages to writing simply by virtue of its not being simultaneous. And I personally value these advantages more than those of speech.

What are the advantages of writing? Well, as Derrida concludes from a careful reading of Rosseau, "It is thus absence (i.e. the absence of the writer at the time of the reader reading the text) that assures the presentation of truth, and presence that entails its distortion" (xi). Without the charm (or lack thereof) of the speaker to take into account, the reader can focus more on the text itself, and is perhaps better able to determine the 'truth' of said text.

So, though writing may be a "destruction of presence" and "disease of speech" (xi), it serves its own purpose quite well, and successful writing is able to bridge the gaps of time and space to convey its truth to the reader even with- or perhaps, Derrida would argue, because of- the writer's absence.

Monty Python on Philosophers

It may have nothing to do with what we are discussing, but I told Professor Graban that I would post the Drunk Philosophers song by Monty Python here. Hopefully it will stimulate a bit of good conversation or, if not, at least provide some small amusement.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQycQ8DABvc

Pink and Flowery

Yesterday in class, Vanessa made a comment that intrigued me. She said that perhaps certain writings create new genres, which create new readerships. These comment lead to two questions: Do genres have power over what we read and write? Do genres have agency?

Here is a situation that may help us examine these questions. If you walk down the religious books aisle of Barnes and Noble, you will see shelves and shelves and shelves of different looking Bibles. There’s an “Adventure Bible” or “Extreme Faith Bible,” and “The Action Bible” (which looks like a graphic novel) aimed at teens, a pink, flowery “True Identity: The Bible for Women,” a working mothers support Bible, a dark, masculine-looking “Manuel: The Bible for Men,” and “Every Man’s Bible.” There are scholarly-looking Bibles with the Apocrypha, and “The Bible for Busy People: Genesis to Revelation.” There are read the Bible in one year editions, denominational Bibles, “Life Recovery” bibles, and more.

I can think of two lenses through which to examine this situation. Let’s consider this situation alongside Burke’s concept of “naming.” The operative question here might be, why have we found it necessary to name, re-name, and name yet again essentially the same text? Burke writes about names, “A different kind of snow implies a different kind of hunt… names for typical, recurrent social situations are not developed out ‘disinterested curiosity’ but because names imply a command (what to expect, what to look out for)” (294). In renaming and re-presenting the text, a different kind of situation is implied. A pink flowery Bible named “True Identity: The Bible for Women” tells the viewer what to expect and look out for.

The situation can also be examined through Ong’s “The Writer’s Audience is Always a Fiction.” The “readership” of the Bible, or the audience, has been segmented. In this case, it is not the writer who has imagined the audience, but it is the editor/publisher that has done so. Different readerships are fictionalized based on assumptions about what will appeal to different audiences. The texts itself is not changed, but other variables (cover, book design, specific title, illustrations, notes beside the text) are manipulated to create essentially a new sub-genre, in the hopes of drawing in a new readership that perhaps sees a pink flowery Bible as more applicable to their lives than a plain Bible. In “Agency: Promiscuous and Protean,” Campbell notes that agency can be, “invented by authors at points of articulation,” and the case of the many Bibles is a demonstration of this point.

Let’s examine one more sub-genre. In the last few years, since the publication of the popular “Twighlight” vampire novels, a teen fiction sub-genre called “paranormal fiction” has developed. It is distinct from “fantasy” and “science fiction” genres, and the name developed out of recurrent social situations (lots of vampire novels being written, purchased, and read). As writers noticed that teens were particularly enthusiastic about vampires, werewolves, and the like, they reshaped their fictionalizations of certain parts of teen audiences to create a new genre. Campbell writes that collectivities have the power to enact or establish agency (5). If teen readers can be thought of as a “collectivity,” then they have agency to motivate writers (also a sort of collectivity) to create a new genre. It seems that genre creation in this case might be the result of agency on the part of both writers and readers. The genre then continues to draw in new readers, continually creating and re-creating the audience. Campbell also writes that texts have agency – “Textual agency is linked to audiences and begins with the signals that guide the process of “uptake” for readers and listeners, enabling them to categorize, to understand how a symbolic act is framed” (7).

My answer to, do genres have agency, is a yes. However, at this point, I don’t see textual or genre agency as independent of author and reader agency. Genres are “named,” or created as social situations, and naming itself may be an expression of agency. The “point of articulation” of the genre agency might begin with the author/creator, the reader, or as an interaction between the two, and genre agency is sustained by the audiences and the authors.

A One Way Street?

We've been dissecting in class what the role of the writer and reader is. It seems that Foucault is saying that the reader fictionalizes the Author. The author-function serves the purpose of guiding the reader's understanding and interpretation of the text. Foucault believes that this predisposition of the reader limits the interpretation of the text since the view of the Author is always subjective. On the other hand, Ong argues that the author is the one who is fictionalizing his audience. By writing in a certain manner or style (say the conversational prose of Hemingway) or intending his work for a distinct audience, the author can manipulate his audience into conforming to his or her expectations.

The question that arises after I've wrapped my head around these two concepts is what's left if the author is fictionalizing the audience and the audience is fictionalizing its Author? For me, there doesn't seem to be an overlap of these expectations from either realms, so is there an actual relationship that exists at all between Author and audience? Or does the relationship simply only work in one direction, author to reader and reader to author?

TTYL, Walter

I would love to know what Walter Ong would say about text messages, the writer, and the audience. He states about letters, “The writer has to set up another relationship to the reader and has to set the reader in a relationship to the writer different from that of the nonchoriographical personal contact.” (19). The writer, even when he or she knows the person to who he/she is writing, must imagine and construct the audience. The issue of “nonchoriographical” contact is a more complex issue in the present day, however.

Much of Ong’s theory of audience construction is based on the distance of time between the reader and the writer. Those who speak are present with their audiences; those who write are not. Given the speed of textual communication in the present day (email, instant messaging, and text messaging), a writer and his/her audience are not always distant in time. Two people who are texting back and forth to each other are actually exchanging author/audience roles quite rapidly. However, in types of electronic communication, distance in time is not always consistent. It is possible to text someone who has his/her phone off and may not respond for several hours. So, how does audience construction vary with time? If a writer sends a text not knowing when or if his/her audience will text back, is the audience construction the same if he or she gets an immediate reply or a reply delayed by three hours?

Ong does write about a few situations in which written communication functions as oral does (he notes that two people who are deaf might communicate by writing, or two people who speak different dialects of Chinese) (10), but I don’t think that he would put texting in this category, despite the fact that it often substitutes for oral communication, given his stated interest in examining writing situations in “their full implications” (9). (Frankly, I think it would be fascinating to compare the discourse of written notes passed in class – I still have some that I surreptitiously wrote in middle school – to texting conversations between students in class now. Someone could probably get a dissertation out of that.) Ong’s theory of audience construction and writers also accounts for the practical space difference between authors and audiences. Are two students texting each other in the classroom, who see each other, still “fictionalizing” their audiences? (What role does the glaring teacher play?)

Ong writes, “Knowledge of the degrees of admissible ignorance for readers is absolutely essential if one is to publish successfully…it takes time to get a feel for the roles that readers can be expected to play in the modern academic world” (19). This statement is certainly true for academic publishing, but I think it might also apply to texting. I am an ever-failing texter (both as a writer and reader) because I don’t really know the degrees of admissible ignorance. In texting, there are certain abbreviations considered standard as well as conventions of telling the reader necessary information without extra length – I don’t know these, and I don’t know when to use them. As a writer, I tend to send texts (which I do very rarely) that are more like paragraphs, and everything is spelled out in conventional English. I do not abbreviate or shorten, and this drives my audience – my sister – up the wall. Obviously, I have not successfully adapted my text to the reader. Perhaps I have not “fictionalized” my audience correctly.

Interestingly, my sister’s texts to me have changed. They used to be things like, “What ABT going 2 ____. H. TTYL.” This completely befuddled me, and so I never answered, or would call and say, “What are you talking about?” This morning, I got a three sentence long text in normal English! Sarah has fictionalized her audience well, and thus has what Ong might call knowledge of the degrees of admissible ignorance for a very specific audience, and the ability to “publish” successfully. This does beg the question, what happens in the quick audience/author exchange of texting when one writer has effectively fictionalized the audience and the other hasn’t?

The Authorial Light, Diminished

I've been troubled lately by what I've read as contradictory statements by Foucault, Barthes and Ong. Only today do I realize what message these three philosophers are trying to put forward as a possible course of pursuit for literary students, scholars and thinkers.

Too often has there been a focus on the author in literature. Gustave Flaubert's masterpiece, "Madame Bovary", was, at the time of its publication (and to an extent, today), tainted by scandal. The unconventional nature of both the content and the style of the novel led to a lawsuit by a then-radical French government against both Flaubert and his publisher, deeming the work to be an indecent attack on morality and good taste. Although this is an important historic topic to consider and discuss when examining French literature as a whole, it diminishes from the novel itself. If literature is supposed to be a pure form of expression and reflection, then to drag it through the mud by forcing it to endure a very real legal conundrum, rather than keeping it a wholly abstract concept as a literary work, tarnishes its luster. Flaubert, ever the perfectionist and devotee of his own style and art form, surely must have felt the same way. Much has been made of his laborious and meticulous compositional process, but in the end, I'm certain he would have been much more interested to hear how contemporary and future readers would respond to his finished product.

To use a more recent example, Jonathan Franzen, the New York Times bestselling author, bristled when his lauded novel, "The Corrections", was placed on Oprah's Book List, inciting both abject fury from Oprah's devoted fanbase and serious discussion by literary critics and thinkers. His argument was that to popularize his novel would be to detract from its artistic merit. Although he makes his living by writing and publishing his works, for him the finished product is a much more aesthetic concept rather than part of the profitable inventory of a book retailer. Despite his attempts to stay out of the spotlight, Franzen has become a literary celebrity, and occasionally the man surpasses the work, a convention which he abhors.

The crux of the argument is that there should be a shift back to the literary work itself rather than focusing on the author. One author who achieved this "disappearance" as Foucault calls it is J.D. Salinger, who, after the upsurge in popularity of "Catcher in the Rye", disappeared from public life and forced scholars and students to focus purely on the work itself, having no other resource other than it available to them. Whether intentional or not, the author often receives more praise than the work itself because we have a need to humanize and put a face on inanimate objects like the contents of books. Of course the author should be recognized as the individual who conceived the work, labored over it, ruminated over the course it would inevitably take and actually wrote either with pen and paper or keyboard. The work is seen as the mere fruit of the man, rather than an actual artistic work which achieves individuality in its own right.

In fact, the work must itself become like a person, separate from its father or mother. If Ong states that the audience must become a fiction which interacts on a personal level with the work itself, then the text becomes like an individual, conscious entity, engaging the reader in discussion, reflection and pure narrative. Hemingway disappears in the shadow of his own works: each of his novels becomes a living, breathing companion which converses intimately and amiably, if wistfully, with the reader. Although hubris often prevents this vital separation, the course of literary development as it stands today demands that authors separate themselves from their works and let the readers interact with the work as they are wont to.

The Fictional Audience in 2011

Ong wrote his article in 1975 and many things have changed in the past 36 years, most notably the arrival of the Internet and mobile communication. The written letter is now largely a thing of the past and is only practiced by people who wish for the nostalgia of days past or by those who are writing to people in third world countries. Even novels have been streamlined. No longer do they need to go to a printing press and be delivered to book stores, they can be uploaded to the Internet and purchased immediately. While this is a possibility, book stores will be around for many many more years because many people, myself included, prefer the feel of a book with actual paper to that of some new fangled book machine. With mobile communication and the rise of text communication, are language is being modified every day by people who are too lazy to type out things like "laugh out loud" or "oh my gawd" and these short little phrases become so popular that they may as well be a part of our every day language. And modern every day English is continually attacked by the rich and famous who think the best way for them to get famous is by shooting pornography or getting addicted to what ever the "coolest" drug is at the time, and they are, unfortunately, very successful and, since we are a society obsessed with the rich and famous, their word becomes law and their law is that words are little play things that they are free to destroy, recombine, or invent at their will. Who cares if there is already a word for it? In this, the day of the I WANT IT NOW, it is infinitely more preferable to say something that sounds right-esque, and if your name is part of the word all the better, with confidence and bravado right now then to wait five seconds and think.

Oratory; A Two Way Synchronous Street

In Ong's The Writer's Audience is Always a Fiction the difference between Audience and Readers is best explained during the discussion of the 'collectivity' of either written word or oral performances, "The orator has before him an audience which is a true audience, a collectivity. "Audience" is a collective noun." Then, "'Readers' is a plural. Readers do not form a collectivity, acting here and now on one another and on the speaker as members of an audience do. We can devise a singularized concept for them, it is true, such as 'readership.'" (11). Reading being a personal assumption of roles inherent to a text then occurs, though in a different way than the listener of a speaker following or tuning into the words as they come from the lips of the mouth and the mind. The final passage has something beautiful to say about this; "And it is hard to write outside of a genre. T. S. Eliot has made the point that so far as he knows, great love poetry is never written solely for the ear of the beloved, although what a lover speaks with his lips is often indeed for the ear of the beloved and of no other. The point is well made, even though it was made in writing" (21). This brings into focus the key question of the article; the relationship of the speaker/listener and that of the writer/reader in terms of audience.

I found myself most enjoying this juxtaposition between rhetorical oratory and asynchronous reading. There were a few passages I found this excerpt particularly apt at describing the difference; "Students of mine from Ghana and from wester Ireland have reported to me what I have read and heard from many other sources: a given story may take a skilled or "professional" storyteller anywhere from ten minutes to an hour and a half, depending on how he finds the audience relates to him on a given occasion...The teller reacts directly to audience response. Oral storytelling is a two way street" (15,16). This is fascinating after Ong's explanation of how the READERS of a WRITER are established as a fictionalized representation of a possible audience while the writer is writing. So by taking on the role of a reader; the person is assuming some or many of the things inherent to the piece of writing and its (pre)conceptualization of the reader.

This gets into something interesting with Barthes' 'moment of self-creation' though I did not read the article and will post on this connection later.