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Revision: Introduction and Self-Assessment
The controlling theme for my portfolio is “revision.” This seems like an obvious choice for a creative writing and English literature major, but it most succinctly sums up the most important thing that I’ve learned in college – that thoughts and words are never complete. They can be rewritten for the better, or for the worse, at any time. My thinking and writing is in a constant state of revision. What I thought as a freshman isn’t what I think now, nor are my current thoughts what I’ll think in the future. This revision of thought and word recorded on this website has been prompted by the literature, history and theories that I’ve encountered over the past four years that has caused me to grow. Now I am ready to graduate to the next step.
Over the past four years, I’ve encountered and interpreted different genres, styles and cultures through literature. Creative writing classes introduced me to genre, and I learned the dramatic difference in writer’s styles by reading very different works during the same semester. For example, Fall 2001 found me in early American Literature and Shakespeare. In American Lit, I read captivity narratives, sentimental novels and slave narratives right after I finished plays like The Tempest. This blend of styles, genre and culture would continue to mesh for the rest of my college career.
Another instance of the blending of styles occurred in my paper for Major British Writers I. I wrote a comparison of “Whoso List to Hunt” by Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder and “On Monsieur’s Departure” by Queen Elizabeth. In it, I discovered that they had two entirely different styles of writing, but very much the same message. Wyatt writes of loving someone who is taken, while Queen Elizabeth writes of loving, but already being taken. The two poems serve as a dialogue between lovers, even though the poems were produced forty years apart.
Even in writing comparison papers like the one for Major British Writers I had to demonstrate where pieces of literature fell in history and how this affects their meaning. My freshman year, I wrote a paper that changed the way that I thought about literature and writing. I was struggling to find a research topic for American literature. I wanted to write about women during the flapper period, and I knew I liked Elinor Wylie. However, I couldn’t bring myself to write a paper that would take a feminist stance. When Dr. Matway attempted to get me to make an argument in my thesis, I said that I didn’t want to come off as a femo-nazi. Clearly, my second semester of my freshman year, I had no idea what feminism was, what it stood for, or how it impacted literature.
Thus, I embarked upon one of my most rewarding learning experiences via a research paper named “Devaluing Wylie.” I found very little in Reeves Library that told me about the author, but I did happen to find all sorts of myths on the Internet about Wylie. I had somehow mesh Wylie’s personal life to her writing, and to the way she was judged by literary critics. After a lot of research and after discovering that being a feminist wasn’t a bad thing, I came up with this thesis:
Because she had been stereotyped as a “new woman,” who challenged society and reversed typical gender roles, Wylie’s literary work was devalued, especially in later years. This was due to the rising anti-female sentiment during the 1920’s in general, and in the publishing industry in particular.
However, when I wrote the first draft, this grand idea didn’t work. I had two big chunks of paper. Half was about Wylie’s life, and half was about her work. Somehow, I had to make the two fit. So, on a Saturday afternoon, I sat in Dr. Matway’s office and wove the two chunks together, and turned an idea into a paper that contained an argument – a paper that wasn’t two chunks, but rather, a whole. In the process, I learned about the marginalization of women in literature, their reintroduction into the canon and the idea that maybe feminism was a good thing after all.
I also demonstrated my knowledge of literature though recognizing themes that run through the course of history. As I compiled this portfolio, I realized that I wrote a lot about courtly love and a lot about women. Since I had a clear interest in women in literature, I naturally gravitated toward them. For a few papers, I combined both interests. Where I found them most represented was in love stories written by Chaucer, medieval romances and lays. I also found that every semester, the definition of courtly love changed according to who was teaching it. I always thought of it according to C.S. Lewis’ famous definition: “Humility, Courtesy, Adultery, and the Religion of Love.” However, when I took Chaucer with Dr. Alexander, he showed me that what I had previously thought to be adherences to this rule was possibly just a misunderstanding, or better yet, a farce. Perhaps courtly love never existed, and was just a creation of following movements. Obviously, this necessitated a research paper.
The previous semester in European Literature, I learned about the ideals of courtly love in a very traditional way. I was interested in women writers Marie de France and Marguerite de Navarre. In my paper, “Eliduc and Heptameron: Breaking Courtly Love Tradition” I defined courtly love as such:
Courtly love was a secular literary tradition targeted at noble women that reflected their romantic aspirations. Tales of courtly love were romantic, adventurous, and had heroic deeds (Fiero 35). Usually a knight pursued a virtuous woman who remained chaste. Both the man and the woman were of high birth, yet could not be together because one or both are them are married to other people. This unrequited earthly love parallels spiritual love. However, the affair is doomed, and at the end, the woman enters a convent and the man repents by performing brave acts (Harman 122-23).
Although that is true, I would later come to a better understanding of what courtly love was by reading Chaucer’s Merchant’s Tale and The Book of the Duchess. There, I discovered that C.S. Lewis can’t make a courtly love catchphrase, and that sometimes unrequited earthly love does not parallel spiritual love. I learned that definitions are meaningless. In my paper, “Defining Courtly Love” I traced the breakdown of courtly love and concluded that it was irrelevant.
Perhaps definitions of courtly love can only go so far…. Some works exalted courtly love, and others, like fabliaux, made fun of the institution. However, meaning breaks down in the end. Through these two stories [The Merchant’s Tale and The Book of the Duchess], Chaucer tells the reader that conventions of love don’t matter and definitions aren’t all that important. In the end, love and lust both exist together in the same sphere.
In a semester’s time, I revised my opinion of courtly love and took another stance on the matter. I even checked some of the same books out from the library, and by reading with a different thesis in mind, was able to support and refute what I had learned the semester before.
With such revision of thought occurring, library resources became rather important to me. I couldn’t just rely on the same copy of C.S. Lewis’ Allegory of Love. I had to incorporate other resources – articles found via EbscoHost and works listed in the footnotes of my Chaucer text. I learned early on with the Elinor Wylie paper that sometimes interlibrary loan is necessary, and often I could only find a start to what I was looking for on the Internet.
I didn’t just study women, courtly love or library resources in college, though. Instead, I analyzed a variety of literature from many different cultures. It seems like everyone has heard of Toni Morrison, and many people have read her. After reading Beloved, Paradise and The Bluest Eye for various classes, I acquired an interest in the culture of Africa. I never learned about it in school, and when Francophone African Literature was offered by the French department, I took it because I thought it would provide me with more insight into colonial rule. In Major British Writers II, we touched on England’s colonial rule by reading Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and a short story by Wole Soyinka.
Taking Francophone African Literature opened my eyes to a whole different culture. We watched films by Ousmane Sembene and read texts about the infiltration and reaction to French colonial rule. My favorite text was Ferdinand Oyono’s Houseboy. Although I was reading a translation, the power of humor to circumvent persecution spoke to me. I decided to do my term paper on it. I touched on mimicry and the loss of identity in the book that was perpetrated by the religious missionaries and the French government. This paper allowed me to consider Catholic social teachings that I learned in a theology class in addition to allowing me to reevaluate the way I think about missionary work.
For a period of time, I worried that I hadn’t read enough of the canon to get into graduate school, or that I wasn’t a “real” English major at a woman’s focused college because no class I ever took made me read Aphra Behn. Suddenly, senior year rolled along and I discovered that I had never read hypertext either. I never even knew that interactive fiction existed as a form of literature. Since I had never considered any of these things as a text before, how could I have possibly imagined that after four years of writing and literature, I would have knowledge of literature? Rather than be concerned with what I read, I discovered that it didn’t matter what I read or what I wrote, just as long as I read and wrote.
Some of my greatest discoveries about literature didn’t even come through writing and reading – they came from discussion. In my Contemporary Women Authors class, I gave an hour and fifteen minute seminar presentation on Amy Tan’s The Bonesetter’s Daughter. In it, I facilitated the class in outlining places where Tan used the theme of writing to guide the story. We made a huge list of references to writing on the blackboard, and through that, discovered a motif that Tan used to show the correlation between writing and the character’s lives. I may never read that novel again, but I know that I can trace a theme through just about any book I pick up.
I also learned to use different formats to express my thoughts. As a creative writing major, I wrote poems, short stories and memoirs. I feel like I’ve written a few short stories and memoirs that are better than average. I even think that my memoir “Mashed Potatoes” could be ready for market should I ever write an appropriate cover letter for it, and if it were a magazine that my grandmother would never read. That story was a memoir of a summer spent with my grandmother, whom I nicknamed EvilGram for obvious reasons. The process of creating a story about her allowed me not take her crotchety behavior to heart anymore. It’s almost as if I reduced her to a character in life. However, writing that story also made me realize that even if she was rude to me, she probably didn’t mean it the way that I took it, and that it was just her bizarre way of showing that she cared.
Lately, however, I haven’t felt like that type of creative writing suits me. Occasionally, I do think I produce good poems, but I don’t think that I write stories and memoirs as well as I am capable. This frustrates me, but I realize that my failure is due to my lack of desire to write this type of literature. I prefer to write about what I think and what I’ve observed around me, and not have to glaze it over as a character’s thoughts or count how many syllables I’ve used.
I think that this is why most of my creative writing takes place on my weblog, where I comment on current events or even write about how I got my car stuck in my front yard. In a way, it’s a memoir of my life and times. In another way, it has a broader focus. I like to think that I touch on things that are important to me, but also mean something to other people too. This is also why I feel at home writing about my strange breakfast habits in Setonian columns. In my short stories, I hate to develop characters, and can’t seem to make them up very effectively. However, if I’m writing about myself or something that happened to me, characterization comes easily to me. I can describe myself waiting impatiently by a toaster. For some reason, I can’t describe a character doing the same action.
Therefore, I think that my analytical nature is more suited toward nonfiction. That is why I can write about myself more easily than I can about a character. I think that is also why I am able to critique other people’s work. I like to read someone else’s short story and try to help them make it better. I much prefer that to writing my own story. I think that is because I have trained myself to be very analytical when it comes to fiction and poetry. I look at every poem like it’s Elinor Wylie, and every story like it is for a class. This helps other writers when I do this, and it makes me a better writer.
My ability to use my weblog as my mode of creative writing also suggests the more significant issues that are facing my field of study. If my creative writing is in blog format, where does that leave me in relation to my peers, who are still writing short stories and poems and not publishing them themselves? In a paper that I wrote for Media Aesthetics, I claim that weblogs have the same attributes as traditional means of publishing because they are composed, edited and peer-reviewed, but just in a different order. I suggest that weblogs are composed and published first, edited and reviewed later. This is an interesting innovation for the publishing world and it gives me more power as a writer than I ever had before. It also means that authorship can be a lot more inaccurate, immature and even worthless. Just because anyone can publish doesn’t mean that they should. Or, it doesn’t mean that they will be read. Thus, weblogs live and die through natural selection of sorts. However, what I write on my weblog has no bounds, unless I place bounds on it. This also means that my weblog won’t be cataloged by the Library of Congress, or, if a server move fails, that my weblog will even exist anymore. I think this poses all sorts of issues for the discipline of writing that are still being argued, and it causes publishing to be reevaluated in light of new technology.
When I first entered Seton Hill, I had no idea what a real weblog was. I also didn’t know much about women’s role in literature, nor had I ever thought about breaking down definitions of courtly love. However, my time here has allowed me to learn how to think critically, write critically, and then scratch it all out and rethink everything again. Nothing that I produced in this portfolio is perfect. None of it is permanent, and I can still change my mind about much of it. However, I know that through learning, thinking and writing, I’ve filled all of the objectives set forth by my major. I’ve learned and grown, and although I may not have read every so-called “great” book, I can read any book and analyze it critically.
As my thoughts about literature developed and changed, so did my thoughts about my major. When I started college, I assumed that I would head straight into graduate school. I was preparing myself for the time when I would pursue my doctorate or even become a secondary teacher. As I became exposed more and more to what other fields had to offer, I began to wonder about whether or not graduate school would be necessary for me upon graduation.
I decided that I would be better off getting a job. I know that I chose this because it is what is right for me right now. I also know that, me being me, I will end up in grad school at some point. I just don’t know what I would be in grad school for at the moment – I’m interested in women, history and new media. Being an English major opened up so many options for me – so many that I don’t even know if I’ll do anything that has anything to do with literature or “creative” writing. Instead, I’m interested in challenging myself by finding out what I want to do with my life for a year or two.
During this senior year, I rediscovered something that I knew about myself my junior and senior years of high school. I had never planned on being an English major. I was all set to enter a tech writing program or even be an engineer. My freshman year of college I didn’t declare a major right away and kept my options open by taking calculus, just so that I’d be on track should I want to get into a science field. However, I got sidetracked and relegated things like that down into the hobby category because I became so interested in writing and literature. Until this year, I never realized that the two could mix happily. In retrospect, I should’ve taken more classes outside the English discipline. However, I think that I have the right amount of skills to find a job that might be able to teach me more than grad school can right now. I’m currently applying for web content writing positions and technical writing, and hoping that work experience will help me make more informed choices about my future.