Anush Emelianova
May 8, 2006
LR Final : Changes Highlighted
Here
it is -- my very last assignment for this class, E603B, World Literature. This course has had many unifying themes, but
three that spoke to me particularly were the themes of nature, freedom ("The
truth shall set you free"), and the hammer ("Hammer your thoughts
into unity"). In considering my
response to these themes, I hope to evaluate my progress in this course.
As per Ram Dass's injunction, my goal is to "see
myself from above" as a hypothetical God may see me.
FREEDOM
The words, now commonplace, originated in the Old
Testament: "Then Jesus said to the Jews who had believed in him, 'If you
continue in
Fig. 1: Flowers
from
my word, you are truly my disciples; and you
shall know the truth, and the truth will make you free.'" [NOAB, John
8.31-32] The Jews were nonplussed:
"What do you mean by saying, 'You will be made free?'" [NOAB, John
8.33] Jesus clarifies: he means freedom
from sin and its enslaving influence, and the truth in question is the
Christian truth. In order to be free
according to Jesus, you must believe in the Christian God.
Is this the freedom the builders of UT
were referring to when they inscribed "The Truth Shall Set You Free"
in an imposing gothic font on the
Many
of the books we have read this semester involve a search for freedom,
successful or otherwise. Stephen
Daedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man is oppressed by Catholicism.
At the beginning of the book, as a child, he has difficulty
understanding his surroundings and expressing himself -- he is trapped inside
his own head. Finally, Stephen
experiences an aesthetic epiphany and achieves freedom by becoming an
artist. The "truth" that
Stephen discovers is the girl on the beach, who seems to him to be a
"strange and beautiful seabird" [Joyce, 171]. The beauty of the girl causes in Stephen an
"outburst of profane joy." [Joyce, 171]
In my case, like Stephen's, some
freedom has come with experience. I used
to write nightly in a journal when I was in about third grade or so. My day-to-day thoughts were simplistic: I
talked infinitely about my mood and the injustice of my parents. (The journal ends with, "This is no
longer a journal! This is now a SPY
NOTEBOOK!!!" I'd just read Harriet the Spy.) Instead of understanding what was going on, I
wrote pages of vitriol about my family's move to
Fig. 5: My roadmap.
Jude in Jude the Obscure and Sarah in The
French Lieutenant's Woman are both trapped by their social status and lack
of fortune. Their positions severely
limit their options and determine their actions to some extent. Even Fowles' wealthy characters cannot escape
the obligations of their station. Ernestina's prospects, for example, are
limited to aristocrats and wealthy businessmen.
In contrast to A Portrait, however,
freedom from class constraints is not a positive development in The French Lieutenant's Woman. Sarah
is a modern woman in that she sees through the class prejudices of her time,
but she is ultimately a tragic character.
(Based on the endings in which she spurns Charles, which had always
seemed most realistic to me.) Charles
sees a union with Sarah as impossible, but when he finally overcomes his class
consciousness and admits his love for her, he fails to achieve happiness and
instead causes the misery of others. Sam
and Mary successfully transcend class barriers and scrounge out an existence as
members of the lower middle class, but this transformation is only made
possible by lies and deception. When she
was a maid, Mary had "infinitely the least selfishness," [Fowles, 75]
but after her rise to the post of mistress, Mary is no longer free from sin:
symbolically, she wears the brooch Sam stole from Charles [Fowles, 424]. Implicitly, Mary and Sam were more free when
they were poor. In their case,
entrapment is caused by Sam's desire to become more wealthy, which forces him
to lie to and deceive Charles.
I have little in common with the
class-obsessed Victorians. As a
middle-class college kid, I have nothing to complain about. Probably I will attend graduate school, buy a
nice apartment and an expensive laptop, and live out the rest of my life without
really caring about the price of gas.
Unlike Sam, I have been lucky enough to start out in a position of
power. I could even make Stephen's
choice and live a starving artist's existence without suffering much from
class. In these modern times, birth and
money are no longer guaranteed passes to virtue. I suppose we are lucky to be free of such
superficial concerns, but the trade-off to longer feeling obligated, as Sam
does, to better oneself materially is that it no longer obvious what the right
course of action is.
What to do? The Sarte-reading friends I have tell me that
my business major will cost me my soul. The
S&P-obsessed ones wax lyrical about Michael Dell and Jack Welch, and don't
see the point of all this theory. I'm
torn between being a well-heeled professional and buying my dad the BMW he's
always been too pragmatic to treat himself to, or adding to the sum total of
culture by creating for a living. One
truth I have found is that either option -- intellectual or professional -- is valuable. In terms of a "vision for the
future," my strongest belief is that we are free to decide. Mundane though it may seem, the greatest
point on tension in my life is in this career decision. Both routes seem acceptable to me. According to Ram Dass in The Witness, it is more important to find peace and to be aware
that "we are free simply to be"
[155]. Nice though this sentiment is, I
can't say it appeals to me much. Perhaps
if I were more skilled at meditation, I could simply exist at peace with
myself, discovering a new self
instead of striving for one.
[155] But I have never been able to keep
still.
Fig. 5: My roadmap.
Even if they manage to escape the
constraints of their class, Fowles' characters are limited by the culture of
Victorian society. Ernestina feels such
a strong sense of duty that she quashes all sexual thoughts, having evolved a
"kind of private commandment" -- "I must not." [Fowles,
29] Ernestina may be free in the sense originally
meant (free from sin), but she is constrained by her sense of duty and societal
pressures. Duty precludes her from
having sinful thoughts, but she also fears "a bestial version of
Duty" [Fowles, 29], a necessary component of marriage. Much like Ernestina, Charlotte Bronté's Jane
Eyre has trapped herself. She sees
herself as small, pale, and ugly, and as a result cannot conceive of a better
life for herself. When leaving Lowood,
she initially desires liberty, but then offers "a humbler supplication"
for "a new servitude." [Bronté, 99]
Societal or psychological constraints
seem the most dangerous to me, since they cannot be identified and thus
fought. We are now freer than we have
ever been politically, socially, sexually.
Nonetheless, I am sure future generations will scoff at us the way we
look down on the poor, repressed Victorians.
When I first read Jane's supplication
for a new servitude, I discounted it as self-defeating. However, Jane's words point to a larger
truth: that absolute freedom is impossible or even detrimental. Sarah, the modern woman, has the ability to
see through the artifices of her time, but she also seems to be free from
concern for Charles' well-being, and acts cruelly. I am reminded of a discussion in TC125K,
Perspectives on Creativity: it was said that some constraints on creativity,
such as the sonnet form, actually help the creative process. It seems very human to find some limitations
comforting.
Considering this, my goal in life is
not to achieve absolute freedom.
Intellectually, I want to be as free as I can -- to know as much as I
can, and to be liberated from false assumptions, like Jane's and Ernestina's
societally-imposed conceptions. However,
my "vision" is not that of a true free spirit. A truly free person could live almost
randomly, picking and discarding ideals as they serve his desires. Such a person would probably be hedonistic --
and much like Sarah. But I cannot
discard all ideals.
NATURE
Perhaps the most central theme of this
course has been the idea of nature, which has woven itself into our ideas of
architecture. During class, we have gone
on nature walks to Japanese gardens and even held class outside whenever
possible at the "Undercliff."
The reigning sentiment seems to be an echo of Ruskin: "We find all
men of true feeling delighting to escape out of modern cities into natural
scenery." [216] In class, we have
always tried to get closer to nature.
This inclination towards nature has
not really come easily to me. My laptop
doesn't do so well in direct sunlight, and I've run out of screen cleaner. Ruskin would undoubtedly say that I am not a
"man of true feeling." Well, I
am not a man, and I cannot say I always prefer nature to civilization. Even more incriminatingly, I have consistently
preferred modern architecture to the more "naturalistic" Gothic.
According to Ruskin, "Naturalism" is one of the
component elements of the Gothic style [218].
In mimicking the turn of the leaf with stone foliation, the Gothic
craftsman is showing his love of nature and his preference for natural
forms. However, in my opinion, the
Gothic imitation of nature is not imaginative.
Simply 
recreating the forms of nature in
stone should not be considered innovative or revolutionary, as Ruskin believes
his favorite type of architecture to be [208].
Ruskin also believes that in Gothic work, the workman is "set
free" [214] -- and then goes on to list several required forms [230-231]. No, the Gothic style is not a radical, powerful
one -- it is limited to imitation.
Furthermore, the Gothic style is fundamentally dishonest. The Mont Saint Michael is considered a Gothic
triumph of naturalism, but it is obviously a man-made work, jutting inharmoniously
out of the green peninsula on which it is 
built.
The Gothic style pales in comparison to a truly organic,
modern structure -- the work of Frank Gehry. Without trying to imitate the unimportant
details of natural structure, the
Though this course has caused me to appreciate nature and
Gothic architecture more through observation, experience, and the works of
Ruskin, I remain a staunch modernist.
THE HAMMER
We have been taught from the very
beginning: hammer your thoughts into unity.
That phrase, from Yeats, reminded me of something I had read in
Nietzsche's Twilight of the Idols,
which is subtitled "How to Philosophize With a Hammer." [Nietzsche, 1]. Nietzsche's idea of "philosophizing with
a hammer" refers to the use of a hammer as a "tuning-fork" to
sound out the hollow or rotten interiors of the "eternal idols"
Nietzsche is combating. [Nietzsche, 4]. As
Yeats had an interest in and was influenced by Nietzsche, it seems plausible
that our course theme of hammering our thoughts was probably influenced by the
Nietzschean creed. Throughout this
course, we have tried to sound out the false idols, from perfectionism and
spell checkers to the separation of man from nature. This semester, we were asked to hammer out
our own selves in writing about a vision for the future.
My "vision," such as
it is, is to become a lawyer. My dream
is to spend the rest of my life arguing with other people and speaking
publically. This dream is unlikely to
inspire others, in my opinion, and doesn't really translate well into a t-shirt
slogan. But the reason law appeals to me
is because, in pursuing it, I can pursue a closely-held ideal:
self-improvement. As a highly
competitive field, law appeals to me because I know it will challenge me.
It might seem strange that I want to spend my life doing
something so cold and unaesthetic, having spent most of this essay talking
about the transformative power of knowledge and the aesthetic. However, I don't think that I would have to
abandon literature and art in order to practice law. Ideally, I can retire early and spend ten
years touring
In the pursuit of unity, I would like to consider the
goals I have had to maintain for the entirety of the course, and my
effectiveness at meeting them:
1)
Write.
I would like to develop both informal (public-oriented) and formal
writing. Hopefully this is something
that can be realized through future projects and assignments. I have met this first goal the least. More on this later.
2)
Speak.
Class discussions are most beneficial to me when I overcome my desire to
stay quiet. The class discussion format in
this course required boldness -- a valuable ability. I found myself speaking more throughout this
course, finally leading the last class day at the Blanton. Though I feel I have a long way to go in
developing confidence and fluency in public speaking, this course has certainly
helped me in my goal of becoming a lawyer.
3)
Consider the future.
Through the use of a witness as well as a more analytic, left-brained
approach, I would like to develop some ideas about my future. I want to develop a better idea of my own
ideal self. This course has forced me to
consider issues I have been trying to ignore for quite some time. In writing this LR and the LR midterm, I
found it very difficult to synthesize my
4)
Newman's Synthesis.
Newman emphasizes the importance of connection between different
courses. I would like my university
education to reflect "consilience."
In
including architecture and science (the evolutionary debate), this course has
combined disciplines for greater understanding.
5)
Create a sense of place at UT. Since
UT will be my home for the next three-plus years, I want to feel comfortable
here by creating a sense of place. This last goal may
seem to be the most mundane, but it has been important to me as a freshman as a
large university. This course has been
most successful in helping me realize this goal, through helping me connect
with natural elements here at the university as well as showing me the
architecture here. I have been amazed by
how important architecture is to my sense of place. Having been inside the tower and understanding
the meaning of the scallops, I feel much more at home.
THE COURSE
Overall, I have enjoyed this course, particularly its internet
aspects. However, I feel that it could
be improved by a more traditional approach to literary analysis. To date, I have written three projects in
this course. The first two were both on
Alduous Huxley, from whom I feel I learned a lot, and the third was a discussion
of modernism in sculpture from the perspective of Jessie Otto Hite, the Blanton
curator. I also did an extra credit
project on Jane Eyre. Though these four
projects combined must have amounted to over 5,000 words, I feel that I could
have gotten much more out of them. Since
we were encouraged to make bots, much of our writing was choppy, taking the
form of a conversation. As the bots were
primarily biographical, the writing was fact-filled and informative rather than
analytical or persuasive. I do not feel
that working on the bots improved my writing very much. In fact, the best writing I did all semester
was in journal form. However, the point
distribution was such that the optional journals (in my opinion, the most
productive and difficult kind of writing) were worth only 8 points each, much
less than the projects or bots, though it was more difficult to do the
considerable reading and then shed light on it through a journal. Despite this, a extra-credit bot (only twice
as many words as a journal) was worth 100 points, though most of the writing
involved in a bot required little analysis and was highly
research-dependent. I feel that optional
journal writing should have been encouraged more with higher points, and
project guidelines should be less bot-dependent and instead more
persuasive. My favorite was the first
project this semester.
Word Count
original: 1580
revised: 3,104
Works Cited
Bronté, Charlotte. Jane Eyre.
Penguin, 2003.
Fowles, John. The French
Lieutenant's Woman.
Joyce, James. A Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Man.
The New
E603
Course Anthology. Ed: Professor Bump. 2005.
E603B
Course Anthology. Ed: Professor Bump. 2006.
Nietzsche,
Freidrich. Twilight of the Idols. Hackett Publishing Company, 1997.
Image Sources
Seeing
myself from above - original image.
Meditating
- taken by Prof. Bump
St.
Michel - http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/%7Ebump/
The
Guggenheim - http://www-personal.umich.edu/~sven/publctns/binopps1.html