Wednesday, September 5, 2007

Class #3 Wrap Up and The Next Response

Please read this post in its entirety.

For Monday, read the Fish (found under 'Important Links') and Terry Eagleton's short essay in Literary Theory. The essay is an excerpt from his book Literary Theory: An Introduction (pp.10-16), if you want to try to find the reading at the library or via some other means. When you've done these readings, post a response which attempts to connect these readings to our discussion of genre thus far, and try to be specific. How is what Fish is talking about like what Chandler (and our class) has been talking about? Also try to find one example drawn from life where the social expectations and conventions are critical to interpreting interaction (as in Fish's classroom) and spend a few paragraphs describing that interaction. Lastly, comment again on one other post, excepting whomever posts first.

I must insist again on a quote from each author in your response.

We'll get back to the O'brien briefly on Monday, and keep considering the questions posed. Particularly: Why admit the lie, especially when what you've written is a 'novel,' not an autobiography (and here, you should note, is a critical issue of genre)?

And I didn't get back to a critical aspect of the Western, one which both Adam and Lesley touched on: I think it (along with war genres) can most easily be made to focus on male affection, traditionally not homosexual though often homoerotic affection. This because it often (for historical and genre-traditional and simply misogynist reasons) lacks or minimizes the role of women. Perhaps this is Abbott's main reason for turning to the genre: he's interested in exploring male bonding and male affection (even love), and is using the conventions of the genre to do so, whether working within those conventions (the Duke and Doc have a strong traditional father/son relationship) or working against them (as between Duke and the Verdigris Kid). In this genre, one might argue, the emphasis on male affection is less taboo or transgressive than it might otherwise have been, which might also contribute to Jessica's comment on Brokeback. Could we argue that Brokeback reaches such a huge audience largely because the main characters are, apart from their sexuality, otherwise such paragons of traditional masculine imagery?

Lastly, be sure to look at Mike Nektalov's last post on O'Brien for a quite fine example, though a number of them were strong.

response 2

As Chandler explains in the section “Working Within Genres,” writers and film makers work under the assumption that the audience already has expectations for their material based on it’s apparent genre. There are certain conventions that make every genre identifiable but if the audience is not previously familiar with these conventions and the genre they belong to, they can go unnoticed. Faucet’s discussion of space and categorization further supports the importance of genres in understanding. Genres function as the framework needed for the viewer or reader to interpret the work in a particular way and therefore ensure we see what the creator wants us to see. Although Chandler mentions the need for “certain 'given' conventions” in a particular genre, he also says that “every work within a genre also involves the invention of some new elements,” which is done by O’Brien’s in his stories, “Spin,” “The Man I Killed,” and “Good Form.” There are plenty of mentions of foxholes, land mines, ammunition, and violence to make sure the reader is aware they are reading a war story. However, O’Brien brings something new to the table of the genre, a different form. War stories are often revered for their truth and frankness, but O’Brien shatters that mold by revealing, in “Good Form” that aside from being a solider, “almost everything else was invented.” He did not do this for entertainment value but rather to bring a different kind of truth to the genre. As a young solider he was afraid to look at the faces of the rival soldiers who perished before him but their bodies are real and his guilt is real. In “The Man I Killed,” O’Brien vividly characterizes the dead young man, saying “he wanted someday to be a teacher or mathematics,” and that he was dainty and frail and not built for war. This was not typically done in war stories but it successfully fits into the genre while allowing the reader to experience what the author wants him or her to and feel what he felt.

Response #2

A good storyteller can tell a story so realistically no matter whether it really happened or not. "It's the form, not the game", O'brien says. How a story-truth can be truer than happening-truth, according to him, depends on how the story is told. The author was a soldier in Vietnam war, and he tells the happening-truth side of the story "I was once a soldier. There were many bodies, real bodies with real faces, but I was young then and I was afraid to look." To show how a same story can be told differently, he tells the story-truth side of the story: "His jaw was in his throat, his uuper lip and teeth were gone, his one eye was shut, his other was a star-shaped hole..." and it goes on. As an audience, I wouldn't care whether the story is real or not, as long as it entertains me and keeps me on the edge of the seat. The concept of "death" comes really closer in the latter version of the story than the first. In addition to that, the author adds how the dead young vietcong might have gone to college, loved his math major, loved his family and friends and girlfriend, and how much he might have hated the fact that he has to fight, as much as the soldier who killed him. Suddenly, the body lying there is not just a vietcong, but a human being, who had a dreams and love, all gone now. Not only the latter version gives me the creeps to imagine the dead body, but also makes me feel sympathetic for the dead young vietcong. Throughout the story, he repeat the description of the dead body, the "his jaw was in his throat..." for some reason, probably because he wants to keep reminding the reader that picture. The soldier who killed the poor vietcong is Tim, who is speechless the whole time, keeps staring back at the dead body, probably out of sympathy and guilt.

War Story Genre?

After reading everything I have to question whether or not O’Brien’s The Things They Carried can be classified as a war story genre because it isn’t your typical war story. I am going to have to use the words of my peer Stacy to describe O’Brien’s The Things They Carried “he is reminiscing his experiences in war” which is all he really is doing. In all three of the readings O’Brien constantly states the fact “I’m forty-three years old, true, and I’m a writer now, and a long time ago I walked through Quang Ngai Province as a foot soldier.” He doesn’t always say it word for word but it is always a variation of it, sometimes he won’t even tell you where he was and he will just tell you the war have been over for a long time now. He also tends to repeat and put a lot of emphasis on things like the corpse he saw “ His jaw was in his throat, his upper lip and teeth were gone, his one eye was shut, his other eye was a star-shaped hole, his eyebrows were thin and arched like a woman’s, his nose was undamaged, there was a slight tear at the lobe of one ear, his clean black hair was swept upward into a cowlick at the rear of the skull, his forehead was lightly freckled, his finger-nails were clean, the skin on his right cheek was smooth and hairless, there was a butterfly on his chin, his neck was open to the spinal cord and the blood there was thick and shiny.” These are the kind of images that you would see in a war story film and it turns out that it is the only war like thing in O’Brien’s writing. A lot of it is just fluff, like how them having a mellow war and people playing checkers and other stuff which doesn’t really do much to justify The Things They Carried being in the genre war story. When Foucault was discussing the classification of animals he said this one thing that caught my attention “ if all the animals divided up here can be placed without exception in one of the divisions of the list, then aren’t all the other divisions to be found in that one division too?” It made me think if it was actually possible to put everything in a genre with no exception because some things are a mixture of two or more genres or classification groups. In Chandlers reading there was a part where someone said “Assigning a text to a genre sets up initial expectations” and O’Brien’s literature didn’t meet my expectations to be considered a war story genre.

Response #2 The Genre of War Stories
I would definitely have to agree with Chandler when he says, "Assigning a text to a genre sets up initial expectations...However, challenging too many conventional expectations for a genre could threaten the integrity of the text."
(page 2) This statement couldn't ring more true when reading Tim O'Brien's stories about war. When I think of the war genre I see the picture of the movie Blackhawk Down in my head of poeple getting blown up and seriously injured and never do I feel a sense of sympathy in any way to the enemy. The enemy is killing our men and will stop at nothig to reach their goal of destroying the Americans. The genre is bloody, violent, and depressing, and yet as I read Mr. O' Brien's stories I found myself laughing at times and having much empathy for the enemy.
The very first line to the story of "Spin" left me wondering immediately if this text was indeed going to stray away from the typical classification of the genre, "The war wasn't all terror and violence. Sometimes things could almost get sweet....On occasions the war was like a Ping Pong ball. You could put a fancy spin on it, you could make it dance." This is not the typical imagery I would assume to have in reading a war story at all, a Ping Pong ball? (page 1)
Yes O'Brien does talk of times in foxholes and being dirty and missing home like every normal soldier of this genre, however, when the enemy, carrying a gun I might add, is either going to be shot or shot down, it is natural to think," Get 'em!" As the reader of the story, we identify with the voice of the story and do not want him to be harmed, especially an American! Especially being in the times of war currently, no more Americans should be harmed, and this is why it is so interesting to me that O'Brien really leads the reader to have an overwhelming sense of empathy for the soldier that he killed. "He had bony legs, a narrow waist, long shapely fingers...He was a citizen and a soldier... He hoped the Americans would go away soon...He had no stomach for violence. He loved mathematics. His eyebrows were thin and arched like a woman's..." O'Brien really paints the picture well in describing him as a feminine sort, one who wasn't meant to be carrying a gun, but more like an abicus. As a reader it is very sad to think of such a life wasted on something so horrible as war.
The real turn of events though is that O'Brien really gets you to empathize with the young man that he has killed and then suddenly describes that there is absolutely no truth in what he has said. He never killed anyone. All this time you realize you are feeling almost guilty for him and with no reason at all. This is why I agree with Chandler when he says, "challenging too many conventional expectations for a genre could threatenn the integrity of the text." Which in the case of Mr. O'Brien's stories is most definitely the case for me. (page 2)

Response Two

In these O'brien stories, 'Spin', 'The Man I Killed', and "Good Form', I learned how the 'War story genre', can be transmitted to cath the readers attention. This is an example of what Chandler says: "Genre provides an important frame of reference which helps readers to identify, select and interpret texts." I think that this is the purpose of the author, to write his personal experience during war, in enjoyable writing to make the reader be interested in the story.It is usual to see or to read in a 'War story genre' climatic moments of the story where there has to be explosions, amunition, casualties, horror, etc., this is crucial in the story because it acts like adrenaline to the mind, by making the reader get caught up in the story and become curious of what will happen next, will the main character die or become a war hero. In my opinion O'brien, wrote his personal experience during war using creativity to catch readers attention from any style, and age that they would be interested in reading a 'war story genre'.

In 'Spin', O'brien uses a more friendly approach of what war was going thru, he starts by saying,"The war wasn't all terror and violence. Sometimes things could almost get sweet. For instance. I remember a little boy with a plastic leg. I remember how how hopped over to Azar and asked for a chocolate bar." This is a n example of how war wasn't all catastrophical, in this story he explained how they passed their time playing chekers, or day dreaming while looking up at the sky and hoping to do things they would preffer doing instead of being at war. In "The Man I Killed', on the other hand, is focused on the authors grief, how his conscience kept on bringing back the memory of the young man he killed at war. He felt sorry for the young man because he didnt look like a soldier prepared for battle, he looked more like a peaceful person not interested in fighting. This is why he says the young man was "Frail-looking, delicately boned, the young man would not have wanted to be a soldier and in his heart would have feared performing badly in battle." O'brien focoses more of his feeling of guilt towards killing an innocent person, not remembering that it was war, that you sometimes have to kill or be killed, this is an innevitable consequence of war. In 'Good Form', the author is re-telling his experience at war but focusing on the present time he says, "I'm forty-three years old, true, and I'm a writer now, and a long time ago I walked through Quang Ngai Province as a foot soldier." O'brien uses the term happening-truth', with what really happen while he was at war, to the story he wanted the reader to experience. All of these storie are put as Foucalt says, "Each of these strange categories can be assigned a precise meaning and a demonstrable content; some of them do certainly involve fantastic entities - faboulous animals or sirens- but, precisely because it puts them into categories of their own, the chinese encyclopaedia localizes their powers of contagion." I think this statement goes with what Chandler also used as an example that by putting genres into categories it is easier to remember the certain parts of the story that better cauht the readers attention, and lie a child it helps contribute to decide what story to read, in this case what part of O'brien's story best catches the readers attention.

Assignment #2

We, the audience are so accustomed to these key elements of a war story genre, which include: patriotism, anger, fear, hatred, violence, deadly weapons, massive amounts of blood, death, and innocent victims of war which only lead us to have our own frame of reference, and a conceptual understanding of a war story genre.
I think Tim O’Brien is fully aware of his audiences’ expectations, which ultimately gives him the advantage to add or delete certain popular elements to a war story genre. In Chandler’s piece ‘Working with Genre’ Nicholas Abercrombie focuses more on the pleasure schema of the audience and its relation to a genre. He adds “…audience derive pleasure from the way in which their expectations are finally realized. There may be satisfaction both in finding our inference and predictions to be correct and in being surprised when they are not.”(Chandler, 5) This framework plays a key advantage for O’Brien to slightly break free from a typical war story genre, without entirely losing his audience. In O’Brien’s short story ‘Spin’ he states “On occasions the war was like a Ping-Pong ball. You could put a fancy spin on it, you can make it dance.” I think of this statement in a larger scope, such as adding additional elements to an ideal war story genre to touch, or perhaps expand his audience. He starts ‘Spin’ by saying “The war wasn’t all terror and violence. Sometimes things could almost get sweet.” My first reaction was “ITS NOT?” In regarding the little boy with a plastic leg and Azar’s comment “One leg, for Chrissake. Some poor fucker ran out of ammo.” I had to remind my self to stop laughing, it’s somewhat melancholy to think of the little boy, but it wasn’t entirely my fault. If anything, its O’Brien’s fault, for he has added a touch of humor to a war story genre. He has a way of controlling the suspense of the story. He has a way of teasing his audience. He creates a visually disturbing mood when he describes Curt Lemon hanging in pieces from a tree. Then cuts off by saying “But the war wasn’t all that way”, and then mentions something hilarious like Ted Lavender who “…went to heavy on the tranquilizers”, and Ted adds “We got ourselves a nice mellow war today”.
My expectations in regarding an American war story genre is the following: anything that is non-American is No Good for You. In The Man I Killed, O’Brien slips away from a typical American war story genre by allowing the audience to empathize with the enemy. Interestingly enough O’Brien has created a character with a back-story whom we all can empathize with, without even knowing his name.
After reading Good Form, I lost complete trust in O’Brien. It’s like a magician exposing his/her tricks. The segment where he defines the story-truth vs. the happening truth and especially the incident when he witness a man getting killed as a memory of his. Is it a memory of his, or is it just a pigment of his imagination? It felt like I was watching a movie, the climax is heavily build and all of the sudden I can see the third camera in the far left corner of the screen, ultimately causes aesthetic distance, not a good feeling.
Foucault mentions something very interesting in The Order of Things that can justify the illegality of O’Brien’s actions. “Order is, at one and the same time, that which is given in the things as their inner law, the hidden network that determines the way they conform one another, and also that which has no existence except the in the grid created by a glance, an examination, a language; and it is only in the blank spaces of this grid that order manifests itself in depth as though already there, waiting in silence for the moment of its expression.”(XX). In the context of war story genre, O’Brien has disrupted the order, by adding new system of elements.

Challengind Expectations

“What historical a priori provided the starting-point from which it was possible to define the great checkerboard of distinct identities established against the confused, undefined, faceless, and, as it were, indifferent background of differences?” (Foucault) Almost each and every one of us has the same default of resorting to predetermined expectations on whatever we encounter. Whether concerning a country and its customs or a certain type of story and the way it is told, we’re very confident (as far, sometimes, as feeling like experts) in what we know of a subject based on past personal experience in and previously gained knowledge of that subject.

We assume we can predict how a tale will unfold based on what genre it falls under. We do this by relying on memories of texts we had read or films we had seen which were of the genre. Using these, we are able to identify a story in terms of what category it is affiliated to. We have the experience, ergo we know what to expect. “Clearly one needs to encounter sufficient examples of a genre in order to recognize shared features as being characteristic of it.” (Chandler) But, no matter the nature of our assumptions, we must be ready to bend them at any given time in case new knowledge is brought into the fray. An author might surprise us by adding elements to a genre such has had never been used before in that genre. These changes may forever morph our previous assumptions, one might even say evolving them, adapting them to the new elements.

If someone told you you were about to read a war story, you’d probably expect to find dramatic battle scenes; soldiers charging into the field, weapons blazing; a bloody carnage parade; and, of course, triumph over adversity. Upon reading O’Brien, you’ll find nothing of the sort. The three short tales present war stories from a new psychological perspective. He recounts not the conflict, but what happens in between. For instance, what happened when things quieted down (“I remember Mitchell Sanders sitting quietly in the shade of an old banyan tree… I remember Norman Bowker and Henry Dobbins playing checkers every evening before dark…”) or in the aftermath of something truly atrocious. THE MAN I KILLED displays a soldier’s remorse over killing a man in such a realistically detailed yet abstract way, giving us a glimpse of what’s going on in his mind, the jumbled thoughts all running over each other at once, all concerning the man he had just gunned down (“…So yes, maybe a scholar. And for years, despite his family’s poverty, the man I killed would have been determined to continue his education in mathematics”). It put me in a state I didn’t really fully expect to be in upon reading a tale of the war genre.

Tuesday, September 4, 2007

Blog Response #2

In O’Brien’s three short war stories, he defies the war story archetype by showing the psychological aspect behind killing a man. According to Daniel Chandler in his essay “Introduction To Genre Theory”, “any text requires what is sometimes called 'cultural capital' on the part of its audience to make sense of it.” As per the ‘cultural capital’ of war stories, killing someone would be the absolute necessity of anything remotely like it (as that’s probably the only thing about war stories people find to be interesting), the short story “The Man I Killed” gives the people what they want, but then exploring the shock and absolute remorse felt by the speaker upon killing a man he did not know. O’Brien makes the death of the soldier seem that much more traumatic to the speaker when he is telling the back-story of the deceased: “…he had been a soldier for only a single day. After his years at the university, the man I killed returned with his new wife to the village of My Khe…”

In “Spin”, O’Brien shows what the soldiers do during their downtime. They play checkers, they watch the skies, and do other things that aren’t so war like. This strays quite far your typical war story. As Michael Focault says in the Prefaces of “The Order of Things”: “We are all familiar with the disconcerting effects of… the sudden vicinity of things that have no relation to each other…” which can describe how people would not want to read a war story without the actual war with guns-a-blazing and a chopper to get to. Does this excerpt sound like something out of Platoon or Saving Private Ryan? “…Ted Lavender would give a soft, spacey smile and say, “Mellow, man. We got ourselves a nice mellow war today.” I really don’t think so. O’Brien’s three stories all defy what may seem like some sort of adventurous, epic story. They simply read and feel more like a series of survival stories, as it seems like the stories were written to show how they soldiers got by day to day, not so much how they fought in a war.

Response 2

In O’Brian’s chapter Spin, I feel that the way he writes it gives a more personable, specific, and a genuine experience. I found it easier to read and that the sort of fragmented setup he used made it feel like it actually happened, rather than having a flowing type novel. This gave it more of an account to account happening which was unique, and in my opinion pretty cool. Twice I recall he talks about a sudden jump in attention. The first time he says “…you’d think this isn’t so bad. And right then you’d hear gunfire behind you and your nuts would fly up into your throat…” The second instance is when he is pinned in a foxhole, he says “You’re pinned down in some filthy hellhole of a paddy, getting your ass delivered to kingdom come, but then for a few seconds everything goes quiet and you look up…” The pervasive image here would be the peace that can occur before, and even during times of high conflict. This also occurs in his chapter The Man I Killed. In this chapter he often refers to the way the man looks. He reminds us of his hair, his face, and his skin. He also takes us to an image of blue bell flowers, another object showing a sort of serenity. Good Form I found to be the most intriguing piece, for the sheer fact that he sort of tells us that the things he wrote didn’t happen, or they did, just not in the way he told them. He stresses here that things that happen aren’t as important as the things that they affect and the emotions they provoke.
Chandler writes that “…an advantage of genres is that they can rely on readers already having knowledge and expectations about works within a genre.” (Page 1, 2nd paragraph). I think that this sort of thing works for O’Brian but in a different aspect. Although this is a war book, from these limited readings it doesn’t seem like a regular war book. I think this makes it stand out and make readers appreciate it more, allowing the book and story to come into its' own. Over all of this I think Foucault touches on a very simple but possibly overlooked topic. He says rather simply “…that order exists” (page xx 2nd paragraph).He says that along with one order comes another and you can order things by many different ways spanning times, tastes, cohesiveness, and resemblance. I think an interesting question is how does entropy plays a role in our classifications, and is there anyway to tell when it does?




#2

O'Brian breaks the mould of the war story genre with his series of short stories collected in "The Things They Carried". His retelling of his traumatic war experiences along with the less horrific parts of the war side by side gives the reader a stark contrast as well as tells a little bit more of the whole story. As O'Brian states in the opening of "Spin":
"The war wasn't all terror and violence. Sometimes things could almost get sweet"
He then goes on to describe how some of his platoon mates would play checkers or stare at the sky and just wonder about it all. He said it was a boring war, one second you'd be sitting there bored out of your mind, the next your "balls would jump into your throat" when gunshots erupted just behind you. All of these "sweet" moments work to break the war story genre which "The Things They Carried" is forced into.

Foucault talks about "a tabula, that enables thought to operate upon the entities of our world, to put them in order, to divide them into classes[...]". O'Brian's war stories, in the case of the operating table, I believe would prove to be inoperable. One would be unable to dissect the stories into different sections for memoir, war story, or even to root out the small amount of fiction sprinkled over the top as shown at the close of "Good Form" when O'Brian says:

"But listen. Even that story is made up. I want you to feel what I felt [...] faceless responsibility and faceless grief. [...] What stories can do, I guess, is make things present."

Assignment #2- Working With Genres

In Daniel Chandlers, "Working With Genres" he tries to portray to the reader how working with certain genres can give the reader a better understanding of how a text can be read. In Chandlers piece he states,"Genres are not simply features of texts, but are mediating frameworks between texts, makers and interperters." However some say genre can influence how a text is read which would question Chandlers theory. Chandler also states that "Genre offers an important way of framing texts which assists comprehension." Neale states that you can define the word 'genre' as a set of expectations. Those are some of the ways Chandler and other authors define 'genre' and how it can alter a readers viewpoint of a story .
When reading Obriens' short stories "Spin", "The Man I Killed", and "Good Form" you can see the main genre of all three short stories is war. In all three pieces O'Brien is rekindling all of his war moments that he has been apart of, hence the genre of a war story. He doesnt go into all the killing, fighting and bloodshed that you would normally see in a war story. He talks about how many peoples life are affected by being apart of a war. Through all these pieces O'Brien is remeniscing about the past. As he states at the end of the final piece "Good Form", "I can look at things I never looked at. I can attach faces to grief and love and pitty and God. I can be brave. I can myself feel again." That quote shows how O'Brien isnt trying to show the reader the gruesome effects of war but how war is a 'Field Trip' and how it has a weird 'Spin' on your life. By reading O'Briens story and relating it to Chandlers "Working with Genres" you can see how some points that are made could be true, and also not so true after reading all the pieces.

'Spin', 'The Man I Killed', and 'Good Form' as war stories...

In all three of Tim O'Brien's short stories: 'Spin', 'The Man I Killed', and 'Good Form', he discusses moments which he lived through while at war as a young man.
While reading 'Spin', we automatically learn that his experience while at war "wasn't all terror and violence" (line 1). O'Brien recurringly describes moments which he lived with his fellow soldiers as "sweet" and/or peaceful, and often states that the war wasn't all about fatality and hatred, as one would expect from a war story.
In 'The Man I Killed', the author relives a moment during the war in which he witnesses the death of an opposing soldier. He captures this moment through vivid details of the man before his death, and also as if the man would have never died. Although O'Brien was vague in regards to whether he actually killed the man or not, the whole purpose of this short story seems to be for closure and his own peace of mind. 'The Man...' transitions into 'Good Form', where we later learn that O'Brien only witnessed the death of this man. In this story, his feelings during that moment are depicted and he states that what he wrote did have a purpose, which was to allow the reader to feel what he went through in that moment. He finalizes this short story discussing his intentions with his anecdotes, which were "to make things present" (line 28) and capture them forever.
Just as Daniel Chandler discusses in 'An Introduction to Genre Theory', "one way of defining genres is as 'a set of expectations'" (page 4), O'Brien's works contradict typical "war story" expectations, that is, one would expect to read about blood, violence, gore, hatred, etc., and all three of O'Brien's stories (including the more war-oriented 'The Man I Killed'), discussed moments in which soldiers were at peace and such. In conclusion, O'Brien's stories depict war stories, but whether or not they fit into the "war genre" is questionable. As Foucalt debates in his preface to 'The Order of Things': "On what 'table', according to what grid of identities, similitudes, analogies, have we become accustomed to sort out so many different and similar things?" (page xix), in other words, O'Brien's stories would traditionally be classified as war stories, but that is up to the reader to determine.

Challenging Genre and Making Chandler Happy

The title of the Genre itself, war stories, brings with it certain preconceived notions. By and large there are certain things the audience gets themselves ready for, or perhaps get excited about, when sitting down to read a war story. Those elements include violence, to say the least, and often also include things like blood, guns, aircraft, face paint, binoculars, floppy boonie hats, grenades, premature death, descents into madness, and cute native women.
We, the audience, know this because each of these things are in just about everything we’ve ever been handed that has been called a war story. So we know it’s a war story because it is similar to other things we’ve been told to call war stories. This type of habitual inclusion results in the “passive consumption of generic texts” and continually feeds the “traditional Romantic perspective, [representing genres] as constraining and inhibiting authorial creativity. Thus to explore Chandler’s rhetoric it is much more valuable to focus on what is different about a work of prose that is still included in a particular theme. It is more valuable because that which is included in a genre but is not a slave to the culmination of it’s expectations thereby challenges the genre by not conforming completely but still insisting that it be part of it.
This in turn is important to any schema because to put too fine a point on any classification eventually leads to absurdity. All to often it is that absurdity that leads to confusion, when the entire point of the classification in the first place was to reduce confusion. If we overspecialize we run the risk of creating groups defined by ridiculous minutia like those that “[have] just broken the water pitcher”.
The thing I found most likely to satisfy Chandler in this small collection of war stories was the sympathy O’Brien built for the enemy. It’s not that this has never been done before so much as it’s the way it was done. The writer chose to flash back and depict a much richer life of the enemy than is typical for the traditional war story. Someone once said that history books are written by the winners in order to allude to the spin that may have been placed on the details. It is often similar with war stories. Whatever side the writer wants us to be on or root for sufficient time must be taken demonizing the other side. Sometimes the good guys are the good guys only because and not until the bad guys are the bad guys.
So how do we do this in an unconventional way that challenges the genre? O’Brien starts with humor. In “Spin” he wastes no time in humanizing the enemy with a small anecdote of children and chocolate and then spares no time in slapping us back to reality with “One leg, for Chrissake. Some poor fucker ran out of ammo.”
In “The Man I Killed” there is challenge on equal par. Dealing with maddening grief is nothing new for the war story, modern or traditional, but detailing the life of a young enemy soldier to the point of making him the victim is not common. O’Brien even goes so far as to establish the idea that this boy was never cut out to be a soldier with details like “his wrists were the wrists of a child.”

Post 2: Working Within Genres

In O'Brien's Spin, The Man I killed, and Good Form, he is reminiscing about his experiences in war, thus the genre of the War story. In Chandler's piece, he states that "From the traditional romantic perspective, genres are seen as constraining and inhibiting authorial creativity. However contemporary theorists, even within literary studies, typically reject this view (e.g.Fowler 1982: 31). Gledhill notes that one perspective on this issue is that some of those who write within a genre work in creative 'tension' with the conventions, attempting a personal inflection of them (Gledhill 1985: 63). This is evident in O'Brien's The Man I Killed where he attempts to romanticize the life of the man he killed. In my opinion this undermines what my understanding is of the War story genre. It's similar to the Western Genre in that there is the good guy/bad guy, and in war genre there is the hero and the enemy. The bad guy/enemy dies, the good guy/hero lives. O'Brien was unable to desensitize himself from the the realities of war. His feeling of guilt brought him to romanticize his enemy's life to help him cope. "He had been born, maybe, in 1946 in the village of My Khe...where his parents farmed...he was not a communist. He was a citizen and a soldier...patriotic resistance had the force of tradition...that to defend the land was a man's highest duty and privilege." O'Brien is the reluctant hero as his buddy Azar congratulates him on "the kill".

In Spin, O'Brien's reminiscing about the war is summed up in the statement "What sticks to memory, often, are those odd little fragments that have no beginning and no end:" Here there is no cohesiveness to the story, leaving the reader in limbo. However, in Chandler's piece, it states that "We may derive pleasure from observing how the conventions of the genre are manipulated (Abercrombie 1996: 45). We may also enjoy the stretching of a genre in new directions and the consequent shifting of our expectations.

The War Genre An Animal Within Itself

Tim O’Brien’s first short story seems more flowery. Though most of his stories are about war this first story seems to be less focused on the violent aspects of war. Spin seemed more like the author was trying to reminisce on paper. He doesn’t just focus on things getting blown up but also nicer moments, when most people think about war stories the only sweet aspect of them has to do with the hero going off to war at first of when he finally comes home gruesomely disfigured or injured. The only happy ending being that the hero finally came home even if he isn’t physically the same when they return. With this first story O’Brien mentions different things. When he first mentions a little boy with a rubber leg this showed that all though the war can be violent there are not only casualties to the violence but also another side to it. Also there was the mention of body lice. Mitchell Saunders had mailed his lice his draft board, this seemed funny to me but also a bit on the shocking side because it seemed like Saunders wanted the board to feel his suffering. O’Brien described the war to be “Like a ping pong ball, on occasion you could put a fancy spin on it, you could make it dance” With Spin O’Brien focuses on other things besides what is expected, in a way putting a “Spin” on the traditional way people expect war stories to be written. Even with things like playing checkers or Lt Lavender taking care of a puppy he highlights softer points of the story, while doing this he still tells you about the war but does it unconventionally.The second of the three O’Brien readings The Man I Killed showed the more graphic side of war and war stories. Though very grotesque when describing certain parts of the story I liked the way he told it because he gave a background on the dead person leading up to their death. I didn’t really enjoy this second reading because even though it was heavy on the background information it seemed to be taunting people who are not built for wars. The character in this O’Brien story is described as girlish and feminine with “wrists of a child” with an interest in Mathematics and no interest in Warring. The way the men talk about killing one and other is done almost in a celebratory way. Kiowa isn’t proud of the fact that he had to kill someone Azar on the other hand acts as if he has done something he should be proud of. “Oh man you fucking bashed that fucker” Azar said. “You scrambled his sorry self” mean while he feels bad about what he has done. “The Man I Killed” in my opinion shows, that even though you may be part of a war it doesn’t nessacarilly mean that you may want to be there or are in anyways proud of what you had to do. Azar kept rubbing in the fact that he killed the man. While Kiowa is neither proud or boastful. O’Briens war stories may be told with great interest but small variations seem to cause some aspects of the stories to blur into each other.
The last O’Brien story Good Form was the shortest, while being the shortest he also brings up the issue of his age. I also noticed he kept bringing his age up in other stories not just this one. It was almost as if this final story was his way of saying he was not the same kid that went to war, that the war in some way wraped him and his way of thinking. “Good Form” was just O’Brien reminiscing instead of doing it through his characters. He talked about the difference between “Story Truth” and "Happening Truth" What I took from that was that story truth is the truth you tell yourself in order to live with your actions, while Happening truth is exactly what happened. He has to live with his own guilt. This last story showed that though the war was over they who idea and the consequences of war still stayed with him. I think that "Good form" was really all about being able to keep a straight face when your faced with difficukty, guilt or danger, or even having to explain yourself to a loved one. When it came time for him to have to explain himself to his daughter he said he could either lie or tell the truth, but it sounded like him having to choose was what was most upsetting.These three stories though similar in some ways, they still manage to go against what it means to be a war story. I think this because even with War being the main subject the underlying subjects are what make the stories human or more real. While it is understood that there do have to be wars O'Briens stories show more than one side of them. Whereas the basic cookie cutter war story is just mind feilds and blowing things up. Tim O'Brien does not "Stay follow the drink and stay in the pink" when it comes to his form, mainly because his stories tell stories within themselves.Another thing I noticed about the O'Brien stories is that he repeats the same discriptions in all the stories "His jaw was in his thoat" and the other "His one eye shut and the other a star shaped hole" At first glance all there of these stories could be taken as war stories but this is only if you do not examine each and deconstruct them. In the order of things Foucault says that animals are divided into sub catagories. With this concept in mind it is safe to say that each genere can be considered its own "animal" He says that limitations are only placed on ideas and things by us ourselves and do not trully exsist. This is seen in the quotation "What transgresses the boundries of all imagination of all possibility, though is simply that alphabetical series" In other words if we ourselfs did not assign catagories to things there would be no way to seperate them or divide them making them all transedencial and able to mix together. Lastly I wanted to close with a quote by Chandler "Any text requires what is sometimes called 'cultural capital' on the part of its audience to make sense of it. Generic knowledge is one of the competencies required (Allen 1989: 52, following Charlotte Brunsdon). Like most of our everyday knowledge, genre knowledge is typically tacit and would be difficult for most readers to articulate as any kind of detailed and coherent framework. Clearly one needs to encounter sufficient examples of a genre in order to recognize shared features as being characteristic of it"
This went back to what I said in my forst posting about the first story we read. 'Cultural Capital" made me think that as an audeince we may not only have to have another group of people read the work to identify what it is exactly but perhaps they would have a different interpretation as well as i stated before. Also what I took from the term was that people would have to have some kind of background understanding before they labled something a certain genre. After reading the three stories I can say that I have been given " sufficient examples of a genre in order to recognize shared features " All three can be called War stories at some point along the line others not so much, but this leaves the question where do we put them? The only place I could think of is maybe in the autobiograpical genre, because even if hes talking avout the war he ultimately talks about himself as well

Post#2 Placing Stories Into Their Own Category or Genre

What makes a “war” story a “war” story? Many would say shootings with blood and intestines sticking out, with a story of two groups conflicting with one another. This is what is expected when reading stories about war. In O’brien’s stories “Spin”, “The Man I Killed”, and “Good Form” he speaks of his own internal conflicts within a war. His stories are not about killing and gore, but how people lives were personally affected by war. Such as when O’brien writes about the young fellow who was killed in “The Man I Killed”; The young man was killed in an act of war but instead of focusing on the fact that they were in war, O’brien focused his thought on how this man managed to end up in the war, and what he did that got him there. You begin to discover that he was a lover, not a fighter. He actually hated the war but felt like he was obligated to be a part of it because of his family’s pride. He loved math and had a lot of good things going for him. He came into the war knowing that it was all over and that he was dead. Now there he is dead with his body teared apart. In a sense O’brien was at a war with himself because he just stole a life, and is reflecting on what could have been, and twenty years later he still has that memory in his head. “What stories can do make things present, I can look at things I never looked at” You can translate this quote from “good form” and take it anyway you’d like. For example take any experience in your life, and reflect about it or even write it down, you may find yourself noticing things you have never noticed before about the situation and yourself. After extracting the true meaning behind O’brien’s stories should they be categorized as war stories? Is it a story about war, or a story about self-conflict? Well Chandler says that Genre can “help readers to identify and interpret texts” but in also “constrains the possible ways in which a text is interpreted”. In other words considering O’brien’s stories to be categorized as war stories can take out the true meaning behind them. Foucault talks about how the Chinese encyclopaedia puts things into categories of their own; in a sense that O’brien’s stories should have a category or genre of their own. When people read or see a War story they expect to see a lot of blood and action, not so much personal issues.

Monday, September 3, 2007

Post Two - Working Within Genres

In the three stories "Spin", "The man I Killed", and "Good Form" O' Brien is retelling some of his experiences in war. This would typically place his pieces into the genre of war stories. Universally this would suggest that there was going to be a lot of blood and gore, blowing up and shooting, and usually some form of a hero who saves his whole platoon or at least his best friend. Somewhere along the way someone dies and the narrator finds a hidden truth or has an epiphany about some aspect of his own life or personality that he was blind to before. However, in these three short pieces by O' Brien there isn't much of any of those expected characteristics. He does briefly touch on some of the blood and gore, and quickly discusses some of the shooting or bombs, but mostly he is speaking of remembering the war and how it affects him now remembering it in a way that it didn't affect him then when he was experiencing it. In the end of "Spin" O' Brien writes "Forty-three years old, and the war occurred half a lifetime ago, and yet the remembering makes it now. And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever." Here is an example of how O' Brien breaks the war story genre of just guns and death and breaks into his discussion of something that happened once being able to live forever through the story he was telling at that time. His more characteristic parts are like the part in "The Man I Killed" when he wrote, "His jaw was in his throat, his upper lip and teeth were gone, his one eye was shut, his other eye was a star-shaped hole, his eyebrows were thin and arched like a woman's, his nose was undamaged, there was a slight tear at the lobe of one ear, his clean black hair was swept upward into a cowlick at the rear of the skull..." This is the war story cliches that people want to read or see. In Chandler's second part of his readings he says, "Genre provides an important frame of reference which helps readers to identify, select and interpret texts." However in the case, by assuming that these pieces by O' Brien are in the genre of war stories, it could take away from the actual purpose the writer may have had because we are limiting its purpose by placing it in a certain genre. Foucault says, "Each of these strange categories can be assigned a precise meaning and a demonstrable content; some of them do certainly involve fantastic entities - fabulous animals or sirens - but, precisely because it puts them into categories of their own, the Chinese encyclopaedia localizes their powers of contagion." I think what he is saying is that while certain pieces do have like characteristics or similarities by putting them into categories like genres it limits the power or purpose they could possibly have.