Post for 9/17

"These various conditions, which appear first as conditions of self-activity, later as fetters upon it, form in the whole evolution of history a coherent series of forms of intercourse, the coherence of which consists in this: thats in the place of an earlier form of intercourse, which has become a fetter, a new on is put, corresponding, to the more developed productive forces and, hence, to the advanced mode of the self-activity of individuals - a form which in its turn becomes a fetter and is then replaced by another."

I don't understand how an interchange of ideas has anything to do with being chained or bogged down.  

Also, the guy who translated this work could of picked a better word than intercourse.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx  
 

Post for 9/17

"The definite condition under which they produce, thus corresponds, as long as the contradiction has not yet appeared, to the reality of their conditioned nature, their one-sided existence, the one-sidedness of which only becomes evident when the contradiction enters on the scene and thus only exists for the later individuals. This condition appears as accidental fetter, and the consciousness that it is a fetter is imputed to the earlier age as well."

This confused me but what I got from it was it when something changes from a conditioned nature, that change is what will exist for later individuals to contradict.

Response #4 The Idealogy of Marxism

"The tranformation, through the division of labour, of personal powers (relationships) into material powers, cannot be dispelled by dismissing the general idea of it from one's mind, but
only by the action of individuals in again subjecting these material powers to themselves and abolishing the division of labour."

I was confused about what material powers meant but I think what is being said here is that in order to create an economically prosperous, united community, the people must give up their personal relationships and only be concerned with working for the greater prosperity of the State, in which they will be unified.


This site that I went to really helped explain the ideas of Marx and Engel and explained many terms that I hadn't heard of in a number of years, so it was a great site to refresh my memory!
http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/help/marxism.htm

'The German Ideology'

"Of the elements handed down to a later age from an earlier, what appears accidental to the later age as opposed to the earlier, is a form of intercourse which corresponded to a less developed stage of the productive forces. The relation of the productive forces to the form of intercourse is the relation of the form of intercourse to the occupation or activities of the individuals."

These two sentences are a little repetitive and confusing, but my main confusion lies in Marx's reference to 'productive forces'.

Response #4

"The conditions under which individuals have intercourse with each other, so long as the above-mentioned contradiction is absent, are conditions appertaining to their individuality, in no way external to them; conditions under which these defenite individuals, living under defenite relationships, can it alone produce thier material life and what is connected with it; are thus the conditions of their self activity and are produced by this self-activity."

What are these conditions Marx and Engels refers to that can produce their material life?

Response Four

"The illusory community, in which individuals have up till now combined, always took on an independent existence in relation to them, and was at the same time, since it was the combination of one class over against another, not only a completely illusory community, but a new fetter as well. In the real community the individuals obtain their freedom in and through their association."

What difference do "illusory communities" (where it's one class over another) and "real communities" (where the individuals gain their freedom through association), in terms of classes actually have, as it seems as if they are both virtually the same in this right?

post #4

"Individuals have always built on themselves, but naturally on themselves within their given historical conditions and relationships, not the 'pure' individual in the sense of the ideologists. But in the course of historical evolution, and precisely though the inevitable fact that within the division of labor social relationships take on an independent existence, there appears a division within the life of each individual, in so far as it is determined by some branch of labour and the condition of pertaining to it."

I think what he is trying to say is that we are all individuals, but that our individuality is built upon our "branch of labour". Basically your economic class will determine your individuality whether your the rich controlling poor (media), or whether your the proletarian being controlled by the bourgeois; your branch of labour will determine part of your individuality depending on your social class and what you choose to follow.

" The transformation,through the division of labour,of personal powers(relationships)into material powers,cannot be dispelled by dismissing the general idea of it from the one's mind, but only bu the action of individual in the again subjecting these material powers to themselves and abolishing the division of labour"

What Marx is trying to say,in my opinion, is changing personal power into material power can not be achieved by dismissing it from your psyche, there has to acion,an uprising, for change to occur.

“This is not possible without the community. Only in community with others has each individual the means of cultivating his gifts in all directions; only in the community, therefore, is personal freedom possible. In the previous substitutes for the community, in the State, ect., personal freedom has existed only for the individuals who developed within the relationships of the ruling class, and only so far as they were individuals of this class.”

How is personal freedom possible “only” in a community? Isn’t this statement contradictory?

Thoughts on the German Ideology

"The difference between the individual as a person and what is accidental to him, is not a conceptual difference but an historical fact. This distinction has a different significance at different times — e.g. the estate as something accidental to the individual in the eighteenth century, the family more or less too. It is not a distinction that we have to make for each age, but one which each age makes itself from among the different elements which it finds in existence, and indeed not according to any theory, but compelled by material collisions in life."

How are people accidentally different when its obvious everyone is both physically and ethnically not the same?

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01d.htm

Response #4

"The definite condition under which they produce, thus corresponds, as long as the contradiction has not yet appeared, to the reality of their conditioned nature, their one-sided existence, the one-sidedness of which only becomes evident when the contradiction enters on the scene and thus only exists for the later individuals. This condition appears as accidental fetter, and the consciousness that it is a fetter is imputed to the earlier age as well."

What? I think it means that when the common routine is interrupted by a new and different method, it becomes a constraint to their way of living, and is ultimately blamed on their predecesors.

# 4

Thus the communists in practice treat the conditions created by production and intercourse as inorganic conditions, without, however, imagining that it was the plan or the destiny of previous generations to give them material, and without believing that these conditions were inorganic for the individuals creating them.

For monday

These various conditions, which appear first as conditions of self-activity, later as fetters upon it, form in the whole evolution of history a coherent series of forms of intercourse, the coherence of which consists in this: that in the place of an earlier form of intercourse, which has become a fetter, a new one is put, corresponding to hte more developed productive forces and, hence, to the advanced mode of the self-activity of individuals-a form which in its turn becomes a fetter and is then replaced by another.

Readings and Response for Monday 9/17

For Monday, read the 'General Introduction' (pp. 1-7) to Modern Literary Theory, then Marx and Engels' The German Ideology (pp. 18-23) in the same. In addition, read the Ramamurthy excerpt and the Anna Karenina excerpt listed under the important links.

The critical text here is The German Ideology, Marx and the effect of Marx on criticism ever since. It is also a knotty and difficult text and riddled with complex terms. To this end, this week we will approach the response a bit differently. Each of you are required to post a passage (no more than three or four sentences) which you find particularly difficult to comprehend, etc. Type out the passage in its entirety and explain, in no more than one sentence, your difficulty. Once you have done that, you are required to choose someone else's post and comment on their bewildering passage. Try to paraphrase it, clarify it, point out your own problems and, most especially, explain it in real world terms, with real world examples. Your comment for this week, then, will be as long as your past posts.

The rule here, of course, is only one comment per post. If you find that a post already has a comment, find another. And please, no commenting on your own post.

In addition, you will probably be doing a bit of minor research to comprehend difficult terms, etc. Try to find at least one website which might help readers new to Marx and Marxism, and copy the link here.

Response 3

The central theme I noticed in our readings of Chandler, Fish and Eagelton is that we can not be sure if the conventions of a genre make the genre recognizable or if the genre itself makes the conventions recognizable. What Eagelton is showing us in his essay about literature is that to most, something is not considered literature till it is classified as such, and there is no standard for what counts as literature because there are no universal properties which make a work literature. “Literature, in the sense of a set of works of assured and unalterable value, distinguished by certain shared inherent properties, does not exist.” Anything can be considered literature. Literature is not objective, it is to be read in many contexts and understood in many different ways. Similarly what Fish does with the anecdote about his classes different interpretations of the same grouping of words is illustrate that once a reader is told in which way they should read a text, that reader will find what needs to be found in order to understand it in the approproate lens. The class that was looking for Christian poetry found Christian poetry in a simple list of names. As Fish says, “It is not that the presence of poetic qualities compels a certain kind of attention but that the paying of a certain kind of attention results in the emergence of poetic qualities.” Once the reader is made aware of what to look for, they will almost certainly see it and this is what makes identifying film and literature by genre difficult, or as Chandler would say, problematic to define.

More Theories

For as long as I know we have been studying genre in our class all the time and the more that we study it and read other peoples thoughts we start to understand it more. All of the readings that we have done relates to one another, like Chandler and the whole Genre theory. When you put a piece of work into a genre, you look at it differently and you expect different things. Stanley Fish’s experiment with the list of authors proves this to be true because when he tells his students “what they saw on the blackboard was a religious poem of the kind they had been studying” their perspective changed. They started to analyze the list as if it really was a poem, they used their prior knowledge of how to understand poem and they deciphered it. Fish also states that “it was the act of recognition that came first--they knew in advance that they were dealing with a poem-- and the distinguishing features then followed.”

So before he told his students that it was a religious poem it was just a list, kind of like what Chandler is getting at. When you know the genre of something you look for and expect certain things because in Fish’s first class the list of names was just a list of names. There is a part in Modern Literary Theory that relates to this on page 15 the last paragraph, “Language is a system of signs, the sign being the basic unit of meaning. The sign compromises a signifier and signified, the signifier is the ‘word image’ (Visual or acoustic) and the signified the ‘mental concept’. From what I understand, he is saying that once you see or hear a word you get a mental concept. So when you hear Western you think cowboys, shoot-outs, etc. The same applies to the word War Story.

As for the example drawn from life where social expectations and conventions are critical to interpreting interaction I couldn’t really think of a good one but I liked Jennifer’s example about the whole dating issue since most people can relate to it. Sometimes hanging out with someone of the opposite sex is just hanging out; it doesn’t necessarily have to be a date of whatever. The word “date” is such a cliché there are so many things that people can do and it will be considered dating but that isn’t always the case.

Post # 3: How it all ties together.

I am starting to understand more clearly as we read more information on literature and genres that Chandler is indeed accurate in assessing that defining genres "can be problematic".

All of the authors we have read seem to be on the same page though in describing what is and what makes a genre a genre, or literature literature. Eagleton proclaims that the idea of a piece of literature being bad or good rather then just being literature as a whole is very interesting. Who decides if something is bad or good? Is it because the reader doesn't understand or they just don't ike it, but why is it bad? He also says, "What was emblamatic to literature was based upon the tastes and values of a certain social class." This really ties in to what Chandler says about genres being economically influenced, that genres are a genre because they will make big money in the box offices. What is good, what is bad, what is a genre and what isn't? Who decides all of this?

I really found Fish's experiment to be very interesting in "How to recognize a poem when you see one". This experiment completely ties together Chandler's idea that we will get out of a text what we assume and make of the genre. Fish had simply wrote a list of names on the blackboard and it was as simple as this. Yet, his class full of students "whose concerns were exclusively literary and were in fact confined to English religious poetry of the seventeeth century" were told that this list of names was actually a poem and they began to make a connection of the names to a religious meaning really scrutinizing over each word knowing that in a poem every word means something. They literally made something out of nothing which I found to be hilarious!! However, this is what we as students are taught "(because they were told by their teachers), that poems are ( or supposed to be) more densely and intricately organized than ordinary communications; and that knowledge translated into a wilingness--one might even say a determi-nation--to see connections between one word and another and between ever word and the poem's central insight." The class was told this was a poem so they made it to be so because of their educational backgroung that is drilled into our heads. Why would we ever doubt a teacher or professor when they say something is what it is. That would go against the very fundamentals of our education. This is why it is so hard to classify anything, a poem, a genre, a piece of literature whether, the reader thinks it is good or bad... who are we to put such classifications, on something, anything? As a society, we are forced into thinking something and perceiving things in the way that "someone" (although we don't know who or why) wants us to.

The most perfect example I can think of is something that I actually experienced yesterday afternoon. This gentleman was sitting at my table in my restaurant by himself waving his arms all around like a freak trying to get my attention even though I was taking antoher guest's order at a different table. I motioned that I would be with him in a second. I scurried to his side to give him the best service possible ( while gritting my teeth) and he proceded to order a burger melt for his daughter and a fresh mozzarella pizza for himself adding that he was in a huge rush. His daughter finally makes it to the table and I get the food rushed out to him!!!! However, the entire order was wrong, and not because I made a mistake but because he got the enire order wrong!!!! When someone goes to a restaurant, they have a certain expectation already embedded in them of how the experience should be, and I agree that a guest should get the best experience because that is what they are paying for. However, if it didn't meet your expectations and it is your own fault, why would you call the server who is trying so hard to please you and trying to make an honest living a "STUPID B...CH"?!!! I tried to fix the problem by offering to make new, accurate food immediately and he got up and walked out saying that his dining expereinced had been compromised and he wasn't hungry anymore!!! Are you kiding me? Just because you have in your head how a meal at a restaurant should go, when did courtesy and manners and just being a normal human being go out the window?

Assignment Three

In these two writings Stanley Fish's 'How to Recognize a Poem When You see One', and the essay by Eagleton, use examples in order to convey and discuss literary elements use to explain the use of genre in an assingment. The two authors touch on the term commonsense as a way of trying to determine what a sign, or assingment is about. All of this is an example as how Chandler says that,"a genre defines a moral and social world. Indeed, a genre in any medium can be seen as embodying certain values and ideological assumption." This can be use to explain the idea each writer has of discussing the importance of the role 'genre' has in the writings of Fish and Eagleton, by discussing the use of it in more broad understanding.

In Fish's 'How to Recognize a Poem When You See One', Fish explains the difference an assignment wrote on the board had by the eyes of his two different classes. Although, one class was focussed more on 'Literary Criticism', while the other on 'English Religious poetry of the seventeenth century'. The first class would only see the assignment as a list of authors who have influence in the discussion and meaning of Literary Theory in their own assumptions. The Other class saw the assignment as was teached by an instructor as a poem. The words diin't follow a meaning, but the class use their own assumptions in trying to figure out the meaning; some touched on the religious significance of the names listed in order. In the end, Eagleton said, "The conclusion, therefore, is that all objects are made and not found, and that they are made by the interpretive strategies we set in motion." This is an example of this work, how the list wrote on the board interpreted for the first class only writer names in a list not following an specific order or significance, and the second class saw the list as a poem and made their suggestions on what it meant. On the essay by Eagleton, he is talking about the use of consious and non-consious in literary theory, how genre works in trying to explain what the writer talks about in the specific text of writing, he says, "The important point to grasp here is that language is not a simple naming process." This means that the importance of language is not only for a specific reader to understand, it is use as a way to interpret genre, how language is seen in different ways by people, because not all people understand the same language, their are many as also many genres.
Therefore, the connection between these writings is the signs of interpretation obtained, first by Fish's class where right away they would see the assignment as a poem, and in the essay the use of language to determine the genre. An example of everyday life is going to school, and try to learn something new each day by the instructor, and putting into practice when an assignment is given, this is where Fish's class example comes to mind where we need to interpret in or own words what the assignment is all about, and how in Eagleton's essay the use of language is helpful to understand and interpret the assingnment we are given.

# 3

In the readings ofLiteracy Theory Eagelton attemptsto touch basis on the complexed language of conscious and non-conscious social class norms. Eagelton states, " The important point to grasp here is that language is not a simple naming process". Fish too shared part in this theory that we fall preyto letting others dictate what a social norm means to us. For example, Fish says,"Thus while it is true to say that we create poetry (and assignments and lists), we create it through interpretive strategies that are finally not our own but have their source in a publicly available system of intelligibility".

In both of the readings one of Eagelton and the other of Fish both pick a part the genre of what is the social norms of life expectancies.

The interaction in Fish' classroom was amazing for the simple fact that a simple list was made out to be an array of things. Fish had two classes one being a Linguistics and Literary class and the other a English religious poetry class. The fist class was given an assignment which was a list of names and the second class walked in while the assignment was still on the board. The second class than began to pick a way at the simple list. One of the things that was interesting while the class was coming up with the meaning of the poem as well as where it derived from was that it had to be biblical but only because of the name usage along with a couple other factors. Truthfully if I had seen the same list I would've thought it to be just a simple list.

A social expectation can usually always be found in a group setting especially at a concert. For example, If a performer at a concert tells you to throw your hands in the air everyone would just do it because it would almost be considered a norm in a concert setting. If while walking home from that same concert in the middle of the night someone screams throw your hands up you would think your being robbed. Why couldn't have been that they to just came from the same concert.

# 3

After reading Terry Eagleton’s essay on ‘Literature’ and Stanly Fish’s “How to Recognize a Poem When You See One” it became eminent in my head that there lies some sort of a parallel connection between Daniel Chandler’s Theory on genre, and our class discussions on the subject of genre.
Hitherto, I am convinced on notion put forward by Eagleton that “we share certain ‘deep’ ways of seeing and valuing which are bound up with our social life, and which could not be changed without transforming that [social] life”(404). It becomes very important to understand that this external stimuli given off by our society shapes or predicts our internal cognitive faculties. This influence by society is unmistakable clear in Chandler’s genre theory. Chandler states that “a genre defines a moral and social world. Indeed, a genre is any medium that can be seen as embodying certain values and ideological assumption.”
A great example to clarify Chandler and Eagleton’s argument is to introduce the works of Stanly Fish’s “How to Recognize a Poem When You See One”. In this work, he conducts an experiment on his second class. These students are “confined to English religious poetry of the seventeenth century” (p, 1), who are given an assignment to somehow dismantle a poem, which consists of random names of Professors. He then made an effort to circle or box out the assignment, making it allegedly more clear to the students, stating that it is a ‘religious poem’. The students collectively made an effort to make something out of nothing, such knowledge that has been taught down to them by their previous instructors. Fish argues that it is their background knowledge of the “academic world” that led them to such actions. He elaborates, “…our tacit knowledge of what it means to move around in academic life was acquired so gradually and so long ago that it doesn’t seem like knowledge at all but a part of the world.” He adds “...your walking is informed by an internalized awareness of institutional goals and practices, of norms of behavior, of lists of do’s and don’ts, of visible lines and the dangers of crossing them; and, as a result, you see everything as already organized in relation to those same goals and practices” (p, 4).
The works of Chandler, Fish, and Eagleton are individually and collectively significant as they pertain to out class discussions on genre. Before reading Abotts’s “The Purpose of the Creature Man”, I read the assignment for class; ‘Find details and moments (scenes) with the story which clearly define the story as a ‘western.’” With this knowledge, my cognitive faculties would only trigger information as a ‘western’, especially my present knowledge of a ‘western’ genre. That only leads me to my own perception of a ‘western’, without knowing the epistemology of a ‘western’. Even till today, we as a class are striving for a better understanding of what it means for a work to be classified as a ‘western’, or a non ‘western’.
Attending the funeral of your fathers friend’s employee, where the cops never actually discovered the body, who has also been missing after his boat has sank in Rockaway, Queens would demonstrate a similar social scenario with Fish, and his students. You don’t have the slightest idea who your fathers friend’s employee is or what he looks like. You cannot really feel sorry for him because no one really knows what it feels like to be dead. So what should one do at a funeral? Don’t worry! Our society has prepared us, spiritually and emotionally. We know that that it’s perfectly legal to cry, and recommended to dress in black (where did we get that idea?), and say our goodbyes.

3: gained experience

Each and every one of us understands things based on what we already know. With accumulated personal experience certain concepts or knowledge on these concepts very well become second nature to us. But it is not enough.

I’m going to be honest. Due to unforeseen circumstances, I was unable to obtain the Eagleton text Literary Theory on time. But despite that, upon reading the comments posted before mine, I was able to determine that he basically puts in his own thoughts on the subject of our previous class discussions: What makes a genre what it is? How is it that, when we watch a movie or read a book, we are able to point out whether it’s a comedy or a science fiction adventure? The answer is experience. Either we’ve encountered these types of stories before or someone went to the trouble of explaining to us what we will expect of them. Either way, we know what category they fall under due to the prior knowledge we have of them. We see a version of this (with school assignments in the place of story genres) in Stanley Fish’s How to Recognize a Poem When You See One. His students who were trained to read into religious poetry were invited to explain the meaning of the names written on the blackboard. Based on what they had previously learned, they came up with all sorts of religious interpretations as to what they meant. They saw something completely different than what was actually written because that is what they were taught to know. “…while it is true to say that we create poetry, we create it through interpretive strategies that are finally not our own...” I really feel this sentence sums it all up. We can write a good poem or a western story but only based on western stories we have seen beforehand. And it’s the same with everything else we do, whether it be taking a bus or punching in a time card. We act according to prior knowledge and experience.

Post 3

The two readings draw on similar material, but use a different medium to express the same concept of genre that we have been talking about. Chandler and Fish talk about the same thing, except Fish uses people, specifically his class and a list of names that was written on the board. Fish’s main point is that even as go throughout our daily lives, we are trained to abide by certain rules which guide our everyday lives that we aren’t always conscious of. For instance walking on the right side of the hallway, or stopping at a red light. He writes “It would never occur to you, for example, to wonder if the people pouring out of that building are fleeing from a fire; you know they are exiting from a class…” On a college campus you would usually think that if a bunch of students are coming out of a building, that a class has let out. This same thing we do with genres, for with a genre we already anticipate certain things to happen, and we also understand things that happen within those same sorts of notions. Eagleton brings excellent evidence to the table that even before we are put into society we are framed into a certain way of thinking. He brings up Saussure’s theory. This theory shows that even with the language we speak everyday we are framed into some sort of thinking. Language deals in the realm of concepts. If you said the word car to someone, they would be able to conjure and image and tell you what one is. This idea of a car though is abstract and also there are many kinds of cars. In another language there could be a slew of different words that mean different types of cars. For instance we all know the difference between, a sedan, a coupe, and wagon, a convertible, an SUV, a pickup, and so on. All these things are cars but in another language you might not be able to interpret to the preciseness that you would in another language. Living we use these words and can understand what they mean, but because they are so common we think of them as natural when they really aren’t.

A social interaction which has certain conventions would be any type of competitive sport, or game that could be played. When people get competitive with each other they tend to talk ill, or badly of opposing players. This “trash talking” isn’t meant to be hurtful, as the players could be friends outside of this competition. The reason it occurs though is that this action is supposed to give a sort of psychological edge, and get into your opponents head by distracting him off his current task in the competition. Once the game is over, (most of the time) the two teams will shake each others hand and go off in good standing with each other, no hard feelings.

Post # 3 Connecting all three!

A connection can be drawn between the two readings and Chandler’s thoughts on genre. Each reading completes the thought of the other. Chandler, in An Introduction to Genre Theory: The problem of definition, states that “a genre defines a moral and social world. Indeed, a genre in any medium can be seen as embodying certain values and ideological assumption.” Perhaps he is striving to say that genres define the world that we live in. With in this world, we follow the norm and up hold certain expectations that are produced by genres. This thought is then continued by Fish when he claims that “For most of us these matters do not require explanation, and indeed, it is hard for us to imagine someone for whom they do; but that acquired so gradually and so long ago that it doesn’t seem like knowledge at all.” He then continues by stating that “so that they are alike in fine detail, it fills them so that no one’s interpretive acts are exclusively his own but fall to him by virtue of his position in some socially organized environment and are therefore always shared and public.” What he means is that since genres define the norm for us, we tend to ignore the concept of individuality and refuse to ask for explanations. For example: when we think about “Western” movies we automatically think about guns, a bad guy, a good guy, hats, and horses. Who established this specific notion? Why are we incapable of discarding this notion about “western” movies? According to Freud in the Literary Theory, we can not reject genres because “the human ego is not even mastered at its own house, that each of us carries a stranger within, the unconscious, which is only partially accessible.” Perhaps this stranger is the key to individually and an end to genres.
One example where the social expectations and conventions are critical to interpreting interaction is a dental office. When you enter a dental office, you expect to see the nurse, the dental chair along with its operational tools such as the drill, and of course most importantly the dentist. You expect the dentist to be wearing gloves, the office to be tidy, and the tools to be sanitized.

Assignment #3

Over the past couple of weeks we have been talking about the word 'genre' and how it can assist a reader in understanding the central theme of the story. By reading Daniel Chandlers two pieces we see how his viewpoints about genre can relate to one of the pieces we read this week. In Stanley Fish's "How to Recognize a Poem When You See One" he uses many similar techniques that we have seen Chandler talk about in both of his pieces.
In "How to Recognize a Poem When You See One" Fish tries to come up with a plan or a way for his students to realize what they are reading is a poem. Fish then came up with a plan very similar to what we saw Chandler do. Chandler told his readers the main genre of what they were about to read before they actually read it. It enabled his readers to look for main ideas that were related to the main genre of the story focusing there thoughts on one main idea. In Fish's case he wrote names on the blackboard with a frame around it and Pg. 43 above that. To him they were just names of authors, but to his students it was a religious poem similar to ones they have been studying. They immediately began to interpret what was on the board in religious terms. Fish states "It was almost as if they were following a recipe- if its a poem do this, if its a poem see it that way, and indeed definitions of poetry are recipes for directing readers as to what to look for in a poem." So by telling students it was a poem it changed all their viewpoints about something so simple to understand. As you can see Chandler and Fish both had similar techniques in analyzing a piece.
In "Literary Theory", Terry Eaglaton talks about what literature is and talks about what the exact meaning of the word. He also talks about how literature can not be categorized by one certain aspect. There are a numerous different categories for the term Literature. Who actually determines what literature is? Is it good or is it bad? These are all questions he addresses in his essay.
An example of a social expectation that you can see in life is going to a wedding. You expect to wear a nice suit go to a nice reception. Enjoy good food, drinks, and have a great time dancing and seeing family that you haven't seen in a long time. However when you get there you see its outside and people are wearing shorts, Shirts, and sneakers. You then ask yourself what is going on? So by interpreting my viewpoint of a wedding like many others would your social expectation for this wedding was completely wrong.

The context phallacy, does genre do a story justice?

The more we explore the value of context as a tool for literary analysis the more evident the duality of its nature becomes. With seemingly innocent intentions we tend to embrace context as an aid for classification, classification being a way in which we can understand a story better.
If we know to which group a particular story belongs we can then digest the story equipped with the themes, props, characters, and overall criteria that necessitate a successful story of that genre. A well defined genre brings with it certain value standards that are either met or failed and subsequently judge the value of a work of prose. However, there is danger here as well. Much like an attorney leading a witness the inclusion consequence of a context recognized can severely limit our ability to understand a work. It places restraints and can unnecessarily bias the reader much the same way the students in Fish’s class were already dedicated to explicate a mere list of names as a poem simply because it was presented as a poem. “In other words, acts of recognition, rather than being triggered by formal characteristics, are their source. It is not that the presence of poetic qualities compels a certain kind of attention but that the paying of a certain kind of attention results in the emergence of poetic qualities.”
This phenomenon can be observed socially as well because many social situations bring with them expectations that we are sometimes helpless to obey. For example, if we were to go to a comedy club and witness a performer delivering material of a decidedly mediocre nature we would be much more likely to laugh then if the same mediocre comic material were presented to us by the person in front of us on line at the bank. Social expectations and social moray’s are constantly influencing the way we decode information and especially the way we respond to it. “With this reservation, the suggestion that ‘literature’ is a highly valued kind of writing is an illuminating one. But it has one fairly devastating consequence. It means that we can drop the once and for all the illusion that the category ‘literature’ is ‘objective’ in the sense of being eternally given and immutable.”

Post Three - Fish and Eagleton

In Literary Theory Eagleton writes about literature and who and what makes literature actually qualify as literature. The literature that is most common and that everyone knows is the literature that was just singled out by a certain class or social group. Eagleton says, "What was emblematic to literature was based upon the tastes and values of a certain social class." This is similar to Chandler because he says that a genre has certain characteristics because of what was popular or very economically positive. In this pattern of making certain things well known and others not, all levels and parts of life are not represented.

Another one of Chandler's main points is represented in the reading of "Fish". The genre that is given to a movie or piece of literature automatically provides a set of expectations for the piece. Chandler says that this means just because of the genre, the way in which we watch a movie or read a text is different. Fish writes the same idea. He had a list of writings for his students in one class just as an assignment, but when his next class came in he told them it was a poem. This automatically gave his class a perspective of where to start thinking about the words and letters arranged on the board. Fish says, "Rather, we have readers whose consciousnesses are constituted by a set of conventional notions which when put into operation constitute in turn a conventional, and conven-tionally seen, object. My students could do what they did, and do it in unison, because as members of a literary community they knew what a poem was (their knowledge was public), and that knowledge led them to look in such a way as to populate the landscape with what they knew to be poems." Simply because of the fact that they were told it was a poem and as an educated literary public we have a way to attempt to interpret a poem the students had a preset notion for their interpretations.

A social situation in which this would also be very obvious would be on a "date". If two people went out to just get dinner with two other friends of theirs it would be a situation of preset notions of simply eating and talking. However, if the same group was going to go out but the two friends were told it was going to be a date, they would act completely different and address the whole situation in an entirely new way.

Class #3 response

Chandler and Fish have similar views about Genre. Chandler states the " Genre provides an important frame of reference which helps readers to identify, select, and interpret texts. " While Fish states " --and indeed definitions of poetry are recipes, for by directing readers as to what to look for in a poem, they instruct them in ways of looking that will produce what they expect to see. These statements reflect what we've been discussing in class regarding the "Western". Each of us have similar, but varying ideas of what we consider to be a "Western" stemming from our personal experiences with this genre that we incorporate into our knowledge . Chandler suggests this as well..."Clearly one needs to encounter sufficient examples of a genre in order to recognize shared features as being characteristic of it."

With Eagleton we learn that "just as people may treat a work as philosophy in one century and as literature in the next, or visa versa, so they may change their minds about what writing they consider valuable. He considers 'value' a transitive term meaning whatever is valued by a certain people in specific situations, according to particular criteria and in the light of given purposes. This is evident in our discussions about the Western genre. In the John Wayne era of "the western" society deemed the films "valuable" so as long as that attitude remained, that type of movie would continue to be made.

An example of social expectations and conventions could be a funeral or wake. You are expected to dress appropriately, be respectful of the grieving family, and friends. It would not be appropriate to go to a funeral or wake dressed in shorts and a tank top. There is always a chance of running into someone you hadn't seen in a long time, so you shouldn't act like it's a reunion.

Eagleton claims that literature, and what is considered literature should not be categorized solely by what one specific social-economic class deems appropriate based on their experinces as a group. As he says on pg.15 what was emblematic to liturature was based upon the tastes and values of a certain social class. Rather, literature should be a compilation of writings from all aspects of life. This realtes to chandler and our discussions of genre through the need to break expectations that attached as characterisitics.
Fish states that reason we are able to discern poetry from other forms of writing is because we have an already embedded with a frame of context to identify poems. As fish says the difference that we see between poems is not inherent to its structure but to different interpretive operations. Fish and chandler are similar because they are both promoting the theory that the things we catergorize into different works of literature,art,and in genral life, are a result of a previous description of a genre and what characteristics make a piece of literature fall into each of these genres.
A restaurant is a good example of social expectations that critical to interpreting responses. When you go to a restaurant there are certain things you are expecting, relatively quick seating,polite waitress,fast service,and properly prepared food amongst other things. You want to be in control of how your dining experience goes, and have the restaurant staff attend to your needs as they arise. When these expectations are not met in any way that is where problems arise and may result in an altercation between you and the restaurant staff.

Post # 3

In Terry Eagleton writings from Literary Theory, he talks about the meaning of the word Literature. People see literature as writing “which they think is good”(Eagleton). Does that mean that the bad writings are not considered literature, but who are the judges of good literature and bad literature. It creates a debate because there can be writings I see great and useful and others may find it unimportant and not good at all, does that make the writing literature just because some people can think its great and others don’t. You can relate this idea to Chandler because what makes a certain genres that genre? Who are the judges of what makes a western a western or a war story a war story.

In Fish’s writing he speaks of poetry to his class. In the reading he talks about how he wrote names on a blackboard in a class. To the students the names on the blackboard were just names, but when he told his students that it was actually a poem, the student started looking at the text much differently. From paragraph [8] “It was almost as if they were following a recipe—if its poem do this, if it’s a poem, see it that way—and indeed definitions of poetry are recipes, for by directing readers as to what to look for in a poem, they instruct them….”(Fish). In other words telling the students that the text was indeed a poem it changed their whole approach in interpreting the text. This also relates to Chander’s idea of genre because being told that certain stories are of a certain genre will make us readers or viewers look at the story at a different perspective and search and notice expectations to make the genre true.

When trying to find an example drawn from life where social expectations and conventions are critical to interpreting interaction I can only think of one thing, cars. When people see cars they see the outside of what maybe is a Mercedes or a Volkswagen and critique just by its name. When people see BMWs driving around they see a luxury car and criticize them just because of its name, without even knowing what’s even under the hood. This globalizing world created a social expectations that the names of these “luxury” cars makes us create high expectations for them. On the other hand other car companies such as Mazda are not seen with such a high expectations can be just as good at times. You can give a person two cars that look exactly alike but put a different brand on them and it will change the value or even our expectations and conventions to interpreting the car and change our view in how good the cars actually are. Of course there can be exceptions to this for people who actually know a lot about cars and make an argument against my idea, but most of the world does not know much about cars, just that Mercedes and BMWs are really good, and that Toyota and Honda are not as good.

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.

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.

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.