Office Hours Update: M 3-4, W 12-1, F 10-11

Journal Assignment: free-write for one page (legibly please!) on one of the following topics:

1. Types of Language

In the quote on the "definitions of poetry" handout," Lewis Truco seems fairly sure that he can define poetry in four words or less ("the art of language"); yet, Roman Jakobson insists that "the content of the concept of poetry is unstable and temporally conditioned." What does the term poetry mean to you? Assuming that we can be more complex than Truco has been, what is "special" or different about poetry? Choose one of the poems for Monday and discuss what benefits the author has reaped from his/her choice of genre.

 

2. Defining Ethnicity

How does Sollors define ethnicity? What is at stake in his definition? Do you agree with it? What is the difference between ethnicity and race? Looking at one of the poems for Monday, how does the poet seem to define "ethnicity"? What advantages does the poet have in using poetic language to construct this ethnic identify?

 

3. Culture vs. Cultured

The following are three very famous definitions of "culture." Which has the most in common with Sollors understanding of culture? What is the difference being form a "culture" and being "cultured"? Do you agree with such a distinction? Use one of the poems for Monday to support your argument.

Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (1869)

"The disparagers of culture make its motive curiosity; sometimes, indeed, they make its motive mere exclusiveness and vanity. The culture which is supposed to plume itself on a smattering of Greek and Latin is a culture which is begotten by nothing so intellectual as curiosity; it is valued either out of sheer vanity and ignorance or else as an engine of social and class distinction, separating its holder, like a badge or title, from the other people who have not got it. No serious man would call this culture, or attach any value to it, as culture, at all. To find the real ground for the very different estimate which serious people set upon culture, we must find some motive for culture in terms of which may lie a real ambiguity, and such a motive the word curiosity gives us" ("Sweetness and Light," p. 1)

Edward Tylor ("the father of British Anthropology"), Primitive Culture (1871)

"Culture or Civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society. The condition of culture among the various societies of mankind, in so far as it is capable of being investigated on general principles, is a subject apt for the study of the laws of human thought and action. On the one hand, the uniformity which so largely pervades civilization may be ascribed, in great measure, to the uniform action of uniform causes while on the other hand its various grades may be regarded as stages of development or evolution, each the outcome e of previous history, and about to do its proper part in shaping the history of the future." (p. 1)

Walt Whitman, Democratic Vistas (1871)

"American has as yet morally and artistically originated nothing. She seems singularly unaware that the models of persons, books, manners, etc. appropriate for former conditions and for European lands, are but exiles and exotics here. No current of her life, as shown on the surfaces of what is authoritatively called her society, accepts or runs into social and esthetic democracy; but all the currents set squarely against it. Never, in the Old World, was thoroughly upholster'd exterior appearance and show, mental and other, built entirely on the idea of caste, and on the sufficiency of mere outside acquisition-never were glibness, verbal intellect, more the test, the emulation--more loftily elevated as head and sample--then they are on the surface of our republican States this day. The writers of a time hint the mottoes of its gods. The word of the modern, say these voices, is the word of Culture.

We find ourselves abruptly in close quarters with the enemy. This word Culture, or what it has come to represent, involves, by contrast, our whole theme." (p. 224)