Digital Books

With the idea of every physical book going online, it can be a scary concept for many people. Remember when there were those random people that would refuse to buy DVDs because they thought that the original VHS version of movies were better, and that DVDs should just go away? I feel like this situation is very similar.

I feel like no matter what your opinion is about books becoming digitized, it is going to happen whether you like it or not. You may sit there and complain and whine and buy as many physical books as you want, but eventually, most likely, all text is going to be digitalized and distributed to the masses in the blink of an eye.

It does, however, take some of the mystery and fun out of things. Imagine a world where the latest Harry Potter book was about to be downloaded at midnight when it was released. Everyone would be at home, in front of their computers, waiting for the download to start that evening instead of lining up outside a Barnes and Nobles’, dressed as their favorite character. In this way, I would have to say that digitalized text definitely takes away the ritual and fun of things.

You may be able to take a tablet everywhere and read as many books as you want, but you don’t get the memories from the pages, like getting caught in the rain with the book, and all the pages of a section are warped and turn in a funny way. If that happened to your tablet... well, you’d probably have a dead tablet.

Wikipedia

Wikipedia is very interesting, if nothing else. I enjoyed reading this article because I feel as though so many English classes sort of just ignore Wikipedia’s existence and just say “Don’t use it for this paper, okay?”, and that’s just the end of the discussion. Nothing more. Nothing less. However, I think that there should be a dialogue about it, especially in middle and high school. I feel that this article shows that yes, Wikipedia can be accurate, but it is not suitable for research papers or any sort of documented work because it can be edited by those who have not gone through the editing and approval process of being published. I feel that many, many teachers in those lower grades do not explain this to their students.

I think the article was a very interesting read. I am an avid user of Wikipedia for my personal life, and I feel as though it does help me learn a lot of things. If I’m listening to a band, and I particularly like their song, I’ll use Wikipedia to go find their page to see what album the song comes from so that I can go listen to the entire album. As music is basically like therapy for me, I find this to be quite a help. When a band doesn’t have a Wikipedia page, I’m almost lost.

But, besides musical tastes, I’ve used Wikipedia for many other things such as hearing some sort of event on the news occurring in another part of the world, and I’m curious what it is all about, so I “wikipedia” (notice how the site has also been converted into a verb amongst modern internet users) that country to discover what is really going on. I don’t think Wikipedia is all that bad, but I feel as though it still has a lot of growing to do before teachers and professors will trust it, if they ever will. 

Acts 3 and 4

So, in the end of Pygmalion, Eliza finally brings herself to the forefront as a human being and she has definitely had enough of Higgins and Pickering trying to tell her what to do and whatnot. I’m a bit disappointed by this. Of course, it’s great for the character that she developed enough to finally stand up for herself and show those two men what she’s really made of... but I think I liked her better when she was just this annoying character that kept making absolutely no sense to anyone. Not that that mattered because Higgins and Pickering basically just ignored her existence anyways.

I think I found the whole situation amusing. Eliza is trying to express ideas that she has, but no one seems to care. This concept seems to still be a bit true that no one cares about her except for Higgins. When she finally expresses her opinion of everything via slipper to a face, Higgins starts to show interest in her. But, honestly, how is she any different from before except now they’re actually sort of paying attention to her? She always made a giant exclamation with nonsense syllables like “aw-oh-oh-oh-oh” or whatever, but now that it has gone physical, they finally pay attention? What kind of turn around is that?! 

I just found the ending to be a bit of a disappoint. It sounds weird, but I think I would have enjoyed it more if they just didn’t care about her still in the end. Would’ve been quite humorous for me.

Pygmalion

I had never heard of nor read the play Pygmalion prior to being assigned to do so in this class. I wasn’t particularly sure what the term “pygmalion” meant, so upon further investigation, I found that it meant a sort of transformation, which I figure will be a large theme in the play. Titles are obviously very important to a work.

I don’t seem to identify with any of the character so far in the play, but I do find Higgins and Eliza’s relationship to be an interesting one. His constant idea of women and how he showcases them to others is interesting, and as the play seems to promise a sort of transformation, I have a theory that the main character that will developed or transformed will be Higgins.

Orwell

I found Orwell’s view of how the English language has been deteriorating and withering away to practically nothing sort of entertaining. I can’t imagine what he would think of how much the English language has changed since his death. With the onslaught of text messaging between cell phones and social networking websites such as Facebook and MySpace in the modern technology age, our language has become sort of impossible to recognize nowadays with abbreviations such as “LOL” or “BTW”. I think Orwell’s concerns are so much before his time, and he has no idea how real his concern really is.

I think the set of rules that showcases at the end of the article are rules that could indeed still be applied to most writing in the modern age, particularly formal writing such as literary essays or reviews. His way of encouraging people to display the English language in the easiest way possible without confusing readers seems to be his goal, and I believe that this is something that most people today fail to do. In formal writing, it is fairly common to read students’ work that involves so many metaphors and similes that can pollute a paper in order to just fill up a page requirement that it takes away from the real topic that’s supposed to be discussed. The idea of using a short word instead of a long word is something that I personally struggle with because this is also a need for most students in today’s academic society to seem more intelligent than their peers. 

As a whole, I feel that society has totally gone against everything Orwell suggests. He urges writers to be more simplified and to the point while still, it seems that the more “intelligent sounding” a piece of writing is today, the better marks it could potentially get in the classroom.

Feminist Perspective on Wuthering Heights

Wuthering Heights was quite head of its time when you sit and consider what Lyn Pykett argues in her feminist point of view. When deciding between the two identities of the two Catherines, Pykett uses a certain way to show how both Catherines seem to resist what society would like for them to be by their upbringings and overall maturation into adulthood. One Catherine has been talked about as being quite wild and unladylike. When this Catherine becomes a bit more mature after venturing to Thrushcross, it would seem that her life is finally on track to a point. I believe she was meant to be unrestrained and “out there”, and perhaps her need to be this way was what led to her destruction, via Edgar and Heathcliff.

The other Catherine seems to endure a particularly similar journey, and I really do enjoy the correspondence between the two. It would appear Brontë did this on purpose, but this time, the other Catherine gets a choice. Sure, she is trapped in Wuthering Heights with no real freedom to an extent, but she gets to choose the love that she wants and it’s just a much nicer ending for her in the end. 

Cultural Criticism

“Nostalgia is a particularly appropriate emotion to invoke in establishing one's innocence and at the same time talk about what one has destroyed" (page 430).

This quotation from this section really made an impact on me because it is something that I’ve always thought about. I’ve often gone back to a moment in my mind and thought about how spectacular a certain event was in my life only to discuss it further with my parents where I was told just how absolutely different the entire occurrence was in reality. It’s sort of an amazing human feature: the ability to delete what is bad from our memories with little to no effort. It is our own personal historical bias.

I believe that perhaps Brontë had this issue with the moors. Perhaps all of her supposed happiest memories were truly there, and she really did love the setting and the atmosphere the entire time she lived there. But isn’t it possible that she only remembered the greatest of the goods from that setting? 

For most people nowadays, it is assumed that someone would be much more in love with the idea of growing up on a beach than in a moor, but seeing as everyone has a unique mind and idea of living, it would make sense that there would be people out there who enjoyed the moors a lot more than a beach. However, if you prefer the beach, are you forgetting all the bad things about the beach like getting sand in your shoes? Salty, frizzy hair? Year round unbearable sunlight? Or are all these things wiped from our memories at the thought of just how much fun we used to have at the beach as children? 

Wuthering Heights, Cultural Docs; Illustrations, p. 289-330

The letters at the end of our edition of Wuthering Heights shed light a little bit as to why Catherine went through the motions of marrying Edgar. I was glad to read these because if you’ve read my comments prior, you know that this was my biggest argument with the novel. I felt like I had experienced unrequited love one times too many in my lifetime already that it is just disturbing to read the tale of someone doing it willingly and supposedly to no fault of their own (or so the reader is lead to believe). 

Instead, the letters display a sense of how women’s rights were allotted to sort of force them into marriage if they wanted to be secure and stable in any sense of the word. For example, a woman would be expected to marry the much wealthier man over the poorer man, despite whatever she would feel inside towards the two men because when it came down to it, they needed to put together the ideas of love and stability into a single unit. This must have caused a great number of compromises within a woman in order to just continue to survive in the world.

I believe that the Brontë wrote about the injustice in women’s property rights in hopes of planting the seed of revolution into the minds of the female readers, but it would appear that this is the extent of her efforts to cause anything to happen. Perhaps she passed before she did things to truly revolutionize the world of women or perhaps this was the only effort she felt comfortable pushing forward with.

Wuthering Heights (Part I)

When I first began to read this novel, I would find myself beginning to become very confused. The text begins in the middle of the tale, throwing the reader off quite a bit. It would appear, however, that this is the author’s intention. The entire reading that has been done so sort of throw the reader into this world that is very uncomfortable and a bit awkward. From the introduction, Linda Peterson makes lots of references to how Emily Brontë was raised on the moors, distant from most of civilization, so perhaps this sort of tone that the novel emits could be attributed to this alone. While the reader might feel uncomfortable and distant from the text, perhaps this is where the author felt the most comfortable.

I enjoyed the minor humor in the novel the most so far. A great example of this is from the very first chapter when Mr. Lockwood becomes trapped with the dogs that are sort of hell bent on attacking him. With little help from the table that he flips in an effort to create a barrier between him and the “beasts”, he continues to call for help, but no one seems to come running to his aid for quite some time.

However, this moment is also when we are introduced to Catherine, which becomes a depressing subject to a degree because her character is one of torment. Reading how tortured she is with being in love with Heathcliff but instead forcing herself to marry Edgar is great connection material for even modern readers. It’s a sort of “love the one you’re with” moral. I wonder if Brontë realized how long her text would continue to be relevant to readers?

Manguel (p. 125-319)

I believe one of the best chapters that were written for this book is the chapter entitled: "The Translator as Reader". I've just never really thought exactly how the functions of translating a certain text from one language to another could be seen as a type of reading that actually involves the reader in a much deeper understanding of the written word. For example, when Manguel writes how Labé uses "an arcane musical language which she, as a lute player, must have known well, but which is incomprehensible to us without a historical dictionary of musical terms". These sort of techniques for writing in one text can be viewed as puns and perhaps even witty, but when it comes to translating the text into another language, one must strive to not lose the original intent of the writing.


This makes translation tricky for most, and it obviously necessitates someone very familiar with the origin language that is being translated, right down to common knowledge of the time the text was written. I suppose I always knew that translating text was a sort of reading in a way, but I guess I never truly understood just how much of a reader's duty it is to continue a certain theme that is present in one text into its translation in another language. However, having been a student of the Japanese language for three years, I guess I should have realized this by how difficult it can be to explain certain puns to different people who are completely uninvolved in the Japanese community.


Do you think that translation is a more modern way of reading, however? I'm unsure of when texts began to be translated from one language to another, so was this sort of textual translation truly important in times long ago?

History of Reading - p.3-123

I definitely found that this text became more and more interesting to me as I dove deeper into the actual material.

Honestly, the most interesting chapter to me was the one that explained the use of picture reading through the example of the Biblia Pauperum that helped either assist poor people in understanding the Bible or helped poor preachers give sermons from the Bible. I suppose I had just never thought of how pictures and pictures alone could convey an entire story to someone who is illiterate, but when you think of modern world items that do this (like road signs), I suppose it makes more sense. I guess being a reader and having the ability to comprehend and understand the text of the English language is something that I've taken for granted for so long.

I am actually familiar with the Codex Seraphinianus from an online resource discovered during high school. When I first found it, I had no idea what it was or what it was about; I honestly just thought all the images were intriguing. Having now read about how it was more of a rare exception to the concept of picture reading, I now understand that for most, it isn't important for the reader of this particular book to know just what exactly it is or what it is about. I think that's sort of a nice concept. It deletes the idea that one absolutely must be able to grasp the main themes and purpose of a text and forces the reader just enjoy having an imagination to a degree.

When reading about the chapter that described how Cuban cigar wrappers were read to by a "lector", an interesting bit of trivia was revealed. A man named Carlos Manuel de Cespedes was brought up in how he started the revolution against Spain to only be killed four years after becoming the first president of Cuba. It must be noted that according to history, de Cespedes had children prior to his death. One of them was a daughter named Gloria who grew up to marry a playwright and silent film actor (and formerly a physician) named Charles A. de Lima, who is partly my namesake. Their child was my grandfather, Edward Charles A. de Lima. It was very interesting to see my great, great grandfather brought up in the A History of Reading. Certainly not something I saw coming.

I was also excited to read about one of my favorite authors, Franz Kafka. I particularly took to his philosophy of how books "cannot take the place of the world", but instead "a man can't... master his own experience through the medium of another personality. [This] is how the world is in relation to books. One tries to imprison life in a book, like a songbird in a cage, but it's not good." (Manguel, A History of Reading. P. 91)

This concept of how individuals can sometimes take other people's experiences and harness them to learn from and create their own deductions without ever having experienced certain situations first hand is evidently a double edged sword. It can create a better understanding of the world so that when an individual does indeed find themselves in a particular situation, they may very well be capable of finding their way out due to a previous reading. However, they make end up lacking the knowledge of why they're doing what they are. It's an interesting argument of which is more valuable: the experience or the simple knowledge.

Introduction

Hey there.

My name is Devin de Lima. I am a transfer student at Kennesaw State University, coming from a smaller private college in Madison, NJ named Fairleigh-Dickinson University. Never heard of it? That's fine. No one has.

I was, however, raised in Woodstock, GA, a few miles north of Kennesaw, so I grew up in this area and went to high school not too far from my current university. I simply moved to New Jersey in hopes of change, and while that is indeed what I got, it didn't necessarily fit my needs anymore after three semesters. This is my first semester at Kennesaw, and I just got done with a semester off, which involved a lot of working and get my feet on solid ground.

I may have been raised in Woodstock, but I was not born there. I was born in Greenwood Lake, NY (never heard of that either? I don't blame you.), where I lived until I was seven before venturing down south due to my father getting a promotion and a transfer. In the end, everything worked out.

I look forward to diving into these readings for the class, and I suppose it's comforting to know that I will not be alone in trying to understand what it is that could be the most important details in these works. Until next time!