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!