Final blog instructions and the last "On Beauty"

"Final blog is due by Wednesday, May 6th, 11:45 AM, King 027. If you want to turn it in early, turn it in to Laura's mail box in Bachelor. TURN IN THE COPY THAT WILL BE GIVEN TO YOU ON WEDNESDAY.

Print out and include: your name, your cell phone number, your blog url, AND a paragraph assessing the experience of blogging this semester.

EC: A paragraph or two describing those grammatical rules that you need to learn to edit yourself when I'm not around."

On the last two pages of On Beauty:

- There is an implicit condemnation on one's class when transitioning from one social class to another

- AT RIGHT: Hector Hyppolite's Maitresse Erzulie - probably the painting Smith uses in her novel to get Kiki and Carlene talking

THE END.

WEDNESDAY: Look at Rosie Erdadez's article

What is beauty on the last two pages of the novel?

The last two pages of Zadie Smith's novel On Beauty show Howard utterly fouling up his last chance at tenure. He gets to the lecture hall for his Rembrandt presentation late, and half-way through his introductory speech realizes he left a yellow folder in his car. I assume this folder holds the speech that was supposed to get him tenure. This disrupts what momentum he carried in, having hastened from the house late, sweaty, and with the latest family disaster in mind - a disaster, by the way, that was entirely his fault. (It's bad timing all around).

When he realizes he left that folder in the car, he can't seem to make a split-second save of his lecture. Instead, he starts the power point. By then, he also catches sight of Kiki in the audience - this seems to finish what little concentration he had mustered. He flips through all the paintings his lecture was supposed to cover without saying anything. The last picture is a painting of Rembrandt's love, Hendrickje. Smith describes the quality of the woman's skin in the painting in a way that is beautiful. One line suggests Howard is looking as closely at this painting as his audience is: "He looked out into the audience once more and saw Kiki only." What else would he have been looking at to turn and look at the audience and Kiki for? He had to have been staring at the painting. Kiki is described often in the novel, and her skin is one of the things about her that receives the most attention - apparently, she has beautiful skin. The woman in the painting has beautiful skin as well.

In this moment, he is looking at the painting the way he often looks at Kiki - seeing her as beautiful, and seeing so much of his life reflected in her person. Almost as importantly, he doesn't say anything - he gives the title of the painting, Hendrickje Bathing, and that's it. After a career built on saying a great deal, and all of it having to do with the fallacies in theories of beauty and genius, he manages to look at the painting as a record of something beautiful for the sake of beauty and love.
Hendrickje Bathing by Rembrandt

The end of "On Beauty"

- The end "grabs at the crux of what the future is for English studies" - that a lot of classes are going to become multimedia classes

- What do you think of the Department of English as an institutional thing? - In my opinion, English Departments are still necessary! Until writers like Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Virginia Woolf, and Shakespeare lose the credibility attached to their names, and until books like In Memoriam, The Iliad, and Moby Dick are not necessary to know as an adult, English Departments are still necessary. Even when those names and novels become outmoded, the work those people produced will always be reference points and incredible resources for people who need them. The classics will begin to include contemporary 21st Century material, but it'll always build on previous material. I can see publishing dying off and going completely online before I see English Departments getting cancelled en masse.

- What does it mean to be an intellectual? Pages 226: Claire talks about loving Warren, never having known someone like him, but considers herself the victim of a female psychological disorder. "She was a woman still controlled by the traumas of her girlhood.... she felt one thing and did another. She was a stranger to herself." In her conversation with Zora about beauty and landscapes, the beauty she talks about is politically suspect (a political reification, where you turn something into an object - a term from Marx's Capital).

- This novel is a lot about taking women as objects: Kiki is fat, Claire is thin. Zadie Smith hates the objectification of women and beauty. She also hates that beauty can't be talked about anymore, especially on the Left. Howard immerses herself in theories of un-beauty, of going against celebrating genius and beauty, but when two women who he thinks are good-looking come onto him he drops his pants. Zora, who believes Howard's theories and spouts it, too, questions the beauty of the landscape - that it is uncorrupted, that there aren't laborers working there, that industrialization isn't making it ugly just beyond the landscape. When Claire brings up Virgil, Zora stops listening. Claire has read Plato, Virgil, Baudelaire, etc, and Zora and Howard are trained in the latest literary theory and are aware of the working poor. What is an intellectual, then??

- Poor people as the playthings of radical intellectuals - page 418, when Carl tells Zora what he knows about Chantelle Williams and Monty Kipps, and accusing her of using him as an experiment she expected favors from. His ticket to a life is gone. "You got your college degrees, but you don't even live right."

- On Levi's stealing the painting from Kipps' office: he's an idiot. He's a stupid 16-year-old with a lot of screwed-up theories. THEN he suggests his mother isn't black for marrying a white man. He has a point when he asks Kiki wha her part is in helping the poor climb economically when she pays her housekeeper $4 per hour - he says she wouldn't do that if the woman was American instead of Haitian.

- The last 2 pages: What has happened to Beauty?

Howard's children still hate him, a lot, but they are still talking to him. He goes downtown to give his lecture, the job-talk of his life. What is beauty on the last two pages?

Literary Theory and "On Beauty"

Literary Theory - varying ways to read and make meaning of a ext

New Criticism: 1920s-1950s - the dominating idea of how to interpret texts. It was a way of seeking out contradictions in a text and figuring out how those contradictions unified the text and created meaning.

1960s: Cultural revolutions in USA, England, and France carries over to the English departments of American universities - psychoanalysis and feminism, for example.

Psychoanalysis - studies the unconscious; finds the meaning in dreams; use of the Oedipus and Electra complexes; psychoanalytic theory (read a text using Freudian theories to discover the workings of a text's unconscious), etc.

Feminism - part of the movement for women's equality and rights through the 1970s. In the 70s, this is where you read texts to discover hidden or not hidden meanings about female desire, empowerment, equality, sexuality, gender politics, and power. And subjectivity. What makes a woman a woman a man a man.

Who cares what the author thought or meant?

Critical Race Theory: texts have larger cultural meanings. Texts include poems, novels, plays, films, TV shows, movies, digial images, art, painting, CDs, music, graffiti, clothes, merchandising, advertising, etc. These are all cultural artifacts - items you can interpret.

Queer Theory - Gender issues, power, gender depictions, heteronormative ways of thinking, etc. How is queer identity constructed in a text?

Power, identity, subjectivity, political significance, cultural signifance, types of representation. Literary theory is difficult to understand, and it is blamed for politicizing the classroom.

Deconstruction: French philosopher, Jacques Derrida. Questions meaning to question stable notions off identity, to question stable notions of what a person and so on.

Opposing it: Logos: speech, reason vs. writing or text. We grant more authority speech and reason than writing or non-reason.

Subjectivity - "1: of, relating to, or constituting a subject: as aobsolete : of, relating to, or characteristic of one that is a subject especially in lack of freedom of action or in submissiveness. 2: of or relating to the essential being of that which has substance, qualities, attributes, or relations. 3 a: characteristic of or belonging to reality as perceived rather than as independent of mind"

Logocentric - "1 : a philosophy holding that all forms of thought are based on an external point of reference which is held to exist and given a certain degree of authority 2 : a philosophy that privileges speech over writing as a form of communication because the former is closer to an originating transcendental source." We privilege th faculty of reason over all else. In the history of the West reason has been used to judge what makes a human human.

Example of Logocentricsm: In literature or philosophy or political reports, or expeditions to far away places, non-white peoples are judged to be without reason and therefore not fully human. Another, more specific example is British imperialism: slave trade between England and its plantations. The reasoning for the slave trade was the old "Us v. Them" - we have logic and reason on our side, they don't, we are responsible for them, therefore, enslavement is justified because they can't take care of themselves.

Essentialism : What is the essence of the human?

*THESE ARE ALL TOOLS TO STUDY AND QUESTION, NOT TO BE MADE INTO IDEALS FOR A PERSONAL CRUSADE. Why do Monty Kipps and Howard Belsey feel free to adhere so strongly to just one theory of literature, to the near-exclusion of all others, when all it does is limit and blind them?

Different human developments in various geographic areas that accoutns for differences in an essentialist way.

Culture wars

How do we make meaning?

Is a text just a text?

What is art?

What is a poem?

Challenging fundamental assumptions of Western culture.

Darwin and the advent of biological adaptation -

FOR FUN: Chocolate sculpture!

Who or what is beautiful in this novel?

The one thing always presented as a work of beauty in this novel is art. Music, painting, dance, dress - they are all part of art. Carl can do beautiful things with his rap music; Claire finds beauty through writing poetry and encouraging her students to write poetry, and Kiki sees overwhelming beauty and inspiration in the art she loves. Even Howard Belsey, the great anti-Rembrandt lecturer, can't help but see something of beauty in Rembrandt's work. He ends the novel with a close-up of the woman Rembrandt loved, a close-up of her skin (one of those portraits is at right). Several of the characters also react strongly to music - such as Jerome's reaction to the concert, where he cried.Art, and the sincere, human efforts that go about creating art or allow people to be inspired, is beautiful.

Define Beauty from Smith's point of view. Do you agree?

Carlene becomes beautiful when she jokes about how Monty's best friend, the Reverend, is gay. Kiki notes that she looks younger and healthier when she laughs. Kiki's beauty comes from an impression of solidity, maternity, and physical presence - she is hard to overlook, not necessarily because of her weight (though to say one can ignore a 250-lb woman is silly) but because of her presence and bearing. Even with her, despite being middle-aged and overweight, there is an impression of physical well-being.

Carl is described in lovely terms when he's swimming, as well as when he is talking to Zora about the Mozart concert. His natural physical grace in the water matches the expressive way he speaks about the music. Even Claire, rather than being described as the classic American beauty (blonde, small, white, skinny), has a moment of inherent loveliness when she moves - years of yoga have honed her movements so they are self-contained and graceful. There is a beauty to that that transcends weight, appearance, and race.

What I drew from this novel was that Smith considers beauty not necessarily a physical thing - often, it has little to do with the physical. Victoria Kipps is stunning - Belsey compares her to Josephine Baker at one point, which is quite a compliment - but she is banal and naive in a way that detracts from her incredible physical appearance. She is in turmoil due to the unexpected death of her mother, which seems to explain many of her actions in the latter half of the novel. There is a casual, takes-things-for-granted quality to her I found off-putting. On the other hand, Carlene Kipps, though not a physically attractive woman, was beautiful in her love and enthusiasm for her paintings. She also makes a grand gesture in willing one of her paintings to Kiki. It's the love, passion, and goodness of one's actions and personality that mark people as beautiful - that much I agree with. After all, even Josephine Baker had more going for her than physical attractiveness - she had talent, passion, self-confidence, and charm to elevate what would otherwise be quite ordinary to something that became immortalized.

Here is a Josephine Baker dance routine: CHECK IT OUT!

Describe a character from "On Beauty"

Zora Belsey - almost too much character.

She is determination personified. Anything she decides she will accomplish, she goes about working at with every ounce of effort she can scrape together. This is how she goes about her college education: when an application, exemplary transcripts, and writing samples don't get her in, she goes to the Dean and subtly threatens him so he puts her into Claire's poetry class.When she has a crush on Carl, she visits him twice a day while he works at Wellington with equally-subtle efforts at enticing him. She is opinionated, relentless, and zealous - a combination that makes for a potent, potentially destructive strength that she uses to bulldoze her way through problems. Her determination gives her a pigheaded quality, especially when it becomes Zora v. the World. Zora has her father's habit of concentrating so much on her life, her wants, her needs, that she does not see how her actions might conflict with what others are doing. It is hard for her to admit she's made mistakes and even harder to go about doing something about them. She's an interesting, thought-provoking character - but most of the time, I felt annoyed with her. She imagines she's filling a huge role wherever she is - Student, Academic, developing Scholar - but she often looks like a fool in the meantime.