Major concepts:
TIME
ALTERITY
Alterity is used to describe the state of being othered. For the purposes of this course, we used this term to denote the gap between the past and the present, or two other fixed moments in time. Awareness of alterity implies an ability of the observer to demarcate differences between the self and other, highlighting the influence of presentism in grasping the depth of alterity between two objects or spaces. Lacking or assuming information about the past, or the present, often leads to misinterpretation of the relationship between the signifier and the signified--altering our perception of time and history from the reality.
New Historicism, for example, takes into account many variables to limit the alterity between a text and the reader; that is, it tries to create relative meaning for the narrative's objects in order to bridge the gap between the past and the present.
ANACHRONISM
The literal definition of ‘anachronism’ is the use or presence of elements that do not fit the time period. For example, movies taking place in the first half of the 19th century that show boots with zippers, twist-off wine bottles in WWI France, or Woody Allen’s knuckle-biting and anxiety-weighed plan to assassinate Napoleon are all examples of anachronism.
This tactic is sometimes used intentionally to bridge the gap between the present and the past (and, therefore, limit alterity). We looked into the anachronisms that occur within our texts to identify the implications of their usage. For instance, Umberto Eco uses the familiar image of the nineteenth-century character, Sherlock Holmes, to represent his fifteenth-century character, William of Baskerville. This deliberate portrayal helps to ease the jerky nature of time-travel on the reader by allowing them to more easily connect and relate to a character who might otherwise seem alien.
TEMPORAL INTERLACEMENT
The blending and weaving of time helps us to bridge the alterity of the past and understand history. Throughout the semester, we have attempted to rebel against the standards of time and investigate the human condition--the ways in which humanity might remain the same throughout time, even while material and physical circumstances continue to change.
In his novel, Dream of Scipio, Iain Pears uses this tactic by weaving together three stories from vastly different time periods. He does this to show the reader their own biases: the way perceptions and interpretations of characters from completely different points in time can affect one another.
By doing this, Pears creates a map that leads the reader to a particular reading; this contributes to a sort of aporetic moment, which displays the way history is overdetermined, just like language.
Alterity is used to describe the state of being othered. For the purposes of this course, we used this term to denote the gap between the past and the present, or two other fixed moments in time. Awareness of alterity implies an ability of the observer to demarcate differences between the self and other, highlighting the influence of presentism in grasping the depth of alterity between two objects or spaces. Lacking or assuming information about the past, or the present, often leads to misinterpretation of the relationship between the signifier and the signified--altering our perception of time and history from the reality.
New Historicism, for example, takes into account many variables to limit the alterity between a text and the reader; that is, it tries to create relative meaning for the narrative's objects in order to bridge the gap between the past and the present.
ANACHRONISM
The literal definition of ‘anachronism’ is the use or presence of elements that do not fit the time period. For example, movies taking place in the first half of the 19th century that show boots with zippers, twist-off wine bottles in WWI France, or Woody Allen’s knuckle-biting and anxiety-weighed plan to assassinate Napoleon are all examples of anachronism.
This tactic is sometimes used intentionally to bridge the gap between the present and the past (and, therefore, limit alterity). We looked into the anachronisms that occur within our texts to identify the implications of their usage. For instance, Umberto Eco uses the familiar image of the nineteenth-century character, Sherlock Holmes, to represent his fifteenth-century character, William of Baskerville. This deliberate portrayal helps to ease the jerky nature of time-travel on the reader by allowing them to more easily connect and relate to a character who might otherwise seem alien.
TEMPORAL INTERLACEMENT
The blending and weaving of time helps us to bridge the alterity of the past and understand history. Throughout the semester, we have attempted to rebel against the standards of time and investigate the human condition--the ways in which humanity might remain the same throughout time, even while material and physical circumstances continue to change.
In his novel, Dream of Scipio, Iain Pears uses this tactic by weaving together three stories from vastly different time periods. He does this to show the reader their own biases: the way perceptions and interpretations of characters from completely different points in time can affect one another.
By doing this, Pears creates a map that leads the reader to a particular reading; this contributes to a sort of aporetic moment, which displays the way history is overdetermined, just like language.
HISTORY
Our current cultural understanding of History would be better described as the medieval Chronicle, a series of consecutive events, while the medieval word Histoire was reserved for fictional narratives. In reality, History is a combination of these two things; it is a representation of the past, influenced by the writer’s own ideas. Thus, there is, according to Roland Barthes, no escape from the bias of conscious or unconscious signification (See: The Discourse of History). Given that History is a narrative structure, Barthes questions the writer's ability to present unbiased “truths” within this structure without their investment into current or past power systems; History can be signified but is far from reality.
Stephen Greenblatt, of New Historicist fame, claims a bit more: who you are is determined by the time and place in which you were born; the author is positioned to be subject to subversive occurrences and recounts this in their text—in other words, History determines you. This claim itself challenges casual definitions of History in that it emphasizes the power of the Historian to weave, interpret, and portray the past. If History determines selfhood, then those who craft History also create the identity of people and places within the past.
Stephen Greenblatt, of New Historicist fame, claims a bit more: who you are is determined by the time and place in which you were born; the author is positioned to be subject to subversive occurrences and recounts this in their text—in other words, History determines you. This claim itself challenges casual definitions of History in that it emphasizes the power of the Historian to weave, interpret, and portray the past. If History determines selfhood, then those who craft History also create the identity of people and places within the past.
Semiotics
Semioticians pursue the construction of meaning as a product and function of language (a system of codes and signs). Thus, semiotics deals with illuminating the meaning within a text by revealing and describing systems of interrelated signs. Semiotics differs from earlier forms of criticism in that it breaks away from concerning itself with the meaning of the text, and instead focuses on how meaning is produced by specific elements in the system.
Saussure, a structuralist and one of the founders of semiotics, focused largely on the systematic nature of language and the ways in which words only hold meaning in relation to each other. Barthes, another structuralist semiotician, was led to an uncertainty of history by understanding it as something dependent upon meaning; in other words, he viewed history as subjective--something that could be altered by the reader’s interpretation of signs within a text, and by the author’s transcription of said signs.
Over the course of this semester, we’ve worked towards understanding the texts semiotically - i.e. trying to see if a text is open or closed, mapping our own movement as interpreters within the system of signs, and discussing how these systems of significance simultaneously work with and against one another.
Semiotics also covers non-linguistic sign systems. This is a method actively used by Slavoj Žižek, a post-structuralist and current public intellectual, who employs semiotics to deconstruct everything from cultural theory to Viagra. In this vein, we are able to view ‘life as a text,’ which is especially significant to this course due to our intention: to interpret history analytically, to perform semiotics on the past.
Saussure, a structuralist and one of the founders of semiotics, focused largely on the systematic nature of language and the ways in which words only hold meaning in relation to each other. Barthes, another structuralist semiotician, was led to an uncertainty of history by understanding it as something dependent upon meaning; in other words, he viewed history as subjective--something that could be altered by the reader’s interpretation of signs within a text, and by the author’s transcription of said signs.
Over the course of this semester, we’ve worked towards understanding the texts semiotically - i.e. trying to see if a text is open or closed, mapping our own movement as interpreters within the system of signs, and discussing how these systems of significance simultaneously work with and against one another.
Semiotics also covers non-linguistic sign systems. This is a method actively used by Slavoj Žižek, a post-structuralist and current public intellectual, who employs semiotics to deconstruct everything from cultural theory to Viagra. In this vein, we are able to view ‘life as a text,’ which is especially significant to this course due to our intention: to interpret history analytically, to perform semiotics on the past.
LITERATURE
FRAME TALES
This is a literary technique of one story being used to prepare the reader for another story (or multiple stories). Eco uses the ‘tale within a tale’ frame to show the unreliability of his narrator as someone whose perception has been altered by time. Greenblatt uses his own life as a frame in the introduction of his book to draw the reader into the text; he puts his relationship with the past on display as a way of showing how others might relate to it.
Pears layers three stories from different time periods to show the reader his/her own biases: the way our brains are trained to draw connections between characters, and place everyone into neat, structured categories. He makes the narratives parallel to display the complex relationships between humans, and the ways in which temporality may or may not have an effect on those relationships. All of these authors use frametale tactics in their stories of dismemberment, destruction, and loss, to alter the readers’ perceptions of history and encourage awareness of their own interpretations.
THE LIVING TEXT
In medieval times, the process of bookmaking was inherently violent and labor intensive. To produce the vellum sheets, they had to kill an animal and treat the hide with chemical baths, stretchings, and scrapings; all for the purpose of creating material to hold ideas. Scribes in monastic scriptoria spent six hours a day in dimly lit rooms trying to preserve the words of others, copying manuscripts line by line, word for word.
One would have to be very committed to the ideas they were recording to go through the painstaking process. Even after words were transcribed onto the page, it would not guarantee the survival of the ideas communicated. If a story or chronicle fell out of favor, its vellum could be scraped clean and reused, the text written over, resulting in palimpsests.
Until the modern era, there was no internet, no Wikipedia, very little travel or transportation of thought, and no way of accessing knowledge except through handwritten manuscripts in candlelit rooms. The texts that were produced held much more influence than we might be able to comprehend today.
This is why we must look at texts as living things: they change over time, and they continue to evolve as they are read and disseminated. They have a cycle of being written, distributed, lost, discovered, buried and discovered again. Texts have the power to transcend boundaries, translating ideas across time and space.
INHERENT POWER OF A TEXT
The books we’ve studied throughout the course of this Capstone explored the inherent power of texts. The words on a page represent and communicate ideas and perspectives--and not always ones that are safe or accepted. During the Middle Ages, the church held complete control over the production, preservation and distribution of most texts, because most learning originated in church schools and most scribes were monks or priests. Beginning in the thirteenth-century, the church felt that textual production and circulation had to be tightly regulated to prevent the spread of heretical ideas. Within theological circles of the thirteenth-century and later, most advocated that secular knowledge should lead to God because they believed that the pursuit of knowledge for knowledge’s sake (intellectual curiosity) was dangerous to one’s soul.
Eco, Greenblatt and Pears all address the struggle of preservation: when civilization is crumbling, what is it that you save? The individual people, or the manuscripts that hold the knowledge and ideas of generations?
This is a literary technique of one story being used to prepare the reader for another story (or multiple stories). Eco uses the ‘tale within a tale’ frame to show the unreliability of his narrator as someone whose perception has been altered by time. Greenblatt uses his own life as a frame in the introduction of his book to draw the reader into the text; he puts his relationship with the past on display as a way of showing how others might relate to it.
Pears layers three stories from different time periods to show the reader his/her own biases: the way our brains are trained to draw connections between characters, and place everyone into neat, structured categories. He makes the narratives parallel to display the complex relationships between humans, and the ways in which temporality may or may not have an effect on those relationships. All of these authors use frametale tactics in their stories of dismemberment, destruction, and loss, to alter the readers’ perceptions of history and encourage awareness of their own interpretations.
THE LIVING TEXT
In medieval times, the process of bookmaking was inherently violent and labor intensive. To produce the vellum sheets, they had to kill an animal and treat the hide with chemical baths, stretchings, and scrapings; all for the purpose of creating material to hold ideas. Scribes in monastic scriptoria spent six hours a day in dimly lit rooms trying to preserve the words of others, copying manuscripts line by line, word for word.
One would have to be very committed to the ideas they were recording to go through the painstaking process. Even after words were transcribed onto the page, it would not guarantee the survival of the ideas communicated. If a story or chronicle fell out of favor, its vellum could be scraped clean and reused, the text written over, resulting in palimpsests.
Until the modern era, there was no internet, no Wikipedia, very little travel or transportation of thought, and no way of accessing knowledge except through handwritten manuscripts in candlelit rooms. The texts that were produced held much more influence than we might be able to comprehend today.
This is why we must look at texts as living things: they change over time, and they continue to evolve as they are read and disseminated. They have a cycle of being written, distributed, lost, discovered, buried and discovered again. Texts have the power to transcend boundaries, translating ideas across time and space.
INHERENT POWER OF A TEXT
The books we’ve studied throughout the course of this Capstone explored the inherent power of texts. The words on a page represent and communicate ideas and perspectives--and not always ones that are safe or accepted. During the Middle Ages, the church held complete control over the production, preservation and distribution of most texts, because most learning originated in church schools and most scribes were monks or priests. Beginning in the thirteenth-century, the church felt that textual production and circulation had to be tightly regulated to prevent the spread of heretical ideas. Within theological circles of the thirteenth-century and later, most advocated that secular knowledge should lead to God because they believed that the pursuit of knowledge for knowledge’s sake (intellectual curiosity) was dangerous to one’s soul.
Eco, Greenblatt and Pears all address the struggle of preservation: when civilization is crumbling, what is it that you save? The individual people, or the manuscripts that hold the knowledge and ideas of generations?
Questions
- What is "civilization"? What does it mean to be civilized?
- What about the past is worth saving?
- Which is more important: Ideals or pragmatism? Universals or particulars? Resistance or cooperation?
- Is history decided by individuals or groups? Does the unique text/person/idea/act even matter?
- Does truth matter more than fiction? Art more than reality?
- What is worth dying for? Killing for? [Love, justice, family, ideals, nation, peace, culture, books, etc...]
- What happens if I click this link?