Showing posts with label feminism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label feminism. Show all posts
Thursday, June 21, 2012
Summer Reading: The End of the Affair
I just finished listening to The End of the Affair by Graham Greene and it took me longer to read than any of the books from last week because I found the narrator to be such a self and detestable character that I didn't want to see what insensitive thing he would do next. In the end, I did pity him, and I had some hope for him. As frustrating as I found it, I couldn't help but like the book. The Regeneration series was interesting to me, but I had a hard time connecting to it because it had so many voices, so many goings on, and the drama of war wasn't as dramatic as it could have been. The End of the Affair is about an affair, but surprisingly it's also about the drama of religion, and not just religious sentiment but the pull toward, in Tillich's terms, the ultimate.
Thoughts on The Immoralist
I wrote this as a reading journal for my Modernism class last semester and thought it would fit well as a blog post. It might be something I'd like to come back to at some point.
In André Gide’s The Immoralist we encounter a man’s apparent descent into a world of darkness and immorality. The turning point in the framed narrative comes at the end of Michel’s long and painful sickness, after traveling throughout Northern Africa with his dutiful wife, and finally recovering his strength and health in Biskra. As Michel recovers he begins to see himself and the world around him in a different light: “And I compared myself to a palimpsest. I tasted the scholar’s joy when he discovers under more recent writing, and on the same paper, a very ancient and infinitely more precious text. What was this occult text? In order to read it, was it not first of all necessary to efface the more recent one?” (43). A palimpsest is a piece of vellum, parchment, paper, or other writing surface which had been scraped of its original writings and reused. In some cases portions of the original text can still be seen and read below the newer writing, and as Michel states, often the only way to investigate the underlying text is to efface the more recent one. The most troubling aspect about this statement is not that there is a hidden “occult text” that must be revealed, or that what Michel plans to reveal is particularly disturbing, it is instead the violence implicit in Michel’s realization.
In André Gide’s The Immoralist we encounter a man’s apparent descent into a world of darkness and immorality. The turning point in the framed narrative comes at the end of Michel’s long and painful sickness, after traveling throughout Northern Africa with his dutiful wife, and finally recovering his strength and health in Biskra. As Michel recovers he begins to see himself and the world around him in a different light: “And I compared myself to a palimpsest. I tasted the scholar’s joy when he discovers under more recent writing, and on the same paper, a very ancient and infinitely more precious text. What was this occult text? In order to read it, was it not first of all necessary to efface the more recent one?” (43). A palimpsest is a piece of vellum, parchment, paper, or other writing surface which had been scraped of its original writings and reused. In some cases portions of the original text can still be seen and read below the newer writing, and as Michel states, often the only way to investigate the underlying text is to efface the more recent one. The most troubling aspect about this statement is not that there is a hidden “occult text” that must be revealed, or that what Michel plans to reveal is particularly disturbing, it is instead the violence implicit in Michel’s realization.
Saturday, November 12, 2011
a string of randoms
I've decided that if I blog things instead of just posting stuff on facebook it would be more accessible to me at a later date. So here are some of those things.
This video brings me endless joy.
Also, I've found this extension for Google Chrome that will switch out gendered words: he for she, him for her, man for woman, woman for man, etc. I'm excited about this because it's an extremely useful tool for seeing how strongly our culture favors masculine pronouns, and it's already something feminists have used to point these things out. We do it all the time in my feminist religious philosophy class.
This video brings me endless joy.
Also, I've found this extension for Google Chrome that will switch out gendered words: he for she, him for her, man for woman, woman for man, etc. I'm excited about this because it's an extremely useful tool for seeing how strongly our culture favors masculine pronouns, and it's already something feminists have used to point these things out. We do it all the time in my feminist religious philosophy class.
Friday, August 26, 2011
living on the boundary, part one: the feminist/Mormon paradox
I've been thinking about boundaries a lot in the last several years: interstitial spaces where meaning is suspended, liminal spaces where meaning is not yet realized, broken and fragmented spaces where meaning is renegotiated. Because boundaries are so much on my mind, I'm expecting I'll be blogging about them more in the future as I try to sort certain ideas out in my brain. That's why I'm calling this post "part one". There's more to come.
I'm currently reading a rather radical feminist theology by Mary Daly called Beyond God the Father, and while I'm not entirely convinced of all of her ideas, I do appreciate the point she makes of living on the boundary. She's referring to feminism and patriarchal, hierarchical, and sexist religious traditions, and about the choices we have as feminists to continue practicing these religions. She suggests the possibility of living on the boundary of a patriarchal organization by "weighing such factors as the positive merits that the institution may have in spite of its sexism, and judging how strong are the possibilities of changing and/or using it without losing a disproportionate amount of creative energy in the effort." I believe this is what most Mormon feminists are doing, or what we must do in the end. Some decide it costs too much creative energy and give up looking for the positive merits of the institution. Some decide to live perpetually on the border "transferring the center of activity to our new space on the edge of such patriarchal space." I like the visual image this offers. The center of our activity is on the edge, and so we move around that center, in and out of the patriarchal institution.
I'm currently reading a rather radical feminist theology by Mary Daly called Beyond God the Father, and while I'm not entirely convinced of all of her ideas, I do appreciate the point she makes of living on the boundary. She's referring to feminism and patriarchal, hierarchical, and sexist religious traditions, and about the choices we have as feminists to continue practicing these religions. She suggests the possibility of living on the boundary of a patriarchal organization by "weighing such factors as the positive merits that the institution may have in spite of its sexism, and judging how strong are the possibilities of changing and/or using it without losing a disproportionate amount of creative energy in the effort." I believe this is what most Mormon feminists are doing, or what we must do in the end. Some decide it costs too much creative energy and give up looking for the positive merits of the institution. Some decide to live perpetually on the border "transferring the center of activity to our new space on the edge of such patriarchal space." I like the visual image this offers. The center of our activity is on the edge, and so we move around that center, in and out of the patriarchal institution.
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