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Cogito, Ergo....um?
23/2/02 21:48I just finished reading an essay on Literary Criticisim, wherein person A criticized person B's interpretation of person C's interpretation of Edgar Allen Poe's story, The Purloined Letter.
It was one of those readings where too many repititions of the same word in the same sentence caused the reader to lose track of little things, like the point.
While I enjoyed reading Poe's story, I saw very little in the story to support some of the assertions made by either person C or person A. (One of these assertions, for any interested Mawrter parties that may be reading this journal, contained the phrase 'phallic mothers.' I guess there's more than one of them after all, and there can indeed be a band.) We didn't read person B's work, but it was summarized. I have read some of person B's work in another class, and agreed with person A's assertion that person B was, in general, just wrong.
Although I think person B is wrong about just about everything; perhaps this comes from my personal preference that I like Story to have some sort of meaning, even if it's not earth-shattering, and person B seems to think that Story shouldn't have any. One wonders if person B thinks that his own essays, being stories of a sort, have no meaning. I certainly couldn't find any in them. Neither, for that matter, could persons A or C.
However, person A's grand conclusion was that one might or might not find meaning in anything, and that there might not be anything there to find meaning in anyway, so I'm certainly not going to take any stock in the rest of the essay. Something about looping back and forth between "certain ambiguities" and "unsure conclusions", which has to be the fanciest way I've ever seen of saying that people in general can't know squat.
One wonders what Poe would have said.
(For those of you who don't do the whole Latin/Philosophy thing: "Cogito, Ergo Sum" is Descarte's famous "I think, therefore I am" quotation.)
It was one of those readings where too many repititions of the same word in the same sentence caused the reader to lose track of little things, like the point.
While I enjoyed reading Poe's story, I saw very little in the story to support some of the assertions made by either person C or person A. (One of these assertions, for any interested Mawrter parties that may be reading this journal, contained the phrase 'phallic mothers.' I guess there's more than one of them after all, and there can indeed be a band.) We didn't read person B's work, but it was summarized. I have read some of person B's work in another class, and agreed with person A's assertion that person B was, in general, just wrong.
Although I think person B is wrong about just about everything; perhaps this comes from my personal preference that I like Story to have some sort of meaning, even if it's not earth-shattering, and person B seems to think that Story shouldn't have any. One wonders if person B thinks that his own essays, being stories of a sort, have no meaning. I certainly couldn't find any in them. Neither, for that matter, could persons A or C.
However, person A's grand conclusion was that one might or might not find meaning in anything, and that there might not be anything there to find meaning in anyway, so I'm certainly not going to take any stock in the rest of the essay. Something about looping back and forth between "certain ambiguities" and "unsure conclusions", which has to be the fanciest way I've ever seen of saying that people in general can't know squat.
One wonders what Poe would have said.
(For those of you who don't do the whole Latin/Philosophy thing: "Cogito, Ergo Sum" is Descarte's famous "I think, therefore I am" quotation.)
