Explorations question #10

On p. 285, Bellah and his co-authors suggest that how a society "deals wth the problem of wealth and poverty" should be a "litmus test . . . for assaying the health of a society." Do you agree? Is this issue the single most important factor that we ought to keep in mind when evaluating particular social arrangements?

Explorations question #9

As promised:

"Modern individualism seems to be producing a way of life that is neither individually nor socially viable, yet a return to traditional forms would be to return to intolerable discrimination and oppression" (Bellah et. al., p. 144). Discuss.

Explorations question #8

We spent class today talking about the definition of community. In the light of that discussion, is AU a community? Or does AU contain multiple communities? (Is AU itself situated within a larger community?)

Explorations question #7

In class we have been tossing around a lot of issues related to Invisible Man, including -- perhaps centrally -- the problem of the unnamed narrator's lack of a clear identity. Is this invisibility of his specific to his location in the bottom part of a racial hierarchy, or is it a more general phenomenon? Can anyone be similarly invisible, or just the members of a subordinate racial or ethnic group?

In order to keep the discussion focused, choose some specific example or instance of the narrator's invisibility from the text and try to disentangle the specific from the general elements. How much of what is portrayed is specific to a particular place and time, and how much is more generally applicable?

Explorations question #6

Question #6 already -- my how time flies.

In class today I suggested, or at least observed, that Ellison and Augustine are in some ways doing the same thing in their respective books: by writing in a retrospective way, they are recalling past events and imbuing them with a significance that they might not have had at the time. In addition, both write autobiographically, in the first person; the main actor is "I" in each work. That said, Ellison is writing a novel, while Augustine is writing something that purports to be a true record of events (albeit as a confession, not merely as a litany of occurrences). Does this genre distinction -- fictional versus non-fictional memoir -- make a difference? Would Augustine's book have been different as a novel, or Ellison's as a true personal history?

responding to question #5

I have not been a very good blogger thus far this semester, and I know that this response is later than my own specified deadline. I'll have to deduct some points from my mid-semester blogging evaluating in a few weeks.

But anyway: my answer to question #5 involves challenging the presumptions of the question itself. The way that the question is phrased suggests that the value of a life precedes any possible autobiographical reflection on it, but (like some of you) I would invert that order: rather than reflecting value that already exists, it is the autobiography itself that imparts value. That said, I would not agree that the value of an autobiography comes from its artistic character, although that is probably an important part of the reader's experience (and presumably why Ms. Cyrus has a ghost-writer: to make the autobiography readable). Rather, I think that augustine is on to something when he regards his autobiographical account to be a "confession": by narrating his life in a particular way he is, in a sense, making it into something else, something that it wasn't when he lived those experiences that he relates, but something that it now can be given his present-day perspective on what he previously experienced. Obviously, for Augustine, this is about making his life into a particular kind of offering or testimony to God, but I don't think that's essential to the exercise -- what is essential is the notion of a summary meaning or plot, whether that involves divinity or not.

In other words, I would say that it is the performative act of writing an autobiography in the first place that produces -- the convoluted grammar in this next bit of the sentence is important -- a life that is worth having lived, at least from the vantage-point of having lived it if not from the vantage-point of actually living it. And this is a scalable process, I think: aren't the downtown memorials in some ways examples of the same kind of process, but often on a national rather than an individual level? "Why was it worth having died in this conflict? Oh, right, now we understand why they died, even if they didn't understand that themselves."

I wonder what a memorial to the "war on terror(ism)" might look like -- what stories it might tell, what experiences it might recollect, what meaning it might impart.

Explorations question #5

Forgot to toss out a question at the end of class today, so here goes:

It was suggested during class discussion that what makes for an interesting autobiography is whether a person has done something important in her or his life, because that makes their personal story an interesting part of the explanation of what they've done. Augustine, somewhat to the contrary, suggests that what makes for an interesting autobiography is a person having some profound experience -- perhaps conversion, but we can imagine alternatives, like a near-death experience -- that causes her or him to re-evaluate her or his life in the light of that changed sensibility. But in both cases, the conclusion is that autobiographies are worthwhile when something dramatic happens to a person. But what about a life that is not characterized by drama? is such a life not worthy of being remembered in autobiographical form?

Another way to think about this might be: would you want to live the kind of life that might merit an autobiography? Why or why not?