文批期末心得

Before I decided to major in Foreign Languages and Literature, I’ve fallen in love with beautiful and blue literary works such as The Little Mermaid and Notre Dame de Paris. I wondered what kind of society could foster the authors to write such sad and unforgettable masterpieces. I imagined that what I might have done if I had been one of the main characters in these stories. Those kinds of fantasy led me to the world of literature, a world that is much more complicated than I expected. For example, the following is a quotation from Michael M. Clarke’s essay on “Bronte’s Jane Eyre and the Grimms’ Cinderella”.

The Cinderella tale is only one of several fairy tales that inform Jane Eyre; allusions to "Beauty and the Beast" and to "Bluebeard’s Castle" present Rochester simultaneously as a good man hidden beneath an ugly exterior and as an ogre husband with multiple former wives, whom he keeps hidden in a secret room in his castle. Allusions to Arabian Nights, furnished by Jane herself as she resists Rochester’s attempts to shower her with luxurious gifts, suggest parallels between the power of a sultan over his harem and the power of the English gentleman over women.

I appreciate the writer analyzing Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre with a new approach because I haven’t thought of Cinderella when I read Jane Eyre. Fairy tales aroused my interest in literature, however, after I knew the dark side of those tales, which are often interpreted with psychological analysis, I found these tales complicated rather than pure and simple.

Literature is not involved with making direct explicit statement about life, but with showing and expressing experience through imagery, symbolism, metaphor and so on. If the literary theories and criticisms can be viewed as tools to unveil the magic and beauty of literary works, sometimes, they also break the reader’s pure enjoyment purposely, because some of the literary critics oversimplify the text by generalizing and categorizing those works of crystallized wisdom.

Theories are everywhere and multifarious, and certain theories seem to be controversial or contradictory. It seems that no consensus exists any longer about what the humanities are, how they are constructed, or what they are good for. In question is whether the reader is formed morally and intellectually by the text, performs the act of reading as a quasi-independent interpreter, or virtually writes the text herself or himself. We don’t even agree about whether our debates and dialogues ought to lead to a new consensus, or whether, once disagreement breaks out, there is nothing much to done about it.

However, appreciating how others view the canon is also a kind of pleasure that I never expect before I enter the university. After studying the literary theories and criticisms, I found the importance of respecting other’s different opinions while holding one’s own opinions. Many different schools of theories have quite different opinions toward the same text; it is hard to tell whose idea is the right one. Things are not always black or white, wrong or right.

Some experts’ thoughts have been confined in the binary opposition because they thought that there is a unitary end of history and of a goal. For Lyotard, the Enlightenment whose project Habermas wishes to continue is simply one of the would-be authoritative “overarching”, “totalizing” explanations of things --- like Christianity, Marxism, or the myth of scientific progress. These “metanarratives” (“super-narratives”), which purport to explain and reassure, are really illusions, fostered in order to smother difference, opposition, and plurality. Hence, Lyotard’s famous definition of Post-modernism is, simply, “incredulity towards metanarratives”. “Grand Narratives” of progress and human perfectablity, then, are no longer tenable, and the best we can hope is a series of “mininarratives”, which provide a basis for the actions of specific groups in particular local circumstances. Postmodernity thus “deconstructs” the basic aim of the Enlightenment that is “the idea of a unitary end of history and of a subject”.

Now, I look up from the textbooks I’ve studied and cast my eyes toward my daily life and the world outside literature. “Can liberal arts help human more than advanced technology can do?” It is a question that bother me all the time especially when I try to convince those so-called “practical” and utilitarian thinkers like my father and others who majoring in “practical” fields such as International Trade, Marketing, Civil Engineering, and Genetic Engineering.

Even though I do believe that what I’ve learned from school will benefit me in spirit more than in tangible reward, I still worry that I cannot reach fortune and fame by the training of liberal art. I know that the final goal of life should not be fortune and fame, but they are necessary temporary goal in life. If I cannot make enough money on my own, I will hardly be able to carry out my dream—to travel around the world. Many senior friends and relatives of mine have told me the importance of realizing our dream in youth or at least before we are too old to do it. The coming of my graduating ceremony, a turning point and an end of a age, brings the anxiety of the lack of time.

Nevertheless, another positive voice inside my heart keeps persuading me to look on the bright side. The voice said, “ Money cannot buy everything; I’ve learned more valuable lessons in the school through the thinking training of literal art.” Just as the words on the cover of a DVD called “Under the Tuscan Sun” says, “Life offers you a thousand chances…all you have to do is to take one.” And I know that to cherish and make good use of the chance I take will bring me unexpected luck in the following choices of life. I like the meaningful metaphor in the DVD. The following is the quotations: “They build track between Vienna and Venice before there is a train; they believe the train will come one day.” Sometimes, you have to believe something first before you can prove it later. It’s hard to tell from the appearance that a decision is a good one or a bad one. I guess this metaphor can explain the reason why I do not regret for majoring Literature.

The study of literature is like a journey to discover my identity and my life because I’ve learned how to associate my daily experiences with the knowledge I gained in class. I remember what Cleopatra says in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, “The size of our sorrow proportioned to our cause (expectation).” Although we might feel disappointed after we have planned and expected something, we should not give up hopes and the positive thinking that can help to make miracles in our life.

To assure my father that I can support myself, I’ve taken 28 credits of educational courses, and planned to be a practice teacher for half of a year in a senior high school in Taipei after graduating. Then, I must pass the final certification to be a qualified teacher. In the process of taking educational programs, I found that psychology is the common field that I have to learn both in literary criticisms like psychoanalytic criticism and educational psychology. Freud’s theories on the unconscious and ideas concerning aspects of sexuality are the most obvious examples.

Infantile sexuality, for instance, is the notion that sexuality begins not at puberty, with physical maturing, but in infancy, especially through the infant’s relationship with the mother. Connected with this is the Oedipus complex, whereby, says Freud, the male infant conceives the desire to eliminate the father and become the sexual partner of the mother. As the very idea of the Oedipus complex would suggest, Freudian theory is often deeply masculinist in bias. (Quoted from Peter Barry’s Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory, second edition, P 97)

Although “penis envy” cannot be the only answer to the rise of gender discrimination, we can hardly deny that Freud’s theory is still related to the deep-rooted value of having a son to carry on the family name. For example, we can still hear that some people worry about having no son but daughters. Another example is that the some parents are eager to see whether the newborn baby has a penis or not.

In my opinion, to look back on how I model my identity is an interesting discovery that helps me realize the theories I learned. I have many identities such as a daughter, a female teacher, and a girlfriend. The common point of these identities is that I am female. As Simone de Beauvoir writes “ One is not born a woman; rather, one becomes a woman,” I notice that the way my parents, my teachers, and senior relatives have expected me is close to this social construct. They wish me to be a good girl that means that I have to be obedient, full of responsibilities toward my family. Although I am willing to be a good girl they like, I also wish to have some privileges as boys have. After taking the course “Gender Studies”, I felt a sense of helplessness because what we can do very few things to change the deep-rooted ideology that results in gender discrimination. What these feminists promote is hard to work well in Taiwan. From the popular movie Memoirs of a Geisha to Shakespeare’s Tempest, many genres and art works talk about “virgin knot”. (Prospero asks Ferdinand not to break her daughter’s “virgin knot” before they marry.) Virginity is emphasized as the necessary virtue of women, but less required or even not required for men in some countries. This kind of unfair treatment happens all day round the world. Even though I can learn more about cultural difference through literature, I still feel a little powerless to this fact.

After the training of literary art, I’ve become a more sensitive and intuitional woman who cares more issues than those who haven’t received the kind of training. Therefore, I suffer more than others. Because they seldom look through the appearance of words and symbols that contain powerful meanings over their imagination, they live in a simple and “meaningless” life. They cannot sense the unintentional message that reveals its true meaning.