I had a good class just now with Yeunsu. I feel that she has learned a lot.

Students in the 500s are still "putting the passage together," I learned. I also learned that the best way to help these kids with the passage is often to ask them to find and paraphrase the main idea in the paragraph, then to find and paraphrase the main idea of each supporting paragraph (almost always the first sentence), and then to discuss how each sentence of the supporting paragraph relates to the main idea. Ask "why" several times (the old Toyota rule). Correct their comprehension as they go along. As you do this, begin to work on the old hypernym/hyponym idea. If you can, copy some stuff from the More Reading Power book and use it to help them understand macro organization.

400s: Mastering the Topic
500s: Mastering the Main Idea (Arguing For)
600s: Mastering the Main Idea (Arguing Against)
700s: Mastering Subordinate Information

Here are Yeunsu's steps:

Reading:

1) Find the main idea in the first paragraph.
2) As you read, make sure you understand how the main idea (pretty much always the first sentence) of each supporting paragraph connects to the main idea of the first paragraph.
3) Use the first sentence of each paragraph to help you read actively. Ask yourself how each supporting sentence relates to the main idea sentence.

Questions:

1) Find the *reference* in the passage. Remember: it may be a treasure hunt!
2) Make sure you understand how the reference connects to the main idea (first line) of the paragraph.
3) Thinking critically about paraphrases (hypo/hypernyms), eliminate answer choices. Remember: don't eliminate whole answer choices; eliminate words.

I would also like to do a section on comparison/contrast, cause-and-effect, etc.

The Norton Reader is super-powerful for SAT prep.

It's 4:38 on Weds., May 30.

It looks like I am going to have to finish this Beowulf paper on my days off, which is disappointing. I wanted to work on my own books and business on my day off. But this world is not a perfect one.

I learned quite a bit this semester, I guess. Mostly I learned that I have to continue to address my weaknesses, and that my weaknesses are not gone.

Main idea vs. Topic for writers. . .

It is important to choose both.

Also, the easiest way to make an outline is to subdivide the topic. But sometimes the most sophisticated way to make an outline is based on the main idea.

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Short double passages--scanning and skimming.

under study skills: the 80/20 rule, frequency and memorization. . .

*Most information is not organized in the order in which you need to memorize it.*

Book:

Le Vocabulaire Latin, Alber-Blaise

>>From the comments on the Get Rich Slowly blog: I know you understand the value of getting rich slowly but carefully. It’s the same with fitness and lifestyle changes — the good stuff is slow, but it sticks.

So true. Of everything.

If I had a regular teacher forum, here's what I would say:

We need to be blessing and encouraging children to start seeking out authors they love, developing tastes and passions, likes and even dislikes.

a) We need to have students do a Book Browsing Journal, in which they look at 20 books they *might* like, and then answer questions about it based on their research: reading 3-5 pages (either on Amazon or in bookstores), looking at other people's recommendations, comparing it to past purchases, etc. We should encourage students to both approve and reject books, and to emphasize that everyone should *look at* or *browse* more books than they choose to read. From this journal should come book choices. (We could have book allowance cards from here.) We should also recommend books.

Model your own love of reading! If you love reading, let it show! Talk about your favorite books, your favorite books as a child, etc., and bring the student alongside you.

I am *exhausted* and I don't know why. I feel like I'm going to fall asleep. Right here.

What am I trying to say about early humanism and subjectivity?

So maybe I need to drop the distinction about interiority. . . although, if helpful, I could substitute a distinction between public and private. That might be less crazy-making.

Damn, I want a dessert or something.

Okay. So the thing is. What.

That Butler is talking, not only about homosexuality and theories thereof, but also--even primarily--about gender and ideology. And these two general categories of thought, or stuff, are profoundly important within the Middle Ages, particularly as they pertain to women. More particularly, Butler's conception of performativity (gender performativity in particular) corresponds to, or is based on, Althusser's conception of ideology (as the individual's imaginative relation to the real).

All of this is relevant to the immense problem of women and Chaucer, and more specifically the question of Chaucer's feminist, antifeminist, or quasifeminist authorial perspective, in that it provides us with a manner of thinking about some of Chaucer's unsavory or un-ideal female characters--in particular the Wife of Bath--in a manner that recognizes both their stereotypical qualities (in particular those stereotypical qualities that they have invented themselves) and also their obvious contestation or subversion of male power structures. In other words, they are doing both things at once--establishing a place for themselves in male power structures and "acting out" misogynistic stereotypes (a.k.a. gender norms)--and this simultaneity is exactly what Butler's theory of gender performativity would lead us to expect.

And here's his clarification. . .

This kid is good.


>>You should have asked earlier, for I can answer that question easily. =)

I mean, the specific lines are referred in question, for example, like "line number 25-27."

If you know this, then you can find what to rephrase, though there is already rephrases in question.

For instance, there's a sentence like "apes are similar to human beings,"

then, you could find wrong answers like "apes are similar in appearance with human beings," "apes could build up intellectual ability like human beings do."

The right rephrased one will be just like this. "Apes have similarity with human beings"(though, I did not use any specific terms of similarity).

So, the pattern is simple, the sentence that CB would like to rephrase as an answer will be in the referred line or referred passage.

I cannot tell you how to find the will-be rephrased one, because the CR section is very flexible in this matter. You sometimes have to find rephrasing of two passages or one short sentence, or even three passages(when you have to find the answer for three passage, the answer might be broad one,,,)

If you have another questions out of reading this answer, just ask, I will elaborate on them..

From College Board: a strange, semi-coherent, but possibly very useful post. . .



Sorry, I don't think you have not known what pattern is.
The format of the test means "LOOKING FOR THE PATTERN"

what that means you should be able to find a pattern for questions.

You should memorize the words a lot, as naidu90 said.

For specific questions, you should find for rephrasing

For main topic one, you should find for wishy washy answer

For vocab one, you should treat like it as a sentence completion

For inference question, it is similar to the specific one. Yet, sometimes, all my methods do not work for this question type. So, you have to be careful..

Give a break for your mind while taking a test. Well, think of this kind of thinking.
"Well, I can give it another shot."

When I felt this feeling at test center after section 2(which is hard cr section), I changed my mind into happy one. And suddenly Bam!!

all questions seem to be made up by formats, and I know I've got all other cr sections including experimental sections right, not missing a single one to go.

Give it a try for a bit, and take your mind at ease. Then, You will feel this CR is nothing after all..

PLACES I STUDY WELL/HAVE STUDIED WELL:

The Starbucks on Harvard St.
Peet's in Evanston
Peet's in Cambridge, MA
Coolidge Corner bar
Pizzeria Uno's
(work)
Lamont
the computer lab in Andover
the cafeteria in Winthrop
my desk (when other people are not home)

PLACES I DO NOT STUDY WELL:

my bedroom
my living room (when other people are in it)
my apartment (when everyone is home at night)
Uno's basement (when it is noisy)

My current restaurant/bar habit is standing in the way of my dreams.


I spent somewhere between $50 and $70 yesterday on eating out, coffee, beer, and Internet access outside my house.

I would be really embarrassed if my parents knew that.

At the same time, I don't know exactly what I could or should have done differently. Esther's family had come to town and so our apartment was totally full of people, and I had to study. I could have gone to Peet's instead of Starbucks, because Peet's has Internet access. . . I guess that would have saved me $12. But it also would have cost me 30-45 minutes of study time.

I think the solution for me is to set myself up so that I don't have the money available to waste.

New theory about students and sentence structure: a) students first need to learn to *write* so-called right-branching, loose sentences, through observation. Then they need to learn to revise through sentence combining.

This was a failed strategy, to just summarize everybody else's surveys.

I needed to do more close reading.

need to save time? make a decision.

the zipless fuck and construal theory

why can't you get anything done?

because you are allowing yourself to be interrupted all the time. Try it. Even if you are spending the "right amount" of time, it may be interrupted time until you are right up against the deadline.

I just thought of a phrase I like a lot: "eminently sound." I want my critical writing to be "eminently sound."

Today, we live in a world that tolerates extreme poverty much like racism was tolerated fifty-plus years ago.

Commit. Resist the temptation of the marketing idea of the week. Create daily, weekly, monthly, and annual marketing calendars, make marketing your new habit, and find the money to stick with the plan.

Jobs that don’t require a specialty are low level. To move up you need to be great at something, and you have to let people know what you don’t do. No one is great at everything.

A few important things:

1) Start with an exhaustive analysis of everything on the market, including everything designed for the test and everything you can think of that might be relevant even though it was designed for a different purpose. Cobble together a best-of packet and make sure it includes everything a kid needs to know. Put it in a rational order: i.e., the order that you would most like to use it in, the order that would make your student feel comfortable and confident if you got hit by a bus and the kid had to follow the order of concepts completely on his own. Consider *both* how skills build and how concepts build. Plan by priority, not by some fantasy of comprehensiveness. Remember that frequency of concepts is hyperbolic, not linear.

2) Think about the ladder of mastery. Automaticity, automaticity, automaticity, automaticity. . .

3) Think about constitutent and complex skills.

4) Think about realistic practice.

I wonder whether Allen would be interested in writing a math component of the SSAT series. I wonder how I could set that up in a way that would be useful and helpful to him, guide him through the iterative part, and also come out the other side with a strong product. I wonder if I could use it to teach him how to design curricula and make larger education decisions. I wonder how it would be best to reimburse him.

a) the case study: MJ and HS

Somewhat controlling, somewhat perfectionistic; prone to paralysis or procrastination; may be uncomfortable working independently; may be prone to blaming others. . . will fail to do their homework for whatever reason, and then, when your class plan falls through because they are not prepared, will try to take over the class. Class will become extremely difficult and slow-paced; may grind to a halt, student may be resistant. You may feel blamed for the pace of the course.

The trick is to hand the student the ball. Make sure he or she is confronted with how little homework he or she is doing. Have a good plan and ensure that the student follows it. Do not allow him or her to take over; he or she does not actually know how to manage the class, and will become more frustrated rather than less frustrated with time.

important time management thingies:

1) the thirty minute game, and/or the value of uninterrupted work (cf. earlier reference);

the more creative and critical thinking skills your task requires, the more important the above principle is.

2) recording how you spend your time.

often, the solution to outsourcing is to use cheap but proven subcontractors (this is better than a college kid)

What I should have done differently this semester:

During the first two weeks of class, getting organized, registered, and physically equipped for class should have been a full-time job, and it involved a lot more work than I realized it would. It is usually not seamless.

I should have a) registered and applied for everything on time;
b) made a request of Prof. Kienzle for some kind of syllabus or something for the reserve book, or asked if I could put it together myself.

In courses where not all materials are available at the beginning of the semester, it's important for me to negotiate that and work with the professors or whatever in order to get my hands on them anyway, even if it's a lot of extra work. Then, if the materials are incomplete, at least I can add them after the fact. Better that, than to have nothing assumbled.

Notes

[1] One valuable thing you tend to get only in startups is uninterruptability. Different kinds of work have different time quanta. Someone proofreading a manuscript could probably be interrupted every fifteen minutes with little loss of productivity. But the time quantum for hacking is very long: it might take an hour just to load a problem into your head. So the cost of having someone from personnel call you about a form you forgot to fill out can be huge.

This is why hackers give you such a baleful stare as they turn from their screen to answer your question. Inside their heads a giant house of cards is tottering.

The mere possibility of being interrupted deters hackers from starting hard projects. This is why they tend to work late at night, and why it's next to impossible to write great software in a cubicle (except late at night).

One great advantage of startups is that they don't yet have any of the people who interrupt you. There is no personnel department, and thus no form nor anyone to call you about it.

(c) only hire people who are either going to write code or go out and get users, because those are the only things you need at first.

You probably can't change that. Even if you could, I don't think you'd want to; someone who really, truly doesn't care what his peers think of him is probably a psychopath. So the best you can do is consider this force like a wind, and set up your boat accordingly. If you know your peers are going to push you in some direction, choose good peers, and position yourself so they push you in a direction you like.

Now it is 5:35 a.m. and I still can't sleep. Why can't I sleep?

Here is what I learned and what I think about Freud:

1) Freud talks quite a bit about mastery--when he discusses separation, and then later, when he discusses trauma, which is in some ways even more interesting.

2) To Freud, it is clear that trauma and separation are both assaults on the self, or more precisely interruptions of the economy of narcissism that constitutes the subjectivity of the mature adult. Freud's mention of the ego as a "unity" is revealing and interesting here. Specifically, the ego-libido and the object-libido are conceived as fluid "chemical energies" (it seems probable that Freud expected these properties of psychology to be further clarified and developed by neuroscience, which he refers to as "psycho-physiology"). To Freud, the attachment to objects grows from the desire to be loved; in a "happy" love relationship, libido flows (in the form of energy) from the ego to the object and back in a form of sustaining economy. This ecosystem of ego-libido and object-libido constitutes the subjectivity of a mature adult.


The loss of a beloved object (which, significantly, to Freud is not merely caused by a death but also by the loss of a relationship) disrupts the unity of the ego (??) and requires the ego to perform the work of mastery, which usually takes the form of instructing the self (through a sort of obsessional rote repetition) in the reality or actuality of the loss. Freud uses the word "pain" to refer to this variety of loss, and suggests that loss is a source of pain because it is a violation of the borders of the self [is this bullshit????? double check].

Separation is not external to the self, even when it takes place in the physical environment that is external to the body of the bereaved. Rather, separation or loss is a breach in the unity that is the ego, because the attachments formed by an individual are not external to him or her but form part of the hard-won unity of the mature self. The loss of an attachment thus compromises the unity of the self and is experienced as a personal danger [again, bullshit?????? double check] which must be mastered.

emotions of anger and grief, . . . competing impulses toward protest and mastery (here, not mastery in the sense of consolation, but rather mastery in the sense of recognizing the loss as real, factual, actual, objective).


Question: how does all this relate to the sublime, *exactly*? How much is it wise or necessary to focus on the idea of separation as personal danger?

Maybe it would be more shrewd to emphasize that, to Freud, the boundaries of the "self" are not as simple as we might expect, but contain a whole economy of identification: with objects of attachment, with countries and places, etc. This would later allow for a more inclusive discussion of danger.

(Death as a loss of self, not a loss of life.) Significantly, although Freud does not *say* it, does he imply that the loss of the ego is potentially more devastating than the loss of life? Double check.

I have spent about $75 so far this week on eating out and drinking while I am studying.

I am getting quite a bit done. On the other hand, I feel that this is ridiculous.

I also feel--after praying about it--that I need to stop blaming myself so much.

It occurs to me as I lie awake here at 4:57 a.m. that I have given up a lifestyle I very much prefer in order to do this graduate student thing. It was nice to be making enough money, and have time to go to the gym, and feel that I was a respected person with a certain amount of authority. Now I am not respected as a student but I have no authority. I am a young person in the program, and I am getting my masters' degree. I am tired of feeling like my house is a mess and I am personally a mess. I want things to be normal and contained and controlled. I want things to be prettier. I want the time to be a girl and also the time to be a professional and I feel like I am 0 for 2 on that score.

I also feel like spending $30 a night on beer is setting back massively on both of those goals. I need to keep praying about that and find alternatives.

If all of my papers rock, however, and I get four A's this semester, it will have been worth it.

Would it be possible for me to really, truly avoid taking out any more debt? And still get done what I need to get done as a student?

If so, what would it look like?

I need to keep praying about my financial situation. I am about $1400 behind on my tithe, and I hate it. I want to pay my tithe.

I wish I could work more easily in my apartment. I wonder if there's a way to make that happen.

I also really, really want to get a substantial raise this summer. I hope it's realistic.

MY PRELIMINARY GOAL:

Eat out less!

I am so anxious about my American Express situation.

I have to deposit that check.

I also need to pay off $4500 this summer.

I have also taken out something like $13,000 in student loans for living expenses, in addition to my $10,000 in student loans for tuition.

That means I am now nearly $30,000 in debt after this year of school.

I don't regret it at all. But I do regret the parts of it that may have been unnecessary. I kind of feel like I am wasting about $1000 a month.

I can see that I do not really have a reason to be scared, because I can pay off at least $9000 of it this summer if I am disciplined, and then I hope I can work for about 15 months and pay off a big chunk of the rest of it. . . maybe close to all of it.

But I am not really living in accordance with my goals. This is not what I want to do with my money, spending $40 a day on eating out and other wasteful expenses. That's over $1000 a month. Think of what I could do with $1000 a month!

I want to feel a little bit more in control of my spending, and I think that means eating out less, maybe even not at all. I feel much better and more in control if I am not eating out at all. I wonder if I can make that an ongoing practice, and what it would look like.

I think I have been naive to assume that I could just decide to spend less money, and that it would be relatively easy compared to my other goal, which was making more money. I think I need to be realistic. . . that spending less money is a big project, one requiring many different skills and several months, or years, to learn. I need to keep at it. And that means continuing to work at not eating out, and continuing to work at recording my expenses.

Also: Lucretia.

I managed to express my thoughts with some clarity today in class. That was good.

The first thing that matters: the visible/invisible distinction.

But I am not really super-interested in the discourse of the body. I am instead interested in the idea of imagining integrity: whether the boundaries of the self are imagined as being essentially physical or essentially otherwise, the idea of wholeness is still very much in play. In some way, trauma is by definition that which violates the integrity of the self (whether bodily or otherwise). That's the value of using Douglas' Purity and Danger in this paper.

I also realized in class today the possibility of a new way to read theodicy: namely, that the crucifixion and the doctrine of sanctification provided a model for suffering innocence.

I need to write up a comparison of Lavinia and Daphne. A lot could grow from those few pages.

One interesting idea: that the Ovidian metamorphoses contain two simultaneous readings, the melancholic and the elegiac. Perhaps these can be the two through lines for the argument. I wonder whether we can say that elegiac theodicies tend to fail? The Austin paper is a helpful one here as well, I expect.

Okay. So maybe there is more than I thought that I can include. I can draw some solid through lines, and maybe get through it all pretty quickly. And it may be significant to *mention* trauma without relying on theorists such as DeCapra; I can talk about separation as essential (and Freudian) and introduce the idea of trauma as a subcategory. I could also add a footnote referring to the 20th century discussion of trauma. I can suggest, through that reading, that the genre of lament can be read both through and against the genre of elegy. I can also align those two generic categories with the aesthetic categories of the sublime and the beautiful, and show that this alignment is a reasonable one given the deep dichotomy underlying Burke's original distinction (namely, that the sublime is related to danger, while the beautiful is related to love). We could even say that, in psychoanalytical terms, the sublime is related to separation and separation anxiety, while the beautiful is related to attachment. As Sacks suggests, the project of elegy is fundamentally one of attachment or reattachment; as such, the aesthetic mode of the beautiful is natural to the genre. (I believe Klinck, or someone else--maybe Jose Mora??--implies a connection between elegy and the beautiful.) Conversely, the project of lamentation is to confront a loss, a separation, a threat to the integrity of the self; as such, the natural aesthetic mode of the lamentation is the sublime. After aligning, and demonstrating, these distinctions, I can bring up the Trauerspiel vs. tragedy distinction.

I really want this paper to be persuasive and craftsmanlike. I want it to have breadth, range, and discipline, and to show sensitivity to the type of argumentation that is most likely to be well-received. I want it to be persuasive, original, and non-trivial.

I also wonder about including my paper from last semester, about how A-S poetics do not operate on the basis of transcendence. . .

Well, it turns out that someone else has already made my lament/sublime argument. . . and a good part of my lament/elegy argument. That made me feel pretty disappointed. It's a very good article that this other person has written.

I guess the question for me now is what can I add to the discussion?

Partly, I suppose, I can structure my argument in a tighter and more comprehensive way, and in my own little way try to imitate Sacks' The English Elegy by a) taking a broader historical approach, from the Greek goos through the German baroque Trauerspiel and so on; b) drawing a tighter, clearer contrast between elegy and lamentation than Austin does; and c) introducing the element of psychoanalysis by discussing loss and separation. I may be flattering myself, but I think I have some chance of introducing breadth to Austin's treatment of the issue and making the comparison in a more complete and elegant way. Her article is elegant (and, I think, true) but it is somewhat historically limited, I think. One could treat the same issues with greater breadth and more incisive focus (both at once). I also think that elegy and the beautiful are fundamentally related, and I wonder if I could prove it.

Of course, once I get this on paper, I can do something new and exciting by applying it to Old English verse. . .

I wonder how new it really is to say that lament relates to the moment of loss or separation, while elegy relates to the work of mourning? I have not seen that before. . .

Well, I'm home. And out of batteries.

Here's the other obvious thing with rape: it happens a lot, and it's usually accompanied by transmutation or transfiguration.

death as a loss of the self, and not a loss of life.

I think all of this irritation has unearthed a significant flaw in my argument so far:

1) I don't really have a clear-cut definition of trauma that extends beyond the idea of the initial event.

2) I guess we get into it a little bit with Freud, and separation, and so on.

This is a problem that I need to either solve or bracket. ):(

necessary background knowledge:

a) the word trauma was first used to refer to psychological wounding in. . .

Sense of "psychic wound, unpleasant experience which causes abnormal stress" is implied in traumatic, in psychological jargon 1889. Traumatize in the psychological sense is attested from 1949.

"trauma." Online Etymology Dictionary. Douglas Harper, Historian. 01 May. 2007. .

If we are to look for trauma in earlier centuries, then, we cannot look merely for the term; we must identify its analogues, its symptoms, its manifestations; we must proceed on the basis of a clear-cut definition and read backwards.

Several possible approaches suggest themselves:

1) Some events are by nature traumatic. (Does anyone famous say this?) For instance, the experience of mutilation is probably traumatic by definition. Physical violation is traumatic.

Can we use the definition of the DSM-IV? or whatever it's called?

I like the definition cited earlier--i.e., that it must be shocking.

What does Freud say? that is relevant to *adult* trauma?

In any case, it seems like only an asshole would deny that rape is traumatic. . . if we are going to accept the notion of trauma at all. This is hardly an academic argument, but any meaningful basic notion of trauma--however we define it--is going to include Lucretia, especially considering her subsequent suicide. That is the important point: even given the absence of agreement about trauma, no matter who you believe, Lucretia clearly counts.

This totally circumstantial, external definition, however, is not really that important. We need to look beyond the event for a certain constellation of events or accrual of concepts with more historical resonance, that will enable us to read backwards.

One such understanding is the sublime.

Another is the impossibility of consolation.

The hell with all of this if you don't understand why.

I don't really know, or care, how this semester's theorists would define trauma backwards. (That's terrible. It's my failing, not a failing of the course.) Nonetheless. That's probably not even true, it's just that I can't remember.

The dilemma of speechlessness; the inability to tell the story; the problem of consolation (and the unconsolable).


Maybe it's smarter to just start with Lucretia and the event that surrounds her and forfingget about connecting it to DeCapra's theory of trauma.

It's not that I disagree with DeCapra et al. It's that I find many of these later theories to be too specific, i.e. related strictly to major 20th century atrocity, and I think there should be a better bridge from Freud (which is extremely universal and, in a sense, presumes that a certain degree of trauma inheres in human existence) and DeCapra (which assumes that trauma is an extreme anomaly on which only a few have license to speak.

Regardless of the source of the trauma, the experience has three common traits: it was unexpected, the person was unprepared and there was nothing the person could do to prevent it from happening. --Wikipedia, "Trauma."

Damn right.

Also. because her rape is clearly traumatic (if there is such a thing as a non-traumatic rape). She kills herself after all. This can actually be contrasted with accounts such as The Rape of the Sabine Women. She is a useful and appropriate topic because a) she is canonical and b) her status as a trauma survivor cannot be in doubt.

Why the f--- am I writing about Lucretia?

a) because she is raped.
b) because her rape is a symbolic rape of Rome (or so it has been argued). Either it is traumatic for Rome, or it acts as a harbinger of future trauma. In either case, it allows the Roman state to throw off the boundaries of its occupiers.

As such, the rape of Lucretia occurs at the nexus of both the public and the private, and thus the nexus of both structural and historical trauma (DeCapra?).

Also, focusing on the figure of Lucretia is important because Lucretia is canonical. Lucretia is therefore a sounder topic, from a strategic point of view, than, say, the virgin martyrs.


How the !@#$%^& am I going to write about this in 4 pages?!? I can barely spell the title of this paper in 4 pages. There is so much necessary background knowledge for people! Hello, hello, hello!

Why do I always feel so frustrated, angry, and resentful when I am beginning to write?

Here is what I want to say:

Hello, people!

OBVIOUSLY. Lucretia is traumatized. Hello. She is raped. Moreover, her sense of identity is so deeply violated that she commits suicide. However you want to define trauma--an encounter with death? (Lifton, I think you are too narrow. I think death is not *actually* the worst loss a person can suffer)--Lucretia has faced it. Can we talk about the loss of the self versus loss of life? I think we can. (Where was that anyway?) So Lucretia's sense of self has been completely compromised. Maybe or maybe not, she feels obligated to kill herself. Also, I think that we are somehow meant to see her suicide as an extension of her chastity.

Also. Peter Sacks, you are a genius. You are also a very kind man. I love your book The English Elegy, and I think it is far, far better than anything I have written or have ever hoped to write. At the same time. I think you only show us half of the truth about Ovid and all of his many, many, many rapes.

I think it's a little bit misleading for you to contrast Lucretia and Daphne in the way you do in your book. After all, your reading of Daphne is not actually a reading of Daphne, is it? No, it's a reading of Apollo, of his state of mind. It's important for you--in terms of how you use your reading of Freud--to create this contrast, and I think it works, if we are just contrasting the episodes. But the consolation found in the Daphne story is probably no consolation for Daphne. No; like Lavinia, Daphne cannot speak, Daphne loses her hands. The consolation in the Daphne story is a consolation for Apollo, it makes him less sad; and subsequently he is also to undergo a meaningful process of figuration that restores his narcissism (in a non-pathological way, as you suggest). Again, I have no real problem with this. And again, you are a genius to have drawn all these through-lines in the first place.

But I think it's important we see two experiences in the Daphne story--that of Apollo, which you already identified and traced so successfully; and that of Daphne, which you don't talk about at all (except--through analogy--by discussing Lucretia). After all, it's a little bit of a technicality in the Metamorphoses who gets raped and who doesn't, isn't it? They all end up undergoing the same process of transmutation--and while that transmutation may be the origin of figuration (and thus elegy, and in a valuable sense speech) for Apollo, it is the source of speech.less.ness for Daphne. Hello.

On my third beer, and in my current irritated state, I am a little bit irritated with everybody for not figuring this out. It seems like a lazy failure to confront misogyny. I think this is the beer.

Also, while I am bitching unreasonably about people who are actually very talented, very dedicated scholars and teachers--because I am angry about not getting my own thoughts into words--I am a little bit annoyed at the *choice* of clinical theory in this course. Why not Bowlby? Why this pseudo-clinical stuff? Why Caruth?

Caruth, I think you are really off-base. I think you need to spend more time in a clinical setting with people who are actually trauma survivors. I think your reading of trauma is overly literary, not to say fictionalized.

Kind of a neat idea. . .

The one part of Niles' article on ring composition (which I find almost completely persuasive) that I don't agree with has to do with his reading of the mere. It's hard to make a strong claim that this point of the text is a narrative or thematic climax: for one thing, there is a clear progression in the structure of the monsters that suggests the dragon is the worst-case scenario; for another, the novelty/subliminality of Grendel's mother is undermined by the fact that we have basically seen her before (in a different form). Moreover, her episode is somewhat short, and there is little build-up of dread (even retroactively, as in Wiglaf's after-the-event speech about how everyone had tried to convince Beowulf not to go fight the dragon). Her appearance on the scene reminds me a little bit of the "mother of"/"bride of" convention in horror movie sequels: the original monster returns with a different face. The threat is feminized in order to allow a recapitulation of the original danger. Grendel's mother seems to me to be essentially a resurrection of the original threat. The character has changed (sort of) but the danger is the same. These monster episodes, in my best off-the-cuff judgment at 11:51 this morning, should be considered together.

That's not the kind-of neat idea, though. It strikes me that in looking for a climax at all--whether consciously or unconsciously--Niles may be missing the implication of one of his own theories, namely that rings do not (spacially) have high points or climaxes. The movement of the narrative is voyage-out-and-return, but this movement is conducted without a particular narrative climax.

It's interesting that--as Vendler has commented (I think in her book on young poets)--the chiasm is essentially the structure of forethought. Here I think we get forethought; the poem is composed, built.

Academic Post 2: Beowulf again

If I am really going to imitate Sacks' method of beginning an argument (through genre), I need to come to a better clinical/psychological understanding of separation, loss, and anxiety. It should be minimal in detail, but accurate.

So here's a sort of outline of concepts:

separation
* protest
* despair
* detachment

mourning
* ?? transfer of affections ??

defense

Except this doesn't work for two reasons: 1) despair = mourning (for who? for Freud? or just for Bowlby?) Also, detachment is somewhat pathological, if I understand correctly. Is defense pathological or part of the normal grieving process? What does defense even mean?

So maybe a more accurate outline looks like this:

separation, as it conceived by Bowlby, is an event with duration rather than a specific moment. (?) But Freud seems to discuss the before and the after with little attention to the moment of trauma itself.

* separation anxiety (Bowlby: protest)

NB: Bowlby suggests that separation anxiety occurs before the event takes place. But how does this make sense with respect to his data, in which he observes separation anxiety in children who have already been taken away from their parents?

* mourning (Bowlby: despair)

* defense OR Bowlby: detachment

Also. . . for crying out loud. . . where in all of these chronologies is the event itself located?