Sidney's always been my hero...

First let me say I must admit gratitude that our re-entrance into our blog discussion after our panel presentations is based on a novel. Nothing quite as wonderful as a plot to keep the mind engaged. …And, just a thought… with that in mind, how might we argue the importance of text and context when addressing song?
…But before I digress too much from my principal questions:
Before the beginning of the eclogues, in chapter nineteen, we are presented with Dametas’ awkward little song of self-celebration after Dorus’ slays the bear. In this song he gives thanks to Pan, somewhat mirroring the invocation of both Dorus’ Muse and Thyrsis’ “my god Pan” in their singing match. How does Dametas’ song (the first we see in Arcadia) set us up for the (potentially arguably) more dignified eclogues? The eclogues begin with Dorus and Thyrsis’ competition to prove their verbal virtuosity; however, this skill is to be proven by their ability to create in their audience the stirrings of compassion—he who expresses the depth and praise of his love with the greatest skill by eliciting the greater sympathy will prove the winner. How might this speak to song, as we have studied it, and how might the invocations play into this? Certainly, compassion may be played upon by presenting the necessity of man’s call on a higher power. How and to what extent is this power (in this case deity) an “other” or outside of the imagination of man, which is so greatly prized in a defense of poetry or song? How and to what extent might Thyrsis’ “balance[ing] the highest point of man’s wit with the efficacy of nature” (Sidney’s Defense of Poesy) in his verses complicate this?

Silent songs? or Fryes with that?

Maybe you want ketchup, maybe vinegar, maybe mayo for your F's so I'm asking a few questions below; take your pick. Though I do hope you'll address the last question (i.e., mention an individual poem or two).

(I will save my questions on Hollander for class but feel free to discuss his essay; his ideas on refrain might be pertinent to the below.)


Northrop Frye associates lyric on the one hand with music and on the other with the "pictorial," which (it seems) can refer either to the visual appearance of the poem or to the imagery it uses. He uses the words "babble" and "doodle" as shorthand for the two "boundaries" of lyric. (As a poet, I can't help feeling slightly infantilized. Goo ga.)

Between these boundaries is "purely verbal" "cantillation," or chant (rhythmic speech). We might read the title of the section of Anatomy of Criticism I gave you, "The Rhythm of Association: Lyric," as a reference to his attempt to locate the crux of lyric at the crux of music and image. (Elsewhere, he calls lyric "the union of sound and sense," which sounds like it doesn't map onto "music and image" but perhaps does if we understand "image" to refer to language's representational aspect.)

I'd like to know whether we can figure out how song would differ from lyric for Frye.

Couldn't we locate song at the crux of music and sense, just as we can for lyric? (Argue with me.)

Can we think about the difference in terms of genre -- which for Frye has to do with the relationship between author and audience? Here are Frye's definitions of the two genres I think are pertinent to this discussion:

* epos - presents "author/minstrel as oral reciter" with audience listening -- author speaks directly to audience
* lyric - "characterized by assumed concealment of the audience from the poet and by the predominance of an associational rhythm distinguishable both from recurrent metre and from semantic or prose rhythm" ["overheard"]

Perhaps he'd say song would count more as "epos," because in song, obviously, there's a performer and an audience.

A lyric poem that calls itself a song, then, is what?

A song without audience? A silent or silenced song? (Argue with me.)

Could there be a relationship between the silencing of the performative aspect of song and what Frye calls the dreamlike paronomasia (wordplay) of lyric?

Do any of the lyric/song poems in the coursepack offer a way of thinking about performance and/or audience that we might relate to Frye's definitions of epos and lyric? do they support his definitions? refute them? complicate them?

Doctor, heal thyself

I am thy poster for this week. I've had meetings and students in my office all day and now am taking a batch of students to the Drop Inn Shelter in Cincinnati, so won't have the question up by 5; I will post it first thing in the morning unless I can do it later when I return from Cinci. In the meantime, to aid thy reading of Frye:

from the glossary to Anatomy of Criticism:

EPOS: the literary genre in which the radical [fundamental] of presentation is the author or minstrel as oral reciter, with a listening audience in front of him.

LOW MIMETIC: A mode of literature in which the characters exhibit a power of action which is roughly on our own level, as in most comedy and realistic fiction [this is opposed to HIGH MIMETIC, which refers to literature in which the central characters are above our own level of power and authority]

LYRIC: A literary genre characterized by the assumed concealment of the audience from the poet and by the predominance of an associational rhythm distinguishable both from recurrent metre and from semantic or prose rhythm.

MODE: A conventional power of action assumed about the chief characters in fictional literature, or the corresponding attitude assumed by the poet toward his audience in thematic literature. Such modes tend to succeed one another in historical sequence.

Joint Effort (Post #6)

Due to technical difficulties, this post is being posted by me, Jackie, but the authors of the questions are Geoffrey and Meg. Cheers!

Geoffrey:

I’m left thinking about Obama. And Glen Beck. And Reagan. And Clinton. And Hitler. Would you prefer Jefferson? I’m thinking of him too… Walker (paraphrasing Hesiod) suggests the world of “rhetoric” breaks into two clear worlds: in short, the rhetoric of art and the rhetoric of business/politics. That rhetoric (or whatever word will eventually become “rhetoric”) is a “pyschagoogic art” of enthralling the given audience and turning aside listeners’ minds. Literally, taking control of their thoughts and bending them to the task at hand, be it poetry or policy. That the Arts would originally be considered the “secondary” half of the two is not surprising. However, the deduction that the most-successful rhetoric of politics and business actually springs from this “secondary art” is quite interesting to me as a writer and as a teacher and as a citizen, and I think Walker and company are on to something quite empowering here.

Back to Obama. He is our President because he’s a good speaker. Period. That’s it. Politics aside, what separated him from that pack and captured the imagination and support of so many a year ago was his ability to speak well. To share his vision in a way that was comprehensible to the “lore and language” (epos) of his mass audiences and supported by the “rhythmic formulae” (epea) of a sweeter discourse clearly found within our churches, streets and cultures. Our ears, suggests Walker, are trained to appreciate these “rhythms” and devices through church, ceremony, art. An epideictic code of an almost Jungian nature that the audience (must never forget the audience) shares collectively. To this, does the master speaker address.

I should just get onto my question: What rhetorical practices that we’ve encountered so far this year in song appear in your favorite “practitioner of pragmatika?” I’ve had a ball the last few days watching Obama speak (on Iran) and Beck rant on Fox. I’ve thought about the best salespersons I’ve ever worked with in the business world. I’ve thought about the “best” teacher I ever had and why... How did he speak? Question #1: What in the language of these practical speakers is similar to the rhetorical devices found in song? From repetition and cadence to expletives and hyperbaton, and everything in between. These devices are learned by the audience from ART, from the poetry of five thousand years of song and story. If Wallace speaks true, we’ll find these same devices in the next speech by your favorite (and least favorite) politician. And if, indeed, the Muses have blessed us with the gift of rhetoric to foster peace and justice on Earth, our very best leaders will those who have assimilated the very best practices of art (rather than the detached “rhetoric”propsed by Aristotle and Socrates). Question #2: As writers and educators and citizens, what rhetorical devices might we learn for ourselves and pass on to the next generation that are lifted from directly from the “bards” of so long ago and today?




Meg/Woog

As I read through Walker's essay I couldn't help but focus in on the sophist as he defines (if they can at all be defined fully) one. A "...professional intellectual, a 'wiseman,' 'sage,' or the possesor , performer, and a professor of some special skill...The sophist might, perhaps, even be a 'wizard'..." (37). This is because they seemed to translate as poets, in that a poet must be some type of wizard to pull the audience into the text/performance with grace. I use the word pull because I am imagining now a ribbon in the wind that a speaker must extend to the audience in order to reach them. The audience might not always be able to catch the ribbon (meaning the imagery or every word spoken) but that the image/text/performance is ever present, dancing before them. The subject matter in poetry can be stronger or more engaging when it dangles in from an audience, leads them to or through a story.
This is most clear in poems such as Edmund Spenser's "Aegloga Quarta" and Shakespeare's "It Was a Lover and His Lass" where the story seems whimsical, fluid, song-like. And, of course these are song-like, as Spenser has a, sort-of duet with these two voices talking back and forth to one another. And as Shakespeare writes with refrain using "with a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino" Sophists are poets in the sense that they bridge the gap, or more importantly, overlap the epideictic and pragmatic speech.
So, to the question. If poets like Blake, Spenser, and Donne are capable of creating poems that are "timeless," in the sense in that they "embody an ancient, ancestral wisdom," (23) speaking as "sages," how then, can modern poets such as Langston Hughes or Geoffrey Hill immortalize their poems? Are they steeped in the language of the present and is that language song-like enough to keep us from forgetting it or its importance/success as a "timeless" art?

P.S. Does anyone still have the Lip Gloss song in their head? Man, I can't stop singing/humming it.

Questions for Week 4-ella-ella

I think that we picked a great set of songs. They have everything we’re looking for in a standard pop song, but are different enough from each other that we can separate them.

To me, it seemed the biggest way to categorize the songs is by song structure: How did the use of instrumentation and emphasis on the refrain affect the bridge? Generally, the two seemed to go together, and I came up with two different poles and then most of other songs.

On one end was Lil’ Mama’s “Lip Gloss”, with virtually no instrumentation and a heavy emphasis on the refrain. Rihanna and Beyonce are very close on the spectrum. The bridges on these songs all seem tacked on and almost like an intrusion to the song. Especially with “Lip Gloss”

On the other end is F.K.O., with more instrumentation, but no real refrain. Wu Tang is similar. They go verse after verse with only once or twice interrupting for a very brief “Protect ya neck”.

My question is how do these song structures affect the inherent purpose and reception of the songs? Can the structures work rhetorically independently of the lyrics?

Also, if we want to talk about the lyrics, here’s something interesting I noticed. In each of the songs, especially the hip hop, the performer carried their own ethos. Lauren Hill told us the importance of real hip hop, Beyonce gave an F-you to committal-phobic men, Snoop Dogg smokes weed etc. To me it seemed that the only performer that didn’t carry their own ethos was Rihanna. Jay-Z shows up at the beginning of the song to basically tell us that she’s with him and we should listen to her, then he disappears. Did that seem strange to anyone else or am I just thinking to much?

Question of the Leadbelly Week (#4)

I've got a few ideas rolling around in my head about this week's readings/recordings. I've had the rhetorical triangle on my mind (not only because Evelyn drew it on the board, but because I will draw it for my 111 students next week). I’m interested in where we apply the ethos angle of the triangle to the recordings.

We've talked a bit in class about how performance changes our reception of a song and how the singer's interpretation enhances (or maybe interferes with) its rhetorical value. For me, at least, I tend to put the performer in the rhetor position, rather than the songwriter (whose name, if known, is tucked somewhere among the liner notes).*

After reading about Leadbelly's life, from several different (conflicting) perspectives, I'm curious about how our knowledge of a singer's life interferes with how we interpret a song? Do we assume (like so many readers assume short stories consist of thinly disguised memoir) that we’re learning about the singer’s life when we hear them perform? How can we apply this to our ability to view these songs as rhetoric?

(This is similar to the “separating the artist from the art” question.)

Also, how is this complicated by our “romanticism” of the artist? (I’m thinking about Mullen’s article now.) Is it possible to listen to these songs without a dose of romanticism that might hinder our ability to look at them objectively? Is it even possible to look at them objectively?

*Except for those rare cases, when considering popular music, or "mainstream" (as opposed to indie?), that we have a song delivered to us by its lyricist/composer. Stevie Wonder pulls this off for us, but there aren't too many like him in that regard.

Question of the Week #3

So, let’s talk about Freud. His is hardly the first literature I’d normally turn to in a critical discussion of song, but I find that the anecdote in the second chapter of Beyond the Pleasure Principle offers an interesting perspective. It tells of a child who plays a game, sort of a one-party fetch, where he hurls toys into the corner, waits, then retrieves them with visible satisfaction. Freud interprets this as a mechanism for coping with the frequent absence of the boy’s mother, that the child mollifies himself “by dramatising the same disappearance and return with objects he had at hand” (13).

This conclusion seems contestable to me (and Freud, to be fair, offers an alternate interpretation), but, for the sake of discussion, let’s assume there’s some validity to it. My question, then, is how and to what degree might the performance of music, especially the selections from Goodbye Babylon, be analogous? How, if at all, do we sing religious songs to as a means of alleviation through “dramatizing” our own experiences? What experiences among those who sing might be the stand-in for the missing mother in the scenario Freud describes? It might be interesting, too, to drag Marx into the discussion: is there an “opiate” effect of dramatizing experiences through song?

I don’t have much of a congealed answer to these questions—not yet, at least. I’m looking forward to reading what everyone comes up with.