I have come into this strange realm of literary criticism knowing a little background information about critical theory so I feel slightly prepared for this journey.  I don't quite feel like Wallace Stevens gawking at some chick rocking out on the beach but rather like that chick herself "maker of the song she sang."  Even though I don't know who in God's name Ramon Fernandez is.  That will have to wait for a while.  I do understand that literary criticism is a way of viewing lietarure.  And this view isn't simpy a critical view of a piece of work but a way of seeing all types of litearture.  It's more like a point of view.  Of course, I could just be blowing steam here too.  Who knows?  And since you're reading what I say and basically rewriting it in your head, you could be completely misreading what it is that I've written.  That, I believe, is an interesting example of literary criticism posed by Paul de Man.  It just depends on how you look at it.

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Journal Page Two

"Hey Ramon Fernandez!"

The text that provides me with consolation is Jane Eyre.  Yes, I know, not the most intellectual novel, but its still my favorite.  I love how everytime I read it, there is always a happy ending.  Jane always ends up with Mr. Rochester, her "dear master."  I probably come back to it because it shuts up the nasally cynical voice in my head that says, "there is no such thing as a happy ending!"  It is my displacement of belief.  It's my way of learning about myself and about the world.  Who doesn't agree that a love story is something of sweetness and light?  I've read a ton of books that profess to mirror Jane Eyre or contemporize the plot but I have never found anything as satisfying as the Bronte original.  It said to me when I was but a wee lass that it was okay to be plain and ordinary.  Now it is the moral message that I find striking: sometimes the right thing is not always the thing one wants...

The question of the mirror and the lamp really came to life for me the other day in my Teaching Composition class.  We were addressing the issue of teaching writing and how one goes about teaching writing.  A lot of students wanted to give their students a formula or model for writng, something to imitate until students could master the creative process themsleves.  Others argued that students should be able to just spontaneously create.  Abrams came to my mind and the question for me became "Is writing in school a mirror or a lamp?"  When do we let children be a mirror and simply imitate style and content and when must children be a lamp, generating their own creative light?  Once from this point it was easy to translate Abrams into literature.  Is literature a mirror, simply imitating life?  Or is literature a lamp, generating truths that one can't find in life?  Looking at my own writing helped me to decide that sometimes it's a lamp and sometimes it's a mirror.  I think I tend to lean more towards the lamp side of the debate because reading literature often helps me to determine things in my own life or make clearer rationalizations about muddled events in my life.

So back to the Mirror and the Lamp debate....During British Literature II today, Dr. Myers brought up another interesting side to the debate on the mirror and the lamp.  The mirror is representative of 18th century poetry.  Everything that was written was merely a reflection of what was seen or heard.  19th Century poetry, however, was a lamp, shining a personal light on what was seen or heard.  Poetry was no longer a mirror but something subjectively shining light.

Quote about why Jane Eyre is a good book to reread: "Jane Eyre [is a] favorite, because I know I'm going to have a predicatable - great - experience when I return to [this] book.  I want to be with the language again.  I want to be with the characters again."            -Nancie Atwell