I was reading Zak's journal (in particular, the section where he was ranting about the female authors nominated for the National Book Award) and I have something to say.  Simple as that.  I agree that Americans place way too much value and emphasis on someone's gender or the color of their skin.  The important thing should be the person himself.  I feel this way about the canon also.  I have problems eliminating certain writers merely because they're a bunch of dead white guys.  I don't think we should incorporate writers of ethnicity MERELY because they are under represented.  The empahsis should be on the merits of the work itself.  This is my extremely modern view, I know.  I agree with Foucault because he wants to de-emphasize the influence that the writer exerts over interpretation of literature.  I really dislike the fact that a piece of literature is interpreted in its historical context before it is interpreted within itself - if that makes any sense whatsoever.  People who say that Lord of the Rings is only an allegory for World War I kind of annoy me.  They aren't taking the work into account.  It's an ignorant interpretation (to me) because it's a refusal to acknowledge other points of view exist.  Okay and another point I wish to make is that days like Diversity Awareness Day only serve to separate us.  We are categorized even further.  Not only am I a female college student but I'm a white female 20 year old off-campus out of state, working upper middle class blonde-haired blue-eyed five foot two inch single American North Dakotan college student.  (Foucault is getting to me a little big - discourse, talking about how different we are only serves to further classify us - calling the day Diversity Awareness day only masks the true intentions of the day "Power is tolerable only on condition that it mask a substantial part of itself.  Its success is proportional to its ability to hide its own mechanisms" (History of Sexuality 86).  At the same time that I think it's a damn shame that we must classify each other by a gender/skin color/socioeconomic system.  I think some of these factors do need to be taken into consideration.  (This is the feminist in me coming out.  The one who says, "Yeah, what if Shakespeare had a sister? Huh?  Huh?")  Women have only had the right to vote for 85 years.  That's not a long time considering that we humans have been in existence for way more than 2000 years.  I think we need to at least acknowledge that women's rights have created amazing opportunites for women and just in the last 100 years or so.

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I saw the film The Elephant Man this semester for the first time.  it was a grotesque and sometimes disgusting film.  For anyone who hasn't seen it, The Elephant Man is based on the life of Joseph Merrick.  Joseph Merrick lived in London, England during the Victorian age and at a time when industrialization was becoming increasingly prominent.  Merrick was afflicted with a disease identified (much later) as Proteus Syndrome.  He had tumerous growths all over his body and his skull had ponderous enlargements.  These tumors and growths deformed his features.  Anyway, in the movie, Merrick is abandoned as a  young child and recruited to join the freak show of a traveling circus.  It is there that he is horribly mistreated.  Women, men, and children run screaming from the sight of him.  The make-up and prosthetics used to make the actor (John Hurt, I believe) into the Elephant Man are extraordinarily realistic.  When the audience finally sees the Elephant Man, it's like a train wreck.  Joseph Merrick is ugly and so hideously deformed that he hardly even resembles a human being.  One cannot simply look away however.  It is impossible not to stare.  The lesson I gained from this movie came not from the horrible image of Merrick but his treatment.  It's appalling the way that people feel they can treat Merrick because he's deformed.  I think that that portion of the film is more disgusting than the image of Merrick.  It's just demeaning.  I have problems understanding how others can treat another human being in such a demeaning manner.  This kind of ties in with my last journal entry.  We are obsessed with image that it is sometimes hard to look beyond physical appearance to find the person inside (what did Poe say was the most tragic thing? The death of a beautiful woman).  A pivotal scene shows Merrick surrounded by people who are staring and sneering at him.  Merrick lifts up his head and shouts, "I am not an elephant!  I am a man!"  I had to re-evaluate the way that I see things and how I let first impressions effect me after watching this film.  I highly recommend it to anyone who hasn't seen it.  How often have I seen someone deformed or a little different and automatically assumed something?  How often does this happen to people who are deformed?  How do we treat people who look like this?  I never know if I should look away or if I should just look at them.  Society doesn't always give us rules of conduct for situations such as this.

Here's a picture of Merrick that I found.  There are a lot out there that show more detail about his deformities but I didn't want to put them up here.  I'm feeling a little like Nikole and I'm not always sure what we can learn from something overly gross (Nikole talked about the Passion of the Christ and why she chose not to see it.  Anyway.  That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

For more information about the Elephant Man, go to: http://www.jsittons.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/elephantman/elephant_man.htm

I've been trying to amass a great many quotations just for general use.  Since I'm running out of room on this page, I thought I'd share a few that are my favorites.  Not necessarily pertaining to Lit Crit. "There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion."  -Francis Bacon (Maybe there is no standard for beauty, but I like to think of this when anyone talks about women in relation to supermodels) "A man is a critic when he cannot be an artist" -Flaubert (I don't know if I agree with this one anymore either.  I used to.  Back when I was an adolescent and had dreams and innocence)

"The impossible is often the untried." -Jim Goodwin