Theory 5

Question 1

What did George Steiner write on the topic of silence?

Answer 1

Silence and the poet

Question 2

What position does the poet stand-in in relation to God?

Answer 2

• speaking is to rival God’s language and thus the poet becomes a sacrilegious character (which is a recurrent trope in the Western literary tradition)
• in the beginning was the Word and thus Logos, total communication, is the act and essence of God - how does it coexist with the living fragments of our own speech?

Question 3

What significance does speech have in relation to humans and animals?

Answer 3

• it is the dividing line between man and myriad forms of animate beings
• it defines man’s eminence above the silence of a plant or the grunt of a beast

Question 4

In what kinds of poetry does the trope of the poet as a sacrilegious character/ the necessary limitations on human language feature?

Answer 4

Medieval Latin poetry, Mallarme, the Russian symbolist verse

Question 5

What does the poet have to keep in mind?

Answer 5

• has to hesitate from the Icarus-style hubris that oversteps the capability of man’s world
• the mystic tradition addresses that “what lies beyond man’s word is eloquent of God” (in reference to the fact that there is a limitation to our own speech, there are the frontiers of light, music, silence where speech has to stop and there is the evidence of divine meaning that surpasses our own

Question 6

How does Dante’s Paradiso reflect a calculus of linguistic possibility?

Answer 6

With each ascent, language is submitted to more and more intense pressure of vision

• language is stretched further and further as he ascends into the divine realm
• aesthetic conventions are brought nearer to the source of pure creative energy
• the poet moves upwards and his words fall behind - until language becomes inexpressible of his experience

Question 7

What happens when poetry reaches the maximum intensity of its being?

Answer 7

it passes into music - it is based on the same logic as the music of the spheres (ie. the myth embedded in the Western tradition that the universe is structured in harmony, which influenced the poet’s own project)
ie. rhetoric has a vocabulary of musicality

Question 8

What is the aspiration of language?

Answer 8

language aspires to the condition of music

Question 9

What techniques does Dante use to try to continue expressing his transcendent experience?

Answer 9

exhaustive metaphor and similies

Question 10

What is at the crux of Wagner’s vision?

Answer 10

the relationship between language and music

Question 11

What two motifs did Wagner’s vision lead to?

Answer 11

1. the motif of the poet as being ‘almost’ a musician
2. despair at being restricted to a form of expression thinner, narrower, and much nearer to the surface of the creative mind than music

Question 12

What kind of circularity does Dante end up falling into by the climax of the Paradiso?

Answer 12

his language becomes that of a babbling infant before he has mastered language at all

Question 13

How does Rilke relate to the power of language?

Answer 13

• he celebrates the power of language to rise towards music and considers the poet as the chosen instrument to facilitate this ‘upward transmutation’
  (he works on the frontier of both language and music, and wishes to guard both the genius of language and the rights of its kinship to music)

Question 14

In modern civilisation, of mass culture and mass politics, what has become of language?

Answer 14

• there has been a brutalisation and devaluation of the word and an exhaustion of verbal resources

Question 15

Steiner details another mode of transcendence for language. Instead of into music, what happens to language and whose view does this reflect?

Answer 15

• the poet enters into silence

- this is essentially what Sontag discusses

Question 16

In modern poetry, what does silence come to represent?

Answer 16

• the claim of the ideal - ie. to speak is to say less

Question 17

Why might there be a certain hopelessness to the modern writers’ task?

Answer 17

• one has to find language that has not been sullied/ worn to the point of cliche/ having been emptied of all meaning

Question 18

In what literary tradition can one find the fullest statement of the submission of the word to the musical ideal?

Answer 18

German Romanticism

Question 19

How might a musical analogy deepen/ reinforce a literary structure?

Answer 19

ie. like Eliot’s ‘The Four Quartets’

Question 20

How might a poet’s choice to use silence reflect their attitude towards the condition of language? Why has language taken this turn?

Answer 20

• chooses it to demonstrate that words have lost something of their humane genius - the communicative act has become precarious and vulnerable and thus a poet might choose the suicidal rhetoric of silence
• language has been injured by the political inhumanity of the 20th century

Question 21

What question does Steiner ask about the relationship between civilisation, inhumanity, and literature?

Answer 21

“Has our civilisation, by virtue of the inhumanity it has carried out and condoned - we are accomplices to that which leaves us indifferent - forfeited its claim to that indispensable luxury which we call literature?”

Question 22

Why does Steiner conclude that we are writing too much?

Answer 22

1. the constant inflation of writing has devalued the once numinous act of written communication
   - valid and new pieces find it hard to be heard
   - when trivial works are lorded as erudite and critical, they threaten to obliterate the work of art itself
2. in a political sense, writers should stop gifting a culture of inhumanity with the luxury of literature
   - if one cannot critique, they should not gift
   - when language has been perverted to be used savagely and in lies, unwritten poems are the greatest protest

Question 23

How do we become ‘deaf to certain sounds’?

Answer 23

We become accustomed to faint hum of sound that we take to be silence - we drown out certain sounds and our minds grapple for stimulating thought which means it becomes difficult to tune into these sounds

Question 24

How does Kierkegaard link silence with waiting?

Answer 24

silence has been politicised as agreement, or relinquishment to the fate of change/ stagnation

Question 25

How might we say that Quakerism rethinks the relationship between speech and silence?

Answer 25

Quakers believe that speech has to arise out of silence, that we need to clear the clamour and emotions of our mind before we can speak the truth
- speech also requires silence, the silence of the speaker’s mind, but also the silence of the listeners’ hearts and minds to give attention

Question 26

What does Aldous Huxley say on the topic of silence? It relates strongly with the conclusion that George Steiner came to

Answer 26

“unrestrained and indiscriminate talk is morally evil and spiritually dangerous”

Question 27

If one has earned silence, what might we call it?

Answer 27

a presence instead of an absence

Question 28

What are the drawbacks of hearing people only being able to think of silence from a hearing perspective?

Answer 28

• we don’t necessarily know how deaf people experience silence ie. we can only ever think of silence as an absence of external noise, but they are always in that world
• sign language as experienced differently by a deaf and a hearing person flags up that one’s interior voice and internal soundscape can play a far greater influence in some lives than others
• might have different connotations of hearing and silence ie. safety/ community etc.

Question 29

What piece did Susan Sontag write on silence?

Answer 29

The Aesthetics of Silence

Question 30

In Sontag’s The Aesthetics of Silence, she argues that art was once thought “an expression of human consciousness” - why is it not now?

Answer 30

• art does not only express the human consciousness, it also interrogates how the mind can be estranged from itself ie. there is a spirit that is trying to be embodied in art but is at odds with the ‘material’ character of art itself
• the artist is constantly trying to transcend what is achievable with a material form of art

Question 31

In Sontag’s The Aesthetics of Silence - what does she believe that ‘formerly’ artists were able to achieve/ aim towards in their works?

Answer 31

• when an artist would create their art, it was a deliverance ie. an embodiment of aestheticism
  (the aim was to reach ‘the good’ ie. mastery of and fulfilment in his art)

Question 32

In Sontag’s The Aesthetics of Silence - how is the artist freed when he resorts to silence?

Answer 32

• he is freed from the bonds of serving the world in a material way (ie. esp. in the materialism of the art world in which there are networks of patrons, clients, and audiences)
• instead, to work through silence is the ultimate transcendence - the ultimately ‘other-worldly’ gesture

Question 33

What does it mean when Sontag describes modern art as ‘inaudible’?

Answer 33

• it pushes the boundaries and asks questions to the point at which the artwork becomes almost inaudible
  ie. it becomes unintelligible to an audience

Question 34

What is the intended purpose of having art be almost ‘inaudible’ as Sontag describes in The Aesthetics of Silence?

Answer 34

• it means their art does not have to be focused on communicating with an audience and instead its silence provokes contemplation, interrogation etc.
• eventually also the artist’s transgression becomes legitimate and an audience comes to understand the intention after contemplation etc.

Question 35

What quote summarises John Cage’s thoughts on silence?

Answer 35

“there is no such thing as silence. Something is always happening that makes a sound”

Question 36

What quote summarises John Cage’s thoughts on the relationship between silence and its environment?

Answer 36

“one must acknowledge a surrounding environment of sound or language in order to recognise silence”

Question 37

What kind of audience interactions with an art piece does silence provoke?

Answer 37

• it prescribes a more immediate, sensuous experience of art (ie. as linked to Sontag’s ‘Against Interpretation’) OR a means of confronting art in a more conscious, conceptual way
• art also focuses attention and teaches skills of attention which in enhances when one reduces the means and effects of an art work

Question 38

Instead of interpreting ‘silence in art’ as a literal manifestation, how might we describe it?

Answer 38

• part of a methodology of minimalism

Question 39

Why does Sontag assert that language is one of the most impure mediums out of which art is made in her ‘The Aesthetics of Silence’?

Answer 39

• it is contaminated by its associations and denotative/ connotative meanings ie. it is given weight by its cultural code
  “it’s impossible for the artist to write a word (or render an image or make a gesture) that doesn’t remind him of something”

ie. intersubjectivity, each person is a being-in-a-world has become a wearying problem
(meaning the artist dreams of a wholly ahistorical/ un-alienated art)

Question 40

Due to language being contaminated, what does an artist have to contend with?

Answer 40

• their own meanings, but also the series of second order meanings that accumulate

Question 41

Due to the ‘contamination’ of language, why might we say language has its own sense of loudness?

Answer 41

• it has its own accumulation of sounds and voices etc.

Question 42

In what two ways might we identify a poem’s emulation of silence?

Answer 42

1. in stillness or in reflection/ rumination
2. minimalism/ aiming to focus ones attention (maybe like Verity Spott’s work who leaves a lot of space around her words to let the poem breathe etc.)

Question 43

How does art that is silent try to capture one way in which art might be capable of being ahistorical/ unalienated?

Answer 43

• silent art encourages a ‘stare’ instead of a roaming, mobile look - it does not release attention
• silent artworks do not demand that an audience ‘add’ something, they simply need to be contemplated in silence

Question 44

What four uses of silence does Sontag describe in her work ‘The Aesthetics of Silence’?

Answer 44

1. certifying the absence/ renunciation of thought (ie. can be an ascetic act) but can also be the indication that one is ‘full’ (perhaps full of thought/ stimulus etc.)
2. certifying the completion of thought
3. providing time for the continuation/ exploration of thought - speech closes off thought, silence keeps things open
4. silence can help speech attain its maximum integrity/ seriousness
   - speech can become fully untethered from the ‘body’ ie. from the centres of sincerity/ empathy - silence can counteract this tendency and even correct/ re-centre language when it becomes inauthentic
   (there is a resistance to keep proliferating language and images which seems to empty language)

Question 45

How does Sontag summarise her feelings towards the proliferation of language? (just give like brief sections of quote)

Answer 45

“words are crude, and they’re also too busy… [which] actively deadens the mind and blunts the senses”

Question 46

What was the attitude of Mallarme towards the ‘job of poetry’?

Answer 46

• to refine our word-clogged reality - the aim of poetry is to introduce silence around things
• to quieten language and to purify it

Question 47

In her work ‘The Aesthetics of Silence’, summarise Sontag’s work on Rilke and Ponge

Answer 47

• she describes as advocates for almost a new phenomenology of experience through the sharpening of our vocabulary we use for describing our sensory responses

Question 48

What is the result of creating a new phenomenology of experience through the sharpening of the vocabulary we use for describing our sensory responses?

Answer 48

• stress is often put on things that are considered trivial/ unimportant (like Cage’s focus on the sound of street traffic)

Question 49

How is the attitude that art should have room for all experiences manifested in contemporary art work today?

Answer 49

• it is based on principles of minimalist presentation of language/ items in a levelled, equal way

Question 50

What is the benefit of purifying language as described in Sontag’s The Aesthetics of Silence?

Answer 50

• when language is purified, the focus shifts from ideas of digging out the meaning of language and towards focusing on how language has aesthetic value in itself

Question 51

How does Sontag use the examples of Kafka and Beckett to exemplify how the purification of language allows it to be converted from ‘meaning’ into ‘use’?

Answer 51

• their narratives seem to invite high-powered symbolic and allegorical meanings and yet they also repel such ascriptions too bc they employ a widespread strategy of literalness (their language discloses no more than what it literally means)

Question 52

In John Cage’s work ‘Lecture on Nothing’, what does it mean when he says ‘what silence requires is that I go on talking’?

Answer 52

• silence exists in the spaces of absence of speech ie. we need something to pierce through the silence in order to identify that it is there

Question 53

What relationship between silence, speech, and productivity does John Cage highlight in his ‘Lecture on Nothing’?

Answer 53

• we are so impatient and so conscious of productivity that we do not build in time to linger in the silence
• however, if you build silence into a piece of music, it can be marked out and licenses people to be able to savour it (ie. Cage 4’33)

Question 54

In John Cage’s work ‘Lecture on Nothing’, what does it mean when he says ‘our poetry now is the realisation that we possess nothing’?

Answer 54

• ie. we have nothing to give/ to make material - works of art are not just saying something as a material manifestation but are actually interrogations of absences (ie. as Sontag says in ‘The Aesthetics of Silence’)

Question 55

Once we recognise that silence is a structural tool in poetry, what should this make us also do?

Answer 55

• apply it as a structural tool in our own lives

Question 56

What might the effect be when a speaker pauses for slightly too long?

Answer 56

• we see that silence is more fluid, it leaks into places, it expands out
• it is also the default of our experience ie. it lingers behind everything we do - we talk about falling into it (like an abyss/ darkness)

Question 57

How does John Cage describe music as it relates to sound in the YouTube video ‘Cage on Silence’? How does Cage believe people ‘listen to music’?

Answer 57

• music is sound, with meaning
• sound itself acts, changes volume/ pitch etc.
• people listen to music through ‘inner listening’ - they hear its meaning etc. whereas he discusses sound (ie. without meaning) as heard by one’s ‘exterior ear’

Question 58

How does Duchamp rethink the description of music as a time art?

Answer 58

• he thinks of music as a space art ie. it has dimensions and shape etc.

Question 59

How does Cage’s 4’33 oppose ‘composer-fetishism’?

Answer 59

• the composer frames the sounds that others are making but he has to relinquish control of the performance because he does not control what is happening

Question 60

In her YouTube talk, ‘Learning How to Embrace Silence’ by TATIANA OLIVEIRA SIMONIAN - how does she describe silence?

Answer 60

• she considers silence the ability to create stillness so that you are present to hear the world around you
• the gift of silence is not to prepare ‘counter-arguments’ in your head while someone talks, but actually to have a truly silent mind

Question 61

How did Claude Debussy/ Miles Davis express the relationship between music and silence?

Answer 61

‘music is what is in-between the notes’

Question 62

How does Kierkegaard distinguish between sound and noise?

Answer 62

• sound has to be autonomous and motivated

- noise is unmotivated/ is a response to stimuli

Question 63

What are kind of interpretations are possible of Hamlet’s closing line ‘the rest is silence’?

Answer 63

• throughout the whole play, he has seemed to have voices in his head - one might suppose that the fatal poison (or his impending death) is enough to silence the voices for a moment, the voices will be gone forever
• perhaps Hamlet is aware of being a fictional construct - it’s only in the denouement that he takes on his rightful role - thus his final words are a stage direction to himself
• the “silence” of death will finally allow him to “rest”. “Going to your rest” is, of course, a common euphemism for death
• little left to watch, after which the characters will be silent - and in the context of the play itself, Hamlet himself will be silenced by death
• could be a statement of uncertainty: Hamlet is about to find out the answer to what happens after mortality but he cannot tell anyone what it is (the answer may be “silence”, i.e. oblivion)

Question 64

How does Andri Snaer Magnason’s (he/him) novel ‘On Time and Water’ summarise the relationship between time and the ecological crisis?

Answer 64

• nature has left its own geological speed and has changed to human speed

Question 65

Why does Andri Snaer Magnason conclude that discussions of the future are so vague?

Answer 65

• because a phenomena like ‘ocean acidification’ has no cultural significance, ie. it cannot be connected to any experience we have ever known

Question 66

Why does Andri Snaer Magnason specifically write about ‘time and water’ and not ‘climate change’?

Answer 66

• because people hear white nose when others talk about climate change

Question 67

What are some of the spiritual/ holy effects of nature?

Answer 67

• can evoke a very basic, Romantic, semi-Christian holiness (ie. the feeling of the numinous)
• one poet described: “his soul resonated with the silence-loaded space dimension of God”

Question 68

Why does Andri Snaer Magnason discuss sci-fi texts alienating us from the ‘core of the future’?

Answer 68

• because the people we see in the works are only semi-human ie. because these texts just focus on technology and transportation

Question 69

How might we respond to a comment that says “…our purpose was just studying something to place ourselves in a well-paying job somewhere to have a good life”?

Answer 69

• contemporary generations are born with more responsibility
• how do we square the lifestyles we want to lead with what is needed of us? how do we atone for being alive?
• how do we not tip into nihilism?
• no one is willing to give up what has been promised, ie. few are likely to resist technology and resources that are already here
• we have ideas of progress as ideas of maximum, working towards larger scales rather than on balance

Question 70

Why does eco criticism demand that we rethink our ethics?

Answer 70

• we have to extend our notion of responsibility for others into the future
  (maybe link in effective altruism and existential risk)

Question 71

What forms of religion imply that nature is something that is outside the human? Who would contest this?

Answer 71

• those that believe in creationism as opposed to Darwinian evolution
• Darwin and the Western scientific paradigm believe that humans are part of nature
• eco-criticism aligns itself with the scientific ie. human as animal

Question 72

How might we agree that there is no such thing as ‘nature’?

Answer 72

• there is no such thing as the unmediated, unsullied, non-human nature

Question 73

Who coined the term ‘nature writing’ - which (notably) is different from eco-criticism - ?

Answer 73

Laurence Buell - he uses it to describe writing that takes humanity and the environment as its primary subject

Question 74

What evidence is there to support the idea that in novels of the 18th/ 19th centuries, being in possession of a ‘good fortune’ (like in Jane Austen’s famous line) was patriarchal, anthropocentric, and bourgeois description of one’s exploitation of nature and other men?

Answer 74

• a good fortune was premised on the private ownership of land
• privatisation of the commons
• slave economy of the Caribbean plantations
• newly industrialised exploitation of minerals and other resources

Question 75

What did Amanda Ackerman write?

Answer 75

Plant Poetics & Beyond: Plant
Meditation: How to Communicate
with Plants

Question 76

In what sense do we have an immaterial relationship to the atmosphere and the world around us?

Answer 76

• through the process of breathing

Question 77

In what kind of social infrastructures do you see as reflecting patterns of nature?

Answer 77

• governmental infrastructure
• decision trees/ flow charts
• family trees (that can be displayed both top down or bottom up)

Question 78

Why do we need to free trees from the frameworks and narratives that we have overlaid onto them? (what are these frameworks?)

Answer 78

• for example, we believe that the trunk is the stem, the core, the origin point from which complexity sprouts
• in fact, complexity sprouts from both ends of the tree (ie. in the roots)
• trees need to be returned to their alien/ strange status

Question 79

If we recognise that we need to free trees from the frameworks and narratives that we have overlaid onto them - how does phenomenology play a part?

Answer 79

• the phenomenological process emerges and is helpful to ‘bracket off’ our narratives etc.
• instead, the trees are allowed to enter into a more ambiguous relationship of recognition and estrangement (the ecological uncanny)

Question 80

How does Deleuze and Guittari’s rhizome theory challenge the human-centric views that we overlay onto nature?

Answer 80

• challenges that there are points of origin from which complexity emerges because this is not how nature works
• non-hierarchical, decentralised, non-linear

Question 81

What do we mean when we describe a ‘forest of trees’?

Answer 81

• non-hierarchical - not just a single plane of communication or in one medium (like a sound/ gas exchange)
• 3D multi-dimensional conference - multi-sensory and in different modes ie. physical overlap, gas exchange, binds and animals, pollination and growth as well as beneath the roots

Question 82

What are the 3 key points to know about the rhizome theory of Deleuze and Guittari?

Answer 82

1. any part of the rhizome can be connected to any other
2. rhizomes have the principle of multiplicity ie. they refuse singularity which could cut off complexity
3. they have the principle of overcoming rupture ie. if there is the destruction of one point, another path opens

Question 83

Describe what Merleau Ponty means by ‘double sensations’ in his work ‘Phenomenology of Perception’

Answer 83

• for example, like what you press your hands together - they are experienced through their alternating roles of being experienced as subject or object ie. touching or being touched

Question 84

If we are to free nature of our pre-determined ideas, how might Merleau Ponty’s phenomenology be useful?

Answer 84

• when we construct this language for experiencing nature, it has to be a language that summarises our lived experiences through the body

Question 85

In what way might we say that we too are in an immaterial relationship with the world/ nature?

Answer 85

• natural scents permeate through our lives and the olfactory sense is most closely tied with the limbic system (ie. our primal memory)
• it can link us through our life histories
• there is thus a balance between our human activities and how nature can be fitted with those activities

Question 86

Ackerman speaks a lot about communication with plants, what quote from her might summarise her thoughts?

Answer 86

“All languages exist on an

interspecies, sensory, and meta-sensory spectrum”

Question 87

How might we apply Merleau Ponty’s idea of our engagement with Others to our relationship with nature?

Answer 87

1. M-P emphasises that we are engaged with a world outside of ourselves and that has its own projects, one that we must adapt and synchronise ourselves with
   - so too does nature in this sense ask us to adapt and synchronise ie. changes in weather, with its growth and potential destruction - we are asked to respect and to accommodate it
2. M-P also emphasises how our interactions with Others is based on the shaping of each other’s projects until we look towards a single project which is a joint creation
   - we see this in the communication between plants themselves, and we might learn from their communication and apply it to our own social networks
3. also M-P emphasises how this shaping of each other’s projects tends to take an embodied form (like dancing) - which is also like the communication between trees but also between us and nature, experiencing natural scents and the relationship to our atmosphere
4. all of these projects are only possible when we recognise each other as free consciousnesses ie. as subjects - which Ackerman suggests that we need to do with plants, instead of just seeing them as ‘setting’

Question 88

What role does Janice Lee imagine the breath can play in our breaking down of the boundaries between plants and ourselves?

Answer 88

• breath can de-categorise the arbitrary categories of living ie. because all living things breath in some way, and thus our mutual respiratory processes can break down the boundaries of our categories

Question 89

How does Janice Lee believe that plants might be able to help us rethink the ideas of the singular self we hold onto and how we safeguard ourselves against permeability?

Answer 89

• plants understand cycles of growing and dying and acting interdependently/ having their bodies in communication and in community with one another

Question 90

How does Pantha de Prince’s ‘Conference of Trees’ link in with mythology?

Answer 90

• there is a certain ethereality he looks to create which revives the mythology of nature ie. recalling the rhythms and energies of nymphs

Question 91

When we come across an untranslatable work in a text/ work of art, how might we react and what does this tell us about ourselves? What happens if this word in repeated?

Answer 91

• we might feel unnerved because we fear the unknown and we want names, beings, matter etc. explained - our impulse is to translate, categorise, and analyse
• if repeated, the word might become a kind of chant or incantation

Question 92

How does the geometry of the natural world clash with that of industrialised structures?

Answer 92

• man-made structures are sharp, they have invasive shapes that interrupt the natural curvatures of the landscape

Question 93

What comparison between nests and our homes does Gaston Bachelard make in his ‘The Poetics of Space’?

Answer 93

• “The well-being I feel, seated in front of my fire, while bad weather rages out-of-doors, is entirely animal”
• we want them to be perfect, to bear the mark of a very sure instinct
• nests can be botched and can fail

Question 94

Why does Bachelard argue that our interactions with nests are often very childish/ nostalgic in his ‘The Poetics of Space’?

Answer 94

• we impose our human images onto what is essentially functional ie. for warmth and to protect the young
• when a nest is discovered today, it harks us back to childhood, or a childhood that should have been ie. when one might go out and discover a nest etc.
• one might feel very disappointed if one finds an empty nest with nothing in ie. there has been activity that we have not been privvy to

Question 95

How paradox of sensibility does Bachelard describe of nests in his ‘The Poetics of Space’?

Answer 95

• A nest-and this we under­ stand right away-is a precarious thing, and yet it sets us to daydreaming of security

Question 96

What two opposing visions of the domestic home as presented in Victorian literature (ie. of the 1830s) does
David Ellison outline in “All Shut Up:
Carlyle and the Pursuit of Domestic Silence”?

Answer 96

• as a form of super secure refuge
  (image of the hearth-scene; a utopian assemblage that joins ambient light, consoling and familiar aromas)
• supposed to filter undesirable stimuli by way of sheltering purposeful, unsentimental, domestic possibility
• as a mode of dizzying flux and tumult
  (domestic instability - the bankrupt’s scattering of goods on the lawn, and the home ceaselessly remodelled a la mode ((in fashion)) )

Question 97

What does David Ellison’s anecdote of Thomas Carlyle’s desire for a silent room in his house tell us about the Victorian dwelling?

Answer 97

• construction of the room speaks to the idea of the Victorian dwelling being held to its
  promise to protect its occupants from the irritations of the world beyond its boundary

Question 98

What kind of contemporary (ie. Victorian) struggle does David Ellison’s anecdote of Thomas Carlyle’s desire for a silent room reflect?

Answer 98

• pressures that beset contemporary
  notions of domesticity, particularly from the requirements of the stay-at-home
  professional

Question 99

What does Thomas Carlyle’s desire for a silent room reflect about interiority?

Answer 99

• The silence he desired is an acoustical construction amenable to the projection,
  amplification and persistence of Carlyle’s sole voice
  (and thus, desire for silence is the desire for a return to our own selves and the soundscapes of our own bodies)

Question 100

What theoretical model of culture is most popular in the 1980s?

Answer 100

poststructuralism

Question 101

Who were the most famous proponents of poststructuralism?

Answer 101

Michel Foucault
Gilles Deleuze
Jacques Derrida

Question 102

What aspects of Romanticism/ Enlightenment progress did Nietzsche resist?

Answer 102

he rejected Romantic metaphysics
he rejected the sublime longings of 19th century Romanticism

• He also rejected the concept of historical progress that governed European thought since the Renaissance
  he found Hegel to be its most formidable advocate
  (Nineteenth-century thinkers in the tradition of Hegel anticipated the attainment of a perfected state of humanity)

Question 103

How did Nietzsche respond to Hegel’s concept of historical progress?

Answer 103

• Nietzsche grounded himself in a version of naturalism—the post-Darwinian conviction that humans are an animal species, led by no transcendent purpose

This turn yields some of his most profound ideas:

• the death of God
• the idea of the ‘eternal return’ ie. the framing of existence in terms of endlessly repeating cycles
• the will to power - which involves a ceaseless struggle for survival and mastery

Question 104

Why have Nietzsche’s works been taken up by many far-right/ fascist thinkers?

Answer 104

He wrote:

• equality is the “greatest of all lies”
• he did split society into a hierarchy of weak and strong
• he did write a diatribe against compassion in ‘The Antichrist’

Nietzsche has a hostility towards the concept of absolute truth
- Ronald Beiner has written that this has “left us vulnerable to harsh new ideologies that appear to regard respect for truth as a snare”

Question 105

When Nietzsche talks about a ‘will to power’, he does not mean achieving domination over others but actually…?

Answer 105

Nietzsche understands power as a struggle for power overoneself ie. one should aim to harness and master the will

Question 106

How does Nietzsche reach his conclusion that the ultimate truth is that no claim should achieve dominion over all others?

Answer 106

Derives from his militating against monopolistic power

• particularly attached to the Greek agon (ie. competition between worthy adversaries)
• Greeks abhorred the idea of ‘domination by one’
• ie. in Athens - there was an institution of ‘ostracism’ which works on the basis of expelling someone who threatened the balance of power

THUS: what lies behind his philosophy is an attitude that basically says - the only healthy state for humanity is one in which rival perspectives vie with one another (this is the same as his idea towards truth)

each competitor in the agon is supposed to stake his/ her own claim on truth

Question 107

When thinking about music and the education of the soul, what is a really essential starting point?

Answer 107

• thinking about the mimetic quality of music ie. music is capable of imitating moral qualities and human attitudes via rhythms and harmonies

Question 108

In the education of the guardians of the city (in their childhood), what did Plato propose?

Answer 108

• that only certain (Phyrgian and the Dorian) rhythms should be kept, because they imitate the sounds and accents of a courageous and temperate man
  (and these same qualities are thus imparted to the soul, meaning the virtues are stimulated)
• ie. music was useful in educating the irrational part of man’s soul

Question 109

What is the relationship between the irrational part of the soul, pleasure, pain, and the good?

Answer 109

• the irrational part of the soul ultimately pursues pleasure and expels pain
• the rational and reasoned part of the brain pursues the good
  (it can pursue pleasure if it is a rational pleasure)

Question 110

As opposed to the idea in The Republic that music was part of childhood education, how does Plato’s ‘The Laws’ differ?

Answer 110

• in ‘The Laws’, music plays an educational role throughout a citizen’s life
• music continually re-establishes and reorientates the balance of pleasure and pain

Question 111

What is the technical term for the biological pathways of communication between trees in a forest?

Suzanne Simard

Answer 111

mycorrhizal networks

Question 112

What does the discovery of mycorrhizal networks tell us about the forest as a network/ system?

Suzanne Simard

Answer 112

• the plantation grows interdependently, they are co-operators existing in a symbiotic relationship
• there is a non-hierarchical distribution of resources, and they are part of a greater project

Question 113

What can we say about the relationship between mothers and children in the forest?

Suzanne Simard

Answer 113

• there are certain ‘mother trees’ that ‘feed’ their young by sacrificing their carbon
• they also recognise their own young
• an injured tree will pass on defence signals to its seedlings

Question 114

When discussing ‘nature’ in any context, what is an excellent line to drop in?

Answer 114

Raymond Williams in his ‘Keywords’ asserts that “Nature is perhaps the most complex word in the language”

Question 115

When we use the word ‘nature’, what is reduced to what?

Answer 115

• a multiplicity is reduced to a singularity

Question 116

What two ways does Raymond Williams details that the term ‘nature’ been understood across human history?

Answer 116

• at one extreme as a literal goddess, and the other as an amorphous but all-powerful creative and shaping force

Question 117

What does Raymond Williams reflect about the relationship between Mother Nature and God across history?

Answer 117

• it is complicated to have a singular religious/ mythical abstraction co-existing with a monotheistic God
• in Medieval European belief, both were used as singular absolutes but God was defined as primary and Nature was his minister/ deputy
  BUT there was also a recurrent trend of seeing Nature as an absolute monarch

Question 118

What was the significance, as Raymond Williams outlines, of nature being understood through an attitude of fatalism rather than providence?

Answer 118

• the emphasis was on the power of natural forces and the seemingly arbitrary/ capricious exercise of these powers with inevitable and often destructive effects on men

Question 119

What is the relationship of nature to innocence as outlined by Raymond Williams?

Answer 119

• nature can be understood as at once innocent, unprovided, sure, unsure, fruitful, destructive, a pure force, tainted, or cursed

Question 120

In the 18th/19th centuries, the laws of nature began to be explored, which led to Nature being associated with Reason. What was the subsequent product of this?

Answer 120

• the ‘state of nature’ became a concept used to argue:

1. society is corrupt and needs redemption and renewal
2. society is ‘artificial’/ ‘mechanical’ and needs to learn from nature
   (these two phases are broadly the Enlightenment and the Romantic)

Question 121

Raymond Williams seems to strike a difference between ‘nature’ and ‘natural’, what is the difference?

Answer 121

• nature has typically meant the ‘countryside’, unspoiled place, plants and creatures other than man
• natural might describe an aspect of the landscape that was man-made (like a hedgerow) but has had time pass and is still obviously natural

Question 122

What roles does Raymond William identify with nature?

Answer 122

• goddess
• minister
• monarch
• lawyer
• source of original innocence
• the selective breeder

Question 123

What are the two sides of nature as ‘selective breeder’?

Answer 123

1. inherently involves ruthless competition, natural selection, laws of survival/ extinction
2. inherently involves mutuality, co-operation, symbiosis etc.

Question 124

How does the phrase ‘music is the space between the notes’ also relate to meditation?

Answer 124

• it speaks to the concept that what is not there is more important than what is there
• can also be applied to meditation

Question 125

What does decalcomania mean in relation to the rhizome theory of Deleuze and Guattari?

Answer 125

• the rhizome structure forms through continuous negotiation with its context, constantly adapting by experimentation
• thus performing a non-symmetrical active resistance against rigid organisation and restriction

Question 126

What was ‘Reclaim the Frame’?

Answer 126

A Q and A with Laura Mulvey

Question 127

When did the theory of the ‘male gaze’ come about and the critique of how women were presented in film?

Answer 127

1960s

- watching the films in a different way - influenced by the women’s liberation movement

Question 128

How did Mulvey’s film ‘Riddles of the Sphinx’ contribute to the feminist movement in cinema?

Answer 128

• contesting conventions

- also trying to think of ways in which cinema - going beyond negative aesthetics, ie. contesting, into what should be

Question 129

The opening sequence of Mulvey’s film ‘Riddles of the Sphinx’ is a long, extended shot of a domestic scene of mother and child - how does this rethink the female experience of their domestic space?

Answer 129

started in domestic space, the interior

1. the womb-like space, mother and child enclosed together - space of comfort/ enclosure
2. or a space of imprisonment/ claustrophobia

• both sides in play at the same time
• nest and imprisonment

Question 130

How did Margaret Thatcher’s election in 1979 affect the landscape of British feminist film? How and when did Channel 4 come on air and affect things again?

Answer 130

after the election of 1979
- Margaret Thatcher

• crazy utopian optimism was hit with what was going to be faced
• difficult to sustain, these films were of a moment

1982 - Channel 4 came on air, different possibilities

Question 131

Can a man subvert the male gaze?

Answer 131

Vertigo - suggests Hitchcock has a level of self-awareness
- both investigating the male gaze while promoting it

using psychoanalysis to examine the patriarchal psyche

Question 132

Which 1985 film followed the lives of two female artists who both contributed to how feminine creativity and political activism was rethought?

Answer 132

Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti (1985)

Question 133

How might gender impact translation work?

Answer 133

• there might be centuries-old masculinist readings embedded into the poem
  (eg. male translations have a habit, perhaps quite unconsciously, of letting Odysseus off the hook (he tried his best! He just couldn’t manage it!)

Question 134

How does Keston Sutherland link his project of creating a culture of free exchange of works (a ‘political poetry’) with an anti-capitalist revolution?

Answer 134

• I was joining a culture of gift exchange, a culture of militant samizdat exclusion from the circuits of mainstream publication

Question 135

What is the aim of Keston Sutherland’s “imperative need for the comprehensive revolutionarytransformation of human experienceand relations”?

Answer 135

• we can rebuild and redesign our own ways of relating to each other, against those formal institutions
• it is direct, that it is completely undisguised, that it is aggressively emphatic, and that is a socialist and realist art

Question 136

How does Keston Sutherland address the difficulties of his poetry?

Answer 136

• when they are really lived with, begin to metamorphose, they shift, they metastasise, they become different objects
• living in this world etc. requires at least the outwards expressions of acceptance, whereas his work investigates the most profound difficulties of acceptance that I can find

Question 137

What are the differences in the use of aposiopesis between the EM period and Romanticism? Speculate why this is

Answer 137

• early modern texts harbour more of an anxiety about the potential for alienation from meaning
  i. e Sidney, Taylor
• perhaps as the Romantic period was so concerned with the transcendental etc. then potentially more earthly topics could be embraced alongside aspects of bawdiness etc.?

Question 138

List the three moments in which a writer might choose to employ aposiopesis

Answer 138

1. at a point of volta/ reconsideration
2. point of retreat or hesistation
3. moment of bawdiness or comedy

Question 139

In what sense is aposiopesis a ‘Self-regulatory figure of thought’?

Answer 139

• emphasises the idea of speech as construction that accumulates over time
  (Saussure: parole - sentence, language is diachronic)
• caught at the crux of two temporal states ie. the mind is capable of conceiving of future and present at once

potentially quite politicised
- when language be dangerous

Question 140

In his 1961 work ‘silence’, what does John Cage say?

Answer 140

“There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear.”

Question 141

How does John Cage’s statement on silence relate to aposiopesis?

Answer 141

• accompanied by a mental resonance of what was left unsaid but is entirely predictable
• the sentence still occurs but in different form (subvocalisation, silent speech)
• transposition of the communicative mode or a conversion of energy
• especially in anger - it is more powerful for the sentence to resonate internally rather than aloud

Question 142

What is anadiplosis and what could it represent when used?

Answer 142

• when another person finishes off the sentence of the other
• indicates a metaphorical passing of the linguistic baton to reflect respect

Question 143

What is auxesis?

Answer 143

arrangement of terms in ascending order of importance

Question 144

What does Ovid say of concealment?

Answer 144

‘If any things are concealed, he imagines them even better’

Question 145

In Alexander Pope’s ‘The Art of Sinking in Poetry’ (1819), who does he describe the aposiopesis was an excellent figure for?

Answer 145

“The Aposiopesis, an excellent figure for the ignorant, as ‘what shall I say?’ when one has nothing to say”

Question 146

What does Jonathon Shears comment about Byron’s use of aposiopesis?

Answer 146

Self-consciously breaking off in mid-sentence is part of Byron’s way of continually presenting himself as though he were present to the reader, ‘feeling as he writes’

Question 147

What is hysteron proteron?

Answer 147

• occurs when the first key word of the idea refers to something that happens temporally later than the second key word. The goal is to call attention to the more important idea by placing it first

The standard example comes from the Aeneid of Virgil: “Moriamur, et in media arma ruamus” (“Let us die, and charge into the thick of the fight”

Question 148

Hysteron proteron was typical of the EM period - was it always a blemish of the writing?

Answer 148

no - sometimes it was an exploited licence of order and style

Question 149

How might hysteron proteron have theological implications?

Answer 149

• it is often used in scripture

Question 150

Hysteron proteron is also a general term for ‘the preposterous in writing, ie. strange inversions - give some examples

Answer 150

These included not only the reversal of elder and younger, ruler and ruled, but the hierarchies of gender, whereby the elevation of female over male

Question 151

What are the four recognisable ways that Shakespeare uses hendiadys?

Answer 151

Shakespeare’s usage:
1. the second may unfold the first
“ponderous and marble”

2. the first may unfold the second
   “from cheer and from your former state”
3. or may logically modify the other
   “law and heraldry” for “heraldic law”
4. parallel structure might mask a more complex and less easily describable dependent relation
   “perfume and suppliance”

Question 152

In what sense might hendiadys be seen to demonstrate one being baffled/ unsteady?

Answer 152

• can betray a sense of feeling divided in the self

- might appear elegant but be underpinned with anxiety

Question 153

Though appearing to unite two concepts, what might the hendiadys actually be?

Answer 153

• can accentuate disunion, or disequilibrium (imbalance)

- mocks the normal union of concepts

Question 154

What did Wimsatt and Beardsley’s 1946 work ‘The Intentional Fallacy’ establish?

Answer 154

• focus on authorial intent is a redundant approach

Question 155

How does Wolfgang Iser reflect on the development of meaning in a text?

Answer 155

• reading has to be an interaction between text and reader through a process of a text being ‘concretised’ ie. given shape and meaning

Question 156

How might different power relations be established by different punning styles?

Answer 156

• Wheatley’s punning (for example) has to be subtle, where Donne’s witticism can afford to have that authoritative edge

Question 157

What is antanaclasis?

Answer 157

literarytropein which a single word or phrase is repeated, but in two different senses

Question 158

What is aphasia? Who discusses it and in which text?

Answer 158

• an impairment of language, affecting the production or comprehension of speech and the ability to read or write
• Roman Jakobson, On Language

Question 159

When suffering from aphasia, what is the difference between stop sounds and continuous sounds?

Roman Jakobson, On Language

Answer 159

stop sounds: ones that are clipped

continuous sounds: ones that are usually introduced before stop/ clipped sounds
- they can be prolonged or stretched

Question 160

How might we describe aphasic regression?

Roman Jakobson, On Language

Answer 160

it is a mirror of the child’s acquisition of speech sounds - it shows child’s development in reverse

Question 161

What are the symptoms of a ‘contiguity disorder’ in relation to aphasia?

Roman Jakobson, On Language

Answer 161

• impairment of the ability to combine simpler linguistic units into complex ones
  ie. loss of syntactic rules organising words into higher units
• the approximate identifications of things are of a metaphoric nature
  (quasi-metaphoric expressions)
  ie. fire for gaslight

Question 162

If someone is suffering from a similarity disorder as an aspect of aphasia, what symptoms of selection deficiency might they get?

Roman Jakobson, On Language

Answer 162

• context becomes the indispensable/ decisive factor
• able to respond, but not to construct
• the deeper the communication is embedded in context, the higher the chance of successful communication

Question 163

If someone is suffering from a similarity disorder as an aspect of aphasia, what symptoms of substitution deficiency might they get?

Roman Jakobson, On Language

Answer 163

for an aphasic who experiences an impaired substitution, but intact contexture - operations involving similarity yield to those based on contiguity

• this is why/ how they exhibit a tendency towards metonymy
  ie. saying ‘glass’ for window, or ‘heaven’ for God

Question 164

What does Roman Jakobson mean when he says “communication relies on the mutual understanding of a common code”?

Answer 164

• speaker and listener have to both make the identical choice of meaning from the array of preconceived possibilities

Question 165

What do the terms concurrence and concatenation mean in relation to communication?

Roman Jakobson, On Language

Answer 165

Concurrence: the simultaneous rejection of certain entities ie. different phonemes in order to comprehend a word

Concatenation: the process of joining up phoneme sounds to form the word

Question 166

What did Saussure mean by the two terms ‘in presentia’ (actual series) and ‘in absentia’ (virtual series)?

Answer 166

They are his two ways of splitting up the internal and external relations of any communicative phrase ie. one must combine the present units to build a superior unit, but one also has to select the specific meaning of the word and reject the other possible substitutions