Literature

Alora Young
Intro to Writing and Literature
9/22/2010

Literatrue

C.S. Lewis once said, “Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it.” Literature should make you feel, make you think. The best literature can change your life. But who’s to say a piece of writing that makes me ponder life and all its heart-breaking horrors will have any effect at all on the person who sat beside me on the bus last Tuesday? Who decides what literature is or is not? Ronald Banthes wrote about ‘jouissance’, a more uncomfortable sort of pleasure, and about the point in reading when one finds themselves lost within a text – when a person becomes so involved that the outside world has no impact on their reading of the world within the text. Surely that is literature. Again, however, not everyone will find jouissance in the same pieces of writing.

Some stories we read challenge our perceptions of literature, and some stories conform to them. My idea of literature was challenged in my reading of ‘Sea Oak’ by George Saunders. If it is indeed considered literature, then in my opinion it is bad literature. It began with promise, implying taboo themes with an opening at a male strip club. It wanted to shock me, and I wanted to be shocked. And then Saunders seemed to try too hard, took it too far, so that it quickly surpassed shocking. It became stupid. I didn’t care about the characters or their clichéd, bottom class struggles, or the fact that Min and Jade “debate about how many sides a triangle has” while studying for the GEDs that they apparently skipped because they couldn’t keep their legs shut any better than they can keep their foul mouths shut.

I think for something to be shocking it has to be plausible, and I didn’t believe for one instant that any of the characters in this story were real. Aunt Bertie almost succeeded in being a little more than two-dimensional, and then she came back from the dead. When she was “basically just a pile of parts”, I caught myself scoffing at the stupidity of the whole thing. “’Show your cock,’ she says, and dies again” just topped it off. I thought the piece was entirely pointless, it didn’t conform in the slightest to my opinion of literature, and I just didn’t like it. Under normal circumstances, I would have stopped reading part-way through, and would have promptly forgotten about it.

Wells Towers’ ‘Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned’, on the other hand, I liked quite a lot. There’s a fine line between successfully and unsuccessfully writing a historically-based fiction in modern language, and I felt that this piece was quite successful. Once you read enough to gather that the characters are Vikings, and get used to the profanities and way the characters talk in modern-day slang (“Djarf get at you yet?”), it becomes really enjoyable. It achieves this, I think, because within all the pillaging, berserking and talk about a curse of having “horns like a goat” and “shit[ting] little shits like a goat” verses the curse of “a seven-foot dick that you had to have hanging out of your pants at all times”, there are moments of true, relatable emotion.

“When I got back in bed, she tucked the covers over her face, hoping I’d think she was angry instead of crying” was a sentence that I felt. It was real, and my empathy for the characters grew with every well-placed and well-written sentence like it. At the story’s end, when our protagonist Harald says, “You wish you hated those people, your wife and children, because you know what awful things the world will do to them, because you have done some of those things yourself”, it brings to the surface an awful reality that many of us don’t ever want to think about. Sometimes we do wish we loved nothing in life because it would make so many things easier. And then we hate ourselves and wish we were better people, and resolve never to think a thing like that again – let alone put it down on paper and get it published. I was sure after reading that sentence that this story was indeed ‘literature’ to me, because it resonates for both good emotions and bad. It makes me feel, makes me think, and adds to reality by taking us almost entirely out of the one we know, yet managing to keep the unfamiliar storyscape and supposedly barbaric characters utterly, unexpectedly real.

Do Not Disturb Response to Literature

Jenna Wilhelmi

9/20/10

Response 1

The Anchor Book of

New American Short Stories

Do Not Disturb

Do Not Disturb made me think about how people are losing the ability to empathize and I am talking about the wife in this story. People seem to think that if someone is not feeling the same pain as them that automatically makes others’ pain less important or easier to bear. As humans, we are constantly trying to win arguments, which includes the game of ‘I’m sicker than you, so I deserve all the pity.’ Even though this is a game you probably don’t want to win, we still can’t stand the thought of losing. I believe that when one person in a relationship is afflicted with illness, both parties are affected. Perhaps the husband’s back pain was his way of empathizing with his wife. He seemed to know that she liked to be the strong one and so he became weak to try and compensate. I also think he may have been trying to regain his part as the ‘victim’ or ‘submissive’ one in the relationship. Some people seem to only be able to play the role they are type cast for.

This story also reminded me of a couple of other things I have seen. One is a short film I saw a while back called ‘The Spine’ by Chris Landreth. In it the husband of a similarly abusive wife literally lost his spine. In the film, peoples’ emotional damage manifested physically. Reading about what happened to the husband at the end of the story reminded me of that immensely. It leads me to believe that the husband’s back pain was real, but that it was due to psychological damage, almost as though he was trying to punish himself for even thinking about leaving his wife.

Subsequently, there was another short story I read a few weeks ago that also tied me to this story. Well, actually it was a one shot comic book. The one shot series is called Demo and it is written by Brian Wood and illustrated by Becky Cloonan. The issue I’m referring to was called Sad and Beautiful World. It was about a couple that fought constantly like the one in Do Not Disturb, but if they left each other or got too far apart in general, wounds would start to appear all over their bodies and this would not stop until they were in each other’s arms again. Do Not Disturb’s relationship is in the same vein. Sometimes the person you hate and who drives you crazy is the one person that you really need in order to live.

Some relationships don’t make sense to me, such as this one. However, they seem to make sense to the people who are in them. It seems as though everyone can’t have the stereotypical fairytale relationship, but that they will instead seek out one that makes sense to them.

So how does this story apply to the word literature? When I think of literature I think o four things: One, it is usually taught in some level of schooling. Two, it makes you think - this is not beach reading. Three, it usually shows some horrid aspect of society. Four, it makes you feel some strong emotion, be that good or bad. In this case, Do Not Disturb, hit the mark on on four of these. Obviously, as stated above, this story made me think quite a bit about the conventions of relationships. In turn, it also show some horrid aspect of society when it made me feel as though people are losing the ability to empathize. Though, I must say that the author showed abusive relationships in a rather comical way. It was hard to figure out whether to be saddened or to laugh. All in all, I would consider it literature based on my criteria, but isn't literature an outdated word? Who says what is worthy of this fancy title or not? Literature is what you make of it, be it bad, good, confusing, infuriating, so-so, adventurous, or depressing.

Assignment 1- What is Literature?

Asking one to define the term literature is like asking what makes art “art”. It is not an easy question. Through the course of this assignment I have felt my mind twisting into an angry fist and my hands pulling out strands of hair because the word literature can have two very different meanings and both are equally acceptable. Trying to blend those two concepts took a while but what I came up with is this: Literature can simply define all written material, gibberish and all, but in order for it to be deemed “admirable“, it must meet a simple list of criteria.

As Robert Luis Stevenson puts it, “The difficulty of literature is not to write but to write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect him precisely as you wish.” Good literature is inventive, it bends the rules of conformation and strives on its flaws. Since our minds have been programmed to notice out of the norm differences we pick up on them quickly when apparent in reading. Writer’s have noticed that trait and use it to influence the mood of their work, thus deeming it inventive. Take The Girl in the Flammable Skirt for example, Aimee Bender chooses to leave out the proper use of quotation marks in order to emphasize a quickened, unattached pace.

Though not always, most exceptional literature comes from the past. Those works have endured the strains of time due to a sustainable theme that societies can relate to at all times. Gilgamesh, one of the world’s oldest known texts, has endured due to its relativity to love and friendship. Without such a common and powerful aspect, it might not have even been told so many of times, or engraved on clay tablets. If a piece of literature does not posses qualities that can relate to a common pathos, it often gets lost within in the whirlwind of other disassociations.

Just like art, certain pieces are loved by many but also hated. There never can fully be a

concurrence on a piece of literature even if it fits in within the “good” criteria, mainly because not all people have similar tastes. Literature is art in the written form; critics pick it apart, attempt to analyze it, there’s some good masterpieces and some scribbles on the wall, but nonetheless it is art.

Ariana Allison: Response 1

So what I've imagined for years is wrong. I feel like I just found out Santa Claus doesn't exist. Literature isn't all Huckleberry Finn and The Grapes of Wrath like we're lead to believe from early on. There is literature that people actually read out of their own free will. Reading the short stories from this week made me realize this.

Sea Oak was a fine example of a piece of your "not-so-ordinary" literature. Zombies, strippers, and addicts-- most wouldn't classify that as literature, but it IS. Dark humored love stories about cancer are also literature (and it's not written by Shakespeare either). It may just be me, but I like reading things I can relate to. I can't always relate to Southern life in the 1900's or migrating to a farm, etc. I'm not saying I can relate to zombies either. What I can relate to is modern day living, modern day language and a sense of humor.
I really enjoyed the language of the stories. It was easy to read, intriguing and understandable. I felt as if the narrator was just telling me about his day in Sea Oak and Do Not Disturb. Another aspect that strung me along was the surprising plot. I had no idea Aunt Bernie was going to come back and raise hell after she died. I literally had to re-read the part that said she was back at home over and over again. I would have never expected zombies. Then again, I wasn't expecting stripper either when I read the title, "Sea Oak." I was expecting to read about some matured man who lost his beloved wife to cancer and now lived in solitude on the beach. However, I did read about a man who almost lost his wife to cancer. Except he hated her guts and she hated his even more. It was one of the most disturbing love stories I have read yet and I thoroughly enjoyed it.


I'm much more at ease knowing that I will be reading pieces that will probably appeal much more to me than 60+ years old "literature". Bring on the reading, please!

- Ariana

What is Literature?

For this week’s assignment we had to read five stories and refer back to the discussion we had about what is literature. All these stories were very different, but all of them had something comical to them. But while being comical they brought out multiple feelings that made me see them all very differently. In the next few paragraphs, I will talk about my feelings toward the pieces, and why I believe they are literature.

I actually really enjoyed George Saunders’ “Sea Oak”. I like how Sanders was not afraid to be real and at the same time unreal and over exaggerated. It’s a good mix. It also brought a very satirical feel to the whole peace. I found the main character’s job humorous, and wondered if there was an actually place like that. If there is not, my mind my now believes there is. Though I really doubt I would ever want to go to a restaurant where the men were pretty much naked. The place reminded me of Hooters, and I really bloody hate Hooters. Though, I have heard they have good chicken wings. The dialect made me believe they were not from a fortunate family. That made them and the area they lived in seem more real, but at the same time it was extremely stereotypical and filled of hyperbole. And to me it was literature because I got more than just pleasure from this story. Though it was pleasurable. I liked how it changed the cliché story about the American Dream, because not everyone who works hard gets everything. After reading this story I felt more dedicated to my future. I did not want to end up like a zombie who came back to life because she never did anything.

I actually did not like Wells Towers’ “Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned”. I was lost through out it. The mix of modern language, dragons, and what I assume were Vikings was just not my cup of tea. I did like a lot of the dialogue and found it filled of irony and humor, but it only made me like it a bit. After the workshop, when I understood a little more into the detail of it, I began to appreciate it more. Since while I was reading it I did not realize that it was a satire. I feel extremely stupid that I did not. The point is that now that I understand that is a satire about the recent war in Iraq: I like it. I now understand how it is literature, because it is more than just a satire. It is about a guy doing something he does not like, because if he does not he will feel inferior and since he believes it is his duty.

I liked A.M. Homes’ “Do Not Disturb”, because it strays from the cliché cancer story. Since in most cancer stories, the person with cancer becomes a completely new person. She or he allows all the good to flow to top, and does some extreme acts of kindness. Since cancer has opened his or her eyes. But in this story the cancer patient, who was a complete bitch before, becomes only a bigger bitch. This is also changes the cliché role of the love interest in a cancer story. Since usually they are heart broken over the fact that the love of their life is going to die, but this guy is heartbroken that he has to stay. Yet at the same time there is part of him that would be shattered if he did actually leave. And he really does not want to be the douche bag that leaves her. Though in the end he attempts to leave, but he becomes paralyzed. It’s ironic, but they were not cliché relationship to begin with. She was the caregiver, the doctor, and he was the housewife, the patient. So when she gets cancer the roles are reversed, and they don’t how react to this. It’s probably why she becomes a bigger bitch, and why he just wants to get away. Since before their relationship worked, for them, and after it was not confortable. This story is literature because it changes the roles in what would usually be a cliché story. It makes you think and actually feel sorry for the husband.

Now Mark Richard’s “Gentlemen’s Agreement” touched my heart, sort of. Though, I will admit, that there were parts where I was completely lost. I liked how the author portrayed innocence in the story. Since when you’re a kid the simple little games and acts make you happy, but adults, who know best, always have to ruin the fun. Though they usually have a reason for it. Since in the end if you keep throwing rocks one might crack your head open. It’s kind of like those old tales that have a moral, but with a weird twist. I would classify it as literature because it had a moral, and you can relate to it.

Aimee Bender’s “The Girl in the Flammable Skirt” was my favorites from this week’s reading, because I could actually really relate to it. Since I always have those bizarre tragic thoughts of what could happen to me and my family in the future. This also connects with the part at the end about the girl that gave this story its title. Since whenever I hear about a disaster story like that I just wonder about what the person was thinking. I also loved the plot of it, because it jumped to scene to scene. It also jumped to some random bits that actually made the story more interesting. I liked her relationship with her parents, because my father also has disabilities, but his only makes him crazier and unapproachable. I liked how it seemed like her father was okay with joking around with his own disability, but when she joked about disabilities, in general, she would get in trouble. It makes her father more real, because I know my father gets angry when I even say one thing about his problems. I also enjoyed her relationship with her lover boy. Since in a way their households are complete opposites, but at the same time they are not normal and that makes them quite similar. Even how both houses are quiet, but in quite different ways: “I imagine in Paul’s house everybody is running around in their underwear, and the air is so thick with bourbon your skin tans from it. He says no; he says the truth is it’s more a pointy silence, he says. A lighter one with sharper prinks. He say’s in his house there are moisture rings making Olympian patterns on every possible wooden surface.” I can keep adding bullet points, because this story has so many attributes. It has to literature, because if it’s not I don’t know what is. It was more than just a pleasure for me. It was something I could relate to and understand. I guess it is one of those stories that takes you somewhere else, but at the same time brings you deeper into reality.

Literature

Literature
The dictionary.com definition of literature is “writings in which expression and form, in connection with ideas of permanent and universal interest, are characteristic or essential features, as poetry, novels, history, biography, and essays”. My understanding of literature is that it can be anything that combines words and a general theme or idea. In that respect, literature can be just about anything, from a cookbook or a comic book to an epic novel. Also, I don’t consider there to be such a thing as good literature and bad literature, there’s only literature that is not your taste and every piece of literature is important because eventually, with the age of the technology on the rise, writers and papers and pens could be a thing of the past.
Wells’ Tower’s Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, was the type of story that fit my idea of literature because the story was well-written in my eyes and it also had a conclusive theme that I really enjoyed reading. The way that it was written in modern language but also was written about a distant time that wouldn’t really be using that language was really interesting to me. Also, the fact that the story was full of gruesome and disgusting images, combined with little pieces of beautiful descriptions, particularly when the narrator speaks of love or his wife and children.
Considering that I feel that literature can be just about anything, there wasn’t a story that didn’t fit my personal description of literature. However, the story that slightly disappointed me was The Girl in the Flammable Skirt by Aimee Bender. The reason being that the story seemed to be very disjointed and didn’t really make sense to me in a few situations. The syntax of the story (full of short, choppy sentences) also disrupted the flow of the story Bender was trying to tell, which, in turn, made me unhappy with the story. Although The Girl in the Flammable Skirt wasn’t exactly my “cup of tea” story-wise, someone enjoys it and it is still categorized as literature. After all, literature is either meant to be enjoyed, or informative, and I’m sure this story is enjoyable or informative to someone somewhere.

What Am I Writing

What is Literature?

by Nathan Gale

Literature is something you hear from places where sound doesn't exist, something you see vaulted across places that are always past your field of vision, like Tantalus reaching for a glass of milk. For if you cant see it or hear then you must describe it the way you see it and hear it for yourself. A pilgrimage to somewhere unknown that cannot be charted upon a map of anywhere. To me true literature in its own way endures with these principles.

Literature may be considered works of romantic prose or airport fiction, yet these books are rather like a math equation, you add the numbers into the equation in order to achieve the highest amount of satisfaction. Whereas literature is a way of recreating the equation, and letting the reader be the numbers, add themselves subtract themselves or divide themselves into two. Literature not only asks question that have not been asked but it reveals to you worlds inside of worlds that you would have never discovered if you had never picked up the book. It challenges connections into existence throughout the chemical portions of your mind, as if shifting your mind from automatic to manual in a few short sentences.

In Aimee Bender’s The Girl In the Flammable Skirt, the author describes a backpack of stone, a weight that the tries to bare for her father yet his trouble finding not only the strength but the logic behind her fathers strange customs. As outlandish as it might be, i too have had to bare the weight of my parents woes. I was able to locate a select portion of myself amongst the fiction of Aimee Benders world, how is this when the life I lead so utterly non-fiction in comparative? Because true literature is about the writer finding and explaining parts of his imagination, that readers will discover inside themselves, like picking an image of yourself right out of a portrait of salmons else’s imagination. A form of Rorshack test.

Literature is then more about finding yourself then learning about the writer or his imaginary landscapes. When you don’t enjoy a piece of literature you know that “you” are no where to found in that book. When you read “trashy literature” such as cheap romance novels, quick thrillers or detective books with 6 ghost writers, you can never find yourself honestly in those books, you can only fantasize or imagine yourself as the protagonist, a false sense of unhealthy identity; a still birth of the self undeveloped and helpless. Literature helps you discover your identity and lets you leave with that identity in tact.

As for myself I discovered my quaint taste of darker topics in 9th grade while reading Burroughs, Ginsberg, Paulhinuik, Artaud, Miller, Bukowski and Kerouac. And during years to come I would find myself again and even my pallet out with writers such as Hesse, Brautigan, Simic, Elliot, Lorca, Yeats, Kafka and Capote. It can feel odd to find yourself 80 years ago in short-story written by the unknown face of a man named Sherwood Anderson, or in a single word of a poem by Blake. Either way to me what separates literature from simply entertainment, is the fact that you are able to build the tinniest bridges over gaps in your thinking, and populate the vast frontier of your imagination with parts of your being you found in the literature you read.

Good Literature starts with the Writer's choices but ends with the Reader's imagination

What is Literature?

All the readings made me refer back to Monday’s Lecture on plasir vs. jouissance (The Pleasure of Text by Roland Bonthes). All five included a surprising depth in the unexpected outcomes of each. This creates an expected unexpectedness in Literature. As readers, we hope the writer will surprise us.

In Sea Oak, George Saunders used his creativity to bring back the dead. As a reader, I am challenged as to why? But, with literature, anything is possible. The writer may control this imaginary situation; however, the story in itself is real. The characters within the story all react according to how Saunders chooses to write them. Does death reveal more about the living? It wasn’t until the classroom discussion of Sea Oak, I understood that all the surreal characters and situations were purposefully written. These choices made the author ask questions about the ridiculousness and compare it to reality. When in fact, as humans we tend to ignore the nature of things such as the cycle of poverty and this “American dream”. But as readers, we see things differently.

In Wells Tower’s Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, the author chose to drag out the beginning with details impertinent to the moral of the story. But, does there have to be a moral, or a reason to which he includes everything? Of course, it sets up the story, pulls you in. This challenges the reader to figure out what is going on instead of being directly told. The uncomfortable lifestyles of being a pirate are expressed in how Tower’s sets up the story. Also, by choosing the narrative as more humanly connected to love and family, the writer juxtaposes the two lifestyles. Again, it wasn’t until after group discussion that I was able to understand the irony of choosing a modern voice with a Viking-like situation. The narrator doesn’t choose battle, but feels obligated as if it were a man’s duty. He is also skeptical of their unnecessary and harmful presence. This is a familiar modern feeling for our soldiers in the Iraqi War. In retrospect, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned is a fascinating story, but only because of Wells Tower’s writing choices.

My favorite story was Do Not Disturb by A.M. Homes because there was so much humor in the complexity of the couple’s situation: being obligated by marriage and by death. The cancer and the marriage are both headed for death. Homes’ choice of dialogue proves humor to be a symptom of uncomfortable situations. As a writer, he creates more tension in making the wife with cancer as the bitch that we cannot sympathize with. However, I think all who have been in long, intimate relationships can understand the frustrations and annoyances that come with it. Also, in modern times, reversed gender roles are a common issues in that feminists want to be more like men and men’s feelings are often made less important because of their history as a gender. But, these are my thoughts and not necessarily what the author meant, which makes good writing even better- that it is left up to the reader’s interpretation.

Gentlemen’s Agreement disturbed me. Mark Richard uses a child’s relationship with his parents to build guilt and anticipation. The child mentions covenants and agreements made with his father but the child is always alone. He justifies his relationships with his rocks and ironically ends up being smashed by one. I don’t understand what the father is doing at the end though.

Aimee Bender’s Girl in the Flammable Skirt uses other stories and characters within the story to define the little girl who is narrating. She is shy because her parents ignore her. She cannot be loved because of her father’s lack to show unconditional love. And she longs to feel the heat caught in the girl’s skirt which she read in a newspaper story. Bender uses everyone else to define the narrator.

All these stories contained unexpected challenges for the reader; Nothing was given, every choice had depth. Literature is complex in the writer’s choices. But the best writer always leaves enough room for the reader’s imagination.

Do Not Disturb, Holly J

Do Not Disturb Response by Holly J
Do Not Disturb: A Response
(With Once in a Lifetime Guest Appearances by Sea Oaks and Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned!)

by Holly J McDede

When the doctor nicknamed Barry Manilow entered 'Do Not Disturb' by A.M Homes, I texted my husband, “I am reading something good.” I added, “No, really” because I had verbally abused George Saunders' 'Sea Oaks' and Wells Tower's 'Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned' seconds earlier. This is not to say those short stories are not literature, as the “Twilight is not literature. It is crap in a toilet” discussion implied. If there are words, and the words form sentences--BAM! BOOM! WHAM!-- it is literature. 'Sea Oaks' and 'Everything Ravaged'' were just more jumbled and more foreign pieces of literature than 'Do Not Disturb.' Had someone told me 'Everything Ravaged' was about the Iraq War , it would have held more power. II dealt with vikings when I could have related it to my ex-boyfriend, ex-actual human being with morals, who is going to Iraq in June. Instead, I related to 'Do Not Disturb', with its description of a relationship, literal and not just metaphorical for once. The humor pervaded throughout, because bitches are funny—when they are kept on pages of a book, where they cannot jump out to tell you that you stupid personality. The humor lessened as the pages turned, but it remained a cancer story I could enjoy. It tested where sympathy would land and I awarded it to both characters.

Rather than begin in the middle of nowhere, the narrator of 'Do Not Disturb' wastes no time addressing the main storyline. “My wife, the doctor, is not well,” the story begins. Soon the wife states, “I was a bitch before I met you, and I'll be a bitch long after you're gone,” offering the same shocking humor I adore. This ridiculous and disturbed humor continues when the wife asks if she can have a baby and her doctor replies, “Miracles happen.” I knew I was not supposed to sympathize with the wife, but I did sympathize because she, horrifyingly, reminded me of myself. I could not hate her, because she is me and I can't just go and hate myself. My husband, like the husband in this novel, stays with me because, naturally, he may just be in love. At the end, the wife states, “I would know if there was something really wrong.” I hope I pay attention to my husband, because it would be nice if the wife's assumption were true for me and my husband did not end up paralyzed in a hotel. Humor with a moral is my brand of literature, especially if the moral comes from my personal experience, and is not hidden away among the symbolism and bizarre exaggerations, as it is in 'Sea Oaks' and 'Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned.'