Journals

 I found that Baldesar Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier puts forth some very interesting ideas about a (vernacular) language and its uses. Castiglione’s discussion focuses on the Italian language and the fact that it was the Tuscan (conceivably Florentine) dialect that became the Italian lingua franca, implying that the Tuscanization of the Italian language to some degree eliminated other non-dominant forms of (what is today considered) Italian culture. He begins his discussion of language by discussing Boccaccio,–who he clearly doesn’t like– his style, and his importance in the making of (then and now) contemporary Italian. It is from this early section of the text that Castiglione feels conflicted about what his native language is and where it is going; it seems like he doesn’t dislike or resent the fact that Italian is becoming Tuscan, more that he is saddened by the changes. He describes the other Italian dialects (Neopolitan, Lombardian, Latin even) as almost a dying art, something rare in an increasingly common world. This section read very linguistically structuralist to me in a really compelling way, especially Castiglione’s description of Italian changing and the dialects being left behind (adaptation of signs and signifiers to match the new versions of the signified).This idea of dying and/or changing languages is what I above all found most interesting from what we’ve read from Castiglione’s Book so far. I get the feeling that this may make little to no sense, so sorry about that, would love to say more in class–just ask!

Laura Cerata’s letters are one of my favorite readings not only from this semester, but perhaps from the entire HUST curriculum I have encountered so far, but I do love a letter. That said, while I was reading Cerata’s work, especially the context for and her second letter itself, I was really struck by the parallels with Marxism. A few weeks ago in Critical Theory, we discussed Marxism, and one of the essays we read by Marx himself was “The Fetishism of Commodities” from Capital. Cerata's invocation of a woman’s (lack of) time for intellectual pursuits, outside of their domestic labors or duties reminded me of Marx’s assertion that anything can become a commodity if it is rare enough. The idea then becomes that women’s time for intellectual pursuits, according to Cerata, is rarified, a commodity that exists only in limited increments at specific times of day (typically night) and is not understood to be something important to and for women. In other words, by suggesting that women are relegated to domestic labors for most of their waking hours, and forced to pursue intelletual pursuits at night or in rare moments alone, time itself becomes a commodity because of its a) value to women who desire intellectual pursuits and b) its scarcity in and of itself. The letter, read with a Marxist lens (or not), serves as Cerata’s sharp critique of women’s position and commodification, a theme that echoes in further feminist writings from Cerata herself to Virginia Woolf, Gloria Anzaldúa, and countless women in between.

I hope this application of Marx and his ideas makes sense. His work is often criticized because it makes very limited mentions of women, a valid critique that I really agree with. That said, I do find most of Marx’s arguments convincing and think (some of) his ideas are somewhat universal particularly when they speak to labor, production, time, and where these ideas do or don’t intersect. It is because of the very intersection of the aforementioned ideas, that I feel like it is possible, feasible, and even makes sense to apply Marx’s ideas to Cerata’s writings on time and women’s intellectual pursuits. I am curious to hear what other people think.

There have been many elements that have drawn my attention in Boccaccio’s Decameron. I have found many elements confusing, angering, or just straight up horrifying, one of these elements is the phenomenon I am choosing to call “Feminine Misogyny.” This is the idea that women actively bought into male narratives of women’s inherent maliciousness, dangerous passion, and extreme emotion as the guiding lines in their lives. So many stories in the Decameron are predicated on the idea of women moralizing about other women’s actions, it’s just kind of hard for me to understand that women actually bought into and actively enforced these narratives, especially when there were women and storytellers who actively fought back against these narratives. 

It really makes no sense to me that in the world where a woman would tell the seventh story from the eighth day in the Decameron exists in a world where Christine de Pizan lived and wrote, and in a world where the Wife of Bath would become a beloved character. I realize that it is easy to fall into the trap of saying “but why did people, why did women believe these things,” as a 21st century woman; it is easy to in turn moralize about what we as contemporary readers know and believe in contrast to the pre-modern world’s ideas and narratives. I think it’s a fine line, but I think it’s reasonable to want to try to understand the “why” behind women’s belief in and buy-in to feminine misogyny. 

 Giovanni Boccaccio’s On Famous Women, in my mind, is a fascinating piece of literary, historical, and cultural identity. It is very imperfect, but it marks the very early start of a shift in the literary canon to more overtly include women. Boccaccio helped to start this new version of tradition, imperfect as it is. Christine De Pizan continued it in her Book of the City of Ladies, also very imperfect. From the 14th century, this tradition of including women in the canon of cultural identity has only continued, if not increased. 

Among the most recent examples of this expansion of the Canon, in my mind, is the Spanish singer Rosalía’s newest album Lux. In it she tells the stories of female saints and reframes their stories. Before, during, and after its release, the album was wildly successful. Maybe it’s because the singer is classically trained, maybe it’s because she sings in 13 languages over 15 tracks, or maybe it’s because the album marries classical music with contemporary pop and openly uses religious themes and imagery; Lux’s success could be, and is attributed to these incredible elements. In my mind, however, the album was so successful and popular because it does, in some way, shape, or form what Boccaccio did when he wrote On Famous Women–bring women’s stories to mainstream attention. 

The methods to which both authors bring this attention to women are very different, but also strikingly similar. They emphasize that women exist, have always existed, and will continue to always exist; in other words, Rosalía and Boccaccio both acknowledge that women are essential to humanity and human existance, that we are matter.  Rosalía does emphasizes this from a lens of respect and admiration, while Boccaccio does it from a judgemental and moralistic lens. As I was reading, I found myself seeing the throughlines in a really interesting way that left me curious to think about this more, and I will take any chance I can to think about and listen to Lux because it is legitimately one of my favorite albums in a long time, and I highly recommend it. (Not for nothing, my favorite songs are “Reliquia,” “La Perla,” “Sauvignon Blanc,” and “De Madrugá”).

As we’ve read Inferno, I can’t help but see Joseph Cambell’s Hero’s Journey. From the outset, the obviousness of the concept struck me in ways that it usually doesn’t when I’m reading other things. I think what made it so clear to me was the fact that the Divine Comedy is a literal journey and has a clear beginning, middle, and end (adding to its ever-present cyclical nature). I find the application of the Hero’s Journey all the more interesting because Inferno starts in media res. I find it very interesting to merge the idea of the Hero’s journey with an epic poem for analysis because while they have striking similarities, they also have some interesting differences; for example, the typical Hero’s Journey typically starts with backstory for who and why the hero is, while an epic poem begins with the action, and a reader learns the context for the character and her journey as the narrative unfolds. This difference in narrative convention doesn’t make the Hero’s Journey any less applicable to epic poetry, in fact I think the concepts are inherently intertwined because (most) epic poems are journeys but not all journeys are epic poems, this is especially interesting, given that Campbell drew inspiration from classical myth (epic poetry). 

The question then feasibly becomes is Dante, both the pilgrim and author, a hero? This is a question I personally have no real answer for, because I think to some degree, no one is a hero (a conversation for another time). If Dante, pilgrim, is a hero, then he is an imperfect one: he is not what society considers or chooses to consider a “true” hero, indeed, we ourselves have pointed this out and poked fun at it (because it is amusing); he is afraid, uncomfortable, and a reluctant traveller. What makes his imperfection as a hero more interesting to me, at least, is that he isn’t afraid to voice his discomfort or his fear or his reluctance and that in and of itself is revolutionary. Dante lived and wrote in a period where men were society’s main focus, and their status (or lack thereof) was make or break. I find I really have to respect Dante, author, for writing himself as the imperfect hero because I think to some degree, it was transgressive. This could have probably been more eloquent, but it’s an idea I want to keep working thinking about within the context of Inferno, but also the rest of the work we read this semester. 

One of my favorite quotes comes from Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own. She says that, “for most of history, Anonymous was a woman,” and to some degree, it is a very true statement; women were shut out of the literary canon, actively excluded from the privileges of authorship, and had to publish work under male pseudonyms, among other pointless injustices. Women as the historical Anon, is an idea I agreed with and found to be very true, until I read this week’s selections from Marion Turner’s Biography of the Wife of Bath. This is not to say that women haven’t been involuntarily anonymized from history, but I think the degree to which that anonymization has occurred is more complicated than I, or perhaps even Virginia Woolf herself thought was possible. 

After reading Turner, I find that there is more nuance to women and their relationship to the literary canon, their portrayals in literature, and their relationship to authorship, than Woolf’s assertion that “anonymous is a woman” suggests. Indeed, Turner begins her Biography by acknowledging that Allison, the Wife of Bath, is one of the most beloved and influential characters in literature (9). She writes about how transgressive Allison was and how her transgression was reflected by both other medieval women and other literary characters. One of Turner’s main points of reference when discussing Allison as a woman, is Margery Kempe and her Book. She explores how Kempe represented similarities and differences to Allison of Bath, and how those characteristics impacted how both women were read and perceived. Indeed, there are the most parallels with Margery and Allison: both women were travellers and pilgrims, and both to some degree recorded their histories.

This idea of recorded histories, both real and fictional, is what makes Turner’s book and ideas so interesting to me. There were (and are) enough existing records of women and female authors for Turner to have been able to trace their histories, collect those stories, and see the reflections or continuities from Chaucer’s story and description of Allison. These ideas, I think, disprove Woolf’s assertion, because if women were truly anonymous, then we would have absolutely no record of anything, of women being authors in the late 14th and early 15th centuries, of how and what they read, and of themselves to any degree. With that said, I think that Turner’s ideas are true of upper class women, who were better resourced, and had better access to education than lower or peasant class women had; in this situation, I think Woolf’s assertion does make sense.

I did find Turner’s writing really interesting, and I really enjoyed reading it. I think her work proves that there is no one way to understand women in the late Middle Ages, as authors, characters, travellers, etc. It is a complicated question, and many sources give different accounts, which make anything more challenging to understand. In my mind, this constant debate and existence of contradictory sources makes for a richer historiography and tapestry for debate and understanding, which makes any subject, in my mind, that much more compelling to discuss.   

The contemporary debate over Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, and political correctness, or lack thereof, is utterly fascinating to me. In today's day and age, it is the impulse of the masses (and to some degree, I include myself in that statement) to dismiss a work of art, a film, a text, etc. because of its creator and that person’s beliefs or ideas. Cancel CultureTM, in many ways seeks to simplify and unite the two ideas of art and artist, confounding them, and thus creating an echo chamber of sorts of the “political correctness” or “wokeness” that has dominated contemporary narratives of understanding and appreciating controversial media and media figures since the dawn of #MeToo in late 2016 and early 2017. I think it is in this simplification and confounding of the ideas of “art” as the work, and “artist” as creator, where problems emerge.

On a macro scale, this is a very formalist approach to understanding the phenomenon of cancel culture, and of course formalism has its issues; but I think that for the sake of longevity, at least when it comes to stories, and pre-modern stories at that, art from the artist, is an essential view to have. Just because we consider Geoffrey Chaucer a controversial figure today, does not make his stories or his ideas any less powerful. It is almost as if they exist on a separate plane: Chaucer is the “Father of English Literature or Poetry,” and thus to some degree informs everything that has been written since in the English language. And yes, he was, as Seal and Sidhu point out in their article on being feminist Chaucer scholars, “a rapist, a racist, an anti-Semite [and spoke for a] world in which…the male, the wealthy, the Christian, and the white…” dominated all social discourse, his work still exists, and is still, I think critical to understanding literature and its evolution, both in terms of form and function. Thus, my emphasis on formalism, which asks us to consider solely the words on the page, to ignore all other aspects that may influence a text’s meaning, and focus on what makes a text, a text. All of this to say, that I think any piece of media can (and should) be appreciated, with an understanding that in some cases it is possible, and feasible to separate art and artist. 

On a different note, I also find the question of (what I call) Legacy Literature’s relevance to contemporary students extremely intriguing. I am coming from a background with what in today’s day and age, are considered ‘hard’ books to read, understand, and teach. Examples include Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter, Camus’ The Stranger, Christa Wolf’s Cassandra, and Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author. I may be extremely biased because of this extensive background, or because I am a voracious reader, but I think that there is hardly any point to education, or more specifically, a liberal arts education, if texts like these are not taught. Society will not know how to read and think critically, we will lose our ability to reflect and disagree, but most importantly, we will no longer understand who, what, and why things, people, and ideas came before us. I understand and agree with the case often made that Legacy Literature is inaccessible, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be made accessible, plenty of resources exist to make these Legacies easier to understand and digest.

 This journal is a bit all over the place and word vomity, so thank you for bearing with me. I want to give credit where credit is due, so I will say that I am pulling a lot of ideas from the podcasts “In Bed with the Right” and “A Bit Fruity,” which do an excellent job of analyzing and evaluating the roles of all of the phenomena far more eloquently than I have here. So thank you, to these wonderful podcast hosts. 

Not to be pretentious, but, I love Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. I am coming to this work with some prior knowledge; my senior year English teacher, (shoutout Ms. Crnkovich!) started the year very intentionally with Chaucer and The Canterbury Tales. She read the first page of the prologue in its original Middle English and asked the class what we thought. I, having just read Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting, raised my hand and said that it sounded distinctly Scottish (and this is a core memory). From there, she assigned different groups to summarize and analyze the different tales. My group was assigned the Knight's Tale. It was not an easy task by any means, but it ended up being very interesting, and the reason I love The Canterbury Tales. 

That said, I am excited to dig into Tales I did not get the chance to read and appreciate last year, and revisit the Knight's Tale. In reflecting on The Canterbury Tales, I think the almost mythology around the stories only adds to their appeal. The whole premise is that a group of people (all classes, vocations, genders, etc) are thrown together on a pilgrimage to see the shrine of St. Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury and tell stories to pass the time, but perhaps also, to understand each other's motivations for visiting the shrine. I find the idea that this diverse group unites around the power of stories and their ability to connect people really compelling; especially given that Chaucer writes in the semi-direct aftermath of the Peasants' Revolt (1381). This blend of people is very suggestive of how the times are beginning to change: shifting less in the direction of hierarchy and aristocracy and more in the direction of possible social mobility, if not the start of a middle class. I will end there, but I could go on and on about how the Canterbury Tales are still relevant today, how much they reveal about society, gender relations (THE WIFE OF BATH!!!), and how stories are the essential human connection, among other ideas. 

At the moment, I think that my biggest goal for the semester in terms of creating an ePortfolio is to be able to see how my thoughts evolve over the course of the semester, both in terms of content and expression. I think there is nothing more satisfying that looking at a body of work and seeing how it changes and adapts to new ideas and situations. I intend to treat this portfolio as an archive and time capsule of sorts, because I will not be in a HUST classroom for a while after this semester. I want to create a space showing work and ideas I am proud of. Having this portfolio or archive will help me return to my proverbial academic roots when I am feeling lost or adrift in my academic career in any, way, shape, or form. I like to keep past work anyway, but I think it will be very fun to be more intentional about the things and ideas I chose to keep. In the end, I think my main goal is in the simplest terms, intentional memory.