A Commonspace Map: Lit Hum I

Reflection

I think about cross-time and cross-cultural influences a lot, which is what prompted me to create a map that chronologically and geographically relates all of my passages. It allowed me to see the similarities and difference in ideas and its correlation to regional history and culture. I realized how much we take dated ideas for granted, but I often fail to consider why and how these ideas are revolutionary at the time. I didn’t understand the significance of The Oresteia until I connected it to how it founded one of the first judicial systems in ancient Rome. I didn’t understand how revolutionary Sappho’s poetry is until I understood the systems of misogyny she lived through as exposed in the Iliad and the Odyssey, and how little autonomy and voice women have compared to men. I didn’t understand the significance of Aeneid until I realized it justified Roman imperialism.

The first time I read through the texts, I was reading to understand the storyline, but the second time, I was looking for character intent and author’s intent. I enjoyed the text more as I read into the impact of the portrayal of each character. For example, I didn’t notice the intent and impact of making Odysseus an ethically ambiguous hero until I began to view the Odyssey as a critique of war and the lasting repercussions of war trauma. Connecting and comparing different moral values and putting them in conversation with each other allows me to diffrentiate between cultural differences and the author deliberately making the reader uncomfortable. This made me enjoy the book much more, especially as I find more contradictions.

Looking back at what I noticed prompted more introspection than I thought. I caught my own tendency of remembering statements that seem jarring, and I tend to extrapolate the statement away from its context. I remember moments in the text that cause me the most confusion and discomfort, and it is usually related to the passiveness of the role of women in a patriarchal narrative, or any justification for imperialism or invasion of a people. I wanted to connect my commonplace book to the cultural/historical context of the setting of each work, which is why I decided to map all the relevant passages. Making literature in my own way means being aware that by reading, I am bringing in my own set of values and tensions from my own upbringing.  Commonplacing forced me to stick to the text. I cannot place a text without considering its context from the story, or in my case, its context in its location and time.

My biggest takeaway this term is that the benefit of ambiguity is fairness. When I was thinking about the different cultural consequences of monotheistic and polytheistic religions, and the impact of having ethically ambiguous gods (such as in Greek literature). I was shocked in moments of Genesis where the text justified invasion or government rule over a land with ‘divine right given to one person’. When I compare this to gods’ intervention in warfare, such as in the Iliad, people who are favored by gods are simply more powerful, and their justification for their rule/kingship is strength, not moral entitlement. I found myself thinking that it is easier to write morally absolute stories in monotheistic texts, therefore it is easier to justify an existing government structure, or justify injustice.

Literature Humanities did a lot for helping me understand the power of a narrative. As quoted from Audre Lorde, the difference between poetry and rhetoric is being ready to kill yourself instead of your children. Rhetoric has the power to talk over someone else, or justify one community’s interests or values over another. Rhetoric kills as it can be used for propaganda, but poetry is introspective and expressive. This difference felt especially apparent when reading Sappho right after Iliad. The Ancient Greek philosophical tradition is heavily gendered, so the only possibility that philosophy from women can be recognized is through poetry, or through another form of art. Between art and philosophy, philosophers at the time had more political impact, fine art is more likely to be forgotten. The lacuna left in the fragments of sappho felt heavy on me, because it reminds me of the perspectives that rhetorics can silence, and how rhetoric is an essential tool for oppression. This is the logical outcome of a system where philosophy and public speech (rhetoric) were gendered male, and thus preserved. Her surviving poetry, then, becomes a counter-rhetoric, a quiet but persistent deconstruction of the epic world. 

I do feel that understanding how rhetorics can be used as a tool for silencing is essential to deconstructing it. Deconstruction does not just mean criticism, but also looking closer at the details being glossed over, such as why an oppressed group is “unrighteous”, or how a nation is punished for character flaws of the ruler in Aeneid. Similarly, when I resist the urge to label something as wrong and instead focus on the social consequences, I am much less likely to impose my value system over another, and I can spot my own bias. When I find myself resisting the urge to read a text through a modern lens, I am less likely to take transformative ideas for granted, so the text becomes more interesting. 

I have a lot to do when it comes to recognizing my own bias and properly contextualizing my takeaways from the text, but the narratives that gave me discomfort throughout the course helped me understand the consequences of my bias. I am deconstructing my bias by building/discovering new reading strategies, and the more creative I get with my study habits, the more I discover. I hope that my commonplacing strategy helps other students contextualize the text in its own space and time. Learning how to identify my own bias becomes especially relevant in the digital world, where the presentation of information becomes more and more fragmented. I also understand that seeing context and nuance takes time, so I plan to invest more time on less amount of text in the future.