Soccah

Identity, or the self, is created through language. We are a collection of labels: Adidas on my shoes, Nike on my back, Puma on my jacket, Arabic on my face, terrorist on your mind, a believer on Tuesday, an atheist on Wednesday, agnostic by Thursday. Young today, you tomorrow. All working together to form the idea of “me.” However, find me someone with the same labels and there will be a difference—excuse the cliché, but we are all unique. The problem, then, is that these linguistic labels, in all their plenitude, do not allow for the rise of the individual.

Thus, we find ourselves outside of labels, outside of words—but not outside of existence, and hence, we feel alienated from ourselves because the words that contain us do not define us. Why English then? How does the study of English literature fit into the question of individual being? Essentially, who are you, and how can English help find out who you are? If the problem posited is that no labels are adequate, or individual enough, to capture our self-hood, the only avenue left, in my mind, is self-creation.

Create the words that describe you. Yet, these words have to be understood by the common cognomen of this world; in order to realize yourself, someone must realize you—but how does someone realize you through your language and not the labels presupposed by the dominant symbolic order?

We do this through metaphor. Metaphors become a subversive way in which to create the self while existing under the structures that be. Poetry, perhaps, is essentially a dissident struggle for identity. In order to find yourself—to realize who you are as an individual—you must write the metaphors of your own being. Metaphors arise from the imagination, an imagination that is cultivated through the arts—in this context, the study of English literature. Literature helps us realize ourselves on our pilgrimage towards metaphor.

Yet, the problem is twofold: If, more broadly, art is that which cultivates our identity, what if we are presented only with the artistry, or imagination, of capital industry? No change will come about. Art is the basis of change. If our imagination is cultivated through the imagination of a corporate capitalism that dominates the forms of communication, then the corporate mentality, or the corporate metaphor (e.g. money)—will continue decay the metaphors that stand in its way, (e.g. democracy) . Subsequently, to ask the question: "What transferable skills does an English degree give you?" is to succumb to the influence of the corporate imagination before you have given yourself the opportunity for growth.

The study of English literature democratizes identity by widening the space of language through metaphor. No one imagination stands atop the study of literature—to find yourself, look through the eyes of your own mind, unfetter your Fancy, as your own path is but a metaphoric step away.

BuildUpThatWall

Are you trying to say that command of the english language helps you express who you are? That I can understand, but not the part about the coperate industry problem...That part sounds like you addressing people that already agree with you..

Writ-with-Hand

Soccah,

Very good post.

I have found that my English classes ironically were the classes that asked more of what the student thought and encouraged more self expression, exploration, and critical thought.

In books I often look to learn or grow - in some way or another. This is why I do not like cliche stories and writing. It does not reflect reality in my opinion. Granted it's good for pushing ideology but I'm not into literature for the push of ideology.

In a creative writing class I had before I got real disappointed in many of the students (not all) and even upset on one of our projects. While the project or month long exercise turned out well and memorable I was irked in the beginning that some wanted to set the story in some cliche ass location like New York, Chicago. or L.A. under the idea that nothing of any interest happens or can happen in their own city. Aside from the fact that you should be not writing with a certain depth about something or some location and culture you don't know... it is completely idiotic to think no interesting story can occur in your own city.

Needless to say my character offended the sensibilities of some people at first.

Sigh.

Everything in life is not as an ideology or corporate commercial might sell it to you as. For example, in high school we had a gym teacher that was a homosexual, liberal voting, white, male that was a racist. This is life. Just as I have met staunch Republican voters that damn near image Jesus Christ in their personal charity to the despised, downtrodden, unwelcomed and with regards to discipline within their own lives. I'm personally more toward the "left" than many Democrats but hands down some of the best people I have ever met in my life were and are Republicans. Of course I think the Republicans generally attract pricks but nonetheless some of the most self-righteous pricks (and racists as well) I have encountered have been Democrats or liberals. I remember one heroine hooked, white, female, prostitute couldn't get enough one time of telling me how morally corrupt the "niggers" are. Yeah, ok.

Speaking of American made white, male, homosexual, racists it begs the question: Is it that they don't build queers the way they use to, or is it that they don't build racist the way they use to? That might be in slight humor and it might be none politically correct in a contemporary Western culture policing words, thoughts, and query that would make Shakespeare quake in his boots, but it's "real" towards the many layers and complexities that make up us human beings.

I can't live every experience in life so I appreciate those windows good literature gives me in to others lives and experiences, because I like to grow, and hopefully grow in understanding as well. I can't fuckin do that if everything has to take place in goddamn New York or Chicago and follow the exact ideological script of limo driven Democrats. At such a point I have to turn to Latin America or somewhere else for insight. Sue me, I can't write every racist person as the most evil person on earth with no admirable codes of honor. And on that note, fuck New York. They drive fucked up anyways.

Truth-Teller

I think it's you who needs a little opening up of different cultures and sensibilities.

While your fellow students may be writing cliche stories, what you're doing is stereotypingthe inner cities and urban metropolis; therefore you are not without sin, my brother.

Mike C

Why do people feel the need to start debates with a long and boring lecture? What a load of pretentious bollocks.

__________________
My writing
My Photo Blog
Web design for Writers
The Oddville Press

Truth-Teller

But I don't understand.

That's how are you write Mike C. You should be more than glad we're arguing over nothing.

lin

Dream on.

__________________

Soccah

Yeah, I was thinking about this. Expressed is more accurate, but expression and creation are intrinsic. How do you express your experience in a way that is particular to yourself? If art/lit widens your perceptive ability (whether through sight/smell/touch) and by doing so, enlivens your imaginative capability, one's expression--whether poor or an act of genius--is really an act of self-creation, or self-definition.

When one asks themselves--"Who am I?"--one can only respond through the labels of language. Labels that are pre-determined under the collective imagination/unconscious of the dominant ideology. Therefore, metaphors become a dissident form of communicating "otherness" by stretching and manipulating meaning.

I don't mean to suggest reading art makes you a good artist, I mean to say that it intensifies your senses to a point which allows you to live through your own imagination/mind/identity--to "find yourself" away from the cloak of influence.

Joyce: "Love thy Label as thyself" To reach this point, unfetter your imagination:

With all the gardener Fancy e'er could feign,
Who breeding glowers, will never breed the same:
And there shall be for thee all soft delight
That shadowy thought can win,
A bright torch, and a casement ope at night,
To let the warm Love in!
J. Keats

Writ-with-Hand

How you got a stereotype of inner cities or urban metropolises out of that post is beyond me? Perhaps it just shows your lack of reading comprehension? Or perhaps you have just never driven in New York City?

HarryG

I you write too much and diversify your topic too much, you lose your reader. English literature alone has spawned enough words to take us to Mars and back again.


But, racism and New York drivers is a much easier topic.


I live in Spain, in my city alone, over 170 different nationalities are registered with the town hall. Racism? It can't exist, can it? How can you even think about black and white when Peruvians are rubbing shoulders with the Chinese, and your beer is served by a Russian barmaid? Pure black Senegalese try to flog you fake sun glasses while a gang of Albanians are trying to pick your pocket, and Moroccans want to blow the place up.


And you have the temerity to complain about New York drivers? Spanish drivers, like all Spanish people, perhaps because of Franco, like nothing better than to break the law at every opportunity. They ignore red traffic lights and everything else about driving rules. When you add the forever-overtaking Germans to that mix, and the stoical Scandinavians, you have driving conditions that are life-threatening, literally.


Added to that, the traffic police, who are very thin on the ground, only want your money. New York drivers? They're pussycats.

Writ-with-Hand

My black grandfather was run out of the South by the Ku Klux Klan for protecting his mother from a white man, so you can ask him or Frank Jude if racism still exists. If you think I have anger than you're slippin on ice and ain't ever run into the likes of my father, a retired federal law enforcement officer, that will choke you by your neck at a red light for looking at him wrong. He follows the law I don't so you figure that out.

Spanish traffic and driving maybe worse than New York's. I've never driven in Spain. I know New Yorkers double park and make their own rules while driving. I've never seen nothing in the U.S. like I have in New York as it goes for driving. I can only compare it to what I'm use too.

Maybe New York and the United States as a whole is nothing but pussycats. I'm not patriotic so I really don't give a shit. New Yorkers still drive fucked up to me. And if the Spanish drive worse than fuck them too.

HarryG

My knowledge of the US is confined to some of its big cities, mostly in the north, although I have been to Miami. Coming from London, mostly, I must say that I encountered little racism in the US, on a comparison basis, but I fully acknowledge that it exists – with a 50/50 population mix and a difficult history, it must.


I've driven in New York and Las Vegas, and I was terrified to do anything wrong because law enforcement officers seem to be everywhere, and all the time I just wanted to put my foot down and drive a lot faster than all those law-abiding Americans all around me.


I always wonder how American drivers feel on German Autobahns, some of which still have no speed restrictions – if they drove at 50 miles-an-hour, they'd be fined by the traffic police for driving too slow.

Writ-with-Hand

Las Vegas is pretty stellar. Like Norfolk, Virginia it's city planning is developed with more space and sections of lanes just for turning. It's a bit different in the "Frost Belt" and "Rust Belt" cities were the urban planning packed things closer together, so generally speaking few to no street lanes are specific as designated turning lanes.

Driving in New York I had cars all around me breaking every goddamn law made. I had Virginia plates on my car too so I'm sure that exacerbated the problem. One car came around from behind me while I was the middle of an intersection waiting to turn left, and it parked right in front of me to turn left. Drivers in New York also routinely made their own lanes. Maybe they drive crazier in Europe but by U.S. standards then New York drivers are nuts (at least they were in the early 1990s).

+
+

As for "racism" in the U.S., I suppose pinning down exactly what is "racism" is a can of worms? People in the United States do not have much experience with nor any ill regards for the Roma (Gypsies) unlike Europeans who speak flat out racist or ethnocentric about those people. But some of the main racial antagonisms and violence today occurs out West like in California - more specifically in certain cities in California like in L.A.

This violence is mainly between Latino gangs and Black-American gangs (Asian-American gangs too) and also with Neo-Nazi gangs. I would hazard to guess that outside of "Eastern Europe" like in Moscow and so forth, much of Europe - while it certainly has gangs and racial violence etc. - does not have the same kind of armed racial gang warfare going on that L.A. cliques do. In the Midwest (which ironically is stereotyped as more conservative and racist than California and L.A.) its not so bad in her big cities between Latinos and Black-Americans (perhaps because we have plenty of Puerto Ricans and not just Mexicans and Central Americans)

Before I was born before the two major sides of my town were divided between blacks and whites. That wall came down in the 1960s. But coming up as a young kid in the 1980s those two sides of town became divided between blacks and Latinos. It was only after I got out of the Marine Corps that I actually ever ventured to any degree to that other side of town (Latino), because when I was coming up black people did not really f*ck around over there because if you strolled around to long you might have ended up with your head being split open. The Latinos in the Latin Kings just automatically assumed if you were a young black male you were a member of the GD's (Gangster Disciples aka Growth & Development). The Latinos (although plenty Puerto Ricans lived on the East Side by the black section of the East side too - but I'm not from the East Side) did not come over to the North Side either. This largely held true till the 1990s. Now the Latino side of town is one of the most bustling, multi-racial and multi-cultural sides of town. I love it! Plenty of Black-Americans and Asian-Americans live over on that side town now.

Just in the mid 1990s I was in a bar on my side of town visited heavily by GD's. A cat sat down next to me at the bar, while two men stood behind me, and the cat introduced himself as being from Chicago, and wanting to know why I was in the bar. Without saying it, he let me know, that if did not want to be shot, stabbed, beaten or killed then I should leave the establishments. I did so. But only after finishing my drink.

See, I was in that bar a week or two earlier than that, and those cats had a problem with me because they thought I was Puerto Rican. I know this because a friend came back to our table and told us all so. But he said he told them (he knew they guys) I was not Puerto Rican but mixed (mulatto) and to leave me alone.

Apparently my guilt was guilt by association - that is I look so be it.

But those racial animosities between Black-Americans and Latino-Americans have revolved around a culture of gangs. So, they overlap one another or are fused with one another.

Contrary to popular belief about the "big bad cities" of the American North. While on some level this was historically true, on just the same level of historical truth the U.S. South, especially in her small towns, where some of the most violent and violently-cruel places probably on earth until the 1960s. The South has a rich culture fused with charm, honor, strong family culture and values as well as etiquettes of respect. But the U.S. South had a darker and more sinister side to it's culture as well though. Much of it - not in numbers but in degree of kind - surpassed the brutality of the French Revolution perhaps. Swamps held the remains of plenty of Black-Americans from police that "released" blacks from their custody to vigilantes and Klan men that ensured they would swing the strong arm of the status quo, maintain customs and order. Many black people in the South, of the older generation (that of my grandparents generation), rarely or never looked white people in the eyes. Many Southern towns had the local customs that if a white person walked down the street a black woman or man moved out of their way (or stepped into the street).

Read up on the Federal men Bobby Kennedy as U.S. Attorney General sent down South in the 1960s. One of them ended up in the hospital. Law abiding Americans? Tell that two the Federal Marshals being attacked and shot by mobs of hundreds of whites.

As for Southern local law enforcement at that time, you had better had some reasonable fear and respect for them (as you did New York cops while you were driving through the city), if you didn't want to be shot down, or beaten to death with chains, and then written up in police reports as cause of death: A car accident.

The Police Chief of Selma, Alabama during that time, had his own actual civilian posse. They would use rubber hoses with barb-wire tied around them, to beat disobedient black peoples with to keep them in line. This is the 1950s and 60s not some long ago forgotten mythical era.

Oh hell no! I've heard about the Autobahn, not two ways in hell I would be driving on that thing. I have to say, you Europeans (or at least the Germans) are nuts to have things like that. And you all talk about the U.S. and her guns!

ash somers

i like books