Madilyn Kane

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September 29, 2015
by madilynkane001
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Blog Post #4 – The Self on The Shelf

Leslie Jamison’s “The Empathy Exams” exhibits concepts in Sara Levine’s “The Self on the Shelf” by providing a persona and personality of sass, sensibility, empathy, and compassion, which is channeled through the narrator—a medical actor. Levine firmly states that, “You, [as the reader, should] leave the essay feeling as if you have met somebody. The worse thing an essayist can do is fail to make an impression” (Levine, 159).

Jamison portrays Levine’s concepts of personhood by manipulating or rather “secretly bullying” the reader with the words “I” and “you.” At first, the narrator relies on the use of “I” to tell her story, so that the reader may follow her narrative along. This is presented in the very first opening sentence: “My job title is Medical Actor, which means I play sick” (Jamison, 1). Here, Levine addresses the importance of using “I”: “In many ways writing is this act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind” (Levine, 160). The narrator wants to make an impression on the reader by imposing herself on other people with the use of “I.”

However, she changes this perspective when she dips out of the narrative diminishing her own voice by relying on the word “you”: “You are a 23-year-old female patient experiencing seizures with no identifiable neurological origin” (Jamison, 2). In this instance, Jamison changes the perspective of the narrative by addressing the audience as “you” in a forceful manner. You, the reader, essentially are forced to embody this particular “23-year-old female patient” and empathize with her as if you were in her shoes. This is the very essence that gives Jamison’s essay a persona.

Moreover, Lavine elaborates on this phenomenon with: “See how the “I” disappears, as if into a large fur coat. First it becomes a “you”” this may be Didion speaking to herself or Didion speaking to the reader. What matters is her choice to detach herself, through pronominal choice, from the person who is behaving badly in her sentence: “You can disguise its aggressiveness all you want,” as if, until now, the naïve reader has been exhausting himself with deceptions” (Levine, 161).

Another method that Jamison utilizes is the art of Italics for an added bonus of emphasis and sass. For instance, the narrator states, “I do things! I want to tell them. I’m probably going to write about this in an essay someday!” in order to added stylistic emphasis and provide an overall tone and voice for the essay as a whole (Jamison, 5). Even more, Levine says, “[Elkin] uses italics, whereas other writers rely on syntax or the reader’s intelligence to get the emphasis across” (Levine, 163). In this case, Jamison chose to use Italics to add to the persona of the narrative to provide an impression for the reader.

In another example, Jamison also uses cross-out marks to tell a story without outright actually saying it. [I will bold the crossed out words.] This is portrayed in: “Patient is here for an abortion for a surgery to burn the bad parts of her heart for a medication to fix her heart because the surgery failed” (Jamison, 23). This method of crossing out words is to add more personality to the narrative by making the narrator seem sassy, empathetic, and compassionate.

September 24, 2015
by madilynkane001
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Blog Post #3 – Three-Poled Frame of Reference

In the Preface to Collected Essays, Aldous Huxley maps out the three-poled frame of reference, which include the personal (autobiographical), the concrete-particular (objective-factual), and the abstract-universal. He elaborates that the personal is when the writer relies on autobiography in order to “look at the world through the keyhole of anecdote and description” (Huxley, 88). The concrete-particular is when the writer is able to set forth, pass judgement upon, and draw “general conclusions from relevant data,” which layout a platform for the depiction of different themes rather than speak about themselves (Huxley, 88). And finally, the abstract-universal is when the writer relies on “the world of high abstractions” as opposed to being personal or mention facts in experiences (Huxley, 89).

Using Huxley’s three-poled frame of reference as a model to uncover Ablert Goldbarth’s Delft, we can infer that Goldbarth utilized all three of these components in his essay effectively. For example, the personal comes into play when the narrator tells an anecdotal story of a fight that he had with his lover twenty years ago: “While it was happening, we finished, in that moment twenty years ago: Cynthia, me. We lay wet and thoughtless…What I said that I did, I don’t remember; or what she said back. It might have been about a cat… We didn’t fight fair; we were truthful” (Huxley, 257). He writes about his life by relying on autobiography, anecdotes, and description, the mechanisms that make up the personal.

Similarly, the concrete-particular is used when the narrator describes the role of the flea throughout the essay. He states, “The flea, which had been the final blank wall of the world became the door to a new world. There, the flea was a looming leviathan” (Huxley, 254). In this example, the flea is a blank wall, but transforms into a door to a new world. It is a symbol that represents opportunity, hence its reference to “the door to a new world.” The flea is an overdetermined symbol throughout the essay, constantly changing form and meaning—positive or not. At one point, the flea is described as a parasite that feeds on its victim, but at another, it is oddly romanticized. For instance, when the narrator’s lover is being attacked by fleas, he refers to them as a “bevy of cupid’s helpers.” This is unusual. Why refer to them as “cupid’s helpers” when they are merely pesky insects? Perhaps it is a metaphor for perspective. This is a literary theme that one can generate from reading the text as the concrete-particular was intended for.

Moreover, Huxley’s abstract-universal comes into play when Goldbarth refers to the “high abstractions in the world” that are not personal or concrete. For instance, the narrator illustrates the concept of time in relation to us human beings. This is presented in: “But for the most part, when we can extend ourselves through time it makes us smaller. Though it’s me, it’s not the me-who’s-here-imaging-this-in-the-Present-Tense: I’m watching another “me,” me-prime, recede through temporal distance as I’d watch a figure dwindle through distance in a spatial terms” (Huxley, 258). The narrator at this point is discussing relativity in regards to time and space. He describes the past and present self through philosophical speculations, which is abstract.

Ultimately, Delft displays all three models of Huxley’s components of the essay, which makes it an effective writing piece.

September 15, 2015
by madilynkane001
10 Comments

Blog Post #2 – The Art of the Essayist

A. C. Benson’s “The Art of the Essayist” illustrates the characteristics and criteria of the essayist–a writer with personality who is not a poet or a romancer, but one who perceives life as it is, simple and raw (42). Benson implies that a good essayist can capture the human experience, interactive relationships, and the simplistic nature of life, through an ordinary scope in order to evoke emotion and mood.

Utilizing Benson’s concept about the essayist, we, as the reader, can come to understand Annie Dillard’s “Total Eclipse.” Dillard tells the story of a woman and her husband, Gary, who embark on a journey to explore nature’s dark side, an unforgettable eclipse wrapped with throbbing emotions of haunting wonder and thrill. The author is an expert essayist in the way she maps out details in the retelling of a nostalgic memory. She cleverly evokes emotions through every day life by upholding on a particular method; at first, Dillard describes picturesque scenes by relying on the five senses in full detail, but then leaves the reader hanging when she abruptly changes the subject with a sentence that continues the plot. For example, when Dillard describes the hotel lobby, she states:

“Beside us on an overstuffed chair, absolutely motionless, was a platinum-blonde woman in her forties wearing a black silk dress and a strand of pearls. Her long legs were crossed; she supported her hand on her fist” (Dillard, 98).

Here, Dillard gives a simple yet detailed picture of the scene in the hotel lobby room with quick short snippets such as the “platinum-blonde woman in her forties.” She wants the reader to pick at each detail like her “strand of pearls” or her seductive and seemingly distraught expression “with her hand on her fist”–to be curious about who this woman was and what was she doing in the hotel at the time. She wants the reader to ask all these questions, to ascertain more information about this mysterious woman, to critically think and imagine her backstory. Dillard is an essayist in the way she keeps the reader wondering, bustling with curiosity.

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