Hi everyone! My name is Liliana Patricia Castaneda Lopez, and I am very exciting (and a bit scared) about this class, I have to confess.
I hold a B.A. in Communications and Journalism from Colombia, and have pursued graduate studies in Pol. Science and Latin American Studies in both Colombia and Canada. My current academic interest is in memory and reconciliation through literature in countries affected by civil wars. I would like to apply for a Ph.D. program in Hispanic Literature in the near future.
Rather than talking about my expectations, which some of you have brilliantly exposed in your postings, I would like to reflect on my fears regarding this class as theory can be an enticing trap too difficult to escape from. I remember I took an intensive course on semiotics several years ago during my major, and I became obsessed with trying to find the meaning behind everything I perceived. Now, reading about the formalists and structuralists brought me back to that time as I tried to look for symbols everywhere and tried to unveil an author’s intention or meaning. Surprisingly, sometimes I realized such intention does not exist or is misinterpreted.
Although for the Formalists motivation seems to go to a second place compared to the procedure and the devices that make literature something autonomous, there seems to be an obsession of overly using a method to explain everything while diminishing other variables.
Hi there,
Don’t worry !! I feel the same !!! Despite a few Theory classes taken years ago, I still don’t think I know what theory is. It always bothered me that theoretical texts are written in such a formal, abstract, complex way that it almost make them inaccessible (at least to me). Isn’t that ironic? A text that is supposed to explain or let say lay some rules or principles in order to better address a question or problem (especially a linguistic-related one) would be deemed unreadable by the majority of the population… I shall call it the clarity of the unreadable. As I was reading Barthes, I remembered the famous S/Z., or how a short story became that unreadable, scripted text, turning the pleasure I had reading Sarrazine by Balzac into pure torture…Trop de codes tue le code…