Andrew Statum

Ralph Messenger's attempt to record his consciousness on tape (or on voice-recognition software) seems to me to be doomed from the outset. He is attempting to funnel an incredibly multifarious phenomenon through one conduit, language, which necessarily limits the extent to which consciousness can be represented. We think in image and word AND sound, who knows, maybe even smell and touch. When we speak, the spoken word carries with it a whole host of images and ideas. Word cannot be divorced from image, nor can image be divorced from word. And words don't always come out of one's mind shaped into a well-shaped narrative like the one we get of Ralph's first sexual experience in chapter six. If Ralph were being honest with himself, he would, more often than not, speak in a series of loosely associated words and grunts.

On page 29 in our edition of "A Stream of Illusion," Carter talks briefly about sensory information coming into the brain and how it is processed. "Sensory signals coming from the sense organs," she writes, "travel to the cortex along very fast pathways that pass (with the exception of olfactory signals) through the thalamus." From here, in the thalamus, they are dispatched to wherever it is they're supposed to go. So what of the sense of smell?

Rita Carter, towards the end of our selection from Exploring Consciousness, discusses, briefly, almost as a throwaway, the levels of awareness our minds seem capable, upon introspection, of attaining (forgive me my weak Jamesian mimicry!). "The human mind," she says, "can lift itself by its bootstraps to higher and higher levels of self-reflection in the process known as introspection," which occurs, "when the contents of one's consciousness itself becomes the subject of attention" (43). Essentially, I take this to mean, and I think we more or less agreed on this as a class, that our minds are capable of not only perceiving qualia, but also knowing we perceive that qualia, and knowing we know we perceive the qualia, and so on a so forth, upwards of four or five levels, after which it all kind of falls apart. I think this model of introspection is useful in attempting to understand James' construction of The Turn of the Screw.

The only thing I remember from my first encounter with this book, which was back in my sophomore year of college, I think, is the quote from Cymbeline. My English professor harped on this for quite a while. I don't remember why. And I haven't read Cymbeline so I have absolutely nothing to contribute on that front. Other than that, like most of college, it's all kind of a blur. I remember more about the wood-paneling of the seminar room than I do about Mrs. Dalloway.

Criticism anymore is hard for me to swallow. Not that it ever was "easy" to read or understand. But there's something much more accessible and honest in the pre-theoretical criticism of Edmund Wilson or Lionel Trilling, or even Samuel Johnson for that matter, than there is in, say, the Freudians or the post-structuralists who all seem to write criticism for the sake of criticism as opposed to writing criticism for the sake of the reader. So much of what passes for "literary criticism" embraces that technical jargonistic gobbledy-gook of the theoretical sciences that it's entirely unreadable by anyone outside of the handful of academicians who have read each other's papers. The entire enterprise smacks of career advancement chicanery.

I used to think Wordsworth was full of shit. "Though nothing can bring back the hour / Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower; / We will grieve not, rather find / Strength in what remains behind." Strength? In what remains behind? In nostalgia? You gotta be kidding me!

Lauren, Lauren, you pesky, saucy minx. I think you may have lied to me, but I can't prove it. Tisk, tisk.

Did you know they've made a movie out of this? Despite the typical promotional histrionics, it looks like it could be decent, though I'm not sure what snowboarding has to do with anything. (And I just looked over Tougaw's blog and found out these last two sentences were completely redundant. My apologies. I'm a total rip-off artist.)

Here's my review of a blog called Neurons Firing. I guess it's meant to be for something like the on-line version of Learning or Teacher magazine or any publication whose readers are in the educational field. As many of our fellow students are themselves educators, I thought this would be a particularly relevant blog to review and get feedback on. Thanks y'all.

Some thoughts on Chaya B. Gopin's entry on the (mis-) labeling of patients.

It's not fair. No one should be able to write the way Keats wrote before the age of fifty. The guy died at what, 26?, having secured for himself a place in the upper echelon of the Western literary canon while I, at 28, have nothing to show for my creative life but a handful of ephemera and some half-baked ideas about literature. How is it possible for anyone to write like this while he was still so young?

Hopefully this reads better than the draft. Thank you all for your helpful feedback.