| [ |
mood |
| |
 tired |
] |
The recital is finally over, and the play will be done Friday night. Meanwhile, I have a multitude of papers to write before next Friday, and I am making writing them the night before into an art. Where has my motivation fled?
My application to VT is in and I just saw that the posting was taken off their employment website today, so hopefully I will know with certainty what I am doing after May by the end of this month, and the increased hope that I know that I probably have a job is not at all helping my end of semester senioritis. I have finally admitted defeat, though, in one regard- I've been flat out the past four weeks, and SURPRISE, have not had time to write my semester-long term paper, so I have asked for a grade of "I" in my independent study for a few weeks post-graduation. That will not be a fun time, but it'll be a helluva lot better than trying to write it during finals week. This is what I get for trying to be all things to all people.
Since I'm breaking from this paper I'm writing for the Burke seminar, I'm going to mind-dump here on a thought I just had. Reading Kenneth Burke, an influential literary critic and "logology" scholar is strongly akin to beating one's head against the wall because the man wrote without completing an undergraduate degree, cites obscure literature, and BUNNY TRAILS OMFG all the time in his writing. Beyond that, his later books assume you are familiar with the rest of his body of work, making unpacking him extremely difficult. On the other hand, he makes a number of points about language that have really struck me. In particular is the notion that it will SEEM natural for a phenomenon to happen in language that happens in reality. Example: In the Rhetoric of Religion, Burke discussions the conversion of a word, "pondus" in the latin of Augustine's Confessions. Pondus essentially means weight, and Augustine first uses weight in the conventional way- to imply the weight of sin, lust, etc. The word has negative implications. Later in the text, Augustine uses weight to imply the "weight" of the Holy Spirit allowing a person to "ascend", or the weight of a movement upward. I'm not explaining this very well, but weight begins to emphasize lightness and take on the qualities of ascenscion by weight, like oil, a "heavier" liquid, floating on water. In essence, the meaning of the word is converted in the Augustine text.
The point Burke makes is that the conversion of "pondus" makes sense because Augustine is writing about his conversion experience to Christianity. The conversion in his life, in effect the changing of his thinking, is reflected in the change in his use of a word. The whole of the Rhetoric of Religion is dedicated to examining similar ways in which Theological terms are analogous to the way people use language. Much of it is extremely psychological- one of the most important notions that Burke introduces is the "God term," what is, in essence, a summation of a huge body of ideas into a word that can convey all of them at once.
This paper that I'm writing focuses on the use of Nature by scientific atheists as the "New God". I think what I'm trying to argue is that if one is going to use science, which rarely uses transcendent terms beyond the physical realm, to disprove God, which as a concept by nature transcends physical phenomena, then it is necessary to find a hierarchically equivalent term to "God" of theology. So, "Nature" in science is as "God" to theology. But the elevation of nature in this way begins to bestow, linguistically, new qualities to Nature, the most significant being personification- in this way, Nature by necessity of the argument, becomes like God. Hopefully this will make more sense before 7:00 A.M. tomorrow. Jesus God I need to graduate.
|
jubilant
contemplative