Although I barely remember high school literature, I remember “To Kill a Mockingbird”, “Huckleberry Finn”, “Catcher in the Rye”, and a few other books that are popular for high school curriculum. As I was still young I had no capacity to appreciate them, the books were just another assignment in another class, just another stepping stone towards graduation. But I had always had an innate love for literature, and a desire to create my own, and so I discovered other authors at random through culture, i.e. Nietzsche and Burroughs, Bukowski and Kerouac, among others through my reading. Yet I still did not have a clear cut driving ambition as to learning the methods by which literature was created and developed, its techniques and purposes, what stories I would see fit worth to tell, and how to go about telling them.
As an adolescent, and later as a young adult I could not be anything, or do anything that didn’t coincide with the preoccupations of being an adolescent or young adult. But I always knew that I had the desire to write, perhaps unconsciously I knew a writer is only as good as the stories he or she can tell, and the stories we tell are based on the lives that we survive, a culmination of the dares we set and win for ourselves, the disorganized mess of life that we are capable of putting together after we have learned some of life’s lessons. But one has to first live to learn, and only after learning who we are from our lives, can we then begin to know the importance and worth of the stories of others in order to clarify the telling of our own. I think this was what I was subconsciously picking up from my reading, and what kept me continuing to search through book shelves. I felt that eventually I would find something that would give me a clearer understanding of my random reading if only I kept searching.
In the past couple of years I have enhanced my desire to become more intimate with the mechanics of the novel, rather than blind stumbling upon writers, yet not knowing what they are really saying, and how they came to put their words together. I have focused my reading to books about books, how literature functions and its devices. Examples of these types of books are: How to Read Novels Like a Professor, and How to Read Literature like a Professor by Thomas C. Foster, How to Read Like a Writer by Francine Prose. I have come upon many great books in my other courses, like The Hero with a Thousand Faces and other books by Joseph Campbell. I have been introduced to books on mythology like Once and Future Myths, and Trickster Makes This World. I have also been introduced to the methods and ideas of Edward De Bono on creativity and idea generation. These books have been very helpful, and my favorite books of his are: Lateral Thinking, and Serious Creativity which is a comprehensive collection of his techniques. I have also been reading the works of Jung as well. I think an understanding of psychology is important to the understanding of literature of well, as people write books, and books are always about people.
I was led to this study as part of my degree choice, Creative Writing and Literature. I was laid off from the best job that I have ever had, even though I was miserable in what I did, and didn’t see myself moving upward and forward, except in the pay they gave me for all the tears in my muscles, the cracks in my spine, and the continuous striving to hold my sanity in check as I became just another automation going through the motions in an increasingly pointless preservation for the sole sake of surviving. When I was laid off, I was awakened to the fact that if I didn’t do something drastic, my life would probably continue within its same limited and pointless cycle. So I have now devoted myself to learning how to excavate my dream from out of my head, and on to paper.
I have taken multiple literature courses such as Mythology and Modern Life, Literary Theory as a Method of Inquiry, and Stories and Creative Leadership, as well as the American Literature I. I have learned a great deal from these courses and now I hope to be able to read and fully appreciate the books of this course through the filters of understanding that I have gained from others. I look forward to becoming introduced and familiarizing myself with the authors that have arisen since the civil war up to modern times. Hopefully through studying these authors I can become ever closer to learning how to tell my own stories that have for far too long been gestating in my head. This will not be my last literature study either. In next two semesters, which should be the last for my degree, I intend to take Shakespeare, Creative Nonfiction Advanced (I am taking the introductory level along with this class), Ideal Worlds: Utopian Literature, U.S. Multicultural Fiction, and Drafting the Novel where I will have to create a 75-100 page manuscript.
As far as being American, I think it is how well we design ourselves after being able to explore whatever interests we discover and encourage in ourselves. We have lots of freedoms, but many people take them for granted, or don’t know how to properly use them. We can be loud and obnoxious, or courteous and sophisticated, an American can be anything that they are intelligent and imaginative enough to define and create, for good or bad. It’s all in how you are able to bring it about. I think the definition of an American is the degree of which the individual has chosen to refine their expressiveness, as most Americans I believe, are an expressive people.
No comments:
Post a Comment