Category: McCoy Fall 2014

Throughout the majority of Meridian I had silently but distantly disliked Truman, appreciated Meridian, and couldn’t fully understand Lynne’s character.

My distaste for Truman swelled after Lynne’s rape, when he confronts Tommy Odds and asks why Odds raped his wife.

This conversation, about Odds raping Lynne, should not have been about race, and was certainly not about atoning for sins. The next couple pages make me sputter with anger, so much so that I find it difficult to develop a coherent argument without snapping the book closed and throwing it somewhere.

Continue reading “Problems with Meridian Part 1”

Chapter 4 of Moran’s Interdisciplinarity really opened my eyes to a new idea.  Upon reading, I discovered that we English majors do the exact same thing that other disciplines do; we tear apart other majors.   Continue reading “Realizing Something New”

In my last post, I expressed my surprise that by reading the fourth chapter of Interdisciplinarity, I was able to connect the books we are exploring in class to Marxist theory. A few days later, I found the entry “Marxist criticism” in The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms and must admit that I had missed something important in my last post – Marxist literary criticism has been pretty prevalent in the West since the 1940s (Murfin & Ray, 282). Had I known this, it wouldn’t have been a surprise to me at all when I was able to look at Cane and Meridian through the lens of Marxist criticism. Continue reading “Endless Theories”

Chapter 4 of Moran’s Interdisciplinarity discusses the relationship between history and literature. Upon reading this, I could not think of anything but Meridian. History has been a central theme through all of our class discussions and individual readings from start to finish in this book. Everything from the setting to the dialogue between characters is rooted in historical context, and I felt that Meridian served as a prime example of the relationship that Moran explores in this chapter of his book.   Continue reading “History as it pertains to literature”

Reading about the way Lynne copes with (or attempts to cope with) her rape reminded me directly of the story I am reading for my creative writing class, and Moran’s meditations on feminism. The men in Lynne’s life challenge her experiences and promptly dismiss them (“[Altuna Jones] looked at Lynne with pity, for she had obviously not been—in his opinion—raped”) and following the assault Lynne has sex out of obligation, grief (175). She is degraded by both the men and women in town, as the men ignore her and the women “began to curse her and to threaten her” (180).

In Cheryl Strayed’s autobiographical work, “The Love of My Life,” she documents the defeating loss and grief she felt upon the early death of her mother. Though married, she copes (or attempts to cope with) the loss by having sex with men and women she does not know and will not remember. In these encounters she experiences a separation from her body: “With them, I was not in mourning; I wasn’t even me. I was happy and sexy and impetuous and fun.” While emotionally she feels no connection to these encounters or the people she has them with, her friends and family cut her off, and in her grieving she develops an addiction to heroin.

Continue reading “Perception of Female and Male Bodies”

I think too much. My mind is constantly at work filling itself with intricate but tangled thoughts and ideas, neurons rapid-firing, and I often find it hard to keep up with myself. I think this is one of many reasons I gravitated towards the English major- because English study corrals my unruly thoughts and helps me make sense of them. Continue reading “Making Connections”

It is no secret that pieces of literature can contain pieces of history. Many times authors will insert allusions that help to set the locale of their book without explicitly stating the setting. But literature doesn’t just interact with historical events; it also interacts with historical figures, particularly past writers. Continue reading “The Psychic Struggle of Authors”

The novel at the center of our latest class discussion by Alice Walker, Meridian, is a gem of a book that I have found deeply thought-provoking as well as an overall invigorating read. The protagonist, Meridian, has been a mystery that is gradually unfolding as I reach the end. Her values and morals as a Civil Rights Worker in the southern region of the USA fit smoothly into her station, and they are relatively clear to the reader, as Meridian is an astounding thinker. It is when she has a fleeting conversation with her close college friend, Anne-Marion, that we are introduced to Meridian’s perspective on Socialist and Communist theories, which have been significantly contributed to by the ideas of Karl Marx. Continue reading “Marxism in Literature”

While reading Chapter 4 of Moran’s Interdisciplinarity (which basically said the same thing over and over again in the thirty pages), I noticed that the text kept bringing up the idea that although History and English had separated from each other as disciplines, historians drew “on ‘soft’ sources such as literary tests, autobiographies…as well as ‘hard’ sources such as official government documents, state papers and statistical data” (Moran, 111).  Why does this matter, you might ask? Well, this proves, to me at least, that no matter how rigidly separated any of the disciplines are, they still draw on aspects of each other to essentially “back-up” the claims being made.  So if English texts are so important to make connections to other disciplines, why does it still get the bad reputation?  I guess I will never know, but the question will continue to puzzle me throughout the semester.