The Quest for the Common Good

Ok Bros,

Who matches up most with the common good?

With John Rawls' theory of justice?

You tell me. You tell each other.

Let the political discourse begin.

Post away...

President Peach

"Finding a Voice": A Reflection on Welty's Memoir

Below is my own essay in response to the assignment, though I bend the rules a bit. Instead of focusing on chapter three alone, I focus on the entire book. As you will see, I do not keep to such a strict format as I suggest for each of your body paragraphs. Regardless, I hope this is a helpful model for you:

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• Opening paragraph with some summary and thesis statement in bold/italics:

In Welty’s autobiography, One Writer's Beginnings, we learn of a woman whose passion to write was inspired by a love for family, for home (Jackson, Mississippi) and the various intricacies of life itself. From the age of two, Welty writes, she learned that “any room in our house, at any time of day, was there to read in, or to be read to” (5). By the time she was five or six, she recalls securing that sense of “hidden observer” (20) diligently monitoring and recording various subtleties of those people and things that surrounded her. She writes, “A conscious act grew out of this by the time I began to write stories: getting my distance, a prerequisite of my understanding human events, is the way I begin work” (21). Welty’s respect for the “holiness of life” (33)—in all of its ironies, juxtapositions, comedies, and tragedies—stemmed from her acute observations of the human experience through the function of memory. The insights of daily life could be best understood through memory and best described for her in words.

• First developing paragraph involving a significant memory of Welty's childhood with a key quote:

Welty's appreciation for memory as a function of writing stems from her mutual appreciation for the events of her childhood. Furthermore, Welty’s sense of freedom as a writer set to see the world and frame it through memory really seems to have developed on those long road trips (later train rides) her family took to see the father’s side of the clan in the rolling farmland of Southern Ohio and the mother’s side in the mountainous terrain of West Virginia: "It took the mountain top, it seems to me now, to give me the sensation of independence. It was as if I’d discovered something I’d never tasted before in my short life. Or rediscovered it—for I associated it with the taste of the water that came out of the well … The coldness, the far, unseen, unheard springs of what was in my mouth now, the iron strength of its flavor that drew my cheeks in, its fern-laced smell, all said mountain mountain mountain as I swallowed. Every swallow was making me a part of being here, sealing me in place, with my bare feet planted on the mountain and sprinkled with my rapturous spills. What I felt I’d come here to do was something on my own" (57).

• Second developing paragraph in which I interpret the above quote from page 57 and discuss the nature of time according to Welty:

In this way, Welty speaks of the sense of time and place that suffuses (or fills) her work and transports the reader to her vanished past. This sense of independence would stay with Welty. It was as a central piece of her history and the foundation of her identity as a woman longing to capture the world that passed by quickly from the window of a car or train. When she did begin to write in her twenties, the stories took shape from revelations she had while traveling in those summers of her youth. These revelations came through memory. Welty believed that time took on a chronology all its own in fiction; an ineffable chronology following along the “continuous thread of revelation” (69). Welty kept life from running away as she says, and learned that every “feeling waits upon its gesture” (85) particularly in regards to writing and memory, which both encapsulate transient life and hold it in one place.

• Third developing paragraph in which I continue on the theme of writing as a way to exercise memory/observation and capture life's moments in time and place:

Although Welty never physically separated herself from her region for any great period of time—she graduated from University of Wisconsin and went to graduate school at Columbia in New York City—she too wished to remain invisible: “My temperament and my instinct had told me alike that the author, who writes at his own emergency, remains and needs to remain at this private remove” (Welty 87). In other words, Welty claims that to gain a wide frame of vision and a greater perspective on the whole of things in their parts. One must be able to set them at a distance. This is especially true, according to Welty, when observing humans. Welty writes that humans change with time as a result of the inward journey where “each of us is moving, changing, with respect to others” (102). Humans therefore remain vibrant through human memory where they are kept alive and thriving.

• Fifth pargraph in all / Closing statements in which I make my conclusions about memory with Welty's help to back me up:

For Welty as for any writer, words help to hold transient life in place. Like Welty says of photography, I would propose that writing captures the transience of time by portraying those single moments when history unfolds before us in the events of everyday life. As Welty states in the final page of her memoir, "The memory is a living thing--it too is in transit. But during its moment, all that is remembered joins, and lives--the old and the young, the past and the present, the living and the dead" (104). Indeed, memory is a way to resurrect that which we thought was dead and nothing could make that which seems impermanent more permanent than writing. Indeed, "Each of us is moving, changing, with respect to others. As we discover, we remember; remembering, we discover; and most intensely do we do this when our separate journeys converge" (102). In other words, it is our inward journey that leads us through time and, when joined with the journey of someone else, it becomes the charged dramatic field of writing (Welty 102)--the ultimate exercise of memory.

The Journey for JSTOR

Bros:

Available now in the library is an internet research database called JSTOR (http://www.jstor.org/).

The goal of JSTOR is to introduce students and scholars to the wide world of literary criticism.[see footnote below] It is also ideal for modeling how to write works of literary criticism.

To familiarize yourself with how to use the system, I would like each of you to:

• print out one scholarly article chosen from the following list of articles and

• submit a one-paragraph “abstract”—a summary of a text, scientific article, document, speech, etc.—on that article to the blog or on hard copy, being sure to indicate the title of the article as well as its author.

Article List:

(you can find and print in full any one of these articles by clicking the PDF link attached to the citations below):

1.
Sonny's Bebop: Baldwin's "Blues Text" as Intracultural Critique Sonny's Bebop: Baldwin's "Blues Text" as Intracultural Critique
Tracey Sherard
African American Review, Vol. 32, No. 4 (Winter, 1998), pp. 691-705
Article Information Page of First Match PDF Export this Citation

2.
"Sonny's Blues": James Baldwin's Image of Black Community "Sonny's Blues": James Baldwin's Image of Black Community
John M. Reilly
Negro American Literature Forum, Vol. 4, No. 2 (Jul., 1970), pp. 56-60
Article Information Page of First Match PDF Export this Citation

3.
James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues": A Message in Music James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues": A Message in Music
Suzy Bernstein Goldman
Negro American Literature Forum, Vol. 8, No. 3 (Autumn, 1974), pp. 231-233
Article Information Page of First Match PDF Export this Citation

4.
Flannery O'Connor's Rage of Vision Flannery O'Connor's Rage of Vision
Claire Katz
American Literature, Vol. 46, No. 1 (Mar., 1974), pp. 54-67
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5.
Flannery O'Connor's Mothers and Daughters Flannery O'Connor's Mothers and Daughters
Louise Westling
Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 24, No. 4 (Winter, 1978), pp. 510-522
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6.
Flannery O'Connor and the Violence of Grace Flannery O'Connor and the Violence of Grace
Thelma J. Shinn
Contemporary Literature, Vol. 9, No. 1 (Winter, 1968), pp. 58-73
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7.
The Moment of Grace in the Fiction of Flannery O'Connor The Moment of Grace in the Fiction of Flannery O'Connor
Bob Dowell
College English, Vol. 27, No. 3 (Dec., 1965), pp. 235-239
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8.
Through a Glass Darkly: Visions of Integrated Community in Flannery O'Connor's "Wise Blood" Through a Glass Darkly: Visions of Integrated Community in Flannery O'Connor's "Wise Blood"
Susan Edmunds
Contemporary Literature, Vol. 37, No. 4 (Winter, 1996), pp. 559-585
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9.
Eudora Welty Eudora Welty
Granville Hicks
The English Journal, Vol. 41, No. 9 (Nov., 1952), pp. 461-468
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10.
Eudora Welty's Theory of Place and Human Relationships Eudora Welty's Theory of Place and Human Relationships
Bessie Chronaki
South Atlantic Bulletin, Vol. 43, No. 2 (May, 1978), pp. 36-44
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11.
To See Things in Their Time: The Act of Focus in Eudora Welty's Fiction To See Things in Their Time: The Act of Focus in Eudora Welty's Fiction
Lucinda H. MacKethan
American Literature, Vol. 50, No. 2 (May, 1978), pp. 258-275
Article Information Page of First Match PDF Export this Citation

You can access JSTOR from the library or from home by clicking the link to the right.

Each of you will have to register individually with an easy-to-remember personal username and password (record them in your journals so that you do not lose them).

DUE DATE: Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Please be sure to submit your article with the proper heading:

Your Name
My Name
ENG 165 / Writing the Essay
Due Date

Article Title:
Article Author:

Abstract

[footnote]
literary criticism noun
1. a written evaluation of a work of literature [syn: criticism]
2. the informed analysis and evaluation of literature