Parmasad- One Brave Little Cookie and SPN’s for Everyone!

While reading Parmasad, I thought about tone and voice. Many of the students I tutor value what they call "objective writing", and many pride themselves on the ability to write for a nameless audience. I tell these same students that even though it's academic writing, it's still writing, and writing should never be boring (a.k.a. voiceless). Good intentions aside, writing to the god of the nameless usually leads to a nameless tone in the writing, and there's no "there" there.

In writing a scholarly personal narrative (or a SPN), one injects personal experience into a larger academic conversation. Thus, to "signify" in a SPN, a writer need not adhere to an autobiographical format, because focusing on specific moments in time as they relate to bigger issues can be just as impactful, (Nash 30). Parmasad displays the effectiveness of SPNs when writing of the cultural disconnect she experienced while growing up as an Indian in Trinidad. Putting moments of her life under the microscope, Parmasad analyzes the importance of writing: "this remarkable exclusion, this invisibility, this feeling of voicelessness filled me with a maddening need to use my writing not as a shield but as a weapon to contest the historical marginalization of a whole people and the negation of my experiences" (135). From her viewpoint, writing is a tool to challenge the cultural limits and bring others to a higher level of understanding. 

In my estimation, an SPN is essential to academia because a properly executed SPN will delve into the "raw marrow" of the writer's life, while bringing the validity of the experience to the forefront of a larger framework, (Nash 26). Developing confidence in writing often goes hand in hand with constructing a narrative, as writers glean key concepts after a re-telling of their experiences. Writing narratives can never be counterproductive, as I'm of the mindset that every high school student should write an SPN, and then again as an undergrad, and then again times again. Much like Nash's idolization of Kimble, the fugitive who reinvents his story in weekly episodic arcs, all writers should endeavor to find their ever-evolving voice to establish meaning (34-35).

Art can be lost if it cannot be understood. An important aspect in writing involves connections and how they're made. To sustain a connection, the language must be effective, and what better use of language as a learning tool utilizing your own voice? As an undergrad, many students are required to write a narrative essay, with no research or larger connection necessary. In contrast, writing an SPN is similar to cutting out a part of oneself, laying it across a table, and magnifying the meaning to fit a larger context. Both types of writing have a purpose, but at differing points in an academic career, an SPN is more purposeful. In fact, several drafts into either, new voice and meaning can be found..

Works Cited

Nash, J, Robert. "What is scholarly personal narrative writing?" Liberating Scholarly Writing. New York: Teachers College Press, 2004. Web. 

Tradition

Tradition. It is a word that has many different meanings, as plenty of words tend to do. For writers, it means repetition, boredom. To T.S. Eliot and other poets of his era, tradition meant a certain quality of writing. Specifically, tradition came into play when comparing modern poets with Romantics and Victorians. Romantics and Victorians influenced writers for generations to come.

The writing styles of the Romantics and Victorians have their differences and their points of agreement. While the Romantic writer fancied nature and created poems with ethereal backdrops, the Victorian writer had a more modern standpoint and wrote more realistically about nature and issues that interested them. This is not to say that either of the the writers had more imagination than the other, but they merely used it in ways that suited them. Poets of the 20th century seemed to have taken both of these styles and merged them, to create poems that are full of modern sentiment, but romantically spoken.

English writer T.E. Hulme would have disagreed because he was a man who longed for writers to lose their "romantic view[s] which drag in the infinite," (Greenblatt et al, 2006). He believed that Romantic poems were always "moaning or whining about something or other [...and true romance and...] beauty may be a small, dry thing," (Greenblatt et al, 2006). Many of T.S. Eliot's works echo this sentiment, such as "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock". In this poem, Eliot writes of the mundane but presents it in such light that it takes on a life of it's own: "Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets/ the muttering retreats/ of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels/ and sawdust restaurants with oyster shells" (Greenblatt et al, 2006).

Eliot's view of traditionalism stemmed from his respect for Hulme and his base of literary history. He believed that in order to be a great writer, one had to study about literature. By learning different styles and reading about different stories, a writer would know better about how to develop their own style; "This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his contemporaneity," (Greenblatt et al, 2006)".

References:

Greenblatt, et al. [Eds]. (2006). The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Romantic Period Through the Twentieth Century [vol. 2] (8th ed.). New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Feminism Through the Eyes of Woolf and Loy

Feminism was never better defined than it was by two women: Virginia Woolf and Mina Loy. Both women wanted more freedom and independence for women during a time when women were still held back by the confines of society. However, both women differed in opinion on the definition of feminism and how said independence should be obtained.

Virginia Woolf defines feminism as a woman that could secure financial means for herself, effectively gaining a space for herself, or, as the title of her famous essay suggests, "A Room of One's Own", (Greenblatt et al, 2006). In her collective narrative, she tries to come to terms with how it would be possible for a woman to be financially independent, because women could not own property and were considered property themselves.

Mina Loy believes that woman should not only have their own money and place to live, but that they should own the entire world. She wanted women to "be brave and deny at the outset--that pathetic clap-trap war cry woman is the equal of man---she is not!" (Greenblatt et al, 2006). To Loy, women and men are equal; women are above men and should shove their way to the top.

Woolf asserts her standpoint quietly, while Loy presents her ideas with passionate abandon. Loy seems almost angry at times during her manifesto, and perhaps she has a right to be. Woolf may have been angry internally, but her writing style is objective, if not a bit depressed.

The sometimes tedious diction of Woolf made it hard to follow sometimes. It is as if she wrote down her thoughts themselves, and as thoughts do, her sentences became run-on sentences that had many different avenues for the reader to follow. Loy's style made it a bit easier to read, because she was so direct. There was no mistaking her views, or her disdain for all men.

One thing that both of the writers seemed to agree on was the "effect of tradition and of the lack of tradition upon the mind of a writer," (Greenblatt et al, 2006).

References:

Greenblatt, et al. [Eds]. (2006). The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Romantic

Period Through the Twentieth Century [vol. 2] (8th ed.). New York,

NY: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.