GREAT STUFF ABOUT LITERATURE/ART/READING–(3)

August 17, 2015
EDUCATION AND LEARNING, READING
2 Comments

from Art and Reality by Joyce Cary (1958; 1961)

Sympathy is essential to the reader and writer. By sympathy the reader can obtain from the created world of art a knowledge of truth, of the real world, with exactly the same sense of illumination as if he had discovered it by force of intuition. So the reader’s process of creative discovery follows the same course as the writer’s.

The reader is often aware of learning more about the world from a book than he gets from actual experience,

not only because in the book he is prepared to find significance in events that mean nothing in life, but because those events in the book are related to each other in a coherent valuation which sets them in ordered relation of importance, and this can reveal to him in what had seemed the mere confusion of his daily affairs new orders of meaning … created by the author … with truth in context … showing motive and morality.

In summary:

PRIMITIVE RESPONSE [innate feelings] + EDUCATION [conceptual/symbolic]

AND

INTUITION [the recognition of the objective real: seeing what’s there]

PLUS REFLECTION, then EXPRESSION: ART

Once more: Art is the MEANS by which we can express ourselves in forms of meaning and communicate these meanings to others. It is the only means by which we can convey both FACTS and FEELINGS about the fact.

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GREAT STUFF ABOUT LITERATURE/ART/READING–(2)

August 10, 2015
AUTHORS, EDUCATION AND LEARNING, READING
2 Comments

from Art and Reality by Joyce Cary (1958; 1961)

What happens in reading?

The reader is receptive only in a special sense. What a reader has in front of him is simply a collection of marks on paper, inert and meaningless in themselves. They are incapable on their own account of giving him anything. Reading is a creative art…. The meaning received is created by the imagination from the symbols, and that imagination must first be educated . . . in the use and meaning of a symbolic system….

Without education, it is not possible for a man even to appreciate any art. For education does not give only knowledge but taste; it qualifies the feelings as well as the judgment. It creates the sensibility, which is a compound of feeling and judgment.

We judge the value of the work finally by its revelation of a moral real. The power and quality of the artist’s craft is in the force and authority of his revelation. His subconscious is creating or reconstructing from the symbols before him the whole emotional content of the work; his reflective judgment is all the time recording flaws of expression, failures of emphasis, loose joints and weak transitions . . . some part . . . ready to notice an error of fact, even when the error does not destroy the continuity of the emotional experience.

The mind, in short, by education, has acquired a complex formal character which has all the spontaneity of primitive emotional make-up. The feelings are charged with ideas and the ideas with feeling, and reflection can proceed without conscious thought.

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GREAT STUFF ABOUT LITERATURE/ART/READING–(1)

August 4, 2015
AUTHORS, READING, WRITING PHILOSOPHY
1 Comment

from Art and Reality by Joyce Cary (1958; 1961)

ART is the MEANS

by which we can express ourselves in forms of meaning and communicate these meanings to others.  It is the only means by which we can convey both FACTS and FEELINGS about the fact.

Truth in art can be checked with an objective reality, by correspondence with the real. All the scenes, all the events, and all the characters must contribute to the total effect, the total meaning of the work. The reader must not be confused by side issues.

Men live so entirely by feeling that reason has extremely small power over even our most intelligent geniuses.

The most important part of man’s existence, that part where he most truly lives and is aware of living, lies entirely within the domain of personal feeling.

Reason has very little power in conflict with any strong emotion, any powerful symbol [like a flag, the mere name of a country . . . or words like “freedom”].

 

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THE BI-POLAR SEMICOLON

July 27, 2015
PEOPLE
7 Comments

Many writers fear the semicolon! They stay away: too difficult to understand. Too confusing. What are the rules for using it? Well, first, it has NOTHING to do with the colon (another story there).

Of late, the semicolon has had a revival of interest because of Project Semicolon/The Semicolon Project (which see). Then the meaning of the semicolon project morphed into a tattoo movement: [colon used here to explain what follows]: “A semicolon is used when an author could’ve chosen to end their sentence, but chose not to. The author is you and the sentence is your life.”

Others use the punctuation symbol to help remind themselves of struggles with mental illness–much like AA members have tattoos. Those curious ask, “What does that tattoo mean?” Struggle, survival, addiction, strength, adversity.

Imagine that a piece of punctuation [in the Greek language it represents a question mark!] has become more than the-dot-on-the-comma. It’s the talk of the town! Media publications, social media, classrooms, blogs about writing, and publications about punctuation.

Nevertheless, it’s a grammar thing/punctuation mark: IT IS A SEMI-PERIOD! A partial stop, a slow period/end stop that keeps going. It ends a sentence, yet connects within that sentence.

A. It connects when and, or, nor, but, for, so, yet, still are not used:
–I earned my pay increase; Fred is still working for his. [a full, yet slow stop]
–Our sales are a bit slow; however, they will pick up during the winter.
–Her maintenance fees overwhelmed her; then she moved out.

And a semicolon can separate, like a super-special comma, for clarity in a sentence.

B. It separates in long sentences, or sentences with many commas:
–Next year we will have offices in Winona, Mississippi; Winona, Minnesota; St. Cloud, Florida; St. Cloud, Minnesota; and in Denver.
–He recently started a new hobby, collecting model airplanes; but he still has his collections of stamps, coins, and model trains.

The semicolon isn’t really manic or depressive; it’s not bi-polar; it’s not suicidal. It is, however, a “big-people” piece of punctuation, needing to be understood. It produces a marriage of sentence parts (I kissed her on the mouth; she, in turn, slapped me.)

The humble and often-misunderstood and misused semicolon is special for readers and for writers. IT MUST NEVER INSTILL FEAR.

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