THIS IS MARY KATE POSTING A NEW COMMENT (I am currently logged on under a different email account).
In class, we pinned Freud against Plato and discussed whether or not emotion should be incorporated into literature. On one hand, Freud argued that authors should indulge in emotion. Plato, on the other hand, argues that they should ignore emotion and be rational in literature in order to explain "truth." While I agree that one purpose of literature should be to generate some sort of truth about the world, I cannot imagine what literature that is void of emotion would even look like. Is this even possible? Instead, what about using logic and reason to channel out emotions to create something constructive that leads to truth? Analyzing our own emotions could possible help us to understand truths about the world. This should not be avoided in my opinion.
2 comments:
I agree that you need emotion to make something literature. When we listed qualities of literature in class, my group valued exploring the human experience most highly. Humans are basicly emotional creatures, so how do you study people while ignoring their feelings? Perhaps Plato was just responding to authors of his time who dealt too much with emotion. There were plays like Media and Oedipus that talked about what happened when people followed their emotions too much. Then, there were plays like Lysistrata that made a satire of emotions. Also, in this period, the best works were supposed to move the audience to Catharsis, a clensing of emotions. I don't think these were negative works of literature. They did emphasize emotions and Plato was probably trying to bring literature back to the middle ground, but as we have seen again and again, when someone responds to a certain trend, they tend to swing all the way to the other end of the spectrum.
I believe this speaks just as much to the question of objectivity. Just as one can never escape subjectivity, (for who indeed has anything to judge from but their personal experience?) i think Freud would argue that, not only SHOULD we write from emotion, but that it is the inescapable motivation that fuels the creation of things. In Plato's "Timaeus," the sort of revised ancient creation myth--not Zeus and all the gods, but one concerning what was called a "demiurge"...ANYWAY--he describes his belief of 3 centers of motivation: the head being the rational drive, the stomach area being the visceral needs, and the genitals as centers of passion motivation. In a perfect Platonic society, all would use their rational centers to absolutely squelch the more base desires of passion and corporeal desire. This shows, i believe, that Plato's idea of rational thought is a REactive process, and the desire felt in the other two centers are PROactive processes. It is an opposition of desire with temperance/prohibition, where desire necessarily precedes.
In order for an author to create an original idea or work, I think it requires a passion and human desire, whereas it is the job of the critic to oppose that original idea with rational thought. (The critic does not escape, though, for if s/he has an original argument within her/his criticism, there is the "irrational" desire fueling that.
Whether or not a work is "good," if it is original, the irrational nature of the emotions motivates its creation, and in so doing proves Freud (at least on this point, and using Platonic terms) correct.
Kyle
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