Do you read just for the sake of reading?
Like there's a book, and it's boring, and you're not learning anything from it, you're not getting anything out of it, and yet you just want to finish it anyway? *sidelong glance at On the Road, The Prince, War and Peace, Sun Tzu's The Art of War* yeah, they're supposed to be GREAT books, so insightful and brilliant, yada yada yada. But you haven't the faintest idea WHY you're reading them? I mean, realistically, when am I EVER going to have my own principality? Yeah, I know I joke about world domination... but my plans rarely come to fruition. :( ;)
Re: Do you read just for the sake of reading?
Quote:
Originally posted by fayefaye
Like there's a book, and it's boring, and you're not learning anything from it, you're not getting anything out of it, and yet you just want to finish it anyway? *sidelong glance at On the Road, The Prince, War and Peace, Sun Tzu's The Art of War* yeah, they're supposed to be GREAT books, so insightful and brilliant, yada yada yada. But you haven't the faintest idea WHY you're reading them? I mean, realistically, when am I EVER going to have my own principality? Yeah, I know I joke about world domination... but my plans rarely come to fruition. :( ;)
Well, if you aren't getting anything out of a book (i.e. no fun, no wisdom, no homework done), my advise is that you quit reading it.
Displacement & the writing and reading of fiction
I find what Mono said very exciting. I want to get a handle on Freudian displacement and see if I can put some ideas together.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mono
A few days ago, in a fairly more in-depth college psychology class, we had a long discussion regarding Sigmund Freud's seven defense mechanisms (repression, denial, projection, displacement, rationalization, sublimation, reaction formation), but went greatly in detail of displacement. Displacement defines as, for example, getting angry with a younger sibling, and venting on something entirely unrelated; but this unrelated 'thing' does not necessarily have to prove as a living thing - also an object.
As I admit myself of doing it, do any of you also, while angry, try to distract your minds with reading a book? I usually prefer poetry, which quickly seems to calm my mind from any turmoil, but I never noticed this tendency of mine until hearing this lecture; I read incessantly, regardless, but sometimes find reading a decent way of displacing any anger or frustration.
Anyway, I found it interesting. Does anyone else know what I mean
I was reminded of something I read years ago, in the Biblical Prophet Ezekiel.
My NIV Student Bible entitles Chapter 4 as "Siege of Jerusalem Symbolized"
Quote:
Originally Posted by God commands Ezekiel
Take a clay tablet, put it in front of you and draw the city of Jerusalem on it. Then lay siege to it: Erect siege works against it, build a ramp up to it, set up camps against it and put battering rams around it. Then take an iron pan, place it as an iron wall between you and the city and turn your face toward it. It will be under siege, and you shall besiege it. This will be a sign to the House of Israel.
[url]http://www.alexandria-press.com/online/online11_failing_to_go_under.htm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Writing and Displacement
Writing something down provides a displacement from the anxiety, the
boredom or the confusion of the moment, and therefore, we believe, cannot have any direct relation to its lived reality. We would like our minds calm
and clear like the written thing but imagine it can never be. Yet this common
sense acceptance is contradicted on a daily basis. Responding to the need for clarity, shorthand journalistic cliché has infested our inner lives. We
understand our experience by attaching certain fashionable words to it.
Generally, this means we are unable to have respect for uniqueness of
experience because it is summed up, packaged, placed within the fashionable
word or phrase; anything else is out of order; separate from reality; it is
literary. The private self is thereby subsumed in limited, stylised words and
phrases developed and exploited by popular commentators who also happen to be the ones recommending fiction covering the ground of popular
commentators and journalists (Tom Wolfe being the favoured example).
http://annotatedtimes.blogrunner.com...C619A08781246/
Quote:
Originally Posted by The Pre-Freudian Character
By the 1950's, here and in Western Europe, it was making less and less
sense to fashion the idiosyncratic, original inner and outer lives of a
character in a novel. His or her behavior was already accounted for by
the universal realities of id, ego, superego, not to mention the forces of
repression, displacement and neurosis.
Thus the postwar rise of the nouveau romance, with its absence of character, and of the postmodern and experimental novels, with their many strategies -- self-annulling irony, deliberate cartoonishness, montage-like ''cutting'' -- for releasing fiction from its dependence on character. For all the rich work published after the war, there's barely a fictional figure that
has the memorableness of a Gatsby, a Nick Adams, a Baron Charlus, a Leopold Bloom, a Settembrini. And that's leaving aside the magnificent 19th century, when authors plumbed the depths of the human mind with something on the order of clairvoyance. Of course, before that,
there was Shakespeare. And Cervantes.
And Dante. And . . . It seems that the further back you go in time, away from Freud, the deeper the psychological portraits you encounter in literary art. Nowadays, often even the most accomplished novels offer characters
that are little more than flat, ghostly reflections of characters. The author's
voice, or self-consciousness about voice, substitutes mere eccentricity for
an imaginative surrender to another life.
http://www.usask.ca/english/frank/psycrit.htm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Psychoanalytic Criticism
The literal surface of a work is sometimes spoken of as its "manifest
content" and treated as a "manifest dream" or "dream story" would be treated by a Freudian analyst. Just as the analyst tries to figure out the "dream thought" behind the dream story--that is, the latent or hidden content of the manifest dream--so the psychoanalytic literary critic tries to expose the latent, underlying content of a work. Freud used the words condensation and displacement to explain two of the mental processes whereby the mind disguises its wishes and fears in dream stories. In condensation several thoughts or persons may be condensed into a single manifestation or image in a dream story; in displacement, an anxiety, a wish, or a person may be displaced onto the image of another, with which or whom it is loosely connected through a string of associations that only an analyst can untangle. Psychoanalytic critics treat metaphors as if they were dream
condensations; they treat metonyms--figures of speech based on
extremely loose, arbitrary associations--as if they were dream displacements. Thus figurative literary language in general is treated as something that evolves as the writer's conscious mind resists what the unconscious tells it to picture or describe. A symbol is, in Daniel Weiss's words, "a meaningful concealment of truth as the truth promises to emerge as some frightening or forbidden idea"
http://www.csun.edu/CommunicationStu...97s/gloss.html
Is the converse of that last sentence useful?
Is truth a meaningful concealment of symbol?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Condensation, displacement, and substitution
Burke critiques Freud's notion of condensation, displacement, and
substitution. According to Freud:
It will perhaps not be though too rash to suppose that the impulses arising
from the instincts do not belong to the type of bound (italicized) nervous
processes but of free mobile (italicized) processes which press towards discharge. The best part of what we know of these processes is derived
from our study of the dream-work. We there discovered that the processes in the unconscious systems were fundamentally different from those in
the preconcious(or conscious) systems. In the unconscious, cathexes can easily be completely transferred, displaced, and condensed. Such treatment, however, could produce only invalid results if it were applied to prconscious material; and this accounts for familiar pecularities exhibited by manifest
dreams after the preconscious residues of the preceding day have been worked over in accordance with the laws operating in the unconscious" (Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 1961, pps.
40-41).
Burke suggests, "Freud laid great stress upon the two processes of "condensation" and "displacement." His observations are well taken. But, since we are here using the term "symbolism" in a wider sense,
we might remind ourselves that the processes of "condensation" and
"displacement" are not confined merely to the symbolism of dreams and neuroses, but are also as aspect of normal symbol systems. A fundamental resource "natural" to symbolism is substitution (italicized). Substitution is quite a rational resource of symbolism. Yet it is but a more genral aspect of what Freud meant by "displacement" (which is a confused kind of substitution" (Reader, 1997, p. 130).
http://www.colorado.edu/English/ENGL2012
Klages/freud.html
Quote:
Originally Posted by Forbidden Dreams
Dreams use two main mechanisms to disguise forbidden wishes: CONDENSATION and DISPLACEMENT. Condensation is when a whole set of images is packed into a single image or statement, when a complex meaning is condensed into a simpler one. Condensation corresponds to METAPHOR in language, where one thing is condensed into another. "Love is a rose,
and you'd better not pick it"--this metaphor condenses all the qualities of
a rose, including smell and thorns, into a single image. Displacement is where
the meaning of one image or symbol gets pushed onto something associated with it, which then displaces the original image. Displacement corresponds to the mechanism of METONYMY in language, where one thing is replaced by something corresponding to it. An example of metonymy is when you evoke an image of a whole thing by naming a part of it--when you say "the crown" when you mean the king or royalty, for example, or you say "twenty sails" when you mean twenty ships. You displace the idea of the whole thing onto a part associated with that thing. You might think of condensation and metaphor as being like Saussure's syntagmatic relations, which
happen in a chain (x is y is z), and displacement and metonymy being like
Saussure's associative relations.
Ezekiel's Tablet & Steinbeck's Turtle
Consider how Steinbeck uses the symbol of a turtle in a similar fashion:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Sparknotes on Grapes of Wrath
Chapter Three presents a symbolic depiction of the farmers’ plights in the turtle that struggles to cross the road. Both chapters share a particularly dark vision of the world. As the relentless weather of Chapter One and the mean-spirited driver of Chapter Three represent, the universe is full of obstacles that fill life with hardship and danger. Like the turtle that trudges across the road, the Joad family will be called upon, time and again, to fight the malicious forces—drought, industry, human jealousy and fear—that seek to overturn it.
