Justification

The first thing a writer learns is that you don’t write to teach so much as you write to discover. As someone who doesn’t keep a journal on a regular basis, a jumble of thoughts, ideas, and phrases live inside me with no escape route. Nor do they have structure. They’re more like a colorful splash of pick-up sticks—a childhood game of patience and coordination. Remember? You gathered a group of multi-colored, pointed sticks into your fist, dropped them, and then studied that random mess, looking for your first strategic move—finding and removing a pick-up stick without disturbing the pile. It’s a search for organization amidst the chaos. The rules for pick-up sticks vary; my rules included a “helper” stick whose the pointy end was able to poke into tiny crevices that my finger, as small as it was, was unable to reach. I’m hoping that this blog becomes my navigation system.

My postings, for the most part, were small tidbits picked up throughout the semester—ideas posted to the blog to keep for future reference. I still think there’s a critical theory behind internet slang, BTW, but I’ve decided it might work better under New Historicism than my original idea of Marxism or Structuralism. That’s the whole point of this blog, though: pulling ideas out of my untidy heap of pick-up sticks and arranging them just so.

OMG! There were so many options to choose from each week, that I wish I hadn’t been lazy about documenting them. Instead of pulling a stick out of the pile and blogging it into an individual working theory, I dumped a new pile of sticks on top of the old, and created such a hazardous mess that I began skipping ideas. And then felt bad, because what I’ve left out were phenomenal ideas. I sat down to write about Deconstruction and Cougar Town, and while my scribbled notes mentioned “defamiliarization”—a concept that might have “kicked ass!” with the episode mentioned in the blog—my focus became The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. I certainly hadn’t expected that. Oh well! The best laid plans…

Writers search for their audience. “Who do I want to read this?” and “Who actually will read this?” These questions require serious thought; the proper audience determines everything, including plot formation, diction, themes and theses. The untrained writer struggles with a focus. Sometimes it’s not enough to know who will read your text, and “Why will they read this?” becomes a third question that demands to be answered. Literary criticism guides the writer towards these answers. C. S. Lewis may have intended his audience to be young Christians seeking guidance during hard times (England during World War II runs through the background of several stories), yet everyone enjoyed reading them because they were a great adventure.

Before this class, I did not recognize “Why will they read this?” as an important question, but as I negotiate my few posted blogs, I’m beginning to realize that this focus deserves as much thought as the original questions. Literary criticism colors your pick-up sticks. Marxist theories are green; New Criticism’s are blue; reader-oriented critics are red; psychoanalytical theories are yellow; and my blog, the “helper” stick, is black (to avoid confusion!).  Eventually, my blog will pull enough sticks from the pile that I will be able to sort them under different tabs, with each tab answering to a different “Why?” My ideas on the heroine’s quest might fall under the psychoanalytical theory tab—not because it’s where I think it belongs, nor because it’s where people who want to read this will expect it to be (Some might think it feminist. It is, but not exclusively so.), but because those who follow that thread are looking for me, the author, to lead them there. This “Blog Justification” follows that idea. Why will you read this? Because it helps my blog make sense. Why will you read my blog? Because it will help literary theory make sense.