The Touch of the Real

I dont think I understood any point out of the first 7-8 pages of Touch of the Real, it got me really confused (probably if I had read Clifford Geertz "Thick Description" it would have made the reading easier), but after those pages it has become considerably more comprehensible. There are two things, which I was particularly interested about.

Firstly a part from p. 30 that says "..there were other techniques and other texts, outside the conventional boundaries of the literary, that possessed a nearly comperable power.The greatest challange lay not simply in exploring these other texts...but in making the literary and the nonliterary seem to be each other thick description." It surey happens with film texts as well and I like the way he puts it; "making" each others thick description, because it seems to emphasize that sometimes this proccess is not natural.

Secondly, when the author talks about how literature gives an "athmospheric Historism" (I think the expression is really felicitous) he says it is a "representation of reality", but with the examples he makes he seems to emhasize that the literary writings portray their era, their reality, it seems to suggest that they reflect the historty in which the texts have been created. I do agree that in many cases this is true and most history books gives an athmospheric Historism of their age, but literary and its fantasy can do more than that. For example Mika Waltari is a finish novelist and in his book The Egyptian (Sinuhe egyptiläinen) he gives an incredibly true-to-age "athmospheric Historisim that has no direct connection to his life experience.

In all honestly, I was a bit confused about this piece, it often felt quite woolly in its attempt toput across some of its points. For example:

'If you are pumping up your bicycle tires because you are preparing to go for a bike ride, a thick description of your pumping requires a reference to your intended ride, whether that ride occurs or not; if, on the oter hand, you are pumping up your bicycle tires because you want to strengthen the muscles of your arms so that the bullies will no longer kick sand at you at he beach, the thick description of your pumping would differ accordingly'.

This little relation to literature left we detached from the piece. Additionally though, in the later stages of the text, mentions of Homer, Dante, Joyce, Madam Bovary- all texts that I haven't read- made it very context specific, and again I was left confused.

I did, however, appreciate ideas such as anthropology and literary criticism 'drawing upon their particular strengths, strengths that depended at least as much upon the differences between their characteristic texts as upo their surprising similarities.'
The contrast and comparison- the concept of a un-straight-forward correlation- was particularly interesting.

Why Angel of Death?

I found the reading quite straightforward as well as interesting. The example of Snow White resembles a lot to Freudian interretation of the story of Oedipus, but I think it is meant to be similar. I think the author draws the conlusion (if I nderstod it well) that there are two kinds of women representation in patriarchal writing: the active, loud (writing/speaking) monster, who has authority, therefore she i masculine and the passive, silent angel, who does not have authority, thus she is feminine. I only did not get the part about the how women become th "Angel of Death". and how or why they "kill themselves into art in order to appeal man". I do not see how the image of death comming into picture, though I have read page 14 through more times, which I think sort of explains it, but it did not explain it to me clearly enough.

Snow White

I enjoyed the reading and thought it was quite interesting. I was especially intrigued by the analysis of Snow White. The only thing that confused me was although it was clear that the angel and monster masks were prevalent in the fairytale, I couldn't really understand exactly why it was used as an example. I didn't draw any conclusions from the analysis maybe due to the language of the text, which was often quite complex or the fact that I'm a little bit dense.