This week, our group met to discuss some questions of the course Prof. Middlebrook offered to us, we recorded our session and the content of this post comes from the transcription of that discussion.

In response to the first prompt:

The self in Montaigne is imagined physically. “I am the matter of this book”. He portrays the self rigidly, it is about only the self whereas “Speaking in Tongues” looks towards a collective.

“You” in “Speaking in Tongues” is directed towards the full group of people she addresses, third world women of color, and this perhaps is an experimentation of the expression of the self. “You” being vague sets up a binary of this vague “you” and then the full group she is addressing. When you consider who is the audience, Montaigne is very self aware in addressing the reader, and refers to the audience member as the reader not “the readers”. Anzaldua includes phrases like “hermanas” in her letter, more proof as a letter to a collective.

In Oscar Wao, the self is imagined very oddly. Some of us thought that until Yunior started including his own story in the novel that it was hard to place the narrator’s place in the cosmos of the story. In the novel it is most definitely written about a collective, but is it addressed to a certain reader? The I that the novel presents writes is Yunior and he writes himself into this collective the story is about, although within the story itself, he is only the ex boyfriend. Something interesting about the description of body in the text, people being over sexualized, everybody’s body inhibits or gives them bodily freedom. The multiple voices in different registers adds to the text tremendously on deciding where we place the narrator in the text and in Oscar Wao the different voices in place highlight one another, everybody’s story in the book brings to light many areas of the narrator’s life for example.

In response to the second prompt:

The purpose of the letter, the person that will receive of a letter, written specially between two people, in thinking of these elements of “Speaking in Tongues” the letter form focuses more on the relationship she has with other women of color that write, drawing from a collective “I”. Whereas Montaigne writes for himself and is very rooted in the “I” and that work being much more presented in a personal essay form. We brought in Susan Stewart’s purpose of writing, to outcast darkness. When we apply Stewart’s thinking to these texts, the purpose, such as Anzaldua’s social comment for her particular demographic that she speaks about and for, it doesn’t matter who reads a text because the text is outcasting darkness just by it being written, essentially a kind of death of the author that Barthe speaks of.

Oscar Wao brings up an interesting contrast to these other texts because of the form being a novel. The novel being traditionally more realistic, capturing something that’s real, which Oscar Wao bends that tradition quite a bit. Novel also has size, a right amount of space to develop the aspects of the “real” and how we may think about the “real”. The novel is bounded very concretely and even that speaks to how the I must be portrayed in novels. The footnotes in Oscar Wao breaks the boundaries of the idea of space. The speaker mentions such far boundaries for subject’ dominicans, family members, Oscar, the speak himself, etc. and is still able to accomplish its meaning through the availability of the novel and how Diaz uses the form.

The multiple languages used in the text adds to the identity of all the characters and the I represented. The power of word, language and self expression, thinking about how each language has shortcomings in being able to express one’s true feelings, so in Oscar Wao, using two languages as a way to better communicate the speaker’s point.

When prof. Middlebrook brought up in our class the idea of languages budding up against one another and the lack of languages conveying truth. This brought us back to the tower of babel, all of us only being able to approximate feeling with language. It is easier to identify with an individual than it is with a plural and this adds so much to the meaning of these texts being written in the form they are. It is only while being placed in front of others that we are liberated to a self, gaining perspective. Our question would be for Prof. Middlebrook in asking what exactly does this analogy she brought up mean?

We closed with a discussion about Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” in speaking on the perfume he describes in the room. The perfume being representative of a dispersed self. Walt Whitman being a rugged person himself, he conveys a transcendentalism but also conveys about himself, this rugged individualism speaking of “everything is viewed through me”.

Transcribed by: Paige

Group: Miguel, Sam, Ava, Paige