Percy Handout

CRTW 201

Dr. Fike

YOU MUST HAVE PERCY'S ESSAY TO PARTICIPATE TODAY. IF YOU DO NOT, PLEASE GO GET A COPY AT THE LIBRARY. YOU MAY REJOIN THE DISCUSSION IN PROGRESS.

OPEN-BOOK QUIZ ON PERCY, NOSICH, AND WA: you must have Percy's text with you in order to take the quiz. 15 minutes + 5 minutes for discussion of answers.

5 minutes:

ANNOUNCEMENTS:

• Paper 1 is due next week (see calendar for date). Be sure to use Courier New 12-point. See also "Guidelines for Papers" in the syllabus. Give me a hardcopy AND send the paper to turnitin.com.

• We will not finish Percy today, so bring your book/photocopy to our next class.

• Mark the text as we work!

Note that Courier New 12-point looks like this.

Go over the quiz.

A few opening points:

• According to Percy, there is no such thing as a sovereign preconception. This is a contradiction in terms because "sovereignty" and "authenticity" mean freedom from preconceptions. If you have sovereignty, you see things as they really are.

• WA 116: "'How is the argument presented, and why is it presented in this way?'" Why is "The Loss of the Creature" in two parts?

• Venn diagram: Tourism vs. Education. What do the two sets of solutions have in common? FBIs = the common ground. (See also "collapsing the binary" in WA, page 95.)

• Our first exercise picks up on the essay's structure. Note that sometimes FORM is meaning. The form structures meaning.

10 minutes + 10 minutes for reports and discussion

Exercise 1: Work in groups of 3-5 persons to fill out this chart. Half of you do the tourist column; the other half can do the student column. Then ask: What do the two sections have in common? 10 minutes, then reports.

Cf. WA 99-101: Difference Within Similarity: "you should focus on unexpected similarity rather than obvious difference" (99). This chart allows you to do so. Column 1 lists the similarities.

Has charting the essay taught you anything about it? For example, what do the solutions have in common? In other words, what unites Percy's advice regarding tourism and education?

5 minutes: A few elements:

Write down the purpose and Q @ I for Percy's essay. Make an attempt to come up with his conclusion.

Purpose:

Problem: " . . . when we think we understand something, we in a sense cease to see it. Our idea of the thing has replaced the thing itself, producing a form of mental blindness--loss of the object" (WA 44).

Q @ I:

Conclusion:

10 minutes:

Exercise 3: Use this list of words below (mostly concepts) to figure out "The Loss of the Creature." Use what you have learned from Writing Analytically and Nosich to work through the list. 10 minutes, then brief reports.

• Group 1: Make one or more lists to establish patterns (strands). What goes with what?

• Group 2: Make a T-chart to distinguish between positive and negative items (binaries).

• Group 3: Identify the 5 most important concepts and discuss them.

• Group 4: Do an SEE-I for "sovereignty." If time allows, do more SEE-Is. (I = analogy).

Ordinariness, barriers,  sovereignty, authentic experience, the creature, delight, symbolic complex, alienation, deprivation, experts, expropriation, concrete thing, theory, loss, individual, species, receptacle, higher consciousness, knowing, specimens, gap between school and life, Platonic ideal, openness, ordeal, prototypes, unconscious motivations, learning, theorizing, zoning, direct recovery, being a consumer, expectations,  deprivation, simulacrum, container, individuality, educational package, wonder, standards of performance, experts, seduction, dialectical movement, the maieutic role of Socrates

Hints:

See WA, ch. 2, WORK WITH PATTERNS OF REPETITION AND CONTRAST, page 27, Step 3: binary oppositions and organizing contrasts.

See WA, ch. 3, pages 59ff., Move 3: LOOK FOR PATTERS OF REPETITION AND CONTRAST AND FOR ANOMALIES.

Day Two

You must have Percy's essay to participate. If you do not, please go get it. You may rejoin the discussion in progress.

Paper 1 due in 2:00 class:

• Courier New 12-point

• Staple the pages together

• Underline the statement of purpose.

• Number the paragraphs, starting with the introduction, in the left margin.

• Label your sections: Introduction, Body, Conclusion.

• Boldface each element the first time you use it in the body.

• Send the paper to turnitin.com.

Sign up sheet for group presentations.

Did anyone NOT receive an index card for quiz grades?

Return to exercise 3, especially the SEE-I.

What did you discover re. concepts as part of your homework assignment?

10 minutes:

Percy and Reading:

See page 465, full par. 1, sentence 2: "A reader may surrender sovereignty over that which has been written about. . . ."

See WA 37: "What we see as reality is shaped by the words we use." Is there any authentic experience of anything? How is it enough to see with the eyes of a novice if language structures even the novice's view of reality? In other words:

Object of perception - - - - - - - - - language  (lens)- - - - - - - - - perceiver

What do these statements mean regarding our analysis of Percy's essay? Is it an "educational package"? Did you experience it authentically, or is it just more theory--another package? In examining the essay closely, are we doing what Percy advocates or just the opposite?

Reader:text::tourist:Grand Canyon?

What conclusions does Percy ultimately reach? In other words, how does he want us to read his essay? Write something.

Conclusion:

15 minutes:

Evaluation: Problems in Percy's Essay

• Page 470, top: "I am serious in declaring that a Sarah Lawrence English major who began poking about in a dogfish with a bobby pin would learn more in thirty minutes than a biology major in a whole semester. . . ." Does he mean this literally?

  • Note this alternative: Annie Dillard's comment in "Seeing" about the "lover": only experts (or lovers) know or experience something as it really is. The amateur misses much about what is observed. (The text is reproduced below.)

• What is the difference between being taught by a great man (or woman!) and being taught by a pedagogical hack?

• Is theory analogous to the elements in CRTW? If so, does Nosich's system compromise your sovereignty? Or do the elements help you strip away the theory (the educational package, the FBIs) and help you see things as they really ARE? Or do the elements do both? They are language, after all.

• Is Percy suggesting that we will get more from his text by randomly poking around in it than by applying the elements to it?

• Black-and-white thinking on 464 and 468. For example, "a receptacle of experience" vs. "a knowing being." Aren't we both at the same time?

• Cultural stereotypes (assumptions)--Terra Haute, Indiana; Iowa; Sears catalog; "the American negro" (467). Percy is making a case against preconceptions by peddling preconceptions. He is guilty of the thing that he criticizes.

• Another assumptions: the idea that "P" is divisible. Do you get 1/18 the value of this class just because you have 17 classmates? That's the kind of thing he's claiming.

• Theoretical examples.

• See quotations below: there may be no such thing as authentic seeing because all seeing is subjective in its very nature. Contradiction in terms?

• POINT: This is the kind of "dialectical" thinking that Percy WANTS us to do. Cf. 471: "the maieutic role of Socrates."

5 minutes:

Paper 1 Assignment:

• In Percy's terms, the Q @ I is this: Have you lost "the creature" through preconceptions, and what might they be?

• How have FBIs cost you an authentic experience of something?

• See the impediments in N 1, the Tart handout, and WA 2 (premature leaps, judgment reflex, generalizing, naturalizing our assumptions).

• Which are most problematic for YOU?

• Pick one or more FBIs, link it/them to a focused topic, and analyze the origin of your thinking about something. (Remember, though, that it is better to say more about less.)

• Several people have asked me about the structure of the paper's body. I have added a suggestion to the long assignment sheet. It boils down to this: 1) focused topic; 2) the key FBI; 3) analysis (see WA 101: might be about X but is really about Y). Be sure that you do "10 on 1" rather than "1 on 10." In other words, say more about less. Go deeply into one filter rather than listing various filters.

RELATED QUOTATIONS:

What if there is no such thing as an authentic experience of ANYTHING precisely because of the mind's dialectical relationship with the object of perception?

Michael Talbot, The Holographic Universe:

"For the first time I realized that the eye/brain is not a faithful camera, but tinkers with the world before it gives it to us. . . . Some studies suggest that less than 50 percent of what we 'see' is actually based on information entering our eyes. The remaining 50 percent plus is pieced together out of our expectations of what the world should look like (and perhaps out of other sources such as reality fields). The eyes may be visual organs, but it is the brain that sees. . . . The brain artfully fills in the gaps like a skilled tailor reweaving a hole in a piece of fabric. What is all the more remarkable is that it reweaves the tapestry of our visual reality so masterfully we aren't even aware that it is doing so" (163).

http://www.articlesnatch.com/Article/Are-Our-Memories-In-Fact-Real-And-Does-This-Effect-Our-Lives-/473647:

Re. Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception: "His thesis was that the brain, rather than being an instrument designed to gather information, actually works in the reverse. Its primary function is not to gather sensory input but to reduce it. The world we live in has such a vast number of stimuli that it can be overwhelming. When faced with a life-threatening situation, such an overload can be counterproductive. Focus is essential for survival" (104; my emphasis).

" . . . even the signals we take in are an artificially assembled composite of reality. For instance, our eyes are constructed such that there are no cones or rods in the area of the optic nerve. As a result, we all have a blind spot in the very center of our visual field. To compensate for this, the eye is constantly jiggling, taking thousands of individual snapshots that blend out the dark spot, so that we don't notice it. What we 'see' is actually a composite of these individual photos, assembled by our minds. As Evelyn Underhill says in her path-breaking book Mysticism: 'It is immediately apparent, however, that this sense-world, this seemingly real external universe . . . cannot be the external world, but only the Self's projected picture of it.  . . . it is a picture whose relation to reality is at best symbolic and approximate, and which would have no meaning for selves whose senses, or channels or communication, happened to be arranged upon a different plan. The evidence of the senses, then, cannot be accepted as evidence of the nature of ultimate reality: useful servants, they are dangerous guides.' In this regard, seeing is not really believing. Rather, believing affects what we call seeing. The old saying, 'You get what you expect,' is profoundly true" (105).

Bruce Moen, Afterlife Knowledge Guidebook:

"Experience has taught me that beliefs are the basic building material of our world. Rarely does anything enter my awareness without first passing through the distortion, coloring, filtering, and editing of the beliefs I've come to hold. Since birth I've interpreted all experience through my growing set of beliefs to construct the worldview in which I live" (43).

Annie Dillard, "Seeing," in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Doesn't the geologist have a more authentic experience of the Grand Canyon than someone who has no prior knowledge or experience of it?