Superior Equality

As I started reading Leaves of Grass, I noticed that Walt Whitman starts out the book making the reader feel inferior than him with just two lines, his two starting lines,

"I CELEBRATE myself;

And what I assume you shall assume" (1)

With his first line he immediately makes the reader see him as good I whatever he does because we don't know yet. And with his second line he starts a psychological dictatorship. He states a completely egocentric fact in which the reader can assume very directly that there is no better opinion than the author's and it is even stated in a way that you would feel threatened if you thought otherwise. It just took me these first two lines to think what is up with this Walt Whitman? The second I read these lines I stopped immediately and thought who does he think he is telling me that I need to think what he thinks? I simply didn't know what to think about it, about his egocentric attitude, so I just kept on reading and it relieved me. It certainly relieved me because it said that I was equal to him. The first impression the first two lines give is an unnecessary statement of superiority but once you take a look at the third line which says, "For every atom belonging to me, as good belongs to you."(1) you see that it's because you are equal so you should think alike, which very few times happens.

It Just Flows

A Simple Heart starts with contextualizing the reader with what has happened so far in Felicity’s and Madame Aubain’s life. The way Flaubert describes the situations they have passed through and what they will pass is certainly pitiful. When Flaubert describes the precarious situation that they had to confront when Madame Aubain moved to her ancestors’ house, he somehow manages to get his description resemble the most precarious state a person can get. Part of his description is the following, “This house, with its slate-covered roof, was built between a passage-way and a narrow street that led to the river. The interior was so unevenly graded that it caused people to stumble”. His way of writing is very concise and doesn’t contain even a bit of wordiness, which is great. When an author makes his pieces of work wordy he/she overstates his ideas and makes the reader become uninterested about his work because what the reader thinks in this case is that the rest of the book is just more of the same last pages he has been reading.

But Flaubert’s A Simple Heart makes every single point of the book worth the while. With Flaubert’s style you can write about the most uninteresting topic in your opinion and, even if it’s bad, you’ll feel that you got over it really fast. When a piece or writing is not wordy it contains a lot of factual and important material which acquires what a wordy writing tries to do (clear things up) but in a more interesting and fascinating way.

A Literary Biography

After reading Gary Lutz's essay, it seems to me that he just narrated his life in a literary context. Apparently his development in words depended solely on him and on the things that surrounded him. His development is shown through stages chronologically from parragraph to parragraph. At first he shows that his family couldn't have been a trigger for him to start reading in his childhood because they didn't have that culture of reading really adopted. Ironically, the only magazine that came to the house was one of photography. Since people normally need something or someone to catapult their literary life and Lutz clearly lacked one, it is shown in the way he narrates his story and, obiviously his story in essence.

He proceeds to describe a sentence and the structure of it. Gary Lutz shows his fixation in details from this point on. He later performs a close reading about a four word sentence which I found great because you get to see the writer's skills in more aspects of the literary field than just writing. His close reading is so detailed that he even analyzes Christine Shutt's piece to the scale of syllables.