Welcome to our second week of class! This week we're going to cover a very important and exciting (for me at least:)) concept: S. I. Hayakawa's Ladder of Abstraction. This week's post will cover:
"A Clean Well-Lighted Place"I'm so curious to hear your thoughts about Hemingway's short story. Ernest Hemingway is a heavy-hitter of American literature. At the University where I studied in France, the American Literature classes generally featured him and his contemporary, F. Scott Fitzgerald. These guys lived in the generation that experienced both World Wars, and Hemingway's prose is famous for being sparse and very, very grounded in concrete details. I first experienced this story as a junior or senior in high school. It wasn't part of the curriculum—I just found it in a random magazine one day and read it. For whatever reason, this one story really did a number on me. I thought about every night when I worked the night shift at a Waffle House in Mississippi to help me pay for college. I thought about it when I mopped the floor of the bagel shop I worked later. The I thought about it in another way when I found my own clean well-lighted places to study in and read in when I couldn't sleep in the middle of the night. (Side note: In the same magazine, I read a translation of Plato's "Allegory of the Cave." Stayed tuned for this story.) Debriefing Your First Literature ResponsesGuys, I was impressed. We are a class of critical thinkers. You guys are thinking about the world, and you are framing your thoughts in language. And that's what we want. Since writing is a skill, though, we can always get stronger. This goes for all of us, professor included. I think the next step for us is to look at ways to clarify and sharpen our relationship with the concrete and abstract dimensions of language. In order to that, you are going to learn about the ladder of abstraction. Then, for your Monday/Tuesday homework, you are going to immediately put this concept to use in your dialectical journal and analytical paragraph response to the short story "Puppy" by George Saunders and "Thank you, Ma'am" by Langston Hughes. Saunders is a different kind of heavy hitting literary figure—he's still alive, for one thing. And he was born in Amarillo, for another. And Langston Hughes was an important writer (and one of my favorites) of the Harlem Renaissance. We'll speak a little more about each of them in class. Introducing the Ladder of AbstractionI loved my university library. I used to browse the different stories and gather different random books that happened to catch my eye. It was in just such a dusty book browsing sessions that I first came across S. I. Hayakawa's book Language in Thought and Action. Even if this book had been the only thing I took away from college, it alone would have made all the investment of money and time worthwhile. It changed the way I understood the world. Hayakawa talks about abstract and concrete in his chapter "How We Know What We Know." He presents a concept called the ladder of abstraction, because like so many other things in life, a thing is never simply "abstract" or "concrete:" it's a spectrum. Below is a page from Hayakawa's book depicting an example of the ladder of abstraction with Bessie the cow. On the right are pairs of words, abstract and concrete. Although, what we now know because of Hayakawa is that the concrete words are actually just more concrete than abstract words, and vice versa. Compared to a mile of land, the concept of "Texas" is abstract. All the levels of abstraction on the ladder are important. The ability to move up and down the ladder is the hallmark of meaningful language. On page 93, Hayakawa says, "A preacher, a professor, a journalist, or a politician whose high-level abstractions can systematically and surely be referred to lower-level abstractions is not only talking but saying something." Take a politician, for example, who is always talking about "freedom." The concept of freedom is a pretty high-level abstraction. The key between meaningful and meaningless language is whether the politician can move down the levels of abstraction successfully without contradicting reality. Maybe the politician moves down the ladder by defining freedom as the freedom to get help when you're sick, no matter what. Or maybe they define freedom as the freedom of a landowner to shoot someone who walks on their property. In my experience, politicians often never bother with the lower (more concrete) levels of abstraction at all. So, how does this help us? Well, for one thing, it gives us a shared vocabulary that we will be using for the rest of our class. While we are analyzing literature, our concrete will mostly take the form of quotes from the text, but not always. When you draw conclusions, make assertions, or write a thesis statement, you are abstracting. WEDNESDAY BONUS: Structure of an Analysis ParagraphLet's look a little more closely at how to turn the elements of your dialectical journal into a paragraph. For now, please adopt the paragraph skeleton below for this week's paragraphs and the body paragraphs of your first draft (due next week).
To help you figure out an abstract character attribute (stated below as ABSTRACTION OF THE NATURE OF THE CHARACTER), here is a link to a random, but hopefully helpful list of character attributes. Something that are true about a paragraph crafted from the sentence skeleton below:
BLUE: abstract conclusion RED: concrete evidence from the text In [NAME OF SHORT STORY], [CHARACTER NAME] [ABSTRACTION OF THE NATURE OF THE CHARACTER]. For example, when faced with [CONTEXT OF THE QUOTE YOU NOTICED], [CHARACTER NAME] [QUOTE]. Her [WORDS/ACTIONS/THOUGHTS] illustrate [SOMEHOW CONNECT THE NATURE OF THE CHARACTER FROM THE FIRST SENTENCE TO THE QUOTE]. Later, when [CONTEXT OF SECOND QUOTE], [CHARACTER NAME] [SAYS/DOES] [SECOND QUOTE]. Here, the [CHARACTER NAME] reveals [CONNECT THE SECOND QUOTE TO THE NATURE OF THE CHARACTER IN YOUR FIRST SENTENCE]. [ONE SENTENCE ELABORATING ON THE EFFECT OF THE CHARACTER'S ON THE STORY AS A WHOLE]. Comments are closed.
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