Reflecting on tonight’s class, we finished reviewing the Enlightenment Theory. The main point in Immanuel Kant’s, What is Enlightenment?, is the emergence from self-imposed immaturity. For when a person can seek out understanding without the guidance from others, he/she is then considered to have taken a step into maturity. Kant’s aim to appreciate beauty universally with disinterestedness, made some sense to me.
In Rene Descartes’s statement, “I think, therefore I am,” we are reminded of the duality of self among other implications that adhere to rationalism, empiricism and skepticism.
Reviewing Bakhtin and Formalism, we discussed his Discourse of the Novel. This essay drives home the point that one should care about the text itself and how every text is dialogical. Meaning, one thought stems from a prior thought and branches out to a future thought/word/dialogue.
I appreciated watching the Hunchback of Notre Dame clip when we discussed the concept of Bakhtin’s Carnival. It made much more sense. I understood the idea of the inversion of power when it is permitted/allowed during the Carnival and how that gives people a different perspective of the life of others. Sometimes it appears to be greener on the other side; other times, not so. In the case with the Hunchback, when he was crowned King of the Carnival, he smiled and seemed to be happy, although the irony in that was he was crowned for being the ugliest – and he wasn’t wearing a mask. So his joy was founded by others who were belittling him.
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