When in doubt, make it up.

In this second installment of Mark v. GRE literature I thought it would be fun – it is Saturday after all – to take a look at the wondrous world of neologisms.

A neologism is simply a newly coined word or phrase. It can be a completely new word, a fragmentation of an existent word, or simply a new usage of an existent word. Some of the more famous neologisms are: laser, quark, genocide, blog, crock pot, aspirin, badonkadonk (its ok to laugh), scrooge, google, and hippopotomonstrosesquipedalian (ironically, this word means “pertaining to very long words”). One of the most unusual neologisms, thanks to Penguin’s Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, is verbocrap.

Verbocrap – an utterly useless word concerning my GRE studies – is basically when a stupid bureaucrat overdoes it in an attempt to sound intelligent. So many Bushisms (another popular neologism) fall into this category, but the example given in Penguin must take the cake. From an ILEA educational publication:

Due to increased verbalization the educationist desires to earnestly see school
populations achieve cognitive clarity, auracy, literacy and numeracy both within
and without the learning situation. However, the classroom situation (and the
locus of evaluation is the classroom) is fraught with so many innovative
concepts (e.g. the problem of locked confrontation between pupil and teacher)
that the teaching situation is, in the main, inhibitive to any meaningful
articulacy. It must now be fully realized that the secondary educational scene
has embraced the concept that literacy has to be imparted and acquired via
humanoid-to-humanoid dialogue. This is a break-through.

Verbose and crappy indeed. A more useful neologism seems to be the term nihilist. First appearing in Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons (a book I own but have not read), nihilism refers to the radical stance that denies all traditional and moral values. Nihilism for Turgenev came from the deep disillusionment of the Russian intelligentsia from the lack of reform (thanks Penguin).

How interesting that this need to destroy all the old to actually get anything done is roughly analogous to the creation of a new word to accommodate a usage, a task for which all other language was incapable.

Mark v. GRE Literature

Essentially, I am planning on taking both the GRE and GRE literature subject test within this year…or the next ten years, who knows. Beyond that, I would actually like to do well. So, I am setting up this posting series as a sort of supplement to my regular reading and studying.

Everyday I read or study some aspect of literature, and more often that not I have some sort of reaction: wonder, confusion, anger, or even just plain and simple boredom. Instead of momentarily embracing these feelings, and then go drink them away or watch Seinfeld until I can’t remember what state I’m in, I hope to put them to words in a way that will be helpful and undeniably my own.

Today we have the undeniable pleasure of looking at the ever popular literary term bildungsroman. Bildungsroman, and its apparent synonym erziehungroman, means “formation novel” or more literally “upbringing” or “education” novel. German critics love to drop this term (I do to) to describe any novel in which the hero or heroine displays any kind of development through the storm that is young adulthood. Many of the novels classified as bildungsroman are German, most notably Goethe’s The Sorrows or Young Werther. If one is feeling gently feminist we might even claim Jane Austen’s Emma or even Northanger Abbey. This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s first novel also has been deemed worth of bildungsroman status.

Some might also think James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a bildungsroman, and it is to an extent. Daedalus does develop through a series of ups and downs: prostitutes and priests, crises of individuality and crises of faith. However, Portrait is more accurately described as a künstlerroman or an “artist novel.” Among the roman styles are this also the zeitroman or “novel of the times/ages.”

It might be apparent by now that roman, means something like novel. While it does denote a novel now, it originally referred to any imaginative works in the vernacular, often verse. By the 16th century it was commonly applies only to prose. The term itself actually comes from the French. The common usages of the French term are used to describe such genres as realist (roman réaliste), psychological (roman psychologique), and imaginative (roman d’imagination). Also there is my personal favorite, the roman existentialiste, which might be well applied to a work such as Camus’ The Stanger.

The connection between roman and romance might be a little clearer now. Roman with its popular vernacular and non-historical style is a direct source for our term romance. But that is for another time.

In a last note we might ask what the bildung prefix means. We gather it means “education or “formation,” but I am familiar with this term as meaning something more along the lines of “culture” it is in this way that my hero H.-G. Gadamer uses it. However, that is also for another time.

THIS is what a little girl like me is doin with a big word like that

Bildungsroman

bil·dungs·ro·man or Bil·dungs·ro·man
n.
A novel whose principal subject is the moral, psychological, and intellectual development of a usually youthful main character.

There you go.

I just started writing one today, by the way. My goal is to finish by the time I'm 23. Hell, if Old Fitzy can do it, why can't I? That's a good 2 1/2 years from now. Plenty of time. Puh-lenty. Any suggestions? So far I've got: it's loosely about me.

The Haikus of a Disillusioned 18-year-old Male

Background: My little brother, who is 18 and over 6 feet tall, is my literary hero of the moment. He will be a freshman Mechanical Engineering major at SPU in the fall, and he hopes to "get really freaking smart and make tons of money." He is interested in environmental conservation from a more practical approach than that of the Biologists who he believe will just talk a lot and never actually do anything; he wants to actually design the electric cars and personal solar panels, not sit around in forests acting like a pussy and getting eaten by bears.

Life and career: At the beginning of the summer, my brother began work as a janitor-esque student worker at Seattle Pacific University. He worked hard every day and then became entangled in an inconvenient misunderstanding involving some other student workers, had to go to meeting after meeting explaining how nothing ever happened, yet was never fully absolved. The "situation" as we will call it became increasingly frustrating, the work became increasingly tedious, and currently, my brother is waiting for school to start so that he can do something other than scrub walls, throw away other people's trash, and defend himself, alone and unsupported, against fabricated accusations. One of the most intelligent people I have ever known, he is also one of the most staunchly realistic and matter-of-fact. This is why his haikus are so amazing.

For the first time ever in any kind of print, ladies and gentlemen, I bring you "Dubius" Daniel.


Untitled

Monotinous work

I long to be a robot

With no sense of time


**************************************************

Untitled

Time doesn't matter

Pictures can speak for themselves

We are sinking fast

**************************************************************

Untitled

Anger of fire

Matter consumed by flame

Ashes are useless




Editor's Note: any effort at plagerism will result in the violent pokage of a fork into your optic nerve. From the gut wrenching cries and tounges bitten off in a fit of uncontrollable something or other, my guess is that it hurts.

3 Hemmingway Poems

Advice to a Son
Never trusth a white man,
Never kill a jew,
Never sign a contact,
Never rent a pew.
Don't enlist in armies;
Nor marry many wives;
Never write for magazines;
Never scratch your hives.
Always put paper on the seat,
Don't believe in wars,
Keep yourself both clean and neat,
Never marry whores.
Never pay a blackmailer,
Never go to law,
Never trust a publisher,
Or you'll sleep on straw.
All your friends will leave you
All your friends will die
So lead a clean and wholesome life
And join them in the sky.
-Berlin, 1931

Lines to Be Read at the Casting of Scott FitzGerlad's Balls into the Seafrom Eden Roc (Antibes, Alpes Maritimes)
Whence from these gray
Heights unjockstrapped wholly stewed he
Flung
Himself?
No.
Some Waiter?
Yes.
Push tenderly oh green shoots of grass
Tickle not our Fitz's nostrils
Pass
The gray moving unbenfinneyed sea
depths deeper than our debt to Eliot
Fling flang them flung his own his
two finally is one
Spherical, colloid, interstitial,
Uprising lost to sight
in fright
natural
not artificial
no ripples make a sinking sanking
sonking sunk
-Key West, 1935

Defense of Luxembourg
So now,
Alive
Join the Daughty Dead
The chutes hanging from the trees
And the high tension wires
All of us long gone
Firing on all airplanes
Unbelieving nothing
Nor his brother
Except that we attack at first light
Come now and join us.
Bring for the week end
Ability to read a map
(This corresponds to shaving kit and pyjamas)
Bring unfear of death
(This corresponds to the formerley seven now five packs of
nationally advertised brands issued at the PX with cheerful
banter in the basement of the Scribe.)
Bring knowledge, subtlety, side-slippering, hardiness, fortitude,
quick and sound decisions, and the ability to abandon
knowingly and soundly all hope of every kind yet stay and
fight.
(this corresponds to a present to your hostess; a trifle
well selected with semi-impeccable taste)
Bring fuck-all,
Bring worthless
Bring no-good-
They can be carried as banners.
Or in the pocket.
But bring them to where we go now.
They are as valuable of soap (soap is made from the dead
horses of horse cavalrymen's dreams) and there is
No need to bring money.
No one can change it.
Bring shit
Bring Fuck
Bring hatred of these cocksuckers.
Now it starts to roll as when the wind comes into the trees in
a forest fire
Come on let's go.
What the fuck is holding it up.
What the fuck is holding you up
It beats the shit out of me lieutenant
Let's go
White jumped off at 0840
They are held up by M.G. fire. Krauts
are infiltrating behind our lines. We are fighting them now.
S6 states he wants to jump-off regardless. Blue following will
mop up infiltrated enemy.
Lets go.
-Finca Vigia, Cuba, 1945