8/31 Notes
What do Europeans think of Americans? They're, brash and rude. They are impolite and ignorant. Or are they ignorant? Dr. Sexson sugges that perhaps ignorance is really a sort of innocence. We are after all a new nation, only 200 years old. We're young, naive, and innocent. This is reminiscent of another who was newly created and innocent, Adam, thus the term "American Adam."
Agon- A contest of force or will between antagonists.

"All literature is displaced myth," Northrop Frye.
Realism is only a displacement of mythology.
This brings up another question raised in class. Can we ever really create something original? Inventions, literature, and ideas build upon those things that came before them. No thing can be created from nothing. So there can be no original literature, only myth, revamped and retold.
Marilyn