E.M. 8/28/06 Pre-class post.

As I read the text for this week's reading assignment, I felt like Alice down the rabbit hole. If I bit this piece of mushroom my brain felt very small or the other side of the mushroom it felt very very large. I must put things within a frame of reference to better understand them. The class that precedes this class on Tuesday is 19c. British lit. Examining how the use and meaning of words have changed over the span of time from Jane Austen's Emma to the present. This is exactly what I am doing every Tuesday. Study the somewhat out of date quaint terms found in Austen's Emma and then take a huge leap into the new 21st Century and study the evolution of words in on our modern culture. De Saussure's stance that the text is a microcosm of the whole i.e. the macrocosm. Now of course I could have bitten off more of the mushroom than I could chew and gotten that completely wrong.Do the three writers’ theorize that each thought or belief is built on the preceding generation of thought and theory? Does the next generation of philosophy construct or deconstructs the existing theories concepts or ideas. To pretend that I understood all of what I read would be a lie. I am hoping that the lecture will provide some sort of insight into what I've read. Right now I feel like the Cheshire cat is grinning at me, mocking my inability to understand higher thought.