Watt by Samuel Beckett
"Samuel Beckett's Watt [is] a text that signals Beckett's crucial turn into a fully 'hermeneutic' mode of writing, a writing, that is, which thematizes, and ultimately parodies, the problematics of interpretation even as it offers itself in protracted seriousness as interpretable object. The process of reading through this thematization--a process I call metahermeneutics-- ultimately places the reader in specular relation to Watt, ultimately compels the reader to balance his or her hermeneutic desire against the exigencies of Watt's own interpretive praxis" (149).
Boulter, Jonathan Stuart. "'Delicate Questions:' Hermeneutics and Beckett's Watt." Samuel Beckett Today/ Samuel Beckett Aujourd'hui 6 (1997): 149-163. Web. 1 October 2012.
Wednesday, September 26, 2012
Titus Andronicus!
Titus Andronicus, William Shakespeare
"In Titus Andronicus almost every spectacle, deed, and character is absorbed into the titanic presence of the protagonist. Certainly Lavinia and Tamora, as utter victim and as consummate avenger, threaten to usurp Titus' centrality. But just as Elizabeth's gender was submerged, in interludes and entertainments, "in the complex iconography of her paradigmatic virtue," always in accord with patriarchal notions of her power as prince, so Shakespeare's notable and notorious female characters are here made to serve the construction of Titus-patriarch, tragic hero, and, from our vantage point, central consciousness. But contradictions beset this enterprise. I maintain that the pressures of Shakespeare's characterization of Titus, of creating this tragic protagonist, are evident in the Others-notably Aaron, Tamora, and Lavinia-who surround the revenge play's central Self. In the case of Tamora and Lavinia, on whom I will focus, gender both marks and is marked by Shakespeare's first experiment in revenge tragedy. It is largely through and on the female characters that Titus is constructed and his tragedy inscribed. "
"In Titus Andronicus almost every spectacle, deed, and character is absorbed into the titanic presence of the protagonist. Certainly Lavinia and Tamora, as utter victim and as consummate avenger, threaten to usurp Titus' centrality. But just as Elizabeth's gender was submerged, in interludes and entertainments, "in the complex iconography of her paradigmatic virtue," always in accord with patriarchal notions of her power as prince, so Shakespeare's notable and notorious female characters are here made to serve the construction of Titus-patriarch, tragic hero, and, from our vantage point, central consciousness. But contradictions beset this enterprise. I maintain that the pressures of Shakespeare's characterization of Titus, of creating this tragic protagonist, are evident in the Others-notably Aaron, Tamora, and Lavinia-who surround the revenge play's central Self. In the case of Tamora and Lavinia, on whom I will focus, gender both marks and is marked by Shakespeare's first experiment in revenge tragedy. It is largely through and on the female characters that Titus is constructed and his tragedy inscribed. "
- Green, Douglas E. "Interpreting "Her Martyr'd Signs": Gender and Tragedy in Titus Andronicus." Shakespeare Quarterly Autumn 40.3 (1989): 317-26. JSTOR. Web. 23 Sept. 2012.
Tuesday, September 25, 2012
Primary Work
The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James
"“Nothing but a laborious riddle,” The Spectator said, while The Nation remarked on its “elaborate placidity”; even William Dean Howells—not just James’s friend and adviser but the editor of The Atlantic Monthly, who had received it, chunk by chunk, for serial publication—was moved to ask, in an essay on James the following year, “Will the reader be content to accept a novel which is an analytic study rather than a story?” A furious but anonymous critic, in The Quarterly Review, cited Howells’s words and added, “The answer to this question, from nine readers out of ten, will be emphatically No.” To an extent, the battle over James has never really shifted from that ground; Jamesians continue to swoon over his fine discernment, while detractors still smirk at his willingness to grind near-nothings into powder."
Lane, Anthony. "Out of the Frame: A new portrait of Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady." The New Yorker, September 3, 2012.
"“Nothing but a laborious riddle,” The Spectator said, while The Nation remarked on its “elaborate placidity”; even William Dean Howells—not just James’s friend and adviser but the editor of The Atlantic Monthly, who had received it, chunk by chunk, for serial publication—was moved to ask, in an essay on James the following year, “Will the reader be content to accept a novel which is an analytic study rather than a story?” A furious but anonymous critic, in The Quarterly Review, cited Howells’s words and added, “The answer to this question, from nine readers out of ten, will be emphatically No.” To an extent, the battle over James has never really shifted from that ground; Jamesians continue to swoon over his fine discernment, while detractors still smirk at his willingness to grind near-nothings into powder."
Lane, Anthony. "Out of the Frame: A new portrait of Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady." The New Yorker, September 3, 2012.
Primary Work
Lady Audley's Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon
"Lady Audley is at once the heroine and the monstrosity of
the novel. In drawing her, the authoress may have intended to portray a female
Mephistopheles; but, if so, she would have known that a woman cannot fill such
a part. The nerves with which Lady Audley could meet unmoved the friend of the
man she had murdered, are the nerves of a Lady Macbeth who is half unsexed, and
not those of the timid, gentle, innocent creature Lady Audley is represented as
being. Whenever she is meditating the commission of something inexpressibly
horrible, she is described as being usually charming. Her manner and her
appearance are always in contrast with her conduct. All this is very exciting;
but is also very unnatural. The artistic faults of this novel are as grave as
the ethical ones. Combined, they render it one of the most noxious books of the
modern times."
Rae, W. Fraser. "Sensation Novelists: Miss
Braddon." North British Review 43 Sept.
1865: 186-7. Web. 25 September
2012.
Primary work
The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers
"In The Member of the Wedding (1946), a twelve-year-old tomboy named Frankie Addams—who has a boy's name, a crew cut, and wears masculine clothes—suddenly falls in love with her brother Jarvis's wedding one summer during World War II. For the bulk of the novel, Frankie fantasizes about being part of the ceremony and even the marriage that follows it. But at the wedding itself, she is a mute spectator, and the newlyweds rather violently exclude her from their honeymoon getaway car.
Early critics read Member as a coming-of-age tale in which Frankie trades in the verdant, ambisexual imaginings of childhood first for illusions of feminine excess and then for a properly adult social life. ... [L]ate-twentieth-century critics have read the novel as a classic 'coming out story.' As with Ann Bannon's Beebo Brinker and other lesbian pulp novels that succeeded Member, Frankie's boyish body predicts her trajectory toward her newfound relationship with Mary Littlejohn in the last chapter, which represents the beginning of her recognition that she desires not weddings but other girls."
Freeman, Elizabeth. "The We of Me: The Member of the Wedding's Novel Alliances." The Wedding Complex: Forms of Belonging in Modern American Culture. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2002. 45-7. Print.
"In The Member of the Wedding (1946), a twelve-year-old tomboy named Frankie Addams—who has a boy's name, a crew cut, and wears masculine clothes—suddenly falls in love with her brother Jarvis's wedding one summer during World War II. For the bulk of the novel, Frankie fantasizes about being part of the ceremony and even the marriage that follows it. But at the wedding itself, she is a mute spectator, and the newlyweds rather violently exclude her from their honeymoon getaway car.
Early critics read Member as a coming-of-age tale in which Frankie trades in the verdant, ambisexual imaginings of childhood first for illusions of feminine excess and then for a properly adult social life. ... [L]ate-twentieth-century critics have read the novel as a classic 'coming out story.' As with Ann Bannon's Beebo Brinker and other lesbian pulp novels that succeeded Member, Frankie's boyish body predicts her trajectory toward her newfound relationship with Mary Littlejohn in the last chapter, which represents the beginning of her recognition that she desires not weddings but other girls."
Freeman, Elizabeth. "The We of Me: The Member of the Wedding's Novel Alliances." The Wedding Complex: Forms of Belonging in Modern American Culture. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2002. 45-7. Print.
Fe
Monday, September 24, 2012
Primary work
William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure
"'A play Caled Mesur for Mesur' by 'Shaxberd' was performed at court, for the new King James I, by 'his Maiesties plaiers' on December 26, 1604. Probably it had been composed that same year or in late 1603. The play dates from the very height of Shakespeare's tragic period, three years or so after Hamlet, contemporary with Othello, shortly before King Lear and Macbeth. This period includes very little comedy of any sort, and what there is differs markedly from the festive comedy of the 1590s. [...] Measure for Measure, perhaps the last such comedy from the tragic period, illustrates most clearly of all what critics usually mean by 'problem comedy' or 'problem play.'
Its chief concern is not with the triumphs of love, as in the happy comedies, but with moral and social problems: 'filthy vices' arising from sexual desire and the abuses of judicial authority." (414)
-Bevington, David. ["Introduction to Measure for Measure."] In Shakespeare's Comedies. By William Shakespeare. Ed. David Bevington. New York: Pearson Longman, 2007. 414-7. Print.
Primary Work
Roxana by Daniel Defoe
"Few works written in the eighteenth century have enjoyed the type of critical reevaluation experienced over the last three decades by Daniel Defoe's last fiction, Roxana (1724). So shabby was its estimation in 1970 that Robert D. Hume could seriously pose the question "The Conclusion of Defoe's Roxana: Fiasco or Tour de Force?" and expect an overwhelming majority of his readers to choose the former. Recent critics, however, have, like Hume himself, overwhelmingly chosen the latter. Roxana's reception over these decades in fact tells us much about the changing nature of eighteenth-century studies itself. Whereas the novel never really fit within a critical vocabulary that would describe the eighteenth century as the Enlightenment Era, Age of Reason, Augustan Age, and so on, it has found a home in what has been recently described as the new eighteenth century: "not so much an age of reason, but one of paranoia, repression, and incipient madness, for which Jeremy Bentham's malign, all-seeing Panopticon, grimly refurbished by Foucault, might stand as a fitting, nightmarish emblem." Scholars who sought to view the period as essentially backward-looking, obedient to an artistic legacy descended from Aristotle and Horace, found little to admire in Roxana. Scholars seeking to view the period as essentially forward-looking, even postmodern in its own right, have found plenty indeed."
Jesse M. Molesworth, "A Dreadful Course of Calamities: Roxana's Ending Reconsidered," ELH, 2007, Vol. 74
Primary work
“The Birthmark,” Nathaniel Hawthorne
“‘The Birthmark’ has been described as an ‘indictment
of modern science,’ but the text and modern life both acknowledge the
extraordinary achievements of science. Science is not unequivocally evil; it
is, however, dangerous in isolation from human society's other influences,
including sexuality, work of all kinds, and familial relations. It is dangerous
in the speed with which it progresses, an incredible pace far outrunning the
cumbersome gait of social and moral change. And it is dangerous when the study
of minute details becomes a system of belief, as it is for Aylmer. He says to
Georgiana that her birthmark can be removed because it is a 'trifle' compared to this or that achievement of 'deep science,' just as in
this century we say that the removal of all pollution or the obsolescence of
nuclear weapons is, if not a trifle, at least a possibility, because 'we
put a man on the moon.' But as Aylmer once knew, creation, let alone
resurrection, is not the business of isolated science. These tasks require
considerable human cooperation.”
- -- Barbara Eckstein, “Hawthorne's
'The Birthmark': Science and Romance as Belief,” Studies in Short Fiction, Fall 1989, Vol. 29
Heartbreak House by George Bernard Shaw
“George Bernard Shaw's Heartbreak House (1919), though first produced after the first world war, is set before it, in a vague Edwardian never-land. Subtitled a ‘fantasia in the Russian manner on English themes,’ it (alone among Shaw’s plays) betrays the influence of Anton Chekhov. The guests at Shaw’s country estate, however, have an allegorical character, representing industry, the arts, idealism, feminism, and the aristocracy. The idealistic but practical young woman Ellie Dunn considers various suitors but falls in love with the aged Captain Shotover, modeled on Shaw himself. The play seems to represent pre-war life as a pathetic illusion dominated by materialism and narrow-mindedness. Shotover has been designing a weapon that will destroy half Europe. Shaw was a determined pacifist and was widely attacked for his antiwar pamphlet, Common Sense About the War (1914). Yet, in the final scene of Heartbreak House, when an air raid destroys the Captain’s stash of dynamite (and kills two minor characters), Shaw seems almost to be embracing the war as, in Marinetti’s words ‘sole hygiene of the world.’ ”
--The Modernism Lab at Yale University, Author Unknown, "Certifying authority: Pericles Lewis"
Sunday, September 16, 2012
Syllabus and Readings for Class
Dear All,
The syllabus and most of the required readings for our Seminar, ENL200 are now available on SmartSite. You can find those materials by going to http://smartsite.ucdavis.edu/ and logging in with your UC Davis username and password. Click on "Resources," which will lead you to the syllabus and required readings.
REMEMBER: There is reading for the first day of class: four essays, all of which are now on SmartSite. I'll send you a reminder about this reading and some things to think about in advance of our discussion next week.
REMEMBER: You have been assigned the project of claiming a primary work about which you shall write in various and conflicting ways during this seminar. That primary work needs to be posted on our blog http://enl200f2012.blogspot.com/ before SEPTEMBER 26.
IF: you do not yet have a UC Davis username and password, I can send you the syllabus and first week's reading via email. Write me at jmarx@ucdavis.edu to make this happen.
With all best wishes,
John
The syllabus and most of the required readings for our Seminar, ENL200 are now available on SmartSite. You can find those materials by going to http://smartsite.ucdavis.edu/ and logging in with your UC Davis username and password. Click on "Resources," which will lead you to the syllabus and required readings.
REMEMBER: There is reading for the first day of class: four essays, all of which are now on SmartSite. I'll send you a reminder about this reading and some things to think about in advance of our discussion next week.
REMEMBER: You have been assigned the project of claiming a primary work about which you shall write in various and conflicting ways during this seminar. That primary work needs to be posted on our blog http://enl200f2012.blogspot.com/ before SEPTEMBER 26.
IF: you do not yet have a UC Davis username and password, I can send you the syllabus and first week's reading via email. Write me at jmarx@ucdavis.edu to make this happen.
With all best wishes,
John
Saturday, September 15, 2012
Primary Work
Mean Free Path, Ben
Lerner
“In Mean Free Path, Lerner’s poems
assume a panoply of voices and rhetoric that converge in like a spilled-out bag
of Skittles. Each line advances until its inevitable collision with another.
The importance of delay is emphasized throughout the book, and it is a detail
instructive for readers. We are alerted both to delays in the completion of his
syntax within the poems — sentences broken by lines from other sentences, “A
live tradition broadcast with a little delay” — as well as the importance of
our own delay, of slowing the pace of our consumption.” (Daniel E. Pritchard, “In
Familiar Ways”, Review of Mean Free Path,
The Critical Flame)
Wednesday, September 12, 2012
Before the Quarter Begins...
Dear Students in ENL200,
For our class this fall, I'd like you to pick a PRIMARY WORK that you will write about a bunch of different ways over the course of the quarter.
Before 26 September, the day of our orientation, I politely but firmly request and, indeed, require that you write a post to this blog (each person should write their own post [see my next post for instructions]) that
1. tells us the name of your work and its author(s).
2. IN ADDITION, provides us with a blurb about the work from any reputable source (a published review or commentary you've found would do, as would an authoritative summary on wikipedia, if you're feeling controversial). Do not write this blurb. Find it. And, of course, let us know what the source for the blurb is.
_________________________________________________________________________________
Your primary work can be almost anything, but here are some basic criteria to guide your selection:
A. It could be something from what you believe will be your field of study, but no sweat if you're not sure about this. You don't have to be. Figuring out what you want to study is part of the project of your two years of coursework starting this fall.
B. It need not be a book, but it should be a complete work. Don't pick a passage from a novel or a stanza from a poem, in other words.
C. It will probably be easier if you pick something literary. Some of you may delve into visual arts of various kinds and new media over the course of your academic careers. That's awesome. Having written two books about novels, I'm writing about video games these days myself. BUT: English remains centrally a textual discipline, and much of what we're going to read that shall spark your writing this quarter will be on the reading of texts. Thus: something literary, something literary and textual, is probably the path of least resistance for this assignment.
Most importantly:
X. Pick something that matters to you, but not something you love. You will be asked to write about this primary work in a number of potentially conflicting ways. If you only can think one way about it, or if you have an interpretation of it that you are just super attached to, your writing in the class will suffer. You’re going to be asked to have a flexible relationship to your primary work, in short, so choose accordingly.
Y. Pick something that is not new to you. Don’t pick something you’ve never read before or something that’s so alien to you that you don’t already have a sense of what it would be like to work with. Don’t put yourself in a situation where it’s possible there are huge unknown hurdles or surprises out there like a secondary critical literature in a language you don’t speak, or something like that, which would stop you in your tracks.
ASK ME QUESTIONS! You can use the comments below to ask questions. I'll answer, and if need be I'll update the criteria above. I PROMISE to explain what this is all about on the first day of class, and you'll see some more about it when I post the syllabus later this week. If upon hearing what this is all about you wish to reconsider your choice of primary work, you may.
I look forward to reading about your selections!
All best,
John
For our class this fall, I'd like you to pick a PRIMARY WORK that you will write about a bunch of different ways over the course of the quarter.
Before 26 September, the day of our orientation, I politely but firmly request and, indeed, require that you write a post to this blog (each person should write their own post [see my next post for instructions]) that
1. tells us the name of your work and its author(s).
2. IN ADDITION, provides us with a blurb about the work from any reputable source (a published review or commentary you've found would do, as would an authoritative summary on wikipedia, if you're feeling controversial). Do not write this blurb. Find it. And, of course, let us know what the source for the blurb is.
_________________________________________________________________________________
Your primary work can be almost anything, but here are some basic criteria to guide your selection:
A. It could be something from what you believe will be your field of study, but no sweat if you're not sure about this. You don't have to be. Figuring out what you want to study is part of the project of your two years of coursework starting this fall.
B. It need not be a book, but it should be a complete work. Don't pick a passage from a novel or a stanza from a poem, in other words.
C. It will probably be easier if you pick something literary. Some of you may delve into visual arts of various kinds and new media over the course of your academic careers. That's awesome. Having written two books about novels, I'm writing about video games these days myself. BUT: English remains centrally a textual discipline, and much of what we're going to read that shall spark your writing this quarter will be on the reading of texts. Thus: something literary, something literary and textual, is probably the path of least resistance for this assignment.
Most importantly:
X. Pick something that matters to you, but not something you love. You will be asked to write about this primary work in a number of potentially conflicting ways. If you only can think one way about it, or if you have an interpretation of it that you are just super attached to, your writing in the class will suffer. You’re going to be asked to have a flexible relationship to your primary work, in short, so choose accordingly.
Y. Pick something that is not new to you. Don’t pick something you’ve never read before or something that’s so alien to you that you don’t already have a sense of what it would be like to work with. Don’t put yourself in a situation where it’s possible there are huge unknown hurdles or surprises out there like a secondary critical literature in a language you don’t speak, or something like that, which would stop you in your tracks.
ASK ME QUESTIONS! You can use the comments below to ask questions. I'll answer, and if need be I'll update the criteria above. I PROMISE to explain what this is all about on the first day of class, and you'll see some more about it when I post the syllabus later this week. If upon hearing what this is all about you wish to reconsider your choice of primary work, you may.
I look forward to reading about your selections!
All best,
John
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