LITR 4232 American
Renaissance
Dickinson, third meeting
| graduation plants?
research projects reader: Miriam Rodriguez more on life & legend of Emily? |
|
Tuesday, 25 April: Dickinson, third meeting: "There came a Day at Summer's full"; "Some keep the Sabbath going to Church--"; "A Bird came down the Walk--"; "I know that He exists."; "After great pain, a formal feeling comes--"; "Dare you see a Soul at the white heat?"; "A Route of Evanescence" [riddle poem]
Reader: Miriam Rodriguez
Thursday, 27 April: Dickinson, fourth meeting: "I heard a Fly buzz--when I died--"; "This World is not Conclusion."; "I started Early--Took my Dog--"; "I cannot live with You--"; "Because I could not stop for Death--"; "A narrow Fellow in the Grass"
Tuesday, 4 May, 10:00am-12:50pm: final exam
graduation plants
Choice by seniority . . .
1. Becky Mobley (we met in the 90s!)
2. Kate Barrack (Minority Literature last semester)
3-5 I met this semester, they must work things out for themselves . . .
Joseph Myers
Julie O'Gea
Bill Wolfe
If you graduate when you're not in one of my courses, welcome to let me know and you can have a plant anyway--
research projects
Thanks for good submissions. Nearly all projects were returned by email on Sunday night.
As with midterm, if you want an anonymous breakdown of project grades, just email request.
Welcome to review, confer by email, phone, or in person.
If you want to talk about your project, that's a learning opportunity for both of us. As with midterm, it's normal for both student and teacher to be defensive and sensitive about grades because both are usually operating conscientiously but uncertainly.
Challenge of upper-level writing in Literature and Humanities: so many things to get right.
surface style
organization
research
critical thinking
Just trying to write a good paper is a worthy intellectual exercise, and you can't underestimate the good it does you.
School system of reading, grading never perfect, but then never is the world of literature
Frustrating b/c everyone puts a lot of work into it, starts with a blank sheet of paper and creates something
Then, instead of being praised and rewarded, mostly you get criticized or offered more work!
Literature helps us imagine more perfect and carefree worlds, but if what we're doing is going to pass for work, we have to keep learning
In situations where you are praised and rewarded, it's a nice change for a while, but soon you get restless, wonder what you're missing, need to stretch . . . .
In any case, don't take grading too personally
Most veteran instructors don't carry grudges, are willing to see what you do next, want it to be good
But so many things to do right, and sometimes it feels like it's just their eccentric priorities, oblivious to what you're achieving . . .
In the long run, the reading and writing are what matter, earn the chance to read and write some more, keep your mind and heart alive, creative, and receptive
final exam
error on syllabus and presentations handout
wrong information: LITR 4232 exam listed as 2 May, 10am-12:50pm
right information: LITR 4232 exam is officially on 4 May, 10am-12:50pm
official time is default time for final exam, only time offered for in-class
But if you were counting on doing it by email on Tuesday, that can still be arranged
Final exam will be posted to webpage by Tuesday, 9:45am
If you want to take the exam on Tuesday, 2 May, use the copy on the webpage and email your answers to me by 2pm. I'll acknowledge receipt before going home that night.
Requirement: In at least one of your answers, refer at least once to previous students' answers to your question.
standard 4 questions, as previewed from beginning of semester
student chooses 2
possible 5th question, free-form in nature: "What have you learned that you didn't expect to learn? How did you learn it? What applications?"
model from grad version of course:
5. Write an essay concerning some persistent or occasional issue, problem, or theme significant to the course but overlooked by the previous four questions. You are welcome to use aspects of the course objectives. Your choice for this question may overlap with other questions above. If your topic appears to range beyond the course's evident subject matter, defend or rationalize your topic. Relate your topic to the larger subject of American Romanticism--what relevant insights does your discussion reveal or suggest? Refer to at least three writers and their texts.
Even if 5th question is added, you still only need to choose two.
But in case you're interested in developing your own topic for 5th question,
more on life & legend of Emily?
life and legend of Emily
attitude toward "finishing" writers like Whitman and Dickinson
We won't, don't, can't finish!
Frustrating for beginning students of literature--What are we supposed to know? What will be on the test? When can I say I know enough about this or that writer?
Advanced students of literature get used to idea of never finishing reading and learning--
People like us were reading and learning from these authors before we came along, and will be after we're gone.
Does this make the study of literature futile, frustrating, or fatuous?
Only if you stick to idea that it's a job to finish, something to be done with--
Alternative ways of looking at what we're about:
Teaching and reading as lifelong career of learning, self-improvement, and intellectual adventure
Literature not a test to be passed and forgotten but an ongoing conversation or dialogue that different writers and readers join and contribute to--
Not a world that is finished but a world you participate in making each day
conversation or dialogue > model of civilization, democracy
broader questions on Dickinson
What images of Dickinson prevail in popular mind? How do people think of her?
Somewhat divided response:
some find Dickinson and her poetry fascinating
some dismiss her and her poetry as odd
What are attractions / repulsions of both Dickinson and her poetry?
What do our attractions / repulsions reveal about ourselves?
Why are people fascinated / troubled by Emily Dickinson's image, lifestyle, legend, etc.?
(Classes often divide between people fascinated by
Dickinson and others who wish she'd lived a normal life so they wouldn't have to
read her poetry)
Can the poetry be read apart from the legend of Dickinson's life? (compare Poe, Sylvia Plath)
Tendency to read the poet into the poem (somewhat encouraged by "representative literature")
"Biographical readings" of poetry are discouraged by literary scholars
But impulse otherwise is honest and irrepressible . . . because poetry is so personal?
3092 When I state myself, as the Representative of the Verse--it does not mean me--but a supposed person
Last class:
3093 Nature is a haunted house . . . .
Gothic?
isolation in "gothic space"
is there a secret? (frustrated love, forbidden love) > mystery
visually, she's descended from the Puritans and maintains dark and light clothing
"Woman in white" image--purity, bride, Miss Havisham
writing as gothic: death, fly as decay, funerals, mourners, cathedrals, churches
Emily Dickinson, 1830-1886
Dickinson homestead
Dickinson children
excerpts from letters:
asked if she never felt want of employment, never going off any place & never seeing any visitor "I never thought of conceiving that . . . ."
I know that is poetry
Instructor's comments:
objective 3. To use literature as a basis for discussing representative problems and subjects of American culture (New Historicism), such as equality; race, gender, class; modernization and tradition; the family; the individual and the community; nature; the writer's conflicted presence in an anti-intellectual society.
American equality, individualism, and independence have premises.
Premises: each person must be productive economically or reproductive biologically. (In plain English, for most Americans to think a grownup is not wasting his or her time on earth, s/he needs to be either making money or having / raising children.)
Emily Dickinson did neither . . . .
Neither did Walt Whitman . . . .
Leads us to problem of "bourgeois, middle-class, heterosexual society" and relations to art . . . . Uuhhh.
Art and literature as domain of the young, the celibate, the unmarried, the drama club, misfits
But up with misfits! If not for the strange, crazed, wayward, and passionate, human life and civilization might be stuck in a repetitious cycle without progress or variety.
Artists can drive you crazy, but they break the mold.
up with misfits
not down with the fit-ins
literature absolutely needs normal people
literature people need to be at least somewhat normal
literature students as verbally gifted loners
social skills but some sense of outside-ness
need to create or find meaning, Chekhov: "genius" = "spiritual greed"
add regarding upside:
great writers, texts as infinite source of meaning; cf. scripture
each generation finds something new, something important, something unfinished
Dickinson poems
Dickinson webpage with alternative photo
style sheet
What's the experience of a Dickinson poem?
style sheet:
paradoxical combinations of abstract / concrete figures or phrases
paradox: A statement that seems self-contradictory or nonsensical on the surface but that, upon closer examination, may be seen to contain an underlying truth. As a rhetorical figure, paradox is used to grab the reader's attention and to direct it to a specific point or image that provokes the reader to see something in a new way.
Pyrrhus: "One more such victory and we are lost." ( > a "Pyrrhic victory" is one that costs more than it gains)
"We had to destroy the village in order to save it."
Zen: "What is the sound of one hand clapping?"
2986 "Dare you see a Soul at
the white heat?"
paradox:
"white heat"--at least ufamiliar, have to see it new
"unannointed Blaze"
"finer Forge"--Transcendental? (i. e., the common forge stands for something higher and finer?)
extended metaphor of forge, refining, ores
"dare" stands at end--can you take it?
open-ended
2989 "I heard a Fly buzz--when I
died--"
king = "King of Terrors"
half-rhyme: Room / Storm, Firm / Room
sight rhyme (words rhyme by sight
but not by sound)
be / Fly
perfect rhyme at end gives sense of closure, but
content: definite beginning, open ending
2989-90 "This World is not
Conclusion."
Beyond / sound near rhymes
Difficulty of tracing antecedent to "it"
Gap gets filled by reader; cf. Whitman's "something", Hawthorne's minister's smile or secret sin; Melville's neither this nor that
2990-91 "I started Early--Took
my Dog--"
paradox: "mermaids in the basement" (!)
Sexual union / mystical union (+ God = nature?) (cf. Transcendentalism?)
2977-78 wild nights
2994-96 "I cannot live with
You--"
cf. plainness of expression,
language--compare Whitman and other American poetry in which "plain
speech" is invested with powerful feeling
Frances Sargent Locke Osgood, "The Little Hand" (2832-3)
We wandered sadly round the room,--
. . .
We wandered sadly round the room,--
Domestic life / spiritual meaning
Cf. Bradstreet, "Burning of Our House," 397
paradox: Right of Frost
2998-9 "Because I could not stop
for Death--"
gothic; tomb as house; cf. Poe
open ending
3001-2 "A narrow Fellow in the
Grass"
when a boy, barefoot--persona
3019 When I state myself, as the Representative of the Verse--it does not mean me--but a supposed person
whiplash unbraiding in the sun
3006 "A Route of
Evanescence" [riddle poem]
note identifies answer
Mark 3
16 And Simon he surnamed Peter;
17 And James the son of Zebedee, and John the
brother of James; and he surnamed them Boanerges, which is, The sons of
thunder:
18 And Andrew, and Philip, and Bartholomew, and
Matthew, and Thomas, and James the son of Alphaeus, and Thaddaeus, and Simon the
Canaanit
Dickinson's reference to "Boanerges" is an instance or example of allusion.
What's the experience of a Dickinson poem?
student comments 2004:
baffling--not sure where images or subject is taking you, so open to interpretations
gives an image at beginning, then extends, takes you somewhere with image
challenging but rewarding
poetry tends to be intense, tightly packed, explosive with meaning
hard to defend appreciation; one can identify, but based on what experience?
imagine another life for Emily; poetry seems full of experience
always a temptation for biographical interpretation--gives a more definite answer; downside: definite answer is a limiting answer
like a code of styles, symbols, to be figured out, deciphered
inviting, willing to go back for more
short, lyric poems are comparatively easy to teach--whole class can be on the same page for extended period
professor's comments:
If I'm not reading Dickinson, I never exactly miss reading her.
But each experience of her poetry is exhilarating, "ecstatic," somewhat unlike any other life or literary experience
takes you somewhere you couldn't go otherwise
and in a hurry
ecstatic, mystical, sublime--almost a sense of danger, of losing your balance, of being thrown somewhere too unfamiliar
analyze, apply in terms of language, style
paradox, strange combinations, near-rhyme
create sense of
near-meaning
near-comprehension
but also always something greater that you're not quite grasping, something that eludes definition
style sheet: ephemeral, mercurial, etc.
can be frustrating if you just want to finish her poem and stop Emily from talking to you
can be liberating
plus always something more to learn, something else to wake up and read for
review presentations
presentation summaries are complete, save 2
changes next time around > no discussion recorder (seems less necessary with web-projector)
other suggestions for improving process?
Best results: questions followed or resulted from presentation
Upsides of student presentations:
Student questions better at meeting class where it is. (In most cases, the text will be new to both the presenter and the class, whereas the teacher may have read the text dozens of times > advanced or stale.)
Students are more comfortable answering a peer's questions: less sense of right or wrong answers, less sense of "what answer is the teacher fishing for? What answer does the teacher want to hear?"
The brains in a classroom always exceed those of any one person. Presentations get students into habit of "producing truth" rather than memorizing or ignoring it.
Presentations work best with a record of presentation--otherwise students are more likely to improvise.
Impressed with presenters' (apparent) comfort level in front of the class, especially willingness to wait for answers, leave space for others to jump in.
questions on Dickinson's life and poetry
What
is the experience of reading a Dickinson poem? How does a Dickinson poem work?
(formalist interpretation of literature--literary texts as autonomous,
timeless works of art, only marginally related to history or autobiography)
Can
Dickinson be connected to the American Renaissance?
(Dickinson born 1830, Twain b. 1835, James 1843, Wharton 1862, Crane &
Dreiser 1871)
(historicist interpretation of literature--literary texts as reflections of
or contributors to literary and / or social movements, periods)
Can
the poetry be read apart from the legend of Dickinson's life? (compare Poe,
Sylvia Plath)
(autobiographical interpretation of literature--generally frowned on by
scholars, but irresistible)
Why are people fascinated / troubled by
Emily Dickinson's image, lifestyle, legend, etc.?
(fusion of literary history and autobiographical interpretation--human life
as text)
reading Dickinson's life as a text: Gothic features
Ancestral home
Secrets?
Reclusive
Woman in white
domineering father figure, wayward children (cf. Wuthering Heights)
Modern
model of personhood: economically independent and / or productive. Women may
enjoy option of not being economically productive but instead of being
biologically reproductive
Dickinson
is neither economically productive nor biologically
Cf.
nun
"Room of One's Own"