October 7 2010

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

1) Journal Exercise: (Suggested: 10 minutes)

Last time, I asked you what you knew about the world – and the answers were grim!

So, today, we are going to take another route.  For the next 10 minutes, I want you to focus on the following question:

Where do you see yourself in ten years? Don’t just speak to your intended careers. Think beyond that. Be as specific as possible.

2) Class Discussion:  (Suggested: 5-7 Minutes)

Right now, you are all part of different communities that intersect in this classroom.

What I want you to do is discuss where you see your community being 10 years from now.

What will be going on? Where will people be? Will you still be a member of the same community? What will change and what will stay the same?

3) Class Discussion: (5-10 Minutes)

4) Mini-Lecture:

1)      Last time, we talked about how quickly the world was changing during the Victorian period.

1. Tennyson’s Poetry can provide us with some insights into what it was like to live during that time.

2. If we look at “The Lady of Shalott,” for example, we encounter a curious situation, which is oddly prescient of the postmodern situation. We see a woman in a room with a boring job. She is watching a mirror (i.e. TV) and gets caught up in what she sees – pursues it, and dies.

i.      Of course, there is much more to it than that.

1. And if we look to Ulysses, we see something similar. A man is bored with his life and hopes for something new – and promises to leave in the pursuit of something new.

2)      While we may notice and discuss these things, there is something else pretty startling going on here.   In Romantic poetry – with the exception of Blake – artworks and stories are considered, but from a distance, as in Keat’s Ode on a Grecian Urn and poems o Homer and Shakespeare.

1. However, in The Lady of Shalott and Ulysses, we have poems that take place inside artworks. The Lady of Shalott moves into the Arthurian Legends.

(We see this same basic pattern today — does anyone know where?? Humm…)

1. “Ulysses,” on the other hand, shows us a revision of an artwork, an adding to or a re-doing. This is different from simply borrowing, which all artworks do. This sense of adventure and ongoing discovery is not nearly as developed in Homer’s poem. Most ages tend to bring aspects of that poem out that most appeal to them. This is the hallmark of a classic.

2)       It is important to notice that the artworks being considered here are extremely traditional.

Shakespeare makes a brief appearance, but these are cornerstone texts of western civilization that are being addressed.

I would argue that this speaks to the great uncertainty of the age, one during which issues of identity were very much in question.

4)      Finally, we might notice that we are dealing with  narratives here. This relates to the rise of the novel – and the notion that artworks were to be beneficial to the public. This would seem to suggest that the Victorian age was buying into the notion that the Keats’s Urn is right when it says “Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty”

Discussion of the Poetry and the responses

Revise Papers:  Read Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market