Essay Exam, will cover all course content so far. There will be five questions, and you will need to write in response to two of the five questions.
1) Journal Assignment: (Suggested: 10 minutes)
In your journal, I would like you to explain to me to the best of your ability the difference between – or if there is any difference between – your digital culture and your “analog” or “real world” culture. Is there a seamless integration between these subjects, or do they mark different arenas of your life.
2) Group Assignment: (Suggested: 10 Minutes)
Now that we have thought about the difference between our digital and analog life (lives), I want you to think about something else. What aspects, of your life are not mediated, fabricated, or sustained in some way by industry? That is to say, how much of your world is a social construct and how much of it just “is”? Discuss and come up with lists to share with the class.
3) Class Discussion: (Suggested: 5-7 Minutes)
Goblin Market
Mini-Lecture:
Eight Points to Remember:
1) In “Goblin Market,” we have an exciting narrative of two sisters who get into and out of a bad situation. We might recognize it as being something like a Fairy Tale. But , as is true of everything we read, there is an important context for this poem, and we need to consider it.
2) We need to remember that this poem emerges during a profound social collapse and expansion: new industry, new transportation, the integration of rural and urban communities. And this can give us some understanding of the eeriness and strangeness at the center of this poem: Two rural woman tempted by a roving “market” of “goblins.”.
3) We might notice that there is a very sharp distinction between the beauty of the women and the utter ugliness of the goblins. There is an important contrast here. We might also be aware of the fact that the fruits of the market are presented as being uniformly attractive. When we read this as members of 21st century, it is very, very easy to overlook how strange these products would be. Not only do they represent fruits from a wide variety of regions, but they are also all very ripe. We expect this in our world. However, in the world of the mid-19th century, such a site would be largely alien to rural people in England. It would only exist in paintings.
4) So, one way to view this poem, or part of this poem, is as a dramatization of the kinds of social tensions that were coming to England at this time.
5) It is also important to know that this poem is finished only a few years after the publication of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species (1859)
One main argument of that text is that the animals and plants that surround humankind have been selectively bread to benefit humanity in a number of ways: animals for farm work and industry, plants for harvesting. Even in 1859, it was recognized that the natural or real world was heavily mediated, and essentially dependent upon a social network that referred out experience of reality. One does not go “outside” — one goes into a landscape shaped by humanity in one way or another..
6) We might next turn to the issue of the sickness. Why are the goblin fruits bad? Well – because they are addicting, though that word does not show up here and would not have made sense to Rossetti, but this is the essential idea she is working with. And we might think about how the concept of addiction connects with the Romantic project. The Romantic project encourages us to make the world over – but addiction would seem to be an issue that gets in the way of that production. We are addicted to the “on script” life, to our routines – and now, we are considering what it is like to be addicted to the fruits of and inter-region commerce industry.
We see this today:
This is a particular concern today: I.E., BP!
7) But we also find something else that is interesting here if we turn to back to the story, Namely: how is the situation resolved? Here we have two rural women working together and, through sacrifice, they escape the fate of the Goblin Market. How is this different than the Lady of Shalott? How is this different than Ulysses?
Discussion and Reading.
Reading for Next Time:
Walter Pater: Studies in the History of the Renaissance
Charles Darwin: Selections from The Origins of Species: 1539-1545
A good way for us to approach the Victorian period is to begin with the idea of “certainty.” What are you certain of – name one physical, intellectual, and, if applicable, spiritual truth that you hold to be true. If possible, provide a brief explanation for how or why you hold this subject to be true.
Group Work: (Suggested: 10 Minutes)
What do we know about the world, generally? What are some longstanding truths that we hold to be “self-evident” about twenty-first-century life? Come up with a list to share with the class.
Class Discussion of lists: (Suggested: 5-10 Minutes)
Min-Lecture: Introduction to the Victorian Period 1830-1901
General points to remember:
1. As is true of the poems we have read, it is simply not possible to summarize the period in question in any way that is respectful of its content. We have to perform a “historiography” of it – a selective history.
2. The historiography I am going to propose is one that has three basic themes:
Extreme Intellectual crisis
Geological
Astronomical
Spiritual
Massive Political Expansion
Expansion of classes and voting “public” in England and within the empire.
Expansion of transportation
Global dominance
Fatalistic Celebration;
Society Desperately – and successfully – expanding even as the notion of human society and civilization crumbles away.
3. These conditions bring a host of challenges. For the moment, we will think of these challenges in terms of the Romantic Period.
Challenge to Blake
The period presents less of a challenge to Blake than it does an affirmation. What looked “crazy” – his radical reconsideration of reality and history – is in some sense confirmed in this period. Charles Darwin, for example, does in science what Blake did for the Bible.
Challenge to Wordsworth
The rapid urbanization of the England means that the leech gatherer and the rural people have been sucked into cities, or now live along railroad tracks. One can no longer “wander in the woods” – at least, not in the same way.
Challenge to Keats
Key concerns regarding the appropriation of culture – who are you to comment on the Grecian urn, Mr. Keats? Why are you to comment on Indian art?
4. The “American” issue. This period covers the era of the Civil War, which – at least for a time – and perhaps did – spell the end for the notions of liberty and freedom that inspired the Revolutionary War
Mini-Lecture in Action: Let’s take the next 10 minutes and consider these challenges in a journal assignment:
How is your world different than your grandparents world, generally? What are the key changes as you are aware of them in terms of social, intellectual, and cultural transformation?
Class Discussion
Read and respond to: Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s The Lady of Shalott and Ulysses.
What do you do to be “creative”? How do you “express yourself” (ugh – I hate that phrase).
Do you consider your creative activities to be your “hobbies”? How did you come by these activities?
Group Discussion:
(Suggested: 7 Minutes)
Share your findings, and then answer this question.
How important is creativity to you? To the people around you?
Class Discussion:
(Suggested: 5-10 Minutes)
Mini-Lecture: (Suggested: 10-15 Minutes)
Eight Points to Consider
Let’s begin by thinking about the different ideas we have come across in the preface to Lyrical Ballads and in Shelly’s “In Defense of Poetry.”
1) We might begin by noting that Wordsworth approaches poetry as a intentional act – he writes ‘experiments,’ that follow a particular method, and which produce certain anticipated results (hopefully).
2) Shelly, however, considers poetry to be a divinely inspired act, produced without rational aims, that has the common effect of joining our minds to absolute truths.
3) Both ideas are radical, but we might consider them in light of a few important lines from Tintern Abby:
1. And I have felt/A presence that disturbs me with the joy/of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime/Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,/And the round ocean and the living air,/ And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:/A motion and a spirit that impels all thinking things, all objects of all thought, and rolls through all things.
4) When we read this line, we might ask ourselves if we, too, feel this presence, or if, rather, we know what he is talking about. If we do feel or know, then we may be having exactly the kind of experience that Shelly is talking aboutin Defense of Poetry – we are being connected with an “absolute truth.”
5) We might call this a “spiritual” or “religious” experience, but we might also call it a “poetic” or “aesthetic” experience. The terms we use are important.
6) If we call it “spiritual” or “religious,” we are associating it with dogmatic faith traditions, which both anticipate and color our experience of the poem.
7) If we call it an “poetic” or “aesthetic” experience, we are basing our reaction on our unique experience with the poem itself. That is to say, The “presence” is not God or Allah, but, rather, simply what it is. The Poem connects us with “the sublime.”
8) And it is over this notion that the difference between Wordsworth and Shelly could not be more stark. Wordsworth constructs the experience, and understands the experience as a construction. Shelly does not. For Shelly, it is a Divine experience.That is to say, it may not be “religious” or “spiritual,” but it is rendered by the influence of a supernatural power.
Mini-Lecture in Action: Journal Exercise: (Suggested: 10 Minutes)
As this point, do you think your understanding of poetry is more in line with what you are reading in Wordsworth, or with what you are reading in Shelly? Explain
“Oi, mister! Indo-Aryans…it looks like I am a Western after all! Maybe I should listen to Tina Turner, wear the itsy-bitsy leather skirts. Pah. It just goes to show…you go back and back and back and it’s still easier to find the correct Hoover bag than to find the one pure person, one pure faith, on the globe. Do you think anybody is English? Really English? It’s a fairy tale!” (200)
Last time, I asked you who you were, and we came up with some general answers, most of which reflected issues relating to emotions or family associations.
One reason the question is so hard to answer is, as Alsana suggests above, it is hard to know “how far back your roots” go. That is to say, where is the dividing line between you, the biological entity, and the world that has formed and is formed by you?
So, today, I am going to ask you another, related question.
But we need to begin with an idea:
You might consider that it is more reasonable to think of “yourself” as a “somebody who has been assimilated into a culture, or cultures.”
Who you “are” represents the social and cultural systems that define your experience of life.
That is not to say that there is no “you,” and certainly not that “you” as an individual are not valuable or anything like that.
We’re not talking about Nihilism here…
To the contrary, it may give you a way to approach and address the concept of you – which is something we seemed to have some difficulty articulating last time.
Let’s do the following to consider this idea, and whether or not we “buy” it:
Journal Entry: (Suggested: 10 Minutes)
Describe an experience in your life when you have been “assimilated,” that is, brought into and changed by a new culture or social trend. It can be as routine as being “assimilated” into the conventions of a class, or a new family, or a religious or political entity.
What was the experience like?
Group Work: (Suggested: 10 Minutes)
Share findings, then come up with a list of the top ten qualities or definitive characteristics of the process of assimilation.
Class Discussion: (Suggested: 5-10 Minutes)
Mini-Lecture:
1:
Near the end of your reading for today, you encountered two significant news events from the late 1980s. The first was the violent reaction to Salman Rushdie’s “The Satanic Verses”
The Satanic Verses:1988
Fiction that Deals with the life of Muhammad (we have seen the outcomes of such in our own times: The Danish Cartoon Protests)
Rushdie’s work has some parallels — Lots of Western Literary Techniques not well-received by some militant Muslims.
Some Muslim groups saw it as a blasphemous book.
Banned in India and it inspired riots – like the one you read about – in the UK.
In mid-February 1989, the supreme leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, issued a Fatwa against Rushdie, calling for his murder.
This tension parallels, and shows the larger political significant of, Samad’s dissatisfaction with Western life – though in an extreme form.
Clearly, it is not shared by all UK Muslims, as is demonstrated by Alsana’s “burning” of Millat’s western items as retribution for his participation in the riot (197).
2:
We also have the Fall of the Berlin wall, which is significant for a number of reasons, the most pressing of which for our purposes is the question it raised about assimilation – Samad: “You can’t just let a million people into a rich country: Recipe for disaster.”
We might notice a few things here, the first is that Irie seems to care a great deal about it, and we might wonder why she feels differently about it than Archie and Samad – I will argue that the issue here is assimilation, or the promise of assimilation – which holds currency for her, but not for Samad (who does want it) and not for Archie(who feels no need for it). Indeed, Archie is more interested in what is on TV.
3:
Samad’s resistance to assimilation is evident in his effort to send Magid to Bangladesh.
Millat’s life appears to justify those fears.
But where do these fears come from?
Well – we might notice that they begin to show up in the text right around the time Samad begins to have an affair with Ms. Poppy Burt Jones. Who is white, and, by all accounts, thoroughly English.
4:
Why is the fear of assimilation such an issue for Samad? Well – we might notice that he is unhappy with the possible identifies he has in London, and that he romanticizes his home country.
From Alsana, of course, and from the riots we read about, we learn that Bangladesh is far from an ideal environment, and that England is supposedly a more stable place – but then we see the hurricane and the Rushdie riots, which suggest things are not as calm in the UK as she is assuming.
These are all important questions going forward, but we might look back to an even earlier scene to get an understanding of their relevance to the next generation of Iqbals and Joneses.
5:
The Mr. J.P. Hamilton Scene: Notice all the recurring motifs in this scene – that’s generally a sign something important is going on in a novel.
1) Doorstep (141) – things they are about selling or robbing.
2) He is a WWII Veteran
3) He is racist (144)
4) Does not want what the children have to offer, even when it’s charity.
5) He is also clearly insane.
6) His teeth are fake. (144)(145)
Mini-Lecture in action:
What are the defining characteristics of an assimilated “Mainer”?
“And don’t speak to me of second generation! One generation! Indivisible! Eternal!”
Somewhere in the midst of this argument, Irie slipped out of the kitchen and headed for the front door. She caught an unfortunate glimpse of herself in the scratch and stain of the hall mirror. She looked like the love child of Diana Ross and Engelbert Humperdinck.
“You have to let them make their own mistakes…”came Alsana’s voice from the heat of battle, traveling through the cheap wood of the kitchen door and into the hallyway, where Irie stood, facing her own reflection, busy tearing out somebody else’s hair with her bare hands.
Let’s begin today by talking about the final paper for this course:
It is due on the day of the final exam.
Long Research Paper: Here is the old post, we have adjusted the description slightly to account for your presentations.
This paper will build on your short research paper. It will propose a mature literary argument capable of sustaining the intense critical scrutiny of your peers. The length will be 6-7 pages, and you will need to use 8-10 peer-reviewed secondary sources.
General Discussion:
Where are we with it?
I’d like to meet with you all at some point later this week to go over what you have and discuss the direction of the paper.
White Teeth:
Time is running out for us with this text, so I am going to set you free on it. Thursday is our last lecture, and it would not be fair for me to assign the rest of the book for that day. So I’ll say this: Proceed at the pace you can, and any question that may relate to it on the final exam will assume only that you have read up to page 300. If there is interest in finishing the book as a class, I can see if I can get money for a Pizza party for the class at the end of finals week. Let me know if you are interested.
Here is how we will start today:
Journal
1) Think about your high school. How many students were in it? What where the major cliques? What were their primary characteristics? Why did they form? What kept them together?
2) Then, answer two questions: Which clique(s) were you in? And were there students who were “hybrids,” (i.e., they were in two or more cliques)?
3) Also – where did your hometown come from? Do you know? How much do you know?
Groups: Share findings
Class Discussion:
Three Major Concerns to lead us to “the end” of our time together in this course
Assimilation:
Examples:
Local
State
National
Worldwide
Diversity:
If you’re in the majority, it’s “diversity.” If you’re not, it’s simple “freedom.”
Examples:
Local
State
National
Worldwide
Hybrids:
Examples
Local
State
National
Worldwide
British Literature, now bumping up against the present, is still dealing with some of the fundamental issues with which our our 18th century poets were dealing.
Let’s perform an experiment: Let’s apply the “Urn’s standard” to our categories.
‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’—that is all. Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know!
What can we make of it? How might we make something of it?
2) For today, we read excerpts from Darwin’s “The Origin of Species”(1859) and Pater’s “Studies in the History of the Renaissance” (1869, 73)
It is useful, I think, to return to Wordsworth as we consider these writers. You may remember these lines from earlier this semester (page 260, lines 95 on…)
Of something far more deeply interfused,/Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the ocean round and the living air,/And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:/A motion and a spirit, that impels/All thinking things, all objects of all thought…
We’ve talked about this passage before, and how it might be interpreted under either a spiritual or an aesthetic reading…
2) Darwin gives us another way to think about it. At the end of your selections from “The Origins of Species,” we encounter this (1545):
It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds…
Here we have a sense that the “motion and spirit” identified by Wordsworth stems from certain laws.
This is, I would argue, a position that is generally consistent with Wordsworth’s comments on poetry and its constriction: i.e., the poetic work achieves an effect by adhering to certain laws and eliciting a certain response from the reader.
So we might begin to see some parallels between natural or “scientific” laws and poetic laws. This is important.
For example, we would not have the experiance of the “motion” and “spirit” if Wordsworth did not write the way he writes.
So we might conclude that there are some parallels between Darwin and Wordsworth — but it may not be evident right away what the these parallel ideas may be…
3) We can get a sense of why its important think about these writers by returning to Percy Shelly’s comments on poetry…
Shelly, you may remember, argues that poetic genius is a form of Divine Inspiration.
You may also remember that this led us to consider Wordsworth and Shelly as if they were arguing opposite sides of the same coin. But if we interject Darwin…something interesting starts to happen.
For example, when we look at Darwin, we encounter a very important – and almost totally overlooked argument in the contemporary period – on the relationship between Divine Inspiration and scientific Laws: namely, he argues that one does not contradict the other, as it is possible to consider the laws of the universe as extending from a divine source. We get this at the very end of our reading, and we also get it on (1541-on).
So, this might lead us to a position where we don’t really care who is “right” –
ONLY TO GO TO THAT POSITION IS TOTALLY OVERLOOK THE IMPORTANCE OF DARWIN AND WORDSWORTH’S WORK.
For example, if we just throw our hands up in the air and say that the laws don’t matter because their source is mysterious, it is really hard for us to then say that we should study these laws at all.
What would be the point? Your knowledge of the law would in no way increase your understanding of the source, as it is always, always mysterious.
One law would be as good as any other.
One poem as good as any other.
Under this reasoning, no law can be more important or meaningful than its “mysterious” source.
This is problem, as most of us know and recognize the fact that most species and artworks are rarely of equal value, and differences do matter, and the sources of those differences do matter.
Consider, if you will, the cat/mouse/flower example from Darwin. You can’t put a pig or ferret in there and have the same ecosystem persist (1541). And you can’t write “Roses are red and violets are TRUCK” and achieve the same poetic effect as “Roses are red and violets are BLUE”
But this leaves us with a problem…
How do we set about determining the value for poetry? For any artwork? It’s too easy (and intellectual deceptive) to simply say that one thing is as good as another.
4) Enter: Walter Pater
4) Pater starts us down the road to aesthetic inquiry. He does so from a position that is more closely aligned with Shelly than Wordsworth.
If you read Pater carefully, you may have picked up on the fact that he makes a few comments that echo Shelly almost perfectly. He talks about the study and pursuit of aesthetics — beauty — is best undertaken by individuals who are keenly aware of the emotional impact of their environment (1507-08). That is to say, he argues that the aesthetic critic is more attentive to Great Passions (1513) than “other kinds of people.”
“Gee, I sure wish I was sen-sa-tive, like Mister Pater am.”
Another problem:
Pater also talks of aesthetics as being an intensely personal science: i.e., what is the effect of beauty on me? What does it mean to me? And this would seem to make some sense — it is, after all, a very important question.
But is it the only kind of question we might persue through aesthetics? And is it the MOST important question?
Also: It leads to a significant problem: Namely, what good are your aesthetic findings if I disagree with you about the nature and composition of an artwork?
Here’s an example:
Pater goes on and on about how wonderful the Mona Lisa is:
(1510)
However, and I don’t know about you, but I find the Mona Lisa to be a very boring painting. It has NO emotional impact on me.
On the other hand, I am deeply moved by “The Lady of Shallot” every time I see it.
Now, Pater does not talk about “The Lady of Shallot”. But I might look at his argument for the Mona Lisa and say that he provides only historical evidence and analogy to verify his interpretation, and offers nothing like a “law” for why he — specifcally — likes the painting so much. He talks about it as if we should all like it equally.
6) And it is over this point that we come to see the importance of Darwin and Wordsworth OVER Pater and Shelly – the former suggest that it is possible to arrive at a conclusion, the latter do not – unless it is divinely inspired. HOWEVER! Pater is extremely important, as he asking a fundamental question about the interpretation of art and the conditions under which it is enjoyed.
Before this, we have only seen such thinking in Keats.
No Homework, Study for Midterm and make sure you have a copy of Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse.
