Read: Chesnutt, "The Goophered Grapevine" (here for printable PDF, or here for web version)... and review the author's biography on Norton 1638-39
Read: Jewett, biography and "A White Heron" (1590-98)
Read: Cheever, biography and "The Swimmer" (2408-17). I am moving Faulkner to 6月8日 and deleting O'Connor again.
Read: Bishop, biography and "The Fish" (2398-2401)
178 (Carol). Briefly summarize what you have learned from previous classes about pastoral genres of writing, or summarize what you learned about a particular pastoral text. (I am using the term quite generally to include any kind of contemplation of natural or artificial landscapes, in poetry or prose. Or even just writing that has a rural or village setting.)
179 (Viola). Choose one of the authors from this list, and explain how and why they use a pastoral setting: Columbus, Champlain, Smith, Cooke, Crevecouer, Jefferson, Freneau, Irving, Detroit, Tecumseh, Thorpe, Emerson, Black Hawk, Zitkala Sa, Roosevelt, Stevens, Wright, Momaday, Silko, Harjo, Lee
180 (Zoe). Choose a different author from the list in #179 and answer.
181 (Joy). Like Dunbar's "Ante-Bellum Sermon," there is a kind of triple layering of irony in "The Goophered Grapevine." In the first layer, there are ignorant slaves living on a nostalgic, pre-1865 Southern plantation. In the second layer, it begins to appear that the slaves have a clever way of outwitting their master... but we could find that idea even in the racist Joel Chandler Harris "Uncle Remus" stories that formed the basis of the Disney "Song of the South" cartoon I showed you. So analyze the all-important third layer, which is the "1887" layer... how does Chesnutt depict Julius the storyteller and his transplanted Northern capitalist employer? How might this relate to Chesnutt's relationship to the (white) reading audience?
182 (Lucille). If there is a symmetry between the 'interior' and 'exterior' situation of Chesnutt's text, there is perhaps an asymmetry between the 'interior' and 'exterior' situation of Jewett's text. To give you a sense of what I mean, answer this... who do you imagine Jewett's original reading audience to be, and what do you suppose are their motivations for being interested in stories like "The White Heron"?
183 (Winnie). Based on "The Swimmer," do you agree with Norton that Cheever isn't a great writer, and that his work is "firmly resistant to ideas"? I'm of two minds - I think the metaphor of "The Swimmer" is one of the most striking and memorable in all of American Literature, but I'm not quite sure what it's a metaphor for. I always mistake "county" for "country" in the story... is this elision warranted?
184. (Meg). Bishop's poetry does not lend itself very easily to the type of analysis we've used in this class, which is mainly ideological or sociological. (I suppose the "wise" fish could suggest something about the mind's capability to incorporate experiences, even disruptive or traumatic ones, into an organic whole of memory or history? I'm not sure.) So in this question I invite you to make any observation/analysis about "The Fish" that you like, or to compare Bishop to another of our authors.
Random Ethno-Cultural Note: Someone just pointed out to me that of the 9 officers in the U.S. "supreme court," 3 are now from Jewish families and the other 6 from Catholic families. (I don't know their actual religious practices, ha ha.) This says a lot about the expansion of "white" that occurred in the past 100 years. The question is, will this category expand further? To whom? Will it cease to be meaningful? Or will it contract?
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This is Carol answering question 178:
ReplyDeletePastoral genres of writing is literary work in which the shepherd's life is presented in a conventionalized manner. In this convention the purity and simplicity of shepherd life is contrasted with the corruption and artificiality of the court or the city. The pastoral is found in poetry, drama, and fiction, and many subjects, such as love, death, and religion, have been presented in pastoral settings. Besides, pastoral shepherds and maidens usually have Greek names, reflecting the origin of the pastoral genre.
Pastoral poems are often set in beautiful rural landscapes. A landmark in English pastoral poetry was Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calender, which contains elegies, fables and a discussion of the role of poetry in contemporary England. Like Spenser, John Milton saw mastery of the pastoral mode as the first step in a great poetic career. In Lycidas (1637), that mastery is completed. Milton used the form both to explore his vocation as a writer and to attack what he saw as the abuses of the Church. And, the formal pastoral in English died out in the 18th century, one of the last notable examples being Alexander Pope's Pastorals (1709). In the Norton Anthology of English Literature, it is said that “[There] was another vein in Pope’s youthful poetry, a tender concern with natural beauty and love. The Pastoral, his first publication, and Windsor Forest abound in visual imagery and descriptive passages of ideally ordered natural; they remind us that Pope was an amateur painter (p.2493).”
This is Winnie answering Q.183.
ReplyDeleteAccording to Norton, Cheever is not considered a great writer mainly because of his insular tendency and the lack of politics and ideology in his work, and yet I don’t think it’s appropriate to judge whether a writer is “great” or not simply by these. When reading “The Swimmer,” I was first confused by the way the real and the surreal mix together; nevertheless, after I finished the whole story, the idea of “time” seemed to stand out.
When Ned is just about to start his “journey,” he is full of energy and thinks that a long swim might “enlarge and celebrate” the beauty of the summer day; however, when he finally gets home, it seems that summer has already gone, and he has become so exhausted that he does not feel triumphant. It’s clear that time has passed a lot faster than he thinks. While he thinks he has spent one day swimming, people, things, seasons, and life around him have all changed—“he had been immersed too long.” (2416) In my opinion, the swimmer is one that refused to face the reality, and the swimming pool is his distraction, imagination, or whatever helps him escape from the real world. And it is because he has been “immersed” in what is not real for too long that he becomes so miserable when he finally begins to get the truth piece by piece.
(As the “county” and “country” thing, I mistake them while reading as well, but I cannot think of any reason why the elision should be warranted~)
Q.182
ReplyDeleteThis is a story about a girl, a hunter and a rare bird. The girl was seemed confused in her affection to the hunter, and was hard to decide whether to tell him where the heron’s nest is at the end of the story. Finally, she decided to respect the life of the bird and not telling the hunter. She struggled to choose in her own better life, her affection and the life of the bird. I think after she climbed up and saw the heron’s family, she might think the bird’s life and the beauty was worth than the money. The asymmetry of her own desire and her conscience created a conflict and made the story to climax. I think the original audiences of Jewett were the government or the factory owners. At that time the environment were not so severely polluted, this story might give the government and factory owners an opportunity to exanimate the policies or the pollution might hurt the earth. If the world was polluted or animals were killed, the scene that Sylvie saw might not exist anymore.
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ReplyDeleteThis is Meg answering Q 184
ReplyDeleteAs I read through the poem, especially the description of the fish, I think about the American aboriginals. Bishop gives detail of the appearance of the fish by lots of concrete images, but the brown skin and the large but shallower eyes, weapon like lips, and also the medal like symbol the fish-line, these description makes me somehow picture an image of an American Indian. He has been a great warrior but now too tired to fight for the freedom, yet he still has the sullen face, and also the stereotype of nature-like, such as the sea-lice and weed hanging around. At last, the description of the rainbow made by the oil and of the boat makes me think about the “Crying Indian” video, but a sort of reverse one. Also, the fish being finally set free seems to me as the Indians finally have their own space in a certain degree, and kind of being free from outside. The rainbow looks so wonderful, but it is made from the pollution of the oil; just like the illusion of freedom to them looks like a beautiful work but it is polluted.