African Art

To finish up for now (Thursday), I'd like to add some links to exhibits on African art.  When we visit the Freer Gallery in March, if we have time or inclination, we may be able to visit the nearby Museum of African Art.  However, while we are reading Heart of Darkness and later on when we are reading Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative and Mariama Ba's So Long a Letter, I'd like for you to be able to look at the links below.  By the way, the picture above is of a power figure from the Congo.  In fact, the figure dates from the 19th century!!  In your opinion, what would Marlow have made of such a figure?

(Here I've posted a copy of a British painting from 1912 as contrast.  J.W. Waterhouse is not the most avant-garde of artists, but his Penelope and Her Suitors may give you an idea of what people in the early 20th century were used to considering as art and why African art might have been shocking to them.)

For more information about the African power figure and its context, see the link below from the Brooklyn Museum:

http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/collections/african_art/22.1421.php

This link takes you to information about that museum's entire collection:

http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/collections/african_art/

Just twenty five years after Heart of Darkness' serialization, the Brooklyn Museum presented an exhibit of African art.  At this time, this art was influencing European artists such as Picasso.

http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/research/digital-collections/pna1923/

Closer to home, here are some links to the Smithsonian's Museum of African Art:

http://africa.si.edu/exhibits/africanvision/index2.html

http://africa.si.edu/collections/index.htm

In 1993, the Bayly Museum of Art at the University of Virginia set up an electronic exhibit on African art:

http://www.lib.virginia.edu/clemons/RMC/exhib/93.ray.aa/African.html

NYC has a Museum for African Art.  Currently, it is based in Long Island City, but it will soon be moving to a new home in Manhattan.

http://www.africanart.org/index.php

The Guggenheim Museum includes a searchable map of Africa on its web site.  Here are links to its pages on Central Africa (the region where the Congo is) and Western Africa (the region where Senegal and Nigeria are).

http://artnetweb.com/guggenheim/africa/central.html

http://artnetweb.com/guggenheim/africa/west.html

The Guggenheim also has a page on African film.  Unfortunately, it seems to have been written in the 1990s:

http://www.artnetweb.com/guggenheim/film/


Here is some background information on African art from a web site at Sweet Briar College in Virginia:

http://www.uiowa.edu/~africart/teachers/Chronology.html

http://hum.lss.wisc.edu/hjdrewal/Looking.html

http://hum.lss.wisc.edu/hjdrewal/aesthetics.html

Anne-Marie O'Connor from the LA Times writes here about the ongoing reassessment of African art:

http://www.calendarlive.com/galleriesandmuseums/cl-et-africanart29jan29,0,5808956.story

This is a little off topic, but I thought that you might be interested in this essay on African history from NYC's Metropolitan Museum of Art:

http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ahis/hd_ahis.htm

I'd like to close with a site from Senegal's DAK'ART Biennale.  It is in French.  The next exhibition will be this summer, so if you plan to go to Dakar....

http://www.biennaledakar.org/

Ge'ez and Its Literature (On African Civilizations pt. 1) Crossposting

While I'm on a roll this morning, I'd like to cross-post a site from my EN 201 blog.  It is on Ge'ez, a language that was once used in what is now Ethiopia and Eritrea.  I realize that Ethiopia is quite far from the Congo, but I also wanted to post an example of an entry derived from one honors student's annotated bibliography.

Ge'ez was used in Abyssinia, the ancestor of Ethiopia and Eritrea.  Now Amharic is the main language of Ethiopia, and Tigrigna is the main language of Eritrea, but both are descended from Ge'ez.  Now Ge'ez is mainly used within the Ethiopian and Eritrean monasteries, which explains my choice of picture above. 

Here is a link to information about the Debra Damo monastery.  It was built on a mountain in the sixth century CE, and it is accessible only to men who are willing to be climb up a rope ladder to the top of the mountain.

http://www.ethiopiantreasures.toucansurf.com/pages/damo.htm

Other monasteries are on islands off the Ethiopian coast:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/1560736.stm

A British man writes about what it is like to visit Ethiopia's churches and monasteries...and what it is like to climb up to Debra Damo!

http://blogs.bootsnall.com/vagabondrick/?p=231

But about Ge'ez....here is a site that gives the history of this language as well as examples of its alphabet:

http://www.ethiopianhistory.com/Ge'ez

This site compares Ge'ez with its "offspring":

http://www.omniglot.com/writing/ethiopic.htm

Could Ge'ez be close to the "Global World Language"?

http://www.valdostamuseum.org/hamsmith/Ogamlang.html

For more background on writings in Ge'ez, see these sites:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ge'ez_language#History_and_literature

http://www.1911encyclopedia.org/Ethiopic_literature

http://wbelcher.bol.ucla.edu/

Here Prof. Getachew Haile, a professor of medieval studies at St. John's University in Minnesota and a political activist, discusses Ge'ez and Amharic with an interviewer:

http://www.senamirmir.com/interviews/theme/5-2001/gh/lang.html

Those of you who are mathematically-inclined may be interested in this writer's efforts to adapt the Amharic/Ge'ez numbering system to include a zero:

http://www.yebbo.com/j/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=447&Itemid=79

Abba Tesfamariam Baraki, a local pastor, is interviewed here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmuJTeSQaAg

Ancient African Civilizations & Ancient Greece & Rome (Cross-posting from EN 201)

After class today, I was thinking about all that Conrad did not know about Africa and its history--and all that we do know, so I thought that I'd post some sites on this topic, for your interest. I've also ordered some books on this topic, so if I get my act together, you may even see a new book review or two here!

Classics scholar Frank M. Snowden, Jr. began the serious study of the interactions between Africans and Egyptians, Greeks, & Romans. Among the pieces of evidence that he used was art from Ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome. He argued that Africans did not experience prejudice from the Greeks and Romans and contributed to their civilizations.

http://www.neh.gov/news/humanities/2004-01/medals.html#snowden

Prof. Snowden spent much of his long career at Howard University. Here is a link to this university's exhibit honoring him for his accomplishments and his influence on classical studies. Here you'll be able to read excerpts from his books as well as reviews of these works:

http://www.howard.edu/library/Special/Excellence@Howard/Snowden/Blacks.htm

Here is the NY Times' recent obituary of Prof. Snowden:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/28/obituaries/28snowden.html?ex=1330318800&en=36f6d8cfe26bf8d7&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

For more information about the influence that Greek culture may have had on one African civilization, the Nubian civilization, see this link to Prof. Stanley Burstein's lecture at Howard:

http://www.chs.harvard.edu/publications.sec/online_print_books.ssp/frank_m._s...

Did you notice that Homer mentioned the Ethiopians in both of his epics?

In 1991, historian Martin Bernal argued that African civilizations strongly influenced the Ancient Greeks; his book was called Black Athena. This argument was criticized by Mary Lefkowitz, a professor of classics at Wellesley College, and other scholars, including Professor Snowden.

Here is a quick overview of the topic. Surprisingly, the discussion page on this entry is brief:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Athena

For a variety of opinions, go to this web site:
http://www.worldagesarchive.com/Individual%20Web%20Pages/BlackAthena.html

Prof. Lefkowitz presents her critique of Bernal's argument here:

http://www.wellesley.edu/CS/Mary/contents.html

Prof. Bernal answers her at length here:
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/bmcr/1996/96.04.05.html

On Joseph Campbell (Crossposting from EN 201)

This afternoon, after our class today, I realized that this entry from my EN 201 blog could be useful as we consider Marlow and his quest in Heart of Darkness. I like to show a tape of Moyers' interview with him in EN 201 because it sets up a useful, modern definition of the hero and the quest that may well explain our discomfort with Gilgamesh and Achilles as heroes. Additionally, Campbell studied so many cultures that he provides a good model for our approach to world literature this semester. (It's true, though, that scholars have criticized Campbell for being too much of a generalist, but at our level, a generalist is probably more helpful to us than a specialist would be.)

First of all, here is a biography of Joseph Campbell from the Joseph Campbell Foundation:

http://www.jcf.org/about_jc.php

This essay was written by a student of Campbell and includes some recollections about him:
http://www.folkstory.com/campbell/campbell.html

Here is an outline of Campbell's "stages of the hero's journey." It's the same handout that I gave you today (Monday 1/28).  Compare these stages to the sequence of events in Heart of Darkness and other works that we read this semester.

http://ias.berkeley.edu/orias/hero/JourneyStages.pdf

FYAmuse, Campbell's work also influenced George Lucas' initial Star Wars movies. Campbell, in turn, had been influenced by Carl Jung's theories of psychology and Mircea Eliade's history and philosophy of religions. For more information about Jung, see the site below:

http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/jung.html

For more information about Eliade, see the site below:

http://www.westminster.edu/staff/brennie/eliade/mebio.htm

If you are interested in writing or storytelling, this site from Maricopa Community College in Arizona could be worth exploring.

http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/smc/journey/

Below are some critiques of Campbell's work and his approach. The first is from a Christian perspective. The second responds to concerns that Christian theologians have with Campbell and the study of mythology.
http://logosresourcepages.org/FalseTeachings/campbell.htm
http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=171

Here is a defense of Campbell's work and approach, also from The Christian Century. This defense mentions Campbell's use of Jungian psychology as well as the extent to which Campbell is misread and to which he misread Jung.

http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=766

From what's out there, Joseph Campbell and his work or his influence might be a good topic for an annotated bibliography--or a presentation!

Journal Entry - Jan. 27, 2008

Link

Above is a link to the first of our reading journals.  Thank you, Juan!

Apocalypse Now & Other Films

It was wonderful to meet everyone and to note how many of you are involved in the arts!  I was impressed by how many of you are knowledgeable about film, art, and music.  This augurs well for EN 202.  Perhaps we will look at more world film than Apocalypse Now and Raise the Red Lantern.

Because I already have a few blog entries on Heart of Darkness, I'd like to write one on Apocalypse Now.  It's an outstanding film, and you can probably see from the image above how impressive it is visually.  And this image is not the most iconic one I could find!

In case you need a refresher on Apocalypse Now, here are some useful web sites.

I have always found IMBD's web sites to be useful:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078788/

This site is a little more detailed, providing some of the history of the filming itself.  Director Francis Ford Coppola had originally wanted Orson Welles to play Kurtz.  Imagine that casting!

http://www.filmsite.org/apoc.html

For a summary of this film, see this site:

http://mural.uv.es/inaber/plot.htm

Here is Roger Ebert's 1979 review of Apocalypse Now.  (The first version of the film was shown in 1979, five years after the end of the Vietnam War.)

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19790601/REVIEWS/41214002/1023

John Patterson of The Guardian interviewed Martin Sheen (Willard) around the time that the second version of Apocalypse Now came out:

http://film.guardian.co.uk/interview/interviewpages/0,,585052,00.html

Gaby Wood interviews an actress who was in the scenes cut from the first version of AN:

http://film.guardian.co.uk/interview/interviewpages/0,,591320,00.html

A student at MIT reviews the second version of AN:

http://www-tech.mit.edu/V121/N31/Apocalypse_Now_.31a.html

If you need more information about the Vietnam War, this site from PBS may be useful:

http://www.pbs.org/battlefieldvietnam/

The war was incredibly controversial.  Here are some other viewpoints:

http://www.vietnamwar.com/

http://www.vietnampix.com/intro.htm

http://www.time.com/time/archive/collections/0,21428,c_vietnam_war,00.shtml

On the other hand, do Vietnam and Apocalypse Now get in the way of our understanding Heart of Darkness?  Here is a link to information about Fitzcarraldo, German filmmaker Werner Herzog' story about a man who was determined to bring opera (and a riverboat) to the South American jungle:

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050828/REVIEWS08/508280301/1023

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083946/

Perhaps this film might help us understand Heart of Darkness a little more.

Reading Heart of Darkness Continued

.
Above is a picture of the Thames River at dusk.  Because Heart of Darkness begins and ends on the Thames, I thought that this image would work quite nicely.

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness: A Case Study in Contemporary Criticism is actually almost twenty years old, but it's a useful introduction to the book and to ways of reading it. 

Twenty years ago (the late 1980s) literary studies was undergoing a great change as ways of reading and writing about literature became more systematic and self-conscious.  This resulted from the (relative) popularization of literary theory.  Literary theory predates the 1980s, of course, but during this decade theory became more and more important to literary studies. 

Before I go further, I want to emphasize that I am reviewing this book because Heart of Darkness is complicated.  There is no one way to read it.  Moreover, Conrad's style can be difficult because he is evoking the atmosphere of the Congo and its psychological impact on Marlow (the original narrator).  Also, Conrad wrote at the end of the 19th century, a time before film and the internet.  His work truly is "betwixt and between"...between older, more elaborate novels by Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, and Charles Dickens & others like Thomas Hardy *and* later, more direct novels by Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald or impressionistic novels by Virginia Woolf.  When I first read Heart of Darkness (in a course on the 19th century British novel), I remember being shocked at how short this novella was.  It looked very different a few years later when I read it in a course on Conrad and then again when I read it at the beginning of a course on the modern British novel. 

Heart of Darkness: A Case Study focuses on five different theories that were popular at the time (1989).  These theories are psychoanalytic (focusing on psychology), reader-response (focusing on the reader's response to literature), feminist, deconstructionist (attempting to take apart the text and discover its structure & contradictions), and new historicist (placing the text in its historical and cultural context).   If this book were to be revised today, I suspect that deconstructionism and reader-response theory might be replaced with queer studies and post-colonial studies.  Here is a link to an essay that takes a more post-colonial approach:  http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/conrad/pva52.html  This situation reminds me that there is no one way to read a piece of literature.

The book actually begins with a short biography of Joseph Conrad and an introduction to his work.  I'm going to save time here by linking to a general biography:

http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/jconrad.htm

What's most important to know about Conrad is this.  He was Polish at a time when Poland did not officially exist because it was ruled by Russia and Germany.  (He grew up in the Russian Empire.)  English was his third or fourth language, and he traveled the world as a sailor before becoming a writer.  At first, his writings were not popular, but they became popular and even influential.  Many later writers admired his work and the view of the world expressed in it.

By the way, like many 19th century novels, Heart of Darkness was first published in a magazine over three issues.  Here's a link to a college's web site that has this version:

http://gaslight.mtroyal.ca/darkmenu.htm

To finish, I'd like to mention what each section focused on in Heart of Darkness. 

The psychoanalytic reading interprets the novel as Kurtz and Marlow's inner journey.  Kurtz falls victim to his desire for power, but Marlow comes away with greater self-knowledge.  This section was written by Frederick R. Karl who also wrote a biography of Conrad, but he does *not* talk about the connections between Marlow and Conrad.  Yes, there are connections!

Adena Rosmarin's section on reader response in turn faces the reasons why Heart of Darkness is difficult for many readers.  Specifically, there are gaps in the narrative and therefore places where the reader has to decide for him/herself what is going on and why it is important.  Conrad's refusal to tell the reader what to think appealed to readers who lived through World Wars One and Two.  WWI, in particular, disillusioned many who fought in it and lived through it.

For more information about WWI, see this site from the BBC:  http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/wwone/

The presence of a feminist reading of Heart of Darkness may surprise you.  Or does it?  In this section, Johanna M. Smith (one of my husband's professors at Indiana University) uses feminist theory to examine Marlow's narrative and his self-justifications about the Company, the Congo, and the women he encounters along the way.  These women include his aunt (who convinces the Company to hire him), Kurtz' African lover, and his European fiancee (his Intended whom Marlow visits at the end of the story).  Interestingly, in the 19th century, a popular type of book was the collected biographies of women.  A number of these women went to Africa, India, and elsewhere in the British Empire as missionaries, and the collected biographies encouraged young female readers to see missionary work as an ideal career.  In practice, most young women could not become missionaries, but these biographies ultimately encouraged them to go on to other careers in the US and the UK.  For more information on these collective biographies and their impact on women, see my review of Prof. Alison Booth's How to Make It As A Woman:
http://ncgsjournal.com/szlyk.htm

Now you know the other side of the story...as Paul Harvey says!

In a deconstructionist reading, J.Hillis Miller argues that Heart of Darkness is something of a parable, a story that appears to be about realistic, everyday events but reveals a hidden, cosmic truth.  He also examines the ways in which Conrad's novel is apocalyptic, that is, about the end of time.  (Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now had come out about ten years earlier.  I know that I first thought of Heart of Darkness as the novel that Apocalypse Now was based on.)

Brook Thomas' New Historicist reading places Heart of Darkness in its historical and cultural context.  Thomas also notes Conrad's thoughts on history and the extent to which a novelist is also a historian.  Conrad, the literary scholar argues, "felt that 'the reality of forms and observation of social phenomenon' in his fiction [produced] more truthful histories than those of most historians" (Thomas 239). 

In your opinion, what are the most important elements of Heart of Darkness?  Why?  Which of the five perspectives outlined above seem most useful to you?

Reading Heart of Darkness

 It's always interesting (and fun) to look at the covers of different books.  Above is a cover of the 2002 edition by Hesperus Press, a British publisher. 

In the same year, Oxford University Press published an edition of Heart of Darkness (and other tales by Conrad) with this cover.  Its editor is Professor Cedric Watts of the University of Sussex.  My professor for the 18th & 19th century novel tended to prefer Oxford UP's editions. 

This edition is from Penguin and, as you might guess from the words in the orange border, dates from the turn of the century (20th to 21st).  Penguin has made available a plethora of great novels in relatively inexpensive and durable paperback.  The editor of this version is D.C.R.A. Goonetilleke, a professor from a university in Sri Lanka.

I like this image that appears to be a cover of an Ipod version.



Now I'd like to look for some older editions or possibly editions in other languages.

Now I've hit the jackpot!  Here is a picture of a cover from a Signet edition from the mid-20th century.  Unfortunately, the author of the web site where I found this picture did not include the date of the edition, but I would guess that this cover may be from the 1950s.  Although the picture appears to be aimed towards a more popular audience, the author of the introduction is Alfred J. Guerard, a noted scholar of Conrad's work and an early psychoanalytic critic.  Hmmm...things were different in the old days!


I'll close with an image of an English-language edition sold at Amazon Japan's site and an image of the edition that I used to own!  Honestly, the picture right above looks more like a painting by Constable (a British painter) than a picture of the Congo!

What do these covers have in common?  How are they different?  Do any seem like they might be influenced by Apocalypse Now?  Which may have been influenced by Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe's reading of Conrad's novel? (See below for link.)

http://www.cis.vt.edu/modernworld/d/Achebe.html

The Novel Continued

Since my previous entry on the novel (cross-posted from EN 201) emphasizes the origins of this genre, I'd like to post an entry that emphasizes later works.  I will begin with the same definition of the novel that I posted earlier, but we will move in a different direction.  In fact, the picture above (the cover of Mariama Ba's novel in French) represents this different direction!

But let's begin with our definition:

http://www.nvcc.edu/home/ataormina/novels/history/define.htm

Prof. Taormina's study of the novel emphasizes English-language novels although, as we see in her outline of the 20th century novel, she does not exclude novels from other traditions.

http://www.nvcc.edu/home/ataormina/novels/history/origins.htm

http://www.nvcc.edu/home/ataormina/novels/history/19thcent.htm

http://www.nvcc.edu/home/ataormina/novels/history/20thcent.htm

How does the novel look if we change our positing in time and in culture?

In the early 20th century, a scholar (or scholars) with the initials C. H. C. W. examined the history of the French novel.  Some novelists (Scudery, Rousseau, Balzac, Flaubert) are in our anthology; some (Hugo, Zola) are not.

http://www.bartleby.com/313/1/2000.html

More recently, a professor at Rice University designed this course on the history of the novel in French.  Note that he includes novelists from Africa and the Caribbean in his course:

http://www.owlnet.rice.edu/~fren220/


The 19th-century novel (Balzac, Flaubert, Zola) was known for its penetrating, unflinching realism and its authors' efforts to position themselves as scientists and sociologists rather than storytellers or moralists:

http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/hum_303/naturalism.html

Twentieth-century French novelists also categorized their work as "Nouveaux Romans" or new novels.  These were even more rigorous, becoming abstract rather than realistic.

http://www3.iath.virginia.edu/elab/hfl0260.html

Here is a 2004 essay by a Nigerian novelist on the African novel:

http://www.chico.mweb.co.za/art/2004/2004jun/040625-novel.html

This British publisher has compiled a list of 19th and 20th century Russian novels:

http://www.mantex.co.uk/ou/aa810/rus-19c.htm

http://www.mantex.co.uk/ou/a319/rus-20c.htm

Here is an overview of Chinese literature that mentions the novel's place in this tradition:

http://afe.easia.columbia.edu/china/lit/brief.htm

The American poet and translator Kenneth Rexroth discusses the Chinese novel here.  Note that he is critical of contemporary Western culture:

http://www.bopsecrets.org/rexroth/chinesenovels.htm

I'll end with some sites about magical realism, an international style of the late 20th century and today:

http://www.english.emory.edu/Bahri/MagicalRealism.html

http://www.themodernword.com/gabo/gabo_mr.html

And we have not even talked about the genre novel, a term that I suspect will become more and more important as we look back at late 20th & early 21st century literature!

Life Writing

One genre that we'll be studying in EN 202 and that may seem new to you is life writing. Life writing includes autobiographies, biographies, journals, diaries, memoirs, oral histories, and even letters.  Although, at first glance, this genre seems to belong more to history or sociology, reading life history can shed light on the ways that literature shapes how we think and feel as well as influences on literature itself.  Some of the earliest novels like Aphra Behn's Oroonoko and Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders even represent themselves as memoirs or autobiographies.  (A memoir covers a part of one's life whereas an autobiography treats the whole of one's life.)  And some life writing like Harriet Jacobs'  Incidents and Samuel Pepys' Diary is not only fascinating but well-written and worth studying as literature.  For example, how does Harriet Jacobs tell her life story in such a way that it appeals to her audience?!  How does she depict herself, Dr. Flint, and her grandmother?  (Note that although Pepys did not want people to read his diary, both Incidents and the Interesting Narrative were written to be read *and* to change people's minds about slavery.)

Here are some links on the study of life writing (or life history):

http://www.sussex.ac.uk/clhr/

http://www.latrobe.edu.au/english/usba/usba.html#field

For those of us who know (a little) French, this site is invaluable as it is associated with Philippe Lejeune, one of the literary scholars to focus on autobiography:

http://www.autopacte.org/

This list from California's Center for Autobiographic Studies explains the difference between autobiography and memoir as well as outlining the different forms of autobiography.  The audience is someone wanting to write and perhaps even publish an autobiography or memoir, but I think that you'll find this list to be useful.

http://www.storyhelp.com/autotypes.html

By the way, Beatrice Wood wrote her autobiography, I Shock Myself, when she was in her early nineties.  Almost ten years later she actively participated in a documentary on herself and her work.  Ms. Wood was also one of the models for Rose in Titanic.  Here is a link to a site with examples of her artwork:

http://artscenecal.com/ArtistsFiles/WoodB/WoodBFile/BWood.html

However, life writing is not simply published or unpublished autobiographies and memoirs.  Here is a link to a project from several universities in Hawaii.  It exemplifies the work that scholars are doing in this area.

http://www.hawaii.edu/biograph/cbrbiohiariyoshi.html

There is also the Legacy Project, a collection of correspondence between service members and their loved ones.

http://www.warletters.com/index.html

To read some of these letters, go to this site:

http://www.gilderlehrman.org/collection/battlelines/index_good.html

This database includes women's letters and diaries from the 1600s to 1950:

http://www.alexanderstreet2.com/NWLDlive/

Here writers discuss their motivations for keeping journals--and preserving their life writing:

http://fraglit.com/impassio/k-essay.htm

http://fraglit.com/lwc/archives/38

A literary scholar writes about her experience reading the published diaries of 18th c. novelist Frances Burney D'Arblay:

http://www.jimandellen.org/burney/fanny.divergent.html

Lifewriting is also an important part of national identity:

http://faculty.arts.ubc.ca/segan/CANLIN.HTM

Of course, we must not forget biography and collections of biographies.  Lucy Hutchinson's biography of her late husband continues to intrigue literary scholars:

http://faculty.goucher.edu/eng211/Lucy%20Hutchinson.htm

I've cited a number of works by women, but one of the most famous literary biographies is James Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson...and earlier Johnson himself wrote a collection of literary biographies:
http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Johnson/Guide/lives.html

I really am only scratching the surface, but I think that adding life writing to EN 202 gives us a much fuller and richer idea of world literature.  If you know French, Spanish, or another language, I would be interested in seeing what you might find in the area of life writing!

A Doll's House (More Pictures!!!)

The picture above is from a California modern-dress production of A Doll's House.  I looked a little bit for a picture from a local production, but I wasn't able to find one quickly.  Below is another period production from the University of California at Riverside.  The scene depicted is Nora's rehearsal of the tarantella.



On the other hand, I did find this essay that explains the importance of Ibsen and his approach to modern drama.

http://www.ibsenvoyages.com/e-texts/four_plays_intro.html

The author of this essay is not only a literary scholar but also the former Resident Dramaturg for the American Ibsen Theater in Pittsburgh. 

Here is a link to a biography of Ibsen.  As you'll see, he lived a long life, and this long life was lived during an eventful period of history--the 19th century.

http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/ibsen.htm

Ibsen caused quite a sensation in England, as this essay from 1893 details, and poet/critic/language reformer George Bernard Shaw coined the term "Ibsenism."

http://ibsen.net/index.gan?id=35363&subid=0

Ibsen caused this stir because of his approach to psychological and social realism. 

http://ibsen.net/index.gan?id=108034&subid=0

This article, also from the Norwegian site Ibsen.net, covers the playwright's approach to the performance of his plays, especially their casting:

http://ibsen.net/index.gan?id=1927&subid=0

I am trying to find some of the 19th c. and early 20th c. performances of A Doll's House online.  I wanted to find a picture of Elizabeth Robins (one of Ibsen's early advocates) as Nora, but all I could find was one of her portraying Hedda Gabler, another of Ibsen's heroines.



Northern State University in Aberdeen, SD has a very informative and complete site on A Doll's House.  The production is from the 2003-04 season.  Unfortunately, the web site is a little wonky.

http://www.northern.edu/wild/0304Season/DollsHouse/Doll_Nts.htm

Below are links to a variety of productions of A Doll's House.  The first link actually brings you to a site where you may download the scanned version of a review from 1918!  Alla Nazimova (pictured below) played Nora.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9B0DEFD81F3FE433A25753C3A9629C946996D6CF

The picture below is from Nazimova's 1922 silent film version of Ibsen's play.



This review is even older.  It describes a benefit performance held in 1894:

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9C02EFDC1F39E033A25755C1A9649C94659ED7CF

Here is a review of the 2007 production pictured at the top of this entry:

http://www.metroactive.com/metro/01.24.07/dolls-house-0704.html

Another recent production in New Hampshire took a very eccentric approach, casting very tall women and very short men.  The play was staged at Dartmouth by the Mabou Mines, an outside, experimental theater group from New York.

http://hop.dartmouth.edu/2005-06/46-dollhouse.html


Here is a link to a video of the Mabou Mines' production:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHn2FxLJOoI

This 2008 production from Chesapeake Shakespeare takes a more traditional approach.  




http://www.broadwayworld.com/viewcolumn.cfm?colid=25048

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/13/AR2008021303167.html



Look up or scroll down to see pictures from a Nepali theater's production of A Doll's House:

http://www.aarohantheatre.org/onstage.php

Here is a review of a recent production in NYC:

http://www.villagevoice.com/theater/0446,feingold,58483,11.html

Here are reviews of films from the 1970s.  The first starred Claire Bloom and Anthony Hopkins, and the second starred Jane Fonda.  We are watching the version starring Ms. Bloom and Hopkins.


But here is a picture of Ms. Fonda's version.


The link below is to a review of the version starring Ms. Fonda.

http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/133372/A-Doll-s-House/overview

I'll conclude with Prof. Ian Johnston's lecture on A Doll's House:

http://www.mala.bc.ca/~johnstoi/introser/ibsen.htm

Mother Courage and Her Children

After reading an article like this, how could I not add Ibsen & Brecht's plays to our reading list for EN 202?

http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/display.php?id=34341

But why are these theater critics so concerned about DC theaters' restricting themselves to English-language playwrights and their works?  Why do they want local theaters to produce works by playwrights like Ibsen, Brecht, or, more importantly, those active in Eastern Europe, Latin America, or the Middle East?

Let's start with this biography of Brecht with its overview of his career and his approach to theater.  Note that he was reacting against an emotional, realistic theater and striving for one that was more politically and intellectually engaged.  Note as well that Mother Courage and Her Children comes out of the period of time leading up to WWII.  At that point, Brecht had already escaped from Nazi Germany.

http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/brecht.htm

Brandeis University has reprinted this article on Brecht's epic theater, which explains his approach in more detail:

http://www.cs.brandeis.edu/~jamesf/goodwoman/brecht_epic_theater.html

For more information about Brechtian theater, see this set of pages from the University of Southern Australia.  In fact, the link will go to a table of contents, making for a more efficient blog entry. 

http://www.usq.edu.au/performancecentre/education/goodwomanofszechwan/brechtandtheatre.htm

This site from Cambridge's American Repertory Theater includes a brief summary of the play as well as a cast list and photographs:

http://www.amrep.org/past/courage/courage.html

More importantly, here is a link to Gideon Lester's history of the play's successful (and unsuccessful) performances:

http://www.amrep.org/past/courage/courage2.html

ART's production is reviewed here:

http://www.bostonphoenix.com/boston/arts/theater/documents/00630946.htm

Here is a review of the Steppenwolf Theater's production from about the same time:

http://www.artscope.net/PAREVIEWS/mothercourage101801.shtml

Recently, the playwright Tony Kushner translated Brecht's play into English for the production pictured at the top of this entry:

http://www.hotreview.org/articles/tonykushneronmc.htm

Peter Marks reviewed this production (in NYC) for the Washington Post:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/22/AR2006082201436.html

The theater company that Brecht himself founded, The Berliner Ensemble, performed Mother Courage at a festival in Iran:

http://iranfacts.blogspot.com/2008/02/mother-courage-and-her-children-brecht.html

Ah, here are some posts about Mother Courage in Charlottesville!

http://cvillemuse.com/2008/04/02/mother-courage-and-her-children/

http://www.dailyprogress.com/cdp/entertainment/theatre_arts/article/mother_putting_cart_before_her_heart/7717/

The URL below links to a podcast interview with the production's director:

http://www.cvillepodcast.com/2008/03/27/mother-courage-and-her-children/

And here is a picture from the production in Charlottesville.

Folk Tales & Folk Songs

   I am finally going to do something with this entry!

Raise the Red Lantern

As it turns out, I will show this film in both EN 201 *and* 202.  Although the film is set in the time period covered by EN 202 (early 20th c., after Sun Yat-Sen but before Mao Tse-Tung), it is also worth showing in EN 201 because it treats polygamy from the woman's point of view.  (This is in opposition to the Tale of Genji, which provides a male perspective even though it was written by a woman or women.)

This review from 1996 gives a good overview of the film and its context:

http://reelviews.net/movies/r/raise.html

Here is another review from 1992:

http://www-tech.mit.edu/V112/N24/lantern.24a.html

This Guardian review from 2000 puts the movie into more context:

http://film.guardian.co.uk/Century_Of_Films/Story/0,,153772,00.html

As does this essay by David Nao:
 
http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/cteq/04/33/raise_red_lantern.html

Senses of Cinema has published a biography of the film director, Zhang Yimou.  Did you know that Raise the Red Lantern is part of a trilogy?

http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/02/zhang.html

Raise the Red Lantern is based on a novella by Su Tong (b. 1963).  The author, by the way, now lives in the US.

http://www.harpercollins.com/books/9780060596330/Raise_the_Red_Lantern/index.aspx

This blog author compares the novella and the film:

http://visionsofparadise.blogspot.com/2006/03/raise-red-lantern.html

I want to make sure that I post a map of China here.  This is Lonely Planet's map.

Below are some outlines of Chinese history:

http://web.cocc.edu/cagatucci/classes/hum210/tml/chinatml/chinatml5.htm

http://emayzine.com/lectures/china%20in%20the%2020th%20century.html

Pingyao, the city where Raise the Red Lantern was filmed, is below:

Dream of the Red Chamber/Story of the Stone

One of the novels that we will be reading excerpts from in EN 202 is The Dream of the Red Chamber (or The Story of the Stone). 



Here is American poet Kenneth Rexroth's discussion of this novel.  Note that we are reading excerpts of excerpts of a novel! Also, he spells the characters' names differently as in his time they were transliterated from the Chinese differently.  Beijing, for example, was Peking.   As you may have noticed in the entry on the novel continued, Rexroth is a strong advocate of world literature. 

http://www.bopsecrets.org/rexroth/cr/7.htm#The%20Dream%20of%20the%20Red%20Chamber

This introduction (a translation of a German translation) is useful even though it is difficult to read.  However, it provides some important background on the author(s) and his/their work:

http://www.scu.edu.tw/english/teachers/steelman/steelman/kuhn000.htm

This overview from Purdue is shorter, clearer, and less argumentative:

http://www.fll.purdue.edu/Chinese/Honglou/intro.html

More practically, here is an outline of the novel and its characters:

http://www.wku.edu/~yuanh/China/tales/lindaiyu_b.htm

The picture below is from a Chinese television network (TV B)'s adaptation of the novel.  Interestingly, there are no men in this picture.




Here are pictures of the characters:

http://www.fll.purdue.edu/Chinese/Honglou/characters.html

A professor of Chinese talks about his experience teaching Dream of the Red Chamber:

http://web.archive.org/web/20080124160954/http://www.cityu.edu.hk/ccs/Newsletter/newsletter2/Red.htm

In 2000, the Oglethorpe University Museum of Art held an exhibit of An Ho's art inspired by the Dream of the Red Chamber:

http://museum.oglethorpe.edu/RedChamber.htm


In 1977, the Hong Kong film producer Run Run Shaw made a movie of Dream of the Red Chamber.  Interestingly, the role of Bao Yu was played by a woman!  The picture at the top of this entry is from this film.

http://www.dragonsdenuk.com/reviews/dream_of_red_chamber.htm

For more information (and pictures), see this web site:

http://www.brns.com/pages4/blin16.html

For more information about Cao Xueqin, one of the authors of Dream of the Red Chamber:

http://anywherechina.com/history/historical_figures/caoxueqin/caoxueqin.htm




If you are ever in Beijing, you may want to go to the Cao Xueqin Memorial Hall (see above):

http://www.10thnpc.org.cn/english/features/museums/139507.htm



Prince Gong's Mansion (see above) may have been the original for Bao Yu's home:

http://www.chinatour.com/attraction/beijing/gong-wang-fu-gong's-mansion-garden.htm

Preserving palaces like Prince Gong's can be difficult:

http://web.archive.org/web/20080210073252/http://www.ebeijing.gov.cn/HomeBj/Hutong/HTOUR/t171490.htm

For more information about Confucianism,

http://www.askasia.org/teachers/essays/essay.php?no=38

For more information about Daoism,

http://www.askasia.org/teachers/essays/essay.php?no=40&PHPSESSID=cf3a1e7b0f8e79502f7f76f32db9f031

For more information about Chinese Buddhism,

http://www.hinduwebsite.com/buddhism/chinese_buddhism.asp

http://depts.washington.edu/chinaciv/bud/5budhism.htm

Mariama Ba & So Long a Letter

Another woman speaking her mind is Ramatoulaye, the narrator of Mariama Ba's 1979 novel, So Long a Letter.  Ramatoulaye is a middle-aged mother of many children, a recent widow, and a highly educated woman, the first woman in her family to receive a Western education and prepare for a profession.  Several years earlier, her husband had abandoned her so that he could take a second, younger wife--a girl who was the same age as his oldest daughter, Deba.  Since Senegal accepted polygamy, Ramatoulaye was still married to her husband, a Westernized physician.  So Long a Letter is written in the form of a letter to Ramatoulaye's friend from college, written while the narrator mourns her husband and her friend travels from France to visit her.

A Muslim student at Wayne State University has written this book review, using her religious and family background (her husband is Nigerian) to explain the book to readers who do not have this background:

http://www.is.wayne.edu/mnissani/solongbk.htm

Another reviewer argues that reading Ramatoulaye's narrative as a letter is a mistake.  Instead, she is keeping a journal.

http://tukopamoja.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!8234535A7FECFC04!1267.entry

Since Mariama Ba wrote in French, many sites are in that language.  This Wikipedia entry seems to be her most extensive biography in English:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariama_Ba

I've found another biography:

http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/mba.htm

Google has translated this interview from 1979 into English.  The translation is fairly rough, especially when it comes to pronouns, but I thought that you would be interested in seeing Ms. Ba's perspective on her life, her novel, and society. 

http://72.14.203.104/translate_c?hl=en&u=http://aflit.arts.uwa.edu.au/AMINABaLettre.html&prev=/search%3Fq%3Dmariama%2Bba%26start%3D10%26hl%3Den%26client%3Dfirefox-a%26channel%3Ds%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla:en-US:official%26sa%3DN%26pwst%3D1


Above is a picture of Dakar, the city where Ms. Ba was born.

For more information about Senegal, her country, see these sites:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/country_profiles/1064496.stm

http://www.senegal-tourism.com/

http://amadou.net/ar/history.html

http://amadou.net/ar/poets.html

Here are some links about other women writers from Africa.

http://www.usp.nus.edu.sg/post/africa/ghana/aidoo/aidoobio.html

http://www.usp.nus.edu.sg/post/africa/godona1.html#amadi

http://www.english.emory.edu/Bahri/Emech.html

http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/arts/features/womenwriters/emechetta_work.shtml

http://www.english.emory.edu/Bahri/Head.html

http://www.thuto.org/english/bessiehead/eng453-03/index.html

Harriet Jacobs (Revised)

   In 1929, Virginia Woolf maintained, "All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn...for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds" (202).  Although Woolf did not have Harriet Jacobs in mind and Jacobs, in turn, did not have Aphra Behn in mind, one of these women might well have been the former slave who wrote Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl in the 1850s.

Of course, Jacobs used a pseudonym when she first published her life story as slavery was still legal and the Fugitive Slave Act was still in force.  Additionally,  as this teacher's guide suggests, some of her readers might have wondered whether she was the only author of her story, and readers today ask themselves how much her story draws on the "novel of seduction."  After all, Jacobs had set out to convince her audience to fight against slavery, and to do that, she had to consider them and their prejudices about women.

http://college.hmco.com/english/heath/syllabuild/iguide/jacobs.html

This site from PBS also addresses these issues more concisely:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4h2924.html

Historian Margaret Washington helps 21st century readers understand the concerns that Jacobs faced as a slave who could not marry in an era when sex outside of marriage stigmatized women:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4i3089.html


The University of Minnesota's VG/Voices from the Gaps has published a brief biography.  It touches on what Harriet Jacobs did after publishing her one and only book:
http://voices.cla.umn.edu/artistpages/jacobsHarriet.php


Or you may find this timeline to be more useful. 

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/JACOBS/hj-timeline.htm

Literary scholar Jean Fagin Yellin recently published a book-length biography of Jacobs.  (Prof. Yellin was the scholar who rediscovered Jacobs' autobiography and proved her authorship of it.)  Here is the NY Times review of the book-length biography:

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9906E7DD1038F932A25754C0A9629C8B63

Here are some historical documents, including the runaway notice that was posted.  The second site links to a collection of Jacobs' correspondence.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4h1541.html

http://www.yale.edu/glc/harriet/docs.htm

Here is a summary of Incidents. Our anthology has not reprinted the entire work, as engaging and enthralling as it is!

http://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/jacobs/summary.html

For a contemporary review of Incidents, go to this link:

http://www.yale.edu/glc/harriet/11.htm

Jacobs' brother John may have written his own life story as well.  In 2000, it was published with Incidents.

http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/jjacobs/summary.html

http://www.lib.unc.edu/instruct/docsouth_workshop/digital_narratives/excerpts/plantation.html

Historians consider slave narratives and evidence from slavery as sources in this issue of History Now:

http://www.historynow.org/12_2004/index.html

See this site for links to slave narratives transcribed in the 1930s:

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/slavery/resources/wpa.html

The New York Public Library's Schomburg Digital Collection contains a number of books by nineteenth-century African-American women.  Among them are Sojourner Truth's autobiography, Frances E.W. Harper's novel Iola Leroy, and several books of poetry. 

http://digilib.nypl.org/dynaweb/digs-t/@Generic__CollectionView;hf=0

While a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Texas, Melanie Ulrich put together this web site on feminism and the anti-slavery movement:

http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~ulrich/RHE309/abolition/

Aphra Behn's Oroonoko

We may read selections from Aphra Behn's Oroonoko alongside the excerpts from Olaudah Equiano's and possibly Harriet Jacobs' slave narratives.  Oroonoko, however, was a novel (that may or may not have been autobiographical) written about 100 years before Equiano's time and over 150 years before Jacobs'.  Some scholars argue that Oroonoko even predates the novel.  Others argue that the protagonist's royal blood was much more important to the author than his race was and that she was using this story to comment on the then-current political situation in England.  (In November of the year that Oroonoko was published, James II fled from England and was deposed.  The new king was his Protestant son-in-law, William of Orange.)

In this novel, Aphra Behn, a novelist/playwright/political pamphleteer *and* one of the first professional women writers in England, tells the story of her friendship with Oroonoko, an African of royal blood who is kidnapped into slavery and ultimately rebels against the Europeans.  Oroonoko is unsuccessful and is then executed.

The picture above is from Thomas Southerne's successful play that was based on Behn's novel.  In this play, Oroonoko's wife is depicted as a European.  Behn, however, depicted this woman as a dark-skinned African. 

For more background about Oroonoko, see these sites:

http://faculty.goucher.edu/eng211/aphra_behn_oroonoko.htm

http://www.wmich.edu/dialogues/texts/oroonoko.html

http://www.english.bham.ac.uk/staff/tom/website/work99/bp3/Behn/essay/essay1.html

http://www.litkicks.com/Oroonoko/

As you can see, it is controversial whether or not Oroonoko is a novel--and how autobiographical it was. 

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/11/aphra_behn_still_a_radical_exa.html

For more information about Behn and her career, see these sites:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/behn_aphra.shtml

http://www.lit-arts.net/Behn/chron-ab.htm

http://www.luminarium.org/eightlit/behn/behnbio.htm

For links to her works (poems, plays, & novels), see this site at Luminarium:

http://www.luminarium.org/eightlit/behn/behnbib.htm

I've enjoyed reading her play The Rover!  Hellena in this play is a feisty girl. 

Olaudah Equiano

One of the units I intend to include in EN 202 will be on life writing (or autobiography/memoir), and our anthology has several examples of the slave narrative.  One of these is Olaudah Equiano's.  (You may recognize his picture from Vol. D of our anthology.)

Equiano was a chief's son who was kidnapped into slavery around 1755 or so.  He fortunately was able to buy his freedom.  He then became an anti-slavery activist in Britain, and he wrote his autobiography, which not only was popular but also helped to spark the movement to abolish slavery in the British Empire and eventually elsewhere.  I wonder if Equiano ever met the poet Mary Robinson, for they were contemporaries, and she became active in the movement that he inspired.

For a little more information about Equiano, see these sites:

http://www.black-history-month.co.uk/articles/olaudah_equiano.html

http://www.brycchancarey.com/equiano/index.htm

The second site includes excerpts from Equiano's Interesting Narrative. 

Below is a roster of other British abolitionists:

http://www.brycchancarey.com/abolition/index.htm

Equiano was not the first former slave who wrote his life story:

http://www.brycchancarey.com/cugoano/index.htm

Below is a timeline of events connected with slavery:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/africa/features/storyofafrica/9generic3.shtml

For more information on African history, see these sites:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/africa/features/storyofafrica/index_section10.shtml

http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/africa/features/storyofafrica/10chapter2.shtml

http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/africa/features/storyofafrica/index_section4.shtml