This is It! The Entry with the Midterm Prompts Is Now Up!!

  The picture above is of Senegalese singer/actor Youssou N'Dour who played author Olaudah Equiano in the 2007 movie Amazing Grace.

Below are the prompts.  I will be going over them in tomorrow's class.

1.  Discuss life writing as a genre of literature.  Given your definition of literature, how is lifewriting (not only autobiographies and memoirs but also biographies, letters, and diaries) literature?  How is it NOT literature?  Could life writing be a more personal form of history? Consider The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl as your main examples, but feel free to include other examples from your reading (The Diary of Anne Frank, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Black Elk Speaks, Into the Wild).


2.  Discuss film as a genre of literature.  Given your definition of literature, how is film literature?  How is it NOT literature?  If you were to teach a film and literature course, which films would you include?  Why?  In this type of course, is it more important for a film to be a groundbreaking film (like Citizen Kane or Apocalypse Now) or for a film to be based on an important work of literature (like Jane Eyre or A Doll's House)?  Why? 


3.  A number of our works so far this semester were originally written in English although not every author was a native English speaker.  How does the presence of these works affect your definition of world literature?  How does the presence of works NOT originally written in English (A Doll's House, So Long a Letter) change your definition of world literature?  Consider Chinua Achebe and Ngugi wa Thiongo's arguments about the language one writes in.  Keep in mind that our class' common language is English, but could some of us branch out in EN 202?  Take a look at the blog entries and see that A Doll's House was translated into English fairly quickly and has remained a staple of the Anglophone repertoire.  Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano were translated into other languages.  Does this mean that Joseph Conrad should have written in Polish and relied on translators for his English or French audience?

4.  Consider the novel as a genre.  What do the works we've read have in common?  Where do they differ?  How has the novel developed if we start with Oroonoko and move on from there to Heart of Darkness and So Long a Letter?  Consider other novels that you've read (novels by Jane Austen, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Albert Camus, or J.R.R. Tolkein) as well.  Feel free to discuss elements such as narration, point of view, the protagonist (who may be a protagonist, for example), plot, setting, character, and mimesis (attempt to depict reality or realism in art).  Have contemporary literary critics feminized the novel?!  

Good luck!

Sample Midterm from EN 201 (With Image from the Odyssey)

Here is the format for the midterm.  Just plug in information from the study guides.

EN 201 – Objective Essay Questions (40 pts) – This part of the exam is closed-book/closed-notebook.

 

Match-up (pts) (10 pts – 5 pts. per section)

 

Match the god with the identifying characteristic.  (1 pt. per correct answer)

 

1.             Athena                            a.             Escorted Priam to Achilles.

 

2.             Poseidon                         b.             Borrowed the Bull of Heaven from Dad.

 

3.             Ishtar                              c.             Helped both Odysseus and his son

 

4.             Hermes                      d.             Was the mother of one of Homer’s heroes.

 

5.             Thetis                         e.             Tried to avenge his son, Polyphemus

 

 

Match the work with an identifying characteristic.  (1 pt. per correct answer)

 

1.             Book of Job                    a.             Was recently translated by Seamus Heaney.

2.             Gilgamesh     b.             Does Ian McKellan have more cultural capital than

                                                                                                Al Pacino?

 

3.             The Iliad            c.             Seeks immortality but loses the herb.

 

4.             Beowulf              d.             The poet sings of the hero’s wrath.

 

 

5.             Richard III           e.             Begins with a bet between God and the Devil.

 

 

Multiple Choice (15 pts – 3 pts. each)

 

1.             Which of these qualities apply to the epic?

a.             Must have no known author.

b.             Retells actions of national or cosmic importance.
c.             Must have been written in Greek or Latin originally.

 

2.             Which of these heroes has a goddess for a mother?

a.             Gilgamesh                              b.             Odysseus

c.             Hector

 

3.             Which author accompanied Dante through the Inferno?

a.             St. Augustine                       b.             Homer

c.             Virgil

 

4.             Which of these works dates from stories told during the Early Middle Ages?

a.             Beowulf                 b.             The Divine Comedy           c.             The Aeneid

 

5.             According to Daniel’s presentation, could the Sirens in The Odyssey have been….
a.             monkeys                                b.             monk seals           
c.             Odysseus’ maids

 

 

 

 

Short Answer (15 pts. -- 5 pts each)

1.                    List videos that we have seen or web sites that we have listened to. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

2.                     List five characteristics of the epic, based on what we have read for this class.

 

 

 

 

 

 

3.                    List five facts or opinions that you have learned about world literature from your classmates’ presentations or the Power Points at WebCT so far.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Extra Credit (up to 10 points—5 points each): 

 

a.             List up to five ways that your journal or blog has helped you.

 

 

 

 

 

 

b.             List up to five ways that my blog has helped you.

 

 

----------------------

EN 201 – Subjective Exam Essay Prompts (60 pts)

Please answer one of the prompts below.  This is an open-book test, and you may consult your notebook (including prewriting for this exam) as well.  You may also use a dictionary, a thesaurus, and correction fluid.  Be sure to double space this exam, leaving one-inch margins on all sides and numbering each page.  You may use both sides of the paper, however.  Take your time.

1.                  Twentieth-century thinker Joseph Campbell has encouraged us to see ourselves as the heroes of our own lives and our own quests.  How is this viewpoint compatible with the epic’s attitude towards the hero?  How is this viewpoint compatible with that of a contemporary novel like The Penelopiad?  Or that of a contemporary movie?  How is it incompatible?  Discuss up to three heroes from our readings so far.  Consider which tradition each hero and his epic belong to.  Consider the distinction between an epic’s hero and a novel’s protagonist.  (Would you call Penelope the heroine of Atwood’s novel?  Why?  Why not?) To which extent does genre affect depiction of character?  Feel free to bring in ideas from your classmates’ presentations, the excerpts we saw from Campbell’s video and Upstairs, Downstairs, our blogs and/or journals, and class discussion.  Remember that Joseph Campbell’s work did not focus on literature or even world literature but on world mythologies and that Bill Moyers interviewed Campbell at a time when Americans vividly remembered the conflicts surrounding the Vietnam War.

2.                  In the introduction to What Is World Literature?, David Damrosch passes judgment on contemporary critics’ attempts to downplay older works in world literature.   He, in fact, argues:  “All too often, students of imperialism, colonialism, nationalism, and globalization do indeed define their topics in such a way as to restrict their investigations to just the last five hundred years of human history, or the last hundred years, or even the last few years.” He then goes on to describe this critical trend as “presentism” (italics his), a quality that leads to intellectual superficiality.  Discussing up to three works that we have read so far, argue for or against the importance of reading earlier works of world literature, both Western and Eastern.  Why is it important to read The Ramayana alongside Gilgamesh or The Mahabharata alongside The Iliad?  On the other hand, in order to give readers a stronger sense of world literature’s global qualities, should we emphasize geography and culture over history?  Would it be better to read the excerpts from the Mahabharata and the Ramayana alongside a modern work from India?  Or should we be reading more works from Ancient Greece and Rome?  How can we avoid superficiality in a world literature course?  Feel free to bring in ideas from Joseph Campbell’s video; Michael Wood’s videos (In Search of the Trojan War); the excerpts we saw from Looking for Richard, etc.; your fellow students’ presentations; and class discussion of the epic’s orality and Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad.  Consider that EN 201 fulfills one of the requirements for your degree.  Consider that this course’s reading list includes a novel from 2005 and that we began the course by watching two films from the 1990s. 

3.                  Discuss the roles that women and goddesses have played in up to three works that we have read.  Ought we consider goddesses like Ishtar, Athena, Hera, and Thetis women in literature? Ought we consider Grendel’s mother in this category as well?  (And why must Beowulf fight Grendel’s mother and not his brother or father?)  Furthermore, are these women represented fairly? Feel free to bring in ideas from class discussion about The Penelopiad and other reworkings of classic literature as well as from my blog entries.  Consider the portrayal of women in the excerpt of Upstairs, Downstairs that we saw.  Consider the role that class or genre may play in the depiction of women, especially in The Odyssey and The Penelopiad but also in the films that we’ve seen. 

4.  At this point in the semester, all of the works that we’ve been reading are epics (or, in the case of Job,) have been considered epics.  An epic is a long verse narrative about a deed of national or cosmic importance, which a hero, often of divine parentage, accomplishes.  The epic is a prestigious genre: Gilgamesh was written down by a priest, Homer’s epics were taught in the Greek schools, and the emperor Augustus strongly supported Virgil’s writing of The Aeneid, an epic that we won’t be reading.  The epic is often grounded in history, as the search for Troy has revealed, although, as Richard III’s example shows, other genres are grounded in history as well.  In addition, many epics began as tales told to their audiences.  Given these elements, how has beginning with the epic shaped your view of world literature?  Which qualities of literature have been obscured? Which types of characters and experience are being obscured? [Recently literary scholar Margaret Anne Doody has examined the novel’s origins in Greek and Roman literature.  Previous histories of the English-language novel began much later, and Doody links their unwillingness to go back as far as she has to classical scholars’ disdain for the novel.]  Could one write an epic today?  Why?  Why not?  Alternately, can we speak of epic films?  Or is the epic strictly a literary genre?  Why?  Why not?

5. Inspired by his reading of Homer’s epics, the German businessman Heinrich Schliemann trained as an archaeologist and traveled to Turkey and Greece to find the site of Ancient Troy.  The American academic Carl Blegen continued Schliemann’s excavations, and Project Troia, in turn, carries on this task.  To look at another example, even today, The Richard III Society defends the historical king against Shakespeare’s depiction of him, and a statement by this group appears in the program of the Shakespeare Theater’s current production of Richard III.  Why does literature’s grounding in historical fact matter?  Why do literary representations of the past matter?  Should either continue to matter?  Or does the search for the historical Troy or the debate over Richard III get in the way of our appreciating literature? 

6.                  Discuss the roles that power has played in the literature we’ve read and the movies we’ve watched in class.  Do these roles change from genre to genre (epic to novel to film to television program) or from culture to culture?  Who holds power in each of the works we’ve read or watched?  Who does not?  What does power allow one to do?  Also, is there a gap between who is *supposed* to hold power and who actually does?

 

Southside by Dream City Theater Group (in progress)

The Washington DC area offers a wide variety of theater.  Just a couple of weeks ago my husband and I went to see international theater director Yukio Ninagawa's production of Shintoku-Maru at the Kennedy Center.  Last spring I saw a thrilling production of Richard III at the Shakespeare Theater near the Verizon Center.  The Gala Theater stages various productions, many of which are in Spanish.  (My husband and I saw Paul Flores and Julio Cardenas' two-man play, Representa! there.)  There are also the Synetic Theater's non-verbal performances grounded in Russian theatrical tradition.  (Someday I have to go out to Virginia where this company is based.)  Tonight we saw the Dream City Theater's staged reading of Southside, a play reworking the story of the 2004 Ballou shootings in which one young man killed a football star who was bullying him.  (The picture above is of Ballou Senior High where Thomas J. Boykin shot James Richardson.)

Unlike many of the theater companies in the area, the Dream City Theater is very local.  Its productions retell the stories of people living in Washington.  The first production of Dream City Theater's that I've seen was The 70, a play set on a Metrobus traveling from downtown Silver Spring down Georgia Avenue past Howard University and then Gallery Place and to the Southwest Waterfront.  Having lived in Silver Spring and spent much time near Gallery Place, I have often seen this bus.  Here is a little more about The 70:

http://www.dreamcitytg.org/projects/the70.htm    

This summer The 70 will be performed at the Atlas Performing Arts Center on H Street.  It will be interesting to see this play in a more final form. 

Here is more information about tonight's play, Southside:

http://www.dreamcitytg.org/projects/southside.htm

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/14/AR2008021401125.html

Washington Post journalist Rachel Beckham interviews an actor from this play, Eddie B. Ellis.  He plays the role of a thirtyish prisoner who befriends Rondell, the young shooter.  Ellis served 15 years, many in super-max prisons, for manslaughter and now speaks to audiences about his experiences. 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/20/AR2008022002771.html

As the evening's performance was a staged reading, the actors read from their script, and there was some blocking but no props.  The individuals in a given scene would stand up at the front of the stage and read their lines while those not in that scene sat in a row of chairs at the back of the stage.  Actors wore street clothes although one actor playing a grandmother wrapped a sweater around herself as if it were a shawl. Several people played more than one part.  For the most part, this was not confusing.  One man played a scared security guard, a character based on former Mayor Anthony Williams, and a corrections officer.  He really was a ringer for the mayor, even without the bow tie! 

The play is not an exact retelling of the events in 2004.  The playwright, John Muller, has added a subplot about a young boy, Yummy, who sells loose candy to make money for his shiftless mother and his family and eventually takes money from a local thug ("Kojo") to shoot Rondell, the boy who shot Pee-Wee.  Yummy is based on a boy from Chicago who had committed 23 felonies and five misdemeanors before being killed himself to avenge a murder.  He became the subject of a Time cover story in 1994:  http://www.gregneri.com/Time_magazine.html  Here are links to stories about the 2004 shooting:  http://www.washingtonpos.com/wp-dyn/articles/A24158-2004Feb8.html
http://www.washingtonpos.com/wp-dyn/articles/A13630-2004Feb4.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A60982-2004Dec13.html

After the performance, the theater group held a question and answer session, beginning with questions directed to the playwright and moving on to those directed to the actors.  The topics of questions ranged from the playwright's writing process to the relationship between the play and the actual events in 2004 to the casting process to the lessons that the cast had learned from the experience of performing this play to future performances in the area where the play was set.  Again, this play is a work in progress, so the playwright was eager to find out what we thought. 

I will continue to keep an eye on Dream City Theater's work.

Midterm Study Guide -- Spring 2008 -- part 3 (novels!)

  The picture above is from a NYC production of Oroonoko, Nigerian author Biyi Bandele's 1999 adaptation of Behn's novel.  I hope that this play comes to the DC area!  Until then, here is a link to the site for the NYC production:

http://www.tfana.org/oroonoko.html

John Beer reviewed the play for the Village Voice.  The review also has a picture from the production:

http://www.villagevoice.com/theater/0808,302441,302441,11.html

Now back to the study guide.

The novel is a fictional prose narrative (50,000 words or more) with a protagonist whom we root for.  His/her story takes place in a believable social setting, and his/her character changes in response to the events of the story.  Authors from many different literatures have written novels.  One novel from Ancient Rome was Apuleius' The Golden Ass, which literary scholar Erich Auerbach discusses in Mimesis.  In the 11th century, Japanese author Murasaki Shikibu wrote The Tale of Genji, a novel that has intrigued many 20th century Western readers, including Kenneth Rexroth and V.S. Pritchett.  Later in the semester we will read selections from The Story of the Stone, an 18th century novel from China.  In The Rise of the Novel (1957), Ian Watt argues that the first (British) novels were written in the mid-1700s.  Works that came before that time (such as Aphra Behn's Oroonoko) were prose fictions.

For the study guide, I am going to go in chronological order, starting with Oroonoko.

Aphra Behn, one of the first professional women authors in England, published Oroonoko in 1688, towards the end of her life.  Before then, she had been a spy for Charles II and written very successful plays as well as poetry and novels.  Could Oroonoko have been based on events and people in her life?  We don't know for sure. 

In Oroonoko, the first-person narrator tells the story of her relationship with Oroonoko, an African prince who was captured into slavery and taken to Surinam, then a British colony.  In Africa, Oroonoko had been the heir of an old, corrupt king and the hero of his nature because of his valor.  Then he falls for Imoinda, the daughter of one of his generals.  Then Oroonoko's grandfather decides that he wants to marry Imoinda even though he cannot consumnate the marriage.  Thanks to his friend's trickery, Oroonoko, though, is able to visit his Imoinda, but they are found out, and she is sold into slavery.  Oroonoko gets back into his grandfather's good graces, but he is eventually captured by European slavers.  He and Imoinda are reunited in Surinam where he has been renamed Caesar and she Clemene and the English offer him vague promises of freedom.  The couple are able to resume their relationship, and he travels with the narrator to an Indian village.  However, when Imoinda becomes pregnant, Oroonoko realizes that he does not want his child to be a slave, so he incites a slave revolt.  After this revolt is quelled, Oroonoko kills his wife and their unborn child.  He is then executed by the English.

Oroonoko was popular during its time, and in 1695, Thomas Southerne wrote a play based on the novel.  However, after her death, Aphra Behn became less and less popular, and her reputation became risque.  With the rise of feminism, her reputation has risen again.

In the study guide on film, I discuss Jane Eyre (a controversial novel in its day, 1847).  The title of Gilbert and Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic comes from Jane Eyre as Mr. Rochester secretly keeps his mentally ill first wife in the attic of his mansion.  See this site for a 2006 adaptation of Jane Eyre:  http://www.bbc.co.uk/drama/janeeyre/

Of course, the British were not the only ones who wrote novels.  (See earlier blog entry on this topic.)

Now we move to the cusp of the 19th and 20th century, to Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1898; 1902).  Is it a 19th century novel?  Like many a 19th century novel, it was first serialized in a magazine.  The novel's two narrators (an unnamed man and Marlow--this novel is a frame story) are very much part of the imperialist project.  Is it a 20th century novel?  Despite Marlow's pride in being British, his narrative criticizes the imperialist project and depicts the disintegration of Europeans' characters.  At times, Marlow shows that he has greater respect for the native Africans.  However, Conrad's Congo is not quite the actual Congo (a Belgian colony that is now the Democratic Republic of Congo and that was essentially ravaged by the Belgians).  Conrad's notes from his time there reveal that there were missionaries, including some women, in this area.  Heart of Darkness sets up an opposition between men and women, with men as hard-heartedly practical and women as impossibly idealistic.  Marlow gets his position with the Company through his aunt and, at the end of the novel, returns the rest of Kurtz' papers to his fiancee.  She idealized Kurtz, and Marlow tells her that her late fiance's last words were "her name."  (They were "the horror, the horror.")

Joseph Conrad's novels puzzled their contemporary readers: were they adventure stories?  were they "something more"?  (Conrad was not a native Englishman; he was born in territory occupied by the Russian Empire, and his Polish parents' activism probably cost them their lives.  English was Conrad's third or fourth language, and he worked for a time in the French and British merchant marines or navy.)  In time, especially after WWI, Conrad's reputation rose as his work became more meaningful to readers.

Finally, we move to the 20th century and the post-colonial era with Mariama Ba's So Long a Letter (1980; transl. 1981).  Since Ms. Ba lived in Senegal, her novel was originally written in French, and with it, we truly turn to world literature.

So Long a Letter is written in the form of a diary, addressed to the narrator (Ramatoulaye)'s beloved friend Aissatou who now lives abroad and works as a translator.  Ramatoulaye is writing after the sudden death of her husband, Modou Fall, a trade unionist.  The novel details both the Islamic funeral ceremonies for Modou and Ramatoulaye's reflections on her life.  A college graduate and teacher, she is a modern woman, and her marriage was a love match.  However, a few years earlier, Modou had taken a second wife, Binetou, a poor young woman with an ambitious mother.  Binetou had been a school friend of Modou and Ramatoulaye's oldest child, the out-spoken Daba.  Similarly, Aissatou's marriage to Dr. Mawdo Ba was a love match, but disapproving of her son's marriage to a woman from a lower social class, Mawdo's mother convinced him to marry a girl whom she had raised.  (This girl later became a midwife whereas both Ramatoulaye and Aissatou were trained as teachers.)  On her husband's taking another wife, Aissatou left Senegal with her sons.  Ironically, two men propose to Ramatoulaye.  The first is her brother-in-law, a feckless man.  The second is the man whom her mother had wanted her to marry years ago.  Both men already have wives.  Polygamy is legal in Senegal.

In fact, here is a link to a Peace Corps member's blog on this very topic from January 2008:

http://caitlininsenegal.blogspot.com/2008/01/polygamy.html

At the end of the novel, Ramatoulaye has finished her 40-day period of mourning and is dealing with her daughter Aissatou's pregnancy.  (It looks like her boyfriend Ibrahim will marry her after they both finish school.)  Ramatoulaye is also awaiting her friend's visit.

Midterm Study Guide -- Spring 2008 -- part 2 (films!)

  Now let's have something more than this picture of Martin Sheen as Willard!

At this point, we've seen scenes from three films.  I am going to take out the copy of A Doll's House that the Rockville campus' library has, but I will include any information from that film on the study guide for drama/theater.

Apocalypse Now (1979) dir. Francis Ford Coppola (who also directed The Godfather--parts 1, 2, and 3).  According to Coppola at the time, "This isn't a film about Vietnam.  This is Vietnam."  The cast included Martin Sheen (Willard), Marlon Brando (Kurtz), Robert Duvall (Lt.Col. Kilgore, the officer with the cavalry hat), a very young Laurence Fishburne (Clean, one of the men on the boat), Albert Hall (Chief, the captain of the boat), Frederic Forrest (Chef, another of the men on the boat), Timothy Bottoms (Lance, the surfer on the boat), and Dennis Hopper (the photojournalist/a revision of the Russian in Heart of Darkness).

Jane Eyre (1944) dir. Robert Stevenson.  The novelist Aldous Huxley was among the screenwriters for this film.  In a number of scenes, Jane's narration appears as highlighted text in a book.  Some of this narration is not Bronte's novel but Huxley et al's screenplay.  Similarly, Dr. Rivers, the one adult who is kind to Jane, appears in the film but not in the book.  Joan Fontaine plays Jane as an adult; Peggy Anne Garner plays her as a child.  Orson Welles plays Mr. Rochester, her Byronic employer and later husband.  Margaret O'Brien plays Jane's pupil and Mr. Rochester's illegitimate daughter, Adele.   With this film's deep focus, it is hard to believe that it was filmed on a set and not at an actual castle.

David Copperfield (1999) -- This version of Dickens' novel (the closest thing we'll probably ever get to his autobiography) stars Daniel Radcliffe as the young David Copperfield.  We saw the following scenes: the evening that David is born to his widowed mother (his aunt Betsy Trotwood visits), David's term at a bad school (Ian McKellan plays the foul-tempered teacher), and his visit from Barkis (who will later marry David's nurse Peggotty) and Peggotty's nephew Ham.  At this bad school, David nevertheless meets Steerforth, a spoiled young man who becomes the boy's protector.

Which of these films would you include in a film and literature course?

Midterm Study Guide for Spring 2008 -- part 1: Life Writing

This study guide will be the first of three or four that I will put up before our midterm on March 5 and 7.  To begin with, I will focus on the genre of life writing, a form of history that focuses on individuals' lives and a form of literature that provides evidence about individuals' real lives.  This genre is non-fiction, unlike plays, poems, short stories, or novels.  Documentary films that narrate a person's life story could be considered in this category, but life writing generally consists of autobiographies, memoirs, biographies, letters, and diaries.  Novels may take on the form of life writing, but this is simply a device to intrigue people or perhaps even to further mimesis (the imitation of reality).

Note that memoirs are about one part of one's life.  Autobiographies cover one's entire life (so far).

We have read two examples of life writing in class: Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative and Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.  Both works are slave narratives, autobiographies written by former slaves to show the cruelty of slavery and argue for its abolition.  The slave narrative often encourages its readers to recognize what they have in common with the author.  Accordingly, Harriet Jacobs depicts her loving family who sheltered her as a young child, and Olaudah Equiano reminds his readers that he is a Christian like they are.

On the other hand, the contexts of Equiano's and Jacobs' autobiographies differ from each other.  Equiano's autobiography was published in 1789, during the year the Bastille fell and at the beginning of the anti-slavery movement.  Equiano may have been born in Africa (in present-day Nigeria), and his masters included Africans as well as Englishmen.  His autobiography was exceedingly popular and helped make him a wealthy man.  (I wonder if Benjamin Franklin read it.)  Jacobs' autobiography was published in 1861, the year that the Civil War began and two years before the Emancipation Proclamation.  The book was published anonymously, and in it, Jacobs referred to herself as Linda Brent.  Her authorship was not conclusively proven until the 1980s, and some sites continue to list Lydia Maria Child as her co-author.

Here is more information about the Interesting Narrative and Incidents respectively.

About The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano
-- Our anthology contains only part of this work.  The entire narrative is available online at  http://history.hanover.edu/texts/equiano/equiano_contents.html
-- The excerpt that our anthology includes begins with young Equiano being brought on board an English slave ship.  He is frightened, never having seen whites before, and expects that these strange spirits are going to kill him. 
-- In the next section, Equiano (who is 12) arrives in England and sees snow for the first time.  He believes that it is salt until he tastes it.  At this point, he is owned by Captain Pascal who will cheat him of his money and belongings.  Equiano befriends several Englishmen: a teenager named Dick who teaches him to read and a barber who teaches him religion and his trade.
-- Equiano is sold to another sea captain who brings him to the West Indies.  Eventually, he is bought by Robert King, a wealthy Quaker, but works for Captain Farmer, who helps him buy his freedom in an excerpt included in our anthology. 
-- Once free, Equiano works his way to England where he will become an antislavery activist and write his autobiography.

About Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
-- Harriet Jacobs begins her autobiography with a depiction of her happy, sheltered childhood.  Even though she and her family are slaves, she does not realize it until after her mother dies and she must work for her mistress.  We meet Jacobs' father, a strong-minded carpenter, and her grandmother, an industrious businesswoman.  Jacobs' grandmother will be the "friend of her youth."
-- Jacobs' first mistress appears to take into consideration that she is a child, letting her play.  However, she also borrows money that Jacobs' grandmother has saved in order to buy her family's freedom.  When the first mistress dies, she does not free her slaves as had been expected, but gives them to her family.  At this point, Jacobs is a growing girl, nearly a teenager.
-- After the death of her first mistress, Jacobs is given to the daughter of Doctor Flint, a "hoary-headed miscreant."  Jacobs' grandmother is sold at auction to an elderly relative of the late mistress who then frees her.  When Jacobs' father dies suddenly, she is not allowed to mourn but is forced to string together garlands for a party at the Flints' house.  Jacobs notes that whites criticized her father for his independence and strong-mindedness.
-- Doctor Flint attempts to seduce Jacobs, alternately threatening her and lavishing her with "kindness."  His wife is very much aware of this and is jealous.  Jacobs is repulsed by Doctor Flint and criticizes his wife for her jealousy and cruelty.  Nevertheless, the doctor tries to get Jacobs to sleep in his room when she works as his daughter's nurse.  Instead, Mrs. Flint demands that Jacobs sleep in her room.  She tries to find out how successful her husband's attempts at seduction have been.  (The doctor has raped other slave women before.  He sells them and their children when he loses interest in the women.  A slave who spoke about his partner's relationship with the doctor is savagely beaten.)
-- Doctor Flint builds a house for Jacobs who then informs him that she cannot live in this house because she is pregnant with another man's child.  This man is an unmarried white neighbor of the Flint's.  He appears to treat Jacobs kindly, and she is proud of his interest in her.  Later she is ashamed of this liaison. 
-- However, Jacobs must tell her grandmother that she is pregnant.  At first, the grandmother throws her out of her house.  Eventually she shows that she understands her granddaughter's situation but does not forgive her.
-- Several years later, after the birth of two children (Benny and Ellen), Jacobs decides to escape.  While making Doctor Flint think that she has fled to the North, she hides in a crawl space at her grandmother's house.  Benny and Ellen, in the meantime, are bought by their father who will eventually marry.
-- After seven years, Jacobs heads up North where she still must flee from first Doctor Flint and then his heirs.  When Emily Flint and her ne'er do well husband come to New York City to track Jacobs down, she must flee with her daughter to Massachusetts, and her friend Mrs. Bruce must buy her despite Jacobs' disapproval.  Only then are Jacobs and her children free.  At the end of Incidents, Jacobs and her children return to live with Mrs. Bruce.

Keep in mind that The Interesting Narrative and Incidents are only one type of life writing (autobiography/slave narrative).  Beginning with St. Augustine, other writers wrote spiritual autobiographies.  In the 17th century, Puritan Lucy Hutchinson wrote a biography of her husband who was executed by Charles II on his return to power.  In the 18th century, scandalous autobiographies were popular, but Benjamin Franklin wrote his autobiography in order to provide a model for readers.  Autobiographies and memoirs are also means of self-expression.  Some life writing was never intended to be published; in the 1660s Samuel Pepys kept his diary in code!  One wonders whether Anne Frank would have wanted her diary to be published if she had lived.

Jane Eyre, David Copperfield, and Other Movies Based on 19th Century Novels

As we finish up our unit on novels and life writing, I thought that I'd show some movies based on canonical 19th century novels.  These movies will make for an interesting bridge between Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Mariama Ba's So Long a Letter.

The picture above is from the 1944 Jane Eyre starring Joan Fontaine and Orson Welles.  The link below is to a review of the DVD of this movie.  I like that it focuses on both the book and the movie, putting both in context.  By the way, one of the screenwriters for this movie was Aldous Huxley, an important novelist in his own right.

http://www.dvdtown.com/reviews/jane-eyre/4599

Here is the IMDB page for this movie:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0036969/

Here British journalist Tanya Gold explains the appeal of Jane Eyre:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/femail/article.html?in_article_id=407404&in_page_id=1879
 The picture below is from the most recent version of Jane Eyre:

In 1996, Franco Zeffirelli directed a theatrically-released version of Jane Eyre starring Charlotte Gainsborough and William Hurt.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0116684/

Below is a poster from the 1999 version of David Copperfield that we will see in class.

Although this poster dates from the 1970s (it is colorized), it is a great picture of the 1935 version of David Copperfield with W.C. Fields as Mr. Micawber.
For more information about the novel David Copperfield, see this page by David A. Perdue:

http://charlesdickenspage.com/copperfield.html

PBS' site for the 1999 David Copperfield is here. 

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/archive/programs/davidcopperfield/index.html

Interviews with the director and the screenwriter respectively are below:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/archive/programs/davidcopperfield/ei_curtis.html

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/archive/programs/davidcopperfield/ei_hodges.html

If you are more visually oriented, you may enjoy this article:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/archive/programs/davidcopperfield/notes.html

Bleak House is my favorite novel by Dickens:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/bleakhouse/index.html

However, I mustn't neglect Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights with Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon (who hated each other):

Or the recent remake of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice:

But, as I've said in class, one often neglects the fact that people other than the British were writing novels and that movies were made of these novels.

See this link for Roger Ebert's review of Cousin Bette, a 1998 film based on one of Balzac's novels:  http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19980612/REVIEWS/806120303/1023

You may find Cousin Bette to be more interesting as it details a forty-something woman's revenge on her family and the man who refused to marry her:

This year Jacques Rivette directed an adaptation of Balzac's novella, The Duchess of Langaise.  However, it was not well-received, and it left the E Street Cinema pretty quickly.

http://www.observer.com/2008/balzac-book-goes-bust-big-screen-atrocities-africa

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/08102/872313-42.stm

In 1993, French director Claude Berri made a movie based on Emile Zola's novel Germinal:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107002/



I am surprised that I did *not* see this movie as one of my friends back in the day had liked Zola's novel.  The picture above is a scene from that movie. 

Every so often someone does a film version of Goethe's novel The Sorrows of Young Werther

http://www.the-sorrows-of-young-werther.com/index2.html

And then there is Tolstoy's War and Peace:

http://www.artdish.com/ubbcgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=39&t=000327

http://thephoenix.com/article_ektid53137.aspx

Audrey Hepburn and Henry Fonda starred in a Hollywood version of War and Peace.

Yukio Ninagawa's Shintoku-Maru at the Kennedy Center

Although we won't be starting the drama unit for a little while yet, I thought I'd post an entry about a play that my husband and I saw this evening...the Japanese play Shintoku-Maru, directed by Yukio Ninagawa.  The play was written during the 1970s, so it is a good example of more modern theater, especially in its reliance on spectacle and refusal to confine itself to realism.  The performance was entirely in Japanese, but the visuals and the acting were amazing.  The actors received two standing ovations, and, well, you can see some of the visuals from the picture above.

Shintoku-Maru tells the story of a young man who is alternately attracted to and repulsed by his stepmother, a woman his father has bought to "complete" the family.  In the meantime, Shintoku, the young man, has been searching for his dead mother, even in the underworld.  Therefore, his father's attempt to "complete" the family ends in madness, violence, and its dissolution.  This story reminds many of Oedipus Rex or Hippolytus. 

The play opened with a market scene.  Actors stood on a balcony above the rest of the stage, and sparks rained down from the torches that they held.  Again, you may see this from the picture above.  Other actors in various masks and disguises, often pushing carts, paraded back and forth on the stage.  Then Shintoku appeared, dressed in white Western clothing and holding a picture of his late mother.  Interestingly, he was the only character to wear pants.  Everyone else in his family (including his father) wore a patterned kimono.  And isn't white the color of mourning in Japanese culture?

In the next scene, Shintoku's father is looking over a display of actresses from a disbanded theater company.  One, Nadeshiko, will become his wife.  As played by Kayoko Shiraishi, this woman is very chatty and tries to become a part of her new family but is rejected by both her stepson *and* her husband.  (Her rejection by her husband is sexual.)  At first, she appears to be wearing a mask.  Here is a picture of Shintoku and Nadeshiko together at the end of the play:

   The actor playing Shintoku (Tatsuya Fujiwara) has appeared in a number of the director's productions, including a very torrid-looking Romeo and Juliet.  Here are some pictures from a 2001 or 2002 production of Shintoku-Maru in Japan:

http://www.majorleague.co.jp/kouen/shintokumaru/gallery/index.html

Truveo, a video site,  also has a link to an interview with Fujiwara about the making of Shintoku-Maru:

http://www.truveo.com/Fujiwara-Tatsuya-Making-of-Shintokumaru/id/3129579189

The scenes on this video are adult but not gratuitous.


For more about the director Yukio Ninagawa, here is a link to a 2001 interview with him:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/saturday_review/story/0,,493351,00.html

Often he has directed Shakespeare's plays:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2006/06/10/bttitus10.xml

http://www.villagevoice.com/theater/0250,solomon,40440,11.html

http://www.yessirnigel.com/lear_pics.htm

I've been trying to find a link to articles about his production of Romeo and Juliet!

But I think that I will have to call it a night now.  Before I do, here is a link to an interview in which he swears off working with English-language actors:

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/ddd2052c-ecef-11db-9520-000b5df10621.html

His productions are not always critically well-received.  Critics Sheridan Morley and Michael Billington explain why:

http://www.iht.com/articles/1999/11/03/lon.t.php?page=1

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,3922982,00.html

I wonder how Ninagawa's Lear compared to Kurosawa's Ran. 

The Rise of the Novel?

Above is an 18th-century illustration from Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, one of the novels that literary scholar Ian Watt considered among the origins of the genre. 

At some point, I am going to reread and review Watt's book, but for now here is a useful outline of histories of the novel from the University of Freiburg, a German university:

http://www.lit-arts.net/Behn/novel.htm

Here is a link to Ian Watt's obituary.  It will give you an idea of the importance he had in 20th century literary studies.

http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2000/january5/watt-15.html

UC Berkeley Professor of Spanish American and Caribbean Literatures and Cultures Richard Rosa made this argument against Watt's history of the novel:

http://www.sobresites.com/alexcastro/artigos/whatisanovel.htm

FYAmuse, here is a link to the Google Books version of Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders.  It is one of my favorite novels, and if I were editing our anthology of world literature, I would want to include an excerpt from it as well:

http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&id=RUxV6_7KX30C&dq=moll+flanders&printsec=frontcover&source=web&ots=JfV4uNzvvG&sig=gi2YvP4SNAT2WtJzPjsRk3XNXhw

I've linked elsewhere to Prof. Taormina's history of the novel, but I think that her page on 18th century novelists will give you an overview of that stage of the continuum.  Note that she is writing about the novel in English.

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

This page from the University of Missouri at Kansas City outlines the predecessors to the novel:

http://m.faculty.umkc.edu/mallinickd/romanticnovel/whipple/historya.html

Could Oroonoko be like the Italian and Spanish romances mentioned here?

I can't link to Catherine Gallagher's Nobody's Story here, but below is an essay by Ruth Nestvold about women and the history of the novel, beginning with Aphra Behn:

http://www.lit-arts.net/Behn/voice.htm