Midterm Study Guide -- Fiction

This afternoon, before the papers come in, I'd like to start the midterm study guide for fiction.  The pictures above are of Mel's Drive-In in Hollywood
http://www.melsdrive-in.com/hoursandlocations/hollywood.html
and a street scene in LA.  Southern California is known for its car culture (isn't The Fast and the Furious set there?), and people are able to drive antique cars more often because the roads don't need to be salted as they do here. 

Hmmm....on review day I'll have to dig up a YouTube of various antique cars on display in Southern California!

However, let's start with the folktales from Monday the 18th.

The first is the Brothers' Grimm's "Godfather Death."

http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/grimm044.html

Next is the Wishram story, "Coyote and Eagle Visit the Land of the Dead."

http://www.native-languages.org/wishramstory.htm

The Navajo shadow puppet show "Coyote and Horned Toad" follows:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjUlyarH9F0

In addition, here is Wikipedia's outline of the characteristics of oral culture:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orality#Theory_of_the_characteristics_of_oral_culture

Take a look at the book review of Fr. Walter J. Ong's Orality and Literacy below:
http://worldlit2.multiply.com/journal/item/51/Orality_Literacy_._._._Cross-Posting_from_EN_201_Blog
How does orality shape the folktales we've read?  How does it shape the stories that Troy tells in Fences--and his approach to life?  (Feel free to compare it to Rose's or Cory's.)

-- Here are some of my EN 202 entries on the Brothers Grimm and their work. 
http://worldlit2.multiply.com/journal/item/146/The_Brothers_Grimm_From_Enchanted_Forests_to_the_Modern_World
http://worldlit2.multiply.com/journal/item/147

For the outline of Joseph Campbell's monomyth (hero's journey), see this link:

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

It goes without saying that Dagoberto Gilb's "Love in L.A." and Joyce Carol Oates' "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" will be on the midterm.  Terms on plot (including foreshadowing, flashback, and false closure) and character (including protagonist, antagonist, and anti-hero) will be on the midterm as well.  Below is a picture of Shakespeare's Falstaff, who exemplifies the anti-hero.  He is the bearded man with the big belly...the man who is talking!

Here is a montage of scenes from "Smooth Talk," the movie that Chris mentioned in class today:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=co9bfNOlSRQ

The trailer is below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXvmkCVbrBk&feature=related



The following stories will be on the midterm:  Sandra Cisneros' "The House on Mango Street," Alice Walker's "Everyday Use," and Lynda Barry's "Today's Demon: Magic."  We will also cover point of view (first-person, third-person limited & objective & omniscient) and theme as a way to compare/contrast works from different genres.  In addition, there may be a question or two on the definition of literature and inclusion of various genres (graphic fiction, autobiography & life writing, film, music).  With the last in mind, here are links to the videos from American Graffiti:

Here is the link to the trailer. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6Jo1gH89VM

For the beginning of the movie, see this link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tzfm2fKYARU


To listen to Bob Dylan's "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" and read the song's lyrics, go
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ziQx0cXV4nY

Here are some more sites where you may find Lynda Barry's work:

http://www.marlysmagazine.com/

http://www.comixology.com/articles/10/All-the-Comics-4-Lynda-Barry

http://comicscomicsmag.com/2011/02/lynda-barry.html

Vice Magazine also has an interesting interview with her.

The last stories on the midterm will be Jamaica Kincaid's "Girl" and Ernest Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants." 

I may also ask you about the following prose poems:

Russell Edson's "Sleep"
http://webdelsol.com/tpp/tpp5/tpp5_edson.html

Naomi Shihab Nye's "Hammer and Nail"
http://webdelsol.com/tpp/tpp5/tpp5_edson.html

Below are the definitions that we looked at:

Understanding "The Yellow Wallpaper"

Link

Thank you, Danielle, for writing this up and letting me link to it!

Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart, and Home and Exile (part 1)

While I am champing at the bit for the semester to begin, I thought that I'd add an entry on the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe, his first novel Things Fall Apart, and his 2000 book, Home and Exile, a trio of essays that began as the author's lectures at Harvard.  In fact, I feel a little guilty with all the Conrad entries I've posted so far. 

The first picture above is of Achebe and from the Guardian's blogs.  The second is one of the many editions of Things Fall Apart.  It appears to be an older edition and is from a Chinese web site.  As I've done with  Heart of Darkness, I could probably devote an entire entry to covers of Things Fall Apart.  So much has changed since 1958 when that novel was first published.  In fact, Achebe's homeland, Nigeria, would still be ruled by the British for another two years. 

Also, Multiply is a good place to repost some links that I have up at WebCT.  The first is to Achebe's "An Image of Africa," an essay that began as a lecture given at the University of Massachusetts in 1975:

http://kirbyk.net/hod/image.of.africa.html

In this essay, the author fiercely criticizes Conrad for relying on racist stereotypes of Africa and Africans as well as working to perpetuate these stereotypes in his Heart of Darkness.  Furthermore, Achebe maintains that, for the most part, Conrad refuses to let Africans speak in his novella.  Then, he notes that when they are allowed to, their few words confirm European prejudice.

Indeed, the picture below is an 17th-century engraving of a procession through Benin City, the capital of the Edo kingdom in what is now Nigeria.

Below is a picture of a bronze bowl dating from the ninth or tenth century CE.  (The bowl is from the Igbo, another group or, as Achebe states, "nation," in Nigeria.)

British author Caryl Phillips interviewed Achebe in 2003.  Here, in this article from the Guardian, Achebe expands on his criticism of Conrad.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2003/feb/22/classics.chinuaachebe

More recently, Ed Pilkington interviewed Achebe.  In this article also published in the guardian, the author recalls his original plan for Things Fall Apart.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/jul/10/chinuaachebe

Pilkington's article also gives you a better sense of Achebe's life.  For a more organized outline, see the BBC's biography:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/documentaries/profile/chinua-achebe.shtml

This website's biography is more detailed and more recent:

http://chinua-achebe.com/index.htm

I know I am going to have to add another entry or two, so I will conclude with some pictures from Nigeria:

First is a picture of Achebe's birthplace, Ogidi:

Below is a picture from an Igbo woman's wedding.  The bride is wearing orange!

 

I am not sure when this picture dates from, but it is from a "virtual village" built to help American students understand Things Fall Apart a little better.

Also, if you go to Staunton, VA, you'll be able to see a replica of an Igbo village:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/jul/05/igbo-village-re-created-for-museum/

The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad (part two)

I don't like writing super long Multiply entries, so here is part two of my entry on the lives and works of Joseph Conrad. 

The picture above is of Conrad with his wife and younger son.  I think that it fits John Batchelor's bio nicely since this biographer does a better job of putting Conrad in context than Stape did.  Also, I suspect that Stape might have lost patience with Conrad.  Unsurprisingly, this can be an occupational hazard with biographers, and if one shies away from Conrad's work and hones in on his letters, it is easier to lose patience with him.

Since Stape, however, does a better job of writing about Conrad's earlier life (in Poland, France, and the merchant marines), this entry will focus on his later life as a writer. 

I wonder how an ESL teacher or theorist would look at Conrad's work.  After all, he was writing in a language that he did not learn until he was an adult.  (English was his third or fourth language, perhaps even his fifth.  I suspect that living in an area that Russia occupied, he had to know some Russian.)  An ESL teacher or theorist would shed interesting light on Conrad's struggles with writer's block and his collaboration with native writer Ford Madox Ford during the 1900s. 

Also, of course, a large part of Conrad's life in England was his attempt to establish and sustain an identity.  I imagine that this added to his tension.  Early on, Polish writer Eliza Orzeszkowa criticized him for writing in English even though he had not lived in Poland since he was a teenager.  Later, English natives such as Lady Ottoline Morrell & Bertrand Russell and would-be natives such as Henry James patronized him as an exotic foreigner.  When Conrad and his agent Pinker were quarrelling in 1909 & 1910, the agent struck back at him by claiming that he did not speak or understand English well enough.  Conrad, of course, responded with a stinging retort.  He also changed agents for a time.  Moreover, when Conrad did go to Poland in 1914, as Batchelor notes, his customary depression and anxiety lifted, only to return once he was in England again. 

Here is a quick outline of some of Conrad's work.  Although Heart of Darkness is perhaps his most celebrated and read work, he wrote many other novels, novellas (short novels), and short stories.  In fact, Marlow (the chief narrator in Heart of Darkness) narrates several other of Conrad's works: Youth, Lord Jim, and a later novel, Chance.  Some critics speculate that Marlow may have been Conrad's English-self or the Englishman he would have liked to have been.

In part 1 of this entry, I mentioned Almayer's Folly (1894), Conrad's first novel.  It is set in Borneo, quickly establishing Conrad's identity as an author who set his stories in exotic places.  At this point, Conrad had been a British citizen for 14 years, but he had spent most of this time at sea in the merchant marine.

Here is a picture from Borneo, a place known for its rainforests and wildlife.

As with Marlow, Conrad would continue to revisit one character from Almayer's Folly, Lingard, in "An Outcast of the Islands" (1895) and The Rescue (published 1920 but begun in the mid-1890s). 

Both Batchelor and Stape discuss Conrad's habit of beginning novels only to drop them and begin a short story that would ultimately become a novel or novella.  Heart of Darkness (1902) began this way, as a short story called "An Outpost of Progress."  Similarly, his novel Lord Jim (1900) began as "Jim: A Sketch."  However, as I have mentioned above, Conrad struggled with writer's block, and moving from project to project seemed to be his best way of dealing with it...even though this strategy was annoying to his agent and his publishers.

Below is a picture of the cover of Lord Jim, a novel about a young man who attempts to redeem himself after he jumps ship.  Batchelor compares the novel's protagonist, Jim, to Hamlet.

 

  Nostromo (1904), The Secret Agent (1907), and Under Western Eyes (1911) are Conrad's most overtly political novels.  The first is set in South America; the other two are set in England and Europe.  In each of these novels, Conrad views political radicalism and intrigue with extreme skepticism. 

 

With Chance (1914), Conrad had his first popular success.  This novel, like several of his earlier works, is set at sea, and it concerns a captain's attempt to ship explosives safely.  (The story that became Chance was titled "Explosives.")  However, unlike his earlier works, Chance includes a love story between an Englishman and an Englishwoman that ends happily.  Prior to this, women did appear in Conrad's work, but as you may notice from "Heart of Darkness," they are often vehicles for the author's social criticism or, as with Winnie Verloc of the Secret Agent or Emilia Gould in Nostromo, voices for this criticism.  In Victory (1915), Conrad's next novel and another success, he places a love story between Heyst, the son of a cynical philosopher, and Lena, a prostitute, at the center of his work; however, she is killed, in part because her relationship with Heyst probably could not exist outside their island.

Conrad continued to write during and after World War I.  His works received much acclaim and respect, perhaps more than their share.  He also tried his hand at adapting several of his works for the stage.  Probably his most successful adaptation was of his late novel Victory, which "ran for eighty-two performances" in 1919.  In 1923, he traveled to the United States.  When he died in 1924, Conrad was working on a novel set during the Napoleonic era in the early 1800s.   

     

Eileen Chang & "Stale Mates"

 

I am going to have track down this book and/or movie, but in the meantime here is an entry on Chinese-American author Eileen Chang's work...which includes both "Stale Mates" and the novella "Lust, Caution."

To begin with, here is Ms. Chang's biography:

 http://www.hellomandarin.com/blog/2009/04/30/chinese-culture-eileen-changs-life-in-brief/

The author's literary executor has also written this essay that provides another perspective:

http://www.zonaeuropa.com/20050215_1.htm

This 2005 review of Ms. Chang's collected essays (in an English translation) provides more of a literary and cultural context for her work:

http://www.raintaxi.com/online/2005fall/chang.shtml

Irish writer John Self reviews the collection of fiction that contains "Lust, Caution."

http://theasylum.wordpress.com/2007/11/11/eileen-chang-lust-caution/

But about the film...

http://www.filminfocus.com/focus-movies/lust-caution/movie-splash.php


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2008/01/02/btchina102.xml

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/03/10/wlee110.xml

Another collection was Love in a Fallen City, which Haiyan Lee, a professor of Chinese literature at the University of Colorado, reviews here:

http://mclc.osu.edu/rc/pubs/reviews/lee.htm

Ms. Chang's first novel in English was The Rice-Sprout Song.  Charlie Dickinson reviews it here:

http://charlied.freeshell.org/RiceSproutSong

She also translated Chinese literature into English.  One novel was The Sing-Song Girls of Shanghai, which tells the story of nineteenth-century courtesans in that Chinese city.

http://cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-12268-9/the-singsong-girls-of-shanghai

In addition, she wrote screenplays.  Australia's Queensland Art Gallery recently screened both the films that she had written screenplays for and those that others have made from her novels, novellas, and short stories:

http://apt5.asiapacifictriennial.com/cinema/hong_kong,_shanghai_cinema_cities/eileen_chang

At least one of these films may not have aged well (or have been that good to begin with):

http://www.brns.com/pages4/drama263.html

However, Eileen Chang's work in different media is very much worth exploring. 

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.

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.

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.

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!