At last! The Final Prompts for EN 202 (Spring 2008)

[The picture above is from a 2007 production of The Country Wife, an intriguing Restoration comedy that hasn't been staged in this area for a while except (this weekend only) at American University!]

1.         Should professors continue to assign plays that are not available on film or are not being performed locally?   Why?  Why not?  Consider how planning for a performance of A Doll’s House, watching that performance, or going to Chesapeake Shakespeare’s performance of that play may have helped you understand Nora’s situation better.  Do you think that watching a performance of Mother Courage or The Love Suicides at Amijima might have helped you understand either play better?  Or should professors of literature not worry about what others choose to stage or film? After all, these professors are not professors of theater!  Feel free to discuss other plays that you’ve seen or to look at blog entries on Shintoku-Maru, Current Nobody, Southside, Gem of the Ocean, and (I hope!) Fences. 

 
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, The Taming of the Shrew, or A Doll's House)?  Why?  How should you handle a film like Raise the Red Lantern or Ran that is not in English?  How would you handle a silent film like one of Charlie Chaplin’s or Oswald the Lucky Rabbit?

 

3.                  Discuss folk tales as a genre of literature.  How do stories like the Coyote Tales, Aesop’s Fables, or the tales that the Brothers Grimm collected fit into your ideas about literature?  How do they complicate your ideas?  Should our anthology have included stories about Rabbit, Raven, or Anansi the Spider?  Should our anthology have included additional stories about Coyote (“Coyote and Hen” or “Coyote’s Adventures in Idaho”) or “Godfather Death”?  How would a reworked story like Charles Perrault’s “Donkey Skin” or his “Cinderella” or Somerset Maugham’s “Appointment at Samarra” fit into your ideas about literature?  Conversely, compare one of our folk tales to an authored work like John Keats’ “The Eve of St. Agnes,” S.T. Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” Ludwig Tieck’s “Fair-Haired Eckbert,” or the poems by Paula Gunn Allen and Leslie Marmon Silko.  How does the folk tale help you understand the authored work better?  How does the authored work help you understand the folk tale better?  Which does each type of work do better? 

4.  More of the works we’ve studied in the second half of the semester were originally written in a language other than English.  How does the presence of works NOT originally written in English (“Sarrasine,” Mother Courage, “Fair-Haired Eckbert”) or the Chinese-language film Raise the Red Lantern change your definition of world literature?  Or what about works like the Coyote Tales that were originally told in languages other than English?  Should EN 202 be a multilingual course?  (Feel free to bring in some of the works you read during the first part of the semester.)  Remember African authors Chinua Achebe and Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s essays on a writer’s choice of language.  Should Joseph Conrad should have written in Polish and relied on translators for his English or French audience?  Should the Native American writers Paula Gunn Allen, Leslie Marmon Silko, Cheryl Savageau, and Gerald Vizenor try to write in their tribe’s language?  Why?  Why not?

 

5.            Complete at least one of the following statements (apologies to Samuel Johnson):

            If (poem/poet/song/musician/rapper) be not poetry/a poet, what is poetry?

AND/OR

            If (poem/poet/song/musician/rapper) be poetry/a poet, what is poetry?

 

Support your argument with quotes from your poet, musician, or rapper as well as analysis of these quotes and your definition of what poetry is and what it is not.  Consider this statement by British poet Basil Bunting:  “Compose aloud.  Poetry is sound” as well as Robert Frost’s jab at free verse, Ezra Pound’s call to “make it new,” or the older statement from Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas that the poet is “not to number the streaks of the tulip.”  Consider the extent to which music relies on a singer’s voice and the producer’s arrangement and to which rap relies on a rapper’s persona and his/her authenticity.

 

           

 

   

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?

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

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!

The Novel (Cross-posting from EN 201)

Now that we are moving on from the epic to the novel, I thought that I'd put up an entry on this genre.

Here is a brief but limited overview of the novel from a professor at Northern Virginia Community College. Her site emphasizes the novel in English:

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

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

For a more detailed and diverse introduction to the novel and the American novel, see this site from the University of North Carolina Pembroke:

http://www.uncp.edu/home/canada/work/markport/lit/amnovel/fall2002/01intro.htm

http://www.uncp.edu/home/canada/work/markport/lit/amnovel/fall2002/syllabus.htm

Do Journey to the West and Genji fit into these definitions? It's true that they are much older than the novels that both professors discuss. It's also true that if we go to the Classics department, we'll find that the novel existed in Greek and Roman literature.

http://ace.acadiau.ca/history/Provencal/Clas34232007.htm

http://people.uncw.edu/deagona/ancientnovel/bibliography.htm

http://people.uncw.edu/deagona/ancientnovel/mscott.htm

Here's a summary of one ancient novel, Heliodorus' Ethiopian Story, which was written in the third century BCE, during the Roman Empire.

http://www.chss.montclair.edu/classics/petron/heliodorus.html

But what about the Chinese novel? Here are some sites from Western and Asian writers alike:

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1938/buck-lecture.html

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

http://acc6.its.brooklyn.cuny.edu/~phalsall/texts/chinlit.html

http://chronicle.uchicago.edu/931209/roy.shtml

And is Genji a novel?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Japanese_literature
http://www.wsu.edu/~dee/ANCJAPAN/LIT.HTM
http://www.randomhouse.com/kvpa/smiley100/excerptsGenji.html
http://web-japan.org/kidsweb/explore/language/q1.html

On the other hand, even though the novel is defined as a *prose* narrative, here is some information about Vikram Seth's The Golden Gate, a recent novel in verse:

http://poetry.suite101.com/article.cfm/the_golden_gate
http://www.tetrameter.com/seth.htm