Study Guide for the Midterm (Part 2)

Above is a picture from a recent production of Nigerian playwright Biyi Bandele's adaptation of Oroonoko.  I hope that this play comes to the D.C. area!

Back to our study guide. 

Oroonoko (1688) -- connections between this novel & Things Fall Apart or Heart of Darkness, Oroonoko as heroic figure, early novel/Behn as pioneering woman/novel author...or is it a novel?!, Oroonoko as Abolitionist text (or not), primitive vs. civilized, myth of the Noble Savage, genre, cultural contact, relationship between Oroonoko & narrator, relationship between Oroonoko & Imoinda, Behn's depiction of Africa, Behn's depiction of Surinam

Candide (1759) -- what is funny?  what is disturbing?, satire exposing problems, satire as a problem/solution paper, picaro, philosophies, initiation as a theme, Candide's humor, objects of satire, Voltaire's depiction of Paris, Candide's relationship with Cunegonde, his relationship with Pangloss, his relationship with Martin, the ending -- why is Candide's commune in the Ottoman Empire?, treatment of women & lower-class in this satire


Recently Chicago's Steppenwolf Theater staged Harriet Jacobs, Lydia R. Diamond's play based on Incidents and Ms. Jacobs' life.  Above is a picture from the play's rehearsal; below is a video of a rehearsal:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ilWF-Fjrgk

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861)-- life writing, slave narrative, 19th c. vs. 18th c., Virginia Woolf's description of the 19th c. from Orlando, slave narrative as argumentative or persuasive writing, Jacobs' expectations for women, her treatment by her owners, her sense of audience, her narration and use of asides to the reader, ending of narrative, how does she feel about her daughter knowing who her father was?

The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789) -- life writing, slave narrative, the popularity of this work, slave narrative as argumentative or persuasive writing, Equiano's Christianity, his relationship with Capt. Pascal, Equiano was a slave in Africa as well, Equiano as narrator, Equiano was from what is now Nigeria


Jane Eyre -- what was controversial about this novel, its narrator

"Stale Mates" (1955, written in the US & in English)  -- set in Hangzhou (a picturesque city in Southern China) during the 1920s, the Warlord Era, what does it mean to be modern?, can one be modern?, Zhang Ailing's depiction of polygamy, the narrator and her attitude towards the characters, men & women, depiction of tradition

Raise the Red Lantern (1991, film) -- set in the north of China during the 1920s, what does it mean to be modern?  what does it mean to be traditional?, Zhang Yimou's depiction of women & of polygamy, visual/aural impact, relationship among the wives, relationship between Songlian and her maid Yan'er, is Master Chen a nice guy, a nice jerk, or a jerk?, what do you make of the ending?

The Story of a Stone/Dream of the Red Chamber (written 1740 to 1750, published 1791, the English translation is in five volumes!) -- frame narrative, Daoist novel, extended family, triangle among Bao-Yu, Bao-Chai, and Dai-Yu, Bao-Yu was a stone in a previous life; Dai-Yu was Diamond Pearl, debt of tears, how do we respond to Bao-Yu (he is moody, prefers to be with women, hates to study, and is interested in clothes and makeup), Bao-Yu's relationship with his father, Jia Zheng (a more traditional man, a scholar and civil servant), role of nature, Bao-Yu's relationship with his grandmother

Study Guide for the Midterm (part 1)

These are the works that will be on the midterm:

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

Lady Mary Wortley Montague's Turkish Embassy Letters (to Alexander Pope, Miss Sarah Chiswell, and the Countess of Mar [Lady Mary's sister])

excerpts from Evliya Celebi's Book of Travels (the whole is ten volumes)

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe (We also discussed his "An Image of Africa" and Caryl Phillips' interview.)

Oroonoko by Aphra Behn

Candide by Voltaire

excerpts from Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

excerpts from Olaudah Equiano's The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano

"Stale Mates" by Zhang Ailing or Eileen Chang

Raise the Red Lantern, dir. Zhang Yimou

excerpts from Xueqin Cao 's The Story of the Stone/Dream of the Red Chamber


The exam will be in two parts.  The first is the subjective exam (60 pts.).  This will be a take home essay.  The second is the objective exam (40 pts.).  I will ask you to fill in the blanks, answer multiple choice questions, and give short answers.   For the most part, the questions will be cover what we discuss in class.  I may ask you to list three to five things that you learned from reading this blog. 

Topics discussed for each work:

Heart of Darkness (1899, 1902)-- between 19th & 20th century, imperialism, history of Congo/DR Congo, frame narrative, Marlow as narrator, Marlow as hero/Kurtz as hero, hero's journey, Marlow & women, Marlow & Africans, Marlow & Europeans who are not English, is Marlow Conrad?/is Conrad Marlow?, Apocalypse Now, An Image of Africa (Achebe's response), Conrad's decision to write in English

Turkish Embassy Letters (written 1716-1718, published 1763) -- Lady Mary's sense of audience, her perspective on the Ottoman Empire, the Ottoman Empire, orientalism, her correspondents, her visit with the wife of the Grand Vizier and then with the wife of the Kabya "the difference between an old devote and a young beauty," letters published *after* Lady Mary's death & even then they were edited, genre of lifewriting



Book of Travels -- ten volume work, Celebi traveled throughout the Ottoman Empire (Turkey, Albania, today's Iraq, Egypt), in the section we read he visits the site of a famous battle and advises the Caliph on how to preserve a ???'s gravesite from desecration, how does Celebi portray the land & people?

Things Fall Apart (1958) -- one of the first modern African novels but not the first (Amos Tutuola's The Palm-Wine Drinkard was published in 1946.), Achebe's depiction of 19th c. Igbo/Ibo society, Okonkwo-'s conflict with his son Nwoye and its outcome, impact of Christianity & British rule, Okonkwo & his wives, the society's attitude towards war, is Okonkwo at odds with his own village (Umofia)?, his conflict with his father, proverbs, what does Umofia value?, Okonkwo's relationship with Ikemefuna, what falls apart in the novel?, is Okonkwo a hero?  Is he a tragic hero?, roles of tradition & ritual, is Okonkwo flexible?  is his village?  why is flexibility important and how does it affect the outcome?, feel free to refer to "An Image of Africa" and interviews with Achebe

What is Orientalism?

Orientalism is an important concept to keep in mind as we start EN 202 because the West's political & cultural power makes it easy to see non-Western literature as exotic and less important than Western literature.  Since this semester we are reading Lady Mary Wortley Montague's letters from the Ottoman Empire *and* excerpts from Evliya Celebi's The Book of Travels, this concept is especially important since Edward Said's book focuses on this part of the world more than it focuses on Africa.  So I thought I would put up some links about it while I have a little more time. 

Nowadays when we talk about Orientalism in literary studies we are referring to Edward Said's definition of this term: Orientalism as a method of defining the Middle East (and the rest of Asia) as an object of study by Westerners.  However, as Danielle Sered notes in a web page on Orientalism, this term was used long before Said.  Then its meaning was a lot less controversial.

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

Prof. Allen Carey-Webb's page at the University of Western Michigan provides more detailed information about the concept of Orientalism, the reception of Said's ideas, and Said himself.

http://www.wmich.edu/dialogues/texts/orientalism.htm

Interestingly, his students have also written about some of the works that we'll be reading.  Here is Michael Omo's page on Heart of Darkness: 

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

Theresa Johnson wrote about Things Fall Apart:

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

OK, I'm starting to go off track, but here is Vicki L. Whisler's page on Oroonoko:

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

Said does mention Heart of Darkness and other works by Conrad, but his emphasis is on the Middle East as it has been scrutinized and defined by Westerners.  Nevertheless, because Said has helped us realize how politicized literature and literary studies are and his book is a key text in post-colonial studies, he has affected how we read Heart of Darkness et al.  We cannot read it as naively as we might have before Said published Orientalism (1978). 

Of course, neither should we read Orientalism naively.  FYI, here are some reviews by critics of Said:

http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/enough-said-3743

The print on this article is small, but this site is more accessible than Salon is nowadays:

http://www.ictal.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=1328

 

How do you interpret the way that the authors of these web sites use the term Orientalist or Oriental?

http://www.orientalist-art.org.uk/

http://www.orientalistart.net/index.html

http://www.arabartgallery.com/orient1.htm

Here is a painting by Kamil Aslanger, a contemporary Turkish artist who calls himself an Orientalist artist.  I tried to go to his website, but it is entirely in Turkish!  It looks and sounds beautiful, though.

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.

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!

Aphra Behn's Oroonoko

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

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

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

For more background about Oroonoko, see these sites:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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