Understanding "The Yellow Wallpaper"

Link

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

Natalia's Summary of The Girl Without Hands

Link

Map of Candide's Journey that Michelle Found

Link

Ram's Summary of Goose Girl

Link

Thank you, Ram :)

Singing the Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Link

Thank you, Michelle :)

If you don't know Gilligan's Island, see these links:

http://www.gilligansisle.com/

http://www.thewb.com/shows/gilligans-island/marooned-pilot/8ae27d25-b203-491a-92fb-2343b8542256

Johann's Summary - "An Image of Africa"

Link

Please see the link above for Johann's summary of Chinua Achebe's "An Image of Africa."  The summary is a Word attachment, so you will need to open or download it.

By the way, below is a picture of a young Achebe with Langston Hughes.  It is from Hughes' 1962 visit to Lagos, Nigeria.

 

 

Theresita's Summary of Fitzcarraldo

Summary of Fitzcarraldo.
7/19/2010

The Movie Fitzcarraldo is a film directed and produced by a German filmmaker Werner Herzog.The story of an obsessed impresario whose foremost desire in life is to bring both Enrico Caruso and an opera house to the deepest jungles of South America.In order to raise the money for the opera house, Fitzcarraldo buys a broken down steamboat and plans to sail it up a tributary off the Amazon, pull the boat over a mountain and drop it into a neighboring tributary, so he can access the wealth of rubber trees there. To get there, though,he will have to brave raging rapids and tribes of hostile natives that are known to make shrunken heads out of foreign intruders.

Study Guide for Midterm (Summer 2009)

It seems like we've just begun,but I'd like to start posting our midterm guide as soon as possible.  The take home midterm is due July 27, but since it will cover what we've discussed in class, I want to make up this guide sooner rather than later.

We began our summer session by defining literature and watching some scenes from Francis Ford Coppola's film Apocalypse Now (1979).  Coppola's film reworks Heart of Darkness, resetting it during the Vietnam War.  For people in the late 1960s and 1970s, Vietnam was extremely controversial and, for some, disillusioning.  (BTW, in the interview we saw, Joseph Campbell alludes several times to Vietnam--even though the interview took place in the mid-1980s.)


If you would like to rewatch some of the scenes that we saw, here are links to YouTube videos.  The first is the beginning when Willard (Coppola renamed Marlow) is in Saigon, waiting for his mission:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZzM4D2_uOP0

Next Willard gets his mission:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iw1KobfPwk

Then he and his men meet Col. Kilgore. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmrEo85vuEI

I am not able to find a video of the rest of this scene, but here is the scene where Lance surfs and Willard mutters "Charlie don't surf."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WiRTONtkVb8

Finally, here is the scene where Willard & Chef encounter the tiger:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbFvAaO9j8M



Tuesday we discussed the first part of Heart of Darkness.  I gave a brief definition and history of the novel.  Here is a link to a more extended definition.

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

Here are some outlines of the 18th, 19th, and 20th century novel.  Note that Conrad is not included in this history! 

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

For more information about Conrad's life, see this very full chronology:

http://conrad-centre.w.interia.pl/pages/chronology_en.html

This page has more detailed information about Conrad's most well-known novels:

http://www.mantex.co.uk/ou/a319/conrd-01.htm

Below is the album cover for the soundtrack of a 1960s movie based on Conrad's novel Lord Jim.  (Marlow also narrated this novel as well.  In this novel, he mentions that he likes to mentor young men.)


Among the topics we discussed Tuesday were the frame narrative (story within a story), the unnamed narrator & Marlow's depictions of London, Marlow's depiction of Brussels ("whited sepulcher"), his description of Africa (coast & the first station), his audience's perception of him, our perception of him, his relationships with women (specifically his aunt), his relationship with other Europeans, and his perception of the native workers.  Since we discussed Marlow's admiration for the accountant with his starched cuffs and collar, we watched a little more of Apocalypse Now's scenes featuring Col. Kilgore.


On Wednesday we moved on to part 2 of Heart of Darkness, focusing on its depiction of Africa and Africans as well as of Europeans.  Some key scenes were Marlow's depiction of his fireman, his reaction to the death of the helmsman, and his encounter with the young Russian.  A number of you mentioned Chinua Achebe's "An Image of Africa":

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

We also took another perspective on Conrad's novel, examining the more recent history of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (aka DR Congo or Zaire).  For more specific information, see this link to my earlier Multiply entry:

http://worldlit2.multiply.com/journal/item/84/Reading_Heart_of_Darkness_Historical_Background>Reading Heart of Darkness (Historical Background)

Here you may rewatch the YouTube documentary on Patrice Lumumba that we saw in class:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HrcX3XUm7eA

In addition, these are links that I sent you with the questions for Wednesday:

This is a link to an English-language trailer of the movie Lumumba :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLh4LGadxoU

Here are links to Al-Jazeera English's documentaries on the Congo:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_d4dFYiIzK8

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpd3ykS4QOQ



Although we did not listen to the music of the Baka people until Thursday, I am linking it here since it fits in better with Wednesday's emphasis on African history and culture.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98Xj_oLkRT4


Thursday we moved on to part three of Heart of Darkness and another perspective: Joseph Campbell's outline of the hero's journey.  Do you think that Marlow follows the hero's path?  If so, where does he cross the threshold?  who are his helpers?  and what is the elixir that he brings back?  Was his elixir that compassion that he shows to Kurtz's fiancee? 

To review the outline, you may go to this link from UC Berkeley:

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

To watch more of the video that we saw in class, go to this link:

http://www.mythsdreamssymbols.com/herojourney.html

We also discussed Marlow's expectations of Kurtz, his impressions of him, the reasons why Kurtz escaped into the woods & Marlow went after him, and his final interview with Kurtz's fiancee, his Intended, as well as the novel's last paragraph.

On to Things Fall Apart!!

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.

 

           

 

   

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?