African Art

To finish up for now (Thursday), I'd like to add some links to exhibits on African art.  When we visit the Freer Gallery in March, if we have time or inclination, we may be able to visit the nearby Museum of African Art.  However, while we are reading Heart of Darkness and later on when we are reading Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative and Mariama Ba's So Long a Letter, I'd like for you to be able to look at the links below.  By the way, the picture above is of a power figure from the Congo.  In fact, the figure dates from the 19th century!!  In your opinion, what would Marlow have made of such a figure?

(Here I've posted a copy of a British painting from 1912 as contrast.  J.W. Waterhouse is not the most avant-garde of artists, but his Penelope and Her Suitors may give you an idea of what people in the early 20th century were used to considering as art and why African art might have been shocking to them.)

For more information about the African power figure and its context, see the link below from the Brooklyn Museum:

http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/collections/african_art/22.1421.php

This link takes you to information about that museum's entire collection:

http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/collections/african_art/

Just twenty five years after Heart of Darkness' serialization, the Brooklyn Museum presented an exhibit of African art.  At this time, this art was influencing European artists such as Picasso.

http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/research/digital-collections/pna1923/

Closer to home, here are some links to the Smithsonian's Museum of African Art:

http://africa.si.edu/exhibits/africanvision/index2.html

http://africa.si.edu/collections/index.htm

In 1993, the Bayly Museum of Art at the University of Virginia set up an electronic exhibit on African art:

http://www.lib.virginia.edu/clemons/RMC/exhib/93.ray.aa/African.html

NYC has a Museum for African Art.  Currently, it is based in Long Island City, but it will soon be moving to a new home in Manhattan.

http://www.africanart.org/index.php

The Guggenheim Museum includes a searchable map of Africa on its web site.  Here are links to its pages on Central Africa (the region where the Congo is) and Western Africa (the region where Senegal and Nigeria are).

http://artnetweb.com/guggenheim/africa/central.html

http://artnetweb.com/guggenheim/africa/west.html

The Guggenheim also has a page on African film.  Unfortunately, it seems to have been written in the 1990s:

http://www.artnetweb.com/guggenheim/film/


Here is some background information on African art from a web site at Sweet Briar College in Virginia:

http://www.uiowa.edu/~africart/teachers/Chronology.html

http://hum.lss.wisc.edu/hjdrewal/Looking.html

http://hum.lss.wisc.edu/hjdrewal/aesthetics.html

Anne-Marie O'Connor from the LA Times writes here about the ongoing reassessment of African art:

http://www.calendarlive.com/galleriesandmuseums/cl-et-africanart29jan29,0,5808956.story

This is a little off topic, but I thought that you might be interested in this essay on African history from NYC's Metropolitan Museum of Art:

http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ahis/hd_ahis.htm

I'd like to close with a site from Senegal's DAK'ART Biennale.  It is in French.  The next exhibition will be this summer, so if you plan to go to Dakar....

http://www.biennaledakar.org/

Ge'ez and Its Literature (On African Civilizations pt. 1) Crossposting

While I'm on a roll this morning, I'd like to cross-post a site from my EN 201 blog.  It is on Ge'ez, a language that was once used in what is now Ethiopia and Eritrea.  I realize that Ethiopia is quite far from the Congo, but I also wanted to post an example of an entry derived from one honors student's annotated bibliography.

Ge'ez was used in Abyssinia, the ancestor of Ethiopia and Eritrea.  Now Amharic is the main language of Ethiopia, and Tigrigna is the main language of Eritrea, but both are descended from Ge'ez.  Now Ge'ez is mainly used within the Ethiopian and Eritrean monasteries, which explains my choice of picture above. 

Here is a link to information about the Debra Damo monastery.  It was built on a mountain in the sixth century CE, and it is accessible only to men who are willing to be climb up a rope ladder to the top of the mountain.

http://www.ethiopiantreasures.toucansurf.com/pages/damo.htm

Other monasteries are on islands off the Ethiopian coast:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/1560736.stm

A British man writes about what it is like to visit Ethiopia's churches and monasteries...and what it is like to climb up to Debra Damo!

http://blogs.bootsnall.com/vagabondrick/?p=231

But about Ge'ez....here is a site that gives the history of this language as well as examples of its alphabet:

http://www.ethiopianhistory.com/Ge'ez

This site compares Ge'ez with its "offspring":

http://www.omniglot.com/writing/ethiopic.htm

Could Ge'ez be close to the "Global World Language"?

http://www.valdostamuseum.org/hamsmith/Ogamlang.html

For more background on writings in Ge'ez, see these sites:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ge'ez_language#History_and_literature

http://www.1911encyclopedia.org/Ethiopic_literature

http://wbelcher.bol.ucla.edu/

Here Prof. Getachew Haile, a professor of medieval studies at St. John's University in Minnesota and a political activist, discusses Ge'ez and Amharic with an interviewer:

http://www.senamirmir.com/interviews/theme/5-2001/gh/lang.html

Those of you who are mathematically-inclined may be interested in this writer's efforts to adapt the Amharic/Ge'ez numbering system to include a zero:

http://www.yebbo.com/j/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=447&Itemid=79

Abba Tesfamariam Baraki, a local pastor, is interviewed here:

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

Ancient African Civilizations & Ancient Greece & Rome (Cross-posting from EN 201)

After class today, I was thinking about all that Conrad did not know about Africa and its history--and all that we do know, so I thought that I'd post some sites on this topic, for your interest. I've also ordered some books on this topic, so if I get my act together, you may even see a new book review or two here!

Classics scholar Frank M. Snowden, Jr. began the serious study of the interactions between Africans and Egyptians, Greeks, & Romans. Among the pieces of evidence that he used was art from Ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome. He argued that Africans did not experience prejudice from the Greeks and Romans and contributed to their civilizations.

http://www.neh.gov/news/humanities/2004-01/medals.html#snowden

Prof. Snowden spent much of his long career at Howard University. Here is a link to this university's exhibit honoring him for his accomplishments and his influence on classical studies. Here you'll be able to read excerpts from his books as well as reviews of these works:

http://www.howard.edu/library/Special/Excellence@Howard/Snowden/Blacks.htm

Here is the NY Times' recent obituary of Prof. Snowden:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/28/obituaries/28snowden.html?ex=1330318800&en=36f6d8cfe26bf8d7&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

For more information about the influence that Greek culture may have had on one African civilization, the Nubian civilization, see this link to Prof. Stanley Burstein's lecture at Howard:

http://www.chs.harvard.edu/publications.sec/online_print_books.ssp/frank_m._s...

Did you notice that Homer mentioned the Ethiopians in both of his epics?

In 1991, historian Martin Bernal argued that African civilizations strongly influenced the Ancient Greeks; his book was called Black Athena. This argument was criticized by Mary Lefkowitz, a professor of classics at Wellesley College, and other scholars, including Professor Snowden.

Here is a quick overview of the topic. Surprisingly, the discussion page on this entry is brief:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Athena

For a variety of opinions, go to this web site:
http://www.worldagesarchive.com/Individual%20Web%20Pages/BlackAthena.html

Prof. Lefkowitz presents her critique of Bernal's argument here:

http://www.wellesley.edu/CS/Mary/contents.html

Prof. Bernal answers her at length here:
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/bmcr/1996/96.04.05.html

On Joseph Campbell (Crossposting from EN 201)

This afternoon, after our class today, I realized that this entry from my EN 201 blog could be useful as we consider Marlow and his quest in Heart of Darkness. I like to show a tape of Moyers' interview with him in EN 201 because it sets up a useful, modern definition of the hero and the quest that may well explain our discomfort with Gilgamesh and Achilles as heroes. Additionally, Campbell studied so many cultures that he provides a good model for our approach to world literature this semester. (It's true, though, that scholars have criticized Campbell for being too much of a generalist, but at our level, a generalist is probably more helpful to us than a specialist would be.)

First of all, here is a biography of Joseph Campbell from the Joseph Campbell Foundation:

http://www.jcf.org/about_jc.php

This essay was written by a student of Campbell and includes some recollections about him:
http://www.folkstory.com/campbell/campbell.html

Here is an outline of Campbell's "stages of the hero's journey." It's the same handout that I gave you today (Monday 1/28).  Compare these stages to the sequence of events in Heart of Darkness and other works that we read this semester.

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

FYAmuse, Campbell's work also influenced George Lucas' initial Star Wars movies. Campbell, in turn, had been influenced by Carl Jung's theories of psychology and Mircea Eliade's history and philosophy of religions. For more information about Jung, see the site below:

http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/jung.html

For more information about Eliade, see the site below:

http://www.westminster.edu/staff/brennie/eliade/mebio.htm

If you are interested in writing or storytelling, this site from Maricopa Community College in Arizona could be worth exploring.

http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/smc/journey/

Below are some critiques of Campbell's work and his approach. The first is from a Christian perspective. The second responds to concerns that Christian theologians have with Campbell and the study of mythology.
http://logosresourcepages.org/FalseTeachings/campbell.htm
http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=171

Here is a defense of Campbell's work and approach, also from The Christian Century. This defense mentions Campbell's use of Jungian psychology as well as the extent to which Campbell is misread and to which he misread Jung.

http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=766

From what's out there, Joseph Campbell and his work or his influence might be a good topic for an annotated bibliography--or a presentation!

Journal Entry - Jan. 27, 2008

Link

Above is a link to the first of our reading journals.  Thank you, Juan!

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.

Reading Heart of Darkness Continued

.
Above is a picture of the Thames River at dusk.  Because Heart of Darkness begins and ends on the Thames, I thought that this image would work quite nicely.

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness: A Case Study in Contemporary Criticism is actually almost twenty years old, but it's a useful introduction to the book and to ways of reading it. 

Twenty years ago (the late 1980s) literary studies was undergoing a great change as ways of reading and writing about literature became more systematic and self-conscious.  This resulted from the (relative) popularization of literary theory.  Literary theory predates the 1980s, of course, but during this decade theory became more and more important to literary studies. 

Before I go further, I want to emphasize that I am reviewing this book because Heart of Darkness is complicated.  There is no one way to read it.  Moreover, Conrad's style can be difficult because he is evoking the atmosphere of the Congo and its psychological impact on Marlow (the original narrator).  Also, Conrad wrote at the end of the 19th century, a time before film and the internet.  His work truly is "betwixt and between"...between older, more elaborate novels by Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, and Charles Dickens & others like Thomas Hardy *and* later, more direct novels by Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald or impressionistic novels by Virginia Woolf.  When I first read Heart of Darkness (in a course on the 19th century British novel), I remember being shocked at how short this novella was.  It looked very different a few years later when I read it in a course on Conrad and then again when I read it at the beginning of a course on the modern British novel. 

Heart of Darkness: A Case Study focuses on five different theories that were popular at the time (1989).  These theories are psychoanalytic (focusing on psychology), reader-response (focusing on the reader's response to literature), feminist, deconstructionist (attempting to take apart the text and discover its structure & contradictions), and new historicist (placing the text in its historical and cultural context).   If this book were to be revised today, I suspect that deconstructionism and reader-response theory might be replaced with queer studies and post-colonial studies.  Here is a link to an essay that takes a more post-colonial approach:  http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/conrad/pva52.html  This situation reminds me that there is no one way to read a piece of literature.

The book actually begins with a short biography of Joseph Conrad and an introduction to his work.  I'm going to save time here by linking to a general biography:

http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/jconrad.htm

What's most important to know about Conrad is this.  He was Polish at a time when Poland did not officially exist because it was ruled by Russia and Germany.  (He grew up in the Russian Empire.)  English was his third or fourth language, and he traveled the world as a sailor before becoming a writer.  At first, his writings were not popular, but they became popular and even influential.  Many later writers admired his work and the view of the world expressed in it.

By the way, like many 19th century novels, Heart of Darkness was first published in a magazine over three issues.  Here's a link to a college's web site that has this version:

http://gaslight.mtroyal.ca/darkmenu.htm

To finish, I'd like to mention what each section focused on in Heart of Darkness. 

The psychoanalytic reading interprets the novel as Kurtz and Marlow's inner journey.  Kurtz falls victim to his desire for power, but Marlow comes away with greater self-knowledge.  This section was written by Frederick R. Karl who also wrote a biography of Conrad, but he does *not* talk about the connections between Marlow and Conrad.  Yes, there are connections!

Adena Rosmarin's section on reader response in turn faces the reasons why Heart of Darkness is difficult for many readers.  Specifically, there are gaps in the narrative and therefore places where the reader has to decide for him/herself what is going on and why it is important.  Conrad's refusal to tell the reader what to think appealed to readers who lived through World Wars One and Two.  WWI, in particular, disillusioned many who fought in it and lived through it.

For more information about WWI, see this site from the BBC:  http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/wwone/

The presence of a feminist reading of Heart of Darkness may surprise you.  Or does it?  In this section, Johanna M. Smith (one of my husband's professors at Indiana University) uses feminist theory to examine Marlow's narrative and his self-justifications about the Company, the Congo, and the women he encounters along the way.  These women include his aunt (who convinces the Company to hire him), Kurtz' African lover, and his European fiancee (his Intended whom Marlow visits at the end of the story).  Interestingly, in the 19th century, a popular type of book was the collected biographies of women.  A number of these women went to Africa, India, and elsewhere in the British Empire as missionaries, and the collected biographies encouraged young female readers to see missionary work as an ideal career.  In practice, most young women could not become missionaries, but these biographies ultimately encouraged them to go on to other careers in the US and the UK.  For more information on these collective biographies and their impact on women, see my review of Prof. Alison Booth's How to Make It As A Woman:
http://ncgsjournal.com/szlyk.htm

Now you know the other side of the story...as Paul Harvey says!

In a deconstructionist reading, J.Hillis Miller argues that Heart of Darkness is something of a parable, a story that appears to be about realistic, everyday events but reveals a hidden, cosmic truth.  He also examines the ways in which Conrad's novel is apocalyptic, that is, about the end of time.  (Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now had come out about ten years earlier.  I know that I first thought of Heart of Darkness as the novel that Apocalypse Now was based on.)

Brook Thomas' New Historicist reading places Heart of Darkness in its historical and cultural context.  Thomas also notes Conrad's thoughts on history and the extent to which a novelist is also a historian.  Conrad, the literary scholar argues, "felt that 'the reality of forms and observation of social phenomenon' in his fiction [produced] more truthful histories than those of most historians" (Thomas 239). 

In your opinion, what are the most important elements of Heart of Darkness?  Why?  Which of the five perspectives outlined above seem most useful to you?