HC 223H, Honors College Literature
The Literary Self: Waves of Change
Bishop, Spring 2003 | 308 Chapman | (541) 346-0733 | lmbishop@oregon.uoregon.edu
Office hours (sign-up sheets on office door; make an appointment if these
hours don't work):
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Tuesday 2:00 pm to 3:30 pm |
Thursday 2:00 pm to 4:45 pm (no hours May 8) |
This third term of Honors College literature continues the last two terms' literary-historical survey. The course requires attentive reading of both primary texts and literary criticism; it also requires, at the end of the term, the production of an original research paper. To meet the course's goals we will divide our reading of primary texts and their secondary criticism among four literary-critical modes from the last two centuries:
• The creation of the novel in the nineteenth century and its use of "medieval"
as a theme
• The advent of twentieth-century modernism
(the link connects to the Minneapolis Institute of Art modernism collection:
see also "Modernism
and the Modern Novel")
• The colonial impulse and post-colonial critique
• Post-modernism and the "new"
After reading a nineteenth-century novel (George Eliot's Scenes of Clerical Life), we will approach modernism through poetry (T.S. Eliot and The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock) and novel (Virginia Wolfe's Orlando--for fun, read Woolf on Eliot and visit The Orlando Project), then move to Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart and Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things to assess colonialism and post-colonialism (read here Roy's 2 April 2003 article on the current American war). We will end the term with Salman Rushdie's postmodern epic novel, Midnight's Children, arguably the best novel in English of the twentieth century.
How do we know who we are, and how do romanticism, modernism, and postmodernism define a self? How does literature of the last two centuries invent, contest or corroborate earlier definitions of the human? How does literature foment and challenge love, revolution, evolution, science, colonialism, fascism, and nihilism? Where is reading, writing, and thinking headed in this new millennium, and what modes will we use to understand our literate selves?
Books are available at Mother Kali's (next to the Dairy Queen on 13th).
The article responses constitute 10% of your grade; the annotated bibliography, 15%; the precis paper, 20%; the term paper, 30%; the class presentation, 10% (including completed evaluations); ; and the final exam will constitute 15% of your grade. Please note the University's "grade point value" system effective 9/90, as I will be using this system to grade your work (unless otherwise noted):
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A+ = 4.3 |
B+ = 3.3 |
C+ = 2.3 |
D+ = 1.3 |
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A = 4.0 |
B = 3.0 |
C = 2.0 |
D = 1.0 |
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A- = 3.7 |
B- = 2.7 |
C- = 1.7 |
D- = 0.7 |
Daily reading schedule (try to read the entire work before we begin discussion; we will, however, try to discuss the parts of each work as outlined below)
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April 1 |
April 3 |
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April 8 Eliot article: Alain Barrat, "Nostalgia
and Reform in Scenes of Clerical Life," Cahiers Victoriens et
Edouardiens 41 (1995): 47-57) |
April 10 |
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April 15 T.S.Eliot article: See the T.S.
Eliot webpage and choose one of the critics for your summary and
reaction OR read the article by Louis Menand on Electronic reserve (biographical
criticism) Still challenged to find a thesis or begin your research? Take the tour on the Humbul Humanities Hub Virtual Training Suite (from Oxford U, UK) and get charged up about meaningful research and the research process |
April 17 (George)
Eliot group presentation |
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April 22 Woolf article: Lisa Carstens,
" The Science of Sex and the Art of Self-Materializing in Orlando,"
Virginia Woolf Out of Bounds (New York: Pace UP, 2001), 39-46 |
April 24 |
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April 29 |
May 1 Wolfe group presentation |
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May 6 Achebe article: Diana Akers Rhoads,
"Culture in Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart," African
Studies Review 36,1 (1993): 61-72 |
May 8 --NO CLASS-- |
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May 13 Roy article: "'Remembrance
of Things Past': A Reading of Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things,"
CIEFL Bulletin 9,2 (1998): 49-56 |
May 15 Achebe group presentation |
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May 20 |
May 22 God
of Small Things group presentation
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May 27 Rushdie article: Neil Ten Kortenaar,
"Salmon Rushdie's Magic Realism and the Return of Inescapable Romance,"
University of Toronto Quarterly: A Canadian Journal of the Humanities
71, 3 (2002): 765-85 |
May 29 |
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June 2 |
June 4 Rushdie group
presentation |
Thursday, April 17 George Eliot group presentation
Thursday, May 1 Woolf group presentation
Thursday, May 15 Achebe group presentation
Thursday, May 22 Roy group presentation
Thursday, June 4 Rushdie group presentation
NB: The overarching themes this term are narration (noticing narrative techniques--voice, mood, reliability--and how they change) and identity (the shaping of character, individuality, subjectivity) . Use the following remarks to spark your thinking/writing about our texts.
Scenes of Clerical Life | Orlando | Things Fall Apart | God of Small Things | Midnight's Children
Scenes of Clerical Life This collection of three stories, Eliot's first fiction publication, takes pains to situate itself historically and to code its narrator as male. How much "history" does Eliot use and allude to? How does that history inform the formal construction of the novel (formal elements include the timing for introducing characters, the narrator's intrusions, particular vocabulary)? How does the aperture of the past affect the present, according to this novel?
Love-Song of J. Alfred Prufrock This clarion call to modernism provides a road map to modernist concerns and modernist techniques. The concerns include the weight of the literary past and the fragmentation of individual identity. The techniques include "free verse," allusion, assonance, off-rhyme, international languages. Here's a good summary by Roger Mitchell:
J. Alfred Prufrock is not just the speaker of one of Eliot's poems. He is the Representative Man of early Modernism. Shy, cultivated, oversensitive, sexually retarded (many have said impotent), ruminative, isolated, self-aware to the point of solipsism, as he says, "Am an attendant lord, one that will do / To swell a progress, start a scene or two." Nothing revealed the Victorian upper classes in Western society more accurately, unless it was a novel by Henry James, and nothing better exposed the dreamy, insubstantial center of that consciousness than a half-dozen poems in Eliot's first book. The speakers of all these early poems are trapped inside their own excessive alertness. They look out on the world from deep inside some private cave of feeling, and though they see the world and themselves with unflattering exactness, they cannot or will not do anything about their dilemma and finally fall back on self-serving explanation. They quake before the world, and their only revenge is to be alert. After Prufrock and Other Observations, poetry started coming from the city and from the intellect. It could no longer stand comfortably on its old post-Romantic ground, ecstatic before the natural world.
from A Profile of Twentieth-Century American Poetry. Ed. Jack Myers and David Wojahan. Copyright © 1991 by Southern Illinois UP, and available at The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.
Orlando Lisa Carstens suggests that gender fluidity in Woolf's novel has more to do with the shape-shifting of an artist, and the multiple selves that contemporary sexology proposed, than gender performances more tuned to postmodern thinking. How does the novel Orlando's interest in history, especially literary history, affect Carstens' assessment? Note too that Woolf's father, Sir Leslie Stephen initiated the Dictionary of National Biography, a work still produced in Britain. What elements of biography, novel, and romance do you see in Orlando? Here's a quotation from Freud's essay, "The Differentiation Between Men and Women" (1905): "Since I have become acquainted with the notion of bisexuality I have regarded it as the decisive factor, and without taking bisexuality into account I think it would scarcely be possible to arrive at an understanding of the sexual manifestations that are actually to be observed in men and women."
Images in Orlando: frontispiece, "Orlando as a Boy," 17-c portrait of Edward Sackville, son of the fourth earl; "Russian Princess as a Child," photograph by Woolf's sister of daughter (Woolf's niece) Angelica; "The Archduchess Harriet," another Sackville, Mary the fourth countess, c. 1600; "Orlando as Ambassador," "art" photograph of Vita done in London studio; "Orlando on her return to England," portrait of Vita for winning literary prize; "Orlando about the year 1840," photograph of Vita by Woolf's sister Vanessa Bell; "Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine, Esq.," a c. 1820 painting bought by Vita in London; "Orlando at the present time," Leonard Woolf photo of Vita at Vita's house.
Things Fall Apart : PART ONE: Think about the epigraph from Yeats's "The Second Coming" with which Achebe introduces his novel. Consider the points of connection, and points of tension, between the Anglo-British modernist poetic tradition (controlled, symbolic, yet unmoored, desperate) that Achebe invokes with his epigram and the spare, descriptive tone of his portrait of African villages and their inhabitants. What purpose does the epigraph serve? What is Achebe's attitude towards the Anglo-British literary tradition? Click HERE for more questions.
PART TWO: What are the lessons, if any, Okonkwo learns among his mother's kinsmen in Mbanta (see p. 166)? What about Okonkwo's ambition and his despair (p. 131)--is it a matter of chi? Is chi the same as fate in the Greek sense? Think about the place of the mother (p. 133) and the song on p. 135: would you describe this as fatalism? What about the foreshadowing on p. 135? Click HERE for more questions.
PART THREE: Notice Akunna's debate with Mr. Brown (pp. 179-81), and the prediction of the tribe's death (p. 187), followed by the District Commissioner's statement about his and his government's intentions (p.194). How does Achebe engage the reader's sympathies? Click HERE for more questions.
God of Small Things The narrative voice of the novel is Rahel, twin sister of Estha. What devices does Roy use to make us aware of that voice's predominance?
Roy's fragmented narrative replicates a signal trait of modernism (the technique's great exemplar is James Joyce, or William Faulkner for American fiction). How does Roy inflect those fragments? What holds the fragments together? What in this novel's sensibility alerts you to its colonial roots? How does fragmentation fit the hybridity of post-colonial identity?
The "Great Stories" the omniscient narrator mentions in Chapter 12, p. 218, are part of the Mahabharata, the millenia-old collection of tales of the five sons of Pandu, locked in dynastic struggle with their cousin. Why is Roy invoking these stories? What is their connection to her story, as she describes them? What dangers do mythic models represent? What is the relationship between big and small?
Three generations of sibling pairs inhabit Roy's novel: Estha and Rahel, Ammu and Chacko, Baby Kochamma and Pappachi. What makes the brother-sister relationship so central to the novel's meaning? What makes brother-sister love so tragic?
Definition of globalization: "the process whereby individual lives and local communities are affected by economic and cultural forces that operate worldwide. More simply, in effect it is the process of the world becoming a single place" (Mullaney 14).
Midnight's Children ".
. . Midnight's Children actively encourages us to reconsider our understanding
of what "History" is and where it may be found while more generally
questioning the form of the historical novel itself by noting the impossibility
of, for example, categorizing our experience of the world without generalization
or omission. In the process, Rushdie is dwaring our attention to the necessity
of embracing the stories embedded or elided within that singular factual linear
narrative we conventionally call "History." . . . Midnight's Children
actively revisits and interrogates India's colonial histories and its postcolonial
imaginings through a critical examination of the promises and failures of the
post-colonial state. Epic in its ambition and form and part historical
metafiction, part magical realism, Midnight's Children charts
the divergent fates of the children of Independence while uncovering the intertwining
social, historical, and religious roots of the nation, roots which always threaten
to fissure rather than anchor the post-Independence state." Julie Mullaney,
Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things (London: Continuum, 2001), 23.
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