HC 223H, Honors College Literature
The Literary Self: Waves of Change
Bishop, Spring 2004 | 308 Chapman | (541) 346-0733 | lmbishop@uoregon.edu
Office hours (sign-up sheets on office door for the entire term; make
an appointment if these hours don't work):
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Tuesday 12:00 noon to 1:15 pm |
Thursday 12:00 noon to 1:15 pm and 3:00 pm to 5:00 pm (no hours April 1 or May 6) |
Class hours: Tues, Thurs. 10:00 am to 11:20 am
Princeton on-line writing lab here
Click here for term paper guidelines
Click here for the University Library's website designed for Honors College students
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. We will end the term with Michael Frayn's play Copenhagen, an imaginative retelling of the historic meeting between Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr in Nazi-occupied Copenhagen in 1941.
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 15% of your grade; the annotated bibliography, 15%; the precis paper, 20%; the term paper, 30%; the class presentation, 15% (including completed evaluations); and class participation will constitute 5% 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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March 30 |
April 1 Romanticism: its relationship to realism and the novel |
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April 6 Eliot article: Alain Barrat, "Nostalgia
and Reform in Scenes of Clerical Life," Cahiers Victoriens et
Edouardiens 41 (1995): 47-57) |
April 8 |
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April 13 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 15 (George)
Eliot group presentation |
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April 20 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 22 T.S.
Eliot group presentation |
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April 27 |
April 29Wolfe group presentation |
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May 4 Achebe article: Diana Akers Rhoads,
"Culture in Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart," African
Studies Review 36,1 (1993): 61-72 |
May 6--NO CLASS-- |
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May 11 |
May 13 |
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May 18 |
May 20 |
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May 25 |
May 27 God of Small Things
group presentation |
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June 1 Copenhagen
article due |
June 3 Copenhagen
group presentation |
Thursday, April 15 George Eliot group presentation
Thursday, April 22 T.S. Eliot group presentation
Thursday, April 29 Woolf group presentation
Thursday, May 13 Achebe group presentation
Tuesday, May 27 Roy group presentation
Thursday, June 3 Frayn 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 | Copenhagen
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?
(April 6 2004) We've noted the desire for transcendance in the Romantic (Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley) and Victorian (Matthew Arnold) poets. Their desire for transcendance recognizes the aporia at the heart of the Romantic reification of feeling: a sense of loss, of another life; of alienation from self as well as other. The novel in the hands of George Eliot puts the Romantic poets' concerns into prose and fashions an analysis of the human heart in terms of the conventions of "realism." (Eighteenth-century novelists initially established realism's conventions.) The prose novel constructs its "real"--narrative events, details of material culture, and psychological insights--in order to investigate Romanticism's aporia. Novelistic "realism" portrays the intellectual, social, and emotional challenges Romantic poets explored in metaphor and image. Because novels depend on fleshing out a recognizable bourgeious culture, Eliot's desire for the transcendant moment uses economic, social, and religious vectors (and their degradation--or success--in the modern world) to explore the gaps Romantics lamented. Like the Romantic poets, Eliot laments loss (notice that the novel's events transpire 25 years--a generation--before our narrator's telling of the tale; try to define for yourself the idea of "nostalgia") yet seeks transcendance. Moreover, as the brief outline of Eliot's life indicates, her personal crises reflect cultural crises over religion, economics, and society in the mid-nineteenth century. Notice, on page 213, the trio of intellect, morality, and wealth: how do those concerns map onto the economic, social, and religious life of Milby? Why does Eliot begin the novel in a bar? Notice the moments when Eliot switches to present tense (page 223, page 231): what purpose does this formal device serve? Why do the Linnet sisters crochet (Chapter 3--and notice that, on page 256, the widow has her loom)? How early do we learn of Mr Dempster's alcoholism and abuse? Why do the women of Milby like Mr Tryan, and what effect does their affection have?
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).
Copenhagen This 1998 play's repeated refigurings of Heisenberg's meeting with the Bohrs use a technique of postmodern aesthetics prompted by the mathematics of iteration (cf the music of Philip Glass) and the uncertainty principle. The effect calls into question the idea of absolute, verifiable "reality," a question for physics as well as narrative art. But the scale of the issue moves from the individual to the global as the spectre of nuclear holocaust shadows the play. Individual responsibility meets global matters: the question is whether ethics survives in a universe or imaginary without absolutes: can ethics survive, even flourish, amidst relativity?Back to top of page | Back to Bishop Home Page | This page created by Louise M. Bishop | Last updated May 31, 2004