HC 223H, Honors College Literature
Making Modernity
Bishop, Spring 2006 | 308 Chapman | (541) 346-0733 | lmbishop@uoregon.edu
NB No office hours on Thursday, April 27
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 11:30 am to 2:30 pm |
Thursday 11:00 am to noon |
Class hours: Tues, Thurs. 8:30 am to 9:50 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 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 nineteenth and twentieth centuries:
• The creation of the novel in the nineteenth century and the changed
discourse of science
• The advent of twentieth-century modernism
(the link connects to the Minneapolis Institute of Art modernism collection)
• The colonial impulse and post-colonial critique
• Post-modernism, realism and hybridity
After reading a nineteenth-century novel to understand the modern narrative (Mary Shelley's Frankenstein), we will read 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) from the beginning decades of the twentieth century, 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 Tom Stoppard's play Arcadia, a play that depends on fractals and fluid time to tell its story of the last two centuries.
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 the UO Bookstore.
The 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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April 4 |
April 6 Frankensteinby Mary Shelley (1797-1851; our version
of the novel was published when Shelley was 21 years old), pp 47-115
(volume 1): preface, the frame narrative and reliable narrators: what
is Shelley's purpose for writing the novel? |
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April 11 Library research visit -- Meet in the ITC of the Knight Library, second floor |
April 13 Frankenstein response
paper |
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April 18 pp. 175-244 (volume 3): Walton, Frankenstein, the monster/creature,
and the creation of the self |
April 20 "Beginning"
thesis question and bibliography due T.S. Eliot (1888-1965),
"The Love Song of
J. Alfred Prufrock" |
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April 25 Frankenstein
group presentation |
April 27 |
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May 2 T.S. Eliot group presentation |
May 4 Annotated
bibliography and thesis question due Orlando, chapter 6: the commercial modern (cf p. 295) |
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May 9 Wolfe group presentation |
May 11 |
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May 16 |
May 18 |
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May 23 |
May 25 |
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May 30 |
June 1 God of Small Things
group presentation |
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June 6 |
June 8 Arcadia
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, the idea of the self) . Use the following remarks to spark your thinking/writing about our texts.
Frankenstein | Eliot \ Orlando | Things Fall Apart | God of Small Things | Arcadia
Frankenstein Our edition of the novel provides excerpts from the writings of Shelley's celebrated parents, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, in order to establish the realm of letters which Shelley both celebrates and challenges. Victor Frankenstein's calamities multiply, yet his own responsibility in causing his trouble, as well as the towering nature of his despair evoke the "Byronic hero," the soul-searching Romantic of deep feeling and no small amount of self-involvement. Does Victor, the narrator, or even you, as reader, understand the difference Justine asserts on p. 114 between "despair" and "resignation"? Another way to reread the novel is to consider the monster's point of view: how is the monster a Romantic hero? The novel's title, "a modern Prometheus," sends the reader to Greek mythology and the human desire for knowledge. From Adam and Eve to the Faust legend and on to Milton, one of Shelley's favorite poets, the human quest for scientia, knowledge, involves a steep, even unsurmountable cost. How does Shelley characterize the adventure of science? What does it add to her novel's anxieties?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).
Arcadia It's no accident that Stoppard's play partitions time in approximately the same bundles as has this term's class. One could argue that the modern temperament was forged in the last two centuries, and that little has changed in our way of thinking fom the time of the Romantic poets. At the same time, this play delights in both similarities and contrasts. The contrasts are perhaps a little harder to find and one could argue that Stoppard's attitude toward change is remarkably conservative. What is Stoppard saying about the modern condition, its historical antecedents, and postmodernism? How is a character, or a self, assembled? What does Stoppard's play say about identity and narration? Which threads have remained the same, and which motifs have changed dramatically (pardon the pun)? As for narrative and identity, how does Stoppard complicate narrative, and what is his wellspring of character? What is the role of science in creating character?Back to top of page | Back to Bishop Home Page | This page created by Louise M. Bishop | Last updated April 3, 2006