Toni Morrison questions

ask questions.
think of answers.
see you tomorrow.

Final paper topics

You are welcome to devise your own topic, as long as you run it by me first.

Examine representations of memory and history in one or two of Charles Chesnutt’s tales. To what extent are the African-American characters the “keepers of memory” or “embodiment of history” in these stories? Are Uncle Julius’s tales personal memories or communal ones? What connections can we make between racial identity and national memory?

Choose two or three of Langston Hughes’s poems and craft an argument about the different types of voices that Hughes embodies (colloquial, formal, particular, universal, gendered, racialized, maybe even the voice of musical instruments). Which voices does he use in your chosen poems, and why? How does the reader/listener get drawn in to these poems; what forms are we asked to take?

Analyze the links between performance and gender in Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Prufrock tries on various masks and personae; he imagines himself playing a bit part in a Shakespeare play. How does this sense of self as performance relate to Prufrock’s sense of his gender and sexuality? How does he construct his own masculinity, and how does he imagine his relationship to women or femininity in the poem?

Much of what we know about Hemingway’s characters, and their relationships, come from dialogue rather than from the narrator’s commentary. Using close readings, analyze Hemingway’s use of dialogue. How do these interactions between characters help build up an account of their relationship? Be sure to examine what is said as well as what is excluded from conversation.

Mountain peak, hills like white elephants, clean, well-lighted place: examine representations of place in Hemingway. How are characters’ identities and their development impacted by their physical location (real or imagined)? How does Hemingway use space/place metaphorically? Consider smaller examples of place (the café, the train station, the tent) as well as the iconic places of the titles. You may write on one story or choose to compare.

Analyze the shifts in the narrator’s voice in Their Eyes Were Watching God. At times the narrator seems to speak in a formal and abstract voice; at others she speaks from the perspective of Janie; still other times she speaks in a communal voice. Sometimes Hurston uses direct dialogue; at other times she uses free indirect discourse (see me if you haven’t encountered this term before). How does the narrator’s voice develop over time? Is the narrator’s voice different in each section (Janie’s childhood and her marriage to Logan Killicks, her marriage to Jody, her relationship with Tea Cake, the ending)? If you choose this topic, you may want to use the essay by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. at the end of the novel, as a source. I recommend you come up with your own argument before you read his essay, though.

Analyze images of eyes and vision in Hurston. This novel is highly interested in images of watching: the opening lines describe a man watching ships at a distance; the next scenes shows the entire town watching Janie walk down the street. What kind of power is vision; what kind of encounter between persons is “watching”? How do mundane acts of watching relate to the searing, searching eyes of the title? Why does Hurston title her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God?

Compare the writings of Langston Hughes, Allen Ginsburg, or Jack Kerouac to the poetry of Walt Whitman. All three of these writers explicitly reference Whitman as a major influence—why? What common ideals, imagery, styles, sensibilities, do you find? Where do they diverge? How do these writers compare to Whitman’s sense of national identity? Of personal identity? You may want to look at Whitman’s “The Song of the Open Road” if you choose Ginsburg or Kerouac.

Analyze the role of childhood and memory in The Woman Warrior. Kingston tells the story from an adult’s perspective, but we always have a sense of herself as a child experiencing these stories simultaneously, whether as a character in “Barbarian Reed Pipe” or as the recipient of her mother’s stories in “No Name Woman.” How does the presence of Kingston-as-child, and her relationship to her mother, impact our reading of the tale? Does it change our position as readers to have to imagine her both as authoritative writer and as still-forming child? How are the stories different when they are told to the child or by the child, as opposed to how they are framed by the adult Kingston?

New Morrison Topics:
Analyze the imagery of Eden and "the fall" in A Mercy. Where and how does Morrison use Edenic or Adam and Eve imagery? What kind(s) of "falls" (literal/figurative/vocabulary of falling) do we witness, and what is the cause of the fall? How does she use snake imagery? Is there a Satan? How does her story diverge from the Eden story?

Discuss water imagery in A Mercy. Many events in the novel happen on the shore of a river or bay, on a ship, or involve water in some way. What does water represent for Morrison? Is it related to healing or destruction--to freedom or enslavement--to travel or stasis--to salvation or damnation--or does it invite a more complicated/mixed interpretation?

Analyze stories of birth and origins in A Mercy. We see only a few examples of successful births that lead to healthy children; why? How do we read the birth of Sorrow's child as it relates to all the orphans and foundlings in the tale? If this is also a novel about the "birth" or origins of American culture, how might we relate all of the characters' confused/obscured origins to the origins of the nation?

Maxine Hong Kingston discussion questions

Questions are in the comments! You know the drill.

Questions on Zora Neale Hurston

Please read the discussion questions in the "comments" section and choose at least one to prepare to answer in class!

Discussion Questions on Stein / Pound / Eliot

Picasso's portrait of Gertrude Stein


Ezra Pound's mugshot (he was arrested for making
anti-American broadcasts and tried for treason during WWII).


Wyndham Lewis's portrait of T.S. Eliot

Harlem Renaissance Art

Archibald Motley, "Blues" (1929)


Ellis Wilson, Summer Magic


Aaron Douglas, Song of the Towers (1934)


Aaron Douglas, "Into Bondage" (1936)


Palmer Hayden, "Midsummer Night in Harlem" (1938)

Whitman and James on the American literary tradition

These are the passages from Whitman and James that I read aloud in class. They give contrasting views on the promises and difficulties of establishing an American literary tradition.

Walt Whitman, open letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1856
Full text available here: http://www.classroomelectric.org/volume1/belasco/lettertoralph.htm
(note error in publication date on this website)

The lists of ready-made literature which America inherits by the mighty inheritance of the English language -- all the rich repertoire of traditions, poems, historics, metaphysics, plays, classics, translations, have made, and still continue, magnificent preparations for that other plainly signified literature, to be our own, to be electric, fresh, lusty, to express the full-sized body, male and female -- to give the modern meanings of things, to grow up beautiful, lasting, commensurate with America, with all the passions of home, with the inimitable sympathies of having been boys and girls together, and of parents who were with our parents.

What else can happen The States, even in their own despite? That huge English flow, so sweet, so undeniable, has done incalculable good here, and is to be spoken of for its own sake with generous praise and with gratitude. Yet the price The States have had to lie under for the same has not been a small price. Payment prevails; a nation can never take the issues of the needs of other nations for nothing. America, grandest of lands in the theory of its politics, in popular reading, in hospitality, breadth, animal beauty, cities, ships, machines, money, credit, collapses quick as lightning at the repeated, admonishing, stern words, Where are any mental expressions from you, beyond what you have copied or stolen? Where the born throngs of poets, literats, orators, you promised? Will you but tag after other nations? They struggled long for their literature, painfully working their way, some with deficient languages, some with priest-craft, some in the endeavor just to live -- yet achieved for their times, works, poems, perhaps the only solid consolation left to them through ages afterward of shame and decay. You are young, have the perfectest of dialects, a free press, a free government, the world forwarding its best to be with you. As justice has been strictly done to you, from this hour do strict justice to yourself. Strangle the singers who will not sing you loud and strong. Open the doors of The West. Call for new great masters to comprehend new arts, new perfections, new wants. Submit to the most robust bard till he remedy your barrenness. Then you will not need to adopt the heirs of others; you will have true heirs, begotten of yourself, blooded with your own blood.

Henry James, from "Hawthorne," chapter 2
http://www2.newpaltz.edu/~hathawar/nhhj2.html

An American reads between the lines--he completes the suggestions--he constructs a picture. I think I am not guilty of any gross injustice in saying that the picture he constructs from Hawthorne's American diaries, though by no means without charms of its own, is not, on the whole, an interesting one. It is characterised by an extraordinary blankness--a curious paleness of colour and paucity of detail. Hawthorne, as I have said, has a large and healthy appetite for detail, and one is therefore the more struck with the lightness of the diet to which his observation was condemned. For myself, as I turn the pages of his journals, I seem to see the image of the crude and simple society in which he lived. I use these epithets, of course, not invidiously, but descriptively; if one desire to enter as closely as possible into Hawthorne's situation, one must endeavour to reproduce his circumstances. We are struck with the large number of elements that were absent from them, and the coldness, the thinness, the blankness, to repeat my epithet, present themselves so vividly that our foremost feeling is that of compassion for a romancer looking for subjects in such a field. It takes so many things, as Hawthorne must have felt later in life, when he made the acquaintance of the denser, richer, warmer European spectacle--it takes such an accumulation of history and custom, such a complexity of manners and types, to form a fund of suggestion for a novelist. If Hawthorne had been a young Englishman, or a young Frenchman of the same degree of genius, the same cast of mind, the same habits, his consciousness of the world around him would have been a very different affair; however obscure, however reserved, his own personal life, his sense of the life of his fellow-mortals would have been almost infinitely more various. The negative side of the spectacle on which Hawthorne looked out, in his contemplative saunterings and reveries, might, indeed, with a little ingenuity, be made almost ludicrous; one might enumerate the items of high civilization, as it exists in other countries, which are absent from the texture of American life, until it should become a wonder to know what was left.. No State, in the European sense of the word, and indeed barely a specific national name. No sovereign, no court, no personal loyalty, no aristocracy, no church, no clergy, no army, no diplomatic service, no country gentlemen, no palaces, no castles, nor manors, nor old country houses, nor parsonages, nor thatched cottages nor ivied ruins; no cathedrals, nor abbeys, nor little Norman churches; no great Universities nor public schools--no Oxford, nor Eton, nor Harrow; no literature, no novels, no museums, no pictures, no political society, no sporting class--no Epsom nor Ascot! Some such list as that might be drawn up of the absent things in American life--especially in the American life of forty years ago, the effect of which, upon an English or a French imagination, would probably as a general thing be appalling. The natural remark, in the almost lurid light of such an indictment, would be that if these things are left out, everything is left out. The American knows that a good deal remains; what it is that remains--that is his secret, his joke, as one may say. It would be cruel, in this terrible denudation, to deny him the consolation of his national gift, that "American humour" of which of late years we have heard so much.

Paper topics

This assignment is now due on Monday, March 23 at 4 p.m. Please write a paper of approximately 5 pages. As always, feel free to come up with your own topics, but run it by me first.

1. Discuss an aspect of Frederick Douglass’s position as an observer in the Narrative. Douglass often takes an observer’s rather than rather than an actor’s role in his autobiography: he watches his aunt’s beating; watches the ships passively from a distance; and at times describes his fellow slaves from a detached perspective. Why does Douglass employ this strategy? Is the observer’s position one of power, weakness, or both? What kinds of traumas might an observer experience differently from a participant? At what points is he not an observer, and why?

2. Examine the role of nature and seasons in Douglass. We learn at the very start that slaves often organize their time according to the seasons rather than to the calendar. How does Douglass relate to the natural world? What kinds of natural imagery does he use, and why?

3. Analyze the role of gender in Douglass’s narrative. Douglass’s narrative is, in part, about his transformation from slave into “man.” To what extent is “man” a male or masculine term, as opposed to a gender-neutral one? How does he depict women and the feminine? Does he attach essential qualities to ideal manhood and womanhood?

4. Compare the technique of apostrophe in Douglass’s Narrative and Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last.” Both writers use this formal rhetorical technique (the address to a person or thing which is absent, inanimate, or unable to respond) in the face of despair. How does apostrophe function for each of them? How does the aesthetic experience (or the experience of beauty) relate to the function of mourning?

5. Analyze “Bartleby” as a Gothic tale or ghost story. The ghostly (vampiric?) Bartleby is surrounded by images of death: he stares at a “dead wall;” had a job reading dead letters; reminds the narrator of dead cultures. Yet this is not a Poe-like haunted mansion, but a “haunted office.” How and why does Melville incorporate Gothic tropes? What is it that scares the narrator, or us, about Bartleby? How does this urban Gothic tale compare to a more conventional horror story?

6. Analyze mythic imagery in “Paradise of Bachelors and Tartarus of Maids.” In both tales, Melville invites us into worlds that live on the edge between myth and reality. How does he use mythology? Why are these mythological elements appropriate to stories about mill-workers and lawyers? How do they change the reader’s relationship with the tales?

7. Analyze the ending(s) of “Bartleby,” “Paradise/Tartarus,” and/or “Life in the Iron-Mills.” All three narrators claim to arrive at a revelation, or at least a deeper understanding of the characters and their social context; do they? To what extent are these endings successes or failures? What is our experience as readers of these tales? Do we identify with or share in the narrator’s experience? To the extent that these tales advocate reform, how does the relative success/failure of the ending further that goal? What kind of result do you imagine coming from these stories from the reader’s perspective?

8. Analyze images of reproduction in “Paradise/Tartarus.” “Tartarus of Maids” is full of the images of female reproduction; how do these biological images interact with the machinery of the paper mill? With other, less literal, forms of reproduction? How does the maids’ story relate to that of the bachelors?

9. Discuss gender roles in “Life in the Iron-Mills.” Hugh Wolfe is mocked as a “girl-man,” and his sculpture has both male and female qualities. What attributes attach to male and female, and how/why does Davis blend or blur those categories? Is gender related to class, to race, to ethnicity, to social position?

10. Analyze the role of art and aesthetics in “Life in the Iron-Mills.” How does the korl-woman sculpture function symbolically? What does art offer to the workers? How do the men of privilege react to it? Does the story imply that art is a legitimate and effective means of inspiring reform? How is the sculpture similar to or different from the story itself?

11. How do city and nature interact in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry?” Whitman sets his poem at the intersection of the natural environment and the built environment: on a commuter ferry, between Manhattan and Brooklyn, surrounded by buildings, but also on a river, near the ocean, surrounded by birds, at sunset. How do these two elements interact for Whitman? What values does he attach to city and to nature? To what extent does he overturn our expectations about what city and nature represent, and why?

12. Analyze the interaction between speaker and reader in Whitman. At times Whitman speaks directly to “you;” at other times he seems to merge with the reader. What kind of relationship does he imagine with the reader, and for what purpose? What power does Whitman have over us, and what power do we have over Whitman?

13. Examine an aspect of Whitman’s perspective on time in either “Crossing Brookyn Ferry” or “When Lilacs Last.” How does he use different ways of measuring time: clock time, calendar time, seasonal time, cyclical time, eternity, the stoppage of time? Both “Brooklyn Ferry” and “Lilacs” incorporate an image of traveling through space and time in a linear fashion—the ferry, the train—but also imagine time more flexibly. How do those different notions of time interact, and when/why does he privilege one over the other?

14. Slants, edges, circles, borders: discuss Dickinson’s use of space and spatial metaphors. Choose a particular set of spatial images and analyze how and why she uses them in two or more poems.

15. Analyze an aspect of nature imagery in Dickinson. Plants and trees, birds and insects, sun and wind: how does this poet, who seems at times intensely “interior,” relate to the outside world? What kind of relationship(s) does she develop with the creatures and experiences of nature: symbolic, material, aesthetic, spiritual?

16. Discuss Dickinson’s relationship to religion, God and the divine. What kind of presence does God have in her poems? How does organized religion, with its hierarchies and structures, relate to larger ideas of the transcendent and the eternal?

17. Analyze Winterbourne’s role in “Daisy Miller.” Why is he the focal point through which we encounter Daisy? Is he a counterpart to Daisy? Does he undergo any transformation? You might consider comparing Winterbourne to one of Melville’s narrators.

18. How do James and/or Wharton imagine the relationship between Europe and America? What do Switzerland, Italy, and England represent to these Americans? To what extent are the characters “representative Americans” and “representative Europeans” vs. individuals? How does environment impact these characters’ fates?

19. Examine ideas of “innocence” and childhood in “Daisy Miller.” At one point, Winterbourne stutters between the terms “ignorance” and “innocence;” what ideas attach to each of those terms, and does either ultimately apply to Daisy? What role does Randolph play in the tale? Is Daisy a child? Is Winterbourne innocent?

20. Analyze the narrator’s voice in either “Daisy Miller” or “Souls Belated.” What relationship do the narrators seem to have with their characters? How do James and/or Wharton use shifts in tone and perspective? At what points do they choose to use irony, mockery, or sarcasm, and at what points a “flatter,” more objective tone, and why?

Post on Henry James

Click on "comments" to post a discussion question or read the questions for Tuesday.

Post on Walt Whitman

Please click on the comments section to add your posts (for the discussion question writers) or to read the discussion questions for our class on Whitman.



(Photos: Whitman in 1854, at age 35, and in 1887, at age 68)

Lowell Mill Workers

Melville's "Tartarus of Maids" is based in part on the mill workers in Lowell, Massachusetts. Here are some images from those mills.

Two weavers

At the loom


Boott cotton mill






Sources, and find out more, at these websites:
http://www.nps.gov/history/nr/twhp/wwwlps/lessons/21boott/21boott.htm
http://www.library.csi.cuny.edu/dept/americanstudies/lavender/lowell.html

Melville tales: Paradise/Tartarus and Bartleby

Please give these questions some thought as you read for tomorrow. We'll address them together in class.

1) Like many other stories we've encountered so far, these tales take as their subject "bachelors" and "maids." Think about why these single men and women--unattached, unencumbered by certain social ties--might be resonant characters for these writers? What are some of the common characteristics between, say, Bartleby and Ichabod Crane? The narrator in House of Usher and the narrator in Bartleby? The maids of Melville's "Tartarus" and the Beatrice in Rappaccini's Daughter?

2) These stories are about the world of work rather than the domestic sphere. What kind of work do we see being done? What is the relationship between work and home, or between public life and private life? What sense do we get of the private/domestic lives of Melville's characters? And how is it significant that Bartleby makes work into a domestic space?

3) All of these tales include images of reproduction and copying. In "Tartarus of Maids" Melville makes an explicit link between images of female reproduction and the great paper-making machine; the main activity in "Bartleby" is copying legal documents. How do you think copying functions symbolically for Melville? Is anyone doing "original" work?

4) There are subtle regional dichotomies set up in "Paradise" and "Tartarus." What can we make of the relationship between England and the U.S. that is implicitly set up in the pairing between the two tales? What about the relationship between North and South in "Paradise"?

5) Why are the "bachelors" matched with the "maids", and what connection do they have with one another? They're not part of the same industry or even on the same continent, so why would Melville pair these tales?

Paper topics

This paper is due Monday, February 16 at 4 p.m. to my office, Cushing-Martin 134. It should be approximately 5 pages long.

Irving’s male characters are often the town gossips, the storytellers, and the repositories of community history. Why? What role do women play in the production of stories? Discuss the connection between gender and storytelling in his tales.

Analyze images of consumption in “Rip Van Winkle” or “Sleepy Hollow.” Why are Irving’s stories so filled with eating, drinking, smoking, and “consuming” stories?

Analyze the role of sleep, dreams, and trance states in one or two of the following tales: “Rip Van Winkle,” “Sleepy Hollow,” “The Birth-Mark,” “Ligeia,” or “House of Usher.” Why is everyone so sleepy? How do Poe, Hawthorne, and/or Irving contrast the world of sleep and dreams with the workaday world, and to what end?

Compare the conversations that Everell has with Digby and that Everell has with Magawisca in chapter four of Hope Leslie. How do the characters’ different class, race, and gender statuses affect their competing claims? How does Everell relate to each character differently?

Emerson famously imagined himself as “transparent eyeball” and privileges those with an “attentive eye” (1115). Discuss Emerson’s use of visual metaphors. Why is sight such a key symbol for him? In what sense does it allow him to access both the physical world and the spiritual world? If you prefer, you may choose to analyze a different sense instead (hearing, touch, etc.).

Both William Apess in “An Indian’s Looking-Glass for the White Man,” and Abraham Lincoln in “The House Divided” speech, use religious imagery and Biblical references to make a case against racial inequality. Compare their use of such imagery: how does it give their arguments structure? What kind of claims do they make on the reader/listener?

Windows, thresholds, doorways, staircases, enclosed chambers, walled gardens: examine the role of architecture in Hawthorne or Poe. Why do these writers place so much emphasis on the structures their characters inhabit, and especially on liminal (borderline) spaces? What is the connection between architecture and the psychological states of their characters? Between the structure of their dwellings and the structure of their stories?

Wombs, tombs, and bridal chambers: Discuss the relationship between sexuality, birth, and death in Poe. What is the relationship between reproduction (childbearing) and Poe's obsessive doubling and repetition? Why do none of the male-female pairs produce children, and why do the children seem to be parentless?

Blog posting

Below are the dates you've signed up for. I will create a heading for each of those weeks, and on your assigned week, you should write a discussion question relating to the reading, something to help guide our conversation in class. Please post your comment no later than Monday at noon. Then the other members of class should check the blog on Monday night and read the discussion questions.

The discussion question should be substantial (at least a couple of sentences long) and should refer us to something specific in the text, either a particular passage or a specific theme/image/character. Read the questions of the other members of your group as well, and think about links between and among the questions.

You should be prepared to discuss and elaborate on your question in class.

Inaugural Addresses

Did you hear echoes of Lincoln in Obama's inaugural address? Re-read Lincoln's speeches and compare them to Obama's speech today. Please post your response in the comment section below no later than 8 AM on Thursday. Read and respond to the other comments, too. You can either log in using your google account, or post anonymously, but be sure to include your name in the text of your comment.

You might think about the following comparisons:
-Allusions (Biblical, literary, and/or political) in Obama's speech and in Lincoln's
-Structure of the speech (how it introduces its main ideas, climax, conclusion, etc.)
-Rhetorical devices (such as repetitions of words/images, particular sentence structures, metaphors and similes, climactic/emphatic phrases, etc.)
-Depiction of the role of the presidency and/or the relationship between government and ordinary people
-Depiction of God or the role of the divine in defining the nation
-Overall theme

Or add your own item to the list! Feel free to discuss differences as well as similarities (but do not just say "I didn't see any similarities").

You can find the text of Obama's speech here:
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hKUtZaMLuh6KEQgRzqqEq1yTZ_2gD95R7TIO0

And the text of every presidential inaugural address here. (Just click the "full text" link under the photo):
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/01/17/washington/20090117_ADDRESSES.html?hp

Jefferson's Land Ordinance of 1785

View Larger Map


















The lines shall be measured with a chain; shall be plainly marked by chaps on the trees and exactly described on a plat; whereon shall be noted by the surveyor, at their proper distances, all mines, salt springs, salt licks and mill seats, that shall come to his knowledge, and all water courses, mountains and other remarkable and permanent things, over and near which such lines shall pass, and also the quality of the lands.

The plats of the townships respectively, shall be marked by subdivisions into lots of one mile square, or 640 acres, in the same direction as the external lines, and numbered from 1 to 36; always beginning the succeeding range of the lots with the number next to that with which the preceding one concluded.

Welcome!

Welcome to the EN360 blog! We will be using this forum to expand on our classroom conversations. I will post supplementary materials here, and periodically I will ask you to contribute your own comments.

If you have a google/gmail account, you can sign in using that account. If not, you can either sign up for a google account, or post anonymously. If you post anonymously or have an unusual screen name, be sure to include your name in the text of your post.

To comment: go to the bottom of the post where it says "2 comments" (or whatever the number of comments is at the moment). Click there, and enter your comments in the window at the bottom of the comments section.