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.