English 120: Introduction to the English Major > Daily Updates


Check here regularly for homework assignments, course announcements, and schedule changes. Any updates will normally be posted by 8:00 p.m. on Mondays and Wednesdays.

For Wednesday, May 11 (Final Exam Period):

The final draft (with supporting materials, below) of your "Historicizing Catcher" project is due to me between 12:40 and 2:30, when I'll be holding "class" in my office (168 Founders). If you'd like to hand it in before then, or if for some reason you just can't bear the thought of making awkward small-talk with me in the middle of finals week, then please use my mailbox in the English Department Office (201 Founders). Do not tack your work to or slide it under my office door. And if you'd like to meet before next Wednesday--this week or (ulp!) next--then e-mail me pronto for an appointment.

Those supporting materials:

  • The copies of your draft that were read and marked up by your fellow conferees (along with any additional printed comments they gave you)
  • Anything else you think it would be helpful for me to see in order to appreciate the process you went through to get to a final draft (research notes, intermediate drafts, etc.)
  • Please put everything in a two-pocket folder or a manila file folder, or simply use a binder clip

If you're planning to retrieve your project next fall, please let me know. (A hand-written note would suffice.) And if you really, really need it back in your hands before next semester, then please include an SASE--that's "self-addressed stamped envelope"--with sufficient postage.

That journal I was recommending you start--and keep--in preparation for Engl 490, Senior Portfolio? You could begin it with a "reflective assessment" of Engl 120 using any or all of the following questions as prompts. (Feel free to add your own.) This is for you, not me. Do it for all of your English classes.

  • What was your understanding of the English major--its shape, its organizing logic, its assumptions, its goals, its practices--before this semester began? How has that understanding changed (if it has) as a result of the English courses you've taken this semester, including English 120? Cite specifics.
  • What were your expectations for this class, going into it? How were/n't they met (again, cite specifics), and is that good, bad, or indifferent?
  • What have you learned that you wish you hadn't and/or what haven't you learned that you wish you had? What do you feel were your greatest accomplishments and/or or your greatest failures this semester?
  • How, specifically, is any of this reflected in your work for English 120?

I hope you learned something this semester about the history, the practices, the habits of mind, and the underlying assumptions of the discipline of English Studies. I hope you learned a little bit about what it means to do serious research at the college level. And I hope you learned something about how to identify the relevant contexts—generic, historical, cultural, ideological—in which to place any text that you might be faced with in the future.  I said at the beginning of the course that in spite of its name, Engl 120 is intended as not so much an introduction to English Studies as a point of entry.  So does it make sense to continue to call this class an “Introduction,” even nominally?  Does the study of literature’s textuality and contextuality—its “situatedness,” its implications in history and ideology—provide as good an overture to this discipline as any? Let me know.

Stay healthy. Keep the humor dry. Do good work. Hope to see you Wednesday.

For Wednesday, May 4 (Day 29):

EXTRA INFORMAL WRITING ASSIGNMENT: take that hapless student paper we worked on in class today (that's a live link to the document just now) and continue correcting its errors in spelling, grammar, punctuation and formatting, à la MLA. Even if you have issues with Bickle's phrasing and sentence structure, assume that you do not need to replace any of his actual words. Hand in a new, scrupulously corrected, clean copy with ten (10) errors or fewer for full credit. (I thought about setting this up on Moodle, but I think it would be easier if you just handed in a hard copy in class.)

Also on tap: valedictory remarks. Instructions for handing in the "Historicizing Catcher" project. And as long as you're poring over the MLA Handbook, peruse Chapter 5 ("Preparing the List of Works Cited") and study the section on the mechanics of quotation (3.7). (Other potential bits of MLA to review: summary, paraphrase, and quotation. Spoiler alert #1: a good paraphrase is often longer than the original! Spoiler alert #2: if you paraphrase your source too closely, retaining its sentence and/or paragraph structure and merely dropping in a synonym now and again, that's a weak form of plagiarism--even if you scrupulously cite the source!) Bring your MLA Handbook to class again, just in case.

Again: if you'd still like me to weigh in on your project-in-progress in some fashion and add my voice to those of your peer responders, then e-mail me for an appointment. I can make some free time on Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. (And, I suppose, next Monday--although that would give you very little time to act on any radically course-changing advice.)

More English major job stats & resources (via Robert Matz, George Mason University English Professor):

Mansplaining Follow-Up:

And finally: I hope those of you not working on the discourse of homosexuality won't feel I'm showing favoritism if I hep everyone to a piece from The New Yorker that I just re-discovered. (I have many stacks of old magazines scattered around the house.) It's a review essay by Margaret Talbot entitled "Forbidden Love," and it centers on Todd Haynes's 2015 movie Carol, which was based on the 1952 lesbian romance The Price of Salt by crime writer Patricia Highsmith. (Highsmith's publisher convinced her to issue the first edition under the pseudonym Claire Morgan. Googling "The Price of Salt" will lead you to lots of good stuff, including an entry in Wikipedia; articles in The New Republic, The Guardian, and the Huffington Post; and an interview with director Todd Haynes and Phyllis Nagy on NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross.) The most interesting section for the purposes of "Historicizing Catcher," maybe, is where Talbot begins to discuss the discourses of homosexuality and psychology (and the semiotics of lesbian pulp fiction cover art) in 1950s America more generally:

Though homosexuality was invisible to most Americans at the time, it was increasingly discussed among intellectuals, many of whom were in the thrall of psychoanalysis. The question most often asked about same-sex attraction was still whether it could be overcome, but people were finally beginning to acknowledge the range of possible sexual identities and behaviors. By 1953, the Kinsey Reports, on male and female sexuality, had been published, broadening the discussion even further.

Read more by clicking on the hyperlinked title of the article, above.

For Monday, May 2 (Day 28):

Hope you got something out of Rob's career dog-and-pony show. If you have any comments for me to pass along to him, I'll happily relay them.

  • Coda: tired of the stale jokes about the career path that supposedly leads from English major to barista? Here's a long riposte from a fancy-pants English professor at George Mason University. (He cites a major study showing that the gap in median salary between graduates with a BA in English and a BA in, say, Biology or Criminology is negligable. "[S]tudents who want to major in English and are good at it should not believe that they are sacrificing a livelihood to pursue their loves," he says. "And students who don’t love what they are learning are less likely to be successful.")
  • On the other hand: the news is not all rosy. See, e.g., Patricia Cohen, "Racial Wealth Gap Persists Despite Degree, Study Says" (New York Times 16 August 2015).
  • And here's a report on how the MLA has been mulling the issue.

As I mentioned in class: if you'd still like me to weigh in and add my voice to those of your peer responders regarding your work on Catcher and the postwar discourse of _____, then e-mail me for an appointment or come to my drop-in office hours.

Next week will be devoted mainly to small-scale nuts-and-bolts issues (go ahead: heave a huge sigh of relief, you who have grown weary of pondering big, theoretical questions) related to MLA style. Bring your copy of the MLA Handbook to class. In preparation: thumb through the Handbook and bone up on what it has to say about "Documentation" (Chapters 5 and 6). If we had another week, we would also spend a little time on the mechanics of quotation (3.7). But since we don't, you can pore over that section on your own. (Other important bits of the Handbook to prioritize: summary, paraphrase, and quotation; plagiarism.)

By the way: pretty much everywhere else in the world, May 1st is International Workers Day (alternate history).

For Wednesday, April 27 (Day 26):

We'll have a visit from Rob Keever of the Career and Academic Advising Center, who will address, among other things, that uncomfortable question you may get from distant relatives at the family reunion, inquiring about your time at Humboldt: "So what are you gonna do with a degree in English, then?"

Please be courteous towards our guest and don't arrive late.

In case we have a few minutes at the end of class: think of small writerly questions that have always nagged you--or things you keep faking without really knowing you're doing them right (and hoping no one calls you on them). (Quick review of today's micro-lesson: titles of shorter works--a single poem, a short story, a journal or magazine or newspaper article, an essay, a song--go inside quotation marks. Titles of longer works--a collection of poems or a book-length poem, a novel, a journal or magazine or newspaper, a movie, an album--get italicized. See Sections 3.6.2 and 3.6.3 of the MLA Handbook. BUT: do you put the title of your own essays in quotes? No--unless for some reason you're citing that essay somewhere else. See Section 4.3.)

On the interwebs:

  • In the April issue of Harper's magazine, television critic Emily Witt talks discusses how the Amazon series Transparent participates in the contemporary discourse about gender identity—how it expresses, or perhaps helps to change, our ideas of what's "normal." The entire piece is worth reading (and the show is worth watching), but here are a few lines from the opening paragraph:

    "If we want to know what American normality is—i.e. what Americans want to regard as normal—we can trust television," David Foster Wallace once wrote. Can we? It’s a chicken-or-egg situation. Does television teach us what’s normal? Or does it only absorb new social realities after a quorum of Americans has gotten on board? Certainly a number of recent shows have taken it upon themselves to educate and enlighten their audiences, with story lines about everyday sexism (Master of None), racial profiling (The Carmichael Show), and the experience of undocumented immigrants (Jane the Virgin). These moral tales tend to be gentle and earnest, like the little allegories about diversity that used to run on Sesame Street. Then there’s the Amazon show Transparent . . . . 

For Monday, April 25 (Day 25):

If you were not in class on Wednesday--and/or if you did not have something you could call a draft ready for me and your fellow writers--then it's your responsibility to contact me YESTERDAY and tell me why (and when we can expect said draft). I will then put you in touch with the people in your peer response group so that they can send you their drafts and you can fulfill your responsibility to them. And you can humbly beg them to have a look at your draft, too, out of the goodness of their hearts, in spite of your blown deadline.

Peer Conferences: Give your partners' rough drafts a diligent and sympathetic reading, using the bullet-point prompts below as a sort of template. (I've edited and combined the directives that you generated with a few others from last semester's class. You may also want to look at this standard-issue handout, which contains some more general guidelines for preparing for a peer conference.)

On Monday, you should definitely be ready to offer some verbal feedback as your group works through each draft (or collection of black marks on pages--or whatever you're calling it) point by point, paragraph by paragraph. But your first job is to prepare some written comments--at least a typed page's worth (in addition to marginal comments)--which you will give to your fellow writers to take away at the end of the conference. Do your best to make your comments address substantive issues. (Your primary mission is not to dole out praise and encouragement, although praise is always nice to hear. And don't concern yourself with sentence mechanics or other "surface" issues, either, unless those issues are so severe as to prevent you from understanding what the writer is trying to say.) Offer details and specific examples whenever you can. Okay; those bullet points:

  • Identify (i.e., mark or paraphrase) the thesis of the paper.  In a few sentences, try to paraphrase what you understand to be the argument that proceeds from that thesis. Does the body of the paper actually do what the stated thesis says it will?  If not, why or how not?  (What’s the solution: different thesis?  Clearer or more precise thesis? More coherent argument?  More complete argument?)
  • Identify the discourse in which the writer sees Catcher and the other text(s) participating. Has the writer made clear how she thinks Catcher and the other texs(s) participate in that discourse? Do you have questions or observations related to that discourse that aren't addressed in the paper?
  • Say what’s “New Historicist” about this paper’s approach.
  • Are sources, both primary and secondary, used effectively? Is the textual evidence from those sources relevant, well chosen, and sufficient? Does it substantially support or develop the paper’s argument, or is it perfunctory or un(der)developed (or just ill-suited in the first place)? Point to one or more examples and comment on it.
  • Are quotes and other evidence merely left to speak for themselves, or are they adequately and effectively introduced and/or explained (i.e., "sandwiched")?  Mechanically speaking, how well are quotes integrated into the body of the text?
  • Identify an idea or a passage that’s underdeveloped.  Explain why or how it could be developed.
  • If there's a section of the essay that's unconvincing, identify it and explain why you're not convinced.
  • As appropriate: identify a passage that’s rambling or redundant or repetitious (and suggest an alternative).
  • Any individual paragraphs that are unfocused? Is the argument of the paper as a whole structured effectively, and if not, could you suggest any more effective structural alternatives?
  • Transitions between paragraphs and/or segues between stages of the argument: any of them too abrupt? Any dots that need connecting?
  • What does the conclusion do besides just stop (or reiterate or review)?  What could it do, if it ought to do something else?
  • As appropriate: suggest alternate or supplemental sources that the writer might consult or draw upon in order to deepen his/her understanding of the discourse and the text(s) with which s/he’s working?
  • As appropriate: identify one or more statements or passages that suggest questions or issues that the writer hasn’t pursued.  Explain.

For Wednesday, April 20th (Day 24):

Dude. An early draft of your Historicizing Catcher project--plus 3 copies--is due. (Yeah; I know I said 2 copies on the project spec sheet, but I'm thinking of forming larger peer groups. I hope you can spare the extra change.)

We'll talk a little bit about the sorts of things you should read for and the kinds of feedback you should aspire to give. And I'll probably cook up something else for us to do--something, hopefully, that doesn't primarily involve listening to your professor be a blowhard.

That Natalia Cecire piece I linked to yesterday (scroll down) also speaks to why lots of conservatives still believe in the Matthew Arnold vision of English Studies. Here's another one, by David Sessions, called "California English." (I don't want to totally demonize Matthew Arnold, by the way: he was a not-bad poet, and he wrote an important, if somewhat problematic, early work of cultural criticism called Culture and Anarchy.)

To finish what I was saying hastily at the end of class. A "draft" can take many forms. But it would be unfortunate if every one of you came in with a page and a half of text plus a tacked-on paragraph about where you’re thinking of going over the remainder of the paper. (That would be better than nothing, obviously—but not much.)  The more you give your readers to work with, the more likely it is they’ll be able to find something useful to say. But if we can’t get a decent sense of your argument, of your intentions, of the way you’re reading (or trying to read) your texts, of how you think Catcher is engaging with discourse X and of how reading it in conjunction with one or two other contemporaneous texts sheds some light on how that discourse was being constructed, perpetuated, contested, whatever…well…

For Monday, April 18th (Day 23):

Hey, don't you have an "Annotated Rye" paper or something to work on? That--and, uh, that other project--are your main orders of business for the next little bit.

I've put together a page of tips--thoughts about both projects that I've been trying to gather for the last week or so. Also: here's that checklist I showed you in class last Wednesday. Neither of these things is meant as a substitute for the project spec sheets, which you should of course study carefully. (By the way: if you weren't in class last week when I handed out hard copies of the final project spec sheet: it's been hiding in plain sight on the front page of the class website. Here's a direct link to the document.) If the tips and/or the checklist help, good; if they amplify or clarify something that was muffled or muddy in the spec sheets, even better. But if not--or if you feel like you've already slogged through enough of my instructional verbiage already, then never mind.

On Monday (remember: due dates...arriving late...bad form, etc.), let's do a Professor-Panel Post-Mortem and then I'll come up with something or other for us to do. It may well involve having our deferred conversation about Terry Eagleton's history of English Studies, so think about giving that chapter another once-over-lightly, just to remind yourself of the rough outlines of that history. I'll get to your IWAs over the weekend.

And in case you were wondering, in light of our "Why Do English" panel, just what it is that I profess: as sensitive as I am to Eagleton's spot-on critiques of Matthew Arnold (on the one hand) and F. R. Leavis (on the other), I guess I believe that there really is a moral component to studying discourse and textuality. Reading--reading critically--really can humanize you, really can make you a better, more thoughtful, more sympathetic person, really can change the world. (No guarantees, obviously.) I also believe that English takes on some of the biggest questions of life--though unlike Leavis, I think those include questions that are specific to contemporary social and political life. In 2014, a super-smart post-doc student named Natalia Cecire (she now teaches as the University of Sussex in the UK) posted a piece to her blog entitled "Humanities scholarship is incredibly relevant, and that makes people sad" that I think should be required reading for English majors. Here's an excerpt that you should find dead relevant to the projects you're working on right now:

The humanities address the questions, big and small, that we urgently want answered. Answers often lie in the history of the way that we’ve mediated these problems, in cultural artifacts like novels, poems, newspapers, visual art, music, and film. Sorting through, analyzing, and theorizing those artifacts is the business of the humanities.

Want more like that? Check out Moira Weigel's "Graphs and Legends," about the great English critic Raymond Williams and the birth of modern Cultural Studies (especially the six paragraphs or so beginning "The new definition of 'culture'"). For Williams, Weigel says,

a work of art provided a record of change, and of the clashes of interest that drive that change. The point of studying it was not study or worship but critique...[His book] Culture and Society departs from the traditional Marxist idea that economic relations dictate or determine the shapes that culture takes. Culture, Williams would later argue, is not merely a “superstructure” built upon an economic “base.” Rather, “the arts of writing and the arts of creation and performance, over their whole range, are parts of a cutural process...”.

Sound familiar?

Links:

  • Historicism in the news: some historians cop an Old-Historicist attitude and complain that Lin-Manuel Miranda's Hamilton doesn't accurately represent history. Others--and the show's creators--adopt the New-Historicist position that the show establishes other kinds of relationships to history. Read all about it. (You haven't heard about Hamilton? What rock have you been living under...?)

For Wednesday, April 13th (Day 22):

Sorry for the short-notice cancellation yesterday--and sorry I couldn't upload an update till this (Tuesday) morning. I've extended the deadline of IWA #8 till Wednesday at 12:55, and we may well come back to Terry Eagleton in some fashion or other next Monday.

Wednesday, you get to hear a bunch of English Professors (Janelle Adsit, Marianne Ahokas, Nikola Hobbel) talk about what it is they profess. Sharpen your pencils and your tongues, and be ready to ask some pointed questions. Unless they get carried away and take up the entire two hours, I can hang around at the end of class and take questions about your "Annotated Rye" projects.

For Monday, April 11th (Day 21):

The California Faculty Association has come to a tentative agreement with the CSU administration over a new contract, which means that plans for the upcoming strike have been put on hold, as faculty consider and vote on the agreement. Classes will meet April 13-19.

It looks like I probably will not be able to round up enough of my colleagues to put together a panel for Monday. (I was hoping to get them to come talk about their personal histories with English Studies--and about what it is they "profess," exactly, when they profess English.) I'll see if I can get them together for Wednesday, instead.

In any event, we're taking a short hiatus from Catcher, so that you can begin work on the two-count-'em-two projects I've just laid on you. But we're not taking a break from assigned reading. What's on deck for Monday is a one-off: another piece by everyone's favorite smart-aleck, Terry Eagleton, called "The Rise of English" (in the online Course Reader). The meat of this chapter, for my money, is the first third of it, through about page 30. The rest, about T.S. Eliot and F. R. Leavis and I. A. Richards--apparently if you aspired to be a prominent critic in the 1920s and 30s, you had to go by your initials--and the American “New Critics” and so on, is not without interest, especially if you've ever wondered where the title of Engl 320 ("Practical Criticism") comes from. Still, in that section of the chapter, Eagleton traces some in-house sectarian squabbles so intricately that you may get dizzy if you don't already know something about all the players and their positions. So feel free to skim that latter portion of the chapter if you need to; it's enough if you get the general outlines.

Informal written assignment #8. Write out some thoughtful answers to the following questions and be prepared to discuss them in class. Take care to show that your answers demonstrate a serious engagement with (and--I hope--an understanding of) Eagleton's text. (Please keep in mind that when Eagleton says "English," he's not referrring to the English language, but to English Studies.)

1. So what did you know previously about the history of English studies? Had you ever thought of it as a created field of study, or did it just seem to be "there" like some eternal object in the natural world? Has Eagleton changed the way you think about it--are you troubled by the knowledge of its dirty secrets and the somewhat dubious circumstances of its birth? Does Eagleton’s (now 30-year-old) characterization of this discipline jibe at all with your real-life experience of it?

2. Does Eagleton convince you (1) that literary study was once upon a time "intimately related to questions of social power" and/or (2) that our field still has anything to do with power and ideology today? (Does anyone, as far as you know, still think of literature and culture as social cement for binding us together, imbuing us with a shared sense of pride in our national lit and language, and getting us to cheer for the greatest hits of Western Civ--or even just making us "better people"?) Related questions: do you have any evidence to conclude that any of English's original ideological aims ever succeeded to any great degree? I.e., does it seem to you that any of its nefarious plans for social control were ever borne out? (And if so, then are we all just the dupes of social conservatives?) Or doesn’t that matter? Does English serve anyone's interests does English now, today, would you say? And what did you personally intend to "get" out of an English education, anyway?

Links:

For Wednesday, April 6th (Day 21):

Download and study the "Annotated Rye" project spec sheet, if you haven't already. I've finally succeeded in posting the revised version of the Catcher Toolkit. Explore it. (Meanwhile, the spec sheet for the final project, which I'm calling "Historicizing Catcher"--is coming soon. Once it arrives, you can figure out how the two projects are meant to work in tandem. In the meantime: get crackin' on the first one!)

Our Wednesday class will probably revolve around the the discourses of homosexuality and "perversity" as they appear in Catcher (though we may also consider the discourse of sexuality more broadly). There may be some in-class reading and/or writing. Bring your copy of Catcher. That's all I know right now. Nothing else you need to prepare. So again: get to work on that project I just dumped on your plate!

For Monday, April 4th (Day 20):

Good in-class work on the Ohmanns. I'll get to your IWAs over the weekend.

Observant people may have noticed in the syllabus a vague promise to introduce the "Annotated Rye" Project and the final project in today's class (I'm writing this Wednesday night). I'm actually going to hold off a bit yet on unveiling the final project, but the assignment sheet for the "Annotated Rye" project is now online. (There's also a link on the front page of the class website, under "Major Assignments.") Download it, read it, study it, highlight it. Come to class Monday with questions. And start thinking about it/working on it now.

Also: explore--and I mean explore--the "Catcher's Toolkit," an online sourcebook intended to aid you in executing both this and the final project. If you're still feeling fuzzy about just what characterizes a "new" historicist approach to things, then you might also browse the New Historicism links under "Weeks 10 and following" in the Online Course Reader. (Plus, there are potentially relevant recommended readings under Week 7 that I never assigned.)

Speaking of assigned readings: I may yet lay some on you (short ones, on "Discourse") for Monday--I'll send a bulk e-mail if I do--but I promise it won't come with a surprise IWA.

For Wednesday, March 30th (Day 19):

Informal Writing Assignment #7 (we're getting down to the wire!): Carol and Richard Ohmann's "Reviewers, Critics, and The Catcher in the Rye." Read it carefully and critically, as is your wont these days. (Right?)  Use my active reading handout; take notes; stop and review periodically to see if you can summarize the last few paragraphs and/or retrace the argument.  Note any comments and/or questions that you have, be they critical or appreciative. (You can bring those questions to class.) Then, upload to Moodle your answers to the following questions:

1. Zero in on one of the essay's numbered sections. (Last names beginning A through Car-, take Section I; Cha- through Mex-, Section II; Mil- through Rear-, Section III; and Rich- through S, Section IV.) What's the gist of the argument that the Ohmanns put forward there? I.e., what are the main point(s) of your section, and how are those points developed and/or elaborated?

2. How do the Ohmanns bring "history" into the picture in your section? I.e., how do they relate various postwar phenomena to what they see as the central concerns of the novel, to Salinger himself, and/or to the novel's reception--both immediately after its publication and in the ensuing years?

Finally, some brief--very brief, if need be--answers to these additional questions:

3. Do you personally find the Ohmanns' argument convincing? How so/how not?

4. Are there questions or interests that you have with respect to Catcher that their approach doesn't resolve--or even address--satisfactorily?

Bonus:

Here's that PowerPoint on Lee Patterson's "Literary History." (Doesn't begin to capture all the nuances of his piece, of course--and it's not a substitute for your own careful notes. But it may serve as useful review if you're trying to get a firmer grasp on what characterizes a "New Historicist" approach to the study of literature and culture. As always: your mileage may vary.)

For Monday, March 28th (Day 18):

We probably have some loose ends to tie up regarding point-of-view and critical "distance," and we still need to talk about how a historicist might "catch" this book. And then we'll move on to some new stuff, starting with the essay by Nancy Lesko (under Week 10 in the Course Reader). (Since you've got the entire weekend, though, you might as well get a jump on the essay by Richard and Carol Ohmann, too; that way, you won't have to scramble to get some challenging reading done between Monday and Wednesday.) By rights, I should give you some reading questions on Lesko, but instead, for now, I'll just exhort you to read as carefully as you can--haul out my "How to Read" handout again, if necessary (see the update for February 29th, below)--and to bring your notes with you to class.

Links:

  • R.I.P. Malik I. Taylor, a/k/a Phife Dawg. Can he kick it? Yes, he can.
  • I'm not sure why I'm telling you about Rebecca Solnit's "The Mother of All Questions," which appeared in Harper's magazine last fall. Partly it's because I really like Solnit; I think she's a fantastic writer and a great essayist.  But partly it's because of something I said about Holden:  he knows how certain kinds of stories are supposed to go—and he defies them. (That's his opening gesture, remember? You're expecting a Charles Dickens novel? That’s not what I'm going to give you!) He's got an awareness of artifice in general, and he has his own theory of authentic mimesis, too. (See Catcher p. 126.) And more than anything, he's troubled—maybe even trapped—by some of the stories his culture has written for him.  And that's what Solnit's essay is about, too.
  • Things in Catcher identified by you (and collated and condensed to one page by me) as "In Need of Explanation."

For Wednesday, March 23d (Day 17):

There's some reading about the formal elements of fiction under "Week 9" in the online Course Reader. When you've finished that reading, choose one formal property of fiction—plot, characterization, setting, or narrative point of view—and consider how that property is in play in Catcher.  E.g.:

  • If you chose plot, you would compare the chronological order of events against the order in which we learn about them in the text; then you'd consider the effects of that selective manipulation of time. (What if Holden began his narrative with his memory of Allie's death, for example, or with an account of his idyllic summer with Jane Gallagher?)
  • For setting, you'd make as try to make a thorough list of the physical settings of the novel, the times of day and year, the social milieux, and so on, and consider their significance. Could you change the setting(s)--move this book to a different time and place--and still have the same story? 
  • For narrative point of view, you'd carefully examine the "character" of the narrator and how it's revealed: What can you say about Holden's narrative voice? How "present" (overbearing?) is it? What is this voice holding back from us? How closely do we trust or identify or sympathize with it? How do we manage to glean any information beyond what the narrator gives us?

And so on. TAKE SOME NOTES and bring them with you. It would be helpful to bring your copy of Catcher In the Rye with you to class for the next several days, too.

We want to practice reading like "New Historicists," I know, and I also know that some of you have already written about what sorts of questions a historicist--old or new--would ask of a book like this. But first I want to spend some time considering the usefulness of formal analysis with regard to this book: how far can we get with Catcher by paying close attention to the text itself—i.e., to the words on the page and the formal properties of fiction?  How do those elements of form—plot, characterization, setting, point of view—contribute to Catcher’s meaning? Then, we'll try to pin the book to a genre, review some of those phony quiz questions (and your answers), and see how naturally any of this segues into a discussion of how a historicist would "catch" this book. (That's not too ambitious, right?)

For Monday, March 21st (Day 16):

I hope you come back from Spring Break all rested and restored. You've got a bunch of reading to get done, of course, starting with Catcher (on which there will be a brief reading quiz!). But you could also get a jump on the short readings related to formal elements of fiction, which we will take up on March 23d (see Week 8 in the online course reader).

On Monday, after the quiz, we'll have a preliminary, more-or-less open discussion of Catcher. But here are a couple of things to think about, and jot down some notes about, ahead of time:

  • What's your personal history with this book? Where and when did you first read it? Was it assigned in school? If so, how was it taught--that is, what were you asked to do with it? (E.g., produce a book report? Present a research paper? Write a journal entry? Choreograph an interpretive dance entitled "Holden Among the Ducks"?) What were you taught about it, formally or informally--i.e., what do you "know" about The Catcher in the Rye as a result of a) reading it in school and, presumably, having a teacher "explain" it all to you; b) having it recommended by a friend or relative; or c) living in a culture in which Catcher is a fairly common point of reference?
  • Aside from what anybody else has tried to tell you about it, what do you actually think of Catcher? Is this one of the touchstone texts in your life? The book that made you become an English major? An annoying, overrated piece of fluff? An irrelevancy? An abomination that should be cast into the fiery pits of hell? Or what?
  • Finally, try to assign it to some sub-genre of fiction. It's not a romance novel, clearly, or a murder mystery, but how would you categorize the generic conventions that it deploys? What other texts would you slot into the same category?

And then: here's Informal Writing Assignment #6! Write some short answers to these questions and and upload them to Moodle:

  • What questions might someone taking an "old" (extrinsic) historicist approach ask of Catcher? What questions would someone taking a new historicist approach ask? (Refer back to your notes on Patterson and our class discussions--and to the supplemental resources I suggested in the Update for Day 15, below.)
  • Would you regard the story of Holden Caulfield any differently if it were suddenly revealed to you that it was not a novel, but a docu-drama, "based on a true-life story," crafted from extensive interviews and personal journals and psychiatric case studies and so on? Would that make it any less a “verbal artifact” (Patterson 259)?
  • And what sorts of things do you think one might want or need to know more about in order to fully understand this novel? (Think of specific allusions, images, details of the setting, etc.)  What apparently "timeless" or "universal" concerns (e.g., "Teenage Angst," "Alienation from the Mainstream," etc.) might actually turn out to be historically or culturally specific to mid-20th century America, or white-male-preppie mid-20th century America, or...?  What would appear puzzling to someone from a different culture? Using any or all of those questions as a prompt, write an inventory of at least ten (10) such items from the text. Annotate that inventory, if you like.

Links:

  • As Timely as Today's Headlines Dept.: "Stephen Greenblatt Wins Holberg Prize" (New York Times 13 March 2016). "Mr. Greenblatt is widely seen as the founder of the school of literary studies known as New Historicism, which seeks to understand works of art through study of their historical context, and in turn to use works of art to understand broader intellectual history."

  • As American as Apple Pie Dept.: "I Am An American"? Apparently Bubba never got the memo. Attacks, threats, firebombings, and all manner of hate crimes against Muslims in the United States have skyrocketed in recent months. (See also The New York Times.) And as Deepa Kumar, Rutgers professor, author of Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, and one of my favorite bloggers, explains, this can't all be blamed on Donald Trump and his ilk. And yet, as a story on NPR's Morning Edition illustrated today: plenty of (young) American Muslims get on with their lives. See "This Is Our Islam: To Be Young, Devout and Muslim in America Today." (Postscript, March 20th: apparently the FBI never got the memo, either.)

  • Other award news: for his novel The Sellout, Paul Beatty has won one of the most prestigious literary prizes in the U.S., the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. It's a really good book, full of nerdy, transgressive humor. (Beatty's a good poet, too: he came up with slam poets like Tracie Morris and Dana Bryant at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, although he has said that was always more comfortable on the page. Look for him on YouTube.)

  • Still trying to wrap your head around Louis Althusser and "interpellation"? Maybe this'll help (from LOLtheorists):

i can haz althusser?

 

For Wednesday, March 9th (Day 15):

We'll be coming back to Kavanagh--so if you weren't well prepared to discuss his essay on "Ideology" before, then you've got a couple more days to get ready now. (You only really need to read part of the chapter,though. See Day 14, below.)

We'll also work together to do an "ideological" reading of a particular visual text, a Public Service Announcement produced by the Ad Council just two weeks after 9/11. In addition to the short description of the ad in the "Overview" section, you may also wish to read the Ad Council's description of itself and its history. (Its FAQ is interesting, too.)

And if you feel as if your grasp on "New Historicism" is still slippery, then there's a whole bunch of short pieces in the course reader from Week 7 which I didn't assign and which you might find helpful. But because I use a quote from Ania Loomba as a sort of "epigraph" on the front page of our class homepage--and because she speaks to the question that Georgia asked in class today (and because she may also shed more light not only on our dearly departed "Lycidas" but on John Donne, as well)--then let me also recommend a short excerpt from the latest edition of Loomba's Colonialism/Postcolonialism (that's a link).

You could also explore the following items from the "New Historicism" section of the course reader (scroll down towards the bottom of the page)--though I emphatically don't vouch for the accuracy and reliability of each and every one. Even Purdue's Online Writing Lab, whose nutshell treatment of New Historicism is generally pretty good, will occasionally make a misleading statement like "New Historicism assumes that every work is a product of the historic moment that created it." (Product of its historic moment? No; that's something a very old-fashioned historicist would say.)

  • "New Historicism" (Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism)
  • "New Historicism, Cultural Studies (1980s-present)" (Purdue University OWL)
  • "New Historicism" (Shmoop.com): Shmoop's tone and diction get really annoying in short order; these guys are desperate to convince you how hip and with-it they are. And the credentials of their writers and editors are...well, not as impressive as they'd like you to think. Still, they occasionally get things right. And here they get things at least half right, on average.
  • "Introduction to New Historicism" (Dino Felluga, Purdue University): "General Introduction" and "Terms and Concepts" are the most useful sections.
  • "New Historicism" (Wikipedia)
  • "Lecture 19: The New Historicism" (Paul Fry, Yale University): From Yale's Engl 300: Introduction to the Theory of Literature MOOC

Finally, those "global" comments on the Lycidas Projects that I promised (as if one or more paragraphs of single-spaced, individually tailored comments weren't enough already):

I really enjoyed reading these.  And either you guys are killin’ or I graded generously or both, but I usually wind up with roughly equal numbers of As, Bs, and Cs, and in this class there were more As than anything else, roughly equal numbers of Bs and Cs, and a handful of people on the borderline between A and B or B and C. That means that a few of your projects were unexceptional but perfectly acceptable, just as many were solidly above par, and a whole bunch were exceptionally good (with one or two that were knock-me-on-my-ass extraordinary). How can everyone be average or above average?  I can’t explain that statistical puzzle.

If I thought your project was just okay, then you probably came up with a fairly capable paraphrase of your passage, but you may have missed or muddled some important details, and it’s likely that you could have gone further in terms of translating the various classical allusions and other pastoral figures into plain English. You might also have had some trouble on the research end: maybe you didn’t find enough helpful sources, or you misread or didn’t quite know what to make of one or more of your sources, or (again) you dutifully tracked down literal definitions for your assigned terms, but missed how they were working figuratively or in the context of the rest of the passage or in the context of a pastoral elegy—which means you didn’t truly elucidate the passage. (And that in turn may be why you had some trouble with your paraphrase.) 

As for the quality of the research:  some of it was thin or casual or haphazard (or just inexperienced—and that’s okay; you’ll get better at research strategy and technique with practice), some of it showed some effort, and some of it was impressively thorough and ambitious.  This was one area where the better projects distinguished themselves: the people who turned in the above-average and the knockout projects really broke a sweat and showed more initiative, more creativity, and more genuine intellectual curiosity:  they went well beyond the easy or obvious sources (Dartmouth’s Milton Reading Room, James Holly Hanford, etc.) and realized that in order to really nail this poem, they were going to have to do some reading about the pastoral elegy in general and about this pastoral elegy in particular.  So they took it upon themselves to track down literary handbooks and dictionaries of mythology and encyclopedias of poetic terms; they went back to Northrop Frye and other things I put in the course reader and on the updates page; and most important, they spent some quality time in the library catalog and the electronic databases and found books and articles that dealt with Lycidas (even their particular passage of Lycidas) and its relation to the pastoral tradition.  They compared and synthesized and cross-checked the information they got from a variety of sources.  And they connected a lot of dots on their own.

Anyway: I got a lot of pleasure out of these, and I even learned a few things about the poem I hadn't known before. So...thanks!

One footnote: I’m gratified that almost no one was overly—or at least overtly—reliant on the web. You’ve clearly learned that academics are wary and skeptical of web resources (we say we are, anyway).  Still, I’m surprised that so few people owned up to using sites like the Poetry Foundation, Shmoop, the University of Toronto’s Representative Poetry Online, Bachelorandmaster.com, etc.  The people who did use those sources, however, used them less as a crutch than as a point of reference or a point of departure.  So that’s good.

For Monday, March 7th (Day 14):

Ballad Projects Due at long last! Some of you are probably capable of holding conversations in ballad stanzas by this point, but if inspiration from the Muses has still not been forthcoming and you feel the need for some last-minute hand-holding (ear training?), then I'm available by appointment after 3:00 on Friday.

If Moodle was misbehaving when you tried to upload (part of) Informal Writing Assignment #5, or if were caught short or confused by the arcane instructions for that assignment, then know that I have re-opened the assignment in Moodle and extended the deadline till Friday midday. (Read the entirety of Patterson's essay if you haven't already.) If that makes you feel even the least bit grateful, then promise me you'll do the new reading I disuss below--and ponder the questions I've appended to the end of this update--without a writing assignment attached, eh?

So: in addition to finishing with Patterson ("New" Extrinsic Group: I'm looking at you!), we will begin tackling James Kavanagh's "Ideology" (required) and Hans Bertens's "Political Reading" (recommended), both found in the online Course Reader. This is almost the last time that I'll ask you to sit still and have your teeth pulled over weighty articles written by pointy-headed English professors. (I appreciate the fact that you've been tolerating this m.o. for a couple of days now.) In Kavanagh's piece, you may stop at the bottom of p. 314, where he begins discussing the film Kiss of the Spider Woman. If you also read Bertens, feel free to focus on pp. 62-69--the sections on "The Politics of Class," "Ideology," and "Hegemony."

Some reading questions:

  • As Kavanagh tells it, in what ways has the term “ideology” usually been regarded or defined (and by whom)? What, by contrast, does Kavanagh mean by it? (Does Bertens's account of any of those definitions complement or contradict Kavanagh's, do you think? And how does this "hegemony" thingy fit into the picture?)
  • What's a "subject"? And what does it mean for a subject to be "interpellated"?
  • What does all this have to do with literature and history? Thinking back to Lawrence Lipking, for example, how might we understand "Lycidas" as an "ideological" text in the sense that Kavanagh and Bertens use that term?

For Wednesday, March 2d (Day 13):

I want you to prioritize Lee Patterson's chapter on "Literary History," for which there is a mandatory Informal Writing Assignment. (I.e., everybody needs to do this one! See next paragraph for further instructions!) If that means you need to delay handing in your Ballad Project until Friday the 4th (or even, god forbid, Monday the 7th), then so be it.

Meanwhile, the instructions for that mandatory Informal Writing Assignment #5 are so drawn-out that I've given them their own separate handout. (Actually, two separate handouts--make sure you get that second one, too!) You may submit one part of this assignment on Moodle, as usual, but another part of it, at least, you will probably need to give to me in person. It's all very confusing, I know, but I hope the instructions will make it a bit plainer.

All right, Balladeers? If you're freaking out about the Ballad Project, don't. Refer to the spec sheet.  Review the assigned readings on the ballad. Do additional research and/or consult handbooks. Avail yourself of the online resources I included in earlier Updates (scroll down). Count syllables, use the pronunciation guides in your dictionary (which will tell you where the natural emphases lie), consult your thesaurus, think of other turns of phrase and alternate grammatical constructions, try singing what you've written to the tune of "Joe Hill" or "The Yellow Rose of Texas." And then come see me during office hours. (I promise I won't treat you like a pitiable feeb.)

For Monday, February 29th (Day 12):

Work on your ballads--and make plans to see me during Friday (by appointment) or Monday (drop-in) office hours if you're panicking or having trouble. (First: review all the reading on the ballad and the ballad stanza, and study the project guidelines carefully.) Remember: the new due date for the Ballad Project is next Wednesday, March 2nd.

I won't yet explain why we looked at Tillyard and Frye under the sign of "history," but on Monday we will take up another, somewhat tougher, scholarly essay that is more overtly historical in its approach. So gird your loins to go into battle with Lawrence Lipking's “The Genius of the Shore: Lycidas, Adamastor, and the Poetics of Nationalism,” in the online reader.

Lipking's essay is a challenging one. At the risk of overselling its difficulty, I'll just say that it's a dense, complexly argued, and sometimes rather subtle reading of Milton’s elegy. You may find some of it elusive, not least because it presumes that you know something about seventeenth-century English history. But it's not utterly out of your grasp, I promise. Take careful notes—highlighting and annotating what appear to you to be Lipking's main assertions, writing marginal notes to help you synthesize or summarize the argument or to render explicit points that Lipking may be making only inferentially, and so on. Please use this "active reading" handout (that's a link) to help with all that. You may stop when Lipking turns his attention to The Lusiads and the figure of "Adamastor" (beginning in the second column of page 214)--although the ambitious among you are of course welcome to read through to the end.

Announcements/Links:

  • Several events left in the final days of Black Liberation Month, including a screening of Selma (Saturday at 7, Jolly Giant Commons) and "Still We Rise" (Monday at 7, KBR)
  • A Black History Month Literary Send-Off: "Books by Black Authors to Look Forward to in 2016"
  • Make that two: Ta-Nehisi Coates on "how poetry shaped him into the writer he is today" (hint: it had to do with making his language concise, powerful, taut)
  • Every HSU student was supposedly e-mailed a flier about novelist Thomas King's appearance in the Library Fishbowl next Thursday at 1--but if you reflexively deleted it, then here are some links: Wikipedia, the Globe and Mail, and the CBC
  • And in the "As Timely as Today's (well, last week's) Headlines" Dept.: reviewing New York Times music critic Ben Ratliff's new book, Simon Reynolds has this to say this about genre:
    • Ratliff is both wary and weary of genre, which, near the start of the book, he asserts is “a construct for the purpose of commerce, not pleasure, and ultimately for the purpose of listening to less.” Genre terms, though, mostly emerge organically out of communities of musicians and fans. [Moreover, they] are useful, perhaps even indispensable; they tell you something. The self-consciously genre-crossing critic — just like the self-consciously genre-blending musician — depends on style boundaries precisely so as to transgress them and achieve desired sensations of liberation, discovery, and an airy cosmopolitan feeling of rising above the rooted and local.

For Wednesday, February 24th (Day 11):

Fer real this time: Lycidas Project Due! Do a private self-assessment of the State of Your "Lycidas" Project. Compare notes with your fellow researchers. Hit the reference books and the databases and the catalog one more time. Refine, revise, and/or expand what you naively imagined was your finished product. And whip the thing into ultimo shape. You can get it to me in hard copy any time between now and Wednesday. (Use my faculty mailbox in the English Department office for early submissions.) E-mail me with last-minute questions.

Then it'll be time to begin balladeering. Again: the Ballad Project has gone live and can be downloaded here or from the front page of the class website. The postponed deadline for the "Lycidas" Project will have repercussions for the Ballad Project deadline, too--so even though the nominal deadline is next Monday, February 29th, you may take longer if you need to. Oh, and in case you missed them last time:

Finally: movin' on.... As a way of putting a final punctuation mark (or maybe an ellipsis?) on "Lycidas," continuing the discussion of genre that we began with a consideration of ballad form, and shifting our focus towards the the topic of literature and history, we will take up two Eminent (Dead) Critics' thoughts about "Lycidas" (Week 6 in the online Course Reader). First, Mr. Eminent (Dead) English critic, E.M.W. Tillyard and then Mr. Eminent (Dead) Canadian Critic, Northrop Frye. Read those two pieces. And then--luck of the draw, I'm afraid; one more ball to juggle--here is Informal Writing Assignment #4:

  1. How would you describe Tillyard's approach to "Lycidas" and its author? Specifically, if you were analyzing the tone of his authorial voice in the same way that we analyzed the tone of, say Thom Gunn's poem, what words would you use to describe it? What does Tillyard seem to expect from a lyric poem, and why specifically does he think readers should continue to care about a poem like "Lycidas"?
  2. What light, if any, does Frye's discussion shed on the poem for you? Try to summarize his argument in a couple of sentences: what do you see as the major points that Frye is trying to make about both Milton and "Lycidas"?
  3. Frye says, among other things, that "[i]f we ask what inspires a poet, there are always two answers....[A]n event may inspire the impulse to write. But the impulse to write can only come from previous contact with literature, and the formal inspiration, the poetic structure that crystallizes around the new event, can only be derived from other poems." Moreover, Frye insists, "[l]iterature often gives us the illusion of turning from books to life, from second-hand to direct experience . . .[b]ut this is never quite what happens. . . .The pretence of personal sincerity is itself a literary convention." What view of literature is he asserting here? Would E.M.W. Tillyard agree?
  4. One more extended quotation from Frye: "Every poem is inherently connected with other poems of its kind, whether explicitly, as Lycidas is with Theocritus and Virgil, or implicitly, as Whitman is with the same tradition, or by anticipation, as Lycidas is with later pastoral elegies. And, of course, ... [e]veryone who has seriously studied literature knows that he is not simply moving from poem to poem ...: he is also entering into a coherent and progressive discipline." Summarize Frye's point here in your own words, and then ponder: if you accept Frye's view (leaving aside the masculinist bias of his pronouns, among other things), then what are its implications for, say, your average twenty-something pursuing a bachelor's degree in English?

Announcements:

  • Felonious Munk, Tuesday @ 6 pm, Kate Buchanan Room. Munk is a social commentator and comedian who is part of a growing movement of non-traditional journalists and pundits engaging wide audiences via social media and independent media outlets. Using new media as a staging ground for social justice activism, Munk provides perspectives often absent from mainstream networks.
  • Looking ahead: a conversation with novelist Thomas King, Thursday, 3/3 @ 1 pm, Library Fishbowl

Links/In Case You're Interested/Because I Can't Help Myself Department:

For Monday, February 22d (Day 10)

Another long one. First things first: if you tried to post an IWA after 9:00 this morning and found yourself locked out, I've extended the deadline till 11:00 tonight. Second things second: download a Ballad Project spec sheet if you can stand to think about it right now; leave it alone for a few days if you can't. (It may make more sense after one more class session, anyway.)

Now: lissen up for an Executive Fiat! Y'know that Lycidas project you'e busting your ass over? (Good for you, by the way!) Well, keep on acting as if it's due on Monday. Get a final draft ready to go. Then, on Monday, instead of handing it in, spend another day or two casting a sober, critical eye on it, revising and augmenting, if necessary (once more, o ye laurels, and once more) ... and do a really kick-ass job. Apply a final coat of spit 'n' polish. Then turn the whole thing in next Wednesday, instead.

On Monday, we'll continue our discussion of Wordsworth and Dickinson's adoption of the ballad stanza, then move on to a broader discussion of genre. This will require some preparatory reading in the online Course Reader (Week 5). There's no IWA attached to this reading, but puh-leeze do it anyway. To wit:

First, glance at the two chapters from Leviticus, just to get the feel of them, then read Ian Frazier's "Lamentations of the Fathers." Take a couple of minutes to think about how the contemporary text (Frazier's) relates to the ancient one (er, Yahweh's).  How important is it that you know the original text to "get" the later one?

Then, before doing the rest of the assigned reading (below), do a little experiment: think of, and write down, the name of a genre you know well. You needn't restrict yourself to literary genres, by the way: if it makes more sense for you to think in terms of film or TV or music (e.g., "romantic comedies," "bromantic comedies," "reality shows," "low-fi," "drum-and-bass," "grunge," "death metal," and so on), then go for it. Make a list of the defining features of the genre you selected. (Here's an example using romantic comedies: story revolves around two usually young-ish people; at outset, they don’t know each other; they meet or are thrown together somehow; they clash, or an obstacle of some kind appears to prevent a relationship from developing; obstacle is gradually removed or compatibility is gradually discovered; movie ends in marriage or, um, hook-up.)

Now read "The problem of definition" and the first four paragraphs of “Working within genres” from “An Introduction to Genre Theory” by Daniel Chandler, keeping in mind the specific genre that you identified above. (Never mind Stuart Klawans's "Strange Worlds"; we'll save that for a bit later in the semester.) Consider these questions for class discussion:

  • With respect to writers/creators: to what extent do you think the constraints of your genre inhibit creativity? To what extent do they foster creativity?
  • With respect to readers/consumers: in what ways does a familiarity with the conventions of this genre lead to “passive consumption,” in your experience? In what ways does such knowledge make it possible to “identify, select, and interpret texts,” as Chandler puts it?

Bonus: here's The Onion News Network's parody of a genre you might not have even recognized as a genre (profanity alert, if you're offended by that sort of thing).

Miscellaneous Links & Announcements:

  • Black Media Matters featuring Felonious Munk: Tuesday, February 23d, 6 p.m., KBR
  • Postscript: More on Dudley Randall and "The Ballad of Birmingham" (placing the poem squarely in the broadside tradition) at the Modern American Poetry site, University of Illinois. And here's E-Notes' introductory page on Randall. Also: Randall's Broadside Press still survives today--have a look. (His papers reside at University of Detroit-Mercy.)
  • Pre-postscript: Wikipedia's entries on Proserpina and on Wordsworth's so-called "Lucy" poems. (The "she" being mourned in "A slumber" is conventionally regarded as "Lucy," a figure some say is based in part on Wordsworth's sister, Dorothy.)
  • Metric System: Baffled by that balladic iambic tetrameter/trimeter stuff? Need an online reference source for scansion? Try Purdue University's Online Writing Lab, the Poetry Library's entry on "scansion," or Riverdale, Oregon Language Arts teacher Mr. Black's "Rhythm, Meter, and Scansion Made Easy." Meanwhile, the English Department at the University of Virginia has created an interactive resource, "for better for verse," that helps you learn (and test yourself) on scansion.

The postponed deadline of the "Lycidas" project may have repercussions for some subsequent due dates, as well (like that of The Ballad Project, for example!). Stay tuned.

 

For Wednesday, February 17th (Day 9):

Take a deep breath; this update is a long one. (And if for some reason you missed yesterday's update, then you'd better scroll down and take in that one, too.)

First, Informal Writing Assignment #3 (I will also open an assignment on Moodle and re-post these instructions there). This one is a two-parter:

Part 1. Re-read both the Wordsworth and Dickinson poems that were assigned for Monday. (In fact, re-read--or simply read for the first time, if you were caught short yesterday--all of the material on the ballad that you were meant to have prepared for Day 8. You'll need a good understanding of it for the next shorter project, and while it's one thing to be told something, it's another thing to learn it for yourself.) Then craft some thoughtful responses to these questions.

a) Given what you have read or otherwise know about ballads, why do you imagine Wordsworth and/or Dickinson might have chosen to employ this particular stanzaic form—that is, the ballad stanza or hymnal stanza? (Wrangle your educated speculation into at least a paragraph of prose.)

b) How would these or any of the other ballads I asked you to read be different—i.e., how would their meanings change—if they were written as, say, epigrammatic heroic couplets? (Or as limericks or villanelles or sestinas or Spenserian sonnets or Rimes royal or double dactyls or terza rima or...you get the picture: any one of a number of other set stanza forms. Diligent, principled researchers that you are, you could look up one or more of the preceding terms in, say, a literary handbook or a glossary of poetic terms—even a reputable online one—and school yourself on the distinguishing formal characteristics of those set forms.)

Part 2 (optional). And finally, go ahead—you know you're dying to: for extra credit, take a stab at transforming, say, "The Bonny Hind" into an epigrammatic couplet, or "A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal" into a limerick. (Those are merely two possibilities. You could choose a different poem and/or a different set stanza form.) Try a relatively "easy" form like the limerick or the haiku, and you may earn up to half an extra IWA credit. A more challenging form: up to a full point.

On The Interwebs:

For Monday, February 15 (Day 8):

Okay, first: go and do some awesome "Lycidas" research over the next four days. Find books, e-books, journal articles, reputable websites, general reference books, specialized reference books (literary encyclopedias, dictionaries of mythology), annotated editions, etc., etc. E-mail me with problems or questions. And let's hear status reports on Monday.

I know you're going to diligently and creatively run various combinations & permutations of search terms (Milton, Lycidas, pastoral, elegy, "pastoral elegy," particular terms in your passage, etc., etc.) through a whole bunch various catalogs and databases. And I know you'll take care to check out a variety of sources: print books, e-books, journal articles, the Oxford English Dictionary, other general reference books, specialized reference works, etc., etc. And reputable websites. I'll sing the same refrain you've been hearing from your teachers since 7th grade, probably: use the web sparingly and (above all) judiciously. Good web resources may lead you to other, more substantial (or more scholarly) ones, and/or they may serve as useful cross-checks or points of comparison with other sources. Here, free/gratis, is a starter pack: a handful of links you may find useful:

  • Milton resources at UCSB's Voice of the Shuttle. (Wait--what? It lists a scholarly journal called Milton Quarterly--who knew? I wonder if Milton Quarterly ever published anything about "Lycidas"? How could one possibly find out?)
  • John Milton and the Cultures of Print: an online exhibit from Rutgers University Libraries
  • "Lycidas" in context: Justa Edouardo King, Naufrago (an 1835 reprint of the 1638 collection in which Milton's poem first appeared; "Lycidas" is the final item in the collection--but dig all the other poems by Cambridge undergrads composed in Latin and Greek!)
  • Surprise, surprise: since Milton was writing a pastoral elegy, he employed plenty of pastoral-elegiac conventions. Just how conventional were they? See for yourself ... (read along for a page or two).

Next: we've still got unfinished business from last week with "Lycidas," I know. (We never even breathed Samuel Johnson's name, for instance. And we're supposedly working through the first section of the poem together. So.) I'll also ask you to perform a quick post-mortem of our library visit.

Beyond that: It's almost the fifth week of the semester, people seem to be getting sick in waves, we've all got loads of work to do, and my brain (like yours?) is beginning to lose its edge. So I'll hit you with some dull questions and see if we can't hone them into a sharp discussion. To that end: read the ballads (and the various resources about the ballad form) in the online Course Reader--you know, the ones assigned on the syllabus--carefully. And be ready to talk in class about the following:

  • According to the assigned reading and/or any other source you might have stumbled across, what's the difference between the various types of ballads (in terms of history & origins, typical formal characteristics, and so on)?  In which category would you slot each of the ballads I had you read?
  • Why do you think a hifalutin poet (like Wordsworth, f'rinstance) might want to borrow from a genre typically associated with the “folk”?

By the way: if you're interested in hearing more ballads—and who isn't?—you might want to sample some of the collections available on Smithsonian Folkways records: Broadside Ballads, Vol. 1, Classic African-American Ballads (essay & liner notes | YouTube playlist), British Traditional Ballads in the Southern Mountains, Vol. 1, etc. Or maybe you'd be into a collection of pirate ballads and sea chanteys, "Rogue's Gallery," co-produced by Johnny Depp and Gore Verbinski, that appeared a few years ago on super-hip indie label Anti Records. (There was a story about that disc on NPR's All Things Considered, as well as a second installment, "Son of Rogue's Gallery.")

Links and Announcements:

  • Black Liberation Month Event: Walk Through Black Brilliance (posters and presentations about overlooked Black artists and intellectuals): Kate Buchanan Room, University Center, Thursday, February 11, 7:00-9:00
  • African-American literary/film history in the news: there is a newly restored edition of the (previously censored) 1951 film adaptation of Richard Wright's landmark 1940 novel Native Son, adapted for the screen--and starring, in the role of Bigger Thomas--Wright himself. (Hmm: what other text that we'll be studying this semester appeared in 1951? What an interesting juxtaposition....) (New York Times 10 February 2016)

For Wednesday, February 10 (Day 7):

We're meeting in the Library "Fishbowl" (second floor--Room 209) for an introduction to undergrad-level research in English Studies. If you have a laptop or notebook or tablet, bring it! (And please try your best not to be late.)

The assignment sheet for the "Lycidas" Project is available as a downloadable PDF right here and on the course homepage. I'm sure some of you are ready to get started even before you get a formal orientation to the library tomorrow. (Do it!) In any case: READ THE ASSIGNMENT SHEET CAREFULLY and make sure you understand what's expected. Ask questions--privately or publicly--if you don't.

My parenthetical exhortation (on p. 3) to add to your list of assigned terms and concepts, if necessary, may be especially relevant if you're working on some of the latter chunks of the poem. Because I was essentially compiling what y'all highlighted or otherwise identified as problematic or puzzling, and since people tended to highlight a lot more energetically at the beginning of the poem than they did at the end, the distribution of labor among the groups may appear lopsided, even though every group has approximately 30 to 40 lines.  But appearances, as we all know, can be deceiving. The third bullet under "warnings and caveats" is pertinent in this regard.

In your, um, spare moments, you should read ahead for next week (various ballads and readings about the ballad form, all in the online Course Reader).

Links and announcements:

  • Black Liberation Month at Humboldt State Now (note the concert by Lisa Fischer and Grand Baton on Tuesday, February 9th and the opening of Masks and Cultures of West Africa on Wednesday, February 10th)
  • African-American and Afro-Caribbean (Pastoral) Elegies. From Phillis Wheatley to the Sorrow Songs to Paul Lawrence Dunbar to Sonia Sanchez to Sean "Puffy" Combs, Black Diaspora poets have a long, varied, and complex history with the elegiac mode. Here are a couple of examples, two centuries apart:
    • Phillis Wheatley, "On the Death of Dr. Samuel Marshall" (1771)
    • Jayne Cortez, "How Long Has Trane Been Gone" (1974) (lyrics)


    • And here's a pastoral elegy for revolutionary historian, political theorist, novelist and cultural critic C.L.R. James, written and performed by Jamaican-born British poet Linton Kwesi Johnson, entitled "Di Good Life" (1991) (lyrics):

For Monday, February 8 (Day 6):

We'll continue our initial discussion of "Lycidas" (and of the writing assignment on "Lycidas" that you did for Wednesday's class). And I'll lay the "Lycidas" Project on you. We'll also consider Samuel Johnson's, er, let's say ... equivocal appraisal of "Lycidas" (in the online Course Reader).

While you're rooting around in the Reader, why not take the opportunity to begin acquainting yourself, if you haven't already, with some relevant terms (elegy; pastoral; pastoral elegy) from the online Glossary of Poetic Terms. And whether you find Dr. Johnson's withering opinion of "Lycidas" comical or outrageous or spot-on, you might be interested other commentators' responses to him.

Link Miscellany:

  • English words by Latin antecedents (Wiktionary)
  • If John Donne were alive today, suggests Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker ("Spooked," 30 November 2015), he might have based a metaphor in quantum physics, which says that "photons and particles ... act like waves ... [and] particles that were part of a single wave function would be permanently 'entangled,' no matter how far apart from each other they migrated." According to this theory, the two particles would be "conjoined" even if they were "millions of light-years away" from each other. (When it was first proposed, Einstein dismissed the theory, since validated, as "Spooky Action at a Distance.")
  • Juan Felipe Herrera, U.S. Poet Laureate (Library of Congress | Poetry Foundation | Academy of American Poets | NPR | Democracy Now | New York Times: 1, 2, 3)
  • The new issue of Black Grooves (Indiana University Archives of African American Music and Culture)--mislabeled February 2015--has a review of performance poet Saul Williams's new album MartyrLoserKing (also featured and reviewed at NPR)
  • Sunday isn't merely the Super Bowl, but the eve of Lunar New Year--and "Dimanche Gras," the day, during the run-up to carnival, when the national Calypso Monarch competition is held in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad. (With steelpan and masquerade, calypso--originally a predominantly Afro-Caribbean verbal performance art--is part of the trinity of carnival arts that have made Trinidad & Tobago world famous.)

For Wednesday, February 3 (Day 5):

Sorry to have to cut things off so hastily today.

For Wednesday: after studying John Donne's (or let's say "John Donne's") exhortation to his beloved, we'll briefly pause to consider Helen Vendler and the speaker of the lyric poem--Thom Gunn's lyric poem, anyway--before moving on to..."Lycidas," which is available online in the Course Reader. (Read it! And if you haven't yet read the Helen Vendler piece, then you may skip it. If you have read it, it wasn't wasted effort: she quotes some good poems and introduces a useful idea or two. Maybe a wack idea or two, also.)

Your second informal writing assignment will be due, too, if you choose to do it. I'll open up an another assignment page on Moodle soon. The first part of the assignment, however, involves something you will actually have to hand in to me in person. Here's the deal: as you read John Milton's "Lycidas" (that's pronounced "LISS-i-dus," by the way), mark in some way--e.g. underline or highlight or circle--words, terms, and concepts in the poem that you don't understand and that you suspect you might need to know in order to "get" this poem. (Don't worry; we can talk about any other thoughts or questions that the poem provoked in your head, too.) I'm taking it for granted that you will take the same sorts of careful and reasonably extensive notes on this poem that you would work up on any text you intend to write about and spend some time with. Bring that marked-up copy of the poem with you and be ready to hand it in to me at the end of Wednesday's class.

The second part of the writing assignment is to upload some answers to the following questions to Moodle:

  1. What is reading the poem "Lycidas" like? A bumpy road? A stroll on the beach? (For instance, can you follow Milton's famously Latinate sentence structure?) Is this what the Russian Formalists meant by “language made strange?”
  2. If it's difficult, what in or about the text makes it so? (Be as specific as you can.)
  3. One of the criteria for literariness that one or two people tentatively put forth in class or on the backs of their quizzes was something like “timelessness”—that is, a text's ability to remain relevant and to continue to address concerns that we recognize as widely human. So I ask you: in what ways are “Lycidas” and its concerns “timeless”? In what ways are they not so very timeless? Try to make both cases, if you can--that is, in what ways might this poem still be Literature (assuming Literature requires timelessness), and in what ways might it have ceased to be Literature, given the criteria of endurance and continuing relevance over time?
  4. Say the whole “timelessness” thing is a crock, anyway—that we don’t, or shouldn't, give a rat’s ass if something is “timeless” or if, like Eagleton, we simply don't believe that anything is truly timeless. What other reasons could there be for wanting to read “Lycidas”? Are there any? Eagleton says he can imagine a time when Shakespeare might seem hopelessly irrelevant; has that time come for “Lycidas”? Is it time to drive a stake into its heart and bid it rest in peace?
  5. Then there’s the college syllabus question. Maybe “Lycidas” is okay if you have nothing else to do, or if you’re trapped on a desert island and this is the only thing available to read. But should it take up time on a college reading list? In the grand scheme of things, would you rather have been spending that half-hour of your life on something else? Should what you want to read have any influence on what you have to read (and vice versa)?

Announcements: hat tip to Shannon for the HSU Black Liberation Month calendar, below:

HSU Black Liberation Month Calendar

For Monday, February 1 (Day 4):

Miles to go before we sleep. We'll turn to the texts we didn't get to on Wednesday, namely: Thomas McLaughlin and then Donne and Dickinson (all in the online Course Reader).

Also: I don't guarantee we'll get to her on Monday, but you may as well get a jump on Helen Vendler's "The Play of Language" and "Constructing a Self" (in the online Course Reader). Then, with Vendler in mind, consider Thom Gunn's poem "Words for Some Ash": how would you characterize the tone of this poem and its speaker?  For instance: what is what Vendler would call its "implied attitude"?  Does the poem give you the sense of seeing through "the lens of a particular feeling"?  And what happens when you imagine yourself in the speaker's position, as Vendler suggests we must do when we read lyric poetry? Jot down some brief responses to those questions and bring them with you to refer to during Monday's class, along with any notes and/or questions you might have about Vendler and/or Gunn.

A heads-up: we'll probably have a first glance at John Milton's "Lycidas" next Wednesday--and there will probably be an IWA associated with it. So get ready, and read ahead.

Announcements:

  • You'd barely know it from searching the HSU website, but Monday is the start of Black History Month (Wikipedia | Library of Congress | History Channel). Keep your eyes and ears open for related campus events during the month of February, starting with the noon gathering on the quad that Shannon told us about. On Tuesday: go to Library 205 and learn how to improve (or create) relevant Wikipedia articles at the "Come Right Black History" Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon. And read this Op-Ed piece from the Lumberjack that dishes some pertinent local Black history.
  • On the literary tip: you can peruse some official BHM recommendations from the Poetry Foundation and Poets.org (Academy of American Poets). Because I teach and study and write about Caribbean literature--and because I like sonnets--I'm especially fond of Jamaican-born Claude McKay's "America." But as long as we're interrogating patriotism, and since Claudia Rankine is a brilliant poet and critic whom the English Department would really like to bring to HSU as a Visiting Writer, then let me also recommend her prose-poem "Citizen, I."

Word-Nerd Miscellany:

For Wednesday, January 27 (Day 3):

I may not be able to stop myself from saying a little bit more about Terry Eagleton and the politics of who gets to decide what "literature" is, and why it's not just a matter of "subjective" personal choice. But otherwise: enough theorizing, enough Interrogation of Basic Assumptions, enough meta-literary talk...for now. Let's talk about a text that is fairly uncontroversially regarded as "literature" (even "Literature").

Your first assignment for Wednesday is to read Robert Frost's "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening"--yes, really; that old warhorse!--and work up a short analysis or interpretation of it. (In case you need reminding: this and other assigned works are in the Online Course Reader.)

Next, read the poems by Emily Dickinson and John Donne and the essay by Thomas McLaughlin on "Figurative Language." Take some reasonably substantial notes on all three (with special attention to how McLaughlin might influence your approach to the Dickinson and Donne poems and/or what you ultimately make of them), and bring those notes with you to class.

This is not a "for-credit" Informal Writing Assignment, so it doesn't get uploaded to Moodle. But I know you'll do it conscientiously anyway. (I'll sit down to respond to your first Informal Writing Assignments over the weekend, by the way.)

Links:

  • Department of Snippets from Recent Periodical Articles Related to Engl 120 (and you thought the Russian Formalists were obscure and old hat! Here's a review article of some recently published books by Viktor Schklovsky, one of the founders of that school of criticism and inventor of the idea of "defamiliarization"): Ben Ehrenreich, "Making Strange" (The Nation 25 February 2013)
  • Department of Spike Lee Joints: Do the Right Thing (1989)

For Monday, January 25th (Day 2):

You found it! Alrighty, then.

Lots of stuff to do over the weekend. First, make sure you read all the way through the syllabus (in your hands already) and the Course Policies (online at the course website). Bring any questions to class on Monday. Next:

1) Answer the "survey" questions on the back of the quiz that you took home with you, and bring that back to class, prepared to discuss your answers.

2) Read Terry Eagleton's “What Is Literature?” in the online Course Reader. (Username & password are on the print copy of your syllabus.) As you read, keep track of any questions you have--and that you might care to raise in class for discussion. Eagleton refers to a number of texts and authors you’re probably not familiar with: Bentham, Macaulay, et al. It’s really not necessary to know anything about these guys in order to understand Eagleton’s argument, but if you find yourself getting so distracted that you can't follow his point, then jot down a note to yourself and raise your concern in class on Monday. (Better yet: look it up!) Then, if you so choose, you may attempt...

Informal Writing Assignment #1:
(As per the syllabus: draft your answers to these questions using a word-processing program, save the document in .doc, .docx, .rtf, or .pdf format, and upload it to Moodle.)

  1. Keep a written inventory of the different ways that people have attempted to define “literariness” and the literary text over the years, according to Eagleton, as well as the problems that he raises with each of those definitions. (For instance, Eagleton starts out by considering the idea of “literature” as a work of “imaginative” writing—writing that is not literally true. But he immediately points out that many nonfictional texts are, in fact, generally considered these days to be “literature.” So clearly “literariness” can’t be limited to texts that aren’t literally true.) Keep notes about the other features of “literature” that people have tried to use as a yardstick, along with the drawbacks and limitations of those yardsticks, as Eagleton sees them.
  2. Then consider your response to the quiz and the implicit (or explicit) criteria you applied. Did any of your criteria pop up at any point in Eagleton’s discussion? Did you, for instance, exclude your iPad manual because it’s a text that serves an “immediate practical purpose”—that is, because it’s not an example of “non-pragmatic discourse”?
  3. After reading Eagleton, what would you now say “literature” is—assuming you still care to hazard such a judgment? Has your definition changed? (Eagleton comes closest to defining literature when he calls it “any kind of writing which for some reason or another somebody values highly” (page 9), and he says that “literature” is a “functional rather than [an] ontological” term. What exactly do you take that distinction to mean?)
  4. And finally, a Big Question: if we take Eagleton seriously, what might be the ramifications for degree programs in English? What should—or might—we study in English classes? How should we decide what we’ll study?

You needn't answer every last prompt in each numbered question, but you should still respond to whatever you take to be the gist of each question. See this link for additional guidelines on Informal Writing Assignments.

If you're unsure what exactly I mean by "informal," I've uploaded a sample informal response. I responded to the first question I asked about today's quiz (How conscious were you of the criteria that you used to judge "literariness," and can you articulate your criteria?) and pretended that it was actually the prompt for an informal writing assignment. I hope this will give you some sense of the level of thinking and organization I'm looking for in your IWAs.

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