For anyone out there still listening:

Novelist Denis Johnson (Jesus' Son, Tree of Smoke) has a new thriller, The Laughing Monsters, featuring a Western narrator "of indeterminate nationality" (according to Christine Smallwood's review in Harper's magazine) involved in some murky shenanigans in West Africa. If the critics are accurate, then I guess we shouldn't put Chinua Achebe's "An Image of Africa" to bed just yet: in Johnson's book, as in so many others before it, Africa appears mainly as a place of bewildering violence, disease, and despair that causes hard-bitten white guys to come unglued. (In a "last desperate gasp of uncomprehending white panic," says Smallwood, Johnson's narrator, taught by his parents "to love all the earth's peoples," unleashes the ugly, shopworn racial epithet beloved of bigots everywhere.)

"Johnson is unflinching when he stares into the human darkness," says Jonathan Sturgeon in Flavorwire. The Laughing Monsters "describes a descent into one of the darkest corners of Africa and into the dark corners of the mind of man," adds the Associated Press. (The book's publisher actually led with these blurbs in a full-page ad for the book in The New Yorker, believe it or not.) Johnson's intentions may be just as critical and ironic as Conrad imagined his were. But what did Achebe say about Heart of Darkness? That it "projects the image of Africa as 'the other world,' the antithesis of Europe and therefore of civilization, a place where man's vaunted intelligence and refinement are finally mocked by triumphant bestiality." "That this simple truth is glossed over in criticisms of [Conrad's] work," he concluded, "is due to the fact that white racism against Africa is such a normal way of thinking that its manifestations go completely undetected." Looks like our critical equipment is no more sensitive than it was forty years ago.

For Tuesday, December 16 (Day 30):

Regular office hours on Monday (see below), when you can drop in for eleventh-hour concerns and consultations. Then: I'll be holding "class" from 12:40-2:30 in my office, where I'll receive your Magic Toyshop papers and shower you with confetti.

Since I promised, here's one last revision checklist. Keep in mind, too, that it's always a good idea to haul out the assignment sheet if you haven't looked at it for a while, to make sure there's not some crucial guideline or specification that you forgot about. And speaking of specs: here's a direct link to the Purdue OWL's MLA page (for those who--ahem--have not procured their own copy of the MLA Handbook).

• Is your thesis:
  • arguable? I.e., does it makes a claim that is not self-evident? ("The Magic Toyshop is full of allusions to fairy tales"—not exactly controversial.)
  • specific? A good thesis is not just an assertion that something is important or significant, but a claim about why or how something is important or significant.
  • defensible? Is it an idiosyncratic or eccentric reading, or is it one that can be supported by an appeal to evidence from the text?
• Speaking of evidence: have you merely gathered the textual evidence that supports your understanding of the text's meaning (and how it goes about making that meaning), or have you ordered that evidence, lined it up in a way that builds a rhetorically effective case?
• And speaking of orderliness: does each paragraph of your essay cohere around one main focus or topic?  Does each paragraph help elaborate an argument that supports your thesis?  And is that argument constructed via a clear line of reasoning (rather than a series of disconnected observations joined mainly by “and”s and “also”s)?
• In the course of your argument, do you make any specific claims that are not convincing—which one could easily contradict or disprove, or which the cited example actually does not support (or does not support well)?

And finally: if you pay attention to the news, you may have noticed that the Senate Intelligence Committee, which has nominal oversight over the CIA and other U.S. "intelligence"-gathering agencies (there are at least 17 of them, at last count), issued a belated but excoriating report this week on our government's use of torture in the interrogation of Al Qaeda suspects since 9/11. Predictably, the CIA and its supporters have launched a P.R. counter-offensive, trotting out a slew of Dick Cheney's old morally-challenged talking points: e.g., that torture isn't really torture, that it's "effective," and that it "saved American lives." In a particularly repugnant statement last Thursday, CIA chief John Brennan even called U.S. torturers "patriots."

For Thursday, December 11 (Day 29):

Keep in mind that I will hold regular office hours on Wednesday and next Monday (1:00-2:30, although I may be in as early as 12:30 and as late as 3:00)--and I'm open to making appointments outside of those hours if and whenever we can find a mutually agreeable opening in my schedule.

For Thursday: the last lecture. And the last mini-workshop (on various mechanics of quotation--and maybe on one or two more of those niggling writing issues you identified today). Fiddler on the Roof? You'll have to wait and see.

What could you be doing now, post-conference, with your paper? Duly considering your peers' feedback, obviously. I'll have a few other suggestions in the coming days. But for now, try out the following exercises on your own draft essay:

• If you were playing Jeopardy (where you're presented with an answer, and you have to come up with its corresponding question), then what question would you say your paper answers?
• Name three things that make your analysis a ______ (feminist/postcolonial/gender/queer) analysis.
• Summarize your argument in the same way you’d summarize someone else’s: when you do a paragraph-by-paragraph summary and read those summaries in quick succession, do they give us a good sense of your argument—not only what it says, but the line of reasoning that leads from one point to the next?

That's enough for now. See you one last time on Thursday.

Oh--the university has probably been sending you nag-o-grams to complete a course evaluation. It would be a good idea for you to do that. You may remember me saying at the beginning of the semester that this was a new version of 320 for me, with new texts and new (or substantially revised) assignments. I've got my own ideas about what worked and didn't work, but I'd be glad to hear yours, too, especially if they're the sorts of things you're not comfortable telling me face to face.

For Tuesday, December 9 (Day 28):

Your weekend mission: read your response group's drafts and generate some good, substantive feedback for each of them, using the questions we generated in class today as your template. Feel free to make marginal notes and comments as well, but the bulk of your work should take the form of written, word-processed comments that you can print out and hand off to your fellow writers at the end of your conference on Tuesday. (You can also refer to/riff off of your written comments as you discuss the drafts verbally.)

Also: there's nothing preventing you from continuing to revise your own draft over the weekend--in fact, I would heartily endorse it. You can fill in your fellow conferees about any changes, trivial or substantial, before you begin your conference.

Given the mountainous servings of extracurricular business I have on my plate for the last week of classes, the chances that I will find time to read and respond to your drafts have dwindled from slim to nil. I have faith, however, that you will do right by each other. And if you're still eager for me to weigh in, or if you'd simply like to come and talk to me about your draft, remember that I will hold regular office hours on Monday and Wednesday (1:00-2:30, although I may be in as early as 12:30 and as late as 3:00)--and I'm open to making appointments outside of those hours if and whenever I can find a mutually agreeable opening in my schedule.

For Thursday, December 4 (Day 27):

Bring two copies of a revised, expanded, bona fide draft with you to class, and upload a copy to Moodle, as well. This draft will be graded; see the assignment sheet for guidelines. (Length matters.) We'll work on devising prompts to use for generating the feedback you'll write over the weekend and give one another next week.

Before you sit down to write, (re-)read Marianne Ahokas's advice about organization and structure here.

Also: come with a writing issue, maybe even a small technical question—a matter of usage or style or grammar or punctuation, say—that has mystified or eluded you, that was brought to your attention on a recent paper (and you don't know how to fix it), or about which you've gotten contradictory information. Maybe we'll take it up.

For Tuesday, December 2 (Day 26):

I hope your holiday is both peaceful and productive, and that you manage to enjoy food, drink, friends, and family in just the right proportions.

On the "productive" front: please remember that I'm expecting you to come back on Tuesday with an early, exploratory draft of your final paper (see the revised calendar below, and download a copy of the final paper assignment sheet if you haven't already)--but that I'm also expecting this early, exploratory draft to have grown into a bona fide first draft just two days later. Realistically, then, this means you need to be mapping out that first draft in the days after Thanksgiving.

For Thursday, November 20 (Day 25):
First, here's that link I promised: Dear White People's director, Justin Simien on NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross.

Calendar for the remainder of the semester:

Thursday, November 20 (Day 25): Come to class with one to two pages of rambling notes about Angela Carter's novel and what you might see if you looked at it through the lens of one of the three critical approaches with which we've familiarized ourselves over the past few weeks. Identify specific passages in the novel that seem pertinent to one or another of those critical schools. 
Analysis questions: short handout with questions to ask when approaching a text using a specific critical lens.

Tuesday, December 2 (Day 26): Use part of the break to write a crapadelic exploratory draft of your paper, and bring it with you to class. But please: no last-minute, dashed-off, bulleted lists of "This is what I plan to write about." Those are bullshit, and we all know it; half the time you're bluffing speculatively about stuff that goes absolutely nowhere once you actually start drafting. So I beg you: craft actual paragraphs, even if the draft ends up being only two pages long as a result, and even if you write no more than two sentences about each idea that would have been a bullet on your list.

Print this draft out! Bring a hard copy. We may devote some time to workshop-y stuff: developing your ideas (a/k/a revising), giving helpful feedback to peers, formatting, incorporating sources into your own writing, and all like that. Please review the fabulous Professor Ahokas's Lit Crit Papers: What Faculty Know but Don't Always Articulate. Also? Make sure your crapadelic draft is formatted according to MLA guidelines for a manuscript (i.e., one-inch margins, running header in the upper-right corner .5" from the top of the paper, etc.). 

Thursday, December 4 (Day 27): Bring two copies of a revised, expanded, bona fide draft with you to class, and upload it to Moodle as well (I'll create a space there for you to do that). This draft will be graded; see the assignment sheet for guidelines. (Length matters for this one, so explore the texts widely and elaborately. You need to produce around 1800 words to get an A on the draft. You'll hand off two copies to colleagues and discuss them in class.) 

Before you sit down to write this draft, (re-)read Marianne Ahokas's advice about organization and structure here.

Tuesday, December 9 (Day 28): Have a revised version of your draft, printed. We'll spend some time talking about editing, stylistics, grammar, citation.

Thursday, December 11 (Day 29): Last class meeting!

Tuesday, December 16 (Day 30): Final deadline for final draft of final project! (And that's final!)

For Tuesday, November 18 (Day 24):

So that's what happens when you combine a due date with starting a new novel. I always wondered. Learn something new every day. Still, the teeth-pulling extracted a few good insights--about the figurative resonances of "flowers," for instance. Thanks to the half-dozen of you who were ready to go and who gamely played along, just the same. I understand that after I forbade them from speaking further, the North Wall contingent sat on a couple of choice items that they've promised to let loose next week.

Anyway...Do-Overs. Next time fer reals. Finish the novel! And in addition to (re)considering the questions I posted for Day 23 (below), jot down a few notes to yourself in response to the following--and be ready to discuss them on Tuesday:

• Make a list, with page numbers, of any allusions or apparent allusions--to artists, paintings, myths, legends, fairy tales, and other works of literature--that you spot and/or look up. Be prepared to contribute one to a collective catalogue. I'll start. Page 1, "O, my America, my new found land": John Donne, "To His Mistress Going to Bed." (And since I'm a scholar by trade: R.V. Young, "'O my America, my new-found-land': Pornography and Imperial Politics in Donne's Elegies")
• Because Angela Carter was famous for her scholarship on (and creative re-visioning of) fairy tales (see, e.g., this blog or that one), I'll ask an even more leading version of a question I posed during Thursday's class: in what ways does/n’t this book remind you of a fairy tale?  Be specific and consider the question in relation to characters, settings, events, form. We mentioned Cinderella; how and where? Any others?
• What do you make of Melanie's relationship with Finn? Why do you think she is by turns, sometimes even simultaneously, attracted and repelled by him?  (Re-read some of those passages, eh?) What would you mark as the stages or turning points in their relationship? (Are you as horrified by some of the conditions of her new home as she is, by the way?)
• And what else can we say about Uncle Philip (apart from the fact that he's an abusive tyrant)? Does anything seem to give him pleasure? Why do you suppose he’s in the toy business? What about the way he treats members of his family? The way he veiws women? What’s at stake in the conflict between him and Finn; how should we read that? (Anything “Oedipal” about it, for instance? Anything else?)
• Go back through the book and see how many different gardens you can find.  What do they have in common (or not)?  What’s going on with all these gardens?  What other gardens do you know of in which there are naked people and apples?
• Melanie’s appearance as Leda is described as her “debut.”  Haven’t we seen her as a kind of “debutante” before that, though?  What are the similarities, if any?  On p. 172, she remarks to herself of Finn’s ordeal that “it must have been like the wedding-dress night.”  Does that strike you as an odd comparison or an apt one?
• Were you surprized by what’s revealed about the Jowles in the end?  Do you feel as though Carter prepares or prompts you to view this revelation one way or the other, with either sympathy or horror?

Speaking of fairy tales (As Timely As Today's Headlines Dept.):

• "Today's Fairy Tales Started Out (Even More) Dark and Harrowing" (NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday 16 November 2014). Scholar and author Jack Zipes on the Grimm Brothers' raw material. The host's introductory invocation of Disney is especially apropos.

For Thursday, November 13 (Day 23): Response to a Critical Essay due! And The Magic Toyshop! (Please try to finish the novel, which is not long. At the very least, you should have read through Chapter 6 by this day.)

Nice work on the Roberts summaries today. (Follow this link if you'd like to look at them again; I've left them more or less unedited.)

Remember that campus is closed on Tuesday, November 11 in observance of Veterans Day (formerly Armistice Day).

As you put the finishing touches on your Critical Essay Response over the next few days, review the assignment sheet to make sure you haven't strayed off course. And in addition to using the template I've included for the opening paragraph of Part 2 of this assignment, you should feel free to borrow liberally from the other sections of Graff & Birkenstein's They Say, I Say that I've included in the online course reader.

For our first two classes on The Magic Toyshop, we'll think about the book in terms of the formal properties of fiction. But for the final paper for this class, you'll write a critical analysis of the novel using one of the critical perspectives we studied in conjunction with Heart of Darkness--that is, feminist, postcolonial, or queer theory. So keep those in mind as you read!

Some more pointed reading questions:

• How would you characterize or categorize the novel generically?  That is, we know it's a novel, but what kind of novel? 
• Throughout its history, the novel has been a preponderantly "realist" genre--it purports to put before us an illusion of "real life." Is The Magic Toyshop "realistic"?  In what ways yes, in what ways no? What events seem "real," and what events strike you as "unrealistic"?
• We'll be focusing again on the formal properties of fiction for the next couple of sessions, so pay some attention to plot, narrative point of view, setting, and characterization:  
  • What happens in the novel, and why?  What event sets the entire narrative in motion? Why does the plot unfold as it does? Is it driven by characters and their individual choices, or by social forces the characters can't control, or what?
  • Who tells us the story, and how does the narrator mediate between the events and the reader? Who, for instance, tells us that "Melanie left the house, a basket on her arm and a list in her pocket, like a French housewife" on page 88? The omniscient narrator? Is the narrator channeling Melanie herself? Who tells us that "Victoria tore the fringes off the hassocks and ate them" on page 9--and what does this consciousness think of Victoria?
  • Do we have access to internal views of the characters (that is, do we get to hear what they're thinking)? Which characters? Which characters, along with their motives, remain closed to us? How does our understanding of the Jowles change over the course of the novel?
  • When and where does the novel take place? How do the settings change, and what happens--what can happen--in each of those settings?

For Thursday, November 6 (Day 22):

Read Roberts's essay again, carefully, and come to class with summaries of paragraphs 2 ("Such an investigation . . . "), 12 (p. 126: "'Heart of Darkness' is a story about the gaining and passing . . ."), and 14 (p. 127: "The much-debated lie to the Intended . . . "). They should be typed, but you can write them in longhand if you show them to me before class. I will collect them!

From the internets: who says only English nerds quote poetry? Ethan Iverson may be a nerd (and a really good writer/blogger), but he's mostly a pianist--for the indie-jazz power trio "The Bad Plus," the first band I know of to have done a jazz cover of Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit," way back in 2001. (By the way, they'll be playing Center Arts for the first time in early December. $5 for HSU students!)

And some final thoughts on “will to style”:  the phrase, like literary “impressionism,” comes from Fredric Jameson’s discussion of Conrad in his book The Political Unconscious (1981).  It has clear echoes of Nietzsche’s “will to power,” obviously, although it also draws upon a notion of style as “language which deliberately calls attention to itself, and ‘foregrounds’ itself as a key element in the work” (that quote comes from Jameson’s Marxism and Form, published in 1971; I lifted it from Ned Lukacher's Primal Scenes, published in 1986).  I think we’ve seen how Conrad’s prose does indeed have such a “willed,” insistent, showy style.  I would add that the way in which Conrad and other modernist writers foreground language—Conrad’s murky, cloudy, gloomy, ambiguous “impressionism” is one manifestation of his “will to style”—is something they have in common with visual artists of the era, who were abandoning realistic representation and instead exploring the medium(s) and/or the form(s) of their art: paint, clay, line, shape, color. What is the writer’s medium, the things from which her representations are built?  Words.

Speaking of words...remember my nitpicky insistence that matters whether you say "addresses," "claims," "says," "asserts," and so on? Here's a tool for you: a list of verbs that may come in handy when you're trying to characterize (or summarize or argue with or otherwise respond to) someone else's thinking.

For Tuesday, November 4 (Day 21):

I may try (tediously?) to tie up our loose Brantlinger ends--here, online. I'll send out an electronic holler if I do. Otherwise: Queer Theory. (It's here. Get used to it.) More particularly: Andrew Michael Roberts, "Epistemology, Modernity, and Masculinity: Heart of Darkness." (It's not in our edition of Heart of Darkness; rather, it's in the online Course Reader.) The usual drill: mark up the text, highlighting/underlining clauses that summarize and using marginal annotations for other comments & questions.

To consider as you read:

• What does Roberts mean when he says, on p. 118, that "knowledge, ideas about knowledge, and symbols of truth are differentially distributed among male and female characters and . . . such knowledge, ideas, and symbols are themselves used to set up, construct, reinforce, or modify gender differences" or "gendered epistemology" (120)? (What's "epistemology," for that matter?)
• What is the evidence of some kind of sexual attraction to Kurtz on Marlow's part?  According to Roberts--and according to what you yourself find in HoD?
• Roberts suggests that there are two overriding preoccupations in the novel: the circulation of knowledge (Marlow's mutterings about what can and can't be seen, can and can't be conveyed, who is and isn't "out of it") and relationships between men (for instance, Marlow speaks to "you fellows" about his time among the pilgrims, the accountant, the papier-mache Mephistopheles, the man of patches, and, finally, Kurtz; there's also Kurtz's relationship to the worshipful harlequin). What's the nature of these relationships? What do men owe one another?  Where do women fit in in their relationships?  
• Roberts references Eve Sedgwick's notion of "epistemologically arousing place holders" in relation to the circulation of knowledge (rather than the knowledge itself); what's all that about? What are these "epistemologically arousing place holders" and what purpose do they serve (again, according to Roberts)?
• What, according to Roberts, is the naive or "realist" explanation for why Marlow lies to the Intended?  Why does Roberts claim there's more going on?  
• How does Roberts historicize his discussion of Heart of Darkness?  What does he see as the significance of the era in which the novel was written? What does he mean by "the love that dare not speak its name"? (You might want to google it.)
• What is Roberts' point, ultimately?  What does this all boil down to?

For Thursday, October 30 (Day 20): What Is Queer Theory? 

Read the introductory essay in our textbook, but also have a look at these resources: 

• David Halperin. Excerpt from Saint Foucault: Toward a Gay Hagiography. New York: Oxford Up, 1995.
• "What the Fuck is Queer Theory?" (Critical-Theory.com). Annoying style, and in desperate need of copyediting, but illuminating, just the same.
• "Queer Theory" (theory.org.uk). The links to outside resources are mainly busted--I don't know how well the site is maintained--but there's still some useful thumbnail sketches here of the theory and the theorists (well, o fJudith Butler, anyway).

Give some thought to where you've encountered queer theory in the past and what you imagine queer theory would have to say about a text like Heart of Darkness.

Also? Read the summaries of the sections of Brantlinger's article. (I'm still waiting for Section IV, and will update the document once I receive it.) We'll continue discussing these in class. If you have time, compare them to the article. What do the summaries capture acccurately about the original? What do they miss--or misconstrue?

For Tuesday, October 28 (Day 19): Patrick Brantlinger: "Heart of Darkness: Anti-imperialism, Racism, or Impressionism?"

(Note: if you received a grade of "C" or lower on your poetry explication and wish to revise it, I've posted some guidelines for doing so.)

Read the entire Brantlinger essay. As you read, think and jot down some notes about the following:

• Brantlinger opens the essay by referencing Chinua Achebe's denunciation of Conrad and Heart of Darkness as racist, and he subsequently returns to that claim at various points. What's Brantlinger's take on this contentious issue? What were your initial reactions to the novel and its depictions of race? Are you persuaded by Brantlinger's reading of the novel's racial politics?
  
  
• Brantlinger claims that Conrad was more appalled by the hypocrisy and propaganda of colonialism than by its violence or by the atrocities inflicted upon the native Congolese.  How does he square this claim with his later assertion that Conrad did, in fact, "admire Kurtz," just as Lionel Trilling claimed?   
  
  
• Brantlinger gives us a list of "true facts" that Conrad chose not to use in the novella (like the presence of Arab slave traders in the Congo); he also considers the source(s) for many of these facts.  Why are Conrad's omissions interesting to him?  How does this detailed historical information figure in his reading of Heart of Darkness?
  
  
• In section III Brantlinger cites Frederic Jameson's description of Conrad's "impressionism"as "elaborate but essentially hollow." First, what's meant by "impressionism?" And then what about that adjective--"hollow": what does it suggest; why does Brantlinger use it? (Also: Conrad's desire to avoid "embarrassingly clear content"--Huh?) Brantlinger relates this "impressionism" to "misty halos" and "moonshine." What's he on about there?  Paraphrase his larger point.
   
• Read carefully Brantlinger's discussion of this novella's genre, especially its status as a mass culture adventure story as well as a Work of Serious Modernist Literature (that's in section III). Smith, too, references the novel's indebtedness to adventure fiction. What does Brantlinger mean by "Gothic romance"? And so what if the novella is a little of both?  Why does that matter?
     
• Compare what Brantlinger says about the Savage Woman (319-320) to what Johanna Smith said about her (193-195). To what extent are they saying the same thing? To what extent do their readings differ?
  
  
• What makes Brantlinger's essay a postcolonial reading of Heart of Darkness, exactly?

After carefully reading the entire essay, go back and focus your energies. If your last name begins with

• A - B, focus on the introductory section; 
• C - G, focus on Section I; 
• K - M, Section II; 
• P - San, Section III; 
• Sat - W, Section IV. 

Mark up the text; draft some notes towards a summary; identify the passages you find most challenging. Come to class prepared to talk about them and to work on summarizing.

For Thursday, October 23 (Day 18): "What Is Postcolonial Criticism?"

We'll spend some more time with Johanna Smith before we begin discussing postcolonial theory. So

1) designated scribes: please send me your group's summary of the "Savage Woman" or "Aunt" section; and
2) the rest of you: be ready for some collective discussion and constructive critique of those summaries.

(And while you're at it: review the rest of Smith's essay and bring questions, objections, squawks, and complaints.)

Next: read "What Is Postcolonial Criticism" (and, if you have access to it, Mary Klages's discussion of race and postcolonialism (chapter 9 of her Literary Theory). Postcolonial theory is sometimes regarded as a branch of Cultural Studies--itself a "big tent"--and a cousin of New Historicism. If you have the time and the inclination, you might want to read "What Is the New Historicism?" for some additional theoretical background. Questions about "What is Postcolonial Criticism" and/or "What Is the New Historicism"? Bring 'em.

But what do you know already about postcolonial criticism? Where have you heard about it and/or what did you learn? How does Ross Murfin's explanation of the concerns of postcolonialism jibe with what you've learned elsewhere? Jot down some notes in answer to these questions and...(do I have to say it?).

For Tuesday, October 21 (Day 17):

Johanna Smith: "'Too Beautiful Altogether': Ideologies of Gender and Empire in Heart of Darkness"
Be sure to reread the passages in the novella that Smith refers to (e.g., the accountant and the laundress, the Savage Woman, Marlow's visit to the Intended, etc.) and compare your understanding of what’s happening in any given scene with Smith's.  Are you persuaded by her analysis? To what extent yes, to what extent no?

As you read, consider the ways that Smith is structuring her essay; what choices is she making in how she presents her insights?  What do you find effective in Smith; what do you find not so effective?

Some things to ponder and reflect upon as you read:

• Think about the function of irony in Smith's essay, especially in her discussion of the accountant and the laundress. We discussed that passage a couple of days ago, but let's consider it again in light of her argument. Reread the relevant section of the novella (pp. 32-33); in what sense or to what degree is Marlow being ironic, as you read him? Smith describes him as "ironic yet appreciative" (192); do you agree? Why?
• How does the Savage Woman "threaten the boundaries of masculine restraint," exactly (as Smith puts it on p. 194)?
• How, according to Smith, does Marlow "construct" the African Woman or the European women (try focusing on one or the other)?  Why is it necessary for him to "construct" the feminine in these ways?
• Students often find Smith's reading of the Intended "far-fetched" (199-201). I don't. Be prepared to duke it out!

If you received a C or lower (or no grade at all) on your formal explication of a poem: look for addititional revision guidelines to be posted here soon...

For Thursday, October 16 (Day 16):

Whew! (Thanks for sticking with me through that marathon class.)

Okay...I know I said No New Reading for Thursday--and it is in fact the case that with respect to Johanna Smith's "Too Beautiful Altogether," you only need to review those first few paragraphs," which we'll be working with in class (in addition to discussing How To Read Critical Texts).

But: I'd also appreciate it if you'd read "What Are Feminist and Gender Criticism?," which immediately precedes Smith's essay in the Bedford edition of Heart of Darkness. For purposes of discussion: consider, first, what you understand to be the aims of feminism generally (apart from feminist literary theory), the aims of gender theory, and your relationship to these ideas. Do you consider yourself a feminist? Are you interested in theories of gender, generally? Why or why not? What do you understand to be the relationship between feminist theory generally and feminist literary theory?

In the (unlikely?) event you bought Mary Klages' book Literary Theory: A Guide for the Perplexed, you should also read her chapter on feminism, which is mainly concerned with feminist literary theory.

For Tuesday, October 14 (Day 15): Reading Literary Criticism

Don't forget to read the Introductory "Biographical and Historical Contexts" and to browse the "Heart of Darkness in Cultural Context" section of our text. (And then there are all those online resources in the Heart of Darkness section of the course reader...)

Tuesday, we'll take a quick break to catch our breath but also to prepare for our tussle with contemporary critical approaches. Take a few minutes to think about what kind of literary or critical theory you've encountered so far in your academic career: feminist theory? psychoanalytic theory? postcolonial theory? New Historicism? queer theory? Where did you encounter it, and how was it presented? (For instance, did you read any of the theoreticians themselves--Spivak or Freud or Butler? Someone else's account of their ideas? Critical essays on literary texts? Or what?) What's your own relationship to so-called "theory"? Love it? Hate it? Can't live without it? Have no opinion whatsoever?

Over the next three weeks we'll read three contemporary articles on Heart of Darkness written (more or less) through three different critical lenses: those of feminist, post-colonial, and queer theories. And you'll produce a response to one of the essays in the form of a written assignment, the Response to A Critical Essay.

To prepare for Monday's class, then, please read the following:

• the description of the Response to A Critical Essay assignment;
• the handout "Making the Most of Your Reading";
• the first several pages of Johanna Smith's essay in our edition of Heart of Darkness: "'Too Beautiful Altogether': Ideologies of Gender and Empire in Heart of Darkness." (For Tuesday, you may stop at the break at the top of page 192).

After reading the beginning of the essay once, try marking it up using the techniques outlined in the "Making the Most of Your Reading" handout--that is, highlight or underline the sentences and phrases that, when read back, provide the best summary of what Smith is saying. Use marginal annotations for your own comments or questions. 

Think too about any rhetorical strategies you see Smith employing here. How well does she construct her argument in these first few pages? What transitional terms does she use to make explicit the logic that gets us from one sentence to the next, for instance? Are there points in the text where her argument becomes unclear to you? Why? Can you diagnose what the problem is? 

Bring your marked up book with you to class on Tuesday!

We'll also spend a bit more time on Heart of Darkness, since there's still a lot to say about the text. Here's the timeline we crafted in class; Amanda very kindly transcribed it (thanks, Amanda!) and I made a few corrections and additions. For discussion purposes on Tuesday, consider first of all:

• We began to discuss what Marlow is sarcastic and cynical about, but what, if anything, is he earnest about? What does he believe in? (Key your answer to one or more passages of your choosing.)

And then review these several passages in the text:

• Desciptions of Kurtz (and his report to Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs) on pages 65-66; on page 82 (when Marlow follows Kurtz back into the jungle and persuades him to return to the boat); and on page 86 (Marlow's assessment of Kurtz after he dies). Also: how would you characterize Marlow's relationship to Kurtz?

• Descriptions of setting on pages 17-19 and bottom page 50 to top of 51. Where are we--literally and figuratively--in both instances? How are we being invited to see the setting?

For Tuesday, October 7 and Thursday, October 9 (Days 13 & 14)

We begin our discussion of Heart of Darkness! Try to finish, but at the very least, make it through parts I and II (in the Bedford edition, that takes you to page 70) by Tuesday's class. For the time being you can use any version of the text of Heart of Darkness, including an electronic one, since it's in the public domain (in fact, an electronically searchable text might come in handy for purposes of discussion). Eventually, though, you'll need the Bedford edition for the critical essays it contains.

For our discussion this week we'll focus on the formal properties of fiction in the text. More specifically, though, here are a few things to look at/think about as you read. You might also want to choose one formal property of fiction to concentrate on as you make your way through the text:

First, plot. What actually, literally, happens here? The text is famously oblique; keep track of what's going on. You might construct a little outline of Marlow's movements, marking pages when he actually leaves one place or arrives at another. (I'm not kidding--it's easy to miss these details.)

Then think about plot, focusing on two of Hawthorn's ideas in particular: order and anachrony. The novella begins some time after the events Marlow narrates; Marlow knows all along where this story is going. Where do we get foreshadowing? The plot mainly unfolds in chronological order, but Marlow periodically makes cryptic references to some future revelation. Keep note of that. And from pages 63 - 66 there's an epic paragraph where Marlow is suddenly all the hell over the place, temporally speaking, in a strange, rambling meditation. What's that all about?

Does the novel skip over events? Are there, in other words, ellipses, gaps?

Also: Marlow has an annoying habit of interrupting the narrative to philosophize or to directly address the other men on the Nellie. Where/when does he do that? Why?

Narration/characterization: it's Charlie Marlow's world. Who is he? What do we know about him, and how do we learn it? We get our first description in the fourth paragraph; he speaks for the first time on page 19. But the entire novella is, in some ways, the revelation of Marlow's character, via his narration. What do you think of him? Do you like him?  Does he make you complicit in some way, as Hawthorn says some narrators do? Complicit in what?

Make a note of Marlow's use of irony (e.g., he refers to the Accountant that he meets on page 32 as a "miracle"; he calls the scrawled note that Kurtz attaches to his report "that valuable postscriptum"). Try to keep track of other moments when Marlow speaks ironically, or uses other figurative language, like understatement.

At the same time, take note of moments when you think irony is being directed at Marlow--that is, when you sense Conrad is taking the piss out of him (as our transatlantic cousins would say). Is Marlow meant to be mainly reliable or mainly unreliable (if we think of reliability as a measure of the distance between the "norms" of the author and the narrator, that is)? One specific motif in the text to watch for: on page 21 Marlow, discussing the rationale for imperialism (which he calls "aggravated murder on a great scale"), makes a distinction between "sentimental pretence" and "an unselfish belief in the idea." "What redeems [imperialism]," he says, "is the idea only." What do you understand by this distinction? How does the distinction play out over the course of the novella? Is Marlow speaking for Conrad, or is Conrad distancing himself from Marlow?  

What about other characters? The manager? The brickmaker? The harlequin? The Savage Woman? The Intended? We experience them all through Marlow; are we meant to trust his assessments of these people? And, of course, there's Kurtz himself. Track your understanding of who this Kurtz person is--what do we learn about him, when do we learn it, and how do we learn it?

What about the framing narrator? Who's he? Why does he exist--why can't Marlow narrate the entire thing (it's not that hard to imagine). What does the framing narrator provide?

As for setting, there are several: the company offices, the Outer Station, the Inner Station, the home of the Intended, and so on. We generally think of the novella as happening in the late 19th century in the Belgian Congo, on the Congo River. The setting, however, is never explicitly named, aside from the Thames Estuary at the very beginning (in some respects the entire novel takes place near Gravesend, no?). But Marlow talks about the settings quite a bit; locate a few descriptive passages (remembering that setting includes not only place, but time and social milieu, too) and think about where it is we're meant to be and, possibly, the figurative resonances Conrad is trying to squeeze from those settings.

Okay! That's plenty to think about as you read!

For Thursday, October 2 (Day 12)

Put a spit-shine on that final draft. (Proofread before you hand in, please. Take out your calipers and make sure those margins are no more than one inch. Etc., etc.)

Then: review the remainder of the Hawthorn chapter, which we'll resume discussing in class.

And delve ever deeper into the Heart of Darkness.

For Tuesday, September 30 (Day 11)

Longer term:

Get a jump on Heart of Darkness. Annotate your text in the margins and take notes in a separate notebook. (Try using Jeremy Hawthorn [below, "near term"] for guidance.)

Medium term:

Work on revising your papers, remembering that the deadline for a final draft is Thursday (and you'd be well advised to put your paper through at least one more intermediate draft before then). Review the feedback you got from your colleagues. Review the assignment sheet carefully, and have another look at the examples of "explication" that Terry Eagleton provides. And then:

• Revisit all of the homework assignments you've had over the last several weeks, especially those pertaining to the formal aspects of poetry that you're focusing on in your paper. Each assignment effectively contains (or at least suggests) a "checklist" of questions that you can run through to help ensure that you're being thorough and methodical.
• Make sure--in addition to taking Marianne Ahokas's straight-talking tips to heart--that you're deploying your critical vocabulary accurately and precisely. That poem you're writing about is a "lyrical ballad," huh? (Really?) A stanza with x lines is called what now? Does that pair of lines you're isolating actually qualify as a "heroic couplet"? Are you sure that thing you keep talking about is a symbol and not a metaphor (or just a plain old image)? No excuses for sloppy terminology; there are any number of websites, handbooks, and other reference sources you can and should refer to--including several handouts you've read, studied, and or downloaded since the start of the semester.

Near term:

Read Jeremy Hawthorn's chapter on "Analyzing Fiction" (in the online Course Reader). It's a long one, so don't leave it for the last minute. Read carefully. Take notes. Quiz yourself. Then pick a work of fiction that you're familiar with (and that you can open up, right now, and refer to) and--with reference to Hawthorn--jot down some notes in response to the following questions:

1.  What kind of narrator are we dealing with here? What's the grammatical perspective? 
2.  "Intra" or "extra" fictional?
3.  In what ways is this an impersonal narrator? In what ways is it a personified narrator?
4.  How "distant" is the narrator--from you? From the events narrated?
5.  Is this narrator "reliable" or "unreliable"? How do you know?  In what sense(s)? 
6.  Is the passage "dramatic" or "recollective"?

Finally, for kicks:

Check out next Tuesday's Redwood Jazz Alliance show, The Cookers. (Only ten bucks for students!)

For Thursday, September 25 (Day 10)

Yes, you've done your last Moodle upload--but you haven't made your last visit to Moodle. Instructions for Thursday's class (what you need to bring, etc.) are there.

For Tuesday, September 23 (Day 9)

Instructions for the last Moodle upload are (where else?) on Moodle.

Looking for the workshop instructions and/or the imagery/figurative language questions that I projected on-screen today? Look no further. (Although I think Michael Meyer's questions about Roethke's "Root Cellar"--on p. 87 of the excerpt on "Imagery"--are also pretty useful.)

For Thursday, September 18 (Day 8)

Latest homework assignment is on Moodle. Just to reiterate: the fact that we're lagging behind the calendar means that two upcoming deadlines have also shifted. Rough draft of the Poetry Analysis paper is now due Thursday, September 25; final draft due Thursday, October 2.

Bring (back) to class all of the work you've uploaded to Moodle so far on your two chosen poems. Print that work out and be ready to show it--and talk about it--to a partner, who will give be instructed to take off the kid gloves and give you some frank, skeptical feedback. The first 20 minutes of class will be devoted to this show-and-"dish."

For Tuesday, September 16 (Day 7)

It's official: we're now a day behind the calendar on the syllabus. This means, among other things, that the asssignment for Thursday, 9/11, still stands. If you didn't manage to do the assignment by the original due date, you have another chance! If you've completed and uploaded the assignment, you have nothing else to do!

BUT: make sure you've checked out the assignment sheet for the "Poetry Analysis" paper (on the main page of the class website).  (Erratum: the original version of the assignment sheet refers to a handout in the Course Reader. That handout is actually on the General Reference page of the class website. I've corrected the reference in the most current version of the spec sheet.)

AND: for Tuesday, please gather up all of the work you've uploaded to Moodle (so far) on your two chosen poems, print that work out, and bring it with you to class.

Link Miscellany:

• As timely as today's headlines: Alexandra Alter, "Line by Line, E-Books Turn Poet-Friendly" (New York Times 15 September 2014): "When John Ashbery, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, first learned that the digital editions of his poetry looked nothing like the print version, he was stunned. There were no line breaks, and the stanzas had been jammed together into a block of text that looked like prose. The careful architecture of his poems had been leveled...."

For Thursday, September 11 (Day 6):

We'll continue the work we began Tuesday on meter. (Get ready for some scan-sionnnnnn!) Review the last set of instructions on Moodle, along with the poems I mentioned there--and the assigned reading, of course.

Meanwhile, there's some new reading to do--and more homework to upload. Details on Moodle.

For Tuesday, September 9 (Day 5):

Moodle assignment is up and visible, as far as I know. (Please--somebody correct me if I'm wrong!)

You should also go back to the main page and print or download a copy of the assigment sheet for the "Formalist Analysis of a Poem" paper. I'll talk about it a little--and take your questions--on Tuesday.

Remember "enjambement"? The root word, as I mentioned in class, is the french word for leg: "jambe." (The English cognate is "jamb," as in "doorjamb"--the two vertical members of a door frame.) But it gets better: the verb "enjamber" means "to straddle." So poetic enjambement is when a grammatical or syntactical unit "straddles" the break between lines, rather than stopping at the end of the line.

For Thursday, September 4 (Day 4):

Homework assignment is on Moodle. But as long as you're here, I'll forewarn you that I'm thinking--thinking, mind you, even though you've been very tolerant so far of my lapses into preaching--of putting together a little sermon that sums up some of what we've been saying about "plausibility" in interpretation. Stay tuned.

Meanwhile, here's that YouTube video of a fairly sweet-tempered, matter-of-fact, un-embittered Philip Larkin reading his "This Be The Verse":

For Tuesday, September 2 (Day 3):

Waddya lookin' here for? (Seriously: glad you checked in--it's a good habit--but we're still on Moodle for a couple more weeks.)

But just to make it worth your while...You've already discovered that Terry Eagleton discusses Hopkins's "Spring and Fall" on pp. 124-5 (and you'll soon discover, if you haven't already, that Helen Vendler also takes it up on pp. 178-9). But here's a parody--which is at the same time an interpretation:

• George Starbuck, "Margaret Are You Drug" (scroll down): "Spring and Fall" rendered in Beatnik-ese--from "Translations from the English"

For Thursday, August 28th (Day 2):

Check out the Syllabus Addenda/Course Policies and General Reference pages of the Course Website (and let me know about any dead links), and of course go the Course Reader page, where you'll find part of your first reading assignment for Thursday. (Username and password on the print copy of syllabus, remember?) Get to the bookstore and pick up Eagleton. Then head on over to the Moodle page to get Thursday's homework instructions. Game on!