A summer syllabus

Now that your semester is done and grades are in, no doubt you are itching to get back to work! I wanted to post a few titles up here to offer you some ideas about summer reading. Like -- I assume -- many of you, I am excited as all hell about the last Harry Potter book coming out in July. However, for those of you who might not be spending the summer rereading the last three Harry Potter novels, here are some suggestions.

A list of literary antecedents

Did you find yourself baffled by the allusions in the texts we read this summer? A goodly number of textual and structural allusions in English-language can be traced back to significant foundational texts from the European tradition. Here is my list of texts that I see coming up again and again, organized from most frequent to least:

1. The Odyssey, Homer (I hear the Fagles translation is quite good; I was raised on the Fitzgerald)
   
2. The Divine Comedy, Dante (Really you just need Inferno and the first bit of Purgatorio... I read the Sinclair prose translation, but I hear that Ciardi verse translation is better in every way)
3. The Metamorphoses, Ovid
   
4. The Iliad, Homer (I read Lattimore, although there are a million newer and trendier translations)
   
5. Oedipus Tyrannos, Sophocles (Lattimore & Green was the conventional translation for this and all Greek tragedies when I was in school)
6. The poetry of Horace
   
7. Agamemnon, Aeschylus
8. Don Quixote, Cervantes
9. The poetry of Catullus
   
10. The Aeneid, Virgil (I hesitate to even put this here -- a very persuasive argument was made in the Harper's review of Fagles's new translation that The Aeneid is scarcely worth reading; still, it's one of those books we're supposed to list as being a significant foundation for Anglophone letters)
    

This list is geared towards readers of twentieth-century literature. In any other context, and possibly even in this context, the Bible should be at the top of this list -- not until the most recent generations have we seen writers coming into their profession with only the scarcest knowledge of the Bible.

A list of literary analogues

If reading translated texts from a couple thousand years ago doesn't sound like quite your thing, how about some recommendations of somewhat more contemporary texts? This list is organized as a sequence of analogues tied to texts we read in class this semester. Because I'm not a verse reader, I will be sticking with prose.

• If you liked Middlemarch, you are a little bit out of luck, what with having already read the greatest novel in the English language. However, you might read in the work of Eliot's greatest admirers echoes of Middlemarch's thematic and structural qualities. I particularly recommend Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady as a late nineteenth-century gripping social drama -- like Eliot, James is concerned with social and psychological phenomena, and so, like Middlemarch, Portrait is a bit light on plot. Virginia Woolf revisited questions of relations and relationality in The Years -- one of the few books she felt genuinely satisfied about, and one that I have been longing to reread for quite a while.
  
• If you liked The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, you might really enjoy Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone (often called the first detective novel) and The Woman in White. Most of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories have a Stevensonesque feel to them, particularly The Hound of the Baskervilles. Although Stevenson has been largely ignored by the academy, I have been told by more than one reliable source that his other works are just an enormous pleasure to read.
  
• If you liked To the Lighthouse, then Mrs Dalloway is a must-read. If you've read them both, try Jacob's Room. If you haven't read A Room of One's Own then that is worth sitting down with for an hour or two -- it's a short literary essay, and Woolf's most enduring literary legacy. The other famous and successful Bloomsbury writer is E. M. Forster, who wrote several excellent novels, particularly Room With a View, Howards End (my favorite), and A Passage to India. Woolf was also, in some ways, Henry James's literary heir, so James's fiction (mentioned above) might be a good place to turn. Woolf also had an interesting literary relationship with Marcel Proust, whose work helped shape the style of her later novels. There is a wonderful new translation of the first volume of Proust's enormous A la recherche du temps perdu, called Swann's Way, by Lydia Davis.
• If you liked Endgame, you're in luck: Beckett wrote several plays and novels with the same twisted sort of nihilistic humor. I particularly recommend Malloy, a strange, short pseudo-novel that includes some of the funniest scenes in any twentieth-century fiction.
  
• If you liked Arcadia, you will probably like Stoppard's even more popular Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. (There's an amusing movie of it as well.)
  
• If you liked Disgrace -- and according to my statistics most of you did -- then you will almost certainly like Ian McEwan's Atonement. His subject matter is not exactly the same -- although there is sex, rape, and violence -- but the precision of his prose style is quite similar to Coetzee's. I have also heard good things about Coetzee's Foe, and his Waiting for the Barbarians is frequently cited as his most significant work.
  

The Shapiro syllabus

Here, because I have a blog and the inclination to indulge myself, are some books I really wish everybody would read. I don't make any special claim about them other than that they are fun and enormously satisfying reads.

• Special Topics in Calamity Physics, by Marisha Pessl, starts off sounding like a slightly more interesting than usual coming-of-age novel, but then about 300 pages in it becomes a murder mystery, and then another 150 pages in it becomes a meditation about literature and life. Even if this sounds boring, it isn't.
• Some more contemporary lit: Zadie Smith's White Teeth is stunning and hilarious -- it is basically a novel about the madness of polyphony. Try also Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything is Illuminated. These young authors -- JSF is barely 30 -- are throwing a wrench into earlier literary mechanisms by which pious authors try to make the whole world feel sacred. Smith and Foer and others are taking problems that are supposed to be solved and showing us that solutions are unnecessary and uninteresting.
  
• Midnight's Children, by Salman Rushdie. Rushdie might be the most interesting living writer in English -- if I had to guess whose books students will be reading in 200 years, I would guess Rushdie (and Toni Morrison). Midnight's Children might be a difficult book -- I didn't think so, but I've heard this complaint about it -- but it is also the book with the most interesting narrator and the most satisfyingly serpentine plot. If you would prefer a slightly more conventionally-plotted story that focuses on the history and effect of popular music, The Ground Beneath Her Feet is a pretty good one.
• You have to be a certain kind of person to love it, but Henry James's The Ambassadors ranks with Middlemarch as one of the great atmospheric novels of the English language. Ambassadors is really made for the sort of reader who likes to sit down and read for two hours and get through only 30 or 40 pages: it is a book that requires rumination, and that will eventually shift the way you see the world. It is an utter masterpiece.
• As long as I'm going on about utter masterpieces, Moby-Dick is not read nearly often enough. It's silly and strange and all sorts of brilliant, and although it's long it's also the kind of book you can read one chapter a night for four or five months.
• Finally, if you're just itching for Deathly Hallows and you want some magnificent YA lit to read, try Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy (first novel: The Golden Compass). I usually try to give an ideological caveat before recommending it -- the last novel of the trilogy is strikingly anti-church -- but the story is so wonderful and the moral language of the novels so articulate that even readers who are deeply invested in church life probably won't feel offended by Pullman's take on Catholicism and Episcopalianism.
  

Gradedown! Post 9 -- Grades are in!

A few minutes ago I submitted grades to MOR for approval. If he approves them today, it is my understanding that they will go online around midnight tonight.

If you're impatient to see your grade, feel free to send me an email! Forgive me if it takes a little while to get back to you -- now that I'm done grading for the semester, I can devote fuller attention to packing up the rest of my apartment.

It has been a pleasure working with you all this semester: this was the first non-100-level English course I've taught, and it has been a welcome challenge to try to keep up with active and critical readers. Please don't hesitate to stay in touch!

Gradedown! Post 8

My grades are due in to MOR tomorrow afternoon, so this might well be the last Gradedown! before the end. Check back later this week for some thoughts about how you might keep your literary muscles in shape for the summer!

Right now, all I have left to grade are

• 18 hebdomadals.

I've been finding that these last hebdomadals are, with some exceptions, the most consistently strong textual interpretation and analysis I've seen this semester. It seems that the brutal practice of writing weekly hebdomadals helped many of you find the right language with which to articulate your literary investigations. I know that as a student it can feel as though all learning is too incremental to be immediately appreciable; however, if you were only to look back at your first hebdomadal and your last you might immediately appreciate the ways you've become better writers. In fact, you might want to go do that now.

Consider Louis Menand's remarks about higher education in last week's New Yorker. He concludes that in recent years colleges and universities have sought to make students feel prepared for whatever unpredictable life awaits them, whereas in fact students would do far better to be aware of just how unprepared they are, and how impossible it would be to be prepared. In an odd way, an English degree can do what a business degree can't: it can show you what happened when Beckett, and T. S. Eliot, and Auden, and Woolf -- all at the heights of their careers -- came into direct and expressive contact with the real, and found themselves lost and hapless.

Is it learning, then, to be able more effectively to articulate the techniques and the nuances by which these writers understand their blindness and their confusion? I think so, if only because it gives you (1) the language with which to describe to yourself your own situation when you look around you in three months or three years and feel that utter panic of uncertainty, and it gives you (2) the absolute certainty that people have been here before, and that comparatively few of those people drowned themselves.

Gradedown! Post 7

Due to a counting-related problem, I had 10 more hebdomadals than I thought. After a couple hours of grading last night and this morning, however, I am down to (I think)

• 37 hebdomadals

It is taking me on average 5-6 minutes to grade each hebdomadal, which means I can do about 10 hebdomadals an hour -- meaning about 4 more hours of grading. These numbers mean that my comments on your hebdomadals are becoming increasingly terse. If you would like me to expand on any of my remarks, please don't hesitate to email me back. (If your question isn't urgent, I might delay until after grades are in to respond.)

I really wish I had set up hebdomadals to be more responsive -- I ask a question on the blog, you respond in your hebdomadal, I ask a question in my response to your hebdomadal, you answer my question in your next hebdomadal, and so on.

Gradedown! Post 6

I managed to finish the rest of the exam essays yesterday, leaving me with just:

• 45 hebdomadals

My mother is flying into town in a couple hours -- she hasn't come here to visit since 2002 -- so I hope to spend most of my weekend with her. Still, if I can fit in a couple good bouts of grading then there's still hope that grades will go in on Tuesday. I'll keep you posted.

Congratulations with the end of finals, everyone!

Gradedown! Post 5

Thursdays are usually given over to planning for section, so you might have imagined that my habits would lead me to focus on pushing through grading hebdomadals. Hah! Today was more of a packing (and video games) sort of day than yesterday was, but that's not to say it was a complete wash. If my counting skills aren't letting me down, I have left

• 31 exam essays
• 47 hebdomadals (still)

Unless I get overwhelmed trying to move my books tomorrow, it might in fact be possible to finish grading by the Tuesday deadline. (I have an ugly history of turning in my grades at the last possible second -- it's a wonder that MOR agreed to let me teach for him again.) Weirdly enough, all this blogging seems to have helped keep me on track. Huh.

I found that the second essay topic -- about violence in the action and structure of texts -- was a serious stumbling block. I've graded all the essays on the first (texts within texts) and second topics, and for some reason essays written on the first topic were substantially better than essays written on the second.

I wrote the second topic, actually, so it's really important to me that I figure out what went on here so I don't do it again. It doesn't seem to me that the second prompt is inherently more difficult than the first -- both ask writers to engage with structural and thematic analysis. Is it simply that we've had a couple of discussions that center around the texts-within-texts problem, and that we only began discussing violence last week?

By the way, if you could read through all the answers I got to this topic you might get a better understanding of why I appreciate essays that make use of unexpected texts. I read four essays in a row that looked at violence in "Porphyria's Lover," Disgrace, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The two of you who used Middlemarch get major props for venturing beyond the obvious -- thank you. (Weirdly, almost no one wrote about "Goblin Market." I guess it's hard to predict exactly what texts count as obvious.)

By the way, thank you guys for the comments on earlier Gradedown! posts: you're helping to keep me awake and working away.

An interhebdolude

The endlessly delightful Heather from section 305 generously agreed to share this gem of a hebdomadal responding to the prompt about epiphanies in To the Lighthouse. (She sent it a few weeks ago, of course, though I just read it yesterday.) One of the pleasures of reading so many hebdomadals in a row has been the chance to run into so many gob-stopping readings: I really want to thank all of you for the work you put in to really thinking through some of the philosophical and stylistic underpinnings of the work we've read this semester -- there are too many excellent essays to feature them all here without drowning people in glorious analysis. Consider Heather's work here as a tribute to the good work so many of you have done these past few weeks.

Epiphanies allow for insight not only into the minds and lives of specific people in the story but more general truths as well. Epiphanies also allow for the stream of consciousness form to have meaning. Without epiphanies, stream of consciousness would just be a jumble of thoughts and ideas, personal and about the external world. Narrative events are different from epiphanies because they have no internal power or outlook. Narrative events are purely external. They create the frame, the setting, the place in the outside world where epiphanies occur. Narrative events drive the narrative and create the skeleton of any story. Epiphanies fill in the gaps, the meat of the story in characters’ thoughts, emotions, feelings, etc…Epiphanies depend on events, are created in and through events. Without events, epiphanies could not be. Lily’s epiphany about marriage comes years after the actual event when Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay have eight children. “So that is marriage, Lily thought, a man and a woman looking at a girl throwing a ball…And suddenly the meaning which, for no reason at all, as perhaps they are stepping out of the Tube or ringing a doorbell, descends on people, making them symbolical, making them representative, came upon them, and made them in the dusk standing, looking, the symbols of marriage, husband and wife” (72). Not only is the event related to this moment from years ago, the actual marriage, but also an event in the present, Prue and Jasper throwing a ball. Epiphanies bring together, in this instance, past (Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay’s marriage), the present (Prue and Jasper’s game), and the future (Lily’s possible marriage to William Bankes).

Though events set the stage for epiphanies, many times the epiphanies come at different times in relation to certain events. When we learn of the deaths of Mrs. Ramsay, Prue, and Andrew, there are no epiphanies relating to the events themselves and the events that surround it until later in the story. The significance of events is to tell the audience what has happened in the characters’ lives we’re reading about. I think it’s important Lily is the only one who gets epiphanies because she is outside the spheres of influence, outside the sphere of connections, more accurately. She is not married like Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay or about to be like Minta and Paul. Her parents aren’t in the story and she’s not one herself. She is not like anyone else in the story. She has no great work completed or fame achieved in the external world. She has few friends, few acquaintances. She seems to always be on the outside, separated from the bias that could affect what she sees and how she sees it. Because she is not connected, she is able to see more, experience more, because she is not closed off or tied down. Her last epiphany, possibly the greatest, is seen at the end and deals with watching Mr. Ramsay, Cam, and James finally reaching the lighthouse. “‘He has landed,’ she said aloud. ‘It is finished’… It was done; it was finished…I have had my vision” (208-209). If Lily had been in the boat with Mr. Ramsay, James, and Cam she would not have had the ability to see what she saw. If she had been part of the Ramsay family or gotten married, she would not have seen what she saw. It is her disconnectedness that allows her to step back and see the bigger picture. Not only does she see the bigger picture but she can see where all the smaller scenes fit into that bigger picture. Making herself separate makes her aware.

In Middlemarch, many different people have epiphanies, symbolizing how disconnected the people in Middlemarch are from their own lives. Dorothea receives hers when she realizes it is neither a sin nor a crime for her to marry for love. She realizes she loves Will and the notion comes as an epiphany because she had not known it before, had not realized it was ok to love and to marry for love and not just for duty or honor. Lydgate experiences his epiphany when he realizes he has lost all control of his life and it’s falling down around him. He tried so hard to please others, mostly his wife, to fit it, and do what was good for society that he forgot to live for himself. When that happened, his life got worse and worse, and farther out of his control. His epiphany grounds him again and by then it’s too late to do anything to save himself which he also realizes. The epiphanies seen in “The Dead” are very personal to Gabriel, about him and seen (realized) by him. There is a much more narrow scope of vision in “The Dead” and though the epiphanies cover a wide array of characters, there is still a single voice they focus on and a specific person, not the world or more general life questions that is affected and/or changed. In To the Lighthouse, the audience also knows what the epiphanies are, to whom they occur and are about, and what they pertain to. There are questions posed throughout the story that the epiphanies give answers to. In Heart of Darkness, the epiphany that comes is very abstract and general, never quite pinned down. Though we, as the audience, can assume that any epiphany will deal with what the heart of darkness actually is we never know. We may get some ideas but nothing is ever made concrete or obvious. In To the Lighthouse, we see the buildup and resolution, or conclusion to almost every epiphany. They reveal secrets of life to the characters themselves and to the world which would otherwise remain forever hidden from view.

Gradedown! Post 4

Finally began attacking the essays last night, leaving me with:

• 47 hebdomadals
• 48 exam essays

It's always somewhat amusing to see all the heat-of-the-moment misnamings that come through on the exams. Within a single essay, for example, there might be a Dr. Jekyll, a Dr. Jeckyl, a Dr. Jekyl, and a Dr. Jeckyl. George Eliot is sometimes an Eliott, an Elliot, and an Elliott -- but she made up the name anyway, so why shouldn't we modify it a little bit at will? My favorite, though, was seeing new versions of my own name crop up on the fronts of blue books: "Kevin Shapiro," for example, or "Meier." Really I'm in no position to tease: a couple years ago I wrote a 20-page essay for MOR that referred regularly to Edmund Casaubon.

Gradedown! Post 3

A few more hebdomadals down, and the alterna-essay:

• 47 hebdomadals
• 66 exam essays

I'm being too indulgent with these, aren't I?

Here are some quick statistics about peer review. The average grade increase from Essay 1 to Essay 2 was 0.43 percent. The essay grades of students who peer-reviewed their essays went up, on average, 3.0 percent: an impressive difference amounting to about a third of a letter grade. The most impressive datum, though, is how amazingly effective star reviewers were -- those five peer reviewers who earned mondo extra credit for putting serious thought and time into peer-reviewing their peers' work. Students whose second essays were peer reviewed by these star reviewers saw grade increases of 8.9 percent: basically a full letter grade. That is seriously, seriously amazing stuff.

Remember that when I graded these second essays, I didn't even glance at the peer reviews: in most cases I didn't know that an essay had been peer reviewed at all.

Thank you, peer reviewers, for making essays on average 3% more pleasant to read. I hope you all keep at it: the statistics here seem to show that a couple hours spent working through a peer's critical comments can boost your grade massively. Massively.

Gradedown! Post 2

Just took care of the peer reviews and one of the hebdomadals, leaving me with

• 1 alterna-essay
• 51 hebdomadals
• 66 exam essays

Here are some interesting things I noticed about the IDs on the final exam:

1. If you were an economist -- and maybe some of you are, actually -- If I were an economist, I would have expected students to approach IDs beginning with the passages about which they felt most confident and proceeding on to passages and texts about which they felt less confident. If a student was only sure about, say, four texts, s/he would take an educated stab at a fifth text. If this hypothesis were right, ID grades would begin high and get lower as the student proceeded. What I noticed, though, was that for most students grades went in the opposite direction -- except in cases where you had to guess at a passage, you more or less improved as you got more practice writing out IDs. What this tells me is that practice really pays -- maybe next semester I will more strenuously urge students to work through several full IDs in the days before the exam.

2. Something I hadn't thought of before: Tristen (306) used the IDs not merely to talk through the thematic problems of the texts but to connect those texts to thematic problems in other texts. It was really smart work, I think, saying that texts could be identified not merely in isolation but also as parts of a larger discourse. That was pretty cool, and I urge all of you to steal Tristen's idea if you take ID-based exams in the future.

3. Whether or not you guys liked a text had little bearing on how well you identified it. This is strange to me -- it's an axiom in literary instruction that getting students to like literature is the entire battle: once they like a text, they will have little trouble working with it. Yet though Disgrace was the massive favorite -- at least according to Friday's quiz-poll -- the average ID score for passage #3 was 4.8/6; IDs of Endgame (passage #4), the second-least-favorite text according to Friday's poll, averaged exactly the same score. While Heart of Darkness had no votes as favorite text and 2 as least favorite, the average grade for HoD IDs (passage #8) was a massive 5.3/6. Here's the breakdown, organized by passage number:

1. Arcadia (3 votes as favorite; 1 vote as least favorite): 7 answers; mean score 4.3
2. The Waste Land (2 votes as favorite; 3 votes as least favorite): 20 answers; mean score 4.8
3. Disgrace (8 votes as favorite): 30 answers, mean grade 4.8
4. Endgame (5 votes as least favorite): 12 answers; mean grade 4.8
5. "Araby" (2 votes as favorite; 1 vote as least favorite): 31 answers; mean grade 4.7
6. Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde (1 vote as least favorite): 25 answers; mean grade 4.8
7. Middlemarch (6 votes as favorite; 7 votes as least favorite): 8 answers, mean grade 4.1
8. Heart of Darkness (2 votes as least favorite): 22 answers; mean grade 5.3
9. To the Lighthouse (2 votes as favorite; 5 votes as least favorite): 10 answers; mean grade 4.6

I promise to get back to grading later tonight... well, whether I promise or not clearly it has to get done. I will probably regale you with a later post articulating some thoughts about peer review (the numbers here are interesting). A little bit later -- maybe after I finish grading; maybe as a reward for getting through some of the exam essays -- I'll write a little bit about next steps for you guys: continuing education, and all that.

Gradedown! Post 1

After the exam today, MOR gave us a grades-in deadline of the 22nd. I'll be posting here for the next few days to motivate myself to keep going -- it's not that I imagine you care; it's that I need something to do with my life other than grading and packing.

I managed to get all the IDs done this afternoon, so here's what I have left to grade:

• One alterna-essay
• 52 hebdomadals
• 9 peer reviews
• 66 exam essays

I don't want to work out the averages here, but I'm thinking that 10 hebdomadals a day should be manageable, although that will be on top of... what? 18 exam essays a day? Don't get me wrong: I am completely in love with this job; there's something about grading, though, that's somewhat overwhelming.

Office hours location update

Hi, all! In order to avoid disturbing my officemates, I'm going to be in HCW 7117 for my office hours this afternoon. On the off chance that someone kicks us out of the classroom, I'll update the note on my office door.

Some remarks about final exam strategy: essay questions (Part II)

So when I plotted out the words-per-five-minutes data we collected two weeks back, here's the frequency chart I got:

The mean words-per-five-minutes count is 132; the median is 124.5. If you wrote these essays blindly, putting pen to paper at minute 0 and going nonstop until minute 45, they would come on average to nearly 1,200 words -- the length of a 4-page paper. This strikes me as the sort of strategy that will drown me in inarticulate verbage.

Here's what I suggest: force yourself to spend 5 minutes thinking about the essay (not necessarily at the beginning -- time taken in the middle and at the end of the essay can really revitalize your argumentative strategy) and write a cautious and legible 24 words per minute. By doing this, you will come out with about 1,000 words -- probably the right length for a thoughtful 45-minute essay.

This is a strategy it is probably worth practicing. Set up a study date with a colleague, set an alarm for 45 minutes, and craft out a full response to a challenging essay question. This will not only give you a chance to figure out when it will be best for you to take your 5 minutes to think through your argument, and to see how well you put together an analytical thesis under pressure, but it will also give you a chance to think through some texts and interpretations: good practice all around.

I have not seen the final exam, and it can be difficult to guess exactly which essay topics Prof. Ortiz-Robles will pick, so you might strategize the essay questions on which you concentrate in such a way as to shore up your weaknesses. From personal experience, I have found that time you spend on any essay prompt translates into better performance on all essay prompts; better, then, to spend time focused on those prompts you hope won't show up on the final but which you fear will show up.

While you are mathematically safe crossing two prompts off the list -- you will only have to write on two out of four prompts on the final -- if you do so and those two prompts show up, you'll be stuck writing on the other two: potentially an ugly situation. Safer, again, to strategize answers to all the prompts, or at least to nine of them.

Develop answers to the essays that make use of more than the minimum two texts. If you have answers set to go that usefully compare three or four texts, then you will not only have an easier time figuring out what to say for those 1,000 words but you also won't have to worry about text overlap.

At a basic level, this class is not about information but about analysis: these essays should show not merely that you have been listening during lecture and discussion for the last 15 weeks, but that you have picked up on the basic strategies of intermediate-level literary analysis. Concentrate on creating new arguments from existing texts, and show me that you can synthesize new readings and contextualize the significance of these readings within the theoretical frames of the class -- the thematic shifts from Romanticism to Modernism; the changing relationship of individual to society; the definition and redefinition of man; shifting theories of what art does and/or how it acts in the world.

One last note about these essays: have fun with them! Be brazen; be creative in your interpretations and analysis. Argue your case with flair, and revel in strong connections between strange texts. If you're not having fun, find a new way to approach the question.

Some practice IDs

My wonderful fellow TA Katie sent me a set of practice IDs that she put together for her class:

• Word doc (42 kb)
• RTF (54 kb)
• PDF (111 kb)

Thank you, Katie!

Tuesday prefinal office hours

(The final prefinal hours, as it were.)

• Tue 5/15, 3:30 to 5:30 pm, 7134 Helen C. White Hall

7134 HCW is my actual office. If my fellow TAs are around I would rather not disturb them -- we can look for a classroom down the hall. If we move, I'll leave a note on the door.

Pre-final office hours!

Where I'll be:

• Monday 5/14 - 11 am to 3 pm - Fair Trade Coffee House
• Tuesday 5/15 - 3:30 to 5:30 pm - TBA

Come with questions, or with texts you'd like to go over. If I'm sitting with someone, join us! The more perspectives we have on a question or on a text the better we'll all do. (You might think about this as a sort of pedagogical multiperspectivalism.)

Possible prefinal office hours

I'm thinking about holding office hours on Monday of finals week from 11 am to 3 pm. Will those of you who are fairly certain you would like to meet with me before the final exam be able to meet with me during those hours? Would you prefer Sunday afternoon hours? Responses via email or via comments below are welcome.

Hebdomadal topics (week 15) (Updated 5/8)

Topic 1.

How effectively can literature respond to political problems? Consider how authors answer this question by means of texts themselves (e.g. Disgrace) and by means of illustrating the effect of literature through texts within texts (e.g. Byron in Disgrace or Byron in Arcadia). You can write about Disgrace alone or about Disgrace and any of the texts we have read this semester.

Here is one way you might think about this problem. Coetzee, Beckett, and T. S. Eliot won Nobel Prizes for literature. Unlike more literary prizes -- the Man Booker Award, the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics' Circle Award, etc. -- the Nobel generally honors writers whose work has a social relevance and not merely an aesthetic relevance. How might the Nobel committee have seen in their work a social commentary absent from the writings of some of their contemporaries -- Stoppard, Auden, Yeats?

This prompt comes close to Final Exam Study Question #5. Feel free to use this hebdomadal as a run-through of that question.

Topic 2.

Develop a thorough answer to any of the essay questions that might appear on the final exam. You must write on Disgrace.

Note that you will have 45 minutes to write each essay during the exam, and that I will expect in the vicinity of 1,000 words for each essay. You might want to time yourself as you practice writing out your answer to one of the prompts.

Hebdomadal (week 14)

Topic 1: Seeing coherence in the incoherent

At the end of discussion on Friday, we were looking for points of coherence in The Waste Land. In particular, I was pushing you to identify (a) images, (b) problems, and (c) rhythmic and rhymic structures that connected shorter chunks of the poem to the poem as a whole. Here are the chunks in question:

1. First stanza (1-18, epigraphs)
2. Unreal city / sprouting corpse (60-76)
3. Game of chess (111-138)
4. Pub scene (139-172)
5. Typist (215-256)
6. Water / rock (331-359)
7. Last stanzas (424-434)

For this hebdomadal, continue this work, answering this question: In what way(s) does The Waste Land form a coherent whole? Bring in analytical work that your small group did last week but that you didn't get a chance to share.

Topic 2: Postmodern pop

For the last few lectures, Prof. Ortiz-Robles has been arguing that in the twentieth century cultural production has moved away from literature to mass media. Put this premise to the test. Transcribe the lyrics of your favorite song and perform a close reading of it.

Two rules:

1. The song you pick has to have been written in a period we can define as "postmodern" -- this either means during or after the 1960s, or else in a socio-cultural context that saw itself as having moved beyond the aesthetic limitations of the early twentieth century.
2. The song has to be sufficiently lyric-dependent that we can expect the songwriter to have spent some time figuring out what to say.

In what way does this song respond to the problems and theories of postmodernism we have discussed since the midterm? In what way does it resemble the literature we have read this semester? How do its lyrics respond to the poetic tradition? Should it / could it be taught alongside poetry?

Hebdomadal topics (week 12, if you can believe it)

Hi! As I mentioned in discussion on Friday, the small group prompts (reproduced below) are all available as hebdomadal topics for this week. I encourage you to pick up where our classroom conversations left off -- abruptly, in the case of section 306 -- and to return to ideas and questions that came up in your small group conversations.

You are also welcome to use these prompts to develop a comparative reading of Woolf, T. S. Eliot, and/or W. H. Auden. How, for example, can we see in the structure of the dinner scene of To the Lighthouse (1927) a response to the dissolution of form in The Waste Land (1922)?

1. How is the dinner scene structured? (Part I, ch. XVII, pp. 82-111.) Of course the scene is broken up by a chronology of courses and of emotional experiences, but what is the logic behind the narrator’s movement from character to character? Why is this the longest scene in the text? What is the significance of its structure? Why would a novel about the chaotic streams of everyday experience have any sort of structure? How does this structure connect to the structuring systems in Middlemarch? …in “The Dead”?
   
   
2. What does the Lighthouse represent? (Consider esp. part I, ch. XI, pp. 62-5; part II, ch. IV, pp. 129-30; and part III, ch. XIII, pp. 208-9.) Why is the Lighthouse always capitalized? What role does symbolism play in a novel about everyday experience? If, as has often been suggested, the Lighthouse is beyond symbolic or metaphoric meaning – if it is a symbol of symbols, or a symbol of the death of symbols – what is it doing at the center of the novel? How does Woolf use symbols or metaphors differently than George Eliot does?
   
   
3. What is the significance of painting? (Consider esp. part I, ch. IX, pp. 46-54 and part III, ch. I, pp. 145-150.) How does Woolf suggest paintings works differently than novels or poetry? Why is Lily Briscoe a painter and not a musician? How does the power or function of paint differ from the power or function of voice (e.g. in Heart of Darkness)? A tangent: it has been said that Mrs. Ramsay had to die for Lily to be able to finish her painting; why?
   
   
4. What role do epiphanies play? What role do narrative events play? (Consider esp. Lily’s epiphanies, e.g. pp. 72, 161, 209. Consider also the parenthetical deaths: pp. 128, 132, 133.) How are epiphanies related to events? What is the significance of events? What is the significance of epiphanies? Why does only Lily get epiphanies? How do the epiphanies of To the Lighthouse differ from the epiphanies of Middlemarch, Heart of Darkness, and “The Dead”?
   
   
5. Why are there so many quotations from other texts? (Consider esp. Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade,” part I, ch. III-IV, pp. 16-17; the Grimm brothers’ “The Fisherman and His Wife,” part I, ch. VI & X, pp. 39, 55-61; Charles Elton’s “Luriana, Lurilee,” part I, ch. XVII & XIX, pp. 110-11, 119; William Browne’s “The Sirens’ Song,” part I, ch. XIX, p. 119, Shakespeare’s sonnet 98, part I, ch. XIX, pp. 121-2; and William Cowper’s “The Castaway,” part III, ch. IV & XII, pp. 166, 206.) How are the uses of quotations here significantly different from the uses of quotations in Middlemarch?

Two corrected essay prompts

Add the following notes to prompt 1:

Prof. Ortiz-Robles came close to answering essay prompt 1 (How is belatedness related to the modern?) in his discussion of “The Dead” on Tuesday. One of the main points he suggested along these lines was that literature must essentially do away with nostalgia and longing to return to a nonexistent time by revealing the beauty and meaningfulness of the present day. If you end up writing about belatedness in “The Dead,” please look over your notes and be sure to respond to – not simply repeat – what Prof. Ortiz-Robles said.

The actual question at the center of prompt 3 4 should read:

Examine a discussion of violence against women in one text to explain how that text’s artistic rendering of this violence offers a critique not only of specific contemporary social conditions – e.g. the plight of the laboring class, of the colonial subject, etc. – but also a critique of art itself. Does the text not only critique but also reproduce this violence against women?

If you have questions about either of these corrections, please shoot me an email.

Thanks go to Heidi for letting me know about the problem with topic 4, to Joe for reminding me to post these, and to the anonymous commenter below for correcting my error.

Hebdomadal topics (week 11)

Topic: The country, the city, and the colony

The trajectory of English literature we have traced so far this semester has moved roughly from the country (the Romantics, Middlemarch) to the city (Tennyson, Browning, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Dubliners). How, though, do we deal with the colony, a third category of space that is at once as depopulated as the country and as dark and unknowable as the city? Use a close reading of a passage from one of the Dubliners stories, or Heart of Darkness to illustrate exactly how colonial space differs from the national spaces of country and city. What is the significance of this difference?

Quizzes: a correction

My email this morning said "Remember that beginning next week there will be weekly short-answer quizzes" -- where by "next week" I meant "this week." My brain was still on spring break, apparently. Sorry for the slip!

Peer review like a grad student: opportunities and rules

One of the basic survival tactics of grad student life is peer review: writing seminar papers I would always talk over a draft of my ideas with a friend a day or two before the essay was due, just so I could be sure I wasn't being stupid or boring. Now that I'm writing my dissertation I use my peers as an early line of defense before turning in chapters to my advisor. In addition to all this, reading my peers' work gives me a sense of what this writing should sound like: sitting alone in front of my computer I'm often confused about what I'm doing, so being able to say "Well, at least I know what Kevin's doing" makes it a lot easier for me to feel like I'm on track.

I doubt many of you are headed out to grad school after this class, but frankly this tactic is relevant for any profession that requires much by way of writing -- that is to say, for any profession that requires a college degree.

I would love for you to peer review your second essays, and strenuously. Peer reviewing is an option, but it's not a fluffy option. Here are the rules:

1. Going through peer review counts as writing two hebdomadals, and your work here will be scored out of 4 points -- 2 points for your draft and 2 points for your comments on your peer's draft. As with hebdomadals, more points will be awarded (up to 3 out of 2) for especially kickass work.
   
2. Pick a classmate to work with. If you know (or can at least describe) the classmate you'd like to ask to be your peer reviewer, feel free to ask me for his/her email address; if you would like a peer reviewer but don't have anyone specific in mind, post a comment here with enough identifying clues (first name + initial of last name, say) that another student can ask me how to contact you.
3. Exchange full, final drafts. These must be drafts that you wouldn't have been embarrassed to hand in to me -- indeed, you will be handing them in to me. I will skim through your drafts and give you a grade between 0 and 2 (or potentially up to 3) for your work, a rough estimate of what I would have given your essay if you had turned it directly in to me. Remember that I give a lot of F's.
4. When you send your draft to your peer, include a list of specific things you would like him/her to look at. I highly recommend looking back at my comments on your first essay -- those are the sorts of issues you want to be especially sure to avoid making this second time around.
   
5. Comment on your peer's draft. I will require a copy of your comments, so if you work from a physical copy remember to photocopy your comments so I can look them over. As you know, I'm a huge fan of commenting in Word so you can always go that direction.
   
6. After you have written extensive marginal comments on your peer's draft, fill out this worksheet (RTF version). The goal here is to encourage you to critique these essays the way I do, and if that means you need to drink three espressos and get all cantankerous because you've read hundreds of literary analysis essays and they all sound the same damnit dammit then by all means do that. Don't be afraid to write things like "I think this bit of textual analysis is awesome, but Mike will probably complain that the narrator's intervention into the novel has already been analyzed to death."
   
7. Return your comments. Make sure I have (1) a full copy of the draft you gave to your peer, and (2) a full copy of all your marginal notes on your peer's draft, and (3) your responses to the worksheet questions. Presumably I will get a fully copy of the draft you gave to your peer when your peer sends me his/her comments on it, but it's probably better to play it safe and give me a clean copy as well. If you wrote out your comments and responses on a hard copy of your peer's essay that's absolutely fine -- just make sure I get a photocopy of everything.
8. One final, optional step: if you choose to meet and talk over your responses for twenty minutes or so -- the length of time it takes to drink a latte, say -- I'll give you both an extra point. Send me a picture of the two of you together as proof, or else write up a brief description of the scene, movie script style. ("It's early evening at the Open Book Cafe, and the fluorescent-lit cup of the room is filled to the brim with nervous underclassmen wearing iPod earbuds and staring intently at fully-highlighted pages from their zoology textbooks. A bolt of lightning flashes outside. As the lights dim, I see in the distance my peer reviewer, wearing an evil smirk and a hipster t-shirt.")
   

A resource for writing about Middlemarch

Middlemarch -- maybe you already noticed this -- Middlemarch is a fairly long book. If you are trying to track down a specific event or description or word in the novel, it can take you a hell of a lot of page-flipping to actually find what you're looking for, even if you've already underlined it.

Here's how I deal with this problem of finding textual detail in a massive text: the Middlemarch etext. Just search the text from your web browser and you can come across, say, every instance of the phrase "poor Dorothea" (thanks to Leigh Ann for the example). You can also use it to figure out exactly what chapter has that bit where Raffles asks Will about his mother, or whatever scene you end up needing for your own argument.

There are hundreds of etexts at Gutenberg.org, although the other texts we have read are sufficiently short that you might not need electronic versions thereof. Here, anyway, are The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Heart of Darkness, and Dubliners (with "Araby" and "The Dead").

Essay 2 conferences sign-up sheet (Updated 4/16)

For me, the best part of the second essays is almost always the conversations I get to have with students as they work through them. In bullet format, here are two rules for these conferences:

1. Come with at least 300 words of draft text of your essay (e.g. a draft of an introduction, a richly detailed outline, a sequence of possible thesis statements or thesis questions)
2. Come with at least one prepared question to ask me

Send me an email to let me know which slot you'd like to sign up for. I'll try to keep on top of the requests, but to be safe you might want to give me a range of times or at least a first and second choice. Thanks!

Tuesday 10 April (Steep & Brew)
12:30 pm -
12:50 -
1:10 -
1:30 -
1:50 -
2:10 -

Wednesday 11 April (Fair Trade Coffee House)
10:30 am -
10:50 -
11:10 - Ed
11:30 - Andrew
11:50 -
12:10 pm -
12:30 -

Thursday 12 April (Fair Trade Coffee House)
9:30 am -
9:50 -
10:10 -
10:30 - Heidi

Friday 13 April (Espresso Royale Caffe, 650 State Street)
1:00 pm - Tara
1:20 -
1:40 -

Tuesday 17 April (Steep & Brew)
12:30 pm - Kelly
12:50 - Dan
1:10 - Jenna
1:30 - John
1:50 - Justine
2:10 - Ross
2:30 - Alicia

Wednesday 18 April (Barriques Coffee Trader, 127 West Washington)
10:30 am - Ruth
10:50 - Leigh Ann
11:10 - Paul
11:30 - Andrew
11:50 - Elena
12:10 pm - Andy V. P.
12:30 - Nora
12:50 - Emily S.
1:10 - Emily A.
1:30 - Ed
1:50 - Alex
2:20 - Joe

Thursday 19 April (Fair Trade Coffee House)
9:30 am - Stephen
9:50 - Todd
10:10 - Alyssa

Essay 2 topics

In case you were unable to attend discussion on Friday (ahem), here are the essay assignments:

• Word .doc
• RTF
• PDF

I'm always eager to hear your questions! Shoot me an email if there's anything you want to ask about or talk about. In a couple days I'll post a conference sign-up sheet and other notes and instructions.

Hebdomadal (spring break) (Updated 4/5)

Hi, all! Right now I'm ten days behind on grading hebdomadals -- if you have sent me a hebdomadal since March 19th, you'll hear back from me over break.

If I don't drown in grading, I'll add some hebdomadal topics about Joyce and Conrad later this week.

Discussion our first week back from break will probably concentrate on Heart of Darkness and "The Dead" -- it's impossible to imagine how we will have a good conversation about both these texts in 50 minutes, but that's our mission. Topics 2 and 3 below deal with "Araby," which we probably won't discuss. If you would rather write about HoD or "The Dead," then shift one of the questions below to suit your interest. You could, for example, consider rewriting your midterm essay to use one of the new texts as evidence.

Topic 1:

The answers to the midterm essays were often vague, frequently relying on cliché and potted readings, and sometimes drifting into (articulate, even eloquent) bullshit. For this hebdomadal, rewrite your midterm essay in the style of one of the take-home essays (though not as long, of course). Focus on developing an original and specific claim backed up by thoughtfully-analyzed textual evidence.

For your textual evidence, don't use the texts on the midterm but, rather, texts we have read since the midterm: Jekyll and Hyde, the end of Middlemarch, The Importance of Being Earnest, and Yeats's poems.

Topic 2:

"Araby" is usually read as a straight epiphany. Have you ever circled all the occurrences of images of darkness and blindness, light and vision in the story? There are a dozen references to sight every page, and the conventional reading of this image is that the external blindness of the speaker turns into internal vision in the last sentence of the story. Yet Joyce didn't understand epiphanies as simple, singular transformations: in his longer fiction, he repeatedly suggests that an epiphany does not necessarily shape behavior -- a character can have an epiphany but then, an hour later, go on seeing the world exactly as he saw it when he woke up in the morning. Epiphanies can also counteract each other, new epiphanies wiping out the relevance of old ones.

Can we read this ambivalence about epiphany in "Araby"? The conclusion of the story suggests that the epiphany is absolute, but can the argument be made from other evidence in the text that this epiphany -- like all epiphanies -- might be ephemeral or otherwise irrelevant? What, then, is the effect of this reading on the larger meaning of the text?

Topic 3:

Imagine this question: "Why is the bazaar in 'Araby' named 'Araby'?" Now imagine the answer I've heard two thousand times.

Looking at depictions of the east in "Araby" and Heart of Darkness, offer a thoroughly new reading of orientalism in "Araby."

(Alternatively, you can flip this prompt, using "Araby" to explain Heart of Darkness.)

Hebdomadal topics (week 10)

Topic 1: Victorian courtships

The stylistic differences in the courtships of Middlemarch and The Importance of Being Earnest illustrate the rhetorical as well as the ideological differences between high Victorian and late Victorian literature. By comparing a scene of courtship from Middlemarch to a scene of courtship from Earnest, concisely articulate how these two authors approach a shared socio-cultural phenomenon differently. Then suggest how their different stylistic approaches suggest different ideological approaches: how do these authors different styles show us how they see their worlds differently?

Topic 2: Prism's Progress

Late in Earnest we discover that Miss Prism is the author of a "three-volume novel of more than usually revolting sentimentality" (1737). The play is otherwise laced with comments about literature and literary criticism (e.g. p. 1703: "The truth is rarely pure and simple. Modern life would be very tedious if it were either, and modern literature would be a complete impossibility!") -- there's plenty of sarcasm here, of course, but what is Wilde saying about literature? Why is he saying it?

Topic 3: Irish Modernisms

Wilde and Yeats paint pictures of different worlds -- consider merely the tonal difference between Earnest and "The Second Coming." To what features of nineteenth-century culture and literature are they responding? How do their visions of the coming century differ? What is the significance of this difference?

Hebdomadal topic (week 9)

Tristen (306) reminded me this afternoon that I haven't really leaned on how optional these topics are. The hebdomadal topics I post online are questions that intrigue me, and they're (I hope) useful starting places for analysis.

However, if there is a text or an approach to a text you would really like to tackle, then please go off on your own! All I ask is that if you choose to write on a hebdomadal topic of your own devising, let me know what that topic is at the beginning of your hebdomadal. (You might find it easiest to phrase that topic in the form of a question.)

In that spirit, here are two topics for this week: one is extremely open-ended, and the other focuses on a problem that has been getting to me.

Topic 1

In both discussions today, you developed exceptionally good questions about Middlemarch. I mean that, by the way: in four years of teaching, I have never seen students move so quickly to develop thoroughly brilliant discussion questions.

We didn't address these questions at all thoroughly. In section 306, we just skipped two or three amazing questions. In this hebdomadal, you can do one of three things:

1. Answer a question that was posed but never addressed. In 306, these questions were:
   • Is anything in Middlemarch left to "choice"? (Shelby, can you let me know the page number of Lydgate's comment? There's a good bit about "liking to do" on p. 402, but I don't think that was the passage you were working with.) Shelby writes that we should consider "page 401, where Lydgate says, 'My dear Rosamond, it is not a question of choice.' It is in regards to Rosamond's comment that living in a 'poor way' will lower his status, so this raises a theme like how social pressure limits personal choice, or something to that effect." Excellent stuff! Thanks, Shelby!
   • How and to what extent can a character move beyond his past deeds?
   • By the way, if I missed any great questions that came up in either class that didn't get their share of attention, send me an email or post a comment below!
2. Answer a question that we didn't deal with quite thoroughly enough in our conversation
3. Answer a question that you and your partner worked through but that you never got to share with the group

Topic 2: Reading reading in Middlemarch

Early in our 305 meeting today, John suggested that Mary Garth is a social outlier in Middlemarch because she's exceptionally good at reading character. We also notice that Mary is just plain good at reading: her voracious appetite for reading is mentioned on pages 72, 89, 160, 196 and elsewhere.

Working either with the example of Mary or with any other character, explain why characters in Middlemarch read. What good does George Eliot -- or her narrator -- think books do? Of the many kinds of books that are read by Middlemarchers -- mythological texts, religious texts, encyclopedias, legal and financial documents, etc. -- what specific role do novels play?

Here are some other scenes that might interest you:

• 47: Dorothea sees Casaubon's library, and at that moment reads him
• 48: Dorothea sees Casaubon's mother's parlor, and sees the books in it as decorations
• 299 and 306: Casaubon's library is described as a sort of a tomb, only moments before he dies
• 66: Fred reads ("only") a novel
• 72: Peter Featherstone's limited library is described
• 196: Trumbull reads Mary's borrowed copy of Anne of Geierstein in his auctioneer's voice
• 353: Sir Walter Scott is mentioned again, and at some length
• 375: Trumbull talks at some length about the value of a book of riddles

Strong answers to Quiz 3 (Updated 3/15)

So, 70% of your midterm grade comes from IDs. The midterm is 15% of your final grade. Your final grade in this class is worth 4 credits. If I have the math right, this means 0.42 of one of your college credits is based entirely on how well you answer seven ID questions Thursday morning.

Here's how to rock that 0.42 of a credit -- specifically the thematic significance side of things:

1. Point to a specific word or phrase from the passage
2. Explain how that word or phrase reveals a recurring question posed by the text as a whole
3. Explain how that word or phrase connects to a specific answer to that recurring question

Want some examples? Here are some examples.

The last quiz passage was this:

Mr Bulstrode felt a shuddering nausea, and did not speak, but was considering diligently whether he should not leave Raffles to do as he would, and simply defy him as a slanderer. The man would soon show himself disreputable enough to make people disbelieve him. “But not when he tells any ugly-looking truth about you,” said discerning consciousness. And again: it seemed no wrong to keep Raffles at a distance, but Mr Bulstrode shrank from the direct falsehood of denying true statements. It was one thing to look back on forgiven sins, nay, to explain questionable conformity to lax customs, and another to enter deliberately on the necessity of falsehood.

Here are some strong answers to the thematic significance of that prompt.

From Nora (305). Look at how the first sentence points towards a thematic connection between two broad concepts -- gossip and the individual -- and how her third sentence reverses our usual way of talking about the power of gossip. The last sentence, though, is the real kicker.

This passage points to the pervasiveness of gossip in any individual’s life. Mr. Bulstrode feels a great deal of anxiety over a potentially soiled reputation. Reputation is so important that, Bulstrode notes, if the one who gossips suffers from a less than stellar reputation the gossip itself is discredited. Citizens of Middlemarch balance their reputations every day, taking careful note of fresh gossip that may damage someone’s, or even their own, fragile reputation. They understand that truth is subjective in Middlemarch society.

Here's one from Kristen (306). Notice how Kristen uses this paragraph to develop a specific, thorough treatment of what truth means:

This passage touches on the theme of secret-keeping in the novel. Many people are keeping secrets to protect themselves or others (Dorothea learned after the fact about the codicil in Casaubon’s will, multiple characters have debts to pay off that others don’t know about, etc.). This also looks at the idea of truth. Mr. Bulstrode fears the truth, referring to it as “ugly-looking.” The truth is powerful and has great effects on people, producing “shuddering nausea” in Bulstrode. Because the truth could be so damaging to him, Bulstrode must rely on the “necessity of falsehood” and the likelihood of people not seeing truth and validity in Raffles, the man who would reveal the truth to the world.

Although Ed (305) would be the first to admit that he should have brought up specific textual details earlier in his answer, it's clear from this argument that he sees how this passage fits into the larger problems of Middlemarch. Notice also that Ed isn't afraid to write conversationally:

The question Eliot is beginning to answer has to do with what role one’s past has in creating one’s present and future. Mr. Raffles is a blast from the past with info that could slander Bulstrode. This information gives Raffles the power to create Bulstrode’s present and future. Eliot shows that there must be a link, some evidence, of past action in order for it to in any way affect one’s present and future. She also points to credibility toward the like in “disbelieve, “ “discernible,” and multiple references to truth and falsehood.

Paul (305) offers this clear analysis of power and gossip:

It is a significant in that it shows a relationship between power and gossip, specifically it answers the question of how power is affected by gossip. Bulstrode is a powerful man, but he worries that R could spread certain stories about Bulstrode through the community. Bulstrode realizes that although Raffles is “disreputable,” he possesses the power to discredit Bulstrode with “any ugly-looking truth.” Bulstrode is forced to respect that gossip can undermine his power within the community

Alicia (306) offers another take on the gossip/power relationship:

This passage reflects Mr Bulstrode’s inner thoughts upon the intrusion of an old, unwanted aquaintance Raffles into his life in Middlemarch. Eliot uses Bulstrode’s angst to answer the overlying question about the power of gossip to ruin societal reputation. “The ugly-looking truth about you” seems to concern Bulstrode not on a personally moral scale, but on the perceptions society would form of him. This distinction is evident in the final sentence, where Bulstrode pits his “questionable conformity” against the outcome of entering into direct falsehood, that he deems “necessary.” In this way, Eliot proposes that gossip contradicts personal ethos, taking on an often times society scale that therefore binds the individual to the truth in convention.

Silqet (305) here offers not only an excellent thematic discussion of the divide between gossip and truth, but also a great sense of humor and style:

Mr Bulstrode is considering what type of approach to take and let things like gossip take their own natural course or whether to speak and deal with the consequences of that. There is this recurring – dare I say theme – of how personal choice – going along with societal norms affects a person and their future. Should Mr B just let things go as they may and let Raffles alone then in time he will lead to his own downfall as he is more and more digging his own grave. Truths and gossip – which to follow or let be the driving force for one’s motive is an issue that Mr B is dealing w/ in the passage. What mode of social acceptability to let form not only his decisions but consequential actions.

Picky details about essay writing

1. It is easier to automatically put your last name and the page number in the upper right-hand corner of each page of your essay by editing the header than by manually typing in your name on each page. If you use Microsoft Word, then
1. Open the View menu
   
2. Select Header and Footer
3. Align your text to the right (you might have a button for this on your toolbar, or you can go to the Format menu and choose Paragraph and then from the Align drop-down box choose Right)
4. Type in your name and then press the Insert Page Number button (which probably appeared on the Header and Footer toolbar, or which you can find by going to the Insert menu, choosing the AutoText submenu, then Header/Footer, then - PAGE - -- for formatting reasons, this is rather less easy than just pressing the Insert Page Number button)
2. Always cite page numbers for prose and line numbers for poetry. You don't need to tell me which you are citing -- e.g. (line 121) or (page 130) -- if it is obvious. If you are switching between the two, there are a variety of commonly-used abbreviations -- most of these are nonstandard, but I would be hard pressed to tell you which they are (personally, I use the l. / ll. and p. / pp. notation)
   
1. For lines
1. (ln 12) or (ln 12-19)
2. (l. 17) or (ll. 17-24)
2. For pages
1. (pg 94) or (pg 130-42)
2. (p. 77) or (pp. 81-6)
3. For numbers
1. (ll. 7f) means line 7 and the following line
   
2. (ll. 7ff) means line 7 and two or more following lines
   
3. (pp. 81f) and (pp. 94ff) mean the same thing, of course, but for pages -- these notations are used more rarely because the 81ff notation
   

Hebdomadal topic (week 8)

This hebdomadal is due before the midterm on Thursday.

This week's topic is, I feel, the height of practicality.

1. Find a classmate with whom to write this heb (if you want a classmate's email address, let me know, or post a comment letting people know that you're looking for a partner)
   
2. Pick a passage from one of the two practice exams posted below (and handed out on Friday)
3. Write out the full ID
4. Exchange your answer with your classmate
5. Read over your classmate's ID and point out exactly how he or she could have written an even stronger answer; pay particular attention to
1. Whether the answer to the context
1. identifies characters who aren't named by the text (I'm not so interested in anonymous narrators or characters whose names are right there in the passage), and
   
2. would lead a casual reader directly to the right page (of Middlemarch) or the right line (of a poem)
2. Whether the answer to the thematic significance
1. identifies a specific thematic question posed by the text of which this passage is a part (by specific I mean something like this: "How does gossip shape the social relevance of truth?")
   
2. suggests the specific answer to that question posed by this specific passage (e.g. "In this passage, Bulstrode suggests that gossip promotes emotional convenience above factual accuracy -- the fact that his behavior has changed in the past ten years would be less significant to Middlemarchers than a conveniently ugly detail from two decades earlier")
   
3. connects that specific answer to a textual detail from the passage -- a word, a phrase, or a formal feature ("Bulstrode himself echoes this lazy, rationalizing judgmentalism by quietly renaming his cruel behavior as a kind of 'questionable conformity to lax customs' rather than as a simple, and nominally 'forgiven,' 'sin'")
   
6. Email the whole caboodle back to your classmate and to me

Since I'm drowning in grading, I can't promise that I'll get an answer back to this hebdomadal before the midterm (although I will try to -- right now I'm ahead in my grading, though that might not last). However, by having worked through your answer with a classmate you will have already gotten some good feedback.

Two practice midterms

In section tomorrow we will be working through not only key points on the Chart o' Poets, but also a few entries on a poetry-only practice midterm. For the last fifteen minutes of discussion tomorrow, I am going to ask you to name two poems you would like to discuss -- poems that baffle you, or that we haven't had a chance to discuss yet, or just poems you'd like a chance to talk about some more.

I have also put together a second practice midterm involving a mix of poetry and Middlemarch. This might be a useful tool to spur studying over the weekend. There are a couple different ways you might use it:

1. To figure out areas where you are weak -- if it turns out you can't identify any of the second-generation Romantics, then that tells you to spend more time with Keats and Shelley
2. As fodder for discussion with a study group or a study partner, to talk through all the nuances of the texts we've encountered over the last month and a half; chances are that if you didn't understand what was going on in "Elgin Marbles" someone else did and would be willing to talk it through
   
3. To practice answering those devilishly picky prompts in Part I: once you've written out explanations of the thematic significance of six Middlemarch passages, you'll probably have gotten the hang of it
   

Hebdomadal topics (week 7)

Yesterday, Prof. Ortiz-Robles gave an example of the sort of question he will be asking for Part II of the midterm: "Discuss the relationship between history and memory with reference to textual details from one of the passages in Part I." (At least, that what I had copied down in my notes.)

For this hebdomadal, develop a similarly open thematic question that you think could be asked of almost any text we've read this semester. This means looking back through your notes and pulling out the conceptual problems Prof. Ortiz-Robles has returned to several times in his lectures.

When you craft the question, you might want to be more specific than asking about "the relationship" between Concept 1 and Concept 2, but don't feel that you have to be two too specific -- asking how Concept 1 shapes Concept 2 might be enough detail to get you going. (Other good verbs: reveals, limits, creates.)

After you've done this, quote a short passage from the poem about which you feel least comfortable and use this passage to answer the essay question you've created. (Poems only this week.)

If I don't drown in grading next week, I'll post the essay topics you guys come up with so you have some likely essay prompts with which to study.

[Thank you, anonymous commenter!]

Charting the Romantics and Victorians

As promised, here is a link to a Word .doc of the chart I handed out in class:

• The Romantics and the Victorians: a chart

Try to fill out columns for two poets, one Romantic and one Victorian. (Recommendation: tackle the two poets about whom you feel least knowledgeable.)

Spend the most time answering the thematic questions posed by the chart: the poets' thematic interests in the individual, society, nature, and poetry itself. If you go in to the midterm with for solid thematic questions that apply to each poet, you'll pretty much have the IDs nailed.

Of Keats and his cats

When forming a possessive to a singular noun in English, you almost without exception add 's: the cat's hats, etc. This rule applies whether or not the singular noun in question concludes with an s; hence, if we were interested in the feline companions of John Keats we would write about Keats's cats. (If we were interested in the cephaliclyptic arrangements of his feline companion, we would write about Keats's cat's hats. This could be the beginning of a peculiarly Seussian bit of literary analysis.)

Although you should never site Wikipedia as a source for anything, I will use it this time as a source for a list of more reputable sources that make this claim (including the MLA Handbook and The Elements of Style). If these aren't sufficiently authoritative sources for you, I direct you to Bob the Angry Flower's remarks on this topic.

Quiz on Friday!

There will be a quiz on Middlemarch in discussion this Friday. I will expect you to have worked through to the end of Book V. Remember, you can find examples of strong answers to the quiz here and here.

Hebdomadal topics (week 6) (Updated 2/27)

If one of the hebdomadal topics from last week caught your eye, feel free to tackle it! You might particularly consider last week's prompt about allusions in light of the question Kelly (305) raised in lecture today: why does GE anachronistically refer (two or three times) to an "Italian with white mice" -- that is, to Count Fosco from Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White? What does it mean that GE is referring, almost in the same chapter, to the great authors of western literature (Dante, Shakespeare) and to a contemporary writer of detective stories?

Topic 1: Speech and structure in Middlemarch

In lecture today, Prof. Ortiz-Robles worked out how promises structure social and moral development in Middlemarch. In your hebdomadal, work through how a different kind of speech reveals the structural and ethical underpinnings of the text. Some possibilities:

• Gossip (e.g. about Lydgate: ch. XLV, pp. 273-284)
• Threat (e.g. Raffles, pp. 328ff)
• Newspaper editorializing (e.g. about Brooke, p. 239)
• Flirtation (pretty much any time Rosamond speaks, e.g. pp. 270f)
• Reading aloud (e.g. Trumbull butchering Anne of Geierstein, pp. 196-7)
• Drunken abuse (e.g. pp. 246ff)

(Frankly, I'm most excited about gossip: it has the advantage not merely of concrete social effect, but it also has some of the titillation of drunken abuse.)

Topic 2: Painting and zookeeping in Middlemarch

I remain fascinated by how incongruously GE deploys symbolic effects in Middlemarch alongside brutal realism. There are probably a thousand sustained images in the novel, but here are two that trouble me:

• Animals are nearly everywhere. (One particularly striking example: on p. 283, Lydgate is called "an emotional elephant.")
• Pictures
• 137ff: DB and EC painted in Rome
  
• 151: Horrock looks "as if he had been a portrait by a great master"
  
• 205-6: EC as Thomas Aquainas
  
• 246: Dagley's cottage "would have made a sort of picture"
• 253: Mary and Letty "made a pretty picture in the western light"

In your hebdomadal, use the analysis of one of these symbols to revisit our broad question from two weeks ago: what is the role of symbolic language in a realistic novel? Is Middlemarch itself a kind of picture -- and, if so, what does that mean? Why would that be significant? Are the Middlemarchers of the book all animals of a sort? Why is that important?

(Jenna [306] prompted the second part of this question with her hebdomadal last week. Thanks, Jenna!)

What should we discuss next?

As I mentioned on Friday, I'm looking to make the two discussions before the midterm as useful as possible for you. My current plan looks like this:

• 3/2: Looking for thematic trajectories in the first five books of Middlemarch
• 3/9: Thematic comparison of all seven poets

If you would rather concentrate on a specific book or passage from Middlemarch, or a specific poet, or a specific poem, let me know! If you feel relatively confident with Middlemarch and would like to spend the next two weeks on the poets, that's an option too.

If you have a request or an idea, please shoot me an email or post a comment! If you comment, please at least give your section number so I can develop different lesson plans if section 305 wants Middlemarch and 306 wants the Romantics. (On the advice of a previous commenter I've disabled moderation, so you should be able to post speedily. Try to keep the snark to a minimum, though.)

Robert Browning, Baldessarre Galuppi, and Kris Delmhorst

Kris Delmhorst's most recent album, Strange Conversation, opens with a catchy track called Galuppi Baldassare, in which Delmhorst sets Robert Browning's "A Toccata of Galuppi's" to music and add conversational lines of her own. You can download the track (and a few others from the same album) at Womenfolk.net. (Baldassarre Galuppi was a Venetian composer of mainly underwhelming tinkly parlor music.) This interrelationship of music, poetry, and place fascinates me: what Browning's speaker gets from Galuppi's toccata seems worlds different from what Delmhost gets from Browning's poem.

Quiz scoring and answers

Hi, all! Here is how quiz scoring worked: I expected an average grade of 6. (The actual average was 6.2) Quizzes that scored 6/10 neither add nor subtract points from your final class grade. Quizzes that scored above 6 add points to your final class grade: a 7/10 gives +0.5 points, an 8/10 gives +1.0, a 9/10 gives +1.5, and a 10/10 gives +2.0. Quizzes that scored below 6 subtract points from your final class grade: 5/10 gives -0.33, 4/10 gives -0.67, 3/10 gives -1.0, and 2/10 gives -1.33.

That is how quizzes will be graded in the future, with a maximum benefit or penalty of 2 points. The expected average might shift up from a 6 to a 7 a little bit later in the semester, however.

Average grades on the two parts of the quiz were 2.6/4 for context and 3.9/6 for thematic significance. The thematic significance part of these IDs is especially difficult, I think, because we have all been trained to think about significance in the text but not about significance for the text. Here are two examples of quizzes that gave strong, articulate considerations of the thematic significance of this passage for the text:

Jenna (306) wrote

I think that the quotations encompass Eliot's larger argument about marriage. She refers to the heart's desires as a "tide" where things "come and go." If our heart's desires are not consistent, but they are "running mesengers" to our heads, how can we make a decision of permanence like marriage? Marriage is a bond for life; however, Eliot makes it clear that our feelings contradict this certainty.

Emily A. (306) wrote

The line that stood out right away was that when people go on a long journey, they "get tired to death of each other." I think this line ties the name of the book (Waiting for Death) to Dorothea and Casaubon, portending the death of their marriage. This scene also draws on the idea of web of affinities in Middlemarch -- Mrs. Cadwallader's connection to everyone, how her words can affect Dorothea in spite of a strong relationship. Celia's blushing is significant to the passage...sets up a contrast between the sisters -- Celia is always calm and rational, we see a contrast in Dorothea.

Some notes on themes

Friday's quizzes were still a bit weak, mainly in part c: identify the thematic significance of this passage...

A theme, remember, is a recurring question or problem in a text. You could say that a theme is what a text is about. Themes shouldn't be vague: for example, "marriage" is not a theme but a concept. If you ask questions about that concept, you might come closer to a thematic preoccupation of Middlemarch; for example, you might say that one theme of the novel is the role played by marriage in connecting the individual to his or her social obligations. This could be phrased as a question: when Dorothea and Rosamond get married, how do their relationships to their premarital social networks change? This could be phrased as a problem: what role does marriage play in reinforcing artificial social structures that are more in need of reform than of reaffirmation?

No text is about only one thing, so there is lots of flexibility here: thinking just about the concept of marriage in Middlemarch we can see that it touches on dozens of thematic questions and problems:

1. What role does marriage play in undermining or reinforcing individual agency?
2. How does marriage reveal the power differential between men and women in Middlemarch?
3. How does marriage shape our understanding of personal history? (For example, how do we see Lydgate's failed pursuit of Laure once he is married to Rosamond?)
4. How is marriage produced? (This was the subject of Prof. Ortiz-Robles's lecture last Tuesday.)
5. What role does marriage play in the social network?
6. How does marriage undermine -- or how is it undermined by -- the web of affinities that span across or between marriages? (E.g. Dorothea and Will, or Lydgate and Farebrother.)
7. How does marriage change our understanding of class dynamics? (Consider the number of cross-class marriages that pre-exist in the text: the Vincys, the Cadwalladers, the Garths.)

Last semester, my students pointed me toward a fairly straightforward trick for transforming a wide concept ("marriage" or "class") into a narrow theme: connect one concept to another ("How does marriage explain class change or class reform?").

Every paper, hebdomadal, quiz and exam essay you write must demonstrate your familiarity with thematic analysis: you should be able to connect nearly any sentence from Middlemarch or nearly any line from "In Memoriam" to a theme from that text. Your paper due this Friday is, in essence, an exploration of a single textual theme or -- in some cases -- an exploration of themes from two texts that connect together. To be able to write articulately about a text, you should be able to say what that text is about -- or, at least, one problem that text is trying to solve.

Hebdomadal (week 5)

There is some logic to writing an extra one or two pages of literary analysis the same week you have a high-stakes essay due: you can think of these prompts as intellectual appetizers to the meatier course of your first essays. You can continue to test the limits of your analytical prowess in a low-stakes hebdomadal, taking risks in your argument here to practice ways of taking risks in the longer argument of your essay. A tantalizing, crisp response paper should serve to whet your appetite for more substantial work.

Topic 1: Structuring Middlemarch

In discussion this week we dissected Book III of Middlemarch to see how its chapters suggest a larger argument; however, we didn't get around to looking at how the Books of Middlemarch themselves serve as the building blocks of the larger novel. (Stephen suggested this avenue of analysis in 305.)

In this essay, look at how the structure of the first four Books in Middlemarch suggest connections and affinities in the larger novel.

Alternatively, repeat the structural dissection we did in class for Books I, II and IV of the novel. What symmetries and affinities do you see within and between Books? What is the significance of these connections?

Topic 2: Quotation and allusion

We also looked a little bit at the sorts of narrative entanglement practiced by George Eliot and Percy Shelley as they interrupt their texts with quotation. We did not treat with allusion very much, although it would have been more proper to have characterized the relationship between "Mont Blanc" and "Tintern Abbey" as one of allusion.

Pick one text (a poem or a paragraph of Middlemarch) and work out how allusion functions. Is it, too, interruptive? Does it unravel textual webs? Or does it add another level of entanglement to the text? What is its structural significance?

If you want a specific set of allusions to work through, you might consider the Ariadne theme in Middlemarch. So far, I have noted four appearances of the Ariadne / Theseus / labyrinth myth:

• p. 16: the Key to All Mythologies as "labyrinthine"
• p. 121: Dorothea compared to Ariadne (or Cleopatra)
• p. 141: Dorothea as virgin sacrifice (of the sort made to the minotaur)
• p. 188: Rosamond as Ariadne

I'm sure I'm missing dozens more. How does this specific allusion connect to the structural concerns of the text? In what way(s) is it significant?

Essay 1 Conferences Sign-up Sheet (updated 2/21)

Tuesday 2/20 (Steep & Brew)
12:30 pm - Andy V. P.
12:45 - Kelly
1:00 - Andrew M.
1:15 -
1:30 - Dan
1:45 -
2:00 - Justine
2:15 - John
2:30 - John (cont'd)
2:45 - Tara

Wednesday 2/21 (Fair Trade Coffee House)
11:00 am - Heidi
11:15 -
11:30 -
11:45 -
12:00 pm - Stephen
12:15 - Stephen (cont'd)
12:30 - Stephen (cont'd)
12:45 - Emily S.
1:00 -
1:15 - Ed
1:30 - Alicia

Wednesday 2/21 (7134 Helen C. White Hall)
3:00 - Elena
3:15 - Justine
3:30 - Nora

Thursday 2/22 (3650 Humanities)
12:15 - Matt

A strong hebdomadal

This first round of hebdomadals yielded several outstanding essays: you are, as a group, strong readers with a taste for risky argumentation. This makes me very happy.

One of these strong examples comes from Silqet (305), whose answer to the "Kubla Khan" prompt from last week struck me as subtle and persuasive:

The argument presented is that the preface to the poem “Kubla Kahn”, those nine to ten lines, is itself better than the poem in its entirety. I would argue that this is in fact true on a number of different grounds. This argument may not seem viable to Coleridge himself if he read this but due to the fact that the rest of us are not suffering from the same type of opium induced sleep and dreams it is likely one may hold this opinion. The poem, while well-crafted in its rhyme-flowing style, comes from the dreams of a man who simply had a vision and began to write on it yet left the reader completely and utterly devoid of any solution or resolution with his piece. The small preface is able to in its few lines complete a thought and idea and come full circle as opposed to the poem itself where the reader is presented in the beginning with a vision of this magical place where, “gardens bright with sinuous rills where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree”(ln 8-9), only to be left hanging at the end with an incomplete story as to the “ancestral voices prophesying war” (ln 30) and how any of that made a point or created a piece worth publishing as a poem rather than just an brief vision from a man with an opium induced dream. The preface creates an entire image for the reader. It gives this vision of these small droplets or “circlets”, each “mis-shape”[ing] each other from a disturbance such as a person or rock.. However, one comes to realize that all is not lost in this disturbance but that it will all soon come back together to form this “smoothness” which will again unite each small droplet to become this full vision of a mirror which you are able to see and produce visions within. The message is that even through a disturbance or interruption that there is no need to lose hope in things. The “stream will soon renew” just as “The visions will return!”. This small preface offers more to a sober reader who is looking to truly take something from a piece rather than just a taste of a vision of heaven on acid at the hand of a un-finishing, drug induced poet writing with the fury of a mad man at his vision never to fully comprehend the idea or cause of the poem. The poem, even as it flows with this eloquent rhyme style, leads the reader down these “meandering”, “measureless to man” “caverns” with no real vision or formal thought (ln 25,27). The end of the poem leaves the reader with two lines that just reinforce that the poet is and was not in his right mind and thus created this unsatisfying piece of work we now call “Kubla Khan”.

The strongest move Silqet makes in this argument is to articulate how the preface to "Kubla Khan" makes a claim for what counts as good poetry, and then to apply this claim to the poem itself. This argument is, in miniature, what an answer to the third prompt for the formal essay assignment might do: develop a close reading of the gloss and then apply the result of that reading to the text itself.

How does poetry act in the world?

An editorial: What W. B. Yeats’s ‘Second Coming’ Really Says About the Iraq War (NYTimes.com link -- free registration may be required.)

Shelley confronts the problem of how poetry acts can act politically in the world. This editorial from yesterday's New York Times offers one answer to this problem. We'll be tackling "The Second Coming" later this semester, but it might be worth looking through the Times's argument now (before the editorial moves behind a subscription wall) to think about the way poetry interacts with politics.

Creating your own hebdomadals

For the first couple weeks, I encouraged you to answer the hebdomadal topics that I've posted on the blog. As we move deeper into the semester, you should feel welcome to follow the urgings of your individual egos -- be you Edward Casaubon, Tertius Lydgate, or Rosamond Vincy -- and answer questions of your own devising.

My only request: if you use your hebdomadal to answer a question of your own devising, begin your hebdomadal by letting me know what that question is.

Hebdomadal topics (week 4)

Topic 1: Brainstorming

Craft a précis of your essay. Include in it

1. The you will be tackling in the essay
2. The portion of the text with which you will be working
3. What you think is the larger argument the author is making with this text (e.g. "I read Book II of Middlemarch as GE's exploration of authority and authorship")
4. In brief, the close reading at the center of your argument
5. The developmental stages of your argument (e.g. "First I will examine the X of Y; then I will look at how the X/Y relationship feeds into problems with Z; then I will investigate the consequences of Z in the context of X and Y; I will conclude by connecting these consequences back to the general project of the author")
6. How you think your essay will improve the way we understand the text (be specific)
7. Any questions or problems you find yourself running into

You're welcome to include more in your précis -- possible thesis statements, a description of the critical context of your argument, a connection between your reading and the topics that Prof. Ortiz-Robles has been developing in lecture, etc. -- but those are the building blocks. Again, feel free to be creative and to take risks. I will try to respond promptly to hebdomadals answering this topic so you can proceed with your essay in a timely way.

Topic 2: Textstorming

Return to the Romantic Epiphanies handout we began working through in class last week. What are the significant similarities in the ways in which our four Romantic poets understand the relationship between nature and epiphanic realizations about the order of the world? What significant ideas do the poets have in common in the ways they treat the role of the imagination in constructing these epiphanies? What are the significant differences among the poets on both of these points?

Alternatively, you might consider offering a specific definition of Romanticism -- or at least of Romantic epiphanies -- on the basis of these four excerpts. Your definition can acknowledge what isn't shared in common among the authors, but should dwell on their similarities and the significance of these similarities.

Essay 1 conferences, a sign-up sheet (Updated 2/13)

Hi, all! If you'd like to meet to discuss the first essay, I'd appreciate it if you would send me an email to sign up for one of the conference slots listed below. If these times don't work for you -- or if the times that would have worked have gotten filled -- just let me know and I'll be happy to meet you at a time convenient to you.

My one request is that when you come to chat with me you have a fairly specific idea of what you would like to write about -- or at least one or two directions you could go, and that you have specific questions to ask. Drafts of anything -- theses, close readings, partial or whole essays -- are welcome!

Tuesday 13 February (Steep & Brew)
12:30 pm - Mark
12:45 - Jenna
1:00 -
1:15 -
1:30 -
1:45 - Heidi
2:00 -
2:15 -

Wednesday 14 February (Fair Trade Coffee House)
10:00 am - Stephen
10:15 -
10:30 -
10:45 -
11:00 -
11:15 - Mia
11:30 -

Thursday 15 February (Steep & Brew In the foyer of Humanities 3650)
10:00 am -
10:15 -
10:30 - Marysa

Tuesday 20 February (Steep & Brew)
12:30 pm - Andy V. P.
12:45 - Kelly
1:00 -
1:15 - John
1:30 - Dan
1:45 -
2:00 - Justine
2:15 -

(Continued above.)

That Darwin quotation from lecture yesterday

In case, like me, you didn't get a chance to copy it down it time:

We can clearly see how it is that all living and extinct forms can be grouped together in one great system; and how the several members of each class are connected together by the most complex and radiating lines of affinities. We shall never, probably, disentangle the inextricable web of affinities between the members of any one class; but when we have a distinct object in view, and do not look to some unknown plan of creation, we may hope to make sure but slow progress.

From Chapter 13 of The Origin of Species (1859).

As long as we're on about this, here's the Coleridge quotation that was on the screen last Thursday:

In this idea originated the plan of the LYRICAL BALLADS; in which it was agreed, that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic; yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith. Mr. Wordsworth, on the other hand, was to propose to himself as his object, to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural, by awakening the mind's attention to the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us; an inexhaustible treasure, but for which, in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude, we have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand.

This is from Chapter XIV of his Biographia Literaria (1817). This bit is also available on page 478 of our Norton anthology.