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.)