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.