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?