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.

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.

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.

Hebdomadal topics (week 2): To the borders of bullshit

Tame textual interpretations often result when literary critics are unsure what distinguishes a risky but persuasive reading from utter bullshit. Critical temerity consists in straddling the border between the two, and this is the skill I would like you to develop early in the semester.

Topic 1: The prosodic and the prosaic

Last Thursday, Prof. Ortiz-Robles pointed out that nearly every line of "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" has an official interpretation endorsed by critics; this can be expanded to the rest of the poems we are reading this semester, for which authoritative interpretations have been more or less locked down. This can be dreadfully boring, as there is nothing quite so deflating as being told to memorize that a poem means such-and-such a thing. Fight against this literary interpretive history with this hebdomadal:

1. Pick a small chunk of a text that has an obvious or at least received interpretation (e.g. ll. 58-66 of "Ode: Intimations," ll. 31-36 or 37-44 of "Kubla Khan," ll. 9-14 of "Elgin Marbles" -- you can pick any small chunk of whatever you like, but for my sanity please avoid the last stanza of "Grecian Urn")
2. Briefly explain the obvious or received meaning of this passage -- this meaning can come from lecture, from prior experience with the poem, or just with your guess at what thousands of students and critics have said about the passage
3. Explain, at length, why this reading is incorrect.

Note: Your reading doesn't have to be correct! You need only be persuasive.

Topic 2: Practicing persuasion

Develop a close, analytical reading that defends one of the following interpretations:

1. In Middlemarch, George Eliot urges nineteenth-century women to castrate British men (literally or figuratively)
2. The nightingale of Keats's ode is a symbol of British industrialization
3. "Frost at Midnight" is an anti-Wordsworthian screed
4. Kubla Khan is Coleridge's vision that his son will usurp him, perhaps in a Oedipal sort of way
5. The preface to "Kubla Khan" is a better poem than the poem itself
6. Mrs. Cadwallader is, in fact, the narrator of Middlemarch

(You are welcome to shift these interpretations or to develop a new one; just let me know what you're up to.)

Your defense must (1) build out of a close reading of the text, and (2) address basic counterarguments. Although you are arguing a silly interpretation, your audience is persnickety and needs to be thoroughly persuaded by careful analysis of textual evidence.