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?