Hebdomadal 6 (Updated 3/7)

You might find it helpful to practice answering a question of the sort you might find on the midterm. I've tried to suggest, with these topics, the style of questions you might see on Thursday. I honestly do not know how closely these essay questions resemble the essay questions you will see on the actual exam. The only thing I am sure is similar between these questions and the questions you will see on Thursday is that all of these questions ask you to make fairly deep comparisons between texts and to associate those comparisons with the basic problems of modernism.

I will try to respond to your hebdomadal before Thursday, although obviously if you send in your hebdomadal late Wednesday night my response might not get back to you in time. Plan accordingly.

A quick note: for those of you who have already written five hebdomadals, your response to this hebdomadal has the potential to earn you extra credit. Here's how this works: if you write a weak hebdomadal, you will earn 0.5 points of extra credit; if you write a good hebdomadal, you will earn 1 point; if you write a strong hebdomadal, you will earn 2 points. I reserve the right to award, in the case of exceptionally good work, up to 3 points of extra credit, although I imagine I will only do this rarely if at all. When I respond to your hebdomadal, I will tell you how many points you earned.

Try to follow the restrictions of the exam: if you wrote on one of these texts for your first essay, don't write on it for this hebdomadal.

Topic 1: The crisis of faith in modern poetry

One of the effects of the First World War was a widespread loss of faith, a loss which poets shared and to which they responded. Working closely with these passages from Wallace Stevens and T. S. Eliot, describe in specific terms how these two poets cast the crisis of faith differently, and explain in detail how that difference is significant to our understanding of modernism. From Stevens's "Sunday Morning":

She hears, upon that water without sound,
A voice that cries, "The tomb in Palestine
Is not the porch of spirits lingering.
It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay."
We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,
Of that wide water, inescapable.

From Eliot's "The Waste Land":

In this decayed hole among the mountains
In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing
Over the tumbled graves, about the chapel
There is the empty chapel, only the wind's home.
It has no windows, and the door swings,
Dry bones can harm no one.
Only a cock stood on the rooftree
Co co rico co co rico
In a flash of lightning. Then a damp gust
Bringing rain

Topic 2: What can we conclude from conclusions?

Modernist authors are forced to cope with the collapse of the usual narrative structure of pre-modern times, in which the novel leads conventionally from the introduction of an imporant problem at the beginning of a novel -- for example, the difficulty of marrying off young women of the middle classes to desireable bachelors -- to a neat and thorough solution: e.g. marriage. This breakdown of the logic of the novel and the novel's narrative is perhaps most visible as modern novelists struggle to conclude their texts.

Working closely with the conclusions of In Our Time and Mrs Dalloway, quoted below, consider and explain how both novels address the problems and themes modernism in their conclusions, and how the difference in the way these novels address these problems and themes suggests important divisions within modernism itself.

From Mrs Dalloway:

For her father had been looking at her, as he stood talking to the Bradshaws, and he had thought to himself, Who is that lovely girl? And suddenly he realised that it was his Elizabeth, and he had not recognised her, she looked so lovely in her pink frock! Elizabeth had felt him looking at her as she talked to Willie Titcomb. So she went to him and they stood together, now that the party was almost over, looking at the people going, and the rooms getting emptier and emptier, with things scattered on the floor. Even Ellie Henderson was going, nearly last of all, though no one had spoken to her, but she had wanted to see everything, to tell Edith. And Richard and Elizabeth were rather glad it was over, but Richard was proud of his daughter. And he had not meant to tell her, but he could not help telling her. He had looked at her, he said, and he had wondered, Who is that lovely girl? and it was his daughter! That did make her happy. But her poor dog was howling.

“Richard has improved. You are right,” said Sally. “I shall go and talk to him. I shall say goodnight. What does the brain matter,” said Lady Rosseter, getting up, “compared with the heart?”

“I will come,” said Peter, but he sat on for a moment. What is this terror? what is this ecstasy? he thought to himself. What is it that fills me with extraordinary excitement?

It is Clarissa, he said.

For there she was.

From In Our Time:

The king was working in the garden. He seemed very glad to see me. We walked through the garden. This is the queen, he said. She was clipping a rose bush. Oh how do you do, she said. We sat down at a table under a big tree and the king ordered whiskey and soda. We have good whiskey anyway, he said. The revolutionary committee, he told me, would not allow him to go outside the plaace grounds. Plastiras is a very good man I believe, he said, but frightfully difficult. I think he did right though shooting those chaps. If Kerensky had shot a few men things might have been altogether different. Of course the great thing in this sort of an affair is not to be shot oneself!

It was very jolly. We talked for a long time. Like all Greeks he wanted to go to America.