Super Secret Bonus Hebdomadal

(Even those of you who have reached the maximum number of hebdomadals are eligible to write this one.)

The goal for this hebdomadal is to give you a chance to show off your carefully cultivated literary-analytical prowess; pull out all the stops!

As you have probably observed, I am about ten days behind in getting hebdomadals back to you; I should be able to catch up with hebdomadals over the course of this week.

Topic 1: Postmodern pop

Transcribe the lyrics of your favorite song and perform a close reading of it. 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 does popular music respond to the poetic tradition? Should it / could it be taught alongside poetry?

Topic 2: Literature in/of exams

Pick the essay question you feel is likeliest to appear on the exam and develop an outline of how you would answer it. Then write your outline in the style of any of the authors we have read this semester. Imagine: a Hacker sonnet comparing Boland and Baker! A Faulknerian multiperspectival epic contrasting Eliot and Heaney! A Bakerian monologue contemplating the meaningfulness of comparing Morrison and Faulkner.

Topic 3: Self-evaluating

Look back on your first hebdomadal or your first essay. Look back on your notes from the first day of our discussion. What have you learned this semester? How is what you have learned likely to be useful to you? What more do you wish you had had the opportunity to learn in class this semester?

If the things you have learned in English 168 do not look liable to be useful, in what way could the course have more directly spoken to your needs as a student?

Hebdomadal 12

This is the last hebdomadal assignment! Can you believe it? Are you sad? I am.

This is your chance to show everything you've learned this semester: your proficiency with close reading, your skill at analysis, your familiarity with the language of literary criticism.

Topic 1: Asking questions of Coetzee

Last week we talked through the process of finding the questions a text compels us to ask. Articulate and explore one of the questions you see at the heart of Disgrace.

Topic 2: Politics and literature

How effectively can literature cope with or respond to socio-political problems? You can write exclusively about Disgrace, or you can compare Disgrace to Boland or Morrison or Yeats, or you can write somewhat more generally (though with reference to texts) about what you see as the guiding problems with literature's socio-political relevance.

Baker incarnate

I have been getting some fantastic, hilarious hebdomadals this week. Jena D. (313) sent in this particularly impressive meditation on alarm clocks that I just had to share:

As I went about my every day activities, commencing with the static drone of my alarm clock, I reflected on the rigid schedule most human beings submit themselves to. I came to the conclusion that we become creators of our own customs, as if our own life is a distinct culture among the population. Every morning I wake up, brush my teeth, turn on my desk lamp, check my email, get dressed, then turn off my desk lamp as not to wake up my snoring roommate, unlock the door, and enter the hallway to walk to class in a rather robotic fashion. I set my alarm for 9:03 every morning, which is both a product of my obsessive compulsiveness and a superstitious association with any number besides three. All mental irrationality aside, it occurred to me that 9:03 is such a strange choice of time, that maybe 9:00 or 9:05 would seem like a more “normal” time to set my alarm. But then again what is considered normal? Why are increments of 5 considered a more acceptable way to measure time? When you ask someone what time it is, they are likely to say “9:10” when it is in fact “9:08”, or “9:30” rather than “9:29.” This has always been a source of frustration to me. When I ask the time, I want to know the actual time, not the time in relation to it’s closest increment of 5.

Of course, naturally, these initial thoughts gave way to a mindless rambling about the situation within my cerebral cortex. I evaluated the act of setting one’s alarm, specifically my own habits and their significance. Although I set me alarm for 9:03, my clock in general is set for exactly 5 minutes fast due to my tendency to be late. I figured, these extra five minutes would give me the necessary leeway to get to classes and appointments on time. However, quickly I found that this invented system had limitations too easy to surpass given the complexity and genius of the human mind. Instead of getting up at 9:03 when my alarm goes off, I mentally registered that it was 8:58, which sounds significantly worse than 9:03 for the sheer presence of the number “8” prior to the colon. As a result, I got out of bed, and hit the “snooze” button, giving myself an extra nine minutes now to sleep, due to the automatic time allotted for “snoozing” decided by the manufacturers of the clock [1]. Somehow feeling robbed by five minutes, I convince myself it is, in fact, ok to sleep an extra four. Therefore, I completely defeated the purpose of setting the clock ahead five minutes.

[1]: That in itself poses a problem, because what is the purpose of warranting a mere nine minutes to sleep? No one can fall asleep, head on pillow, and enter the escape-from-earth dream world we all know and love, in a petty nine minutes. If anything, it causes more unrest and anxiety among the “sleeper” who is constantly tortured by trying to predict when the alarm is going to go off so as not be caught off guard. Besides the personal attack on its inanity, why did the alarm clock manufacturers define 9 minutes as the appropriate “snooze time,” rather than 5 or 10?

Hebdomadal 11

There will be one hebdomadal topic after this one.

Topic 1: The politics of the daily

Prof. Wolfe hinted in class on Tuesday that there is a way that even detailed discussions of shoelaces, escalators and urinals can constitute a political statement along the lines of what we saw in Beloved. What is the political statement of Baker's The Mezzanine?

Topic 2: Shoelace-gazing

Write a paragraph that imitates the style of The Mezzanine, dealing with some minute detail of your everyday life. After this paragraph, write one or two sentences commenting on how this paragraph of observations reflects details about your life that are not superficially present in your writing.

Topic 3: Writing the exam

Looking back to the essay questions on the midterm as a guide, write an essay question involving The Mezzanine that you might reasonably find on the final exam. Remember that all exam questions ask you to compare specific sections from two texts.

Extensions: free for the taking!

Hi!

It has been fantastic meeting with oodles of you over the last week to discuss your essays, and I have learned a great deal about these essay topics from how you are confronting them. I have noticed that even those of you who began writing these essays immediately are wrestling a week and a half later with your topics and with the significance of your arguments.

Because I want to be able to give you the highest grades I can, and because this essay is turning out to be more of a brute than I expected, I'm extending the essay deadline to 5 pm on Monday evening. If you feel confident with your essay on Friday afternoon please feel free to turn it in then, but if you want the extra 72 hours you are welcome to them.

Writing the final exam

Prof. Wolfe is in the process of designing the final exam, and he is keeping an extremely open mind about how to organize it. He would especially love to hear from you, the eventual victims of the exam, how you would like it to be put together. Two long essays? Two medium-length essays with a set of IDs? Certain kinds of essays? Certain kinds of IDs?

He's serious about hearing your input, and I strongly encourage you to email me some notes concerning how you would like the exam to be constituted. Unless you direct me otherwise, I will transmit your remarks directly to Prof. Wolfe.

Thank you!

...and even more conference slots have opened

I've opened up a couple conference slots for this afternoon and four for Wednesday afternoon: click here to see what's available, and shoot me an email to sign up. I'm becoming increasingly concerned about the second essay: remember that it is 25% of your final grade, and that it is going to be graded even more strictly than the first essay. I really want you all to do amazingly well: let me know how I can help you, and please please don't hesitate to meet with me or email me questions!

Personal, live Writing Center instruction right from the comfort of your computer!

Earlier this semester, the Writing Center debuted Live Online Conferences. From 6:30 to 9:30 on Sunday and Tuesday nights, you can log into Learn@UW (instructions at the bottom of this page) and meet with Mark or Annette for half an hour. If you're worried about your thesis, your outline, or (hopefully) your draft for this second essay and haven't had a chance to make an appointment at the main Writing Center location in 6171 Helen C. White Hall (phone number: 263-1992), and if you're not near one of the Writing Center's many satellite locations in dorms and other sites around campus, you might think about making use of these Live Online Conferences this Sunday or Tuesday.

More slots opened today!

I've opened a slew of new conference slots for this afternoon: check out the updated conference sign-up sheet and let me know if I can sign you up!

Collaborators wanted!

Matt F. (314) is looking for someone with whom to write this second essay. He confesses "I like to take do my work in bursts, but usually they're spread out over a longer period of time." If this sounds like your style of collaborator, let me know and I'll give you his email address!

(And if you want to get added to this list as one looking for a collaborator, please let me know!)

The women of Irish myth

Eavan Boland's critical essays react directly to three nineteenth-century texts that collapse women with Irish nationhood.

• Cathleen ni Houlihan is the title of a play by W. B. Yeats, taken from an extant myth of an old woman who wanders the dirt paths of Ireland, looking for young men to fight for their country. To the young man who will one day save Ireland, she will appear as a young woman of extraordinary beauty.
• "An Old Woman of the Roads," a poem by Padraic Colum, might remind you more than a little of "The Lake Isle of Innisfree."
• "Dark Rosaleen," by James Mangan, is a lightly-coded call to Catholic Europe to act against the British.

So true

As usual, New Yorkers say it best --

Girl #1: I despise books about political science.
Girl #2: I just despise books.
Girl #1: You know, if I paid attention in class, I would know what, like, half these words meant.

--Shakespeare & Co., 69th & Lexington

Hebdomadal 11

(This is the second-to-last set of hebdomadal topics.)

A quick note: I'm noticing a drop-off in the word count of recent hebdomadals. The 300-word minimum is strict: this semester I have given full credit to only one hebdomadal that fell short of 300 words.

The word count is code, in a way, for "I'm looking for a reasonably-sophisticated argument that cannot be sufficiently grounded or analyzed in fewer than 300 words": this means a bit of close reading, a bit of analysis, a bit of connection to larger course themes, and a bit of creativity. (Hint: if you are regularly falling short of the minimum word count, I respond extremely well to hebdomadals that actually talk me through your process of reading a text -- these hebdomadals are, because of their nature, slightly chattier and hence wordier.)

Topic 1: Pre-writing

Tender 300 words that point toward your second essay. Introduce these 300 words so I know what I am looking at, but you can use them to develop the question you would like your essay to answer, you can use them to craft your thesis and outline, or you might simply spend these 300 words processing the text you expect to place at the center of your argument. In other words, I am looking for some structured, articulate brainstorming.

You might look to the two examples of strong hebdomadals I just posted to get a sense of how you might organize this introductory interrogation or thesis-making or interpretation.

Topic 2: Comparing themes, comparing poetics

One of the broad goals of any introductory literature course is to train you to see and analyze the major themes that authors treat generation after generation. Comparing a poem by Eavan Boland to a poem by either Yeats or Heaney identify a single theme (examples: nature; violence; class; women; art) that both poems have in common and identify how the authors' differing treatment of this theme suggests larger differences between the authors' poetic philosophies.

If you want, feel free to write this hebdomadal in the form of notes for a five-minute lecture for the class.

Two hebdoxemplary readings

Two weeks ago, Steph (314) wrote an analysis of rememory in Beloved that gives an excellent demonstration of how we can connect concrete character readings (Sethe) to broader textual themes (rememory) to giant literary problems (postmodernism). Although the restraints of the essay didn't allow Steph to read the text too closely, it's easy to see how a longer version of this argument would incorporate a variety of close readings to help nuance this argument.

Toni Morrison plays with a concept called “rememory” in her novel Beloved. This idea is somewhat different from a simple memory. Rememory is the idea that the way we act now is due to the actions that changed us in the past. Rather than just simply remembering something that happened in the past (a memory), rememory gets in the way of what we would normally do with our lives. This theory can be related to many aspects of literature. From the broad to the specific, rememory is actually more applicable to life than it may seem.

This can all be paralleled to the broader picture of the postmodern movement in literature. This movement wouldn’t even be around if modernist writers hadn’t set the framework for it. Postmodern writers can’t escape their past, which is modern writing. The idea that history is all around us is exemplified in this sense. Postmodern writers built off of what modern writers did. Therefore when we are reading postmodern literature, like Morrison’s Beloved, we are seeing the modern undertones that she stemmed off of.

Going a little more specific, rememory further relates to Toni Morrison’s main theme of the novel. She wanted this to be a reference for slave life. Considering that there wasn’t anything in 1987 that really examined the lives of slaves, she wanted this book to do that. Through all the characters we are able to see the horrifying truth of what slave life was like. Morrison is building off of the modern concept of miscommunication with this novel as well. Obviously, the communication barrier between slaves and non-slaves was huge. With this story she is bridging the gap that so many modern writers talk about. Working off of the modern concept that miscommunication is all around us—including in our history—she tries to make slave life come alive for her audience. The audience is in a sense getting a history lesson through the bodies of these characters. These characters relive their horrible past through Morrison’s concept of rememory.

Rememory can be even more specifically related to Sethe. She has a big problem with her memory and rememory. She doesn’t want to remember what happened in her past, but ironically can’t help but be affected by it. She even goes as far as to warn Denver about memories getting in the way of your functioning. In her first reference to rememory, Sethe says to Denver, “you can’t never go there” (page 36) where the “there” she is referring to is the place where rememory takes control. This is another part of the history lesson Morrison is conveying. Although slavery isn’t around today, former slaves are still affected by their past which is one of the main points that Morrison is trying to make by writing this novel. This rememory idea that she is giving her audience really relates to many aspects of her type of literature—postmodernism.

If Steph gives us a strong sense of how we might write concretely even about broad course themes, Leanne (314) models ways in which a comparison across texts can be rooted deeply in a close reading but can take that close reading to analytical heights. Observe in particular the way Leanne quotes Heaney and Hacker: she cites only a few words at a time, and she follows each quotation with extensive analysis and discussion across the two poems. This is an extremely sophisticated approach to literature, and is no different than the way professors and scholars ground their arguments in text.

The problem, which is at the center of “Come to the Bower,” is coping with feelings of temptation and desire of an unattainable or “forbidden” female object. If the poem “Come to the Bower” were an answer to a question, the question would be: How does one create an aesthetic work to adequately convey the poetic strategies used to cope with feelings of desire for an unattainable sexual encounter with another person? Both Seamus Heaney’s “Come to the Bower,” and Marilyn Hacker’s “Lacoste 1,” form similar answers to such a question using a Garden of Eden-like setting, symbols of a “forbidden fruit” of temptation, and nature imagery.

Seamus Heaney, in his work “Come to the Bower,” speaks to a female object of desire. Heaney uses the setting of a bower as a backdrop for his intricate description of an imagined sexual encounter with the female figure. A bower, which can also mean a woman’s bedroom or apartment in a medieval castle, is employed in “Come to the Bower” as a shady, leafy shelter or recess in a garden or wooded environment. Heaney further develops the setting of a garden, perhaps similar to the biblical setting of the Garden of Eden, by using phrases like “By sweetbriar and tangled vetch” and “Of the peat, sharpened willow.” He could also be describing a woman’s bedroom, filled with many roses and small flowers, but there is no doubt that the setting is romantic, dark, and conveys the feeling of temptation for a “forbidden fruit,” or sexual encounter. Heaney creates an image of himself desiring the female object, which is referred to in the poem as “dark-bowered queen” and “Venus bone.” His reference to the female figure as Venus, the roman Goddess of love and beauty, and “dark-bowered queen,” portray her to be an idealized, desirable woman of beauty, perhaps even a symbol of the forbidden fruit of temptation.

In comparison to Marilyn Hacker’s poem, “Lacoste 1,” a biblical reference to the Garden of Eden, which is used by Heaney as well (the Bower), employs the feeling of temptation. In her phrase, “But I’m bad at being bad, and risk that satisfaction on a kiss,” Hacker creates the feeling of temptation and uses the word ‘kiss’ as a symbol of the forbidden fruit. Both poets write of a craving for an enticing, sexual encounter with a female figure. Hacker, like Heaney, uses nature imagery (flowers, water, and fruit/animals in nature) to create a personal, private depiction of herself developing an intense yearning for an idealized female object.

Hacker’s use of the phrase, “I worked, walked, ate, grew brown, wiry, and lissome climbing paths along peach-orchards’ plaid on vineyards,” employs the natural image of a peach orchard and uses the peach as a symbol of something sweet, desirable, and even abundant around her, yet unattainable, or forbidden from consumption. Like the encounter she desires with the female she speaks of, Hacker’s use of the peach is describing a “forbidden fruit.” In “Come to the Bower,” Heaney uses the phrase “And spring water starts to rise around her,” which creates an image of the desired female as a goddess surrounded by natural, spring water. His use of ‘spring water’ may symbolize the potential for cleansing or revitalization of himself if he satisfies his feelings of temptation for the woman.

The nature imagery and symbols of life in nature used by both Heaney and Hacker reveal a similar aesthetic strategy for coping with feelings of temptation for an unachievable encounter with a desired female figure.

(I have slightly reparagraphed Leanne's essay for clarity.)

Essay 2 Conference Sign-up Sheet

As before, please email me to sign up for a slot below. If none of the times below work for you, please contact me to set up an appointment that will work for you.

I ask that when you see me you have two or more specific ideas or questions to discuss: conferences are most useful when we are able to speak to specific interests or problems. I would be particularly delighted to help you sophisticate drafts of thesis statements or of thesis questions, to talk about literary passages worth attending to in your argument and extratextual sources worth consulting, or just to help you think through the organization of your argument.

All conferences occur at Steep & Brew on State Street.

Tuesday 11 April
1:30 pm -
1:50 -
2:10 -
2:30 -
2:50 -
3:10 - Katie H.

Thursday 13 April
1:50 pm -
2:10 -
2:30 - Leanne H.
2:50 -
3:10 - Keith N. and Jena D.
3:30 -
3:50 -
4:10 -
4:30 -

Friday 14 April
2:30 pm - Ellen K.
2:50 - Matt F.
3:10 - Kylah B.

Monday 17 April
1:30 pm - Jenna S. and Natalya L.
1:50 - Steph P.
2:10 -
2:30 - Liz P.
2:50 -
3:10 -
3:30 - John O.

Tuesday 18 April
9:35 am - Brandy H. (before lecture)

1:30 pm - Mike P.
1:50 - Greta H.
2:10 - Julia J.
2:30 - Leanne H.
2:50 - Greta K.
3:10 - Alyssa D.
3:30 - Jena D. and Keith N.
4:00 - Sebastian C.

Wednesday 19 April, in Espresso Royale Caffe
4:00 pm - Alex A. and Beth W.
4:20 - Katie H.
4:40 - Sarah D.
5:00 - Julie E.

Essay 2 assignment

Here is a PDF copy of the second essay assignment that I passed out on Friday.

Bogs, blogs, Glob (Updated 4/7)

April 6's lecture on Seamus Heaney's bog poems:

• Slides (PPT file), 5.6mb
• Slides (PDF file), 25.5mb
• Slides (RTF file, no images)
• Lecture notes (Word file)
• Lecture notes (PDF file)
• Lecture notes (RTF file)

I want to thank you all for your kindness and your attention today: this was my first lecture, and its choppiness wasn't unexpected. I'd love to hear any questions and comments you have about my ramblings this morning -- please feel free to email me whenever at mashapiro@gmail.com.

Hebdomadal 10

Topic 1:

Read "Come to the Bower" closely. What problem is at its center? If the poem were an answer to a question, what would that question be? Work particularly closely with the language of the text.

You might also consider how "Come to the Bower" is like any poem by Marilyn Hacker, or like Yeats's "The Stolen Child." If you want a bit more of a challenge, you could compare the themes of "Bower" to the themes of Beloved (although you should, as always, be sure to compare specific passages from both texts).

Topic 2:

At the end of discussion last week, we were left with the question of how authors of socially realist fiction work with symbols. Both Seamus Heaney and Toni Morrison confront this problem: pick any Heaney poem or any paragraph or short section from Beloved and begin to answer this question: What is the role of symbolism in a work grounded on historical fact. It might be helpful to you to compare the symbolism you see in Heaney or Morrison with the kind of symbolism we discussed in "The Second Coming."

Behind!

Hi, all!

Just so you know, I do have all your beautiful hebdomadals from last week; however, I was away this past weekend and have a fairly packed week ahead of me. (Among other things, I am preparing lecture for this Thursday.) This means that you might not get your hebdomadals from last week back until this Thursday night. I'm sorry about the delay!

Also, if you have any recommendations about what I should discuss in my lecture, I am all ears!