For Tuesday, October 27

For Tuesday, let's finish up Hemingway's In Our Time.

Also, surf over to our Eliot wiki. Click on your motif to open up your wiki page. On the wiki page for your motif: click on "edit page" at the top of the page; select an example of your motif from the poem; quote the example; then, explain the example - - what is happening with the motif at this point in the poem? what is the motif signifying at this point in the poem? how does this instance of the motif relate to other instances of the motif? Write as much as you can - -bonus points for length - - and type your name after your comments; click on "save."

For Tuesday, October 20

Don't forget, for Tuesday, you want to select one motif from the 15 or so that we collected from "Burial of the Dead" in The Waste Land. Find as many instances or examples of that motif in the rest of the poem as you can. Cite the lines where you find the motif. Remember - - you are looking for concrete examples of the motif and/or its variations. Bring this list into class.

Here's the list of motifs from our last class:

Seasons/natural time

life-in-death; undead; zombie

plagiarism/cultural pastiche

exile

voices/ventriloquy/polyphony

nostalgia/memory

dryness/drought vs. wetness/water

roots/plant/organic

"broken images"/isolate flecks/fragments

sailors/voyages/ocean

hyacinth girl: men and women; impotence

crowds

"unreal city"/ city/London

"hypocrite lecteur"/the reader

deaf/mute/blindness

mixing

The Waste Land

For Thursday, we'll continue with Eliot's "The Waste Land."

Here's a nice recording of Eliot reading the poem:

You might also want to check out this very interesting annotated, multimedia version of the poem.

Gertrude Stein (1874 – 1946). A radical modernist in literature and life, Stein was both an avant garde textualist and a central organizing figure for expatriate modernists in Europe. Here's a link to her "The Geographical History of America or the Relation of Human Nature to the Human Mind."

Masters and Robinson

Edgar Lee Masters ( 1868 - 1950) Trained as a lawyer (and a one-time law partner of legal legend, Clarence Darrow), Masters made his literary bones with the publication of Spoon River Anthology (1915). Neither Masters' conceit (a kind of collectively voiced collection) nor his subject matter - - small town American life - - were new. What was new about Masters' collection was the way in which it approached small town life in America on the eve of World War I - - resisting sentimentality while refusing to give in to scorn or cynicism. It was probably this ambivalent stance which helped to create the novel poetic voices that Masters conjured up via his literary seance.

Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869 - 1935). Robinson is one of the most compelling of the "transitional" figures that spanned the close of America's "Victorian" culture and the rise of modernism. He left behind a troubled family and youth in New England to make his literary way in New York City - - one of the earliest exemplars of the "bohemianism" that would come to define Greenwich Village in the American literary consciousness. Until Teddy Roosevelt picked up Robinson's second collection of poems, Robinson was in dire straits. Thanks to the economic stability provided by Roosevelt's patronage, Robinson could continue to write poetry until, eventually, he gained the ear of the American public and literary critics. While apparently straightforward on the surface, like is New England peer, Robert Frost, his poems are complicated - - not so much formally as in tone and stance. Like Frost, Robinson attempts to reckon "modern" experience within more traditional forms and structures. His efforts remain under-appreciated.

But what is one to do?

The four texts (Adams, Du Bois, Bourne, Gilman) we've looked at over the past couple of weeks share a common theme: a crisis is rocking American society and culture as the nation moves into the 20th century. The particular setting of each text varies, and each text seems to take up this crisis in different terms (science and technology, race, ethnicity, gender).

Despite these differences, are there commonalities in the way these texts imagine crisis? For instance, several of the texts share a concern with dysfunctional epistemologies - - problems with the way we know the social and personal world. Likewise, several of the texts focus on subjectivity - - what kinds of people does the new world of modernity produce?. And, several of the texts seem more concerned with how people experience the modern world rather than the dynamics of that world itself. Most of the texts also experiment with different ways of representing the crisis of modernity - - different textualities and forms.

What common motifs, themes, images, conflicts, literary techniques, or plots of crisis can you see among the four texts we've read? Which is most interesting? Which warrants further discussion and development?

Your goal in your first short paper is to describe, explain, and analyze the connections between the "critical" imagination of at least two of the texts we've read. That is, show me how two of the texts we've read seem to use some common motifs, images,conflicts, and/or plots, etc., to imagine and elaborate their sense of national crisis.

Your essay should be typed, no more than two pages, double-spaced. Proofread for typographical, spelling, punctuation, and grammatical errors. The essay is due at the beginning of class on Thursday, September 17, 2009. Enjoy!

Randolph Silliman Bourne ( 1886 – 1918) Bourne is one of the great, unacknowledged intellects and writers of American cultural history. Born with severe physical disabilities, Bourne went on to join the generation of American progressives - - like John Dewey, Jane Addams, Charles Beard, and William James - - who struggled through the first decades of the 20th century to bring American consciousness up to speed with the demands of modernity. He was a radical pacifist who broke with many of his fellow progressives in denouncing the First World War. His essay, "War Is the Health of the State" remains a powerful argument against war and militarism. Bourne was especially interested in education, nationalism, and redefining cultural democracy. His life was cut short by the influenza epidemic (or Spanish Flu) of 1918.