jade_sabre (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
jade_sabre) wrote2009-04-25 05:18 pm
jade_sabre) wrote2009-04-25 05:18 pm
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best essay ever
so basically for my Brit Lit II class I have to do this "semi-weekly writings" where I reflect on the readings we've done since the last one we turned in, but uh, as I turned in my last one back in February, I had a lot to catch up on. But this way I was able to examine trends and also just have fun talking about literature.
But just to give y'all an idea of what I've been reading, and again, what I want to do with my life, I'm posting it. Because it was awesome.
Romanticism
First we read all the manifestos, from where Coleridge and Wordsworth talked about their anti-Enlightenment reactionary positions to Burke waxing eloquently on poor Marie Antoinette having to live in a stuff prison cell to Mary Wollstonecraft pointing out that Burke was full of a lot of hogwash because the whole idea of inherited property just gave a lot of privilege to a group of people who were actually quite terrible at managing said privilege. (Even at the end of the 1700s, the seeds for socialism were already sprouting.)
Then we read some of Wordsworth’s poetry, which was deeply introspective and involved a lot of waxing about childhood memories and their importance on the way he has grown up (like Chatueabriand, preceding Proust’s madeleines) and how poetry should reflect that kind of introspection with fewer constraints, such as a lack of apostrophe in addressing abstract ideas and a use of more natural, less formalized (though really if you compare Wordsworth’s ideas of natural language with the kind of poetry found in modernist poetry, like Eliot’s earlier works, I would have to say Wordsworth still gets wrapped up in overly flowery language), and how the poet has to bring all this together.
Coleridge’s poetry sort of goes along with this, except for the fact that his margin notes on Rime of the Ancient Mariner are much more comprehensible than the actual poem itself (it also has that Romantic sense of fascination with the supernatural, and that whole “man who is cursed to live forever” thing that turns up in Manfred and Faust). John Keats differs, a bit, in that he plays a lot more with structure, keeping a very traditional structure that people disapproved of while still expounding deeply on emotions and death. (Also, Coleridge was getting high on opium and failing to finish poems, while Keats was taking opium because he had TB and was dying and still managed to finish things.)
I presented on Shelley and I pretty much think his poetry is complete rot—well, not complete rot, but I have a low opinion of the man himself that combines with my natural (and mostly inexplicable) dislike of Romanticism (although someone once suggested the problem with Romanticism is that most of its poets had, despite all of their protestations, one eye in the mirror the whole time they were writing, which causes their poetry to ring a bit hollow, due to the inherent narcissism trying to mask itself as profundity) and produces a general apathy towards the quality of his work. He also whines a lot, and had a similar view of poets as being exceedingly special in their role in describing the world.
Byron’s Manfred is another example of a Romantic with too high an opinion of himself, especially as Manfred himself is basically a self-insert character. Obviously the idea of the Byronic hero—someone who views themselves as completely free and independent from the rules of normal society due to their elevated status (from intelligence, enlightenment, beauty, strength, ability to sparkle in the sunlight, whatever), also a character who has a certain element of tragedy or fallen-ness to them—is very important in English literature, but I would like to know—if Manfred is really so free, why would he care about society’s rules about incest? Or beyond that, the natural rules that outlaw incest for humans (as he has clearly denied nature’s control over him via his extended life span)? And even if he is free from all this—from the nature, from God, from the witches—he’s still completely a slave to his dead sister’s gaze, and that’s why he ends up in so much trouble in the end. So much for pathos.
In the same supernatural vein we read “The Irish Incognito” and “Wandering Willie’s Tale.” The former was a story about Irish-English relations (see Translations) and a bit about what makes an English gentleman (see Great Expectations). The latter veered more towards the Gothic end of Romanticism, with all the creepiness and the ghosts and the large manor castles and the appearances of the devil. (Also, “Wandering Willie’s Tale” is a form of historical fiction, yay Walter Scott.)
Victorian Period
“Dover Beach” inspired an awesome poem entitled “Dover Bitch” which I think everyone should read. I am a fan of follow-up response poetry.
The biggest work we read for this period was Great Expectations, which wasn’t much at all like David Copperfield, which I preferred (which might put me on Ruskin’s side of things). It did important things like reflect on the position of the gentleman in English (especially London) society at the time, consider the fall of the old houses (merchant money versus old money, something that was an issue in Jane Austen’s time, and had probably been an issue since feudalism started to die and mercantilism became the real Hot New Thing), and tell a story of doomed love. And while I appreciate the psychology of what’s going on in the novel, I still think Dickens did a terrible job of ending it (there were about five different points where it seemed as if the novel should have ended but then it kept going), but I will freely admit that I love his prose. Also I love making snide comments about how he owned the publishing industry at the time and did things like force Elizabeth Gaskell to finish her stories early when he started disapproving of what she was writing about.
Speaking of Mrs. Gaskell (but not of all the potential issues with that name), we read “The Old Nurse’s Story,” which was a Gothic story (because Gothic literature will never die; it will just start turning from “cheap thrillers” into “social commentary on the uncertainty of our times,” if you look at Frankenstein and Dracula and Jekyll and Hyde* and maybe even Heart of Darkness, if you see it as turning from the Big Scary Castles to the Big Scary Jungle). We also read it in conjunction with Christina Rossetti’s poetry and Ruskin’s short bit on the role of women. So first we see that the role of women was at once being strictly defined in Victorian society, and yet women had more freedom in terms of publishing and being able to write as a profession. (Of course these women all had rooms of their own. But we didn’t read that work and I’ve only skimmed it, sadly.)
Speaking of Ruskin, he had some striking similarities to Marx, in that they both thought that the industry of the time was absolutely horrendous (something that shows up in both Dickens and Gaskell), but Marx would have been absolutely horrified by Ruskin’s solution of going back to the good old feudal days (yet in his call for a greater show of respect to authority, he’s falling in with Arnold’s sense of elitism, I think, which ties back into all the voting law confusion going on at the time). Ruskin, in turn, would have been/was horrified by Pater’s idea that maybe art should just be art, and not have a moral. (Early Dickens would also have disagreed with this, and even Great Expectations still has a sort of moral in Pip’s tragic-pride-filled-downfall.) But that’s okay, because Oscar Wilde and his friends were going to have a field day with that towards la fin de siècle.
*Jekyll and Hyde—also a commentary on what makes not only a gentleman, but also a man--Jekyll seems like a perfect gentleman on the outside, but in the end he is the one who willfully gives into becoming a monster for the last time, because actually maybe men aren’t as good as people thought they were—this is an idea, going along with Heart of Darkness, that everyone gets really into after the horror of WWI. As a side note digression: Why do we make so many movies about WWII and not WWI? Maybe it’s just because we’re American and didn’t lose half of our population to it (maybe it could be seen as analogous to making Civil War movies? Now I’m just rambling), but it seems like there should be more movies made about it.
The Twentieth Century
The first work we read in this section was Heart of Darkness, which ties into all of those Empire and Imperialism readings that I rather skimmed in that colonization was going on and Britain was taking over Ireland (see again Translations) to India and everything in between. I know a lot of people really hate HoD, but I rather enjoyed it, aside from the fact that I think it could have been ten thousand words shorter and not lost anything aside from Marlowe’s whining (my favorite character is definitely his crewmate on the outer ring of the narrative who tells him to stop babbling and get on with the story). The structure of the story is fairly complicated and the narrative is ambiguous and the story contains almost no moral (sorry Ruskin) or any real beauty (sorry Pater) and Chinua Achebe is probably completely right in thinking that it is racist, but then again it doesn’t really do anything to hide this racism, so I’m not entirely sure his argument was particularly…meaningful. The real problem is not that Conrad is secretly racist, but that he uses this racism and builds on people’s perceptions of it in order to prove a pivotal point in his novel (the jungle is primitive and savage and turns people into those black animals!), and, well, that just reinforces racism and is bad. (There’s been a lot of debate recently on the internet about the role of racism and systemic prejudice in literature, so reading HoD was particularly interesting in that light.)
Anyway, then we dove into the Joy That Is Modernism. The Manifestos were all written just before and during World War I, showing more how the tensions of the time were bleeding into art, because the Victorian ideas that progress and empire were going to make everything actually…didn’t make everything better, and so it was time for an artistic revolution. Hulme, writing before the war, says Romanticism sucks (he and I are great friends on this subject) but Classicism and the way of Pope and his buddies is going to make a comeback (boy, was he wrong). The Imagists (aside from having a Bloomsbury-Group-esque sleepfest going on) wanted to capture moments, precisely and absolutely, but really that’s incredibly difficult to do without metaphor or simile or the usual techniques, and so they kind of gave up on that and moved onto things that were like Imagism but slightly less rigid. But in keeping with that original idea, the excerpt from Blast again reinforces the idea that what matters is the Now, the precise moment and what’s going on in it.
Of course, what’s going on in that precise moment is WWI, and so at the end of that everyone feels quite terrible. Wasteland is of course the grand example of this, focusing on individual moments that are completely disconnected and many of which are rather awful in and of themselves. It’s also interesting to note that he doesn’t completely break ties with literary history, but draws on everything—that is to say, a lot of what he writes is not directly accessible, not only because it’s portrayed in a confusing manner, but because it’s written in a different language or refers to a story with which the general public is not acquainted. (I have a pet theory that lots of people have probably written about already and I just haven’t had a chance to read about, wherein one can look at the Modernists, while many of them are atheists or what-have-you, as not yet able to give up on the past entirely, trying to place it in the context of what’s happened to them, bringing the past into the present and examining it, referencing to it despite thinking that it’s really useless, because in the end it’s not really useless or else they wouldn’t care about it; meanwhile, the post-modernists just give up on everything except what they’re going through [yay existentialism], and that’s why they’re so particularly grim.)
Anyway, the obsession with the precise moment lingers, though its interpretation varies. James Joyce, writing (or at least finishing and publishing) “Araby” and “The Dead” at the same time as Blast’s publications, focuses on the moment of the epiphany—not of a sublime epiphany, but of a littler one, taking place within the normal motions of human life and giving deeper weight and meaning to those moments as well as placing life in a new context for evaluation. For example, Gabriel realizes that, hey, maybe he isn’t the only man in his wife’s life, and maybe she’s someone more than just “his wife.” Or something like that. (I found “The Dead” very tedious the first time I read it, and so far that hasn’t changed. Maybe when I’m older.)
And then of course there is Mrs Dalloway which is a brilliant sparkling shiny wonderful novel about moments and how actually they’re all connected and despite the fact that we can’t really know what anyone else is thinking we can still appreciate them for being there and even if we can’t communicate our feelings just as we want to, we can trust others to appreciate us and see what we are trying to say (c.f. Richard and the roses). Virginia Woolf is the queen of semi-colons. The protagonist is both Mrs. Dalloway of the party and Clarissa of Bourton and of existential ponderings, and somehow this character who is not very learned or well-read has thoughts and ideas of interest to us. The novel is almost devoid of classical allusions and its structure was practically unknown at the time, which serves the Modernist desire (unfulfilled?) to cut ties with the things of the past, and yet it is about the bourgeois and their sensibilities as much as it is about life in general. Also it is brilliant and wonderful and I love it.
For our final work (which I thought was an odd thing to read as our final reading, since it didn’t really seem to tie everything together the way I might have thought it might, but we’ll see if I can’t find some way to tie it all up anyway), we skipped post-modernism (although I’m not really sure when that ends) and jumped ahead nearly fifty years to 1980 and the play Translations, which is about the shifting tensions between the Irish and English in 1838 as exemplified through the Anglicization of Irish words and places. The play is a little confusing in that the whole thing is in English, despite the fact that there are multiple scenes wherein half the cast is supposed to be speaking in Irish in front of a bunch of English people who can’t understand them. The play attempts, among other things, to portray the English language as clumsy and imprecise, and to overdramatize the events that passed in order to create emotional responses in the audience. It ties back in with the evils of colonization, but it directly stands against Rushide’s essay we read (way back in the beginning of class) about how English is a universal literary language—while ironically being in English. It is not a play about city society (like the others we read) but about the collapse of a society as directly caused by language.
So I suppose that, in a way, could tie everything together, because no matter how people we’ve read have disagreed in the way language should be used or who should be using it and who should be reading it or what it should be doing in people’s lives, everyone agrees that language does something to people’s lives and there is a responsibility on writers to be aware of the impact they may be having, because literature does matter.
After all, isn’t that why we’re all here?
But just to give y'all an idea of what I've been reading, and again, what I want to do with my life, I'm posting it. Because it was awesome.
Romanticism
First we read all the manifestos, from where Coleridge and Wordsworth talked about their anti-Enlightenment reactionary positions to Burke waxing eloquently on poor Marie Antoinette having to live in a stuff prison cell to Mary Wollstonecraft pointing out that Burke was full of a lot of hogwash because the whole idea of inherited property just gave a lot of privilege to a group of people who were actually quite terrible at managing said privilege. (Even at the end of the 1700s, the seeds for socialism were already sprouting.)
Then we read some of Wordsworth’s poetry, which was deeply introspective and involved a lot of waxing about childhood memories and their importance on the way he has grown up (like Chatueabriand, preceding Proust’s madeleines) and how poetry should reflect that kind of introspection with fewer constraints, such as a lack of apostrophe in addressing abstract ideas and a use of more natural, less formalized (though really if you compare Wordsworth’s ideas of natural language with the kind of poetry found in modernist poetry, like Eliot’s earlier works, I would have to say Wordsworth still gets wrapped up in overly flowery language), and how the poet has to bring all this together.
Coleridge’s poetry sort of goes along with this, except for the fact that his margin notes on Rime of the Ancient Mariner are much more comprehensible than the actual poem itself (it also has that Romantic sense of fascination with the supernatural, and that whole “man who is cursed to live forever” thing that turns up in Manfred and Faust). John Keats differs, a bit, in that he plays a lot more with structure, keeping a very traditional structure that people disapproved of while still expounding deeply on emotions and death. (Also, Coleridge was getting high on opium and failing to finish poems, while Keats was taking opium because he had TB and was dying and still managed to finish things.)
I presented on Shelley and I pretty much think his poetry is complete rot—well, not complete rot, but I have a low opinion of the man himself that combines with my natural (and mostly inexplicable) dislike of Romanticism (although someone once suggested the problem with Romanticism is that most of its poets had, despite all of their protestations, one eye in the mirror the whole time they were writing, which causes their poetry to ring a bit hollow, due to the inherent narcissism trying to mask itself as profundity) and produces a general apathy towards the quality of his work. He also whines a lot, and had a similar view of poets as being exceedingly special in their role in describing the world.
Byron’s Manfred is another example of a Romantic with too high an opinion of himself, especially as Manfred himself is basically a self-insert character. Obviously the idea of the Byronic hero—someone who views themselves as completely free and independent from the rules of normal society due to their elevated status (from intelligence, enlightenment, beauty, strength, ability to sparkle in the sunlight, whatever), also a character who has a certain element of tragedy or fallen-ness to them—is very important in English literature, but I would like to know—if Manfred is really so free, why would he care about society’s rules about incest? Or beyond that, the natural rules that outlaw incest for humans (as he has clearly denied nature’s control over him via his extended life span)? And even if he is free from all this—from the nature, from God, from the witches—he’s still completely a slave to his dead sister’s gaze, and that’s why he ends up in so much trouble in the end. So much for pathos.
In the same supernatural vein we read “The Irish Incognito” and “Wandering Willie’s Tale.” The former was a story about Irish-English relations (see Translations) and a bit about what makes an English gentleman (see Great Expectations). The latter veered more towards the Gothic end of Romanticism, with all the creepiness and the ghosts and the large manor castles and the appearances of the devil. (Also, “Wandering Willie’s Tale” is a form of historical fiction, yay Walter Scott.)
Victorian Period
“Dover Beach” inspired an awesome poem entitled “Dover Bitch” which I think everyone should read. I am a fan of follow-up response poetry.
The biggest work we read for this period was Great Expectations, which wasn’t much at all like David Copperfield, which I preferred (which might put me on Ruskin’s side of things). It did important things like reflect on the position of the gentleman in English (especially London) society at the time, consider the fall of the old houses (merchant money versus old money, something that was an issue in Jane Austen’s time, and had probably been an issue since feudalism started to die and mercantilism became the real Hot New Thing), and tell a story of doomed love. And while I appreciate the psychology of what’s going on in the novel, I still think Dickens did a terrible job of ending it (there were about five different points where it seemed as if the novel should have ended but then it kept going), but I will freely admit that I love his prose. Also I love making snide comments about how he owned the publishing industry at the time and did things like force Elizabeth Gaskell to finish her stories early when he started disapproving of what she was writing about.
Speaking of Mrs. Gaskell (but not of all the potential issues with that name), we read “The Old Nurse’s Story,” which was a Gothic story (because Gothic literature will never die; it will just start turning from “cheap thrillers” into “social commentary on the uncertainty of our times,” if you look at Frankenstein and Dracula and Jekyll and Hyde* and maybe even Heart of Darkness, if you see it as turning from the Big Scary Castles to the Big Scary Jungle). We also read it in conjunction with Christina Rossetti’s poetry and Ruskin’s short bit on the role of women. So first we see that the role of women was at once being strictly defined in Victorian society, and yet women had more freedom in terms of publishing and being able to write as a profession. (Of course these women all had rooms of their own. But we didn’t read that work and I’ve only skimmed it, sadly.)
Speaking of Ruskin, he had some striking similarities to Marx, in that they both thought that the industry of the time was absolutely horrendous (something that shows up in both Dickens and Gaskell), but Marx would have been absolutely horrified by Ruskin’s solution of going back to the good old feudal days (yet in his call for a greater show of respect to authority, he’s falling in with Arnold’s sense of elitism, I think, which ties back into all the voting law confusion going on at the time). Ruskin, in turn, would have been/was horrified by Pater’s idea that maybe art should just be art, and not have a moral. (Early Dickens would also have disagreed with this, and even Great Expectations still has a sort of moral in Pip’s tragic-pride-filled-downfall.) But that’s okay, because Oscar Wilde and his friends were going to have a field day with that towards la fin de siècle.
*Jekyll and Hyde—also a commentary on what makes not only a gentleman, but also a man--Jekyll seems like a perfect gentleman on the outside, but in the end he is the one who willfully gives into becoming a monster for the last time, because actually maybe men aren’t as good as people thought they were—this is an idea, going along with Heart of Darkness, that everyone gets really into after the horror of WWI. As a side note digression: Why do we make so many movies about WWII and not WWI? Maybe it’s just because we’re American and didn’t lose half of our population to it (maybe it could be seen as analogous to making Civil War movies? Now I’m just rambling), but it seems like there should be more movies made about it.
The Twentieth Century
The first work we read in this section was Heart of Darkness, which ties into all of those Empire and Imperialism readings that I rather skimmed in that colonization was going on and Britain was taking over Ireland (see again Translations) to India and everything in between. I know a lot of people really hate HoD, but I rather enjoyed it, aside from the fact that I think it could have been ten thousand words shorter and not lost anything aside from Marlowe’s whining (my favorite character is definitely his crewmate on the outer ring of the narrative who tells him to stop babbling and get on with the story). The structure of the story is fairly complicated and the narrative is ambiguous and the story contains almost no moral (sorry Ruskin) or any real beauty (sorry Pater) and Chinua Achebe is probably completely right in thinking that it is racist, but then again it doesn’t really do anything to hide this racism, so I’m not entirely sure his argument was particularly…meaningful. The real problem is not that Conrad is secretly racist, but that he uses this racism and builds on people’s perceptions of it in order to prove a pivotal point in his novel (the jungle is primitive and savage and turns people into those black animals!), and, well, that just reinforces racism and is bad. (There’s been a lot of debate recently on the internet about the role of racism and systemic prejudice in literature, so reading HoD was particularly interesting in that light.)
Anyway, then we dove into the Joy That Is Modernism. The Manifestos were all written just before and during World War I, showing more how the tensions of the time were bleeding into art, because the Victorian ideas that progress and empire were going to make everything actually…didn’t make everything better, and so it was time for an artistic revolution. Hulme, writing before the war, says Romanticism sucks (he and I are great friends on this subject) but Classicism and the way of Pope and his buddies is going to make a comeback (boy, was he wrong). The Imagists (aside from having a Bloomsbury-Group-esque sleepfest going on) wanted to capture moments, precisely and absolutely, but really that’s incredibly difficult to do without metaphor or simile or the usual techniques, and so they kind of gave up on that and moved onto things that were like Imagism but slightly less rigid. But in keeping with that original idea, the excerpt from Blast again reinforces the idea that what matters is the Now, the precise moment and what’s going on in it.
Of course, what’s going on in that precise moment is WWI, and so at the end of that everyone feels quite terrible. Wasteland is of course the grand example of this, focusing on individual moments that are completely disconnected and many of which are rather awful in and of themselves. It’s also interesting to note that he doesn’t completely break ties with literary history, but draws on everything—that is to say, a lot of what he writes is not directly accessible, not only because it’s portrayed in a confusing manner, but because it’s written in a different language or refers to a story with which the general public is not acquainted. (I have a pet theory that lots of people have probably written about already and I just haven’t had a chance to read about, wherein one can look at the Modernists, while many of them are atheists or what-have-you, as not yet able to give up on the past entirely, trying to place it in the context of what’s happened to them, bringing the past into the present and examining it, referencing to it despite thinking that it’s really useless, because in the end it’s not really useless or else they wouldn’t care about it; meanwhile, the post-modernists just give up on everything except what they’re going through [yay existentialism], and that’s why they’re so particularly grim.)
Anyway, the obsession with the precise moment lingers, though its interpretation varies. James Joyce, writing (or at least finishing and publishing) “Araby” and “The Dead” at the same time as Blast’s publications, focuses on the moment of the epiphany—not of a sublime epiphany, but of a littler one, taking place within the normal motions of human life and giving deeper weight and meaning to those moments as well as placing life in a new context for evaluation. For example, Gabriel realizes that, hey, maybe he isn’t the only man in his wife’s life, and maybe she’s someone more than just “his wife.” Or something like that. (I found “The Dead” very tedious the first time I read it, and so far that hasn’t changed. Maybe when I’m older.)
And then of course there is Mrs Dalloway which is a brilliant sparkling shiny wonderful novel about moments and how actually they’re all connected and despite the fact that we can’t really know what anyone else is thinking we can still appreciate them for being there and even if we can’t communicate our feelings just as we want to, we can trust others to appreciate us and see what we are trying to say (c.f. Richard and the roses). Virginia Woolf is the queen of semi-colons. The protagonist is both Mrs. Dalloway of the party and Clarissa of Bourton and of existential ponderings, and somehow this character who is not very learned or well-read has thoughts and ideas of interest to us. The novel is almost devoid of classical allusions and its structure was practically unknown at the time, which serves the Modernist desire (unfulfilled?) to cut ties with the things of the past, and yet it is about the bourgeois and their sensibilities as much as it is about life in general. Also it is brilliant and wonderful and I love it.
For our final work (which I thought was an odd thing to read as our final reading, since it didn’t really seem to tie everything together the way I might have thought it might, but we’ll see if I can’t find some way to tie it all up anyway), we skipped post-modernism (although I’m not really sure when that ends) and jumped ahead nearly fifty years to 1980 and the play Translations, which is about the shifting tensions between the Irish and English in 1838 as exemplified through the Anglicization of Irish words and places. The play is a little confusing in that the whole thing is in English, despite the fact that there are multiple scenes wherein half the cast is supposed to be speaking in Irish in front of a bunch of English people who can’t understand them. The play attempts, among other things, to portray the English language as clumsy and imprecise, and to overdramatize the events that passed in order to create emotional responses in the audience. It ties back in with the evils of colonization, but it directly stands against Rushide’s essay we read (way back in the beginning of class) about how English is a universal literary language—while ironically being in English. It is not a play about city society (like the others we read) but about the collapse of a society as directly caused by language.
So I suppose that, in a way, could tie everything together, because no matter how people we’ve read have disagreed in the way language should be used or who should be using it and who should be reading it or what it should be doing in people’s lives, everyone agrees that language does something to people’s lives and there is a responsibility on writers to be aware of the impact they may be having, because literature does matter.
After all, isn’t that why we’re all here?