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March 27, 2006

Selective Memory

O'Connor, ''A Late Encounter with the Enemy'' -- Jerz: American Lit II (EL 267)"It was made of gladiola petals taken off and painted gold and put back together to look like a rose (158)." Great line. In the New critical/formalist approach, I've learned that Gladiolas are native to tropical and southern Africa. We all know how much O'Connor uses race. By rearranging the petals of an African flower to make it more of an American symbol of beauty, albeit a gilded one, O'Connor extends the layers the meaning from flowers to people to the "General".

Posted by BrendaChristeleit at 3:38 PM | Comments (2)

"Literary critics have often borrowed liberally from other disciplnes (e.g., history, pyschology, politics, anthropology) but have primarily aimed at developing literature as a study in its own right." I have unknowingly used bits and pieces of many of these approaches this semester in EL 267. This chapter really delineates and expands on each of these 10 approaches, and will be helpful to write a full-blown essay using any one of them at a later date. I have completed an outline just to keep them straight:

Download file

My classmates should feel free to use if they so desiret.

Posted by BrendaChristeleit at 3:18 PM | Comments (0)

March 25, 2006

Thankfulness & Coping 101

O'Connor, ''A Circle in the Fire'' -- Jerz: American Lit II (EL 267)"Even a small change in the weather made Mrs. Cope thankful, but when the seasons changed she seemed almost frightened at her good fortune in escaping whatever it was that pursued her. As she sometimes did when one thing was finished and another about to begin, she turned her attention to the child... "(150). I think that these are some of the most important lines in the whole story, and they deserve a close reading. We know that Mrs. Cope repeatedly says how thankful she is, but how deep can her thankfulness be if she feels it with every change in the weather? Thankfulness is a good quality, and it assumes a level of serenity for the one who is thankful. When we are truly thankful, we feel blessed, but Mrs. Cope does not feel blessed. Her life is all about sweating the small stuff (nut grass, weeds, potential fires, Mr. Culver using the gate) and she disdains everyone around her. You are unquestionably thankful if you manage to avoid some calamity, and may even devote the rest of your life to God, doing good, etc., but we don't know if there was a defining or dangerous moment that Mrs. Cope somehow survived, and if this is why she makes such a conscious effort to be thankful (Notice that there is never any mention of a Mr. Cope, yet there is a daughter). Because the reader is not given a complete history, and because of her focus on petty details ( "(She) ate her dinner hastily, not conscious that she had her sunhat on"(147), Mrs. Cope's gratefulness seems contrived. No matter how hard she works and how thankful she says that she is, she really has no control (as personified by th visitors) and this douses any good in her life, including being a mother to her daughter, who is only squeezed in between tasks.

Posted by BrendaChristeleit at 6:31 PM | Comments (2)

March 24, 2006

Mercy me

O'Connor, ''The Artificial Nigger'' -- Jerz: American Lit II (EL 267)"Mr. Head had never known before what mercy felt like because he had been too good to deserve any, but he felt he knew now." (128). I am feeling very drained and wrenched out after reading these O'Connor stories one after the next, and it's becoming a struggle to pick out something fresh to blog on, because her underlying themes change very little so far. For example, when Mr. Head gets his tickets from teh scale and Nelson's is upside-down, but Mr, Head's is right on track with his self-image, I just knew that something was about to crack. For an instant I thought that Mr. Head was going to abandon Nelson like Mr. Shiflet did to Lucynell, Jr., and I was partially correct. The title, the numerous racial references, the self-proclaimed goodness of Mr. Head, and the fact that we've read so many of these stories in a row are all getting old pretty quickly. I'm "ravenous" for something different.

Posted by BrendaChristeleit at 10:40 AM | Comments (4)

March 22, 2006

Had Bevel lived...

O'Connor, '''A Temple of the Holy Ghost'' -- Jerz: American Lit II (EL 267)
"She would pull down her mouth and hold her forehead as if she were in agony and groan, "Fawther, we thank Thee," exactly the way he did and she had been told many times not to do it. She would never be a siant, but she thought she could be a martyr if they killed her quick." (94)
O'Connor flat-out nails how a young person, who is coming into their own and really starting to question their world can feel about the whole religion/church rituals which the adults seem to swallow hook, line & sinker. Although "the child" has her fun, she also believes enough to sincerely pray to be a better person. The confusion that Bevel had in "The River" is carried on in this girl of 12.

Posted by BrendaChristeleit at 8:56 PM | Comments (5)

March 19, 2006

Ruby's quite a gem!

O'Connor, ''A Stroke of Good Fortune'' -- Jerz: American Lit II (EL 267)"It was mortifying to let that kind of a husband see that you had that kind of a brother." Get real Ruby! We never get to meet Bill Hill, but are told that he works as a "Miracle Products" salesman who we know lives in a 4th floor walk-up apartament 8 blocks from the center of town. Ruby can't seem to see the good in anything - her brother, her pregnancy, even collard greens - and clings onto this concept of what a catch her husband was. Funny how she never just calls him "Bill", but always "Bill Hill". Ruby is kinda like Grandma in "A Good Man..." in that she is in denial about so many things.

Posted by BrendaChristeleit at 8:28 AM | Comments (5)

March 16, 2006

Thanks!

Demonstrative Research Essay -- Jerz: American Lit II (EL 267)I loved meeting all of you in the Tues-Thurs class and am happy that I can now put faces to names on the blogs. You have very good discussions, and it was refreshing to hear all of your opinions on our readings. Good luck to you all for the remainder of the semester!

Posted by BrendaChristeleit at 12:25 PM | Comments (2)

March 15, 2006

Chapter 18 - Writing & Documenting the Research Essay

Roberts, Ch 18 -- Jerz: American Lit II (EL 267)"Unless you are planning an extensive research assignment, you can safely assume that the writers of critical works will have done the selecting for you of important works published before the date of publication.(236)" Roberts adds: "But such bibliographies will not go up to the present, for that, you will need to search for works published after the most recent of the books." Nice little tip - once you find a recent, reliable source, your legwork is 1/2 over.

Posted by BrendaChristeleit at 7:25 AM | Comments (1)

March 14, 2006

Using Research to demonstrate an opposing viewpoint

Demonstrative Research Essay -- Jerz: American Lit II (EL 267)"The essay also contains passages taking issue with certain conclusions in a few of the sources." This goes along with the whole idea that writing about literature is not an exact science, it is an art, and there can be as many differing opinions about what something means, symbolizes, etc., as they are researchers.

Posted by BrendaChristeleit at 10:26 PM | Comments (0)

March 11, 2006

What about the hitchhiker?

O'Connor, ''The Life You Save May Be Your Own'' -- Jerz: American Lit II (EL 267)"The boy didn't have his hand raised to thumb a ride, he was only standing there, but he had a small cardboard suitcase and his hat was set on his head in a way to indicate that he had left somewhere for good." (66). As I said in some other blog, I kept waiting for Mr. Shiftlet to back up over the hitchhiker with his care before driving away, but he never does-he just goes off into the storm. What do you guys make of the hitchhiker and Mr. Shiftlet's diatribe that sets the boy off so much?

Posted by BrendaChristeleit at 12:38 PM | Comments (4)

March 8, 2006

Mr. Shiftless, I mean Shiflet

O'Connor, ''The Life You Save May Be Your Own'' -- Jerz: American Lit II (EL 267)"She was ravenous for a son-in-law." Ravenous is an apt adjective-she was so hungry for a man around the house, and Mr. Shiflet proved himself enough to win her good graces in only a week. I also liked the line "'Saturday' the old woman said, "you and her and me can drive into town and get married." And I thought that the story takes place in Alabama, not Utah.

Posted by BrendaChristeleit at 8:45 PM | Comments (3)

Pastoral by William Carlos Williams – An Early Insight into Later Poems

Paper 1 (40pts) -- Jerz: American Lit II (EL 267)Here's my paper #1 - it was not easy pulling things togther or finding things about this apparently seldom studied poem, but the more I read, the more that my thesis took shape. I would appreciate any feedback my classmates want to give before the due date (I'm going to start enjoying what's left of Spring break now!)

Brenda Christeleit
Professor D. Jerz
EL267 – Paper #1 (Expansion of Exercise 1-2a)
14 March 2006
Pastoral by William Carlos Williams – An Early Insight into Later Poems

Pastoral by William Carlos Williams’ (Conarroe 151) is an early example of his use of everyday language, renunciation of symbolism, attention to the visual form and shifting of perspective. Although scholars have paid more attention to his poem by the same title that begins “The little sparrows/hop ingenuously…” (Conarroe 152), the subject Pastoral is worth exploration as a forerunner of Williams’ mature style.

Williams’ style evolved rapidly from awkward syntax to shorter everyday phrases with precise page placement. 1909’s Poems has “…sentences…so long you lose track of them” with “convoluted and inverted clauses and subordinate clauses” (Perloff, Voices & Visions). Although Pastoral was written very soon after Poems was published, it demonstrates a shift to ordinary speech which occurred for at least three reasons: 1)Williams adopted prevalent ideas from visual art, 2) he closely observed his surroundings, and 3)his habit of scribbling notes on his small physician prescription pads led to more concise and authentic language. Pastoral uses unaffected “non-poetic” language in its opening line, “When I was younger/It was plain to me/I must make something of myself” (1-3). This matter-of-fact statement could be spoken in everyday conversation, and its ordinariness has no need of paraphrase.
Williams’ method of writing the early poetry, including Pastoral, is “…to start with an image, then either moralize it, or in some way assert that it is important.” (Townley 80). The speaker admires the decrepit shanties “of the very poor” (7), but never indicates disdain or pity. Contrarily, he demonstrates a connection between himself, his upbringing, his current life and his countrymen. The idea that the subject matter of Pastoral merits a poem stems from the as yet embryonic idea that “…there is no need to need to go anywhere or do anything to possess the plenitude of existence (Miller 4)”, and it this reason that Williams never became an ex-patriot as did contemporaries Hemingway and Eliot. His subject is strengthened by the use of indigenous speech patterns and language.

Pastoral also hints at the later works by its rejection of symbolism. Williams’ seeks to express the contact between words, imagination and the object (Imaginations 59). Pastoral’s images include “Roof out of line with sides/The yards cluttered/With old chicken wire, ashes,/Furniture gone wrong;” (8-11) do not symbolize anything but themselves. Even though Williams doesn’t require the resolution of symbols, there remains a value judgment which disappears in later works like Breakfast (Conarroe 164).
Williams’ was professionally trained to observe “absolutely commonplace details” (Kenner, Voices & Visions). Such training led to his belief that “poems are not made of beautiful thoughts, they are made of words” (Williams, Voices & Visions). He ironically titles the subject work “Pastoral”, not because it is an ode to a bucolic setting, but because it expresses Rutherford, N.J. - his ideal. He asserts his place in history by taking a European ideal of paradise and overlaying it on the poor America. As Miller writes in William Carlos Williams: A Collection of Critical Essays:
His work registers a change in sensibility [and his…] presuppositions about poetry and human existence are…a unique version of a new tradition. What they are and the way they are implicit in each of his poems can only be discovered by that immersion in his writing which must precede interpretation of any part of it. The difficulties of such interpretation may be suggested by consideration of the ways Williams’ work fails to provide the reader habituated to romantic or symbolist poetry with the qualities he expects.” (1-2).

This “change in sensibility” is most apparent in Pastoral’s lack of symbolism. Miller continues “For Williams, the uniqueness of each thing is more important than any horizontal resonances it may have with other things” (4). Cappucci names Pastoral as an example of Williams’ belief in “the purpose and power of poetry” (375). He documents Williams’ “unique aesthetic pleasure” (379) in finding poetry amid his surroundings, which includes the use of “…short unrhymed lines and colloquial phrases like ‘furniture gone wrong’ to portray the distinct voice of the locale.”(379). Williams states in Collected Poems, “Unconsciously, I was playing with the form of the line, and getting into the American idiom”(481). However unconscious it may be in Pastoral, this attempt to elevate the American language to poetry without use of symbolism or romanticism reaches its apex in later works.
Williams’ later attention to the visual form of a poem is also foretold in the physical placement of the poem’s most robust lines, “No one/Will believe this/Of vast import to the nation.” The only such alignment in the entire work, Williams significantly indents the line “No one” which introduces the remaining concluding phrases. This attention to spacing is a direct influence from the avant-garde visual arts scene, as well as a precursor to his later idea that poets use words like painters uses paint (Perloff, Voices & Visions). Referring to an ensuing work entitled, The Red Wheelbarrow, Morris writes, “As well as creating an image, the poem’s own structure is also part of its meaning […] Each individual verse actually makes a shape like a wheelbarrow…” (Morris 1155). The subject matter, the poet’s relationship to the subject, and the visual form of the poem are all themes through Williams’ later work, and are all found in the infrequently studied Pastoral.

The final evocation of what was to come provided by Pastoral is its shifts in perspective. The first change is implied in the aging of the author and the second comes with the jolting final phrase. Like The Red Wheelbarrow, perspective is a theme. Blythe and Sweet write that “When read carefully, in fact, the poem [The Red Wheelbarrow] is not only a statement about the importance of perspective (‘so much depends’) but an exercise that forces readers to experience actual changes in perspective” (39). They liken the shifts to a movie director’s shot sequence of close-up, extreme close-up, then wide-angle as the poem progresses (40). In Pastoral, the camera shots would proceed from a close up on the speaker, then a wide-angle on the house, then an extreme close-up on the speaker again for the final lines. These shifts in perspective do not allow the reader to remain comfortable while reading the poems.
If the reader is attentive, they will discover that even in the early and little-known poem Pastoral, Williams Carlos Williams was laying the foundation for future work. Some themes included are the use of ordinary language and rejection of symbolism, the visual impact of a poem, and engaging the reader on different levels through shifts in perspective. Williams’ immersed himself in his surroundings, and sought to express the contact between his imagination, the object and words. Pastoral is a surprising example of the different ways that Williams’ work evolved into his later highly individual, modern and influential poems.


REFERENCES

Blythe, Hal and Charlie Sweet. "Williams's 'The Red Wheelbarrow'." ANQ 14.1 (2001): 39-40.
Cappucci, Paul R. "'And Everyone and I Stopped Breathing': William Carlos Williams, Frank O'Hara, and the News of the Day in Verse." Papers on Language and Literature 39.4 (2003): 375-89.
Conarroe, Joel, ed. Six American Poets. New York: Random House, 1991.
Cosgrove, Peter. "Hopkins's ‘The Windhover’: Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself." Poetics Today 25.3 (2004): 437-64.
Garcia, José Maria Rodriguez. "War and Degradation in Edgar Lee Masters and William Carlos Williams." Orbis Litterarum 58.2 (2003): 79-100.
Mikkelsen, Ann. "The Truth about Us": Pastoral, Pragmatism, and Paterson." American Literature 75.3 (2003): 601-26.
Miller, J. Hillis, ed. William Carlos Williams: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1966.
Rogers, Richard P. (Director) & Jill Janows (Producer). Voices & Visions: William Carlos
Williams (Video). New York: The New York Center for Visual History, Inc., 1988.
Scott, Webster, ed. Imaginations. New York: New Directions, 1971.
Townley, Rod. The Early Poetry of William Carlos Williams. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1975.
Williams, William Carlos. In: ML Rosenthal, ed. The William Carlos Williams Reader. New York: MacGibbon and Kee, 1966.
Williams, William Carlos. Poems. Intro., Virginia M. Wright-Peterson. 2nd. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2002.

Posted by BrendaChristeleit at 5:36 PM | Comments (0)

The River

O'Connor, ''The River'' -- Jerz: American Lit II (EL 267)"She has a hangover." This was the only place where I laughed out loud. Bevel is only 4-5 years old and knows what a hangover is, yet is so innocent that he was going to "keep on going until he found the Kingdom of Christ in the river" (51). At this tender age, Bevel is pawned off, unsupervised, feeds himself and is aware of things that no 4-5 year old should be. "The River" is literally a death of innocence story.

Posted by BrendaChristeleit at 8:07 AM | Comments (3)

March 5, 2006

Shouldering assumptions

O'Connor, ''A Good Man Is Hard to Find'' -- Jerz: American Lit II (EL 267)"She was sitting against the side of the red gutted ditch, holding the screaming baby, but she only had a cut down her face and a broken shoulder." The shoulder motif is continued with June Star hanging over her mother's shoulder whining, and Grandma touching Misfit's shoulder right before he shot her. What is all this shouldering about? Shouldering blame, burdens, or a joint where an appendage meets the body?

Posted by BrendaChristeleit at 2:26 PM | Comments (3)

Grandma's Moment of Clarity

O'Connor, ''A Good Man Is Hard to Find'' -- Jerz: American Lit II (EL 267)"Why you're one of my babies. You're on of my own children!"(29). We know that Misfit is not literally Grandma's child because "Bailey was the son she lived with, her only boy."(9) Is this a last-ditch (no pun intended) effort by Grandma to save her skin, is she in shock, or is she trying to manipulate something else? I think that it's a combination of all three: 1)She wants to keep Misfit talking; 2)She's in shock becasue despite the whole family, including children, going into the woods with precisely the same # of gun blasts, she can only call out Bailey's name, and 3)Her modus operandi is to be a manipulator, albeit unsuccessful. What a taut little tale!

Posted by BrendaChristeleit at 2:22 PM | Comments (2)

March 2, 2006

Criminal=subculture=artist=counter-culture=palm reader???!!

Academic Article TBA -- Jerz: American Lit II (EL 267)""In addition, the criminal world and various subcultures such as mystics and artists become appealing avenues for personal growth and offer their own financial rewards." Ok, I let this one slide because there is at least a conjunction between "criminal world" and "artist", but when Doctoral Candidate Thomson later says "Many Sims take on careers such as an artist or palm reader that allow more time and opportunity to pursue counter cultural activities." SAY WHAAAAAAA? Our culture is so completely about the INDIVIDUAL presently, that counter-culture art is an oxymoron. The more an artist rejects the culture, the more in fact they accept it, because they are adhering to our current belief that individual expression = good; non-individual expression = bad. I searched Thomson and found very little (other than is a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Kansas, if this is the same man).
Even is Thomson is 110% completely correct about the similarities between Gatsby and a Sim, the whole article was clouded by the views that he expresses about art and artists, which I hope are his alone and not intertwined in this game. I have a REAL life; a life which includes an ongoing battle to keep arts education in the schools, so that kids don't have to be trapped in lives where material possessions = self-worth. I searched for Sims and found that for $9.99/month, I could PRETEND to have a life by playing Sims (I'll keep my $$$, thanks).

Posted by BrendaChristeleit at 7:44 PM | Comments (0)

March 1, 2006

Prelim ideas for Paper #1

Paper 1 (40pts) -- Jerz: American Lit II (EL 267)WCW -class structure-"Pastoral", and current events

Posted by BrendaChristeleit at 8:37 PM | Comments (0)

A myrtle by any other name would smell as ...

Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925) -- Jerz: American Lit II (EL 267)Onilee's blog about the colors blue and green got me thinking - aren't myrtle bushes blue? Here's what WordNet says

The noun myrtle has 2 meanings:

Meaning #1: widely cultivated as a groundcover for its dark green shiny leaves and usually blue-violet flowers
Synonym: Vinca minor

Meaning #2: any evergreen shrub or tree of the genus Myrtus

Blue like Gatsby's chauffeur's uniform - definitely not pure white like a daisy.

Posted by BrendaChristeleit at 4:35 PM | Comments (2)