Another Post-Modern Text...

Dictee is on-line! I am not sure if on your own computers you'd need to download files (I didn't), or sign up for anything (I didn't).

Here is a website that has some of the pages and some provocative questions to help understand and articulate your ideas of why Cha made the aesthetic choices she did...

Form and Content and Author

To help you meditate on the texts we have read and explored together for your final essay, I thought it would be helpful to provide you with a few articles in which the idea of "form and content" becomes a larger part of the discussion of the writer.

As we discussed in class superficially in class, form and content often meet with the author's thematic intent, or their thematic/cultural statement.

Check out what American writer Tobias Wolff has to say about the short story as an American form -- on page 2 of this interview...

Here is an article from Poets & Writers on how one writer "accidentally" became a memoirist!

And here is a provoking opinion piece from The New York Times which discusses John Updike, the novelist, and the scope or scale of what he set out to do as a writer...

Also, here's a fantastic poem from Sherman Alexie in the current issue of The New Yorker, which has the same kind of attitude the exemplifies his writing...

Final: Lit Crit 2

Form, Meet Content. Content, Meet Author.
(250 pts)

Due: Wednesday, June 17, 2009 by noon, either in mailbox or by e-mail

Write a literary analysis in which you discuss both Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric and one other text (or set of poems) from one of the authors discussed in

- You will want to have a thesis statement that clarifies your argument on the relationship between authorial identity, form and content, as evidenced in two texts.
- As always, provide lines of texts that support thesis, and explain how lines do so.
- Cite the page number of all quoted, paraphrased or summarized text from the stories at the end of each citation.
- Provide Work Cited Page
- For longer quotes (four lines or more) follow special MLA formatting guidelines
- Provide a title that clarifies thesis and subject matter – be creative, grab reader’s attention. This will be part of essay grade.
- Avoid use of “I” in essay, as “I” is NOT the subject. The use or non-use of first person has nothing to do with “my opinion.” Use of this rhetorical structure has to deal with subject of writing. “I” is not the subject. The stories and the writers are.

The essay must be a minimum of four (4) complete pages, double-spaced, using a 12-point standard font, with a maximum length of six (6) complete pages.


Final Prompt:

As we end our journey together in exploring these Contemporary American texts as cultural responses, you are to discuss the relationship between form and content in the work of Claudia Rankine and one other author of your choice.

In making the discussion more dynamic, consider what genre or mix of genres the author(s) use, and argue why this may be done through discussion of those texts. Of course, discussion of time period and what is happening with American culture (through general knowledge or through the text) becomes important. And perhaps it is important to contextualize the authors you are focusing on with brief discussion of authors who came before them in literary history.

The goal is to provide an understanding to your audience (me) why a text exists within the form the author has provided to us. The best way to articulate that is to break down the content itself, who the author is, and where do these aspects all meet? What in the subject matter lends itself best to the form with which the subject matter is written in?

Reading Excerpt

Don't Let Me Be Lonley: An American Lyric, by Claudia Rankine:

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19005

http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Let-Me-Be-Lonely/dp/1555974074#

http://www.graywolfpress.org/component/page,shop.flypage/product_id,49/category_id,0485aa93fa0558fb1f755721e776984d/option,com_phpshop/

reading reminder: 5/29

I apologize for not blogging this earlier, but in case you did not write this down in class:

Komunyakaa: "Facing It" (3076) and "My Father's Love Letter" (p. 3077)

Li-Young Lee: "Persimmons" (p. 3199); "Eating Alone" and "Eating Together" (p. 3201)

Jorie Graham: "The Geese" (3118) and "At Luca Signorelli's Resurrection of the Body" (3119)

Mimicking the Artist 2 (30pts): End of Cold War Era authors

Due: Monday, June 1st (!!!)

Prompt:

You are to write a creative piece (a poem or a short story) in which you thematically focus on exploring one aspect of cultural identity conflict as an American (that includes ethnic, religious, gender, regionalism, intellectualism, blue-collar, etc.). 

You must imitate one of the authors we have covered over the last three weeks since midterm. That list includes: Amy Tan, James Wright, Philip Levine, Rita Dove, Alberto Rios, Thomas Pynchon, Sandra Cisneros, Yusef Komunyakaa, Billy Collins, Li-Young Lee and Jorie Graham.

Imitate their writing style, how they chose to address their themes of cultural conflicts in their characters and in their poems. But, to be clear as water....You are writing your own, original creative piece inspired by one of the above authors.

Requirements: 1-2 pages, SINGLE-SPACED, Times New Roman, CREATIVE TITLE, indicate who you are imitating...

Reader Response #3 (50pts): 5/27

In 1-2 pages, answer the following prompt for Wednesday, May 27th:

"Woman Hollering Creek" by Sandra Cisneros is a Mexican-American immigrant story about a woman named Cleofilas. From this plot and character, Cisneros explores numerous themes, including the following: conflict of nationality, victimization, economic hardship, and the role of women in Mexican culture. Choose one of the themes and argue for Cisneros' take on that theme through this story. 

In other words, what statement is made on the theme through Cleofilas: who she is, what has happened to her, and what happens to her. Discuss her identity as you explore one of the above themes."

Guidelines:

1-2 pages, 12pt font, Times New Roman, double-spaced.

quick link:

Alberto Rios' "Day of the Refugios"

Upcoming Reading Schedule, and RR #2:

Reader Response #2

(50pts)

Due: Monday, 5/18/2009 in class

Guidelines:

Rita Dove's "Parsley" is one of her more known poems. More importantly, the poem exemplifies her exploration of social historical issues. As critic Helen Vendler states in the essay "Rita Dove: Identity Markers" on Dove and her place among African American poetry, considering this poem in particular:

… Poems of victimage, told from the viewpoint of the victim alone, are the stock-in-trade of mediocre protest writing, and they appear regularly in African-American literature. The position of victimage, and victimage alone, seems imaginatively insufficient to Dove, since it takes in only one half of the poem’s world. That half has of course great pathos, and we hear that pathos in the song she writes for the Haitian cane-cutters … (Vendler, 1995).

In one and a half to two pages, explore how Dove goes beyond simply using emotion to explore the subject of the poem -- the murdering of 50,000 Haitian cane-cutters who could not pronounce their "r"s correctly in Spanish! Focus on the language -- its musicality, its imagery -- and the message or thoughts the speaker of the poem provides to its audience by the end of poem. To help you out, what makes this poem go beyond your standard "this is wrong" journalistic approach to such atrocity?

Reading Schedule:

Monday, 5/18: Thomas Pynchon's "Entropy", pages 2816-2827

Wednesday, 5/20: Amy Tan, pages 3154-3163

Friday, 5/22: Sandra Cisneros, pages 3163-3171

Monday, 5/25: No Class, Memorial Day

Wednesday, 5/27: Yusef Komunyakaa and Lorna Dee Cervantes, select poems TBA

Friday, 5/29 : Billy Collins and Jorie Graham, and Fanny Howe - select poems TBA

Taking Further Analytical Steps: for 5/13

To help each student reader become more critical of the poems, it is important to size up what our own readings of the individual writers' works with those of published critics and reviewers alike.

One really good site on Modern American Poets, for instance, is the following website run by the University of Illinois *click bold link*. This particular site may help enrich your reading of some of the work we've read, are reading, and will read, before the term is over and June sets fire to our skin!

Part of your homework for Wednesday:

• Find, and print off, a published piece of criticism of one of the authors we are assigned to read this week. 
  
• Bring it in, having read, and be ready to discuss the criticism.*
• Go to an academic database (on library network!), use the one provided above, or evaluate on-line sources not endorsed by professor, but that do seem reputable academic sites ( www. . . . .edu sites most often are reputable). 
• WIKIPEDIA IS NOT, I REPEAT, NOT, I REPEAT, NOT A REPUTABLE SITE

*This particular assignment is something I am going to push the students in this particular course to do more and more, with three major goals particularly in mind:

1. To make you aware of how the literary world views the literature of our time.
2. To provide you models for your own criticism and critical writing strategies
3. To support and/or challenge your own readings of the texts.

example of student literary analysis

*The version below has been somewhat edited, and could use some more textual citation to support points within the middle parts, but do pay attention to some of the interpretations and focus on explaining how the line has clarified Blanch DuBois's character as lonely and needy...and then explains that through the text.

A representative line from Tennessee Williams' play A Streetcar Named Desire is the line from scene 11, with the main character Blanche speaking to the doctor come to take her to the psyche ward: ""Whoever you are, I have always depended on the kindness of strangers." The line sums up the character and outcome of protagonist Blanche DuBois, a woman who desperately seeks honest acceptance from any form of humankind. When she states that she has "always depended on the kindness of strangers," the audience sees her loneliness and how Blanche has lived much of her life as a "woman of the night," taking numerous strangers into her bed for solicited passion. 

Far too long, she had allowed these men (even a boy) to give her a false sense of love and security, to the point she began to believe their lies - even creating many lies of her own, as she tried to hide or justify her immoral lifestyle. 

As a child, Blanche had been groomed in comfortable living conditions - affluent to say the least. As an adult, she lost the mansion she once lived in, but still needed to maintain her modest social status somehow. It is apparent that more than intimacy, Blanche sought someone, anyone, who would treat her as the prim and proper lady she so badly wanted to be. Someone who would not pass judgment on the person she really was. Though she knew it was not genuine, Blanche accepted the artificial "kindness" of these strangers because it masked the loneliness she really felt. Blanche was lonely and this "kindness" is what she lived for, until she was banned from the hotel room she had turned into a whorehouse. Throughout the play, Blanche still attempts to fill this void.

Loneliness echoes the attitude of other characters in this production. Harold "Mitch" Mitchell for one, was romantically linked to Blanche. He too was lonely and sought the companionship of a beautiful and proper woman and Blanche is exactly what he was looking for. In Scene 6, they express their loneliness and how together, they would no longer be alone. However, when he gets wind of Blanche's shady past he dumps her immediately and unsympathetically. Unlike Blanche, Mitch sought an honest woman and refused to settle for less. He wanted "kindness" too, but it had to be real, lest he stay lonely and continue to live at home with his ailing mother. Mitch knew he would be more lonely when his mother was no longer around. Apparently, he did not care.

Blanche makes the noteworthy quote at the end of the play, speaking to Doctor, who arrives to take her to a mental institution. He was a caring and compassionate gentleman, and he addresses her as a lady - this is all she had ever wanted. The psychiatric doctor represents freedom from loneliness and all that is good in humankind, and in Blanche's mind, she has finally found the real kindness of a stranger. This time, with no strings attached.

Reminder for Wed., April 29th:

Read both Kerouac and Ashbery (which is a switch from last week). We will discuss in the following order: Ginsberg's "Howl", then Kerouac, then Ashbery.

Mimicking the Artist 1

Mimicking the Artist 1: (Civil Rights Era of America)
due: Monday, May 4, 2009

Guidelines:

- 1-2 page short story (perhaps one brief scene from a larger piece) that serves as a creative homage to a writer you admire (or don’t!).

- Can be an author we’ve read, or a writer you’ve read and feel you understand their literary techniques/writing style.

- Imitate/parody the author’s writing style – the literary device(s) that make them famous (plot, characters, language/dialect/syntax/word choice, dialogue, theme, symbolism, suspense, allegory/ etc.)

o At the top, on left-hand side, head your paper with:
       • Your name
       • Mimicking _______ (insert their name)
       • ID story and/or aspect of their writing you’re mimicking

Since we live in a Post-9/11 America, what issues are relevant today that you could represent through a piece of literature? Choose one of the authors we have read, or another established American author from the time period (1945-1980ish) we are working through in the first half of the quarter. How do they deal with their culture? How do we, as 2009 Americans, deal with ours? Imitate your author’s writing style and genre (poetry, drama, fiction, essayist?) but in your own voice. In other words, write a modern version or homage to one of the texts of that era.

The ubiquitous advice to burgeoning writers (even if forced to write!) is to be honest, and “write what you know.” However, leaving the statement at that is dangerous. Without context, it tells you to write with an authority of having the answers, when this is simply not the case What that statement really means is this:

Write from the reality and experiences of your life; what have you been through, what people in your life have gone through; what is the world you live in; what themes of humanity obsess you? What do you know, but not really know? What is worth exploring based on you and your experience?

Schedule Reminders/Clarifications:

1. Reader Response #2 is rescheduled for a later date! 

2. No Class, Friday, April 24th: for class attendance, e-mail me a quick response to James Balwin's "Going to Meet the Man" in which you contrast the thematic and stylistic choices between Baldwin and Ralph Ellison.

3. Week 4 Readings 

Monday, April 27th: "Postmodern Manifestos" (p. 2485); Allan Ginsberg's "Howl" (p. 2576) and "A Supermarket in California." (We will also spend some time discussing Baldwin and his writing.)

Wednesday: Frank O'Hara (p. 2590-2596); Berryman (p. 2273-2283)

Friday: Ashbery (p.2603 -2619); Kerouac (p. 2439-2459)

For Friday, 4/17:

Reader Response 1 (50 points): Concentration of Language

Due: Friday, April 17th

Pick one line of dialogue from one of the characters in Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire.

• It must be one sentence, or at most one segment (one turn in the back and forth between characters) of dialogue…but preferably not a long segment.
  

Explain and interpret how this one line represents different elements of the play*: the character speaking, the setting, the plot, and most importantly, how does this line indicate or foreshadow what happens to the character(s) by the end of the play.

*You don’t have to discuss “everything.” I really want you to focus – and focus on explaining that one line and how it represents the play (like Obama represents American history, or iPods represent 21st American culture) . . .

Tip of the Day: Be direct, avoid the “I” and focus on what the line and play and its characters. By being the writer, we know you are there, making the interpretation! You don’t need a long intro (3-4 sentences?), either – make your claim on what the line represents in the first sentence if that helps you get right into interpretation.

Guidelines: 1-2 pages, double-spaced, 12 point font (Times New Roman or other standard font); cite page numbers of quoted, paraphrased or summarized material.

Class Discussion, Wed., 4/15:

For Wednesday you are to have read the first five (5) scenes of Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire, as we'll begin discussing it then.

Also, we will discuss Jarrell's two poems from last class.

Class Discussion, Monday, 4/13:

Elizabeth Bishop, Stanley Kunitz and Randall Jarrell.

At least, this is the goal (at least the first two)!

Bishop (p. 2166): The Fish, At the Fishhouse and Questions of Travel

Kunitz (p. 2103): Father and Son, After the Last Dynasty, and Quinnapoxet

Jarrell (p. 2266): 90 North and The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner

For Wednesday, 4/8:

Below are the specific authors and poems we'll focus our first discussion around. They are not necessarily in the order that we will discuss them in class, so make sure to get at least one good reading of each poem.

Annotate each poem. It might be helpful to use a thesaurus or have an encyclopedia help you pick up allusions or define unfamiliar words and phrases.

Wednesday’s Heavy List:

Theodore Roethke:

- My Papa’s Waltz
- The Lost Son
- The Waking
- Elegy for Jane
- In a Dark Time

Robert Penn Warren:

- Audobon

Stanley Kunitz:

- Father and Son
- After the Last Dynasty
- Qunnapoxet
- The Wellfleet Whale

Randall Jarrell:

- 90 North
- The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner
- Thinking of the Lost World

Elizabeth Bishop:

- The Fish
- At the Fishhouses
- Questions of Travel
- One Art

Syllabus for Spring 2009