Light in August : Colloquial Language

Faulkner uses dialectical language of the South to really immerse the reader in the environment of Yoknapatawpha County. It's an auditory experience- as if Faulkner want us to catch all the nuances of Southern life.

What do you think of his use of dialect in the book? Which specific examples stand out as memorable?

On page 76, Faulkner is using the narrator to explain what Gail Hightower sees coming down the street from his front window on a Sunday night :

"But on a Sunday evening, and with the echo of the phantom hooves still
crashing soundlessly in the duskfilled study, he watches quietly the puny,
unhorsed figure moving with that precarious and meretricious cleverness of
animals balanced on their hinder legs....."


Faulkner uses a combination of e.e. cummings-type poetic language, in "duskfilled", and "unhorsed", coupled with higher-level vocabulary words like "precarious" and "meretricious", then throws in a colloquialisms like "hinder legs" just so you know you're still in backwoods Mississippi.

See if you can find examples of colloquial language Faulkner uses that sticks in your mind.

Poetry: By the People, For the People

As you know, I frequently participate in English Nerd Seminars. I posted the following poems with an explanation of Poetry in the Round and here is what we received back.......

This also gives Charles, Andy and Eric a chance to see what we read in class after they left....without the hilarity.

Plan on another "round" soon.

And now, I give you, your words.


++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Shut up, Nerd

"Shut up, Nerd.
Said an angry fellow classmate
pointing a razor-sharp pencil
surrounded by pencil shavings and half-chewed erasers.
Into her unsuspecting nose
Which crinkled up, and cried a little
as snot dripped onto the pencil.

Ew, that’s gross
said the weird kid in
the corner, but nobody cared."

And this was the comment:
"It evokes great imagery for me (ever watched a little kid shove something up their nose, screw up their face and start to blub? That image, in half the words)."
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

The Silent Bird Sings of Morn

"The silent bird sings of morn.
Black dew-drops - drunken tufts of sky
laying midnights and yellows on the righthand
branch.
An ocean of suspended petals
Drift in and out of the light
Forming pictures of the early
morning as I gaze out my window."


And the comment:
".."The silent bird sings of morn.."
Pretty zen... is this kid studying
"Set Theory" in math, maybe?"

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Black, Hollow & Timeless

"Black, hollow, and timeless
Slowly disappearing in the
explosion of the citadel
opening the portal

Recalling the names of each,
the faces of none, the will
of only one.

Free the frail and restless bones
shackled and poor.
Let us measure our worth once more."

And the comment:
"...around here, and Citadel reference would have brought on an argument about the Clemson/USC rivalry...Can you imagine poetry in the round with 14 year olds. Any snot reference would render the class incapable of learning for at least 15 minutes."

Guilt or Innocence?

When reading the short stories, ask yourselves the following quesiton: Who is Guilty? Who is Innocent?

The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber

Is Margo guilty of murder?

If you think so, then you probably see Margo as emasculating, overbearing, controlling. Francis has struggled and finally broken her hold over him, and now she must kill him.

In this light, Margo is a classic femme fatale, a fading beauty who will blackmail, belittle and cuckcold men to get what she wants. The shooting is a deliberate act to prevent her husband from leaving her, and taking away her power.

OR.....

Was the shooting an accident?
Did Francis reach his potential, overcome his fears, find himself, only to find that life is over? Does Margo really try to "save" Francis? He has come from a crewcut, henpecked 35-year-old to a confident, masculine, self-assured man. Is the buffalo hunt his final act of courage that culminates his life? Kind of nihilistic, eh?

As we read the three estrogen-based short stories, think: Who is innocent in the story? Who is guilty?

What does Mrs Mallard's feelings about love say about her?

"And yet she had loved him--sometimes. Often she had not. What did it matter! What could love, the unsolved mystery, count for in the face of this possession of self-assertion which she suddenly recognized as the strongest impulse of her being!"

What is most important to her?

In "The Yellow Wallpaper", what effect does love have on the protagonist? Is this really love? Can you love someone who calls you "goose"?

What effect has love had on Granny Weatherall? What does she look for as she lies in her deathbed?

This week in English 12AP

THis week we will continue to read and analyze Hemingway's short stories "The Killers" and "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber."

If you did not pick up a copy of the story on Thursday, you can access it here.

http://www.duke.edu/~ss57/macomber.pdf

We will also be reviewing poetic analysis again in class. We will be trying to find the "deeper meanings" in poetry, those elements and themes which convey universal applications.

Poetic elements and analysis questions we will review this week are:

Persona- Who is the speaker?

Setting - What is the occasion?

Tone / Theme - What is the central idea or purpose of the poem?

Syntax - What is the diction, structure, development?

Development - How does imagery, metaphor, simile, juxtaposition allow meaning to develop?

We will be re-reading Frost's "Out, Out"- , "(p. 178) "Dulce et Decorum Est" by Wilfred Owen (p 7-8), William Carlos Williams "The Red Wheelbarrow" and "Constantly risking absurdity" by Lawrence Ferlinghetti (17-18).

We will also be discussing reading assignments for the remainder of the short story/ poetry unit.
Everyone will need to take a copy of the short story anthology from the classroom.

Update 3/24: I have reviewed the anthology. The following short stories will be required reading for this week and next week:

"The Story of an Hour" by Kate Chopin (p. 63)

"The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (p. 82)

"The Jilting of Granny Weatherall" by Katherine Ann Porter (p. 206)

"Cathedral" by Raymond Carver (p. 388)

That's four short stories.

We'll take Chopin, Gilman & Porter as homework for 3/27.

Review women's roles and themes in each one. Look at questions of identity, gender roles and feminism in each one. There will be an essay assigned to compare these three stories under this thematic evaluation.


Literary Notes.....


Today ( 3/24) is the birthday of poet, publisher, and bookstore proprietor Lawrence Ferlinghetti, (books by this author) born in Yonkers, New York (1919). His Italian father died while his French-speaking mother was pregnant, and his mother had a nervous breakdown and went to a mental hospital the year after he was born. He was sent to live with an aunt, who divorced her husband and took Lawrence to France. Four years later, she returned to New York, placed him in an orphanage until she could find work, then brought him into the rich household where she had found a position as governess. She disappeared and later died in an asylum, and the family she worked for adopted and began to educate the boy with classic literature.

After college, he served in the Navy during World War II. He was sent to Nagasaki shortly after the blast and said, "Before I was at Nagasaki, I was a good American boy. I was an Eagle Scout; I was the commander of a sub-chaser in the Normandy Invasion. Anyone who saw Nagasaki would suddenly realize that they'd been kept in the dark by the United States government as to what atomic bombs can do." He became staunchly antiwar. While in graduate school in New York and Paris, he began to write poetry and to draw and paint. He moved to San Francisco and wrote poems, book reviews, and columns for various Bay Area publications, including the City Lights magazine published by Peter Martin.

In 1955, Ferlinghetti started a publishing company, which that year published his first book of poetry, Pictures of the Gone World. He hoped to publish volumes slim enough that workers would be able to slip them into their pockets to read during their lunch breaks. Later that year, he went to a poetry reading called "Six Poets at the Six Gallery," organized by the poet Kenneth Rexroth. There he saw a poet named Allen Ginsberg read a new poem called "Howl." Ferlinghetti was deeply impressed, and after the reading, he sent Ginsberg a telegram that said, "I greet you at the beginning of a great career. When do I get the manuscript?"

The next year City Lights published "Howl," which was seized on its way back from the London printer by customs officials for violating obscenity laws. Ferlinghetti was put on trial for printing and selling lewd and indecent material. The ACLU defended him and he was acquitted, and the publicity from the trial benefited his bookstore and helped "Howl" to become one of the most widely read poems of the century. Ferlinghetti said, "The San Francisco [customs office] deserves a word of thanks. It would have taken years for critics to accomplish what the good [customs office] did in a day." From then on, he could publish what he wanted.

Paradigms: Scientific or Literary?

We've had an interesting discussion about paradigms in literature and literary analysis. The way in which we interpret literature has changed from that of an authority dictating meaning to us, to a variety of meanings, public interpretation and personal interpretation.

And when Charles sits on his desk, breaking the student paradigm of constraint behind a sturcture, he has interpretive epiphanies....coincidence?


(I hear you: is she making this all up?)
For your consideration.....

As we all know,things change. Or as our man Yeats said;

"Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand. "

Was Yeats talking of paradigms shifting in Ireland? In the world?

Speaking of paradigms....this is where the term originated: (from wikipedia & noelweidbrocht.com)

Paradigm shift, sometimes known as extraordinary science or revolutionary science, is the term first used by Thomas Kuhn in his influential 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions to describe a change in basic assumptions within the ruling theory of science. It is in contrast to his idea of normal science.

It has since become widely applied to many other realms of human experience as well even though Kuhn himself restricted the use of the term to the hard sciences. According to Kuhn, "A paradigm is what members of a scientific community, and they alone, share.” (The Essential Tension, 1997). Unlike a normal scientist, Kuhn held, “a student in the humanities has constantly before him a number of competing and incommensurable solutions to these problems, solutions that he must ultimately examine for himself.” (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions).

A scientist, however, once a paradigm shift is complete, is not allowed the luxury, for example, of positing the possibility that miasma causes the flu or that ether carries light in the same way that a critic in the Humanities can choose to adopt a 19th century theory of poetics, for instance, or select Marxism as an explanation of economic behavior. Thus, paradigms, in the sense that Kuhn used them, do not exist in Humanities or social sciences. Nonetheless, the term has been adopted since the 1960s and applied in non-scientific contexts.

So as you return your tray table to it's locked and upright position, think of any paradigms that may have shifted in Kafka's Metamorphosis, and as we read Hemingway, look for evidence of paradgims that may or may not have shifted during travel...

Today in Literature: Have you read Julius Ceasar? she asked.

Today is the infamous Ides of March. Two thousand fifty-two years ago on this day, the Roman emperor Julius Caesar was stabbed to death by senators who called themselves the Liberatores (Liberators) and claimed they were preserving the integrity of the Roman system. Although Caesar ostensibly refused to be named king, he had no qualms about stamping his face on coins (a spot previously reserved for gods), and he happily assumed the title "dictator for life" in February of 44 B.C.E., just a month before his assassination. The most famous of the Liberators is Marcus Brutus, a man personally connected to Caesar. Brutus's mother, Servilia, was one of Caesar's lovers, and Caesar singled Brutus out as a young man of promise and gave him a government position. It's not certain why Brutus conspired to kill Caesar, but the young man did come from a family of anti-authoritarians — his ancestor Junius Brutus overthrew the last king of Rome in 509 B.C.E.

Of course, William Shakespeare wrote a play about this. In it, Ceasar is told to "Beware the Ides of March"(Act 1, sc.ii) because, well, something bad was going to happen. Like his bff Brutus was a backstabber. Literally. After Brutus had killed Ceasar, he gave a big funeral speech. "I come to bury Ceasar, not to praise him" he told the mob. "I loved him, but loved Rome more" he also said. Deflection: a useful political tool.

Have we witnessed any other political deflections in the Shakespearean works read so far this year?

NEXT UP: Ernest Hemingway

Ernst Hemingway (1899-1961) was an expatriate American writer. His writing career started with a stint as reporter for the Kansas City Star in 1917. His short stories and novels are noted for their understated and succinct writing style, which evolved from his journalistic style. He once said that his writing was influenced by the Star's style guide : "Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English. Be positive, not negative."

Hemingway's novels include "The Sun Also Rises", "For Whom the Bell Tolls" , "A Farewell to Arms" and "The Old Man and the Sea."




Hemingway lived and wrote in Paris after World War I. Many of his novels focus on Americans living in Europe after the war. His novels also include manly activities as bullfighting, the running of the bulls in Pamplona, and hunting trips. His writing is categorized by economy in writing, featuring stoic male protagonists who exhibit what is known as "grace under pressure." His writing -the style, characters and themes- had a great influence on the development of modern fiction. He was a contemporary of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, and Ezra Pound ( remember him? Imagists?) who was Hemingway's artistic mentor for a time. Hemingway said"Ezra was right half the time, and when he was wrong, he was so wrong you were never in any doubt about it."

The short stories of Hemingway we will read are:

The Snows of Kilimanjaro
The Killers
The Short happy Life of Francis Macomber

As we read these short stories ( actual short stories, not novellas like Kafka's Metamorphosis), watch for how Hemingway uses economy of language to tell his story, to describe people and settings, and how his use of dialogue fleshes out a story or character.

We will also evaluate whether or not Papa ( Hemingway's nickname) stuck to his Kansas City Star style manual guidelines, using short sentences, short first paragraphs, vigorous English.

Since these stories are so short, we will try to read & annotate them in one sitting, with discussion and analysis for the remainder of the week.