Reading prompts for the class of December 4 - Walt Whitman (anthology, pp. 176-187)

 1. Write a text analysis of the initial excerpt of “Song of Myself” from the beginning until “the song / of me rising from bed and meeting the sun."

2. Consider the interpretative hesitation of the part that begins, “A child said, ‘What is the Grass?’ and consider if this “poetics of doubt and speculation” has similar instances in Huck’s narration or if, on the contrary, there is a pragmatism that forebears more far-fetched comparison.

Walt Whitman, retouched picture for the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass.

Reading prompts for the class of November 29

 1. Consider the quotation below from Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Self-Reliance" (anthology, p. 164 [38 of the source text]) aand reflect on how it might relate to the econunter of Huck and Jim with the Duke and the King, or of the latter two with the Wilks' family in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

"Our reading is mendicant and sycophantic. (anthology In history, our imagination plays us false. Kingdom and lordship, power and estate, are a gaudier vocabulary than private John and Edward in a small house and common day's work; but the things of life are the same to both; the sum total of both is the same. Why all this deference to Alfred, and Scanderbeg, and Gustavus? Suppose they were virtuous; did they wear out virtue? As great a stake depends on your private act to-day, as followed their public and renowned steps. When private men shall act with original views, the lustre will be transferred from the actions of kings to those of gentlemen."

2. Is Huck Finn self-reliant? In what ways / when?

Reading prompts for the class of Nov. 22 - 2 questions about Huck Finn (chapters 22 and 28)

 1 Write a literaty text analysis of the following excertpt from chapter 22 of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn:

Suggested topics: importance of the text within the context of the author’s work and time; subject of the enunciation; point of view and effect upon the reader/addressee; rhetoric and linguistic devices and language tropes (descrptive or lyric manner, figures of speech, symbolism, innovation / surprising markers or pattern traces within the author’s work); intertextuality with texts studied in this class (at least 2) or others. 

"Do I know you? I know you clear through was born and raised in the South, and I’ve lived in the North; so I know the average all around. The average man’s a coward. (...) Why don’t your juries hang murderers? Because they’re afraid the man’s friends will shoot them in the back, in the dark – and it’s just what they WOULD do.

(...)

"... The average man don’t like trouble and danger. YOU don’t like trouble and danger. But if only HALF a man – like Buck Harkness, there – shouts ‘Lynch him! lynch him!’ you’re afraid to back down – afraid you’ll be found out to be what you are – COWARDS – and so you raise a yell, and hang yourselves on to that half-a-man’s coat-tail, and come raging up here, swearing what big things you’re going to do. The pitifulest thing out is a mob; that’s what an army is – a mob; they don’t fight with courage that’s born in them, but with courage that’s borrowed from their mass, and from their officers. But a mob without any MAN at the head of it is BENEATH pitifulness. Now the thing for YOU to do is to droop your tails and go home and crawl in a hole. If any real lynching’s going to be done it will be done in the dark, Southern fashion; and when they come they’ll bring their masks, and fetch a MAN along. Now LEAVE – and take your half-a-man with you” – tossing his gun up across his left arm and cocking it when he says this."

2. In chapter 28, Huck makes the following reflection about saying the truth or lying: " I reckon a body that ups and tells the truth when he is in a tight place is taking considerable many resks, though I ain’t had no experience, and can’t say for certain; but it looks so to me, anyway; and yet here’s a case where I’m blest if it don’t look to me like the truth is better and actuly SAFER than a lie. I must lay it by in my mind, and think it over some time or other, it’s so kind of strange and unregular. " - Can you extrapolate from this reflection and think about other cases where the fiction you have read in this course problematized the pragmatic value of lying vs. telling the truth?

HW for the class of November 20th - E. A. Poe 's "The Raven" and "The Philosophy of Composition"

 As always, answer to one or more;

1. In "The Philosophy of Composition" (anthology, p. 143-139), E. Allan Poe purports to explain "step by step" how he wrote "The Raven". While at it, he inserts some comments on types of compostion and the difference between prose and poetry. Taking as example texts read in this class, would you agree with the distinction he makes in the following passage

"I designate Beauty as the province of the poem, merely because it is an obvious rule of Art that effects should be made to spring from direct causes — that objects should be attained through means best adapted for their attainment — no one as yet having been weak enough to deny that the peculiar elevation alluded to, is most readily attained in the poem. Now the object, Truth, or the satisfaction of the intellect, and the object Passion, or the excitement of the heart, are, although attainable, to a certain extent, in poetry, far more readily attainable in prose. Truth, in fact, demands a precision, and Passion, a homeliness (the truly passionate will comprehend me) which are absolutely antagonistic to that Beauty which, I maintain, is the excitement, or pleasurable elevation, of the soul. It by no means follows from any thing here said, that passion, or even truth, may not be introduced, and even profitably introduced, into a poem — for they may serve in elucidation, or aid the general effect, as do discords in music, by contrast — but the true artist will always contrive, first, to tone them into proper subservience to the predominant aim, and, secondly, to enveil them, as far as possible, in that Beauty which is the atmosphere and the essence of the poem." (anthology, p 145)

2. Another argument of "The Philosophy of Composition" is that "close circumscription of space is absolutely necessary to the effect of insulated accident -- it has the force of a frame to a picture" (anthology, p, 147). Comment on how Poe applied this constraint to "The Cask of Amontillado" (anthology, pp. 130-135), "The Raven" (pp. 140-142) and/or "The Oval Portrait" (pp.151-152)

3. Write a short creative piece where "the bust of Pallas" in the poem "The Raven" is brought to life - given that Pallas is Athena, the goddess of reason/science as well as of "warfare", you can have her address the incoherences of phantasy in at least two texts from our course.

                                                         illustration by Edouard Manet

HW for the class of November 15th - Poe and Twain in the Gothic vein

 1. Read the following article on the Gothic in American literature up to the third page (https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Thomas-Bjerre/publication/346930804_Southern_Gothic_Literature/links/5fd287c245851568d154cc25/Southern-Gothic-Literature.pdf). Speculate on Gothic features - and whether they be European, American or Southern - in Twain's Huckleberry Finn, chapter 16, and in Poe's "Annabel Lee" and/or "The Cask of Amontillado"

2. Creative writing: imagine you are Emmeline Grangenford writing on the theme of "Annabel Lee" - her death and her romance with the poet who took her for the purest maiden that ever stepped the earth.

Final papers - instructions

1. You are required to engage with the argument(s) of one of the following essays from your edition of Huckleberry Finn. Write how they changed your perspective, or why you disagree with the view, adding or opposing textual evidence (with analysis). You might also want to apply/extend the author's argument to other texts you have studied in the course. I have summarized the essays' arguments in order to help (but this is also a simplification, excluding additional interesting points):

a. Earl F. Brideu, pp. 346-355: on the drawings by Kemble and how they present a "softened" narrative [for the audience] of the verbal text

b. John H. Wallace (p. 375-376) vs. Jocelyn Chadwick-Joshua (376) on wether The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn are a racist text

c. Leslie Fiedler (pp. 385-86): homoerotic undertones in the relation of Jim and Huck [see full article here: http://ereserve.library.utah.edu/Annual/ENGL/7700/Locke/come.pdf]

d. Leo Marx (pp. 386-87) - the flawed ending of the book is related to Mark Twain's difficulty in escaping his "genteel tradition"

e. Ralph Ellison (pp.388-89) - the novel gives food for thought due to its ambiguity, but the "negro's" infantilization causes discomfort

f. Henry Nash Smith (pp. 389-392) how speech forms (vernacular or exalted styles) evidence the conflict between accepted values and protest

g. Toni Morrison (pp. 393-402): silences and terrors in the novel come from the wound of slavery in Southern society

h. Shelley Fisher-Fishkin (pp. 402-405): Twain gave Huck an African-American voice

i. David S. Smith (pp. 405-420): the novel contains a critique of socially construed fictions (e. g. romanticism, religion, etc.)

j. Ishamel Reed (pp. 420-425): how the themes and conundrums of the novel linger in contemporary society

k. Jane Smiley (pp. 424-434): Huck (and Twain) do not care enough about Jim's desire for freedom

l. Tom Quirk (pp. 434-45): How flaws in the novel and failure in its structure contribute to its restless liveliness

m. Thomas Cooley (pp. 445-456): innovation of narrative technique portraying both deep and impressionistic conscience ("the river of conscience" evoking the modernist "stream of consciousness")

n. Andrew Levy (pp. 456-462): relevance of the novel in the current discussion about how we raise our children

2. The work will preferably be done in pairs, although requests to do it individually can be accepted, provided they are justified.  It will be 2500 words max. excluding bibliography (or 1800 words max. in the case of individual papers).

3. Plan / Abstract The work plan should not exceed 2 pages and should include 

a) title / research question

b) short abstract

c) Topics and subtopics 

d) Annotated Bibliography (of other texts you engage with [not too many], explaining shortly why they are useful)

4. Deadlines

Plan / Abstract: by November 27th, sent via the moodle platform

1st draft (with at least 3/4 of the work): by December 18th

Submission of final work: December 30th at 8 p. m., via moodle and at the teacher's locker (in the corridor of the Department of English Studies, 2nd floor)

HW for Nov. 13: N. Hawthorne's "Wakefield" and H. D. Thoreau's intro to Walden - creative writing

After studying one of the following excerpts, follow the prompt for creative writing indicated in each of them, making sure that you introduce stylistic markers in your piece of one of the texts studied in the course (as if you were writing in "the manner of" - not necessarily of the author from the given excerpt, but of one of our authors or their most known devices). Furthermore, weave your text so that in it we will find echoes of at least two texts studied in the course so far (these may be thematic or stylistic, or characteres direclty addressing one another, as in promp two).

1.

"Only the wife of his bosom might have hesitated. She, without having analyzed his character, was partly aware of a quiet selfishness, that had rusted into his inactive mind; of a peculiar sort of vanity, the most uneasy attribute about him; of a disposition to craft which had seldom produced more positive effects than the keeping of petty secrets, hardly worth revealing; and, lastly, of what she called a little strangeness, sometimes, in the good man. This latter quality is indefinable, and perhaps non-existent. 

Let us now imagine Wakefield bidding adieu to his wife. It is the dusk of an October evening. His equipment is a drab great-coat, a hat covered with an oilcloth, top-boots, an umbrella in one hand and a small portmanteau in the other. He has informed Mrs. Wakefield that he is to take the night coach into the country. She would fain inquire the length of his journey, its object, and the probable time of his return; but, indulgent to his harmless love of mystery, interrogates him only by a look. He tells her not to expect him positively by the return coach, nor to be alarmed should he tarry three or four days; but, at all events, to look for him at supper on Friday evening. Wakefield himself, be it considered, has no suspicion of what is before him. He holds out his hand, she gives her own, and meets his parting kiss in the matter-of-course way of a ten years’ matrimony; and forth goes the middle-aged Mr. Wakefield, almost resolved to perplex his good lady by a whole week’s absence."

Rewrite Wakefield's departure in the perspective of the wife.

2. "Amid the seeming confusion of our mysterious world, individuals are so nicely adjusted to a system, and systems to one another and to a whole, that, by stepping aside for a moment, a man exposes himself to a fearful risk of losing his place forever."

Imagine Thoreau's reaction to this short story and to its concluding commentary. Make sure to weave in quotes from his text(s) or phrases that he might have written.

Reading promts for November 6: Huck Finn and Thoreau's life in the woods and civil disobedience

Answer one or more 

1. Write a literary text analysis of the passage that goes from "I see young men" to "break through and steal" (p. 110 anthology, p. 1769 of the text)

2. What points of contact do you find between the excerpt from Walden, "Economy", and chapter 14 of Huckleberry Finn?

3. "Civil Disobediece", first titled "Resistance to Civil Government" gave name to a strategy of power of the regular citizen. In which ways do Huck and Finn commit civil disobedience and in which ways are they liable to regular/petty crimes?