Slam Poetry Links

Saul Williams on HBO's Def Poetry Jam (YouTube Link)

Saul Williams performing "Amethyst Rock" in the movie Slam

Lamont Carey performing "I Can't Read" on HBO Def Jam Poetry (You Tube Link)

Taylor Mali performing "Like, You Know" on Def Jam.

Sonia Sanchez performing "Our Vision is Our Voice" (You Tube Link)

Amiri Baraka performing "Why is We Americans?"

Please also PRINT OUT the handout on Blackboard--read these selections and bring the print out to class.

Literature after 9/11

As you read the excerpts in the Norton Anthology's new "Writing in a Time of Terror: September 11, 2001," think about the questions I posed in class as we were discussing The Road: How did 9/11 change literature? How do writers help us process trauma and work through historical crises? What is the relationship, broadly speaking, between literature and history? Can historical events change literary styles and sensibilities? How does literature create historical memory?

Please bring your copies of The Road to class, too. As you read both the 9/11 readings in the Norton Anthology and The Road for Friday, comment below on both the aesthetics and the politics of the readings. What do the texts say about our times? What assessment do they give of the future?

Cormac McCarthy, The Road (p. 1-69)

As you read The Road for Tuesday's class, think about the stylistic texture of this novel. How would you describe McCarthy's prose? What do you make of the opening images that McCarthy delivers of the world post-apocalypse? Do we get a moral voice here? A neutrally descriptive voice? Why does McCarthy center his novel on the relationship between father and son? Would you consider this to be a novel influenced by 9/11? Why or why not?

Please use the space below to write on any aspect of the novel. You might also want to check out The Road movie trailer and website here.

This interview with Cormac McCarthy appeared a few months ago in the Wall Street Journal. Please read it. Also, The Road was chosen for Oprah's Book Club in 2008, and Oprah lured the famously reticient McCarthy out of his writerly seclusion for a very rare interview. Watch a clip of the interview here. You might also want to take a look at how her book club presents The Road here. What are your opinions about the interview and about the book club's take on The Road?

Reed + Baraka + Clifton

Ishmael Reed. See him read here. Check out an animation of his work here.

Lucille Clifton's Poets.org page is available here. She passed away last month and her obituary can be found here. See a video of her reading here. See her reading "homage to my hips" here.

Check out Amiri Baraka's homepage here. Read about his play "Dutchman" here. See him read on Def Jam Poetry here. Also check out an amazing exhibit on Amiri Baraka in LA here. It's also worth seeing him work with the Urban Music Coalition here.

Confessional Poetry

Information on Anne Sexton @ Poets.org here. Some film clips here. Listen to her read "The Truth the Dead Know" here.

Sylvia Plath biography at Poets.org. Listen to her reading "Daddy" here and "Lady Lazarus" here.

Read Adrienne Rich's biography at Poets.org here. Check out an article in Boston Phoenix on her work here. Watch this video and listen to her read "What Kind of Times are These." And definitely check out this awesome animation of her poem "Diving into the Wreck."

Themes and Tensions in Ragtime

*the role of coincidence versus fate or destiny
*the multiple, insistent connections and links between characters
*the rise of industrial, mechanized capitalism
*metafictional commentary (stories about stories)
*simulacra (images/copies of "the real"); increasing confusion about the real versus the fake; the original versus copies

*and MUSIC!

What other repeated images, motifs or ideas can you locate in this text? Start tracing out how the book repeats and modifies key ideas and scenes. How do all these disparate characters become linked?

Ragtime

As you read Doctorow's Ragtime, think about how the novel reflects on (and perhaps rewrites) the history of modernism with postmodern flair. How does Doctorow address the role of technology in modernism? The role of immigration? Why is the narrative voice so ambiguous? What questions and concerns does Doctorow raise about the nature of historical truth? What do you think of the characters you are meeting so far in the novel?

Note also that there is a film adaptation of this book (look here).

Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman (1949)

America has long been known as a land of opportunity, a place of great possibility, as the phrase "The American Dream” indicates. In Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, we follow Willy Loman as he reviews a life marked by the desperate pursuit of a dream of success. Although he denies any direct intent to make a political statement about the capitalist way of life in the United States. Miller brings the American Dream onto the stage for evaluation. Through reading this classic drama, we will investigate both what is truthful and what is illusory in the American Dream. We will also contextualize this play within mid-century social crises of value, politics and economics.

Unusual in its presentation of a common man as a tragic figure, the play received the Pulitzer Prize as well as the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award when it was produced and published in 1949.

Miller famously stated this about the play: “I wished to create a form which, in itself as a form, would literally be the process of Willy Loman’s way of mind.” How does he do this?

Below note your observations about the play's structure, staging, and content. What questions do you have as you are reading the opening scene? (Try to read through the whole play, but focus your comments below on the first act.)

A Contemporary Twist on A Streetcar Named Desire

Read a review of "Blanche Survives Katrina in a FEMA Trailer Named Desire" here.

Article on Passing from Sunday's NY Times

Photo of Ralph Ellison

I thought you'd all be interested in this article from Sunday's NYTimes Book Review section entitled "Do Not Pass." As you'll remember, we talked about passing when we read James Weldon Johnson's Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man. Click here to read this great article by Toure, which references several other key works in the history of passing literature.

Streetcar Named Desire

As you read the end of A Streetcar Named Desire, think about if and how this play reaches any sort of resolution and closure. Keep reading the stage directions carefully and noting how Williams dramatizes internal psychological states through music, the play of light and shadows, and through dialogue. You might want to think about the following questions as you write your response to ANY aspect of the play, from beginning to end. Feel free to discuss your responses to the film version of the play.

1. What critique--if any--does the play make concerning gender roles? What do we learn about what it means to be a woman? To be a man? Is this a "feminist" play?

2. How are class differences treated in the play?

3. Why does the play end the way it does?

4. Does the play simply dismiss Blanche's need for fantasy? Or does it show us why fantasy may be necessary? Do any of the other characters struggle with or depend upon fantasy?

5. How is visuality important in the play? Think about the use of light, scenes centered on exposure, and Williams' techniques of staging. How does the gaze work in the play, especially between genders?

6. How does the play discuss and treat homosexuality? How do you read the fact that Blanche's husband kills himself? How is this event the central trauma of the play?

Comments on A Streetcar Named Desire

As you read the first five scenes of Tennessee Williams' Streetcar Named Desire for Monday, think about the relationships between characters, the role of the setting, and how you would stage and perform the play. Think about names of places, people, and the streetcars. What does the play say about the complicated dynamics of families? What is the role of music in the play?

The Harlem Renaissance

As you read for our class on Thursday, think about how these writers reposition and rethink African-American identity during the 1920s and 1930s.

Here's some sites to explore as you progress through the readings:

The Kennedy Center: http://artsedge.kennedy-center.org/exploring/harlem

Library of Congress Website:www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/harlem/harlem.html

PBS resources

Post below on ANY aspect of the texts.

Eliot, The Waste Land and Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Please concentrate on reading "The Love Song" for Friday's class and The Waste Land for Monday. This post will serve for comments on both poems.

As you read these two lengthy, complex poems by T.S. Eliot, note that while the poems initially seem fragmented and disjointed, the two poems are held together by rhymes, sounds, repetitions, repeated themes. You might want to think about the following questions as you post your responses below.

1. How does "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" voice a stream of consciousness? Who is speaking? Who is being addressed?

2. What can you tell about Prufrock as a person? What makes his life trivial or meaningless? What is he afraid of? How do his aliments represent modern consciousness? What does he mean when he asks "Do I dare / Disturb the universe?"

3. How is the city portrayed in "The Love Song"? Does this sense of the city bear any relation to Prufrock's character and his dilemma? What is the picture of modern life given in the poem?

4. What does the song of the mermaids signify? How do you read the ending of the poem?

5. What structures The Waste Land? What is the experience of reading it like--does the poem disorient you? Depress you? Is it mystical? Religious? Explain your responses with specific references to the poem's language.

6. Is there a single voice behind the utterances in The Waste Land? Why? Why not?

7. What meaning(s) do you think The Waste Land offers?

Finally, here are some fun Eliot links to explore:

Bio and information at Poets.org.

His acceptance speech for his Nobel Prize.

Video reading of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." (via YouTube. Useful to listen to as you read.) And a cool animation of the same poem. And another.

Eliot reading The Waste Land (via YouTube). With images of the poem and its many, many revisions.

Poetryfoundation.org

I mentioned this website in class, but click on over to Poetryfoundation.org. It's an amazing website full of links to poems, podcasts, essays and more. There are also wonderful links to animated poems, including a great one by Gertrude Stein titled "A Very Valentine."

(Some of you might know Dr. Geoffrey Brock, who teaches creative writing here at the University of Arkansas. One of his poem was animated and can be found here on YouTube.)

William Carlos Wiliams

As you read Williams' poetry, think about the following questions and post your responses below:

1) How does Williams play with interrelations among "the sister arts" (painting, photography, music)?

2) How do his poems use simple words that become meaningful when placed in juxtaposition or when placed in a highly visual composition?

3) Like Frost's work, many of these poems directly or indirectly address the writing of poetry. How? What do they say?

4) How does Williams construct his speakers? What kind of voice do we find in these poems? How would you characterize his language?

Here's Brueghel's "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus," which is what Williams based his poem on of the same name:

Tying Together the Poetry

As the semester began, we spent some time discussing the general principles of modernism, and I want to give you a brief list of some modernist principles to look for as you keep reading the poetry I've assigned.

*the address of aesthetic problems similar to those examined in art (Cubism in relation to "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," and its aesthetics of fragmentation and multi-perspectival space and time)

*alientation brought on by the loss of historical heritage, the loss of religion, etc.

*disjointed timelines, loss of narrative/poetic coherency

*introspective / psychoanalytic contemplation of "selfhood"

*collapse between subject and object ("The Snow Man": one has to be nothing in order to know nothing)

*borrowings from other cultures and languages

*open form, free verse, unconventional use of metaphor

We'll keep building this list as we keep reading.

Comments on Wallace Stevens

Comment on any of the assigned poems by Wallace Stevens. How is his work different than Frost's? How do you interpret his abstract language and philosophical themes? Are there repeated preoccupations in his poems--and if so, what would you characterize as his major poetic concerns? Finally, in what way are his poems particularly "modernist"?

You can look up some additional information about Stevens on his Poets.org site.

And here's his obituary in the New York Times.

Comments on Frost (Continued)

If you are posting for Friday, please use the space below to comment on ANY aspect of Frost's work.

Robert Frost

Post below on any aspect of Robert Frost's work, though you might want to think about the following questions:

1) How do Frost's speakers view the American landscape? Furthermore, what makes his poems "American"?
2)What kind of relationships between humanity and nature are explored in Frost's poems?
3) What attitudes toward the passage of time are expressed?
4) How does Frost capture the rhythms of ordinary speech through traditional verse forms?
5) How does Frost marry form and content?
6) The theme of loss recurs in a number of Frost's poems. Compare the ways in which loss is portrayed in these poems.

You might also be interested in checking out some of these Frost resources on the web:

Poets.org page about Robert Frost

The Friends of Robert Frost House and Museum in Vermont

This video (link to YouTube) of Frost reading "After Apple-Picking." There are many, many videos of Frost up on YouTube, which--at least to me--are fascinating tributes to one of our most famous national poets.

Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man Continued

Dear students,

As you continue reading Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, think about your overall evaluation of our nameless narrator. What do you applaud about him? What do you critique? What message about race, class, and gender in American do you think Johnson seeks to leave you with? And why do you he tells us this story through the genre of autobiography?

Looking forward to our discussion tomorrow--please come in ready to debate and discuss this provocative text!

Comments on Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man

Dear students,

For each day of blogging I will set up a post, and you will write your commentary (1-2 developed paragraphs, ideally tied closely to the text--try to discuss specific language and specific scenes) in the comments section. Click on the link below.

You are free to write on whatever strikes you as interesting, intriguing, or inexplicable in the section we will be discussing. For example, you might want to think about how knowing that this text is a novel and not an autobiography reshapes our conception of its purpose. You might also think about how Johnson's text nods to slave narratives. What kind of social and cultural critiques does the novel offer? And why does it do so through irony?

Let me know if you have any questions!

Welcome to the Class Blog for English 2353!

Welcome to the blog for English 2353! Throughout the spring semester, we will use this blog as a forum for responding to and analyzing the novels we will be reading. In addition to in-class participation, your contributions to this blog will be assessed as part of your final grade. I will also be using the blog as a way to make class announcements, post handouts or sample papers, describe assignments and respond to questions.

My expectations are that you will contribute to this blog with the same degree of respect, thoughtfulness, and intellect that you use in making oral contributions to class discussion. Please "attend" this blog regularly between our class meetings and contribute a minimum of once a week (we'll set up a schedule in class). Identify your posts either with your name or an identifiable version of your name (e.g., "Sally H.").

Let me know if you have any questions!