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.