The exam (Wed., 6/13, 9:30 AM)

On the exam, you will identify 10 passages (authors, rough dates), you will write an interpretive paragraph (with suavely handled quotes) about one of them, and you will draw a cartoon inspired by one of them.  You will also read a short story and write a paragraph about it.  There will be a brief extra credit section as well.

Identify This, part V

I.
Oh yeah, my father lived many years in Alaska. He was an adventurous man. We've got á little streak of self-reliance in our amily. I thought I'd go out with my older brother and try to locate him, and maybe settle in the North with the old man. And I was almost decided to go, when I met á salesman in the Parker House. His name was Dave Singleman. And he was eighty-four years old, and he'd drummed merchandise in thirty-one states. And old Dave, he'd go up to his room, y'understand, put on his green velvet slippers--I'll never forget--and pickup his phone and call the buyers, and without ever leaving his room, at the age of eighty-four, he made his living.


J.
 I wanted to walk straight on through the red grass and over the edge of the world, which could not be very far away. The light and air abot me told me that the world ended here: only the ground and sun and sky were left, and if one went a little farther there would only be sun and sky, and one would float off into them, like the tawny hawks which sailed over our heads making slow shadows on the grass.

Identify This, Part IV

G.

Legree drew in a long breath; and, suppressing his rage, took Tom by the arm, and, approaching his face almost to his, said, in a terrible voice, "Hark 'e, Tom! -- ye think, 'cause I've let you off before, I don't mean what I say; but, this time, I've made up my mind, and counted the cost. You've always stood it out again' me: now, I'll conquer ye, or kill ye! -- one or t' other. I'll count every drop of blood there is in you, and take 'em, one by one, till ye give up!"

   Tom looked up to his master, and answered, "Mas'r, if you was sick, or in trouble, or dying, and I could save ye, I'd give ye my heart's blood; and, if taking every drop of blood in this poor old body would save your precious soul, I'd give 'em freely, as the Lord gave his for me. O, Mas'r! don't bring this great sin on your soul! It will hurt you more than 't will me! Do the worst you can, my troubles'll be over soon; but, if ye don't repent, yours won't never end!"

 H.

Oh the doleful sight that now was to behold at this house! "Come, behold the works of the Lord, what desolations he has made in the earth." Of thirty-seven persons who were in this one house, none escaped either present death, or a bitter captivity, save only one, who might say as he, "And I only am escaped alone to tell the News" (Job 1.15). There were twelve killed, some shot, some stabbed with their spears, some knocked down with their hatchets. When we are in prosperity, Oh the little that we think of such dreadful sights, and to see our dear friends, and relations lie bleeding out their heart-blood upon the ground. There was one who was chopped into the head with a hatchet, and stripped naked, and yet was crawling up and down. It is a solemn sight to see so many Christians lying in their blood, some here, and some there, like a company of sheep torn by wolves, all of them stripped naked by a company of hell-hounds, roaring, singing, ranting, and insulting, as if they would have torn our very hearts out; yet the Lord by His almighty power preserved a number of us from death, for there were twenty-four of us taken alive and carried captive.  

Identify this, part III

E.
Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain, 
May be refin'd and join th'angelic train.

F.
His hatred of his wife glittered and sparkled in every word he spoke to her. The disappointment he felt in his daughters sifted down on them like ash, dulling their buttery complexions and choking the lilt out of what should have been girlish voices. Under the frozen heat of his glance they tripped over door sills and dropped the salt cellar into the yolks of their poached eggs...

Identify this, part II...

C.
Well, all day him and the king was hard at it, rigging up a stage and a curtain and a row of candles for footlights; and that night the house was jam full of men in no time. When the place couldn't hold no more, the duke he quit tending door and went around the back way and come on to the stage and stood up before the curtain and made a little speech, and praised up this tragedy, and said it was the most thrillingest one that ever was; and so he went on a-bragging about the tragedy, and about Edmund Kean the Elder, which was to play the main principal part in it; and at last when he'd got everybody's expectations up high enough, he rolled up the curtain, and the next minute the king come a-prancing out on all fours, naked; and he was painted all over, ring-streaked-and-striped, all sorts of colors, as splendid as a rainbow. And -- but never mind the rest of his outfit; it was just wild, but it was awful funny. The people most killed themselves laughing; and when the king got done capering and capered off behind the scenes, they roared and clapped and stormed and haw-hawed till he come back and done it over again, and after that they made him do it another time. Well, it would make a cow laugh to see the shines that old idiot cut. 


D.

Futile - the winds -

To a Heart in port -

Done with the Compass -

Done with the Chart!

Identify this...

A.

“It was found,” said the sexton, “this morning, on the scaffold, where evil-doers are set up to public shame. Satan dropped it there, I take it, intending a scurrilous jest against your reverence. But, indeed, he was blind and foolish, as he ever and always is. A pure hand needs no glove to cover it!”     “Thank you, my good friend,” said the minister gravely, but startled at heart; for, so confused was his remembrance, that he had almost brought himself to look at the events of the past night as visionary. “Yes, it seems to be my glove, indeed!”     “And, since Satan saw fit to steal it, your reverence must needs handle him without gloves, henceforward,” remarked the old sexton, grimly smiling. “But did your reverence hear of the portent that was seen last night? a great red letter in the sky,—the letter A,—which we interpret to stand for Angel. For, as our good Governor Winthrop was made an angel this past night, it was doubtless held fit that there should be some notice thereof!”

B. I am a rather elderly man. The nature of my avocations for the last thirty years has brought me into more than ordinary contact with what would seem an interesting and somewhat singular set of men, of whom as yet nothing that I know of has ever been written:—I mean the law-copyists or scriveners. I have known very many of them, professionally and privately, and if I pleased, could relate divers histories, at which good-natured gentlemen might smile, and sentimental souls might weep.

what you've given me so far...

Below is all from you except for a few left over authors that I filled in myself.  Some authors are done twice.  I hope it's useful.  Next I'll post some excerpts and you can see if you can identify them...

Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672)

 - wrote The Prologue

 - was the first American published poet

Anne Bradstreet- 1612-1672, Most famous work: "The Prologue".  Notable: Immigrated to America as a puritan, themes of feminism.

Phyllis Wheatley (1753-1784)

Works: "On being brought from Africa to America"

 Qualities/Themes: slavery and race, religion, salvation

Phillis Wheatley      1753-1784         "On Being Brought From Africa..."                                    a slave who was later freed

Philip Freneau 1752-1832, “The Indian Burying Ground,” Poet of American Revolution

Philip Freneau  (January 2, 1752 – December 18, 1832): he was an American poet, nationalist, polemicist, sea captain and newspaper editor. He has been called by some the "Poet of the American Revolution". He was born in New York and graduated from Princeton along with his good friend James Madison.

Major Works: Newspaper editor of The National Gazette and New York Daily Advertiser and later, with help from Madison, editor of The Gazette of the United States which was made to counter the federalist papers. Plus poems such as "The House of Night", "The Indian Burying Ground," and "Noble Savage"

Themes: His poems were known to combine neoclassicism and Romanticism . Amazingly, his poem "The House of Night" is one of the first romantic poems written and published in America. He used gothic elements and dark imagery, a technique later copied by Edgar Allan Poe. Furthermore his nature poems such as "The Wild Honey Suckle" ,written in 1786, is considered an early seed to the later Transcendentalist movement with many more famous names to come. His view of Indians as noble was not common at the time. In, addition he was an early abolitionist joining the cause later in his life.

Mary Rowlandson:  1637-1711 The Sovereignty and Goodness of God: Being a Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson themes: providence of god, superiority of white people

Jonathan Edwards, 1703-1758; Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, Personal Narrative, Resolutions; The Great Awakening; great theologian and philosopher

Benjamin Franklin, 1706-1790; The Autobiography; The Way to Wealth; self-improvement, rags to riches, the American Dream, technological improvement, etc.

James Fenimore Cooper, 1789-1851; The Last of the Mohicans; the frontier, Indians and White people; father founded Cooperstown.

Nathaniel Hawthorne- 1804-1864, Most famous works: "The Scarlet Letter" and "The House of the Seven Gables". Notable: Had ancestors involved in the Salem Witch trials, themes of romanticism.

Harriet Jacobs (1813-1897)

 - wrote Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

 - born a slave

 - escaped from slavery and became abolitionist

 - used pseudonym Linda Brent

Harriet Jacobs (1813-1897):

·      Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

·      She wrote her novel under the pseudonym of Linda Brent; her master Dr. James Norcom sexually abused her.

Edgar Allan Poe, 1809-1849, “The Black Cat”, “The Purloined Letter”, “The Raven”; reason vs. emotion, the unconscious, deranged first person narrators, the first detective stories.

Henry David Thoreau 1817-1862 Walden, He lived in Walden Pond

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), "Self-Reliance," "Nature"--transcendentalism 

Emerson: 1803-1882 Nature, self-reliance, the poet... themes: transcendentalism, nature, self-reliance, individuality

Henry Longfellow (1807-1882)

 - wrote many poems

 - wife died in fire

 - friends with Ralph Waldo Emerson

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882):

·      “Paul Revere’s Ride,” The Song of Hiawatha, and Evangeline

·      One of the members of the Fireside Poets; he was part of the Romanticism movement; and during his time he was incredibly wealthy.

Walt Whitman (May 31, 1819 – March 26, 1892) was an American poet, essayist and journalist who was born in Long Island New York. He was strictly anti-slavery and extending slavery but often would not go as far as being an abolitionist. His sexuality had often been discussed and many have debated on whether his sexual preferences. He has been called America's first "poet of Democracy"

Major Works: Franklin Evans (1842), Leaves of Grass (1855), Drum-Taps (1865), Memoranda During the War, Specimen Days Democratic Vistas (1871)

Themes: His work was a big part of the transition between Transcendentalism and realism in which both views were present. His writing is considered the essence of America by many for its new free verse writing style, strong unusual imagery, and unflinching references to death and sexuality. He wrote with much authority and self confidence as well and included many controversial subjects such as slavery, sexuality etcetera. His style was copied by virtually every poet that came after him.

Emily Dickinson (1830 - 1886)

- liked baking and gardening

- reclusive

- eventually wore all white and did not leave her room

- poems were heavily edited, though she published few in her lifetime

- poems are short and contain lots of dashes, random capitalization, personification, and a loose rhyme scheme

- poems were untitled

works include:

-       “I'm nobody! Who are you?”

-       “Much Madness is divinest Sense”

Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896), Uncle Tom's Cabin--anti-slavery sentiment

Herman Melville (1819-1891):

·      Typee, Omoo, Mardi, Redburn, Whitejacket, and Moby Dick

·      He was born to an aristocratic family; he taught in a school and then later became a sailor on a merchant ship; he was part of the Romanticism movement.

Mark Twain: (1835-1910), The Adventures of Huck Finn (1885), humorist/depressed

Mark Twain (1835-1910)

Works: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Prince and the Pauper

 Qualities/Themes: slavery/race, use of dialect, wilderness

Henry James (1843-1916); Beast in the Jungle; went to Harvard Law School and became a British Subject, most notable are his contributions to literary criticisms 

Willa Cather (1873-1947), My Antonia--prairie love story

Ernest Hemingway, 1899-1961; In Our Time, “Indian Camp,” “The End of Something,” “Hills Like White Elephants”, etc.; stripped-down modernist prose, understatement

TS Eliot: (1888-1965), Four Quartets (1936/40), Nobel prize in literature

T.S. Eliot

9/26/1988- 1/4/1965

The Waste Land, Four Quartets, Prufrock, The Family Reunion

Conservative religious themes, disillusionment,

William Carlos Williams, 1883-1963, poem "The Red Wheelbarrow"; Modernism

Ezra Pound (1885-1972)- In a Station of the Metro. As an early imagist poet, his style focused on using very few words in describing a scene, reducing a scene to its essence.

Langston Hughes, 1902-1967; “Let America Be America Again” etc.; leading Harlem Renaissance writer, comfortable in rhyme and dialect, wrote a play with Hurston

F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1896-1940; The Great Gatsby; great prose stylist of the jazz age

Zora Neal Hurston: 1891-1960; Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937); Themes/Style: Black struggles, poverty, nature, written partly in dialect

Arthur Millier (1915-2005) Death of a Salesman, The Crucible. Themes included the failure of the American Dream, the importance of the common man’s story, and the unfair attack on communism in America (in his opinion).

Arthur miller: 1915-2005 death of a sales man themes: american dream, family relationships, immigrant experience (implied)

Toni Morrison (1931-   ); Song of Solomon; complex style, sweeping, ambitious novels covering many generations, magical realism, postmodernism

John Ashbery- 1927 - Current, Most famous works: "What is Poetry" and "Daffy Duck in Hollywood". Notable: Won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1976.

John Ashbery

1/28/1927-still alive

What is Poetry, Daffy Duck in Hollywood, Some Trees, The Tennis Court Oath

Surrealism, enormous vocabulary, free-flowing style

James Tate (1943-  ; “The Rules”, etc.); absurdist works written in unrhymed prosy lines

Donald Barthelme (1931-1989) The School. Post-modern author; wrote absurd stories that build up through seemingly unrelated details. 

George Saunders, (1958-  ; “Pastoralia”)

John Barth: (1930-1995), Lost in the Funhoouse (1968), postmodern/professor

John Barth

5/27/1930-still alive

Lost in the Fun House, Chimera, The Friday Book

Parody, repetition, historical awareness

Jennifer Egan (1962- )

 Works: To Do, Black Box (series of Tweets), The Invisible Circus

Qualities/Themes: post-modernist, genre-bending, absurd, murder!

Jennifer Egan (born September 6, 1962-present) was born in Chicago New York. She has written fiction, novels, short stories and journalism. She won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction

Major Works: Emerald City (short story collection) (1993), The Invisible Circus (novel) (1995), Look at Me (novel) (2001), The Keep (novel) (2006), A Visit From the Goon Squad (novel) (2010), Black Box (short story) (2012)

Themes: She writes postmodern stories that are often very metafictional and artificial. Her story A Visit from the Goon Squad has been hesitantly classified as either a novel or a short story and the whole book is written in a vary artificial genre bending format of a PowerPoint. Her short story To Do is formatted as a shopping list but subtlety points to dire motives of the main character and the reader is left to speculate on what happened with only a few fragments of information. 

A few postmodern stories

Below are: "The School" (Barthelme); "To Do" (Egan); and the first couple of pages of "Lost in the Funhouse" (Barth)

The School  (by Donald Barthelme)

Well, we had all these children out planting trees, see, because we figured that… that was part of their education, to see how you know the root systems… and also the sense of responsibility, taking care of things, being individually responsible. You know what I mean. And the trees all died. They were orange trees. I don’t know why they died, they just died. Something wrong with the soil possibly or maybe the stuff we got from the nursery wasn’t the best. We complained about it. So we’ve got thirty kids there, each kid had his or her own little tree to plant, and we’ve got these thirty dead trees. All these kids looking at these little brown sticks. It was depressing.

It wouldn’t have been so bad except that just a couple of weeks before the thing with the trees, the snakes all died. But I think that the snakes—well, the reason that the snakes kicked off was that… you remember, the boiler was shut off for four days because of the strike, and that was explicable. It was something you could explain to the kids because of the strike. I mean, none of their parents would let them cross the picket line and they knew there was a strike going on and what it meant. So when things got started up again and we found the snakes they weren’t too disturbed.

With the herb gardens it was probably a case of overwatering, and at least now they know not to overwater. The children were very conscientious with the herb gardens and some of them probably… you know, slipped them a little extra water when we weren’t looking. Or maybe… well, I don’t like to think about sabotage, although it did occur to us. I mean, it was something that crossed our minds. We were thinking that way probably because before that the gerbils had died, and the white mice had died, and the salamander… well, now they know not to carry them around in plastic bags.

Of course we expected the tropical fish to die, that was no surprise. Those numbers, you look at them crooked and they’re belly-up on the surface. But the lesson plan called for a tropical-fish input at that point, there was nothing we could do, it happens every year, you just have to hurry past it.

We weren’t even supposed to have a puppy.

We weren’t even supposed to have one, it was just a puppy the Murdoch girl found under a Gristede’s truck one day and she was afraid the truck would run over it when the driver had finished making his delivery, so she stuck it in her knapsack and brought it to school with her. So we had this puppy. As soon as I saw the puppy I thought, “Oh Christ, I bet it will live for about two weeks and then….” And that’s what it did. It wasn’t supposed to be in the classroom at all, there’s some kind of regulation about it, but you can’t tell them they can’t have a puppy when the puppy is already there, right in front of them, running around on the floor and yap-yap-yapping. They named it Edgar—that is, they named it after me. They had a lot of fun running after it and yelling, “Here, Edgar! Nice Edgar!” Then they’d laugh like hell. They enjoyed the ambiguity. I enjoyed it myself. I don’t mind being kidded. They made a little house for it in the supply closet and all that. I don’t know what it died of. Distemper, I guess. It probably hadn’t had any shots. I got it out of there before the kids got to school. I checked the supply closet each morning, routinely because I knew what was going to happen. I gave it to the custodian.

And then there was this Korean orphan that the class adopted through the Help the Children program; all the kids brought in a quarter a month, that was the idea. It was an unfortunate thing; the kid’s name was Kim and maybe we adopted him too late or something. The cause of death was not stated in the letter we got, they suggested we adopt another child instead and sent us some interesting case histories, but we didn’t have the heart. The class took it pretty hard, they began (I think, nobody ever said anything to me directly) to feel that maybe there was something wrong with the school. But I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the school, particularly; I’ve seen better and I’ve seen worse. It was just a run of bad luck. We had an extraordinary number of parents passing away, for instance. There were I think two heart attacks and two suicides, one drowning, and four killed together in a car accident. One stroke. And we had the usual heavy mortality rate among the grandparents, or maybe it was heavier this year—it seemed so. And finally the tragedy.

The tragedy occurred when Matthew Wein and Tony Mavrogordo were playing over where they’re excavating for the new federal office building. There were all these big wooden beams stacked, you know, at the edge of the excavation. There’s a court case coming out of that: the parents are claiming that the beams were poorly stacked. I don’t know what’s true and what’s not. It’s been a strange year.

I forgot to mention Billy Brandt’s father, who was knifed fatally when he grappled with a masked intruder in his home.

One day, we had a discussion in class. They asked me, where did they go? The trees, the salamander, the tropical fish, Edgar, the poppas and mommas, Matthew and Tony, where did they go? And I said, I don’t know, I don’t know. And they said, who knows? And I said, nobody knows. And they said, is death that which gives meaning to life? And I said, no, life is that which gives meaning to life. Then they said, but isn’t death, considered such a fundamental datum, the means by which the taken-for-granted mundanity of the everyday may be transcended in the direction of—

I said, yes, maybe.

They said, we don’t like it.

I said, that’s sound.

They said, it’s a bloody shame!

I said, it is.

They said, will you make love now with Helen (our teaching assistant) so that we can see how it is done? We know you like Helen.

I do like Helen but I said that I would not.

We’ve heard so much about it, they said, but we’ve never seen it.

I said I would be fired and that it was never, or almost never, done as a demonstration. Helen looked out of the window.

They said, please, please make love with Helen, we require an assertion of value, we are frightened.

I said that they shouldn’t be frightened (although I am often frightened) and that there was value everywhere. Helen came and embraced me. I kissed her a few times on the brow. We held each other. The children were excited. Then there was a knock on the door. I opened the door, and the new gerbil walked in. The children cheered wildly.

 

To Do    (by Jennifer Egan)

1. Mow lawn

2. Get rid of that fucking hose

3. Wash windows

4. Spay cat

5. Dye hair

6. Do tarot cards

7. Pick up kids

8. Drop off kids at Mom's

9. Buy wig

10. See if small removable portion of fence can be cut QUIETLY

            a. Kinds of clippers    

            b. Metal solvents    

            c. Electrical devices    

                        1. How noisy?        

                        2. Flying metal chips?        

                        3. Danger of electrocution?        

                                    a. Rubber gloves/goggles?            

                                    b. Lethal?            

                                                1. Sign will                

                                    c. Does it make the body look really shitty at                                       death?            

                                                1. Get tooth capped                

11. Send warning letter

            a. Newspaper cutouts?    

            b. Get kids to write it?    

            c. Write with left hand?    

            d. Be vague. "Certain unpleasant things"    

12. Mail letter

            a. Or drop it off while wearing wig    

13. Renew meds

14. Investigate poisons

            a. Flammable    

            b. Powders    

            c. Gasses    

            d. Pills    

            e. Herbal    

            f. Chemical    

            g. Musical    

                        1. Ask kids        

                        2. Hamlet – ear        

            h. Ingestible    

                        1. Cookies?        

                                    i. Must look INNOCENT    

15. Research cameras

            a. Affixed to fence    

            b. Propped in hole cut in fence    

            c. Small, undetectable    

            d. Implanted in flowers    

            e. How to use?    

            f. Must be REASONABLY priced.    

            g. Take no shit from photo man.    

                        1. Remind him of ruined prints.        

16. Pick up kids

17. Make dinner

18. Get ready for party

            a. Polka dots    

            b. Black gloves    

            c. Hair ribbon    

            d. Veil    

            e. Bring seltzer    

            f. Remind Stan of party    

            g. Plan two funny stories    

            h. Breathing exercises to prepare for seeing THEM    

                        1. Kiss kiss        

                        2. Hug hug        

                        3. Remember:     

                            NO ONE CAN SEE YOUR THOUGHTS

(From) Lost in the Funhouse  (by John Barth, from Lost in the Funhouse (1968)

         For whom is the funhouse fun? Perhaps for lovers. For Ambrose it is a place of fear and confusion. He has come to the seashore with his family for the holiday, the occasion of their visit is Independence Day, the most important secular holiday of the United States of America. A single straight underline is the manuscript mark for italic type, which in turn is the printed equivalent to oral emphasis of words and phrases as well as the customary type for titles of complete works, not to mention. Italics are also employed, in fiction stories especially, for “outside,” intrusive, or artificial voices, such as radio announcements, the texts of telegrams and newspaper articles, et cetera. They should be used sparingly. If passages originally in roman type are italicized by someone repeating them, it’s customary to acknowledge the fact. Italics mine.

            Ambrose was “at that awkward age.” His voice came out high-pitched as a child’s if he let himself get carried away; to be on the safe side, therefore, he moved and spoke with deliberate calm and adult gravity. Talking soberly of unimportant or irrelevant matters and listening consciously to the sound of your own voice are useful habits for maintaining control in this difficult interval. En route to Ocean City he sat in the back seat of the family car with his brother Peter, age fifteen, and Magda G —‘ age fourteen, a pretty girl and exquisite young lady, who lived not far from them on B — Street in the town of D —, Maryland. Initials, blanks, or both were often substituted for proper names in nineteenth-century fiction to enhance the illusion of reality. It is as if the author felt it necessary to delete the names for reasons of tact or legal liability. Interestingly, as with other aspects of realism, it is an illusion that is being enhanced, by purely artificial means. Is it likely, does it violate the principle of verisimilitude, that a thirteen-year-old boy could make such a sophisticated observation? A girl of fourteen is the psychological coeval of a boy of fifteen or sixteen; a thirteen-year-old boy, therefore, even one precocious in some other respects, might be three years her emotional junior.

            Thrice a year — on Memorial, Independence, and Labor Days — the family visits Ocean City for the afternoon and evening. When Ambrose and Peter’s father was their age, the excursion was made by train, as mentioned in the novel The 42nd Parallel by John Dos Passos. Many families from the same neighborhood used to travel together, with dependent relatives and often with Negro servants; schoolfuls of children swarmed through the railway cars; everyone shared everyone else’s Maryland fried chicken, Virginia ham, deviled eggs, potato salad, beaten biscuits, iced tea. Nowadays (that is, in 19-- , the year of our story) the journey is made by automobile — more comfortably and quickly though without the extra fun though without the camaraderie of a general excursion. It’s all part of the deterioration of American life, their father declares; Uncle Karl supposes that when the boys take their families to Ocean City for the holidays they’ll fly in Autogiros. Their mother, sitting in the middle of the front seat like Magda in the second, only with her arms on the seat-back behind the men’s shoulders, wouldn’t want the good old days back again, the steaming trains and stuffy long dresses; on the other hand she can do without Autogiros, too, if she has to become a grandmother to fly in them.

            Description of physical appearance and mannerisms is one of several standard methods of characterization used by writers of fiction. It is also important to “keep the senses operating”; when a detail from one of the five senses, say visual, is “crossed” with a detail from another, say auditory, the reader’s imagination is oriented to the scene, perhaps unconsciously. This procedure may he compared to the way surveyors and navigators determine their positions by two or more compass bearings, a process known as triangulation. The brown hair on Ambrose’s mother’s forearms gleamed in the sun like. Though right-handed, she took her left arm from the seat back to press the dashboard cigar lighter for Uncle Karl. When the glass bead in its handle glowed red, the lighter was ready for use. The smell of Uncle Karl’s cigar smoke reminded one of. The fragrance of the ocean came strong to the picnic ground where they always stopped for lunch, two miles inland from Ocean City Having to pause for a full hour almost within sound of the breakers was difficult for Peter and Ambrose when they were younger; even at their present age it was not easy to keep their anticipation, stimulated by the briny spume, from turning into short temper. The Irish author James Joyce, in his unusual novel entitled Ulysses, now available in this country uses the adjectives snot-green and scrotum-tightening to describe the sea. Visual, auditory tactile, olfac­tory, gustatory Peter and Ambrose’s father, while steering their black 1936 LaSalle sedan with one hand, could with the other remove the first cigarette from a white pack of Lucky Strikes and, more remarkably, light it with a match forefingered from its book and thumbed against the flint paper without being detached. The matchbook cover merely advertised U.S. War Bonds and Stamps. A fine metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech, in addition to its obvious “first-order” relevance to the thing it describes, will be seen upon reflection to have a second order of significance: it may be drawn from the milieu of the action, for example, or be particularly appropriate to the sensi­bility of the narrator, even hinting to the reader things of which the narrator is unaware; or it may cast further and subtler lights upon the things it describes, sometimes ironically qualifying the more evident sense of the comparison.

            To say that Ambrose’s and Peter’s mother was pretty is to accomplish nothing; the reader may acknowledge the proposition, but his imagination is not engaged. Besides, Magda was also pretty, yet in an altogether different way. Although she lived on B — Street she had very good manners and did better than average in school. Her figure was very well developed for her age. Her right hand lay casually on the plush upholstery of the seat, very near Ambrose’s left leg, on which his own hand rested…

(the story continues…)

po-mo story assignment

Postmodern Story assignment

Rough draft: June 4

Final: June 8

Length: 3 pages

Assignment:

Write a story that acknowledges fiction’s limitations and playfully pushes against them.  Your story should be one or more of the following:

Self-conscious                                       Self-referential                         Absurd                                   

Transparently artificial                      Intertextual                     Metafictional/metatextual

Genre-bending                                      Playful                                     artifactual

Some examples, in addition to the ones we’ve already considered: 

Borges’s story, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” poses as an academic essay about a modern writer who rewrites Don Quixote.  The essayist insists that the modern writer’s version is much better than that of Cervantes, even though they are word for word the same.

Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine, a short novel about a guy who has gone out on his lunch break to get a new pair of shoelaces.  The novel takes place in the man’s head while he rides  down the escalator in his office building.

Kathy Acker’s Great Expectations takes large chunks of Dickens’s novel but tells a very different story, one of sex and violence; bordering on the unreadable, this novel critiques the male-dominated world.

Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried calls into question how we know what “really” happened, etc.

Julio Cortazar’s Hopscotch, whose chapters can be read in various orders.

You might:

rewrite a book we’ve already read, and interpose authorial commentary;

write about trying to write a story;

write a story with different endings;

write a story about a character in search of a story, or a setting in search of a character, or a plot in search of a setting, or…

Read a work of American fiction from the past 50 or so years

By next Tuesday (E) or WEdnesday (F), you have to have acquired a copy of a creative, narrative work written by an American sometime since 1955 and you have to have begun reading it.  The book does not have to be "postmodern", but since you do have to write a "postmodern" story, it might be helpful.  Below is a brief list of some books that might be good to read:

Title, Author
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,  Junot Diaz
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius,  Dave Eggers
Beloved (or anything else by), Toni Morrison
Slaughterhouse Five (or anything else by),  Kurt Vonnegut
The Breast (or anything else by),  Philip Roth
Pale Fire,  Vladimir Nabokov
The Crying of Lot 49,  Thomas Pynchon
The Dead Girl,  Melanie Thernstrom
The Secret History,  Donna Tartt
Brief interviews with Hideous Men,  David Foster Wallace
Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk
A Visit From the Goon Squad,  Jennifer Egan
The History of Love,  Nicole Krauss
Either of Jonathan Safran Foer's novels
Maus and Maus II, by Art Spiegelman
Fun Home and You Are Not My Mother, by Alison Bechdel
etc.