Revising your essays

As we've gone on, I've gotten a clearer idea of how I think your essays could be improved.  In your revision, I'd like you to rewrite at least two paragraphs, and focus on including your reflections in the moment.  In other words, your essays should still be thoughtful, should reflect on how you were influenced by the experience you describe, and should mention either The Scarlet Letter or Whitman or Dickinson--but those reflections should come in the context of a particular moment...  We'll talk about this in class.

In-The-Moment Personal Essay

 REVISION OF A PERSONAL ESSAY                                               

You have written, under time constraints, two personal essays: one, a month ago, about a time you felt deeply, or thought deeply, the way Hester thought deeply in The Scarlet Letter; the other last week, when you wrote a personal essay in response to either a Whiman poem or a Dickinson poem—for most, that essay was about the way some external thing affected you internally.

Now I’d like you to drastically revise and somewhat expand one of those essays into a more considered work.  If you want to, you can start over from scratch and write about something new, but I would recommend using what you did before as a brainstorming session at least.

All but a very, very few of the essays I read seemed to me to have the same weakness, and could be improved in the same way, by making them much more focused on specific moments, by moving down to the bottom rungs of the ladder of abstraction and the ladder of temporal speed, so that as much as possible you write about particular sensory details at a moment-by-moment speed, with very little in the way of abstraction or summary.

All language is based to some extent on abstraction, of course, and we can never match the speed of our writing exactly to the speed of our living (though I think Nabokov claims that Tolstoy comes close on that second score), but what I mean is the difference between:

I used to be a great soccer player.  From the time I was seven, it was a part of my identity.  I loved to run, to kick and to win.  My nickname was Pele,  When I broke my leg just after scoring the winning goal in a game against Needham last fall, it was like my whole world changed.  I couldn’t run around the way I used to do, and maybe I never would again.  Instead I sat at home and streamed really bad movies on Netflix.  My mom made me tea and I popped painkillers like they were popcorn.  My body was in pain anyway, and my mind was in pain, too.  I was numb. I wasn’t a soccer star anymore.  Maybe I would never be a soccer player again. I couldn’t even remember what it was like to kick a soccer ball.

and this:

I sprinted in from the left and leaped into the air, scissoring my legs and kicking the ball.  I just had time to see the ball sail into the upper left corner of the net, and to wonder how I was going to land—on my back?—when a guy on the other team slammed into my legs, sending me spinning like a pinwheel flicked with a fingernail.  I flipped around; when I hit the ground my left leg was at an awkward angle.  Just at that moment, a different guy on the other team slammed into me, and my lower leg snapped like a toothpick. 

As the sun set three days later, I was lying in bed, in pain, popping  painkillers like they were popcorn while Home Alone 3 played in low-resolution on the screen of the iPad that rested on my good leg.

Maybe that second passage isn’t as good—but it’s the kind of thing I want you to aim for.

Rough revised draft due: Mon/Tues, 12.19/20.11                        

Final Draft due: Thursday, 12/22/11

Author list so far...

Below are the 22 authors we've learned about and read.  Biographical tidbits not included.

Neo-classical  (or: Puritanism and Enlightenment)

(Colonial-era Poetry)
Anne Bradstreet (1612?-1692), "The Prologue," from The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America
Phyllis Wheatley (1753-1784), "On Being Brought from Africa to America"
Philip Freneau (1752-1832), "The Indian Burying-Ground"

(Captivity Narratives)
Mary Rowlandson (1637-1711), The Sovereignty and Goodness of God

Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758), Personal Narrative; Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God; Resolutions

Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), from Autobiography -- and his critics:
    (Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 1905)
    (D. H. Lawrence Studies in Classic American Literature, 1923)

Romanticism (including the American Renaissance/transcendentalism)

(Seduction Novels/Gothic Novels)
Susannah Rowson (1762-1824), Charlotte Temple
Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810), Wieland

James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851), The Last of the Mohicans

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864), The Scarlet Letter

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), "The Black Cat"; "The Purloined Letter"; "The Tell-Tale Heart"; "The Raven"

Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), Walden
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), "Self-Reliance"; "Nature" etc.

H. W. Longfellow (1807-1882), Hiawatha, "The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere," etc.

Walt Whitman (1819-1892), "Song of Myself"; "There Was a Child Went Forth"; "I Hear America Singing"; etc.
Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), I'm Nobody; Much Madness is Divinest Sense; Wild Nights; etc.

Herman Melville (1819-1891), “Bartleby the Scrivener,” Moby Dick
Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896), Uncle Tom's Cabin

Regionalism/Realism 

Mark Twain (1835-1910), The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Interesting interpretations of

For Wednesday, your homework is to find three (or two, if you write about them in a comment on this post) interesting interpretations of some aspect of a text (book or movie).  These interpretations could be ones you got from someone else, or they could be your own. (Assuming they're not yours, let us know where you got the interpretations--your friend, an article, a website, whatever.)

One way to think about interpretation is that it involves applying to a text an outside framework or paradigm, or seeing it through a particular lens.  For example, you can look apply to "Bartleby" a religious framework, or a political framework, or a philosophical framework , etc.  Or, for a non-Bartleby example: examining Twilight within the framework of domestic abuse leads to interesting interpretations.

NB: If you choose to write the interpretations you find on a piece of paper, you need to write down three of them; if you write them in a comment on this post, you only need do two.

Bartleby, the...

(Bartleby can be seen in many ways.  Below are some possibilities.  After you have read the end of the story, pick the following interpretation you prefer and write a brief comment about how some aspect of the end of the story fits with that interpretation.)

Artist/Writer? Melville himself had great success with his early, fairly conventional sea-faring novels (Typee, Omoo, etc.), but his later, more idiosyncratic books were commercial failures, and eventually Meville pretty much stopped writing.  You can see "Bartleby" as a self-portrait of Melville, a writer who didn't want to do any more "copying" of standard styles, a writer who preferred not to follow the conventions and needs of the marketplace.  If we see the story in this way, how does the end fit in?  Be specific.

Transcendentalist?  You can see B. as a parody or ideal of the philosophy of Emerson and Thoreau: he drops out of the world of commerce and follows his own whim entirely.  (In Emerson's essay, "The Transcendentalist"--in which Emerson outlines what his idea of a transcendentalist is: a person who is not a "materialist" but an "idealist"--Emerson says that there can be no such thing as a "pure" transcendentalist, but what he says about transcendentalists is surprisingly similar to Bartleby: "they are not good citizens, not good members of society; unwillingly they bear their part of the public and private burdens ...  [The Transcendentalist says:] Unless the action is necessary, unless it is adequate, I do not wish to perform it. I do not wish to do one thing but once. I do not love routine. ... we do not like your work. ... I can sit in a corner and perish, (as you call it,) but I will not move until I have the highest command."  If we see the story in this way, how does the end fit in?  Be specific.

Political Protester? It is possible to see Bartleby as the first member of Occupy Wall Street."  He exercises passive resistance in a Gandhi or MLK-like way, refusing to take part in a system that relegates him to meaningless drudgery.  If we see the story in this way, how does the end fit in?  Be specific.

Philosopher? We can see Bartleby as a Schopenhauerian precursor to the existentialists, one who has perhaps unconsciously pondered the first sentence of Albert Camus's essay, "The Myth of Sisyphus" ("There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide") and has answered it in his own peculiar way.  The highest form of wisdom, according to Schopenhauer, is renunciation, not of life but of will, as in the holy ascetics--which perhaps brings us to Bartleby as a...


Jesus-figure? The parallels are in the story: Bartleby's arrival is referred to as his "advent"; the narrator decides not to deal harshly with Bartleby by recalling Jesus's teachings: "the divine injunction: 'A new commandment give I unto you, that ye love one another.'"  The narrator denies B. three times, just as Jesus is denied three times by Peter.  And so on.   If we see the story in this way, how does the end fit in?  Be specific.


Foil for the narrator? Some people see the narrator as the main character, and B. as important mainly for the light he throws on the narrator, who is in turn our representative: when we read, we see things more or less through the narrator's eyes and react more or less as he does.  Bartleby, then, shows us things about ourselves that we aren't normally aware of.  If we see the story in this way, how does the end fit?  Be specific.


Diagnosable Patient? Do you see Bartleby as having a diagnosable condition?  Is he clinically depressed?  (or is he melancholic?)  Is he "on the spectrum"?   If we see the story in this way, how does the end fit?  Be specific.

Bartleby, the Scrivener (A Story of Wall Street)

The story is available here:  http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/11231/pg11231.html

Once you have read through half of the story, How do you react to Bartleby's recalcitrance?  How do you think you are supposed to react?  Explain.