Field Trip to Walden Pond

Meet me in the Atrium Thursday morning at 8:30 AM.  If you don't come on the trip, you will come to class and will have to write an essay. If you are coming on the trip, here's what you should do:
 
Bring $10 for the bus if you haven't already

Bring the signed teacher approval form if you haven't already.  (If you have turned in your Teacher Approval signature form, you will already be excused from your classes for the day; if you have NOT turned in the form, please bring the signed form as soon as possible so that you can be excused.)

Bring lunch.

Bring something to write with.  Bring a book if you like.

Wear clothes and shoes that will be okay in the woods, and bring a positive, flexible attitude.   The weather should be okay, but it has rained a lot, so there may be some mud on the trails in places.  We will be walking, sitting, and writing in the woods.

See you then.

Postmodern absurdism

In class a few weeks ago we read some John Ashbery and James Tate poems.  Yesterday in class we read a short story by Donald Barthelme that reminded some of you of the Tate poems.  For those of you who weren't in class yesterday, here's the story:




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.

Postmodern self-consciousness

In the last month of school, you will read some contemporary American literature of your own choosing.  Last Friday I talked about something that often shows up in fiction of the past several decades, and read aloud some passages for illustration.

One feature we often see in contemporary literature is a heightened self-consciousness, a way in which the text comments on itself, or contains texts within it.  This is not a brand new technique, of course—we see it in the opening to Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, in Hawthorne’s preface to The Scarlet Letter, and in the ironies and commentaries built into Moby Dick, The Scarlet Letter, and even such apparently earnest works as Whitman’s Song of Myself.  Nevertheless, self-consciousness is probably more common, and taken to greater lengths, in fiction written after the nineteen-fifties.

Often this self-consciousness is expressed in anxiety about the inadequacy of writing to handle the inexpressible intensity and variety of real life.  For example, Vonnegut’s first chapter in Slaughterhouse Five talks about how he had been trying for years to write a novel about his experiences during the fire-bombing of Dresden in World War II.  The horrors of this experience seemed unable to be expressed through normal fictional conventions.  How can you represent the killing of hundreds of thousands of innocents?  Similar feelings were often expressed about the holocaust: after such overwhelming horror, how can one believe in God, how can one make art?  Such anxieties were often felt on a smaller level as well: Dave Eggers opens his memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, with an “Acknowledgments” section that includes things like long discussions of how he chose the title of his book, and sentences like, “While the author is self-conscious about being self-referential, he is also knowing about that self-conscious self-referentiality.”

Often, these anxieties about how to deal truly and authentically with the difficulty and slipperiness of real life seem to have made the authors turn, ironically, self-consciously, to parody, to humor, to science fiction, to magical realism, to cartoons.  It’s no coincidence that the most famous American book about the holocaust is a graphic novel, and one with two strands, a present-time level on which the author interviews his survivor father about his experiences, and a past-time level that shows his father’s experiences.  Including the interviews makes it clear that the author is not pretending to complete authority, that the author is aware that writing about the holocaust is on some level impossible.

So—you don’t have to read a self-conscious, postmodern book—but you might consider it. Here are some possibilities:

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers
Fun Home and Are You My Mother by Alison Bechdel
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie
The Dead Girl be Melanie Thernstrom
Slaugherhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
The Breast by Philip Roth
The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston
Open City by Teju Cole
 

Example of a good analysis of a line from "Beast in the Jungle"

The paper below is not perfect (there are some mechanical issues, and the conclusion strikes me as a little weak), but it's very, very good, and it really does exactly what I was asking you all to do in that paper.  If you're revising, looking at this paper might be helpful.

Wildcard

Here’s the thing about reading James.  It isn’t linear.  That is, there are multiple interpretations and the meanings branch out.  Whereas this is a technique used by many writers, if unintentionally, James makes it the main driving force behind his work.  This ambiguity and double meaning comes through on all levels – words, sentences, paragraphs.  One such example is the paragraph split between pages 435 and 436, towards the end of the fourth chapter.  The paragraph itself has very little action (though a substantial amount compared to the story as a whole) and little explicit reflection on life.  However, it should not be overlooked.  In fact, it could be considered the climax of the story.  Within the paragraph, an analogous phenomenon occurs with the following sentence:

                   "She only kept him waiting, however; that is he only waited.” (pp. 435)
 

     At first glance, this sentence is straightforward.  Marcher waits because of May.  It could be read simply, and it does have valuable meaning.  May, even in her last moments, retains control over her man.  She calls the shots.  It is because of her that he waits.  The sentence is effective in that is creates suspense, dramatizes the silence and adds perhaps underserved gravity to a matter seemingly simple.  Reading the work as an account of women’s control over men finds a perfect symbol in this instant.

The clause after the semicolon is peculiar, though.  It seems to convey no information and seems oddly out of place.  On second reading, this becomes vexingly obvious.  It could be seen as a clarification.  “That is” is the spoken equivalent of “i.e.”.  It is an example used to dissolve ambiguity (ironically, its sole purpose here is to create it).  But this clarification, too, is ambiguous.  One possible meaning could be that he waited.  By simply leaving the first clause, one would think he waits May intended for him to wait.  The added detail, however, reveals that he actually waited because of her and not because she meant him to.  In fact, she has said all there was to say.  With her painful yet graceful steps, with her face …  “He saw in her face the truth”.  There is nothing left to wait for; everything is said!  Yet this arrogant and selfish act of waiting for more… this ignorance of what is right before his eyes and thirst for satisfaction of his perverted obsession… this defines Marcher’s character.  The poor woman is dying, and her only wish is for Marcher to open his eyes for one brief moment.  He doesn’t.

Yet the clarification could also be of different meaning.  Again, the casual reader skims over a slightly bothersome detail.  That detail is the word “only”.  One naturally recognizes it to mean that waiting was his only action at the given time.  However, that’s not it.  James wouldn’t include a word that is so mundane in meaning.  Of course he only waited!  That’s part of the definition of waiting.  No, James is too calculating with his words to let that slip.  Instead, “only” could have another meaning.  Instead of referring to the action, it refers to the subject!  Only Marcher waited.  Of course, the wording is of an order unusual, but that’s not weird because he has been doing that all along.  The implications of this, however, are a little troubling.  If May isn’t waiting, than that suggests that she is exactly where she wants to be.  This is a direct contradiction of the previous train of thought.  In fact, it changes the meaning of the paragraph!  It turns her desperate final attempt into a success story.  Or does it mean that she does not expect Marcher to respond?  One could easily make a case that it changes the meaning of the story, too.  With this idea of parallel stories in mind, one is prompted to re-read, this time conscious of multiple scenarios (almost a sort of meta-advertisement of the story).  And this is the beauty of this sentence and of his whole style.  It is powerful no matter how one interprets it.  Yet depending on which word he chooses to make his focus, it means very different things.  It is a wildcard.  It adds credibility to whichever mindset the reader is in – a perfect part of the whole.

Gatsby chapters 5 and 6

Is the architecture of the book becoming clear?  What do you think?  What do you like?  What do you wonder about?  The shift between chapter 5 and chapter 6 is quite abrupt, isn't it?  What do you make of it?

Gatsby, Chapter 4

What do you think?  Gatsby becomes even more intriguing!  How is Fitzgerald (or Nick, depending on how you look at it) choreographing the reader's experience?  What about Gatsby as a lens (what are we learning about Nick and others by the ways in which they see Gatsby?)?  What else?

Gatsby!

Fitzgerald's novel, The Great Gatsby, is in many ways a perfect American novel.  It's an extremely tightly constructed novel, and it is brilliantly written on the sentence by sentence level.  Such perfection might be too neat and might feel airless--but Fitzgerald's writing is so virtuosically freewheeling and breezy that it never does feel that way to me (it's my own personal theory that Fitzgerald is not as good a writer as his narrator, Nick Adams, and that's why Gatsby is better than any of Fitzgerald's other productions).  In any case, the prose in Gatsby is lovely.  One way it's lovely is in the remarkable surrealism of its language, which manages to compress metaphors into single words and slip amazing images into the most casual of sentences. When you read chapter 1, try to notice examples of brilliant writing, and write a comment on this post quoting and briefly explaining your favorite example.

Posts and comments on "Your Antonia" and "Your Eyes"

Over the next week, you must write at least one post, and several comments on other people's posts, on the blogs for your books (links are over there on the right).

Your posts should be interesting enough to provoke discussion.  You might raise a question, but often a provocative statement of an idea can make for more interesting discussion.  It helps to have something to argue against!

Your comments should actually say something--more, in other words, than just "Good idea!"  You should comment on all of your group's posts, but you should also post on others' posts...

AP TESTS

Checks are due this Friday, for $87 made out to "AP Guidance"  On the memo line write which test it's for (English Language or English Literature).

Hemingway stories

We will be reading these the week after break; if you are in France, read them!

http://www.nbu.bg/webs/amb/american/4/hemingway/camp.htm

http://www.repeatafterus.com/title.php?i=8752

http://www.scribd.com/doc/94569/Hills-Like-White-Elephants

Modernist poems Day 2

Below is T.S. Eliot's first great poem.  We will consider the picture it gives of its narrator, of the possibility of fulfillment, of modernist anxiety and self-consciousness, and connections to other texts we've read.

 

The Love-Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

By T.S. Eliot


Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question. . .                               10
Oh, do not ask, "What is it?"
Let us go and make our visit.

  In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

  The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,                               20
And seeing that it was a soft October night
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

  And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;                                30
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions
And for a hundred visions and revisions
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

  In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

  And indeed there will be time
To wonder, "Do I dare?" and, "Do I dare?"
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair—                               40
[They will say: "How his hair is growing thin!"]
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin—
[They will say: "But how his arms and legs are thin!"]
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

  For I have known them all already, known them all;
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,                       50
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
  So how should I presume?

  And I have known the eyes already, known them all—
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?                    60
  And how should I presume?

  And I have known the arms already, known them all—
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
[But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!]
Is it perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?
Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
  And should I then presume?
  And how should I begin?
        .     .     .     .     .

Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets              70
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows? . . .

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
        .     .     .     .     .

And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep . . . tired . . . or it malingers,
Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?                  80
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter,
I am no prophet–and here's no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.

  And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while,                                             90
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question,
To say: "I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all"
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
  Should say, "That is not what I meant at all.
  That is not it, at all."

  And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,                                           100
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—
And this, and so much more?—
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
  "That is not it at all,
  That is not what I meant, at all."                                          110
        .     .     .     .     .

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.

  I grow old . . . I grow old . . .                                              120
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

  Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

  I do not think they will sing to me.

  I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.

  We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown               130
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.


                                                              [1915]

Modernist poems Day 1

These poems are all in their different ways a part of "imagism." We will consider (and if you are in Mexico you should consider) how what these poems imply without saying straight out.  (Williams said, "No ideas but in things.")

In a Station of the Metro
by Ezra Pound (1913)

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough. 


The Red Wheelbarrow
by William Carlos Williams (1923)

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

Wallace Stevens (1917)

I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird. 

II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds. 

III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime. 

IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one. 

V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after. 

VI
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause. 

VII
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?

VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know. 

IX
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles. 

X
At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply. 

XI
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds. 

XII
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying. 

XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.

assignment sheet for "Beast" papers

are available at the link on the right...

If you missed class Monday or Tuesday

Check out the powerpoint presentations available at the link on the right, and read the first 10 pages or so of Willa Cather's My Antonia (1918).  Check out in particular the paragraph in which Jim Burden, the narrator, who has just lost both of his parents and has to go live with his grandparents in Nebraska, describes driving from the train station across the Nebraska prairie.  Consider in particular what this passage has to do with "modernism" as described in the powerpoint.

"Cautiously I slipped from under the buffalo hide, got up on my knees and peered over the side of the wagon. There seemed to be nothing to see; no fences, no creeks or trees, no hills or fields. If there was a road, I could not make it out in the faint starlight. There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made. No, there was nothing but land—slightly undulating, I knew, because often our wheels ground against the brake as we went down into a hollow and lurched up again on the other side. I had the feeling that the world was left behind, that we had got over the edge of it, and were outside man's jurisdiction. I had never before looked up at the sky when there was not a familiar mountain ridge against it. But this was the complete dome of heaven, all there was of it. I did not believe that my dead father and mother were watching me from up there; they would still be looking for me at the sheep-fold down by the creek, or along the white road that led to the mountain pastures. I had left even their spirits behind me. The wagon jolted on, carrying me I knew not whither. I don't think I was homesick. If we never arrived anywhere, it did not matter. Between that earth and that sky I felt erased, blotted out. I did not say my prayers that night: here, I felt, what would be would be."

What will your paper be about?

Write a note to your classmates telling what your paper will be about.  Before you post, first read the comments and make a helpful suggestion about the previous person’s ideas; then offer your own.

If possible, use the "reply" button below the last person's post to make your helpful suggestion; and then in a separate new comment box present your own paper idea.

Marcher and May

Why do you think May doesn't tell Marcher what she thinks?

Note about the exam

The passages on the exam will NOT be those I have posted on this blog recently--nor will I use all of those authors.  Those passages were just for you to read and look at and practice with a bit.

All I can say about what will be on the exam is that they will be from the following list of authors, the same as the one I posted on Dec. 14:

Below are the 21 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

Here are more excerpts...

From The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
 
In fact, the summum bonum of his ethic, the earning of more and more money, combined with the strict avoidance of all spontaneous enjoyment of life, is above all completely devoid of any eudaemonistic, not to say hedonistic, admixture. It is thought of so purely as an end in itself, that from the point of view of the happiness of, or utility to, the single individual, it appears entirely transcendental and absolutely irrational. Man is dominated by the making of money, by acquisition as the ultimate purpose of his life. Economic acquisition is no longer subordinated to man as the means for the satisfaction of his material needs. This reversal of what we should call the natural relationship, so irrational from a naive point of view, is evidently as definitely a leading principle of capitalism as it is foreign to all peoples not under capitalistic influence. At the same time it expresses a type of feeling which is closely connected with certain religious ideas. If we thus ask, why should “money be made out of men,” Benjamin Franklin himself, although he was a colorless deist, answers in his autobiography with a quotation from the Bible, which his strict Calvinistic father drummed into him again and again in his youth: “Seest thou a man diligent in his business? He shall stand before kings” (Prov. xxii. 29). The earning of money within the modern economic order is, so long as it is done legally, the result and the expression of virtue and proficiency in a calling; and this virtue and proficiency are, as it is now not difficult to see, the real Alpha and Omega of Franklin’s ethic, as expressed in the passages we have quoted, as well as in all his works without exception.
And in truth this peculiar idea, so familiar to us today, but in reality so little a matter of course, of one’s duty in a calling, is what is most characteristic of the social ethic of capitalistic culture, and is in a sense the fundamental basis of it. It is an obligation which the individual is supposed to feel and does feel towards the content of his professional activity, no matter in what it consists, in particular no matter whether it appears on the surface as a utilization of his personal powers, or only of his material possessions (as capital).

 --Max Weber

From The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
 
Sometimes we’d have that whole river all to ourselves for the longest time. Yonder was the banks and the islands, across the water; and maybe a spark—which was a candle in a cabin window; and sometimes on the water you could see a spark or two—on a raft or a scow, you know; and maybe you could hear a fiddle or a song coming over from one of them crafts. It’s lovely to live on a raft. We had the sky up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss about whether they was made or only just happened. Jim he allowed they was made, but I allowed they happened; I judged it would have took too long to make so many. Jim said the moon could a laid them; well, that looked kind of reasonable, so I didn’t say nothing against it, because I’ve seen a frog lay most as many, so of course it could be done. We used to watch the stars that fell, too, and see them streak down. Jim allowed they’d got spoiled and was hove out of the nest.

--Mark Twain 

 From Wieland:

I feel little reluctance in complying with your request. You know not fully the cause of my sorrows. You are a stranger to the depth of my distresses. Hence your efforts at consolation must necessarily fail. Yet the tale that I am going to tell is not intended as a claim upon your sympathy. In the midst of my despair, I do not disdain to contribute what little I can to the benefit of mankind. I acknowledge your right to be informed of the events that have lately happened in my family. Make what use of the tale you shall think proper. If it be communicated to the world, it will inculcate the duty of avoiding deceit. It will exemplify the force of early impressions, and show the immeasurable evils that flow from an erroneous or imperfect discipline.

My state is not destitute of tranquillity. The sentiment that dictates my feelings is not hope. Futurity has no power over my thoughts. To all that is to come I am perfectly indifferent. With regard to myself, I have nothing more to fear. Fate has done its worst. Henceforth, I am callous to misfortune.

I address no supplication to the Deity. The power that governs the course of human affairs has chosen his path. The decree that ascertained the condition of my life, admits of no recal. No doubt it squares with the maxims of eternal equity. That is neither to be questioned nor denied by me. It suffices that the past is exempt from mutation. The storm that tore up our happiness, and changed into dreariness and desert the blooming scene of our existence, is lulled into grim repose; but not until the victim was transfixed and mangled; till every obstacle was dissipated by its rage; till every remnant of good was wrested from our grasp and exterminated.

By Charles Brockden Brown

(Now... you may ask, "Isn't this a lot like a Poe story?  How can I tell Wieland is not by Poe?"  The answer is, it's not easy, but I would say: first, the story doesn't sound exactly like Poe; the sentences are less varied and considerably more monotonous than Poe usually is.  Second, Poe disdains easy morals like the one at the end of the first paragraph here ("It will... show the immeasurable evils that flow from an erroneous or imperfect discipline.").  Third, Poe wouldn't mix metaphors the way Brown does in the that last sentence, the only long sentence in the passage.  Fourth, Poe's narrators usually address the reader, if they do, as the general public, not a particular reader who has made a "request.")

 

Here are some excerpts...

 Here are some excerpts from works we read.  More to come.

On Being Brought From Africa to America

"Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land,
Taught my benighted soul to understand
That there's a God, that there's a Saviour too:
Once I redemption neither sought nor knew.
Some view our sable race with scornful eye, 
"Their colour is a diabolic die." 
Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain, 
May be refin'd and join th'angelic train.  

--Phillis Wheatley

From The Autobiography:
 
  My list of virtues contain'd at first but twelve; but a Quaker friend having kindly informed me that I was generally thought proud; that my pride show'd itself frequently in conversation; that I was not content with being in the right when discussing any point, but was overbearing, and rather insolent, of which he convinc'd me by mentioning several instances; I determined endeavouring to cure myself, if I could, of this vice or folly among the rest, and I added Humility to my list) giving an extensive meaning to the word.
   I cannot boast of much success in acquiring the reality of this virtue, but I had a good deal with regard to the appearance of it. I made it a rule to forbear all direct contradiction to the sentiments of others, and all positive assertion of my own. I even forbid myself, agreeably to the old laws of our Junto, the use of every word or expression in the language that imported a fix'd opinion, such as certainly, undoubtedly, etc., and I adopted, instead of them, I conceive, I apprehend, or I imagine a thing to be so or so; or it so appears to me at present. When another asserted something that I thought an error, I deny'd myself the pleasure of contradicting him abruptly, and of showing immediately some absurdity in his proposition; and in answering I began by observing that in certain cases or circumstances his opinion would be right, but in the present case there appear'd or seem'd to me some difference, etc. I soon found the advantage of this change in my manner; the conversations I engag'd in went on more pleasantly. The modest way in which I propos'd my opinions procur'd them a readier reception and less contradiction; I had less mortification when I was found to be in the wrong, and I more easily prevail'd with others to give up their mistakes and join with me when I happened to be in the right.
     
--Ben Franklin

From The Scarlet Letter
 By another impulse, she took off the formal cap that confined her hair, and down it fell upon her shoulders, dark and rich, with at once a shadow and a light in its abundance, and imparting the charm of softness to her features. There played around her mouth, and beamed out of her eyes, a radiant and tender smile, that seemed gushing from the very heart of womanhood. A crimson flush was glowing on her cheek, that had been long so pale. Her sex, her youth, and the whole richness of her beauty, came back from what men call the irrevocable past, and clustered themselves with her maiden hope, and a happiness before unknown, within the magic circle of this hour. And, as if the gloom of the earth and sky had been but the effluence of these two mortal hearts, it vanished with their sorrow. All at once, as with a sudden smile of heaven, forth burst the sunshine, pouring a very flood into the obscure forest, gladdening each green leaf, transmuting the yellow fallen ones to gold, and gleaming adown the gray trunks of the solemn trees. The objects that had made a shadow hitherto, embodied the brightness now. The course of the little brook might be traced by its merry gleam afar into the wood's heart of mystery, which had become a mystery of joy.

Such was the sympathy of Nature—that wild, heathen Nature of the forest, never subjugated by human law, nor illumined by higher truth—with the bliss of these two spirits! Love, whether newly-born, or aroused from a death-like slumber, must always create a sunshine, filling the heart so full of radiance, that it overflows upon the outward world.

--Nathaniel Hawthorne

From  "The Purloined Letter"
Oh, no; nothing of that nature. The fact is, the business is very simple indeed, and I make no doubt that we can manage it sufficiently well ourselves; but then I thought Dupin would like to hear the details of it because it is so excessively odd."
   "Simple and odd," said Dupin.
   "Why, yes; and not exactly that either. The fact is, we have all been a good deal puzzled because the affair is so simple, and yet baffles us altogether."
   "Perhaps it is the very simplicity of the thing which puts you at fault," said my friend.
   "What nonsense you do talk!" replied the Prefect, laughing heartily.
   "Perhaps the mystery is a little too plain," said Dupin.
   "Oh, good heavens! who ever heard of such an idea?"
   "A little too self-evident."
   "Ha! ha! ha! -- ha! ha! ha! -- ho! ho! ho!" roared our visitor, profoundly amused, "oh, Dupin, you will be the death of me yet!"

--Edgar Allan Poe

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.