Final Exam- Quotations
"Their shoulders held the sky suspended: They stood, and earth's foundations stay; What God abandoned, these defended, And saved the sum of things for pay."
A.E. Housman "Epitaph on an Army Mercenaries" A poem meant to commemorate the dead soldiers. This poem is meant to celebrate soldiers who he says have saved the world. Housman celebrates their existence.
"I who am poisoned with the blood of both, Where shall I turn, divided at the vein? I who have cursed The drunken officer of British rule, how choose Between this Africa and the English tongue I love? Betray them both or give back what they give? How can I face such slaughter and be cool? How can I turn from Africa and live?"
Derek Walcott "A Far Cry from Africa" This is the concept of hybridity, racialization and double consciousness in society where Walcott deal with the internal struggle of being both English and South African. He struggles often dealing with who he should identify with and how he should react to the nationalism and racism dealt with. He questions his place in this society and who he should identify with
"WE NEED THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF HUMANITY— their stupidity, animalism, and dreams. We believe in no perfectibility except our own... Popular art does not mean the art of the poor people, as it is usually supposed to. It means the art of individuals...To make the rich of the community shed their education skin, to destroy politeness, standardization and the academic, that is civilized, vision, is the task we have set ourselves."
Ezra Pound + others "BLAST - Long Live the Vortex) ?????
"In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuation of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan can indeed be defended, but only by arguments that are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the country-side, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. ...Such phraseology is needed if one want to name things without calling up mental pictures of them."
George Orwell "Politics and the English Language" Orwell talks about how we as a society have fallen away from intelligent language. He argues we as a society are degenerating from our use of language. He attacks language that is made of metaphors or are abstract and calls for us as a society to talk clearly and use honest language, leaving little to no room for misinterpretation
"He was in a dark part of the hall gazing up the staircase. A woman was standing near the top of the first flight, in the shadow also. He could not see her face but he could see the terracotta and salmonpink panels of her skirt which the shadow made black and white. It was his wife. She was leaning on the bannisters, listening to something...But he could hear little save the noise of laughter and dispute on the front steps, a few chords struck on the piano and a few notes of a man's voice singing....There was a grace and mystery in her attitude as if she were a symbol of something."
James Joyce "The Dead" ?????
"Leave off looking to men to find out what you are not—seek within yourselves to find out what you are. As conditions are at present constituted—you have the choice between Parasitism, & Prostitution—or Negation"
Mina Loy ""Feminist Manifesto" ?????
"He knows that the story of the Afrikaner farmer—regional Party leader and Commandant of the local security commando—shooting a black man who worked for him will fit exactly their version of South Africa, it's made for them. They'll be able to use it in their boycott and divestment campaigns, it'll be another piece of evidence in their truth about the country. The papers at home will quote the story as it has appeared in the overseas press, and in the back-and-forth he and the black man will become those crudely-drawn figures on anti-apartheid banners, units in statistics of white brutality against the blacks quoted at the United Nations...."
Nadine Gordimer "The Moment Before the Gun Went Off" ?????
"And then I went to school, a colonial school, and this harmony was broken. The language of my education was no longer the language of my culture...In Kenya, English became more than a language: it was the language and the others had to bow before it in deference...Thus one of the most humiliating experiences was to be caught talking Gīkũyũ in the vicinity of the school. The culprit was given corporal punishment...or was made to carry a metal plate around the neck with inscriptions such as I AM STUPID or I AM A DONKEY."
Ngugi wa Thiong'o "Decolonizing the Mind" ?????
If I should die, think only this of me: That there's a corner of a foreign field That is forever England. There shall be In that rich earth, a richer dust concealed: A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware, Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam, A body of England's breathing English air..."
Rupert Brooke "The Soldier" A nationalist piece that supports the war. The soldier in the story is willing to die for his country. He believes where he is buried will be part of England due to his presence.
"...we seem, to ourselves, post-lapsarian men and women. We are Hindus who have crossed the black water; we are Muslims who eat pork. And as a result—as my use of the Christian notion of the Fall indicates—we are now partly of the West. Our identity is at once plural and partial. Sometimes we feel that we straddle two cultures; at other times that we fall between two stools. But however ambiguous and shifting this ground may be, it is not an infertile territory for the writer to occupy. ..To conquer English may be to complete the process of making ourselves free...And the imagination works best when it is most free."
Salman Rushdie "The British Writer and a Dream-England" Rushdie speaks of the crossing of cultures that the British empire causes. He wants to use English freely as a world language
"The cold smell of potato mold, the squelch and slap Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge Through living roots awaken in my head. But I've no spade to follow men like them. Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests. I'll dig with it."
Seamus Heaney "Digging" ?????
"The Bishop tells us: when the boys come back They will not be the same; for they'll have fought In a just cause: they lead the last attack On Anti-Christ; their comrades' blood has bought New right to breed an honorable race...
Siegfried Sassoon "They" A bishop tells the people that hte soldiers that come back form the war will be changed in a god way for their fight which he supports. The soldier claim that they have been changed... but because of their injuries/illnesses
"It is essential to prove that beauty may be in small, dry things. The great aim is accurate, precise and definite description. The first thing to recognize is how extraordinarily difficult this is. It is no mere matter of carefulness; you have to use language and language is by its very nature a communal thing; that is, it expresses never the exact thing but a compromise... The artist I take to be the man who simply can't bear the idea of that 'approximately.' He will get the exact curve of what he sees whether it be an object or an idea in his mind."
T.E. Hulme "Romanticism and Classicism" Hulme questions the Romantic culture and whether or not metaphors and abstract writing had a place in modern society. He believed because we as a culture know more than previous writers, we have a job to write literature that is clear, with sharp language that defines things in a way that does not represent it as infinite, but with Zest
"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 that they will sing to me. I have seen them riding seaward on the waves Combing the white hair of the waves blown black... We have lingered in the chambers of the sea By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown Till human voices wake us, and we drown."
T.S. Elliot "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" A middle aged man past his prime worries about what women at a party will think of him
"The land's sharp features seemed to be The Century's corpse outleant, His crypt the cloudy canopy, The wind his death-lament... At once a voice arose among The bleak twigs overhead In a full-throated evensong Of joy illimited: An aged thrush, frail, gaunt and small..."
Thomas Hardy "The Darkling Thrush" The 19th century has died. The song represents the hope of weak faith that Hardy does not understand
"Septimus: So we are all doomed? Thomasina [Cheerfully]. Yes. Valentine: Like a steam engine, you see. [Hannah fills Septimus's glass from the same decanter, and sips from it.] She didn't have the maths, not remotely. She saw what the things meant, way ahead, like seeing a picture. Septimus: This is not science. This is storytelling. Thomasina: Is it a waltz now? Septimus: No. [The music is still modern.] Valentine: Like a film. Hannah: What did she see? Valentine: That you can't run the film backwards."
Tom Stoppard "Arcadia" ?????
"No, no, nothing is proved, nothing is known. And if I were to get up at this very moment and ascertain that the mark on the wall is really—how shall we say?—the head of a gigantic old nail, driven in two hundred years ago, which has now, owing to the patient attrition of many generations of housemaids, revealed its head above the coat of paint, and is taking its first view of modern life ...what should I gain? Knowledge? ... And what is knowledge? What are our learned men save the descendants of witches and hermits who crouched in caves and in woods brewing herbs, interrogating shrew-mice and writing down the language of the stars?"
Virginia Woolf "The Mark on the Wall" ?????
"If you could hear, at every jolt the blood Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud Of vile, incurable sores on children's tongues,-- My friend, you would not tell with such high zest To children, ardent for some desperate glory, The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori. "
Wilfred Owen "Dulce et Decorum Est" The author tells of a brutal death from the war due to a gas attack. He vividly describes the horrifying event.
"I have passed with a nod of the head Or polite meaningless words, Or have lingered a while and said Polite meaningless words... Being certain that they and I But lived where motley is worn: All changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born."
William Butler Yeats "Easter, 1916" Yeats sees how a normal Easter in Ireland changes into a violent mob
