English Literature II - FINAL

But poets should Exert a double vision; should have eyes to see near things as comprehensively As if afar they took their point of sight, And distant things as intimately deep As if they touched them. Let us strive for this. I do distrust the poet who discerns No character or glory in his times, And trundles back his soul five hundred times, Past moat and drawbridge, into a castle-court, To sing - oh, not of lizard or of toad Alive i' the ditch there, - 'twere excusable, But of some black chief, half knight, half sheep-lifter, Some beauteous dame, half chattel and half queen, As dead as must be, for the greater part, The poems made on their chivalric bones; And that's no wonder: death inherits death.

"Aurora Leigh" by Elizabeth Barrett Browning -this double vision is not easy, it requires work, effort and energy (line 184) -hold the afar, while you expand. You're figuring out what the lines say, and you're holding all of these words. You're almost getting the end at the begining and you're working back. -echo of "IN" and "INtimate" and "distANt" If the previous line asked you to expand your focus, this one asks you to cramp it in, up close. -You're zooming in and out. -Let's imagine Arthur in these romantic idealized legendary terms, and let's make them everyday boring and let's think of our current world as a romance. -we would use novelistic conventions to talk about our clear and plain lives, but maybe Camelot and Arthur are boring, and we used fancy language to talk about our everyday

So, quiet as despair, I turn'd from him, That hateful cripple, out of his highway Into the path the pointed. All the day 45 Had been a dreary one at best, and dim Was settling to its close, yet shot one grim Red leer to see the plain catch its estray. For mark! no sooner was I fairly found Pledged to the plain, after a pace or two, 50 Than, pausing to throw backward a last view O'er the safe road, 't was gone; gray plain all round: Nothing but plain to the horizon's bound. I might go on; nought else remain'd to do.

"Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came" by Robert Browning -"Plain" is repeated four times in four stanzas. The repeating takes the meaning out of the word, and emphasizes how empty the landscape is.

Thus, I had so long suffer'd, in this quest, Heard failure prophesied so oft, been writ So many times among "The Band"—to wit, The knights who to the Dark Tower's search address'd 40 Their steps—that just to fail as they, seem'd best. And all the doubt was now—should I be fit?

"Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came" by Robert Browning -Lurz Thesis: Child Roland Dark Tower reveals the universal self as a kind of trap. -The title is throwing back to medival organization -"child" means it's little and powerless -"been writ" He's being written into this role as a knight -the dashes actually trap the speakers lines, in the way that he is trapped, and a "victim"

For, looking up, aware I somehow grew, Spite of the dusk, the plain had given place All round to mountains—with such name to grace 165 Mere ugly heights and heaps now stolen in view. How thus they had surpris'd me,—solve it, you! How to get from them was no clearer case.

"Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came" by Robert Browning -later, turns the emptiness into a "shameful hunger" -takes the romantic's image of mountains and makes them "ugly little heaps"

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace Behind the wagon that we flung him in, And watch the white eyes writhing in his face, His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin; 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 innocent 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.

"Dulce et Decorum Est" by Wilfred Owen

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge, Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs, And towards our distant rest began to trudge. Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots, But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind; Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots Of gas-shells dropping softly behind. Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time, But someone still was yelling out and stumbling And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime.— Dim through the misty panes and thick green light, As under a green sea, I saw him drowning. In all my dreams before my helpless sight, He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

"Dulce et Decorum Est" by Wilfred Owen -if "The Soldier" denies death, Wilfred Owen's poem shows us the real death of the war -we're plunged into a scene we're not prepared for -deformed figures resist idealized perfection -Speaks to the seedier side of English's society, the "old beggars", and the nation the soldiers are fighting for is not perfect -the ocean imagery takes us deeper into this world -last line essentially translates to "To fight for your country is noble." It's in Latin which is a dead language. These boys who learned latin and how to write high sonnets are now shipped off to war, and he wants to point out this irony

So, happy and unafraid of solitude, I worked the short days out,-and watched the sun On lurid morns or monstrous afternoons, Like some Druidic idol's fiery brass, With fixed unflickering outline of dead heat, In which the blood of wretches pent inside Seemed oozing forth to incarnadine the air,- Push out through fog with his dilated disk, And startle the slant roofs and chimney-pots With splashes of fierce colour. Or I saw Fog only, the great tawny weltering fog, Involve the passive city, strangle it Alive, and draw it off into the void, Spires, bridges, streets, and squares, as if a sponge Had wiped out London,-or as noon and night Had clapped together and utterly struck out The intermediate time, undoing themselves In the act. Your city poets see such things, Not despicable.

"Aurora Leigh" by Elizabeth Barrett Browning -the city, and how city poets find beauty in the smog and nastiness -look at this beautifully gross thing -if Victorianism is supposed to be beautiful, she's like look at the nasty stuff that's just like our "Druidic" roots

The mother's rapture slew her. If her kiss Had left a longer weight upon my lips, It might have steadied the uneasy breath, And reconciled and fraternised my soul With the new order. As it was, indeed, I felt a mother-want about the world, And still went seeking, like a bleating lamb Left out at night, in shutting up the fold,- As restless as a nest-deserted bird Grown chill through something being away, though what It knows not.

"Aurora Leigh" by Elizabeth Barrett Browning -the men are going to fondle the breasts of their past...looking at past and future... "I mean I don't know what she was smoking, but, I mean, I want some." -the women's role nourishing the infant, but makes it a historical account of the past, and it transforms the children into art work. Taking the socially defined role for women and redefining it as bizarre that women are just milk giving breasts, but she makes it dark and intense. -the poem is her child?

I have met them at close of day Coming with vivid faces From counter or desk among grey Eighteenth-century houses. I have passed with a nod of the head Or polite meaningless words, Or have lingered awhile and said Polite meaningless words, And thought before I had done Of a mocking tale or a gibe To please a companion Around the fire at the club, Being certain that they and I But lived where motley is worn: All changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born.

"Easter 1916" by William Butler Yeats -guy read in English and in Gaelic statement of Irish Independence, and they got arrested for it -the issue of Irish home rule was being looked at legislatively, and these people wanted to get violent about it, because the legal stuff wasn't working out -the speaking "I" plunges us into the historical moment -short line and ordinary rhythms, have more everyday speech sound then "Fergus" Doesn't sound like high poetic language as his last poem did -Lines 5-10, comment on the emphasis it places on polite meaningless words. These lines themselves are literally just polite, meaningless, gentile words. Poem seems to be addressing the changing of things - "Utterly" means on the surface. The echo of the word sounds like the way that uttering can change things, the power of language to change. He asks us to add poetry to the arsenal of revolt. Gives status to those who made the declaration of independence into historical action of great significance (his poem contributes to the Irish independence)

Her time was running out but she continued to sit by the window, leaning her head against the window curtain, inhaling the odour of dusty cretonne. Down far in the avenue she could hear a street organ playing. She knew the air. Strange that it should come that very night to remind her of the promise to her mother, her promise to keep the home together as long as she could. She remembered the last night of her mother's illness; she was again in the close dark room at the other side of the hall and outside she heard a melancholy air of Italy. The organ-player had been ordered to go away and given sixpence. She remembered her father strutting back into the sickroom saying: "Damned Italians! coming over here!"

"Eveline" (Dubliners) James Joyce -family and home keep her in place, she has to be true to her mother and keep the home together- works against her hope of going out. Gets underscored by the close dark room of her mother's sickness. Her feelings of affection and devotion keep her paralyzed -close dark room of her mother's illness transforms into the dark room where the story takes place -Emphasis placed on family and national ties -she's passive like a docile animal, frames her as the unthinking object seen in the story's opening -Eveline reflects the exhausted burden of Irish culture

"SHE sat at the window watching the evening invade the avenue. Her head was leaned against the window curtains and in her nostrils was the odour of dusty cretonne. She was tired."

"Eveline" (Dubliners) James Joyce -the odor in her nostrils seems to blur the boundary between the living woman and the curtains- she is just one more object in this living world. - "The evening..." Literally shows this blurring -the letters she speaks trap her, the words never progress they're just redundant

(not including first line) It will flame out, like shining from shook foil; It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod? Generations have trod, have trod, have trod; And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod. And for all this, nature is never spent; There lives the dearest freshness deep down things; And though the last lights off the black West went Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs — Because the Holy Ghost over the bent World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

"God's Grandeur" by Gerard Manley Hopkins -poem is a sonnet, and it's not a traditional sonnet, but it is one -the sonnet is not written in iambic pentameter, which is the normal meter for a sonnet like this (would be unstressed, stress x5), but his sprung rhythm means that his iambic falters in two spots, 1) at "grandeur" and it makes very little sense to read it iambically, in a poem about god, you wouldn't put the stress on the word "the" -complicated echos between the words "charged" and "grandeur" the words resonate with each other. The "arg" sound gets flipped around in the word "grandeur". "Grandeur" turns "charged" inside out and give a sonic sense of the way Hopkins sees the word. The sonic reverberations continue into the -"Generations have trod, have trod, have trod" does not sound like the glittering. And it mimics the way life would be without God, just work and human toil. Monotonous and iambic.

SUMMER ends now; now, barbarous in beauty, the stooks arise Around; up above, what wind-walks! what lovely behaviour Of silk-sack clouds! has wilder, wilful-wavier Meal-drift moulded ever and melted across skies? I walk, I lift up, I lift up heart, eyes, 5 Down all that glory in the heavens to glean our Saviour; And, éyes, heárt, what looks, what lips yet gave you a Rapturous love's greeting of realer, of rounder replies? And the azurous hung hills are his world-wielding shoulder Majestic—as a stallion stalwart, very-violet-sweet!— 10 These things, these things were here and but the beholder Wanting; which two when they once meet, The heart rears wings bold and bolder And hurls for him, O half hurls earth for him off under his feet.

"Hurarhing in Harvest" by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Lay your sleeping head, my love, Human on my faithless arm; Time and fevers burn away Individual beauty from Thoughtful children, and the grave Proves the child ephemeral: But in my arms till break of day Let the living creature lie, Mortal, guilty, but to me The entirely beautiful.

"Lullaby" by W.H. Auden -begins with a stressed syllable (use first stanza) -images of limitations

Why should I blame her that she filled my days With misery, or that she would of late Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways, Or hurled the little streets upon the great, Had they but courage equal to desire? What could have made her peaceful with a mind That nobleness made simple as a fire, With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind That is not natural in an age like this, Being high and solitary and most stern? Why, what could she have done, being what she is? Was there another Troy for her to burn?

"No Second Troy" by William Butler Yeats

Glory be to God for dappled things - For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings; Landscape plotted and pieced - fold, fallow, and plough; And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim. All things counter, original, spare, strange; Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: Praise him.

"Pied Beauty" by Gerard Manley Hopkins

I sit in one of the dives On Fifty-second Street Uncertain and afraid As the clever hopes expire Of a low dishonest decade: Waves of anger and fear Circulate over the bright And darkened lands of the earth, Obsessing our private lives; The unmentionable odour of death Offends the September night.

"September 1 1939" by W.H. Auden -relationship between public and private, what here and what's distant (he's writing this from NYC while WWII is breaking out) and he then sees some of the same violence and problems that are blowing up in Europe coursing through American culture waves, natural vs. unnatural, disgusting cycles of human destruction

Into this neutral air Where blind skyscrapers use Their full height to proclaim The strength of Collective Man, Each language pours its vain Competitive excuse: But who can live for long In an euphoric dream; Out of the mirror they stare, Imperialism's face And the international wrong.

"September 1 1939" by W.H. Auden Fascism

And the nations combine each cry, invoking the life That shapes the individual belly and orders The private nocturnal terror: "Did you not found the city state of the sponge, "Raise the vast military empires of the shark And the tiger, establish the robin's plucky canton? Intervene. O descend as a dove or A furious papa or a mild engineer, but descend."

"Spain" by W.H. Auden -(line 37) we see that Spain is trying to deal with Western culture, and current events. Love is a ballast against the forces of history. Different from the Wasteland's treatment of its cultural heritage. Fascism is about control, and the poem is saying that things are flexible, and it might not be perfect. -works like Lullaby in that the loving interactions are transferred on to the cultural resources of West civilization- they're not going to save us but they will help us confront the powers working against us (like in the civil war). Eliot might be like 'Throw it all away.' and Auden is kind of like 'Well maybe not all of it.'

Yesterday the belief in the absolute value of Greek, The fall of the curtain upon the death of a hero; Yesterday the prayer to the sunset And the adoration of madmen. but to-day the struggle. As the poet whispers, startled among the pines, Or where the loose waterfall sings compact, or upright On the crag by the leaning tower: "O my vision. O send me the luck of the sailor."

"Spain" by W.H. Auden When you reach Today's struggle (line 24), you understand it as merely one more event in history

The air of the room chilled his shoulders. He stretched himself cautiously along under the sheets and lay down beside his wife. One by one they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age. He thought of how she who lay beside him had locked in her heart for so many years that image of her lover's eyes when he had told her that he did not wish to live. Generous tears filled Gabriel's eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman but he knew that such a feeling must be love. The tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself which these dead had one time reared and lived in was dissolving and dwindling. A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

"The Dead" (Dubliners) James Joyce

Gabriel, trembling with delight at her sudden kiss and at the quaintness of her phrase, put his hands on her hair and began smoothing it back, scarcely touching it with his fingers. The washing had made it fine and brilliant. His heart was brimming over with happiness. Just when he was wishing for it she had come to him of her own accord. Perhaps her thoughts had been running with his. Perhaps she had felt the impetuous desire that was in him, and then the yielding mood had come upon her. Now that she had fallen to him so easily, he wondered why he had been so diffident. He stood, holding her head between his hands. Then, slipping one arm swiftly about her body and drawing her towards him, he said softly: "Gretta, dear, what are you thinking about?" She did not answer nor yield wholly to his arm. He said again, softly: "Tell me what it is, Gretta. I think I know what is the matter. Do I know?" She did not answer at once. Then she said in an outburst of tears: "O, I am thinking about that song, The Lass of Aughrim." She broke loose from him and ran to the bed and, throwing her arms across the bed-rail, hid her face. Gabriel stood stock-still for a moment in astonishment and then followed her. As he passed in the way of the cheval-glass he caught sight of himself in full length, his broad, well-filled shirt-front, the face whose expression always puzzled him when he saw it in a mirror and his glimmering gilt-rimmed eyeglasses. He halted a few paces from her and said: "What about the song? Why does that make you cry?"

"The Dead" (Dubliners) James Joyce -he assumes they were totally thinking the same thing, my interiority is the same as your interiority -what is the mental or emotional relationship being set up? -he's interpreted this kiss as what he wants, instead of what it really is -thinks everything he thinks is what everything thinks -he assumes that her heart is also brimming over with happiness -The modernist self is a self that is completely not consistent with itself. In his relationship to his own image, he's unknown to himself. - "You guys are 19, you're going to get your heart broken, it's the worst." - "You're like 'Oh I get it Joyce was an ass man.'"

When the lancers were over Gabriel went away to a remote corner of the room where Freddy Malins' mother was sitting. She was a stout feeble old woman with white hair. Her voice had a catch in it like her son's and she stuttered slightly. She had been told that Freddy had come and that he was nearly all right. Gabriel asked her whether she had had a good crossing. She lived with her married daughter in Glasgow and came to Dublin on a visit once a year. She answered placidly that she had had a beautiful crossing and that the captain had been most attentive to her. She spoke also of the beautiful house her daughter kept in Glasgow, and of all the friends they had there. While her tongue rambled on Gabriel tried to banish from his mind all memory of the unpleasant incident with Miss Ivors. Of course the girl or woman, or whatever she was, was an enthusiast but there was a time for all things. Perhaps he ought not to have answered her like that. But she had no right to call him a West Briton before people, even in joke. She had tried to make him ridiculous before people, heckling him and staring at him with her rabbit's eyes.

"The Dead" (Dubliners) James Joyce -she's mocking him for not being Irish enough...? And, she asks him to travel with her, and he says he likes going to other countries on the mainland -promotes international interaction, and Miss Ivors makes him guilty, she says pretty much "You should see your own country first before you travel around all of Europe." -cultural politics: Irish culture in touch with the rest of the world vs. Irish culture very much wrapped up in itself and its own history -Glasgow is in Northern Scotland -free indirect discourse : there's no narrator, it's just dialogue (Jane Austin is a Masteress of this) Joyce kind of f*cks with it. The narrator starts to mimic the character's it's closest to (modernist) Idea of each person has their own world and little way of thinking about things

He continued scraping his feet vigorously while the three women went upstairs, laughing, to the ladies' dressing-room. A light fringe of snow lay like a cape on the shoulders of his overcoat and like toecaps on the toes of his goloshes; and, as the buttons of his overcoat slipped with a squeaking noise through the snow-stiffened frieze, a cold, fragrant air from out-of-doors escaped from crevices and folds.

"The Dead" (Dubliners) James Joyce -snow seems to encase him as a powerful substance. Freeze pun shows the protective, paralyzing effect on him -suddenly deaden terms that Gabriel is presented in -the sound around his buttons is characteristic of Joyce's odd observations, this sound excites in an odd way which is almost refreshing and liberating, how you feel when you pay attention to the microscopic portraits of the party. The world is speaking to us in very unusual and wacky ways if we pay attention and look closely

Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

"The Second Coming" by William Butler Yeats -the problems of the second coming is immediate cut off by the next line "When a vast..." and suddenly a pagan discourse invades -the following description is a "deliberately artificial image that is itself hard to envision" -this most famous of his poems concludes with a question. This era is meant to provoke questions, not answers. -He's drawing from some Indian mysticism, which would kind of be a "f*ck you" to England, and to signal the end of Western civilization -The gyre = the rise of one age, is the fall of the other, and this all repeats

And think, this heart, all evil shed away, A pulse in the eternal mind, no less Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given; Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day; And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness, In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

"The Soldier" by Rupert Brooke -obviously patriotic sonnet about England and war -England is going to last forever as continental Europe even if he dies. -"England bore" sounds like England is God and it makes people -just as the speaker is formed by England, the poem is formed by traditional English styles -progression from body to mind, body to spirit, abstracts England

Look at the stars! look, look up at the skies! O look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air! The bright boroughs, the circle-citadels there! Down in dim woods the diamond delves! the elves'-eyes! The grey lawns cold where gold, where quickgold lies! Wind-beat whitebeam! airy abeles set on a flare! Flake-doves sent floating forth at a farmyard scare! Ah well! it is all a purchase, all is a prize. Buy then! bid then! — What? — Prayer, patience, alms, vows. Look, look: a May-mess, like on orchard boughs! Look! March-bloom, like on mealed-with-yellow sallows! These are indeed the barn; withindoors house The shocks. This piece-bright paling shuts the spouse Christ home, Christ and his mother and all his hallows.

"The Starlight Night" by Gerard Manley Hopkins

APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain. Winter kept us warm, covering 5 Earth in forgetful snow, feeding A little life with dried tubers. Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade, And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten, 10 And drank coffee, and talked for an hour. Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch. And when we were children, staying at the archduke's, My cousin's, he took me out on a sled, And I was frightened. He said, Marie, 15 Marie, hold on tight. And down we went. In the mountains, there you feel free. I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.

"The Wasteland" by T.S. Eliot -The feeling of frustration, alienation, confusion- take as intended effect, what you learned in your Western schooling is wrong -Enjambed lines emphasize the stillness and the jolting of the Spring coming, but Spring is kind of negative and painful. Corpse Poem The snow covers the speaker, so the speaker is in the ground and is dead. The poem is effectively trying to make the dead speak Eliot a fascist? The poem as a dead culture. After the opening lines, it begins to splinter. Tons of voices, like Browning.

Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante, Had a bad cold, nevertheless Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe, 45 With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she, Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor, (Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!) Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks, The lady of situations. 50 Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel, And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card, Which is blank, is something he carries on his back, Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find The Hanged Man. Fear death by water. 55 I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring. Thank you. If you see dear Mrs. Equitone, Tell her I bring the horoscope myself: One must be so careful these days.

"The Wasteland" by T.S. Eliot -calls woman wise, while she's kind of wacky (like him) and reading into the cards, and reading into his wacky words, is nonsensical and absurd and abstract -does he speak all these different languages? Maybe in the same way he totally doesn't understand these languages we won't fully understand his words -You'll leave the fortune teller, and the poem, confused.

Here is no water but only rock Rock and no water and the sandy road The road winding above among the mountains Which are mountains of rock without water If there were water we should stop and drink 335 Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand If there were only water amongst the rock Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit 340 There is not even silence in the mountains But dry sterile thunder without rain There is not even solitude in the mountains But red sullen faces sneer and snarl From doors of mud-cracked houses

"The Wasteland" by T.S. Eliot -mouth is supposed to spit and it can't, you can't move or rest on the road, the mountains surround the wasteland

When Lil's husband got demobbed, I said, I didn't mince my words, I said to her myself, 140 HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME Now Albert's coming back, make yourself a bit smart. He'll want to know what you done with that money he gave you To get yourself some teeth. He did, I was there. You have them all out, Lil, and get a nice set, 145 He said, I swear, I can't bear to look at you. And no more can't I, I said, and think of poor Albert, He's been in the army four years, he wants a good time, And if you don't give it him, there's others will, I said. Oh is there, she said. Something o' that, I said. 150 Then I'll know who to thank, she said, and give me a straight look. HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME If you don't like it you can get on with it, I said, Others can pick and choose if you can't. But if Albert makes off, it won't be for lack of telling. 155 You ought to be ashamed, I said, to look so antique. (And her only thirty-one.) I can't help it, she said, pulling a long face, It's them pills I took, to bring it off, she said. (She's had five already, and nearly died of young George.) 160 The chemist said it would be alright, but I've never been the same. You are a proper fool, I said. Well, if Albert won't leave you alone, there it is, I said, What you get married for if you don't want children? HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME 165 Well, that Sunday Albert was home, they had a hot gammon, And they asked me in to dinner, to get the beauty of it hot— HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME Goonight Bill. Goonight Lou. Goonight May. Goonight.

"The Wasteland" by T.S. Eliot -the "Goodnight" bit emphasizes the nagging-ness of this Western small talk, the Western traditions also undermined by -death comes from life, and is also omnipresent -Wasteland sounds like a barren womb of an infertile woman

The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne, Glowed on the marble, where the glass Held up by standards wrought with fruited vines From which a golden Cupidon peeped out 80 (Another hid his eyes behind his wing) Doubled the flames of sevenbranched candelabra Reflecting light upon the table as The glitter of her jewels rose to meet it, From satin cases poured in rich profusion; 85 In vials of ivory and coloured glass Unstoppered, lurked her strange synthetic perfumes, Unguent, powdered, or liquid—troubled, confused And drowned the sense in odours; stirred by the air That freshened from the window, these ascended 90 In fattening the prolonged candle-flames, Flung their smoke into the laquearia, Stirring the pattern on the coffered ceiling. Huge sea-wood fed with copper Burned green and orange, framed by the coloured stone, 95 In which sad light a carvèd dolphin swam. Above the antique mantel was displayed As though a window gave upon the sylvan scene The change of Philomel, by the barbarous king So rudely forced; yet there the nightingale 100 Filled all the desert with inviolable voice And still she cried, and still the world pursues, "Jug Jug" to dirty ears. And other withered stumps of time Were told upon the walls; staring forms 105 Leaned out, leaning, hushing the room enclosed. Footsteps shuffled on the stair, Under the firelight, under the brush, her hair Spread out in fiery points Glowed into words, then would be savagely still.

"The Wasteland" by T.S. Eliot -the animate and the inanimate

At the violet hour, when the eyes and back 215 Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits Like a taxi throbbing waiting, I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives, Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives 220 Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea, The typist home at tea-time, clears her breakfast, lights Her stove, and lays out food in tins. Out of the window perilously spread Her drying combinations touched by the sun's last rays, 225 On the divan are piled (at night her bed) Stockings, slippers, camisoles, and stays. I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest— I too awaited the expected guest. 230 He, the young man carbuncular, arrives, A small house-agent's clerk, with one bold stare, One of the low on whom assurance sits As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire. The time is now propitious, as he guesses, 235 The meal is ended, she is bored and tired, Endeavours to engage her in caresses Which still are unreproved, if undesired. Flushed and decided, he assaults at once; Exploring hands encounter no defence; 240 His vanity requires no response, And makes a welcome of indifference. (And I Tiresias have foresuffered all Enacted on this same divan or bed; I who have sat by Thebes below the wall 245 And walked among the lowest of the dead.) Bestows one final patronizing kiss, And gropes his way, finding the stairs unlit...

"The Wasteland" by T.S. Eliot -urbanization makes gender and sex irrelevant and the taxis can throb now and we might as well be genderless machines if the taxis can have sex and it just doesn't make difference "human engine" the human waits like the throbbing taxi etc... -he's been to Hell, and says the city sucks

Unreal City, 60 Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many. Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled, And each man fixed his eyes before his feet. 65 Flowed up the hill and down King William Street, To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine. There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying "Stetson! You who were with me in the ships at Mylae! 70 That corpse you planted last year in your garden, Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year? Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed? Oh keep the Dog far hence, that's friend to men, Or with his nails he'll dig it up again! 75 You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!"

"The Wasteland" by T.S. Eliot The urban experience is really just tons of corpses bustling together, and they're only animated by their movement with other people. The last line, "You my hypocritical reader- my double - my brother!" Our investigations of the fragmenting poem is the same as the dog digging up the corpse. He uses multiple different languages, and then translates them in the footnotes, he wants to confuse you, but maybe doesn't want you to blame the other language for your confusion, but still to understand that you don't understand.

I caught this morning morning's minion, king- dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing, As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding Stirred for a bird, - the achieve of, the mastery of the thing! Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier! No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear, Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.

"The Windhover" by Gerard Manley Hopkins

... And pierce the deep wood's woven shade, And dance upon the level shore? Young man, lift up your russet brow, And lift your tender eyelids, maid, And brood on hopes and fear no more. And no more turn aside and brood Upon love's bitter mystery; For Fergus rules the brazen cars, And rules the shadows of the wood, And the white breast of the dim sea And all dishevelled wandering stars.

"Who goes with Fergus?" by William Butler Yeats -We're not going to look at the new idea of Ireland, but of the mythic past of Ireland (fairies and leprechauns) -Nature itself is also staged as maybe the answer to life's difficulties (turn away from the real world) -delicate balance between the rhymes, everything is contained and static, and it is reliable and this accomplished order is explained in the second half -not modernist, because things are not falling apart, they are being put together -look at the meaning and significance of the nature, there's no literal or metaphorical light shed on these features, but we can extract some faith out of these -searching for the perfect picture of this idolized Irish-ness -draws on Wordsworth's romantic love of nature. Romantic and also reflective of resistance. We're under Britain, but we have all these cool Irish non-Brit stuff (the fairies and the leprechauns) Don't take an English cultural mythology, use our own. Get away from the city that England created, and go back to our beautiful roots. Resist the British appropriation of towns and rivers in Ireland because they didn't like to pronounce the Gaelic names.

Modernism

- in the modernist period the possibility of coherence was beginning to be questioned (losing faith in faith itself) - Fredrick Niche (showed that everything we believe to be the moral law is just a product of history→ just like how Deviance on a sliding scale. Truthes that are just opinions taken as facts.), Freud (The unconsious shapes our life, and a large part of what we consider to be ourselves, is really not as coherent and transparent as it seems), and Albert Einstein (Pointed out that Newton's laws of space and time only apply to our own positions and world. There's no alternate perspective with which we can view the world.) → Established how impossible it was for us to have faith. "Darwin on crack." - "overwhelming, alienating urban experience" - people weren't used to the crazy stimulus that is what cities are then and today. Modernism tries to convey this effect. - allusions, and bombardment of the writing of the time reflect the feelings of the city - Theme: back to the self, but the self as a fragmented phenomenon - Modernism is maybe a sort of completion of some of the previous texts (Browning, Stevenson Hopkins), but the modernist kind of said the Victorian Era was very conventional. If there was a kind of opposition to the dominant culture, in modernism the culture itself is falling apart, and there's nothing to revolt against, because everything is falling apart.

Modernism and Colonialism

- the perspective expands after WWII that compliments the process of decolonization as we see non-white writers who use a language of an oppressor -colonialism was kind of a give in, just England was a crazy huge power, and they were expected to go out and take what was not theirs -Ireland was England's first colony

Tennyson

-1809-1892 -poetic titan who embodies the cultural currents of the time -Awarded and popular -everyone read Tennyson -wrote about the industrialized society's tensions -imagination of the self, as inanimate object -looks at the self and realizes he's nothing more than dust in nature

Postcolonialism and The Change of British Lit

-DerekWalcott (and Joyce) - rewrites the Iliad as a Caribbean story. Use the "oppressor's language" to write about his own Jamaican heritage -Louise Bennett (and Yeats) -Walcott and Bennett show us how brit lit was rewritten, recolonized

Robert Browning's style

-He wants to show the weirdness of the people and of the events -the Painting is familiar yet not -the poet is not the one speaking -like an actor giving a monologue -Like how we hear Hamlet "To be or not to be" -he takes the monologue out of the play and puts it into poetry -writes the same thing as other poets but in someone else's voice -the lyric and the dramatic is a portrait of the self, and also a reenactment of that self -the self is not some universal phenomenon, it's a non-free dependent thing -In frankenstein, the self could do what it wanted, and in Browning, the self is very limited and it looks at the world in one non-universal way -the perspectival self -he has a very diverse, varied voice -the "i" in each of Browning's poems is a different person - the Byronic self is known, unlike the many faces of Browning's . We don't know Browning's voice -the evolution of the self (Like the evolving stages of the memorium self) is not in Browning, his selves get splinters, and no self is consistent

Robert Louis Stevenson and The end of the century (Fin de Siecle)

-Maybe the great social reforms weren't so great, and the poverty just stayed. And, then there was a sense of depression -Start focusing on the self experiences of sensual pleasures -they turn in, and look at the "swirling confusions of the self"

Again at Christmas did we weave The holly round the Christmas hearth ; The silent snow possess'd the earth, And calmly fell our Christmas-eve. The yule-log sparkled keen with frost, No wing of wind the^region swept, But oveTalTtnTngs brooding slept The quiet sense of something lost. As in the winters left behind, Again our ancient games had place, The mimic picture's breathing grace, And dance and song and hoodman-blind. Who show'd a token of distress ? ~" No single tear, no mark of pain : O sorrow, then can sorrow wane? O grief, can grief be changed to less ? O last regret, regret can die ! No mixt with all this mystic frame, Her deep relations are the same, But with long use her tears are dry.

-Talks about Christmas, which appeals to the christianity that he was just ditching, and "he still clings to structures even as he hollows them out" -acknowledges that his feelings are evolving and changing, but he's also sort of raging against evolution, and this ambivalence -he has structure in all his language, taming these thoughts, but asks huge questions and is uncertain -The structural nature of the Victorian Era reflected in his language

Tennyson vs. Browning

-announcement of the title creates a circular narrative (like in Tennyson), mirrors the way he is trapped into the poem's identity for him -there's some Darwin in stanza 12 -Browning's extreme perspectivalism. If Tennyson was concerned with the changes, Browning wants to look at how the destablizing changes. He might be warning against having a stable identity -While there's this whole trapping thing going on, you can also remagine yourself as a Duke who killed his wife, or as a Knight. You can make yourself. He's a proto Post-modernism.

W.H. Auden between Woolf and Rhys

-born to fancy family, too young to be in WWI, traveled a lot after Oxford, went to Berlin (Sexually free place, he discovers his homosexuality) -rejects society like woolf, but is different in that he explores the self and nature like Wordsworth

In Memoriam as Homosexual Eulogy

-doubt and grief -his close friend died, and it's an expansion of his personal loss that can be applied to death as a whole and perhaps Darwinian evolution -narrates his own experience, and kind of evolution of the self -"asserts his autonomy, but in a negative or evacuative mode ... a refusal of the self... negation of the self" -"certain kind of Victorian relationship between men" -how does a man grieve another man? Page 1210: -The blooming = the dying -the treatment and framing of the homosexual theme as passing and dying, a phase -it was common for boys in the boarding schools to have relationships, they were intense older to younger boys, they were away from their loved ones and had no connections -Oxford was known for its homosexual relationships (Oscar Wilde) -you leave these homosexual connections behind, and have a hetero marriage -Arthur's actual death, and a metaphorical death of their homosexual relationship - "once fostered" might be the time at school -the poem is trying to continue this love that he's being forced to let go of -the flower that is forced to die, and his homosexual love is forced to die, it's always already doomed -uses Arthur's actual death to represent the mourning of all of the homosexual relationships -He's still animating death, and talking about how constant it is, and he's imagining a space where their love could stay alive -the rhyme allows you see the way that there's a connection that's split apart. The A rhymes are split apart, but consistent. -this acts as a framework for him to conceptualize his loss

Jean Rhys

-grew up in British West Indies -struggled financially, and reflects the challenges that come from that -still not very well read, except for Wide Sargasso Sea -She's known, but doesn't have Woolf's stature -the empire Britain had created was crumbling, and people start to move -similar to Woolf, in that many of the informal techniques are similar to Woolf -post-colonial. She takes up tradition, and transforms it.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

-she was a woman writing about a woman, which was pretty new -a woman self in society. Wordsworth could just be a universal self, without the social details of his historical moment -stereoscopic -"verse novel" poetry's lyricism with novel -her play pairs with her husband's work, where she goes further and combines two genres and looks as the self perspective as multiple seves within one self (one voice with many different facets) -she says poets need to have double vision

Joyce to Woolf and Modernism

-we did this thing where we did everything we were told, and WWI happened. They might not have the answer, but they want to slow down and think shit through. -Joyce is in other people's heads, Woolf is in her own. Joyce as a man, had more authority and freedom already, and he could think in other people's heads.

James Joyce

-worked to develop an aggressively metropolitan, international voice (while Yeats went for a rural Celtic voice) -weaved Irish history & culture into the international literary stage -left Ireland for Italy where he taught English and wrote, spent most of his life abroad -everything he ever wrote was about Ireland -writer living in self exposed exile -struggled with his Irish identity, didn't totally reject Irish conventions, just wanted to rethink them

1901?

1901: Queen Victoria died, and Edward VI had a similar reign to that of his mother's, and a technological revolution happened (electricity, film, the telegraph and telephone) were all changing the cultural landscape. Cultural trend: consolidation and reflection.

1914-1918

1914-1918: This technological revolution was beyond cultural production, and it changed transportation and weaponry, making WWI intensely new and terrifying. They were still doing trench warfare, but now there was all this new technology that just lead to unprecedented bloodshed. The radical break that Victoria's death had created was sort of acted out through this war. Cultural trend: writers began to rebel against their "cultural inheritance" (TS Eliot and Margaret Wolf). An embrace of fragmentation.

The Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come conveyed him, as before -- though at a different time, he thought: indeed, there seemed no order in these latter visions, save that they were in the Future -- into the resorts of business men, but showed him not himself. Indeed, the Spirit did not stay for anything, but went straight on, as to the end just now desired, until besought by Scrooge to tarry for a moment. ``This courts,'' said Scrooge, ``through which we hurry now, is where my place of occupation is, and has been for a length of time. I see the house. Let me behold what I shall be, in days to come.'' The Spirit stopped; the hand was pointed elsewhere. ``The house is yonder,'' Scrooge exclaimed. ``Why do you point away?'' The inexorable finger underwent no change. Scrooge hastened to the window of his office, and looked in. It was an office still, but not his. The furniture was not the same, and the figure in the chair was not himself. The Phantom pointed as before. He joined it once again, and wondering why and whither he had gone, accompanied it until they reached an iron gate. He paused to look round before entering. A churchyard. Here, then, the wretched man whose name he had now to learn, lay underneath the ground. It was a worthy place. Walled in by houses; overrun by grass and weeds, the growth of vegetation's death, not life; choked up with too much burying; fat with repleted appetite. A worthy place! The Spirit stood among the graves, and pointed down to One. He advanced towards it trembling. The Phantom was exactly as it had been, but he dreaded that he saw new meaning in its solemn shape. ``Before I draw nearer to that stone to which you point,'' said Scrooge, ``answer me one question. Are these the shadows of the things that Will be, or are they shadows of things that May be, only?'' Still the Ghost pointed downward to the grave by which it stood. ``Men's courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead,'' said Scrooge. ``But if the courses be departed from, the ends will change. Say it is thus with what you show me!'' The Spirit was immovable as ever. Scrooge crept towards it, trembling as he went; and following the finger, read upon the stone of the neglected grave his own name, Ebenezer Scrooge.

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

``I'll send it to Bob Cratchit's!'' whispered Scrooge, rubbing his hands, and splitting with a laugh. ``He sha'n't know who sends it. It's twice the size of Tiny Tim. Joe Miller never made such a joke as sending it to Bob's will be!'' The hand in which he wrote the address was not a steady one, but write it he did, somehow, and went down stairs to open the street door, ready for the coming of the poulterer's man. As he stood there, waiting his arrival, the knocker caught his eye. ``I shall love it, as long as I live!'' cried Scrooge, patting it with his hand. ``I scarcely ever looked at it before. What an honest expression it has in its face! It's a wonderful knocker! -- Here's the Turkey. Hallo! Whoop! How are you! Merry Christmas!'' It was a Turkey! He never could have stood upon his legs, that bird. He would have snapped 'em short off in a minute, like sticks of sealing-wax. ``Why, it's impossible to carry that to Camden Town,'' said Scrooge. ``You must have a cab.'' The chuckle with which he said this, and the chuckle with which he paid for the Turkey, and the chuckle with which he paid for the cab, and the chuckle with which he recompensed the boy, were only to be exceeded by the chuckle with which he sat down breathless in his chair again, and chuckled till he cried.

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it. And Scrooge's name was good upon 'Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail. Mind! I don't mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country's done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens -immediately announces that the narrator is going to tell the story and he's also going to comment on the story -the list of people in talking about the death, is exaggerated, and it draws extra attention to the narrative presence -mocks the way that the phrase "dead as a doornail" and he meditates on how ridiculous it is - "Mind!" He's reminding us to read with care and thought. It's a totally unnatural way to describe death, and it's not even a nail that we would put someone in a coffin with. Our language should make sense, and should apply to our lives -this is a critique of the greed of Scrooge -just as Scrooge's signature is just a symbol of the fact that he will pay you back, and that's just a promise, and the stocks that he signs on are also just symbols of something, and money is just a sign of value, not value itself -language is sort of like money, it's just symbols of things with actual value -make these money exchanges that we're so used to, seem bizarre, and fantastical, and maybe it's super dumb that we have faith in these things -might think of Dickens as an early fantasy writer (leading to Kafka, etc...) -the fantasy aspects of this novel work to expose the fantasies that we usually don't notice (like in money and in language)

Now, it is a fact, that there was nothing at all particular about the knocker on the door, except that it was very large. It is also a fact, that Scrooge had seen it, night and morning, during his whole residence in that place; also that Scrooge had as little of what is called fancy about him as any man in the City of London, even including -- which is a bold word -- the corporation, aldermen, and livery. Let it also be borne in mind that Scrooge had not bestowed one thought on Marley, since his last mention of his seven-year's dead partner that afternoon. And then let any man explain to me, if he can, how it happened that Scrooge, having his key in the lock of the door, saw in the knocker, without its undergoing any intermediate process of change: not a knocker, but Marley's face.

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens -notice how often the narrator is joining us to think, and asking us to not take things at face value -just when you think your have the key of logic and of truth, Marley's face appears and you're thrown back into fantastical-ism, and you have to rework your understanding of reality again. - "it" as a pronoun, means that you don't know how to label something (*Ian is smaht*)

Once upon a time -- of all the good days in the year, on Christmas Eve -- old Scrooge sat busy in his counting-house. It was cold, bleak, biting weather: foggy withal: and he could hear the people in the court outside, go wheezing up and down, beating their hands upon their breasts, and stamping their feet upon the pavement stones to warm them. The city clocks had only just gone three, but it was quite dark already: it had not been light all day: and candles were flaring in the windows of the neighbouring offices, like ruddy smears upon the palpable brown air. The fog came pouring in at every chink and keyhole, and was so dense without, that although the court was of the narrowest, the houses opposite were mere phantoms. To see the dingy cloud come drooping down, obscuring everything, one might have thought that Nature lived hard by, and was brewing on a large scale. The door of Scrooge's counting-house was open that he might keep his eye upon his clerk, who in a dismal little cell beyond, a sort of tank, was copying letters. Scrooge had a very small fire, but the clerk's fire was so very much smaller that it looked like one coal. But he couldn't replenish it, for Scrooge kept the coal-box in his own room; and so surely as the clerk came in with the shovel, the master predicted that it would be necessary for them to part. Wherefore the clerk put on his white comforter, and tried to warm himself at the candle; in which effort, not being a man of a strong imagination, he failed.

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens -the description of London + fantastical stuff, and the fog is coming in through all the keyholes and it foreshadows that Scrooge is going to see the face in the knocker, also that there are clocks, because time is so important, "brewing" "obscuring" show that things won't be clear later on -he's copying letters, like when you repeat a word over and over it loses it's meaning, and printing money devalues its currency -The clerk isn't imaginative, around a candle and it doesn't actually do it and he says that he essentially can't stay warm in his mind -clerk is in a tank like a fish, and he's a lowly thoughtless person, and he doesn't have imagination. No original thoughts, unlike Scrooge who has an imagination

The Spirit touched him on the arm, and pointed to his younger self, intent upon his reading. Suddenly a man, in foreign garments: wonderfully real and distinct to look at: stood outside the window, with an axe stuck in his belt, and leading an ass laden with wood by the bridle. ``Why, it's Ali Baba! '' Scrooge exclaimed in ecstasy. ``It's dear old honest Ali Baba! Yes, yes, I know! One Christmas time, when yonder solitary child was left here all alone, he did come, for the first time, just like that. Poor boy! And Valentine,'' said Scrooge, ``and his wild brother, Orson; there they go! And what's his name, who was put down in his drawers, asleep, at the Gate of Damascus; don't you see him! And the Sultan's Groom turned upside-down by the Genii; there he is upon his head! Serve him right. I'm glad of it. What business had he to be married to the Princess!'' To hear Scrooge expending all the earnestness of his nature on such subjects, in a most extraordinary voice between laughing and crying; and to see his heightened and excited face; would have been a surprise to his business friends in the city, indeed. ``There's the Parrot!'' cried Scrooge. ``Green body and yellow tail, with a thing like a lettuce growing out of the top of his head; there he is! Poor Robin Crusoe, he called him, when he came home again after sailing round the island. ``Poor Robin Crusoe, where have you been, Robin Crusoe?'' The man thought he was dreaming, but he wasn't. It was the Parrot, you know. There goes Friday, running for his life to the little creek! Halloa! Hoop! Halloo!''

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens -the illusions, and how each of the characters come from stories about the self, civilization vs. lack there of, and maybe this passage is breaking down imagination vs. reality -imagination allows us to see the issues with the borders between these entities

Again brutish necessity wipes its hands Upon the napkin of a dirty cause, again A waste of our compassion, as with Spain, The gorilla wrestles with the superman. I who am poisoned with the blood of both, Where shall I turn, divided to 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?

A Far Cry from Africa by Derek Walott -being human in the natural world -what does it mean to use human language at all -speaking a curse or misfortune -the whole poem itself is a far cry from Africa, can't measure up or reach Africa itself, and he almost betrays them both, even as he is trying to give back what they gave him (constructive and destructive) -express the failure of language through language (far cry from Africa, far cry from a poem)

Threshed out by beaters, the long rushes break In a white dust of ibises whose cries Have wheeled since civilization's dawn From the parched river or beast-teeming plain. The violence of beast on beast is read As natural law, but upright man Seeks his divinity by inflicting pain. Delirious as these worried beasts, his wars Dance to the tightened carcass of a drum, While he calls courage still that native dread Of the white peace contracted by the dead.

A Far Cry from Africa by Derek Walott -wheel = culture civilization thing -natural vs. human/colonial violence

Literacy in the Victorian Era

Fun date: 1880: Schooling becomes mandatory in England for both sexes. +around this time there were quite a few laws that made school more mandatory for a wider age range, and including kids working in factories -Victorian Era was the great era of reading -publishers coordinated with libraries to give them books because books were expensive to buy -they required authors to make triple deckers (three separate books) help libraries triple their fees -also had authors disseminate their novels in parts, and Dickens did this by putting out his chapters through magazines

* So careful of the type ? ' but no. From scarped cliff and quarried stone She cries, l A thousand types are gone : I care for nothing, all shall go.

In Memoriam by Tennyson -Darwin's word did not emerge randomly, it was just the most definite and structured proposition - "From scarped cliff and quarried stone" we found fossils and mankind was not created by God, and Genesis is wrong - "I care for nothing, all shall go." +all shall die +she cares for the wiping away of everything +embracing death +everything is going to be okay +concrete negativity +Darwin told us that everything was going to die and "go" -Rhyme between "no" and "go in the stanza. The movement of evolution is empty and negative. These evolutionary ideas are moving towards a greater good, it's just kind of empty, and it moves us towards death and the love of the nothing. -Darwin does not paint a lovely picture of nature, it's very predator eats prey and maybe Tennyson wants us to accept this -he's meditating on death emotionally, and evolution is filled with death -men who would think they are the pinnacle of nature, are on the same level as slime, and get no more attention or danger -Arthur is the prime dragon, and even he comes to slime, but he's still fantastical and "prime". -a mourning of the certainty of Heaven after death -What happens when we lose the certainty, do we clamp down and keep to our convictions, or do we readjust

And gazing on thee, sullen tree, Sick for thy stubborn hardihood, I seem to fail from out my blood And grow incorporate into thee.

In Memoriam by Tennyson -the tree is aligned with aging and death, the tree is a reminder or embodiment of death -it's a U tree (an evergreen) so it's not subject to seasonal change -P Shelley also felt the inconsistency of death -death is an ongoing long lasting process -"trying to animate death as something that is itself living" -"Incorporate" he want's to be the tree, maybe join the inanimate world that his dead friend has just entered -Memorium Stanza: Four lines, iambic pentameter, with ABBA rhyme scheme. The form was named after Tennyson's work -the rhyme scheme structures the death, and the ever green tree keeps the cycle of seasons as well

End of March and beginning of April 1871- this is the time to study inscape in the spraying of trees, for the swelling buds carry them to a pitch which the eye could not else gather- for out of much much more, out of little not much, out of nothing nothing: in these sprays at all events there is a new world of inscape. The male ashes are very boldly jotted with the heads of the bloom which tuft the outer ends of the branches. The staff of each of these branches is closely knotted with the places where buds are or have been, so that it is something like a finger which has been tied up with string and keeps the marks...

Journal [On "Inscape" and "Instress"] by Gerard Manley Hopkins -description of the tree embodies the blossoming flower. The tree is dynamic, and we're really getting the sense of spring and of blossoming. This defines inscape. The flowering that's happening makes the dynamic energy that animates the tree. A concept where you're thinking about the dynamics of something, about what it's doing. It's not a flower, it's a blossoming flower. -uses the rhythm to linguistically encode what it's describing. The rhythm of the wording does the same amount of work as the words themselves. "Much much more" makes it dynamic, builds it up. "Nothing nothing" flattens the rhythm, makes it not dynamic. Be sensitive to the play with stresses.

"I come here because somebody steal my savings..."

Let them Call it Jazz by Jean Rhys -racism -they only like her in this world when they make sense of her status 'Oh she must be a prostitute' -goes to prison, she learns how to lie, twist language, receives money for song in jail = Exchanges linguistics for money. She doesn't get to sing or name the song, it's them. Story is both a centering of Selina, and a push to put her back into society. Woolf is trying to make some room for herself, and Rhys seems to be ...?

PERHAPS it was the middle of January in the present that I first looked up and saw the mark on the wall. In order to fix a date it is necessary to remember what one saw. So now I think of the fire; the steady film of yellow light upon the page of my book; the three chrysanthemums in the round glass bowl on the mantelpiece. Yes, it must have been the winter time, and we had just finished our tea, for I remember that I was smoking a cigarette when I looked up and saw the mark on the wall for the first time. I looked up through the smoke of my cigarette and my eye lodged for a moment upon the burning coals, and that old fancy of the crimson flag flapping from the castle tower came into my mind, and I thought of the cavalcade of red knights riding up the side of the black rock. Rather to my relief the sight of the mark interrupted the fancy, for it is an old fancy, an automatic fancy, made as a child perhaps. The mark was a small round mark, black upon the white wall, about six or seven inches above the mantelpiece.

The Mark on the Wall by Virginia Woolf "perhaps" is tentative Same random feeling 'There's this, and that other thing, and then the thing in my book...' abstractness very Eliot Idea of owning property and the knights are called fancy, they're empty and immature customs She's trying to not write in the confines of tradition, and the relief at the mark. The mark looks like a period, she kind of says exactly that later on, and the mark is the end of an oppressive period, and now she can print her own works and write how she wants

How readily our thoughts swarm upon a new object, lifting it a little way, as ants carry a blade of straw so feverishly, and then leave it.... If that mark was made by a nail, it can't have been for a picture, it must have been for a miniature—the miniature of a lady with white powdered curls, powder-dusted cheeks, and lips like red carnations. A fraud of course, for the people who had this house before us would have chosen pictures in that way—an old picture for an old room. That is the sort of people they were—very interesting people, and I think of them so often, in such queer places, because one will never see them again, never know what happened next. They wanted to leave this house because they wanted to change their style of furniture, so he said, and he was in process of saying that in his opinion art should have ideas behind it when we were torn asunder, as one is torn from the old lady about to pour out tea and the young man about to hit the tennis ball in the back garden of the suburban villa as one rushes past in the train.

The Mark on the Wall by Virginia Woolf -flips to new scene -botany, shakespeare -mark is the anchor and the stimulus -the ellipses (...) stabilization between stimulus and stability, allow her to weave in and out of these little vignettes

"Though it's no good buying newspapers.... Nothing ever happens. Curse this war; God d*mn this war!... All the same, I don't see why we should have a snail on our wall." Ah, the mark on the wall! It was a snail.

The Mark on the Wall by Virginia Woolf -snail moves slowly, doesn't give a sh*t, and leaves a trail. She's leaving a trail across literature -super smart woman in class points out that you have to come out of your shell to get anywhere, and Woolf does the same thing (I have to come out of these forms, and it could be bad, but that's how we move forward.)

Indeed, now that I have fixed my eyes upon it, I feel that I have grasped a plank in the sea; I feel a satisfying sense of reality which at once turns the two Archbishops and the Lord High Chancellor to the shadows of shades. Here is something definite, something real. Thus, waking from a midnight dream of horror, one hastily turns on the light and lies quiescent, worshipping the chest of drawers, worshipping solidity, worshipping reality, worshipping the impersonal world which is a proof of some existence other than ours. That is what one wants to be sure of....

The Mark on the Wall by Virginia Woolf -the fixing is not static, and is like a momentary pause -ellipses is a collection of full stops. We would usually use this dot to make order, and now we're using it to be open ended to break the status quo etc... (I used them. Get it.)

The wonder is that I've any clothes on my back, that I sit surrounded by solid furniture at this moment. Why, if one wants to compare life to anything, one must liken it to being blown through the Tube at fifty miles an hour—landing at the other end without a single hairpin in one's hair! Shot out at the feet of God entirely naked! Tumbling head over heels in the asphodel meadows like brown paper parcels pitched down a shoot in the post office! With one's hair flying back like the tail of a race-horse. Yes, that seems to express the rapidity of life, the perpetual waste and repair; all so casual, all so haphazard....

The Mark on the Wall by Virginia Woolf -the tube = abstract and modern -fragmented sentences that pile up on each other that give feeling of shock and jar of life -not pessimistic about urbanization -different orientation to breakdown -the feminine perspective implied with hair pins show the new space for women they have the power and liberty of a racehorse literally letting their hair down -if Eliot was super negative about post-WWI England, she's pretty down with it, and finds it freeing -stop and start rhythm of the sentences give sense of modern life and also help her develop her own style of writing, the sentence does not lock itself into standard English forms. The last sentence ends in an ellipsis, her power as a printer, trails off and is free, part of the freedom of this form comes from the fact that she can use this. Agency as the printer of her own work. She could have used a period, but she's a grown *ss woman with her own ******* printing press and she could end a sentence with a smiley face if she d*mn well pleased. #f*ckthepatriarchy

Generalizations bring back somehow Sunday in London, Sunday afternoon walks, Sunday luncheons, and also ways of speaking of the dead, clothes, and habits—like the habit of sitting all together in one room until a certain hour, although nobody liked it. There was a rule for everything. The rule for tablecloths at that particular period was that they should be made of tapestry with little yellow compartments marked upon them, such as you may see in photographs of the carpets in the corridors of the royal palaces. Tablecloths of a different kind were not real tablecloths. How shocking, and yet how wonderful it was to discover that these real things, Sunday luncheons, Sunday walks, country houses, and tablecloths were not entirely real, were indeed half phantoms, and the damnation which visited the disbeliever in them was only a sense of illegitimate freedom. What now takes the place of those things I wonder, those real standard things? Men perhaps, should you be a woman; the masculine point of view which governs our lives, which sets the standard, which establishes Whitaker's Table of Precedency, which has become, I suppose, since the war half a phantom to many men and women, which soon—one may hope, will be laughed into the dustbin where the phantoms go, the mahogany sideboards and the Landseer prints, Gods and Devils, Hell and so forth, leaving us all with an intoxicating sense of illegitimate freedom—if freedom exists....

The Mark on the Wall by Virginia Woolf -these structures are no more than the fantasies that people take for reality -the ellipses, as if the marks on the page themselves were her freedom "typographical freedom"

It is useless, and the time awfully fails me, to prolong this description; no one has ever suffered such torments, let that suffice; and yet even to these, habit broughtno, not alleviationbut a certain callousness of soul, a certain acquiescence of despair; and my punishment might have gone on for years, but for the last calamity which has now fallen, and which has finally severed me from my own face and nature. My provision of the salt, which had never been renewed since the date of the first experiment, began to run low. I sent out for a fresh supply and mixed the draught; the ebullition followed, and the first change of colour, not the second; I drank it and it was without efficiency. You will learn from Poole how I have had London ransacked; it was in vain; and I am now persuaded that my first supply was impure, and that it was that unknown impurity which lent efficacy to the draught.

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson -he usually describes himself as a mixture of the two kinds of impulses "...which has finally severed me from my own face and nature." Is this an instance of doubling or definition? Lack of self control. Severing is creating two. And, it's violent. Is it scary or liberating? -Jekyll's nature (doubled) and Severing (makes two), severing isn't creating a distinction, it's blurring a distinction → Then do a Darwinian reading. -"Impurity" the impure salts make the potion work, that makes him become Jekyll or Hyde (gives him self control and abiltiy to turn between the two) Purifies good and evil, and allows them to be by themselves. He needs "impurity" to make these binaries. Everything seems to be about the fact that you have to accept your evil nature as part of yourself, you can't just embrace it as a alterego. #Darwin -the narrative frames themselves dissipate. The frames that would contain Jekyll's evilness have dissipated

MR. Utterson the lawyer was a man of a rugged countenance that was never lighted by a smile; cold, scanty and embarrassed in discourse; backward in sentiment; lean, long, dusty, dreary and yet somehow lovable. At friendly meetings, and when the wine was to his taste, something eminently human beaconed from his eye; something indeed which never found its way into his talk, but which spoke not only in these silent symbols of the after-dinner face, but more often and loudly in the acts of his life. He was austere with himself; drank gin when he was alone, to mortify a taste for vintages; and though he enjoyed the theater, had not crossed the doors of one for twenty years. But he had an approved tolerance for others; sometimes wondering, almost with envy, at the high pressure of spirits involved in their misdeeds; and in any extremity inclined to help rather than to reprove. I incline to Cains heresy, he used to say quaintly: I let my brother go to the devil in his own way. In this character, it was frequently his fortune to be the last reputable acquaintance and the last good influence in the lives of downgoing men. And to such as these, so long as they came about his chambers, he never marked a shade of change in his demeanour.

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson -profession of lawyer aligns him with laws and it associates it with the rules and principles of the larger culture. This is emphasized in the following description of his coldness, and his avoidance of things that give him pleasure, (he doesn't drink wine and go to the theater even though he likes them). He deprives himself of pleasure, as if it is a bad thing. He's the personification of Victorian society, about restraint and rigidity (think back to Tennyson's "Memoriam" and his rigid way of talking about his love for his friend) -the novella attempts to frame the strange case through the strangeness of the structuring. All these frames that try to contain revolution, and like in Frankenstein, these frames eventually break down

Next, in the course of their review of the chamber, the searchers came to the cheval-glass, into whose depths they looked with an involuntary horror. But it was so turned as to show them nothing but the rosy glow playing on the roof, the fire sparkling in a hundred repetitions along the glazed front of the presses, and their own pale and fearful countenances stooping to look in. This glass has seen some strange things, sir, whispered Poole. And surely none stranger than itself, echoed the lawyer in the same tones. For what did Jekyllhe caught himself up at the word with a start, and then conquering the weaknesswhat could Jekyll want with it? he said. You may

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson -see your own evilness -look in a mirror and there are two of you, you're alienated from yourself and you see yourself split -mirrors are kind of crazy things, and we're used to them, but there still strange -"echos" also an instance of doubling -the documents repeat the mirroring, the documents themselves become multiple, the two wills are exactly the same exactly the same expect for the name, and he sees his own name, and it's even more like a mirror, the will also becomes a mirror itself you're either going to hate or love the thing you see and the document becomes an instance of disentangling the two parts of the self -we ourselves get involved in the reading of the text because of the delay of the letter, we want to know what's in it before we can actually read it, and we want to solve this mystery and we're not allowed to. "And with that he brought the paper to his eyes..." he reads the letter, and we read the letter, we're put into exactly Utterson's spot, we are now looking into the mirror ourselves, but in this crazy world

Two doors from one corner, on the left hand going east the line was broken by the entry of a court; and just at that point a certain sinister block of building thrust forward its gable on the street. It was two storeys high; showed no window, nothing but a door on the lower storey and a blind forehead of discoloured wall on the upper; and bore in every feature, the marks of prolonged and sordid negligence. The door, which was equipped with neither bell nor knocker, was blistered and distained. Tramps slouched into the recess and struck matches on the panels; children kept shop upon the steps; the schoolboy had tried his knife on the mouldings; and for close on a generation, no one had appeared to drive away these random visitors or to repair their ravages. Mr. Enfield and the lawyer were on the other side of the by-street; but when they came abreast of the entry, the former lifted up his cane and pointed.

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson -the line of the building along the street is broken by the entry of the court, there's an interior space (a court) this interior space juts out into public space, which suggests a kind of violence or conflict -this description also functions as an account of a kind of containment, holding something back and what this thing is remains unknown, as the description refuses to give what is inside (you can't see in) -"blind forehead" this architectural place calls to an interior mental space, we can read this as a metaphor for a mental or psychic space -the story seems to be interested in getting at it's own ability to get at its inner secret -draws attention to the fact that we can never really get into the full story, we need to acknowledge our own ignorance, and we should just think about what we're actually doing when we try and think through impossible thoughts

As ____________, dragonflies draw flame; As tumbled over rim in roundy wells Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name; Each mortal thing does one thing and the same: Deals out that being indoors each one dwells; Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells, Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came. I say móre: the just man justices; Keeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces; Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is — Chríst — for Christ plays in ten thousand places, Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his To the Father through the features of men's faces.

"As Kingfishers Catch Fire" by Gerard Manley Hopkins

As also in birth and death. Whoever says To a loyal woman, 'Love and work with me,' Will get fair answers, if the work and love Being good themselves, are good for her-the best She was born for. Women of a softer mood, Surprised by men when scarcely awake to life, Will sometimes only hear the first word, love, And catch up with it any kind of work, Indifferent, so that dear love go with it: I do not blame such women, though, for love, They pick much oakum; earth's fanatics make Too frequently heaven's saints.

"Aurora Leigh" by Elizabeth Barrett Browning - (line 439) she says that women have work, and she denounces hating, pretty much, dumb in love women. Anit-female competition. -work and love are connected and not connected -we shouldn't have to economize work and love -Romney asks her to help him with his reform advocacy, and she says that she has to do her literary work and her mother's work, and you can't just fold me into your work. I'm independent. -your work goes beyond your husband and the place that this economy has put you -there's an X shape made between the repeats of the words work and love, and Ian was dope and just said that the X is almost the signature of an illiterate n woman signing onto something she does not understand

(first sentence not included) What hours, O what black hours we have spent This night! what sights you, heart, saw; ways you went! And more must, in yet longer light's delay. With witness I speak this. But where I say Hours I mean years, mean life. And my lament Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent To dearest him that lives alas! away. I am gall, I am heartburn. God's most deep decree Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me; Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse. Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I see The lost are like this, and their scourge to be As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse.

"I Wake and Feel the Fell of Dark, Not Day" by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Yesterday all the past. The language of size Spreading to China along the trade-routes; the diffusion Of the counting-frame and the cromlech; Yesterday the shadow-reckoning in the sunny climates. Yesterday the assessment of insurance by cards, The divination of water; yesterday the invention Of cartwheels and clocks, the taming of Horses. Yesterday the bustling world of the navigators.

"Spain" by W.H. Auden -"yesterday" and list like syntax, sound like a chant, equalizes all the different endeavors and achievements.

If I should die, think only this of me: That there's some corner of a foreign field That is for ever 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, Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

"The Soldier" by Rupert Brooke

Louise Bennett's "Jamaican Labrish"

- it's fun because of the dance, but also serious -the poem's rhyme scheme and other forms show how this Jamaican dialect can work with English and shouldn't be alien - "ocean" and "sea" kind of shows how ridiculous it is we base country's influence on their geographical location

Inscape

-By "inscape" Gerard Manley Hopkins means the unified complex of characteristics that give each thing its uniqueness and that differentiate it from other things -by "instress" he means either the force of being which holds the inscape together or the impulse from the inscape which carries it whole into the mind of the beholder. - regular meter - "sprung rhythm" - inner + landscape → don't look at an individual as a conventional type

Yeats

-His work is in three phases 1) Late romantic phase 2) Political? phase 3) Mystical phase, that looks at the progress of civilization (most modernist phase) Ultimately ends in the 1930s, as he looks back at his development -1890s sort of a late romanticism. Nature provides mystical renewal, but through Irish terms (Celtic revival, trying to consolidate Irish culture so they could pit their culture against other strong cultures. West Ireland was all about ) In Yeats' early phase, he was into this revival

How do Stevenson's narrative and structure frames work?

-The structure works to tell the story and to explore how there are things that we can and can't know about the self

Virginia Woolf

-had aristocratic ties to high culture -more abstract writing -takes from Joyce and Eliot and is celebrated (now) as a central modernist figure -not just because of her glorious upbringing, but also because she's a great writer -she was not sent to university, stayed home with where she read from her father's huge cool library -she started writing, and her step brother was able to publish them. Being edited by her male family member did limit her, and it wasn't until she found her own press with her husband that she could freely publish

A Christmas Carol

-imaginative sympathy -he uses literary fiction to explore the plight of the urban poor -Blake and Wordsworth talked about the rural poor being left behind, and Dickens talks about how they're doing in the cities -best known piece of Victorian Era -It was after Oliver -It's kind of about the Poor Law of 1834, where they made terrible workhouses for the poor -showcases his comedy, extreme sentimentality, and his personal narrative touch

The Fantastic (through Dickens)

-people need to change their ways -story claims that the imagination transcends the evil reality of the world -Lurz proposes that the ultimate effect is to make us read deeper than the clear moral about sympathy. Undercut the Christmas Carol as a tale to be a good person and to give to the poor -the fantasy pieces were sort of supposed to make the transactions that we are used to (language and money) strange. This allows for both language and money to be destructive. Even understanding how to use money, is tied to how to use language, it's dependent on the fact that we know how to use one thing to symbolize something else

Charles Dickens & The Victorian Novel

-prose fiction was equally powerful as poetry -Victorian Era was arguably the great era of prose -Dickens was the most popular writer of the time -Dickens and Arnold give us a sense of the pedagogical work that happened after Romanticism -shift from revolution to reformation, where there are bills and laws being changed systematically -these novels were supposed to show the grossness of social injustices

But the gallantry of her friends would not allow of this; and the man in faded black, mounting the breach first, produced his plunder. It was not extensive. A seal or two, a pencil-case, a pair of sleeve-buttons, and a brooch of no great value, were all. They were severally examined and appraised by old Joe, who chalked the sums he was disposed to give for each, upon the wall, and added them up into a total when he found there was nothing more to come. ``That's your account,'' said Joe, ``and I wouldn't give another sixpence, if I was to be boiled for not doing it. Who's next?'' Mrs Dilber was next. Sheets and towels, a little wearing apparel, two old-fashioned silver teaspoons, a pair of sugar-tongs, and a few boots. Her account was stated on the wall in the same manner. ``I always give too much to ladies. It's a weakness of mine, and that's the way I ruin myself,'' said old Joe. ``That's your account. If you asked me for another penny, and made it an open question, I'd repent of being so liberal and knock off half-a-crown.'' ``And now undo my bundle, Joe,'' said the first woman. Joe went down on his knees for the greater convenience of opening it, and having unfastened a great many knots, dragged out a large and heavy roll of some dark stuff. ``What do you call this.'' said Joe. ``Bed-curtains!'' ``Ah!'' returned the woman, laughing and leaning forward on her crossed arms. ``Bed-curtains!'' ``You don't mean to say you took them down, rings and all, with him lying there?'' said Joe. ``Yes I do,'' replied the woman. ``Why not?'' ``You were born to make your fortune,'' said Joe, ``and you'll certainly do it.'' ``I certainly shan't hold my hand, when I can get anything in it by reaching it out, for the sake of such a man as He was, I promise you, Joe,'' returned the woman coolly. ``don't drop that oil upon the blankets, now.''

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens -bed curtains as a portal to other worlds, the regular word, and also to new places in Scrooge's mind -scrooge's life is boiled down to this lame material things, which is extra valueless in light of how rich he is

For the people who were shovelling away on the housetops were jovial and full of glee; calling out to one another from the parapets, and now and then exchanging a facetious snowball -- better-natured missile far than many a wordy jest -- laughing heartily if it went right and not less heartily if it went wrong. The poulterers' shops were still half open, and the fruiterers' were radiant in their glory. There were great, round, pot-bellied baskets of chesnuts, shaped like the waistcoats of jolly old gentlemen, lolling at the doors, and tumbling out into the street in their apoplectic opulence. There were ruddy, brown-faced, broad-girthed Spanish Onions, shining in the fatness of their growth like Spanish Friars, and winking from their shelves in wanton slyness at the girls as they went by, and glanced demurely at the hung-up mistletoe. There were pears and apples, clustered high in blooming pyramids; there were bunches of grapes, made, in the shopkeepers' benevolence to dangle from conspicuous hooks, that people's mouths might water gratis as they passed; there were piles of filberts, mossy and brown, recalling, in their fragrance, ancient walks among the woods, and pleasant shufflings ankle deep through withered leaves; there were Norfolk Biffins, squab and swarthy, setting off the yellow of the oranges and lemons, and, in the great compactness of their juicy persons, urgently entreating and beseeching to be carried home in paper bags and eaten after dinner. The very gold and silver fish, set forth among these choice fruits in a bowl, though members of a dull and stagnant-blooded race, appeared to know that there was something going on; and, to a fish, went gasping round and round their little world in slow and passionless excitement.

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens -the list form makes the items in the list indistinguishable, comment on consumerism? -pessimistic about this consumerism -fish go round and round, like how money just circulates and doesn't really do anything, or have any value -personification of fruits and foods like faces in a crowd and they don't matter, and the superficiality of everything at the time in London

A wind is ruffling the tawny pelt Of Africa. Kikuyu, quick as flies, Batten upon the bloodstreams of the veldt. Corpses are scattered through a paradise. Only the worm, colonel of carrion, cries: "Waste no compassion on these separate dead!" Statistics justify and scholars seize The salients of colonial policy. What is that to the white child hacked in bed? To savages, expendable as Jews?

A Far Cry from Africa by Derek Walott -Mau Mau uprising of Kenya +The war mirrors his work in many ways. Grew up in caribbean, and is of African descent, and loves the English language -distance emotional intimacy +far cry, they're far away and also emotional -forms of violence -the rhyme → wants to document the tender relationship to the land, but also the violence that is destroying it -anthropomorphizes the worm with military language, and it then gets reversed with the scholar's that suck the emotionality

But there was one curious circumstance. I had taken a loathing to my gentleman at first sight. So had the childs family, which was only natural. But the doctors case was what struck me. He was the usual cut and dry apothecary, of no particular age and colour, with a strong Edinburgh accent and about as emotional as a bagpipe. Well, sir, he was like the rest of us; every time he looked at my prisoner, I saw that Sawbones turn sick and white with desire to kill him. I knew what was in his mind, just as he knew what was in mine; and killing being out of the question, we did the next best. We told the man we could and would make such a scandal out of this as should make his name stink from one end of London to the other. If he had any friends or any credit, we undertook that he should lose them. And all the time, as we were pitching it in red hot, we were keeping the women off him as best we could for they were as wild as harpies. I never saw a circle of such hateful faces; and there was the man in the middle, with a kind of black sneering coolnessfrightened too, I could see thatbut carrying it off, sir, really like Satan. I

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson -the "curious circumstance" is his immediate loathing, and here the point seems less to be about the unexplainability of Hyde's experience, but mainly the universal reaction to want to kill him -referring to the doctor's wish to kill hyde "I knew what was in his mind, just as he knew what was in mine" a dark and inexplicable violence, his appearance exposes the viewers -this murderous feelings can't be really carried out, so they just want to spoil his reputation, and this becomes an act of social control, bring what was private into the public sphere -this is what his entire tale is doing, and the multiple frames repeatedly frame our own desires to get to the heart of the story, we want to kill off what we can't explain, the fantasticalness doesn't allow us to explain, it exposes our desire to explain, and to tie up loose ends -similar to Dickens, it is money that plays a large role, and we again look at the relationship between money and language. Money works as a signifier of exchange value. Money is literally exchanged for narrative. He focuses on the name on the check but refuses to say what the name was, and tells you it's the point of his story, which is like how money is an empty signifier. This keeps us at the surface and refuses to let us grasp at a deeper meaning. We become aware of our desire to know. The novel is like "Hey! Look at this secret you can't know! Now, reflect on your own human mind."

The court was very cool and a little damp, and full of premature twilight, although the sky, high up overhead, was still bright with sunset. The middle one of the three windows was half-way open; and sitting close beside it, taking the air with an infinite sadness of mien, like some disconsolate prisoner, Utterson saw Dr. Jekyll. What! Jekyll! he cried. I trust you are better. I am very low, Utterson, replied the doctor drearily, very low. It will not last long, thank God. You stay too much indoors, said the lawyer. You should be out, whipping up the circulation like Mr. Enfield and me. (This is my cousinMr. EnfieldDr. Jekyll.) Come now; get your hat and take a quick turn with us. You are very

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson -their entry into the court begins to make them indistinguishable to Jekyll himself. The images of mixing and middleness (allowed to happen by the breaking of the frame) -two extremes and the court is in the middle, not inside or outside. "Damp" isn't dry, but also not wet. "Twilight" not light, not dark. Middle window is half way open. Things start to get mixed up, and nothing is black and white. → There can be no good self and a bad self, you have to deal with your sides inside of yourself. -build up and it's a romantic atmosphere (referred to in class as "The Gay Reading") Romance itself can be overly intimate, encroaching, and it's almost violent. "Since the gay thing has come up..." the middleness, and a homosexual relationship can't be real in this time, it's in the middle and it's damned ("God forgive us") Historically gay men were thought of as a middle between men and women. -the men look at the evil and recognize it in themselves "God forgive US"