Novels, Plays, Poems Writing Assignments (Berek)

            Dean Young’s Fall Higher (I won’t try to make my computer turn the “a” upside down) is a new book, published this year, by a poet I’m guessing is not familiar to you. Imagine yourself in a bookstore, picking up the volume and reading Tony Hoaglund’s blurb inside the front fold of the dust jacket. “Deeply, authentically committed to the surrealist mode of poem-as-event, also fluent in the lingus Americano (French fries and beer), Young’s poems improvise, remember, and discover with an abandon which is furious, mind-boggling, funny and heartbreaking.” High praise, but what does it mean? Duck “surrealist,” except perhaps for its suggestion that the poems don’t necessarily follow the logic of everyday waking life. Do you see these poems as “events,” doing something to you rather than reporting on the speaker’s life? What kind of furious abandon do perceive? Young’s sentences—as important a unit as his lines—may jerk us around; his sudden shifts leave us baffled. But being funny can be a good thing, and we can treasure art that breaks our heart.

            The premise of this course is that how something is done is a crucial part of the doing. Reading a volume of poems, not just a few poems in an anthology, gives us a chance to learn about a poet’s characteristic modes of doing—his or her “how”—as well as to look for characteristic patterns or themes or emotions. But we also know that poets can surprise us; each new poem is an opportunity for surprise. Choose a poem that interests you from the third section of Fall Higher. Describe what the poem does to you by analyzing the “how” of its doing. Be forthright, be adventurous, be open to surprise. Don’t hesitate to be as boisterous as Young. Tell the truth, even if the truth reveals your own irritation or confusion. And have some fun.

Two to four pages. Due Wednesday, December 14, 5 PM in my Johnson Chapel mailbox.

            Find a moment in Between Father and Son in which Vidia uses memory as a mode of creating a sense of self or (alternatively) seems to evade or dismiss memory for the same purpose. Explain why you admire or don’t admire this moment.

One page. Due Thursday, December 8, 4 PM, in my Johnson Chapel mailbox.

            Looking at the reliefs in the museum in Naples, Sasha’s Uncle Ted focuses on the moment when Orpheus turns back to look at Eurydice. “He sensed between them an understanding too deep to articulate: the unspeakable knowledge that everything is lost” (Goon Squad, p. 214). Like Howards End, A Visit from the Goon Squad looks both backward and forward, shuffling time as events turn into memories. Clinging to memory—thinking back with longing toward the past—is a form of nostalgia. Yet when Bennie Salazar heard Lou Kline say, in the nineties, that rock and roll peaked at Monterey Pop in the seventies, Bennie thought about Lou, “You’re finished . . . Nostalgia was the end—everyone knew that” (p. 37).

            Nostalgia seems powerful as well as deplorable in Goon Squad, visible both in attention to old rock songs (and their pauses) in the PowerPoint chapter or in the audience’s response to Scotty Hausmann’s performance on slide guitar. In Howards End, both the house that gives its name to the novel and the women most linked to the house—Ruth Wilcox and Miss Avery—have value in part because of their connections to the past.

            You have two options to choose among for this essay. Either

1)    Explain how ideas about memory or nostalgia (choose your word) help give shape to one chapter in A Visit from the Goon Squad. If you aren’t sure, say why.

2)    Explain how memory or nostalgia helps give shape to some aspect of your own life. What happens when (like Orpheus) you look back? While you may if you wish refer to a text we have read, your subject is yourself, not literature.

Two pages. Due Friday, November 18, at 5PM in my Johnson Chapel mailbox.

            In a celebrated epigraph to Howards End, E. M. Forster said, “only connect.” The novel describes how the Schlegel sisters try to “connect” with one another, with Tibby and Aunt Juley, and with Leonard Bast. Margaret sometimes achieves connection with Ruth Wilcox, and sometimes fails; she thinks her marriage to Henry Wilcox can connect Schlegels and Wilcoxes. On p. 159, Margaret meditates about connecting “the prose and the passion,” and perhaps the body and the soul. But the novel also invites us to think about different divides: that between past and present, England and Germany, country and city, the seen and the unseen, those who stand upon money as upon islands, and those with no money at all. And sometimes through the narrator, sometimes through a character, the novel offers us terms to use in our thinking: “panic and emptiness,” “telegrams and anger,” “the personal,” “the abyss.”

            In your paper, explore one concrete example of a “connection” in the novel, whether successful or failed. Are the oppositions and categories the novel offers the reader adequate to explain your own sense of what is more successful and what is less successful in this connection? Do you have other terms to propose? You must focus on a particular episode or scene.

 Two or three pages

Due Friday, November 11, by 5 PM in my Johnson Chapel mailbox.

Before writing Paper 7, you will need to read a handout including the two reviews referred to below. You can find them in my Johnson Chapel mailbox on Monday and Tuesday, Oct. 31 and Nov. 1. I will bring any uncollected copies to class on Nov.  2.

           Eurydice, first performed eight years ago, has received a somewhat mixed press. Here are two reviews, both from reputable reviewers. One, in The New York Times, considers Eurydice a major achievement. The reviewer, Charles Isherwood, finds it seriously moving, reporting that “I fought off tears for half the play, not always successfully.” In The New York Observer, on the other hand, John Heilpern calls the play a “vulgarized version” of the Orpheus-Eurydice myth. He dismisses the play as, at best, “mere whimsy.”

            Eurydice combines playfulness, elaborate patterns of images sometimes made literal on stage (think of water), an obvious reference to an ancient myth about music, loss and love, and a specific allusion to the moment in King Lear when the aged father imagines—fruitlessly—an imprisoned life with his daughter both isolated from and protected from the world. Does this remarkable mixture move you to powerful emotion, as it did Charles Isherwood? Or do you feel more as John Heilpern did? Explain why you feel as you do by analyzing a specific moment in the play.

1-2 pages, no more.

Due Friday, November 4, at 5 PM in my Johnson Chapel mailbox.

            King Lear includes extraordinary scenes in which characters try to make sense of their own suffering—one thinks of Lear in the hovel with Edgar and the Fool, of Lear’s reunion with the blind Gloucester, of Lear’s reunion with Cordelia. And we have looked in class at moments when characters as different as Regan and Edgar offer conflicting judgments about the meaning of their own experiences and the experiences of the king and Gloucester. (You may want to look at the handout distributed on Wednesday.) In the last scene of the play many of the major characters learn about or witness the deaths of Regan, Goneril, Edmund, Cordelia, and Lear. By their actions and their words characters express their responses to these deaths. We in turn use their responses to help us refine our own judgments.

             Read and reread with care King Lear 5.3.149-end, from Edgar’s defeat of Edmund in combat to the end of the play. Focusing on a few characters who seem to you especially interesting, and explaining why you find those characters interesting, explain how the words and actions of these characters help shape your own response to the deaths of Cordelia and Lear. If you find your own responses conflicted or baffled, say whether or not you can take esthetic pleasure in your own bafflement.

Three pages. Due Monday, October 24, at start of class.

          Though the job of Lear’s Fool is to entertain and amuse the king, in Act One scene four most of the Fool’s jokes are at Lear’s expense. The language of the Fool’s jokes is hard to understand for a modern theater audience or reader; that language is also rich in words and ideas that resonate throughout the play.

            In 1.4, what emotional relationship between Fool and King should the actors try to create? What thoughts and feelings should the exchanges between Lear and the Fool arouse in the audience? What theatrical means might the performers use? These are large and complicated questions. Your task in this paper is to offer answers based on your best present understanding of King Lear. You will probably want to focus only on a speech or two, and you must in your essay ground your answer in the meanings of specific words within the world of the play.

Two pages. Due at the start of class, Monday, October 17.

            Rattle Bag includes a collection of excerpts from Wordsworth’s very long autobiographical poem, The Prelude (1805), a poem Wordsworth subtitled “Growth of a Poet’s Mind.” A fully responsible reading of “Boat Stealing” or any of the other excerpts would require setting them in the context of the whole poem. But Wordsworth himself thought that to some degree moments such as the one described in “Boat Stealing” could be looked at individually—elsewhere in The Prelude he called such moments “spots of time.”

            Before the “Boat Stealing” section, Wordsworth describes himself as having been “Fostered alike by beauty and by fear” (I.302). Nature—a word that Wordsworth capitalizes—does some of that fostering; Nature is the referent of the mysterious “her” in the first line of your excerpt. Immediately before “Boat Stealing,” the poem says,

How strange, that all          

The terrors, pains, and early miseries,          

Regrets, vexations, lassitudes interfused          

Within my mind, should e'er have borne a part,          

And that a needful part, in making up          

The calm existence that is mine when I          

Am worthy of myself! Praise to the end!                

Thanks to the means which Nature deigned to employ;          

Whether her fearless visitings, or those          

That came with soft alarm, like hurtless light          

Opening the peaceful clouds; or she would use          

Severer interventions, ministry       

More palpable, as best might suit her aim.

                                                (The Prelude, Bk. I, 344-356)

            Though I don’t expect you to analyze these lines, you will find in them some possible descriptions of what happens in “Boat Stealing.” Is the moment a “fearless visiting,” or a “soft alarm,” or a “Severer intervention”? Probably the last—but it is worth trying to imagine what the other phrases might mean.

            Wordsworth’s speaker—let’s call the speaker “Wordsworth”—both describes and assesses what he does and how he feels in “Boat Stealing.” How does the speaker’s language (word choices, images, sounds, rhythms, for example) shape both the description and the assessment? And what is your own experience of Wordsworth’s experience?

Two pages. Due Thursday, October 6, at 4 PM in the instructor’s mailbox.

            Reading together the sonnets on our handouts—poems by Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne and Milton—we have talked about how rhythm, and particularly shifts in rhythm, can affect our responses and about how rhyme can help divide a poem in ways that reinforce “turns” in argument. Thoughts sometimes stay within the confine of a line and sometimes carry over; strong pauses sometimes coincide with line divisions and sometimes appear within lines. The pleasure we take in poetry arises in part from the interplay of these formal resources and the tone of voice—sometimes changing tones of voice—we hear.

            Rattle Bag, quirky yet abundant, includes some sonnets you will enjoy. Read and reread these:

Frost, “On a Tree Fallen Across the Road” (323)

            “Range-Finding” (354)

Shelley, “Ozymandias” (333)

Hopkins, “As kingfishers catch fire” (41)

                “The Windhover” (468)

            Now choose the poem you find most pleasurable and write a brief essay in which you explain to a classmate how the formal properties of the poem help create and enhance your pleasure.

            The Hopkins sonnets are challenging and wonderful. I hope some of you will decide to write about one of them; should you do, don’t hesitate to say what you find confusing as well as what you think you understand.

Two pages. Due Thursday, September 29, at 4 PM in my Johnson Chapel mailbox.

Note: anyone observing Rosh Hashanah should speak to me about modifying the time at which this paper is due.

            Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Bight” (Rattle Bag, p. 76) wittily tells the reader near the end of the poem, “The bight is littered with old correspondences.” The word “correspondences” perhaps reminds us of the “torn-open, unanswered letters” to which the poem compares wrecked boats. But the poem is filled with many other similes and metaphors asserting “correspondences” for the details of the scene it describes.

            The scene and its “correspondences” together suggest something about the state of mind of the speaker “on my birthday.” Try as best you can to describe that state of mind by analyzing the implications of some of the poem’s images. You will need to be selective, but you should select examples from enough parts of the poem so you can show whether or not the implications of the images change as the poem proceeds. 

One or two pages, no more. Due Thursday, September 22, by 4 PM in my Johnson Chapel mailbox.