Literature Humanities 07-08

Who's there?

Nostalgic for Lit Hum? Or just that bored in California/Canada/Oregon/Jersey?

Well, here are three upcoming films all based on some of your most favoritest Lit Hum texts.

First, Hayden Christensen and Mischa Barton compete for the Kirsten Dunst Void Actor Award in a what surely will be a straight-to-DVD adaptation of The Decameron.

Next, ever wondered what happens in Denmark when Fortinbras took over? What happened to Horatio? Any of the newly dead come back as ghost a la Hamlet Prime? Hamlet 2 is your answer.

Finally, a not-exactly direct adaptation of Oedipus. Actually, not-at-all-direct, but an adaptation of a real story. Still, the Oedipus parallels are strong enough to warrant a mention. Nervous. 

I'll be seeing all of these, though I'm really desperately hoping for a Crime and Punishment movie starring Patrick Dempsey as Raskolnikov, Ben Kingsley as Porfiry, and Julie Delphy as Sonia. Oh wait.

Happy Summering,
Jeff

Once more into the breach, dear friends, once more...

One last post from me...   

The PowerPoint from this morning is at the end here, but first a quick round-up on other things you might use from the course site.
1.    Midterm and Midterm Review materials. Find these things under the pages section. Good way to re-acquaint yourself with old friends from the first part of the semester.
2.    Close Reading Passages. I choose passages for our weekly discussions very much like the kinds of things they like to put on the exam. Take and look and see what ya'll said about them.
3.    Discussion topics. Don't overlook these. Serious discussions of the texts, with evidence and attempts to figure out what the hell is going on.

And, finally, the PowerPoint. It also has a few extra slides at the end of character lists.

Download spring_2008_final_review.ppt

That's it from me. Good luck.
Jeffrey

LitHum Pick 'em

I wasn't sure how long the LitHum Showdown (aka "Cage Match") would take, so I had another exercise ready in case we ran through it fast. We sank our teeth in and had a good time with it, so this went unused, but you might find it interesting.

Anyway, I paired up some of the ideas/themes we've been talking about this semester for your consideration. I was going to have you pick a side for each, and then discuss why (criteria of your own choosing, natch). If you want to use this as a study tool, might I suggest being able to identify works that deal with each idea? Even better if you can identify a work that deals with the conflict directly.

Here they are (I'll include my own preferences in the comments, join if you like):

Feeling or Thought?
Being or Knowledge?
Contentment or Consciousness?
Present or Future?
Essay or Epic?
Beginnings or Endings?
Love or Fame?
Fantasy or Fact?
Desire or Duty?
War or Plague?
Mercy or Justice?
Innovation or Tradition?
We or I?
Ordinary or Extraordinary?
Character or Story?
As it Could Be or As It Is?
Right Here or Out There?
Unknown or the Known?
It’s Getting Better or It’s Getting Worse?
Poetry or History?
A Provocative Ending or a Pleasing One?
Dialogue or Description?

Give me your hands, if we be friends

Unbelievable. We're done. Through. Finito. Ende. Odysseus is back in Ithaka. Quixote is Quexana again. Hamlet Prime has been avenged. Lizzy and Charles Darcy are living happily ever after. Dante's been to Hell and back. We've suffered though Montaigne's kidney stones and sailed out to the lighthouse. We've seen Leonidas stand and Troy fall. Oedipus and Raskolnikov have learned their lessons. Achilles has made his choice and so has Lt. Cross. Socrates has told us his secrets; Hamlet has kept his.

It's been my great pleasure and absolute privilege to be Virgil to your Dante, Don Quixote to your Sancho. Thank you for your good humor and willingness to play along. I looked forward to our sessions every week and would sign up, in a heartbeat, to take another ride with you all.

If you'd like to leave a thought or two about the course as a whole, please use the comments thread here to do so.

Wishing you all the best here at Columbia and undiscovered happiness out there on the wine-dark sea, 

Jeff

I have no chair, nor church nor philosophy;
I lead no man to a dinner-table or library or exchange,
But each man and each woman of you I lead upon a knoll,
My left hand hooks you around the waist,
My right hand point to landscapes of continents, and a plain public
road.

Not I, not anyone else can travel that road for you,
You must travel it yourself.

It is not far...it is within reach...

-Uncle Walt

But to us too it seems that this will be a good place to stop

As you do your last round of commenting, I'd appreciate it if you dropped a comment or two here about the blog thing as a whole.

As a general rule, I want to avoid, as much as possible, making students do things that seem pointless, irritating, or otherwise bogus, so your honesty (laud or lambast) is important to me. If you'd prefer to do this anonymously through the course evaluation, I completely understand.

What worked?
What didn't?
If you were running it how would you do it?
How often did you take a look at the links/info I put up?
What else might be helpful?
Would you do this again, or would some other regular writing assignment be better?


I, for one, appreciate all your hard work and diligent participation here.
Jeff.

"True happiness is of a retired nature, and an enemy to pomp and noise; it arises from the enjoyment of oneself; and, in the next, from the friendship and conversation of a few select companions."
                                            -Joseph Addison, politician, writer, and famous conversationalist.1711

Defending "Defender of the Faith"

Early in his career, Roth received considerable criticism for his sometimes less-than-perfect Jewish characters. Some critics thought that characters like Grossbart would solidify and perpetuate long-held stereotypes about Jews (40 years earlier, W.E.B. Du Bois famously criticized a cadre of young Harlem Renaissance writers along similar lines).

The Gordian Knot of ethno-cultural identity is very much at stake in "Defender of the Faith." While Grossbart's machinations certainly elicit strong readerly reactions, Nathan Marx's struggle with his own identity is the cognitive center of the work. Since we didn't get to it in class, I'll keep my questions here pretty general:

1. At what point is Marx most sympathetic towards Grossbart?
2. What finally turns Marx against him? Why such strong feelings?
3. How justified is Marx in changing Grossbart's orders back to the Pacific?
4. What is the nature of Marx's struggle with his identity throughout? What larger issues of identity do you think the story is addressing?

On "Rationing"

So.....In rationing there were many things that seemed to make little to no sense to me, the first of them being the presence of Uncle Kotai in the beginning of the text, he is introduced, constructed for what seems like no reason other then to let Saburo's character develop (and even that explanation is hard to believe), and then killed off.  Then after the majority of the story, Kotai is mentioned again and for the last time when Waters is describing Saburo.  The only other reason I can think of Kotai being in the story at all is to set a mood for the rest of the story.  1) What is the deal with Uncle Kotai, what purpose does his character serve in the text?  The other main thorn is best described by: "There was no response.  The awkward streetcar flashed into his mind, and in that moment of panic he understood himself to be on the verge of something he had feared subconsciously, all his life." (p. 6).  Yet, even by the end of the story, I, at least, had no idea that Saburo was afraid of much.  I guess what I am wondering is if anyone else felt that this text is so normal, it is almost mundane, but at the same time, it elicits emotional responses that should not surface from a mundane text. -Tyler

Question of the Narrator in "Ysrael"

Ysrael The narrator and his brother, Rafa embark on a journey to find some mysterious child with a deformed face, Ysrael. Their journey represents a voyage of discovery, experience, and a sense of brotherhood.  It is mentioned on page 5, "I didn't mind these summers, wouldn't forget them the way Rafa would.  Back home in the Captial, Rafa had his own friends, a bunch of tigueres who liked to knock down our neighbors and who scrawled chocha and toto on walls and curbs.  Back in the Capital he rarely said anything to me except Shut up, pendejo".  There is a drastic transformation from not speaking any words to each other to sharing hands in a criminal act against Ysrael.  What I was wondering is what does this exploration by the narrator into the life and mind of his older brother do for him?  Do you get the sense that he will learn a productive lesson from the experience?  By this I mean what do you make of the last lines, "Rafa signaled for a stop. Get ready to run, he whispered.  I said, OK"?  Is the journey to el campo a lifestyle that ends once they return to the capital? Or is it that now that the narrator has experienced life with his brother he will want to spend more time with this destructive brother? Considering the entire text and the narrative voice do you find the narrator able to say no once he returns to the capital? And to supplement that question, do you think that Rafa has a new respect for his younger brother or will he continue to dismiss him?  Lastly, what do you make of the molestation scene?  I personally thought that it would haunt the narrator for a long time and he would have something negative to associate with the trip along with seeing the horrendous face of Ysrael and the violent act of his brother.

On the Matter of Gravity

In his novel "The Unbearable Lightness of Being," Milan Kundera writes this in Chapter 2: "If every second of our lives recurs an infinite number of times, we are nailed to eternity as Jesus Christ was nailed to the cross. It is a terrifying prospect. In the world of eternal return the weight of unbearable responsibility lies heavy on every move we make. That is why Nietzsche called the idea of eternal return the heaviest of burdens (das schwerste Gewicht). / If eternal return is the heaviest of burdens, then our lives can stand out against it in all their splendid lightness./ But is heaviness truly deplorable and lightness splendid?/ The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body. The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life's most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become./ Conversely, the absolute absence of a burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into the heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant. What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?"

I'm hoping you guys can see why I thought of this passage upon reading The Things They Carried. A lot of the things mentioned in this passage tie in to specific events in the books. "If every second of our lives recurs an infinite number of times" -- that reminds me strongly of Lavender's death playing in Kiowa's head, and he replaying it over and over again to the others. The idea of weight needs no explaining. The idea that "we sink beneath" the heaviest burdens again reminds me of Lavender's death -- how he fell ilke a "bag of sand." In addition, on pages 22-23, we see the dream of "freedom birds,' concluding with the idea that with their dreams, "they gave themselves over to lightness."

My questions to you are the following: Going off of our discussions in class, which did Lieutenant Cross pick -- weight or lightness? What about the soldiers -- what do they pick? What should they pick? What options of picking do they really have? What else is said on the idea of weight vs. lightness in the text? And finally, which do you choose to live by?

To Zora

One last bizarre piece of Jeffness for the road as we wind up here....

Olu Dara, bluesman/jazz trumpeter/father of Nas/all-around badass, recorded this track, which seems to me to be a sort of ode to Zora Neale Hurston. See what you think.

Also-our new (and last) weekly image is "Flag" by Jasper Johns.
Try staring at the green version of the flag for a few seconds and then looking at the ghost-flag at the bottom.

Larger image here: