Dead Man

Although this movie seemed random and pointless at first view, it is amazingly full of interesting parallels and information. From the moment Bill Blake got on the train he began an amazing journey in the land of the dead. In this land many things that he didn't understand happened, and the viewer truly found out how naive he was. When he met Nobody, he had been shot by an estranged lover and was badly wounded. As he came in and out of consciousness he heard bits and pieces of what seemed to be the ramblings of a crazy man. But in fact Nobody was a brilliant scholar who helped enlighten Bill to the truth, that he was William Blake. Whether he was truly William Blake in his 'alive life' or not, by the end of the movie he had become him. This was very interesting because Bill said that he was not William at all, but after the transformation was complete, he spouted his poetry and proclaimed that that was who he was. By the end of this movie, when William Blake rubbed the dead fawns blood into his own injury it is clear that something had changed him. It is almost like he experienced an epiphany that molded him into the man he needed to be to finish his journey, whatever that may be.

Invisible Man

I absolutely loved this novel. The story sucked me in, and I couldn't put it down. I felt so sorry for the Invisible man, and all of the terrible things that happened to him, that I felt as if it was almost happening to me. The way in which the story was written, making you feel like you were there with him, and that what was happening to him, was almost happening to you too. From the very beginning, when he was thrust into the 'battle royal' and horrified by all that happened to him there, just to get his scholarship to college, only for that not to work out either, I felt so terribly sorry for him. The end broke my heart too, he had such a kind heart, and all he wanted was to give speeches and belong, and no matter where he went all he found was disappointment and sadness. One failure after the other, and he couldn't be hopeful anymore at the end, and lived a life of sadness and disappointment. The connections made between this novel and the other ones we are reading is striking. When he is reading the slip of paper from the eviction, and it is almost the exact thing from The Bear, it is amazing.

The Bear

Although at first this book was incredibly difficult to read and focus on, after discussing it in class it seems as if it is a completely different book. After discussing and understanding Faulkner's writing style it becomes so much easier to see how skilled he was at story-telling. The Bear is a wonderful 'coming of age story' of a boy who learns how to be a man through hunting for a bear. Isaac learns to respect nature and his elders by hunting for the notorious bear. Although I thought it was very disappointing that they caught the bear so quickly in the novel, it seems that the story isn't so much about the bear, but what he learns from the whole experience. He learns so many things that help him throughout his entire life, not simple about hunting. He learns patience and percerverance and how to learn and listen to people around him. This novel also includes what is said to be one of Faulkner's greatest characters: Boon. Although it is difficult for me to see why he is one of the greatest, he does seem like a powerful character. He trains a dog to kill the bear, and is the one who really ends up killing it. He ends up being the one who Ike learned the most from, and was my favorite character in the novel. If not only because he had a dog, but also because he was patient enough to train and raise it to be what he wanted it to be. I'm glad that we discussed this novel in class because if we hadn't I don't think that I would have been able to truly appreciate it as much as I do now.

week 9

October 24 and October 26

INVISIBLE MAN

constructed like a piece of music, like a quartet
The blues: Betsy Smith "Sugar in my bowl", "A good man is hard to find"

Louis Armstrong "What did I do to be so black and blue"

DEAD MAN

• William Blake and Daisy Miller

WB= he has no clue, destruction of character

DM= sexual (primal) instincts, innocence in society

• Thel talking about how everyone has a gun in America
• capitalistic bounty hunters
• road movie
• abduction myth
• portrayal of the Indians

Who abducts him?

• Nobody? and then he becomes sympathetic like Patty Hearst
• William Blake? Abducted by the poet

WILL: individual

BILL: wants to fit in and be like everybody else

Like WS "Waving Adieu, Adieu, Adieu", "Of Modern Poetry"

main themes:

1. death: circling back around to the beginning
2. what it means to be an American: no one actual point, they are complicated
3. seeing an old place in a new way, or seeing everything new

"We are all waiting there for our abductor whether this person is good or bad"

THE BEAR

• rhythm is going one 'primal'
• unpunctuated, revolving, fluid, confusing, like the old testament
• the death of the bear
• a great storyteller
• the bear was there first, before men

INVISIBLE MAN

• the operation: a lobotomy? Electro-shock therapy? castration?
• whatever it was it caused him temporary memory loss
• pg 265 eviction: the things that are listed are ordinary things, that anyone could have, they tell a story
• Marcus Garvey
• militant: no negotiations with whites, a black nationalist
• the rings and fighting before the speech
• vinettes or set pieces that grasp our attentions and leads us on
• picaresque (picaro), like Don Quixote, a rogue or rascal figure
• has a series of set narratives that teach the protagonist lessons
• Horatio Alger, famous for writing rags to riches stories
• this is the anti- Horatio novel- he has good intentions, but he keeps running into injustice
• "initiations into different identies" becomes cynical and mean at the end
• Rhinehart= the trickster, the doppelganger, runner, gambler, lover, preacher, etc
• 'dream novel' more like a dream than reality
• verbal sparing: playing the dozens pg 238

My verbal sparing match:

Your mamma's so fat, she sat on a rainbow and skittles popped out!

Your mamma's so fat, she's got her own zip code

• IM is based on jazz improvisations
• integrative: it pulls things together and creates unity between these things
• imagination inspires democracy pg 564
• mind= imagination "poems of our climate"
• music goes back to the origins which puts music at the bottom of our pyramid!

~

history

~pyschology~

~~~~dreams~~~~

fable, folklore, and fairytale

~~~~~~~~~mythology~~~~~~~

~~~~~~~~~~~~music~~~~~~~~~~~~

• Gilgamesh: the first book ever published (Tod Clifton)
• The Odyssey by Homer= the Cyclops (Brother Jack)
• Aeneid by Virgil: finds something original, yet has an origin
• Sibyl
• Sybil is a white woman with a fantasy about being raped by a black man, he doesn't actually rape her, he makes her think he did, then writes a note about how she was raped by Santa
• he is on a mythological quest
• the last chapter is like Revelation in the bible

MUSIC

• like 'The Merchant of Venice' ~ Shylock is evil because he doesn't like music= evil hates music

Set Pieces:

1. Battle Royal
2. True Blood: a tale of incest
3. Golden Day: the vets (brothel/asylum/bar)
4. Homer Barbie: orator, blind as a bat
5. President of the College: Bledsoe (expelled from Eden, Paradise)
6. Vet on the bus: give him advice about games
7. Emerson: the son of a liberal, he is a dogooder who was reading Freud's 'Totem and Taboo'
8. Paints: 10 black drops + white paint = 'perfect white' but really looks dirty
9. Lucius Brockway: machine with in the machine
10. electro-shock therapy: makes him loose his identity, then he realizes that knowing who Brier Rabbit is is more important than knowing his name
11. Mary: from the bible ~ at the end he has to get home to Mary, she is nurturing and motherly
12. Peter Wheatstraw: the yam seller who reminds him of home
13. Eviction: helps the brotherhood discover him, also the inventory of items is like "Man on the Dump"
14. Brotherhood: (communism) they believe in discipline, unification, science, history
15. Clifton: eulogy pg 445-9 (from the book of Judges 5:27) makes the sambo dolls dance for them, he has "fallen out of history"
16. Rhinehart: a doppleganger~ never meet him, just hear about him
17. Sybil
18. apocalypse: the end of the world

yo' mama jokes: this link gives you tons of hilarious 'yo' mama' jokes!

"spit, grit, and mother wit" comes from the word agon- agony

week 8

October 17 and 19

The Bear, by William Faulkner

• a good hunting story
• he is famous for long, meandering sentences
• Boon: one of his greatest characters

'Ode on the Grecian Urn' by John Keats

• about truth, not girls
• work of art inspired by a boy chasing a girl
• they are frozen in time, he will always chase her
• there is only one truth
• pride, honor, courage, and humility are all real
• "beauty is truth, and truth is beauty"

Important images from "Dead Man" and "The New World"

• the land mirroring the sky
• this is the only simile in the bible: Exodus 24:10:

" Under his feet was something like pavement made of sapphire, clear as the sky itself"

DEAD MAN:

• they enter the world of the dead on train #29
• fawn killed (innocent) by old and corrupt
• William Blake lays down with it and gets it's blood on him- he understands how the old world works
• they get shot through the heart while they are having a lovers quarrel
• The Indian knows more than WB because he was abducted and was taught about Homer and poetry
• based on the life of the poet William Blake
• All about the Native Americans and the relationship between them- discovered the vision and the intelligence of them
• he is an accountant from Cleveland: he goes through a metamorphosis, an initiation

Important people for test:

• William Blake
• Ralph Ellison
• Bildungsroman
• Dead Man
• far-fetched

2 great prose writers:

1. Ernest Hemingway: simple, direct, economical dialect

• paratactic: lots of things held together with the word 'and, like deep focus
• like the New Testament writing styles

2. William Faulkner: long sentences with a specific rhythm

• like the Old Testament writing styles

'energy is eternal delight' ~William Blake

Motive for Metaphor:

• Ulysses (Odysseus) and Penelope: a woman waiting for her husband
• 'Was is Ulysses? or just the warmth of the sun on her pillow?'
• Men rising up to the zenith, then going back down again
• William Blake and Wallace Stevens are alike: "if the doors of perception were cleansed, then everything appears the way it really is"
• Aldous Huxley "The Doors of Perception"

ontology: the study of being

Primal: 'Bear, Man, and God'

1. separation of the neophyte from his family
2. retreat into the forest (zone of unfarmiliarity), symbolizes death
3. need to experience death- beyond the shade
4. wild animal conducts them in what they need to do- swallowed by a creature ex) Jonah, Pinocchio, 'Invisible Man' in the basement

men's 'rights of passage are public, women's are not:

• patriotical society
• men aren't supposed to know
• women are mysterious

'Poetry is a destructive force'

week 7

October 10 and 12

WALLACE STEVENS:

• resemblances in nature: relationships, all things resemble each other
• each man resembles all other men, same for years, women, time, etc.
• ex) a river that is so calm it resembles the sky, like a mirror
• imagination is all about how things are 'like' one another

~poetry is the subject:

• a poem isn't what is written on the page- it is the relative order of experience- it gives to it, and makes it something else

Disolutionment of 10 o'clock:

• drunken sailor dreaming is a poet
• he is 'catching tigers in red weather'

animation is a way to make imagination come to life

Wallace was on a crusade with Matt Arnold, his 'right-hand man'

• 'more and more man will discover that it has to turn to the poet to provide us with what we will suffice' ~ the mind is important and needs to find what will content it
• poetry must be living, and change to what is new and modern
• the poet and the musician: "he is the poet, not like the poet"
• English majors deal with fiction, not with what is real

"What you hear is the serenade of a man that plays a blue guitar"

week 6

October 3 and 5

TEST REVIEW:

~poetry is the subject of the poem

WALLACE STEVENS:

• is a romantic:

1. venerates nature:
2. god- like powers of a poet
3. secular humanists

• metaphor poem and Autumn
• 'She was the maker'
• 'the great' with the power to create
• in the absence of God, we have ourselves
• central concern is with the interplay between reality and imagination:

1. Right and North: symbols are directional (cold, ice, snow, in the N)
2. Up and down: West= spring, East= Autumn seasonal poems-> winter, summer, Autumn and spring
3. Imagination is in the south: color- blue= imagination, tropical flowers and animals
4. Metaphor: poetry is the subject always!
5. east and west: not quite it's self but metaphors for something else
6. Spring is ambiguous, you don't have to be quite yourself.
7. the blackbird is an illusion to reality because it's always there

ALL OF THIS LEADS TO: 'Poetry is the subject of the poem'

QUESTIONS:

1. The four Disney characters that Deborah gave us? (beast, prince charming, satyr, etc.)
2. What tactic do women use to abduct men?
3. What kind of power does D.M. use to control her men?
4. What is the name of Mote's church?
5. What are the lion, the scarecrow, and the tinman looking for?
6. What the new Jesus?
7. What is the difference between the imaginative and imaginary?
8. What did L. Frank Baum think he was doing when he directed the W of O?
9. Understand all of the evolutionary forms? man to beast
10. What is 'rosebud' physically?
11. Citizen Kane uses what film technique to place equal focus on the foreground and background?
12. Daisy Miller is shown as a symbol for what country?
13. Who is 'the master'?
14. Daisy Miller's little brother can be seen as what figure?
15. Doppleganger
16. Memorize the 'Idea of Order'
17. What was the name given to Charles Kane's estate in Citizen Kane?
18. Give 3 specifics of what makes a road movie with examples
19. Imagination is forever trying to find meaning and if the imagination wants to find a connection, it will
20. What is a mater dolorosa?
21. How do the characters of "Mules and Men" and 'Idea of Order' visualize time?
22. What are the three levels of the pyramid?
23. What does DM die from on the journalistic level?
24. Who is Patty Hearst's Grandfather?
25. Where does Hazel buy his car?
26. Whose the only character in WB who is a 'true believer'?
27. If you were a myth called 'southern gothic' which text would you be embodied by?
28. What is a disturbing WIKI fact about L. Frank Baum?
29. What is the meaning of theosophy?
30. Theme of indifference in WB?
31. Name 3 places Haze is found?
32. What is the chance of a coincidence?
33. 'The man with the blue guitar' stanza 22?
34. The 'man with the blue guitar' is based on which Picazo painting?

week 5

September 26 and 28

epiphany:

1. an experience that is equivalent to an 'outer world' experience
2. Job's epiphany in the bible
3. sometimes can happen while you are sleeping
4. writing can never quite capture it

Kubla Khan

• Xanadu: represents everything that is
• 'Fragments in a dream'

deep focus: both the background and foreground are in focus

background is as important as the foreground

READING ALOUD:

• reading aloud= 'the reader becomes the book' Wallace Stevens
• Sounds are most important to the elementary students, no the words themselves
• Like the Labyrinth the creatures from her world are the same ones in her 'dream,' when she was 'carried away' to the labyrinth

ZORA:

• she didn't understand what she watched and heard, until she left it and went to college and talked about it
• "lie up a nation" culture is based upon lies (stories)

America was founded on a lie:

• Christopher Columbus
• George Washington and the cherry tree
• Paul Bunyan
• Pecos Bill
• John Henry
• movie 'Tall Tale'

Flannery O'Connor was a devoted Orthodox Catholic who wrote horrible novels

simile: like or as

metaphor: making them one: is or was

• blown banners turn into wings
• resemblance is key
• cloud watching
• a tree that looks like a man
• "remeberance of the things past" ~Shakespeare
• "the world without imagination" Wallace pg 23

THE WIZARD OF OZ:

• L. Frank Baum wanted to write the great American children's story from this land, not Europe
• He also wanted to exterminate all of the Native Americans

THEMES:

1. innocence: sings a song about lemon drops~ Dorothy is very young and innocent she doesn't know much
2. "Toto I don't think we're in Kansas anymore" is a metaphor for infarmiliarity
3. it's a road movie: like so many other American films
4. wizard isn't great at all, he is fake
5. hit the road and pick up people that are colorful and exciting to help fulfill your 'manifest destiny'
6. secular humanism: the truth is within yourself, not a divinity (nausticism)

O'Connor was against secular humanism:

• Hazel is a man who believes in something very passionately
• He is spiritual because of how strong his belief is
• In creating a church without Christ, he was really acknowledging that one existed
• He wasn't just indifferent to his spiritual welfare, he was strongly against the people who didn't care
• Flannery pities Hazel because of how passionate he is ex) pg 222
• She copied his death from Oedipus
• Also she got Motes from in the new testament when they 'mote their eyes'

For test:

• Henry James
• Flannery O'Connor
• Wallace Stevens
• Zora Neale Hurston
• Citizen Kane
• Wizard of Oz
• doppelganger

Wallace themes:

• Disolutionment of reality: when you open your door, you come out into the weather
• Disolutionment of 10 o'clock: people dreaming, asleep and imaginary
• colors: white= reality; blue= imagination
• direction: north= real; south= imagination
• the nature of poetry it's self, is poetry

Sunday Morning:

• great poem of the earth
• she has rejected the great religions, but still has the earth
• death makes life beautiful
• Shakespeare: love them more because death makes them beautiful
• Grandparents are more beautiful now than before because you look at them more carefully now that you have less time than them
• must look at things as if they were the only things in the world
• images: filled with style and language
• imagist

The Red Wheelbarrow

The Story of 2 Pears:

• still-life: objects set up to study and paint
• don't want them to look like anything but pears, nothing more

The Poems of Our Climate:

• like a haiku - gives you a vivid image

Prologues to What is Possible:

• simile: much more beautiful then Flannery O'Connor
• like a storm- being 'carried away' by his own simile
• compares 2 things then starts thinking about the 2nd thing, then the next

week 4

September 19 to 21

the male predator: 'carried away,' abducted, raped

animal-> demon lover-> beast-> prince charming
wolf-> satyr-> Heathcliff, Darcy, The Beast-> lacking something, too boring

~need to know stories, so you will know what is going to happen to you

MYTH- hero with no parents:

~Oedipus
~Dorothy
~Moses
~Oliver Twist
~Luke Skywalker
~Citizen Kane

The Wizard of Oz:

• first song: "Somewhere Over the Rainbow"
• Mr. Marvel- the man with the wagon (medicine man, trickster, confidence man)
• school teacher= wicked witch (Mrs. Gulch)
• twister 'carries her away'
• people from California become from Kansas
• black and white-> color
• in the end you find it's a dream

"poets influence us because they make us fall in love with their poems"

Flannery O'Connor

southern gothic

"the truth is always besides the point"

Sunday Morning

• Stevens liked his birds: he talks of pigeons, geese, blackbirds, etc.
• "we are imprisoned by words and language"
• the sounds of his words carry you away
• Wallace Stevens defines his poetry as an attempt to define poetry as a supreme fiction

Epiphany (Christian)

Epiphany (feeling)

~an experience so powerful that it changes the world around you

Shakespeare created the way you think, and speak. Pay attention to your thoughts and words because that is all you have

WISE BLOOD

"The few hogs nosing in the furrows looked like large spotted stones" pg 9
"a nose like a shrike's bill" pg 10
"like passages leading somewhere and she leaned halfway across the space that separated the two seats" pg 10
"He looked as if he were held by a rope caught in the middle of his back and attached to the train ceiling" pg 12
"He moved like a crow" pg 15
"women dressed like parrots" pg 15
"the knobs framed her face like dark toadstools" pg 18
"something in his throat like a sponge with an egg taste" pg 19
"he thought where he was lying was like a coffin" pg 19
"pulled her mouth down as if she wasn't any more satisfied dead than alive, as if she were going to spring up and shove the lid back and fly out and astisfy herself" pg 27
"He saw her in his sleep, terrible, like a huge bat, dart from the closing..." pg 27
"The black sky was underpinned with long silver streaks that looked like scaffolding and depth on depth behind it were thousands of stars that all seemed to be moving very slowly as if they were about some vast construction work that involved the whole order of hte universe and would take all time to complete" pg 37
"his neck was thrust forward as if he were trying to smell something that was always being drawn away" pg 37
"His cheeks were streaked with lines tht looked as if they had been painted on and had faded" pg 39
"Her eyes glittered on him like two chips of green bottle glass" pg 42
"He looked like a friendly hound dog with light mange" pg 44
"she had theseyer brown glasses and her hair was so thin it looked like ham gravy trickling over her skull" pg 47
"with his elbow out like sharp wings" pg 54
"it was like a large spread raveling and the separated threads disappeared down the dark streets" pg 55
"he was like something washed ashore on her" pg 59
"his throat got dryer and his heart began to grip him like a little ape clutching the bars of its cage" pg 60
"her eyes took everything in whole, like quicksand" pg 60
"his face had a fragile look as if it might have been broken and stuck together again, or like a gun no one knows is loaded" pg 68
"his face under the cap was like a thin picked eagle's" pg 69
"he was sitting huddled up as if he were freezing" pg 71
"they made a great clatter like two idiots clapping in church" pg 74
"he had the look of being held there, as if by an invisible hand, as if, if the hand lifted up, the figure would spring across the pool in one leap without hte expression on his face changing once" pg 84
"he hated them; just thinking about them made his face turn a chocolate purple color as if the malted milk were rising in his head" pg 90
"he only looked pressed down in that blue suit, as if inside it, the thing winding was getting tighter and tighter" pg 90
"looking at the woman as if he were looking at a wall" pg 91
"the eyes were like two clean bullet holes" pg 98
"his face was so close to the glass that it looked like a paper face pasted there" pg 103
"and it glared as if someone were aobu to insult him" pg 104
"he would find himself doing this or that, like a bird finds itself building a nest when it hasn't actually been planning to" pg 129
"his blood was rushing around like a woman who cleans up the house after the company has come" pg 134
"and then he got up and began to walk down the street as if he were led by a silent melody or by one of those whistles that only dogs hear" pg 139
"he looked like an ex-preacher turned cowboy" pg 148
"they had on brown felt hats and black town suits, and they looked like older and younger brother" pg 149
"with his head slightly forward, as if he weren't sure what he was hearing" pg 149
"various eyes looked through the back oval window at his situation, some with considerable reverance, like the boy from the zoo" pg 160
"the sky was an unpredictable surly grey like the back of an old goat" pg 173
"the umbrella kept slipping from under his arm and getting tangled in his feet, as if it meant to keep him going anywhere" pg 173

week 3

September 12, and 14

WALLACE STEVENS:

• "the man behind the myth" journalistic POV
• a parody of journalism~ can make anything happen: he makes his second wife famous even when she is a terrible singer
• journalists cannot get anything important or significant out of a an obituary
• 'carries' his wives away to Xanadu (his mythic, gothic castle) they are 'abducted' and held captive against their will
• puzzle solved by rosebud: but are we any closer to understanding Kane?
• finding the facts does lead to the myth behind it, but the journalists don't see this

animous: woman qualities projected onto a man ex) Shakespeare: 'my mistress looks nothing like the sun..."

The image of Daisy is everywhere:

• The Great Gatsby
• Citizen Kane

RAPUNZEL by The Brother's Grimm

Men are 'poor dopes':

• Winterborne
• Rapunzel' Prince
• Heathcliff

Woman waiting for her:

• 'knight in shining armor'
• 'rescuer'
• 'prince charming'
• 'xanadu'

'she sang beyond the genius of the sea'

old crow, the mother, the maiden-> hell 'weaving, weeping, and lying'

Mater Dolorosa: the sorrowing mother

biology: women used to be asexual, so their were only mothers and daughters, and they lived in harmony... until men

'Terms of endearment' is a great example of the bond between mother's and their daughters. They were happy, until men... Flin. She first lost her daughter to a man, then to death.

FAMOUS ABDUCTEES:

• Helen of Troy
• Persephone
• Europa
• Thalia
• Donahay
• Lolita
• William Randolph Hearst's Granddaughter

Movies and books

Here is a list of movies and books mentioned in class:

• "The American Adam" by Richard W. Lewis
• "Billy Budd" by Herman Melville
• "The Ugly American" by William J. Lederer, and Eugene Burdick
• "The Turn of the Screw" by Henry James
• "The Tempest" by William Shakespeare
• "The Winter's Tale" by William Shakespeare
• Home Alone
• Twin Peaks
• "The Geography of the Imagination" by Guy Davenport
• Raising Arizona
• All the Kings Men
• The Simpson's episode: 'Rosebud'
• Being John Malkovich
• Daisy Miller
• Carried Away
• American Beauty
• Six Feet Under
• Lolita
• The Natural
• "War of the Worlds" by H.G. Wells
• "Beast in the Jungle" by Henry James
• the story of 'Persephone and Hades'
• Terms of endearment
• Face off
• Deadwood
• The American
• "Wuthering Heights' by Emily Bronte
• "Pride and Prejudice" by Jane Austin
• Beauty and the Beast
• "The Raven" by Edgar Allen Poe
• "Little Red Riding Hood" by The Brother's Grimm
• Casablanca
• The labyrinth
• Tall Tale
• All about Eve
• Road Stories:
• Thelma and Louis
• Road Trip
• Harry and Tonto
• Bonnie and Clyde
• Lolita
• Badlands
• "Pilgrim's Progress" By John Bunyan
• Wizard of Oz
• Road to El Dorado
• Road to Singapore
• Road to Zanzibar
• Road to Rio
• Road to Hollywood
• Road to Utopia
• Road to Morocco
• "The Habit of the Heart" by Robert Bellah, et.
• The Departed
• After Hours Education of Henry James
• Pow Wow Highway
• "The Odyssey" by Homer
• Stranger Than Paradise
• Coffee and Cigarettes
• "The Doors of Perception" by Aldous Huxley
• "Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley
• The Fisher Kings
• "Catcher in the Rye" by J. D. Salinger
• "Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man" by James Joyce
• Rapunzel
• Cashe
• "Oliver Twist" by Charles Dickens
• "Beloved" by Tony Morrison
• "Gilgamesh"
• "Aeneid" by Virgil
• "Totem and Taboo" by Sigmund Freud
• "Julius Caesar" by Shakespeare
• Groundhog Day
• "The Raven" EAP
• Pale Fire
• "Finnegan's Wake" by James Joyce
• End Game
• My Dinner With Andre
• "The Stand" by Steven King
• "King Lear" by Shakespeare
• Bagdad Cafe
• The Sound of Music
• "The Echo Maker" by Richard Powers
• "Melmoth the Wanderer" by Charles Maturin
• "Fall of the House of Usher" by EAP
• "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" by Louis Carroll
• "Nabokov's Blues" by Kurt Johnson and Stevens L. Coates, etc.
• Stranger than Fiction
• The Woodsman
• The Professional
• The Prestige
• "Reading Lolita in Tehran" by Azar Nafisi
• 'Great Gatsby' by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• "The Renaissance" by Walter Paton
• Vertigo
• "Ash Wednesday" by T.S. Eliot

week 2

September 5, and 7

"Don't pay attention to the things that don't astound you" Wallace Stevens

The creator of the text doesn't necessarily mean anything by them. It is very easy to see something, that isn't there.

The Goths:

• old Germanic tribes
• sacked Rome
• Barbarians: uncouth, uncivilized
• middle ages
• medieval
• not classic Greek or Roman
• 1611 first recorded~ the same year as the King James Bible
• civilized word~vs~Barbarians
• desolate
• mysterious
• crude
• architectural style: all about vertical and height
• fiction the emphasizes darkness: Poe, The Monk, Frankenstein
• emphasizes the grotesque: gory, ugly, disgusting

EXAMPLES:

• Edgar Allen Poe
• Flannery O'Connor
• Nicholas Cage's film "Raising Arizona"

DAISY MILLER:

• 'trickster brother'
• flirting: "dancing around the boundaries of comfort"
• uncouth
• a flower, like in Persephone and Hades
• Italian men:
• suave
• cook/wine
• hairy
• smooth talking
• handsome
• egotistical

aesthetic: a pattern of imagry ex) Poe said that the only thing to write about was the death of a beautiful woman

14 richest people in the world:

• Santa Claus
• Richie Rich
• Daddy Worbucks
• Scrooge McDuck
• Thurston Howard III
• Willy Wonka
• Bruce Wayne
• Lex Luther
• J.R. Ewing
• Charles Montgomery Burns
• Charles Foster Kane
• Cruella Deville
• Gordon Gecko
• Gatsby

Flirtation:

• 'carried away'
• denies the ancient phenomenon of marriage and abduction
• marriage as abduction: rituals during ceremony, advantages and disadvantages, rituals after the ceremony: being carried over the threshold
• 'dancing around the boundaries of desire'

'there are some traditions that logicians hate and poets love" ~Lolita

week 1

August 29, and August 31

THE GREAT PYRAMID

journalism
~~history~~

~~~psychology~~~

~~~~~~dreams~~~~~~
Fable, folk lore and fairy tales

~~~~~~~~Mythology~~~~~~~~

America is:

• Budweiser
• suburbia
• honor
• Indians
• education
• impala 71
• oil
• vitality
• greed
• pride
• melting pot
• eagle
• freedom
• quilts
• hypocrisy
• 'young' and 'new'
• growth
• opportunity
• springs
• envy
• Americana
• cowboys
• baseball
• red, white and blue
• apple pie
• politics
• westerns
• soldiers
• land (mountains and prairies)
• rebel
• immigration
• liberty
• assimilation
• French fries
• walmart

America is about the old mixing with the new, then mixing with now, the innocent mixing with the corrupt. Completely new, but indebted to what is old.

Original: origins are old, nothing is ever completely new.

agon: a contest of force or will between antagonists to see who will be victorious

"all literature displaces myth" this is a time of realism, which is a central displacement of mythology.

Me as a pear...

If I could be any image from Wallace Stevens I would definately be a pear from "The Study of Two Pears." I would dress up as a beautiful pear: "yellow forms Composed of curves Bulging toward the base. They are touched red." It would be so fun to climb in a bowl, and take a picture of me in a pear suit!!

The River of Rivers ...

The River of Rivers in Connecticut clearly shows the line "The poetry is the subject of the poem" is true of Wallace Stevens poems. This is shown through every word of this poem. The way it is written, and the way in which he paints the beautiful pictures with his words is very evident of this.

"There is a great river this side of Stygia,
Before one comes to the first black cataracts
And the trees that lack the intelligence of trees."

This paints a beautiful picture of the land of Stygia, and how beautiful it is, before the world blinds you from it, the black cataracts. And the trees loose their intelligence, and become unromantic and stupid. This stanza is all about the poetry because it creates a picture of a magical land that is perfect. Then it goes on to explain this beautiful river:

"In the river, far this side of Stygia,
The mere flowing of the water is a gayety,
Flashing and flashing in the sun. On its banks,

No shadow walks. The river is fateful,
Like the last one. But there is no ferryman.
He could not bend against its propelling force."

The river is so strong and pure that it is untouched by humans. There isn't even a ferryman to pollute it. This beautiful river is described in such profound words like: 'the flowing is a gayety,' 'it flashes in the sun,' 'fateful,' like the last one.' How can a river be described in such terms without it being about the words and the poetry. Then in starts to describe the town:

"It is not to be seen beneath the appearances
That tell of it. The steeple at Farmington
Stands glistening and Haddam shines and sways.

It is the third commonness with light and air,
A curriculum, a vigor, a local abstraction...
Call it, once more, a river, an unnamed flowing,

Space-filled, reflecting the seasons, the folk-lore
Of each of the senses; call it, again and again,
The river that flows nowhere, like a sea."

It is a romantic town, filled with 'light and air' that is centered around the river. There is something very poetic about a town that is completely focused on a river. Something that takes away from the romance is that Haddam, Connecticut is an actual town. But perhaps giving the real town such romantic qualities does make it romantic after all.