Comps Passed

I passed comps in February, and am now preparing for the dissertation proposal. I'm not sure if I will alter this blog and continue to maintain it, or simply start a new blog. It seems this one served it's purpose, as I was most afraid of failing my comps in Literature...

Comps Sample Answer-- Changing Relations question

Modern British and American Literature

Comprehensive Exam

Sample answer

1-14-11

1)   “All human relations have shifted—those between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children. And when human relations change there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics, and literature. Let us agree to place one of these changes about the year 1910.”

Virginia Woolf

Explore Woolf’s famous declaration about the changing nature of human relations during the early twentieth century by providing examples from several works of modernist literature reflective of this shift.  Choose characters, relationships among characters, and ideas that explore in some depth one or two of the pairs mentioned (masters and servants, husbands and wives, or parents and children).

I.               Introduction

II.             Example #1 (Wallace Stevens’ Sunday Morning shows a changed relation between “man and God”

III.           Example #2 (A Raisin in the Sun shows changing family relations within the Younger’s family unit, and also the relationship or position of African Americans within the larger American society)

IV.            Example #3 (William Butler Yeats’ Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop also shows changed relation between woman and man and the catholic church and Irish people)

V.              Example #4 (O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock subverts the patriarchic order of early 2oth Century Ireland, with ‘two mothers being better’)

VI.            Example #5 (Dreiser’s Sister Carrie is ostensibly a ‘rags to riches’ story, but in many ways it deconstructs the rags to riches story, so that Carrie is not happier after she is rich, in fact she is fairly isolated by the end of the story. So a meta-narrative of the American Dream is discredited somewhat.)

VII.           Example #6 (Richard Wright’s Native Son presents a warning to white society in the microcosm of Bigger Thomas’s world about a violent outburst coming if African American’s are allowed to continue in a second class status.)

VIII.        Example #7 (E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India challenges the relationship between masters (the English) and servants (the Indians)… prefigures the coming revolt against British dominance of India.)

IX.            Example #8 (Kate Chopin’s novel is an early example of a woman challenging the social order that keeps women and particularly sexuality suppressed.)

X.              Conclusion

Comps Sample Answer-- Urban/ Rural question

Comprehensive Exam

Modern British and American Literature

Sample answer

12/ 15/ 2010

1)   From James Joyce’s Dublin to Virginia Woolf’s London, the urban landscape figures prominently into many seminal works of modernist literature. At the same time—and perhaps because of the modern emphasis on urbanity and mass culture—the natural world often takes on an ethereal or mythical quality in the hands of modern authors. Outline this urban/ rural dichotomy by discussing at least four to six major modernist works—explaining how each author deals with the city, the country and the inhabitants of both regions in varied ways.

Within most discussions of modernism there is mention of the great social changes of the period: the publication of Freud’s works in English and the increasing presence of psychoanalysis, particularly within the educated classes; the ideas of Einstein and his general theory of relativity; Nietzsche and his declarations about the irrelevance of religion and the necessity for individual strength; and, the manifold technological advances that brought forth— with the same broad swath— advances in both living conditions and advances in humanity’s ability to extinguish itself in mechanized warfare. All of the aforementioned conditions of modern existence intersect in the life of the modern city.

Many thousands migrated from rural to urban living during this period, and the act of migration itself, and the newly found living conditions, tended to isolate people from each other, from their heritage, and even from themselves.  Modernist works often show us characters who are struggling in some ghetto against institutions and mass movements to retain some sense of identity, culture, or simply to make ends meet. In contrast to this stark and lonely urban existence is the portrayal of the countryside as an idyllic and nourishing place. This urban rural dichotomy is apparent in novels, poems and drama of the period.

BC Southam in his work on T.S. Eliot’s poems expresses the idea that the Wasteland Eliot refers to is not only the physical wasteland of an industrialized modern society, but a spiritual wasteland that is the contemporary society in which the poem was composed.  The famous refrain “unreal city” is a haunting reminder of the alienation and the anonymity of life in early 20^th century London.

In Ulysses, James Joyce creates a picture of an alienated modern person— an advertising man in his middle ages who is in many ways ‘lost at sea’ . Leopold Bloom makes his way trough his own ‘unreal city’—Dear, Dirty, Dublin, and grapples with most, if not all, of the problems of existence in the modern world (spiritual, moral, physical, sexual, etc.).  Bloom’s sense of alienation is compounded by being Jewish in a society, while not openly hostile in its anti-Semitism, in some ways places Jews in a similar position to blacks in 2oth century American—relegated to invisibility.  Leopold is also cut off from his past and his future by the fact that he is the last in his family line, as his father and son have both died. In some ways, history (at least the family history) ends with Leopold. He is also cut off from his wife, and much like Homer’s hero from the Odyssey there is a need to defend his wife (Molly) from the advances of other men.

In Juno and the Paycock Sean O’Casey paints a picture of life in a Dublin tenement during the early part of the century. The family no longer works together as they might have in a rural setting. The father (Captain Boyle) doesn’t seem to work at all, and to further illustrate the emasculated man of the ghetto, the other man of the house (Johnny) is an amputee and emotionally disturbed young man. The only male character who has any real agency within the play is the English Barrister (Bentham) who eventually swindles the family and impregnates Mary out of wedlock: In Captain Boyles words, “he’s done to us the same as he’s done to Mary…” Though there is some reason to see this swindle as typically English in a time when Ireland certainly was trying to wrest itself from the English grasp. But it is perhaps a more salient point to see Bentham as a representative of the legal institutions that hold this urban world together—the laws. In a rural setting and in that distant mythic past the law is an agreement among people, and in the modern urban world the law is a tool for the rich to hold onto power over the poor.

In Ernest Hemingway’s’ the Sun Also Rises, there is a clear distinction between the freedom and pastoral existence in the countryside and the constrained and artificial lifestyle of Paris, and even Pamplona. This theme is rife in the works of Hemingway—with his love and respect for rural life in his early stories such as Father’s and Sons, in which a man meditates on the valuable things his father taught him (hunting and fishing), and ruminates on his father’s inept attempts to teach him about sex. In the end, he reconciles his feelings believing that his father teaching him about shooting was much more important than his father teaching him about, what is to most people an important topic in human relations. It implies that even important human relations pale somewhat to the beauty and freedom one may find in a venture into the country on a hunting trip. An interesting parallel presents itself in The Sun Also Rises, as Rick who cannot function sexually due to war wounds, finds comfort away from society (the city) during a fishing trip. It seems to be the only really peaceful part of the book. This symbolism is not so much a representation of Hemingway’s sexual difficulties as it is a rejection of society, relations with other people in a modern context, and an idealization of the pastoral, the countryside, and the lost life of men doing work in the open air.

Another very idyllic vision of nature is contained in Dylan Thomas’s Fern Hill in which he recalls the beautiful farm of his childhood, and, though not explicitly, he contrasts this with a modern urban existence. It is implied that he is no longer on the farm, and it seems clear that his youth has passed. The two ideas youth passing and the ‘loss of the farm’ seem conflated, as Thomas paints a picture of lost youth as being like moving away from the beautiful countryside, and so this exodus becomes the end of beauty and the end of being a part of something and of being known among one’s fellows (“prince of the apple towns”). 

In the closing scene of DH Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, Paul Morell turns and walks back toward the lights of the town, and it seems certain that he is only going back toward the city because he has lost everything and has nowhere else to go. His family and his romantic relationships are in a shambles. The city is contrasted in many places in the novel. The city is the place where his beloved older brother William dies. The town is the place where Paul’s father goes to get drunk. The town is the place where Paul encounters Clara Dawes and her husband within the confines of the factory. And the countryside is where Paul and Miriam meet, and this is the relationship that was the closest thing to love Paul knew.  Whatever Lawrence’s exact ideas were about the city and the country, there is certainly a distinct contrast in Sons and Lovers.

Richard Wright, in his powerful novel Native Son presents what may be the strongest indictment of the city as a place of corruption, greed, fear, oppression, and horror. Bigger Thomas’s character and situation is interesting partly because he seems to have almost no agency, as even the murder he commits is not essentially his idea, and is really more of an accident than a premeditated murder. Once the mistake is made, however, the wheels of the machine are turning, and it is only a matter of time before the machinery of the modern city catches and executes its “justice”.

Of course, like most important concepts the role of nature is debated in modernist works. Joseph Conrad, for example, in the Heart of Darkness shows nature as a somewhat dark and destructive force. Of course, for Conrad it is more a matter of human nature being dark and destructive.  Also, in Mrs. Dalloway, London is portrayed as being very pleasing and positive to Clarissa Dalloway. This feeling of being able to turn off negative emotions is expressed by Clarissa as she is going out to buy the flowers, and then crossing Victoria Street declares the foolishness of people, but then quickly goes on to express her love of life.  It is expressed in the general stream of Clarissa’s consciousness, and it seems a very existential sort of moment. “I don’t understand this life. I don’t really even like many of its moments, but somehow, for some unimaginable reason, I love it” is what she seems to be saying.

Perhaps, more than a renunciation of the idea that the modern urban life is deadening and alienating, Clarissa’s declaration of love of life, on that particular day in June, is meant to suggest an antidote to the malaise of modernity. Perhaps Clarissa’s solution is an expression of the need for an existential approach to a world that is senseless and brutal. There is a suicide in the book, after all. And the counterpoint to the very heaviness of Semtimu’s demise seems to be, “for there she was.” The very fact of Woolf providing a fictional character with an antidote to modern life shows the author’s own concern about the possibility of existence in the modern urban environment.

Leopold Bloom expresses a similar sentiment in the early part of Ulysses, as he goes out in the morning to the butcher’s shop. As he turns into Eccles Street, feeling bad and tired, he says to himself, “I’m here now. I’m here now.” Repeating it seems to emphasize this same compromise with modern urban existence Clarissa Dalloway has also made—an existential, almost Zen like focus on the present moment.

A note on Juno and the Paycock

Sean O'Casey's Juno and the Paycock tells the story of the downfall of the Boyle family (Jack the father, Juno the mother, Mary the Daughter, and Johnny the son) from relative poverty into destitute conditions. They live in a tenement in Dublin and are working class through and through. Near the beginning of the play, it seems as if good fortune will finally smile upon the Boyle family, as they receive news that a rich uncle has passed away and intends to leave them a sizable sum.

It turns out bad for the family as they are swindled by Bentham, a young lawyer from London, who has, in the words of Captain Jack Boyle done to us the same as he's done to Mary. He had "screwed" the family financially and Mary literally, as he has absconded leaving Mary pregnant and unmarried.

Some interesting parallels to a Doll's House, which Mary is reading at one point in the play: a woman leaving her husband is the finale of both dramas, and the idea that this is pretty radical given the time and the social conditions is evident. Perhaps, as Juno claims "two mothers'll be better than one"... tough from very different social classes, both stories present powerful argument for suffrage.

Mary's character is interested in improving herself, but she has been born into unfortunate circumstances. Page 5 stage direction states that there are "two forces working in her... one, through circumstances of her life... the other, through books..."

Captain Boyle is antagonistic toward her reading and sees it as putting on airs. At one point he even indirectly blames Mary's reading and new ideas as leading to her pregnancy. "What did the likes of her born in a tenement house, want with readin?"

There is an interesting attitude toward religion in the play, as the clergy certainly has power, but religion and god seems to be rendered impotent "agen the stupidity of men". Bentham presents himself as a theosophist and then proceeds to swindle the family. It could be a symbolic indictment of the church in Ireland. Another interesting line comes from the mother of Tancred during her son's funeral procession: "O blessed Virgin where were you when me darlin' son was riddled with bullets?"

The lines spoken by Joxer near the end of the play seem so important thematically: "The whole worlds in a terrible state of chaos." This seems a very modern idea, reminiscent of Eliot's "unreal city" and Yeats' widening gyre of history coming apart. This modern idea of history coming apart, is not a totally hopeless state in the hands of a writer with a truly modernist bent. That, I think, explains the feeling of hopefulness one may feel at the end of Juno or a Doll's house. The modernists see the end as the beginning. Things have to be wiped out before they can begin again, anew. Similar to Giambista Vico's theory of history, which Joyce drew on to write Fennigan's Wake, Juno constructs a world that needs to be torn down-- a world that by being torn down opens the door for new possibilities.

A Day with Leopold

A Day with Leopold

a play list loosely tied to James Joyce’s Ulysses

1) My Girl's a Yorkshire Girl

“This song is first associated (in the Wandering Rocks episode of Ulysses) with Blazes Boylan, who steps to the catchy refrain as he marches down the street. We hear the song later played on the pianola in Bella Cohen's brothel during the Circe episode, where it is linked with Privates Carr and Compton, two British soldiers who eventually get into an altercation with an inebriated Stephen Dedalus.

The song features two young men discussing their girls; in the course of the conversation they find out that the respective girls share similar characteristics. Inevitably it turns out they are both talking of the same girl; and to make matters worse, the lads — who have decided to pay her a visit — are greeted at the door by her husband, who chases them off with his own rendition of the chorus of the song.

Obviously the song furthers the Odyssean theme of a universal temptress, suitors, and a husband who reclaims his right to her. In this way it is a direct parallel to the main dilemma of Ulysses.”
[from CD liner notes,  contributed by Prof. Zack Bowen]

http://www.james-joyce-music.com/ulysses.html

2) I know I’m losing you—This is a recording by Rod Stewart from the 1971 album Every Picture Tells a Story. Stewart was born and raised in North London. The song was a 1966 #1 hit single by The Temptations, on Motown records. Thematically, I connected this song to Leopold’s likely feeling that his wife having slowly slipped away from him.

3) Leopold’s Morning—this is a homemade piece, with sound recording from pages 59-60 of Ulysses, and my addition of music using Apple Garageband software. I like this passage as it sets up so much of Leopold’s and Molly’s and Millie’s and Boylan’s relationship, and all in a stream of Leopold’s thoughts as he goes through his morning routine.

4) The Letter—The song was a number one hit for the Memphis group, the Boxtops in 1967. This is a live recording by Joe Cocker of Sheffield, England with his band Mad Dogs and Englishmen. The song appeared in the film and on the live Album Mad Dongs and Englishmen (1969-1971). Letters figure prominently into Leopold’s Morning (one from Millie and one from Boylan). Also, the theme of this song is desperately trying to get home to someone you love, which connects both to Leopold and to Homer’s Odysseus.

5) Blumenlied

“This is a song Bloom buys for his daughter Milly when she is taking piano lessons. Known in English as "The Flower Song," it is tied to Bloom's pen name, Henry Flower, which he uses in his clandestine correspondence with Martha Clifford. It is one of a number of flower references throughout Ulysses.”
[from CD liner notes, contributed by Prof. Zack Bowen]

6) The Rocky Road to Dublin—this is a recording of the traditional Irish ‘slip-jig’ performed by The Chieftains and The Rolling Stones. “The song is partially recited several times by Mr. Deasy in James Joyce's Ulysses. The words were written by D.K. Gavan, "The Galway Poet", for the English music hall performer Harry Clifton (1824-1872), who popularized the song.”

Wikipedia

7) Seaside Girls

“This cheerful ditty is perhaps the most frequently mentioned song in Ulysses. Milly's morning letter to Bloom erroneously refers to the song as having been written by Blazes Boylan, and Bloom associates the song with Boylan throughout much of the rest of the book. It becomes the motif of the universal temptress figures leading all men to their eventual destruction. Most of the subsequent references to the song in Ulysses are made by Bloom, who of course is never far from female temptation.”
[from CD liner notes, contributed by Prof. Zack Bowen]

8) Tales of Brave Ulysses—This is a song recorded by the group Cream. The explanation from Wikepedia makes clear the song’s thematic connection to Ulysses. “The lyrics are inspired by Homer's Odyssey, an account of the adventures undertaken by Ulysses. This can be seen in the song's reference to "naked ears ... tortured by the sirens sweetly singing," an event from Homer's epic. When interviewed on the episode of the VH1 show, Classic Albums, which featured Disraeli Gears, lyricist Martin Sharp explained that he had recently returned from Ibiza, which was the source of many of the images in the song (e.g. "tiny purple fishes run laughing through her fingers") and the general feeling of having left an idyll to return to "the hard lands of the winter"; Clapton stated in the same show that he had been independently writing a tune based on the Loving Spoonful's "Summer in the City", and when Sharp gave him the words (on the back of a bar napkin) they fit the tune.” [1](Wikipedia)

9) Finnegan’s Wake—No allusions to Ulysses here, but to Joyce’s last work. Probably no need to explain this choice!

10) Stranger in a Strange Land—The title of this song and its mood connects to how Leopold might be feeling as he wanders Dublin all day, possibly feeling, if not homeless, at least dispossessed of his home for the time being. Incidentally, Leon Russell, who recorded this song as part of his 1971 Album Shelter the People, was a part of Joe Cocker’s Mad Dog’s and Englishmen album and tour, so we have some intertextuality within this compilation!. Also, a bit of trivia is that this song contains one of the first uses by a popular musician of the Moog Synthesizer, which later became very common in pop and rock music.

11) The Croppy Boy

“One of the major musical themes running through Ulysses, this song gathers many large issues — Ireland's tortured political history, Roman Catholicism, divided loyalty, betrayal, and Christ-like self-sacrifice — into one bundle, ripe for Joyce's elaboration. The song dates to the rebellion of 1798; like their hoped-for French allies, the most ardent Irish revolutionaries wore their hair short (i.e., cropped ) in emulation of the virtuous republican Romans. Stephen Dedalus shares a similarity with the song's protagonist by failing to pray for his mother, even on her deathbed: this thought will come back to haunt him, literally, at the climax of the Circe chapter.”
[from CD liner notes, contributed by Kevin McDermott]

12) Satisfaction—This is from the Band Devo, and it just seemed to fit thematically with how Leopold might be feeling by the end of his day. The name of the Band, interestingly, is based on the concept of “Devolution”—the idea that humans are actually devolving rather than evolving.

13) Dublin—I think this is just a beautiful, moody song that happens to be set in Dublin home of the band featured here—Thin Lizzy.

14) Struggling Man—Jimmy Cliff is not normally associated with Ireland, but with Jamaica—another Island nation with a somewhat turbulent history. I certainly see Leopold Bloom, much like all moderns perhaps, as a Struggling Man.

15) Love's Old Sweet Song

“This is one of the most frequently referred to and significant musical allusions throughout Ulysses. Molly Bloom will be singing this song on her concert tour with Blazes Boylan and, indeed, the afternoon liaison between her and Blazes is ostensibly for the purpose of rehearsing the music for that concert, including this song. Bloom learns that the song will be included in the concert tour early in the morning, and it serves throughout his day and the novel Ulysses both as a leitmotif of Molly's adultery and as the theme song of her potential reconciliation with Bloom.
” [from CD liner notes, contributed by Prof. Zack Bowen]

Mrs. Dalloway

I read Mrs. Dalloway some time ago, and didn't take particularly good notes. I need to try here to summarize some very basic ideas I have about the book:

This is a modern novel, one that breaks with tradition in rendering its vision of the life of a small group of people. Like many great modern works, it is stylistically, and perhaps thematically linked to classic of western literature. Again, as with Joyce, Pound, Eliot, the famous dictum "make it new" does not mean a complete destruction of the past, but rather a reworking of classical elements in order that the tradition may continue. The dramatic structure of one 'day in the life' is much in line with Aristotle's pronouncement in his Poetics that drama take place within a 'reasonable time frame'. This is reminiscent of Joyce's one day in the life of Leopold Bloom, in Ulysses. Other things, such as the stream of consciousness style, identify this work as a modernist piece of fiction, as well as the non-linear narrative (with flash-forwards and flash-backs). Thematically many part of the story also seem distinctly modernist: the focus on time's passing, the obsessions of the characters with the past and confusion about their places in the world, or if not confusion, at least thoughtfulness.

A few Rounds with Wallace Stevens

And in this corner, the heavyweight champion of the world (in poetry, in the 20th century, in English)... okay some qualifiers, but honestly Wallace Stevens (in Hemmingwayesque parlance) is not a poet you'd want to go a few poetic rounds with... actually, interestingly I heard a story of Hemmingway and Stevens actually getting into a fist fight in Key West (supposedly Stevens broke his hand on Papa's jaw).



Some notes from The Cambridge Companion to Wallace Stevens:

(P. 1-- para 1) "... they see Stevens as a major poet because he addresses major themes: the relationship between the world and the mind, the beauty of planet earth as an end in itself, poetry (or art in general) as an affirmation of life, the problem of belief in a secular age, the need for creating a sense of nobility in a crass and violent world."

(P. 3-- para 2) "If there is a common thread throughout his work, it is that reality and our responses to it are in constant flux. We must learn to live with multiple perspectives... be at home with multiple truths... and accept uncertainty, contradiction, even chaos, as central to existence..."

(P. 4-- para 2) "More than other poets, Stevens pointedly declares that everything we believe is a fiction, that reality is an invention of the mind..."

(P. 6-- para 1) "... he creates new linguistic structures that attain integrity... valorizes perception over conception, moments of genuineness and authenticity that, in a world of constant change, lie beyond, or, one might say, above, reason."

(P. 11-- para 2) "He had come, like his father, to leave behind orthodox belief and observance. But, like William James, he realized the value of preserving some variety of religious experience in expressing what he came to consider the "divine"".

(P. 24-- para 4-5) "... "the poetry of the subject" the specific and precise details of which a poem consists, and the "true subject", which is what the poem expresses... Stevens' "true subject" is the relation of reality and the imagination..."

(P. 27-- para 1) "... the explicit purpose of many (all?) of his poems is to re-create and embody the presence of another person, "an interior paramour."

(P. 29-- para 2) (Regarding Sunday Morning) "Present pleasure set against ancient sacrifice is one of the several antitheses upon which the poem is built: life versus death, change versus stasis, the actual world versus an imaginary one." (and para 3) "She wants a religion of the earth, not of the supernatural..."

(P. 31-- para 1) "Considering different perspectives is fundamental to Stevens' way of thinking about the world."

(P. 32-- para 1) "Sunday Morning is a poem set in the present about the relations of the poet with himself and concerned with discarding the past in order to enter more fully into the present. Eliot, Pound, an Crane need both a mythic and a historical past. Stevens wants the present."

(P. 34-- para 2) (Regarding Tea at the Palaz of Hoon) "Stevens believes that there is a real world, but that we perceive it imperfectly" (Para 3)... If the relation between the individual and the world is uncertain, then any definition of the self is problematic."

Chapter 3 (pgs. 37-47)... about Stevens' long hiatus after Harmonium was published and his perceived conservative politics during 1930s (Man With Blue Guitar) figures prominently into this essay...

(P. 49-- para 2) "A high toned old Christian woman dramatizes the central insight in George Santayana's Interpretations of Poetry and Religion (1900)... poetry and religion are both human fabrications, designed to express and at least partly satisfy our longing for the ideal... poetry must step forward to provide us with a new mythology..."

Chapter 4 (pgs 48-61) explores the "supreme fiction"-- Stevens' ideas about poetry in some ways taking the place of God/ coming from the same source/ and fulfilling a vital human need...

Chapter 8 (pgs. 103-117) discusses Stevens' less obvious relationship to philosophy-- he was not an historical name dropper as were other great modern poets-- Pound, Eliot...

(P. 109-- para 3) "Much of Stevens' work is epistemological in inspiration... how can we know the external world around us..."

Chapter 9 (pgs. 118-132) Reflects on Stevens' and the importance of the seasons... makes the case for Stevens as a great pastoral modernist poet...

(P. 120-- para 2) "The poems of autumn are always of departure, dislocation, and a enveloping destitution."

(P. 122-- para 2) "The poems of winter are like those of autumn, except pushed further, and in some cases, to an extreme. "... what would it be like to be one with the earth in an absolute sense, to erase altogether the Cartesian rupture?"

(P/ 124-- para 3) "Spring-- the ensuing season offers a different delight. It signals the beginning of subjectivity reemerging... it is possible to discover a meaning in nothingness..."

(P. 127-- para 3) "Summer- the imagination's happiest and most requiting pairings with the world... find celebration in the fullness of summer..."

(P. 132-- para 1) "His 'grand poem', in which he found both frustration and placation, was also his personal refuge and self-appointed cure."

(P. 193-- para 1) "The major poetic idea in the world is and always has been the idea of God."

(P. 193-- para 2) "I am not an atheist although I do not believe today in the same god in whom I believed as a boy."