Ode on a Grecian URL

I have not been able to grade all of the essays this weekend--I've done 10 per day, but that still leaves me shy by some 5 or 6. (And I don't think I will be able to continue grading all night with quite the equanimity and attention you would want me to bring to your work.) They remain my first priority, and it's possible that I will be able to finish up even as soon as Monday or Tuesday afternoon.

Thank you for your continuing patience!

...and thank you, by the way, for excellent discussions on Friday morning. Both Prof. Ortiz-Robles and I were impressed by the attentiveness and insight you brought to our first encounter with John Stuart Mill.

Congratulations on surving the midterm! It is my sincere hope that you all did fabulously.

Three quick notes for you tonight:

First, remember to bring your anthologies of VICTORIAN literature to section tomorrow--we're going to kick off next week's reading by beginning John Stuart Mill in class.

Second, I wanted to highlight Melanie's especially entertaining and insightful discussion of monstrosity in Frankenstein. So many of your hebdomadals for last week were just marvelous--if I get time after grading your essays I'll try to put together a list of the best sentences and ideas from them all--but for now delectate on Melanie's masterful meditations on monstrosity:

When people use the word “monster”, the definition seems to me to be “someone or something that forgoes social convention and gives in to their basest and animalistic instincts without remorse.” To be “civilized”, humans must live by a certain standard of behavior that dictates what one can and cannot do. If one does swerve from this path, one must immediately repent of their crime and scurry back to the enfolding arms of social convention. This is what separates a man from a monster. A monster doesn’t care about social conventions, it doesn’t care about being invited to the hot parties or sipping tea with their pinky up, a monster is free from the constraints of society. A monster doesn’t do what is right, it doesn’t feel remorse for its actions, it doesn’t kill with a reason, it just thrives on its whims. This scares the living daylights out of society. Society doesn’t know how to deal with someone who seems to be above their rules, so they fear and loathe monsters.

The line between monster and man is often times relatively thin. What makes a man a monster? If a man murdered in cold blood the criminal that shot his wife and child, people may not condone his actions but they would understand, even a little. This man would not be a monster. The criminal that shot the wife and child would be considered a monster though. Both men murdered, but only one would be a monster, why? When a human is called a monster it seems to imply a loss of humanity, a loss of some touch of divinity that each person has inside. People generally want to believe in the best of others (no matter how bitter and callous life has made us). People want to believe that we all may be sinners at the core but some higher purpose or higher good keeps us from giving in to these basic instincts. When a person loses this sense of a higher purpose, be it for his or her own personal gain or just for the hell of it, they lose this spark of divinity and all that remains is the sinning shell of a once righteous, respectable individual. This is what we mean when we call a man a monster. He’s a fallen angel, a sub-human.

When Frankenstein is contemplating making a mate for his monster, he thinks “They might hate each other; the creature who already lived loathed his own deformity, and might he not conceive a greater abhorrence for it when it came before his eyes in the female form?” Mary Shelley chose to use creature in this case, as a creature can evoke pity while a monster should not. People can feel sorrow for the creation that was made so ugly that no one can look at him in peace. Creature and creation seem to denote the idea that the being in question should be valued for its very existence (“Honor all of God’s creatures”). Calling the creation a creature compares it to humans. I believe people chose to use monster instead of creature because of fear. We fear what Frankenstein’s creation was, someone longing to belong, to be loved. That is far too human for our taste. A monster is someone who was weak, chose to give in to their darkest desires. Humans fear that there is monster in all of us so we hate the term, we fear the term and we apply it to what we are scared to become. We can hate a monster in peace, but a creature reminds of what we may be so we hide behind the term monster.

Third, I wanted to invite the more obsessive among you to begin composing your sixth hebdomadal. It's not due until NEXT week, of course, but if you want to write it now you certainly may.

Hebdomadal 6: Style transplant

Now that we are moving into a study of the Victorians, we need to begin thinking about the different decisions prose writers make as regards style. Middlemarch and Frankenstein are so different not just because of their plots (or because Frankenstein at least has a plot, as some of you have suggested) but because George Eliot and Mary Shelley just write in entirely different ways.

But what are these different ways of writing? In this hebdomadal, I would like you to explore ways of defining a single author's style, and of writing in that style yourself.

Choose Mary Shelley or George Eliot or John Stuart Mill. Write a paragraph describing the style of the author you've chosen. Think about the sense the writing style gives you: is it clear and open or think and chaotic or tight and claustrophobic? How long are the sentences s/he writes? how long the paragraphs? How present is the author or speaker in the text--does the word "I" appear a lot or are the sentences mostly passive? ("I disagree with John" or "Commonly, John was disagreed with"?) What words, or types of words, come up the most frequently?

In a second paragraph, pick a paragraph from another author's work and rewrite that paragraph in the style of the author you've chosen. Thus, if you've chosen to study Mary Shelley's prose, write a paragraph from Middlemarch the way Mary Shelley would have written it. Or you can write a paragraph from the newspaper or, really, anywhere else in the style of the author you've chosen: it might be particularly fun to ape how Mill would write a Letter to the Editor if he were alive today and complaining about the police presence on State Street this weekend.

There're details below about a review session this Wednesday night.

If the practice exams these past two weeks haven't been enough, here're a few more samples to work with. (I'm trying to give both long and short sections, since I don't really know how long they will be on the actual exam. Also, since I don't know how to control indentation via HTML the poetry is all presented unindented--an exciting challenge!)

Remember, as you practice,

1. to name the speaker (if there is one) or the persons or objects being spoken about
2. to focus on contextualizing the passage within the larger text
3. to describe how the passage reflects the larger themes and arguments of the text.

You might also practice reading closely in the style of the essay: look for formal and lingual features to support an argument about the text's larger claim, the author's larger project, and periodic interests.


#1

Well hast thou said and holily dispraised
These shapings of the unregenerate mind;
Bubbles that glitter as they rise and break
On vain Philosophy's aye-babbling spring.

#2

Now, if nature be thus cautious in preserving in a state of enjoyment a being thus employed, the poet ought to profit by the lesson thus held forth to him, and ought especially to take care, that whatever passions he communicates to his reader, those passions, if his reader's mind be sound and vigorous, should always be accompanied with an overbalance of pleasure.

#3

. . . O Thou,
Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed

The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low,
Each like a corpse within its grave, until
Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow

Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth, and fill
(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air)
With living hues and odours plain and hill

#4

Such dim-conceived glories of the brain
Bring round the heart an undescribable feud;
So do these wonders a most dizzy pain,
That mingles Grecian grandeur with the rude
Wasting of old time--with a billowy main--
A sun--a shadow of a magnitude.

#5

They were just in time to see another figure standing against a pedestal near the reclining marble: a breathtaking blooming girl, whose form, not shamed by the Ariadne, was clad in Quakerish grey drapery; her long cloak, fastened at the neck, was thrown backward from her arms, and one beautiful ungloved hand pillowed her cheek, pushing somewhat backward the white beaver bonnet which made a sort of halo to her face around the simply braided dark-brown hair. She was not looking at the sculpture, probably not thinking of it: her large eyes were fixed dreamily on a streak of sunlight which fell across the floor.

#6

. . . And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.

#7

The great secret of morals is Love; or a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own. A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the cause.

#8

Young love-making--that gossamer web! Even the points it clings to--the things whence its subtle interlacings are swung--are scarcely perceptible: momentary touches of finger-tips, meetings of rays from blue and dark orbs, unfinished phrases, lightest changes of cheek and lip, faintest tremors. The web itself is made of spontaneous beliefs and indefinable joys, years of one life towards another, visions of completeness, indefinite trust.

#9

[Someone] darted forward, and with supernatural force tore me from his father, to whose knees I clung: in a transport of fury, he dashed me to the ground, and struck me violently with a stick. I could have torn him limb from limb, as the lion rends the antelope. But my heart sunk within me as with bitter sickness, and I refrained.

The Writing Center has been kind enough to let us use one of their beautiful classrooms--Helen C. White Hall 6172--this Wednesday at 8 pm for our review session. It'll work exactly like office hours: I'll be in the room from 8:00 to 9:30 answering whatever questions you bring me. These questions can be as vague as you like ("Can you go over what Prof. Ortiz-Robles said about 'Hymn to Intellectual Beauty'?") but you need to come up with them. I recommend a bit of pre-review reviewing.

To those of you who, in your first hebdomadals, strongly encouraged me to give Death Cab For Cutie a second chance: you were so right. Plans is amazing--I didn't know our country was making music like this any more. Why isn't DCFC all over the radio?

* * *

I've not yet heard any interest in a Wednesday night (8 to 9 pm) review session; it's not going to happen if I don't get at least a few positive replies by Monday.

Sid asked if there would be a possibility of having a review session next week for the midterm. The only reasonable time I have free is 8 pm on Wednesday. Would that time work for those of you who are interested in a review session? If there's any interest I'll go ahead and reserve a room for Wednesday night.

There will be at least one more topic come Thursday night--I want to see where Prof. Ortiz-Robles takes our discussion on Thursday--but here's one topic to get you bird-and-worm types started:

Topic 1 - Monstrosity

Let's think about monsters for a bit. What do we mean by "monster"? (Don't consult a dictionary--write your own definition.) How does a monster differ from a human? What do we mean when we call a human a monster--for example, if we were to call Victor Frankenstein a monster what, specifically, would we be saying?

Why do we call Frankenstein's monster a monster? He's called a number of other things in Frankenstein--Creature, Wretch, even Being. Pick one of the instances in which these terms come up--how does its use differ from "monster"? Why have we, as a culture of readers, settled on "monster" rather than on one of these other terms?

Topic 2 - Vacancy

Prof. Ortiz-Robles's reading of Frankenstein has hinged on this idea of the monster as a vacancy, an idea he connects to Shelley's "Mont Blanc." But how does this connection work--how is the monster vacant other than in the unspeakability of his features?

Read the last stanza of "Mont Blanc" (p. 723) closely: how can you divide this stanza into sections? What sorts of words appear, and in what order? How would you describe the meter and rhyme scheme? Towards what do all of these poetic features point?

Now read the monster's last words in Frankenstein (p. 1034) just as closely, even for meter and rhyme. How is the language here different from the language at the end of "Mont Blanc"? How is it similar?

The most important point here, however, is to figure out how these two passages describe vacancy. What is the poetic or ethical value of vacancy?

The consensus is that we spend tomorrow morning continuing to work on Shelley, with a particular emphasis on his "Defence"--I might try to tie in a survey of the rest of our Romantic poets as well. Please be sure to bring your Norton Anthology.

Because I have so many essays on my plate, it is probably best to make this hebdomadal optional. If you choose to write one this week,

1. don't expect a response from me for a couple weeks--my primary goal is to get your papers read;
2. you can skip a future hebdomadal of your choice, although you need to inform me at the time that you are doing so (a quick "I'm skipping this week's heb because I wrote the optional one" email will suffice);
3. alternatively, you can use this hebdomadal to erase a less successful past or future hebdomadal from your record.

Topic 1: Pleasure.

You may have noticed that one of the things Prof. Ortiz-Robles does in lecture is pick out and address the sheer delightfulness of the texts we read. This hebdomadal is to give you an opportunity to do that yourself, and to think a little bit about the pleasure that texts give us.

Pick the poem or passage from Middlemarch you like the most of all those we've read so far this semester--try to avoid things that we have marveled over in lecture or discussion. Comment on just what you find so delightful and delicious in the passage you've selected and use your answers to the following questions to put together a larger argument about the relationship of pleasure (enjoyment) and Pleasure (enlightenment).

• Why do you like this poem?
• Why is it important for a reader to like a poem?
• How does the experience of liking a poem change your reading of it? How do you read a poem differently if you don't like it?

Topic 2: Images.

Find an image that illustrates a fairly unique, identifiable object described in one of the poems or chapters of Middlemarch that we've read so far this semester. (Objects like Eolian harps or Grecian urns or specific landscapes are fair game; more common objects, like mirrors and fire grates, are not. You might consult blog posts about objects in Keats and Wordsworth.)

• How does the author describe the object? What features of the object does s/he accentuate or ignore?
• How does s/he move from description of the material object into a discussion of more theoretical, or moral, or aesthetic features?
• What value does a description of a unique, recognizable physical object add to our reading of a poem or Middlemarch chapter that we would not have had otherwise? Why, in other words, would an author include a particular landscape or artwork in his or her own artwork?

Photograph of Mont Blanc by ldanderson.

Topic 3: Stretching It.

Give an example from lecture or discussion where Prof. Ortiz-Robles or I or one of your classmates offered a reading of a poem that struck you as going too far. How can you tell that this reading was divorced from the author's intent? Is it important that our analysis fit into the author's original intent for a piece? What should be our goal as sensitive readers? Consider this common argument: If the value of a text rests entirely with the author's intent, why don't authors just lay out all their ideas in an unambiguous manifesto like Wordsworth's "Preface"? What is the point of all the artistry and uncertainty that we find in poems like "Ode on a Grecian Urn"?

Alternatively, look at a short (sonnet-length) poem that you've written--it should be a poem that you've put some care into, not a limerick you've dashed off quickly. Give an example of a correct reading of the poem and an example of a reading that goes too far. Would it be possible for a reader to see meaningful images or ideas in your poem that you didn't put there intentionally? Can you give an example? What are the limits of the reader's authority?

So, citation: everybody's favorite topic. I'll try to make what I'm looking for as clear as I can.

1. The most important thing is that you cite every specific idea, bit of information and bit of language you get from somewhere else. This does not include talking your argument over casually with a friend or formally with a writing instructor. This does include stuff that came up in lecture, in discussion, in supplementary readings (the editors' introductions to our poems, the Biographia Literaria or Keats's letters, for example), or from the internet.

   
   

2. I ask you to cite things MLA style. The rules that follow are distillations of what you can find in the MLA handbook.

   
   

3. Poems should be cited by line. Thus if you are quoting lines 2 and 3 of "Tintern Abbey," after those lines you should include, inside the sentence and inside parentheses, (2-3). That is, "again I hear / These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs" (2-3).

   Super top-secret English-geek-only rule: if you want to cite two sequential lines, you can write (2f), meaning line two and the following one. If you are citing multiple lines in a row, you can write (2ff), meaning line two and following.

   
   

4. Other things to notice: others' words are enclosed in quotation marks; an ellipsis ("...") designates elided text in the middle of a quotation; the slash mark designates line separation; punctuation and capitalization is retained.

   
   

5. Non-poetic quotations should be cited by page, but in the same way. If you're quoting from the Biographia Literaria, for example, you might write "that willing suspension of disbelief . . . which constitutes poetic faith" (478).

   
   

6. If it is not clear from the context of your paragraph whom or what you are citing, include the author's name (if you are writing on only one work by that author) or the text's title in the parentheses. Thus This is what Wordsworth means by "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" (242) or The "Rime" can be considered a true "spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" (Wordsworth, 242).

   
   

7. If you are citing (or paraphrasing) the editors' notes, the author name to use is Abrams et al. (for M. H. Abrams, the main editor of our Norton anthology, and his assistant editors). Thus: It is for reasons such as this emphasis on "the language really spoken by men" that Wordsworth's "Preface" is called "a revolutionary manifesto" (Abrams et al., 238).

   
   

8. Those of you quoting the marginalia for "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" are getting into some of the beautiful obscurantisms of the MLA style. Convention is to cite the line(s) attached to the marginal notes and to add an "n." signifying note. For example: The annotator characterizes the albatross as "one of the invisible inhabitants of this planet" (131ff n.).

   
   

9. Citing or paraphrasing one of the class lectures? The format is simple: The sublime, one of Shelley's poetic preoccupations, negotiates the difference between the political and the poetic (Ortiz-Robles, 6 October 2005).

   
   

10. If you are only working with the class texts, don't worry about having a Works Cited page. If you are also citing information you've gleaned from the internet or from other sources, please include a short bibliography. (Rules for formatting references are available on the Writing Center's writer's handbook website.)

    
    

11. If you run into anything not covered here, do the best you can. The rule of thumb is to provide enough information for your reader to be able to find the exact information you quote or paraphrase. (You're welcome to try emailing me if you want more specific citation advice, but it's not likely I'll be able to get back to you before the essay is due.)