For my final post, i thought i would write about the last thing we read in class. there are some things i felt i wanted to say about the dead to anyone who reads these things besides Dr. Reed who read my paper. some of this may overlap my paper but i felt they needed to be stressed.
When it was first published, and for several decades thereafter, Dubliners was considered little more than a slight volume of naturalist fiction evoking the repressive social milieu of Dublin at the turn of the century. It was overlooked in favor of Joyce's later, highly innovative works, most notably A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Ulysses (1922), and Finnegans Wake (1939). In the ensuing years most critics have recognized that Dubliners holds a greater significance than had previously been attributed to it, and subsequent studies have examined the symbolic significance, structural unity, and autobiographical basis of the stories. Critical interest in "The Dead," in particular, has remained intense in recent decades as scholars debate the thematic importance of this final story in the volume, especially its presentation of Gabriel's spiritual awakening—a theme which likely transcends the moral and spiritual paralysis of the entire cast of Dubliners. Likewise, the story is the primary focus of this collection, which has been said to illustrate the multidimensional narrative method that would revolutionize modern literature. Overall, "The Dead" is thought the masterpiece of Joyce's most accessible collection of work.
Wednesday, May 9, 2012
the love song of J. Alfred Prufrock
Originally i was going to a paper on this for another class but i did not go through with it. i figured it would make a decent blog post so i kept the notes and put them together for this post. it is fairly long though so i apologize for that.
For Eliot, poetic representation of a powerful female presence created difficulty in embodying the male. In order to do so, Eliot avoids envisioning the female, indeed, avoids attaching gender to bodies. We can see this process clearly in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock". The poem circles around not only an unarticulated question, as all readers agree, but also an unenvisioned center, the "one" whom Prufrock addresses. The poem never visualizes the woman with whom Prufrock imagines an encounter except in fragments and in plurals -- eyes, arms, skirts - synecdoches we might well imagine as fetishistic replacements. But even these synecdochic replacements are not clearly engendered. The braceleted arms and the skirts are specifically feminine, but the faces, the hands, the voices, the eyes are not. As if to displace the central human object it does not visualize, the poem projects images of the body onto the landscape (the sky, the streets, the fog), but these images, for all their marked intimation of sexuality, also avoid the designation of gender (the muttering retreats of restless nights, the fog that rubs, licks, and lingers). The most visually precise images in the poem are those of Prufrock himself, a Prufrock carefully composed – "My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin, / My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin" -- only to be decomposed by the watching eyes of another into thin arms and legs, a balding head brought in upon a platter. Moreover, the images associated with Prufrock are themselves, as Pinkney observes, terrifyingly unstable, attributes constituting the identity of the subject at one moment only to be wielded by the objective the next, like the pin that centers his necktie and then pinions him to the wall or the arms that metamorphose into Prufrock's claws. The poem, in these various ways decomposes the body, making ambiguous its sexual identification. These scattered body parts at once imply and evade a central encounter the speaker cannot bring himself to confront, but in the pattern of their scattering they constitute the voice that Prufrock feels cannot exist in the gaze of the other
For Eliot, poetic representation of a powerful female presence created difficulty in embodying the male. In order to do so, Eliot avoids envisioning the female, indeed, avoids attaching gender to bodies. We can see this process clearly in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock". The poem circles around not only an unarticulated question, as all readers agree, but also an unenvisioned center, the "one" whom Prufrock addresses. The poem never visualizes the woman with whom Prufrock imagines an encounter except in fragments and in plurals -- eyes, arms, skirts - synecdoches we might well imagine as fetishistic replacements. But even these synecdochic replacements are not clearly engendered. The braceleted arms and the skirts are specifically feminine, but the faces, the hands, the voices, the eyes are not. As if to displace the central human object it does not visualize, the poem projects images of the body onto the landscape (the sky, the streets, the fog), but these images, for all their marked intimation of sexuality, also avoid the designation of gender (the muttering retreats of restless nights, the fog that rubs, licks, and lingers). The most visually precise images in the poem are those of Prufrock himself, a Prufrock carefully composed – "My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin, / My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin" -- only to be decomposed by the watching eyes of another into thin arms and legs, a balding head brought in upon a platter. Moreover, the images associated with Prufrock are themselves, as Pinkney observes, terrifyingly unstable, attributes constituting the identity of the subject at one moment only to be wielded by the objective the next, like the pin that centers his necktie and then pinions him to the wall or the arms that metamorphose into Prufrock's claws. The poem, in these various ways decomposes the body, making ambiguous its sexual identification. These scattered body parts at once imply and evade a central encounter the speaker cannot bring himself to confront, but in the pattern of their scattering they constitute the voice that Prufrock feels cannot exist in the gaze of the other
leda and the swan
Yeats uses Greek mythology in "Leda and the Swan" to describe the sexual nature
of the poem. Yeats uses many poetic elements and techniques to describe the
sexuality of the poem. He uses elements such as language and the structure of
the poem itself to portray to his readers a very vivid picture of the sensual
elements of this poem. Through structure and language Yeats is able to paint a
powerful sexual image to his readers without directly giving it meaning of the
poem. This image Yeats is portraying is important because it helps readers to
look beyond the surface and get the deeper more erotic meaning of "Leda and the
Swan."
yeats: the second coming
Just thought i would have a brief comment on yeats' “The Second Coming”. it is written in a very rough iambic pentameter, but the meter is so loose, and the exceptions so frequent, that it actually seems closer to free verse with frequent heavy stresses. The rhymes are likewise haphazard; apart from the two couplets with which the poem opens, there are only coincidental rhymes in the poem, such as “man” and “sun.”
woolf: A room of one's own
i was having a coversation with someone about this and i was told that i had a really good opinion and wanted to share it. this not exactly what i said but it is pretty much the same idea. Just as Woolf speaks out against traditional hierarchies in the content of her essay, so, too, does she reject standard logical argumentation in her essay's form. Woolf innovatively draws on the resources of fiction to compensate for gaps in the factual record about women and to counter the biases that infect more conventional scholarship. She writes a history of a woman's thinking about the history of thinking women: her essay is a reconstruction and a reenactment as well as an argument.
Sunday, April 15, 2012
Ruben Dario
i don't have much to say in this post. it is more of just a comment. i really liked Dario as aperson. his poetry is good but the fact that he was a diplomat and a writer really suprised me. thats such a rare thing to find. i can assume that this is because of his poetry being such a hit but this is also rare for a poet's work to hit that hard with the people in charge of a country and have them make him a diplomat. like i said, not a very big post but just something i felt like i wanted to comment on.
Amichai Jerusalem
the most powerful lines that go with this poem i would say are the last two, lines14 and 15. they read "to make us think that they are happy. to make them think that they are happy." this is a very deep thing to say about people in the middle east. it is discribing the pyrric victory that comes with living there. these people are getting the land that they have been fighting over for centuries but the amount of people who are still dying for this land make it pointless. why would someone need a country if there are no people to put in the country? the flags that each side puts up are simply a facade so that the world won't know the difference. these are a proud people who don't want the world to know that they are hurting and they would rather solve their problems on their own. Because God knows how quickly a certain country would be over there once they started asking for help.
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