American Literature in the World

Tracy’s Essay 1

Aims of the discussion

• Examine the method in which structure and style contribute to the reading’s analysis of Bigger’s psyche
• Examine the complex relationships between Bigger (a poverty-stricken black man), the private investigator (the ideal American white male), and the press (which paints public portrayals)

General Introductory Themes

• Changes in narrative style
• Racial introspection, how the depiction of one man may affect the actions conducted on others
• How does one interpret what is in their control?

Topic 1: Narrative Style

• Change in narrative style from omnipresent to what seems as if viewing the world only through Bigger’s perceptions (202, 215)
  • 234 -> stream of consciousness-like in which the reader gets to step inside Bigger’s mind right before he rapes Bessie.
  • Steps away from Bigger’s mind and asks questions for the reader to ask about Bigger (240).
• The narrative style of Native Son structures thought processes by moving in and out the mind of Bigger—showcasing the individual and the group dynamics of thought.

Topic 2: The Press

• How is the Press used to show how persuasive it can be to alter public opinion?
• The press: “youre putting us in the position of having to print anything we can get about this case” (200)
  • Bigger learns more of the case via the newspaper (242-243)
• Structure in which headlines and news clippings are presented in the novel. How would novel be different if the press was not involved?

Topic 3: Bigger’s racial introspection and his thoughts on possibilities and the  Future

• He felt suddenly that he wanted something in his hand, something solid and heavy: his gun, a knife, a brick,” (144). Does this suggest that because he doesn’t hold certainty in his life that he must hold/possess a weapon for protection
• Repetition of “would” throughout the first third of the novel, but as well on page 153. This repletion consistently displays a matter-of-fact tone which implies that Bigger does not control his fate.
• Bessie stating, “You know we’s black. We can’t go just anywhere,” as she refers to if Bigger and she were to get caught after bribing the Daltons (148).

Topic 4: The Detective as a Representation of Institutionalized Racism

• Britten’s use of the N-word and utter hatred of communism.
• Introduction of P.I. Mr. Britten on page 155-157. A dominating figure that belittles Bigger with his use of “Boy” and yelling.
  • Contrast Bigger’s attitude/responses to Britten with those toward Bessie (179).
• Quickly accuses Bigger as a communist (161).
• Bigger convicts one of his intellectual and society support line of Jan (167) Britten is less accusative, but rather more methodical in his integration of Jan.
• Is the P.I in this novel the suave and heroic detective that Sam Spade may be preserved as in The Maltese Falcon?
• Slightly unrelated, but maybe speak about the snowstorm and the Chicago weather as another means in which institutionalized racism is depicted—it smothers and suffocates Bigger (199, 220 , 241).

Last Thoughts

• The bell (165): Does this short, but compact, section contribute to Bigger’s impending doom?
• The white snowstorm may be a parallel with snow/winter in The Jungle; after the storm the city continues to be all white
• The name of this chapter is named “Book Two: Flight” yet Bigger is captured, and unlike a bird which can fly away to freedom Bigger is ultimately captured.

Kristy Kim

English 012: Essay #1 Outline

Professor Dimock

16 February 2016

An Unconventional Tragic Hero?

 A Character Study of Newland Archer

What is a tragic hero?

• Classical definition: a person of noble birth with heroic or potential heroic qualities
• Is fated by some supernatural force to destruction and/or suffering
• The hero struggles against his fate, wins admiration/sympathy for engaging in cosmic conflict
• Because of the hero’s hamartia, or tragic flaw, the hero fails in his struggle against fate, hero brings about his own destruction
• Fate vs. free will—how much is pre-destined? Does fate exist? Does luck exist (good or bad)?
• Through great suffering the hero is enlightened (But is Newland ever enlightened? Compare to Countess Olenska and May Welland)
• Tragic doom is usually both public and private
• internal vs. external conflict
• Aristotle’s definition: “a man doesn’t become a hero until he can see the root of his own downfall”
• An Aristotelian tragic hero must possess 5 specific characteristics
• Flaw or error of judgment (hamartia): role of justice/revenge in judgments
• Reversal of fortune (peripeteia) brought about because of hero’s error in judgment
• Discovery/recognition of the reversal of fortune (brought by the hero’s own actions—anagnorisis) Does Newland recognize? (It is recognized by the reader)
• Excessive pride (hubris)
• Character’s fate is greater than deserved

Newland Archer:

1) person of noble birth: importance of bloodlines in New York high society

2) societal hierarchy/structure: external forces/Newland’s world

• novel begins with Newland rebelling against society superficially
• “Women ought to be free—as free as we are” (34)
• “about to ally himself with one of his own kind” (26)
• contradicting views: Newland believes that he is enlightened/progressive against a crooked society

3) Newland’s hamartia: “thinking over a pleasure to come often gave him a subtler satisfaction than its realization” (4)

– connect to the ending of the novel

– fear of rebelling against the status quo

– admires Countess Olenska for her independence but fears her fate

4) fate vs. free will

– are they “free” to do what they want? Ned Winsett connection

– bound by societal expectations/their own expectations of what they deserve

– they never see another perspective (i.e. even when traveling abroad, the bubble of New York follows)

– his reversal of fortune is ironically when he gets his wish (his marriage with May is accerlerated)—motif continues throughout novel

5) Newland never reaches actual self-actualization (both emotionally and intellectually)

– compare to Ned Winsett, the tutor, Riviere

– compare to Countess Olenska, May Welland

– unpleasantness

What is Newland’s greatest tragedy?

• That he was never able to be with Countess Olenska?
• Or that he stood in the way of his own happiness—fears, societal pressures, cowardice
• Unfulfilled potential, the flower of life: does he mourn it or just recognize his loss?

Quotes:

• “conservatives cherished it for being small and inconvenient, and thus keeping out the “new people” whom New York was beginning to dread and yet be drawn to” (3)
• “sitting down beside her broke a lily-of-the-valley from her bouquet. She sat silent, and the world lay like a sunlit valley at their feet” (20-21)
• “nothing about his betrothed pleased him more than her resolute determination to carry to its utmost limit that ritual of ignoring the “unpleasant” in which they had both been brought up” (21)
• “we need new blood and new money” (25)
• “Madame Olenska has had an unhappy life: that doesn’t make her an outcast” (33)
• “That terrifying product of the social system he belonged to and believed in, the young girl who knew nothing and expected everything” (35)
• “the experience, the versatility, the freedom of judgment, which she had been carefully trained not to possess” (36)
• “In reality they all lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world, where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs” (36)
• “untrained human nature was not frank and innocent; it was full of twists and defences of an instinctive guile. And he felt himself oppressed by this creation of factitious purity, so cunningly manufactured by a conspiracy of mothers and aunts and grandmothers and long-dead ancestresses” (37)
• “he wondered if she did not begin to see what a powerful engine it was, and how nearly it had crushed her” (61)
• “Everything may be labelled—but everybody is not”// “I suppose there’s no need to, in heaven” (63) (108)
• “they could only look out blankly at blankness” (67)
• “should have respected the feelings of New York” (72)
• “it suddenly became the Pharisaic voice of a society wholly absorbed in barricading itself against the unpleasant” (80)
• “but one can’t make over society” (91)
• “You’ll never amount to anything, any of you, till you roll up your sleeves and get right down into the muck” (102)
• “here was the life that belonged to him” (115)
• “You mustn’t think that a girl knows as little as her parents imagine. One hears and one notices–one has one’s feelings and ideas” (121)
• “Yet there was a time when Archer had had definite and rather aggressive opinions on all such problems, and when everything concerning the manners and customs of his little tribe had seemed to him fraught with world-wide significance” (149)
• “There was no use in trying to emancipate a wife who had not the dimmest notion that she was not free” (160)
• “Something he knew he had missed: the flower of life” (286)
• “What was left of the little world he had grown up in, and whose standard had bent and bound him?” (290)
• “She said she knew we were safe with you, and always would be, because once, when she asked you to, you’d given up the thing you most wanted” (293)
• “It’s more real to me here than if I went up” (298)

Sources:

http://www.csus.edu/indiv/s/santorar/engl190v/trag.hero.htm

http://www.bisd303.org/cms/lib3/WA01001636/Centricity/Domain/593/10th%20english%20Fall/C%20-%20The%20Tragic%20Play/Antigone.Medea/Definition%20of%20Tragic%20Hero.pdf

Tracy’s Outline

shortessayoutline

We began our class on Death Comes for the Archbishop by focusing on the novel’s historically suspect account of the American Southwest as the site of idyllic, even Edenic, encounters between global authority and local populations.  We turned to the generic mystification of the novel—Cather refers to it as a “narrative”—to make sense of the text’s ostensible repression of colonial violence in Southwestern history. We read the text’s generic ambiguity not as a claim to documentary or historical authenticity, but as the generation of a regional mythology particular to the Southwest.

While the interactions between the French priests and the Southwestern locals appear remarkably egalitarian, the novel marks these relations as regional contingencies, produced by the infrastructural instability and arrested rate of modernization on the Southwestern frontier. Without steady lines of global communication or even reliable forms of local transportation, global power structures like the Catholic church appear unable to reproduce themselves fully on the regional level. Within Southwestern localities, the typical vectors of colonial power invert, and we see the French bishops appealing to their own parishioners for physical protection and the legitimation of their authority.

The novel’s form, which seems organized by encounters with regional art—the Santos tradition and other religious art in particular—allowed us to talk about material culture and the transmission of regional history. We looked at the moment where Latour and Vaillant appraise a church bell and dispute the indebtedness of Spanish silverworking to Moorish craftsmanship. Latour celebrates the Moorish origins of the craft, seemingly eliding or repressing the violent history that allowed that craft to develop in Europe. Jason suggested that repressions of this kind may be endemic to the material archives on which Southwestern regional histories rely, and from which the bell issues. Material, as opposed to textual, archival objects are by nature unable to give a full account of their origins, enfolding a necessary repression of the violence that might characterize their genealogy.

We turned to how visual art both mediates Latour’s relationship to the Southwestern landscape and how it structures the novel’s representation of New Mexican locality. Latour’s aesthetic sense is both the reason for his dispatch to the Southwest—his ability to appreciate art is one of the primary reasons he’s made bishop—as well as an essential and perhaps inextricable part of his devotional practice. The revelation of the cruciform tree in the opening chapter consolidates his missionary purpose, while the construction of a cathedral, formally wedding both his aesthetic values and religious devotion, functions as the capstone achievement of his life.  We discussed how art, almost without exception, takes on a devotional function in the novel—from the santos artwork to the cloth painting ostensibly made by the Lady of Guadalupe, the kind of visual art documented by the novel produces locality as it elaborates religious belief and practice.

From there, we looked at the novel’s attention to the Southwestern landscape to understand how cross-cultural exchange functions within the context of ecological practice: specifically, how the local populations abandon an abusive priest’s draconian gardening projects after his death, and how Latour reacts to local practices which ritualize nature and natural formations. For Latour, the relationship of Southwestern populations to the landscape evokes or is implicated in a history that is not only premodern, but pre-Christian—a history that proves both threatening and inaccessible to Latour, a foreigner and a clergyman. For the Mexican and Native American populations, ecological practice allows for both the production of locality and a primary form of local control. After Friar Baltazar is executed, his church is left intact, but his garden is left to wither—suggesting, perhaps, that his abuses of power were felt most strongly in their ecological, as opposed to religious or social, effects.

Biography

Jhumpa Lahiri is an Indian-American author and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2000.

Born in London to parents from West Bengal, Lahiri’s family moved to the US when she was just two years old. After spending her childhood in Rhode Island, Lahiri attended Barnard College, where she received a B.A. in English literature. Following this, she pursued graduate coursework at Boston University, where she received a MFA in Creative Writing, a MA in Comparative Literature, and a Ph.D. in Renaissance Studies.

In 1999, Lahiri released her first major work, a short story collection titled, Interpreter of Maladies. The text went on to receive the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Following the success of her debut collection, Lahiri published novels, both of which received critical acclaim: The Namesake (2003) and Unaccustomed Earth (2008). Most recently, Lahiri published her fourth major work, titled, The Lowland.

Lahiri’s work tends to center on the Indian-American experience, often making a study of cross-culturalism across a wide range of narratives. Her work has been praised for its authentic portraits of diasporic communities, in the US and abroad.

Bibliography

Interpreter of Maladies, 1999

The Namesake, 2003

Unaccostomed Earth, 2008

The Lowland, 2013

Selected Excerpts

Interpreter of Maladies, “This Blessed House.”

Sanjeev felt knots forming at the back of his neck. He felt dizzy. He needed to lie down. He walked toward the bedroom, but stopped short when he saw Twinkle’s shoes facing him in the doorway. He thought of her slipping them on her feet. But instead of feeling irritated, as he had ever since they moved into the house together, he felt a pang of anticipation at the thought of her rushing unsteadily down the winding staircase in them, scratching the floor a bit in her path. The pang intensified as he thought of her running to the bathroom to brighten her lipstick, and eventually rushing to get people their coats, and finally rushing to the cherry-wood table when the last guest had left, to begin opening their housewarming presents. It was the same pang he used to feel before they were married, when he would hang up the phone after one of their conversations, or when he would drive back from the airport, wondering which ascending plane in the sky was hers.

The Lowland, “Brotherly Love” 2013 

Since childhood, Subhash had been cautious. His mother never had to run after him. He kept her company, watching as she cooked or sewed.

While Subhash stayed in clear view, Udayan was disappearing: even in their two-room house, when he was a boy, he hid compulsively, under the bed, behind the doors, in the crate where winter quilts were stored.

He played this game without announcing it, spontaneously vanishing, sneaking into the back garden, climbing into a tree, forcing their mother, when she called and he did not answer, to stop what she was doing. As she looked for him, as she humored him and called his name, Subhash saw the momentary panic in her face, that perhaps she would not find him.

When they were old enough, when they were permitted to leave the house, they were told not to lose sight of each other. Together they wandered down the winding lanes of the enclave, across the lowland, to the playing field, where they sometimes met up with other boys. They went to the mosque at the corner, to sit on the cool of its marble steps, listening to a football game on someone’s shortwave.

Eventually, they were allowed to leave the enclave and to enter the greater city. To board trams and buses by themselves. They began to linger outside Technicians’ Studio, where Bengali film stars spent their days. They caught sight of the actors and actresses as they emerged from their dressing rooms or stepped into waiting cars. Udayan was the one brave enough to ask them for autographs. He was blind to self-constraints, like an animal incapable of perceiving certain colors.

Interviews

In New York Magazine: “I’m the least experimental writer,” she says. “The idea of trying things just for the sake of pushing the envelope, that’s never really interested me.”

In The New Yorker: “Well, I was told many years ago, when I was studying writing at B.U., that triangles are very helpful in building a story, because the triangle is a stable thing, but it’s not a square. There’s something about it that creates drama. But I was definitely aware of a series of triangles, absolutely, and they do play out throughout [The Lowland]. I think they’re wonderful in terms of creating tension. I think so much of literature, so many novels and stories, have that tension, of two people wanting something, and what is the thing they want, or who is the person they want? It can go in so many different directions. I often think the novel is, among other things, very much about what a family is, and what a family means. Though a family can be any number of people, it has to consist of three people if you think of a family having at least two generations. So that’s another essential element I’m exploring.”

Biography

Dave Eggers is an American author, journalist, and editor who is also known for his work in philanthropy. Born in 1970, Eggers was raised in Lake Forest, Illinois before attending the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he studied journalism.

Eggers’ studies were interrupted by the loss of both of his parents within a year. His mother died of stomach cancer and his father of lung cancer. The story of how Eggers coped with their deaths while raising his younger brother, then eight years old, is the subject of his acclaimed memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.  Soon after being published in 2000, the text became a best-seller and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction.

In the years since, Eggers has published a total of nine books. What is the What, published in 2006, tells the story of one of the Lost Boys of Sudan. The book was a finalist for National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction.

In addition to his work as an author, Eggers has played an important role in the development of several independent media sites. Most notably, he founded McSweeney’s, an independent publisher based in San Francisco, which publishes the monthly magazine, The Believer.

Outside of his work as an author and publisher, Eggers has made significant contributions to non-profit organizations that encourage literary education among youth. He co-founded 826 Valencia, a nonprofit that provides writing and tutoring services to children in San Francisco.

Bibliography

Nonfiction 

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, 2000

Zeitoun, 2009

Visitants, Expected 2015

Fiction

You Shall Know Our Velocity, 2002

How We Are Hungry, 2004

What Is the What, 2006

The Wild Things, 2009

A Hologram for the King, 2012

The Circle, 2013

Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever? , 2014

Screenplays 

Away We Go, 2009

Where the Wild Things Are, 2009

Promised Land, 2012

Critical Reception

2000 New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

2001 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction finalist, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

2007 National Book Critics Circle Award (Fiction) finalist, What is the What

2010 American Book Award, Zeitoun

2012 National Book Award (Fiction) finalist, A Hologram for the King^[28]

2012 A Hologram for the King named in the 10 Best Books of 2012 list by editors of The New York Times Book Review^[29]

2012 New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2012 List (Fiction & Poetry), A Hologram for the King

2012 New York Times 10 Best Books of 2012 list (Fiction, chosen by the editors of The New York Times Book Review), A Hologram for the King

Selected Excerpts

The Circle:

After the interview, at her desk, Mae scolded herself. What kind of person was she? She was so ashamed. She’d been doing the bare minimum. She disgusted herself and felt for Annie. Surely Annie had been hearing about her deadbeat friend Mae, who took this gift, this coveted job at the Circle — a company that had, at her desperate request, insured her parents! Had saved them from familial catastrophe! — and had been skating through. Damn it, Mae, she thought. Be a person of some value to the world.

…

Mae looked at the time. It was 6 o’clock. She had plenty of hours to improve, there and then, so she embarked on a flurry of activity, sending 4 zings and 32 comments and 88 smiles. In an hour, her PartiRank rose to 7,288. Breaking 7,000 was more difficult, but by 8, after joining and posting in 11 discussion groups, sending another 12 zings, one of them rated in the top 5,000 globally for that hour, and signing up for 67 more feeds, she’d done it. She was at 6,872, and she turned to her InnerCircle social feed. She was a few hundred posts behind, and she made her way through, replying to 70 or so messages, RSVPing to 11 events on campus, signing nine petitions and providing comments and constructive criticism on four products currently in beta. By 10:16, her rank was 5,342, and again, the plateau — this time at 5,000 — was hard to overcome. She wrote a series of zings about a new Circle service, allowing account holders to know whenever their name was mentioned in any messages sent from anyone else, and one of the zings, her seventh on the subject, caught fire and was rezinged 2,904 times, and this brought her PartiRank up to 3,887.

She felt a profound sense of accomplishment and possibility that was accompanied, in short order, by a near-complete sense of exhaustion. It was almost midnight, and she needed sleep. It was too late to go all the way home, so she checked the dorm availability, reserved one, got her access code, walked across campus and into HomeTown.

When she closed the door to her room, she felt like a fool for not taking advantage of the dorms sooner. The room was immaculate, awash in silver fixtures and blond woods, the floors warm from radiant heat, the sheets and pillowcases so white and crisp they crackled when touched. The mattress, explained a card next to the bed, was organic, made not with springs or foam but instead a new fiber that Mae found was both firmer and more pliant — superior to any bed she’d ever known. She pulled the blanket, cloud-white and full of down, around her.

But she couldn’t sleep. Now, thinking about how much better she could do, she logged on again, this time on her tablet, and pledged to work till 2 in the morning. She was determined to break 3,000. And she did so, though it was 3:19 a.m. when it happened. Finally, her mind aglow but knowing she needed rest, she tucked herself in and turned off the lights.

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

I did not know that the last time I saw my father would be the last time I would see my father. He was in intensive care. I had come up from college to visit, but because it had been so soon after his diagnosis, I didn’t make much of it. He was expected to undergo some tests and treatment, get his strength back, and return home in a few days. I had come to the hospital with my mother, Beth, and Toph. The door to my father’s room was closed. We pushed it open, heavy, and inside he was smoking. In intensive care. The windows were closed and the haze was thick, the stench unbelievable, and in the midst of it all was my father, looking happy to see us.

No one talked much. We stayed for maybe ten minutes, huddled on the far side of the room, attempting as best we could to stay away from the smoke. Toph was hiding behind me. Two green lights on the machine next to my father blinked, alternately, on, off, on, off. A red light stayed steady, red.

My father was reclining on the bed, propped against two pillows. His legs were crossed casually, and he had his hands clasped behind his head. He was grinning like he had won the biggest award there ever was.

After a night in the emergency room and after a day in intensive care, she is in a good room, a huge room with huge windows.

“This is the death room,” Beth says. “Look, they give you all this space, room for relatives, room to sleep…”

There is another bed in the room, a big couch that folds out, and we are all in the bed, fully dressed. I forgot to change my pants before we left the house, and the stain from the spill is brown, with black edges. It is late. Mom is asleep. Toph is asleep. The foldout bed is not comfortable. The metal bars under the mattress dig.

A light above her bed is kept on, creating a much-too-dramatic amber halo around her head. A machine behind her bed looks like an accordion, but is light blue. It is vertical and stretches and compresses, making a sucking sound. There is that sound, and the sound of her breathing, and the humming from other machines, and the humming from the heater, and Toph’s breathing, close and constant. Mom’s breaths are desperate, irregular.

SANDBURG’S CROWDS

Intro: Sandburg is fascinated by crowds/masses of people, and they way they make up a city.

Thesis: Sandburg uses each crowd he describes in order to emphasize a different facet of the Chicago community.

By ethnicity

Fish Crier (pg 7)—Jewish man – here he is singular, but he represents the mass of Jewish fish sellers—happy in his own ignorant way

The Shovel Man (pg 7)—Juxtaposition of shovel man working for almost no money to the dark-eyed woman who believes that the immigration to America was good for them

We need someone to love us to be worth anything in the world – either a group or an individual person that gives us affirmation

Picnic Boat (pg 8)—optimistic view of immigrants

Happiness (pg 8)—Crowd of Hungarians – Hungarians are a bit of red herring – they are indistinguishable; if you like somebody, you refer to them as a single person, but Sandburg gives this Hungarian crowd a distinguishing factor

Population Drifts (pg 13)—life beats the romanticism out of you: is it worth it?

Main points Sandburg brings up: Disillusionment with the American dream/immigration; optimistic view of happiness in profession and ethnic community

By labor

Halsted Street Car (pg 4)—calling upon cartoonists because the faces are almost caricatures of helpless workers

Working Girls (pg 14)—juxtaposition of romanticism; certain pride in the knowledge that accompanies being a “working girl”

To Certain Journeymen (pg 17)—all are equal in death

Ice Handler (pg 19-20)—repetitive and almost obnoxious facet of working in the ice industry is that the ice will melt—you will have good days and bad days on the job, and you will feel worthless, but you are not

Main points: Individuals represent the workers of their profession as a whole; you will toil but you have certain knowledge of the city and of the real world that you should take pride in

By the generalized “masses” in Chicago (labor + ethnicity)

Chicago (pg 1)—Sandburg is biased, proud of his city

Masses (pg 2)—poor don’t have to show off like the epic nature does, but it’s a beautiful mass all the same

The Walking Man of Rodin (pg 6)—The working men are the legs of Chicago and they’re the foundation of Chicago: the head is the faces, politicians and rich upper crust but you don’t really need that, you need the poor manual labor. Brings out dignity of not thinking, a non-intellectual life

Fellow Citizens (pg 20-21)—happiness of mayor and millionaire, who think they know happiness vs. the true happiness of an accordion player

Bronzes (pg 25)—Move from passive to active – as if they could get up and go tomorrow

Not such a bad thing for them to be bronzes either – we do need monuments – we need something that will last and will not fail like the rest of us

Skyscraper (pg 29-31)—idea of enduring monument

Main points brought up: Chicago is a city of endurance, exemplified by the monuments and skyscrapers—the poor people who you don’t give a second thought to actually shape the city

Conclusion: do the crowds shape Chicago, or does Chicago shape the crowds?

Answer: the crowds shape Chicago