Hobbit homes

You can follow this link to Hobbit homes as a new design choice.

monkeys, typewriters, shakespeare

Do you recall the commonplace hypothetical question about whether a million monkeys in a room with a million typewriters would recreate Shakespeare's oeuvre due to the finite possibilities of our 26-letter linguistic system?

Well, they're doing it!!! But virtually...
Here's a link to a story about a computer programmer simulating monkey-hands on typewriter keyboards, and so far the program has churned out 99.99% of Shakespeare.

Banned Books Week!

Follow this link to a U.S. map of book censorship cases.
While you're at it, why not pick up a banned or formerly banned book and dip into a few pages? Maybe Joyce's Ulysses, Henry Miller, or some Harry Potter...

Like candles etherized upon a cake

Happy Birthday, T.S. Eliot!
This recent issue of The New Yorker has a great article on Eliot's personal life and its intersections with his major influences upon poetry and literary criticism.

Contemporary Captivity Narratives

Hi LitBloggers!
Thanks for bringing up all sorts of contemporary captivity narratives that captivate us, particularly in the U.S. narrative-consumer market.
Here's the Wikipedia entry for Jessica Lynch. It has several links to various articles that discuss the multiple inaccuracies that were built into her own captivity narrative mythology.

An Extra Opportunity: Sigmund Freud

In our discussion of Wigglesworth and his Day of Doom, we talked about his loss of the father and Freud's connection between religion and the power of the father and the absence of the father. If you're interested, one of Freud's most famous lectures on this topic is called "The Question of a Weltanschauung." I'm going to email you a PDF of this text--it's not long and quite readable. Next Wednesday after class, anyone who'd like to discuss it can walk over to the cafeteria for a late lunch and Freud.

This is not at all required. It is simply an opportunity to read some theoretical material and talk about it informally if you like. So, watch your email inbox for the text coming soon.

AssignmentS for Wednesday, Sept. 21

First, the blog writing: For Wednesday, we are reading Mary Rowlandson’s genre-founding autobiographical account of her captivity narrative as well as other writers’ depictions of Hannah Dustan’s captivity and escape narrative. For this blog, please write about 2-3 points of difference you discover between reading an autobiographical account and an account written by others. For example: do they use different narrative strategies? How do their powers of persuasion differ? Do they give different representations of the captors, the captives, and/or the lands through which the captives are taken? 200-300 words, posted by 11.59pm Tuesday night.

Second, to change up the class format, I want each of you to bring one passage from the texts and present a close reading analysis of it. Please pay attention to the language in the brief passage you choose and, if you choose a passage in Rowlandson pay attention to its relation to the whole text—if you choose a passage from the Dustan selections pay attention to it in comparison with the others. You are entirely free to choose any passage that catches your attention.

Kafka Up Your Mind!

That's right, reading Kafka builds your mind and not just for literary thinking!

Follow this link to a study about brain activity under the influence of K.

Here's another link to a journalism article about the study that you might find more accessible.

Dr. Johnson's Birthday

On this day in 1709, Samuel Johnson was born!
Please take careful note of the image and how he absolutely devoured and eviscerated literary text with his eyes. This intensity of reading practice is what we as English literary scholars aspire to achieve. (Perhaps without the wigs though)

Empire State of Mind includes the ENG 352 LitBloggers!

We'll be reading selections by James Fenimore Cooper soon. While in Manhattan, I snapped this picture of his one-time home at 145 Bleecker Street.

Anne Bradstreet

Today we're discussing Anne Bradstreet's poetry on the anniversary of her death. It's almost like that was planned or something...

William Bradford and Quentin Tarantino?

As we were discussing Bradford today, there was one passage we didn't get to--a passage that makes me think of Quentin Tarantino:

"Thus it pleased God to vanquish their enemies, and give them deliverance; and by His special providence so to dispose that not any one of them were either hurt, or hit, though their arrows came close by them, and on every side thme, and sundry their coats, which hung up in the barricado, were shot through and through." p.119, from Chapter X of Book I.

Does this not remind you of the scenes in Pulp Fiction, first when Jules and Vincent kill Brett, after mis-quoting a Bible verse with some language very close to Bradford's, and then they are amazingly not hit by a gun-full of close-range shots--then later in the film when they discuss this "miracle?"

Clearly the discourse of providence co-mingled with violence is still part of American/U.S. culture today.

Today's writer birthday...

Today in 1921, one of the all-time great science fiction writers was born: Stanislaw Lem. Years before the "Gaia Hypothesis," Lem wrote Solaris, a novel featuring a planet-as-single-organism.

A Project Gutenberg Passing

You can follow this link to a story about Michael Hart, the inventor of the e-book and founder of Project Gutenberg, who passed away last week.

Today: The Stono Rebellion

September 9th, 1739 was the largest slave rebellion in the colonies before the American Revolution.

In response to the uprising, colonists temporarily halted slave imports and tightened the laws regarding slaves.

There are a number of ongoing historical-literary projects to make accessible slave narratives and thereby to open up previously unknown events and ideas, such as insurrections.

Here's a link to one.

An Important Site!!

Do you like literature and kitties?

Blog for Sept. 8 and John Smith update

Hi LitBloggers!

Two items here:

1. Your Blog Assignment: Due Thursday night, Sept. 8th by 11:59pm
One of the ways we study literary and film texts is character analysis. Tambien la Lluvia (Even the Rain) provides several complex and compelling characters. For this blog, please write about Costa and Daniel as characters. You may approach them according to what you found compelling and/or problematic about them, but if you like, you might think of which ways Costa is a modern-day Casas and consider Daniel’s actions in relation to his conversation with Costa at the very end of the film. 200-300 words.

2. To get a little more out of this week and make Monday more manageable, let’s read and prepare to discuss the John Smith selections from the Anthology, pp. 55-72. That way we can focus on Bradford on Monday and talk then about Puritans and Pilgrims.

Sanitizing Mark Twain?

Follow this link to a story about the new "sanitized" edition of Huckleberry Finn. The creators argue that sanitizing the novel makes it accessible to many people who would otherwise be too uncomfortable to read it. Opponents argue that it is wrong in any case to modify a writer's text, but that in this case one of the benefits of the novel is that it does make people uncomfortable so they will think and talk about race dynamics in the U.S. past and present.

Thoughts?

First LitBlogging: Due by Sept. 5

This week we'll be working on Spanish Conquests and Encounters. In the readings for Monday's class, Columbus, de Las Casas, and de Vaca all write impressions of their contact with new places and peoples. Please select either places or peoples for your focus, and write a 200-300 word piece that puts all three writers in conversation on the topic. You might write about the similarities and differences in attitudes towards the beauty or fertility of these places across the writers, and even within their own accounts for the matter. Or, you might consider the various attitudes towards the cross-cultural contacts all of these writers not only witnessed but in which they participated.

Please post your blog writing by 11:59pm September 4th so I have a chance to read them in the morning before we meet for class.

Our Collaborative "America" List

Yesterday, you collaboratively generated a list of qualities that come to mind when asked what makes America America and Americans American. We'll use this occasionally in class to think about our texts and to expand the list as the semester proceeds. Feel free at any time to add via comments to this post.

Here's the initial version:

America: Place, Culture, People

Freedom
Patriotism
Human Bodies
Self-concerned—Insular perspective
Wealth and opulence
Elitism, Exceptionalism
Cultural superiority
Religion and Spirituality
Imperialism
Opportunity, social mobility
Cultural icons: Cowboys, etc. (Cultural fusion and/or appropriation)
Music and arts: Again, cultural fusions, appropriations, innovations
Low culture (in relation to European high, aristocratic culture)
The American Dream
(Protestant) work ethic
Celebrity culture and fame
Land-ownership
Landscape as natural resources and as symbolic of good/evil, etc.
Travel and transportation
Consumerism, Industry

Midnight in Paris-ish

September 1st, 1933: Gertrude Stein published The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.

That book describes much of the lifestyle Stein and other American writers lived in Paris, and I'm wondering if any of you have seen the latest Woody Allen movie that taps into that literary history, Midnight in Paris?