Blog for Friday, November 18th

With Frederick Douglass and Harriet Beecher Stowe, we have two of the most significant American literary figures writing the way out of slavery. Yet, these two texts are very different in their literary mode, authors’ life experiences of slavery, and intended audience. For this blog, I want you to focus just on how the texts work and not discuss biography. Please write 250-300 words to make two comparisons. Each comparison should have one passage from Douglass and one from Stowe. Each comparison will do close reading work on both passages involved. This is not a preference exercise of one over the other, but an articulation of divergent approaches to the same issue. (As an example, you might pick passages that engage with gender, family/children/parents, Christianity and slavery, and, yes, animals…)

Post the blog by 10am Friday.

Frederick Douglass, retold

Here's the Funny or Die video of Frederick Douglass

Drunk History Vol. 5 w/ Will Ferrell, Don Cheadle & Zooey Deschanel from Will Ferrell

Yelping with Cormac McCarthy

Cormac McCarthy is one of the most important living American novelists, and really one of the most important American novelists of all time. More subjectively, I recommend Blood Meridian as his best. The Road was popular, but cannibals roasting babies isn't really my deal. And his novel Child of God was recommended to me by a female scholar from the Czech Republic--she told me she reads it every Christmas day. Now, I would not recommend that...

Follow this link to a humorous writer imagining if Cormac McCarthy wrote Yelp reviews.

Nimble, lithe fingers

I also wanted to draw attention to Harding Davis as part of a tradition of social reform literature and thought that focuses on industrialization's marks on women, children, and the family structure. We noted the absence of a functioning family, and in this story Hugh and the other men do have work, but in different areas than the women. Note how the men work on the fires, but the women work on the production side of the mills. As industrial machinery became increasingly self-governing and alternately powered, men disappeared from many industrial scenes. We'll take this up more on Friday.

Knickknackery

I really do like the book-ending of these objects--the soot-coated angel and the korl woman kept behind a curtain--and had hoped also to attend to the bit at the story's end where Harding Davis writes, "The gas-light wakens from the shadows here and there the objects which lie scattered through the room...homely fragments, in which lie secrets of all eternal truth and beauty. Prophetic all!"

Quaker ex Machina

Your responses to the end of Harding Davis's story have stuck with me this afternoon.
I wonder if another way to think about the abruptness and lack of details when the Quaker woman intervenes is that these factors contribute to the stunning ease with which she does something. She decides to act on behalf of someone and acts--granted, as some of you pointed out, too late for Hugh.
Any more thoughts?

Was Thoreau a cat-person?

In response to Dyani's query, you might want to check out this nifty book called Bonds of Affection: Thoreau on Dogs and Cats. Some editors combed his works and assembled the excerpts in which he talks about dogs or cats.

Perhaps we should inquire with the experts at Writers and Kitties.

"Invert your head" Movie Reviews

I'd like to hear your head-inverted movie analyses!

All you have to do is to articulate the apparent message of the film and then start thinking about how the film, in fact, says the opposite. This isn't about being clever, but about close reading Hollywood film to see how the explicit ideology is often undermined by deeper structures of ideology.

Avatar: It's about reconnecting with the local and being environmental, but the film was primarily advertised and celebrated for its digital technologies, which meant it was shot in a green screen studio and its local places are digitally invented. In other words, there's no there there.

Monday as told through LOTR...

If our class was a sort of Lord of the Rings adventure (and, really, what would be cooler than that?), we have just wandered the pastoral landscapes of the Shire, but we saw how Thoreau could feel a tremor (is this becoming Star Wars too?) of the industrial influences of Sauron creeping in via the railroad.

This is not far-fetched; recall what Treebeard said, "There was a time when Saruman would walk in my woods. But now, he has a mind of metal and wheels; and he does not care for growing things, except as far as they serve him for the moment."

So, with Rebecca Harding Davis, we're about to enter the Mines of Moria.


As you read "Life in the Iron Mills," please consider the following questions for our class discussion:

What do we learn about the narrator? What do these details signify? And what effects does the depiction of the narrator have on how the text moves the reader?

The environment: Obviously it's grim, but think about how and what Davis does with this wrecked place? How does it speak to you compared with Emerson and Thoreau's environments in which people live and may seek their soul or spirit?

Contemplate Davis' story in conversation with Thoreau's famous quip: "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation."


Please keep these questions close as you pass through Moria, and I'll meet you Monday in Mordor.

Size matters

Here's a cool bit on the culture of long, long, long, long, long fiction.

This Week's Word: Pantisocracy

Yes, Pantisocracy!

Wordsworth Vector

I've been noodling over our discussions on Emerson and Thoreau, books and thinking and walking and doing, and I wanted to send your way this pair of poems by William Wordsworth (who along with Samuel Taylor Coleridge was the Lennon and McCartney of the Romantic Era).

First is "Expostulation and Reply"

"Why, William, on that old grey stone,
Thus for the length of half a day,
Why, William, sit you thus alone,
And dream your time away?

"Where are your books?--that light bequeathed
To Beings else forlorn and blind!
Up! up! and drink the spirit breathed
From dead men to their kind.

"You look round on your Mother Earth,
As if she for no purpose bore you;
As if you were her first-born birth,
And none had lived before you!"

One morning thus, by Esthwaite lake,
When life was sweet, I knew not why,
To me my good friend Matthew spake,
And thus I made reply:

"The eye--it cannot choose but see;
We cannot bid the ear be still;
Our bodies feel, where'er they be,
Against or with our will.

"Nor less I deem that there are Powers
Which of themselves our minds impress;
That we can feed this mind of ours
In a wise passiveness.

"Think you, 'mid all this mighty sum
Of things for ever speaking,
That nothing of itself will come,
But we must still be seeking?

"--Then ask not wherefore, here, alone,
Conversing as I may,
I sit upon this old grey stone,
And dream my time away,"


Then, "The Tables Turned"

Up! up! my Friend, and quit your books;
Or surely you'll grow double:
Up! up! my Friend, and clear your looks;
Why all this toil and trouble?

The sun above the mountain's head,
A freshening lustre mellow
Through all the long green fields has spread,
His first sweet evening yellow.

Books! 'tis a dull and endless strife:
Come, hear the woodland linnet,
How sweet his music! on my life,
There's more of wisdom in it.

And hark! how blithe the throstle sings!
He, too, is no mean preacher:
Come forth into the light of things,
Let Nature be your teacher.

She has a world of ready wealth,
Our minds and hearts to bless—
Spontaneous wisdom breathed by health,
Truth breathed by cheerfulness.

One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.

Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;
Our meddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:—
We murder to dissect.

Enough of Science and of Art;
Close up those barren leaves;
Come forth, and bring with you a heart
That watches and receives.

A very bearded day in American Literary History

William Cullen Bryant was born

and

Walt Whitman politely declined an offer of marriage from Anne Gilchrist, a literary critic who fell in love with him simply by reading Leaves of Grass and included in her proposal that she was still of a suitable age to be his Baby Mama, though she may not have used that exact phrasing.

Lit Crit Bday

Today we mark the birthday of one of the great literary critics. Many know of Edward Said's genius in relation to Orientalism and more specifically to U.S./Palestine politics and representations, but I like to celebrate his first book that brilliantly focuses on what the title suggests: Beginnings. Now you know where I get my obsession with the frames of texts...