Final assignments

Your final assignment, should you choose to accept it, is a 5-7pp. personal critical essay on a topic of your choice. I’ve written this up as a shared set of directions for both of my seminars in case seeing the other class’s essay options helps you think of something you would like to write about. You are welcome to adapt or abandon the questions I’ve written as you see fit.

Reminder: I’d love to see something from you in the way of final writing, but you will receive credit for the class whether or not you hand something in to me.

You’ll upload your assignment to Courseworks and I’ll send you a short email with comments before the end of May. I’ve included these hard deadlines because I don’t want you to feel open-ended stress about writing something for which you may not have the wherewithal, and I intend to submit the roster of Pass grades on May 22, but I’d be delighted to read anything for you in summer months if you find yourself working on a writing project of any kind and would like some feedback.

The term “personal critical essay” is possibly coined by me. It overlaps with the category called “creative nonfiction” and can be found more often on literary websites than in academic journals. These are some of its traits:

- Less formal in tone than an academic essay

- May quote a passage or passages from the reading, but won’t depend on extended close reading work or a fully developed analytic argument

- Personal thoughts and observations are welcome

- Getting your self into your voice on the page is to be desired rather than avoided

- May be structured as associative “musings” and probably won’t include conventional argument transitions

I’m going to share a few examples, though these are all at a higher level of polish and sophistication than I imagine you should shoot for if it’s your first attempt in this mode.

The first one, a lovely short piece for Electric Literature, was actually adapted from the final essay a student wrote for me when I taught the Epic Histories class in Paris – based on specific conversations we’d had about Baudelaire’s “Painter of Modern Life” and the students’ own habits and preferences, I wrote an essay question about what it’s like to visit Sephora in Paris, and got this amazing set of reflections in response: Sarah Anjum Bari on visiting Sephora under the shadow of the Arcades Project (read it here).

And I’ll give you two more links to essays written and published by advanced PhD students in our department:

Liz Bowen’s New Inquiry review of the film A Quiet Place (read it here)

Carina dell Valle Schorske’s Lit Hub essay on Gwendolyn Brooks (read it here)

Finally, an essay that we’re going to read for and talk about during the final meeting of Clarissa: See-Young Chu’s “Woven: A Refuge for Jae-In Doe: Fugues in the Key of English Major,” published in Entropy. This is an upsetting one, and you should make sure you’re fortified for it before reading, especially if reading about sexual assault is triggering for you. You can find it here.

Epic Histories options

Original due date: Monday 5/11

New due date: Monday 5/18

1. Take one of Benjamin’s short chunks of text in the Arcades Project or elsewhere and use it as the epigraph for a personal essay about how we experience history in the time of covid-19.

2. We talked about several stumbling-blocks that made it difficult for Gibbon to write his own autobiography, the two chief ones being the challenge of how to represent a bad father given the bounds of decorum and the difficulty of retroactively defending a tendency towards religious skepticism that looked far more dangerous in the light of revolution in France. If you were going to set out to write your own autobiography, what would be the chief factor that would make it hard for you to tell an honest and fully represented story?

3. We switched from live to online meetings just before we moved on from Gibbon to Benjamin. How is reading the Benjamin of the Arcades Project different from reading Decline and Fall and/or Gibbon’s autobiographies? How is our online conversation different from the face-to-face ones we had for the first half of the semester?

Clarissa options

Original due date: Friday 5/8

New due date: Friday 5/15

1. Given that the novel Clarissa is so concerned with the problem of confinement, what was it like to read Richardson’s book in conditions of quarantine? Alternately, write a letter to a close friend in which you reflect on your current situation in a fashion that includes some thoughts about Richardson’s novel.

2. We talked about the “mad papers” and looked the typography Richardson the printer was able to use to supplement the textual meanings he created by way of words. Using a mix of visual and verbal methods (this might or might not be an essay!), create a single page layout, analog or digital, that integrates some bits of Clarissa and other texts you’re currently reading into a visual representation of your current state of mind.

3. How does a Columbia literature seminar create community? Is the physical classroom space essential, or do we find ourselves able to approximate many of its virtues on Zoom? If not, why not? How would you frame the virtuality of Zoom communication in terms of eighteenth-century epistolarity?

Teaching edition

Posting around here has been sparse due to excessive other demands, so I thought I'd just give a glimpse into what I've been up to. Yesterday taught a favorite novel, Amelia Alderson Opie's Adeline Mowbray: or The Mother and Daughter. Today, another really wonderful and underrated novel, William Wells Brown's Clotel: Or, The President's Daughter. (Titling coincidence merely serendipitous - but see Franco Moretti's argument about direct and indirect articles in "Style, Inc."!)

Here's the critical reading assigned in addition to the novel for tonight's lecture (which I am still in the process of writing):

#Ann duCille, “Where in the World is William Wells Brown? Thomas Jefferson, Sally Hemings, and the DNA of African-American Literary History,” American Literary History 12:3 (2000): 443-462
#Jonathan Senchyne, “Bottles of Ink and Reams of Paper: Clotel, Racialization, and the Material Culture of Print,” in Early African American Print Culture, ed. Lara Langer Cohen and Jordan Alexander Stein (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 140-158
#Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 26 (2008): 1-14

And here's the assignment students will write for seminar this week. It is the last of four short assignments that they write as they build up to working on a final essay that will include both close reading and critical argument; it is designed to let students practice skills as well as coming to a deeper understanding of the novel itself.

Please write answers to the following questions.

1. One of the critical essays you read for this week offers this overview of critical assessments and interpretations of Clotel:

The runaway slave’s mastery of neoclassical diction, which some see as little more than a flaunting of his educational attainments, is for other readers a subversive deployment of the King’s English to tell the slave’s story. What one critic views as structural chaos, another sees as a creative appropriation of multiple forms – from the oral tradition of the slave narrative to the sentimental emplotments of women’s fiction. Where one sees only the bourgeois pretensions of the black middle class, another finds an “informed use of folklore” that offers an insider’s view of the plantation system[.] (Ann duCille, “Where in the World Is William Wells Brown? Thomas Jefferson, Sally Hemings, and the DNA of African-American Literary History,” American Literary History 12:3 [2000]: 443-462; 456)

a. Make a list of three to five of the novel’s most conspicuous formal or stylistic traits (you can include the three that duCille isolates here, only I would like you to describe them in your own words and in as factual or descriptive a manner as possible).

b. Then offer at least two possible arguments concerning the way each particular trait works in the novel. Make sure that these arguments are formulated so as to satisfy the implicit expectations we have of interpretation: not just what the trait involves or how it works, but also what it’s for or why it matters.

2. Near the end of the essay, duCille writes: “When all is said, done, and disposed of—the borrowing, overplotting, preaching, and propagandizing—the real problem with Clotel lies in the particular slippery nature of Brown’s brand of realism, which both deploys and denies the documentary impulse that drives the reading, if not the writing, of African-American literature” (458).

a. Write a paragraph or two that first paraphrases and then amplifies or illuminates this critical assertion. What does duCille have in mind when she lists borrowing, overplotting, preaching, and propagandizing as crucial elements of Clotel? Give specific examples; you can refer back to your answer to question 1 if you feel you’ve already touched on some of the relevant details.

b. What does it mean to say that this novel’s “brand of realism . . . both deploys and denies the documentary impulse”? Pick that statement apart by explaining what duCille means by “the documentary impulse” and identifying where it can be seen in Brown’s novel – three or four examples will do. Then consider what it means to make a distinction between deployment and denial in this context.

3. One obvious oddity of Brown’s novel is that though it regularly invokes real historical incidents, the timeline/chronology is distorted: there are a number of internal contradictions as well as departures from real historical chronology. What are the effects of these contradictions and anomalies? What do they tell us about the novel’s mode of representation? Offer a thesis and support it with specific examples.

4. Jonathan Senchyne uses the phrase “strategically edits” to describe what one chapter in Clotel does to and with Lydia Maria Child’s story “The Quadroons” (“Bottles of Ink and Reams of Paper: Clotel, Racialization, and the Material Culture of Print,” in Early African American Print Culture, ed. Lara Langer Cohen and Jordan Alexander Stein [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012, 140-158; 157). That phrase itself represents a kind of argument about Brown’s fictional practice. Use the phrase “strategically edits” as the jumping-off point for a fuller description of what it means and why it matters when Clotel borrows and adapts another literary text.

5. When I lecture on Clotel on Tuesday evening, I will consider some questions about the advantages and limitations of close reading as a method for getting a grasp on novels. In some ways, Clotel is very different from, say, Emma (it’s more like Paradise Lost in the sense that it would be perverse to read it without considering questions of history and politics). But it remains important, I would say, to attend closely to the novel’s narrative voice. Find a two- to four-sentence stretch that you think can fairly stand in for the novel’s narrative voice more generally. Then write a paragraph characterizing that narrative voice. What do we know about the narrator? What are the predominant traits of the narrative voice? Make sure to consider intellectual, affective (emotional) and political dimensions as well as more narrowly stylistic ones.

Week three

Happy with yesterday evening's Wordsworth lecture for LTCM - I am getting a better handle on how to use the time (I only lecture once a week, for seventy-five minutes, and the other class meeting is in smaller-group seminars taught by advanced doctoral students). "Preface to Lyrical Ballads," a few pages of John Hollander's delightful discussion of accentual-syllabic verse in English from Rhyme's Reason, some thoughts on "The Idiot Boy" and a bit of Geoffrey Hartman at the end: it was fun.

Readings:

Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads (1802): “Preface” (95-115), “The Thorn” (and Wordsworth’s note on 199-200), “We Are Seven,” “The Idiot Boy,” “Lines Written a few miles above Tintern Abbey,” “Hart-Leap Well,” “‘Strange fits of passion,’” “‘She dwelt among th’ untrodden ways,’” “‘A slumber did my spirit seal,” “Lucy Gray,” “‘Three years she grew in sun and shower’”

Geoffrey H. Hartman, Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1787-1814 (1964; Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1987), 141-162
Paul De Man, “Time and History in Wordsworth,” Diacritics 17:4 (1987): 4-17

Here is the first assignment, due in seminar this week:

1. Choose a favorite stanza of “The Thorn” and type it up in your assignment. Then read it out loud and mark in boldface where you think the stresses fall in each line.

We will talk about this in lecture Tuesday, and I’ll give you a supplementary handout, but a good deal of English poetry doesn’t fall into clear and easy feet: you don’t need to identify a specific meter or mark iambs and trochees and spondees as per our Virgil/Milton discussion last week, just start to get the feel for the rhythm of the lines.

2. How many lines are in the stanza, and what is the pattern of the rhyme scheme?

Use letters A, B, etc.: a Shakespearean sonnet in this system would be ABAB CDCD EFEF GG, while a Petrarchan sonnet would be ABBA ABBA with the last six lines – the “sestet” following the “octave” – generally following the pattern either CDECDE or CDCCDC.

3. How would you describe the diction of the poem (vocabulary, turns of phrase, habits of speech and style)? How would you describe the voice of the poem’s speaker?

4. In Wordsworth’s own note to “The Thorn,” he gives a detailed description of the character who speaks the poem. How does this affect your reading of the poem? Would the poem stand more effectively on its own without it, or does the note augment and amplify aspects of the poem as we have it? What does Hartman say about this narrator, and do you agree with his assessment? If not, why not?

5. One stanza that provoked mirth in some readers is XVII (ll. 177-187). What is inappropriate or embarrassing about the language here? Why does Wordworth court the risk of becoming ludicrous here and elsewhere in the poem? How does this relate to the defense of repetition he offers in his note to the poem?

6. Why might Hartman call “The Thorn” “Wordsworth’s most experimental poem” (140) and “one of the strangest poems in Lyrical Ballads” (146)? You can give a few quotations from his discussion or offer your own thoughts and speculations; it will be valuable if you can step outside his terminology and argument and offer your own account of why this should be so.

7. Write three to five separate assertions about “The Thorn” that you are willing to stand by. They can range from description (the kind of thing you wrote in answer to the first question above) to argument (making a case about the effects or meaning of some choice Wordsworth has made, as Hartman and De Man often do). Mark each with an A or a D depending on where you see it falling – you can mark it D/A if you feel that it falls equally under the two headings.