Jekyll & Hyde

You might find this introduction to the Oxford Classics edition, available on google books, very useful for revision purposes.

AN INVITATION

This afternoon some of us met to discuss the performance of George Peele's The Arraignment of Paris which we will be putting on in April, and to read through the text. Thanks to everyone who came along.

If you didn't come to the meeting but would like to perform in the play, or to help with scenery, costume design, music or any other aspect of the production, it is not too late! Simply let me know, or come along to our next meeting, which will be held on Thursday 6th January at 2pm.  Don't be shy...

Early film and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

Here's a link to a famous (well, famous-ish) silent early film adaptation of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. I hope it might interest both those of you studying the novel and those of you interested in film at the time of the modernsits. I admit I turned the volume off when I watched it - I can only take so much dramatic organ music.

Please note that the film is an adaptation - it makes changes to the plot, introducing new elements and eliminating others. Watching the film(s) is not a substitute for reading the book!

And if you are reading this on Tuesday (or Wednesday morning) remember that tomorrow (Wednesday) there will be a quiz on the novel, and a catch-up class from 2-4pm.

South Park does Great Expectations

If you need some light relief from too much Dickens and George Eliot (if there is such a thing!), you might want to watch this: 'Pip', the episode of South Park that parodies Great Expectations (both Dickens' novel and the famous 1946 film adaptation). I don't want to see the Genesis Machine appearing in any essays, though....

(Thanks to Sema for the link!)

Run-on sentences

Run-on sentences were perhaps the single most common grammatical problem I came across when marking your midterms. I'm not going to fully explain what they are and how to avoid them here. If I identifed run-ons as a problem in your writing, though, I recommend that you look at this website. It gives a simple explanation of how you can join together separate, independent clauses. (You can also try the exercises; the answers are given on the same page).  In particular, note method 3. You cannot simply join two independent clauses with a comma; instead, you need a comma and a connecting word (e.g. and, but, or, for - when for means because). So, instead of writing

Mrs. Joe is cruel to Pip, she often beats him. 

you should write

Mrs Joe is cruel to Pip, and she often beats him.

or

Mrs. Joe is cruel to Pip; she often beats him.

or

Mrs. Joe is cruel to Pip. She often beats him.

I hope this helps a little.

Chesterton on Trabb's boy

"A Dickens character hits you first on the nose and then in the waistcoat, and then in the eye and then in the waistcoat again [...] The scene in which Trabb's boy continually overtakes Pip in order to reel and stagger as at a first encounter is a thing quite within the real competence of such a character [...] The point with Dickens is that there is a rush in the boy's rushings; the writer and the reader rush with him. They start with him, they stare with him, they stagger with him [...] Trabb's boy is among other things a boy; he has a physical rapture [joy] in hurling himself like a boomerang and in bouncing to the sky like a ball. [...] It is life; it is the joy of life felt by those who have nothing else but life. It is the thing that all aristocrats have always hated and dreaded in the people. And it is the thing which poor Pip really hates and dreads in Trabb's boy."

G. K. Chesterton, snobbery, modernism and Great Expectations

G. K. Chesterton was a novelist, poet, essayist and "prince of paradox" writing in the first decades of the twentieth century. He's a favourite writer of mine. He stands in a fascinating relationship to the Modernists. Here he is on modernism's obsession with 'making it new':

The real objection to modernism is simply that it is a form of snobbishness. It is an attempt to crush a rational opponent not by reason, but by some mystery of superiority, by hinting that one is especially up to date or particularly 'in the know'. [...] The pure modernist is merely a snob; he cannot bear to be a month behind the fashion (All Things Considered).
* * *
People have fallen into a foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum, and safe. There never was anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy. It was sanity: and to be sane is more dramatic than to be mad. It is easy to be a madman; it is easy to be a heretic. It is always easy to let the age have its head; the difficult thing is to keep one's own. It is always easy to be a modernist; as it is easy to be a snob. (Orthodoxy).

Nevertheless, his own work, especially his fiction, is in some respects wonderfully experimental and strange. His ideas about heresy and orthodoxy are also very interesting to read alongside Milton's views on these subjects.

I've just read his essay on Great Expectations, which I'd recommend. You can view the whole text at Project Gutenberg, here. In the meantime, here is a little taste:

In this book for the first time the hero disappears. The hero had descended to Dickens by a long line which begins with the gods [...] but Great Expectations may be called [...] a novel without a hero. [...] I mean that it is a novel which aims chiefly at showing that the hero is unheroic.

Chesterton goes on to accept that this "must appear of course to overstate the case"- Pip is delightful, charming. But nevertheless, for Chesterton:

Most of Pip's actions are meant to show that he is not heroic. [...] The study of Pip is meant to indicate that with all his virtues Pip was a snob. [...] When he deals with Pip he sets out not to show his strength like the strength of Hercules, but to show his weakness [...]
All his books might be called Great Expectations. But the only book to which he gave the name of Great Expectations was the only book in which the expectation was never realised.

I might post a little more from Chesterton at a later date. He is excellent on the significance of Trabb's boy.

W. P. Frith's 'Derby Day'

I mentioned this painting as a fine example of Victorian realism, a subject you might want to revise for the midterms. I meant to put it here ages ago - here it finally is. Sorry for the delay. If you (double?)click on the image I think you should be able to enlarge it a little.

Great Expectations - revision/further reading

  I mentioned today in class the possibility of reading Orlick as (the textual manifestation of) Pip's unconscious - his 'Id', in Freudian terms. Here is a link to a short esssay that sets out this argument quite clearly and concisely ('Investigating Orlick as the Unconscious'). It then goes on to look at the different endings to Great Expectations, and to complicate the Freudian reading. Don't worry too much if you get lost in this part - if you haven't studied psychoanalytic theory, it's difficult to follow. The site also has some good links to other material on Dickens and the Victorian period, and on psychoanalytic literary theory.

You might also find this essay on 'Repressions in Great Exectations' interesting.

On the different endings to the novel, have a look at this site: it gives some of the arguments for and against the two versions. From here you can also reach other pages from CUNY (City University New York) on Great Expectations: these will give you a more useful, reliable guide to the novel than SparkNotes! There are pages here on Pip's sense of guilt, his 'great expectations', redemption and love, and Dickens and society (this last also includes an interesting discussion of Dickens's own position as not-quite-a-gentleman in Victorian society). These are not difficult to read, and will be useful for revision.

Great Expectations - Seminar questions

Here are the questions the last group put together for our seminar tomorrow. Sorry not to have managed to make these available before now. I've revised some of them slightly. Page numbers refer to the Penguin Popular Classics edition.

1.  How would you describe Pip’s feelings when he hears of  his sister’s death ?(255)
2. 
   How does Pip feel when he discovers the identity of his real benefactor ?(293)
3. 
   How would you interpret Magwitch’s description of Compeyson ? What does this description reveal about his notion of a gentleman ? (317)
4. 
   
   How does Estella react when Pip confesses his love to her ? And how would you describe Miss Havisham’s feelings regarding this confession of love  and Estella’s attitude toward Pip ?(330-331)
5. 
   ‘What I have done! what I have done !’She  wrung her hands ,and crushed her white hair and returned to this cry over and over again .‘What I have done! ’(367).Who do you think is speaking here? How would you describe the speaker’s feelings here ?
6. 
   As readers, are we made to feel  a degree of sympathy for Miss Havisham? If so, how? Does she justify her wrong-doings  (with regard to both Pip and Estella)?what is Pip’s reaction ?(364-365).

Try to think about some of these questions at least before tomorrow's class.

Great Expectations/More Wittgenstein

G for Gentleman

Here's a very useful resource: a collection of essays on Great Expectations that you can read online, or download (although I think you have to pay to do so).

There are a lot of other useful books and essays available on this website, including (for the Modernists - but also for anyone else interested) Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (also available on Project Gutenberg). This is - famously - one of the most difficult books of philosophy ever written, but have a look anyway. The introduction isn't (so) difficult, and the whole book is only 70 pages long. If nothing else, look at a collection of Wittgenstein quotes - not for study, just because. Take these for starters:

Wittgenstein: architect

One of the most misleading representational techniques in our language is the use of the word 'I.'

Like everything metaphysical the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of the language. 

Language is a part of our organism and no less complicated than it. 

and this is a great rule to remember in seminar discussions -

Never stay up on the barren heights of cleverness, but come down into the green valleys of silliness. 

For all his rarefied intellect, Wittgenstein knew the serious, philosophical value of silliness.

Love, Zizek and Great Expectations

Recently we looked at the different kinds of love in Great Expectations, and their consequences for those who experience them. It was a fascinating discussion (for me at least), especially as I found out more about Turkish ideas of (and words for) love.

Some of you also asked me my own views on love. I promised to put something on here. My own views probably aren't very interesting. Where they're most interesting, they are probably not my own, but second-hand. So here is a video of Slavoj Zizek on love - this seems pretty convincing to me.

Great Expectations - problems and queries

I know that Great Expectations is in many ways, and on many levels, a difficult text. Dickens's language (wonderful as it is) causes all sorts of problems for non-native and native speakers of English alike. So, to help you, and to help you help each other, I'd suggest that you post any problems you have in the 'Comments' section below. You can do this anonymously if you prefer. Other students and I can then offer help by adding a comment. We'll see if this works!

Dickens Resources

I promised to post something here relating to Dickens and the Victorian novel. Here is a list of online resources that you might find useful and reliable. Most of all, though, I'd recommend this Stanford University website, which gives a guide to Great Expectations, in sections, that you can also print. I think you might find this a very useful resource as you read the remaining chapters. It also has pdf files of the original serialisation of the novel in the review that Dickens himself edited. There are also maps, to help you understand where the characters are going and the events unfolding. These won't load on my computer for some reason, but you might have better luck (or better computing skills).

More on Dickens and the Victorians soon, I promise!

Pip enjoying his Christmas dinner

Secondary reading

I'm sure you are all familiar with this, but just in case, here is a link to the university library website. You can access a wide range of reading material here. In particular, I want to draw your attention to EBRARY. You can search here for articles and book chapters related to your study, read them online, and even print them. There are lots of interesting things here on Dickens and the nineteenth-century novel, John Milton, Modernist poetry, Beowulf, The Canterbury Tales...and pretty much anything else you are likely to study.

Especially if you are in the third or fourth year, you should be accessing this kind of secondary material - reading not only the texts themselves but also what critics and scholars have written about them. I know you have a lot of reading to do already. Reading critical studies and articles, though, will give you new insights, and make reading the primary texts - the poems, plays and novels - much more rewarding.

The image, by the way, is from the Ellesmere manuscript. This manuscript is famous for containing an illuminated (or illustrated) version of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Here you can see the knight, the first of Chaucer's pilgrims to tell his tale.

Thomas Hardy on the BBC

The BBC are currently dramatizing Thomas Hardy's novel, A Pair of Blue Eyes, for radio. You can listen to it on the BBC iPlayer website. I've only listened to the first part, but it seems quite easy to follow.

The Panopticon

In talking of Charles Dickens's preoccupation with prisons today, I mentioned the Panopticon, Jeremy Bentham's design for a new kind of penitentiary. There's a good link about it here, and you can go from that page to Bentham's writings on the subject, if you're interested. I'll try to add more later.