More Milton resources

Here on google books is a good introduction to Milton. Have a look! Again, don't worry if some of it is difficult. You are not expected to read this for the exam. 

So, no more suggestions that I've forgotten about you!

'L'Allegro' and other Milton poems

I'm not sure if I've posted this link here before, but it's probably worth posting it again if I have. This is a site dedicated to John Milton. I think it will be very useful for those of you taking the 'Readings in Milton' course. The link I've posted here goes to the 'L'Allegro' page (someone emailed me asking for more material on 'L'Allegro'), but all of Milton's major poems are here.

Anti-Fraternal Literature

 You should be prepared to give a very brief definition of anti-fraternal literature in your midterm exam. Someone emailed me to say they are not sure about it.  I hope this will help...

Anti-fraternal literature was written from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries. It was written against the friars, monks and other "religious" men and women who were supposed to be living lives of purity and holiness, but in reality were often living lives of  luxury at the expense of the poor. Often anti-fraternal literature would make fun of these hypocrites. Sometimes it would attack them directly.

The Pardoner



Interestingly, friars (like Grendel, hundreds of years before!) were often described as 'sons of Cain'. Chaucer, Gower, Langland and John Wyclif (who we discussed briefly in class) were all significant writers of anti-fraternal literature.  Remember, though - Chaucer could also present very positive images of religious men. For a contrast with the images of the Pardoner, the Summoner, and the Friar, look at the image of the 'holy-minded', honourable Parson in the 'General Prologue'.

You can find a review of a book on this subject here (appropriately for us, in a journal called 'COMITATUS'!) This review is short (one and a half pages) but quite difficult, especially at the start. Don't worry if you only understand a little. If you are really interested in this subject, you can have a look at this article on JSTOR, which you can access through the university library. Again, this is difficult, so don't worry if you have problems with it. You don't need to read it for the exam!

Beowulf, Heroic Culture and Christianity

I had an email from a student asking about the relationship between Germanic heroic culture and Christianity in Beowulf. I've copied my reply to him below - I hope this will be useful for some of you.  

The relationship between Germanic heroic culture and Christianity in the poem is a difficult subject. I don't expect you to have an answer to this problem in your midterms! You should know that the problem exists, however.

Much of the poem seems to be clearly Germanic, heroic, "pagan". For example, the values celebrated in the poem are those of the warrior, and of kinship, and of a life after death achieved through fame on earth for heroic deeds, rather than in a Christian heaven.  Yet the poem also contains allusions to the story of Cain and Abel and a great flood caused by God - both stories from the Bible. On the other hand, if it is a Christian poem, why is there no clear reference to Christ anywhere?

There are basically two theories. One is that the poem is fundamentally an old Germanic, heroic, "pagan" poem that a Christian scribe (probably a monk) tried to make "Christian"  as he wrote it down. People who support this theory usually argue that he didn't do a very good job! For them, Beowulf would be a better, more unified poem if the Christian elements had not been added.  This theory was first argued by German critics in the nineteenth century.

The other theory is that the poem is more deeply, truly Christian. According to this theory, the poem may have its origins in Germanic heroic culture, but it is full of Christian ideas and references. Christian elements are fundamental to its structure and meaning, and the Germanic, pagan setting is more 'decorative'. This theory was put forward by in the middle of the twentieth century.

Now, the most popular view of Beowulf tries to find a compromise between these two theories. The poem itself is seen as an attempt to bring together  and assimilate Christian and pagan views.

There is an interesting article on this question here. This is a DIFFICULT article, but you might find the first four paragraphs helpful. PLEASE DON'T WORRY if you don't understand it all, though. After the first four paragraphs the author gives his own answer to the question - this is even more complicated. I'd suggest you ignore that part!

As I said, I don't expect you to have an answer to this problem!  You should simply be aware of it and able to give a couple of examples of why it is difficult to answer.

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."

H.D. (again), Ezra Pound and Imagism

Here is a link to the full text of David Ayers' short chapter on 'H.D., Ezra Pound and Imagism', which appears in his book Modernism: An Introduction. I hope some of you might find it useful in preparing for the midterms.

Here too is (another) link to an online version of Some Imagist Poets of 1915. Go on, have a look at one or two new poems. I promise it won't kill you.

H.D.'s 'Sea Rose', & other Imagist poems

Here, gathered together in one place, are three short critical readings of 'Sea Rose', all taken from longer studies. This is a really useful resource, and STRONGLY RECOMMENDED! After yesterday's conversation about further reading, here is a really easy way to access some good secondary material.

And to help you in reading a little wider, here are a few more poems from Some Imagist Poets (1915). These are by Richard Aldington (H.D.'s husband).

A GIRL

You were that clear Sicilian fluting
That pains our thought even now.
You were the notes
Of cold fantastic grief
Some few found beautiful.

NEW LOVE

She has new leaves
After her dead flowers,
Like the little almond-tree
Which the frost hurt.


OCTOBER

The beech-leaves are silver
For lack of the tree's blood.

At your kiss my lips
Become like the autumn beech-leaves.

And here is another from the same colleection, this time by D. H. Lawrence (you may remember looking at one of Lawrence's poems, 'Hummingbird', at the start of the course):

GREEN

The sky was apple-green,
The sky was green wine held up in the sun,
The moon was a golden petal between.

She opened her eyes, and green
They shone, clear like flowers undone,
For the first time, now for the first time seen.

The myth of Orpheus

Here is a link to a short summary of the myth as Milton would have known it. The main source for the myth is Book Ten of Ovid's Metamorphoses. You can find a prose translation into English here, with explanatory notes.

There are many, many representations and re-tellings of the myth of Orpheus in western art. One that might interest any of you with a passion for cinema is Jean Cocteau's film Orphée.  If you ever get the chance to see it, do! It was released in 1950, but a good case could be made for seeing it as fundamentally a 'modernist' work.

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.

'Lycidas'

Here's a link to an introductory guide to 'Lycidas' on Google Books. Unfortunately only a selection of the pages are available, but I think these should prove helpful. I'll post more links to Milton material shortly.

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.

A Language of Concrete Things

 H.D.'s draft of 'Helios'

Following on from our discussions last week - you can find more on Hulme, Imagism, and the philosophy of language (Wittgenstein, Russell, Ogden) in the following, which you can access via EBRARY (which you can access at the university library webpage):

Thacker, Andrew (2006). "A Language of Concrete Things: Hulme, Imagism and Modernist Theories of Language" in T.E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism (Abingdon, Oxon: Ashgate), pp. 39-55

Thacker also discusses the influence of the French philosopher Henri Bergson on T.E. Hulme, and Georg Lukács' critique of commodification, published in 1922 (for those of you interested in the Frankfurt School).

I'd also recommend having a look at Project Gutenberg. You can read or download for free the Imagist anthologies there, including Some Imagist Poets (1915), which has a very short, very informative 'Preface' by the poets who contributed (They argue for a "poetry that is hard and clear, never blurred nor indefinite"). You can also find at least two of H. D.'s poetry collections, Hymen and Sea Garden, to read online or download for free. H.D.'s poems have the virtue of mostly being very short - in fact, this is true of virtually all Imagist poems.

I also found at Project Gutenberg T.S. Eliot's essay on Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry. This is a key text for understanding how Pound and the Imagists influenced Eliot.  Eliot writes there:

"Pound's verse is always definite and concrete, because he has always a definite emotion behind it [...] no word is ever chosen merely for the tinkle".

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.

Modernism and British Poetry - extra session

Just to remind you that next week we will catch up on the session we missed last week. So, on Wednesday 11 November our session will run from 11am - 2pm, rather than finishing at 1pm. Lots of time to talk about the Imagists, H.D., Wittgenstein and the philosophy of language!


"Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language."
                                                            Wittgenstein

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!

Vorticism

Those of you working on Blast might find this website useful. It focuses mostly on the visual arts side, but there are helpful descriptions of the movement, key figures, and key contexts, too.

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

Nazim Hikmet and Ezra Pound - update

My splendid friend Liz, who teaches at Edinburgh University, has sent me a copy of the article I mentioned (see previous post). I haven't read it yet, so I can't tell you if it is any good. If you want to see for yourselves, though, please send me an email, and I'll get a copy to you.

Gat-toothed was she...



The Wife of Bath

While talking today about the description of the Wife of Bath in the 'General Prologue' to The Canterbury Tales, we briefly discussed the gap between her two front teeth:

Gat-toothed was she, soothly for to saye.     ( l.470)

In Chaucer's time this was seen as a sign of an amorous character. I also mentioned that gap-toothed models, like Lara Stone and Georgia Jagger, are now becoming very fashionable - and that models are even paying dentists and surgeons to separate their teeth. Most of you looked at me as though I had gone mad. Well, here is the story.



Georgia Jagger - distant relative
of the Wife of Bath?

 Secondly, and more seriously, I’d recommend this website for working on your Chaucer assignments. Here you can find the descriptions of the individual pilgrims. Look on the left of the webpage, and click on your pilgrim. You then have the original Middle English, and a modern translation.

Finally, here's a link to an interesting website about the Wife of Bath hosted by the University of North Carolina. In particular, it looks at the 'good Wif' in relation to medieval ideas about virginity. As Jane Zatta observes there, 'by challenging the value of virginity, the Wife of Bath calls into question both secular and religious ideals of women.'

Nazim Hikmet and Ezra Pound

I saw today that there is an article out in the latest issue of the Journal of Modern Literature on Ezra Pound and Nazim Hikmet, looking at both as "quintessential modernist poets". Unfortunately I don't have access to the journal itself, but I'll try to get a copy - let me know if you're on the Modernism and English Poetry course and would be interested. Here's an abstract (a short summary):

Ezra Pound and Nazim Hikmet, quintessential modernist poets, share similarities as striking as their differences. Both poets were charged with treason and incarcerated for long periods because of their radical ideologies — fascism and communism, respectively. This essay focuses on modernist poetry at the intersections of formal revolutions in poetic techniques, radical politics, and state curtailment of the rights of free speech. I trace the complicated relationship between poetry and the state, and the effect of incarceration on the formal redirection of the two poets' work while they were in prison, where they produced what is generally considered to be their best work.

As I've said before, I think there's growing interest, in Britain and the USA at least, in figures like Hikmet, poets writing outside the established centres of European modernism, Paris, Berlin and London. This is related to increasing interest in poets like David Jones (Wales), Hugh MacDiarmid (Scotland) and Basil Bunting (Northumberland, in northern England). We'll look at all these poets, albeit briefly, on the course.

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.

Apologies

Apologies for a shortage of posts over recent days - I currently have no internet access at home. Normal service will be resumed soon, I hope. In the meantime, if you have come across something you think might be of interest to fellow students, do forward me the link, and if it seems suitable I'll post it here (giving you the credit!).

It's also been drawn to my attention that the Dickensians have been neglected here (although I did post something on the Panopticon a while ago). I'll try to make sure I post something for the Nineteenth-Century Novel course soon.