'Spain' revisited again...

Here is a link to an interesting blog posting on Auden's poem 'Spain'. It gives some extra background, which may help you understand the context better. It then discusses many of the points that came up in our class discussion today. For the author, "'Spain' is indeed, as some of you suggested, "the most reluctant of political poems", yet as he also recognises, it "still compels by its potency". He makes some interesting arguments, too, regarding the source of that potency. He also makes reference to Auden's poem 'In memory of W. B. Yeats', the poem we shall look at tomorrow.  The Norton anthology website also has a section on Auden's  poem on Yeats, with some other links you might find interesting.

And here is Picasso's painting, 'Guernica', which depicts the bombing of the Spanish town by fascist forces (more information - in Turkish! - here). Click on the image to see a larger version. Like 'Spain', 'Guernica' was completed in 1937, and was intended (at least in part) to serve an expressly political end, drawing attention to fascist atrocities and encouraging support for the Republican cause.

Auden, Orwell and 'Spain'

Joan Miro, Aidez l'espagne ('Help Spain!')

George Orwell (author of 1984 and Animal Farm) was shot in the throat fighting for the Republic in Spain on the same day that W. H. Auden's poem, 'Spain', was published as a 5-page pamphlet to raise money for the Spanish Medical Aid Committee (20 May 1937). Orwell praised Auden's poem, describing it as “one of the few decent things that have been written about the Spanish war.” However, he criticized line 95 of the poem, "The conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder", and Auden himself later changed the line (see the note in your anthology). In fact, Auden eventually suppressed the poem entirely, refusing to publish it in his collected poems. There's an interesting article here about the debate between the two men.

I'd highly recommend George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia, his record of his experiences fighting in the International Brigades in Spain during the civil war there. It's a book that made a profound impression on me when I was in my late teens, and a great read. 

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.

'Spain' and Psychoanalysis

Here is a link to what looks to be an interesting article on W. H. Auden's poem, 'Spain'. I haven't had a chance to read it all yet, but even if you only read the first few paragraphs it will give you some useful context.

Presentation and bibliographies

Presenting your work well is very important. Probably the most popular set of rules for presenting academic work on literature is that of the Modern Languages Association. Here is a very useful website giving guidelines on how to present your work, including your bibliography or works cited and any quotations or references. 

More good Milton sites

Luminarium is a useful site, whatever you are studying: here is their page giving additional resources for the study of Milton. There are images, essays, articles and books online, and various other things you might find helpful.

You might also find interesting (if challenging!) this article on Milton by Frank Kermode, published in the New York Review of Books. Thanks to Meri for putting it in her bibliography exercise, and thus drawing my attention to it! Until his death in August, Frank Kermode was probably the best-known living English literary critic, and he's a wonderful read.

Turkey, the EU, & Orhan Pamuk

Some of you might be interested in this article by Orhan Pamuk that recently appeared in The Guardian. I'm not sure I agree with much of his analysis, at least of Europe - I don't yet know enough about Turkish politics to comment, although I'm fascinated and want to learn more. It's an interesting and thought-provoking piece, though, and well worth a look.

The article is followed by lots of comments, many of them stupid or ignorant, a few genuinely informative and insightful. They will perhaps give you an intriguing view of some of the attitudes toward Turkey current in Britain. You can also comment yourself - it would be good to see some more comments from Turks on there, and you'll be reaching a readership of thousands! 

Modernism and Film

I've just sent by email some notes on Modernism and Film to those of you on the Modernism and British Poetry course. I hope you find them interesting. Please note that this is extra material for you to look at and incorporate into your work if you wish to do so.

Here are links to a handful of modernist films you may find interesting:

Marcel Duchamp's Anemic Cinema (1926)

Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel's short surrealist film, Un Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog) (1928) - with its famous scene of a razor cutting into an eye: sometimes interpreted as an assault on the viewer, on we who watch the film. There are obvious parallels here with what we discussed in today's class concerning art as acid, a cleansing or surgical burning or cutting away of spiritual and aesthetic corruption. Here is an interesting essay on the film, Bunuel, Dali and Sigmund Freud.

Finally, here is a link to the famous Odessa Steps sequence from Battleship Potemkin (1925), which shows the Tsarist soldiers shooting at the crowd.  This is a scene that has been the subject of many pastiches and parodies. As in your assignments you are writing your own pastiches of modernist poems, you might be interested in the following re-workings of Eisenstein's scene, the first from The Untouchables, starring Kevin Costner, and the second from Terry Gilliam's Brazil - a personal favourite! (I'm sorry both of these are in Spanish - I couldn't find English versions online. I'm sure if you have time you can find English and/or Turkish versions.)

The sonnet form

Here is a website that gives a good introduction to the sonnet, if you want to revise this topic for tomorrow's Outlines course quiz. If you click through the pages, you come to a short practice test. You might also find this diagram useful in understanding the differences between the Shakespearean and the Petrarchan sonnet forms.

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!)

Darkness Visible

Cambridge University have put together Darkness Visible, a wonderful resource for reading Paradise Lost. It has sections on Milton's language, on the main characters, on illustrations of Milton's epic, and many others. It is all put together by Cambridge academics and students, and is written as an introduction for newcomers to the poem.
Another resource you might find helpful is this introduction to Paradise Lost, provided by Dartmouth College. It deals with Milton's cosmology, the poem's genre, ideas of God and marriage and many other topics.

I hope some of these are useful. Let me know if you find any other helpful material.

A raid on the inarticulate

For those of you who stayed behind today...here is the excerpt that I mentioned - and quoted badly from memory - from 'East Coker', the second of T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets:

That was a way of putting it—not very satisfactory

A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion,

Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle

With words and meanings.

'East Coker' was completed in or around 1940. It is a poem I return to again and again. Here is that quote about 'a raid on the inarticulate' in context. I think it is worth quoting this passage at length. The idea of 'the general mess of imprecision of feeling, / Undisciplined squads of emotion' seems to me to go straight back to Pound and Imagist theory (if not always Imagist practice).

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—

Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres*   Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt

Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure

Because one has only learnt to get the better of words

For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which

One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture

Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate

With shabby equipment always deteriorating

In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate—but there is no competition—
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost

And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions

That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.

For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

                          [* the two (world) wars]

Here is another, related passage, which comes a little earlier in the poem:

    You say I am repeating

Something I have said before. I shall say it again,

Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there,

To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,

  You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.

In order to arrive at what you do not know

  You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.

In order to possess what you do not possess

  You must go by the way of dispossession.

In order to arrive at what you are not

  You must go through the way in which you are not.

And what you do not know is the only thing you know

And what you own is what you do not own

And where you are is where you are not.

At this point I should probably just send you to read the whole poem in all its weird glory. I'd be interested to know your thoughts.

Paradise Lost-athons!

I thought some of you might be interested in the phenomenon of the Paradise Lost-athon. This is something that has become increasingly popular both in Britain and the United States, and probably elsewhere too. Basically, a group of students, staff and anyone else who is interested gets together to read Paradise Lost together, aloud - ALL OF IT!  Here is an example - one that recently took place at my old university, to raise money for the blind (a particularly appropriate aim, I think, given Milton's blindness). And here's another, from a few years back, in the States.

If enough of you were interested, we could perhaps do our very own Paradise Lost-athon at IKU, combining readings in English and Turkish, perhaps (and maybe a little French and Greek too?), and even a little dramatization. Always wanted to dress up as Satan? Normally refreshments and a fun atmosphere, and sometimes even costumes, are an important part of the event. Let me know if this is something you might want to do and I'll try to organise it. It's an excellent way to get to know the poem.

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.

Modernism, metonymy and fragmentation

Fragmentation and disintegration, and substitutions of parts for wholes, were occurring at many different levels in the early twentieth-century.  As Terry Eagleton observes:

Modernism reflected the crack-up of a whole civilization. All the beliefs which had served nineteenth-century middle-class society so splendidly - liberalism, democracy, individualism, scientific inquiry, historical progress, the sovereignty of reason - were now in crisis. (After Theory (London: Allen Lane, 2003) p. 63)

Which of these levels was most significant is disputed. I mentioned in class Henry Ford's perfection of the assembly line. In 1908, Ford's company began selling his famous Model T. The car became popular, and soon Ford found he was unable to meet the enormous demand:

His solution was to invent a moving industrial production line. By installing a moving belt in his factory, employees would be able to build cars one piece at a time, instead of one car at a time. This principle, called "division of labor," allowed workers to focus on doing one thing very well, rather than being responsible for a number of tasks. (source).

You can see film of  Ford's assembly lines at work here.

It is Terry Eagleton (see above) who points to a modern move from metaphor to metonymy. The critic Michael North connects this to 'Prufrock': 

The general fragmentation of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is obvious and notorious. The poem seems a perfect example of what Terry Eagleton calls the modern "transition from metaphor to metonymy: unable any longer to totalize his experience in some heroic figure, the bourgeois is forced to let it trickle away into objects related to him by sheer contiguity." Everything in "Prufrock" trickles away into parts related to one another only by contiguity. 

 As North goes on,

In this poem the horror of sex seems to come in part from its power to metonymize. Like Augustine, Eliot sees sex as the tyranny of one part of the body over the whole. Though Eliot is far too circumspect to name this part, he figures its power in his poetry by the rebelliousness of mere members: hands, arms, eyes. Sexual desire pulls the body apart, so that to give in to it is to suffer permanent dismemberment. This may account for the odd combination in Eliot's work of sexual ennui and libidinous violence. The tyranny of one part scatters all the others, reducing the whole to impotence. In this way, the violence of sex robs the individual of the integrity necessary to action.

North also discusses metonymy and time in 'Prufrock' - you can find a more complete extract from his book, The Political Aesthetic of Yeats, Eliot, and Pound (Cambridge University Press, 1991), by following the link in the post before this one, or simply clicking here and scrolling down.

We will return to this in greater detail next week.

Criticism on 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock'

Here is a link to a series of short critical extracts on 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock'. See what some of the brightest critics have had to say about the poem. Remember, quoting or referencing critics in your work and in your exam essays is a good thing to do! Reading critics is also an excellent way of learning how to write criticism.

'Grasshopper', by e. e. cummings

I have sent this around as an email already, but I know some of you don't always get my emails, and posting it here will allow you to discuss it, should you want to. A couple of you were asking about poems (rather than manifestoes) that use typographical experimentation. This is one of my favourites, by the American poet, e. e. cummings:

If you are confused, look at the poem's last word for a clue to the subject. If you know what a grasshopper is (and how it moves) you can begin to read this poem!

I'd be very interested to know what you think. You can see a very useful selection of critical interpretations of the poem here, but make up your own minds before seeing what the critics say.

Cummings was another American poet who came to Europe and was involved in the First World War, and lived in Paris in the 1920s. He was also a painter and met Pablo Picasso, and was influenced in his poetry (like so many others) by Ezra Pound. He is a strange mix of the avant-garde and the traditionalist - some of his poetry is quite traditional, and his use of nature in his poems especially is in some ways close to that of the Romantics.

Daphne and Apollo 2

...and here is the same sculpture from a different angle. I think you can see how Bernini represents the process of transformation better here. Again, click on the image to enlarge it.

Daphne and Apollo

Here is the sculpture by Gian Lorenzo Bernini of Daphne metamorphosing into the laurel tree just as Apollo, the god of poetry, is about to catch her. (You can click on the picture to make it bigger.) The story is told in the Metamorphoses, by the Roman poet, Ovid. You can read Ovid's story (in an English translation) here. The Metamorphoses is one of the most important of the many Roman texts that fascinated writers and artists in the Renaissance.

Modernist Film - Buster Keaton's Cops

I've discussed with a couple of you now the relation between film and modernism. I'll post more on this later - and if there's enough interest and I can sort out the technology, we can run an extra session on it. For now, though, have a look at Buster Keaton's Cops. Suspend your prejudices about what you think you are about to see, and you might be surprised. Keaton influenced Bunuel and Salvador Dali, and later worked with Samuel Beckett.

(If you would be interested in an extra session on film, add a comment below - this will give me an idea of the levels iof interest. Thanks!)

Dulce Et Decorum Est (2)

Yet another engagment with the 'old Lie'.... although a slightly more recent one!

First World War poetry on film

These short clips might be interesting:

1. an extract on Wilfred Owen from a BBC programme

2. an extract from Regeneration, the film I mentioned today, in which Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon discuss poetry at Craiglockhart military hospital in Scotland.

There are also lots of good clips on Youtube relating to other First World War poetry, and the First World War more generally. Have a look!

Dulce Et Decorum Est

I forgot to draw your attention today to the passage in 'Hugh Selwyn Mauberley' where Ezra Pound quotes the same 'old Lie' that Wilfred Owen uses in the title and the close of his poem. There Pound writes

 These fought, in any case,
and some believing, pro domo, in any case . .     

Some quick to arm,
some for adventure,
some from fear of weakness,
some from fear of censure,
some for love of slaughter, in imagination,
learning later . . .

some in fear, learning love of slaughter;
Died some "pro patria, non dulce non et decor". .

By chance, I also found this translation into Turkish of poem V of 'Hugh Selwyn Mauberley'. I have no idea whether it is good, or accurate, but it might be of interest. Perhaps one of you can tell me?

You might also be interested to see the manuscript of Wilfred Owen's first draft of 'Dulce Et Decorum Est', here, at the British Library's web page. Click on 'see transcript' to see a typed version of his first draft. The page also has some brief commentary on the poem. If you click on 'enlarge' - or directly here - you can see the whole first page of the manuscript properly.

Among other things, the British Library website states the following, which I didn't know (and probably should have - and so should you!):

At the time of the First World War, the poet Owen Seaman, who was editor of Punch magazine, wrote patriotic verses under the title, 'Pro Patria' that urged young men to the fight - though he himself, being 53 years old, remained as one "whose burden is to watch and wait." Those at a less comfortable distance from the fighting saw it differently. In his revelation of the reality of war Owen uses the Roman motto ironically, calling it "the old lie".

Finally, I discovered that the British Prime Minister, David Cameron, recently named 'Dulce Et Decorum Est' as his favourite poem. I'll leave you to decide how many levels of irony there are to that.....

Modernism and British Poetry Assignment

Today I set the assignment for this course. Some of you were absent, so for those who were, and for ease of reference for all of you, here are the details again:

For this assessment you are required to combine a short piece of ‘creative’ writing with a longer, more substantial piece of critical writing.

Part One

You should write a short pastiche of a ‘Modernist’ poem – that is, a piece of work that might pass for writing from the Modernist period (in the style, say, of W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, H.D., T.S. Eliot, or any other poet from this period).  This should be no longer than two sides of A4 (though one should be sufficient) and can be on any subject. You may write an original piece in the style of a Modernist writer, or you might like to re-write a poem from an earlier period (you may find a short Romantic poem a good starting point)

.

(The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms describes a pastiche as ‘a literary work composed from elements borrowed either from various other writers or from a particular earlier author. The term can be used in a derogatory sense to indicate a lack of originality, or more neutrally to refer to works that involve a deliberate and playfully imitative tribute to other writers.’)

Part Two

For the second part of the assessment you should then write a short commentary (of approximately 750 words) on your pastiche in the form of a close critical analysis. This is the most important part of the assignment: you will be marked not on the quality of your pastiche but on the quality of the critical comments you make about it.

In this critical commentary you should explain what is being attempted in the creative piece; the ways in which its form is related to its content; and you should show by the use of detailed examples why you think it is characteristic of the Modernist experimental style.

Please note that the normal scholarly standards of essay-writing and presentation apply to this part of the assessment. Your pastiche can be as experimental in form as you like. Your commentary should be a well-structured, short essay.

You need not refer extensively to secondary reading but evidence of an engagement with Modernist practice and theory will be rewarded. In showing how your text is ‘Modernist’ you can (and should!) make comparisons with Modernist texts you have studied on the course.

This assignment will be worth 30% of your final mark.

DEADLINE: Completed assignments should be returned to the course tutor by 1pm on Thursday 23^rd December 2010.

DRAFTS: Feedback will be provided on any drafts submitted by Friday 17^th December. No feedback will be given on drafts submitted after that date. Drafts can be sent as Word attachments with an accompanying email to p.hart@iku.edu.tr.