Monday's class CANCELED

I am called out of town on Monday, 4/12. Class will not meet. Instead we will discuss chapters 27-35 of Uncle Tom's Cabin on Wednesday and the remainder of the novel on Friday. Enjoy your day off (from English 303, anyway)!

Week 11 Lectures

DOWNLOAD 4-9-10 lecture.


DOWNLOAD 4-7-10 lecture.

(There is no lecture to download for 4-5-10 since the heat forced us outside. Elements of that lecture are incorporated into the 4-7 and 4-9 lectures.)

Uncle Tom's Cabin & American Culture

The University of Virginia hosts an excellent site devoted to Uncle Tom's Cabin and its cultural contexts. In addition to information about its publication history and Stowe's life, it indexes a large number of images, many of them illustrations of the various editions of the novel published from 1851 (when it was first serialized) onward. Those of you who like to analyze visual culture might see the potential for a paper #3 here--how do the images in one edition compare to another, e.g., and/or how do they compare to what Stowe herself authors in the text?

Quiz 8 (Take-home; due Monday, 4-5)

For Monday, read Uncle Tom's Cabin, chs. 1-8 + Stowe's preface. As you do, keep in mind that Benito Cereno was published only three years later and, of course, that it is also about slavery. Do the comparisons end there. Identify one interesting commonality or difference between the two texts and discuss it in ~500 words.

Week 10 lectures

DOWNLOAD 4-2-10 lecture.


DOWNLOAD 3-31-10 lecture.


DOWNLOAD 3-29-10 lecture.

Dickinson, Demonized!

Abby Morgan (section 002) contributes this interpretation of "My Life had stood--a Loaded Gun." It's a very original analysis--and a surprisingly plausible one, if one takes the "demon" to represent some force to which Dickinson feels drawn even though her society and religion forbids it. In any event, it suggests once again how extraordinarily flexible, hence meaningful, this amazing poem is.

"Sedgwick, Hawthorne, and Me"

A belated post, but as I say, I'm catching up. . . .

Rosalind Whitley (section 001) produced these in conjunction with the paper #1 assignment.





What does a woman have to do to get noticed at an English department function?

Week 9 lectures

DOWNLOAD 3-26-10 lecture.


DOWNLOAD 3-24-10 lecture.


DOWNLOAD 3-22-10 lecture.

Walt, Wordled

Recently I stumbled across a site named wordle, which allows you to create "word clouds" from any piece of text you copy and paste into its generator. A word cloud measures the frequency of individual words and then arranges them into a picture in which the words that occur most often appear largest.

What's above is the 1855 version of "Song of Myself," wordled. Big surprise as to which word is the largest!

Updating the blog. . . .

As you may have noticed, I've fallen behind on blog updates. I'll catch up this weekend. Stay tuned. . . .

Dickinson en Deshabille

Billy Collins, the former U.S. poet laureate, has a poem about Dickinson that you may appreciate, given the last few we studied. I cannot find a recording of Collins reading it, but here is the poem plus a reading of it by Garrison Keillor.

Collins' own reading of his poetry is always entertaining. If you've never read or heard him, start with this one, "The Lanyard," among poetry's great odes to motherhood.

Quiz 7 (Take-Home; due Monday, 3-29)

(The quiz originally scheduled for Friday is now moved to Monday. For Friday, we will discuss those Dickinson poems in which death proves conspicuous.)

We will devote next Monday’s discussion to what is perhaps Emily Dickinson’s most famous and most complex poem: “My life had stood—a Loaded Gun” (Pearson 209-210). None of her poems has attracted a broader range of interpretations than this one. What I want you to do for Monday is to develop your own. Do so by answering the following questions first:

Who or what is speaking in the poem?
What is the “Life” to which the speaker refers?
Why is this “Life . . . A Loaded Gun”?
Who is the “Owner”?

Read and reread the poem, testing as you do various possibilities until you find a combination that seems to work. You might think back over the other poems we have read and discussed to assess whether this poem seems to belong to one or more of the thematic categories we have identified. Once you have settled on a set of answers, develop an interpretation of the entire poem in which you explain how your understanding of its metaphors work.

With Emily ... the Skipper, too ... the Millionaire, and His Wife!

Apparently my singing Emily Dickinson was so bad that Abby Morgan (section 002) decided we needed a proper version. Here it is, complete with visuals:


Well done!

Week 8 Lectures

DOWNLOAD 3-19 lecture.


DOWNLOAD 3-17 lecture.


DOWNLOAD 3-15 lecture.

Paper #2

Here is the handout for your second paper, due Friday April 2.

On Exploring. Lying About It. . . .

Stacie McDaniel (section 001) sends along the following link to Cracked.com's very funny (and also very smart) take-down of some of Europe's most famous explorers, including our very own (we get to claim him now) John Smith.

Quiz #6

For Friday, read the Dickinson poems in the Pearson anthology, pp. 187-191. All are more-or-less about poetry itself. For your take-home Quiz, think about one way in which, different though they are, Whitman and Dickinson may be thought of as similar. Discuss by way of specific references to the poetry of each. (~500 words, due at the beginning of class)

Whitman, Pitch Man

As part of a recent ad campaign, Levi's used two Whitman poems, "Pioneers! O, Pioneers!" (1865) and "America" (1888), to promote its brand. (Both poems were eventually incorporated into later editions of Leaves of Grass.)

Here they are. What do you think? What would Whitman have thought?





Note: the first commercial uses what may be the only recording we have of Whitman's voice.

Week 7 Lectures

DOWNLOAD 3-5-10 lecture.


DOWNLOAD 3-3-10 lecture.


DOWNLOAD 3-1-10 lecture.

Additional Poe Texts

In lecture I referred to Poe's review of Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales, in which he offers his view that effect is the most important aspect of any literary work, and his essay, "The Philosophy of Composition," in which he explains (truthfully or not) how he composed "The Raven." Here are links to those works.