Nineteenth-Century Literature in English 1 PDF

**Nineteenth-Century Literature in English 1** ============================================== **Features of Romanticism** --------------------------- - Autonomous writers - Positive: author is seen as a special individual, even a hero or visionary prophet - Negative: outcas...

**Nineteenth-Century Literature in English 1** ============================================== **Features of Romanticism** --------------------------- - Autonomous writers - Positive: author is seen as a special individual, even a hero or visionary prophet - Negative: outcast - Literature largely produced by upper-middle class and upper - Individual - Romantic genius: superior, spiritual, creative - Strong emphasis on creativity (\ neoclassicism) - Thematic innovation - Stylistic innovation - New genres: gothic novel -- novel of ideas -- regional novel -- historical novel - New non-fictional: personal, intimate, subjective essay - New dramatic genres: poetic plays -- farce -- melodrama - Political: democratic impetus - Individualism -\> value liberty, freedom, creativity - Emerge working classes + demand better life - Support emancipation women - Political: revolutionary zeal - Romantic artist = rebel, nonconformist in a time of revolutionary hope - Interest in revolutions - American Revolution - French Revolution - Hero worship (fe. Napoleon) - Positive heroes: recurrent use of "over-reaching" figures like Prometheus - Ambiguous of threatening heroes: Faust (deal with devil in return for knowledge and eternal youth) + Byronic hero (solitary, egocentric, haughty, misanthropic, doomed, tormented, and at war with himself, the world, and God) + biblical figures (Cain and Satan) - Subjective worldview - Insistence of personal feelings - Extremes of feelings - Idealization of love - Exploration of the Mind and Soul - Obsession with Inwardness -\> exploring working of society by artist dig into themselves to find salvation for the ills of the world - Mind is a powerful force: innately good, but corrupted by civilization - Imagination - Work of art = emerges spontaneously - free of all rules - The mind/imagination: presented as actively involved in perception/experience of reality: pervasive imagery of the mind as a lamp (which reveals reality by shedding a light on it) rather than a mirror (which simply reflects reality) - Clear interest in irrational and abnormal fantastic, magical, mysterious, instinctive, intuitive, visionary states of consciousness, the occult, the esoteric + threats to mental sanity: exploring forms of madness, derangement, hallucination, demonism, terror, horror, guilt + exploring alternative perceptions through drugs or mesmerism - Growing awareness of inner division and multiplication divided psyche - Recurrent motifs: fe. The Doppelganger, twin figures - Keats' sensitivity to the ambivalence of experience: mingling of pleasure and pain -- erotic quality of the longing for death - Revelation of the soul - Self-reflective expressions of individual experience and feelings \ institutionalized religion and dogma - Deep trust that the mind has access beyond sense to the transcendent and infinite - Personal mysticism and religious myth-making - Doubts about God and organized religion - Cult of beauty - First forms of aestheticism: art for art - Beautiful and sublime - Obsession with death - Attitude towards the past - Noble savage - Middle Ages - Shakespeare - Attitude towards the present - Sociopolitical turmoil - Idealization child: more innocent, pure, not yet corrupted - Attitude towards the future - Optimist (prophet) - Millennial expectations profoundly rooted in Hebrew and Christian tradition: cf. the French Revolution aroused apocalyptic expectations, which were often translated into a spiritual revolution of the human mind: new ways of seeing became the chief aim in life - Utopian social projects - Nature: primary external topic -- lovingly detailed attention with invocation of the more idealistic, transcendent, spiritual dimensions of nature - Allegoric -- symbolism - Recurrent motif of the Aeolian harp: nature producing its own natural harmonies, the wind as bringer of creative inspiration - Sublime: awe and terror -- supernatural - Nightscapes: recurrent themes of sleep, dreams, nightmares - Meditations of the moon and stars - Exoticism - Indoors: sometimes represented in terms of constriction and oppression: cf. the favorite setting of cellars, dungeons, prisons, vaulted chambers, ruined castles, dark abbeys, etc. in Gothic fiction and Dark Romanticism (e.g. Poe); such settings tend to have strong mental and psychological overtones and are often analyzed in terms of an "uncanny" ("unheimlich") atmosphere - frequent use of lamps and candles as motifs (cf. representations of the workings of the mind as well as today's cliché of what counts as "romantic": candlelight dinners) **Romantic Poetry: The Big Six** -------------------------------- [Tintern Abbey ] - Painting - Written about by Wordsworth [Features of Romanticism (dia)] - Emancipation of the individual - Subjective worldview [The "mind-forg'd manacles I hear"] - 'London' -- William Blake - Organization by the city - There is no sublime nature there - Laws restricting our freedom - J.J. Rousseau (French Enlightenment) - "Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains" - A child is more pure, innocent and less chained (like an adult) child = representation of freedom - Idea noble savage: belief that savages (non-western) are somehow more noble, more free, less constraint - William Wordsworth + Coleridge: inspired and intrigued by the French Revolution -\> went to France - Edmund Burke - Pamphlet: Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) - Conservative: maybe things are going too fast, we do need reform but we need some preservation -- democracy is hard to maintain, can turn into tyranny - This book started the pamphlet war - A Philosohical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) - Made the sublime into a philosophical concept - Productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling an experience beyond reason; it inspires terror, wonder, and awe - Thomas Paine - Rational figure - 'Common Sense' (1776) rational argument why US should become independent, first person to suggest this - 'Rights of Man' (1791) reflection on the French revolution (reply on 'Reflections on the Revolution in France') - Idea of democracy: they're trying it out in France but it's failing the people have the right to overthrow the government if they don't act in favor of the people - Mary Wollstonecraft - 'A Vindication of the Rights of Men' (1790) \-- (reply on 'Reflections on the Revolution in France') we are not sovereign, we are not free - 'A Vindication of the Rights of Woman' (1790) adding a dimension for women, women are also rational creatures (not just emotional - William Godwin (husband Mary Wollstonecraft) - The father of anarchism, as a philosophical idea: if we organize our society according to rational ideas, we will eventually not need a government true democracy - 'An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice' (1793) minimal government interference - (reply on 'Reflections on the Revolution in France') [Anna Laetitia Barbauld] - Spirit of revolution, very interested in the French Revolution, very involved with reform - 'The Rights of Woman' (1792) -- direct response to Wollstonecraft (W. named her one of the few female intellectuals of the time she wasn't happy about it) - Addressing a - Lyrical poem - Traditional form: 4 lines per stanza - Language: heavily standardized, typical poetic diction, classical form, inversion (classical style) - Typical romantic would be: voice of the people, common language, not the classic idea of beauty - Burst of language (shouting) - Irony: she says women shouldn't strive for equality but that they should turn things around - She says that they maybe already have equal rights we shouldn't distance ourselves from each other (love), no revolution - Once you learn to love each other, you shouldn't try to 'conquer' - In nature you will learn that separate rights will disappear in mutual love (between all human beings) - Very ambiguous poem: both conservative and romantic [The Lake Poets: Wordsworth and Coleridge] [William Wordsworth] - Poet philosopher - Designated poet of the country (by queen Victoria) - Travelled to France (French Revolution) because of the Terror forced to go back and leave his wife and child -\> couldn't return because of the Napoleonic Wars - Moved to the Lake District with Coleridge became the Lake Poets - 'Lyrical Ballads' - Write poetry in the voice of the people - "Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility" - 'Lines Written in Early Spring' (1798) - Lyrical poem - 1^st^ person speaker is reflecting on personal experience - Quatrains - Highly stylized way but in the voice of the people you can read the lines as if they were spoken - He is listening to songbirds (a natural song) -- a songbird is a natural poet - It speaks to the human souls, it connects him to nature - Reflection on nature - 'What man has made of man' mind-forg'd manacles OR technology is very different from his experience with nature, why isn't everything like this? This thought makes him sad, he can't experience this happiness (of the birds, the nature) -- every person is marked by misery - 'The World Is Too Much With Us' (1807) - Sonnet - We remove ourselves from the world we no longer recognize our connection to nature -- we try to control it, we even destroy nature - We are no longer controlled by nature, we are controlled by the mind-forg'd manacles - Exclamation (not seen in classical literature) - Volta: 9: starts lamenting - He doesn't want to be disconnected from nature - He'd rather be a forgotten nature God -\> pre-rational religion, before we started to remove ourselves from nature - Pagan = savage - 'Lines Composed A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey' (1798) - Ruin abbey (there aren't a lot in GB) - Thinking about an experience walking in nature 5 years ago - Nature with a capital N connection with the world - Thinking back about the poet he once was - Rhyme scheme thrown out of the window enjambments - The nature wants to find the experience from 5 years ago remembrance of lost time, bring back the experiences he once had - The beauty is still there after 5 years, he tries to re-experience his connection with nature - Recollects his emotions in tranquility - Deeper than rational the feeling of unremembered pleasure - Sublime: something he cannot put into words - A world that you cannot put into words, rationalize that would limit it - We no longer separate ourselves with the world, we are one - In this moment there is life and food for future years the experience is nourishing - 'My dear, dear friend': his sister, who went on the walks with him - 'Ode: Intimations of Immortality from recollections of Early Childhood' (1807) - The stanzas end with a question - Childhood is the closest thing we have to the divine (freedom) - Same tale as 'Lines Composed A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey' (1798) - Natural imagery - Where has the time gone? The experiences are lost - The first experience in nature is unique you cannot get it back - Recollection of early childhood innocent, young, fresh, unbound, uncivilized - 'Shepherd boy': a child in nature, almost prophetic - 2 questions at the end of the 4^th^ stanza: why have the experiences gone? - Why can the child see something that he cannot? Why can I no longer paint what once I was/saw? - Here the poem originally ended, but later writes an answer himself - When we're born we somehow move away from the ideal world (Socrates) OR pre-existence of the soul: religious meaning: something that exists before and after us, the soul emerges in the divine -\> existence of the soul, the soul as something different from the mind - As a child it's the closest we can ever be to these things - Shades of the prison-house (67): the mind-forg'd manacles -\> we are prisoners - Small exterior, but divine soul - The child is a prophet - Stanza 9: not talking to the child anymore, talking to Joy even though we cannot bring back those experiences we once had, maybe there is somethind in nature still that lingers and yet remembers that what is fugitive something divine he can see in a leaf of grass - Positive ending: it is normal, natural that those experiences flee from us - Fleeting hint of immortality, something in us connects us to the divine [Samuel Taylor Coleridge] - Poet philosopher - Exotic poet - "Lyrical Ballads" - Willing suspension of disbelief - Got addicted at a very young age used medication: opium + alcohol - That's what makes his poems dreamlike - Saw himself as a prophet-poet - Two types of poems: ecstatic poetry or dark poetry - "Dejection: An Ode" (1802) - Dark Romanticism - Natural imagery - Aeolian lute: a wind harp nature is playing the song nature's poet - Depression, a darkness that's too much to rationalize - Addressing a lady - \(30) he is gazing at something, he knows he should feel something but he doesn't he no longer enjoys nature even = the darkest of the dark - \(39) I cannot write like a poet anymore poetic paralysis - \(44) green light in the sky - (45-46) There is nothing outside that I recognize in myself (answer to Wordsworth) poetic paralysis - "Kubla Khan, Or, A Vision in a Dream: A Fragment" (1796,1816) - Ecstatic Romanticism - A vision that came to him in a fragment - In an opium dream the poem came to him he received it from the divine - The man from Porlock = most known unknown figure in English literature - He forgot big parts of the perfect poem -\> it fled from him still remembers scattered lines - Xanadu = exotic place - Kubla Khan = historical figure, grandson of Genghis Khan - Willing suspense of disbelief - Sacred river river of inspiration, it cannot be controlled - Violent, energetic, something that cannot be stopped - \(21) fragments: his information comes in big fragments, it just comes to him genius: a poet is the mediator of what comes to him - Inspiration is violent, energetic (you cannot measure it) - Tone-switch: a first person speaker instead of Kubla Khan - More direct appeal to poetry: 'I once saw a damsel play...' - Could I bring back the vision, something I once had (Wordsworth) - Ending: His poetry is so divine, people should be warned - (50-55) drunk the milk of paradise: poetic genius poet should capture those visions - "Biographia Literaria" (1817) - Book about his literary life - Vision what literature and poetry should be - First part: on Wordsworth and poetic genius - To carry on the feelings of childhood (sense of wonder) into the powers of manhood - Difference between talent and genius - Second part: on 'Lyrical Ballads' and the objects originally proposed - Attempt to put visions into words - Willing suspension of disbelief = poetic faith - Experience instead of explanation - Third part: on fancy and imagination - Primary imagination (all of us have this): human perception, how we experience the world = interpretation of the world, reconstruction of the world\ Eternal act of creation = God, our soul is eternal and God-given - Secondary imagination (genius): echo of the primary, attempt to make sense of the world as it eternally is closest we can be to the eternal - Fancy is something we all have the ability to make a beautiful phrase [Lord Byron ] - Second generation emulate 1^st^ generation - Celebrity during his lifetime - Member of the House of Lords poet isn't his job, had enough money - Very curious romantic romantic lifestyle but not romantic writing style poetry is belated neo-classicism - 1812: famous speech in the House of Lords about the Luddites (people who were against industrialization -\> destroyed machines because people were losing their jobs to machines) - "So, We'll Go No More a Roving" (1818) - Based on a popular song - 1-4: Typical romantic imagery: nature + nostalgia - 5-9: I have aged - "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage" (1812-1818) - Elegy - Neo-classicist style - Invocation of the muses - Indications that Childe Harold = Lord Byron - Child: Ada Loveless first computer programmer **Keats, the Shelleys, and the Gothic** --------------------------------------- [Percy Bysshe Shelley] - Second generation - 'Poets can do something that other people can't do, poetry teaches us something that nothing else can. Poets are the real legislators of the world.' - "To Wordsworth" (1814) - Sonnet - W: Poet of nature + poet of 2 consciousnesses: who we are and who we were - Typical W theme: youth + things that depart never return - 5: change in tone the poet is the only one who is sad about a loss later you know it's the loss of W's talent, revolutionary spirit - W was a genius, an example and a refuge maybe we can do it like you did - End sonnet: W has become conservative (no more revolution, etc.) he is no longer the genius and inspiration he was no longer an example - I'm going to take over being an example - Natural imagery + 2 consciousnesses - Satirical poem parodying W - "Adonais" (1821) - An Elegy on the Death of John Keats - Pastoral elegy symbols - Natural imagery - 2: 'cry with me too' - 6: voice of time - Keats dies but his poetry lives on (immortality trope) - Shelley presents Keats as an icon someone who speaks for all of them - We all die - "Ozymandias" (1818) - 1: First-person speaker (who addresses the readers) - Exoticism (like Coleridge) - 2: The traveler starts describing - Ozymandias: Egyptian pharaoh = Ramses II - The face exudes power: 'I am in charge here' - 8: divine authority better listen or we don't get fed - 11: he is talking to a dessert he doesn't actually have power - The colossal is wrecked, shattered - You may have been all-powerful but nothing remains because you died - Only remembered because of the poem - "To a Skylark" (1820) - Shelley\'s response to the Ode to a Nightingale, Keats? -\> might be - Poem was meant to accompany a closet play a play that is meant to be read, but not performed - 'Prometheus unbound' subtitle of Frankenstein: 'A Modern Prometheus' -\> not shy to challenge the gods - Evocation of the skylark as artist, as the ideal poet (capital P) - Skylark cannot help but sing a songbird, only sings when they are flying unpremeditated art - You don't have to compose the skylark it is something that comes naturally a poet doesn't have to think about his poetry - Singing: pouring out your heart - Immaterial outpouring of joy (out of your body) - 40: the skylark can evoke feelings - 61: talking to this natural poet, philosopher poet - 101-105: harmonious madness burst of frenzy = beautiful, inspiration, etc - Something inspired in that natural poet if the poet could do that, everybody would listen to him - "A Defence of Poetry" (1821) - Idea of poetry and the poet - To be a poet is to apprehend the true and the beautiful - Poet = legislator and prophet - 'A poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth' - Defence against Plato - Plato: division between our world and world of ideas no room for fiction and poetry -\> imitation of our world which is already an imitation - Imagination = good great instrument of moral good, we must imagine something that isn't the reality at that moment in time: to become better poetry administers empathy - Literature as an empathy engine science can\'t do this, etc. - Science etc. enslaves men - Poetry is something divine center of knowledge [John Keats] - Emerge yourself in the emotions that are being evoked - Don't try to explain it, experience it - Surrounded by death (TBC) - "Ode to a Nightingale" (1819) - Songbird - Hemlock = poison - Opiate = primitive painkiller that makes you forget things - Sadness, heartache - Dreading his existence - Addresses the nightingale you can only hear it at night - Dryad = tree nymph (mythical) - Natural imagery - 10: full-throated ease: it comes naturally if only Keats could do the same thing - Keats wants to fully evaporate in nature, with the nightingale - You cannot escape death - The nightingale doesn't know it's going to age - Our world is full of sorrow there is no transcendent Beauty in the world of man - Bacchus: I'm not going to drink myself to death - The nightingale is something transcendent and poetical - Stanza 6: tone and mood shift - Night of the soul - Only death can release me from being bound to the world - Let death come painlessly - Joy that the nightingale is not bound to this world transcendent song: men cannot hear it to its fullest extent - Emperor and clowns: in ancient days everybody could hear it -- no difference in class - Idea immortal art, that might surpass death - "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" (1819) - In a different, strange world - Ancient story - The beautiful lady without mercy - Nature - 4^th^ stanza: knight starts speaking I tried to seduce the lady I found in the forest - Knight surrenders to immediate beauty -\> he is captivated by beauty in front of him, so he cannot see what is underneath - "Endymion: A Poetic Romance" (1817) - \+ 4000 lines - Evocation of Beauty more than immediate beauty - It no longer exists but left something behind transcendent - Idea of transcendent beauty [Mary Shelley] - SEMINAR 1: FRANKENSTEIN - Genesis of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein - Lake Geneva 1816: the year without a summer, because of a volcano eruption - Lord Byron was also in Geneva, close to the Shelley's - Lord Byron proposed to tell ghost stories to each other -\> Frankenstein **The Romantic Novel: Austen and the Bröntes** ---------------------------------------------- [Jane Austen] - Romantic novelist: only 6 novels (yet seen as greatest novelist of her time) - During life time: not well known - All revolved around some kind of marriage plots (scheming) - In Pride and Prejudice: mother schemes to let her daughters marry rich, because the family only has daughters who cannot inherit -\> the next male heir gets the estate, etc.\ Women didn't have property rights, women can't own things - Social microcosm: small situations that paint the society at large - Style: elegant, ironic, free indirect discourse - When a narrator takes over the words or thoughts of a character and presents it as the narrators own - Begun around 1795: 'First Impressions', reworked in 1811 after success if debut 'Sense and Sensibility' (1811) - Novel of manners: fictional conduct books: books who tell you how to behave - Other genres: historical novel, gothic novel - Female characters trying to find their way in society (that is usually against them) - Characters try to read each other's minds and intentions - Pride and Prejudice - Title: Elisabeth = prejudice about Mr Darcy + Mr Darcy = too proud to correct her - All the plots surround misunderstandings -\> they don't communicate - Handbook of Narrative Analysis: introduction via PaP (dia) - Focalization: similar to pov or perspective relation between object and subject of perception -\> between narrative's characters/actions/objects and the agent who perceives\ Austen invented switching focalization, very experimental - External: the narrator is describing it - Internal: the character is experiencing it, narrator goes in the head of the character - The narrator is crawling in the mind of Mrs Bennet, the narrator tells us her interpretation - Variable: internal + external - Discourse: the way in which certain words are presented - Direct: quote - Indirect: paraphrase - Free indirect: narrator taking over a characters thoughts as if they are their own - PaP: narrator who stands outside the story, but comes in the story by constant switching of focalization and discourse - Theory of mind: we all construct a mind for other people - The fictional minds and how the characters try to construct the other's minds - Try to read each other's minds and often misread it - Mind-reading - PaP is a failed exercise of Elisabeth of the Theory of Mind - Changes her ToM towards Darcy, she realizes that she had been prejudice - I can't read my own mind, I'm a stranger to myself I'm not good at reading people, I am the prejudice one - She longs to read people's minds - She tries to figure out how he is reading her mind -\> what does he think she thinks [Emily Brönte] - Sisters: Charlotte and Anne all died young (child birth and the rest tbc) - Published under Ellis Bell male pseudonym - Only one novel: 'Wuthering heights' - Brussels - 'Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell' (1846) - Wuthering Heights - More Romantic than Realist: dark Romanticism (you can read it as Gothic, hint of incest) - Critique: savage cruelty and outright barbarism - Narrative experimental techniques - Structure - Frame narrative: Lockwood narrates - Embedded narrative: Nelly Dean narrates - Doubly embedded narrative (e.g. Isabella Linton, Zilla) - Time - Frame narrative: 1801-1802 - Nelly Dean's 1770s -- narrative present - Place: the Yorkshire moors - Locale: house Wuthering Heights (named after the weather there), Earnshaws - Heavy walls, small windows, big fire place - \ Thrushcross Grange, Lintons - More modern - Focus on dreams - Conversation Nelly Dean \ Catherine - Realism, voice of reason \ Romanticism - ND does not understand what is going on **Dark Romanticism and Transcendentalism** ------------------------------------------ [History] - 1620: Puritans only writing for religion - 18th century: the Great Awakening and the American Enlightenment - Early 19th century: "a literature of our own" - 1830s-1850s: the American Renaissance: "a literature for our democracy" - How free are we? How free should we be? - We are all equal, we are all the same - What makes America unique? democracy - American Renaissance - Transcendentalism: essays, lectures, pamphlets, poetry - Prose fiction : Hawthorne, Melville - Poetry : Walt Whitman [Edgar Allen Poe] - Tortured genius (a very good scientist) - Mother died -- father abandoned him foster family 'Allen' (Virginia) - Brilliant student BUT drinking and gambling problem - Kicked out by foster family - 1836: Married his 13 year old cousin (for money) -\> died of TBC in 1847 - 1849: found dying in streets of Baltimore last words: "Lord help my poor soul" - Outlier: really insisted on the autonomy of literature (\ national narrative) - Strong desire to be a writer constant financial difficulties - Struggling writer (money) BUT influential - Started literary traditions gothic writer -- horror stories - Invented the genre: detective fiction (Auguste Dupin) - Poète maudit outsider artist - 'The Raven' (1845) - Dreary midnight - Speaker is pondering, thinking about the past - Entering some kind of dream state - Rudely awoken by tapping on the door - Ghost - Thinking of someone the speaker has lost: Lenore - Alliteration, rhyme, rhythm: trochaic poem (sequence of stressed, unstressed syllables) - States of mind: terror, fear - Beating of my heart: bodily sensation - It's all taking place in the mind of the speaker there's nothing there - He's afraid of the void, what is out there - Evokes atmosphere with repetition words, rhythm, rhyme states of mind: fear (takes place inside the mind alone) - Speakers addresses raven as prophet of evil supernatural, symbol of something much larger than he can grasp - Raven simply says nevermore: your mind will never be relieved of the pain of the loss of Lenore, you're never going to see her again - Screams to go away -- raven only says nevermore - End poem: the raven never moves, it is still sitting there - Shadow that it casts has captured the soul of the lonely, doomed speaker - Keynote: nevermore - 'The Philosophy of Composition' (1846) - The Heresy of the Didactic: poetry should not teach you anything -\> l'art pour l'art - "There is no better poetry than the poem written for the poem's sake" - Shows how he fabricates poetry -\> poetry as a mechanism (not a romantic idea) - 'Writing backward': what effect do I want to create with the reading create poem with precision of a mathematical problem as an engine, everything is well thought out not written in a frenzy, no genius here - 2 concerns: needs to be beautiful and needs to be read in one sitting (unity of effect) - Unity of effect: - Length: about 100 lines - Effect: contemplation of the beautiful -\> excitement of the soul - Tone: melancholy the most legitimate of all the poetical tones - Keynote: like a refrain in a song, "Nevermore" pretext: "a non-reasoning creature capable of speech" - Topic: "the death of a beautiful woman" (most poetical topic in the world) - Originality: seriousness \ air of the fantastic - The making of the raven - 'The Fall of the House of Usher' (1839) - Never know the name of the narrator - Melancholy house - Insufferably gloom There is nothing to relieve this -- not even the sublime: combination of pleasure and pain there is only dreary's - There is only terribleness, gloom - Speaker tries to explain these states of minds - What invokes that state of mind? -\> a mystery -\> inexplicable -\> can't explain it - Constantly tries to explain it, but cant do it - Strange behavior Rodrick Usher - Mind of narrator trying to understand whats happening failing to make sense - House of Usher: vacant and eye-like windows house described alive creating atmosphere - It is familiar and strange, you don't know where it comes from at the same time unheimlich (Freud) = the uncanny something you repressed - Uncanny - The vacant and eye-like windows house = alive - Focus on the mind of the narrator struggling to make sense - House of Usher = family mansion and the family itself as if the people are not alive, looks as if he is a corps blurring the boundaries between alive and death - Blurring boundaries between life and death -- human and non-human - Doppelganger motif and hints of incest - Metonomy of the house: mansion, family story - Sensational and a reflection of "Philosophy" - Fear - Madeline Usher is dying: has a disease narrator is already anticipating that she will be dead the death of a beautiful woman - Sentience of vegetable things - Burry the body in the tombs, puts her living in the tomb narrator notices that the 2 are twins (hint incest) - End: house crumbles **The American Renaissance (I): Thoreau and Hawthorne** ------------------------------------------------------- [Poe \ Transcendentalism] - Poe about the transcendentalism: there is no actual meaning behind it, there is no substance to it, flat prose intellectual scum - Transcendentalism was a slur: head in the clouds [Transcendentalism and European Literature: German Idealism, British Romanticism] - Belated Romanticism quintessentially American - Self-reliance: independent from institutions - Connection with Europe: Kant, Schelling, via Coleridge idealism, the mind transcends the immediate -- mind is different from the brain: things we do not see in our immediate environment - fe. George Ripley: 'Specimens of Foreign Standard Literature' translations philosophy and foreign (religious) texts - New England: connection to Harvard - Unsystematic spirituality + aphoristic writing (very suggestive one liner) + very bombastic + really dramatic - BUT focus on selfhood/subjectivity/nonconformity -- often in relation to Nature - Ralph Waldo Emerson - Connection between Romantic writers in UK and Romanticism in America - "the sage of Concord" - Began career as Unitarian pastor in Boston stopped, to strict, wants his own system of spirituality science, reason, belief in moral progress, traveled widely - Inwardness, self-cultivation -- 'Self-Reliance' (1841) - Mostly known for his essays - Charismatic lecturer -- lyceum movement: lecture circuit - Founder of the 'transcendental club' - 1836: annus mirabilis miracle year 'Nature' - Literary journal: The Dial - Very influential fe. Nietzsche: "the most gifted if Americans" - Other publications - 'The American Scholar' (1837) devise American intellectual tradition should look like - 'The Poet' (1844) should celebrate the country, write in burst of language, don't wait for rhyme scheme - 'Nature' -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1836) - First person speaker: addressing some kind of collective the American people - We only know the world around us through whatever has been revealed to us by our forefathers (the Brits) why should we not do the same? Our own intellectual tradition, declaration of intellectual independence own tradition of poetry, literature... - Nature imagery - Philosophy, intellectual tradition, literature of our own - Every question we might ask has an answer -\> we can find it in nature, creation + in ourself - Nature is readable, creation unfolds + connection to you - Universe consists of nature and the soul (you and everything around you) - You become part of nature -- universal cosmos I become a transparent eyeball, part of nature that sees all I am a particle of God - We are all the same, equal slavery is not a part of Nature - We are all nature made from the same atoms same as sand - Deep relation between man and vegetable (organic) universal connection - We should all try to capture this - Henry David Thoreau - Concord, Massachusetts transcendental club - Protégé of Emerson - Introduced him to transcendentalism -- and Hawtorne - Urged him to write for 'the dial' - 'Walden' or 'Life in the Woods' (1854) - Experiment self-reliance - Non-conformism, environmentalism, rugged individualism - Abolitionists, opposed Mexican-American war -\> jail - 'Resistance to Civil Government' -- HDT (1849) - Today better known as 'civil disobedience' - We wouldn't need a government if we accepted everybody is equal and treated each other that way - Right of revolution: inefficiency or tyranny -- innate right -- refuse allegiance to government - Government = piece of machinery that should work to our benefits - Every machine will have its deficiencies, friction - Reference to slavery -\> 1/6 population + reference to Mexican-American war, they did nothing wrong, we should not invade - Every government will do injustice let it go if it is part of good government - If the injustice requires you to be unjust to someone else break the law be counter-friction - 'Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is in prison' - 'That government is best which governs least' - Nathaniel Hawtorne - Salem, Concord, Massachusetts - Idealism - philo **The American Renaissance (II): Herman Melville** -------------------------------------------------- [Background] - Whale hunting was really popular at the time oil inside the whale - Fossil fuel as a natural resource - Herman Melville: sailor (dropped out of school at 12) - Whale = nothing and everything all at once existential dread - White color of atheism - 800pg novel only 80 pages on the chase of the whale -\> rest = about existentialism - (start) Dedication to Nathaniel Hawthorne [American Renaissance: Herman Melville] - Melville saw Hawthorne as a genius -\> became writing friends - Fan because of his short stories \--The Scarlett Letter\-- - Civil disobedience (Scarlet Letter: Hester Prynne = ultimate self-reliant character) - Sympathy and resistance: "I will not speak" (does not tell who the father is) - Self-reliance: "The world's law was no law for her mind" - New purpose: empathy -- helping others (Dimmesdale) - We are the only ones who have to come up with our own value system, be true to ourselves, a world without a God existential thought - We are all humans who are capable of good and bad things -\> we cannot deny this (corruption if we do) we need to find a way of not being a devil to one another - Both love and hate make us human we know that we are capable of both - Only virtue os seen as good in a puritan society they punish everyone that is different - Both expressions of simply our humanity both can be read as allegorical figures of this X - Letter to Hawthorne: writing about Moby-Dick as a paper allegory -\> both about a whale and not - 'gospels = 'evangelies' -- die in the gutter = go bankrupt [Herman Melville] - New York -- and Pittsfield, Massachusetts - Left school at 12 sailor at 14 - 1841: joined whaler 'Acushnet' - 1842: jumped ship in French Polynesia lived among cannibals - His travel narratives are based on his experience -\> fe. Called "the man who lived among cannibals' - Initial success: exoticism, foreign land, adventures, the fact that the writer actually experienced it - Bestsellers 'Typee' and 'Omoo' - Five novels before publishing Moby-Dick, or The Whale - 'Mardi' was not a travel novel -\> not a success -\> wrote about travels again: 'Redburn' and 'White-Jacket' - Moby-Dick: a flop today: the Great American Novel later novels: no success, end reputation - Caught between art and the market [Moby-Dick] - Beginning 20^th^ century: popularity - The sea and the literary imagination - Exoticism: uncharted territory, adventure the whale-hunt - All life is underneath the ocean, beautiful and scary - Documentation about life on a whaler - Microcosm: society aboard Pequod: Ahab and Ishmael - Name boat = Puritan tribe - All different classes and ethnicities - Democracy \ tyranny -- Ahab's monomania - The sublime: site of contemplation: the leviathan (the whale) - Intertextuality: other texts about whales something that is too big to be real, to overcome something sublime a leviathan - Whalers see the sublime in nature -\> face-to-face with it, have to battle it - The colorless all colors of atheism is what the sailors have to deal with - The whale wins, only Ishmael survives - MICROCOSM - 'Call me Ishmael' we don't know if his name is actually Ishmael -\> old testament figure: the first son of Abraham \-- second son = Isaac -\> convinced A to outcast Ishmael in the dessert biblical outcast - He is the only survivor reference to Job, quote - Talks about whaling -\> almost encyclopedia - Early chapters: sticks close to his own thoughts - Later: thinking about what others think and say telling us things that he cannot know - Embodied omniscient narrator - Narrative voice expands outwards - Polyvocal - Ishmael = democracy \ Ahab = tyranny (gets the best lines in the book) - Ahab manages to convince everyone that his revenge plot is everyone\'s revenge plot - Democracy is fragile need to hear all the opinions, also the extreme ones - \ Ahab: monomania -\> fanaticism - Someone speaking as an elective \ speaking FOR the people - Ahab doesn't show his face until chapter 28 - 'their supreme lord and dictator' -\> face not shown but his foot can be heard - wooden leg, massive scar by Moby-Dick - Crew thought hunting A whale, didn't realize THE White Whale people didn't know his plan, would have stopped him, would not have invested supernatural revenge - 'Monomaniac': anything he does and says is driven his desire -\> desire for revenge - For Ahab all evil is personified by this whale destroy in order to survive kill or be killed - Ishmael: sympathizes with Ahab -\> his thirst for revenge consumes him - THE SUBLIME - Existential, spiritual concerns - Shakespeare teaches us that love and hatred are the same emotion and what makes us human - Whale = for Ahab an agent and principle that stands for all bad in the world and frustrations of mankind something indescribable, the inscrutability irritates him -\> desire to know what it means, search for meaning desire for meaning - Pursuit of creature is also a pursuit of meaning and interpretation - Pursuit of Moby Dick and Moby-Dick - 'the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them' - Scary whiteness: inspires existential dread divineness + nameless, inexplicable terror - The whiteness of the whale: inscrutability of it -- whiteness = visible absence of color and at the same time the more concrete of colors colorless all-color of atheism we want to fill the void with meaning: the fact that we are just here, there is no meaning from the outside, we need to find it ourselves existential dread - What keeps us going? Why do we not commit suicide? ["Bartleby, the Scrivener"] - Existential - First person narrator: - Eminently safe man: comfort in the mundane - Property lawyer speaking to us in legal terms - Has always known how to live his life - Bartleby: we only know that he worked in a dead letter office - Letters that do not reach the right address - Can't say anything else about him - Irreparable loss to literature - Writer who prefers not to write - All the rest is what I have seen constantly trying to rationalize B actions - The story of an unreadable mind do not diagnose Bartleby!! Because we see him through someone else's eyes - Didn't fire B because of sympathy -\> he must be insane -\> easiest way to explain someone's character that doesn't align with yours - Empathy with people that act and look like us - Fascinated by B throughout the story - Theory of mind falls short - Setting: A Story of Wall-Street the beginning of capitalism, all of the wealth in hands of the few - Inefficient office, pointless work - Turkey, Nippers, Ginger Nut inefficient workers - B would look out of the window looking at a brick wall? mechanically, works as a machine but breaks down would have fired him BUT fascination - Scrivener who prefers not to be a scrivener shows his resistance, by just saying it - Shows no human passion: motionless, sedate - Neither refusal nor acceptance -\> preference - Something larger than life is going on -- we are both sons of Adam, human bond narrator desperately wants to understand him, fraternal melancholy - B doesn't change throughout the story -\> it's the narrator, takes over behavior of B - Story of alienation -\> of the narrator - Ends in prison: where B ends up B is alone in the universe, so the narrator did not know who to write to to help him - I understand: B gives me a purpose in life only purpose in life -\> shaken by inexplicable character -\> expresses personal will in a world where there is no will left - Allegorical story -\> existential concerns - B is working in the dead letter office he is dead - Also a story about writing - B is all of us at the same time trying to find some kind of way **The Literature of Slavery: Slave Narratives** ----------------------------------------------- [American slavery and abolitionism ] - Whiplashes - American Renaissance: a "literature for our democracy" - 1619: first slave ship arrives in Jamestown, even before the Puritans were there, the founding fathers - North: finance, industry \ South: plantation economy and slavery - 1776: declaration of independence -- 1787: constitution -\> 3/5^th^ compromise - 1793: cotton gin King Cotton when slave trade really started ramping up start breeding - 3.2 million slaves by 1850 14% of the population - Abolitionist movements from early on - Early to mid-19^th^ century: "Underground Railroad" - 1833-1870: American Anti-Slavery Society (William Lloyd Garrison) [Frederick Douglass (1818-1895)] - Born into slavery in Maryland escaped in 1838 - Born as Frederick August Washington Bailey - Freedom bought in Great Britain after 'Narrative' - Writer, orator, politician, diplomat, publisher -- e.g. 'North Star' - Among the most influential intellectuals of the 19^th^ century - Afr-Ams. "must be our own representatives and advocates - Human rights (1848: Seneca Falls: suffragette convention) - Plenty very famous speeches: e.g. "What, to the Slave, Is the Fourth of July" (1852) - Wrote 2 more slave narratives didn't tell the details in the first works: people will learn how slaves escape, taking away the chances for other slaves + endangering people who helped ['Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass (1845) an American slave'] - "Written by himself" real story, my experience - Author portrait, American version: wants people to know he's black British: looks more white - Don't make us look better or worse than we are - Not a story of protest -- does show how degrading they were treated - First paragraph - First person who addresses you - Emphasizes that slaveholders use ignorance as a tool - Does not know how old he is, when born - Knowledge as a weapon - Father was a white man (don't know who though) -\> maybe the master - Ignorance is again a weapon - Stops his wife from learning F how to read if I know how to read, I can prove that we are equal - I owe as much to his violent reaction, than his wife learning him motivates him to do it, realizes that slaveowners want to keep the slaves ignorant - Without knowing the danger of education I would've still be there - Separated from mother: she was a field hand -- she couldn't see him, because she would be whipped if she wasn't on the field by sunrise -- only possible with permission (seldom) = a kind slaveowner - DIA KOPIEREN - In line with American Renaissance: remove ourselves from the manacles of society - Appendix where he talks about America - Deeply religious hypocrites slaveholding (not all Christians are hypocrites) - Testifying to dehumanization restoring humanity to the enslaved - Mr. Severe: good name sadist testify cruelty of slavery - Some slaves say it is not that bad: kindly master, privileges no martyrs, dumb people human beings: all of us react like this - Spy slaves -\> you cannot speak up -\> suppress the truth to just be 'happy', no severe consequences - People are not less or more human they are just human -- there are people who have it worse (= human) there are worse masters - Testifying to moral corruption of people and customs - Slavery also dehumanizes the slavemaster sweet angel woman caved under the influence of slavery -\> turned into a demon - Disgrace not to get drunk at Christmas -\> this makes you a lazy slave - Resistance -- Mr. Covey "the negro-breaker" - Whips them so hard that he breaks their spirit - Mr. Covey liked to believe himself to do the work of God -- even when he is raping slaves - Quiet resistance -- disobedience Mr. Covey whips him till he's broken, last spirit of humanity was beaten out of him - F started fighting -\> turning point: realization -- Mr. Covey cannot do anything about it, if rumor spreads that he got beaten up, his reputation would be ruined the role he was playing would have been lost if he had punished F - Roleplaying a system (master-slave dynamic)