Class,
Thank you for participating in my pedagogical experiment. Your writings, will remain here. In the years to come, other students will contribute to what you've helped to create. Like you, they will struggle and hopefully, grow.
Others still, will eventually come across these writings, and because of your words, they'll see the world through your mind. The mind of a beginner.
Ovid said this better than I could have:
Adde parvum parvo magnus acervus erit. - Add little to little and there will be a big pile.
Gutta cavat lapidem, non vi, sed saepe cadendo. - The drop hollows out the stone by frequent dropping, not by force; constant persistence gains the end.
-liconti
Monday, June 19, 2006
Thursday, June 01, 2006
Discussion 5 - Atwood, Orwell and You
This is the last discussion topic for the year. You'll have what's left of this week and all of next week to work on your blog. This blog will have a greater weight than your previous blogs.
Read Margaret Atwood's article, "Orwell and Me" from Guardian Unlimited. I will provide both a URL and the full article.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,978156,00.html
Consider the following in your 750 word response:
Orwell and me
Margaret Atwood cried her eyes out when she first read Animal Farm at the age of nine. Later, its author became a major influence on her writing. As the centenary of George Orwell's birth approaches, she says he would have plenty to say about the post-9/11 world
Monday June 16, 2003
The Guardian
I grew up with George Orwell. I was born in 1939, and Animal Farm was published in 1945. Thus, I was able to read it at the age of nine. It was lying around the house, and I mistook it for a book about talking animals, sort of like Wind in the Willows. I knew nothing about the kind of politics in the book - the child's version of politics then, just after the war, consisted of the simple notion that Hitler was bad but dead.
So I gobbled up the adventures of Napoleon and Snowball, the smart, greedy, upwardly mobile pigs, and Squealer the spin-doctor, and Boxer the noble but thick-witted horse, and the easily led, slogan-chanting sheep, without making any connection with historical events.
To say that I was horrified by this book is an understatement. The fate of the farm animals was so grim, the pigs so mean and mendacious and treacherous, the sheep so stupid. Children have a keen sense of injustice, and this was the thing that upset me the most: the pigs were so unjust. I cried my eyes out when Boxer the horse had an accident and was carted off to be made into dog food, instead of being given the quiet corner of the pasture he'd been promised.
The whole experience was deeply disturbing to me, but I am forever grateful to Orwell for alerting me early to the danger flags I've tried to watch out for since. In the world of Animal Farm, most speechifying and public palaver is bullshit and instigated lying, and though many characters are good-hearted and mean well, they can be frightened into closing their eyes to what's really going on.
The pigs browbeat the others with ideology, then twist that ideology to suit their own purposes: their language games were evident to me even at that age. As Orwell taught, it isn't the labels - Christianity, Socialism, Islam, Democracy, Two Legs Bad, Four Legs Good, the works - that are definitive, but the acts done in their name.
I could see, too, how easily those who have toppled an oppressive power take on its trappings and habits. Jean-Jacques Rousseau was right to warn us that democracy is the hardest form of government to maintain; Orwell knew that to the marrow of his bones, because he had seen it in action.
How quickly the precept "All Animals Are Equal" is changed into "All Animals Are Equal, but Some Are More Equal Than Others". What oily concern the pigs show for the welfare of the other animals, a concern that disguises their contempt for those they are manipulating.
With what alacrity do they put on the once-despised uniforms of the tyrannous humans they have overthrown, and learn to use their whips. How self-righteously they justify their actions, helped by the verbal web-spinning of Squealer, their nimble-tongued press agent, until all power is in their trotters, pretence is no longer necessary, and they rule by naked force.
A revolution often means only that: a revolving, a turn of the wheel of fortune, by which those who were at the bottom mount to the top, and assume the choice positions, crushing the former power-holders beneath them. We should beware of all those who plaster the landscape with large portraits of themselves, like the evil pig, Napoleon.
Animal Farm is one of the most spectacular Emperor-Has-No-Clothes books of the 20th century, and it got George Orwell into trouble. People who run counter to the current popular wisdom, who point out the uncomfortably obvious, are likely to be strenuously baa-ed at by herds of angry sheep. I didn't have all that figured out at the age of nine, of course - not in any conscious way. But we learn the patterns of stories before we learn their meanings, and Animal Farm has a very clear pattern.
Then along came Nineteen Eighty-Four, which was published in 1949. Thus, I read it in paperback a couple of years later, when I was in high school. Then I read it again, and again: it was right up there among my favourite books, along with Wuthering Heights.
At the same time, I absorbed its two companions, Arthur Koestler's Darkness At Noon and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. I was keen on all three of them, but I understood Darkness At Noon to be a tragedy about events that had already happened, and Brave New World to be a satirical comedy, with events that were unlikely to unfold in exactly that way. (Orgy-Porgy, indeed.)
Nineteen Eighty-Four struck me as more realistic, probably because Winston Smith was more like me - a skinny person who got tired a lot and was subjected to physical education under chilly conditions (this was a feature of my school) - and who was silently at odds with the ideas and the manner of life proposed for him. (This may be one of the reasons Nineteen-Eighty-Four is best read when you are an adolescent: most adolescents feel like that.)
I sympathised particularly with Winston's desire to write his forbidden thoughts down in a deliciously tempting, secret blank book: I had not yet started to write, but I could see the attractions of it. I could also see the dangers, because it's this scribbling of his - along with illicit sex, another item with considerable allure for a teenager of the 50s - that gets Winston into such a mess.
Animal Farm charts the progress of an idealistic movement of liberation towards a totalitarian dictatorship headed by a despotic tyrant; Nineteen Eighty-Four describes what it's like to live entirely within such a system. Its hero, Winston, has only fragmentary memories of what life was like before the present dreadful regime set in: he's an orphan, a child of the collectivity. His father died in the war that has ushered in the repression, and his mother has disappeared, leaving him with only the reproachful glance she gave him as he betrayed her over a chocolate bar - a small betrayal that acts both as the key to Winston's character and as a precursor to the many other betrayals in the book.
The government of Airstrip One, Winston's "country", is brutal. The constant surveillance, the impossibility of speaking frankly to anyone, the looming, ominous figure of Big Brother, the regime's need for enemies and wars - fictitious though both may be - which are used to terrify the people and unite them in hatred, the mind-numbing slogans, the distortions of language, the destruction of what has really happened by stuffing any record of it down the Memory Hole - these made a deep impression on me. Let me re-state that: they frightened the stuffing out of me. Orwell was writing a satire about Stalin's Soviet Union, a place about which I knew very little at the age of 14, but he did it so well that I could imagine such things happening anywhere.
There is no love interest in Animal Farm, but there is in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Winston finds a soulmate in Julia; outwardly a devoted Party fanatic, secretly a girl who enjoys sex and makeup and other spots of decadence. But the two lovers are discovered, and Winston is tortured for thought-crime - inner disloyalty to the regime.
He feels that if he can only remain faithful in his heart to Julia, his soul will be saved - a romantic concept, though one we are likely to endorse. But like all absolutist governments and religions, the Party demands that every personal loyalty be sacrificed to it, and replaced with an absolute loyalty to Big Brother.
Confronted with his worst fear in the dreaded Room 101, where a nasty device involving a cage-full of starving rats can be fitted to the eyes, Winston breaks: "Don't do it to me," he pleads, "do it to Julia." (This sentence has become shorthand in our household for the avoidance of onerous duties. Poor Julia - how hard we would make her life if she actually existed. She'd have to be on a lot of panel discussions, for instance.)
After his betrayal of Julia, Winston becomes a handful of malleable goo. He truly believes that two and two make five, and that he loves Big Brother. Our last glimpse of him is sitting drink-sodden at an outdoor cafe, knowing he's a dead man walking and having learned that Julia has betrayed him, too, while he listens to a popular refrain: "Under the spreading chestnut tree/ I sold you and you sold me ..."
Orwell has been accused of bitterness and pessimism - of leaving us with a vision of the future in which the individual has no chance, and where the brutal, totalitarian boot of the all-controlling Party will grind into the human face, for ever.
But this view of Orwell is contradicted by the last chapter in the book, an essay on Newspeak - the doublethink language concocted by the regime. By expurgating all words that might be troublesome - "bad" is no longer permitted, but becomes "double-plus-ungood" - and by making other words mean the opposite of what they used to mean - the place where people get tortured is the Ministry of Love, the building where the past is destroyed is the Ministry of Information - the rulers of Airstrip One wish to make it literally impossible for people to think straight. However, the essay on Newspeak is written in standard English, in the third person, and in the past tense, which can only mean that the regime has fallen, and that language and individuality have survived. For whoever has written the essay on Newspeak, the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four is over. Thus, it's my view that Orwell had much more faith in the resilience of the human spirit than he's usually been given credit for.
Orwell became a direct model for me much later in my life - in the real 1984, the year in which I began writing a somewhat different dystopia, The Handmaid's Tale. By that time I was 44, and I had learned enough about real despotisms - through the reading of history, travel, and my membership of Amnesty International - so that I didn't need to rely on Orwell alone.
The majority of dystopias - Orwell's included - have been written by men, and the point of view has been male. When women have appeared in them, they have been either sexless automatons or rebels who have defied the sex rules of the regime. They have acted as the temptresses of the male protagonists, however welcome this temptation may be to the men themselves.
Thus Julia; thus the cami-knicker-wearing, orgy-porgy seducer of the Savage in Brave New World; thus the subversive femme fatale of Yevgeny Zamyatin's 1924 seminal classic, We. I wanted to try a dystopia from the female point of view - the world according to Julia, as it were. However, this does not make The Handmaid's Tale a "feminist dystopia", except insofar as giving a woman a voice and an inner life will always be considered "feminist" by those who think women ought not to have these things.
The 20th century could be seen as a race between two versions of man-made hell - the jackbooted state totalitarianism of Orwell's Nineteen Eight-Four, and the hedonistic ersatz paradise of Brave New World, where absolutely everything is a consumer good and human beings are engineered to be happy. With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, it seemed for a time that Brave New World had won - from henceforth, state control would be minimal, and all we would have to do was go shopping and smile a lot, and wallow in pleasures, popping a pill or two when depression set in.
But with 9/11, all that changed. Now it appears we face the prospect of two contradictory dystopias at once - open markets, closed minds - because state surveillance is back again with a vengeance. The torturer's dreaded Room 101 has been with us for millennia. The dungeons of Rome, the Inquisition, the Star Chamber, the Bastille, the proceedings of General Pinochet and of the junta in Argentina - all have depended on secrecy and on the abuse of power. Lots of countries have had their versions of it - their ways of silencing troublesome dissent.
Democracies have traditionally defined themselves by, among other things - openness and the rule of law. But now it seems that we in the west are tacitly legitimising the methods of the darker human past, upgraded technologically and sanctified to our own uses, of course. For the sake of freedom, freedom must be renounced. To move us towards the improved world - the utopia we're promised - dystopia must first hold sway.
It's a concept worthy of doublethink. It's also, in its ordering of events, strangely Marxist. First the dictatorship of the proletariat, in which lots of heads must roll; then the pie-in-the-sky classless society, which oddly enough never materialises. Instead, we just get pigs with whips.
I often ask myself: what would George Orwell have to say about it?
Quite a lot.
Read Margaret Atwood's article, "Orwell and Me" from Guardian Unlimited. I will provide both a URL and the full article.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,978156,00.html
Consider the following in your 750 word response:
- What you have learnt in ENG4U
- What it's like to experience your adolescence (a critical and confusing phase of your life) in our post 9/11 world.
- Frye's The Educated Imagination
- Atwood's last question
- What you will do with your life
Orwell and me
Margaret Atwood cried her eyes out when she first read Animal Farm at the age of nine. Later, its author became a major influence on her writing. As the centenary of George Orwell's birth approaches, she says he would have plenty to say about the post-9/11 world
Monday June 16, 2003
The Guardian
I grew up with George Orwell. I was born in 1939, and Animal Farm was published in 1945. Thus, I was able to read it at the age of nine. It was lying around the house, and I mistook it for a book about talking animals, sort of like Wind in the Willows. I knew nothing about the kind of politics in the book - the child's version of politics then, just after the war, consisted of the simple notion that Hitler was bad but dead.
So I gobbled up the adventures of Napoleon and Snowball, the smart, greedy, upwardly mobile pigs, and Squealer the spin-doctor, and Boxer the noble but thick-witted horse, and the easily led, slogan-chanting sheep, without making any connection with historical events.
To say that I was horrified by this book is an understatement. The fate of the farm animals was so grim, the pigs so mean and mendacious and treacherous, the sheep so stupid. Children have a keen sense of injustice, and this was the thing that upset me the most: the pigs were so unjust. I cried my eyes out when Boxer the horse had an accident and was carted off to be made into dog food, instead of being given the quiet corner of the pasture he'd been promised.
The whole experience was deeply disturbing to me, but I am forever grateful to Orwell for alerting me early to the danger flags I've tried to watch out for since. In the world of Animal Farm, most speechifying and public palaver is bullshit and instigated lying, and though many characters are good-hearted and mean well, they can be frightened into closing their eyes to what's really going on.
The pigs browbeat the others with ideology, then twist that ideology to suit their own purposes: their language games were evident to me even at that age. As Orwell taught, it isn't the labels - Christianity, Socialism, Islam, Democracy, Two Legs Bad, Four Legs Good, the works - that are definitive, but the acts done in their name.
I could see, too, how easily those who have toppled an oppressive power take on its trappings and habits. Jean-Jacques Rousseau was right to warn us that democracy is the hardest form of government to maintain; Orwell knew that to the marrow of his bones, because he had seen it in action.
How quickly the precept "All Animals Are Equal" is changed into "All Animals Are Equal, but Some Are More Equal Than Others". What oily concern the pigs show for the welfare of the other animals, a concern that disguises their contempt for those they are manipulating.
With what alacrity do they put on the once-despised uniforms of the tyrannous humans they have overthrown, and learn to use their whips. How self-righteously they justify their actions, helped by the verbal web-spinning of Squealer, their nimble-tongued press agent, until all power is in their trotters, pretence is no longer necessary, and they rule by naked force.
A revolution often means only that: a revolving, a turn of the wheel of fortune, by which those who were at the bottom mount to the top, and assume the choice positions, crushing the former power-holders beneath them. We should beware of all those who plaster the landscape with large portraits of themselves, like the evil pig, Napoleon.
Animal Farm is one of the most spectacular Emperor-Has-No-Clothes books of the 20th century, and it got George Orwell into trouble. People who run counter to the current popular wisdom, who point out the uncomfortably obvious, are likely to be strenuously baa-ed at by herds of angry sheep. I didn't have all that figured out at the age of nine, of course - not in any conscious way. But we learn the patterns of stories before we learn their meanings, and Animal Farm has a very clear pattern.
Then along came Nineteen Eighty-Four, which was published in 1949. Thus, I read it in paperback a couple of years later, when I was in high school. Then I read it again, and again: it was right up there among my favourite books, along with Wuthering Heights.
At the same time, I absorbed its two companions, Arthur Koestler's Darkness At Noon and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. I was keen on all three of them, but I understood Darkness At Noon to be a tragedy about events that had already happened, and Brave New World to be a satirical comedy, with events that were unlikely to unfold in exactly that way. (Orgy-Porgy, indeed.)
Nineteen Eighty-Four struck me as more realistic, probably because Winston Smith was more like me - a skinny person who got tired a lot and was subjected to physical education under chilly conditions (this was a feature of my school) - and who was silently at odds with the ideas and the manner of life proposed for him. (This may be one of the reasons Nineteen-Eighty-Four is best read when you are an adolescent: most adolescents feel like that.)
I sympathised particularly with Winston's desire to write his forbidden thoughts down in a deliciously tempting, secret blank book: I had not yet started to write, but I could see the attractions of it. I could also see the dangers, because it's this scribbling of his - along with illicit sex, another item with considerable allure for a teenager of the 50s - that gets Winston into such a mess.
Animal Farm charts the progress of an idealistic movement of liberation towards a totalitarian dictatorship headed by a despotic tyrant; Nineteen Eighty-Four describes what it's like to live entirely within such a system. Its hero, Winston, has only fragmentary memories of what life was like before the present dreadful regime set in: he's an orphan, a child of the collectivity. His father died in the war that has ushered in the repression, and his mother has disappeared, leaving him with only the reproachful glance she gave him as he betrayed her over a chocolate bar - a small betrayal that acts both as the key to Winston's character and as a precursor to the many other betrayals in the book.
The government of Airstrip One, Winston's "country", is brutal. The constant surveillance, the impossibility of speaking frankly to anyone, the looming, ominous figure of Big Brother, the regime's need for enemies and wars - fictitious though both may be - which are used to terrify the people and unite them in hatred, the mind-numbing slogans, the distortions of language, the destruction of what has really happened by stuffing any record of it down the Memory Hole - these made a deep impression on me. Let me re-state that: they frightened the stuffing out of me. Orwell was writing a satire about Stalin's Soviet Union, a place about which I knew very little at the age of 14, but he did it so well that I could imagine such things happening anywhere.
There is no love interest in Animal Farm, but there is in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Winston finds a soulmate in Julia; outwardly a devoted Party fanatic, secretly a girl who enjoys sex and makeup and other spots of decadence. But the two lovers are discovered, and Winston is tortured for thought-crime - inner disloyalty to the regime.
He feels that if he can only remain faithful in his heart to Julia, his soul will be saved - a romantic concept, though one we are likely to endorse. But like all absolutist governments and religions, the Party demands that every personal loyalty be sacrificed to it, and replaced with an absolute loyalty to Big Brother.
Confronted with his worst fear in the dreaded Room 101, where a nasty device involving a cage-full of starving rats can be fitted to the eyes, Winston breaks: "Don't do it to me," he pleads, "do it to Julia." (This sentence has become shorthand in our household for the avoidance of onerous duties. Poor Julia - how hard we would make her life if she actually existed. She'd have to be on a lot of panel discussions, for instance.)
After his betrayal of Julia, Winston becomes a handful of malleable goo. He truly believes that two and two make five, and that he loves Big Brother. Our last glimpse of him is sitting drink-sodden at an outdoor cafe, knowing he's a dead man walking and having learned that Julia has betrayed him, too, while he listens to a popular refrain: "Under the spreading chestnut tree/ I sold you and you sold me ..."
Orwell has been accused of bitterness and pessimism - of leaving us with a vision of the future in which the individual has no chance, and where the brutal, totalitarian boot of the all-controlling Party will grind into the human face, for ever.
But this view of Orwell is contradicted by the last chapter in the book, an essay on Newspeak - the doublethink language concocted by the regime. By expurgating all words that might be troublesome - "bad" is no longer permitted, but becomes "double-plus-ungood" - and by making other words mean the opposite of what they used to mean - the place where people get tortured is the Ministry of Love, the building where the past is destroyed is the Ministry of Information - the rulers of Airstrip One wish to make it literally impossible for people to think straight. However, the essay on Newspeak is written in standard English, in the third person, and in the past tense, which can only mean that the regime has fallen, and that language and individuality have survived. For whoever has written the essay on Newspeak, the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four is over. Thus, it's my view that Orwell had much more faith in the resilience of the human spirit than he's usually been given credit for.
Orwell became a direct model for me much later in my life - in the real 1984, the year in which I began writing a somewhat different dystopia, The Handmaid's Tale. By that time I was 44, and I had learned enough about real despotisms - through the reading of history, travel, and my membership of Amnesty International - so that I didn't need to rely on Orwell alone.
The majority of dystopias - Orwell's included - have been written by men, and the point of view has been male. When women have appeared in them, they have been either sexless automatons or rebels who have defied the sex rules of the regime. They have acted as the temptresses of the male protagonists, however welcome this temptation may be to the men themselves.
Thus Julia; thus the cami-knicker-wearing, orgy-porgy seducer of the Savage in Brave New World; thus the subversive femme fatale of Yevgeny Zamyatin's 1924 seminal classic, We. I wanted to try a dystopia from the female point of view - the world according to Julia, as it were. However, this does not make The Handmaid's Tale a "feminist dystopia", except insofar as giving a woman a voice and an inner life will always be considered "feminist" by those who think women ought not to have these things.
The 20th century could be seen as a race between two versions of man-made hell - the jackbooted state totalitarianism of Orwell's Nineteen Eight-Four, and the hedonistic ersatz paradise of Brave New World, where absolutely everything is a consumer good and human beings are engineered to be happy. With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, it seemed for a time that Brave New World had won - from henceforth, state control would be minimal, and all we would have to do was go shopping and smile a lot, and wallow in pleasures, popping a pill or two when depression set in.
But with 9/11, all that changed. Now it appears we face the prospect of two contradictory dystopias at once - open markets, closed minds - because state surveillance is back again with a vengeance. The torturer's dreaded Room 101 has been with us for millennia. The dungeons of Rome, the Inquisition, the Star Chamber, the Bastille, the proceedings of General Pinochet and of the junta in Argentina - all have depended on secrecy and on the abuse of power. Lots of countries have had their versions of it - their ways of silencing troublesome dissent.
Democracies have traditionally defined themselves by, among other things - openness and the rule of law. But now it seems that we in the west are tacitly legitimising the methods of the darker human past, upgraded technologically and sanctified to our own uses, of course. For the sake of freedom, freedom must be renounced. To move us towards the improved world - the utopia we're promised - dystopia must first hold sway.
It's a concept worthy of doublethink. It's also, in its ordering of events, strangely Marxist. First the dictatorship of the proletariat, in which lots of heads must roll; then the pie-in-the-sky classless society, which oddly enough never materialises. Instead, we just get pigs with whips.
I often ask myself: what would George Orwell have to say about it?
Quite a lot.
Tuesday, May 23, 2006
Bonus Discussion 5 - 2+2=5
Do not use or expose yourself to any of the following for 4 days (96 consecutive hours):
- Television
- Internet
- Telephone
- Computer or Video Game system
- Radio
- Digital Personal Music Player (CD, MP3)
- Newspaper
Keep a pen and paper journal of your experience. Blog it on the fifth day.
Discussion 4 - Reading 1984
Why read 1984? What did you learn about yourself, or the world you live in?
Tuesday, May 16, 2006
Bonus Discussion 4 - 1984 Article Response
The Great 1984 Article Hunt: Student Response
- Comment on one article that someone in the class posted. Focus your honest response towards the article that the person found. Share your ideas with the class.
- Indicate early on in your response as to who you are writing to.
- Your comment must follow the established criteria.
- Only one student may comment on any other given student. In the event of a odd number of posts, the last student may choose to write their response to a person who has already been responded to.
Discussion 3 - 1984
The Great 1984 Article Hunt
The purpose of this week's discussion is twofold. Firstly, you'll begin to start thinking about the world you live in, and the world Winston lives in. Secondly, you'll learn how to focus a search by using specific keywords, or combinations of keywords. Consider using combinations of words rather than asking a question or typing a sentence.
The purpose of this week's discussion is twofold. Firstly, you'll begin to start thinking about the world you live in, and the world Winston lives in. Secondly, you'll learn how to focus a search by using specific keywords, or combinations of keywords. Consider using combinations of words rather than asking a question or typing a sentence.
- Search the Internet and find a legitimate newspaper, magazine, or scholarly article that deals with the reality (social or political) portrayed in 1984. Consider articles which deal with comparing aspects of our world with that of Orwell's dystopia.
- Once you've found an article, write a summary or response to the article. Your summary must follow the criteria set out for our class's blog.
- Copy and paste the original article after your summary / response. Be sure to include the URL underneath your copy of the article.
- NO DUPLICATED ARTICLES. ONE ARTICLE PER STUDENT.
Search Engines of noticeable consideration:
- Google - http://www.google.ca
- Google News - http://news.google.ca
- Google Scholar - http://scholar.google.ca
Search Engine tips:
- Read this amazing explanation http://www.google.ca/intl/en/help/basics.html#keywords
- Use keywords
- Use combinations of keywords
- Do not type sentences or questions
- Use quotations to force a word order
- Use the + sign to force a connection
- USE THE ADVANCED GOOGLE SEARCH
- 1984
- George Orwell
- Orwellian
Sunday, May 07, 2006
Bonus Discussion 3 - The Keys to Dreamland / The Canon
In "The Keys to Dreamland", Frye says, "But Shakespeare's plays weren't produced by his experience: they were produced by his imagination, and the way to develop the imagination is to read a good book or two."
With that quote in mind, consider this definiton:
The Western canon is a canon of books and art (and specifically a set with very loose boundaries) that has allegedly been highly influential in shaping Western culture. The selection of a canon is important to the theory of educational perennialism. (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_canon)
American literary critic Harold Bloom's The Western Canon (1994) is his attempt to define the Western Canon. People will always argue as to what works should or should not be part of the canon. Some people will also argue that there is no need for a canon. Nevertheless, here is a link to a copy of the appendices to Bloom's book (NB: I have cut and pasted the parts you will need for your assignment further down in this post):
http://www.literarycritic.com/bloom.htm
Assignment details:
A. The Theocratic Age
"Since the literary canon is at issue here, I include only those religious, philosophical, historical, and scientific writings that are themselves of great aesthetic interest. I would think that, of all the books that are in this first list, once the reader is conversant with the Bible, Homer, Plato, the Athenian dramatists, and Virgil, the crucial work is the Koran....
"I have included some Sanskrit works, scriptures and fundamental literary texts, because of their influence on the Western canon. The immense wealth of ancient Chinese literature is mostly a sphere apart from Western literary tradition and is rarely conveyed adequately in the translations available to us." (p. 531)
The Ancient Near East
The Epic of Gilgamesh
Egyptian Book of the Dead
Holy Bible (King James Version)
The Apocrypha
Sayings of the Fathers (Pirke Aboth)
Ancient India (Sanskrit)
Mahabharata
Bhagavad-Gita
Ramayana
The Ancient Greeks
Homer. Iliad; Odyssey
Hesiod. Works and Days; Theogony
Archilochos
Sappho, Alkman
Pindar. Odes
Aeschylus. Oresteia; Seven Against Thebes; Prometheus Bound; Persians
Aeschylus. Suppliant Women
Sophocles. Oedipus the King; Oedipus at Colonus; Antigone; Electra
Sophocles. Ajax; Women of Trachis; Philoctetes
Euripides. Cyclops; Heracles; Alcestis; Hecuba
Euripedes. Bacchae; Orestes; Andromache; Medea; Ion; Hippolytus; Helen; Iphigenia at Aulis
Aristophanes. The Birds; The Clouds; The Frogs; Lysistrata
Arisotophanes. The Knights; The Wasps; The Assemblywomen
Herodotus. The Histories
Thucydides. The Peloponnesian Wars
The Pre-Socratics (Heraclitus, Empedocles)
Plato. Dialogues
Aristotle. Poetics; Ethics
Hellenistic Greeks
Menander. The Girl from Samos
Longinus. On the Sublime
Callimachus. Hymns and Epigrams
Theocritus. Idylls
Plutarch. Lives; Moralia
Aesop. Fables
Lucian. Satires
The Romans
Plautus. Pseudolus; The Braggart Soldier; The Rope; Amphitryon
Terence. The Girl from Andros; The Eunuch; The Mother-in-Law
Lucretius. The Way Things Are
Cicero. On the Gods
Horace. Odes; Epistles; Satires
Persius. Satires
Catullus. Attis and Other Poems
Virgil. Aeneid; Eclogues; Georgics
Lucan. Pharsalia
Ovid. Metamorphoses; The Art of Love; Heroides
Juvenal. Satires
Martial. Epigrams
Seneca. Tragedies, particularly Medea and Hercules Furens
Petronius. Satyricon
Apuleius. The Golden Ass
The Middle Ages: Latin, Arabic, and the Vernacular Before Dante
Augustine, Saint. City of God; Confessions
The Koran (Al-Qur'an)
The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Nights
The Poetic Edda
Snorri Sturluson. The Prose Edda
The Nibelungen Lied
Eschenbach, Wolfram von. Parzival
Troyes, Chrétien de. Yvain: The Knight of the Lion
Beowulf
The Poem of the Cid,
Pisan, Christine de. The Book of the City of Ladies
Pedro, Diego de San. Prison of Love
B. The Aristocratic Age
"It is a span of five hundred years from Dante's Divine Comedy through Goethe's Faust, Part Two [1321-1832], an era that gives us a huge body of reading in five major literatures: Italian, Spanish, English, French, and German. In this and in the remaining lists, I sometimes do not mention individual works by a canonical master, and in other instances I attempt to call attention to authors and books that I consider canonical but rather neglected. From this list onward, many good writers who are not quite central are omitted...." (p. 534)
Italy
Dante. The Divine Comedy; The New Life
Petrarch. Lyric Poems; Selections
Boccaccio, Giovanni. The Decameron
Boiardo, Matteo Maria. Orlando Innamorato
Ariosto, Ludovico. Orlando Furioso
Buonarroti, Michelangelo. Sonnets and Madrigals
Machiavelli, Niccolò. The Prince; The Mandrake, a Comedy
Vinci, Leonardo da. Notebooks
Castiglione, Baldassare. The Book of the Courtier
Stampa, Gaspara. Sonnets and Madrigals
Vasari, Giorgio. Lives of the Painters
Cellini, Benvenuto. Autobiography
Tasso, Torquato. Jerusalem Delivered
Bruno, Giordano. The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast
Campanella, Tommaso. Poems; The City of the Sun
Vico, Giambattista. Principles of a New Science
Goldoni, Carlo. The Servant of Two Masters
Alfieri, Vittorio. Saul
Portugal
Camoëns, Luis de. The Lusiads
Ferreira, Antònio. Poetry
Spain
Manrique, Jorge. Coplas
Rojas, Fernando de. La Celestina
Anonymous. Lazarillo de Tormes.
Quevedo, Francisco de. Visions; Satirical Letter of Censure
León, Fray Luis de. Poems
Cross, St. John of the. Poems
Góngora, Luis de. Sonnets; Soledades
Cervantes, Miguel de. Don Quixote; Exemplary Stories
Vega, Lope de. La Dorotea; Fuente Ovejuna; Lost in a Mirror; The Knight of Olmedo
Molina, Tirso de. The Trickster of Seville
Barca, Pedro Calderón de la. Life is a Dream; The Mayor of Zalamea; The Mighty Magician; The Doctor of His Own Honor
Cruz, Sor Juana Inés de la. Poems
England and Scotland
Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales; Troilus and Criseyde
Malory, Sir Thomas. Le Morte D'Arthur
Dunbar, William. Poems
Skelton, John. Poems
More, Sir Thomas. Utopia
Wyatt, Sir Thomas. Poems
Surrey, Henry Howard, Earl of. Poems
Sidney, Sir Philip. The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia; Astrophel and Stella; An Apology for Poetry
Brooke, Fulke Greville, Lord. Poems
Spenser, Edmund. The Faerie Queene; The Minor Poems
Ralegh, Sir Walter. Poems
Marlowe, Christopher. Poems and Plays
Drayton, Michael. Poems
Daniel, Samuel. Poems; A Defence of Ryme
Nashe, Thomas. The Unfortunate Traveller
Kyd, Thomas. The Spanish Tragedy
Shakespeare, William. Plays and Poems
Campion, Thomas. Songs
Donne, John. Poems; Sermons
Jonson, Ben. Poems, Plays, and Masques
Bacon, Francis. Essays
Burton, Robert. The Anatomy of Melancholy
Browne, Sir Thomas. Religio Medici; Hydriotaphia, or Urne-Buriall; The Garden of Cyrus
Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan
Herrick, Robert. Poems
Carew, Thomas. Poems
Lovelace, Richard. Poems
Marvell, Andrew. Poems
Herbert, George. The Temple
Traherne, Thomas. Centuries, Poems, and Thanksgivings
Vaughan, Henry. Poetry
Rochester, John Wilmot, Earl of. Poems
Crashaw, Richard. Poems
Fletcher, Francis Beaumont and John. Plays
Chapman, George. Comedies, Tragedies, Poems
Ford, John. 'Tis Pity She's a Whore
Marston, John. The Malcontent
Webster, John. The White Devil; The Duchess of Malfi
Rowley, Thomas Middleton and William. The Changeling
Tourneur, Cyril. The Revenger's Tragedy
Massinger, Philip. A New Way to Pay Old Debts
Bunyan, John. The Pilgrim's Progress
Walton, Izaak. The Compleat Angler
Milton, John. Paradise Lost; Paradise Regained; Lycidas, Comus, and the Minor Poems; Samson Agonistes; Areopagitica
Aubrey, John. Brief Lives
Taylor, Jeremy. Holy Dying
Butler, Samuel. Hudibras
Dryden, John. Poetry and Plays; Critical Essays
Otway, Thomas. Venice Preserv'd
Congreve, William. The Way of the World; Love for Love
Swift, Jonathan. A Tale of a Tub; Gulliver's Travels; Shorter Prose Works; Poems
Etherege, Sir George. The Man of Mode
Pope, Alexander. Poems
Gay, John. The Beggar's Opera
Boswell, James. Life of Johnson; Journals
Johnson, Samuel. Works
Gibbon, Edward. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful; Reflections on the Revolution in France
Morgann, Maurice. An Essay on the Dramatic Character of Sir John Falstaff
Collins, William. Poems
Farquhar, George. The Beaux' Strategem; The Recruiting Officer
Wycherley, William. The Country Wife; The Plain Dealer
Smart, Christopher. Jubilate Agno; A Song to David
Goldsmith, Oliver. The Vicar of Wakefield; She Stoops to Conquer; The Traveller; The Deserted Village
Sheridan, Richard Brinsley. The School of Scandal; The Rivals
Cowper, William. Poetical Works
Crabbe, George. Poetical Works
Defoe, Daniel. Moll Flanders; Robinson Crusoe; A Journal of the Plague Year
Richardson, Samuel. Clarissa; Pamela; Sir Charles Grandison
Fielding, Henry. Joseph Andrews; The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling
Smollett, Tobias. The Expedition of Humphry Clinker; The Adventures of Roderick Random
Sterne, Laurence. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman; A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy
Burney, Fanny. Evelina
Steele, Joseph Addison and Richard. The Spectator
France
Froissart, Jean. Chronicles; The Song of Roland
Villon, François. Poems
Montaigne, Michel de. Essays
Rabelais, François. Gargantua and Pantagruel
Navarre, Marguerite de. The Heptameron
Bellay, Joachim Du. The Regrets
Scève, Maurice. Délie
Ronsard, Pierre. Odes, Elegies, Sonnets
Commynes, Philippe de. Memoirs
d'Aubigné, Agrippa. Les Tragiques
Garnier, Robert. Mark Antony; The Jewesses
Corneille, Pierre. The Cid; Polyeucte; Nicomède; Horace; Cinna; Rodogune
Rochefoucauld, François de La. Maxims
Fontaine, Jean de La. Fables
Moliere. The Misanthrope; Tartuffe; The School for Wives
Moliere. The Learned Ladies; Don Juan; School for Husbands; Ridiculous Precieuses; The Would-Be Gentleman
Moliere. The Miser; The Imaginary Invalid
Pascal, Blaise. Pensées
Bosuet, Jacques-Bénigne. Funerary Orations
Boileau-Despréaux, Nicolas. The Art of Poetry; Lutrin
Racine, Jean. Phaedra; Andromache; Britannicus; Athaliah
Marivaux, Pierre Carlet de. Seven Comedies
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. The Confessions; Émile; La Nouvelle Héloïse
Voltaire. Zadig; Candide; Letters on England; The Lisbon Earthquake
Prevost, Abbe. Manon Lescaut
Fayette, Madame de La. The Princess of Cleves
Chamfort, Sébastien-Roch Nicolas de. Products of the Perfected Civilization
Diderot, Denis. Rameau's Nephew
Laclos, Choderlos de. Dangerous Liaisons
Germany
Erasmus. In Praise of Folly
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Faust, Parts One and Two; Dichtung und Wahrheit; Egmont
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Elective Affinities; The Sorrows of Young Werther; Poems; Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship; Wilhelm Meister's Years of Wandering
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Italian Journey; Verse Plays; Hermann and Dorothea; Roman Elegies
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Venetian Epigrams; West-Eastern Divan
Schiller, Friedrich. The Robbers; Mary Stuart; Wallenstein; Don Carlos; On the Naïve and Sentimental in Literature
Lessing, Gotthold. Laocoön; Nathan the Wise
Hölderlin, Freidrich. Hymns and Fragments; Selected Poems
Kleist, Heinrich von. Five Plays; Stories
With that quote in mind, consider this definiton:
The Western canon is a canon of books and art (and specifically a set with very loose boundaries) that has allegedly been highly influential in shaping Western culture. The selection of a canon is important to the theory of educational perennialism. (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_canon)
American literary critic Harold Bloom's The Western Canon (1994) is his attempt to define the Western Canon. People will always argue as to what works should or should not be part of the canon. Some people will also argue that there is no need for a canon. Nevertheless, here is a link to a copy of the appendices to Bloom's book (NB: I have cut and pasted the parts you will need for your assignment further down in this post):
http://www.literarycritic.com/bloom.htm
Assignment details:
- Research any three books in section A or B. I have provided this below.
- Do not use a book that anyone else in our class has used.
- Explain why they are part of Bloom's canon.
- Do not use texts listed in sections C or D.
A. The Theocratic Age
"Since the literary canon is at issue here, I include only those religious, philosophical, historical, and scientific writings that are themselves of great aesthetic interest. I would think that, of all the books that are in this first list, once the reader is conversant with the Bible, Homer, Plato, the Athenian dramatists, and Virgil, the crucial work is the Koran....
"I have included some Sanskrit works, scriptures and fundamental literary texts, because of their influence on the Western canon. The immense wealth of ancient Chinese literature is mostly a sphere apart from Western literary tradition and is rarely conveyed adequately in the translations available to us." (p. 531)
The Ancient Near East
The Epic of Gilgamesh
Egyptian Book of the Dead
Holy Bible (King James Version)
The Apocrypha
Sayings of the Fathers (Pirke Aboth)
Ancient India (Sanskrit)
Mahabharata
Bhagavad-Gita
Ramayana
The Ancient Greeks
Homer. Iliad; Odyssey
Hesiod. Works and Days; Theogony
Archilochos
Sappho, Alkman
Pindar. Odes
Aeschylus. Oresteia; Seven Against Thebes; Prometheus Bound; Persians
Aeschylus. Suppliant Women
Sophocles. Oedipus the King; Oedipus at Colonus; Antigone; Electra
Sophocles. Ajax; Women of Trachis; Philoctetes
Euripides. Cyclops; Heracles; Alcestis; Hecuba
Euripedes. Bacchae; Orestes; Andromache; Medea; Ion; Hippolytus; Helen; Iphigenia at Aulis
Aristophanes. The Birds; The Clouds; The Frogs; Lysistrata
Arisotophanes. The Knights; The Wasps; The Assemblywomen
Herodotus. The Histories
Thucydides. The Peloponnesian Wars
The Pre-Socratics (Heraclitus, Empedocles)
Plato. Dialogues
Aristotle. Poetics; Ethics
Hellenistic Greeks
Menander. The Girl from Samos
Longinus. On the Sublime
Callimachus. Hymns and Epigrams
Theocritus. Idylls
Plutarch. Lives; Moralia
Aesop. Fables
Lucian. Satires
The Romans
Plautus. Pseudolus; The Braggart Soldier; The Rope; Amphitryon
Terence. The Girl from Andros; The Eunuch; The Mother-in-Law
Lucretius. The Way Things Are
Cicero. On the Gods
Horace. Odes; Epistles; Satires
Persius. Satires
Catullus. Attis and Other Poems
Virgil. Aeneid; Eclogues; Georgics
Lucan. Pharsalia
Ovid. Metamorphoses; The Art of Love; Heroides
Juvenal. Satires
Martial. Epigrams
Seneca. Tragedies, particularly Medea and Hercules Furens
Petronius. Satyricon
Apuleius. The Golden Ass
The Middle Ages: Latin, Arabic, and the Vernacular Before Dante
Augustine, Saint. City of God; Confessions
The Koran (Al-Qur'an)
The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Nights
The Poetic Edda
Snorri Sturluson. The Prose Edda
The Nibelungen Lied
Eschenbach, Wolfram von. Parzival
Troyes, Chrétien de. Yvain: The Knight of the Lion
Beowulf
The Poem of the Cid,
Pisan, Christine de. The Book of the City of Ladies
Pedro, Diego de San. Prison of Love
B. The Aristocratic Age
"It is a span of five hundred years from Dante's Divine Comedy through Goethe's Faust, Part Two [1321-1832], an era that gives us a huge body of reading in five major literatures: Italian, Spanish, English, French, and German. In this and in the remaining lists, I sometimes do not mention individual works by a canonical master, and in other instances I attempt to call attention to authors and books that I consider canonical but rather neglected. From this list onward, many good writers who are not quite central are omitted...." (p. 534)
Italy
Dante. The Divine Comedy; The New Life
Petrarch. Lyric Poems; Selections
Boccaccio, Giovanni. The Decameron
Boiardo, Matteo Maria. Orlando Innamorato
Ariosto, Ludovico. Orlando Furioso
Buonarroti, Michelangelo. Sonnets and Madrigals
Machiavelli, Niccolò. The Prince; The Mandrake, a Comedy
Vinci, Leonardo da. Notebooks
Castiglione, Baldassare. The Book of the Courtier
Stampa, Gaspara. Sonnets and Madrigals
Vasari, Giorgio. Lives of the Painters
Cellini, Benvenuto. Autobiography
Tasso, Torquato. Jerusalem Delivered
Bruno, Giordano. The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast
Campanella, Tommaso. Poems; The City of the Sun
Vico, Giambattista. Principles of a New Science
Goldoni, Carlo. The Servant of Two Masters
Alfieri, Vittorio. Saul
Portugal
Camoëns, Luis de. The Lusiads
Ferreira, Antònio. Poetry
Spain
Manrique, Jorge. Coplas
Rojas, Fernando de. La Celestina
Anonymous. Lazarillo de Tormes.
Quevedo, Francisco de. Visions; Satirical Letter of Censure
León, Fray Luis de. Poems
Cross, St. John of the. Poems
Góngora, Luis de. Sonnets; Soledades
Cervantes, Miguel de. Don Quixote; Exemplary Stories
Vega, Lope de. La Dorotea; Fuente Ovejuna; Lost in a Mirror; The Knight of Olmedo
Molina, Tirso de. The Trickster of Seville
Barca, Pedro Calderón de la. Life is a Dream; The Mayor of Zalamea; The Mighty Magician; The Doctor of His Own Honor
Cruz, Sor Juana Inés de la. Poems
England and Scotland
Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales; Troilus and Criseyde
Malory, Sir Thomas. Le Morte D'Arthur
Dunbar, William. Poems
Skelton, John. Poems
More, Sir Thomas. Utopia
Wyatt, Sir Thomas. Poems
Surrey, Henry Howard, Earl of. Poems
Sidney, Sir Philip. The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia; Astrophel and Stella; An Apology for Poetry
Brooke, Fulke Greville, Lord. Poems
Spenser, Edmund. The Faerie Queene; The Minor Poems
Ralegh, Sir Walter. Poems
Marlowe, Christopher. Poems and Plays
Drayton, Michael. Poems
Daniel, Samuel. Poems; A Defence of Ryme
Nashe, Thomas. The Unfortunate Traveller
Kyd, Thomas. The Spanish Tragedy
Shakespeare, William. Plays and Poems
Campion, Thomas. Songs
Donne, John. Poems; Sermons
Jonson, Ben. Poems, Plays, and Masques
Bacon, Francis. Essays
Burton, Robert. The Anatomy of Melancholy
Browne, Sir Thomas. Religio Medici; Hydriotaphia, or Urne-Buriall; The Garden of Cyrus
Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan
Herrick, Robert. Poems
Carew, Thomas. Poems
Lovelace, Richard. Poems
Marvell, Andrew. Poems
Herbert, George. The Temple
Traherne, Thomas. Centuries, Poems, and Thanksgivings
Vaughan, Henry. Poetry
Rochester, John Wilmot, Earl of. Poems
Crashaw, Richard. Poems
Fletcher, Francis Beaumont and John. Plays
Chapman, George. Comedies, Tragedies, Poems
Ford, John. 'Tis Pity She's a Whore
Marston, John. The Malcontent
Webster, John. The White Devil; The Duchess of Malfi
Rowley, Thomas Middleton and William. The Changeling
Tourneur, Cyril. The Revenger's Tragedy
Massinger, Philip. A New Way to Pay Old Debts
Bunyan, John. The Pilgrim's Progress
Walton, Izaak. The Compleat Angler
Milton, John. Paradise Lost; Paradise Regained; Lycidas, Comus, and the Minor Poems; Samson Agonistes; Areopagitica
Aubrey, John. Brief Lives
Taylor, Jeremy. Holy Dying
Butler, Samuel. Hudibras
Dryden, John. Poetry and Plays; Critical Essays
Otway, Thomas. Venice Preserv'd
Congreve, William. The Way of the World; Love for Love
Swift, Jonathan. A Tale of a Tub; Gulliver's Travels; Shorter Prose Works; Poems
Etherege, Sir George. The Man of Mode
Pope, Alexander. Poems
Gay, John. The Beggar's Opera
Boswell, James. Life of Johnson; Journals
Johnson, Samuel. Works
Gibbon, Edward. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful; Reflections on the Revolution in France
Morgann, Maurice. An Essay on the Dramatic Character of Sir John Falstaff
Collins, William. Poems
Farquhar, George. The Beaux' Strategem; The Recruiting Officer
Wycherley, William. The Country Wife; The Plain Dealer
Smart, Christopher. Jubilate Agno; A Song to David
Goldsmith, Oliver. The Vicar of Wakefield; She Stoops to Conquer; The Traveller; The Deserted Village
Sheridan, Richard Brinsley. The School of Scandal; The Rivals
Cowper, William. Poetical Works
Crabbe, George. Poetical Works
Defoe, Daniel. Moll Flanders; Robinson Crusoe; A Journal of the Plague Year
Richardson, Samuel. Clarissa; Pamela; Sir Charles Grandison
Fielding, Henry. Joseph Andrews; The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling
Smollett, Tobias. The Expedition of Humphry Clinker; The Adventures of Roderick Random
Sterne, Laurence. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman; A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy
Burney, Fanny. Evelina
Steele, Joseph Addison and Richard. The Spectator
France
Froissart, Jean. Chronicles; The Song of Roland
Villon, François. Poems
Montaigne, Michel de. Essays
Rabelais, François. Gargantua and Pantagruel
Navarre, Marguerite de. The Heptameron
Bellay, Joachim Du. The Regrets
Scève, Maurice. Délie
Ronsard, Pierre. Odes, Elegies, Sonnets
Commynes, Philippe de. Memoirs
d'Aubigné, Agrippa. Les Tragiques
Garnier, Robert. Mark Antony; The Jewesses
Corneille, Pierre. The Cid; Polyeucte; Nicomède; Horace; Cinna; Rodogune
Rochefoucauld, François de La. Maxims
Fontaine, Jean de La. Fables
Moliere. The Misanthrope; Tartuffe; The School for Wives
Moliere. The Learned Ladies; Don Juan; School for Husbands; Ridiculous Precieuses; The Would-Be Gentleman
Moliere. The Miser; The Imaginary Invalid
Pascal, Blaise. Pensées
Bosuet, Jacques-Bénigne. Funerary Orations
Boileau-Despréaux, Nicolas. The Art of Poetry; Lutrin
Racine, Jean. Phaedra; Andromache; Britannicus; Athaliah
Marivaux, Pierre Carlet de. Seven Comedies
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. The Confessions; Émile; La Nouvelle Héloïse
Voltaire. Zadig; Candide; Letters on England; The Lisbon Earthquake
Prevost, Abbe. Manon Lescaut
Fayette, Madame de La. The Princess of Cleves
Chamfort, Sébastien-Roch Nicolas de. Products of the Perfected Civilization
Diderot, Denis. Rameau's Nephew
Laclos, Choderlos de. Dangerous Liaisons
Germany
Erasmus. In Praise of Folly
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Faust, Parts One and Two; Dichtung und Wahrheit; Egmont
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Elective Affinities; The Sorrows of Young Werther; Poems; Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship; Wilhelm Meister's Years of Wandering
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Italian Journey; Verse Plays; Hermann and Dorothea; Roman Elegies
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Venetian Epigrams; West-Eastern Divan
Schiller, Friedrich. The Robbers; Mary Stuart; Wallenstein; Don Carlos; On the Naïve and Sentimental in Literature
Lessing, Gotthold. Laocoön; Nathan the Wise
Hölderlin, Freidrich. Hymns and Fragments; Selected Poems
Kleist, Heinrich von. Five Plays; Stories
Discussion 2 - Why Study Myth?
This weeks assignment is two-fold, it tackles both persuasive writing, and it starts you thinking about the larger assignment for The Educated Imagination.
Write an open letter to the Ministry of Education arguing persuasively that mythology should become part of the Secondary School English Curriculum.
Use both Frye's The Educated Imagination and the mythology package that I gave you as starting points. Secondary sources are most welcome, but must be cited.
Use at least three rhetorical devices to persuade your reader. There are three pages of rhetorical devices that comprised the last pages of your dialetical journal / literary devices handout.
Write an open letter to the Ministry of Education arguing persuasively that mythology should become part of the Secondary School English Curriculum.
Use both Frye's The Educated Imagination and the mythology package that I gave you as starting points. Secondary sources are most welcome, but must be cited.
Use at least three rhetorical devices to persuade your reader. There are three pages of rhetorical devices that comprised the last pages of your dialetical journal / literary devices handout.
Wednesday, May 03, 2006
Bonus Discussion 2 - The Motive for Metaphor
We've discussed Frye's first essay / lecture, "The Motive for Metaphor", in class. Give a poetic example of how, "the motive for metaphor, according to Wallace Stevens, is a desire to associate, and finally to identify, the human mind with what goes on outside of it."
- Include your poem in your response.
- Try to place your poem after your introduction.
- Explain your choice.
- Cite your poem, either a URL or a MLA listing.
Sunday, April 30, 2006
Discussion 1 - Heart of Darkness
- Critically explain the significance of one symbol from Heart of Darkness to the novella.
- Trace Marlow's character development in Heart of Darkness.
- What is the theme of Heart of Darkness?
Wednesday, April 26, 2006
Bonus Discussion 1 - The Hollow Men
The shear volume of classic / canonical poetry on the internet is awe-inspiring. I would like to use T.S. Eliot's "The Hollow Men" as a starting point for poetic analysis on the internet.
I've already done a Google search for the poem, and I would like you to read these three versions of the same poem. Note that before the URL, I've named these web pages in the same manner as their authors have. Hopefully this will allow us to begin to distinguish them.
This is a bonus discussion topic. You will not be penalized if you do not participate.
I've already done a Google search for the poem, and I would like you to read these three versions of the same poem. Note that before the URL, I've named these web pages in the same manner as their authors have. Hopefully this will allow us to begin to distinguish them.
- The Hollow Men - http://www.blight.com/~sparkle/poems/hollow.html
- "The Hollow Men" - http://www.columbia.edu/itc/tc/scfu4016/hollow.html
- A Hypertext Version of T.S. Eliot's "The Hollow Men" - http://www.aduni.org/~heather/occs/honors/Poem.htm
- Read the identical poems in this order.
- Read each version before you move to the next one.
- Do not scan them, take note of their differences and similarities.
- Make notes as you read to help you understand the meaning of the poem.
- Look up, and then write down all the words you do not understand. I suggest the Canadian Oxford Dictionary, but since you are already online, go to www.m-w.com (The Merriam - Webster Online Dictionary). Note, there's a link to this dictionary in the Links section of this blog.
- Ask yourself, are the poems different from one another?
- Is one version harder to read than another? Why (Consider colour and layout)?
- Does the reader's understanding of the theme of the poem change from any particular version?
- How can a reader be sure of the authenticity of a poem on the internet?
- What are the benefits and disadvantages to having poetry on the internet?
- Are there historical or editorial reasons for changes in these poems?
This is a bonus discussion topic. You will not be penalized if you do not participate.
SECURITY NOTICE
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Monday, April 24, 2006
Getting Started, Making an Account
Blogger.com allow members to join blogs via email invitations. Since our blog will only accepts posts from members, you will have to create a blogger.com account.
YOU CAN NOT USE A CURRENT BLOGGER.COM ACCOUNT. MAKE A NEW ONE.
YOU CAN NOT USE A CURRENT BLOGGER.COM ACCOUNT. MAKE A NEW ONE.
- Go to blogger.com
- Click 'Sign In'
- Click 'Sign Up Here'
- Read the following points before you continue
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- Select Edit Profile
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Welcome
This blog will be used as a forum to discuss your reading assignments. You will be evaluated both on your participation in this blog, and the material you produce in response to the topic(s).
Some things to keep in mind:
Some things to keep in mind:
- This blog is secure, only members from our class can post.
- Do not add anyone to the contributor list(don't send out an invitation to anyone).
- The ENTIRE world can READ our posts.
- All posts will be written in standard formal English.
- I am interested in YOUR ideas. Do not plagiarize. Our schools academic honesty rules apply here.
- You must write one 250 word(minimum) response in this blog every week (Monday to Sunday). Please note that all posts are time stamped. Your 250 word(minimum) post will be evaluated. Marks will not be posted, or disclosed in this forum.
- If there is only one topic in any given week, then the entire class is expected to reply to that topic. If there are multiple topics in any given week, once 10 replies have been made per topic, that topic will no longer be discussed. For example, 3 topics per week, 10 students per topic.
- THIS FORUM IS RESERVED FOR YOUR LITERARY RESPONSES. It is not for posting personal messages to your classmates, or for asking me questions.
- You may reply to another students posting as long as it is relevant to our work.
- After you receive an invitation from blogger, read the post called, "Security Notice"(April 2006). Follow those steps.
- Login into your blogger.com account and set your profile to private.
- The easiest way to read a long series of posts is by clicking on the title of the series of posts you want to read. Look for the titles on the right hand side of the blog in a section called Blog Archive.
- You can write your response online using Blogger's interface or you can use a word processor, save your work, and then copy and paste it into Blogger's interface. I write this after having already lost a document twice.
- Posting is done by clicking on the word Comments at the end of an entry. Only publish your assignment as a comment to a posting I have created, do not create a posting on the main page.
- Unless I state otherwise, your assignments will be found in the archive under the current month. There may be cases where I will ask you to write about a topic which was posted a year, or more, ago. I will let you know if that is ever the case.
- The URL is simple, eng4u1.blogspot.com
- Have fun, be courteous, treat each other with respect, and be honest.
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