Discussion 8 - Atwood, Orwell and You

This blog will weigh more than the previous ones. It is due in the new year. Please check the calendar.

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 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.

Discussion 7 - Why Write?

This week's blog will help you develop notes for the in-class essay, and it will provide the foundation for the questions you will be seeking answers to. Read Orwell's essay and consider why he wrote.

Why I Write

George Orwell

From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer. Between the ages of about seventeen and twenty-four I tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with the consciousness that I was outraging my true nature and that sooner or later I should have to settle down and write books.

I was the middle child of three, but there was a gap of five years on either side, and I barely saw my father before I was eight. For this and other reasons I was somewhat lonely, and I soon developed disagreeable mannerisms which made me unpopular throughout my schooldays. I had the lonely child's habit of making up stories and holding conversations with imaginary persons, and I think from the very start my literary ambitions were mixed up with the feeling of being isolated and undervalued. I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts, and I felt that this created a sort of private world in which I could get my own back for my failure in everyday life. Nevertheless the volume of serious — i.e. seriously intended — writing which I produced all through my childhood and boyhood would not amount to half a dozen pages. I wrote my first poem at the age of four or five, my mother taking it down to dictation. I cannot remember anything about it except that it was about a tiger and the tiger had ‘chair-like teeth’ — a good enough phrase, but I fancy the poem was a plagiarism of Blake's ‘Tiger, Tiger’. At eleven, when the war or 1914-18 broke out, I wrote a patriotic poem which was printed in the local newspaper, as was another, two years later, on the death of Kitchener. From time to time, when I was a bit older, I wrote bad and usually unfinished ‘nature poems’ in the Georgian style. I also attempted a short story which was a ghastly failure. That was the total of the would-be serious work that I actually set down on paper during all those years.

However, throughout this time I did in a sense engage in literary activities. To begin with there was the made-to-order stuff which I produced quickly, easily and without much pleasure to myself. Apart from school work, I wrote vers d'occasion, semi-comic poems which I could turn out at what now seems to me astonishing speed — at fourteen I wrote a whole rhyming play, in imitation of Aristophanes, in about a week — and helped to edit a school magazines, both printed and in manuscript. These magazines were the most pitiful burlesque stuff that you could imagine, and I took far less trouble with them than I now would with the cheapest journalism. But side by side with all this, for fifteen years or more, I was carrying out a literary exercise of a quite different kind: this was the making up of a continuous ‘story’ about myself, a sort of diary existing only in the mind. I believe this is a common habit of children and adolescents. As a very small child I used to imagine that I was, say, Robin Hood, and picture myself as the hero of thrilling adventures, but quite soon my ‘story’ ceased to be narcissistic in a crude way and became more and more a mere description of what I was doing and the things I saw. For minutes at a time this kind of thing would be running through my head: ‘He pushed the door open and entered the room. A yellow beam of sunlight, filtering through the muslin curtains, slanted on to the table, where a match-box, half-open, lay beside the inkpot. With his right hand in his pocket he moved across to the window. Down in the street a tortoiseshell cat was chasing a dead leaf’, etc. etc. This habit continued until I was about twenty-five, right through my non-literary years. Although I had to search, and did search, for the right words, I seemed to be making this descriptive effort almost against my will, under a kind of compulsion from outside. The ‘story’ must, I suppose, have reflected the styles of the various writers I admired at different ages, but so far as I remember it always had the same meticulous descriptive quality.

When I was about sixteen I suddenly discovered the joy of mere words, i.e. the sounds and associations of words. The lines from Paradise Lost —

So hee with difficulty and labour hard
Moved on: with difficulty and labour hee.

which do not now seem to me so very wonderful, sent shivers down my backbone; and the spelling ‘hee’ for ‘he’ was an added pleasure. As for the need to describe things, I knew all about it already. So it is clear what kind of books I wanted to write, in so far as I could be said to want to write books at that time. I wanted to write enormous naturalistic novels with unhappy endings, full of detailed descriptions and arresting similes, and also full of purple passages in which words were used partly for the sake of their own sound. And in fact my first completed novel, Burmese Days, which I wrote when I was thirty but projected much earlier, is rather that kind of book.

I give all this background information because I do not think one can assess a writer's motives without knowing something of his early development. His subject matter will be determined by the age he lives in — at least this is true in tumultuous, revolutionary ages like our own — but before he ever begins to write he will have acquired an emotional attitude from which he will never completely escape. It is his job, no doubt, to discipline his temperament and avoid getting stuck at some immature stage, in some perverse mood; but if he escapes from his early influences altogether, he will have killed his impulse to write. Putting aside the need to earn a living, I think there are four great motives for writing, at any rate for writing prose. They exist in different degrees in every writer, and in any one writer the proportions will vary from time to time, according to the atmosphere in which he is living. They are:

(i) Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on the grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc., etc. It is humbug to pretend this is not a motive, and a strong one. Writers share this characteristic with scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful businessmen — in short, with the whole top crust of humanity. The great mass of human beings are not acutely selfish. After the age of about thirty they almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all — and live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under drudgery. But there is also the minority of gifted, willful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class. Serious writers, I should say, are on the whole more vain and self-centered than journalists, though less interested in money.

(ii) Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement. Pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story. Desire to share an experience which one feels is valuable and ought not to be missed. The aesthetic motive is very feeble in a lot of writers, but even a pamphleteer or writer of textbooks will have pet words and phrases which appeal to him for non-utilitarian reasons; or he may feel strongly about typography, width of margins, etc. Above the level of a railway guide, no book is quite free from aesthetic considerations.

(iii) Historical impulse. Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.

(iv) Political purpose. — Using the word ‘political’ in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples’ idea of the kind of society that they should strive after. Once again, no book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.

It can be seen how these various impulses must war against one another, and how they must fluctuate from person to person and from time to time. By nature — taking your ‘nature’ to be the state you have attained when you are first adult — I am a person in whom the first three motives would outweigh the fourth. In a peaceful age I might have written ornate or merely descriptive books, and might have remained almost unaware of my political loyalties. As it is I have been forced into becoming a sort of pamphleteer. First I spent five years in an unsuitable profession (the Indian Imperial Police, in Burma), and then I underwent poverty and the sense of failure. This increased my natural hatred of authority and made me for the first time fully aware of the existence of the working classes, and the job in Burma had given me some understanding of the nature of imperialism: but these experiences were not enough to give me an accurate political orientation. Then came Hitler, the Spanish Civil War, etc. By the end of 1935 I had still failed to reach a firm decision. I remember a little poem that I wrote at that date, expressing my dilemma:

A happy vicar I might have been
Two hundred years ago
To preach upon eternal doom
And watch my walnuts grow;

But born, alas, in an evil time,
I missed that pleasant haven,
For the hair has grown on my upper lip
And the clergy are all clean-shaven.

And later still the times were good,
We were so easy to please,
We rocked our troubled thoughts to sleep
On the bosoms of the trees.

All ignorant we dared to own
The joys we now dissemble;
The greenfinch on the apple bough
Could make my enemies tremble.

But girl's bellies and apricots,
Roach in a shaded stream,
Horses, ducks in flight at dawn,
All these are a dream.

It is forbidden to dream again;
We maim our joys or hide them:
Horses are made of chromium steel
And little fat men shall ride them.

I am the worm who never turned,
The eunuch without a harem;
Between the priest and the commissar
I walk like Eugene Aram;

And the commissar is telling my fortune
While the radio plays,
But the priest has promised an Austin Seven,
For Duggie always pays.

I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls,
And woke to find it true;
I wasn't born for an age like this;
Was Smith? Was Jones? Were you?

The Spanish war and other events in 1936-37 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it. It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think that one can avoid writing of such subjects. Everyone writes of them in one guise or another. It is simply a question of which side one takes and what approach one follows. And the more one is conscious of one's political bias, the more chance one has of acting politically without sacrificing one's aesthetic and intellectual integrity.

What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an art. My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice. When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art’. I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing. But I could not do the work of writing a book, or even a long magazine article, if it were not also an aesthetic experience. Anyone who cares to examine my work will see that even when it is downright propaganda it contains much that a full-time politician would consider irrelevant. I am not able, and do not want, completely to abandon the world view that I acquired in childhood. So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information. It is no use trying to suppress that side of myself. The job is to reconcile my ingrained likes and dislikes with the essentially public, non-individual activities that this age forces on all of us.

It is not easy. It raises problems of construction and of language, and it raises in a new way the problem of truthfulness. Let me give just one example of the cruder kind of difficulty that arises. My book about the Spanish civil war, Homage to Catalonia, is of course a frankly political book, but in the main it is written with a certain detachment and regard for form. I did try very hard in it to tell the whole truth without violating my literary instincts. But among other things it contains a long chapter, full of newspaper quotations and the like, defending the Trotskyists who were accused of plotting with Franco. Clearly such a chapter, which after a year or two would lose its interest for any ordinary reader, must ruin the book. A critic whom I respect read me a lecture about it. ‘Why did you put in all that stuff?’ he said. ‘You've turned what might have been a good book into journalism.’ What he said was true, but I could not have done otherwise. I happened to know, what very few people in England had been allowed to know, that innocent men were being falsely accused. If I had not been angry about that I should never have written the book.

In one form or another this problem comes up again. The problem of language is subtler and would take too long to discuss. I will only say that of late years I have tried to write less picturesquely and more exactly. In any case I find that by the time you have perfected any style of writing, you have always outgrown it. Animal Farm was the first book in which I tried, with full consciousness of what I was doing, to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole. I have not written a novel for seven years, but I hope to write another fairly soon. It is bound to be a failure, every book is a failure, but I do know with some clarity what kind of book I want to write.

Looking back through the last page or two, I see that I have made it appear as though my motives in writing were wholly public-spirited. I don't want to leave that as the final impression. All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane. I cannot say with certainty which of my motives are the strongest, but I know which of them deserve to be followed. And looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably where I lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally.

1946

THE END

____BD____
George Orwell: ‘Why I Write’
First published: Gangrel. — GB, London. — summer 1946.

Reprinted:

— ‘Such, Such Were the Joys’. — 1953.

— ‘England Your England and Other Essays’. — 1953.

— ‘The Orwell Reader, Fiction, Essays, and Reportage’ — 1956.

— ‘Collected Essays’. — 1961.

— ‘Decline of the English Murder and Other Essays’. — 1965.

— ‘The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell’. — 1968.

URL: http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/wiw/english/e_wiw

Tag Cloud

I wanted to alter the overall layout of the blog by altering the Labels widget. I found detailed instructions and source code at:

http://www.compender.com/2007/12/simple-tag-cloud.html

The new Tag Cloud replaces the old Label widget.

Discussion 6 - 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.

I put together a short document on the course website that explains how to make an effective search. It's in the ENG4U1 files page, under the heading 'Technology', look for search_guide.pdf. It's here.

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.

Your article cannot be older than NOVEMBER 2007.

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.

Reserve your article by posting a comment to this thread, and state the URL, article title and author.

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

Keywords (I didn't think that I needed to do this, but given the responces ...)
1984
George Orwell
Orwellian

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 - Your Immagination

Who is ultimately responsible for your mind?

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. See the website for details.

Discussion 3 - World War I Poetry

World War 1 poetry is a genre of poetry which flourished in the horror of the First World War. Written predominantly by soldiers in the field, World War 1 poetry struck a chord with readers at home because it portrayed the reality of, The Great War.

As you read Findley's The Wars, I would like you to read World War 1 poetry and write a blog entry.

Your blog posting must include in this order:

• The poem (including title, poet's name, date)
• Your response

Notes:

1. Everyone must have a unique poem.
2. You can reserve your poem by posting the title of the poem you would like to use as soon as you want. Post it here, in this thread.
   
3. When your assignment is ready, just delete your 'reservation' post, and submit your real one.
4. You cannot use a poem listed February 2007 posting unless you speak to me by Wednesday of this week.

In your response, I would like you to use the following guide to structure your posting.

A Framework for Responding to Poetry

Introduction:

• Briefly introduce the title of the poem and name of the poet.
• Try to classify the type of poem it is e.g. sonnet, ballad, haiku, acrostic, shape, lyric, ode, limerick, elegy, dramatic monologue etc.
• Briefly explain the subject of the poem.

Point One: Explore the Themes of the Poem

• Try to group the ideas in the poem is there a story that the poem tells?
• What do you think the poem is about?

Point Two: Imagery used to express themes

• What are the pictures in the poem?
• Are metaphors/similes used to explain ideas?
• Are the five senses used to evoke certain reactions in the reader?

Point Three: Form and Structure

• How is the poem organized e.g. lines, verses, layout and shape.
• Why has the poet decided to structure the ideas in this way e.g. the sequence of ideas, length of lines, patterns etc.

Point Four: Rhyme and Rhythm

• How does the poem rhyme? E.g. abab or aabb etc.
• What is the rhythm of the poem when read aloud?
• Why has the poet chosen this rhyme and rhythm to express these ideas?

Point Five: Language Patterns

• Think about the sound of the poem and choice of words
• The poet uses specific words because they have a certain association in the reader's mind.
• Look out for alliteration, onomatopoeia, assonance, personification, symbolism. How has the poet grouped words to achieve a desired effect?

Conclusion: Poet's message

• What is the poet trying to communicate to the reader?
• How effective are the devices/language that he uses?
• What is your response to the poem?

(www.englishresources.co.uk)

I suggest trying the school library or the public library before you try the searching the Internet for poems.

Please note, if you use a search engine to look for poetry, please note that "one", "1", and "I" all give different results.

Discussion 2 - To be or not to be. Aye, there's the point.

Hamlet delivers 3 soliloquies in the first 3 acts of Hamlet. Explain how the three soliloquies build towards the "explosion of action" which is Act 3 of Hamlet. Focus your response on the soliloquy in Act 3.

Discussion 1- Your thoughts on Act 1 of Hamlet

The foundation of Hamlet is laid in Act 1.
I would like to know what you think is the most interesting aspect of Act 1.

Considerations:

• Language
• Plot
• Dramatic devices
• Characterization
• Anything of considerable importance that you've noticed

Please use MLA citations, and the formal paragraph structure that I have given you in class. Make sure you have a clearly stated thesis from which you argue your opinion(Yes, your opinion ... yes, you can use 'I', judiciously).

This may be a good time to read the Writing section of the website.

RSS - Adding 'Recent Comments' & googlesites

Google is not continuing support for googlepages. New sites will not be opened, and it's unclear how long the URLs will remain active. I'm migrating my website to googlesites- let's see if I can do this before Labour Day.

The new URL is : sites.google.com/site/mrliconti

Note to self:
RSS Feed for 'Recent Comments' on the blog is:
http://eng4u1.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/default

ENG4U1-10 June 2008

Class,

Last year I wrote the following:

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.

This year, I want to send the same message.

Godspeed,

-liconti

Discussion 9 - The Motive for Metaphor

Before you even begin this last blog, keep the theme of the course in mind as you attempt the last blog for the year.

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" (Frye).

For the poetic source, please use a song you enjoy.

• Include your poem/song in your response.
• Try to place your poem/song after your introduction paragraph.
• Explain your choice. (See framework below & use any analysis notes from class)
  
• Cite your poem/song, using a MLA listing.
• In your response, I would like you to use the following guide to structure your posting.
  
  
  A Framework for Responding to Poetry
  Introduction:
  
  • Briefly introduce the title of the poem and name of the poet.
  • Try to classify the type of poem it is e.g. sonnet, ballad, haiku, acrostic, shape, lyric, ode, limerick, elegy, dramatic monologue etc.
  • Briefly explain the subject of the poem.
  Point One: Explore the Themes of the Poem
  
  • Try to group the ideas in the poem is there a story that the poem tells?
  • What do you think the poem is about?
  Point Two: Imagery used to express themes
  
  • What are the pictures in the poem?
  • Are metaphors/similes used to explain ideas?
  • Are the five senses used to evoke certain reactions in the reader?
  Point Three: Form and Structure
  
  • How is the poem organised e.g. lines, verses, layout and shape.
  • Why has the poet decided to structure the ideas in this way e.g. the sequence of ideas, length of lines, patterns etc.
  Point Four: Rhyme and Rhythm
  
  • How does the poem rhyme? E.g. abab or aabb etc.
  • What is the rhythm of the poem when read aloud?
  • Why has the poet chosen this rhyme and rhythm to express these ideas?
  Point Five: Language Patterns
  
  • Think about the sound of the poem and choice of words
  • The poet uses specific words because they have a certain association in the reader's mind.
  • Look out for alliteration, onomatopoeia, assonance, personification, symbolism. How has the poet grouped words to achieve a desired effect?
  Conclusion: Poet's message
  
  • What is the poet trying to communicate to the reader?
  • How effective are the devices/language that he uses?
  • What is your response to the poem?
  (www.englishresources.co.uk)

Discussion 8 - Hollow Darkness

With our in-class poetry unit over, I would like to turn your attention to the Interweb.

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.

1. The Hollow Men - http://www.blight.com/~sparkle/poems/hollow.html
2. "The Hollow Men" - http://www.columbia.edu/itc/tc/scfu4016/hollow.html
3. 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).
  

Questions to consider:

1. Ask yourself, are the poems different from one another?
2. Is one version harder to read than another? Why (Consider colour and layout)?
3. Does the reader's understanding of the theme of the poem change from any particular version?
4. How can a reader be sure of the authenticity of a poem on the internet?
5. What are the benefits and disadvantages to having poetry on the internet?
6. Are there historical or editorial reasons for changes in these poems?
7. Why study this poem after Conrad's Heart of Darkness?
   

Discussion 7 - Why Write?

This week's blog will help you develop notes for the in-class essay, and it will provide the foundation for the questions you will be seeking answers to. Read Orwell's essay and consider why he wrote.

Why I Write

George Orwell

From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer. Between the ages of about seventeen and twenty-four I tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with the consciousness that I was outraging my true nature and that sooner or later I should have to settle down and write books.

I was the middle child of three, but there was a gap of five years on either side, and I barely saw my father before I was eight. For this and other reasons I was somewhat lonely, and I soon developed disagreeable mannerisms which made me unpopular throughout my schooldays. I had the lonely child's habit of making up stories and holding conversations with imaginary persons, and I think from the very start my literary ambitions were mixed up with the feeling of being isolated and undervalued. I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts, and I felt that this created a sort of private world in which I could get my own back for my failure in everyday life. Nevertheless the volume of serious — i.e. seriously intended — writing which I produced all through my childhood and boyhood would not amount to half a dozen pages. I wrote my first poem at the age of four or five, my mother taking it down to dictation. I cannot remember anything about it except that it was about a tiger and the tiger had ‘chair-like teeth’ — a good enough phrase, but I fancy the poem was a plagiarism of Blake's ‘Tiger, Tiger’. At eleven, when the war or 1914-18 broke out, I wrote a patriotic poem which was printed in the local newspaper, as was another, two years later, on the death of Kitchener. From time to time, when I was a bit older, I wrote bad and usually unfinished ‘nature poems’ in the Georgian style. I also attempted a short story which was a ghastly failure. That was the total of the would-be serious work that I actually set down on paper during all those years.

However, throughout this time I did in a sense engage in literary activities. To begin with there was the made-to-order stuff which I produced quickly, easily and without much pleasure to myself. Apart from school work, I wrote vers d'occasion, semi-comic poems which I could turn out at what now seems to me astonishing speed — at fourteen I wrote a whole rhyming play, in imitation of Aristophanes, in about a week — and helped to edit a school magazines, both printed and in manuscript. These magazines were the most pitiful burlesque stuff that you could imagine, and I took far less trouble with them than I now would with the cheapest journalism. But side by side with all this, for fifteen years or more, I was carrying out a literary exercise of a quite different kind: this was the making up of a continuous ‘story’ about myself, a sort of diary existing only in the mind. I believe this is a common habit of children and adolescents. As a very small child I used to imagine that I was, say, Robin Hood, and picture myself as the hero of thrilling adventures, but quite soon my ‘story’ ceased to be narcissistic in a crude way and became more and more a mere description of what I was doing and the things I saw. For minutes at a time this kind of thing would be running through my head: ‘He pushed the door open and entered the room. A yellow beam of sunlight, filtering through the muslin curtains, slanted on to the table, where a match-box, half-open, lay beside the inkpot. With his right hand in his pocket he moved across to the window. Down in the street a tortoiseshell cat was chasing a dead leaf’, etc. etc. This habit continued until I was about twenty-five, right through my non-literary years. Although I had to search, and did search, for the right words, I seemed to be making this descriptive effort almost against my will, under a kind of compulsion from outside. The ‘story’ must, I suppose, have reflected the styles of the various writers I admired at different ages, but so far as I remember it always had the same meticulous descriptive quality.

When I was about sixteen I suddenly discovered the joy of mere words, i.e. the sounds and associations of words. The lines from Paradise Lost —

So hee with difficulty and labour hard
Moved on: with difficulty and labour hee.

which do not now seem to me so very wonderful, sent shivers down my backbone; and the spelling ‘hee’ for ‘he’ was an added pleasure. As for the need to describe things, I knew all about it already. So it is clear what kind of books I wanted to write, in so far as I could be said to want to write books at that time. I wanted to write enormous naturalistic novels with unhappy endings, full of detailed descriptions and arresting similes, and also full of purple passages in which words were used partly for the sake of their own sound. And in fact my first completed novel, Burmese Days, which I wrote when I was thirty but projected much earlier, is rather that kind of book.

I give all this background information because I do not think one can assess a writer's motives without knowing something of his early development. His subject matter will be determined by the age he lives in — at least this is true in tumultuous, revolutionary ages like our own — but before he ever begins to write he will have acquired an emotional attitude from which he will never completely escape. It is his job, no doubt, to discipline his temperament and avoid getting stuck at some immature stage, in some perverse mood; but if he escapes from his early influences altogether, he will have killed his impulse to write. Putting aside the need to earn a living, I think there are four great motives for writing, at any rate for writing prose. They exist in different degrees in every writer, and in any one writer the proportions will vary from time to time, according to the atmosphere in which he is living. They are:

(i) Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on the grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc., etc. It is humbug to pretend this is not a motive, and a strong one. Writers share this characteristic with scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful businessmen — in short, with the whole top crust of humanity. The great mass of human beings are not acutely selfish. After the age of about thirty they almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all — and live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under drudgery. But there is also the minority of gifted, willful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class. Serious writers, I should say, are on the whole more vain and self-centered than journalists, though less interested in money.

(ii) Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement. Pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story. Desire to share an experience which one feels is valuable and ought not to be missed. The aesthetic motive is very feeble in a lot of writers, but even a pamphleteer or writer of textbooks will have pet words and phrases which appeal to him for non-utilitarian reasons; or he may feel strongly about typography, width of margins, etc. Above the level of a railway guide, no book is quite free from aesthetic considerations.

(iii) Historical impulse. Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.

(iv) Political purpose. — Using the word ‘political’ in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples’ idea of the kind of society that they should strive after. Once again, no book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.

It can be seen how these various impulses must war against one another, and how they must fluctuate from person to person and from time to time. By nature — taking your ‘nature’ to be the state you have attained when you are first adult — I am a person in whom the first three motives would outweigh the fourth. In a peaceful age I might have written ornate or merely descriptive books, and might have remained almost unaware of my political loyalties. As it is I have been forced into becoming a sort of pamphleteer. First I spent five years in an unsuitable profession (the Indian Imperial Police, in Burma), and then I underwent poverty and the sense of failure. This increased my natural hatred of authority and made me for the first time fully aware of the existence of the working classes, and the job in Burma had given me some understanding of the nature of imperialism: but these experiences were not enough to give me an accurate political orientation. Then came Hitler, the Spanish Civil War, etc. By the end of 1935 I had still failed to reach a firm decision. I remember a little poem that I wrote at that date, expressing my dilemma:

A happy vicar I might have been
Two hundred years ago
To preach upon eternal doom
And watch my walnuts grow;

But born, alas, in an evil time,
I missed that pleasant haven,
For the hair has grown on my upper lip
And the clergy are all clean-shaven.

And later still the times were good,
We were so easy to please,
We rocked our troubled thoughts to sleep
On the bosoms of the trees.

All ignorant we dared to own
The joys we now dissemble;
The greenfinch on the apple bough
Could make my enemies tremble.

But girl's bellies and apricots,
Roach in a shaded stream,
Horses, ducks in flight at dawn,
All these are a dream.

It is forbidden to dream again;
We maim our joys or hide them:
Horses are made of chromium steel
And little fat men shall ride them.

I am the worm who never turned,
The eunuch without a harem;
Between the priest and the commissar
I walk like Eugene Aram;

And the commissar is telling my fortune
While the radio plays,
But the priest has promised an Austin Seven,
For Duggie always pays.

I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls,
And woke to find it true;
I wasn't born for an age like this;
Was Smith? Was Jones? Were you?

The Spanish war and other events in 1936-37 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it. It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think that one can avoid writing of such subjects. Everyone writes of them in one guise or another. It is simply a question of which side one takes and what approach one follows. And the more one is conscious of one's political bias, the more chance one has of acting politically without sacrificing one's aesthetic and intellectual integrity.

What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an art. My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice. When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art’. I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing. But I could not do the work of writing a book, or even a long magazine article, if it were not also an aesthetic experience. Anyone who cares to examine my work will see that even when it is downright propaganda it contains much that a full-time politician would consider irrelevant. I am not able, and do not want, completely to abandon the world view that I acquired in childhood. So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information. It is no use trying to suppress that side of myself. The job is to reconcile my ingrained likes and dislikes with the essentially public, non-individual activities that this age forces on all of us.

It is not easy. It raises problems of construction and of language, and it raises in a new way the problem of truthfulness. Let me give just one example of the cruder kind of difficulty that arises. My book about the Spanish civil war, Homage to Catalonia, is of course a frankly political book, but in the main it is written with a certain detachment and regard for form. I did try very hard in it to tell the whole truth without violating my literary instincts. But among other things it contains a long chapter, full of newspaper quotations and the like, defending the Trotskyists who were accused of plotting with Franco. Clearly such a chapter, which after a year or two would lose its interest for any ordinary reader, must ruin the book. A critic whom I respect read me a lecture about it. ‘Why did you put in all that stuff?’ he said. ‘You've turned what might have been a good book into journalism.’ What he said was true, but I could not have done otherwise. I happened to know, what very few people in England had been allowed to know, that innocent men were being falsely accused. If I had not been angry about that I should never have written the book.

In one form or another this problem comes up again. The problem of language is subtler and would take too long to discuss. I will only say that of late years I have tried to write less picturesquely and more exactly. In any case I find that by the time you have perfected any style of writing, you have always outgrown it. Animal Farm was the first book in which I tried, with full consciousness of what I was doing, to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole. I have not written a novel for seven years, but I hope to write another fairly soon. It is bound to be a failure, every book is a failure, but I do know with some clarity what kind of book I want to write.

Looking back through the last page or two, I see that I have made it appear as though my motives in writing were wholly public-spirited. I don't want to leave that as the final impression. All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane. I cannot say with certainty which of my motives are the strongest, but I know which of them deserve to be followed. And looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably where I lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally.

1946

THE END

____BD____
George Orwell: ‘Why I Write’
First published: Gangrel. — GB, London. — summer 1946.

Reprinted:

— ‘Such, Such Were the Joys’. — 1953.

— ‘England Your England and Other Essays’. — 1953.

— ‘The Orwell Reader, Fiction, Essays, and Reportage’ — 1956.

— ‘Collected Essays’. — 1961.

— ‘Decline of the English Murder and Other Essays’. — 1965.

— ‘The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell’. — 1968.

URL: http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/wiw/english/e_wiw

Discussion 6 - 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.

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.

Reserve your article by posting a comment to this thread, and state the URL, article title and author.

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

Keywords (I didn't think that I needed to do this, but given the responses ...)
1984
George Orwell
Orwellian

Discussion 5 - Keys to the Cannon

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 definition:

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:

1. Research any three books in section A or B. I have provided this below.
2. Do not use a book that anyone else in our class has used.
3. Explain why they are part of Bloom's canon.
4. 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 4 - Writing

Consider the division between what you write about and how you proceed to write it.

Have you ever thought about your writing?

Do you want to continue writing using the same (read limited) vocabulary and sentence structure as you use now for the rest of your life?

Do you think that university will teach you to write, or that you should start university with an emerging writers voice?

Next year, regardless of your discipline, you will be judged by your writing. Consider that your ideas on a topic or subject will always be filtered by your ability to articulate your thoughts and set them down on paper. Always.

Your vocabulary and sentence structure develop by reading. Read everything: magazines, poetry, newspapers, the back of a cereal boxes, both professional and amateur writing on the internet, comic books, texts, and if all else fails, novels. When you encounter a word that you cannot define for your mom, or little brother or your English teacher, stop reading- grab a dictionary and look up the word.

Commit the following to memory, "Writing is a cyclical process". It usually is not a linear process. Understand now that authors, textbook writers, and poets all start and write / rewrite their work until they begin to see that their words stand alone.

Start by reading 'Writing' on the website.

For this week's assignment, choose a structure from the list I provide in the 'Writing Process' and explain it to me in this week's posting.

Discussion 3 - To be, or not to be. Aye, there's the point.

Hamlet delivers 3 soliloquies in the first 3 acts of Hamlet. Explain how the three soliloquies build towards the explosion of action which is act 3 of Hamlet. Focus your response on the soliloquy in act 3.

Discussion 2 - Aspects of Act 2

This topics for this week will give you a chance to formulate an opinion, and prove it. There can only be four students per topic. You must reserve your choice in this thread. I will delete the reservations after the due date.

1. Show that Hamlet is insane Act 2.
2. Show that Hamlet is sane in Act 2.
3. Discuss the parallelism of Hamlet, Laertes and Forinbras by the end of Act 2.
4. Who has the advantage in the play by the end of Act 2, Hamlet or Claudius?
5. Explain the significance of Ophelia by the end of Act 2.

Discussion 1 - You say solid, I say sullied

You have 3 choices for this weeks blog. The first choice is for students who enjoy historical context and politics. The second choice allows for you to stretch your close reading muscles. The third choice allows you an opportunity to form a personal opinion, and defend it.

1. Read the entire article for The Prince at Wikipedia. The article is here. How do the ruling characters in Act 1 of Hamlet act in accordance with the principals set forth by Machiavelli?
2. What does the Hamlet's first soliloquy reveal about the him? How does it affect the mood in Act 1? How does this effect you? I am looking for a close reading. If your next question is "close reading?", please read this. It will help. Be careful of the sources that you find explaining close readings; they can be discouraging.
   
3. Poetry is living language. Find lines that speak to you in Act 1. Quote them fully and explain them as best you can. Why do you love these lines? What do they reveal about the characters that speak them, what do they reveal about you- the person that likes them?

All blogs for this semester, unless otherwise stated, are due by Sunday at midnight.

ENG4U1-02 September 2007

Class,

Last year I wrote the following:

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.

This year, I want to send the same message.

Godspeed,

-liconti

Interviewing the interviewers

I would like to thank the journalists who took the time to be interviewed by my students. It was an experiment which took the students out of their comfort zone, and into the world of language in action.

Thank you for giving your time.

If you're a journalist looking for your interview, click here.
The original thread appeared November 2007.

Journalists:

• David Menzies
• James Daw
• Tanya Talaga / Robert Cribb
• Jacquelyn Thorpe
• Patrick White
• Valerie Hauch
• Antonia Zerbisias
• Tamara Cherry
• Daphne Gordon
• Murray Campbell
• Emily Mathieu
• Morgan Campbell
• Tom Van Alpen
• Jeff Brooke
• Ashante Infantry