守護七星潭活動

The following message is from 荒野保護協會花蓮分會：

各位關心七星潭未來發展的朋友們大家好:
不知道各位元旦三天連假打算去哪跨年？
感謝前一陣子媒體積極報導七星潭相關訊息，但我們擔心熱潮一退，明年七星潭議題將不被關注，所以邀請大家參加完跨年活動，元旦睡到飽、玩的開心，99.1.2下午到七星潭觀星廣場和搶救七星潭聯盟一起許下「我愛七星潭、用愛守護七星潭」的新年心希望！
本活動朝集體排愛心、牽手行為、音樂表演形式進行，邀請所有關心七星潭、愛七星潭的朋友身穿紅色系衣服到觀星廣場，一起排愛心、牽手，和搶救七星潭聯盟、七星潭社區發展協會共同表達「我愛七星潭，牽手護七星潭」的決心，現場我們也會說明接下來的初步規劃和蒐集到的最新資訊！

活動時間：99.01.02(六)13:14
活動地點：七星潭賞星廣場
活動流程(視天候及到場人數多寡調整)

13:14 活動開始
Pm 2: 10 開始用身體填滿海洋之心、牽手護七星潭
15:30 表演活動---(目前確定邀請到老林家樂團、湯姆、農村武裝青年到場表演，其他表演團體持續邀約中...)

活動聯絡人：江珮瑾0910951113、蔡中岳0912521216
聯絡信箱：lovehualien@gmail.com
搶救七星潭聯盟
搶救七星潭連署
※搶救七星潭聯盟為一群志願工作者(本聯盟成員包括全國性和地方性民間社團和組織、七星潭社區發展協會、花蓮在地和外地大專院校學生、學者專家、中小學老師與環保團體等)組成，秉持「溫柔而堅定、愛與非暴力」理念自主發起本活動，邀請認同此理念的朋友身著紅色系衣服到場參與，敬請自備雨具、防寒用品，和我們一起抱持著風雨無阻、天冷心暖的態度來參加~
※敬請轉貼facebook活動連結，邀請越多人來越好，讓政府看看大家愛七星潭的心有多大！

星期三 (12/30) 和星期五(1/1)導生面談

這禮拜的導生面談，時段如下：
Wednesday, 12/30
2:00-2:30
2:30-3:00
3:00-3:30
3:30-4:00

Friday, 1/1/2010
2:00-2:30 (Ted, Grace, Vivian Tu)
2:30-3:00
3:00-3:30
3:30-4:00 (Sue)
歡迎啾團 or 個人參加。

Questions for Katherine Anne Porter's "Flowering Judas" (deadline: 1/1/2010, 12 p.m.)

Choose one of the following questions to answer:
1)What are the benefits of Laura's relationship with Braggioni?
2) How is Laura different from the other people around her?
3) What kind of a person is Braggioni? Is he capable of salvation?
4) In the story, Braggioni says to Laura: "We are more alike than you realize in some things. Wait and see" (539). Can you find any hidden similarities between them?
5) What do the flowers of the Judas tree symbolize?
6) What is the purpose of the dream at the end of the story?

Frida Kahlo and Surrealism

"The art of Frida Kahlo,"André Breton wrote in 1938, "is a ribbon around a bomb." Scarecely known outside surrealist circles for many years, Kahlo is today the most renowned of all the women who have been involved in the movement. Born in 1907 in Coyoacán, Mexico, of a Hungarian-Jewish faher and a Spanish-Mexican mother, she was stricken with polio as a child; a later streetcar accident, and its attendant operations, left her an invalid for life. She took up painting in the mid-1920s, met Diego Rivera in 1928, and married him a year later. Her own course as an artist, however, was very different from that of her muralist husband.

In recent years, with the rise of a lucrative Frida Kahlo industry, it has become the fashion to belittle her association with surrealism. The facts remain: Not only did Breton arrange her first exhibition in Paris (1938) and write the first important (and often reprinted) text about her work, but Kahlo herself took part in the 1940 International Surrealist Exhibition in Mexico City, frequented in surrealist exiles' milieu in Mexico during the war, and for a time used the term surrealist as a self-description. The fact that she made some abrasive comments about Breton in letters counts for little, for it is well known that Kahlo made abrasive comments regarding practically everyone she knew.

However, well before her final capitulation to Stalinism in 1948, Kahlo had distanced herself from surrealism. Her last works include portraits of Stalin and other works "to serve the Party." After her death in 1954, her home in Coyoacán became the Museo Frida Kahlo.

Excerpted from Surrealist Women: An International Anthology (1998) edited with introductions by Penelope Rosemont.

〈演講公告〉蔡明亮導演創作甘苦談

拿了免費票 (及沒拿票) 的同學不要忘記這星期五的演講。難得邀請到國際級導演蔡明亮來東華跟我們談創作。大家星期五見！

演講地點:文一講堂C203
演講時間:12月11日(星期五)14:00-16:30

Civilization and Alienation (deadline: (12/14, 12 p.m.)

In D. H. Lawrence's short story "Odour of Chrysanthemums," he attempts to portray the antagonism between the natural world and the mechanical world. Industrialization, originally a project aiming at emancipating humankind, turns out to become a merciless monster which devours human beings and alienates them from their essential qualities. Technology's promise of happiness and peace is bankrupt. Machines, rather than an emacipator of humankind, become war machines or devices used by human beings to kill or to exploit their fellow human beings. This is the epochal milieu of the production of modernist literature and arts; writers unanimously felt pessimistic about Western culture which subscribed to the myth of progress and grotesquely turned into irrationality and barbarism.

Enclosed is the picture (source: http://www.onlineinvestingai.com/blog/2009/04/27/wage-slave-freedom-hard-work-never-works/) of three Welsh coal miners who are just up from the pits after a day's work in coal mine in Wales. Look at the picture and try to feel the pain and disenchantment of Elizabeth the wife. Can you imagine the reasons why her miner husband Walter turns into an abusive and angry drunkard? What kind of sentimental reasons does Elizabeth have when she seems to care so much about the presence of pink chrysanthemums throughout the story?

"A Rose for Emily"--a student production

I found this interesting clip from YouTube, which is based on Faulker's acclaimed short story and looks like a student's school project. Although the production is crude, the story is narrated beautifully. I post this for your reference; feel free to leave comments (which are optional).

"A Rose for Emily" by The Zombies (deadline: 12/8, 12 p.m.)

In Today's class, we talked about Faulkner's famous short story "A Rose for Emily" (1931) , his presentation of the conflict between the North and the South, Miss Emily as a symbol of a bygone era, and the tragic decline of southern sensibility. The title "A Rose for Emily" indicates a chilvaric gesture toward a "lady," who is given a rose as a homage to her "ladyship." However, making her a "lady" (by her authoritative father and the traditional antebellum southern society) also cripples her for life. Her status as a "lady" brings about the tragic ending of the story.

Faulkner's story is so famous as to become an inspiration for a British music band "The Zombies." They adapted the story for their song, in which Miss Emily's fate is being lamented:

The summer is here at last
The sky is overcast
And no one brings a rose for Emily

She watches her flowers grow
While lovers come and go
To give each other roses from her tree
But not a rose for Emily...

Emily, can't you see
There's nothing you can do?
There's loving everywhere
But none for you...

Her roses are fading now
She keeps her pride somehow
That's all she has protecting her from pain

And as the years go by
She will grow old and die
The roses in her garden fade away
Not one left for her grave
Not a rose for Emily...

Emily, can't you see
There's nothing you can do?
There's loving everywhere
But none for you...

Her roses are fading now
She keeps her pride somehow
That's all she has protecting her from pain

And as the years go by
She will grow old and die
The roses in her garden fade away
Not one left for her grave
Not a rose for Emily...

Listen to the music. Do you think the music (and its lyrics) convey the similar feelings you have when you read the story itself? Desribe your feelings.

星期五導生面談 (12/4)

這禮拜五下午我們來安排導生面談，時段如下：
2:00-2:30
2:30-3:00
3:00-3:30
3:30-4:00
有興趣的同學趕快登記。老師會準備每個人兩百元圖書禮券，交換條件是：要準備至少一個問題問老師。

Female Gothic--"The Yellow Wallpaper" (deadline: 11/25, 12 p.m.)

The Gothic novel is a type of fiction which was inaugurated by Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story (1764). Following Walpole's example, authors of such novles set their stories in the medieval period, often in a spooky castle furnished with dungeons, underground tunnels,and evoke horror via mystery and a variety of terror.

Later the term "gothic" has been extended to a type of fiction which does not set in the medieval period but is saturated with a gloomy and terrified atmosphere. The extended sense of the term "Gothic" can be applied to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, her sister Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre and so forth. Charlotte Perkins Gilman's macabre fantasy--"The Yellow Wallpaper"--also exploits the nightmarish feel, violence, and uncanny terror frequently found in Gothic writings.

Some feminist critics use the term "female Gothic" to discuss some particular stories in which the heroine expresses what otherwise cannot be spoken under the law of patriarchy. The genre of the "female Gothic" allows women writers otherwise subject to the narrative restrictions of gentility to find outlets for their repressed sides or the unconscious.

Therefore, in the story "The Yellow Wallpaper," can you find any "Gothic" elements? What are they (the setting, the room, the narrator, the psychological status of the heroine)? Why does Gilman use this "Gothic" genre to express her dark protests, fantasies, and fear?

星期五導生面談 (11/13)

這禮拜五下午我們來安排四位導生面談，時段如下：
2:00-2:30
2:30-3:00
3:00-3:30
3:30-4:00
有興趣的同學趕快登記。原則上我們一對一，如果緊張要找人一起我也ok。有什麼問題 (學業的、人際關係的、感情的、生涯規劃等)我們都可以談，當做聊天談心，I'll see you guys soon.

Portraits of Japanese culture in "Souvenir of Japan" and "Lost in Translation" (deadline: 11/5, 12 p.m.)

In Sophia Coppola's 2003 film Lost in Translation,the situation of two outsiders plunged into an alien Japanese culture is vividly depicted. In Angela Carter's "A Souvenir of Japan," although the narrator does not need translation and seems to be more savvy about Japanese customs and rituals than the protagonists in Lost in Translation, she is equally tormented by loneliness and alienation.

While the former is set in the 2003 Tokyo, the latter is set in the same city of the 1970s. In both portraits of Japanese culture (the one American, while the other British), can you find similarities or parallel traits? How are Japanese people different (or similiar) in these two cultural texts and their representations?

What's so bad about assumptions? (deadline: 10/22, 12 p.m.)

In "Our Friend Judith," Doris Lessing makes us see how limited those stereotypical assumptions could be if we apply them to understand Judith, who is in fact a complicated character and differs from the idea of "spinster" assumed by people who deem the unmarried status as a kind of abnormality. You have the following two options to answer my question:
1) From the story, we know that it is not good to assume anything about anyone but we all do it and sometimes when people make assumptions they tend to harbor wrong thoughts in their minds or even to say rude comments. Therefore in our society we have so many prejudices, bigotries, discrimations based on wrong assumptions about people of different (racial, class, gender, sexual orientation, marital) status. Can you come up with any concrete examples?

2) Do people make assumptions about you based on certain "stereotypes"? What is it poeple think about you that is completely false?

"Flappers" and the Roaring 1920s (deadline: 10/12, 12p.m.)

In today's class, we talked about Hemingway's "Hills like White Elephants" and its historical setting; popular terms like "flappers," "hedonism," and the lifestyles of aimlessness of the post-WWI "lost generation" of American expatriates in Europe, epitomize the spirit of the 1920s. It is an era of rapid social change. In the United States, women were finally allowed to vote in 1920. In France, designer Coco Chanel created the more carefree and sporty style and liberated women from the fussy and overdone clothing of the Victorian era. She also adopted male fashions--short hair, ties, collars, long tailor-cut jackets, pajamas--to create a boyish look. Chanel's style is usually associated with the image of the "flapper," a new generation of young women who, unlike their Victorian predecessors who had been restricted within the domestic realm, were capable, adventurous, independent. A looser, more casual style of clothing and short hair allowed women to play sports and to enjoy a great measure of mobility and independence. The flappers demonstrated their independence through new looks and attitude, such as short skirts and haircuts, openly using cosmetics, and being seen to smoke and drink cocktails.

In the enclosed video clip, you can see the flappers, their anti-traditional attitude and modern looks. How can all this relate to the character "Jig" in Hemingway's story? After viewing this video, can you have a more concrete image of Jig? In the story itself, what aspects demonstrate Jig's character as a "flapper"?

Charlie Parker, who?

In "Sonny's Blues," the elder brother challenged Sonny to name some jazz musician that Sonny admired. Sonny said "Bird," who is Charlie Parker (1920-1955), a brilliant saxophonist and jazz innovator working in New York in the mid-1940s. Below is the vedio clip of this "Bird." This post is for your reference. You are free to leave any comments, which are optional.

Strange Fruit by Billie Holiday (deadline: 10/5, 12 p.m.)

"Strange Fruit" is a song about the lynching of black people that occurred chiefly in the South but also in all regions of the United States. It is a famous protest song that condemns American racism and was performed most famously by Billie Holiday. This collective violence inflicted by a white mob upon the bodies of black people was notorious in American history. Lynchings ocurred frequently during the 19th century. Even by the 1950s, lynchings still existed, especially in the South. In the 1960s, lynchings rose as reaction against civil rights activism.

"Sonny's Blues" takes place in the early 1950s, prior to the gains made by the Civil Rights Movement. The story is set during the dark days of segregation and supposedly "separate but equal" accommodations in public facilities.

Enclosed in this post you can find a picture of lynching and a vedio clip of Billie Holiday performing "Strange Fruit." Below are the lyrics:

Southern trees bear strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

Pastoral scene of the gallant south,
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,
Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh,
Then the sudden smell of burning flesh.

Here is fruit for the crows to pluck,
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,
For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop,
Here is a strange and bitter crop.

Listen to Billi Holiday's haunting and melancholy voice. Observe her emotioanlly arresting performance. Look at the photo of lynching. How do you make of this "strange fruit" here? The imageries presented in the song are so beautiful but are also horrifying. Wouldn't you wonder how much suffering Billie Holiday as an artist must have had to go through in order to sing like that? How does all this relate to Sonny's desire to become a Jazz musician? Look in particular at each brother's take on the subject of "suffering."

Real or not real, that's the question! (deadline: 9/28, 12pm)

"The Thing in the Forest" begins like a fairy tale: "There were once two little girls who saw, or believed they saw, a thing in the forest." Do you believe what they saw was "real"? What evidence is there in the story for that reality? Are there clues to suggest that it might not be real? Does the fairy-tale quality of the first sentece influence your reading of the story?"

You can answer the above questions, or you can go to the older post "Trauma and Recovery" to answer the question there.

Why do we need literature?

In today's introductory class, we talked about why literature matters. We need this proper warm-up before seriously engaging our soul, mind, and even spine and muscle in the study of literature. I cited Oscar Wilde's remark on arts ("all art is quite useless") to start my point: art does not have any "practical" values. By arrogantly proclaiming "art for art's sake," Wilde is justifying the intrinsic value of art, which is separated from the "utilitarian," "practical," or the narrow-minded concept of life practiced by the philistines, who dedicated themselves to the worldly pursuits such as making money, limited themsleves to their comfort zones, and were generally hostile to culture, the arts, and the so-called "spiritual" things.

This understanding is crucial, since once you're here, you also need to justify yourself (to your parents or even society) why you are here, why do you study literautre, such a luxury and seemingly "unpractical" subject (unlike business, law, or medicine) from the perspective of the mainstream society.

You are here because you want to know the techniques to appreciate the sensual pleasure of verbal craftsmanship of many literary works, to garner the delightful play of reality and illusion, to liberate yourself from your limited existence and enter into other worlds and cultures, to expand your horizon, to cultivate empathy and the spirit of understanding, to have a critical mind to lift you beyond familiar ways of thinking, and so forth.

See, the reasons why you are here are endless and full of possibilities. It is so simple yet also so complicated. It is about how to be a human being. This explains why we need literature and why we need arts.

Therefore, welcom to the realm of literature. I hope all of you will enjoy the process of this exploration. Please also be reminded that sometimes the best pleasures require an effort that beginners like you tend to call "pain." But no pains, no gains, right?

Antigone or Creon? Which Side Are You On?

Antigone at her brother's grave, from the Louvre

In the confrontation of Creon and Antigone we see the clash of two absolute principles: the claims of the individual conscience in opposition to the interests of the state. Both of them are absolutely determined to do what they deem right, no matter what the consequences will be. Both of them can be considered as stubborn and perverse. Do you sympathize with Antigone? Or do you think she is stupid and ridiculous? Why is Antigone so obsessed with glory? Should she be? When Creon talks about the gods and the law, is he talking about the same kinds of gods as Antigone does? At the end of the play, do you sympathize with Creaon, or do you think that he is a misogynist dictator who gets what he deserves? How do you choose a side, Creon or Antigone?

Ulysses and Colonialism

Cunning is one of Odysseus's most essential traits. While it is impossible to hear the seductive songs of the Sirens and not succumb to them, Odysseus is cunning enough to come up with a way to fulfill his desire but not being destroyed by the Sirens's power. Bound to the mast and therefore unable to be physically drawn to the Sirens, he commands his sailors (with their ears stopped with wax) to oar while he freely and safely enjoys the song of the Sirens.

While we may praise and admire Odysseus's courage and wit in his series of adventures, we can also say that he is deeply manipulative in his encounters with elemental deities, displays his colonial desire by subjugating and exploiting nature, and simply uses the enforced toil of his oarsmen to fulfill his desire for conquest. In other words, he can be said to represent the very archetype of the imperialist.

In Alfred Tennyson's poem "Ulysses," can you discern this similar imperialist trait in the portrait of Ulysses? Since the Victorain age is the period in which the British military achievement is glorified and the supremacy of "white races" is justified in the bloody subjugation of "lower" and primitive races, Tennyson, being a Victorian poet, must be aware of the spirit of his era and express this awareness in his poem. Pick up some lines in the poem that betray his "imperialist unconscious" and explain their relevance.

Leda and the Swan

The theme of "Leda and the Swan" is the barbarism of human history. The myth of Leda and the swan was a popular theme in Renaissance art, but the story was deemed as romantic and charming. In Yeats's version, the tale is shown from the victim's point of view. Impregnated by Zeus, Leda will give birth to Helen and Clytemnestra. Faithless Helen will trigger the 10-year Trojan War. Clytemnestra will kill her husband, Agamemnon, and be murdered in turn by their vengeful son, Orestes. In other words, Western culture is doomed from the very start. It's origin is tainted with deceit, treachery, and violence.

How do you link this pessimism to Yeats's view upon the Western civilization? What does it mean when the poet wonders whether Leda, "being so caught up" in her brief encounter with God, gained "knowledge" of the meaning of history? What is the meaning of this "knowledge"? Do human beings become more "knowledgable" or "wiser" from the lessons of history?

Metaphysical Poets and their Shock Tactic

The name "metaphysical poets" is now applied to a group of 17th-century poets who, whether or not directly influenced by John Doone (1572-1631), use similar poetic procedures and abstruse arguments. Andrew Marvell (1621-1678), who was born 50 years later than Donne, was one of these metaphysical poets.

Metaphysical style is characterized by a seemingly outrageous or far-fetched logic, which organizes the poem in the form of an urgent or heated argument--with a disdainful lady who sexually rejects her lover, or God, or death. The extravagant uses of hyperbole produce a startling and witty effect. Give some examples that illustrate this "shock tactic" of metaphysical poets. How do the ingenious uses of paradox, pun, the rough and colloquial idioms, the dramatic form of apostrophe or direct address create the shocking effect? Or, among the poems we discussed so far (by Donne or Marvell),which simile or metaphor is most shocking for you?

the Petrarchan conceit v.s. the metaphysical conceit

A "conceit" is an "elaborate metaphor" which establishes a striking parallel between two very dissimilar things. And there are two types of conceit:

1) The Petrarchan conceit is a type of metaphor used in love poems written by the 14th-century Italian poet Petrarch, but became cliched in some of his later Elizabethan imitators. A typical Petrarchan conceit involves a cold, imperious beauty and her distressed male lover, who suffers from the lady's rejection, while praises her beauty, her cruelty and exaggerates his own misery. For example, the despairing lover is a ship on a stormy sea, or a lady's eyes shine like stars, her lips are as red as coral, her breasts and her forehead are as white as snow, and so forth.

2) The metaphysical conceit is characteristic of John Donne's poetry and other metaphysical poets of the 17th century. In dramatic contrast to the figures of conventioanl Petrarchanism, Donne's metaphysical poems used witty and surprising comparisons drawn from miscellaneous sources--theology, alchemy, philosophy, cartography, and even everyday objects. The result is an extended metaphor with a highly intellectual and complicated logic that controls an entire poem.

What are the examples of John Donne's metaphysical conceit? Give us some examples and explain Donne's poetic argument.

Demonic Possession and the Dilemma of a Woman Artist

In yesterday's class we talked about Emily Dickinson and her strange but beautiful poems. As a "virgin recluse," she selected her society prudently, and avoided strangers, especially during the later years of her life. Only seven poems were published in her lifetime, all edited by other hands. More than a thousand poems were hidden away in her bedroom chest, to be discovered after her death.

Unlike another great American woman poet Sylvia Plath whose persona and poems are conventionally known to be corporeal and inflamed, Emily Dickinson is more ethereal and gossamer. However,recent critics, inflected by feminism, have pointed out that underneath the elfish, deceptively ingenue-like surface of this "virgin recluse," a volcano keeps seething, which could, had it chosen, have submerged an entire city, not only a city, but the whole universe. Dikinson's biographer and editor Thomas Johnson has said that she often felt herslef possessed by a demonic force. And many of her poems can surely be read as poems of possession. Adrienne Rich in her famous essay "Vesuvius at Home:The Power of Emily Dickinson" has emphasized Dikinson's dilemma as a woman poet in the nineteenth century, her schizo status as being torn between society's expectation of a proper femininity and her unwomanly, aggressive, demonic, and volcanic creativity. Can you discern her dilemma in any of her poems we read? Or how does her account of her creativity "Vesuvian" and unfeminine from your point of view?

How did Sylvia Plath's work as a visual artist influence her poetry?

The following excerpt is from the BBC's "Woman's Hour" program that was broadcasted on 5th November, 2007:

Last month was the 75th anniversary of Sylvia Plath's birth. Although well-known for her poetry, her turbulent relationship with Ted Hughes and her tragic death, her artistic life is scarcely acknowledged. In fact, Sylvia’s diaries, letters and school notebooks are full of doodles and self-portraits and it was only at the age of twenty that she decided to leave fine art behind as her chosen career and opt for the written word. Jane is joined by Kathleen Connors, who has brought out a new book celebrating Sylvia’s artwork, and by the poet Ruth Fainlight, who was friends with Sylvia in the 1950s.

Listen to this item and write down anything that is of your interest.

Robert Browning's "My Last Duchess"

"My Last Duchess" is a poem in which the speaker, the Duke of Ferrara, shows a visitor round his mansion. The visitor is a representative of the young woman that the Duke is going to marry. The Duke shows the representative the portrait of his former wife, who is now dead. In the Duke's remarks about his dead wife, he seems happier with the portrait of her, "as if alive," than he was with her when she was alive. What's wrong with his dead wife? In this dramatic monologue, how do you describe the personality of the Duke?

Sylvia Plath and the Electra Complex

In an introduction to "Daddy" prepared for the BBC, Sylvia Plath explained that

"the poem is spoken by a girl with an Electra complex. Her father died while she thought he was God. Her case is complicated by the fact that her father was also a Nazi and her mother very possibly part Jewish. In the daughter the two strains marry and paralyze each other--she has to act out the awful little allegory once over before she is free of it."

The figure of "Electra" used by Plath is a Greek daughter whose relationship to her tyrannical father--Agamemnon, who sacrificed his other daughter, Iphigenia, to the winds--is erotically charged. After Agamemnon is killed, Electra's mother, Clytemnestra, and her lover, Aegisthus, abuse Electra because of her loyalty to the memory of her father. Out of her hatred toward her mother and her love for her father, Electra urges her exiled brother to return and to kill Clytemnestra and Aegisthus.

The conflation of Agamemnon-father-Hitler-husband is both haunting and powerful in "Daddy," in which the pull of patriarchy is so strong that the daughter/speaker needs to kill her father/husband in order to free herself from them. However, even when she has resolved to kill her father, she is still half in love with him. Give me some lines or imageries that for you illustrate this emotional ambivalence.

spaces of the senses

In today's class, we discussed Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale" and his picture of a happy world of senses. In the poem, Keats is listening to an unseen bird whose presence cannot be located but can only be "heard." The sense of sight must yield to other senses--the senses of smell, taste, and hearing. In stanza 5, the poet writes:

I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet
Wherewith the seasonable month endows
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild;
White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;
Fast fading violets covered up in leaves;
And mid-May's eldest child,
The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.

Here we are first introduced with the sense of smell, in the form of "soft incense." In darkness, the poet cannot identify the flowers, but the darkness is "embalmed," which means "fragrant," and the seasonable fragrance helps Keats guessing the identity of each odor. As the lines continue, the poet anticipates the tasting of the "dewy wine" coming from the musk-rose, which also attracts the insects, whose "murmurous" sound suggests the sense of hearing.

From what has been analyzed above, you can see that the sense of vision is dethroned from its privileged dominance in the hierarchical realm of the senses. What have been given a priority are the senses that used to be subordinated to the predominant sense of seeing. Why does the poet debase the sense of "sight" and elevate other senses? In today's culture in which the sense of the visual dominates (as manifested in the ubiquity of TV screens,advertisements, neon signs, photographs, visual images) and eclipses other senses, can we say that we modern people have somehow lost our ancient capacity of hearing and smelling? Which sense do you trust the most? Do you believe that "seeing is believing"? or do you mistrust the sense of sight and, instead, favor other bodily perceptions such as touch, taste, smell,or hearing, by which you navigate the world?

Is Barbie a bad influence on girls?

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Barbie turns 50 years old this week. For some young girls, Barbie represents an ideal of perfection. However, for some social critics, Barbie has a toxic influence on female children because the doll sends the wrong message to female children who mistake the anatomically fantastic Barbie dolls as the true ideal of beauty. In Marge Piercy's "Barbie Doll," the girl tried to change her appearance to fit the commercialized notion of body image and ended up in a tragedy. In West Virginia, a state lawmaker proposed a bill last Tuesday to ban the sales of Barbie dolls. The following news article comes from msnbc.com:

The Barbie Ban Bill, proposed by Democratic Delegate Jeff Eldridge (D) Lincoln County, says such toys influence girls to place too much importance on physical beauty, at the expense of their intellectual and emotional development.
"I just hate the image that we give to our kids that if you're beautiful, you're beautiful and you don't have to be smart," Eldridge told West Virginia news station WOWK.

The delegate concedes that the chances of getting the bill passed are slim, but adds that he stands behind it.

"I knew a lot of people were going to joke about it and poke fun at me," Eldridge said. "I couldn't get anybody to sign on the bill with me but I said I'm still going to introduce it."

A Mattel spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday. The Barbie doll officially turns 50 on March 9, and the toy maker has made big plans this year to mark the anniversary.

Barbie has had her foes over that half-century. Critics say the doll promotes materialism and an unnatural body image.

The bill has been sent to the House Judiciary Committee.

What do you think? Do you agree with Jeff Eldridge? or do you think it goes overboard in the issue of body image?

Jhumpa Lahiri on Becoming an American

Nationality, tradition and belonging: The themes of Jhumpa Lahiri's fiction spring from the complexities of the author's own life. Born to Indian parents in London and raised in Rhode Island, the author of Unaccustomed Earth (2008) and The Interpreter of Maladies (1999) says she's struggled for four decades to feel like she belonged in America.

"For me," Lahiri tells Morning Edition's Steve Inskeep, "there is sort of a half-way feeling [of being American]."

But, she says, her parents never thought of themselves as American, despite the fact that they applied for and received citizenship.

"They've lived here now for more than half of their lives, and they raised a family here and now have grandchildren here. ... It has become their home," says Lahiri. "But at the same time, for my parents, I don't think either of them will ever consciously think, 'I am an American.' "

Lahiri says her parents were always isolated from mainstream American culture. Despite the fact that they spoke English, they were "betrayed by their accents." If the family went to buy a washing machine, the sales clerk would talk to Lahiri, assuming her parents couldn't understand.

"The accent, the fact that my mother wore traditional clothing — that marked them immediately as soon as we went out in the public sphere," says Lahiri.

Growing up, Lahiri's loyalty to her parents conflicted with her desire to fit in: "It didn't matter that I wore clothes from Sears; I was still different. I looked different. My name was different," she says. "I wanted to pull away from the things that marked my parents as being different."

Lahiri says her parents didn't mix with her friends' parents in an easy, comfortable way — not because they didn't want to, but because there was a barrier that they couldn't overcome.

"I think this was a two-way street," she says. "It wasn't just that they were afraid or unwilling — there was a fear, an unwillingness on both sides."

Lahiri says creating characters who also struggle with the immigrant experience has helped her confront the truth of her life.

"A lot of my upbringing was about denying or fretting or evading," she says. But through fiction, Lahiri says she's learned to accept that her parents will always be tied to two different parts of the Earth.

"It has been liberating and brought me some peace to just confront that truth, if not to be able to solve it or answer it," she says.

Source cited from NPR.org. Listen Now.

Story Hour in the Library - Bharati Mukherjee and Clark Blaise at UC Berkeley

Here you can have a chance to be the virtual audience of the "reading series" at UC Berkeley that was held on October, 9th, 2008. The readers invited in the Story Hour Reading Series are Bharati Mukherjee and Clark Blaise, who have been married for 45 years and both teach in Berkeley's English department.

"For me, my fiction is a way to get in touch with my inner bad girl"--Bharati Mukherjee

Bharati Mukherjee, the author of "The Management of Grief," was born in Calcutta in 1940. Traveling to the United States to study creative writing at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, she rebelled against her father's command to come back home and marry the man he selected for her when she fell in love with her classmate, Canadian writer Clark Blaise, and married him impulsively during her lunch break after only two weeks of courtship.

In "The Management of Grief," the topic of arranged marriage is one of the story's themes of cultural difference and dislocation. Here you can listen to Mukherjee's 2002 interview with NPR, in which she talked about arranged marriage in Hindu societies, her father's choice of husband for her, how she dared to break parental rules, her 2002 novel, Desirable Daughters, the conflict between traditional India and modernity, her struggle with the immigrant experience, and her view upon women's condition and being an Indian-born American writer. Write down anything that you notice as particularly interesting or impressive.