Class 1:
 May 9

"Call"#1 review

"Call"#2 review

   Intro to course: syllabus and policies
   Film: faux Lovecraft film, "The Call of Cthulhu"

Absalom, Absalom! story summary

No class: reading break--read Absalom, Absalom!

You may find the plot summary to the left useful, as you embark on A,A! There is also a brief chronology in the back of our edition.

 Class 3:
 May 16

Wiki. Encyclo. on gothic
 

Read 1st several pages ONLY of this

Master of the Dark Sublime: Poe Stories

"Marginalia (The Veil of the Soul)," "To Helen," "Annabel Lee," "The Poetic Principle,"  "The Oval Portrait" (e-texts), 

"The Tell-Tale Heart" & "The Black Cat" (in our edition of Poe)

See the Wiki. article to the left for a quick overview of gothic tradition/genre.  See PDF scholarly article's first several pages ONLY for additional background on what Gothic is.  (I put up this article, also, to keep American Psycho on the list as a possible final postmodern novel for us to read.)

E.S. on gothic

Prof's Poe Review

Master of the Dark Sublime: Poe Stories

"The Purloined Letter," "Murders in the Rue Morgue," "The Fall of the House of Usher," & "Manuscript Found in a Bottle"

To the left is an excerpt from Eve Sedgwick's book Between Men.  It elaborates a theory in her Gothic Conventions that gothic novels express homophobic paranoia and homosexual/homosocial desire.  She is quite brilliant, although the excerpt may not make sense out-of-context and is only indirectly related to Poe (perhaps!).  It will be useful to read and ponder her thesis as a theoretical possibility to explicating Melville's "Benito Cereno," for next week.  Melville's novella parodies/elaborates homosocial panic and attraction (as does much of his fiction--the relation b/w Claggart and Billy in Billy Budd, for example). 

The other link is to my undergraduate lecture notes for Poe.  PLEASE NOTE: IN A GRADUATE CLASS I DO NOT WORRY TOO MUCH ABOUT WHETHER THE DISCUSSION PROCEEDS IN A ORDERED SEQUENCE--ASSOCIATION AND A "JAZZ" LIKE STRUCTURE IS FINE.   IT IS IMPORTANT, HOWEVER, FOR YOU TO READ MY REVIEW NOTES WHERE I TRY TO CHART OUT THE ISSUES MORE TIDILY!

 Class 5:
 May 23

Melville Biography
 

READ THIS PAGE AFTER YOU READ "BENITO"-No need to memorize the details, but note how clever/ politically sensitive Melville has been in selecting names.  Melville's story was based on a actual ship revolt, and much of the deposition at the end is drawn liberally from court documents .


Read this after you finish "Benito".  This essay relates the camera gaze in film to the narrative gaze in Melville's story
 

Benito Review Notes

Racial Paranoia & Captivity

Melville, “Benito Cereno”
Paul Bowles, "A Distant Episode" (handout)

Melville's work is relatively short, but extremely dense.  Fascinating, but not an "easy" read.  It has a mystery-novel structure; what you discern the first time reading it differs from what you discern the second time.  After you complete it the first time go back and re-read the opening several scenes, the scene in which Babo is shaving Cereno, and the concluding ship-battle scene.  Then at random read several pages/scenes and note the difference the second time around.

To the left are links to Melville's life/works, background to "Benito," and an analysis of "Benito" using film-theory--the latter because a) it's a reasonably good essay on "Benito," b) it's a model essay of sorts, for what you should be aspiring towards, and c) some of you may be interested in writing on a film.

Last to the left: my undergraduate review notes.





 

Class 6:
May 25

Critical YWP essay

Gilman's statement

Gilman bio.

Female 'Hysteria':

Gilman, “The Yellow Wallpaper”

The first link takes us to an online only essay that is very earnest and useful.  I suggest that you do not print it out, but read/skim online.  In class I want to briefly consider this essay as a model of a certain type of close reading or scrupulous "over attention," by which I mean not a jibe at the author, but a reflection on what it means to linger longer on literary texts.  Why would we want to do this?  Are such readings kindred to the low-level sight of Poe's dullard police?  

The next is Gilman's reflections on why she wrote her story.

Finally, a brief bio. of Gilman.

Female 'Hysteria':    

Film: Hitchcock, “Rebecca”--at Bruce's house in Hollywood (map & directions here)

Theoretical essay on Lacan and Hitchcock (handout given at previous class meeting) TO BE HANDED OUT THIS TUESDAY NIGHT

PAPER GUIDELINES NOW AVAILABLE

BOOK REVIEW GUIDELINES: The guidelines--besides what's on the syllabus: 1-2 pages single-spaced; flawless style (as if you were submitting it as a review to be published)--are a) summary of the argument/content of the work, b) critical assessment pointing out strengths and weaknesses. Those can be done in tandem, or a) can go before b). If you were really writing a review, and knew the subject matter well, you'd have also a prefatory paragraph that puts the work in a larger context of kindred works... but I'm not expecting that. It's good to have a couple of key quotes to exemplify good points or bad points or crucial terminology.  Get next meeting a journal or 2 from me, which will have sample reviews. They come in all shapes and sizes, so there's a lot of flexibility... but style has to persuade, too.

Female 'Hysteria':

James, Turn of the Screw

PAPER GUIDELINES NOW AVAILABLE

BOOK REVIEW GUIDELINES: The guidelines--besides what's on the syllabus: 1-2 pages single-spaced; flawless style (as if you were submitting it as a review to be published)--are a) summary of the argument/content of the work, b) critical assessment pointing out strengths and weaknesses. Those can be done in tandem, or a) can go before b). If you were really writing a review, and knew the subject matter well, you'd have also a prefatory paragraph that puts the work in a larger context of kindred works... but I'm not expecting that. It's good to have a couple of key quotes to exemplify good points or bad points or crucial terminology.  Get next meeting a journal or 2 from me, which will have sample reviews. They come in all shapes and sizes, so there's a lot of flexibility... but style has to persuade, too.

Email me a 1/2 page single-spaced statement on your essay topic (or desire to do the theory alternative) no later than June 4. 

Female 'Hysteria':

SUMMARY OF LAST SESSION (semi-Lacanian):

Here's the passage, Exodus 33, I mentioned in class.  Melville in MDick uses it in the context of not knowing the whale's intent/interior, only his tail, which in turn is a analogy for not knowing primal, original truth; all truth is known obliquely, in the fallen hazards and delights of language.  One of the BIG points about Melville's tale "Bartleby, the Scrivener," is that Bartleby's melancholia derives from his working in the Dead Letter Office, where communication (letters of mercy and love) never reaches its destination.

20 And he said, Thou canst not see my face: for there shall no man see me, and live.

21 And the LORD said, Behold, there is a place by me, and thou shalt stand upon a rock:

22 And it shall come to pass, while my glory passeth by, that I will put thee in a clift of the rock, and will cover thee with my hand while I pass by:

23 And I will take away mine hand, and thou shalt see my back parts: but my face shall not be seen.

Gothicism's syntax is almost always a movement towards the unspeakable, a dark route, as it were, to the limit of language and its referential capabilities.  Psychoanalytically, separation from mommy is the primary loss, which speech attempts to rescind through the naming of what is absent; but alas speech is always ruled by protocol/law/Father, so speech can never do its primal task of recovering union, of suturing the wound of parturition. So writers of a certain metaphysical habit (Romantic age writers, and James although he seems on the surface to be part of the Realist era), try to thwart language by using language: metaphorical excess, satirizing the inarticulate or illiterate placidity of Mrs. Grose, the gaps in the dialogue-exchanges, performative language (Flora's stabbing words); or by creating a ghost story the content of which reverts to the obscene and unsayable; or by foregrounding the materiality of language (the letters) rather than what language is supposed to transparently point to. More difficult to convey, is the unheimlich/uncanny aspect of Turn of the Screw: we did not get to the spatial dynamics, a category on the board, but it seems that the gaze over long distances b/w governess and ghost defines a space of abrupt muteness, of stillness, where (after all the yakking mentally of the governess) the scene is briefly hollowed of the capacity for speech in the first place.  Were the governess secured within a bourgeois home, rather than a mansion haunted by paternal absence, language would not be able to take these unseemly, uncanny, and excessive and hysterical/promiscuous routes.  One of the great effects of Turn is the story takes on its greatest depth--not by exploring interiors--but by expanding the cavernous interior outward, so that the cinematically-rich shots b/w ghost and governess happen over open spaces typically that (per above) are uncannily not quite open in the sense of "landscape", but rather are criss-crossed by gazes that suggest foul intimacy, knowing looks beyond words (if you buy the governess's interpretation).  Perhaps what makes the postmodern American Psycho disingenuous gothic is that it denies these interior/exterior admixtures or conflations or threshholds: there is no visceral knowledge (even CSI fashion) to complement the surface style; whereas Cronenberg truly is gothic, albeit also postmodern.   A note: one of the problems with theory--which I've sort of applied in this paragraph--is that every story tends to become just a vehicle to articulate theory (i.e. the "bad" essay on "Yellow Wallpaper").  I've taken the categories we had on the board, emphasizing some/ignoring others, to create a very typical and predictable Lacanian reading.  I more or less "believe" what I just wrote, but it also gets glib.  To avoid glibness, if I were going to translate the above into a real essay on Turn, I would  look at specific scenes much more intensely as being "symptomatic"; not quite close reading in the New Critical sense, but close in the sense of maintaining some palpable fidelity to the text/story, rather than launching so quickly into theory spinning.  I'd also try to bring in some history, other cultural documents, etc., to balance abstraction against the specificity of real people in real time.  P.S. my points  about chat-online flirtation has little to do with gothic, except that flirtation is a discourse that fascinatingly (as does Gothic) trades on boundaries/transgressions of boundaries, of the revealed/not revealed, and of the mobility of desire (e.g., desire needs to be mirrored in the Other in some fashion). 

Here is an apt blog description of James' hyper-nuanced style that relates to paranoia and a comment made in class about flirtation sometimes being a one-side projection of desire: 
http://www.dhalgren.com/Blog/?m=200406
 

James, Turn of the Screw, background material and critical essays in our edition:

--"Modern Spiritualism..." pages 15-19: READ as it is important to know that James' contemporaries took such matters seriously

--Cultural Documents section pages 123-86: SKIM, and I mean SKIM (15 minutes should do it)
--Critical essays 254-349: BUT SKIM prefatory summaries of psychoanalytical, gender, marxist criticism and concentrate on the actual essays on "Turn."  DO NOT assume they are model essays, however; I will point out what I take to be exemplary.

Paper writing tips & how to integrate theory into your paper

No class: paper writing break and conferences as needed

Email me a draft of your essay (or 15 page theory assignment) by June 10.

Prof. Quick Notes on A,A

Internet academic essay on Poe stories we read and Faulkner's A,A!.

Dark Houses of the South:

Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!  (we'll discuss the first 1/2)

CUT Handout: C. Porter essay on Faulkner's A, A! for June 15 class.

Faulkner, A, A! continued (we'll discuss the second 1/2)

CUT Handout for this class: C. Porter essay on Faulkner's A, A!

Email by June 17 the book review, and post at the same time on PAGEOUT under the discussion thread I provide. 

The Hidden God:
 

Get Lovecraft Handout for next/last class

O’Connor short stories: "Everything That Rises Must Converge," "Greenleaf," "A View of the Woods," "The Comforts of Home," "Revelation," and "Judgment Day"

Also read parts I & II of the editor's intro. (Part III gets too detailed interpretively vis-a-vis the short stories)

See the plot summaries to the left--review quickly before you come to class.

Prof. Summary: Sometimes I talk about the terms the "sublime" and "the wound" to organize my thoughts about literary/aesthetic/psychoanalytical issues (the sublime = transcendental epiphany, atemporaral being, and so forth; wound = absence, loss, lack, our idiosyncratic particularity, perhaps political/psychological resentment; but also all scars, bodily or textual or psychological.  The wound, most simply, equals all the contingencies of time; the sublime, being beyond time.  In "Yellow Wallpaper" the ugly wallpaper could represent the flesh's ailments; and her going thru the wallpaper, the conversion of the flesh into the feminist acceptance of the body and its liberation (as it were).

O’Connor’s absolutely devout Catholicism--the sense that worldly experience is only a prelude to or a material manifestation of spiritual mysteries (the violence of grace in particular)--inverts or transforms my terms.  In O’Connor’s universe the wound (let us call it our grotesque/gothic particularity) is either a sign of our fallenness or a sign of radically interrupting grace.   The violent penetration of grace equals both punishment and redemption or illumination.  The "wound" for me evokes humanistic, secular empathy; for O’Connor it is a visionary/fleshy conduit unto God’s sublimity.  When I read her I get confused because I cannot quite reconcile my way with her way.  (Which is not to say that I don’t understand her when she’s hilariously puncturing smugness, etc.)

A theme in the class is whether violence is merely lurid; metaphysical insofar as pain/violence is "unspeakable"; a revelation of the inside of the body, and thus fundamentally taboo; or existential, in the sense that the syntax of narrative moving towards bodily horror guarantees authenticity (when we feel the "flesh" is all-too-real).

Email or turn in by June 21 a compilation of your substantial online contributions. 

Course Evaluations

Lovecraft's horror story credo

Urban-Hip, Contemporary, or Postmodern Paranoia:
Hidden God continued

Lovecraft story xerox (if handed out in previous class)
Film to be selected; to be watched in class: Alien

McCormac, Blood Meridian or Pynchon, Crying of Lot 49 or graphic comic novel (class will decide)

Email me the final version of your essay (or 15 page theory alternative) by June 24.

Film night and dinner party at professor's house, Sat. or Sun, 24th or 25th