March 30- Jeanette Winterson "Art and Lies"

Homework: The first Handle and the first Picasso stories of Art and Lies

Wikipedia...I personally think that Wikipedia is an good source for background material on a specific subject. Wikipedia might not be a scholarly website but it does provide good information for helping with the interpretation of a text or gaining new ideas on a topic.

The novel starts in the 18th century followed by the short story in 19th century. Who decides the "canon"? I think that we, as the readers of novels, poetry, and prose, decied the canon. Each person has their own qualifications for the authors of the canon, and thus each person decides for themselves, who and what is great literature.

Art and Lies- Jeanette Winterson
-After reading her introduction to Weight, I found Winterson very interesting as an author. She writes like a collage and that allows for multiple interpretations of the text. The introduction to Weight, has sparked my interest in reading the whole book (which I plan to do over the summer).

March 27- Poetess Archive

"Oh! Happy child in thy fawn-like glee!
What is remembrance or thought to thee?
Fill thy bright locks with those gifts of spring,
O'er thy green pathway their colours fling;
Bind them in chaplet and wild festoon--
What if to droop and to perish soon?
Nature hath mines of such wealth--and thou
Never wilt prize its delights as now!"

The poem, Child with Flowers, can represent the youthfulness of children and the beauty of nature that it is written about. Yet the poem is a suggestion for children to live in the moment, but will children be the ones reading this poem? The audience of the poem is adults who no longer live in the moment, people who focus on the future and what is to come. When delving deeper into the poem, you can see the poet telling the audience to slow down, and enjoy the smaller things in life, like nature.

Is text a visual experience or an auditory experience?
-I think that a text can be both a visual and auditory experience. You read a novel but some times read it out loud to get the full affect of the authors intentions. When reading poetry, you read it out loud to hear the patterns yet visualize the images the poet described.

March 23- Juxta and Frankenstein

Homework for Friday:
- On BB go to Poetess Archive folder under course documents
- Look at 3 versions of the Bijou poem
1- Page image
2- HTML version
3- TEL encoded version
- Task: do a close reading of the poem in the HTML version
- Question 1: is the poem the same in these 3 versions?
- Question 2: What difference will digitizing make to our understanding of the poems?


Three Versions of Frankenstein:
- When comparing the three different variations of Frankenstein I noticed the difference of emphasis from friend to creature, in the 1831 edition.
Questions:
1-Did Mary Shelly write three different novles?
2-The stranger agrees to different things, why does the change matter?
3-Why does visualizing the text matter?
Answers:
1- I think that Mary Shelly didn't write three novels. I think that she just revised the first one and had it republished. She found that there were something that needed to be changed or added and decided to republish the book.
3-Visualizing helps with the understanding of a text and helps with a close reading of passages.

March 20- Aurora Leigh

Laura is gone traveling the world.... so Kirstyn is teaching us today and next week!

"Never flinch,
But still, unscrupulously* epic, catch -daring
Upon a burning lava of a song*, -not purely of the imagination
The full-veined, heaving, double-breasted Age:
That, when the next shall come, the men of that
May touch the impress with reverent hand, and say
'Behold,–behold the paps we all have sucked!
That bosom seems to beat still, or at least
It sets ours beating. This is living art,
Which thus presents, and thus records true life."
-- This stanza represents the personification of poetry and its gradual movement to the next generation of poets. The language of the stanza complicates the reader's understanding of the stanza because it does not directly reference poetry. The poet as a living historian, using the past and the present to form new ideas.

Question 2: Can there be heroes in modern life? According to the poem? According to you?
--I think that there can be heroes in modern life. People who choose to help others with out thought or how it might affect them. I think that people in the military are heroes because, at the drop of a hat, give up their lives to defend our freedom and country. According to the poem, I think that Elizabeth Barrett Browning thinks that there can be modern heroes just in literature and as authors and poets.

March 18- Aurora Leigh

Auroras' mother and Italy are embodied as one while the Aunt and England are embodied as another figure. Aurora Leigh is stuck between the Englishness that her aunt forces upon her and the Italian culture her mother comes from. She learns to be her own person in the end of the poem/novel, not following either the English or Italian cultures.

Quote 1: Book I, 304-312
-Aurora views her aunt as confined yet the aunt doesn't see herself that way because she doesn't know anything different

Quote 2: Book II, 218-225
-Literature is a great comfort for Aurora

Quote 3: Book II, 400-406
-What you want to accomplish is not a bad thing. She says she is not worthy of these things (love, wife, mistress)

Quote 4: Book II, 671-684
-Her aunt is trying to force Aurora to marry Romney; She afraid that Aurora wont be able to support herself financially if she doesn't get married.

Quote 5: Book III, 302-312
-Working for booksellers in order to support her art (poetry)
-She gave up the security of marriage to be an artist, much like Elizabeth Barrett Browning
-Attempting to keep up her reputation

March 16- Aurora Leigh

<---Elizabeth Barrett Browning (EBB) born in 1806 and died in 1861. Her mother died when she was 20. EBB published her first book of poetry when she was 22 (1828). In 1844 she met Robert Browning via letter and eloped with him in 1845.

"Aurora Leigh"
-- Her mother dies when she is 4 and her father takes care of her till his death. Her father is a man of property and money in England. Since her father didn't get married after Aurora's mothers death the money passes to her aunt, taking away Aurora's right to be called "Lady."
Palmsest- a piece of parchment 0r paper that has many different layers of writing on it- this is what EBB/AL thinks our minds are like. Unlike tabula rasa, where your a mind is a blank slate yet everything you do and encounter makes an impresssion and shapes decisions.
Aurora Leigh is looking for the deep unconditonal love that a mother gives her child, she was "cheated" out of it when her mother died:

"My mother was a Florentine,
Whose rare blue eyes were shut from seeing me
When scarcely I was four years old; my life,
A poor spark snatched up from a failing lamp
Which went out therefore. She was weak and frail;
She could not bear the joy of giving life–
The mother's rapture slew her. If her kiss
Had left a longer weight upon my lips,
It might have steadied the uneasy breath,
And reconciled and fraternised my soul
With the new order. As it was, indeed,
I felt a mother-want about the world,
And still went seeking, like a bleating lamb
Left out at night, in shutting up the fold,–
As restless as a nest-deserted bird
Grown chill through something being away, though what
It knows not."

Aurora's mother died when she was four, not giving Aurora enough time to get to know her. Aurora wanted to "[feel] a mother," she wanted to know a mothers love and devotion, yet was unable to find something to fill that void left behind.

March 5- The Lifted Veil

The one on on the right (J.K.Rowling) is thinking about Harry Potter and how much money its going to make her. She is thinking about where Harry's story is going to take him and how it will turn out. She is wanting all the stalkers to go away and leave her alone. She is wanting people to leave her alone and let her write in peace and not be bugging her to finish a novel a year and have it ready for the pubic before she believes it is ready.

Does Latimer have the supernatural powers he says he does?
-He bases his supernatural ability on his vision of Prague. He uses the light in a shape of a star as proof that his vision was real. Yet he could have just seen pictures of Prague and resurfaced in his subconscious. He says he can read everyones mind but Berthas because it's more fun that way. Latimer is projecting his desires onto the one he wants. Latimer's mother worshiped him, just like Victor's mother. "I am cursed..." just like Victor. He has a poets sensibility without the poet's voice.  

March 2- end of Frankenstein

Free indirect discourse was invented by Jane Austen.
Novels have free indirect discourse while, movies use voice overs, close- ups, images, juxtapositions, cuts as ways for expressing the interior monologue of a character on screen.

---End of Frankenstein--
Does Victor learn his lesson at the end of the novel?- The evidence in the novel proves that he doesn't. He tries to get the crew to search for his creation. Is Victor a hero? The choice between being with loved ones and doing work.