Literature: September 2005 Archive Page

The tomb of Odysseus has been found, and the location of his legendary capital city of Ithaca discovered here on this large island across a one-mile channel from the bone-dry islet that modern maps call Ithaca. --Thomas Elias --Archeologists make historic discovery (Madera Tribune)

Pride and Preface (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

In “Drama as Literature,” I assigned the first third or so of Oedipus the King, which always throws students for a loop.

What’s with the “strophe,” which is the part of the choral performance chanted as the performers dance from right to left, and the “antistrophe,” which is chanted as the performers dance from left to right? Who chants while they sing dance, anyway? A few students have studied the play before, and they’re laudably more interested in hearing what their peers have to say as they encounter the story for the first time. When I checked the blogs last night, I could see that those students who bravely ventured to blog their opinions on the play sounded a bit tentative.

So in class today, I tackled their estrangement head-on, with an introduction that went something like this:

I recognize that the very idea of an artistic performance that includes action, dance, music and the spoken word is unfamiliar to you. After all, it’s completely unrealistic to depict a crowd of people suddenly speaking, singing and dancing in unison, as a backdrop to dramatic action.

There’s nothing on television, especially on a familiar channel such as MTV, that involves the lyrical expression of human passions in a form that involves groups of performers speaking words that are more powerful, more beautiful, and more musical than any words that you or I speak in daily life. I understand that it is foreign to your experience, to imagine listening to an entertainment that involves people singing and speaking the way they would if language were perfect and they themselves were gods.

Once I made my point, I acknowledged that our knowledge of Greek theatre is sketchy (we don’t really know what a choral performance would have looked like) but I did draw a diagram of a Greek theater, noting that the characters on stage often announce the arrival of a new character, in part because the entrance was so far away from the center of the stage that the actor would have been visible to most of the audience long before he was in position to begin speaking. I also talked about the function of the Greek masks, which contained a small megaphone in the mouthpiece. But I also told that when my wife went to Greece as part of a drama class, her instructor had the class spread out in the theatron (seating area), then he pulled out a pin. The stage was so well-constructed that everyone heard it drop.

In the midst of all this, one of my students made an offhand reference to the fact that I’m cited in our textbook, Drama: A Pocket Anthology (3rd edition). I told him I didn’t know what he was talking about.

Another student confirmed, and there in the preface I found my name, in a list of instructors who commented on the second edition. I seem to remember now that I gave some feedback on a sample table of contents, and maybe commented on the introductory material, but I had completely forgotten about it.

Okay, so it’s not the same thing as someone citing me as an authority or responding to a claim I made in published scholarship, but it was a nice little Monday-morning picker-upper. After the mock-serious lecture about the strangeness of the conventions of the Greek theatre, I got to look all humble and surprised in front of my students.

Of course as soon as class was over I walked up and down the Humanities wing, book in hand, bragging to my colleagues. Fitting, perhaps, after a discussion of a tragic hero with the fatal flaw of excessive pride.

At any rate I’m pleased to know that some of my students actually read the preface.

--Austrian national anthem 'sexist' (BBC)

Should that caption read "Austrian schoolchildren are taught the national anthem during solar eclipses"? I can't imagine why else they might be wearing those goggles.

I don't mean to make light of the subject.

I've written a handout on gender-neutral language, and in my American Lit class, we discussed the ritualistic rhetoric and nearly universal pomposity of national anthems.

But the photo choice is distracting and odd. (My sister suggests that perhaps it was the only handy photo of Austrian schoolchildren.)

The original handwritten manuscript of what became Alice in Wonderland has been put online using software to virtually turn the pages.

Alice's Adventures Under Ground, by Lewis Carroll, is the latest 3D addition to the British Library's Turning the Pages collection of books. --Original Alice work in 3D online (BBC)

I had to hunt on the British Library website to find a link to the page this article is talking about. That's completely silly -- what a waste of an online news item if it reports on a web page but doesn't include a link to it. I'd also say that "in 3D" is a bit misleading. It's just a digital manipulation of a 2D scan. And instead of just clicking on a page to make it turn, you have to click and drag, but half the time the page slips out of my virtual fingers, so I have to grab at it again. Annoying.

I'm not sure the direct link to Alice will work, but here's the Turning the Pages table of contents.

Reflection on Wojtyla's The Jeweller's Shop (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Last night, I read Karol Wojtyla The Jeweller’s Shop for the first time. I knew it was mostly a collection of monologues with little action, in part because it was written to be performed in secret, in Nazi-Communist-occupied Poland.

It is a poetic drama, in which the spoken word dominates over all other components of theater. (I’m reading it in translation, of course.) The old jeweler who figures in the lives of three couples only appears through their lines – he never appears in the play.

In the play, numerous references to “ego” and “alter ego,” which recalls the influence of Freud in the early 20th century. But even more notable is the anti-romantic stance. “I wanted to regard love as passion,” says Teresa, who lives for many years as a widow. If she expected love to sweep her away, she would have been disappointed.

Andrew dismisses “beauty accessible to the senses,” and prefers a stronger bridge between people: “beauty accessible to the mind.” It is perhaps this bridge that gives their brief marriage meaning even after his death.

I found personal meaning in the hesitation that Teresa and Andrew feel outside the jeweller’s shop window. “suddenly we were together / on both sides of the big transparent sheet / filled with glowing light.”

During my own engagement, for months I felt a horrid knot in my stomach when passing jewelry shops. Not because I didn’t want to get married or because I was worried about spending money, but because the sparkling metallic teeth of the salesbots gleamed so intensely whenever their sensors detected a young couple slowing down to take a look. (“May I help you?” “Why yes, you can BACK OFF, you gleaming metallic salesbot!”)

Where was I?

Teresa and Andrew are equal in height, still choosing their fate before the window, which has become a mirror.

The involvement of the chorus in the wedding scene reminded me of the abstract depiction of the wedding in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, which was written about 20 years earlier, though Wilder was toying with minimalism for its aesthetic effect, not out of theatrical necessity. At any rate, the wine-cheered crowd is present for the wedding, which is public, and follows the couple part of the way. But at some point the crowd will drop out of the picture.

The rush and fun of the wedding will be over, and the hard work of the marriage will begin. Teresa sees it as “The will of Teresa being Andrew, / the will of Andrew being Teresa.”

Wojtyla, who would eventually become a priest, bishop, and John Paul II, knew suffering. His own mother died when he was about nine, his elder brother died a few years later, and his father died when Wojtyla was in college. While the play speaks highly of married love, unlike a traditional comedy (which ends with a wedding), this play includes that staple of country music, “old love on the rocks.”

Echoing Teresa’s formula for married love, Anna laments, “It was as if Stefan had ceased to be in me. / Did I cease to be in him too? / Or was it simply that I felt / I now existed only in myself?” (32)

Ibsen represents a similar discovery as a liberating, dollhouse-shattering force in Nora’s life, but Ibsen was more an individualist than anything else (including feminist). Wojtyla presents the ego as empty deadness, and points out the futility of Anna’s self-absorbed attempts to lash out: “So I fought for Stefan’s love, / ready to retreat at any time, / if he did not realize the sense / of the battle.”

Wojtyla has to convey to the audience a deeper understanding of Anna’s character than Anna herself possesses. “I thought the guilt was Stefan’s -- / I could find no guilt in myself.” (34) But she and Stefan are both guilty of sins of cold hearts. (This affects their daughter, Monica, whom the passionate Anna finds strange and reserved.)

The play’s final section focuses on Christopher (the son of Teresa and the late Andrew, who died when Christopher was a baby) and Monica (the daughter of Anna and Stefan, who are still together).

The line that struck me the most powerfully is Monica’s: “I want so much to be yours, and there is only one thing constantly in my way – that I am myself” (57).

As the play was wrapping up, we see the mature Teresa’s discussion of the effect on her son of the mysterious Adam, and we see the mature Anna’s recognition that a chance encounter with the same Adam did some work to heal the rift between her and Stefan. I thought the play was going to end on a realistic note, but suddenly we have a final redeeming reflection from Stefan (who hasn’t spoken at all during this time).

She listens to her 12-year-old son and his friends as they discuss the novels that their teachers have told them to read over the summer. The boys don't like them. They seem, in fact, to hate them.

The books that her son, Alex, and his friends are compelled to read are highly regarded by teachers and professors of education. Many come decorated with Newbery medals and endorsements by the American Library Association. They are books known in the field of children's literature as Young Adult (YA) literature. All are highly realistic, written in a confessional tone, usually in the first-person voice of an angry or alienated teenager. The protagonist deals with traumatic experiences: murder, suicide, the death of a parent or friend, incest, sexual abuse, rape, drugs, abortion, kidnapping, abandonment. Friendly or protective adults are virtually nonexistent; the main character's mother, writes Feinberg, is dead, missing, or nonfunctional. Children in these novels almost never play. Often they feel guilty for whatever catastrophe befalls them. The books are uniformly humorless, earnest, and depressing. Their message, to the extent that they have one: the world is a nasty and brutish place, and you can depend only on yourself.

What is missing from YA books, says Feinberg, is any recognition of the role that imagination and fantasy play in children's ways of experiencing life. Instead, the books seem dedicated to shocking children, destroying their fantasies, and giving them a mean dose of reality. --Diane Ravitch reviews the book by Barbara Feinberg --Welcome to Lizard Motel: Children, Stories, and the Mystery of Making Things Up [Review] (Education Next)

Found amongst a good collection of links on This Week in Education.

ALGERNON Do you really keep a diary? I'd give anything to look at it. May I?

CECILY Oh no. [Puts her hand over it.] You see, it is simply a very young girl's record of her own thoughts and impressions, and consequently meant for publication. When it appears in volume form I hope you will order a copy. --Oscar WildeDo you really keep a diary? (The Importance of Being Earnest)

When Cecily and Gwendolyn whip out their diaries in order to determine which of the two of them is really engaged to Earnest, I can't help imagining them typing "proposal" into a weblog search engine.

Also worth noting about The Importance of Being Earnest

[T]he theme of child abuse is picked up and parodied in Earnest. This theme was considered especially heartbreaking by the Victorians, and Wilde himself uses it at times to wring our hearts a bit, but in Earnest, even the abused child is manipulated to create an atmosphere of hilarity as Wilde has a good laugh at his earlier works.

Nassaar, Christopher. "Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest." Explicator, Vol. 60 Issue 2 (2002). 78-80.

I appreciated Naassar's comparison between this play and Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, which I teach for my Media Aesthetics course. Yet I think it's a bit dismissive to conclude, as Nassaar does, "all is laughable nonsense, even Wilde himself." As actors say, good comedy is hard to do. Wilde has created not just a work of nonsense, but a linguistically complex, layered set of puns and witticisms that spoof social class comedies in general and the well-made-play in particular.

In Drama as Literature, we have just read A Doll's House, and students predictably spent more time considering Nora's character and Torvald's motives than they spent examining the importance of Krogstad's letters or the backstory that makes Nora a forger and liar even before the story begins.

Earnest brings the "incriminating papers" prop to another level, where in fact the hero as a baby is mistakenly exchanged with the manuscript of a three-volume novel. Algernon and Jack play-act the role of Earnest, while Gwendolyn and Cecily write in their journals (though Cecily's work is more exaggerated and fictional than Gwendolyn, given the fact that Gwendolyn has been courted by a man calling himself Earnest, and Cecily has never met any such man).

Is this a blogger which I see before me? (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

The other day I read a kid's version of Macbeth to my son (age 7). It's William Shakespeare's Macbeth (retold by Bruce Coville / pictures by Gary Kelley).

A couple nights later, instead of the science-fiction paperback we've been ploughing through for weeks, my son asked for Macbeth again. It uses excerpts from the Shakespearean dialogue, woven together with modern-language narrative, making the story easily followed.

Anyway, I was tired, and thinking about the introduction to weblogs class that I needed to prepare for the next morning, so that when Macbeth says, "Is this a dagger which I see before me?" I stumbled over a word and changed the quotation.

My son laughed his head off, and made me promise to blog it.

I do the same thing whenever I try to talk about the game "Grand Theft Auto." I say "Grand Text Auto" instead. (When I said that in front of two bloggers at the Serious Games summit last year, they laughed and pointed and said, "So you do it, too?")

Talk to teachers, review messages posted on e-mail groups and browse professional journals, and you'll find high school assignments that are long on fun and remarkably short on actual writing.

For example, someone who teaches an honors class for high school freshmen posts a short-story project that allows students 13 options, only a handful of which involve actual writing. Among the choices students are offered: create a map to illustrate the story's setting, make a game to show the story's theme, put together a collage from magazine photographs, or assemble a scrapbook or photograph album for the character.

Teaching Arthurian literature? Have your students design a coat of arms. Need an alternative to a book report? Have students draw the design for a book jacket.

While such activities may be more entertaining for students, and less work for the teachers in terms of grading the projects, kids are often showing up at college unable to write. --Donna Harrington-Lueker --'Crayola curriculum' takes over (USA Today)

This essay is from 2002. I tracked it down from a comment on JoanneJacobs.com.

In one of my classes, when I teach Margaret Edson's play Wit, I read from a copy of The Runaway Bunny, a children's book which is mentioned in the play. It's the last week of the class, and many of the students are just starting to get the hang of studying literature at the college level; so they seem happy and nostalgic for a time when teachers did most of the work for them. But I don't do this in place of asking them to do serious work. And since many of our English majors are double-majoring in education, it helps us talk about the playwright's full-time job as a kindergarten teacher, and the play's implicit anti-intellectualism.

Of course, high school teachers simply don't have the time to get students to write and revise college-length papers. So naturally, I don't expect all college freshmen to arrive on campus already competent in college-level work. But I'd really prefer that more arrive on campus ready to do such things as read and follow assignment instructions, and read a syllabus on their own.

Best response to this whole thing, from a commenter: "I'm so angry at this crap I feel like making a poster."