The Great Figure
I’m about to teach Death of a Salesman in my “Intro to LIterary Studies” class. It’s part of a unit on literary criticism, so after we discuss such topics as “Is Willy Loman a Tragic Hero?” and the formal experimentalism called for in the stage directions, I’m hoping to ask my students to look at this play in a greater literary context. I’m going to start by introducting them to William Carlos Williams’s “The Great Figure” and Charles Demuth’s “The Figure 5 in Gold.”
A unit on Williams and Demuth on the “Model School Library” doesn’t preserve the spacing in Williams’s original poem… it makes no sense at all as a few lines of prose.
By the way, I stumbled across a plucky little website that argues Munch’s “The Scream” is no good.
Update: Fixed the broken URL. (Thanks, Mike.)
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Thanks for your comment, Josh. I enjoyed your explication of the poem.
In Death of a Salesman, there's a scene in which Willy shouts about the way the stench and noise of the city is surrounding him... he's obviously not happy in an urban setting. Since Williams and a few other modernists such as Hart Crane and Ezra Pound are unusual for their willingness to celebrate urban life (with its noise and buildings and crowds), I thought it might be interesting to show a literary work that contradicts the message of Miller's play.
I enjoyed your interpretation of the "graphic" quality of the text. As a textual thinker, I am a little concerned that Demuth's painting is so often reproduced alongside Williams' poem, as if somehow the poem is not complete without the painting to explain it (when in fact the painting was inspired by the poem). I noticed that you started with Williams's explanation of the poem... that's what an influential group of literary critics called the "intentional fallacy" -- the idea that the the way to critique a literary creation, the way to comprehend and evalute its meaning, is to judge it by what the author intended to create. I don't want students to trust Spark Notes to tell them what they are supposed to think about a work, because then they won't think about the work at all, they'll just try to reproduce in their papers or oral presentations what Spark Notes told them was important about the work.
I don't personally feel there is anything wrong with citing the opinion of the author, but when students pose questions in their papers, and then quote the author's opinion and act as if that settles the matter and there is no more intellectual work to be done, that makes me pull my hair out.
Don't get me wrong -- your blogging was creative and comprehensive, and you obviously had an opinion you wanted to get across.
Why didn't you ever take a "real" literature class? You obviously enjoy it... is there still a chance for you to make up for lost time? Seton Hill University offers online courses... :)
"I'm hoping to ask my students to look at this play in a greater literary context. I'm going to start by introducting them to William Carlos Williams's 'The Great Figure' and Charles Demuth's 'The Figure 5 in Gold.'"
How do you do that? Having never taken a real lit class, I don't understand how you're relating the poem and the painting (and their relationship?) to Death of a Salesman...
My take on Williams' and Demuth's masterpieces:
http://heresjosh.blogspot.com/2003_07_01_heresjosh_archive.html#105829183681069441
Dennis,
I never doubted you for a minute! :)
Very sketchily.
Seriously, I went over the basics, telling them Aristotle's definition of tragedy, but I didn't make them read Aristotle directly. There are other works and topics we go over more thorougly, so don't worry! :)
Dennis, I realize it has been a long while since I was in a lower-division English course (100 or 200) so I wonder how is a question like "Is Willy Loman a Tragic Hero?" answered without Aristotle, Miller, or other theorists?
Bobby, I didn't assign that essay, in part because this is a 100-level course that I'm hoping will get them thinking on their own. Miller is unusually talkative about his own works, and I didn't want to give them the idea that the best way to learn about an author's literary accomplishments is to read essays in which the authors explain them point by point. (Okay, I'm being unfair to Miller's essay, which really is useful...)
Dennis,
Yeah! Death of a Salesman is an excellent choice of text. My question is did anyone say that Willy is not a tragic hero using Aristotelian theory as a justification? [I am holding back the urge to REALLY talk about Aristotle's Poetics, which you know is hard for me, but not impossible]. Of course I must ask if your students will read Miller's "Tragedy and the Common Man," from Miller's book _The Theater Essays of Arthur Miller_, which was one of our first literary discussions three years ago.
Well, we didn't actually get to Williams and Demuth today, but it was a lively discussion anyway. I've learned to go with the flow a little more than I used to do -- if the discussion is productive I don't like interrupting it and wrenching it back to accomplish my agenda.