Thursday--and some excellent essay-writing advice!

Dear year 13,

Just to remind you that today's lesson is reserved for you to be getting on with your coursework, but that I will see you tomorrow as usual to give you feedback, and hopefully collect in a few finished pieces.

Most of you are working fine, but there are a few (you know who you are) who have not yet submitted an appropriate piece--be warned, if you do not hand in coursework, then whatever I have from you will have to be submitted, even if you feel it is not your best work. Why ask your examiner to mark a piece that is 700 words long, when they are expecting something much more substantial? You are losing easy marks here.

Don't miss the opportunity to create a good coursework essay. This is an ideal opportunity for you to improve your grade, and save yourself from any problems later on by underpinning your exam work with a solid coursework grade

Below is some excellent advice if you are having problems in structuring your essay--from Miss Glynn.

First of all, although some people are in the habit of starting an essay without having written a plan first, that isn't good practice. Now is a good time to learn how to write an effective plan! It will enable you to have a detailed overview of the essay before you start writing. Otherwise you may find yourself trying to trawl your way through an essay, whilst scouring the text for useful references, only to find at the end of it that you've totally strayed from the question - NOT a pleasant experience! If you write a detailed plan, you will find the process far more satisfying, I guarantee it. If your argument changes as you progress, you can always adapt your plan.







Introduction:


1) Break the question down into points for discussion.


2) Bullet-point your introduction. This should touch on every point that you plan to cover, and these points should be informed by your essay question.


3) Your introduction should hint towards your stance, but leave room for you to round those ideas off in your conclusion.


4) If you removed the main body of the essay, your introduction and conclusion should stand alone as a clear, linear argument.






Each paragraph should include:


1) A focus on one of the points for discussion raised in your introduction.


2) An exact textual reference - these should be in place before you start writing your essay!


3) Critical reference if appropriate - how does it support or challenge your point?


4) Link to the title - essential in every paragraph!!! This may come through in your analysis*.


5) Reference to the form of the text. How does form influence your argument?


6) Your analysis* of the points raised in the paragraph, as informed by the evidence given.


7) Clear links to the previous and following paragraphs.






Conclusion:






This should round off the points raised in your introduction, giving a clear opinion.


Your opinion should start to form in the introduction, develop paragraph-by-paragraph, and reach a clear conclusion at the end. Your opinion doesn't need to either agree or disagree with the question. A balanced opinion is just as valid, it just needs to have conviction!!


Don't let your conclusion be a lazy add-on to the rest of your essay. It will leave a lasting impression and give justification to the main content of your argument. Similarly, a strong introduction and conclusion cannot support a weak essay, they will only draw attention to half-hearted or confused writing. Make sure the quality of your work is consistent!


To summarise, I suggest that your essay plan should look like this:






Introduction:




Paragraph 1:


All info as suggested above.






Paragraph 2:






Paragraph 3: etc...






Conclusion:




Good luck!!

The Sick Rose

Here is the poem; please post your critical thoughts! (well done AO1 for getting there first)


O Rose, thou art sick!
The invisible worm,
That flies in the night,
In the howling storm,

Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy;
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.


To enhance your reading of the poem, please look closely at this annotated bibliography, which gives you a quick route through some of the key critical ideas about he poem.  We looked at some of the major ideas last lesson, but this site has many more.

Coursework title for 'The Fly'

To what extent does Katherine Mansfield's use of symbolism in 'The Fly' conform to David Lodge's description of 'a shimmering surface of suggested meanings without a denotative core'?

More on The Fly

Well done those of you who have already commented... the rest of you, get to it--I expect to see some more comments and responses please!

Here is some further food for thought. How do these critical snippets affect your reading of the story?

The experiment with the Fly by the Boss, so named because he appears to be the boss of his little world and of the little life of the Fly who has fallen into his inkpot, the boss as well over his employees Woodifield and Macey and over his dead son (all are as flies to him), dramatizes both the plot (the conflict between time and grief) and the theme (time conquers grief). At the first stage of the experiment the Boss is to be equated with the Fly. He is, ironically then, at once both boss and fly.

Robert Wooster Stallman “Mansfield's ‘The Fly,’” in The Explicator, Vol. 3, No. 6, April, 1945, item 49

On January 11, 1918, after a wartime train trip to the South of France for her health, Katherine Mansfield wrote her husband, John Middleton Murry, that she felt “like a fly who has been dropped into the milk-jug and fished out again, but is still too milky and drowned to start cleaning up yet.”¹ As early as 1913 her story “Violet”² had idealized a “tender and brooding woman” lifting a small green fly from a milk glass and talking about Saint Francis. These passages prefigure one of her best-known stories, “The Fly,” wherein the Boss rescues a fly from the inkwell

Celeste Turner Wright “Genesis of a Short Story,” in Philological Quarterly, Vol. 34, No. 1, January, 1955, pp. 91-6.

The difficulties Miss Mansfield's excellent story “The Fly” have occasioned interpreters stem from their eagerness to make one of two obvious equations: (1) within the story itself, to see the fly symbolizing the boss (Stallman, EXP., April, 1945, III, 49; Berkman, K. M.: A Critical Study, p. 195); (2) biographically interpreting, to see the fly as K. M. herself (Jacobs, EXP., Feb. 1947, v, 32; Bledsoe, EXP., May, 1947, v, 53; Wright, EXP., Feb., 1954, XII, 27).

Stanley B. Greenfield “Mansfield's ‘The Fly,’” in The Explicator, Vol. 17, No. 1, October, 1958, item 2.

“The Fly” seems to me to be unified by one predominant theme: death, its inevitability, and man's resistance to it. The most significant single sentence in the story occurs in the opening paragraph: “All the same, we cling to our last pleasures as the tree clings to its last leaves.”

Pauline P. Bell  “Mansfield's ‘The Fly’,” in The Explicator, Vol. 19, No. 3, December, 1960, item 20.

Late in 1915 when Katherine Mansfield received the news that her brother had been killed fighting in France, she wrote in her journal:

The present and the future mean nothing to me. I am no longer “curious” about people; I do not wish to go anywhere; and the only possible value that anything can have for me is that it should put me in mind of something that happened or was when we were alive. … Supposing I were to die as I sit at this table, playing with my Indian paper-knife, what would be the difference? No difference. Then why don't I commit suicide? Because I feel I have a duty to perform

John T. Hagopian  “Capturing Mansfield's ‘Fly,’” in Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 9, No. 4, Winter, 1963-1964, pp. 385-90.

The chief characteristic of the boss in Katherine Mansfield's “The Fly” (see EXP., April, 1945, III, 49; Feb., 1947, v, 32; May, 1947, v, 33; Feb., 1954, XII, 27; Nov., 1955, XIV, 10; Oct., 1958, XVII, 2; and Dec., 1960, XIX, 20) is, I think, his inability to recognize that others have a breaking point. This is shown in his attitude toward the fly, toward Macey, toward Mr. Woodifield, and toward his son. He does not intend to kill the fly; he only admires its courage and its ability to free itself of ink. After the fly's fourth soaking, he does not see that the fly has suffered all that it can, and he encourages it with: “Come on. … Look sharp”

J. Rea “Mansfield's ‘The Fly,’” in The Explicator, Vol. 23, No. 9, May, 1965, item 68.

Obviously the boss stands for a superior controlling power—God, destiny, or fate—which in capricious and impersonal cruelty tortures the little creature struggling under this hand until it lies still in death. At the same time the boss is presented as one who has himself received the blows of this superior power through the death of his only son in the war.

Sylvia Berkman, from Katherine Mansfield: A Critical Study, cited in Mary Rohrberger “Katherine Mansfield: ‘The Fly,’” in Hawthorne and the Modern Short Story, Mouton and Company, 1966, pp. 68-74.

 

 

No other story of Katherine Mansfield has prompted such a critical controversy.¹ Many critics have proposed interesting interpretations; yet the more one reads of the criticism, the more one realises that the answer to the problem the story raises is not in fact found in just one or another sentence, symbol or parallel inside or outside the story. Critics seem to have been obsessed by the necessity to equate the fly with either the boss, Woodifield, the boss's son, or the boss's grief.

Paulette Michel-Michot “Katherine Mansfield's ‘The Fly’: An Attempt to Capture the Boss,” in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 11, No. 1, Winter, 1974, pp. 85-92.

This much-explicated¹ story is deservedly famous. It was completed on 20th February, 1922 and published in ‘The Nation’ on 18th March in the same year. Exceptionally short in length, it tells by implication much more than what it states explicitly. The result is not only an extraordinary depth and suggestiveness but also a puzzling obscurity. For, with many of the suggestions left deliberately vague, the story becomes an enchanting, but baffling riddle which lends itself to many conflicting and, sometimes, fanciful interpretations.

Atul Chandra Chatterjee “1918-23; The Final Phase,” in The Art of Katherine Mansfield, S. Chand & Company, 1980, pp. 234-321.

The Fly

Dear year 13, as promised, some ideas on 'The Fly' for you to ponder.


First of all, I'm going to give you two literary sources, and I would like you to comment on how these illuminate the text for you... Mansfield would have been familiar with both.


SOURCE 1, from King Lear:

Enter GLOUCESTER, led by an Old Man

EDGAR: My father, poorly led? World, world, O world!
But that thy strange mutations make us hate thee,
Lie would not yield to age.

Old Man: O, my good lord, I have been your tenant, and
your father's tenant, these fourscore years.

GLOUCESTER : Away, get thee away; good friend, be gone:
Thy comforts can do me no good at all;
Thee they may hurt.

Old Man: Alack, sir, you cannot see your way.

GLOUCESTER: I have no way, and therefore want no eyes;
I stumbled when I saw: full oft 'tis seen,
Our means secure us, and our mere defects
Prove our commodities. O dear son Edgar,
The food of thy abused father's wrath!
Might I but live to see thee in my touch,
I'ld say I had eyes again!

Old Man: How now! Who's there?

EDGAR : [Aside] O gods! Who is't can say 'I am at the worst'?
I am worse than e'er I was.

Old Man: 'Tis poor mad Tom.

EDGAR : [Aside] And worse I may be yet: the worst is not
So long as we can say 'This is the worst.'

Old Man: Fellow, where goest?

GLOUCESTER : Is it a beggar-man?

Old Man: Madman and beggar too.

GLOUCESTER : He has some reason, else he could not beg.
I' the last night's storm I such a fellow saw;
Which made me think a man a worm: my son
Came then into my mind; and yet my mind
Was then scarce friends with him: I have heard more since.
As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods.
They kill us for their sport.

EDGAR : [Aside] How should this be?
Bad is the trade that must play fool to sorrow,
Angering itself and others.--Bless thee, master!

King Lear Act 4, scene 1, 32–37

Source 2: William Blake, The Fly

Little fly, Thy summer’s play My thoughtless hand Has brushed away. Am not I A fly like thee? Or art not thou A man like me? For I dance And drink and sing, Till some blind hand Shall brush my wing. If thought is life And strength and breath, And the want Of thought is death, Then am I A happy fly, If I live, Or if I die.

William Blake (1757-1827)       P. 1793 I look forward to your insights! More tomorrow.

Ode to Autumn

Here are the questions for this week. Remember that you need to use the critical ideas we discussed and looked at if you are to write this essay really well.

Choose ONE of these titles, and write a fluent and clear critical response to the question, using close evidence from the poem throughout to back up your ideas, and reinforcing your ideas with critical reference where appropriate:


1. It can be argued that 'To Autumn' is an intellectual response to the season rather than an emotional one. How far do you agree with this statement?

2. Does the use of metaphor allow the reader to share Keats’ intense enjoyment of the season in 'To Autumn' or does it obscure his celebration? Discuss how far you agree with each proposition and why.

3. Is 'To Autumn' a celebration of nature and autumn or is it an acknowledgement that the scene portrayed is an idealised vision of the past?

4. Knowles and Moon comment that ‘it is typical that metaphors use concrete images to convey something abstract, helping to communicate what is hard to explain’. To what extent do you think that the metaphors in 'To Autumn' are there to communicate abstract ideas, and how far are they used by Keats as simple aids to description?

5. ‘Knowles and Moon describe the functions of metaphor as ‘explaining, clarifying, describing, expressing, evaluating, entertaining’. How do you think Keats employs metaphor in ''To Autumn', and which of these functions does he prioritise?

Some useful critical terminology for your essay

Valediction: a farewell speech. To Autumn is in the valedictory mode.


Apostrophe: A feature of an ode. A figure of speech or rhetorical term in the form of an address in which someone is absent, dead or non-human and is addressed as if it were alive and present and able to reply. The speech can be addressed to a person, idea or thing.

Ode: (from the Greek – to sing) A lyric poem with a dignified theme phrased in a formal, elevated style. Its purpose is to praise and glorify. Odes describe nature intellectually rather than emotionally. An ode has a succession of stanzas in lines of varying length and metre. Its tone is formal, its style is elevated; it is lofty and has noble sentiments. It is characterised by its length, intricate stanza forms, grandeur of style and seriousness of purpose. The form was established by the Greek poet Pindar.

Caesura: a pause within a line of verse. In this example from To Autumn there are caesuras in both lines ‘Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,’
‘Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft’

End-stopped: The end of a line of verse coincides with an essential grammatical pause usually signalled by punctuation.
‘Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:

And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head...’

In this example from 'To Autumn', the first line is end-stopped, the second uses enjambment (see below)

Enjambment: The running over of the sense and grammatical structure from one verse line or couplet to the next without a punctuated pause.

Lyric: A poem, usually short, expressing in a personal manner the feelings and thoughts of an individual speaker (not necessarily those of the poet). Keats’ sonnets and odes are in the lyric form.

Synaesthesia: The description of a sense impression in terms more appropriate to a different sense; the mixing of sense impressions in order to create a particular kind of metaphor. As Keats likes to dwell on sense impressions, he uses synaesthesia.

In his ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, he describes the taste of wine in terms of colour, action, song, sensation and feeling.

‘O, for a draught of vintage...
Tasting of Flora and the country green,
Dance, and Provencal song, and sunburnt mirth!’

Tony Harrison--essay question and commentary

Ah, Tony Harrison... I think that it would probably be helpful for you to consider an essay question on him. You could look at just 'Them and [uz]', or if you know 'National Trust' from last year, then draw that in as well.

To start with, look at this interview with Harrison on radio 3--the transcript you can find here says some interesting things about his schooldays, including a close description of the generation of 'Them and [uz]'. What do you think?

For your essay question, try this one:

In what ways does Harrison present the Marxist perspective that “social circumstances determine much, if not all, of your life” in Them & [uz] ?

Here are some of my thoughts on the poem to get you started--but don't plagiarise!

The title of this poem turns round the more common saying ‘us and them’ which is often used in the context of a social divide, with the lower classes emphatically ‘them’. Here, Harrison reverses the expected order, to emphasise the word ‘us’, which he renders in the style of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), so as to detail its pronunciation. This ‘us’ is spoken with a northern accent, and the difference between it and the southern pronunciation, and the status accorded to each, is the issue on which the poem turns.

The dedication to the poem reveals its split interests between the academic and the sociological. Leon Cortez was a musician of the thirties and forties who wrote popular comic songs. Richard Hoggart (left) is an academic, the author of The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-class Life, and someone who in many respects led the way for writers like Harrison to enter the formal poetic canon of literature. Harrison here accords them equal status, perhaps because they represent two different types of inspiration and example, two examples of ‘uz’ as opposed to the ‘them’ of the establishment. Hoggart is himself from Leeds, and his entry into the academic establishment, and his appreciation of D.H. Lawrence, for instance, would be something that may have inspired the young Harrison, Lawrence being, even in the 1950s and 60s, a writer whose working-class roots, and use of sexual colloquialisms had led to his exclusion from the canon.

The poem focuses throughout on the prestige accorded to Standard English, and Received Pronunciation. Received Pronunciation, or RP, is the ‘neutral’ accent of the dialect of Standard English, strongly associated with the upper register of speech. It is the dialect of Southern England, and also of upper-class speakers. At the time when Harrison wrote the poem, announcers on the BBC, for instance, would be expected to speak using Standard English and RP, and regional accents would have been seen as vulgar or comical. Northern pronunciation, like Harrison’s, would have been mocked as non-standard (in the way that an Irish or a Caribbean accent can still be mocked in certain contexts) and as a boy, Harrison would have been expected to take hold of the ‘advantages’ that his grammar-school education offered him in the way of accent modification. The expectation that he should do this is clearly the starting point for the painful memories that form the basis of this poem.

Throughout the poem, Harrison shows off his extensive knowledge of literature and culture so as to negate and exorcise the demons of self-doubt sown by his upbringing. He also demonstrates his technical skill; while apparently writing freely and colloquially, he creates a finely-wrought structure of strongly rhymed couplets—a traditional form for satiric verse.

The poem starts with a vivid rendition of Greek speech, ‘αĩ, αĩ’, which effectively isolates the reader who cannot read Greek letters. The fact that they are immediately transliterated into the English ‘ay, ay’ only emphasises the inadequacy of the monoglot reader. Harrison here aligns himself with the famous Greek orator Demosthenes, who reputedly suffered from a stammer. Demosthenes is said to have


cured himself of this affliction by walking along the beach, and practising speaking while he had sea-worn pebbles in his mouth (a modern version of this can be seen in the film My Fair Lady where Professor Higgins puts marbles into Eliza’s mouth to help her pronunciation). Using the slang word ‘gob’ faced against this classical reference demonstrates the range of Harrison’s learning and emphasises the extent to which his accent and use of dialect is a free choice, and not, as his teacher seems to have imagined, a lack of education or intelligence.


The incident recorded in ll. 3-5 is especially ironic; Harrison remembers a teacher stopping him during a recital of part of the opening words of a Keats poem, ‘Ode to a Nightingale’. The opening lines of the poem are: ‘My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains, / My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk’. Harrison’s rendition of this is couched in imitative accent: ‘mi ‘art aches’, and his teacher’s reaction to this is portrayed as violent. He describes his heart as ‘broken’ by the sound of the recital, and stigmatises Harrison as a ‘barbarian’, explaining that all poetry should be in RP. This sort of moment of humiliation is something often recounted in literature; you might think of Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, or Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, where authority figures similarly mock the protagonist. As in these books, Harrison’s humiliation is exacerbated by the knowledge, gained in later life, but felt instinctively at this early stage, that the teacher is wrong—not just wrong to do this in a humane sense, but wrong in his assumptions about the nature of literature.

The mature Harrison gets his revenge through an interpolation in brackets ‘(even Cockney Keats?)’, which indicates his superior knowledge of poetry: unlike the teacher, he is aware that Keats himself had been mocked by the aristocratic critical establishment of his day because of his London accent. In other words, Keats had been accused of being lower-class and uncouth on the basis of his voice, in much the same way as Harrison had. Aligning himself with a powerful poet in this way, Harrison threatens all his teacher’s judgements; he establishes his superiority in the dialogue, and demonstrates his linguistic expertise by deftly rendering his teacher’s accent in the IPA as [ΛЅ].

Throughout the poem, Harrison remembers his teacher as calling him ‘T.W’. Presumably his initials were used as a means of distancing the teacher from the student. Harrison remembers the language of contempt: ‘He was nicely spoken’. The phrase has the resonance of childhood; it is the sort of comment made about well-behaved children. The teacher’s speech is described as ‘nice’ a word, in this context, meaning not just pleasant, but correct, exact, in a way which infers the manner in which the teacher himself is submissive to the establishment. The teacher describes Harrison’s attempt at reciting Keats as an attack on English itself: ‘can’t have our glorious heritage done to death!’ The exclamation here, and the semantic field of words such as ‘glorious’ and ‘heritage’ seek to further distance the young, Northern boy from the well-spoken southern teacher. He is relegated to ‘the drunken porter’, the role chosen for him implicitly appropriate because it is comic and vulgar.

Harrison uses here the distinction between verse and prose frequently found in Shakespeare—that verse is generally used in serious contexts, and prose frequently for comedy—to amplify his teacher’s prejudice. From his point of view, prose is a lower form of art, and the only sort of writing to which Harrison can aspire. His speech—that is, the everyday speech, ‘the language that I spoke at home’ is described as bankrupt—though Harrison wittily refers indirectly to this clichéd expression by saying, more obliquely, that it is ‘in the hands of the receivers’. The teacher’s harsh correction ‘we say’ effectively shuts Harrison out from the elite ‘we’ by virtue of his accent, and he expresses his silencing in ironic colloquialism (‘That shut my trap’) and the use of language associated with servility: ‘I doffed my flat ‘a’s’. The awkward Northern speech is imaged as unsightly, even diseased: ‘great / lumps..to hawk up and spit out’.

In section II, Harrison becomes more explicit about his anger and his revenge on his childhood experience. He decides to ‘take over’ poetry in another financial metaphor (‘We’ll occupy / your lousy leasehold’), and like some fairy-tale giant, ‘chewed up Littererchewer and spat the bones’. The misspelling of ‘Literature’ here both enacts the meaning (it is litter, to be chewed up) and mocks insistence on regular spelling with its phonetic imitation. Harrison breaks the rules that he has been taught, that he has submitted to, and recovers his own voice in an entirely literal sense: ‘[uz] [uz] [uz]’. His anger is evident as the pace of the poem speeds up, the emphatic repetitions urging on the solid rhymes as he re-invents himself as ‘Tony’ and forgets his childhood initials.

In the final stanza, Harrison re-asserts his poetic authority. Wordsworth’s Westmoreland accent makes, as he points out, matter rhyme with water—exactly the flat ‘a’ sound that he has had to ‘lose’ as a child at school. He reclaims his status as a Northern speaker, discarding the rules about how to ‘aspirate’, that is, to pronounce ‘correctly’ the initial ‘h’ sound on a word like ‘heart’ in the line from Keats (to ‘drop one’s aiches’ used to be a signifier of low class). Harrison is rebelling, in this poem, against the way in which the poetic establishment had, in his childhood, claimed Keats as a poet of the upper class, and ignored his lower middle class, liberal roots. He is rebelling against a perceived ahistorical cultural rewriting of history in which ‘Standard’ English is privileged over the spoken word of the poet himself.

In a final example of how easily this prioritizing can happen Harrison recounts with wonder and amusement how when he was finally ‘successful’ as a writer, and was mentioned in The Times, presumably in a review, the paper made a hyper-correction; wrongly believing ‘Tony’ to be an abbreviation of ‘Anthony’ they ‘corrected’ it, as he says ‘automatically’. The exclamation at the end of the poem enacts his wry amusement here: the official written word is already, implicitly, smoothing over the perceived roughness of the poet.

The Flea--essay question for those who weren't there

Last lesson, we considered this idea: "Unless we identify and agree what the literal meaning of a word or expression is, we cannot identify and agree what is metaphorical " (from Knowles and Moon Introducing Metaphor) and discussed how the almost-banality of the image of the Flea itself is transformed by Donne into an image which is scientific, transcendent, spiritual and creative. We looked at the nexus between the ordinary and the extraordinary in the poem (for instance, the references reminiscent of the Trinity or the redemption, juxtaposed with references to killing parasites)

The question you are then to write on is this:

“Metaphor is for most people a device of the poetic imagination and the rhetorical flourish—a matter of extraordinary rather than ordinary language” (Lakoff and Johnson Metaphors We Live By cited in Critical Anthology, p.13)


How does Donne negotiate the ordinary and the extraordinary in The Flea?

Essays should be in by Thursday.

THURSDAY'S COVER

Please see the post below for todays' cover. I look forward to seeing you tomorrow!

Year 13--Thursday's lesson!

Dear Year 13,

I am trusting nobody but myself to leave you work this week. I am (very sadly) away on Thursday, though happily here on Friday which should help me to catch up with you and your work.

Building on the work that you have been doing on Donne and Marvell, I would like you to watch some videos on another Donne poem as a basis for discussion both in class and on the blog.

Above  is a video with a dramatised reading of 'The Flea', another very conceited poem (in the sense of a conceit as an extended metaphor). The text of the poem is below:

Mark but this flea, and mark in this,
How little that which thou deny'st me is;
It sucked me first, and now sucks thee,
And in this flea, our two bloods mingled be;
Thou knowest that this cannot be said
A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead.
Yet this enjoys before it woo,
And pampered, swells with one blood made of two,
And this, alas, is more than we would do.


Oh stay, three lives in one flea spare,
Where we almost, yea, more than married are.
This flea is you and I, and this
Our marriage bed, and marriage temple is;
Though parents grudge, and you, we are met
And cloistered in these living walls of jet
Though use make you apt to kill me,
Let not to that self murder added be,
And sacrilege, three sins in killing three.

Cruel and sudden, hast thou since
Purpled thy nail in blood of innocence?
Wherein could this flea guilty be
Except in that drop which it sucked from thee?
Yet thou triumph'st, and sayest that thou
Find'st not thyself, nor me, the weaker now.
'Tis true, then learn how false fears be;
Just so much honour, when thou yield'st to me,
Will waste, as this flea's death took life from thee.

Once you have read through the poem, I would like you to look at this video, which discusses the imagery and explains some ways of reading it.

I would like you to make notes on this poem, and thus prepare for Friday's class, when we shall be considering the section on 'Metaphor' in the Critical Anthology, and discussing if 'the Flea' is a poem where the elaborate nature of the extended metaphor is more overpowering than enabling.

To show that you have actually looked at the blog, please put a comment on what you thought of the poem (and the discussion) beneath--remember to use pseudonyms for anonymity!

Work for today's lesson

I hope that you are enjoying reading through 'To His Coy Mistress'. What I would like you to do is to compare this with the reading that we did yesterday of Donne's 'Elegy on His Mistris Going to Bed'. You might want to compare, for instance, some of the mercantile imagery used--of possessions, jewels and so on-- and you might also want to consider the different audiences for each poem.

For background on Donne, the best site is Luminarium, which has a wealth of information about his life and works.. You can find some especially interesting essays here.

Marvell is also well represented on Luminarium, and you can find some interesting background reading and critical essays here. You might find it especially helpful to consider the biographical background to each poem--how relevant is it--and how much is it a construct? In other words, are these poems written for real women in real situations, or are they in effect rhetorical showpieces, whose primary purpose is to entertain and demonstrate the ability and wit of the poet?

At a minimum, you should carefully read and annotate 'To His Coy Mistress' and be prepared for a blazing discussion on the comparison next lesson.

Find out, for instance, why Vegetable love would be slow, and what is the relevance of 'antediluvian' to the poem...

Happy researching!

COVER FOR MISS DAVIES

With reference to the Gothic concepts discussed in the lesson yesterday, continue to explore the following scenes in Macbeth in preparation for the forthcoming essay on female characters in the play:




Act 1, Scene 5 – Lady Macbeth’s first appearance

Act 1 ,Scene 7 – Macbeth and Lady Macbeth

Act 2, Scene 2 – Macbeth and Lady Macbeth

Act 5, Scene 1 – the sleepwalking scene



Aim to annotate these scenes in as *much detail as possible* and remember you are focusing on:



How the female characters talk

Who they talk to

What they say

Any gothic concepts that are useful in analysing the way the female characters are presented

Tennyson's Women

"But what is time given us for," asked Laura, "except to enjoy ourselves? I mean a lady's time. Gentlemen and poor people are different." — Laura Courtenay in Elizabeth Missing Sewell's Gertrude (1845)

The Lady of Shalott by J W Waterhouse (1888)

It was good to see ytou in class today, and thank you for those last essays. Hopefully the next ones will be a little easier to write after today's lesson. Remember that if you look at the assessment objectives, it will make it much easier to see where there might be gaps in your work.

The following links you might find helpful when researching ideas. Most important is The Victorian Web, which is a site which has a huge amount of solid, reputable information about Victorian literature and culture on it. Though you can wander around it as you please, I shall give you some signposts to save you time, for instance for some interesting information on Tennyson, you can go to the central Tennyson index  while for broader matters of gender, you can find plenty of information here. Those of you who were asking about the details of the pictures we looked at can find them--and many more in this section on the illustrations to 'The Lady of Shallot'. If you are wondering where to start when connecting 'The Lady of Shallot' to 'Mariana', then this short essay might give you some ideas of where to start. Similarly there is an extract from the excellent essay by Elizabeth Nelson  "Tennyson and the Ladies of Shalott," from Ladies of Shalott: A Victorian Masterpiece and its Contexts, Ed. George P. Landow, Brown U.: 1979.

Another interesting part of the site is the questions area, where it suggests some ideas for exploring texts. If you look at the Reading and Discussion questions for Tennyson's Poems, you'll find a whole section on 'The Lady of Shalott' and Mariana' which will perhaps start you tihinking about new ideas to explore.

If you're being more adventurous, here, also, is the list of articles I mentioned in the lesson. You might be able to find them in JSTOR or in the county library:

• Jeffers, Thomas L. “Nice Threads: Tennyson’s Lady of Shalott as Artist.” Yale Review 89 (2001): 54-68.
• Showalter, Elaine . “Victorian Women and Menstruation.” Suffer and Be Still: Women in the Victorian Age. Ed. Martha Vicinus. Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1972. 38-44.
• Vicinus, Martha, ed. Suffer and Be Still: Women in the Victorian Age. Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1972.
• Wright, Jane Cooke. “A reflection on fiction and art in ‘The Lady of Shalott’.” Victorian Poetry (2003): 54-68.

Happy writing!

Tennyson's Women

OK, I just created the longest post ever on this topic, and lost it by accident, so I am feeling very negative about the whole blogging thing now. I shall try again.

J W Waterhouse, The Lady of Shalott, 1888

The most useful resource that I can point you to with regard to your homework task is The Victorian Web, which is a conucopia of information about Victorian literature and culture orginally created by Brown University in America, and now hosted by the University Scholars Program. It is quite vast, so I shall give you a few navigation points to steady you.

The main Tennyson Index is your first point of call, and there are many sub-sections which you can investigate usefully. One of these deals with Visual Art, and discusses the many painterly responses to the poems that we have been discussing.

Many scholars are also very generous about their contributions to this website, and they are well worth citing. For instance, Elizabeth Nelson gives a simpler version of her article  "Tennyson and the Ladies of Shalott," from Ladies of Shalott: A Victorian Masterpiece and its Contexts, Ed. George P. Landow, Brown U.: 1979, and the whole text of her article on 'The Embowered Woman'

Should you get stuck when thinking about the poems, there is a useful list of Tennyson's poems, reading and discussion questions which you can refer to. Read through these short essays and the questions they suggest, to loosen up your ideas.

Those of you who asked for the references to the paintings can find them all here, with paintings of 'Mariana' here.

The useful articles I suggested are these, which you might be able to find at the central library, or on JSTOR, but there might be enough on the Victorian web to keep you busy.

• Jeffers, Thomas L. “Nice Threads: Tennyson’s Lady of Shalott as Artist.” Yale Review 89 (2001): 54-68.
• Showalter, Elaine . “Victorian Women and Menstruation.” Suffer and Be Still: Women in the Victorian Age. Ed. Martha Vicinus. Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1972. 38-44.
• Vicinus, Martha, ed. Suffer and Be Still: Women in the Victorian Age. Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1972.
• Wright, Jane Cooke. “A reflection on fiction and art in ‘The Lady of Shalott’.” Victorian Poetry (2003): 54-68.

 Happy essay writing!

Tennyson's poetry

Dear Year 13 (as you now are)

Alas, I am unable to be with you on Thursday, which is really annoying as it is our first lesson. I am out at Warwick University. This term we shall be working on your unit 4 coursework, and tomorrow we shall discuss this in detail.

For the moment, all you need to know is that it will be due in on November 11th (put the date in your planners) and that before you complete it, you will have to write at least three other substantial essays in preparation.

For the first of these, we are going to look at two Tennyson Poems.

For Thursday's lesson, I would like you to read through both poems (you may have come across them before).

Then, using the computers in room 5 , research the following questions:

1) Find out some biographical information about Tennyson. When did he live, what were the important events in his personal life? What was going on in the world at the time? At what stage in his career as a poet did he write these poems?

2) Find out some information about women in Tennyson’s time. What were their rights? What were their social expectations? What were the differences between women of different classes, and how did this affect what they could or could not do?

3) Find out some information about the background to each poem. Try and discover what story each one was based on, and what inspired Tennyson to write them.

Present this information as a lavishly illustrated powerpoint presentation to be shown to the whole class and me) next lesson.

Lamia and La Belle Dame

Lamia

 Think about the start of the poem, and the ways in which Keats places it in the past through his mention of magic and fairies. He is employing a similar technique to that used by Chaucer in The Wife of Bath’s Tale. Again, there are echoes of Shakespeare, here with A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

 The meaning of the word ‘Lamia’ is a monster, often thought to suck blood, especially of children—in other words, Keats is romanticising a demon here. How does he create sympathy for Lamia at the start of the story, so that the reader becomes engaged by her? One of the main critical debates about the poem is whether the reader is supposed to sympathise with Lamia, and if so, to what extent.

 Look closely at the language used about Lamia by Lycius—he calls her ‘goddess’ and ‘naiad’ and ‘Pleiad’ (a star). What do all these terms imply about her? Why does she then ‘play’ a woman instead?

 The poem’s opening creates what is in effect a frame-narrative, as we find out Lamia’s origin, something unknown to Lycius. How does this gentle introduction contrast with the ending?

 What about the authorial intrusions into the narrative (most noticeable at the start of part 2). Why does Keats include these, and how do they affect the way the story is told?

 Keats uses heroic couplets (rhymed couplets of iambic pentameter) for this poem. What might this imply about the nature and authority of the story? How is it different from the ballad form of ‘La Belle Dame’ or the Spenserian stanzas of ‘The Eve of St Agnes’?

 What about the division of the story into two parts? How does this affect the narrative? Is there a lacuna between the parts—the equivalent of an authorly ellipsis that passes delicately over the lovemaking implied?

La Belle Dame Sans Merci

 Another framed narrative—though here it is a single-ended frame narrative, as although we hear the first speaker’s question answered (and repeated) by the knight at the end of the poem, we do not actually hear the voice of this first speaker again.

 It is striking how the poem creates a space for the voice of the knight, by leaving the three first stanzas unanswered. Sometimes readers do not notice the shift of speaker here—be sure that you do!

 The form of the poem is a ballad, and it has the typical features of this genre in terms of the four-line stanza, the ABCB rhyme, the archaic language, the simplicity of character and construction, the inverted syntax—what about it is not typical of a ballad?

 The structure of the poem is circular—the final stanza repeats (in part) the first. How does this repetition cause the reader to reflect upon the knight’s experience?

 The metre consists of three lines of iambic tetrameter, with a final line of varying syllabic length containing three strong stresses. How does this final line, and the strong stresses, affect the poem? How does it slow down the reader, and make us reflect on the words in that final line?

 Notice how the characters in the poem are in part stereotypical—the knight is never named, the lady’s name is a description rather than a personal name. How does this affect the message of the poem? Is Keats making more general statements about the relationships between men and women, and the ways that they view each other?

 Notice the semantic repetition as well as the lexical repetition—for instance ‘haggard’ echoes ‘starved’.

The Poetry of John Keats

Remember that all three Keats poems comprise one text—so you should be careful to mention all three, even if you concentrate more on one or two. Remember that you can do this through cross-reference and comparison, e.g. ‘The ballad form that Keats uses for “La Belle Dame” means that his narrative is far more pared down and bare in terms of imagery than in ‘Lamia” where his imagery is deliberately sensual’

The Eve of St Agnes

 Remember that again this is a narrative told in an archaic fashion—Keats uses (for instance) the 3rd-person singular archaic ‘-eth’ form, and this immediately places the narrative in a particular context—which for Keats meant everything that was romantic and interesting…

 Consider the ways in which Keats is creating a mood by the opening of the story—the frame (though it is not quite a frame in the same way as a proper frame narrative) of the old bedesman and Angela which acts as a contrast to the youth of the lovers. Remember that for Keats details like the rosary and praying to the virgin would have seemed exotic (they were specifically Catholic) and would have located the narrative in the distant past.

 Don’t forget the links to Romeo and Juliet and how this ties into the admiration Keats had for Shakespeare. Is he, in some ways, rewriting a tragedy as a comedy (i.e. a story which ends in marriage), and if so, why would he want to do this?

 How far do you think the narrative is structured like a play? Look at the way that the scene is set in Madeleine’s bedroom—almost like a stage set—by Porphyro.

 Consider also the changes of scene in the poem, and how these produce a structural pattern—from the chapel, to the hall, to the corridors, to the bedroom, back to the corridors, back to the hall, back to the chapel (with the mention of the bedesman) while the lovers escape just before the end.


 Remember that you should discuss the use of the Spenserian stanza form. What would this mean to Keats in terms of his admiration of Spenser? What does this stanza form, with its long final line, allow the poet to do that a ballad does not?

 Notice how Keats uses chiasmus (antimetabole) between the title and the first line: ‘The Eve of St Agnes/St Agnes’ Eve’ the reversal highlighting the shift from the formal title into the colloquial voice of the narrator. The colloquialism is emphasised by non-fluency features such as ‘Ah!’ which suggest the power of memory and set the poem in the past.

 Notice also the frequent shifts from past to present tense in the poem (Porphyro is often associated with the more active present tense) and the shift of tense at the end that brings the poem back to the ‘present day’ of the narrator.


Tomorrow I'll post on Lamia

Last tips for 'Aspects of Narrative'

Whatever question you are asked in the ‘Aspects of Narrative’ paper, you should always be aware of certain things about the ways in which each author tells the story. Remember that the narrative strategies of each author are really important, and that even if the question does not explicitly ask you about narrative strategy, it does expect you to discuss it as part of your response to the ‘how’ element of the questions.

Remember the Assessment Objectives

For all questions, you should be aware of the importance of expressing yourself fluently and clearly, using appropriate critical language in order to help you to analyse and support your readings of the text (AO1). Although AO1 is not formally assessed in question Aa, it is still vitally important in helping you to put your ideas across clearly to the examiner.

In those questions which ask you to focus on AO2 (Part Aa and B—NOT Ab) you should be conscious of the most important aspects of structure, form and language in your chosen texts.

For those questions which ask you to focus on AO3 (Part Ab and B—NOT Aa), you should be aware of aspects of the text that can allow you to readily engage in critical debate.

Only part Ab will demand AO4, and that context will be supplied by the question itself. In other words, answering the question properly will allow you to fulfil the assessment objectives. However, do be aware that a knowledge of context can sometimes be a very effective way into the AO3 debate

Over the next few days, I shall post a guide about some of the things that it is likely you can use in almost any answer about your set texts. You should be aware of the opportunity to use these ideas. However, BEWARE of bolt-on strategies—there is no one-size-fits-all in this paper.

The Great Gatsby and decadence

When we consider questions about 'decadence' or 'corruption' and so on, it's very easy to focus on the drug-dealing or associations with gangsters, not to mention the adultery in the book. However, I've been thinking about the relationship between
Gatsby and Daisy--the initial relationship that he explains retrospectively to Nick--and its implications for the rest of the novel (what a lot of retrospective narrative there is in the text, to be sure!) It's worth considering its impact on a contemporary audience.


It's probably hard for you to feel the force of the confession that he makes, but try to imagine that you are back in the aftermath of the First World War, at a time when young girls were very much protected, and there was a huge premium placed on chastity before marriage. There's Daisy, daghter of a rich family, queen of the neighbourhood, and there's Jay Gatz, with his foreign name and his lack of cash, his only attractions his good looks and his anonymising uniform that gives him a spurious respectability...

Consider the kind of threat that marriage or relationships 'outside' the clan mean for the respectable girls and their families. In one sense, isn't Gatz a kind of predator, sniffing around the whole world that Daisy represents, and not just the girl herself? How far can his attraction to her be separated from his attraction to the American Dream?

Think about that and then look at these quotations again:

• It excited him, too, that many men had already loved Daisy—it increased her value in his eyes.

• He took what he could get, ravenously and unscrupulously— eventually he took Daisy one still October night, took her because he had no real right to touch her hand.

• He had intended, probably, to take what he could and go—but now he found that he had committed himself to the following of a grail.

• He felt married to her, that was all.

I find more and more that the idea of 'corruption' here is profoundly political and class-based. What do you think?

Making it clear--and thinking about time

One thing that you really need to think about with this paper is the title--all those elements of narrative structure make up the 'how' of how the story is told (as opposed to the 'why' or the 'what'. In section A you know that you have to discuss that, but in section B the questions can often lure you away, so that you're talking about the nature of time, or beginnings or endings or whatever, and not about how time is presented, or how endings are presented. It's almost as though you should add that bit to every question that you answer..

For a trial questions, try answering 'How is time presented in three of the texts that you have studied' and e-mail it to me for marking.

I think if you're considering time in the texts, you have to think about the different ways in which it is used to structure the narrative. If you consider the most common way to indicate time in writing--the use of different tenses--this can sharpen your account. So, for instance, look at the tense-shift at the end of 'The Eve of St Agnes', or during 'La Belle Dame'.

Otherwise, consider how Haddon uses time differently--subjective time 'it seemed ages' and objective time 'seven minutes after midnight' and how those two interact to suggest things about character and perspective.

What about how the wedding-guest's anxiety about time (what is happening with the wedding) interacts with the Mariner's tale? There are lots of little signals that time is passing, with references to the bride's actions for instance, or the singing of the wedding. How does this enhance the sense that the mariner is in some ways stopping time or outside time in his narrative?

By the way, all of you, accuracy in writing is the thing that impresses the examiners most--so whatever long words you want to use, make sure that you are secure in their use (a good way is to see how they are used by other writers--which is why reading good critical prose is one of the best ways to enhance your vocabulary).

A realy good source for some key literary terms is the University of Cambridge English faculty website. This link takes you straight to their page on literary terms, and is a good place to start developing your own sense for what's useful.

Thursday's lesson

... will not now take place, as I have been invited back for another day of interviews. Many apologies, as obviously, I would far rather be teaching you. There are two things that I suggest you do with your time today:

1) Those of you who were not in Tuesday's lesson, please collect your essays from the purple folder on my desk, read through them carefully, and look at the sheets of exam advice. Use these to try and improve your essays, and then e-mail me the improved version.

2) All of you need to work harder on your knowledge ofb the texts, and on responding to the key ideas in each. LOok at the sample questions, and write notes for each text on how the author creates character, uses the speaking voice, opens and ends the poems, and presents key events.

you could, of course, do a timed essay from the selection of questions that I have already posted, and e-mail it to me.

Many thanks, and apologies again,
MMc

Narrative structures and how they change things

An interesting exercise to foreground your understanding of narrative is to think about how narratives would be different if they had some aspect of the narrative style changed. For instance, imagine The Great Gatsby told through an objective, omniscient third-person narrator. How different would this be from Nick's story? Would Nick, and what he does, feature very much at all?

In the same way, try and do this with Keats. If we heard the story of Lamia or La Belle Dame from the women concerned, how might the telling of the story change? What about Lamia from the point of view of Apollonius? This sort of exercise can be useful in helping you to think about narrative perspectives. In Lamia, there are moments where the perspective seems to change, so that we sympathise with one character more than with another. Can you identify them, and pick out some of the details that create this impression?

Writing Section B responses

For section B, you have to remember to make connections NOT comparisons. You do not have to struggle to find out ways in which your texts relate to each other.

Remember, you can write three separate sections here and still be relevant--in fact, writing a (timed) section at a time is a good way to practise for this paper. It is also good to know just what you can write, in terms of length, at full tilt in 20 mins--don't plan for more than that in the exam, or you will write half a geat essay.

You do not have to treat all sections exactly equally--BUT do not expect to get good marks if you write a page on two texts and one paragraph on the third.

Things that are bad to do include:

putting in irrelevant information just because you know it
Shoe-horning in context ditto
quoting critics unless they are spot-on relevant
retelling the story (the examiner KNOWS it!)
Feature spotting (more on this later)
Not mentioning the question or addressing it
constantly repeating the question because you can't think of anything to say
Not referring to your texts.
Things that are good to do include:

precise reference to the terms of the question, drawing them out to create a genuinely interesting discussion.
using your knowledge of narrative techniques properly--relating them to features of the story and the meaning created.
Giving examples with quotation and detailed analysis
Thinking all the time 'HOW?' that is--not 'what' is the story being told, but 'how' is it told?
Don't forget your section A skills! Consider the use of Narrative voice and ‘voices’ more generally, Point of view, Key structural points: beginnings, climaxes, endings, Structural patterning, echoing, foreshadowing, repetition, Key significances, such as places, aspects of time and chronology.
Don't write about character--but about characterisation
Remember that the story does not come out of nowhere—you need to discuss the choices that the author has made when deciding how to tell this particular story
When you are planning, mahe the question the heart of your plan. You can even use a grid plan, as at GCSE, to make it clearer how to structure your answer. It might seem schematic, but it is better to have an answer tht ticks the boxes of the assessment criteria than one which wanders off the point.

Remember the AOs 1, 2 and 3. USE correct terminology--which should force you to analyse form and structure. Consider different ways of reading the text; how could it be read differently, and how does this add to its subtlety?

La Belle Dame Sans Merci

In some ways, this poem is like an object lesson in what to expect from a ballad. It starts in the middle of the story, there is an ambivalent ending, it has (lots of) structural repetition, there is a conventional four-line stanza form, ABCB rhyming scheme, archaic language and the depersonalised figures typical of ballads.

On the other hand, Keats makes it his own. there are many factors that individualise it, from the Shakespearean references (to Macbeth? Romeo and Juliet?) to the single-ended frame narrative. Did he copy that from Coleridge's double-ended frame narrative for The Amcient Mariner, do you think?

Anyway, one of the best ways to understand Keats (or Coleridge) and what they were trying to do by imitating ballads is to go and read some for yourself. This website will show you a fine collection. It is an archive of Child's Ballads (Francis Child was one of the most influential collectors of popular ballads in the 19th century. Have a look and let me know which is your favourite. How does 'La Belle Dame Snas Merci' compare?