eng 272: edgar allan poe and gothic fiction

                                                                                        Strawberry Hill, Horace Walpole's gothic home, image from wikipedia

Crumbling Castles! 

Maniacal Mansions!

Aberrant Abbeys!

This is the stuff of gothic fiction, a genre that blends romantic fiction and horror fiction to create narratives that are psychologically gripping, emotionally complex, and downright scary. 

This website, created by college students, discusses the main attributes of Gothic fiction, including the primary emphasis on setting as an expression of the emotional and psychological reality of the characters, who are living in a fallen, chaotic world. 

What's particularly interesting in Poe's story is the use of stereotypical Eastern imagery, from opium dens to Arabesque patterns, to sarcophagi. How is Poe using this imagery in juxtaposition to the Germanic Romanticism? 

We must also consider our narrator--how reliable is he? After all, he is strung out on opium for most of the story...

What, finally, is Poe's message about love?

campus preview night: finding inspiration: chocolate and writing

Tonight I'm going to share with you one of my favorite class exercises: a chocolate tasting!

First, I'll discuss the role of chocolate in writing (inspiration, joy, energy burst), and then discuss how doing a chocolate tasting can expand your senses and your writing!

We'll describe the difference between eating and tasting, and then list how all of our 6 senses can be used to taste chocolate (or any other foods, really).

Then we'll dive in to our tasting and begin to make some notes, transforming our sensory impressions into writing. Voila--a delicious beginning!

eng 102: making an argument, revisited

One sure-fire way to construct a solid argument is to use tools from classic rhetoric: ethos, logos, and pathos. Being able to combine all three appeals in one argument can help you create a solid argument.

The following website explains all three appeals and gives some humorous examples of ethos, logos, and pathos at work:http://www.rpi.edu/dept/llc/webclass/web/project1/group4/

Here's another website that explains ethos, logos, and pathos more thoroughly:http://courses.durhamtech.edu/perkins/aris.html

And yet more examples!http://www.public.asu.edu/~macalla/logosethospathos.html

eng 272: langston hughes, the harlem renaissance, and the blues

                                             photograph of Langston Hughes taken by Carl Van Vechten, 1936. from wikipedia and in the public domain. 

Langston Hughes is most often read as a poet of the Harlem Renaissance, an exciting time of literary and artistic creation in the 1920s. Hughes did write other genres, but we're focusing on a small selection of his poetry. Like many poets of the 20th century, Hughes was influenced by Walt Whitman, particularly his emphasis on using personal experience to raise larger issues.  

Hughes dedicated his writing to representing an African American experience, as did the other writers and artists of the Harlem Renaissance. His poems reverberate with sadness, struggle, and hope. Many of Hughes' poems were influenced by the popular African American musical forms of the day jazz and blues. Consider why these musical forms were so influential at the time, and became such an influence on poetry...

For a real treat, listen to Hughes reading his poem "The Negro Speaks of Rivers."

eng 272: richard wright's "the man who was almost a man"

photograph of Richard Wright by Carl Van Vechten, 1939. from the Library of Congress Collection, and in the public domain.

Richard Wright's most famous novel, Native Son, explored the pervasive racism and violence of the early twentieth-century. Wright advocated for African American writers to use their pens and literary influence to critique the racist American culture that proliferated in the period after the Civil War and before the Civil Rights Movement.

He famously dismissed Zora Neale Hurston's novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, which we'll be reading shortly, because her depiction of the African American race did not explicitly highlight racism and prejudice. Rather, her novel focused on the intimate life of one woman and the men she loves. Wright's work forced readers to confront social and political realities, and remains popular to this day.

His short story, "The Man Who Was Almost a Man," raises important questions about masculinity, race, and class. What does it mean to be a man? To be a young African American man? How does one wield power in this world?

eng 272: the yellow wallpaper

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, c. 1900, from wikipedia, in the public domain

Charlotte Perkins Gilman's haunting short story "The Yellow Wallpaper," comments on the prevailing treatments for women suffering from "nervous disorders. During the time in which Gilman was writing, women's roles in society were shifting ever so slightly, yet there was still a considerable movement to contain women. They were "hysterical" and subject to "nervous disorders," and the best way to treat this problems was with total bedrest. This confinement to the domestic sphere can be, as Gilman shows us, utterly destructive. Gilman emphatically states that she wrote this story with a specific purpose in mind: "to save people from being driven crazy" ("Why I Wrote the Yellow Wallpaper"). 

Check out these illustrations from The New England Magazine in 1892...

eng 272: the new women: chopin, wharton, and gilman

At the Beach, by Charles Dana Gibson, 1901

courtesy of wikipedia; in the public domain

As we move from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, American literature reflects significant social changes. Emily Dickinson's and Walt Whitman's poetry alert us to a dramatic change in stylistics, as well as a seismic shift in the philosophy behind men's and women's social roles. The days of separate spheres, with men going out into the world and women maintaining the domestic realm were coming to a close. The "sanctity" of womanhood (the Cult of True Womanhood) and its attendant power were being challenged by a more secular movement of women to explore their full selves through work outside the home, political activism, and--shockingly--celebrating their sexuality. 

All three women writers we're reading this week wrote revolutionary exposés of women's lives. Kate Chopin's "The Storm" was seen as so racy that it wasn't published until 1969 (incidentally, the same year as the infamous "summer of love"). Edith Wharton's chronicles of the fall of the old New York aristocracy and the rise of the nouveau riche also touched on women's liberation and passion--consider the shocking truth at the heart of "Roman Fever." And Charlotte Perkins Gilman, perhaps the most strikingly political of the three authors, takes on the medical establishment and its treatment of "women's issues," as well as the social system that contrives to isolate and infantilize women in "The Yellow Wallpaper."

To best understand the revolutionary nature of these three stories, it's helpful to have a sense of both the Cult of True Womanhood and the New Woman. 

How do these stories show a shift in women's roles? Do vestiges of the old roles remain? How do women help and/or hurt one another? What roles does class and race play into these stories, as well as gender? 

eng 272: sounding out barbaric yawps

Walt Whitman, photograph by Samuel Hollyer of a daguerreotype by Gabriel Harrison (original lost), circa 1854, printed in the first edition of Leaves of Grass, courtesy of the Bayley Collection at Ohio Wesleyan, from whitmanarchive.org

Walt Whitman, or Uncle Walt, as he's affectionately known, is considered by many scholars to be the first truly American poet, writing in a distinctive, revolutionary style, in an entirely American manner. Stylistically, he's famous for using poetic catalogues, long rhythmic lines, and repetition. Content-wise, Whitman was also revolutionary, celebrating the body in all its messy, lusty glory, and his all-inclusive sexuality created such a stir that his poetry was repeatedly the subject of obscenity claims.

He followed Emerson's advice about the role of the poet, creating a poetic voice that was of everyday working people and celebrated everyday existence. He wrote, in the Preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass that" The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem," and that "Their Presidents shall not be their common referee so much as their poets shall. Of all mankind the great poet is the equable man" (998). What about poetry and the act of writing it equalizes us and makes us fit for the highest office of the land?

Also in the Preface to LoG, Whitman makes a powerful statement of his philosophy:
"This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argues not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely wit powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, reexamine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body..." (1000).

The Walt Whitman Archive online contains multitudes of resources for Whitman scholars and fans alike.

eng 102: quote sandwich revisited

Who wants a tasty Quote Sandwich?
The Quote sandwich is a valuable tool to use when you're integrating source material into your writing.

The first slice of "bread" is your introduction to the quote, which can take 3 different forms:

1. phrase + comma:According to Sheehan, "The restaurant experience is an essentially isolating one" (202).

2. sentence + colon:
Sheehan compares his experience searching for food to his former drug use: "It suddenly occurs to me that I've had a lot of nights like this one. Nights spent looking not for goat bones, but for girls or The Man. The messages that Mark leaves have that same edgy expectancy I remember from nights spent hunting for eight-balls or trying to run down the weed guy on a Friday night" (195).

3. Integrated into your sentence:Sheehan argues that "the restaurant experience is an essentially isolating one," even though diners are out in a public place (202).

The filling is the quote itself and the citation (don't forget that or you'll be in plagiarism trouble!)see above examples for properly formatted and cited "filling."

The last slice of bread is your follow-up to the quote.
This is where you tell us why you included the quote in the first place. For essay #2 in English 102, this is where you do a detailed analysis of HOW the quote is written.

For example, let's take a look at example #2 from above:

In our intro to the quote, we mentioned a comparison between searching for food to drugs. Now, we need to identify what in the quote makes the comparison.Drug lingo like "The Man," "eight-balls," and "the weed guy" are important, as is the "edgy expectancy" of trying to find the right people.

Now, let's put it all together:

Sheehan compares his experience searching for food to his former drug use: "It suddenly occurs to me that I've had a lot of nights like this one. Nights spent looking not for goat bones, but for girls or The Man. The messages that Mark leaves have that same edgy expectancy I remember from nights spent hunting for eight-balls or trying to run down the weed guy on a Friday night" (195). By using the drug lingo "The Man," "eight-balls," and "the weed guy" Sheehan provides concrete examples of what he used to search for on the street, and suggests that the need to find "goat bones" and Mama is similar to a druggie in need of a fix. He further emphasizes this comparison by describing Mark's phone messages as having an "edgy expectancy," a phrase that signals the desperate anticipation the two men feel.

You'll notice that I didn't include citations when I used the phrases from the quote. That's because I just quoted and cited the whole section directly before so it's clear where these words and phrases are coming from.