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:confetti_ball: English 45C :confetti_ball:, image, image, image, image,…

- - - - H.D.'s "Oread" is so short it can be placed here for the reader's pleasure:
        "Whirl up, sea—
        whirl your pointed pines,
        splash your great pines
        on our rocks,
        hurl your green over us,
        cover us with your pools of fir."
        Following after the imagism lauded by Pound, H.D.'s Oread focuses on the power of words to conjure images which themselves act as metaphors for the work as a whole. Importantly, "Oread" refers to "Chiefly poetic. A nymph that inhabits mountains; a mountain nymph." (OED). Oread is so limitless in meaning it's less about what it might mean and what it means to the individual. This poem says more about the individual reading it than the actual work itself.
    - - "Sea Rose" is another imagist H.D. poem heightened to such a degree that it becomes somewhat impossible to rationalize the central (though this is reductionist it conveys my point) "message" of the poem as a whole. That said, "Sea Rose," much like "Oread" focuses on the beauty of nature which was common in H.D.'s work, take, for example, the use of flowers in Kora and Ka.
    - - One of Yeats's most famous poems, "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" was written while Yeats was staying in London and heard a small fountain's waters which reminded him of his home county in Ireland, Sligo. "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" is therefore, from its trusses, a poem about natures ability to collapse time and place into a singular moment experienced psychologically
    - - Williams Carlos Williams's "Spring and All" is a poem meant for Spring with the tonality of a deadened December. This situates the poem in a strange in-between realm where it simultaneously occupies the livelihood of a coming springtime and the deathly silence of winter. Take, for example, a sample that describes (with imagistic technique classic with the first generation of imagists) springtime in a muted wintry tone:
        ". . . Beyond, the
        waste of broad, muddy fields
        brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen
        patches of standing water
        the scattering of tall trees
        All along the road the reddish
        purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy
        stuff of bushes and small trees
        with dead, brown leaves under them
        leafless vines—"
  - - - Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury is a piece focused on how time itself decays the individual, the family of said individual, and the cultural world in which said family operates. Although ostensibly fitting in the Decadence branch, The Sound and the Fury belongs in the time branch as it is inevitably time which does in the Compson family. Each of the narrators of each section (Benjy/Benjamin, Quentin, Jason, and Dilsey) are all in their own ways separated from time. Benjy's mental disabilities prevent him from conceptualizing the difference of time as it passes him by. The immeasurable pressure put on Quentin to succeed as the Harvard Compson is self-evident in his choice to attempt to break his watch (though it continue ticking) and his inevitable decision to commit suicide. Jason's relation with time is a more vengeful hatred of being conned out of some kind of prosperous existence he believes he is owed. Dilsey, last but not least, operates as a sort of conductor to the great declination of the Compson family as she is the matriarch in disguise orchestrating the entirety of the day to day life for the Compson family.
    - - Langston Hughes's "Nude Young Dancer" is centered around the temporality of a subject of the same description as the title. Every sentence of the poem is a question mark, hinting at the triple-entendre unknowability of the subject, of time itself, and the past of the subject's lineage; that being African heritage. Hughes asks, "What jungle tree have you slept under, / Midnight dancer of the jazzy hour?" "Slept" suggests a past temporality that no longer exists but once thrived as a jungle tree does, metaphorical of the African culture, before the metaphorical lumbering mill of colonialism exported said midnight dancer into another part of the world. In all, "Nude Young Dancer" is a poem about a culture out of time, a woman out of time, a whole group of people taken out of their past to haunt the present in a land that to them seems entirely alien.
    - - Clarissa Dalloway, Peter Walsh, Septimus Warren Smith, these are all characters trapped in a past of their own in some way or another. Clarissa is trapped in the memory of her free youth before she was married to her Husband Mr. Dalloway, Peter is haunted by his being expelled to India and his inability to fight in the first world war leaving him a foreigner to his own native country, unable to understand the weight of the sacrifices made to preserve the hegemony of British culture, and finally is Septimus who was successful in defending England but paid the ultimate price in dying spiritually on the battlefield, returning home with such serious PTSD that he inevitably kills himself. All of this taken together paints the picture of Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway as a novel intimately interested in the function of time. Written in response to the First World War, Dalloway's depiction of culture in a near post-lapsarian world (considering the atrocities of war as a sort of lapse in humanity's hubris).
- - - - One might say that the reductionism of Pound's Imagism is, in fact, a pernicious decadence, not of intellectual scholarship but moral empathy. As a leading figure in the first generation of modernists, Pound, amongst many of his peers, was unable to separate his intellectual beliefs from his moral and therefore political beliefs. This unification of intellectual maxim and moral spirit would cause for such oversights on Pounds part such as joining in Fascist activities as Fascism's political nuances best embodied the reductive, almost internally explosive, nature of imagism.
      - As shown in the Movement branch: “Note on ‘Imagisme’” (1913)
        F. S. Flint (probably co-written with Ezra Pound)
        
        Direct treatment of the 'thing' whether subjective
        or objective.
        
        To use absolutely no word that does not
        contribute to the presentation.
        
        As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence
        of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a
        metronome.
  - - - Langston Hughes's "Let America be America Again," focuses on the societal decay of America as a nation. More specifically, Hughes's point is that America doesn't adhere to the values espoused when it was first created (despite the fact that it does when viewed from the perspective of wealthy land-owning white men but I digress). Hughes's "Let America be America Again" doesn't only focus on the struggle of African Americans but instead generalizes to mention marginalized and betrayed groups of all kinds including poor white workers and Native Americans driven from their lands.
    - - Yeats's "Easter 1916" was written about the Easter uprising in response to England's colonial rule over Ireland. England's response to this uprising was so swift and so severe that, in common English fashion, it caused even more harm than the initial uprising itself. Easter 1916 itself is a curious poem in that it doesn't inherently take a stance on either side, neither for nor against the Irish Republic (Irish nationalist) and Irish Free State (British) movements. Instead, Yeats wished to merely comment on the societal decadence necessary to have not only an uprising, but a retaliation by a force so strong and severe that it stirs more revolutionary ideas than it quells.
    - - Langston Hughes's "Harlem (2)" is inherently bound to both the Harlem Renaissance and one of his other most famous poems, "Let America be America Again." In the latter Hughes communicates the "dream" at the core of America as "a land where Liberty / Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath, / But opportunity is real, and life is free, / Equality is in the air we breathe" it is this same dream that Hughes refers to as "deferred" in "Harlem (2)." Hughes leaves what America ought to do ambiguous, giving space to both politic and violently revolutionary action as viable options.
  - - - Achebe's Things Fall Apart is centered almost entirely around the cultural collapse of the Ibo people of the lower Niger and of protagonist Okonkwo's battle and inevitable defeat with the imperialistic powers of Europe which transfigure his home, friends, and family against him.
        
        Post Colonial Literature was defined in lecture as "Writings from countries that were former colonies of European powers, e.g. in the case of the British Empire: Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, India, Jamaica
        
        Becomes increasingly prominent starting around mid-
        20th century with various anti-colonial independence
        movements accelerating after WWII
        
        Assumes that culture is one of the fronts of colonialism,
        in addition to economic, political, and military takeover.
        Thus overturning imperial domination entails creating
        alternate literary and cultural representations (Salman
        Rushdie in a 1982 opinion piece, “the Empire writes
        back”)
    - - At the center of "The Dead" from James Joyce's Dubliners is a double entendre in the literal dead of Irland in the graves and the more metaphysical metaphorical cultural death as seen in main character Gabriel Conroy. The entire section is centered, therefore, around the deadening of a culture of sorts, specifically a predominately Irish culture as exemplified by Gabriel's highly contested conversation with Molly Ivors, a staunch Irish Nationalist, and his recalcitrance in acknowledging and accepting his Irish heritage. This cultural deadening of Gabriel is a broader critique of the decay of Irish culture in the wake of England's colonialist control over Ireland.
      - Joyce's Dubliners was inspired by a literary movement in Ireland that passed recently before his time called the Irish Literary Revival. At that time in Irish literature, occupied by writers such as Yeats, a flood of Irish folklore, media centered on Irish heritage, and focus on the nationalistic efforts of Free-Irish politics made their rounds in Ireland. Applying a Yeatsian view of Joyce one might think of Molly Ivors's character as a sort of caricature of Maud Gonne, an incredibly zealous Irish Nationalist.
      - The Uncle Charles Principle is defined as "Kenner coined the term “the Uncle Charles Principle” to describe Joyce’s kaleidoscopic changing of styles. At the beginning of Book II in Portrait, the novel reads: “Every morning, therefore, Uncle Charles repaired to his outhouse” (Portrait 53). Lewis scoffed, saying “people repair to places in works of fiction of the humblest order” (qtd. in Voices 17). Lewis did not understand that “repair” is Uncle Charles’s word, not Joyce’s. The narrative style shifts to fit the language of the focalized character." - Kenner, Hugh. Ulysses. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987.
- - - - Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrivener" is a piece which has stirred up national intrigue and striking throughout time. Broader worldly influences aside, Bartleby himself is quite a powerpack with the infamous phrase "I would prefer not to" when faced with commands from the machine of capitalism. Melville's work had an eerie way of predicting the sentiment felt by many wage-slave workers across the world. Bartleby is a character who is centered on action through inaction, a walking paradox in a way. There have been many attempts to interpret what exactly Melville's intent was with the character on an allegorical level the conclusion of which appears to be muddled in the myriad available readings and opinions. All of that said, it is clear that Bartleby, although often forsworn to the same lines "I would prefer not to" is the single character in "Bartleby, the Scrivener" who can
    - - Although upon first reading it isn't entirely evident that the African American piano player in "The Weary Blues" is in control. Indeed it would seem as though the pianist is, in fact, completely lost all control he has. This is, in my opinion, the most prescient question to ask the player of "The Weary Blues." Many scholars state that the entire purpose of Hughes's poem was to prove just how downtrodden and out of control African Americans feel and are in America. This felt derivative so I thought I might see if the opposite holds true: that the pianist is in more control than he may let on, and indeed he is. "He played that sad raggy tune like a musical fool. / . . . / Thump, thump, thump, went his foot on the floor. / He played a few chords then he sang some more—. . ." In these few lines we see that the pianist is indeed his own percussionist, that he's the orchestrator of the weary blues that pain him in such a seemingly pleasurable way. Thus I suggest that the pianist is indeed in control of his own torment.
      - https://youtu.be/uM7HSOwJw20?si=Bts0cy4beUY6-BWQ
        
        Interestingly, this clip from this course features an entirely white backing band for Hughes. There's a lot to be said about this and not enough space here to do it, but I'm sure you can see how this may complicate and or perfectly exemplify Hughes's point.
  - - - The strange action and inaction of the unnamed Governess, Miles, and Flora at the core of Henry James's The Turn of the Screw are core tenets to what contribute to the eeriness of the 1898 Gothic horror novella. James's works as mentioned in lecture are often so precisely worded in a meaningfully ambiguous way that it's often hard, while reading, to discern exactly who is doing what where. James's prose is famously long and dense and with many run-on sentences it's easy to be brought down to the level of the characters, sifting through a labyrinth of not enough information to discern the correct course of action: continuing to read or putting the book down. Jokes aside, it is precisely this ambiguous non-informative yet highly descript (paradoxical) prose of James's that allows him to perpetually keep the reader guessing as to what his true intent is. For example, what exactly was Peter Quint's relationship to Miles? Although we are told some aspects of their relationship and that they spent a lot of time together, there's so much ambiguity there that it is almost entirely the reader's own sort of Rorschach test which dictates what exactly the characters different intentions and actions were with one another. This leaves The Turn of the Screw as a rather screwy in-between, between incredibly active damning action and completely inactive benign stillness.
    - - Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot was likely my favorite piece we read in this course. Vladimir and Estragon are two sides of humanity, the mind and the body, both of which often fail us in our folly. Waiting for Godot has inaction in the title, waiting. In my reading of Beckett's first foray into the dramaturgical world I found a lot of moments that pointed to the pointlessness of religiosity and more towards that of the absurd. This is described in lecture as the "theater of the absurd" pulling "absurdism" from Camus.
        
        The Theater of the absurd was explained in the following in lecture: “The shedding of easy solutions, of comforting
        illusions, may be painful, but it leaves behind it a
        sense of freedom and relief. And that is why, in
        the last resort, the Theatre of the Absurd does
        not provoke tears of despair but the laughter of
        liberation.”
        -Martin Esslin, “Theater of the Absurd”
  - - - T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is one of the author's most famous works, perhaps for the perplexing character at its center, Prufrock himself. The titular character is an enigma in his seeming incapability to commit to a single action other than the desire to move: "Let us go then you and I." Aside from this movement however, Prufrock is indeed paralyzed seemingly by his emotional state which dances and shimmers before the reader just below the surface of the poem; or so it feels, likely as Eliot intended. Prufrock's inability to act, pejoratively self-abnegating his inner desires, opinions, sentiments, etc. at every turn functions as a reflection of humanity's own struggle with indecisiveness in a time when decisiveness is paramount.
    - - H.D.'s "Eurydice" centers on the ancient Greek myth wherein Eurydice, wife of Orpheus, is kidnapped by Hades. Orpheus, desperate to get her back, travels to the Underworld to retrieve her. Hades strikes a deal with Orpheus, that if he can make it to the surface overworld without looking back to check if Eurydice is there, then he and her are free from his influence in the underworld. Orpheus, upon looking back, loses Eurydice forever.
        H.D. approaches this mythos with a finely tuned feminist twist. She shifts the perspective of the narrative to that of Eurydice after Orpheus has failed his task in believing her constancy in returning to the overworld. Importantly, despite a tone of efficaciousness, Eurydice is effectually powerless as her autonomy is stripped of her by Hades. This, in my personal opinion, is either a critique of the masculine-centric patriarchal world in which we live, or by contrast, a critique of male lovers by H.D. who was famously openly bisexual, having relations with both men and women.
- - - - Yeats's "Sailing to Byzantium" is a poem with movement at it's roots. From the title itself insinuating a movement in the verb "sailing" to famous lines such as "that is no country for old men" suggesting a generational movement. This poem, however, is also more of an individual movement piece, specifically for Yeats himself. Written in The Tower, released in 1928, Yeats was 63 yet it's almost as if his life was just beginning. Having been many times rejected by his life-long beloved Maud Gonne Yeats had turned to a colleague as a lover in Georgie Yeats with whom he purchased an old Norman tower in Ireland, renovated it, and began a family. "Sailing to Byzantium," a poem about a mechanical bird singing is often seen by scholars as a metaphorical symbol of Yeats as a poet communicating his desire to remain relevant in a changing world as an aging man newly married and preparing to have children at the old age of 63.
    - - Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God centers around the novels protagonist Janie Crawford and her movement from lover to lover and husband to husband as she locates herself. Crawford's movement and discovery of location and or identities in those locations (usually husbands) throughout the novel often parallels Janie's personal changes as a character as she navigates finding her own identity. Their Eyes Were Watching God is, in essence, a character study of Janie Crawford's movement within herself
        
        Within Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God W.E.B. Dubois's concept of Double Consciousness takes center stage. Stanford's Philosophy Encyclopedia defines double consciousness as "a source of inward “twoness” putatively experienced by African-Americans because of their racialized oppression and disvaluation in a white-dominated society. The concept is associated with William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, who introduced the term into social thought in his groundbreaking The Souls of Black Folk (1903). Its source has been traced back from there, by recent commentators, to the development of clinical psychology in the nineteenth-century North Atlantic, and to trends in idealist philosophies of self – the transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson and G.W.F. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. It is thus indirectly related to other nineteenth- and twentieth-century riffs on Hegelian themes, such as false consciousness and bad faith. In our day it continues to be used by numerous commentators on racialized cultures, societies, and literatures; by cultural and literary theorists; and by students and researchers of Africana Philosophy. Recent philosophical debates center on the significance of the concept for Du Bois’s thought overall, its theoretical coherence, and its relevance given current social conditions."
    - - Edgar Allen Poe's "The Man of the Crowd" centers on the movement of an unnamed narrator as he chases after the titular character: the man of the crowd. The adventure is inevitably fruitless however as it seems as though the man in the crowd is not inherently up to any evil-doings but is instead anxiously following around the crowd wherever he goes. This could link the man in the crowd as a character to the inefficacious section of the map. That said, the narrator is quite literally moved, so inspired by his own morbid curiosity, to follow close behind the man in the crowd around London. This instigation to literal movement as well as the movement of the crowd as an almost single entity in itself categorizes "The Man in the Crowd" as a piece belonging under the movement section.
        
        From "The Man of the Crowd" the concept of the gothic novel comes to the fore which is described as "A story of terror and suspense, usually set in a gloomy old castle or monastery (hence ‘Gothic’, a term applied to medieval architecture and thus associated in the 18th century with superstition).” - Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, ed. Chris Baldick
        
        "The Man in the Crowd" also creates an instance of detective fiction, defined as: “The classic English detective novel marries the two elements. Its particular form owes its greatest debt to Poe, whose three or four detective stories written in the 1840s strikingly anticipate many of the genre's main features. In particular, English writers followed him in creating detectives who were remote from the common herd, creatures of pure ratiocination, emotional hermits who observed but did not participate in the hurly‐burly of life around them.” - The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature
  - - - Although Pound's later fascinations with fascism often extends in an unfortunate marring of some of his best work, the prince of the imagist movement himself is at his best in "In a Station of the Metro." Incredibly short and dictionally purist, as is normal of imagists at the time, Pounds "In a Station of the Metro" scrutinizes the movement of society itself as an individual (ostensibly Pound himself) remains motionless in the whirlwind around them. There is a transience in the use petals as invoking the florist metaphor of people as petals parallels the transience of these faces in the crowd with the transience of a petal's lifetime. Much like petals must some day yellow and fall, so too must we.
      - Imagism is given in Lecture by "Note on ‘Imagisme’” (1913)
        F. S. Flint (co-written with Ezra Pound)
        
        Direct treatment of the 'thing' whether subjective
        or objective.
        
        To use absolutely no word that does not
        contribute to the presentation.
        
        As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence
        of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a
        metronome.
    - - Langston Hughe's "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" is a piece focused on the diasporic relationship of African Americans with their forgotten roots. Written from the perspective of an African American who has "known rivers" the poem weaves through a myriad selection of places and times that African peoples have been enslaved by another hegemony of some kind. From the Euphrates, to the Congo, to the Nile, Hughes's point stands that Africans have been subject horrors of unjust servitude for what seems like all time in every corner of the globe.
        
        Active during the Harlem Renaissance
    - - Yeats's "The Second Coming" was another poem written in the collection of The Tower published in 1928. The poem fixates on the movement of a "rough beast," an antichrist of sorts, "slouching" towards Bethlehem to be born. To most scholars including Berkeley Lecturer Jesse Nathan this slouching beast is, in most generic readings, accepted as a sort of perverted reflection of society's morality. With this taken into consideration, that this antichrist "beast" figure is slouching---moving---its way to Bethlehem can be seen as humanity's moving away from high esteemed morality and instead descending into depravity. This is also examined in the flight of the falcon "turning and turning in the widening gyre."