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ENG45C, Their Eyes Were Watching God Janie uses her silence first as self…

- - - - Overflow of Interpretations
    - - "HIs own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world; the solid world itself which these dead had one time reared and lived in was dissolving and dwindling" pg. 32
      - "Generous tears filled Gabriel's eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman but he knew that such a feeling must be love." pg. 32
    - - Turn of the Screw It is never made clear whether the children in Turn of the Screw are actually speaking to the ghosts. Every character in this story is opaque. This unreadability becomes the horror of the novel as there is an epistemological collapse and inability to interpret anyone's interior from their exterior.
        
        Turn of the Screw The governess uses obsessive surveillance as a supporting point for her assertion that ghosts are haunting the children at Bly Manor, but these observations brink on hysteria as she conceives even the most fleeting behaviors as evidence of the children's knowledge, "There were days when I could have sworn that one of them had, with a small invisible nudge, said to the other: 'She thinks she'll do it this time - but she won't!'" pg. 73-74
        
        Unreadability in Turn of the Screw James develops the radical idea decades before other Modernists that unreadability is not a lack of meaning, but an excess of possible meanings. He produces an overflow of information that too many interpretations can be made from, creating an overflow. Humans desire one, decisive explanation and when the governess cannot conclusively come to one, it creates within her paranoia and hysteria.
        
        Turn of the Screw Although the governess says she sees the ghosts, they are never witnessed by anyone else. She is insistent that these children are aware of and in communication with the ghosts, but has no proof of it. Her inability to conclusively read the children becomes a source of terror
        
        "'She has told you?' she panted. 'Not a word - that's the horror. She kept it to herself! The child of eight, that child!' pg.44
    - - A key difference between the texts is that in Bartleby, the Scrivener, Bartleby is the only character who is unknowable, whereas in Turn of the Screw, all characters are unknowable. Bartleby's world is interpretable and consistent narrated by someone the reader can rely on as a stable anchor, the lawyer. In Turn of the Screw, nothing is stable or reliable; it is unclear whether the ghosts exist, whether the narration of the governess can be trusted, whether the children are actually being corrupted or if this is a figment of the governess's paranoia.
        
        The children and ghosts of The Turn of the Screw are ambiguous just as Bartleby is using different techniques.
        Minimalism: Bartleby's signature phrase leads to a surplus of possible interpretations to attempt to understand his motives
        Maximalism: the overflow of detail from multiple characters leads to a sensation of destabilization for the reader because a small action, such as a glance or hesitation can mean one thing, such as innocent confusion, or the complete opposite, such as cunning corruption
      - The multitude of possible interpretations that arise from presenting an image
        
        Ezra Pound Station in the Metro
        This is image is presented without description, making it clearer visually but more difficult to interpret because the brevity of words on imagist poetry leads to plethora of possibilities in meaning.
        The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
        Petals on a wet, black bough.
        There are many ways to interpret this image, such as haunting faces or faces of anonymity, just as there are in James's presentation of his characters.
- - - - Harlem As Elsie has been alienated, possibly because of her race, or economic status, and thrown into the foster system instead being raised by the village or the community she grew up in, forced to figure her life out with the cards she was dealt, the Harlem poem confronts the effects of being rejected or neglected by the community, by being subject to objectivity to the exasperating point that hope can deflate into the exhaustion of a deferred dream when it is never given a opportunity to inflate with possibility and motivation from others.
  - - - The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain "Most of my own poems are racial in theme and treatment, derived from the life I know. In many of them I try to grasp and hold some of the meanings and rhythms of jazz ... jazz to me is one of the inherent expressions of Negro life in America" pg. 56.
        
        The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain "To these, the Negro artist can give his racial individuality, his heritage of rhythm and warmth, and his incongruous humor that so often, as in the Blues, becomes ironic laughter mixed with tears" pg. 56
        
        Hughes resists collapse of communal identity by writing poetry in the musical rhythm of his culture as an African American and deliberately choosing to make the main subject of his writing his people
  - - - Leda and the Swan Much attention is given to the brutality of the act (rape) and its political consequences (Fall of Troy, Helen's abduction). Helen is born from that violence, and fate forces events into motion. Important moments don't always come from power or choice, but from helplessness and trauma. This can be related to how Ireland was violently colonized and stripped of autonomy by Britain.
        Leda = vulnerable figure (Ireland)
        Zeus as the Swan = God who takes what he wants (Imperial Power)
        Leda gives birth to a person who changes history just as Ireland is dragged into historical violence without choice and deep consequences. Leda gains knowledge through force as how Ireland's nationalism was awakened after centuries of trauma.
      - The Second Coming Loss of order and meaning, "Blank and pitiless gaze". Civilization as we know is about to come undone and an era of terror and foundation slouch in sight, coming to destroy, not redeem. "The falcon cannot hear the falconer;/
        Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold" The world is destabilized as what is known as the natural order has been destroyed by this apocalyptic future that impresses upon the present.
- - - - In Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf similarly rejects time as linear and collapses past, present, and future as Clarissa spends her day in preparation for her dinner party. There is an inescapable link to the past and the present as time in these works is lived and not measured
  - - - Mrs. Dalloway Clarissa's exterior as a housewife in her early fifties recovering from influenza does not reflect her interior as a complex, "light, vivacious" woman who contains decades of knowledge from experience. However, there are several moments when her age affects her negatively, especially in conjunction with feeling excluded, "She thought, feeling herself suddenly shrivelled, aged, breast less, the grinding, blowing, flowering of the day, out of doors, out of th window, out of her body and brain which now failed". pg. 25
- - - - Things Fall Apart "The six men remained silent and the Commissioner left them for a while" (194)/ "They were still handcuffed, and they just sat and moped." (195)/ "Even when the men were left alone they found no words to speak to one another. It was only on the third day, when they no longer bear the hunger and the insults, that they began to talk about giving in" (195)/ "He carried a strong stick, and he hit each man a few blows on the head and back. Okonkwo was choked with hate."(195).
    - - Bartleby, The Scrivener Bartleby's silence is meaningful as he passively resists subscribing to the status quo and from anyone knowing who he is and how he thinks.
        
        "I would prefer not to" becomes a powerful act of noncompliance to capitalism and to becoming another cog in the machine of bureacracy. The world he lives in is rooted in hierarchy and functionality, yet he rejects the logic of this through his quiet refusal to opt out of the system, exposing the fragility of a bureaucratic society when a worker withholds action.
      - The Sound and the Fury The reader never gets Caddy's perspective throughout the novel, but her absence is a dominating presence as she rejects the preconceived roles her brothers attempt to subscribe to her as either a fallen women (Jason) or still a young girl who needs saving from being shamed (Quentin).
  - - - The Red Wheelbarrow In the lack of words is where this image is able to be fully visualized. There is a rejection of symbolism in this poem through W.C.W. that urges the reader just look and not define. The lack of explanation in the first two lines
        so much depends/ upon
        is a resistance of epistemology that impresses the importance upon the image itself instead of what it could possibly mean. Tradition dictates one must look at a poem with metaphysical or cultural symbolic lense to understand; W.C.W breaks away from that completely
- - - - Their Eyes Were Watching God "No matter what Jody did, she said nothing" pg.72 :