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ENGL 45C - Coggle Diagram

- - - - Henry James The Turn of the Screw
        
        Henry James Bio: James was an American, but spent a lot of his youth in England, and lived his adult life as an expat in Europe. His lived experience positioned him inside and outside American culture. This reflects in his work as the clash between the New World and Old World.
        
        The Governess and Mrs. Grose: Neither characters are people of great estate; the governess still reports to a master and Mrs. Grose is a servant. Nevertheless, both characters enforce the rules of class--specifically toward Peter Quint, whom they rank as a "base menial."
        
        Anxiety Over Peter Quint: the governess and Mrs. Grose feel and express anxiety over Quint's acting above his station through dating Ms. Jessle opening and acting "too free" with Miles
        
        The Gothic Conundrum: Quint's "freeness" with the children and the governess's anxiety over it are elements of gothic horror. The gothic includes a trope of the eroticized child.
        
        Anxiety Over Class Expressed Through a Limited POV: The use of a very limited point of view restricts narrative information to the reader. It turns the story into an epistemological drama--one in which both the characters and the reader wonders who holds knowledge.
    - - Herman Melville's Bartleby, The Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street
        
        The Lawyer's Emotional
        Evolution: At the start, he embodies the traits of a typical lawyer (prudence, indivualistic, values capitalism), and at the end, he is burned with "fraternal melancholy," which might be interpreted as empathy.
        
        The Lawyer Questions Permissibility: Bartleby's rejection of his work, and occupation of his office brings into question the lawyer's conception of rights. He asks Bartleby what right he has to occupy the office--a question which forces the lawyer to also ask what is permissible in their society.
        
        Bartlebyan Desire: Bartelby's influence over the lawyer suggests the lawyer's anxiety that he will become Bartleby--a.k.a. someone freed from the illusion his employment
    - - James Joyce's "The Dead"
        
        James Joyce's Politics/Identity: Joyce left Ireland in 1904, and visited Dublin for the last time in 1912, although he is credited with writing the "novel of Ireland." He was supportive of the struggle for sovereignty AND critical of Irish Nationalism
        
        Gabriel's Strained Relationship with Ireland: Gabriel reflects Joyce's personal beliefs in "The Dead." He says that he is "sick of his own country," and embraces trends/ideas from Mainland Europe. For example, Gabriel's "goloshes" are not fashionable in Ireland and are received with much distaste at the party.
        
        Free Indirect Discourse: Free Indirect Discourse, which uses 3rd person narration to blend the thoughts of different characters in the text, is used by Joyce to grant the reader access to privileged information about politics across different characters.
  - - - "The Second Coming"
        
        WWI as a Watershed Event: This poem responds to the unprecedented scale of death and destruction brought upon by WWI, specifically in its destruction of the idea that society always progresses in the "right" direction.
        
        The Use of Myth to Make Meaning: The first stanza of this poem only speaks in declarative statements, which presents these statements as general/universal truths
    - - "Tradition and the Individual Talent"
        
        Eliot on the Necessity of Tradition: Eliot's poems reflect the tradition of English literature, not by chance but through practice. Eliot says it is imperative for every writer to inherit tradition through great labor and study. This suggests that tradition is available to all, not just those who inherit it through birth. The centering of tradition embeds meaning into Eliot's work.
      - "Love Song to J. Alfred Prufrock"
        
        Prufrock Questions Himself: The speaker is constantly asking himself questions, about the audacity to act and the idea of a different outcome. He is not a man of action, rather he is a man of reflection. This is the "epic hero" of modernity, according to the Auden quote.
    - - Internality: Vladimir and Estragon mostly express themselves to the audience through their internal thoughts/experiences, so it is hard to know what "type" of characters they are
      - What are they waiting for?: These two tramp-like figures are waiting for someone named "Godot." This might represent purpose, salvation, change, etc. They are a pair, looking for the thing that Auden says the modern man is tasked with.
        
        Absurdity: Unlike many of the other texts, Beckett embraces the absurd. In Didi and Gogo's hunt for meaning, they repeatedly suggest they hang themselves to pass time.
  - - - Free Indirect Discourse: The reader gains access to both Clarissa's most internal thoughts and other characters perception of her through Woolf's use of FID. One effect of this is a deep intimacy with characters understanding of themselves, the world, and each other.
      - Gendered Expectations: Clarissa is a conventional figure of elite status (hostess, housewife, and wife of a member of parliament), but Clarissa feels a sense of unknowability, despite her placement in an easily defined role.
        
        Clarissa's Thoughts: Clarissa is very pre-occupied with aging and death. She is beyond the age of fertility and conventional beauty, and struggles with feeling visible to others as a result. She toils over the function of her gendered labor, and decides that it works to bring people together, but she does not feel like a part of this.
    - - Exploration of Sexual Desire: Janie experiences a sexual awakening while observing a pear tree. This passage invites desire into Janie as a character, and she couples that desire with her understanding of what marriage is,
        
        H.D.'s "Oread"
        
        Re-Alignment of Femininity: H.D. was bisexual, and her work elicits more expansive notions of gender and sexuality
        
        Erotic Energy: though this poem is not about specific sexual acts, the speakers description of the sea is undeniably sensual and explosive, like Janie's experience with the pear tree
        
        This passage is undeniably erotic. The way she explains her awakening is deeply sensual and explosive. The whole passage is embedded with life force energy.
      - Marriage Plot: The traditional marriage plot is rooted in class conflict--marriage is a means through which women gain independence, stability, and protection.
        
        In the novel, marriage is a medium through which Janie discovers herself and her relationship to love. Although she ends up alone, she also ends with a sense of peace and resolution in her life.
    - - Investment in Caddy's Sexuality
        
        Benjy: Like his brothers Quentin and Jason, Benjy demands Caddy's innocence, and feels a lot of anxiety over evidence of Caddy's promiscuity (ex. her muddied drawers) and smells her loss of virginity (Caddy doesn't smell like trees).
        
        Limits to Caddy's future: The brother's obsession with Caddy's sexuality forces her representation into its adolescent form, robbing the readers from a sense of futurity for her.
  - - - Achebe tries to create a distinct form of English in his work, which he does in part through the incorporation of orality and legends into the text.
        
        Orality/Tale: There is no distinct vernacular in the novel's characters; rather, the reader might find evidence of orality in the use of reference to and repetition of stories. This is also evidenced in the incorporation of legends into the novel, like that of Okonkwo beating the Cat, for instance.
    - - "The Negro Speaks of Rivers"
        
        Written by Hughes in 1920, this poem places African-American experience in a broad history through the ancestral connection to rivers.
        
        The poem includes the Euphrates, Congo, and Nile, and the Mississippi--the later connecting Christian Western Civilization and African diaspora to black ancestry.
      - The New Negro: A concept that came out of the Harlem Renaissance that asserted a cultivation of black identity--one that is distinct and rooted in pride. This was accomplished through the creation of distinctly African-American forms of art. It both transcended racial stereotypes and established a lineage to the past.
- - - - Herman Melville's Bartleby, The Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street
        
        Bartelby's Job: A "scrivener" is a law copyist, which essentially a human copymachine. Bartleby's job is very machinistic, and his refusal to do that work is a disruption to that seamless process.
        
        Urban Setting: The story also takes place in Wall Street, which is the center of capital in modern U.S. economics
        
        Work Culture: The other law copyists show no inclination nor obligation to help one another--they lack singularity aside from Bartleby
    - - Ezra Pound
        
        "In a Station of the Metro"
        
        Formal Elements of Imagism: The point of imagism was the capture "an instant," which might be achieved through rejecting any flowery language in a poem, or really adding any word that is not absolutely essential.
        
        An Instant in Urban Life: Pound interplays with the objective and subjective to communicate the emotional and intellectual complex of the moment, which is the scene of people in a crowded train station.
      - W.B. Yeats
        
        "The Lake Isle of Innisfree"
        
        Anxiety Over Life in an Urban Center: This poem presents to the reader an image of an idyllic, almost Edenic place in Ireland, that the speaker of the poem escapes to in his mind. We know this because the last lines bring us to the concrete streets of the city, where the speaker imagines from.
      - Edgar Allen Poe's "The Man of the Crowd"
        
        Urban Setting: Poe uses London as the setting for his narrator's mission to catalogue the social types in the urban crowd.
        
        Social Types:The narrator notices the varying social types in the streets, and determines their social status through their clothing and the way they carry themselves. Through these bodily details, the narrator infers occupation and class.
        
        This is an example of Detective Fiction, which is a genre that is (in part) marked by a character's use of logic and reasoning to solve some mystery
    - - Langston Hughes
        
        "The Weary Blues"
        
        Hughes adapts AAVE/ordinary speech into his work. He believed that the people's speech could be a part of poetic expression.
        
        Here, blues music, a genre that expressed the lived experiences of ordinary people, is used as a poetic medium.
        
        Hughes mimics the rhythms of the blues within the poem itself
        
        "To A Nude Young Dancer"
        
        Nightclubs/bar/cabaret: Hughes describe cabarets as spaces of experimentation--where non-normative expressions of gender/sexuality can be expressed. They were often devoted to pleasure seeking, and allowed for the dismissal of bourgeois respectability.
    - - London: The city is the backdrop of this novel. Most of the novel follows people walking around and discovering things in the city.
        
        Stream of Consciousness: The novel does not subscribe to the traditional supports of a novel. Woolf advocated for writing that follows meandering human thought, which supports the text as a city novel because it is able to follow the character's movements through London.
    - - "Spring and All"
        
        The Non-Urban Center: "Spring and All" is a poem about the New Jersey landscape, and follows said landscape as it unfolds during the speakers commute to the hospital.
        
        Big to Small: The poem begins with a broadview of the scene, and then moves in its focus on individual parts, in a near detective-like-fashion as seen in "The Man of the Crowd." In that sense, the smaller elements of the local landscape are percieved as small parts of a greater whole--an acutely modern idea.
  - - - Septimus Smith: is not a member of the London elite. He has just come back from war and is trying to adjust.
        
        PTSD: Septimus comes back from war suffering from PTSD. He is filled with nihilism and is horrified with the human race. He can no longer feel, specifically the beauty of language. All of this eventually leads to his suicide.
      - A Eulogy: This is a novel about the aftermath of WWI. Although the war is over, people are still affected by it.
    - - "Eurydice"
        
        The Myth of Orpheus: This Greek myth concludes in Eurydice's eternal condemnation to the underworld after Orpheus looks back at her to ensure she is following him. H.D. adopts Eurydice's perspective in the poem.
        
        A statement on WWI: Written in 1917, the poem suggest feelings of hopelessness and despair in the face of unbelievable destruction and death.
  - - - Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart
        
        The first part of the novel centers the traditional world of the Ibo people, and the second and third parts show that traditional world fall apart at the encroachment of British colonization.
        
        Tragedy: Achebe shows this process of unravel, in part, through the depiction of tragedy. Okonkwo can be interpreted as a tragic figure due to him being at the mercy of fates beyond his control (accidental killing), he is noble, he kills himself at the end, and clings the most to tradition
        
        Missionaries: The colonizers bring Christianity to the Ibo tribe through their missionaries. This captivates members of the tribe, like Nwoye, who was already disillusioned by Ibo culture and felt relief as the prospect of something new.
    - - W.B. Yeats
        
        "Easter 1916"
        
        "A Terrible Beauty is Born": This quote from the poem represents the impossibility of return to Yeats' romantic Ireland.
        
        Context: This poem was written by Yeats in the wake of an armed insurrection by Irish Republicans--one in which resulted in about 500 Irish deaths from British forces
  - - - Jason's Resentment of Modernity: Modernity comes to the South later, but Jason is aware and very anxious of its encroachment.
        
        He resents New York and Wall Street and sees the accumulation of capital in the North as an affront to his ability to thrive.
        
        Yet, he is obsessed with money, and treats everyone in terms of their extractive value. He exemplifies calculated rationality, which is a necessary component of the shift toward capitalism (according to Max Weber).
    - - Technology in Woolf's London: The city is full of technologies that the novel's characters puzzle over.
        
        The Car: Multiple characters, at multiple different times in the novel, report their experience with a car backfiring. Already a novel technology, the fixation on the car also is on its backfiring, since it sounds like an explosion and many in the novel are haunted by WWI.
        
        The Plane: The novel also feature a plane, writing an advertisement in the sky. Also a novel technology, this moment in the text also represents the development of the market economy and commodity production.