For Friday: Poe and Narrative

Jumping off from Chapter 6, "Narrative" (in Culler's book), we'll be examining four short short stories from Poe from a narratological perspective.  Remember that a story is an ordered series of events based on (a) who is speaking, (b) who they are speaking to (audience/intended audience), and most importantly (c) who speaks with what authority?  Poe actively (gleefully) plays with these distinctions and challenges how we interpret plot and the narrator's intentions. 

For Friday, answer ONE of the following in a decent sized paragraph (no one sentence or brief resposnes please!).  Also, quote from the stories to support your answer.  Show us where you see these ideas in the text.

1. Culler writes that narrators are "termed unreliable when they provide enough information about situations and clues about their own biases to make us doubt that the narrator shares the same values as the author" (88).  How do any of the four stories for this week exhibit unreliable narration--and where?  How do they expose the narrative 'stagecraft' and allow us to see behind the scenes to another--and possibly more reilable--plot? 

2. All four stories (The Tell-Tale Heart, The Black Cat, The Cask of Amontillado, and Berenice)  feature a confessional narrator--one who unburdens his heart after committing a terrible deed.  So what makes each one distinct and interesting?  Choose two of them and compare how Poe 'theoretically' approaches the same plot from different directions.  How does he use characterization, language, and other perspectives to change how we experience and understand the stories?

3. Poe is writing firmly in the Gothic tradition of storytelling, which usually favors (a) a confessional story, (b) symbolism and allegory, and (c) a setting that contributes to the psychological mood of the story.  In what way are these stories "intertextual," in that they write about writing about the Gothic?  How do we know he is referencing and borrowing Gothic traditions and using them for his own ends?  Can we see his 'winks' to the audience regarding this? 

4. Culler also reminds us that "A work from another time and place usually implies an audience that recognizes certain references and shares certain assumptions that a modern reader may not share.  Feminist criticism has been especially interested in the way that European and American narratives frequently posit a male reader: the reader is implicitly addressed as one who shares a masculine view" (87).  Where do you see passages in the work that imply an "ideal" audience and/or a "masculine view"?  Even though we can appreciate them, how are they products of Poe's society with its own unique aesthetics?  Consider how little part women play in these stories, and how easily they are controlled/destroyed by the men in the stories. 

For next week:Culler, Ch.2 & Short Paper #1 Assignment

NOTE: For M &W, read Chapter 2 of Culler's Literary Theory; we will discuss this chapter in class.  On Friday we will discuss your SP#1 below...

Short Paper #1: Literature as Theory/Theory as Literature

In Chapter 2 of Literary Theory, Culler writes that “Literature is the noise of culture as well as its information.  It is an entropic force as well as cultural capital.  It is a writing that calls for a reading and engages readers in problems of meaning” (40). 

For this short, introductory paper, I want you to choose a work of 'literature' you've already read—perhaps the favorite book you mentioned on the first day of class.  But it doesn't necessarily have to be a book: it could also be a show, a film, or comic book/graphic novel, or something else you feel qualifies as literature (read Ch.2 for examples).  Then I want you to write a short 2-3 page paper examining how this work functions as a work of theory: that is, as something that (1) questions 'common sense' ideas about culture and society; (2) is interdisciplinary (that is, it can relate to other fields and ideas outside of the book); (3) is analytical and speculative—it attempts to work out ideas of identity, etc. and (4) is complex and reflexive—making us 'think about thinking' without giving easy answers.

In doing this, also think about what makes literature literature according to Chapter 2.  As Culler suggests, literature is not only a product of culture but it shapes culture as well.  So any book written in 2011 is shaped by the ideas, biases, and aesthetics of 2011...but a truly significant work can also change how people in 2011 think about the world around them.  The work you choose (and almost anything can fit if you think about it) should help us “see” the world we live in and question, in some way, how we see it, and how the characters (and thus, ourselves) engage in 'common sense' every-day ideas. 

FOR EXAMPLE: I might choose Swift's Gulliver's Travels, which is about a traveler who has the bad luck to keep getting shipwrecked on strange lands—either a land of giants, or ant-sized people, or extremely wise horses who use humans for 'cattle.'  What initially seems like a crazy adventure yearn becomes quite theoretical when you consider when it was written: 1726.  Gulliver's Travels is a way of examining Swift's society by making it satirical; through this lens, we realize that the humor is based on real absurdities and conditions that were seen as normal and even ideal.  By “blowing up” his society on a gigantic scale (the Brobdignagians) or shrinking them to absurd size (the Liliputians) the book shifts our perspective on 'common sense' notions and critiques them through the seemingly naïve perspective of an outsider—the traveler/author himself. 

DUE IN-CLASS NEXT FRIDAY: we will discuss your papers and books in class as the “reading” for that day, so be sure to come! 

Questions for Culler, Chapter One "What is Theory?"

Rousseau, one of the "theorists"

By Friday, I want you to respond to ONE of the following questions in a decent-sized paragraph using support/ideas from the text.  Please no one-word answers or empty statements; trying to articulate something abstract like theory helps you come to terms with it, so this assignment (and others like it) will be very beneficial!  Good luck...

From Chapter One, "What is Theory?"

1. What does it mean that an idea like sex, or gender, is "culturally constructed"?  How can theory help us examine this and understand why it's like this--and perhaps, even re-write it? 

2. Culler, through examples with Derrida and Rousseau, explains that writing is a supplement to speech (just as speech is itself a supplement of an earlier, pre-linguistic 'language'): what does it mean that writing 'supplements' speech?  Is it less important or powerful?  How does this help us understand how we write and use writing, and the limits of writing (especially in literature) itself?

3. Our culture talks a lot about being a "natural" person or being an "authentic" person.  We're very concerned with being our "true self."  However, as Culler points out, such a thing might not even exist.  Why is this?  How does culture (through theory) explain how being "natural" is no more natural than any other state of being?

4. Why, according to Culler, is theory not predictable or completely knowable?  Why could you never truly master theory?  And if so, why study it at all?  What is the point of studying something you can--in a sense--never truly learn? 

Welcome to the Course!

This is our official class blog for Critical Responses to Prose, Spring 2012.  However, as the web address suggests, our sub-theme for this course is 'gothic literature,' and much of our time in class will be spent discussing this unique--and long-lasting--genre, and particularly, how various theoretical approaches can uncover new meanings in what can seem like rather exhausted stories. 

I will be posting questions each week for the readings, and you will be required to respond to ONE of these questions by Friday of that week (or a Wednesday, if a Friday is canceled).  However, you don't need to worry about that this week...for now, look over the syllabus and be sure to buy the books for class (rather than wait until Week 9 to buy them, at which case the bookstore will have shipped them back!).  I look forward to teaching this class (I've spent the December break reading and preparing for it, to the exclusion of all my other classes!) so I hope you will find it enjoyable, enlightening, and occasionally even fun.  If nothing else, you need to read Dracula at least once in your life. 

More soon!