Sunday 25 March 2018

Questões de investigação para o trabalho final individual


Deverão escolher uma destas (ou outra à vossa escolha que seja previamente conversada com a professora, ou ainda uma combinação de perguntas a negociar...) e trabalhá-la em relação a pelo menos três textos. Os tópicos e textos devem estar escolhidos a 30 de Abril e no dia 7 de Maio deverão entregar um plano de trabalho com uma bibliografia comentada (duas páginas). No dia 23 de Maio, trarão pelo menos três páginas de texto escrito em esboço para discussão e revisão de pares. O trabalho final será entregue até ao dia 4 de Junho, impresso, no meu cacifo, e terá um máximo de 2000 palavras, excluindo bibliografia.

1.       Que podemos extrair da relação com o estrangeiro ou com hóspedes (in)desejáveis nos textos estudados?

2.       Como interpretar a sede de viagem (wanderlust) nas obras estudadas e como se concretiza esta? (a viagem é de crescimento / revelação / evasão…)

3.       Em que sentido(s) manifestam os textos uma visão desesperançada do mundo contemporâneo?

4.       Como é tratado o problema da transmissão de uma ideologia norte-americana no enquadramento geopolítico?

5. Como se manifesta a perspetiva sobre épocas anteriores (pensar no espetro entre nostalgia e revisionismo?)

6. Que transformação sofre a imagem do feminino ao longo dos textos estudados, e como se relaciona esta mudança com outros aspetos de identidade potencialmente oprimíveis (pensar nos Estudos de Interseccionalidade)? 

7. Que ansiedades masculinas (idem, ver 6)?

8. Qual o papel da liminalidade e da ruptura de limites e fronteiras nos textos estudados?

9. Quais os propósitos da reflexividade / metaliterariedade nos textos estudados?

10. Que textos podem ser considerados histórias de formação e o que depreendemos do desenlace em relação a alguns princípios ideológicos da formação identitária dos EUA ("self-made-man", perseguição da felicidade, Destino Manifesto)

11. Que papel é atribuído ao avanço tecnológico e como se intersecciona com as categorias identitárias de género, etnia, classe, orientação sexual, credo religioso, posição intercultural, etc.?

12. Que perspetiva nos trazem os textos para a discussão de assuntos como apropriação cultural ou political correctness?

13. Qual a representação, o lugar e a reflexão sobre o trabalho nas obras literárias estudadas?


14. Como podemos retraçar o binómio natureza/sociedade nestes textos e que ilações se podem daí retirar a nível ambiental?

15. Que construções de realismo encontramos nos textos estudados e qual o seu papel transformativo sobre a realidade?

16. Que representações de multilinguismo (heterolinguismo) encontramos nos textos estudados e como servem a caracterização e a problematização da interculturalidade?


Tuesday 20 March 2018

Analyse. Practice. Try Again. EASTER homework. Extra!

Lady Lazarus, Sylvia Plath

I have done it again.   
One year in every ten   
I manage it——

A sort of walking miracle, my skin   
Bright as a Nazi lampshade,   
My right foot

A paperweight,
My face a featureless, fine   
Jew linen.

Peel off the napkin   
O my enemy.   
Do I terrify?——

The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?   
The sour breath
Will vanish in a day.

Soon, soon the flesh
The grave cave ate will be   
At home on me

And I a smiling woman.   
I am only thirty.
And like the cat I have nine times to die.

This is Number Three.   
What a trash
To annihilate each decade.

What a million filaments.   
The peanut-crunching crowd   
Shoves in to see

Them unwrap me hand and foot——
The big strip tease.   
Gentlemen, ladies

These are my hands   
My knees.
I may be skin and bone,

Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.   
The first time it happened I was ten.   
It was an accident.

The second time I meant
To last it out and not come back at all.   
I rocked shut

As a seashell.
They had to call and call
And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.

Dying
Is an art, like everything else.   
I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell.   
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I’ve a call.

It’s easy enough to do it in a cell.
It’s easy enough to do it and stay put.   
It’s the theatrical

Comeback in broad day
To the same place, the same face, the same brute   
Amused shout:

‘A miracle!’
That knocks me out.   
There is a charge

For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge   
For the hearing of my heart——
It really goes.

And there is a charge, a very large charge   
For a word or a touch   
Or a bit of blood

Or a piece of my hair or my clothes.   
So, so, Herr Doktor.   
So, Herr Enemy.

I am your opus,
I am your valuable,   
The pure gold baby

That melts to a shriek.   
I turn and burn.
Do not think I underestimate your great concern.

Ash, ash—
You poke and stir.
Flesh, bone, there is nothing there——

A cake of soap,   
A wedding ring,   
A gold filling.

Herr God, Herr Lucifer   
Beware
Beware.

Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair   
And I eat men like air.

                          SO WHAT IS STRIKING AND WHY?

Monday 19 March 2018

Burroughs (1914-1997)



and criticism on the beats by James Baldwin: http://eng389f17.aarongoldsman.com/w14/beat-criticism-in-james-baldwin/

Friday 16 March 2018

For Wed. 21 - The New York Poets

Hey, everyone!
Next Wednesday, João and I will be reading a few poems from two New York School poets, Frank O'Hara and Barbara Guest. Bellow, you will find the links to the poems we'll be reading and discussing in class, as well as some information on these poets and the movement in which they took part.
Also, we'd like to leave you a few questions in order to get the conversation going.

Questions:
1-In what way can we say that the tension between privacy and publicity is explored in O'Hara's "Poem" ["Lana Turner has collapsed!"]? Also, how does this relate to the overall poetics of the New York School?

2-How does Barbara Guest explore literary constraints in "The Hungry Knight"?

Links:
New York School

Frank O'Hara

Barbara Guest









Wednesday 14 March 2018

Maps On the Road

Interactive Maps



here a link to a blogger who has put all of On the Road - the scroll, in the www.: http://gettinginsidejackkerouacshead.blogspot.pt/2008/08/11-august-2008.html

And a Bonus: you can use this post to select On the Road passages that you find remarkable and write a short analysis on them.

Monday 12 March 2018

Debate: The Life you save may be your own", Flannery O'Connor - Pro book


Whenever we see a movie based on a book, several people will ask which one is the best. After brief comparisons, we conclude that the book is always the most viable option.
The expectations are (as it is well known? Is it? É uma pressuposição dada ou?) a book-based film will be as faithful as possible to it. However, the cinematic adaptations of a book do not achieve a complete fidelity and are pressured by several factors involved in creating a film. While working on this film vs. book topic, we have stumbled on a major question: “Does the movie in question betray its literary source?” After reading and viewing the short story "The Life You Save May Be Your Own" and studying Thomas Leitch's "Adaptation Studies at a Crossroad" article, we easily conclude that the film is not true to the original text, which compromises the public's experience.
Firstly, the film focuses on its commercial side, compromising its character. To exemplify the commercial approach, we can concentrate on how Lucynell's appearance was changed to be more appealing.  Also, the change of the ending might be a marketing strategy by giving the viewers the beautiful happy ending.
As we read the short story, we realize the meaning of colors and how they can stimulate the readers' minds to create a prior idea of the characters. Unfortunately, the adaptation is performed in black and white, which breaks a connection that could exist with the viewers’ imagination. Here, we have a perfect example on how the conditioning of producing a film can compromise the original idea.  Contrariwise, the characters and the story in the book are never compromised by any film making decisions/conditions. Furthermore, you get to know the characters better in the book than in the movie. In the short story, for example, Lucynell (the daughter), is wearing a short blue organdy dress and has pink gold hair and blue eyes, giving the readers the possibility of acknowledging an immediate childish and innocent image of Lucynell.
There are several changes in the characters descriptions and in the dialogue, distorting the original conception of O'Connor's tale. One of the cons of the film adaptation is that you can’t stimulate your mind using your imagination while watching it, an adaptation is always someone else’s perspective while when reading a book, you can create your own interpretation at your own pace (on the contrary, a film has limited storytelling time and a specific conduct for watching it). The ending is clearly the pivotal difference between the short story and the movie: in the first one, Tom Shiftlet abandons Lucynell Crater at The Hot Stop; however, in the second one, he comes back for her and that change can influence not only on the perspective that viewers/readers may have about the characters but also on the perspective of the whole tale. Therefore, this book-based film represents an interpretation where concrete aspects of the story are lost and it should never be a substitute of the reading as the book provides perspectives of the story in its whole.

Sunday 11 March 2018

Debate Wed 14 - Morality and Political Correctness

A questão do discurso de ódio é complicada e tem nuances, mas uma definição comum é a seguinte: "determinada mensagem que busca promover o ódio e incitação a discriminação, hostilidade e violência contra uma pessoa ou grupo em virtude de raça, religião, nacionalidade, orientação sexual, gênero, condição física ou outra característica". Mesmo com as pontas soltas que esta definição nos deixe, usando-a como base, conseguimos identificar certos tipos de discurso como claramente inseridos nesta categoria. 
A questão do discurso de ódio na arte, e na literatura em particular, já foi discutida inúmeras vezes. A noção de que na arte, esta problemática não se deveria colocar, é amplamente aceite. Afinal, as vozes que proferem os discursos na literatura são vozes fictícias, de personagens, direccionadas a outras personagens, também fictícias, mantendo sempre separação entre o autor, pessoa real, e as vozes da obra, personagens imaginárias. Há que ter sempre em atenção que as posições tomadas em trabalhos fictícios não reflectem necessariamente as posições do autor, e, da nossa parte, não há dúvidas disto. As obras literárias podem e devem ser lidas de forma crítica e, quando oportuno, os leitores podem e devem reconhecer e reflectir sobre o que há de problemático e ofensivo nelas. Mas, sendo trabalhos artísticos, de ficção, não é justificável que sejam censuradas.
Nesse caso, porque estamos nós a criticar o conteúdo das obras dos autores da Beat Generation? A quê, exactamente, nos opomos?
Vamos focar-nos especificamente em On The Road, de Jack Kerouac. Uma das questões que a obra coloca é a sua legitimidade enquanto trabalho literário. Tanto pela forma como foi escrita como pelo seu conteúdo, há quem defenda que On The Road não é ficção.
Esta questão não foi até hoje respondida. Mas, ficção ou não, é um facto que On The Road relata acontecimentos reais na vida de Kerouac, com descrições de pessoas reais, e até a utilização de nomes reais, no caso do scroll original.
Assim sendo, as descrições machistas e ofensivas que encontramos das mulheres em On The Road são proferidas não sobre personagens imaginárias, mas sobre pessoas que reais e susceptíveis de serem impactadas pelas palavras sobre elas escritas. Parece-nos, então, justo afirmar que o discurso preconceituoso em On The Road se enquadra na categoria de discurso de ódio e deve ser tratado como tal.

Maria Kopke
Rita Silva

Saturday 10 March 2018

Beginner's Guide to Close Reading

Topics for the text analysis exercise:

theme(s) and structure; 
importance of the text within the context of the author’s work and time; 
subject of the enunciation;
 point of view and effect upon the reader/addressee (beware of deixis);
 rhetoric and linguistic devices and language tropes
symbolism, 
innovation / surprising markers, collocations, 
pattern traces within the author’s work
 intertextuality with texts studied in this class or others. 

Make a point to read your passage out loud (or audibly to yourself( at least once in order to find previously unheard of elements. More help here

Example, including excerpt from Howl:
Importance of the text within the context of the author’s work and time [as way of introduction]
The excerpt belongs to the first part of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl”, whose reciting in 1955 and publication in 1956 was a landmark for the Beat Generation, a group of young artists and post-war intellectuals who felt downcast (beat) by world politics (the atom bomb), government control and capitalist society, preferred a marginal way of life and were greatly influenced by the blast and freedom of the jazz scene. Replicating with their typewriters the fury of the improptu beat, they sought also a closer relationship between life and art (more intimacy) and, valuing spontaneity, their writing was often a continuum of the heartbeat.

Structure and form:
Situated near the poem’s beginning, the excerpt fits into the first part, that describes the contrary and frenetic urges (urgency, desire and violence are at once convoked through the poem’s title, “Howl”) of the poet’s peers, “the best minds of my generation.” Following this description, the second part deals with the materialistic, capitalist and machinal worldview that holds its sway over these individuals. The third part adopts a more intimate register to address a particular generation member – Carl Solomon – and to establish a bond with him, and a later footnote recasts the first part’s jeremiad’s tone into a praise, striving for redemption and acceptance.
The excerpt begins by adopting an additional characterization for the “best minds”, “a lost battalion of platonic conversationalists” and continues with the pattern of initiating almost every line with the relative personal pronoun, “who”, an anaphor that permits a catalogue of features (like in Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, an archtypical text for Ginsberg) to be heaped onto this generation, whose actions are also described in an enumerative style, which helps to create a rhythm of velocity. This rhythm, letting one to pause for breath only through the expirational “who”, allows for the lines to be joined together. In fact, thoughout this long poem Ginsberg uses the innovation of presenting the lines as odd paragraphs, with a very sparce puncutation that gives way to free association, mixing poetry with Kerouac’s precepts of “spontaneous prose”.

Subject of enunciation and point of view
From the beginning of the poem (“I saw”) we know this is a first person testimony, although the constant employment of “who”, referencing a third collective party, the poet’s generation, offers such “cry” or “Howl” as representative. This third person shift, occuring throughout this excerpt and in fact to the end of the poem’s first part, creates some distanciation. The colloquial tone, however, unmistakably asserts that the poet was a participative witness in the conversations and ravings of his generation, also potentially contributing to empathy with the reader: “yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering”.

Thematic threads along with rhetoric devices + symbolism
In this excerpt, the main thematic thread describing this generation is perhaps the excess of drugs, coupling a state of vagrancy, sometimes helplessness, with the paradoxical search for visionarism, beyond the bleak reality of the US 50’s. These simultaneous and contradictory urges are expressed through hyperbole and paradox – in the excerpt’s first line there is sinking and self-destruction but always from higher places (“fire escapes”, “windowsills”, “Empire State”, “the moon”). Redundancy at times achieves the same effect of juxtaposing realities, as in the excerpt’s last line, where the lack of punctuation in “seeking visionary indian angels who were visionary indian angels” allows for the interpretation that the seekers were already what they sought, visionary.
This last line also indicates another theme, the urge for a previous state of innocence or primitivism (“indians”) that would also facilitate a closer relationship to nature, as that propugnated by the “founding” strain of transcendentalism in American literature – hence, perhaps, the allusion to “grandfather night” in the line that bespeaks this generation’s movement in boxcars “through snow towards lonesome farms”.
The reference to boxcars compounds the previsous lines’s “wander[ing]… in the railyard”, and gives centrality to the train, which like the car was crucial to this generation’s apology of movement through space. Dislocation is pictured as aimless (“vanished into nowhere”, “wondering where to go”) but crucial, whether through real transports of through the transportation of drug (ab)use and withdrawal (and free association in writing leads easily from one to the other (“migraines of China under junk-withdrawal in Newark”).
The repetition of “boxcars boxcars boxcars” give us simultaneously a sonorous impression (the bipartition of the consonantic phonemes “b” and “p” replicates the sound of the train “racketing through”) and a visual image of the train – which is perhaps also an ambiguous symbol of modern society and progress, as it can as well be seen as entrapping, inside boxes. Unmistakably oppressive are the mechanisms of control and distribution of power of the poet’s conteporaneous post-war society (“shocks of hospitals and jails and wars”)
While being heavily contextually marked (“Tangerian bone-grindings” most probably refers to one of the poet’s friends, Burroughs, short stay in Tangier, and “postcards of Atlantic City Hall” has the ring of a private joke), the poem at once strives for speed and intemporality. Speed is marked through the absence of commas but also through polyssindotous in the enumerations “facts and memories and anecdotes and eyball kicks and shocks”), as well as through profuse alliteration, which seems to make everything overlap into a screaming instant (for instance the vibrant and nasal sounds in “bonegrinding and migraines”). Also, place is felt at once as compressed and expansible: “the cosmos instintictively vibrated at their feet in Kansas”,  as if the corrosion of space and time categories led to the ideal happening of creation, invoked through a subtle biblical allusion: “in total recall for seven days and nights with brilliant eyes”.

Intertextuality
While “brilliant eyes” might allude ironically to drug consumption, it also resonates with the previous “best minds”, longing for visionary states. The preference for philosophical idealism is present in intertextual references to Plato (in “platonic conversations”), Plotino, while mysticism and supernatural awe are underlined by the references to “Poe” or “St John of Cross”. These overlapping of cultural references serves to show how cultured were the “best minds” but also how permeable to influence from different traditions and times. On the other hand, one may speculate that the author’s Jewishness surfaces in two contradictiory instances: the first seems to align institutional religiousness to socially stratified urbanism – “meat for the synagoge cast on the pavement”, while the second aligns the new musical counterculture (“bop”) with the exegesis of Scripture (“Kabballah”)

Conclusion
“Bop Keballah” is one of the surprising collocations in this excerpt (another being “Zen New Jersey”) that signals this generation’s synchretic hunger for knowledge and revelation. This revelatory impulse was, for its members, compatible with a life of excess and reckless freedom, in opposition to the sense of control imparted by middle-class America and the capitalist ideology of its politics.

Jack Kerouac - king of the Beats

Wednesday 7 March 2018

The School, D. Barthelme, excerpt text analysis

This excerpt of the short story can be divided into two parts. In the first part the students ask the teacher questions about death; what happens after death, what death means, and how one is to react to it. The second part begins with the introduction of the character Helen, the teaching assistant, whom the students ask the teacher to make love to.
The entire excerpt is marked by a mock-dramatic structure, as the prose is laced with markers of dialogue. ‘they said’ and ‘I said’. What is most striking about the dialogue is the escalation of the register of the discussion, especially in the “lines” spoken by the students. In their first question, in which they ask where all the dead plants, animals, and people go, they use very childish, low-register diction; such as ‘the poppas and mommas’. But the escalation of the register is very noticeable. As, just a few sentences later, the students are asking about death ‘as a fundamental datum’ and how the ‘mundanity of the everyday may be transcended’. The rapid transition of register from low to high (from familiar, affectionate, childish terms to words denoting deep, abstract concepts, even the Latin loan-word ‘datum’) is a bold, direct treatment of the ideas that have been underlying the short story thus far: questions of death and its significance.
It is as if the students cease to be merely students. The story has been escalating in its surreality: the narrative has progressed from dead plants to dead children and family, and now the time for reckoning has come. The climax of the narrative sees the readers’ key questions unabashedly thrown their face via the mouthpiece of the chorus of students. The introduction of Helen is like the chorus, the collective, demanding an offering; in this case, a ritual, the demonstration of lovemaking. The ‘assertion of value’ that the students demand is the assertion that ‘life is what gives meaning to life’. So love, the making of love, and the propagation of that which gives meaning to life, serves as a sufficient conclusion to the counteract the enumeration of death.

Tuesday 6 March 2018

"Howl" by Allen Ginsberg

1. "Howl" is full or religious elements throughout the poem. In part III, Ginsberg writes about the ressurection of Christ where it is Solomon who takes the role of Jesus. Given this, what do you think Solomon represents?

2. The author describes Solomon has being "(...) madder than I am (...) (line 94), and proceedes to give examples of Solomon's insanity. If Solomon is truly mad, why do you think the author gives so much credit and consideration to Solomon? Also, what do you think is the true meaning of "Rockland" ?

- Ana Ferreira

Monday 5 March 2018

For Monday 12 - On The Road

1) In the introducing part of this edition written by Howard Cunnel, he writes: "We've known now for a while now that there is much more to it than this, just as a novel is far more spiritual quest than how-to-be-a-hipster manual". Why do you think Howard feels the need to point this out? How do you think this novel is seen as a spiritual book?

2) Reading this book knowing that Jack Kerouac's father died 10 years before the first time "On The Road" was published, how do you think this event affected Kerouac's writing and life? (considering this is a narrative based on Jack's travels across the United States not being a fictional story)

Friday 2 March 2018

Pro-film, Position Statement: "The Life You Save May Be Your Own", Flannery O'Connor

Resultado de imagem para schlitz Playhouse life you save

“The Life You Save May Be Your Own”, Flannery O’Connor
Pro-film position statement

Firstly, we have to make a distinction between adaptation and translation. A filmmaker when given a literary work is expected to adapt the given artistic piece to a “new environment”; those adaptations are crucial for it to survive the “changes in structure or function” of a given socioeconomic context, as stated by Thomas Leitch in Adaptation Studies at a Crossroad.
The film is not expected to translate directly the writer’s intentions. We defend that cinema has a legitimate place of analysis and its study requires a perspective detached from the original literary piece. The cinematographic adaptation is subjugated to diverse factors of political, economic and cultural forces that will articulate with each other in the production of the film. For instance, the film adaptation “The Life You Save” comports a whole variety of information about a given context in the United States of America that its literary counterpart tries to criticize. Unfortunately for Flannery O’Connor, the exact society she’s critical about is the one in which she is integrated. For further explanation, after she was led to sell the book’s adaptation rights; she said that “the punishment always fits the crime” (Flannery O'Connor: New Perspectives, 20). Therefore, acknowledging the forces of change in the American society of which she is dependent on for continuing her writings; meaning those aspects criticized in the story are uncritically reproduced by the film.
By analyzing the film adaptation of her literary piece, we are given newer information about the cultural and socioeconomic influences. The context of fear of a war against the Soviet Union might justify the audience’s desire for a happy ending; therefore explaining its change in the adaptation to the television screen. The condition of women in North-American culture might explain the changes in Lucynell’s characterization to a more appealing and slender figure. Although the author’s initial intentions are reinterpreted, we are given a more faithful historical context and a representation of its current changes.

While it is true that there are certainly some reinterpretations, there is also room for some expansion of ideas present in the story but not fully developed. For example the character of Tom Triplett is more elaborate than Tom Shiftlet. While the latter is ultimately a one-note shifty man, the former is a flawed man, who is given a chance of redemption and takes it. Furthermore, the short-story focuses on religious motifs, such as sin, punishment and redemption; which are fully realized in Tom Shiftlet’s characterization. In opposition, the cinematographic adaptation concentrates on the theme of misfit love and the relationship between Lucynell and Tom which is explored in more detail, giving us as the viewer a more established sense of bond between the two; a bond that is fulfilled in the final scene of the film. Therefore, a qualitative comparison between different artistic expressions that explore such different themes and use such different mediums cannot be successfully accomplished. In conclusion, the two artistic objects - film and story - although existing in separated dimensions, they complement each other's existence.


Mauro Spencer
Francisco Cardoso
Filipa Figueiras

Thursday 1 March 2018

Allen Ginsberg's "Howl"




1. Very much like in punk-rock (Phillips, 2015), it seems that one theme that is present in Howl’s poetry is the desire to abolish the old/the tradition and bring in the new/the creation.
In your honest opinion, do you find it more important to support what is traditional, i.e. the heritage of a generation, of a specific cultural period – positive or negative – or to, from that point, create something new, and keep developing new idea(l)s, new works, new identities? Should every generation have its own voice?

2. In the first part of the poem, Ginsberg makes quite a few references to the academies and universities. Not only were “the best minds of his generation” expelled from the academies, but also in line 10 there is an interesting expression: “scholars of war”.
Some questions arise here: how do you interpret Ginsberg’s perception of the academies and universities (good or bad), and how do you justify it being so?
Also, what do you think he means to imply by using this particular expression (“scholars of war”)?  


3. There are several religious elements throughout "Howl”. These elements are scattered and almost abstractly put, I’d say, as they make no allusion to any religious beliefs. What do you think these religious elements signify in the poem?


Finally, I invite you to listen to Allen Ginsberg reciting his poem on February of 1956, in Portland. Think about the tone and rhythm in which he is reciting. What conclusions do you draw?