Difference between revisions of "2007-08 BM1: Session 12"

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(/* 3: Some aspects of Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses can be described as 'postmodern'. Other aspects of the text can be described as 'postcolonial'. Give an example for either a postcolonial or a pos)
(b) in the nineteenth century. (5))
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===b) in the nineteenth century. (5)===
 
===b) in the nineteenth century. (5)===
:* The greatest English author if not the best author of all times, a genius; an author with insight into man's nature.
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* The greatest English author if not the best author of all times, a genius; an author with insight into man's nature.
:* From 1760s: Shakespeare cult, birthplace, stratford.
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* From 1760s: Shakespeare cult, birthplace, stratford.
:* His works the object of popular editions  
+
* His works the object of popular editions  
:*"Victorian bardolatry"  
+
*"Victorian bardolatry"  
:*Permanent Shakespeare performances at Stratford.
+
*Permanent Shakespeare performances at Stratford.
  
 
==6: The meaning of the term 'poetry' has changed over the past few centuries. Name one contrast between the meaning of 'poetry' around 1700 and around 1900.==
 
==6: The meaning of the term 'poetry' has changed over the past few centuries. Name one contrast between the meaning of 'poetry' around 1700 and around 1900.==

Revision as of 17:22, 24 January 2008

Back to 2007-08 BM1 Introduction to the Critical and Scholarly Discussion of Literature, Part 1


Expectations:

1: Construct correct bibliographical entries for the following items.

  • The paperback edition of J. M. Coetzee’s Booker Prize Winning novel Disgrace published in the year 2000 by the New York publisher Vintage. (5)
  • J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace, New York: Vintage, 2000.
[1 right sequence, 1 title in italics, 3 (6 x 0,5) complete data, 1 plausible punctuation]
  • An article entitled Speech-Manuscript-Print, published in the year 1990 by the historian D. F. McKenzie, and to be found on pages 87 to 109 in volume 22 of The Library Chronicle of the University of Texas at Austin. (7)
  • D. F. McKenzie, "Speech-Manuscript-Print", The Library Chronicle of the University of Texas at Austin 22 (1990): 87–109.
[1 right sequence, 1 article title in inverted commas, 1 Journal in italics, 3 (6 x 0,5) complete data, 1 plausible punctuation]

2: Knowledge about established notions on periods.

a) Indicate roughly the dates usually associated with three of the following five periods. (6)

  • Renaissance: 1350/1500-1650
  • Restoration: 1660-1700/1720
  • Enlightenment: 1660/1680-1790
  • Romantic Age: 1770-1830
  • Victorian Age: 1832/1837-1900/1901

b) For three periods of your choice, name at least one typical feature conventionally associated with it. (6)

  • Renaissance (c.1500 - c.1650): discovery of antiquity and roman/greek poetry, rejection of medieval period, discovery of the individual (Renaissance man), humanism, boom in drama (Shakespeare embodies it all), religious conflict: English reformation to Civil War, which establishes a puritan republic (1649-1660).
  • Restoration (1660-1700): under the special protection of the court, libetinistic, witty
  • Enlightenment (1660-1790): rationality, age of reason, sciences, philosophy, civil liberties, religious and political tolerance.
  • Romanticism (1770-1830): reacts to the deficits of enlightenment, radicalises emotions (and expresses them individually), turn to nature, individuality, heroism (outsiderdom), fragment and infinity, escapisms: exotism, medieval / pagan past, initially politically radical, then a conservative turn, -- turn to popular forms, rejection of poetic diction,
  • Victorian Era (1832-1900): period of British imperialism, duplicity of moral standards: an age of strict morals, suppression of sexuality, transgressive literature produced by an avantgarde of authors, aestheticism, strong class division reflected by literature: boom of commercial entertainments esp. melodrama.

c) For three periods of your choice, name one writer who wrote during this period. (3)

  • Renaissance: William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, Edmund Spenser, John Fletcher, Thomas Kyd, Thomas Middleton, Thomas Nashe, John Webster, John Donne
  • Restoration: Willaim Wicherley, William Congreve, Apha Behn
  • Enlightenment: Joseph Addisson, Richard Steele, Alexander Pope
  • Romantic Age: Mary Shelley, William Wordsorth, Lord Byron
  • Victorian Age: Charles Dickens, George Eliot

d) When were these periods 'invented'. Indicate roughly around what time scholars started constructing literary history as a succession of such periods. (3)

The present periodisation did basically beginn with the histories of literature produced in the 19th century
Es gibt halbe Punkte, wenn Folgefehler gemacht werden z.B.: Victorian age 14th century and Chaucer as poet.

3: Some aspects of Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses can be described as 'postmodern'. Other aspects of the text can be described as 'postcolonial'. Give an example for either a postcolonial or a postmodern feature of the text.

  • Invitations for Postcolonial Readings of Satanic Verses:
  • multicultural Britain, diaspora identities, racism.
  • Saladin Chamcha's / Salahuddin Chamchawala's identity quest
QUOTES:
The mutation of Salahuddin Chamchawala into Saladin Chamcha began … in old Bombay, long before he got close enough to hear the lions of Trafalgar roar. When the England cricket team played India at the Brabourne Stadium, he prayed for an England victory, for the game’s creators to defeat the local upstarts, for the proper order of things to be maintained.
[SV 37]
[At his boarding school he decided that]… he would be English, even if his classmates giggled at his voice and excluded him from their secrets, because these exclusions only increased his determination, and that was when he began to act, to find masks that these fellows would recognize, paleface masks, clown-masks, until he fooled them into thinking he was okay, he was people-like-us. He fooled them the way a sensitive human being can persuade gorillas to accept him into their family, to fondle and caress and stuff bananas in his mouth.
[SV 43]
Because he did have that gift …, he was the Man of a Thousand Voices and a Voice. If you wanted to know how your ketchup bottle should talk in its television commercial, if you were unsure as to the ideal voice for your packet of garlic-flavoured crisps, he was your very man. [SV 60]
... but, during his recent visit to his home town … there had been strange and worrying developments. It was unfortunately the case that his voice (the first to go) and, subsequently, his face itself, had begun to let him down. [SV 33]
...Saladin felt hourly closer to many old, rejected selves, many alternative Saladins – or rather Salahuddins – which had split off from himself as he made his various life choices … [SV 523]
...Saladin … had begun to find the sound of his full, un-Englished name pleasing for the first time in twenty years … [SV 524]


  • Invitations for Postmodernist Readings of Satanic Verses:
  • Closing the gap between the high and the popular – the use of contemporary popular culture (advertising; TV series; British, American and Indian Cinema)
  • Strong Intertextuality: (numerous references to the European literary tradition: Ovid, Shakespeare [King Lear / Othello], Milton [Paradise Lost], Swift, Blake, Kafka, Joyce)
  • the violation of ontological levels: Gibreel Farishta as actor and as Archangel Gibreel, his "dreaming" of the even-numbered books (cf. McHale, p. 85: "And what exactly is scandal? Ultimately, its source is ontological: boundaries between worlds have been violated.")
  • the postmodern play with the (death of the) 'god-like' author
QUOTE:
"I’m saying nothing. Don’t ask me to clear things up one way or the other; the time of revelations is long gone. The rules of Creation are pretty clear: you set things up, you make them thus and so, and then you let them roll. Where’s the pleasure if you’re always intervening to give hints, change the rules, fix the fights? Well, I've been pretty self-controlled up to this point and I don’t plan to spoil things now. Don’t think I haven’t wanted to butt in; I have, plenty of times. And once, it’s true, I did. I sat on Alleluia Cone’s bed and spoke to the superstar, Gibreel. Ooparvala or Necchayvala, he wanted to know; I didn’t enlighten him; I certainly don’t intend to blab to this confused Chamcha instead.
I’m leaving now. The man’s going to sleep. [SV 409]

4: In the context of Shakespeare studies what is

a) a Quarto edition? (5)

  • An edition of a single play in quarto format (some of these were published during Shakespeare's lifetime - Shakespeare editors divide quartos into good, bad and doubtful quartos; only about half of Shakespeare's plays were published in quarto editions).

b) the Folio edition? (5)

  • The edition of Shakespeare's collected plays published in 1623 in folio format.

5: Briefly characterise the status of Shakespeare

a) around 1600. (5)

  • Shakespeare was mentioned and celebrated as the author of his plays (cf. title-page)
  • But during his lifetime no one was interested in his personality.
  • There were no manuscripts preserved.
  • There was no contemporary interest in personal records, diaries, letters, etc.
  • There were no literary reviews and periodicals, no theatre criticism.
  • The interest in Shakespeare's person and the criticism of his work was retrospective.

b) in the nineteenth century. (5)

  • The greatest English author if not the best author of all times, a genius; an author with insight into man's nature.
  • From 1760s: Shakespeare cult, birthplace, stratford.
  • His works the object of popular editions
  • "Victorian bardolatry"
  • Permanent Shakespeare performances at Stratford.

6: The meaning of the term 'poetry' has changed over the past few centuries. Name one contrast between the meaning of 'poetry' around 1700 and around 1900.

Before 1700

  • Poetry is defined as everything written in verse.
  • Poetry is divided up into a large number of genres: epic, tragedy, comedy, opera, song, ode, sonnet, elegy etc. etc.
These genres may be higher or lower, greater or smaller, fashionable or unfashionable at any particular time.
  • Poetry has a widespread presence, as an almost everyday form of writing. (For funerals, weddings, for the expression of religious sentiments and beliefs. -- Scholars write poems as prefaces to other scholars' works.)

After 1700

  • The corpus of existing poetry is reorganised along chronological and national lines
  • After the mid-eighteenth century, there is a new mode of arrangement which is national and chronological. Cf. Percys Relics, Warton 1774
  • This chronological rearrangement also changes the conditions under which new poets are writing.
  • Poets now aim for a place in this chronology.
  • Critics are monitoring the progress of the nation’s poets.
  • Poets can form groups / schools / movements which (may claim to) represent new tendencies and can attract critical controversy.
  • First example: the debate about the “modern school of English poetry”, later renamed the Romantic movement.
  • Poetry is incorporated as a vital part of the newly-formed concept of Literature, but with some major differences to the older concept of poetry:
  • Literature implies the exclusion of some genres which used to be part of poetry (notably the central areas of opera and song)
  • Literature includes new genres which were not originally part of poetry (the novel)
  • The term poetry itself was increasingly reduced in scope (only rarely used for dramatic or narrative texts), limited to a set of smaller poetic forms which had previously not been specifially labeled as a group.
(10) points.

7: Formulate at least two different definitions of the term 'literature' and discuss what advantages and disadvantages each definition could have for the practice of literary studies.

(30 points)



Notenskala:

  • 73 – 100: 1
  • 61 – 72: 2
  • 49 – 60: 3
  • 37 – 48: 4
  • 25 – 36: 5
  • 0 – 24: 6