Study Questions

28 January, 1998

Study Questions for the George Mason Review Article This exercise should help you to create thesis statements, find focus and concentrate on the economical use of specific evidence in your own paper (much shorter!) due next week. You should read all the essays but answer the following questions only in relation to your assigned essay. 1. Copy out the line(s) that you think constitute the thesis statement for your essay. How well do you, as a reader, think your author phrased and communicated her/his thesis statement? How well is the thesis sustained throughout the paper? 2. List the main points your author seems to be making in his/her essay. Does s/he make too many or too few points? Or do you feel the number of points convincingly carries the author's argument? 3. For each of the main points summarize very briefly the evidence your author uses. How convincing is this evidence? Why? 4. All the writers in this section use direct quotations from the readings they discuss? Try to work out the different roles those quotations play in your essay. Do they add emphasis? Do they act as evidence to support the author's argument?

4 February, 1998

Study Questions for 'Eurydice' and 'Those Various Scalpels' 1) Who is telling the story in Eurydice? To whom is the narrator speaking? How does this narrator's story differ from that of the Roman poet, Ovid, extracted in the handout? 2) What is the attitude of the narrator to Orpheus and how is it expressed in the poem? 3) What might the story of Eurydice and Orpheus symbolize for the narrator? What might the death, reawakening and death of Eurydice represent beyond its literal meaning in a retelling of a traditional story? 4) How does the author use some of the poetic devices we have discussed in class to create meaning in this poem? Choose one example and examine it in detail. 5) Marianne Moore's poem "Those Various Scalpels" is a description of the poet, Mina Loy. Moore maps out the description for her readers: 'your hair,' 'your eyes,' 'your cheeks,' etc. How do you imagine Mina Loy from your reading of the poem? Is she ordinary? Exotic? Conventional? Unconventional? 6) (compulsory question) Moore uses a series of extended metaphors to describe her subject. Choose one of these metaphors and break down its associations in as much detail as you can. What does the metaphor convey to you about the part of the woman Moore is describing? Does the description relate simply to physical attributes or does it suggest psychological, emotional or intellectual attributes as well?

9 February, 1998

Study Questions for 'The Waste Land' Make sure you know exactly which section of the poem you should be working on. Note down the e-mail addresses of your fellow group members so that you can exchange information on the reading between classes. You should be ready, as a group, to present the results of your readings to the rest of the class. Readers and scholars have argued for years over the meanings, intentions and significances of "The Waste Land.' Add your voices to the chorus... Read your section of the poem out aloud several times and if possible listen to at least one other person in your group read it also. I plan to allocate class time to this exercise. 1) Try to identify the different voices in your section of the poem. How many distinct voices do you hear? Think how you might show the different voices to the class. Give each group member a voice and read part of your section to the class? 2) What signals alert you to the change of voice? Change in vocabulary? Change in tone of voice? Change of language? Change in line length? Change in patterns of rhyme, rhythm and repetition? 3) Do you hear the voice of a narrator linking the different voices together? If you do not hear the voice of a narrator, how do the different voices relate to each other for you? 4) What is the effect, for you as readers, of the collaging together of different voices? What does the author gain? What does he lose? What do you think he is trying to convey?

11 February, 1998

Study Questions for Their Eyes Were Watching God, chapters 1 - 3 Note: Leave the introduction to the novel by Mary Helen Washington until after you have read the first three chapters of the novel. Then go back and read her comments, paying particular attention to her notes on voice. (The MLA, to which MHW refers in her introduction, is an annual convention attended by literary scholars in the United States, where many of the most important developments in literary scholarship have first aired.) Remember to look over the study questions before you read the chapters. 1) Who speaks in chapter 1 of the novel? What do they all have in common? Why do you think the author might have chosen these particular individuals (or group(s)) as speakers so early in the novel? 2) Who passes on knowledge in chapters 2 and 3? What is the importance of this knowledge to Janie, and to us as readers? How does the teller of knowledge validate (give us evidence from which we can trust the conclusions drawn) that knowledge? 4) The characters in this novel speak as we all speak; in contractions and slang, with a particular accent, and using images shared among a particular social and cultural group. Instead of turning these speeches into conventional literary language, the author seems to reproduce them as they might have been spoken. What, for you, is the effect of this apparently close transcription of spoken language? 5) Is there another voice beyond that of the characters themselves speaking in these chapters? If you think there is, where do you find evidence of its existence, how would you describe it, and what do you think its function is? 6) Look carefully at the final sentence of chapter 3. Is the experience discussed significant only in terms of Janie herself, or does it have a wider resonance for all of us? How would you describe the experience encapsulated in this line?

16 February, 1998

Study Questions for Their Eyes Were Watching God, chapters 4 - 6 Remember to look over the study questions before you read the chapters. 1) The question of the mule arises again in these chapters. What does the mule symbolize to Janie, and what, for you, is the significance of the mock-ceremonial burial of the mule? 2) What images do Joe and Janie hold of each other when they first meet, and how do those images change during the early years of their marriage? Pinpoint those actions or speeches which cause those images to shift. 3) Identify the lines of tension within Janie and within the novel as a whole as they are unfolding. How does the dialogue and the language of the narration develop and accentuate those tensions? 4) What similarities do you see between the way Joe treats Janie, and the way Nanny treated her? Pinpoint one incident or conversation that demonstrates this similarity. 5) Compare the dialogues between the women on the porch at the beginning of the novel, Coker and Hills' dialogue when Joe and Janie come to town, and the conversations on the porch of Joe's store. To what extent do they represent a social and cultural consensus (perhaps under threat)? And how do the speakers react to any challenges to that consensus? 6) What do you think the narrator means when writing of Janie, "She had an inside and an outside now and suddenly she knew how not to mix them."?

18 February, 1998

Study Questions for Their Eyes Were Watching God, chapters 7 - 13 1. To what extent does Janie's speaking throughout these chapters 'kill' Joe? Think particularly about the relationship between Janie's speech in the store and the suspicions of Joe and the community about 'black' magic, and deathbed conversation. What does relationship suggest about the dominant cultural consensus on the issue of women's public speech? 2. After Joe dies, the narrator writes of Janie "She thought back and forth about what happened in the making of a voice out of a man." What exactly might Janie be thinking about here, and what is the significance of the placing of this question here, after Joe has died, but before Janie has met Tea Cake. Think about this question, too, as you continue to the end of the book. 3. What does Janie's meeting with Tea Cake while the rest of the town attends a ball game signify about the potential nature of the relationship? How does Janie reconcile her attraction to Tea Cake and her love of freedom? What incidents in their early acquaintanceship are significant to her, and why? 4. How is the tension between economic stability (and safety and protection?) and the love and instinct (and danger and potential disaster?) developed in this section of the book? How does Janie's extended dialogue with Phoeby in chapter 12 develop this long-running theme? 5. Why do we believe (do we believe?) that Phoebe is Janie's 'bosom friend'? Phoebe rarely appears, for example, in the whole chronicle of Janie's years with Joe. To what extent is Phoebe operating as the 'bridge' (as several critics identified her in class) again and why? What do we as readers gain from her presence? 6. How do you as a reader react to the events of chapter 13? What is being negotiated between Janie and Tea Cake, and what adaptations are being made? How is Janie positioned at the end of the chapter? 7. Pick out one of the themes or images we discussed this week in class, and explain how its use illuminates Janie's character and/or influences the structure of the novel in these chapters.

25 February, 1998   "It may be said that the genuine poetry of the black woman appeared not in literature but in the lyrics of blues singers like Bessie Smith...black women were better able to articulate themselves as individuals and as part of a racial group in that form"   Barbara Christian

Study Questions for Their Eyes Were Watching God, chapters 14 - 20 1. How does Janie's relationship with Tea Cake progress in the final chapters of the book? Choose one incident/conversation that seems critical to you and analyze its significance. 2. Nanny, Joe Starks and Tea Cake, although very different characters, all hit Janie. What does this violence represent within the novel as a whole? 3. Just as the community 'on the muck' differs from that of Eatonville, so too does Tea Cake's masculinity differ from that of Joe. What elements of African-American life does each man/community seem to represent? To what extent do Mrs. Turner's imprecations clarify these contrasts? (You may want to read Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s comments in the Afterword when you are thinking about this question.) 4. To what extent is the hurricane another voice in the book? What transitions does it mark for Janie? What happens to Janie's voice after the hurricane? 5. Look at the language with which the hurricane arrives, overwhelms and finally abandons the characters. What images and symbols accompany the hurricane and its aftereffects? 6. To what extent is Janie 'free' by the end of the book? And of what or whom is she freed? Or does she simply return to the same state she existed in after Joe Starks died? 7. To what extent is the book more or less of a feminist novel because Janie lives her life in the company of men, and, in a sense, through the actions of those men?

25 February, 1998

Study Questions for Muriel Rukeyser Try to give some textual support for your ideas in the journals. A page or line number or a very brief quotation will suffice. Try to be specific, too: try not to say, "Technique x arouses our emotions," but attempt, "Technique x arouses emotions of fear and tension because..." Transfer the techniques you deploy in the papers to the journals. 1. First of all, work out how many people are speaking in this first group of poems. Is there a voice acting as the narrator (creating the scene, giving readers a context)? If so, where does it appear? 2. Although these poems look like poems (for example, the three-line stanzas (tercets) of "The Road," variations in line length of "Philippa Allen" and "Mearl Blankenship"), they also imitate other, more common forms of writing in our culture. What are these forms, and what meanings do they help to create for the reader of the sequence? 3. In "Philippa Allen," certain sections are indented. What happens to the voice in those indented sections? Does the syntax change? Does the speed at which we gain information change? What effect do these indented sections have on you as a reader? 4. Choose one of the poems in the sequence and analyze it as a poem. Think about the three 'Rs' of poetry and think about the idea of collage as a method for creating a work of art. Look at where the line breaks, and the shape of the verses. 5. What are the similarities and differences between The Waste Land and these first extracts from The Book of the Dead? Think in particular about the types of voices allowed to speak in each, and the way in which the voices are 'treated' by the writer. 6. To what extent is The Book of the Dead (on the evidence of these first poems) a documentary poem? Look up documentary if you are not quite sure of all its meanings. What does the writer gain from the conjunction of documentary and poetry?

2 March, 1998

Hypertext Readings  Read for Wednesday's class the following articles:- Introductory articles (short) which may be useful if you have worked only infrequently with the internet Introduction to Internet Terminology Introduction to Web-Browsing Creating a Web Page   Hypertext Definition of Hypertext: a clear, easy-to-read article on the history of hypertext, offering simple guidelines to new writers in the medium

4 March, 1998

Study Questions for Muriel Rukeyser, second set of poems. I have included only three study questions for this reading but I do expect you to respond to each in detail. 1. Again, list the different categories of information that are collaged into these poems. What is the dominant voice for you in these poems - the documentary or the poetic? Where does the power (or lack of power) of the voice(s) lie for you as a reader. 2. One of the dominant images that develops in this group of poems is the relationship between the map (of our country?) and the x-rays of the silicotic miners' lungs. For example, see p. 45, lines 30 - 33:- "but always now the map and the X-ray seem resemblent pictures of one living breath one country marked by error and one air." What is MR seeing about the US in the 1930s in looking within the bodies of the miners of Gauley Bridge? How does this relationship add meaning to the poems for you as a reader? 3. What happens to the self, the voice or signature of the 'creator' in a collaged work like "The Book of the Dead"? To what extent does the author lose control over the work? Or does that control simply become less apparent, less visible to the reader? (Think of collaged music videos, for example, when you are answering this question. To what extent are they completely random, and to what extent are they carefully chosen and rigorously orchestrated to appear random?)

For Monday, 23 March         "...Lowell has created the language, cool and violent all at once, of contemporary introspection. He is our truest historian." Richard Poirier

Study Questions for Robert Lowell (For Sale, Sailing Home from Rapallo, Waking in the Blue, Home after Three Months Away, and Memories of West Street and Lepke) 1. How does the first line of 'For Sale' reverberate throughout the poem? Is the 'poor sheepish plaything' just the cottage? Why is it called 'my Father's cottage' even although both parents lived there? How does this poem cast light on the relationship between Mother and Father (what do you make of the consistent capitalization and the formality of the address to such close relatives, by the way?) and between the speaker and each of his parents? 2. How would you describe the tone of 'Sailing Home from Rapallo'? How does Lowell use color to organize the poem and create meaning for the reader? Why do you think Lowell includes so many foreign words in the poem? In such a poem we expect mourning: how does the speaker in this poem mourn? (Think, too, about this question when reading 'During Fever.' 3.. In 'During Fever' what is the relationship between the crib-creaking incident and the rest of the poem? What meanings might be attached to the 'fever'? (Does it just apply to the daughter, for example?) Look up ambivalence if you are not sure of its exact meaning. How does ambivalence towards the speaker's mother, speaker's father, and the speaker's memories themselves emerge in these poems. 4. Why might 'Waking in the Blue' and 'Home After Three Months Away' be seen as complementary poems? In these two poems, the speaker compares himself both to those 'twice my age and half my weight' within the mental hospital and to the very young daughter in the tub, 'each of us pats a stringy lock of hair.' What does this tell the reader about the speaker's perception of his place in the world, and the state(s) of mind explored in the poems? 5. Three 'stories' seem to be told in 'Memories of West Street and Lepke': that of the speaker remembering part of his 'fire-breathing' past in intimate, precise detail; the description of the experiences of Czar Lepke's jail life, and perhaps a description of a cross-section of mid-century America; himself as the intellectual, the vegetarian/pacifist, the religious person, the Hollywood pimps and the gangster himself. Try to trace these 'stories' through the poem, and work out how they might all be brought to resolution in the final six lines, again thinking of this poem in the context of those you have already read in this sequence and the autobiographical knowledge you have gained of the speaker. 6. Who is missing thus far from the 'family drama' we have shared with the author? How does the poem 'Man and Wife' deal with that omission and in what way is that final person integrated into the drama?

for Wednesday, 25 March Lowell 'views art as proof of existence and a means of creating identity.' Marjorie Perloff

Study Assignment Skunk Hour (RL), Armadillo, The Moose (Elizabeth Bishop), Churchgoing and The Whitsun Weddings (Phillip Larkin) 1) What similarities, if any, do you see between the poems of Bishop and Larkin, and those of Lowell? Don't think only of subject matter: think of tone of voice, of use of form, of poetic imagery, of sound, etc. 2) With your partner, draft two study questions based on your own readings of the poems. You should aim to generate questions that will push your readers into thinking as deeply as possible about the poem(s). Your question may relate to just one poem, to one of the authors, or to the authors and/or the poems as a group. Note in your journal what you hope your readers would gain by trying to respond seriously to your questions. Bring two copies of your questions to class.

For Monday, 30 March

Study Questions: The Names (Chapters 1 - 3) Preliminary notes The title opens the text for us. In the first few chapters, 'naming' of multiple kinds takes place, from the pining of brand names to consumer artifacts (the Macintosh exchange) through the way language allows us to 'name' the world in which we live to our use of 'names' to hide, rather than express, meaning (ie the use of euphemism). Think about what naming achieves for us (does it locate us in space, in time, within a culture, etc.?). Language is itself a system which allows us to create order out of the chaos of experience and the chaos of thought. The pull between ordered systems and chaos runs runs throughout this text, as do the characters' searches for order in a chaotic world (think of the narrator's attempts to classify risk, to predict where chaos will strike and to name that chaos, or Owen's growing fascination with the 'disorder' (or is it order) of the murder, or Kathryn's digging in the trenches). The differences (and similarities) between knowledge and paranoia, and knowledge and information, also inhabit this text. Look up these concepts in a dictionary and an encyclopaedia, and try to develop your own definitions of them. Keep them in mind as you read through the book. Finally, the action of the book occurs in the Eastern Mediterranean and in the Middle East, the border zone, or zone of merging, if you like, of the West and the East. Border zones in literature (whether the seashore - the border between land and water - or a physical border) tend to be zones of disorder, in which no system of natural, cultural or political laws dominates, or in which an apparently dominant system (?the American way of life, the American way of business?) is challenged, or finds itself ineffective. 1) How would you describe the narrative technique of the first two chapters? Think about the shifts in time and space, and the use of conversation. 2) DeLillo is a sharp and lyrical writer, despite the conversational style of the narration. Lines like "The 'phone is ringing, the first of the day's wrong numbers' or "His life was the chief indication, full of the ornaments of paranoia and deception" or 'To women, these men must have the glamour of a wrecked Ferraris" convey multiple levels of information. Think of the choice of that word 'ornament', for example, or the subtle intimation of chaos contained in the first of the day's wrong numbers. Pick out five or six lines you particularly like which combine effective language in a local context with resonance for the text as a whole. 3) Both the narrator, and the other characters, meditate on what it means to be an American in the then contemporary world of 1978-9. What conclusions do these characters draw about their country, and the 'American' character in these meditations? Why do you think the author includes them? 4) The narrator branches out from time to time into mini-essays (such as the one on tourism). Try to identify other mini-essays. What is their function in the text? 5) The text itself (the record of a self or a civilization) crops up over and over again: the stone tablets Owen deciphers, Kathryn's reports on the archaeological finds, the narrator's risk analysis reports, Tap's 'nonfiction novel'. What do you think DeLillo is trying to suggest by these parallels in his narrator's and characters' lives? How are we as readers positioned to respond to the text in front of us, this novel? 6) What is the significance of the line "That was my day" at the end of chapter 3? What do we learn about the narrator from his 'day'?

For Wednesday, 1 April

Study Questions: The Names (Chapters 4 - 5)  1. What is the significance of the Owen's comment, "If I were a writer, how I would enjoy being told the novel is dead. How liberating, to work in the margins, outside a central perception." To what extent is he talking just about writing, and to what extent is he commenting on...his own and the other characters' lives, modern life, with its speed and instability, on personal relationships, on Americans abroad, on...? 2. The book thus far shifts between the personal, romantic relationship of the narrator and his wife, and the relationships based on the accident of place, which the narrator enjoys with other, expatriate Americans. What connections do you see between these story lines as they have developed? What, for example, is the significance of Kathryn's decision to leave? 3. To what extent are all the characters in search of a system, a scheme of order to follow, a slot to fill? Think about the significance of Ann's description of mailing letters from Beirut" "It was the arbitrary nature of things." How are we, as readers, positioned to react to these searches? 4. Look for resonant lines again in the text, lines which amplify either the local ongoing action, or relate it to the themes you see developing within the novel. Note down five or six which are important for you in your understanding of the novel. 5. The arrival of a new character, or a character differentiated from the others in some way, often precipitates change. Eliades seemed to act as a catalyst in Chapter 3, for example. How does Volterra act as a catalyst (think in terms of the multiple story lines - the marriage of the narrator, the murder story, etc.) in this section of the book? What has happened to the narrator by the end of the section? 6. Look at the different kinds of knowledge discussed in the book thus far - the knowledge of the body, of the mind, of the spirit, of facts and figures, of morality, and so on. What is the narrator learning about the components of knowledge (as opposed, say, to information), and what is the author, via the narrator's story, trying to communicate to us, as readers?

Study Questions: The Names (Chapters 6 - 8) Write a long entry (at least a page) on each of the three questions below. 1. How do you see the role of women in this section of the book - Del, Ann, the fleeting glimpse of Lindsay in both person and in memory? 2. One of the themes of this section is the location of meaning. To what extent do events have intrinsic meaning or pattern? Or to what extent do we as humans impose a pattern on them and call it meaning? Look at the sequence of conversations in Chapter 7: James and Ann discussing adultery, Peter's unwillingness to discuss mathematics, and James' and Owen's discussion of the cult in trying to answer this question. 3. Where do we learn most about James as a character in this section of the book? Find and analyze one conversation or section of narrative that offers you your greatest insight into James. Be careful to relate it to the section as a whole. To what extent do you discern a theme to your reading of James?

Study Questions: The Names (Chapters 9 -10) Write a long entry (at least a page) on each of the three questions below. 1. When Andahl describes the murder he uses the phrase 'a frenzy of knowing.' What do you think he means, and how do Owen, James and Volterra, in their own ways participate in the 'frenzy of knowing' in the book? 2. In a book so devoid of sexuality (though not conversation or mediation about it), what is the significance of James' encounter with Janet Ruffing? 3. What do you think the importance of the cult is within the book? What does it represent?

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