English 45B Final Review

pastoral

aristocratic fantasy of labor about isolated pastoral performances usually in reflection of city life and the balance of man with nature (e.g. Virgil’s Epilogues)

georgic

the labor of transforming the natural land; takes labor seriously (e.g. Stephen Duck’s The Thresher’s Labor)

epic

grand poem of national foundation and imperial destiny (e.g. Virgil’s The Aeneid)

ode

celebratory lyric poem of a person, place, thing, or idea, (e.g. John Keats’s An Ode to a Nightingale)

elegy

a poem of lamenting/mourning (e.g. Thomas Gray’s Elegy, Written in a Country Church-Yard)

lyric

poetic modality based on song/oral recitation; used to express intensity.emotion about something, unlike the narrative purpose of a ballad (e.g. William Wordsworth’s Lines Written Above Tintern Abbey)

ballad

a poem with a musical quality that is narrative in nature (e.g. S.T. Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, part of Lyrical Ballads)

gothic

a genre characterized by an environment of fear, the threat of the supernatural, and the intrusion of the past upon the present; the American gothic includes a refusal of the sublime and a focus on excessive inwardness (e.g. Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher)

captivity narrative

a colonial American genre in which one is captured by those they deem uncivilized or whose values they opposed (e.g. Mary Rowlandson’s The Sovereignty and Goodness of God)

epistle

writing in the form of a letter or a series of letters typically addressed to a person or group of people (e.g. Alexander Pope’s Epistle II: To a Lady)

metrical foot

basic prosodic unit; a group of syllables that follow a certain pattern of stress

dactyl

strong, weak, weak

anapest

weak, weak, strong

trochee

strong to weak

iamb

weak to strong; standard metrical rhythm of the English verse line

dimeter

2 metrical feet

trimeter

3 metrical feet (e.g. Robert Burns’s The Holy Fair)

tetrameter

4 metrical feet (e.g. some lines in Robert Burns’s The Holy Fair)

pentameter

5 metrical feet; standard “heroic measure” of English poetry (e.g. Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock)

hexameter

6 metrical feet; “heroic measure” in ancient and Latin verse (e.g. some lines in Robert Burns’s The Cotter’s Saturday Night)

alexandrine

a line of 12 syllables in iambic hexameter (e.g. some lines in Robert Burns’s The Cotter’s Saturday Night)

blank verse

verse without rhyme, typically in iambic pentameter (e.g. William Wordsworth’s Lines Written Above Tintern Abbey, Phillis Wheatley’s To the University at Cambridge)

heroic couplet

a pair of rhymed lines of iambic pentameter (e.g. Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock)

spenserian stanza

eight lines of iambic pentameter followed by one line of iambic hexameter (e.g. Robert Burns’s The Cotter’s Saturday Night)

ballad measure

a specific poetic meter consisting of four line stanzas with the first and third lines in iambic tetrameter and the second and fourth in iambic trimeter with a rhyme scheme of ABCB (e.g. S.T. Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner)

meter

the rhythmic structure of a line created by the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables

caesura

syntactic break/pause within a line

enjambment

a continuation of the syntactic unit across the line-break

feminine ending

the addition of an unaccented syllable to the end of the last iambic foot of a line (e.g. Jonathan Swift’s The Lady’s Dressing Room)

free indirect discourse

describes a third-person narrative that has access to characters’ thoughts and feelings (e.g. Jane Austen’s Persuasion)

antithesis

compares and contrasts ideas with parallel grammatical structure (e.g. Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock)

concordia discors

dissonance contained in a larger concourse; harmony being achieved through the balance of opposing forces (e.g. Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock)

zeugma (syllepsis)

a word applies to two others in different senses (e.g. Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock)

apostrophe

a speech/address to a person who is not present/a personified object (Robert Burns’s To a Mouse)

sublime

sense of awe, wonder, and even terror as well as transcendence or exceeding ordinary limits

augustan

associated with the emperor Augustus; seeing London as a new Rome and characterized by a return to traditional Roman forms (e.g. Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift)

bard

a poet, traditionally associated with a particular oral tradition; the custodian/guardian of cultural values, identity, and history (e.g. Thomas Gray’s The Bard, Robert Burns as the Scottish national bard)

translatio studii/translatio imperii

the translation of knowledge (studii) and empire (imperii) westward

shibboleth

a word meant to police the linguistic boundaries of a community (e.g. “Houghmagandie” in Robert Burns’s The Holy Fair)

autoethnography

a description/account of a culture/people from someone of that culture with personal experiences in reflection of broader society and its effects (e.g. Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative)

contact zone

the space of colonial encounters; the space in which peoples geographically/historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations (e.g. the coast in Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative)

triangular trade

the transatlantic trade routes between Europe, Africa, and the Americas that allowed the exchange of goods and slaves

The Sovereignty and Goodness of God

Mary Rowlandson

• negative mirror image of the epic (national foundation)

• Rowlandson reduced to sub-human, but sees captors as animalistic

• Puritans idea of salvation only coming through faith]

• food as a gateway to culture, with what enters the body as a signifier of entry to a social body (Rowlandson joining the social body of her captors in various ways)

Oroonoko

Aphra Behn

• Surinam presented as a sort of Eden (sense of wonder); then portrays Native Americans in derogatory manner as grotesque

• Oroonoko calls out a Christian hypocrisy in the captain swearing on God rather than on his own honor

• Oroonoko reduces Imoinda to her aesthetic value by killing her and loses his own aesthetic appeal after attempting to take his own life

• distinguishes the supposedly “good” English as those that sympathize with Oroonoko, but they in fact fail to properly protect him

Robinson Crusoe

Daniel Defoe

• myth or fantasy of origins by beginning the world again; features the invention of culture and civilization, the rediscovery of agriculture, animal-husbandry, crafts, etc.

• romance of labor; Crusoe as an economic man in a new modern commercial age) and emphasizes the colonial ideology of placing importance of labor as fundamental to making the human world

• Crusoe keeps an account on the island, demonstrating an attempt to tame the world and the struggle of the intellectual labor of account

• Crusoe as the symbol of British conquest in his militarization and occupation of the island

• remembrance of money, even thought it is useless on the island; Crusoe is also overjoyed when he discovers his wealth (capitalistic and economic man)

Gulliver’s Travels

Jonathan Swift

• Swift makes fun of the popular European genre of the time of a curiosity about remote and new parts of the world

• emphasis on sensory experience and vivid immersion

• depict a series of adventures in culturalization, destabilizing a sense of cultural norms

• internalization of cultural norms for survival; “great Power of Habit and Prejudice”

The Rape of the Lock

Alexander Pope

• a mock-epic, utilizing epic conventions to make fun of the vanity and triviality of modern aristocratic life

• the toilet as a feminine interior world containing the artificial construct of the Goddess; a world of luxury commodities that is a product of international commerce (a sort of imperial fantasy in which the rest of the world offers itself to Europe for its use)

• lists that level everything and place them at equal value in an orderly relationship evokes the idea of disorder ready to errupt (reflects the new political order of imminent violence, concordia discors)

Epistle II: To a Lady

Alexander Pope

• depicts women as ever-changing and fickle; are either too emotional or too cold

• discusses various types of women (paintings/portraits) and claims that none of them are perfect; asserts that because of their inherent contradictory nature, women are best suited for domestic pursuits

The Lady’s Dressing Room

Jonathan Swift

• assertion of order emerging from confusion/variety

• depiction of the toilet/dressing room as a gross secret hidden by the external appearance of women

Epic and Empire

John Dryden

• modern age at odds with the values of the ancient heroic epic

The Reasons That Induced Dr. Swift to Write a Poem Called the Lady’s Dressing Room

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

• Swift hiring a prostitute but unable to get it up; blames his inability on the prostitute

• prostitute refuses to give him his money back, he asserts that he will write about her dressing room to ward off any customers, she says she will wipe her ass with his work

The Answer (To Pope’s Impromptu)

Anne Finch

• women have the faculties of intellectual thinking, but do not receive the proper education like men do

• allusion to Orpheus

• recommends that Pope should not offend women; he will not meet the same fate as Orpheus, but women still admire his work

An Epistle to Mr. Pope

Anne Ingram

• women and men are driven by the same desires

• women are only disadvantaged by their lack of opportunities for education

An Essay on Women

Mary Leapor

• in society’s eyes, women can do no right and are held to these impossible and contradictory standards

• women are not free and cannot enjoy the full advantages of freedom that men do; they are defined by factors such as their marital status and relationships to men

The Thresher’s Labor

Stephen Duck

• georgic in its depiction of laborers

• labor as anti-pastoral, exposing the false consciousness about the rural countryside)

• yet heroic with great value in the work itself (comparisons drawn from epic poetry, namely to ancient Greek heroes and divine figures)

The Woman’s Labor

Mary Collier

• emphasizes the immutable station of women, never able to break out of being a washerwoman until death

• a critique of Duck’s The Thresher’s Labor, with women’s workday not regulated by the sun while the men get to go home when the sun goes down and wake up when the sun rises

• asserts a gendered category of labor in which their martyrdom lacks any redemptive payoff

Elegy, Written in a Country Church-Yard

Thomas Gray

• from the perspective of a gentleman observing and contemplating the lives of the poor and their deaths

• mourns the lost possibility of a poor man getting educated and rising above his station, with peasants’ intellectual potential going unrecognized until their deaths

To Maecenas

Phillis Wheatley

• Maecenas: proverbial name for a wealthy patron of the arts (represents Western Classical literary tradition)

• Wheatley demonstrates humility yet boldness and audacity in claiming a position in and entering a literary tradition

• depicts poetry as a collaborative affair, even when one is attempting to usurp a prior poet

To the University at Cambridge

Phillis Wheatley

• an assumption of authority by Wheatley to be heard/listened to (invocation of the muse)

• encourages the students to embrace their education as well as religious values

On being brought from Africa to America

Phillis Wheatley

• calls out the racist troping of the color black being representative of moral darkness

• assertion of the idea that Christianity levels all in the eyes of God

On Imagination

Phillis Wheatley

• characterizes imagination as a faculty of transcendental freedom (flight)

• flight associated with freedom again and again; reminiscent although not necessarily referring to the folkloric motif of flying Africans (escape from enslavement)

• invokes the cycle of seasons, with winter representing bondage

To…William Earl of Dartmouth

Phillis Wheatley

• connects America’s struggle for independence from Great Britain with that of enslaved people

• celebrating the appointment of William Legge to the position of secretary of state overseeing the North American colonies and President of the Board of Trade and Foreign Plantations

To S.M. A Young African Painter

Phillis Wheatley

• praises the artist Scipio Moorhead for his drawings and art

• encourages him to use religious and divine inspiration (immortal) for his art so that he will achieve “immortal fame”

Epistle to J. L***k (John Lapraik)

Robert Burns

• scene of before Lent in which the men are singing songs and telling each other poems

• compares Lapraik to poets of English prose, asserting that his poem is as good as these well-regarded poets’ works; the poets that he references, however, are not all of the majority English and Christian populations

• rejects the title of poet for himself and claims natural inspiration for his work; claims Lapraik as an ally in thriving Scottish poeticism

To a Mouse

Robert Burns

• apostrophe that goes downwards to a mouse (rather than up to a muse)

• mouse analogous to the rural poor being evicted from their homes

• Man’s dominion granted to Adam, yet Burns sees the mouse as an equal and extends sympathy to even vermin

• stanza in English rather than Scots; addressing a higher philosophical concepts in what is regarded as a more formally educated and universal dialect while the cultural and familiar dialect is used to address the immediate/close

To the Deil

Robert Burns

• depricates Satan as some guy with a bunch of nicknames

• asserts that it is no fun torturing people and therefore portrays the Devil as a member of the laboring class community

• offers Satan sympathy and asserts that he too has a chance at redemption (undoing of Calvinist theological infrastructure)

• minimizes biblical stories like Milton’s Paradise Lost by portraying the Devil this way

The Holy Fair

Robert Burns

• describes the ceremony of taking holy sacrament for Presbyterians

• the speaker is immersed in the crowd, familiar with all the people

• “Houghmagandie”: a shibboleth, policing linguistic boundaries of a community; plays with the idea of the hermaphrodite (does one dare to admit knowledge of the meaning as a polite reader?)

• relocates the sense of what is sacred into the body and bodily desires

The Cotter’s Saturday Night

Robert Burns

• begins in English and transitions to Scots when the cotter arrives at home and sees his children

• concept of enrichment bringing vices among the pious; the family described are exemplary peasants with strong rural virtues

• the Bible reading is a demonstration of a national moral backbone

Tam O’ Shanter

Robert Burns

• a mock-epic in iambic tetrameter (not epic, comic)

• uses long simile like an epic

• describes a gendered social landscape (topography of masculine sexuality); male pleasure predicated on the exclusion of their wives and women

• witches portrayed as a secret domain of female enjoyment, possibly greater than males’

• pathetic image of male sexual yearning with the visibility of women’s bodies in real time inspiring a sort of phobia

The Bard

Thomas Gray

• the bard as the primitive/native poet and guardian of cultural order/meaning

• center of a culture in which poetry is central; poet has cultural centrality in an era when disciplines are emphasized

• describes models of history (progress, extinction, and revival)

• shifts meter, demonstrating the sheer violence of the smashing of culture and the passion with which cultural forms of poetry are torn apart

• an imitation of ancient genre (Pindaric ode)

Fragments of Ancient Poetry

James Macpherson

• translation from the Gaelic prose

• many landscapes of mourning, depictions of memory as a traumatic wound, and extinction scenarios (death of children by parent, etc.)

Fingal, An Ancient Epic Poem

James Macpherson

Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano

Olaudah Equiano

• inverse of captivity narrative, Equiano being snatched out of own world and forced into plantation slavery

• autoethnography: “others” construct in response to metropolitan representations

• addressed to political causes, adopting a pose of humility in representing a larger constituency; major work for communicating the goals of the abolition movement to the public

• evokes African culture as an “organic community” without division; there are slaves, but they are captives of war being integrated into the society, while European enslavement is commercialized

• turning point not with manumission, but with literacy and spiritual conversion; the act of forming life as a coherent narrative reflecting a sense of owning that life as one’s own

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

William Blake

• a mini-prophetic book of proverbs meant to jolt readers out of ways of thinking that we’re used to

• based on notion of antagonism, asserting the need to think in opposition to what we think we know in order to progress

• unified vision of the cosmos

Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience

William Blake

• appraising tradition, with a “song” being made into something radical

• poems between Innocence and Experience responding to each other, either reinforcing or challenging one another; responses can also happen within a poem

• “London”: tetrameter represents the still-developing child, “mark” as a verb (implication of noticing and reproduction) and a noun, blackening church as complicit in the issue of chimney-sweepers being increasingly children and also literally blacker because of the soot, “appalls” as turning white, wedding coach vs. hearse (STDs between sex workers and husbands)

Lyrical Ballads

S.T. Coleridge & William Wordsworth

• Wordsworth attempting to describe poetry as experiments for both writers and readers, returning it to common life

• Coleridge’s focus on the supernatural and extraordinary vs. Wordsworth’s focus on “common life”, the ordinary, everyday, and natural

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

S.T. Coleridge

• the wedding as the social order being interrupted by the mariner

• features a disorienting of time and space (time coming to a stop, in another reality); Coleridge is still able to imagine an open world with more out there yet to be codified

• still appeals to Christian cosmos and evoking Christian theology even when addressing alien, non-Christian spirits

The Idiot Boy

William Wordsworth

• a shaggy dog story: a long, involved story without point and which refuses poetic effects

• sort of animalistic, gleeful joy of Johnny that may have been shocking to the modern audience

The Thorn

William Wordsworth

• about Martha Ray, who was in love with a man named Stephen Hill; got pregnant, but Stephen left

• the thorn as the site of a child’s grave that Martha frequently visits and mourns at; the townspeople talk about what they think happened, but it is very certain

• describes a terrible traumatic event while the poem is dedicated to trying to figure out exactly what happened

Simon Lee

William Wordsworth

• about an old huntsman who has fallen on hard times; the narrator helps him in digging up the root of an old tree

• turns to the reader, both apologetic and challenging of the worthiness of the subject to be poeticized

• a story about common physical mortality

• features a democratizing gesture of inviting the reader to create the story with Wordsworth

The Old Cumberland Beggar

William Wordsworth

• describes an old beggar and the various acts of charity shown to him by the community

Michael

William Wordsworth

• describes an old pastor named Michael letting his son Luke leave home and go to the city in the hope of achieving success and a better life

• leaves project unfinished

Sir Patrick Spens

William Wordsworth

• ballad; demonstrates compression of time

• King of Scotland calls for a great sailor to make a voyage; Sir Patrick Spens is dismayed at having to sail in the winter and recognizes that he could die

• ship does end up sinking, killing Sir Patrick Spens and his men

Lines, Written above Tintern Abbey

William Wordsworth

• describes the act of getting older and losing one’s primordial contact they once had as children

• rolls on with many enjambments and caesuras, and written in blank verse, illustrating the movement of thought without and unconstrained by standard poetic units

• blank verse also associated with the high English of Milton and Shakespeare

• in iambic pentameter, but contains metrical irregularity

• poem structured around the rising and falling of elation and doubt; poetic language breaks down as Wordsworth reaches for something he cannot grasp

Expostulation and Reply

William Wordsworth

• asserts power of wise passiveness; encourages learning passively from nature rather than exclusively from books

• framed as Wordsworth’s friend asking him why he is wasting time just sitting on a rock outdoors rather than being inside studying books

The Tables Turned

William Wordsworth

• argues that nature is a better teacher than knowledge purely from books

• also asserts the importance of practical experience, with studying not being enough

Lucy

William Wordsworth

• series of poems describing the narrator’s feelings of loss and mourning over Lucy, a person they loved and admired from afar

• “diurnal” aka daily as “die urn all”, emphasizing the inevitability of mortality

Persuasion

Jane Austen

• a historical novel; Sir Walter being insecure in his status as a baronet (new social rank) and during war with Napoleonic France

• free indirect discourse perfected; gives reader agency to make own judgements

• the mirror as a trope of narcissism; Sir Walter has a dread of time passing with his objection of the naval profession and illustrated through his being in debt (an inability to account for the future)

• negation around Anne as nobody to her family and around Wentworth who is without fortune

• Anne as a melancholic heroine dislocated from “natural” time; thinks in hypotheticals and subjunctives

• follows a sequence of removals and excursions; with the movement to Lyme comes new possibilities

• Bath: urban scene (transition too being an aesthetic and auditory one) and a place of social appearance where social classes mingle

• Nurse Rooke as a hub of gossip and information channels, but goes unseen by Anne (the lower class as overlooked and invisible, the readers being made complicit by the lack of description)

• Anne and Wentworth able to come together through a series of mediations

The Two Drovers

Walter Scott

• short story narrating fate of traditional regional culture under the pressures of modernization

• commerce bringing people together, but also driving them apart by inspiring competition

• ethnical and national differences as constructed rather than natural

• tragedy as a clash between 2 moral codes, laws, or systems

• assumption that time to reason cools down passion and reactionary retaliation; an assumed and universalized coordination of time and space that psychology can be mapped on

Rappaccini’s Daughter

Nathaniel Hawthorne

• a morbid mix of literary modes like the garden is a mix of nature and artifice

• “love and horror”: contrary impulses fighting

The Fall of the House of Usher

Edgar Allan Poe

• foundational of the American Gothic

• gothic: set in an old manor house (architecture of past; the past still lingers and holds power)

• family tree not branching off is characteristic of the American Gothic idea of excessive inwardness and oppressive closure

• Roderick Usher with hypersensitivity, his senses collapsing in on each other; like the house eventually does

The Black Cat

Edgar Allan Poe

• narrator attempts to make sense and define a logic of cause and effect of the senseless acts of cruelty (like a scientific experiment that Poe invites the readers to)

• “spirit of perverseness”: committing an act because we know we should not

• formal arrangements interpreted as significant (image of cat on wall, white spot like photography, and corpse like Greek Herm)

The Pit and the Pendulum

Edgar Allan Poe

• experiment, with the reader disoriented from the perspective of the main character

• made to share the claustrophobic anguish of a lab rat with the main character

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

Frederick Douglass

• not knowing birthday or age as deprivation of status of humanity at birth; have to keep track of lifetime with the seasons like animals

• asserts that the institution of slavery brutalized and corrupts both slaveowners and slaves alike

• humanity is a variable rather than certain, literacy being the medium of struggle for humanity

• feeling (spontaneous wild songs of emotion) understanding (literacy), and action (battle with Mr. Covey) as turning points for humanity

Benito Cereno

Herman Melville

• suspense generated through free indirect discourse with readers attempting to read through Delano

• Delano’s misreadings of loving relationship between Don Benito and Babo: thinks in lazy, racist stereotypes; yet Delano has a poetic sensitivity and intuition

• shades of grey (black vs. white), ruined and charred palace, monastery as typical site of gothic fiction (past, such as oppressive system of slavery, still persisting and holding power)