PS-Q1

tell me more about what you mean with ‘books and people’ both being ‘works [you] wish to read’? - scientific (the author + choices - ‘reveals’) + personal ‘behaves’

• scientific - author makes directed choices (consciouly or unconsciously so) = people act in a way sustained by underlying reason - both deeply complex

• scientific - practice of close reading is transferable - reference childline

• scientific - emotional intelligence comes from understanding - lit exposes us to human experience

• personal- ‘reading is more essential to humanity now than jsut saying “oh, i really love it”’ + idea that books may not always make you feel better but will ‘make you see the world differently’ (Mary Beard, Chair of Booker Prize)

• personal - reading Dominion by Addie E Citchens for eg

why did you pick up on the ‘political intersectionality of queer relationships’ in particular?

• politics > shame - Ludwik and Janusz struggle yes because of the shame but politics is forefronted

• politics > shame - in their final argumen Ludwik asks Janusz to flee with him again (abt to get passport), but Janusz won’t ‘I belong here. And I will make it’ - heteronormity is only to reflect normality (its not an act of shame) and this is needed because of the Party and political suppression

• the canon - queer people are multi-dimensional as canon develops (compare with Giovanni’s Room which feels entirely occupied w shame - and which Ludwik, at first not fully understanding the importance of politics, often references)

• personally drawn to texts which prioritize class struggles - normal people (think of Marriane’s struggle as a woman but privileged), in that sense i perhaps have a sort of Marxist tendency of reading

why the comparison between White Nights and Intermezzo?

• through time - The Dreamer’s ‘anxious attachment’ is timeless (‘my Nastenka’), Peter’s narrative is choppy (lacks line separation/speech marks) and is said to be inspired by Ulysses (who is mentioned in a convo w Sylvia!)

• endings - both lack conventionally satisfying endings which explain human condition (Dreamer doesn’t end up with Nastenka, Peter’s unconventional relationship w Sylcia and Naomi)

• self indulgent characters - video essay sugests Dreamer is a lover of narrative above all else (so people wish to be like books), Peter can be so selfish but it is so human! (Sylvia his soulmate - when he is with ‘that feeling, he thinks: all he has wanted, all his life’)

tell me more about the ‘convention’ Beloved was disregarding

• ‘so charged with pain that the novel becomes poetry’ - criticisim of The Bluest Eye, stream-of-consciousness interior monologues, kinship of characters, the psychological destruction of grief and the Middle Passage, ‘I am beloved and she is mine’ (matriarchal love that knows no barriers)

• re-invention of structure mirrors re-invention of narrative - Morrison was dealing with the struggle of particularly black women, the monstrous maternal as a product of the monstrousity of slavery

• rebellion becomes cannonical - won the Nobel Prize for literature (money), important because of the meaning which this break-away carried with it

what did you find interesting about the criticism ‘a symptom of immaturity’?

• wider (later + dominant) praise for Modernists - Eliot, Pound, etc all celebreties, Morrison won Nobel Prize, this was a contrasting idea

• criticism of modern art - enjoy it too (recently saw Klein’s Untitled Blue Monochrome), anyone could do that so whats the value? generally interested in arts (fun of Woolf saying 1915 Impressionist exhibition is when the way we saw things changed)

• delved into earlier criticism - Waugh said Elliot’s work was that of a ‘drunken slave’ and a 1923 article in Cassell’s weekly criticised Ulysses

• an interest in immediate criticism and what develops from it (bookclub!)

what did you find ‘innovative’ about Eliot? - The Wasteland

• Thursday lunchtime extention sessions helped me contextualise what made it ‘innovative’

• New Criticism - BUT, Eliot would want us to appreciate it not contextually as innovative

• Polyphony (multiple voices) - from ‘April is…’ to ‘I’+ Ms Sostoris, Eliot considers all these angles of his central theme of urban breakdown (like those maths spacial reasoning questions), question of how we connect in a communal space of poetry when we come from ‘radically private experience’, how do we move from the general to the particular? (Yale course) - in this way sort of similar to Joyce’s Ulysses?

what did you find ‘innovative’ about Woolf? - The Death of the Moth

• small as big - similar to what we see in Ulysses, also for much of the essay we are encouraged into an interest in the moth without its role as a metaphor being so emphasised (he is just part of the scene, with the plough outside and wider the pastoral imagery)

• morals - the essay is focused on her observation, but also the emotions that this observation provokes (yet it does not move into the stage of action as she ultimately accepts death for the moth and doesn’t try to save it with her pencil), Woolf really liked Emerson and he said that ‘in the work of a writer of genius, we rediscover our own neglected thoughts’

• gender - in terms of gender, she is actually one of the writer’s where i found the criticism of modernism as elitist most interesting - less to do about her prose being inaccessible and more to do with Showalter syaing her ‘flight into androgyny’ was a (privileged) escape from having to really talk about women’s oppression

what did you find ‘innovative’ about Joyce? Tower of Babel - Ulysses + Finnegan’s wake

• Ulysses’ principle - suggests Bloom (cuckolded, sacked, unimpressive) is as worthy of attention as Ulysses/Odysseus, the ordinary as extraordinary, really a theme I + contemporary lit return to (Normal People)

• Finnegan’s wake - a reunderstanding of realism as he felt his tower of Babel best represented what the human mind and characters ACTUALLY sound like

what is the value in Paris, France?

• inate - interesting to read this description which was meant to create a ‘continuous present’, reading her work is also fun - so self-indulgent about ‘creating the 20th century’ and loopy, feels like the primary source of all those contemporary works concerned with the artist and creation of movement

• writing that failed - most successful work was ‘The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas’ (a bestsller that adhered to convention/not modernist), perhaps helpful in supporting argument that the modernist writer’s success wasn’t just cos they were doing something new but they were doing it well and to the exploration of new feeling/ideas

• modernism as a wider movement - personally connected to Picasso and Matisse, shows how culture was changing (not just literature), she was perhaps the one who thought of herself as a modernist most externally,

• her greatest value is perhaps contextual!

what do you mean by the ‘reliance on Dicken’s realism as an anchor’?

• my mistakes! - taking the work to be too intentionally ‘new’ (and I’m not particularly struck by the idea of the ‘new’, given it needs the ‘old’ to define it and so is not so entirely radical)

• Eliot & co’s stance - they did not argue for an appreciation of their work under this light, were not ‘self-consciously modernist’ (did not refer to themselves as such), rather were of the ‘New Criticism’ approach (Elliot’s essay)

wolf on gender

• Orlando - when Orlando first sees Sasha in the frost market on the Thames, he doesn’t know her sex, but feels a passionate attraction anyway - the setting is one of stillness/freeze, and in such a way Woolf explores through Orlando what lust/romance might look like when gender is frozen

• sex as secondary - Middlesex of course, but also Taiwan Travelogue (would it have been as effective as a story on colonisation if it was not also a queer text?)