As we went down through Indiana–you were too young, child, to remember it, but I always think of all of you, the way you looked that morning when we went down through Indiana, going to the Fair. All of the apple trees were coming out and it was APRIL.
Sister says:
Can you remember how Robert used to look?… I was looking at the old photograph the other day — that picture showing all of us before the house in Orchard Street? You weren’t there, You hadn’t arrived
And how we went to St. Louis back in 1904
Henry James, “The Jolly Corner” (1908)
Semi autobiographical
Returned to America 30 years later, returned to his home
All his relatives died and he was the only one left
Spent his time going through room after room
Always thought about himself as the guy who never left (his alter ego)
Eventually met his alter ego
Couldn't see his face because the ghost was hiding behind his hands
“Ghostly visits” emphasizes the ambivalence of what is normally called “reality” and “fact”” the remembered experience has far more solidarity than the objective drab shell of life.
Freud
The uncanny (Das Unheimliche)
The Fish by Elizabeth Bishop
Repetition of the same thing, becoming lost and retracting one’s steps
Fort and Da (gone and there) Freud’s grandson realized he can control the game but not his parents' actions. Had the resemblance of being in control.
Jacques Lacan- mirror stage
Elizabeth Bishop, “The Fish”
Spent her time fishing
The fish in her poem did not fight because he was caught and released over and over again
The fish knows the deal of catch and release
This ruins the fun of fishing for victory
Flat poem
Repeated similes
Knowledge requires a knower and a known
Knowledge is both a tool and a weapon
The Fish poem is about the ethics of knowing
Fisherman is bothered that the fish is not fighting for its life
Robert Lowell “Skunk Hour”
Skunk Hour Poem:One dark night, my Tudor Ford climbed the hill’s skull; I watched for love-cars . Lights turned down, they lay together, hull to hull, where the graveyard shelves on the town. . . . My mind’s not right. A car radio bleats,
“Love, O careless Love. . . .” I hear my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell, as if my hand were at its throat. . . . I myself am hell; nobody’s here— only skunks, that search in the moonlight for a bite to eat. They march on their soles up Main Street: white stripes, moonstruck eyes’ red fire under the chalk-dry and spar spire of the Trinitarian Church. I stand on top of our back steps and breathe the rich air— a mother skunk with her column of kittens swills the garbage pail She jabs her wedge-head in a cup of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail, and will not scare.
Robert Lowell:
“The first four stanzas are meant to give a dawdling more or less amiable picture of a declining Maine sea town. I move from the ocean inland, Sterility howls through the scenery, but I try to give a tone of tolerance, humor, and randomness to the sad prospect. The composition drifts, its direction stinks out of sight into the casual, chancy arrangements of nature and decay. Then all comes alive in stanzas V and VI. This is the dark night…My night is not gracious, but secular, puritan, and agnostical. An Existentialist night.”
Skunk Hour title shows the division and acknowledgment that human beings are going through suffering
Existentialism: expassing the notion of nothing “God is Dead” absurdity making sense
Lady Lazarus by Sylvia Plath
Call
“Je m’appelle” (I call myself…)
“Miracle!”
Caul (“glass caul”)
Bell Jar
Ishamel is Abraham’s illegitimate son
Wants to break out of glass caul or breaking through the limitations
Sylvia Plath’s career was based on her trauma and time of living
One of the biggest dilemma’s was despite her talent as a writer, her being a woman hindered her.
Daddy by Sylvia Plath
Intro
Written in 1962
Mythologizes the father figure
Widely anthologized and one of Plath’s most iconic and enduring works
Recall Plath’s own father’s early death
It is also likely addressed at least times, to Hughes
Plath wrote about anger, including macabre humor, and resistance in “Daddy”
Yet at the same time, she contrasted those dark subject matters with themes of jay, in hand with a deeper understanding of the numerous hindering functions of women
Plath is very angry during this time
Lady Lazarus,,,,, is also an angry poem
Was raising two kids by herself during this time
She was strangely productive
Her husband, Ted Hughs and her were separated since he was cheating on her
“The poem is spoken by a girl with an Electra complex. Her father died while she thought he was God. Her case is complicated by the fact that her father was also a Nazi and her mother was possibly part Jewish. In the daughter, the two strains marry and paralyze each other—she has to act out the awful little allegory once before she is free of it.”
Two daddies in this poem: Her father that died when she was a child,
Sounds carry semantic meaning
Sylvia Plath
Wrote poems about bumble bees
Her father, Otto passed away when she was eight. This traumatized her
Tried to kill herself three times; succeeded the third time
Born in 1932, in Boston
Plath’s father, Otto Plath was an entomologist and a professor of biology at Boston University
Father died in 1940 due to amputation of foot
Attended Smith college, a prestigious women's college
Submitted thesis of the Two Dostoveskeys in 1955
During her third year of college, she is awarded am illustrious position as a guest editor at Mademoiselle magazine
Mental Health and Writing
Plath made her first suicide attempt on August 24th, 1953 by crawling under the front porch and taking her mother’s sleeping pills
Survived first attempt, later saying she saw blackness
Meeting Ted Hughes
Met at Cambridge, seeking Hughes out after reading his poetry
Married 6 months after meeting with Plath’s mother as the only witness
Moved back to the United States
Plath taught at Smith College
Plath took a job as a receptionist at the psychiatric unit of Massachusetts General Hospital
Early Career and Marriage
Moved back to England in december 1959
Daughter Frieda was born on April 1, 1960
February, 1961, plath suffers a misscarriage
Plath’s Divorce
Couple begin renting out their flat out to a couple
Ted Hughes meets Assia Wevill and plath finds out they are having an affair triggering her
Plath’s Depression
October 1962, Plath experiences burst of creativity composes most of the poems which her reputation now rests
Winter of 1962-63 was the coldest, children was often sick in an unheated flat in London having a miserable time
Her only novel, the Bell Jar was published in January 1963
Plath’s Suicide
While for most of the time Plath was working, her depression worsened
Loses 20 lbs during that period
The day of her death she had a live-in nurse coming in
Plath was found dead with her head in the oven
She made sure that there was no contact of the carbon monoxide reaching her kids by making sure to put towels and tape between the rooms to seal them
Assia Wevill
Wevill was reportedly haunted by Plath’s memory; began using things which once belonged to sylvia
No Name Woman by Maxine Hong Kingston
Horrible story based on real events
Memoirs have to be factual and verifiable
Book was controversial due to her upbringing in America between two cultures
On the Road by Jack Keuroauc
About hitchhiking
“Howl” by Allen Ginsberg
Looking for an angry fix
Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior
“Good Chinese Girl” vs “Open American”
Controversial because there was no real way to confirm if her experiences were real
Memoir is able to describe what is going on in the head
Story opens with ""You must not tell anyone," my mother said, "what I am about to tell you. In China your father had a sister who killed herself. She jumped into the family well. We say that your father has all brothers because it is as if she had never been born”
Villagers got angry that baby was born out of wedlock
Family tried to suppress this story until Kingston was told this story as a cautionary tale
Story is framed as a family secret
Story is framed as a secret to gain confidence
Propman is not part of the story but still part of the story aka parenthetical permace
Marginal characters in a patriarchal society are the observers such as women
Males are often able to control the narrative
Those with nothing at stake or no power are more reliable narrators / story tellers because they do not have much at stake
“If I want to learn what clothes my aunt wore, whether flashy or ordinary, 1 would have to begin, "Remember Father's drowned-in-the-well sister?" I cannot ask that. My mother has told me once and for all the useful parts. She will add nothing unless powered by Necessity, a riverbank that guides her life. She plants vegetable gardens rather than lawns; she carries the odd-shaped tomatoes home from the fields and eats food left for the gods.
Mother was frugal
Mother lives by the principal of necessity
“Adultery is extravagance”
Two principles of life are necessity and extravagance
Villagers are angry because they are viewing the pregnancy as a selfish gesture when people are starving
Villagers live by the principal of necessity but they see the aunt as living in extravagance by having sex and getting pregnant
Restrict economy is about focusing the economy on increasing human life style by providing basic necessities
General economy is when the economy focuses on personal growth such as college degrees etc
Life is about production or life is about expenditure, waste, and dying
Sex was originally only meant to have kids but now has lost its meaning
Maybe, must have, or are conjunctions
Counterfactual statements are powerful because of the possibilities of what could have been
Counterfactual statements are also mental images of things that do not exist such as unicorn, dragon, Gold Mountain
Mental objects play a strong part in our mental image
“Devoting pages of paper” chinese tradition of burning money for the dead
Money is burned so that the essence of the money can be grabbed by the ghosts to be used in the after life
Paper money, orgimani, and burning money; making something out of nothing
Haunts has the word AUNTS “r. The Chinese are always very frightened of the drowned one, whose weeping ghost”
Chinese superstition
Socrates and Plato believed in reincarnation
When a person dies, the soul starts the reincarnation process
Two conditions: a criminal or a person who has drowned are stuck in limbo
Only way to escape limbo as a drowned person is to replace themself with a substitute
Her aunt may be upset for spilling her beans
Medium is the person that speaks up for the spirits
Medium is a dangerous job because you expose yourself to spirits
Maxine is using herself as the substitute as a medium to tell her aunt’s story
The writer is the substitute of the drowned ghost
Her aunt did come back alive; but with no name
Narrator is the medium
Medium is a translator
What is literature?
Putting herself in another’s shoes
Political reps are investigating and imagining placing themselves in the shoes of citizens
N. Scott Momaday
Native American Quotes
Kiowa Indian
PhD from Stanford
Got his first job as assistant professor at UCSB
Published as a chapbook
The Journey of Tai-me
(fine edition limited to 100 hand-printed copies)
Sacred Sun Dance doll
Tai me is the sacred sundance doll
Tai-me is told in a Tripartite format (three part format)
Mythology
History
Family
Non linear time
“And” (american rhythm)
Each “and” is co-existing, not hierarchy
Palimpsest- parchment made from animal skin; computer memory is a palimpsest
palimpsest is anything that holds memory; forgotten things can be recovered if you know how to
Only colonists appeared time to be linear
Stories that come with their own telling;
Dialogism
Communal
Culture as a way of life
Total translation
Songs have their own souls
Can be uprooted and translated but originality cannot be replicated
“I became more keenly aware of myself as someone who had walked through the time and in whose blood there is something inestimably old and undying. It was as if I had remembering something that happened two hundred years
Simon Ortiz
Advocated against uranium mining in New Mexico
Fought in the Vietnam War
How did Sam Ortiz Write about the Sand Creek Massacre?
“There are ghost towns all over the West; some are profitable tourist attractions of the “frontier,” others are merely sad and unknown”
“Colonel Chivington was a moral man, believed he was made in the image of God, and he carried out the orders of his nation’s law; Kit Carson didn’t mind stealing and killing either At the salvation Army A clerk Caught me Wandering Among old spoons And knives Sweaters and shoes I couldn’t have stolen anything; my life was stolen already”
Frontier Thesis was a powerful trope
Westward movement starting in the 19th century
Think “Manifest Destiny”
Concept that God gave colonists the right to expand westward
Center of the world is went from the mediterranean, to the atlantic, and eventually the pacific
“The Frontier is the line of most rapid and effective Americanization. The wilderness masters the colonists. It finds him a European in dress, industries, tools, modes of travel, and thought. It takes him from the railroad car and puts him in the birch canoe… Moving westward, the frontier became more and more American”
Frederick Jackson Turner (1893)
“Teleological suspension of the ethical” (Soren Kierkegaard)
Abraham
Conception or commitment to a goodness that transcends one’s current understanding of the good
Radical Hope
What does morality mean when a good person commits atrocities by just doing their job
Radical hope is when you can only hope in the dark. How can you believe in concepts of bravery?
Radical Hope comes from the biblical story of Abraham
Abraham must kill isaac to suspend the notion of the ethical