ENG-120-INA Final Exam

"The 1980s: Disasters, Divestment, Diversity" 

• Global progress towards democracy but much went wrong 

• Murders or attempted murders of world leaders & prominent artists 

• Icons murdered - John Lennon in 1980 & Marvin Gaye in 1984 

• Political assassinations: Egyptian President Anwar Sadat 

• Assassination attempts: Pope John Paul & President Ronald Reagan (survived) 

• Alarming spread of a deadly AIDS virus 

• Chernobyl nuclear disaster in the Soviet Union in 1986 

• U.S. space shuttle Challenger in 1986 

• The world's superpowers, despite their technological superiority, were far from infallible 

(Continued) 

• Cold War diminished 

• Iran-Iraq war, 1980-1988 

• Soviet Union disintegrated & Berlin Wall knocked down 

• Divestment from South Africa help bring the end to the Apartheid 

• Racial & ethnic diversity becomes more important "within our own borders" (Lauter 3433) 

• Toni Morrison's novel Beloved "tells the story of slavery in such a way as to be both personal & collective" (Lauter 3433) 

• U.S. begins "to contemplate its history & its role on the global stage in more sophisticated ways than ever before" (Lauter 3343) 

"Raymond Carver's 'What We Talk About When We Talk About Love'" 

• Characters: Two couples 

  • Mel, 45 years old, cardiologist; & Terri 

  • Laura, 35 years old, legal secretary; & Nick, 35 years old, story's 1st-person narrator 

• Setting: "sitting around a kitchen table" (Carver 3455) talking about love 

• Start of the story: "Sunlight filled the kitchen from the big window behind the sink" (Carver 3455) 

• Multiple images of the light in the room as the conversation advances, including one at the beginning of the story & one at the end 

• Stark descriptions of the world outside: "Outside in the backyard, one of the dogs began to bark" (Carver 3458) 

• Terri's view toward love, as expressed in her story about Ed: "the man she lived with before she lived with Mel loved her so much he tried to kill her" (3455) 

• Terri: "Be he [Ed] loved me. In his own way maybe, but he loved me" (Carver 3455) 

• Mel notes that Ed killed himself with the gun Ed bought "to threaten Terri & me" (Carver 3457) 

• Terri: "I was in the room with him when he [Ed] died" (Carver 3457) 

• Mel's view toward love: "Physical love," "Carnal love," "Sentimental love" (3458-3459) 

• Mel's story of his first wife: "But now I hate her guts" (3459) 

• Mel says that part of the "saving grace" in his love with Laura is that "if something happened to one of us tomorrow, I think the other one would grieve…but the surviving party would go out & love again, have someone else soon enough" (Carver 3459) 

  • What does this tell us about his view on love? Do you agree with this view toward love? 

• Mel's story about a couple in their "mid-seventies" who are involved in a car accident 

• Mel points out that, "it was killing the old fart because he couldn't look" at his wife (3462) 

• Setting: "The light was draining out of the room, going back through the window where it had came from" (3463) 

Minimalism 

• Plot & Minimalism 

  • Plot: The discussion ends without a full closure on the meaning of love: "I could hear my heart beating, I could hear everyone's heart. I could hear the human noise we sat there making, not one of us moving, not even when the room went dark" (3464) 

• Minimalism: Carver's work has been described as "Minimalism" 

  • A type of story that limits narrative details & description by narrator 

  • Plots are left open-ended 

  • Ernest Hemingway's minimalism: Much dialogue but litter narrator-provided description, such as in Hemingway's short story "Hills Like White Elephants" 

  • "Iceberg Theory": Like an iceberg that is only 10% visible above the water, only 10% of the story is written on the page; the other 90% of the iceberg lies beneath the surface of the water just as the other 90% of the story lies beneath or inside of what is written on the page 

    • What happens next?  

"Toni Morrison's 'Recatitif'" 

• Short Story: Formal Features 

  • Title: "Recatitif" - The title refers to a feature of music that focuses on the rhythms involved between song & speech or rhythms in language. The episodic plot is kind of 'Recatitif' 

  • Characters: Twyla & Roberta; become friends at St. Bonny's shelter at 8 years of age; their parents are alive 

    • Takes place at an orphanage, this is strange because parents are alive 

  • Point of view: Twyla's 1st-person 

  • Setting: St. Bonny's & elsewhere between the 1950s & 1980s 

  • Plot structure: 5 episodes 

Plot: 5 Episodes 

1. St. Bonny's: Race, family, Maggie are all introduced 

2. 1960s at Howard Johnson's, Twyla is working; Roberta is going to see Jimmi Hendrix 

3. Shopping at the Food Emporium,  a gourmet grocery store: Roberta is wealthy ("dark blue limousine" with a driver 3548) & Twyla is middle class; they seem to get along; Maggie story mentioned: Did Maggie fall or was she "knocked down" (3549) 

4. Picketing busing practices: Twyla sees Roberta picketing the forced integration. Roberta says, "You're the same little state kid who kicked a poor old black lady when she was down on the ground. You kicked a black lady & you still have the nerve to call me a bigot" (Morrison 3552). Twyla replies, "She wasn't black" (Morrison 3552) 

5. At a "small diner" on Christmas Eve in the 1980s: Roberta wants to discuss what she said about Maggie. The story ends on an ambiguous note with regard to what actually happened with Maggie 

Theme of Race 

• Twyla: "It was one thing to be taken out of your own bed early in the morning - it was something else to be stuck in a strange place with a girl from a whole other race" (Morrison 3541) 

  • We don’t know anyone's race, its based on how we perceive race based in stereotypes 

• Twyla's mother tells her that, "they never washed their hair & they smelled funny" ( Morrison 3541) 

• Maggie "couldn't talk… she was old & sandy-colored & she worked in the kitchen" (Morrison 3543). We do not know Maggie's race 

• On-going yet sometimes strained friendship at the shelter & he 30 year intermittent relationship between two girls - Role of race? 

Morrison's Approach to Writing 

• Experimental in its approach to the short story because we do not learn the race of the main characters, Twyla & Roberta 

• We are left to decide for ourselves based on, we assume, our individual preconceptions 

• The story of Maggie (the old lady) is left unresolved 

  • Is this minimalism? 

  • Lacking foreclosure? 

• Morrison's position as one of the most important authors in the twentieth-century American literature is achieved in her novels, most notably Beloved, The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, and Sula. Her work explores representations of African-American experience, womanhood, & African-America history 

"The 1990s: New World Disorder" 

• "New World Disorder":  A phrase that gains its meaning from understanding the phrase "new world order" 

• Cold War ends 

• US "only remaining superpower" (Lauter 3758) 

• President Bill Clinton 1993-2001 / Fleetwood Mac song 

• Wealth expands: Venture capitalists & "modest middle-class investors became rich" (Lauter 3758) 

• Yet a "sense of disorder clutched the 1990s" (Lauter 3758) 

• "Armed standoffs between government agencies & antigovernment forces - militias, cults, or rogue individuals - marred the ebullient mood of prosperity & forward-thinking innovation" (Lauter 3758) 

  • Ruby Ridge, Idaho - The Weaver family / 2 deaths (1992) 

  • Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas - David Koresh / 76 deaths (1993) 

  • Anti-government militia movements: Federal building bombing in Oklahoma City, OK 

    • Timothy McVeigh / 168 deaths (1995) 

  • Columbine High School - 13 deaths (1999) 

  • Rodney King riots in Los Angeles - Disenfranchisement with judicial & penal systems (1992) 

• 1990s: Democracy grows across the world but individual rights at home are "subjected to gross misinterpretation, giving rise to an unpredictable series of violent events…on the home front" (Lauter 3758-9) 

Literature of the 1990s 

• 1990s literature tended "toward the domestic" (Lauter 3759) 

  • Art Spiegelman & Naomi Shihab Nye 

• Immigrant literature: Family and self; "the intense need for the sons or daughters of immigrants to understand & appreciate their parents, who made the difficult decision to leave behind their homelands but also to help negotiate between their stories & the somewhat intransigent American story" (Lauter 3759) 

• Gender identity: "Also related to the expectations of one's family, often a favorite subject of ethnic writers. One consistent motif in women's writing during this period is an examination of the circumstances & meaning of one's sexual awakening… & a curiosity about how one's sexual experiences connect or fail to connect to one's public gender identity" (Lauter 3759) 

• Visual aspects of literature grow: "Willingness to accommodate the predominately visual aspects of American popular culture" (Lauter 3759) 

• Rise of the graphic narrative: "Reflects the desire of writers & reader to consider the way literature has changed as Americans became more comfortable 'reading' images, perhaps due to the rise of the Internet" (Lauter 3759) 

• Hypertext developed: The reader's interactive capabilities are expanded dramatically, sharing control of the plot structure & access to extra-textual materials 

• Highly visual appeal: "Demonstrated publishers' willingness to appeal to a new generation of readers attuned to visual elements as they relate to literary culture" (3759) 

"Art Spiegelman's Maus II" 

• Art Spiegelman 

  • Born in Sweden in 1948 to Anja & Vladek Spiegelman, Polish Jews who has survived Auschwitz 

  • Arguably "the world's most influential living progenitor of the idea that comic books can be [serious] literature" (Chute 3765) 

  • Explores "the medium's [i.e. comics] formal capacities" (Chute 3766) 

  • Maus II engages "form with the power of narrative" (Chute 3766) 

    • Formal features: Medium of comics, plot, character, point of view 

• Maus II - Spiegelman's Writing Approaches 

  • Genre: Comics, a black-and-white text 

  • Plot: Tells the story of Vladek Spiegelman's (art's father) Holocaust testimony & the story of Art Spiegelman's struggle to tell the story in Maus II; Art's efforts to collect his father's memories and stories of the Holocaust and to narrate the stories in comics 

  • Characters: Vladek, Art, Anja, Pavel 

    • "Represents Jews as mice & Nazis as cats, inhabiting and reversing stereotypes created by Nazi propaganda" (Chute 3766) 

  • Point of view (narration): 1st person - the author (Art Spiegelman) 

Themes 

• The horror of the Holocaust 

• History 

• The responsibility of survivors to tell their stories 

  • The burden of guilty & self-awareness, survivor's guilt: Speaking with his therapist, Art feels "completely messed up" (3771) 

• Effect of the past on the present 

  • His book is a success, but his mother kills herself ("she left no note" (3769)); the picture of Art surrounded by dead & emaciated Jewish mice as he writes (Spiegelman 3769) 

• Capitalism: 

  • Financial/publishing success & the commitment to art: "a critical success" (Spiegelman 3769) 

  • Spiegelman is pressed to present marketing informative for his book: "Tell our viewers what message you want them to get from your book" (3770); licensing deal 

• Racism  

• Father-son relationships: "Even so, every boy when he's little, looks up to his father" (Spiegelman 3772) 

• Luck: Relates to survivor's guilt; in response to a question about possibly admiring his father for surviving, Art tells Pavel, his therapist, that, "Well, sure, I know there was a lot of luck involved" (Spiegelman 3773). 

Maus II, Critical Concepts 

• Postmodern "metafiction": Fiction that comments on the status of fiction; the text is self-reflexive 

  • Self-reflexive: Maus II focuses on the story told - or the work of telling the story told - in the text; this is a feature of metafictional texts 

• As Chute points out, Maus II "is self-reflective. Meditating on & rupturing its own established frameworks, including its animal metaphor & its past-and-present narrative structure" (Chute 3766) 

"Naomi Shihab Nye's Poetry" 

Family Story & Identity 

• German American mother & Palestinian American father 

• A Marcy Jane Knopf - Newman, Nye's family became refugees in 1948 when they lost their "home in Jerusalem to Israeli settler" (Knopf - Newman 3836) 

• 1966: Nye's family "sold is business & moved to the Middle East, to a town eight miles north of Jerusalem" (Knopf - Newman 3836) 

• 1967: Six-day war; the family flees on the eve of this war 

• The family returned to the United States & moved to Texas "where Naomi found herself homesick from Palestine - for the muezzin, the olive groves, & her grandmother's stories" (Knopf - Newman 3836) 

• As Knopf points out, "The borderland culture of Texas provides Nye. With striking thematic parallels of invisible & dispossessed peoples" (Knopf - Newman 2826) 

• Moreover, " A product of Texas, where Bye has spent the bulk of her life with her husband & son, she has been profoundly influenced by Latino & Native American art & literature" (Knopf - Newman 3836) 

Reading "Ducks" 

• Epigraph: A short quotation or saying at the beginning of a book or chapter, intended to suggest its theme 

  • "We thought of ourselves as people of culture. 

  How long will it be till others see us that way again." - Iraqi friend 

• Speaker: 3rd-person speaker but the story is near to Shihab Nye's personal story & life experiences 

• Imagery 

  • "Ducks" Imagery: Nye lines 1-5 

  • Nye lines (13-23) 

• Diction 

• Meter: Free verse 

"Ducks" Imagery 

• "She could not call her family in Basra 

Which had grown farther away than ever 

Nor could they call her. For nearly a year 

She would not know who was alive,  

The ducks were building a nest" (Nye lines 24-29) 

• What's the significance of the image of the nest? 

Themes 

• "the way historical events affect people's daily lives…shaped largely by a family legacy of dispossession" (Knopf-Newman 3836) 

• "poetically documenting stories that would otherwise be rendered invisible" (Knopf-Newman 3836) 

  • Would be lost in time 

• "humanizes people who are dehumanized in the media & history" (Knopf-Newman 3836) 

  • Portrayed a certain way, not stereotyped 

• "To see similarities across the visible difference" (Knopf-Newman 3837) 

  • See others the way we'd see ourselves 

"Drama: How I Learned to Drive Paula Vogel" 

Drama: State Properties, Stage & Production Features 

• State properties: Anything that is moveable on the stage 

• The stage: Sparse set 

  • Minimalist  

• Lighting 

• Slides & projections 

• Sound: Music 

• Traffic signs 

• Titles  

Production Features & Stage Directions 

• Memory play 

• Three-person Greek chorus plays the supporting roles of family & passers by 

• Narrator voice overs (e.g. "Vehicle Failure") 

• Italicized stage directions from Paula Vogel (e.g. "Li'l Bit pantomimes refastening her bra behind her back") 

• Other set elements? 

Characters 

• Li'l Bit: "A woman who ages forty-something to eleven years old" 

  • Lots of time passes 

• Peck: "Attractive man in his forties. Despite as few problems, he should be played by an actor one might cast in the role of Atticus in To Kill a Mockingbird" 

• The Greek Chorus: Various forms, e.g. "as waiter," "as mother" 

• The family: Grandfather, grandmother, Aunt Mary 

Themes & Analysis 

• Plot is ordered through the central character's memory 

• Subject matter: "incest and sexual predation - this dark comedy-drama won the New York Draa Critics' Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and Obie Award for Playwriting" (Abbotson 3859) 

• "Young girl's sexual awakening through the attentions of an older man" (Abbotson 3859) 

• Driving lessons are a metaphor used to "relate a complex tale of the relationship between the abused & the abuser" (Abbotson 3859) 

• Pushes "the boundaries of censorship with her language & choice of subject" (Abbotson 3858-3859) 

• "Vogel resists portraying the central protagonist, Li'l Bit, as the victim, & by depiction her uncle Peck as an attractive & kindly person, she emphasizes the ambiguities of the situation" (Abbotson 3860) 

• "The play is more about growth & maturation than the destructive force of abuse" (Abbotson 3860) 

• Paula Vogel has stated that "the play is not a play about pedophilia but about 'coming of age' in our difficult contemporary culture" (Abbotson 3860) 

  "The Twenty-First Century: 9/11 & Beyond" 

  • 9/11: September 11, 2001 Terror attacks on the Twin Towers 

  • Americans experience more fear & are less confident about "global prominence" (Lauter 3947) 

  • Growing unease: "Paranoia became the dominant response" (Lauter 3947) 

  • Anthrax started appearing in the mailboxes of member of Congress & ordinary citizens, one of whom died as a result 

  • "The so-called 'war on terror' has reaffirmed America's military superiority, but it has also led to renewed questions about America's role on the global stage" (3947) 

  • "Contemporary literature both embraces & reflects the chaos of the contemporary world" (Lauter 3948) 

    • Postmodernism  

  • "The rational logic of cause & effect is difficult to discern in these works. The reader can come away disoriented & wondering whether stability is possible in the real world or in works of fiction" (Lauter 3948) 

  • "Many postmodern works create their own world, but others play with the history & legends of the world we think we know" (Lauter 3948) 

  • "History thus becomes one of the most prominent subjects of twenty-first century literature" (Lauter 3948) 

   

  "The 9/11 Terror Attacks' & Jean Baudrillard's 'The Spirit of Terrorism'" 

   

  The 9/11 Terror Attacks 

  • Paradox: The 9/11 Attacks, the destruction of New York's World Trade Center towers 

  • "U.S. economic & cultural domination has increased, the country has become a focus for the frustrations of violent religious zealots. And their attacks - both physical &ideological - have challenged U.S. domination itself" (Keniston 4022) 

  • The U.S. led war in Iraq 

  • Hurricane Katrine along the Gulf Coast 

  • Baudrillard: The failure of globalization 

  • "The end of the Cold War permitted U.S. power & influence to expand without hindrance" (Keniston 4022) 

  • Baudrillard also argues that the attacks were "from the outset inseparable from the symbolic ways that they were represented" (Keniston 4022) 

  • Don DeLillo: "DeLillo focuses on the ways in which the attacks undermined our notion of & faith in the future & on the function of narrative itself. In response to the destructive plot perpetuated by attackers, DeLillo explores counternarratives many of which complicate the notion of truth" (Keniston 4022-23) 

  • "In this way, the discrepancies between those accounts point to the importance of storytelling itself & thus to literature" (Keniston 4023) 

   

  Jean Baudrillard's "The Spirit of Terrorism" 

  • Baudrillard's focuses on how globalization is at the center of the 9/11 attacks 

  • Baudrillard identifies America's "complicity" in the 9/11 attacks, writing that, "they did it, we wished for it. If this is not taken into account, the event loses any symbolic dimension" (Baudrillard 4024) 

  • The conditions of history include the tenson between the "dominant world power" as against the "disinherited & exploited" (Baudrillard 4024) 

  • Focuses on the symbolism of the attack as embodied in the images 

  • Suggests that power produces a need to destroy itself & focuses on how we search for ways to produce meanings for events: 

    • "Very logically - and inexorably - the increase in the power of power heightens the will to destroy it" (Baudrillard 4023) 

    • "We try retrospectively to impose some meaning on it, to find some kind of interpretation" (Baudrillard 4027) 

  • Unlike so many cultural theorists, Baudrillard does not locate & define issues related to 9/11 as representing "a clash of civilizations" but, instead, "triumphant globalization battling against itself" (Baudrillard 4026) 

  • "The West, in the position of God (divine omnipotence & absolute moral legitimacy), has become suicidal & has declared war on itself… The moral condemnation & the holy alliance against terrorism are on the same scale as the prodigious jubilation at seeing this global superpower destroyed - better, at seeing it, in a sense, destroying itself, committing suicide in a blaze of glory" (Baudrillard 4024)