literary lucubration

As usual, there were some “kinks” with many a blog set up. Do not fear, we will use this week to get ourselves edublog situated.

On Friday, our class will be in the computer lab beginning work on our first big research project. That means you need to get your AUP (the yellow sheet of paper received in the wildly exciting class assembly today) signed and turned in to Ms. Peretti at the attendance office as soon as humanly possible. It will be very boring for you on Friday if you cannot log in. And sad.

Also, those of you who DID get the url to your blog sent to me and posted your first journal (although generally fairly paltry, all around [no offense]) you received 10 extra credit points. Woohoo!

Attached below is the homework for this week (that lovely lavender page) which did not work yesterday but is letting me add it to this post today (in case some of you thought I was crazy for just telling you to try again tonight to create your blog)

wk-1

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I am inexpressibly impressed with my amazing and talented AP Lit students of spring 2008 and delighted to have survived my first year at Fife. We came, we saw, we learned.

And after muddling through the cold, gray winter of Seattle I am now enjoying the oppressive heat of a Las Vegas summer, curled up with many books ‘neath the hum of the air conditioner.

Last night I finished reading Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler, international fiction first published in 1979 and translated from Italian by William Weaver. The novel has a playful narrative structure that is both episodic and organic—chapter one begins with a direct address to the reader, “You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade” (3). The tone is light but earnest, somewhat prankish on the reader but so familiar as to be welcome. I read this book on the recommendation of a friend who studies new media fiction, for which it is considered an important cornerstone despite being a traditional published text. At first I was skeptical of being directly addressed as a reader, but then I was addressed: “It’s not that you expect anything in particular from this particular book” Calvino writes, “You’re the sort of person who, on principle, no longer expects anything of anything” (4). He goes on to discuss many categories of books you walk through at the bookstore, for example “the thick barricade of Books You Haven’t Read” and “Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered” and even “the Books That Fill You With Sudden, Inexplicable Curiosity, Not Easily Justified” (5).

This is a book for readers. It pokes fun but also gratifies. The 2^nd person narration is maintained every other chapter, interwoven with individually named chapters written in 1^st person that still meander into an occasional direct address of the reader. The novel is really a (deliciously) frustrating tease of many novels, each story interrupted just as the tension builds. In the numbered chapters the Reader encounters and interacts with an Other Reader, and the broken story lines become a basis for their relationship. “Does this mean” Calvino inquires just after their first meeting, “that the book has become an instrument, a channel of communication, a rendezvous?” (32).

The Reader goes in search of answers and a complete, unadulterated and unsabotaged text until the climax of chapter nine reveals the true protagonist of this labyrinth of stories. He (or actually “you”) thinks he has found the book you seek, that you will finally be able to finish the story. “But do you imagine it can go on in this way, this story? No, not that of the novel! Yours! How long are you going to let yourself be dragged passively by the plot? . . . what use is your role as protagonist to you? If you continue lending yourself to this game, it means that you, too, are an accomplice of the general mystification” (218).

The most dynamic character in the book is the reader, the actual reader, coming to realize the true effect of the author’s organization and devices. In the course of storytelling, Calvino presents varying motivations and theories for and of reading; parallel, overlapping, eclipsing, mutually exclusive, but all co-existing.

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And now for something completely different . . . (or is it?)

Edward Albee’s play was a controversial success when first produced on Broadway in 1962, and although the language and interactions are not nearly as shocking to a 2008 audience, at the time George and Martha shattered the 1950s “Leave it to Beaver” and “Father Knows Best” idyllic myth of a middle class U.S. family.

Great work to our first 2 groups of discussion leaders, and we’re looking forward to tomorrow’s discussion of Cold War connections with Joey and Michael. Attached is the unit schedule complete with vocabulary, allusions and questions to ponder.

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I honestly think you all deserve t-shirts that say “I survived Hamlet in 3 weeks”

Really, though. Some amazing presentations on psychoanalytic theory, feminist theory and deconstruction (heady stuff) and now a full week to decompress before leaping back into the fray to prepare for the big test.

Of course you have all been studying the allusions list and reading the poetry packet weekly. You will have a chance to be rewarded for this work when we meet again . . .

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Along with the notes and discussion in class, consider the following claims:

Oedipal

• Hamlet’s primary problem is Oedipal in that he is unable to accept his mother’s sexual activity with a man who is neither his father nor himself, and this contributes significantly to the calamity and the universal carnage at the end of the play.
• Hamlet’s ambiguous references to Ophelia’s sexuality and to Polonius as her “pimp” suggest that Hamlet, while 30 years old physically, is psychosexually immature.

Id, Superego, Ego

• Can we consider Fortinbras as representing the id, Hamlet as superego and Laertes as ego? How does each character seem to represent a different means of responding to a father’s death?
• Examine the scenes in which Fortinbras plays a role or is mentioned—What seems to motivate his military actions?
• Examine Hamlet’s vow to avenge his father’s murder, and then the soliloquies in which he berates himself for inaction. What is/are the main factor(s) that inhibit(s) Hamlet’s action?
• How does Laertes handle his father’s murder and his sister’s apparent suicide? How is his planned action against Hamlet different in motive and execution from both Fortinbras’ action and Hamlet’s inaction?

Fin de Siecle

• Hamlet was most likely written between the years 1599-1601, during the turn of the century and a mere three years after the death Shakespeare’s only son, Hamnet (and at the end of Elizabeth’s long reign, 1558-1603)
• What references are made in the play to Danish decadence and what is Hamlet’s attitude toward it?
• Claudius-1.2.1-16; 125-132
• Hamlet-1.2.139-141; 180-183
• Horatio and Hamlet-1.4.8-41
• And what about the ghost’s status in the afterlife?
• What is significant about Wittenberg, where Hamlet goes to school?
• What does Hamlet suggest when he says, “The time is out of joint: O cursed spite, / That ever I was born to set it right!”
• What might Shakespeare be suggesting by having only non-Danes like Horatio survive the end of the play, and the Norwegian Fortinbras assume the throne?

How might the play reflect an Elizabethan fin de siecle? How might Shakespeare’s personal grief be expressed in the play? What lines, speeches, or character reflections might be read as personally revealing?

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