Jrdn’s ENG158 Bloggggg

AmLit 158:  Great work today in class; everyone’s comments were very helpful!

So we took a quick look at Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” and “Indian Camp”… Here are two prompts that I would like you to consider in a blog post that allows you to extend the class discussion.  Please choose one prompt or post your own take on one of the stories

Hills… Our reading touched upon these lines, and noted that, in our culture, feeling or emotion generally gives way to knowledge, logic, or reason.

“Come on back in the shade,” he said.  “You mustn’t

feel that way.”

“I don’t feel any way,” the girl said.  “I just know things.”

“I don’t want you to do anything that you don’t want to do –”

In light of this discussion, please offer your interpretation of the story’s ending that accounts for the meaning or importance of the word “feel” in the story’s final lines:

He went out through the bead curtain.  She was sitting at the table and smiled at him.

“Do you feel better?” he asked.

 “I feel fine,” she said.  “There’s nothing wrong with me.  I feel fine.”

(References back to “The Yellow Wallpaper” or any other work we have studied together are welcome!)

Indian Camp… We took a look at Marsden Hartley’s paintings “Still Life, No.1” (as seen in the 1913 Armory Show) and “Indian Fantasy” (painted in 1914).  We also glanced at one of the essays attached to the website:

 The MOMA exhibition that was unmistakably invested in identifying  a foundation for modern art that was ‘primitive’ and thus provided  authentic, direct expression (Staples “I Prefer the Navajo  Rug: Locating an American Primitive”)

Please assess Hemingway’s use of Native American characters in the “Indian Camp” with this passage in mind:  Does “Indian Camp” depict Native Americans as being somehow primitive and/or authentic?  Explain your position… I’m especially curious about your view of the husband as a possible opposite to Nick’s Dad, who can ignore the woman’s screams of pain.  Try to help me understand your answer by quoting a passage or two from the text that proves your point. 

Just a reminder, AmLit158ers!  On Monday 4/27/09, we’ll be discussing ‘Papa’ Hemingway’s classic short stories:

§  Indian Camp  

§  Hills Like White Elephants

The links for the texts can be found on the syllabus (lower right here on the mother blog).  Please do read them both — they’re short. 

Though we will touch on both stories in class, we will spend most of our time on Indian Camp.  Thanks, Jordan   

P.S.  You can download an “illuminated text” (an animated powerpoint) of the story, if you prefer.  Click Here to view “Indian Camp” Illuminated Text

(You Need to use “View Show” from the Slideshow tab to play it)

re:  Dickinson Line by Line Commentary… I sent a bunch of you something like this… 

 I’m hoping to try something a bit different, a break from my tendency to ramble on and misspell words online…  Ok! here’s the deal:  A bunch of you wrote insightful and interesting things about “Tell all the Truth…”  Let’s try a little experiment:  Please go to the motherblog and find one (or more, why not?) of the names below and read their stuff on “Tell all the Truth.”

(names omitted here…)

Is there anything you agree on or anything you find interesting?  It would be incredibly cool if you then dropped them a quick comment to let them know someone besides me is listening!

The Duck Bunny

Donnie Darko meets Duncan Hines – from the end of my last lit seminar here at SFSU!

“TRUE! — nervous –very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why WILL you say that I am mad?” (242).

I read everyone’s in-class writing about the opening of Poe’s TTHeart and I think you did a fine job suggesting that the narrator feels trepidation and excitement about what he has already done.  Some of you also noted his desire to tell of it in a way that explains his actions.  Overall, insightful responses and thorough reading.  Also, while I’m looking back, I was very impressed with the quality of the group work – I hope you all had some fun working face-to-face in your pods.

I wanted to add an idea to the mix:  I think the narrator uses the word “nervous” in a way that is no longer current for us — he means, quite literally, that his nerves, those threads of tissue linking our sensory organs to our brain, were in a state of excitement.  Although we know of neurology today, our usage of the word “nervous” has certainly shifted away from this meaning.

The nervousness he announces is a sickness, rooted in the physicality of the nerves (a feature of human anatomy well-known by Poe’s time 

http://books.google.com/booksid=UaSaRzw8gYEC&pg=PA280&dq=neurology,+%2219th+Century%22#PPP1,M1), pp. 270-290 can be scanned for a sense of the 19th-century view) that can be seen as an interstitial category between normalcy and full “madness.” This, I would argue, is the “disease” to which he refers in the second line — the narrator feels that he has a disease in which his nerves are abnormally agitated and thus are unusually (almost preternaturally) apt to convey unusual sensations to his mind.

Notice that the next lines develop the idea of his “sharpened senses” mentioned in line 2:  ”I heard all things in heaven and in earth” (242).  Since the narrator knows that elements of his narrative might strike his reader as impossible, he admits that the interlocutor will no doubt find him mad – his “nervous” state is his attempt to speak a scientific language that justifies the perceptions he will mention in his narration.  So, in my reading, the nervous state of the narrator is intimately linked to his heightened senses and his madness.

Notice, too, that he opposes madness, not only nervousness, with his ability to tell his story “calmly” and “healthily” at the end of the paragraph (242).   Of course, his promise is false; he cannot narrate his story calmly and so fails to convince anyone that he is anything but mad.  Further, his fixation upon the beating of his victim’s dead heart (an impossibility, of course) undercuts his avowal of a nervous condition that would amplify his senses, instead suggesting a diseased imagination or ‘fancy’ producing not merely “sharpened senses” but actually creating its own sensory input, sensations that the narrator can’t help but experience as real.  Such a phenomenon would be just as dangerous within the terms of the theory of mind current in Poe’s day as in that of our own.

Lastly let me point out the “in betweeness” of the narrator’s position in relation to two discourses at work in the first paragraph and throughout the tale.  On the one hand, we have a scientific idea of excited nerves, but on the other, we have references to “all things in the heaven” and “many things in hell” which extend the reasonable logic of sensation into the incongruous space of a loosely Christian spiritual moral geography.  Similarly, although ideas enter the narrator’s “brain” (2nd paragraph, 242) it is the soul from which one’s deepest groans originate, and the soul that can feel “awe” (244).  Thus, in the narrative of The TTHeart we find two distinct yet overlapping systems that the narrator makes us of in order to explain how he, as a human subject, thinks and feels — one scientific/rational, one Christian/spiritual.

For another example of a Poe character who is nervous in this way, see the story “The Fall of the House of Usher” in which Mr. Usher suffers from “excessive nervous agitation”!  Also, as one of you pointed out, Poe’s “Black Cat” is a somewhat parallel story of murder and self-betrayal on the part of the murderer.

Feel free to comment if you agree, disagree, or have any other feedback or advice for me.  Paix!

viola is helping me get blogtastic here.  i’ll soon be sharing my every mental move!  stay tuned