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Lecture notes english literature lesson 1-5
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Sien Eelen English: culture and literatureNotes English: culture and literature
This course has been turned into a literature course.
Theme: power & outsidership (power is everywhere)
Class 1: 7/10/2021
Outsidership & literary representation
- Gender
- Age
- Language
- Sex
- Skin-color
- Financial/economic situation
- Disability
- Level of education
- Political orientation
Big difference between an outsider and a hermit
Hermit: alone by choice, goodbye to society, self-sufficient, self-reliant,
entity on him own
Outsider: defined by a failed relation or integration to a larger group,
negative bond to society, bears the scars of a failed integration, sent
away, ‘not one of us’, shut down
FOR NEXT WEEK OCT 14: GREAT GATSBY
- Gatsby = huge name, cultural reference
- Gatsby = outsider because there is something hopelessly romantic
about Gatsby: the belief that history doesn’t matter, the belief that
you can make anything happen, you can make the past come back.
Gatsby believes that he can reanimate the past. He believes that he
can restore the past through money, that you can buy back your
dreams. makes him a romantic outsider.
OCT 21: CATCHER IN THE RYE
- He hates the ‘phony’ world
- He doesn’t belong outsider
- Adolescent = outsider in own culture
OCT 28: JANE EYRE Line Magnus
- 19th century literature
,Sien Eelen English: culture and literature
- Jane eyre and other people in that novel as outsiders
NOV 4: THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY Lauren Ottaviani
- Outsider (author also as an outsider, Oscar Wilde being gay, he
flaunted it, for him it was a provocation, he was proud of it as well as
challenged)
NOV 18: THINGS FALL APART video lecture Lauren Ottaviani
- First African novel in English literature
NOV 25: THE SCARLET LETTER video lecture Albers
- About a woman who has a child by an unknown father (she is
married) situated in puritan New England.
- Outsider because of having a child with someone other than her
husband and for not owning up to it.
- Letter A punishment & kind of empowerment
DEC 2: THE YELLOW WALLPAPER & THE AWAKENING video lecture
Albers
DEC 9: THE GOD OF SMALL THINGS video lecture Albers
DEC 16: BELOVED video lecture
DEC 23: discussion (questions?)
!!!CHOOSE 4 NOVELS TO READ IN FULL!!!
For the rest: you must know what has been said in class by
Professor Albers
FIRST READING: Bartleby
blatant example of outsidership
- Difficult to read (old English, difficult!!)
- Too long for what the plot was about
,Sien Eelen English: culture and literature
- Very descriptive, detailed a bit boring but also good for
imagination
- ‘langdradig’
- Why classic story?
o Herman Melville
Big NY author
Born in 1819
Different novels based on his ocean trips, he travelled a
lot
Whaling industry was biggest industry in America back
then
Huge whaling ships, huge trips all over the world,
sometimes for years, finding out ‘what you want to do’
Melville part Dutch (mother’s side, Gansevoort)
Moby Dick
Adventurous novels
1851: stuns the world (NY) publishes a novel that is
600 pages long and it’s all about a white whale, the
biggest commercial failure of 19th century literature,
about a crazy captain that has lost his leg in a whale
hunt, this captain Ahab is determined to take revenge
and goes after the white whale (known as Moby Dick),
whole book is narrated who is joined (Ishmael) and who
is an alter ego of Melville himself.
really about male friendship, democracy, …
read a lot of Shakespeare while writing it (in 1,5
years)
completely fell on a cold hard ground
commercial success very short lived
Financial problems, alcohol problems, marriage down
the drain, his son committed suicide, life of Melville = a
horror story
Worked as a clerk (copied documents) !! nobody knew
that he actually was a big author.
He never thought that a few years later Moby Dick was
considered as one of the biggest American novels ever.
o Bartleby described as an enigma
o Narrator of the story = lawyer
o P7-8: ‘I would prefer not to’. Not a refusal, linguistic
outsidership of Bartleby, he occupies a position of “neither in
nor out”, “neither here nor there”. The lawyer starts out the
story not describing Bartleby, he starts the story describing
, Sien Eelen English: culture and literature
himself. We learn a lot about the lawyer the way he sees
himself and the way others see him.
o He (Bartleby) turns down whatever it is this world has to offer
him. “I would prefer not to”. Bartleby would be fired because
he doesn’t want to do anything.
o The law firm moves, and Bartleby stays behind. The lawyer
hovers between authority and empathy on the other hand. P14
for example
o What would you rather be doing then?? “I may not know
what I would rather be, but I prefer not to have this life
anymore”
o Intellectual rebellion this was written in the middle of the
19th century
o Bartleby’s life reads like a dead letter, dead dimension to the
life of Bartleby. What is the destination?
o Bartleby: the story as a critique on capitalism
Alienated labour (work you do for someone else, “you
work in a factory all day making a bike, but you cannot
take the bike home with you, you get money instead.
You sell yourself; you sell your labour to someone who
pays you to make things that are not your own.”)
Alienated labour: Bartleby is only copying work, nothing
is his own work.
o “Bartleby is really what it conveys”. “The radical insight that
the standing social order is morally outrageous
o Most radical outsidership because it cannot be linked to any of
the ‘obvious’ reasons of why you can be an outsider (skin-
color, economic situation, …) you cannot explain it, he just
stands there literally as a pilar of salt and people really think
he is a lunatic. The lawyer goes back and forth, he doesn’t
treat him like a lunatic.
Class 2: 14/10/2021
SECOND READING 14/10/2021 THE GREAT GATSBY
- Background
o Publisher was keen on publishing Fitzgerald’s book (he
submitted a first version) because it would be his third novel.
o Fitzgerald based certain parts of his book on the design for the
cover (= piece of art)
- Fitzgerald’s life
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