Sien Eelen English: culture and literature
Notes 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
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
- Jane eyre and other people in that novel as outsiders
NOV 4: THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY Lauren Ottaviani
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- 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?)
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Bartleby
blatant example of outsidership
- Difficult to read (old English, difficult!!)
- Too long for what the plot was about
- 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
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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
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.
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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
o 1896 born in St. Paul Minnesota
o Princeton university
o 1917: US army (>Alabama)
o 1920: this side of paradise
o 1920: marries Zelda Sayre
She first did not want to marry him because he hadn’t
any money.
He went to NYC, book sells great, and he proves to be
successful, Zelda marries him.
o 1922: the beautiful and damned
Europe. Modernism
He hung out with artists
Americans went to Europe because they were so
disappointed with America after WWI
“The lost generation” (Stein, Pound, Hemingway, etc)
Refers to artists who became famous in the
interbellum
o Common sadness and depression because of
the war
o 1925: The Great Gatsby (a dud)
The reception was not quite positive at first “a dud”
He was extremely disappointed
Disintegration (alcohol addiction)
o 1930: Zelda nervous breakdown
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She had literary ambitions on her own
She was sent to a sanatorium in Switzerland
Died suffering from schizophrenia
However, when she was in Switzerland she wrote
some letters to Scott Fitzgerald about her life, very
dramatic, these letters were stunning
o 1931: “echoes of the jazz age”
Essay Fitzgerald wrote
Roaring twenties
o 1934: tender is the night
Some say this is his best book. Albers disagrees, he says
it’s a weak re-run from the Great Gatsby.
He was also disappointed with the reception on this
book, so he reshuffled the book. He created another
version, he recomposed it. Was published post-humous
(after his death). Neither of the two versions lives up to
Gatsby.
o 1937: Hollywood. Screenwriting
He made most of his money here writing poems and
short stories. Magazines paid him a lot of money for his
short stories.
He went to Hollywood, there was a huge market there
because there was a shortage of good writers. He made
money there as a screenwriter.
o 1940: dies of a heart attack
o 1940: The Last Tycoon (unfinished)
- Francis Cugat designed the cover of the book
o Detail: irises are naked woman
o A lot about tears in the story
o Daisy having a face that looks very much like this picture
o Bottom: industrial city, ashes of the valley where they drive
through when they’re going to the city, looks a bit like coney
island
o World exhibition vaguely pictured
- Historical background
o The roaring twenties, or the jazz age. “It was an age of
miracles, it was an age of art, it was an age of excess, and it
was an age of satire.” (Fitzgerald, “Echoes of the Jazz Age”)
o Wall Street crash (1929): “the most expensive orgy in history”
was over.
Ended the jazz age
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o 1919-1933: prohibition (eighteenth amendment, repealed by
the twenty-first amendment)
Period where drinking happened extremely often, even if
it was prohibited.
Drinking was seen as a failure. No alcohol was to be sold
anywhere. The government couldn’t pay any police force
to control this. (Speak easy = bars that look like houses
where people would secretly drink, and you could
escape through the back door.)
Gatsby always called to the phone
Finances his life with crime money
He was making his money off the illicit alcohol
production and selling.
The novel
- Interesting themes
o Satirical dimension of the novel “an age of satire”.
Nick is very sarcastic about how they miss Daisy back in
Chicago, this is the first time it becomes clear that she is
a complete airhead. That she’s extremely stupid. (Ch. 1)
Nick is an observer of this ritzy lifestyle.
o “An age of miracles” (or the power of dreams)
o Temporal dimension in the novel
= mirrored with geographical dimension in the novel
(people going back east, they’re doing what Gatsby
wants to do with time)
- What makes Jay Gatsby an outsider
- Situation book:
o Gatsby lives on great neck (west egg) and Daisy lives on
Manhasset neck (east egg)
o The valley of ashes
Contradiction of terms: a valley connotes pastoral
things. It means grass, sheep, rivers, painting-like,
Virginian, … ‘ashes’ point to something very different
from anything ‘a valley’ might suggest. A commercial
billboard taking the place of God. Commerce, billboards,
advertisements = the new religion (in America).
All these signs in the novel of replacement of religious
symbols by commercial advertisements. Ex: the first
time Nick sees Gatsby (when Gatsby is standing by the
water in front of his house).
o The whole novel takes place in three months (June-september)
o Novel is a flashback, narrated by Nick Carraway.
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o Nick was in NY to make money.
He emphasises the fact that all these people were all
mid-western. And that they were perhaps not suited to
life at the …
Gatsby says he’s from San Francisco (in the mid-
west) and it’s not clear whether this is a mistake
by the author or whether it’s just Gatsby lying
again.
What makes Gatsby great?
- The fact that he had a dream, made him less superficial than the
people around him
- Huge hope for something unrealistic, which Nick admires.
What makes Gatsby an outsider
- He wants to reverse time
- He refuses to accept the irreversibility of time, he refuses to accept
history
- He thinks history has a rewind button
- He thinks that money can help you do this (fatal mistake) the idea
that everything is for sale, even what has already passed.
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