Introduction to Literature

   Don Sparling

   Iva Gilbertová

   Steve Hardy

   Vydala Masarykova univerzita v Brně

   pro Filozofickou fakultu roku 1998

   Vydání 2., upravené, 1998

                                         ISBN 80–210–1776–7

                        Ó    Don Sparling, Iva Gilbertová, Steve Hardy, 1997

                                          Winter SEMESTER

   SESSION 1

   WHAT IS LITERATURE?

   A. Working in groups, try to find as many answers as possible to the following questions (you
   may want to jot down a few points):

               What is “literature”?

               Why do we read it?

               How does it differ from “non-literary” texts?

               Why is literature often thought more “valuable” than non-literary texts?

   B. Read the three following texts and consider some of the following questions:

               Where do you think the texts might be found? Why?

               What features do the texts share? What features are different in each?

               How does the language of the texts differ?

               Which text(s) do you think might be valued most? Why?

               Would you call all the texts “literary” texts? If not, why not?

   Passage A

               All the face-to-face positions where one partner has both thighs between those of
   the other – he astride both hers or between them – are Frontal. Includes all the varieties of
   the Matrimonial plus most of the more complicated, deep facing positions. Gives more depth
   (usually), but less clitoral pressure than the Flanquettes. To unscramble a complicated
   posture for purposes of classification, turn the partners round mentally and see if they can
   finish up face-to-face in a matrimonial without crossing legs. If so, it’s frontal. If not,
   and they finish face-to-face astride one leg – it’s a flanquette; square from behind –
   croupade; or from behind, astride a leg – cuissade. It’s as simple as that.

   Passage B

               Before she knew what had happened, Sabrina found herself lying on the satin sheets
   with Brad pressed close to her. It was heavenly having him so close. There wasn’t one inch of
   her that wasn’t in contact with him. She felt his every move. He was so warm, and solid. She
   had an awesome craving to touch him. She could feel the throbbing of his heart beneath her
   palm as she stroked the rippling smoothness of his bare chest. And she could feel the strength
   of his arousal as he shifted against her. She closed around him in a rippling welcome that was
   as elemental as time itself. Her gasps of joy matched his heated groan. Sabrina looked into
   Brad’s eyes, but the sliding rush of his thrusts created such a powerful storm within her that
   her lids fluttered closed as the first flutters of delight struck her. Her universe expanded
   and contracted, the tiny ripples growing into surging waves as she absorbed him into her very
   soul.

   Passage C

   Since our arrival at the house had not been signaled by the noise of the truck, we were able
   to go around to the side and crush up against the wall, kissing and loving. I had always
   thought that our eventual union would have some sort of special pause before it, a ceremonial
   beginning, like a curtain going up on the last act of a play. But there was nothing of the
   kind. By the time I realized he was really going ahead with it I wanted to lie down on the
   ground, I wanted to get rid of my panties which were around my feet, I wanted to take off the
   belt of my dress because he was pressing the buckle painfully into my stomach. However there
   was no time. I pushed my legs apart as far as I could with those pants tangling my feet and
   heaved myself up against the house wall trying to keep my balance. Unlike our previous
   intimacies, this required effort and attention. It also hurt me, though his fingers had
   stretched me before. With everything else, I had to hold his pants up, afraid that the white
   gleam of his buttocks might give us away, to anybody passing on the street. I developed an
   unbearable pain in the arches of my feet. Just when I thought I would have to ask him to stop,
   wait, at least till I put my heels to the ground for a second, he groaned and pushed violently
   and collapsed against me, his heart pounding. I was not balanced to receive his weight and we
   both crashed down, becoming unstuck somehow, into the peony border.I put my hand to my wet leg
   and it came away dark. Blood. When I saw the blood the glory of the whole episode became clear
   to me.

   SESSION 2

   APPROACHING TEXTS

   1. Read the following two stories, and then in each case write down a summary of 25-30 words
   which reproduces what actually happens in the narratives.

   Story A

   A massive hunt was under way on Monday for a machete-wielding attacker who forced his way into
   a Wolverhampton infant school and lashed out at staff, parents and children as young as three
   in the playground. Four adults and three children were injured.

   Police named a man they were looking for as 32-year-old Horrett Irving Campbell, also known as
   Izzie, who lives in Villiers House, a block of flats near the scene of the attack at St Luke’s
   Church of England School in Blakenhall, Wolverhampton.

   Up to 50 police officers, some in riot gear, raided the block of flats in their search for Mr
   Campbell, whom police described as a dangerous man, not to be approached. Police also raided
   his father’s home elsewhere in Wolverhampton. However, they stressed he was only a suspect.

   All three children underwent surgery on what were described as “disfiguring head injuries”.
   The children were named as Ahmed Malik, aged 3, Francesca Quintyne, 4, and Rhena Chopra, 4.
   Rhena’s mother, Surinder Kaur, 29, was also injured, and underwent an operation. The other
   adults hurt were Azar Rafiq, 29, Wendy Willington, 29, and nursery nurse Lisa Potts, 19.

   The attack came towards the end of the school day when a man in his mid-30s appeared to become
   involved in an argurnent with a woman outside the school.

   Many of the children were at school for the first time, enjoying a teddy bears picnic party
   designed to make them feel at home when they began school next term. The attacker jumped over
   the fence and struck out at a teacher before moving on to the party. He slashed at the
   children as they tried to run inside.

    Story B

   In the darkened, uneven cobbled square, in the old quarter of Barcelona, the Barrio Gótico,
   the middle-aged American couple who walk by appear to be just that: American, middle-aged. The
   man is tall and bald; his head shines dimly as he and his wife cross the shaft of light from
   an open doorway. She is smaller, with pale hair; she walks fast to keep up with her husband.
   She is wearing gold chains, and they, too, shine in the light. She carries a small bag in
   which there could be – more gold? money? some interesting pills? They pass a young Spaniard
   lounging in a corner whose face the man for no reason takes note of.

   Persis Fox, the woman, is a fairly successful illustrator, beginning to be sought after by New
   York publishers, but she sees herself as being in most ways a coward, a very fearful person;
   she is afraid of planes, of high bridges, she is overly worried by the illnesses of children –
   a rather boring list, as she thinks of it. Some years ago she was afraid that Thad, her
   husband, who teaches at Harvard, would take off with some student, some dark, sexily athletic
   type from Texas, possibly. More recently she has been frightened by accounts everywhere of
   muggings, robberies, rapes. She entirely believes in the likelihood of nuclear war. She can
   and does lie awake at night with such thoughts, for frozen hours.

   However, walking across these darkened cobbles, in the old quarter of Barcelona, toward a
   restaurant that Cambridge friends have recommended, she is not afraid at all, only interested
   in what she is seeing: just before the square, an arched and windowed walk up above the alley,
   now crenellated silhouettes, everywhere blackened old stones. Also, she is hungry, looking
   forward to the seafood for which this restaurant is famous. And she wishes that Thad would not
   walk so fast; by now he is about five feet ahead of her, in an alley.

   In the next instant, though, before she has seen or heard any person approaching, someone is
   running past her in the dark – but not past; he is beside her, a tall dark boy, grabbing at
   her purse, pulling its short strap. Persis’ first instinct is to let him have it, not because
   she is afraid – she is not, still not, afraid – but from a conditioned reflex, instructing her
   to give people what they want: children, her husband.

   In the following second a more primitive response sets in, and she cries out, “No!” as she
   thinks, Kindergarten, some little boy pulling something away. And next thinks, Not
   kindergarten. Spain. A thief.

   He is stronger, and with a sudden sharp tug he wins; he has pulled the bag from her and run
   off, as Persis still yells, “No!” – and as (amazingly!) she remembers the word for thief.
   “LADRÓN!” she cries out. “Ladrón!”

   Then suddenly Thad is back (Persis has not exactly thought of him in those seconds), and
   almost before she has finished saying “He took my bag!” Thad is running toward the square,
   where the thief went. Thad is running, running – so tall and fast, such a sprint, as though
   this were a marathon, or Memorial Drive, where he usually runs. He is off into the night, as
   Persis yells again, “Ladrón!” and she starts out after him.

   Persis is wearing low boots (thank God), not heels, and she can hear Thad’s whistle, something
   he does with two fingers in his mouth, intensely shrill, useful for summoning children from
   ski slopes or beaches as night comes on. Persis, also running, follows the sound. She comes at
   last to a fairly wide, dimly lit street where Thad is standing, breathing hard.

   She touches his arm. “Thad –”

   Still intent on the chase, he hardly looks at her. He is not doing this for her; it is
   something between men. He says, “I think he went that way.”

   “But Thad –”

   The street down which he is pointing, and into which he now begins to stride, with Persis just
   following – this street’s darkness is broken at intervals by the steamy yellow windows of
   shabby restaurants, the narrow open door of a bar. Here and there a few people stand in
   doorways, watching the progress of the Americans. Thad sticks his head into the restaurants,
   the bar. “I don’t see him,” he reports back each time.

   Well, of course not. And of course each time Persis is glad – glad that the boy is hidden
   somewhere. Gone. Safe, as she and Thad are safe.

   They reach the end of the block, when from behind them a voice calls out, in English, not
   loudly, “Lady, this your bag?”

   Thad and Persis turn to see a dark, contemptuous young face, a tall boy standing in a doorway.
   Not, Thad later assures Persis, and later still their friends – not the thief, whom he saw as
   they first crossed the square, and would recognize. But a friend of his?

   The boy kicks his foot at something on the cobbles, which Thad walks over to pick up, and
   which is Persis’ bag.

   “I can’t believe it!” she cries out, aware of triteness, as Thad hands over the bag to her.
   But by now, now that everything is over, she is seriously frightened; inwardly she trembles.

   “Well, we got it.” Thad speaks calmly, but Persis can hear the pride in his voice, along with
   some nervousness. He is still breathing hard, but he has begun to walk with his purposeful
   stride again. “The restaurant must be down here,” he tells her.

   Astoundingly, it is; after a couple of turns they see the name on a red neon sign, the name of
   the place they have been told about, where they have made a reservation.

   The kitchen seems to be in the front room, next to the bar: all steam and steel, noisy
   clanging. Smoke and people, glasses rattling, crashing. “I really need a drink,” Persis tells
   Thad, as instead they are led back to a room full of tables, people – many Americans,
   tourists, all loud and chattering.

   At their small table, waiting for wine, with his tight New England smile Thad asks, “Aren’t
   you going to check it? See what’s still there?”

   Curiously, this has not yet occurred to Persis as something to be done; she has simply
   clutched the bag. Now, as she looks down at the bag on her lap, it seems shabbier, a battered
   survivor. Obediently she unsnaps the flap. “Oh good, my passport’s here,” she tells Thad.

   “That’s great.” He is genuinely pleased with himself and why should he not be, having behaved
   with such courage? Then he frowns. “He got all your money?”

   “Well no, actually there wasn’t any money. I keep it in my pocket. Always, when I go to New
   York, that’s what I do.”

   Why does Thad look so confused just then? A confusion of emotions is spread across his fair,
   lined face. He is disappointed, somehow? Upset that he ran after a thief who had stolen a bag
   containing so little? Upset that Persis, who now goes down to New York on publishing business
   by herself, has tricks for self-preservation?

   Sipping wine, and almost instantly dizzy, light in her head, Persis tries to explain herself.
   “Men are such dopes,” she heedlessly starts. “They always think that women carry everything
   they own in their bags. Thieves think that, I mean. So I just shove money and credit cards
   into some pocket. There’s only makeup in my bags.”

   “And your passport.” Stern, judicious Thad.

   “Oh yes, of course,” Persis babbles. “That would have been terrible. We could have spent days
   in offices.”

   Gratified, sipping at his wine, Thad says, “I wonder why he didn’t take it, actually.”

   Persis does not say, “Because it’s hidden inside my address book” – although quite possibly
   that was the case. Instead, she says what is also surely true: “Because you scared him. The
   last thing he expected was someone running after him, and that whistle.”

   Thad smiles, and his face settles into a familiar expression: that of a generally secure,
   intelligent man, a lucky person, for whom things happen more or less as he would expect them
   to.

   Persis is thinking, and not for the first time, how terrible it must be to be a man, how
   terrifying. Men are always running, chasing something. And if you are rich and successful,
   like Thad, you have to hunt down anyone who wants to take away your possessions. Or if you’re
   poor, down on your luck, you might be tempted to chase after a shabby bag that holds nothing
   of any real value, to snatch such a bag from a foreign woman who is wearing false gold chains
   that shine and glimmer in the dark.

   2. Did you find any differences in making the summaries of the stories? Were there problems
   with one of the summaries that did not seem to be there in the case of the other? Did anything
   have to be left out, and why?

   3. Now write down two lists of 10 words that occur in the stories that you feel are crucial to
   the meaning of each story, what it is about.

   4. Again, consider what differences and difficulties there were in each case.

   5. Bring both the summaries and the lists to class. Think about what you believe can be
   learned about a text by reducing it to a shorter version. Be prepared to explain why you chose
   the particular words you did.

   6. Suggest titles for the two stories. How important do you feel a title is in relation to a
   story (or poem)?

   SESSION 3

   NARRATIVE DEVELOPMENT AND CHARACTER

   Preparation – Unit 18 in Ways of Reading.

   For another view of how narrative works, study the following description of the findings of
   the American sociolinguist William Labov, who based his work on oral narratives.

   According to Labov, a fully-formed oral narrative has the following structure:

   1. Abstract: What, in a nutshell is this story about?

   2. Orientation: Who, when, where, what?

   3. Complicating action: Then what happened?

   4. Evaluation: So what, how is this interesting?

   5. Result or resolution: What finally happened?

   6. Coda: That’s it, I’ve finished and am “bridging” back to the present situation.

   These are related to Labov’s famous “diamond” picture of the progression of an oral narrative,
   reproduced below. Notice how evalution, while associable with a “most expected” place in the
   progression of a narrative, is shown – by the spreading waves – to be something that can
   permeate throughout the telling, occurring anywhere.

                                             Evaluation


   

   

   Complicating action                                                       Resolution


   

   Orientation                                                                           Coda

   

                                              Abstract

   A. In class you will look at some simple narratives and be asked to show how they work in
   terms of the theories of Propp and Labov.

   B. Start reading the following story, by the American writer Kate Chopin (1851-1904).

                                        The Story of an Hour

   Knowing that Mrs. Mallard was afflicted with a heart trouble, great care was taken to break to
   her as gently as possible the news of her husband’s death.

   It was her sister Josephine who told her, in broken sentences, veiled hints that revealed in
   half concealing. Her husband’s friend Richards was there, too, near her. It was he who had
   been in the newspaper office when intelligence of the railroad disaster was received, with
   Brently Mallard’s name leading the list of “killed.” He had only taken the time to assure
   himself of its truth by a second telegram, and had hastened to forestall any less careful,
   less tender friend in bearing the sad message.

   She did not hear the story as many women have heard the same, with a paralyzed inability to
   accept its significance. She wept at once, with sudden, wild abandonment, in her sister’s
   arms. When the storm of grief had spent itself she went away to her room alone. She would have
   no one follow her.

   There stood, facing the open window, a comfortable, roomy armchair. Into this she sank,
   pressed down by a physical exhaustion that haunted her body and seemed to reach into her soul.

   She could see in the open square before her house the tops of trees that were all aquiver with
   the new spring life. The delicious breath of rain was in the air. In the street below a
   peddler was crying his wares. The notes of a distant song which some one was singing reached
   her faintly, and countless sparrows were twittering in the eaves.

   There were patches of blue sky showing here and there through the clouds that had met and
   piled one above the other in the west facing her window.

   She sat with her head thrown back upon the cushion of the chair quite motionless, except when
   a sob came up into her throat and shook her, as a child who has cried itself to sleep
   continues to sob in its dreams.

   She was young, with a fair, calm face, whose lines bespoke repression and even a certain
   strength. But now there was a dull stare in her eyes, whose gaze was fixed away off yonder on
   one of those patches of blue sky. It was not a glance of reflection, but rather indicated a
   suspension of intelligent thought.

   There was something coming to her and she was waiting for it, fearfully. What was it? She did
   not know; it was too subtle and elusive to name. But she felt it, creeping out of the sky,
   reaching toward her through the sounds, the scents, the color that filled the air.

   Now her bosom rose and fell tumultuously. She was beginning to recognize this thing that was
   approaching to possess her, and she was striving to beat it back with her will – as powerless
   as her two white slender hands would have been.

   2. Pause at this point, and think of at least two different ways of continuing the story at
   this point. Try to find evidence in the story so far that might indicate these possible
   continuations. What kinds of different meaning(s) are opened up by your alternative versions?

   3. Now continue reading.

   When she abandoned herself a little whispered word escaped her slightly parted lips. She said
   it over and over under her breath: “Free, free, free!” The vacant stare and the look of terror
   that had followed it went from her eyes. They stayed keen and bright. Her pulse beat fast, and
   the coursing blood warmed and relaxed every inch of her body.

   She did not stop to ask if it were not a monstrous joy that held her. A clear and exalted
   perception enabled her to dismiss the suggestion as trivial.

   She knew that she would weep again when she saw the kind, tender hands folded in death; the
   face that had never looked save with love upon her, fixed and gray and dead. But she saw
   beyond that bitter moment a long procession of years to come that would belong to her
   absolutely. And she opened and spread her arms out to them in welcome.

   There would be no one to live for during those coming years; she would live for herself. There
   would be no powerful will bending her in that blind persistence with which men and women
   believe they have a right to impose a private will upon a fellow-creature. A kind intention or
   a cruel intention made the act seem no less a crime as she looked upon it in that brief moment
   of illumination.

   And yet she had loved him – sometimes. Often she had not. What did it matter! What could love,
   the unsolved mystery, count for in face of this possession of self assertion which she
   suddenly recognized as the strongest impulse of her being!

   “Free! Body and soul free!” she kept whispering.

   Josephine was kneeling before the closed door with her lips to the keyhole, imploring for
   admission. “Louise, open the door! I beg; open the door – you will make yourself ill. What are
   you doing, Louise? For heaven’s sake open the door.”

   “Go away. I am not making myself ill.” No; she was drinking in a very elixir of life through
   that open window.

   Her fancy was running riot along those days ahead of her. Spring days, and summer days, and
   all sorts of days that would be her own. She breathed a quick prayer that life might be long.
   It was only yesterday she had thought with a shudder that life might be long.

   She arose at length and opened the door to her sister’s importunities. There was a feverish
   triumph in her eyes, and she carried herself unwittingly like a goddess of Victory. She
   clasped her sister’s waist; and together they descended the stairs. Richards stood waiting for
   them at the bottom.

   4.Pause again, before reading the conclusion, and consider what you might “reasonably” expect
   to happen next.

   5. Now read the final part of the story.

   Some one was opening the front door with a latchkey. It was Brently Mallard who entered, a
   little travel-stained, composedly carrying his grip-sack and umbrella. He had been far from
   the scene of accident, and did not even know there had been one. He stood amazed at
   Josephine’s piercing cry; at Richards’ quick motion to screen him from the view of his wife.

   But Richards was too late.

   When the doctors came they said she had died of heart disease – of joy that kills.

                                                                                             1894

   6. In what ways does the actual ending of the story challenge your expectations? How does the
   story in general deal with or challenge conventional social expectations, including the
   representaion of women in nineteenth century society?

   7. Consider the narrative structure of the story from the perspective of Propp’s and Labov’s
   schemata of narrative construction. What help do they provide in analysing the structure and
   meaning of the story?

   C. Read “Travelling in the Dark”, by the American poet William Stafford (b. 1914).

                             Travelling Through the Dark

   Travelling through the dark I found a deer

   dead on the edge of the Wilson River road.

   It is usually best to roll them into the canyon:

   that road is narrow; to swerve might make more dead.

   By glow of the tail-light I stumbled back of the car                          5

   and stood by the heap, a doe, a recent killing;

   she had stiffened already, almost cold.

   I dragged her off; she was large in the belly.

   My fingers touching her side brought me the reason –

   her side was warm; her fawn lay there waiting,                             10

   alive, still, never to be born.                                                            

   Beside that mountain road I hesitated.

   The car aimed ahead its lowered parking lights;

   under the hood purred the steady engine.

   I stood in the glare of the warm exhaust turning red;                      15

   around our group I could hear the wilderness listen.

   I thought hard for us all – my only swerving –,

   then pushed her over the edge into the river.

                                                                                             1962

   1. How is the narrative of the poem developed (can the approaches of Labov or Propp help you
   in any ways)?

   2. Note the various elements of “character-functions” in the poem (not only the people!). What
   role do they play in the “story” of the poem?

   3. Decide (a) what the poem is saying; (b) what is of particular interest about the ways in
   which it speaks.

   D. “The Chrysanthemums” is by John Steinbeck (1902-1968).

   The Chrysanthemums

   The high grey-flannel fog of winter closed off the Salinas Valley from the sky and from all
   the rest of the world. On every side it sat like a lid on the mountains and made of the great
   valley a closed pot. On the broad, level land floor the gang plows bit deep and left the black
   earth shining like metal where the shares had cut. On the foothill ranches across the Salinas
   River, the yellow stubble fields seemed to be bathed in pale cold sunshine, but there was no
   sunshine in the valley now in December. The thick willow scrub along the river flamed with
   sharp and positive yellow leaves.

   It was a time of quiet and of waiting. The air was cold and tender. A light wind blew up from
   the southwest so that the farmers were mildly hopeful of a good rain before long; but fog and
   rain do not go together.

   Across the river, on Henry Allen’s foothill ranch there was little work to be done, for the
   hay was cut and stored and the orchards were plowed up to receive the rain deeply when it
   should come. The cattle on the higher slopes were becoming shaggy and rough-coated.

   Elisa Allen, working in her flower garden, looked down across the yard and saw Henry, her
   husband, talking to two men in business suits. The three of them stood by the tractor shed,
   each man with one foot on the side of the little Fordson. They smoked cigarettes and studied
   the machine as they talked.

   Elisa watched them for a moment and then went back to her work. She was thirty-five. Her face
   was lean and strong and her eyes were as clear as water. Her figure looked blocked and heavy
   in her gardening costume, a man’s black hat pulled low down over her eyes, clodhopper shoes, a
   figured print dress almost completely covered by a big corduroy apron with four big pockets to
   hold the snips, the trowel and scratcher, the seeds and the knife she worked with. She wore
   heavy leather gloves to protect her hands while she worked.

   She was cutting down the old year’s chrysanthemum stalks with a pair of short and powerful
   scissors. She looked down toward the men by the tractor shed now and then. Her face was eager
   and mature and handsome; even her work with the scissors was over-eager, over-powerful. The
   chrysanthemum stems seemed too small and easy for her energy.

   She brushed a cloud of hair out of her eyes with the back of her glove, and left a smudge of
   earth on her cheek in doing it. Behind her stood the neat white farm house with red geraniums
   close-banked around it as high as the windows. It was a hard-swept looking little house, with
   hard-polished windows, and a clean mud-mat on the front steps.

   Elisa cast another glance toward the tractor shed. The strangers were getting into their Ford
   coupe. She took off a glove and put her strong fingers down into the forest of new green
   chrysanthemum sprouts that were growing around the old roots. She spread the leaves and looked
   down among the close-growing stems. No aphids were there, no sowbugs or snails or cutworms.
   Her terrier fingers destroyed such pests before they could get started.

   Elisa started at the sound of her husband’s voice. He had come near quietly, and he leaned
   over the wire fence that protected her flower garden from cattle and dogs and chickens.

   “At it again,” he said. “You’ve got a strong new crop coming.”

   Elisa straightened her back and pulled on the gardening glove again. “Yes. They’ll be strong
   this coming year.” In her tone and on her face there was a little smugness.

   “You’ve got a gift with things,” Henry observed. “Some of those yellow chrysanthemums you had
   this year were ten inches across. I wish you’d work out in the orchard and raise some apples
   that big.”

   Her eyes sharpened. “Maybe I could do it, too. I’ve a gift with things, all right. My mother
   had it. She could stick anything in the ground and make it grow. She said it was having
   planters’ hands that knew how to do it.”

   “Well, it sure works with flowers,” he said.

   “Henry, who were those men you were talking to?”

   “Why, sure, that’s what I came to tell you. They were from the Western Meat Company. I sold
   those thirty head of three-year-old steers. Got nearly my own price, too.”

   “Good,” she said. “Good for you.”

   “And I thought,” he continued, “I thought how it’s Saturday afternoon, and we might go into
   Salinas for dinner at a restaurant, and then to a picture show – to celebrate, you see.”

   “Good,” she repeated. “Oh, yes. That will be good.”

   Henry put on his joking tone. “There’s fights tonight. How’d you like to go to the fights?”

   “Oh, no,” she said breathlessly. “No, I wouldn’t like fights.”

   “Just fooling, Elisa. We’ll go to a movie. Let’s see. It’s two now. I’m going to take Scotty
   and bring down those steers from the hill. It’ll take us maybe two hours. We’ll go in town
   about five and have dinner at the Cominos Hotel. Like that?”

   “Of course I’ll like it. It’s good to eat away from home.”

   “All right, then. I’ll go get up a couple of horses.”

   She said, “I’ll have plenty of time to transplant some of these sets, I guess.”

   She heard her husband calling Scotty down by the barn. And a little later she saw the two men
   ride up the pale yellow hillside in search of the steers.

   There was a little square sandy bed kept for rooting the chrysanthemums. With her trowel she
   turned the soil over and over, and smoothed it and patted it firm. Then she dug ten parallel
   trenches to receive the sets. Back at the chrysanthemum bed she pulled out the little crisp
   shoots, trimmed off the leaves of each one with her scissors and laid it on a small orderly
   pile.

   A squeak of wheels and plod of hoofs came from the road. Elisa looked up. The country road ran
   along the dense bank of willows and cottonwoods that bordered the river, and up this road came
   a curious vehicle, curiously drawn. It was an old spring-wagon, with a round canvas top on it
   like the cover of a prairie schooner. It was drawn by an old bay horse and a little
   grey-and-white burro. A big stubble-bearded man sat between the cover flaps and drove the
   crawling team. Underneath the wagon, between the hind wheels, a lean and rangy mongrel dog
   walked sedately. Words were painted on the canvas, in clumsy, crooked letters. “Pots, pans,
   knives, sisors, lawn mores, Fixed.” Two rows of articles, and the triumphantly definitive
   “Fixed” below. The black paint had run down in little sharp points beneath each letter.

   Elisa, squatting on the ground, watched to see the crazy, loose-jointed wagon pass by. But it
   didn’t pass. It turned into the farm road in front of her house, crooked old wheels skirling
   and squeaking. The rangy dog darted from between the wheels and ran ahead. Instantly the two
   ranch shepherds flew out at him. Then all three stopped, and with stiff and quivering tails,
   with taut straight legs, with ambassadorial dignity, they slowly circled, sniffing daintily.
   The caravan pulled up to Elisa’s wire fence and stopped. Now the newcomer dog, feeling
   out-numbered, lowered his tail and retired under the wagon with raised hackles and bared
   teeth.

   The man on the wagon seat called out, “That’s a bad dog in a fight when he gets started.”

   Elisa laughed. “I see he is. How soon does he generally get started?”

   The man caught up her laughter and echoed it heartily. “Sometimes not for weeks and weeks,” he
   said. He climbed stiffly down, over the wheel. The horse and the donkey drooped like unwatered
   flowers.

   Elisa saw that he was a very big man. Although his hair and beard were greying, he did not
   look old. His worn black suit was wrinkled and spotted with grease. The laughter had
   disappeared from his face and eyes the moment his laughing voice ceased. His eyes were dark,
   and they were full of the brooding that gets in the eyes of teamsters and of sailors. The
   calloused hands he rested on the wire fence were cracked, and every crack was a black line. He
   took off his battered hat.

   “I’m off my general road, ma’am,” he said. “Does this dirt road cut over across the river to
   the Los Angeles highway?”

   Elisa stood up and shoved the thick scissors in her apron pocket. “Well, yes, it does, but it
   winds around and then fords the river. I don’t think your team could pull through the sand.”

   He replied with some asperity, “It might surprise you what them beasts can pull through.”

   “When they get started?” she asked.

   He smiled for a second. “Yes. When they get started.”

   “Well,” said Elisa, “I think you’ll save time if you go back to the Salinas road and pick up
   the highway there.”

   He drew a big finger down the chicken wire and made it sing. “I ain’t in any hurry, ma’am. I
   go from Seattle to San Diego and back every year. Takes all my time. About six months each
   way. I aim to follow nice weather.”

   Elisa took off her gloves and stuffed them in the apron pocket with the scissors. She touched
   the under edge of her man’s hat, searching for fugitive hairs. “That sounds like a nice kind
   of a way to live,” she said.

   He leaned confidentially over the fence. “Maybe you noticed the writing on my wagon. I mend
   pots and sharpen knives and scissors. You got any of them things to do?”

   “Oh, no,” she said quickly. “Nothing like that.” Her eyes hardened with resistance.

   “Scissors is the worst thing,” he explained. “Most people just ruin scissors trying to sharpen
   ‘em but I know how. I got a special tool. It’s a little bobbit kind of thing, and patented.
   But it sure does the trick.”

   “No. My scissors are all sharp.”

   “All right, then. Take a pot,” he continued earnestly, “a bent pot, or a pot with a hole. I
   can make it like new so you don’t have to buy no new ones. That’s a saving for you.”

   “No,” she said shortly. “I tell you I have nothing like that for you to do.”

   His face fell to an exaggerated sadness. His voice took on a whining undertone. “I ain’t had a
   thing to do today. Maybe I won’t have no supper tonight. You see I’m off my regular road. I
   know folks on the highway clear from Seattle to San Diego. They save their things for me to
   sharpen up because they know I do it so good and save them money.”

   “I’m sorry,” Elisa said irritably. “I haven’t anything for you to do.” His eyes left her face
   and fell to searching the ground. They roamed about until they came to the chrysanthemum bed
   where she had been working. “What’s them plants, ma’am?”

   The irritation and resistance melted from Elisa’s face. “Oh, those are chrysanthemums, giant
   whites and yellows. I raise them every year, bigger than anybody around here.”

   “Kind of a long-stemmed flower? Looks like a quick puff of colored smoke?” he asked.

   “That’s it. What a nice way to describe them.”

   “They smell kind of nasty till you get used to them,” he said.

   “It’s a good bitter smell,” she retorted, “not nasty at all.”

   He changed his tone quickly. “I like the smell myself.”

   “I had ten-inch blooms this year,” she said.

   The man leaned farther over the fence. “Look. I know a lady down the road a piece has got the
   nicest garden you ever seen. Got nearly every kind of flower but no chrysanthemums. Last time
   I was mending a copper-bottom washtub for her (that’s a hard job but I do it good), she said
   to me, ‘If you ever run acrost some nice chrysanthemums I wish you’d try to get me a few
   seeds.’ That’s what she told me.”

   Elisa’s eyes grew alert and eager. “She couldn’t have known much about chrysanthemums. You can
   raise them from seed, but it’s much easier to root the little sprouts you see there.”

   “Oh,” he said. “I s’pose I can’t take none to her, then.”

   “Why yes you can,” Elisa cried. “I can put some in damp sand, and you can carry them right
   along with you. They’ll take root in the pot if you keep them damp. And then she can
   transplant them.”

   “She’d sure like to have some, ma’am. You say they’re nice ones?”

   “Beautiful,” she said. “Oh, beautiful.” Her eyes shone. She tore off the battered hat and
   shook out her dark pretty hair. “I’ll put them in a flower pot, and you can take them right
   with you. Come into the yard.”

   While the man came through the picket gate Elisa ran excitedly along the geranium-bordered
   path to the back of the house. And she returned carrying a big red flower pot. The gloves were
   forgotten now. She kneeled on the ground by the starting bed and dug up the sandy soil with
   her fingers and scooped it into the bright new flower pot. Then she picked up the little pile
   of shoots she had prepared. With her strong fingers she pressed them into the sand and tamped
   around them with her knuckles. The man stood over her. “I’ll tell you what to do,” she said.
   “You remember so you can tell the lady.”

   “Yes, I’ll try to remember.”

   “Well, look. These will take root in about a month. Then she must set them out, about a foot
   apart in good rich earth like this, see?” She lifted a handful of dark soil for him to look
   at. “They’ll grow fast and tall. Now remember this: In July tell her to cut them down, about
   eight inches from the ground.”

   “Before they bloom?” he asked.

   “Yes, before they bloom.” Her face was tight with eagerness. “They’ll grow right up again.
   About the last of September the buds will start.”

   She stopped and seemed perplexed. “It’s the budding that takes the most care,” she said
   hesitantly. “I don’t know how to tell you.” She looked deep into his eyes, searchingly. Her
   mouth opened a little, and she seemed to be listening. “I’ll try to tell you,” she said. “Did
   you ever hear of planting hands?”

   “Can’t say I have, ma’am.”

   “Well, I can only tell you what it feels like. It’s when you’re picking off the buds you don’t
   want. Everything goes right down into your fingertips. You watch your fingers work. They do it
   themselves. You can feel how it is. They pick and pick the buds. They never make a mistake.
   They’re with the plant. Do you see? Your fingers and the plant. You can feel that, right up
   your arm. They know. They never make a mistake. You can feel it. When you’re like that you
   can’t do anything wrong. Do you see that? Can you understand that?”

   She was kneeling on the ground looking up at him. Her breast swelled passionately.

   The man’s eyes narrowed. He looked away self-consciously. “Maybe I know,” he said. “Sometimes
   in the night in the wagon there –”

   Elisa’s voice grew husky. She broke in on him, “I’ve never lived as you do, but I know what
   you mean. When the night is dark – why, the stars are sharp-pointed, and there’s quiet. Why,
   you rise up and up! Every pointed star gets driven into your body. It’s like that. Hot and
   sharp and – lovely.”

   Kneeling there, her hand went out toward his legs in the greasy black trousers. Her hesitant
   fingers almost touched the cloth. Then her hand dropped to the ground. She crouched low like a
   fawning dog.

   He said, “It’s nice, just like you say. Only when you don’t have no dinner, it ain’t.”

   She stood up then, very straight, and her face was ashamed. She held the flower pot out to him
   and placed it gently in his arms. “Here. Put it in your wagon, on the seat, where you can
   watch it. Maybe I can find something for you to do.”

   At the back of the house she dug in the can pile and found two old and battered aluminum
   saucepans. She carried them back and gave them to him. “Here, maybe you can fix these.”

   His manner changed. He became professional. “Good as new I can fix them.” At the back of his
   wagon he set a little anvil, and out of an oily tool box dug a small machine hammer. Elisa
   came through the gate to watch him while he pounded out the dents in the kettles. His mouth
   grew sure and knowing. At a difficult part of the work he sucked his under-lip.

   “You sleep right in the wagon?” Elisa asked.

   “Right in the wagon, ma’am. Ran or shine I’m dry as a cow in there.”

   “It must be nice,” she said. “It must be very nice. I wish women could do such things.”

   “It ain’t the right kind of a life for a woman.”

   Her upper lip raised a little, showing her teeth. “How do you know? How can you tell?” she
   said.

   “I don’t know, ma am,” he protested. “Of course I don’t know. Now here’s your kettles, done.
   You don’t have to buy no new ones.”

   “How much?”

   “Oh, fifty cents’ll do. I keep my prices down and my work good. That’s why I have all them
   satisfied customers up and down the highway.”

   Elisa brought him a fifty-cent piece from the house and dropped it in his hand. “You might be
   surprised to have a rival some time. I can sharpen scissors, too. And I can beat the dents out
   of little pots. I could show you what a woman might do.”

   He put his hammer back in the oily box and shoved the little anvil out of sight. “It would be
   a lonely life for a woman, ma’am, and a scarey life, too, with animals creeping under the
   wagon all night.” He climbed over the singletree, steadying himself with a hand on the
   burrow’s white rump. He settled himself in the seat, picked up the lines. “Thank you kindly,
   ma’am,” he said. “I’ll do like you told me; I’ll go back and catch the Salinas road.”

   “Mind,” she called, “if you’re long in getting there, keep the sand damp.”

   “Sand, ma’am?… Sand? Oh, sure. You mean around the chrysanthemums. Sure I will.” He clucked
   his tongue. The beasts leaned luxuriously into their collars. The mongrel dog took his place
   between the back wheels. The wagon turned and crawled out the entrance road and back the way
   it had come, along the river.

   Elisa stood in front of her wire fence watching the slow progress of the caravan. Her
   shoulders were straight, her head thrown back, her eyes half-closed, so that the scene came
   vaguely into them. Her lips moved silently, forming the words “Good – bye – good-bye.” Then
   she whispered, “That’s a bright direction. There’s a glowing there.” The sound of her whisper
   startled her. She shook herself free and looked about to see whether anyone had been
   listening. Only the dogs had heard. They lifted their heads toward her from their sleeping in
   the dust, and then stretched out their chins and settled asleep again. Elisa turned and ran
   hurriedly into the house.

   In the kitchen she reached behind the stove and felt the water tank. It was full of hot water
   from the noonday cooking. In the bathroom she tore off her soiled clothes and flung them into
   the corner. And then she scrubbed herself with a little block of pumice, legs and thighs,
   loins and chest and arms, until her skin was scratched and red. When she had dried herself she
   stood in front of a mirror in her bedroom and looked at her body. She tightened her stomach
   and threw out her chest. She turned and looked over her shoulder at her back.

   After a while she began to dress, slowly. She put on her newest underclothing and her nicest
   stockings and the dress which was the symbol of her prettiness. She worked carefully on her
   hair, penciled her eyebrows and rouged her lips.

   Before she was finished she heard the little thunder of hoofs and the shouts of Henry and his
   helper as they drove the red steers into the corral. She heard the gate bang shut and set
   herself for Henry’s arrival.

   His step sounded on the porch. He entered the house calling, “Elisa, where are you?”

   “In my room, dressing. I’m not ready. There’s hot water for your bath. Hurry up. It’s getting
   late.”

   When she heard him splashing in the tub, Elisa laid his dark suit on the bed, and shirt and
   socks and tie beside it. She stood his polished shoes on the floor beside the bed. Then she
   went to the porch and sat primly and stiffly down. She looked toward the river road where the
   willow-line was still yellow with frosted leaves so that under the high grey fog they seemed a
   thin band of sunshine. This was the only color in the grey afternoon. She sat unmoving for a
   long time. Her eyes blinked rarely.

   Henry came banging out of the door, shoving his tie inside his vest as he came. Elisa
   stiffened and her face grew tight. Henry stopped short and looked at her. “Why – why, Elisa.
   You look so nice!”

   “Nice? You think I look nice? What do you mean by ‘nice’?”

   Henry blundered on. “I don’t know. I mean you look different, strong and happy.”

   “I am strong? Yes, strong. What do you mean ‘strong’?”

   He looked bewildered. “You’re playing some kind of a game,” he said helplessly. “It’s a kind
   of a play. You look strong enough to break a calf over your knee, happy enough to eat it like
   a watermelon.”

   For a second she lost her rigidity. “Henry! Don’t talk like that. You didn’t know what you
   said.” She grew complete again. “I’m strong,” she boasted. “I never knew before how strong.”

   Henry looked down toward the tractor shed, and when he brought his eyes back to her, they were
   his own again. “I’ll get out the car. You can put on your coat while I’m starting.”

   Elisa went into the house. She heard him drive to the gate and idle down his motor, and then
   she took a long time to put on her hat. She pulled it here and pressed it there. When Henry
   turned the motor off she slipped into her coat and went out.

   The little roadster bounced along on the dirt road by the river, raising the birds and driving
   the rabbits into the brush. Two cranes flapped heavily over the willow-line and dropped into
   the river-bed.

   Far ahead on the road Elisa saw a dark speck. She knew.

   She tried not to look as they passed it, but her eyes would not obey. She whispered to herself
   sadly, “He might have thrown them off the road. That wouldn’t have been much trouble, not very
   much. But he kept the pot,” she explained. “He had to keep the pot. That’s why he couldn’t get
   them off the road.”

   The roadster turned a bend and she saw the caravan ahead. She swung full around toward her
   husband so she could not see the little covered wagon and the mismatched team as the car
   passed them.

   In a moment it was over. The thing was done. She did not look back.

   She said loudly, to be heard above the motor, “It will be good, tonight, a good dinner.”

   “Now you’re changed again,” Henry complained. He took one hand from the wheel and patted her
   knee. “I ought to take you in to dinner oftener. It would be good for both of us. We get so
   heavy out on the ranch.”

   “Henry,” she asked, “could we have wine at dinner?”

   “Sure we could. Say! That will be fine.”

   She was silent for a while; then she said, “Henry, at those prize fights, do the men hurt each
   other very much?”

   “Sometimes a little, not often. Why?”

   “Well, I’ve read how they break noses, and blood runs down their chests. I’ve read how the
   fighting gloves get heavy and soggy with blood.”

   He looked around at her. “What’s the matter, Elisa? I didn’t know you read things like that.”
   He brought the car to a stop, then turned to the right over the Salinas River bridge.

   “Do any women ever go to the fights?” she asked.

   “Oh, sure, some. What’s the matter, Elisa? Do you want to go? I don’t think you’d like it, but
   I’ll take you if you really want to go.”

   She relaxed limply in the seat. “Oh, no. No. I don’t want to go. I’m sure I don’t.” Her face
   was turned away from him. “It will be enough if we can have wine. It will be plenty.” She
   turned up her coat collar so he could not see that she was crying weakly – like an old woman.

                                                                                             1938

   1. Elisa is clearly the major character in the story. What do you feel are her major traits?
   What methods does Steinbeck use to build up our understanding of her? You may want to consider
   such things as description of appearance, authorial comment, dialogue, behaviour, setting ,
   and the relationship to the story’s other characters.

   2. How do the story’s minor characters function in the narrative? What do we learn about them?

   3. What role do the chrysanthemums play in the story?

   SESSION 4

   CONVENTION AND GENRE: THE SONNET

   Preparation – Units 9 and 10 in Ways of Reading

   Sonnets have continued to be popular for more than six hundred years. Though they originally
   dealt solely with the theme of love, poets have come to employ them for many other purposes,
   and have enjoyed the challenge of experimenting with both the formal and the thematic
   conventions of the genre.

   The sonnets that you will be looking at this week were all written in the twentieth century.

   A. Read “The Lynching”, by the African American poet Claude McKay (1890-1948).

                               The Lynching

   His Spirit in smoke ascended to high heaven.

   His father, by the cruelest way of pain,

   Had bidden him to his bosom once again;

   The awful sin remained still unforgiven.

   All night a bright and solitary star                                                   5

   (Perchance the very one that guided him,

   Yet gave him up at last to Fate’s wild whim)

   Hung pitifully o’er the swinging char.

   Day dawned, and soon the mixed crowds came to view

   The ghastly body swaying in the sun.                                            10

   The women thronged to look, but never a one

   Showed sorrow in her eyes of steely blue.

   And little lads, lynchers that were to be,

   Danced round the dreadful thing in fiendish glee.

                                                                                             1920

   1. To what extent is this a conventional sonnet in terms of its handling of formal means and
   subject matter?

   2. One strong tradition in the early sonnet was the mixture of discourses on sensual and
   spiritual love and enlightenment. How is this paralleled in McKay’s treatment of his subject
   matter?

   B. The American poet Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950) was particularly fond of the sonnet.
   Read the following example of hers in this form.

                    I, Being Born a Woman and Distressed

   I, being born a woman and distressed

   By all the needs and notions of my kind,

   Am urged by your propinquity to find

   Your person fair, and feel a certain zest

   To bear your body’s weight upon my breast:                                   5

   So subtly is the fume of life designed,

   To clarify the pulse and cloud the mind,

   And leave me once again undone, possessed.

   Think not for this, however – the poor treason

   Of my stout blood against my staggering brain –                            10

   – I shall remember you with love, or season

   My scorn with pity, – let me make it plain:

   I find this frenzy insufficient reason

   For conversation when we meet again.

                                                                                             1923

   1. How does Millay both stay close to and challenge the earlier conventions of the sonnet,
   particularly in the treatment of her theme?

   2. Consider how her use of language and form contribute to the effectiveness of the poem.

   C. To understand fully the following sonnet by W.H. Auden (1907-1973), you should consider it
   in the context of the time and place at which it was written.

                        Sonnets from China: XII

   Here war is harmless like a monument:

   A telephone is talking to a man;

   Flags on a map declare that troops were sent;

   A boy brings milk in bowls. There is a plan

   For living men in terror of their lives,                                               5

   Who thirst at nine who were to thirst at noon,

   Who can be lost and are, who miss their wives

   And, unlike an idea, can die too soon.

   Yet ideas can be true, although men die:

   For we have seen a myriad faces                                                 10

   Ecstatic from one lie,

   And maps can really point to places

   Where life is evil now.

   Nanking. Dachau.

                                                                                             1938

   1. In its use of form and language, this poem is radically different from the conventional
   sonnet. In what ways? In what ways does it remain in contact with those conventions?

   2. What is the argument or story of the poem?

   SESSION 5

   CONVENTION AND GENRE; GENRE ANALYSIS

   Preparation – Unit 17 in Ways of Reading

   A. Below you will find the opening passages of five different books. Go through them
   carefully, keeping in mind the whole question of genre as you read.

   Extract A

   I would never have gone to Greece had it not been for a girl named Betty Ryan who lived in the
   same house with me in Paris. One evening, over a glass of white wine, she began to talk of her
   experiences in roaming about the world. I always listened to her with great attention, not
   only because her experiences were strange but because when she talked about her wanderings she
   seemed to paint them: everything she described remained in my head like finished canvases by a
   master. It was a peculiar conversation that evening: we began by talking about China and the
   Chinese language which she had begun to study. Soon we were in North Africa, in the desert,
   among peoples I had never heard of before. And then suddenly she was all alone, walking beside
   a river, and the light was intense and I was following her as best I could in the blinding
   sun, but she got lost and I found myself wandering about in a strange land listening to a
   language I had never heard before. She is not exactly a story teller, this girl, but she is an
   artist of some sort, because nobody has ever given me the ambience of a place so thoroughly as
   she did that of Greece. Long afterwards I discovered that it was near Olympia that she had
   gone astray and I with her, but at the time it was just Greece to me, a world of light such as
   I had never dreamed of and never hoped to see.

   Extract B

   Mr. Sniggs, the Junior Dean, and Mr. Postlethwaite, the Domestic Bursar, sat alone in Mr.
   Sniggs’s room overlooking the garden quad at Scone College. From the rooms of Sir Alastair
   Digby-Vaine-Trumpington, two staircases away, came a confused roaring and breaking of glass.
   They alone of the senior members of Scone were at home that evening, for it was the night of
   the annual dinner of the Bollinger Club. The others were all scattered over Boar’s Hill and
   North Oxford at gay, contentious little parties, or at other senior common-rooms, or at the
   meetings of learned societies, for the annual Bollinger dinner is a difficult time for those
   in authority.

   It is not accurate to call this an annual event, because quite often the club is suspended for
   some years after each meeting. There is tradition behind the Bollinger; it numbers reigning
   kings among its past members. At the last dinner, three years ago, a fox had been brought in
   in a cage and stoned to death with champagne bottles. What an evening that had been! This was
   the first meeting since then, and from all over Europe old members had rallied for the
   occasion. For two days they had been pouring into Oxford: epileptic royalty from their villas
   of exile; uncouth peers from crumbling country seats; smooth young men of uncertain tastes
   from embassies and legations; illiterate lairds from wet granite hovels in the Highlands;
   ambitious young barristers and Conservative candidates torn from the London season and the
   indelicate advances of debutantes; all that was most sonorous of name and title was there for
   the beano.

   “The fines!” said Mr. Sniggs, gently rubbing his pipe along the side of his nose. “Oh, my! the
   fines there’ll be after this evening!”

   There is some highly prized port in the senior common-room cellars that is only brought up
   when the College fines have reached -L-50.

   “We shall have a week of it at least,” said Mr. Postlethwaite, “a week of Founder’s port.”

   A shriller note could now be heard rising from Sir Alastair’s rooms; any who have heard that
   sound will shrink at the recollection of it; it is the sound of the English county families
   baying for broken glass. Soon they would all be tumbling out into the quad, crimson and
   roaring in their bottle-green evening coats, for the real romp of the evening.

   “Don’t you think it might be wiser if we turned out the light?” said Mr. Sniggs.

   In darkness the two dons crept to the window. The quad below was a kaleidoscope of dimly
   discernible faces.

   “There must be fifty of them at least,” said Mr. Postlethwaite. “If only they were all members
   of the College! Fifty of them at ten pounds each. Oh my!”

   “It’ll be more if they attack the Chapel,” said Mr. Sniggs. “Oh, please God, make them attack
   the Chapel.”

   Extract C

   Yesterday morning as I was about to enter the lecture hall, I was stopped by a Christian
   student who asked me in a voice eager with malice, “Have you heard about the Emperor
   Theodosius?"

   I cleared my throat ready to investigate the nature of this question, but he was too quick for
   me. “He has been baptized a Christian.”

   I was noncommittal. Nowadays, one never knows who is a secret agent. Also, I was not
   particularly surprised at the news. When Theodosius fell ill last winter and the bishops
   arrived like vultures to pray over him, I knew that should he recover they would take full
   credit for having saved him. He survived. Now we have a Christian emperor in the East, to
   match Gratian, our Christian emperor in the West. It was inevitable.

   I turned to go inside but the young man was hardly finished with his pleasant task.
   “Theodosius has also issued an edict. It was just read in front of the senate house. I heard
   it. Did you?”

   “No. But I always enjoy imperial prose,” I said politely.

   “You may not enjoy this. The Emperor has declared heretic all those who do not follow the
   Nicene Creed.”

   “I’m afraid Christian theology is not really my subject. The edict hardly applies to those of
   us who are still faithful to philosophy.”

   “It applies to everyone in the East.” He said this slowly, watching me all the while. “The
   Emperor has even appointed an Inquisitor to determine one’s faith. The days of toleration are
   over.”

   I was speechless; the sun flared in my eyes; all things grew confused and I wondered if I was
   about to faint, or even die. But the voices of two colleagues recalled me. I could tell by the
   way they greeted me that they, too, had heard about the edict and were curious to know my
   reaction. I gave them no pleasure.

   “Of course I expected it,” I said. “The Empress Postuma wrote me only this week to say that…”
   I invented freely. I have not of course heard from thc Empress in some months, but I thought
   that the enemy should be reminded to what extent I enjoy the favour of Gratian and Postuma. It
   is humiliating to be forced to protect oneself in this way, but these are dangerous times.

   Extract D

   The American handed Leamas another cup of coffee and said, “Why don’t you go back and sleep?
   We can ring you if he shows up.”

   Leamas said nothing, just stared through the window of the checkpoint, along the empty street.

   “You can’t wait forever, sir. Maybe he’ll come some other time. We can have the Polizei
   contact the Agency: you can be back here in twenty minutes.”

   “No,” said Leamas, “it’s nearly dark now.”

   “But you can’t wait forever; he’s nine hours over schedule.”

   “If you want to go, go. You’ve been very good,” Leamas added. “I’ll tell Kramer you’ve been
   damn good.”

   “But how long will you wait?”

   “Until he comes.” Leamas walked to the observation window and stood between the two motionless
   policemen. Their binoculars were trained on the Eastern checkpoint.

   “He’s waiting for the dark,” Leamas muttered, “I know he is.”

   “This morning you said he’d come across with the workmen.”

   Leamas turned on him.

   “Agents aren’t airplanes. They don’t have schedules. He’s blown, he’s on the run, he’s
   frightened. Mundt’s after him, now, at this moment. He’s got only one chance. Let him choose
   his time.”

   Extract E

   “I see,” said the vampire thoughtfully, and slowly he walked across the room towards the
   window. For a long time he stood there against the dim light from Divisadero Street and the
   passing beams of traffic. The boy could see the furnishings of the room more clearly now, the
   round oak table, the chairs. A wash basin hung on one wall with a mirror. He set his briefcase
   on the table and waited.

   “But how much tape do you have with you?” asked the vampire, turning now so the boy could see
   his profile. “Enough for the story of a life?”

   “Sure, if it’s a good life. Sometimes I interview as many as three or four people a night if
   I’m lucky. But it has to be a good story. That’s only fair, isn’t it?”

   “Admirably fair,” the vampire answered. “I would like to tell you the story of my life, then.
   I would like to do that very much.”

   “Great,” said the boy. And quickly he removed the small tape recorder from his briefcase,
   making a check of the batteries. “I’m really anxious to hear why you believe this, why you…”

   “No,” said the vampire abruptly. “We can’t begin that way. Is your equipment ready?”

   “Yes,” said the boy.

   “Then sit down. I’m going to turn on the overhead light.”

   “But I thought vampires didn’t like light,” said the boy. “If you think the dark adds to the
   atmosphere…” But then he stopped. The vampire was watching him with his back to the window.
   The boy could make out nothing of his face now, and something about the still figure there
   distracted him. He started to say something again but he said nothing. And then he sighed with
   relief when the vampire moved towards the table and reached for the overhead cord.

   At once the room was flooded with a harsh yellow light. And the boy, staring up at the
   vampire, could not repress a gasp. His fingers danced backwards on the table to grasp the
   edge. “Dear God!” he whispered, and then he gazed, speechless, at the vampire.

   The vampire was utterly white and smooth, as if he were sculpted from bleached bone, and his
   face was as seemingly inanimate as a statue, except for two brilliant green eyes that looked
   down at the boy intently like flames in a skull. But then the vampire smiled almost wistfully,
   and the smooth white substance of his face moved with the infinitely flexible but minimal
   lines of a cartoon. “Do you see?” he asked softly.

   The boy shuddered, lifting his hand as if to shield himself from a powerful light. His eyes
   moved slowly over the finely tailored black coat he’d only glimpsed in the bar, the long folds
   of the cape, the black silk tie knotted at the throat, and the gleam of the white collar that
   was as white as the vampire’s flesh. He stared at the vampire’s full black hair, the waves
   that were combed back over the tips of the ears, the curls that barely touched the edge of the
   white collar.

   “Now, do you still want the interview?” the vampire asked.

   The boy’s mouth was open before the sound came out. He was nodding. Then he said, “Yes.”

   The vampire sat down slowly opposite him and, leaning forward, said gently, confidentially,
   “Don’t be afraid. Just start the tape.”

   1. Decide which genre of fiction/writing each of the extracts might belong to. In each case,
   make a note of what features of the writing led you to this decision. Can you note any further
   features which would support or weaken your original choice?

   2. Consider how approximately you would expect each text to continue. What might this tell you
   about the “rules”/conventions/characteristics of each genre?

   3. Why, if at all, is it helpful to know what kind of genre(s) a piece of writing belongs to?
   How might this be helpful to the writer and the reader respectively?

   B. We will be showing Bladerunner in the department this week more than once (see the notice
   board for the times). This film is an interesting mixture of pure entertainment, violence,
   sardonic humour and thoughtful speculation. It is also a sophisticated treatment of a number
   of traditional themes, and draws on several popular film genres.

   Go to one of the sessions and watch the film. Although it is difficult to follow at times, one
   thing that helps the viewer to feel “familiar” inside it is the way it employs traditional
   film genres. After watching the film, think about what possible genres the film may draw on.
   For each, make a list of the various elements (characters, themes, situations, etc.) and aims
   that are typical of the genre. In the light of this, consider how Bladerunner both employs and
   changes the conventions of the genres, and how this relates to what you think the film may be
   about. We will discuss all this in class, as well as such things as the myths reflected in the
   film, the symbols and clichés it presents, the references to both “high” culture and “popular”
   culture, and so on.

                                             SESSION 6

                                    NARRATIVE AND POINT OF VIEW

   Preparation – Units 19 and 20 in Ways of Reading

   A. Read the following two complete versions of the story of the coming of the Wise Men to the
   infant Christ, the first from the Authorized (or King James) version of the Bible (1611) and
   the second by T. S. Eliot (1888–1965).

                           The Gospel according to St Matthew, Chapter 2

   1. Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judaea in the days of Herod the king, behold, there
   came wise men from the east to Jerusalem,

   2. Saying, Where is he that is born King of the Jews? For we have seen his star in the east,
   and are come to worship him.

   3. When Herod the king had heard these things, he was troubled, and all Jerusalem with him.

   4. And when he had gathered all the chief priests and scribes of the people together, he
   demanded of them where Christ should be born.

   5. And they said unto him, In Bethlehem of Judaea: for thus it is written by the prophet,

   6. And thou Bethlehem, in the land of Juda, art not the least among the princes of Juda: for
   out of thee shall come a Governor, that shall rule my people Israel.

   7. Then Herod, when he had privily called the wise men, inquired of them diligently what time
   the star appeared.

   8. And he sent them to Bethlehem, and said, Go and search diligently for the young child; and
   when ye have found him, bring me word again, that I may come and worship him also.

   9. When they had heard the king, they departed; and lo, the star, which they saw in the east,
   went before them, till it came and stood over where the young child was.

   10. When they saw the star, they rejoiced with exceeding great joy.

   11. And when they were come into the house, they saw the young child with Mary his mother, and
   fell down, and worshipped him: and when they had opened their treasures, they presented unto
   him gifts; gold, and frankincense, and myrrh.

   12. And being warned of God in a dream that they should not return to Herod, they departed
   into their own country another way.

                                  Journey of the Magi

   “A cold coming we had of it,

   Just the worst time of the year

   For a journey, and such a long journey:

   The ways deep and the weather sharp,

   The very dead of
   winter.”[1]^                                                                                5

   And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,

   Lying down in the melting snow.

   There were times we regretted

   The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,

   And the silken girls bringing sherbet.                                             10

   Then the camel men cursing and grumbling

   And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,

   And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,

   And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly

   And the villages dirty and charging high prices:                              15

   A hard time we had of it.

   At the end we preferred to travel all night,

   Sleeping in snatches,                                                                     

   With the voices singing in our ears, saying

   That this was all folly.                                                                  20

   Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley.

   Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;

   With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,

   And three trees on the low sky,

   And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.                   25

   Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,

   Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,

   And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.

   But there was no information, and so we continued

   And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon                              30

   Finding the place; it was (you might say) satisfactory.

   All this was a long time ago, I remember,

   And I would do it again, but set down

   This set down

   This: were we led all that way for                                                 35

   Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly.

   We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,

   But had thought they were different: this Birth was

   Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.

   We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,                                  40

   But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,

   With an alien people clutching their gods.

   I should be glad of another death.

                                                                                             1935

   1. In what ways are the points of view (narrative voices) of the two texts different? How does
   this affect our picture of the various actors in the story? How does it affect our view of the
   significance of the action?

   2. What kinds of details does the first text include that the second one does not? What
   difference does this make to the two accounts?

   3. How do the “story” and the “narration” function in the two texts?

   4. What can you say about the unity and coherence of the two texts?

   5. Are there any ways in which you think the narrative(s) of one text are clearer or simpler
   than the other? Why is this?

   6. In what ways are the meanings of the two texts affected by the narrative methods employed?

   B. Read the following story by Penelope Lively (b. 1933), paying attention to the development
   of the narrative and the general points it appears to make.

                                     Next Term, We’ll Mash You

   Inside the car it was quiet, the noise of the engine even and subdued, the air just the right
   temperature, the windows tight-fitting. The boy sat on the back seat, a box of chocolates,
   unopened, beside him, and a comic, folded. The trim Sussex landscape flowed past the windows:
   cows, white-fenced fields, highly-priced period houses. The sunlight was glassy, remote as a
   coloured photograph. The backs of the two heads in front of him swayed with the motion of the
   car.

   His mother half-turned to speak to him. “Nearly there now, darling.”

   The father glanced downwards at his wife’s wrist. “Are we all right for time?”

   “Just right. Nearly twelve.”

   “I could do with a drink. Hope they lay something on.”

   “I’m sure they will. The Wilcoxes say they’re awfully nice people. Not really the
   schoolmaster-type at all, Sally says.”

   The man said, “He’s an Oxford chap.”

   “Is he? You didn’t say.”

   “Mmn.”

   “Of course, the fees are that much higher than the Seaford place.”

   “Fifty quid or so. We’ll have to see.”

   The car turned right, between white gates and high, dark, tight-clipped hedges. The whisper of
   the road under the tyres changed to the crunch of gravel. The child, staring sideways, read
   black lettering on a white board: “St Edward’s Preparatory School. Please Drive Slowly”. He
   shifted on the seat, and the leather sucked at the bare skin under his knees, stinging.

   The mother said, “It’s a lovely place. Those must be the playing-fields. Look, darling, there
   are some of the boys.” She clicked open her handbag, and the sun caught her mirror and flashed
   in the child’s eyes; the comb went through her hair and he saw the grooves it left, neat as
   distant ploughing.

   “Come on, then, Charles, out you get.”

   The building was red brick, early nineteenth century, spreading out long arms in which windows
   glittered blackly. Flowers, trapped in neat beds, were alternate red and white. They went up
   the steps, the man, the woman, and the child two paces behind.

   The woman, the mother, smoothing down a skirt that would be ridged from sitting, thought: I
   like the way they’ve got the maid all done up properly. The little white apron and all that.
   She’s foreign, I suppose. Au pair. Very nice. If he comes here there’ll be Speech Days and
   that kind of thing. Sally Wilcox says it’s quite dressy – she got that cream linen coat for
   coming down here. You can see why it costs a bomb. Great big grounds and only an hour and a
   half from London.

   They went into a room looking out into a terrace. Beyond dappled lawns, gently shifting trees,
   black and white cows grazing behind iron railings. Books, leather chairs, a table with
   magazines – Country Life, The Field, The Economist. “Please, if you would wait here. The
   Headmaster won’t be long.”

   Alone, they sat, inspected. “I like the atmosphere, don’t you, John?”

   “Very pleasant, yes.” Four hundred a term, near enough. You can tell it’s a cut above the
   Seaford place, though, or the one at St Albans. Bob Wilcox says quite a few City people send
   their boys here. One or two of the merchant bankers, those kind of people. It’s the sort of
   contact that would do no harm at all. You meet someone, get talking at a cricket match or what
   have you.… Not at all a bad thing.

   “All right, Charles? You didn’t get sick in the car, did you?”

   The child had black hair, slicked down smooth to his head. His ears, too large, jutted out,
   transparent in the light from the window, laced with tiny, delicate veins. His clothes had the
   shine and crease of newness. He looked at the books, the dark brown pictures, his parents,
   said nothing.

   “Come here, let me tidy your hair.”

   The door opened. The child hesitated, stood up, sat, then rose again with his father.

   “Mr and Mrs Manders? How very nice to meet you – I’m Margaret Spokes, and will you please
   forgive my husband who is tied up with some wretch who broke the cricket pavilion window and
   will be just a few more minutes. We try to be organised but a schoolmaster’s day is always
   just that bit unpredictable. Do please sit down and what will you have to revive you after
   that beastly drive? You live in Finchley, is that right?”

   “Hampstead, really,” said the mother. “Sherry would be lovely.” She worked over the
   headmaster’s wife from shoes to hairstyle, pricing and assessing. Shoes old but expensive –
   Russell and Bromley. Good skirt. Blouse could be Marks and Sparks – not sure. Real pearls.
   Super Victorian ring. She’s not gone to any particular trouble – that’s just what she’d wear
   anyway. You can be confident, with a voice like that, of course. Sally Wilcox says she knows
   all sorts of people.

   The headmaster’s wife said, “I don’t know how much you know about us. Prospectuses don’t tell
   you a thing, do they? We’ll look round everything in a minute, when you’ve had a chat with my
   husband. I gather you’re friends of the Wilcoxes, by the way. I’m awfully fond of Simon – he’s
   down for Winchester, of course, but I expect you know that.”

   The mother smiled over her sherry. Oh, I know that all right. Sally Wilcox doesn’t let you
   forget that.

   “And this is Charles? My dear, we’ve been forgetting all about you! In a minute I’m going to
   borrow Charles and take him off to meet some of the boys because after all you’re choosing a
   school for him, aren’t you, and not for you, so he ought to know what he might be letting
   himself in for and it shows we’ve got nothing to hide.”

   The parents laughed. The father, sherry warming his guts, thought that this was an amusing
   woman. Not attractive, of course, a bit homespun, but impressive all the same. Partly the
   voice, of course; it takes a bloody expensive education to produce a voice like that. And
   other things, of course. Background and all that stuff.

   “I think I can hear the thud of the Fourth Form coming in from games, which means my husband
   is on the way, and then I shall leave you with him while I take Charles off to the
   common-room.”

   For a moment the three adults centred on the child, looking, judging. The mother said, “He
   looks so hideously pale, compared to those boys we saw outside.”

   “My dear, that’s London, isn’t it? You just have to get them out, to get some colour into
   them. Ah, here’s James. James – Mr and Mrs Manders. You remember, Bob Wilcox was mentioning at
   Sports Day. . .”

   The headmaster reflected his wife’s style, like paired cards in Happy Families. His clothes
   were mature rather than old, his skin well-scrubbed, his shoes clean, his geniality untainted
   by the least condescension. He was genuinely sorry to have kept them waiting, but in this
   business one lurches from one minor crisis to the next.… And this is Charles? Hello, there,
   Charles. His large hand rested for a moment on the child’s head, quite extinguishing the thin,
   dark hair. It was as though he had but to clench his fingers to crush the skull. But he took
   his hand away and moved the parents to the window, to observe the mutilated cricket pavilion,
   with indulgent laughter.

   And the child is borne away by the headmaster’s wife. She never touches him or tells him to
   come, but simply bears him away like some relentless tide, down corridors and through swinging
   glass doors, towing him like a frail craft, not bothering to look back to see if he is
   following, confident in the strength of magnetism, or obedience.

   And delivers him to a room where boys are scattered among inky tables and rungless chairs and
   sprawled on a mangy carpet. There is a scampering, and a rising, and a silence falling, as she
   opens the door.

   “Now this is the Lower Third, Charles, who you’d be with if you come to us in September. Boys,
   this is Charles Manders, and I want you to tell him all about things and answer any questions
   he wants to ask. You can believe about half of what they say, Charles, and they will tell you
   the most fearful lies about the food, which is excellent.”

   The boys laugh and groan; amiable, exaggerated groans. They must like the headmaster’s wife:
   there is licensed repartee. They look at her with bright eyes in open, eager faces. Someone
   leaps to hold the door for her, and close it behind her. She is gone.

   The child stands in the centre of the room, and it draws in around him. The circle of children
   contracts, faces are only a yard or so from him; strange faces, looking, assessing.

   Asking questions. They help themselves to his name, his age, his school. Over their heads he
   sees beyond the window an inaccessible world of shivering trees and high racing clouds and his
   voice which has floated like a feather in the dusty schoolroom air dies altogether and he
   becomes mute, and he stands in the middle of them with shoulders humped, staring down at feet:
   grubby plimsolls and kicked brown sandals. There is a noise in his ears like rushing water, a
   torrential din out of which voices boom, blotting each other out so that he cannot always hear
   the words. Do you? they say, and Have you? and What’s your? and the faces, if he looks up,
   swing into one another in kaleidoscopic patterns and the floor under his feet is unsteady,
   lifting and falling.

   And out of the noises comes one voice that is complete, that he can hear. “Next term, we’ll
   mash you,” it says. “We always mash new boys.”

   And a bell goes, somewhere beyond doors and down corridors, and suddenly the children are all
   gone, clattering away and leaving him there with the heaving floor and the walls that shift
   and swing, and the headmaster’s wife comes back and tows him away, and he is with his parents
   again, and they are getting into the car, and the high hedges skim past the car windows once
   more, in the other direction, and the gravel under the tyres changes to black tarmac.

   “Well?”

   “I liked it, didn’t you?” The mother adjusted the car around her, closing windows, shrugging
   into her seat.

   “Very pleasant, really. Nice chap.”

   “I liked him. Not quite so sure about her.”

   “It’s pricey, of course.”

   “All the same…”

   “Money well spent, though. One way and another.”

   “Shall we settle it, then?”

   “I think so. I’ll drop him a line.”

   The mother pitched her voice a notch higher to speak to the child in the back of the car.
   “Would you like to go there, Charles? Like Simon Wilcox. Did you see that lovely gym, and the
   swimming-pool? And did the other boys tell you all about it?”

   The child does not answer. He looks straight ahead of him, at the road coiling beneath the
   bonnet of the car. His face is haggard with anticipation.

                                                                                             1978

   1. The story includes a wide range of perspectives on the event(s) which it covers, relating
   to both the characters and the narrator. Using the information on focalization in Ways of
   Reading (Unit 19), consider a) how the perspectives of the characters in the story differ; b)
   how the focalization of the story shifts from one perspective to another at different stages
   in the narrative.

   2. The story is a piece of sharp social observation rendered in a primarily comic mode. Can
   you point to moments in the text where these two aspects combine?

   SESSION 7

      PERSONA AND TONE

   A. Read the following poem by Stevie Smith (1902-1971). (You may have to do this a number of
   times before it begins to make sense!)

                           Not Waving But Drowning

   Nobody heard him, the dead man,

   But still he lay moaning:

   I was much further out than you thought

   And not waving but drowning.

   Poor chap, he always loved larking                                                 5

   And now he’s dead

   It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,

   They said,

   Oh, no no no, it was too cold always

   (Still the dead one lay moaning)                                                    10

   I was much too far out all my life

   And not waving but drowning.

                                                                                             1957

   1. How many voices or speakers can you discover in the poem? Label each voice 1, 2, 3, etc.
   and mark where each voice begins and ends.

   2. What features of the language lead you to think that there is more than one speaker in the
   poem?

   3. Try to define each speaker more exactly. (For example, is the speaker first or third
   person?) Try to say who you think each speaker might be, using textual evidence to justify
   your conclusions.

   4. Try to define the tone of each speaker, his or her attitude to the drowning man.

   5. What are some of the meanings that “drowning” might have in the poem?

   6. Try to sum up what you think the poem is saying. What contribution does the use of
   different voices make to this?

   B. Read the following story by the Irish writer James Joyce (1882-1941), which describes the
   situation of a particular person at a particular time.

                                              Eveline

   She sat at the window watching the evening invade the avenue. Her head was leaned against the
   window curtains and in her nostrils was the odour of dusty cretonne. She was tired.

   Few people passed. The man out of the last house passed on his way home; she heard his
   footsteps clacking along the concrete pavement and afterwards crunching on the cinder path
   before the new red houses. One time there used to be a field there in which they used to play
   every evening with other people’s children. Then a man from Belfast bought the field and built
   houses in it – not like their little brown houses but bright brick houses with shining roofs.
   The children of the avenue used to play together in that field – the Devines, the Waters, the
   Dunns, little Keogh the cripple, she and her brothers and sisters. Ernest, however, never
   played: he was too grown up. Her father used often to hunt them in out of the field with his
   blackthorn stick; but usually little Keogh used to keep nix and call out when he saw her
   father coming. Still they seemed to have been rather happy then. Her father was not so bad
   then; and besides, her mother was alive. That was a long time ago; she and her brothers and
   sisters were all grown up; her mother was dead. Tizzie Dunn was dead, too, and the Waters had
   gone back to England. Everything changes. Now she was going to go away like the others, to
   leave her home.

   Home! She looked round the room, reviewing all its familiar objects which she had dusted once
   a week for so many years, wondering where on earth all the dust came from. Perhaps she would
   never see again those familiar objects from which she had never dreamed of being divided. And
   yet during all those years she had never found out the name of the priest whose yellowing
   photograph hung on the wall above the broken harmonium beside the coloured print of the
   promises made to Blessed Margaret Mary Alacoque. He had been a school friend of her father.
   Whenever he showed the photograph to a visitor her father used to pass it with a casual word:

   – He is in Melbourne now.

   She had consented to go away, to leave her home. Was that wise? She tried to weigh each side
   of the question. In her home anyway she had shelter and food; she had those whom she had known
   all her life about her. Of course she had to work hard, both in the house and at business.
   What would they say of her in the Stores when they found out that she had run away with a
   fellow? Say she was a fool, perhaps; and her place would be filled up by advertisement. Miss
   Gavan would be glad. She had always had an edge on her, especially whenever there were people
   listening.

   – Miss Hill, don’t you see these ladies are waiting?

   – Look lively, Miss Hill, please.

   She would not cry many tears at leaving the Stores.

   But in her new home, in a distant unknown country, it would not be like that. Then she would
   be married – she, Eveline. People would treat her with respect then. She would not be treated
   as her mother had been. Even now, though she was over nineteen, she sometimes felt herself in
   danger of her father’s violence. She knew it was that that had given her the palpitations.
   When they were growing up he had never gone for her, like he used to go for Harry and Ernest,
   because she was a girl; but latterly he had begun to threaten her and say what he would do to
   her only for her dead mother’s sake. And now she had nobody to protect her. Ernest was dead
   and Harry, who was in the church decorating business, was nearly always down somewhere in the
   country. Besides, the invariable squabble for money on Saturday nights had begun to weary her
   unspeakably. She always gave her entire wages – seven shillings – and Harry always sent up
   what he could but the trouble was to get any money from her father. He said she used to
   squander the money, that she had no head, that he wasn’t going to give her his hard-earned
   money to throw about the streets, and much more, for he was usually fairly bad of a Saturday
   night. In the end he would give her the money and ask her had she any intention of buying
   Sunday’s dinner. Then she had to rush out as quickly as she could and do her marketing,
   holding her black leather purse tightly in her hand as she elbowed her way through the crowds
   and returning home late under her load of provisions. She had hard work to keep the house
   together and to see that the two young children who had been left to her charge went to school
   regularly and got their meals regularly. It was hard work – a hard life – but now that she was
   about to leave it she did not find it a wholly undesirable life.

   She was about to explore another life with Frank. Frank was very kind, manly, open-hearted.
   She was to go away with him by the night-boat to be his wife and to live with him in Buenos
   Ayres where he had a home waiting for her. How well she remembered the first time she had seen
   him; he was lodging in a house on the main road where she used to visit. It seemed a few weeks
   ago. He was standing at the gate, his peaked cap pushed back on his head and his hair tumbled
   forward over a face of bronze. Then they had come to know each other. He used to meet her
   outside the Stores every evening and see her home. He took her to see The Bohemian Girl and
   she felt elated as she sat in an unaccustomed part of the theatre with him. He was awfully
   fond of music and sang a little. People knew that they were courting and, when he sang about
   the lass that loves a sailor, she always felt pleasantly confused. He used to call her Poppens
   out of fun. First of all it had been an excitement for her to have a fellow and then she had
   begun to like him. He had tales of distant countries. He had started as a deck boy at a pound
   a month on a ship of the Allan Line going out to Canada. He told her the names of the ships he
   had been on and the names of the different services. He had sailed through the Straits of
   Magellan and he told her stories of the terrible Patagonians. He had fallen on his feet in
   Buenos Ayres, he said, and had come over to the old country just for a holiday. Of course, her
   father had found out the affair and had forbidden her to have anything to say to him.

   – I know these sailor chaps, he said.

   One day he had quarrelled with Frank and after that she had to meet her lover secretly.

   The evening deepened in the avenue. The white of two letters in her lap grew indistinct. One
   was to Harry; the other was to her father. Ernest had been her favourite but she liked Harry
   too. Her father was becoming old lately, she noticed; he would miss her. Sometimes he could be
   very nice. Not long before, when she had been laid up for a day, he had read her out a ghost
   story and made toast for her at the fire. Another day, when their mother was alive, they had
   all gone for a picnic to the Hill of Howth. She remembered her father putting on her mother’s
   bonnet to make the children laugh.

   Her time was running out but she continued to sit by the window, leaning her head against the
   window curtain, inhaling the odour of dusty cretonne. Down far in the avenue she could hear a
   street organ playing. She knew the air. Strange that it should come that very night to remind
   her of the promise to her mother, her promise to keep the home together as long as she could.
   She remembered the last night of her mother’s illness; she was again in the close dark room at
   the other side of the hall and outside she heard a melancholy air of Italy. The organ-player
   had been ordered to go away and given sixpence. She remembered her father strutting back into
   the sickroom saying:

   – Damned Italians! coming over here!

   As she mused the pitiful vision of her mother’s life laid its spell on the very quick of her
   being – that life of commonplace sacrifices closing in final craziness. She trembled as she
   heard again her mother’s voice saying constantly with foolish insistence:

   – Derevaun Seraun! Derevaun Seraun!

   She stood up in a sudden impulse of terror. Escape! She must escape! Frank would save her. He
   would give her life, perhaps love, too. But she wanted to live. Why should she be unhappy? She
   had a right to happiness. Frank would take her in his arms, fold her in his arms. He would
   save her.

   ........................

   She stood among the swaying crowd in the station at the North Wall. He held her hand and she
   knew that he was speaking to her, saying something about the passage over and over again. The
   station was full of soldiers with brown baggages. Through the wide doors of the sheds she
   caught a glimpse of the black mass of the boat, lying in beside the quay wall, with illumined
   portholes. She answered nothing. She felt her cheek pale and cold and, out of a maze of
   distress, she prayed to God to direct her, to show her what was her duty. The boat blew a long
   mournful whistle into the mist. If she went, to-morrow she would be on the sea with Frank,
   steaming towards Buenos Ayres. Their passage had been booked. Could she still draw back after
   all he had done for her? Her distress awoke a nausea in her body and she kept moving her lips
   in silent fervent prayer.

   A bell clanged upon her heart. She felt him seize her hand:

   – Come!

   All the seas of the world tumbled about her heart. He was drawing her into them: he would
   drown her. She gripped with both hands at the iron railing.

   – Come!

   No! No! No! It was impossible. Her hands clutched the iron in frenzy. Amid the seas she sent a
   cry of anguish!

   – Eveline! Evvy!

   He rushed beyond the barrier and called to her to follow. He was shouted at to go on but he
   still called to her. She set her white face to him, passive, like a helpless animal. Her eyes
   gave him no sign of love or farewell or recognition.

                                                                                             1914

   1. How many different voices appear in the story? (Be careful, since these different voices
   are not always presented in terms of representation in direct speech.) Mark what they say and
   who says them. What significance can you ascribe to what is said and who says it?

   2. Recall what you read in Ways of Reading concerning focalization. One of the subtleties of
   this story is that it is not always easy to distinguish sharply between the voices of the
   narrator, Eveline, and other characters in the text. Try to find examples of where this
   delicate problematization of who is speaking occurs, and decide what effect(s) it might have
   on the reader of the story.

   3. Another aspect of focalization is not how the narration represents events and thoughts, but
   precisely what information it chooses to include and not include. How does this consideration
   have a bearing on reading the text in terms of, first, the kinds of detail included, and
   second, what might have been included but isn’t? Pay particular attention to the “break” in
   the story towards the end. What is the effect of this?

   4. What is “Eveline” “about”? To what extent does Eveline represent more than herself?

   SESSION 8

      PARALLELISM AND DEVIATION

   Preparation – Units 11 and 12 in Ways of Reading

   A. Read (and reread!) the following poem by the American poet e.e. cummings (1894-1962).

   [anyone lived in a pretty how town]

   anyone lived in a pretty how town

   (with up so floating many bells down)

   spring summer autumn winter

   he sang his didn’t he danced his did.

   Women and men(both little and small)                                            5

   cared for anyone not at all

   they sowed their isn’t they reaped their same

   sun moon stars rain

   children guessed(but only a few

   and down they forgot as up they grew                                          10

   autumn winter spring summer)

   that noone loved him more by more

   when by now and tree by leaf

   she laughed his joy she cried his grief

   bird by snow and stir by still                                                         15

   anyone’s any was all to her

   someones married their everyones

   laughed their cryings and did their dance

   (sleep wake hope and then)they

   said their nevers they slept their dream                                         20

   stars rain sun moon

   (and only the snow can begin to explain

   how children are apt to forget to remember

   with up so floating many bells down)

   one day anyone died i guess                                                         25

   (and noone stooped to kiss his face)

   busy folk buried them side by side

   little by little and was by was

   all by all and deep by deep

   and more by more they dream their sleep                                      30

   noone and anyone earth by april

   wish by spirit and if by yes.

   Women and men(both dong and ding)

   summer autumn winter spring

   reaped their sowing and went their came                                      35

   sun moon stars rain

                                                                                             1940

   1. Pick out the “deviant” collocations (combinations of words) in the poem.

   2. What linguistic conventions/rules do they seem to be deviating from?

   3. Are all features of the poem deviant? What kinds of regular patterns can you find (e.g.
   rhythm, rhyme, syntax, etc.)?

   4. How does the poet’s handling of deviation and regularity relate to the meaning of the poem?

   B. “The Cool Web” is by the English poet Robert Graves (1895-1985).

                               The Cool Web

   Children are dumb to say how hot the day is,

   How hot the scent is of the summer rose,

   How dreadful the black wastes of evening sky,

   How dreadful the tall soldiers drumming by.

   But we have speech, to chill the angry day,                                     5

   And speech, to dull the rose’s cruel scent.

   We spell away the overhanging night,

   We spell away the soldiers and the fright.

   There’s a cool web of language winds us in,

   Retreat from too much joy or too much fear:                                 10

   We grow sea-green at last and coldly die

   In brininess and volubility.

   But if we let our tongues lose self-possession,

   Throwing off language and its watery clasp

   Before our death, instead of when death comes,                            15

   Facing the wide glare of the children’s day,

   Facing the rose, the dark sky and the drums,

   We shall go mad no doubt and die that way.

                                                                                             1927

   1. Identify any patterns of repetition and parallelism in the poem – for example individual
   words/collocations, syntactic patterns at sentence and discourse level, sound patterns, and so
   on.

   2. Note any patterns of contrast in the poem (e.g.lexical-semantic, sound-syntax).

   3. Look for deviant collocations at the lexical/syntactic level.

   4. Consider what you feel the essential argument of the poem to be. How is this enhanced and
   complicated by the patterns you have identified?

   C. The following passage is the opening section of Bleak House, by Charles Dickens
   (1812-1870).

   LONDON. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall.
   Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly
   retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus,
   forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering
   down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as
   full-grown snowflakes – gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs,
   undistinguishable in the mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot
   passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas, in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing
   their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been
   slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the
   crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and
   accumulating at compound interest.

   Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the
   river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping, and the waterside pollutions of a
   great (and, dirty) city. Fog on the Essex Marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping
   into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of
   great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and
   throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the
   stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog
   cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance
   people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round
   them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds.

   Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets, much as the sun may, from the
   spongey fields, be seen to loom by husbandman and ploughboy. Most of the shops lighted two
   hours before their time – as the gas seems to know, for it has a haggard and unwilling look.

   The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest,
   near that leaden-headed old obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a
   leaden-headed old corporation: Temple Bar. And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln’s Inn Hall, at
   the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.

                                                                                             1853

   1. Do as in B above for this text. Consider particularly “deviant” collocations, syntactic
   irregularities at sentence level and their cumulative effect at supersentence level.

   2. What kind of patterns are woven at syntactic and semantic levels? How are these augmented
   by sound-patterning?

   SESSION 9

   FIGURES OF SPEECH

   Preparation – Units 13 and 14 in Ways of Reading

   A. The following pieces of text have been taken at random from a variety of literary and
   non-literary sources.

   a)    Open cast mining rapes countryside.

   b)    An aged man is but a paltry thing,

          A tattered coat upon a stick.

                 (Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium”)

   c)    I was left for dead by the fastest wheels on the road.

   d)    The grass was soft as a child’s breath.

   e)    His great love is the turf.

   f)     After a somewhat leaden opening, the play’s fluid plot captivated the audience.

   1. Pick out as many kinds of figurative language as you can in the above examples. Try to
   identify how they function, and their connotations – in other words, how they influence our
   perception of the thing being presented.

   B. Read the following poem by the Black American writer Langston Hughes (1902-1967).

                                    Harlem

   What happens to a dream deferred?

   Does it dry up

   Like a raisin in the sun?

   Or fester like a sore –

   And then run?                                                                               5

   Does it stink like rotten meat?

   Or crust and sugar over –

   Like a syrupy sweet?

   Maybe it just sags

   Like a heavy load.                                                                       10

   Or does it explode?

                                                                                             1951

   1. Identify as many uses of figurative language in the poem as you can.

   2. Is there a pattern in the way the poem uses metaphors and similes?

   3. What sorts of different reactions to the “dream deferred” do the various metaphors and
   similes suggest might occur?

   4. How does the figurative language function in relation to the poem’s meaning?

   C. The two poems that follow, by Christina Rossetti (1830-1894) and George Herbert
   (1593-1633), use figures of speech in very different ways.

                             Up-Hill

   Does the road wind up-hill all the way?

          Yes, to the very end.

   Will the day’s journey take the whole long day?

          From morn to night, my friend.

   But is there for the night a resting-place?                                        5

          A roof for when the slow dark hours begin.

   May not the darkness hide it from my face?

          You cannot miss that inn.

   Shall I meet other wayfarers at night?

          Those who have gone before.                                               10

   Then must I knock, or call when just in sight?

          They will not keep you standing at that door.

   Shall I find comfort, travel-sore and weak?

          Of labour you shall find the sum.

   Will there be beds for me and all who seek?                                  15

          Yea, beds for all who come.

                                                                                             1862

                             Virtue

   Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright,

          The bridal of the earth and sky:

   The dew shall weep thy fall tonight;

                      For thou must die.

   Sweet rose, whose hue, angry and brave,[2]^                                                  
   5

          Bids the rash gazer wipe his eye:

   Thy root is ever in its grave,

                      And thou must die.

   Sweet spring, full of sweet days and roses,

          A box where sweets[3]  compacted lie;                                     10

   My music shows ye have your closes,[4]

                      And all must die.

   Only a sweet and virtuous soul,

          Like seasoned timber, never gives;

   But though the whole world turn to coal,                                       15

                      Then chiefly[5] lives.

   1. “Up-Hill” is presented in the form of a dialogue between two speakers, but their identity
   is not made clear. Who could they be and how does this relate to the ambiguity of the poem in
   terms of its ability to function at both a literal and a metaphorical level?

   2. In “Virtue”, the phenomena described in the first three stanzas are related to other
   concepts. What is the significance of these, and what differences are there between them? What
   do they have in common? Similarly, in the last stanza, how is the phenomenon described there
   contrasted with the others, but also what characteristics is it represented as sharing with
   them?

   3. Consider the two poems together. What concerns do they share at a metaphorical or symbolic
   level? What are the essential differences in the use of form and language in expressing this
   concern?

   D. “The Black Cat” is one of the best known stories by Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849). After
   reading it, answer the questions asked at the end.

                                           The Black Cat

   For the most wild yet most homely narrative which I am about to pen, I neither expect nor
   solicit belief. Mad indeed would I be to expect it, in a case where my very senses reject
   their own evidence. Yet, mad am I not – and very surely do I not dream. But to-morrow I die,
   and to-day I would unburden my soul. My immediate purpose is to place before the world,
   plainly, succinctly, and without comment, a series of mere household events. In their
   consequences, these events have terrified – have tortured – have destroyed me. Yet I will not
   attempt to expound them. To me, they have presented little but horror – to many they will seem
   less terrible than baroques. Hereafter, perhaps, some intellect may be found which will reduce
   my phantasm to the commonplace – some intellect more calm; more logical, and far less
   excitable than my own, which will perceive, in the circumstances I detail with awe, nothing
   more than an ordinary succession of very natural causes and effects.

   From my infancy I was noted for the docility and humanity of my disposition. My tenderness of
   heart was even so conspicuous as to make me the jest of my companions. I was especially fond
   of animals, and was indulged by my parents with a great variety of pets. With these I spent
   most of my time, and never was so happy as when feeding and caressing them. This peculiarity
   of character grew with my growth, and, in my manhood, I derived from it one of my principal
   sources of pleasure. To those who have cherished an affection for a faithful and sagacious
   dog, I need hardly be at the trouble of explaining the nature or the intensity of the
   gratification thus derivable. There is something in the unselfish and self-sacrificing love of
   a brute, which goes directly to the heart of him who has had frequent occasion to test the
   paltry friendship and gossamer fidelity of mere Man.

   I married early, and was happy to find in my wife a disposition not uncongenial with my own.
   Observing my partiality for domestic pets, she lost no opportunity of procuring those of the
   most agreeable kind. We had birds, gold-fish, a fine dog, rabbits, a small monkey, and a cat.

   This latter was a remarkably large and beautiful animal, entirely black, and sagacious to an
   astonishing degree. In speaking of his intelligence, my wife, who at heart was not a little
   tinctured with superstition, made frequent allusion to the ancient popular notion, which
   regarded all black cats as witches in disguise. Not that she was ever serious upon this point
   – and I mention the matter at all for no better reason than that it happens, just now, to be
   remembered.

   Pluto – this was the cat’s name – was my favorite pet and playmate. I alone fed him and he
   attended me wherever I went about the house. It was even with difficulty that I could prevent
   him from following me through the streets.

   Our friendship lasted, in this manner, for several years, during which my general temperament
   and character – through the instrumentality of the Fiend Intemperance – had (I blush to
   confess it) experienced a radical alteration for the worse. I grew, day by day, more moody,
   more irritable, more regardless of the feelings of others. I suffered myself to use
   intemperate language to my wife. At length, I even offered her personal violence. My pets, of
   course, were made to feel the change in my disposition. I not only neglected but ill-used
   them. For Pluto, however, I still retained suffcient regard to restrain me from maltreating
   him, as I made no scruple of maltreating the rabbits, the monkey, or even the dog, when, by
   accident, or through affection, they came in my way. But my disease grew upon me – for what
   disease is like Alcohol! – and at length even Pluto, who was now becoming old, and
   consequently somewhat peevish – even Pluto began to experience the effects of my ill temper.

   One night, returning home much intoxicated, from one of my haunts about town, I fancied that
   the cat avoided my presence. I seized him; when, in his fright at my violence, he inflicted a
   slight wound upon my hand with his teeth. The fury of a demon instantly possessed me. I knew
   myself no longer. My original soul seemed, at once, to take its flight from my body; and a
   more than fiendish malevolence, gin-nurtured, thrilled every fibre of my frame. I took from my
   waistcoat-pocket a penknife, opened it, grasped the poor beast by the throat, and deliberately
   cut one of its eyes from the socket! I blush, I burn, I shudder, while I pen the damnable
   atrocity.

   When reason returned with the morning – when I had slept off the fumes of the night’s debauch
   – I experienced a sentiment half of horror, half of remorse, for the crime of which I had been
   guilty; but it was, at best, a feeble and equivocal feeling, and the soul remained untouched.
   I again plunged into excess, and soon drowned in wine all memory of the deed.

   In the meantime the cat slowly recovered. The socket of the lost eye presented, it is true, a
   frightful appearance, but he no longer appeared to suffer any pain. He went about the house as
   usual, but, as might be expected, fled in extreme terror at my approach. I had so much of my
   old heart left, as to be at first grieved by this evident dislike on the part of a creature
   which had once so loved me. But this feeling soon gave place to irritation. And then came, as
   if to my final and irrevocable overthrow, the spirit of PERVERSENESS. Of this spirit
   philosophy takes no account. Yet I am not more sure that my soul lives than I am that
   perverseness is one of the primitive impulses of the human heart – one of the indivisible
   primary faculties, or sentiments, which give direction to the character of Man. Who has not, a
   hundred times, found himself committing a vile or stupid action for no other reason than
   because he knows he should not? Have we not a perpetual inclination in the teeth of our best
   judgment, to violate that which is Law, merely because we understand it to be such? This
   spirit of perverseness, I say, came to my final overthrow. It was this unfathomable longing of
   the soul to vex itself – to offer violence to its own nature – to do wrong for the wrong’s
   sake only – that urged me to continue and finally to consummate the injury I had inflicted
   upon the unoffending brute. One morning, in cold blood, I slipped a noose about its neck and
   hung it to the limb of a tree; hung it with the tears streaming from my eyes, and with the
   bitterest remorse at my heart; hung it because I knew that it had loved me, and because I felt
   it had given me no reason of offence; hung it because I knew that in so doing I was committing
   a sin – a deadly sin that would so jeopardize my immortal soul as to place it – if such a
   thing were possible – even beyond the reach of the infinite mercy of the Most Merciful and
   Most Terrible God.

   On the night of the day on which this most cruel deed was done, I was aroused from sleep by
   the cry of fire. The curtains of my bed were in flames. The whole house was blazing. It was
   with great difficulty that my wife, a servant, and myself, made our escape from the
   conflagration. The destruction was complete. My entire worldly wealth was swallowed up, and I
   resigned myself thenceforward to despair.

   I am above the weakness of seeking to establish a sequence of cause and effect, between the
   disaster and the atrocity. But I am detailing a chain of facts – and wish not to leave even a
   possible link imperfect. On the day succeeding the fire, I visited the ruins. The walls, with
   one exception, had fallen in. This exception was found in a compartment wall, not very thick,
   which stood about the middle of the house, and against which had rested the head of my bed.
   The plastering had here, in great measure, resisted the action of the fire – a fact which I
   attributed to its having been recently spread. About this wall a dense crowd were collected,
   and many persons seemed to be examining a particular portion of it with very minute and eager
   attention. The words “strange!” “singular!” and other similar expressions, excited my
   curiosity. I approached and saw, as if graven in bas-relief, upon the white surface, the
   figure of a gigantic cat. The impression was given with an accuracy truly marvelous. There was
   a rope about the animal’s neck.

   When I first beheld this apparition – for I could scarcely regard it as less – my wonder and
   my terror were extreme. But at length reflection came to my aid. The cat, I remembered, had
   been hung in a garden adjacent to the house. Upon the alarm of fire, this garden had been
   immediately filled by the crowd – by some one of whom the animal must have been cut from the
   tree and thrown, through an open window, into my chamber. This had probably been done with the
   view of arousing me from sleep. The falling of other walls had compressed the victim of my
   cruelty into the substance of the freshly-spread plaster, the lime of which, with the flames,
   and the ammonia from the carcass, had then accomplished the portraiture as I saw it.

   Although I thus readily accounted to my reason, if not altogether to my conscience, for the
   startling fact just detailed, it did not the less fail to make a deep impression upon my
   fancy. For months I could not rid myself of the phantasm of the cat; and, during this period,
   there came back into my spirit a half sentiment that seemed, but was not, remorse. I went so
   far as to regret the loss of the animal, and to look about me, among the vile haunts which I
   now habitually frequented, for another pet of the same species, and of somewhat similar
   appearance, with which to supply its place.

   One night as I sat, half stupefied, in a den of more than infamy, my attention was suddenly
   drawn to some black object, reposing upon the head of one of the immense hogsheads of gin, or
   of rum, which constituted the chief furniture of the apartment. I had been looking steadily at
   the top of this hogshead for some minutes, and what now caused me surprise was the fact that I
   had not sooner perceived the object thereupon. I approached it, and touched it with my hand.
   It was a black cat – a very large one – fully as large as Pluto, and closely resembling him in
   every respect but one. Pluto had not a white hair upon any portion of his body; but this cat
   had a large, although indefinite splotch of white, covering nearly the whole region of the
   breast.

   Upon my touching him, he immediately arose, purred loudly, rubbed against my hand, and
   appeared delighted with my notice. This, then, was the very creature of which I was in search.
   I at once offered to purchase it of the landlord; but this person made no claim to it – knew
   nothing of it – had never seen it before.

   I continued my caresses, and when I prepared to go home, the animal evinced a disposition to
   accompany me. I permitted it to do so; occasionally stooping and patting it as I proceeded.
   When it reached the house it domesticated itself at once, and became immediately a great
   favorite with my wife.

   For my own part, I soon found a dislike to it arising within me. This was just the reverse of
   what I had anticipated; but – I know not how or why it was – its evident fondness for myself
   rather disgusted and annoyed me. By slow degrees these feelings of disgust and annoyance rose
   into the bitterness of hatred. I avoided the creature; a certain sense of shame, and the
   remembrance of my former deed of cruelty, preventing me from physically abusing it. I did not,
   for some weeks, strike, or otherwise violently ill use it; but gradually – very gradually – I
   came to look upon it with unutterable loathing, and to flee silently from its odious presence,
   as from the breath of a pestilence.

   What added, no doubt, to my hatred of the beast, was the discovery on the morning after I
   brought it home, that like Pluto, it also had been deprived of one of its eyes. This
   circumstance, however, only endeared it to my wife, who, as I have already said, possessed, in
   a high degree, that humanity of feeling which had once been my distinguishing trait, and the
   source of many of my simplest and purest pleasures.

   With my aversion to this cat, however, its partiality for myself seemed to increase. It
   followed my footsteps with a pertinacity which it would be difficult to make the reader
   comprehend. Whenever I sat, it would crouch beneath my chair, or spring upon my knees,
   covering me with its loathsome caresses. If I arose to walk it would get between my feet and
   thus nearly throw me down, or, fastening its long and sharp claws in my dress, clamber, in
   this manner, to my breast. At such times, although I longed to destroy it with a blow, I was
   yet withheld from so doing, partly by a memory of my former crime, but chiefly – let me
   confess it at once – by absolute dread of the beast.

   This dread was not exactly a dread of physical evil – and yet I should be at a loss how
   otherwise to define it. I am almost ashamed to own – yes, even in this felon’s cell, I am
   almost ashamed to own – that the terror and horror with which the animal inspired me, had been
   heightened by one of the merest chimeras it would be possible to conceive. My wife had called
   my attention, more than once, to the character of the mark of white hair, of which I have
   spoken, and which constituted the sole visible difference between the strange beast and the
   one I had destroyed. The reader will remember that this mark, although large, had been
   originally very indefinite; but, by slow degrees – degrees nearly impercepcible, and which for
   a long time my reason struggled to reject as fanciful – it had, at length, assumed a rigorous
   distinctness of outline. It was now the representation of an object that I shudder to name –
   and for this, above all, I loathed, and dreaded, and would have rid myself of the monster had
   I dared – it was now, I say, the image of a hideous – of a ghastly thing – of the GALLOWS! –
   oh, mournful and terrible engine of Horror and of Crime – of Agony and of Death!

   And now was I indeed wretched beyond the wretchedness of mere Humanity. And a brute beast –
   whose fellow I had contemptuously destroyed – a brute beast to work out for me – for me, a man
   fashioned in the image of the High God – so much of insufferable woe! Alas! neither by day nor
   by night knew I the blessing of rest any more! During the former the creature left me no
   moment alone, and in the latter I started hourly from dreams of unutterable fear to find the
   hot breath of the thing upon my face, and its vast weight – an incarnate nightmare that I had
   not power to shake off – incumbent eternally upon my heart!

   Beneath the pressure of torments such as these the feeble remnant of the good within me
   succumbed. Evil thoughts became my sole intimates – the darkest and most evil of thoughts. The
   moodiness of my usual temper increased to hatred of all things and of all mankind; while from
   the sudden, frequent, and ungovernable outbursts of a fury to which I now blindly abandoned
   myself, my uncomplaining wife, alas, was the most usual and the most patient of sufferers.

   One day she accompanied me, upon some household errand, into the cellar of the old building
   which our poverty compelled us to inhabit. The cat followed me down the steep stairs, and,
   nearly throwing me headlong, exasperated me to madness. Uplifting an axe, and forgetting in my
   wrath the childish dread which had hitherto stayed my hand, I aimed a blow at the animal,
   which, of course, would have proved instantly fatal had it descended as I wished. But this
   blow was arrested by the hand of my wife. Goaded by the interference into a rage more than
   demoniacal, I withdrew my arm from her grasp and buried the axe in her brain. She fell dead
   upon the spot without a groan.

   This hideous murder accomplished, I set myself forthwith, and with entire deliberation, to the
   task of concealing the body. I knew that I could not remove it from the house, either by day
   or by night, without the risk of being observed by the neighbors. Many projects entered my
   mind. At one period I thought of cutting the corpse into minute fragments, and destroying them
   by fire. At another, I resolved to dig a grave for it in the floor of the cellar. Again, I
   deliberated about casting it in the well in the yard – about packing it in a box, as if
   merchandise, with the usual arrangements, and so getting a porter to take it from the house.
   Finally I hit upon what I considered a far better expedient than either of these. I determined
   to wall it up in the cellar, as the monks of the Middle Ages are recorded to have walled up
   their victims.

   For a purpose such as this the cellar was well adapted. Its walls were loosely constructed,
   and had lately been plastered throughout with a rough plaster, which the dampness of the
   atmosphere had prevented from hardening. Moreover, in one of the walls was a projection,
   caused by a false chimney, or fireplace, that had been filled up and made to resemble the rest
   of the cellar. I made no doubt that I could readily displace the bricks at this point, insert
   the corpse, and wall the whole up as before, so that no eye could detect anything suspicious.

   And in this calculation I was not deceived. By means of a crowbar I easily dislodged the
   bricks, and, having carefully deposited the body against the inner wall, I propped it in that
   position, while with little trouble I relaid the whole structure as it originally stood.
   Having procured mortar, sand, and hair, with every possible precaution, I prepared a plaster
   which could not be distinguished from the old, and with this, I very carefully went over the
   new brick-work. When I had finished, I felt satisfied that all was right. The wall did not
   present the slightest appearance of having been disturbed. The rubbish on the floor was picked
   up with the minutest care. I looked around triumphantly, and said to myself “Here at least,
   then, my labor has not been in vain.”

   My next step was to look for the beast which had been the cause of so much wretchedness; for I
   had, at length, firmly resolved to put it to death. Had I been able to meet with it at the
   moment, there could have been no doubt of its fate; but it appeared that the crafty animal had
   been alarmed at the violence of my previous anger and forbore to present itself in my present
   mood. It is impossible to describe or to imagine the deep, blissful sense of relief which the
   absence of the detested creature occasioned in my bosom. It did not make its appearance during
   the night; and thus for one night, at least, since its introduction into the house, I soundly
   and tranquilly slept; aye, slept even with the burden of murder upon my soul.

   The second and the third day passed, and still my tormentor came not. Once again I breathed as
   a freeman. The monster, in terror, had fled the premises for ever! I should behold it no more!
   My happiness was supreme! The guilt of my dark deed disturbed me but little. Some few
   inquiries had been made, but these had been readily answered. Even a search had been
   instituted – but of course nothing was to be discovered. I looked upon my future felicity as
   secured.

   Upon the fourth day of the assassination, a party of the police came, very unexpectedly, into
   the house, and proceeded again to make a rigorous investigation of the premises. Secure,
   however, in the inscrutability of my place of concealment, I felt no embarrassment whatever.
   The officers bade me accompany them in their search. They left no nook or corner unexplored.
   At length, for the third or fourth time, they descended into the cellar. I quivered not in a
   muscle. My heart beat calmly as that of one who slumbers in innocence. I walked the cellar
   from end to end. I folded my arms upon my bosom, and roamed easily to and fro. The police were
   thoroughly satisfled and prepared to depart. The glee at my heart was too strong to be
   restrained. I burned to say if but one word, by way of triumph, and to render doubly sure
   their assurance of my guiltlessness.

   “Gentlemen,” I said at last, as the party ascended the steps, “I delight to have allayed your
   suspicions. I wish you all health and a little more courtesy. By the bye, gentlemen, this –
   this is a very well-constructed house,” (in the rabid desire to say something easily, I
   scarcely knew what I uttered at all); “I may say an excellently well-constructed house. These
   walls – are you going, gentlemen? – these walls are solidly put together”; and here, through
   the mere frenzy of bravado, I rapped heavily with a cane which I held in my hand, upon that
   very portion of the brick-work behind which stood the corpse of the wife of my bosom.

   But may God shield and deliver me from the fangs of the Arch-Fiend! No sooner had the
   reverberation of my blows sunk into silence, than I was answered by a voice from within the
   tomb! – by a cry, at first muffled and broken, like the sobbing of a child, and then quickly
   swelling into one long, loud, and continuous scream, utterly anomalous and inhuman – a howl –
   a wailing shriek, half of horror and half of triumph, such as might have arisen only out of
   hell, conjointly from the throats of the damned in their agony and of the demons that exult in
   the damnation.

   Of my own thoughts it is folly to speak. Swooning, I staggered to the opposite wall. For one
   instant the party on the stairs remained motionless, through extremity of terror and awe. In
   the next a dozen stout arms were toiling at the wall. It fell bodily. The corpse, already
   greatly decayed and clotted with gore, stood erect before the eyes of the spectators. Upon its
   head, with red extended mouth and solitary eye of fire, sat the hideous beast whose craft had
   seduced me into murder, and whose informing voice had consigned me to the hangman. I had
   walled the monster up within the tomb.

                                                                                             1843

   1. Try to find as many instances of the use of irony in the story as you can, and show how
   they function.

   2. How does Poe work with symbols in the story?

   SESSION 10

   ALLUSION AND INTERTEXTUALITY

   Preparation – Units 15 and 16 in Ways of Reading

   A. The poems in this section are by Robert Greene (1558-1592) and William Butler Yeats
   (1865-1939), respectively. Read them, and then answer the questions that follow.

                             Samela

   Like to Diana in her summer weed,[6]

   Girt[7]  with a crimson robe of brightest dye,

                             Goes fair Samela.

   Whiter than be the flocks that straggling feed,

   When washed by Arethusa’s fount they lie,                                    5

                             Is fair Samela.

   As fair Aurora in her morning gray,

   Decked with the ruddy glister of her love,

                             Is fair Samela.

   Like lovely Thetis on a calmed day,                                              10

   When as her brightness Neptune’s fancy move,

                             Shines fair Samela.

   Her tresses gold, her eyes like glassy streams,

   Her teeth are pearl, the breasts are ivory

                             Of fair Samela.                                                 15

   Her cheeks like rose and lily yield forth gleams,

   Her brows bright arches framed of ebony:

                             Thus fair Samela.

   Passeth[8]  fair Venus in her bravest hue,

   And Juno in the show of majesty,                                                 20

                             For she’s Samela.

   Pallas in wit, all three, if you well view,

   For beauty, wit, and matchless dignity,

                             Yield to Samela.

                                                                                             1589

                             Leda and the Swan

   A sudden blow: the great wings beating still

   Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed

   By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,

   He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

   How can those terrified vague fingers push

   The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?                               5

   And how can body, laid in that white rush,

   But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

   A shudder in the loins engenders there

   The broken wall, the burning roof and tower                                  10

   And Agamemnon dead.

   Being so caught up,

   So mastered by the brute blood of the air,

   Did she put on his knowledge with his power

   Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?                              15

                                                                                             1924

   1. Find out the significance of each of the characters from classical mythology alluded to in
   “Samela”. How does reference to these increase the effectiveness of the poem?

   2. In “Leda and the Swan”, what is the significance of the allusions to Leda, the swan, and
   Agammemnon? In what ways is allusion to elements of classical mythology used very differently
   than in the first poem?

   B. Read the following poem by Henry Reed (b. 1914)

                             Naming of Parts

   To-day we have naming of parts. Yesterday,

   We had daily cleaning. And to-morrow morning,

   We shall have what to do after firing. But to-day,

   To-day we have naming of parts. Japonica

   Glistens like coral in all of the neighbouring gardens,                        5

          And to-day we have naming of parts.

   This is the lower sling swivel. And this

   Is the upper sling swivel, whose use you will see,

   When you are given your slings. And this is the piling swivel,

   Which in your case you have not got. The branches                       10

   Hold in the gardens their silent, eloquent gestures,

          Which in our case we have not got.

   This is the safety-catch, which is always released

   With an easy flick of the thumb. And please do not let me

   See anyone using his finger. You can do it quite easy                     15

   If you have any strength in your thumb. The blossoms

   Are fragile and motionless, never letting anyone see

          Any of them using their finger.

   And this you can see is the bolt. The purpose of this

   Is to open the breech, as you see. We can slide it                          20

   Rapidly backwards and forwards: we call this

   Easing the spring. And rapidly backwards and forwards

   The early bees are assaulting and fumbling the flowers:

          They call it easing the Spring.

   They call it easing the Spring: it is perfectly easy                           25

   If you have any strength in your thumb: like the bolt,

   And the breech, and the cocking-piece, and the point of balance,

   Which in our case we have not got; and the almond-blossom

   Silent in all of the gardens and the bees going backwards and forwards,

          For to-day we have naming of parts.                                      30

                                                                                             1946

   1. “Naming of Parts” juxtaposes two different kinds of language, describing two different
   processes. Try to characterize the nature of those differences, particularly as far as the use
   of language is concerned.

   2. As the poem progresses, the two different languages in the poem overlap or even coincide.
   At which points in the poem does this happen? What is the effect and how does it contribute to
   the overall significance of the poem?

   

   C. “Unpopular Gals” is by the Canadian writer Margaret Atwood (b. 1939).

                                           Unpopular Gals

   1.

   Everyone gets a turn and now it’s mine. Or so they used to tell us in kindergarten. It’s not
   really true. Some get more turns than others, and I’ve never had a turn, not one! I hardly
   know how to say I, or mine; I’ve been she, her, that one, for so long.

   I haven’t even been given a name; I was always just the ugly sister; put the stress on ugly.
   The one that other mothers looked at, then looked away from and shook their heads gently.
   Their voices lowered or ceased altogether when I came into the room, in my pretty dresses, my
   face leaden and scowling. They tried to think of something to say that would redeem the
   situation – Well, she’s certainly strong – but they knew it was useless. So did I.

   You think I didn’t hate their pity, their forced kindness? And knowing that no matter what I
   did, how virtuous I was, or hardworking, I would never be beautiful. Not like her, the one who
   merely had to sit there to be adored. You wonder why I stabbed the blue eyes of my dolls with
   pins and pulled their hair out until they were bald? Life isn’t fair. Why should I be?

   As for the prince, you think I didn’t love him? I loved him more than she did; I loved him
   more than anything. Enough to cut off my foot. Enough to murder. Of course I disguised myself
   in heavy veils, to take her place at the altar. Of course I threw her out the window and
   pulled the sheets up over my head and pretended to be her. Who wouldn’t, in my position?

   But all my love ever came to was a bad end. Red-hot shoes, barrels studded with nails. That’s
   what it feels like, unrequited love.

   She had a baby, too. I was never allowed.

   Everything you’ve ever wanted, I wanted also.

   2.

   A libel action, that’s what I’m thinking. Put an end to this nonsense. Just because I’m old
   and live alone and can’t see very well, they accuse me of all sorts of things. Cooking and
   eating children, well, can you imagine? What a fantasy, and even if I did eat just a few,
   whose fault was it? Those children were left in the forest by their parents, who fully
   intended them to die. Waste not, want not, has always been my motto.

   Anyway, the way I see it, they were an offering: I used to be given grown-ups, men and women
   both, stuffed full of seasonal goodies and handed over to me at seed-time and harvest. The
   symbolism was a little crude, perhaps, and the events themselves were – some might say –
   lacking in taste, but folks’ hearts were in the right place. In return, I made things
   germinate and grow and swell and ripen.

   Then I got hidden away, and stuck into the attic, shrunken and parched and covered up in fusty
   draperies. Hell, I used to have breasts! Not just two of them. Lots. Ever wonder why a third
   tit was the crucial test, once, for women like me?

   Or why I’m so often shown with a garden? A wonderful garden, in which mouth-watering things
   grow. Mulberries. Magic cabbages. Rapunzel, whatever that is. And all those pregnant women
   trying to clamber over the wall, by the light of the moon, to munch up my fecundity, without
   giving anything in return. Theft, you’d call it, if you were at all open-minded.

   That was never the rule in the old days. Life was a gift then, not something to be stolen. It
   was my gift. By earth and sea I bestowed it, and the people gave me thanks.

   3.

   It’s true, there are never any evil stepfathers. Only a bunch of lily-livered widowers, who
   let me get away with murder vis-`a-vis their daughters. Where are they when I’m making those
   girls drudge in the kitchen, or sending them out into the blizzard in their paper dresses?
   Working late at the office. Passing the buck. Men! But if you think they knew nothing about
   it, you’re crazy.

   The thing about those good daughters is, they’re so good. Obedient and passive. Snivelling, I
   might add. No get-up-and-go. What would become of them if it weren’t for me? Nothing, that’s
   what. All they’d ever do is the housework, which seems to feature largely in these stories.
   They’d marry some peasant, have seventeen kids, and get “A dutiful wife” engraved on their
   tombstones, if any. Big deal.

   I stir things up, I get things moving. “Go play in the traffic,” I say to them. “Put on this
   paper dress and look for strawberries in the snow.” It’s perverse, but it works. All they have
   to do is smile and say hello and do a little more housework, for some gnomes or nice ladies or
   whatever, and bingo, they get the king’s son and the palace, and no more dishpan hands.
   Whereas all I get is the blame.

   God knows all about it. No Devil, no Fall, no Redemption. Grade Two arithmetic.

   You can wipe your feet on me, twist my motives around all you like, you can dump millstones on
   my head and drown me in the river, but you can’t get me out of the story. I’m the plot, babe,
   and don’t ever forget it.

                                                                                             1992

   1. These brief pieces depend on a knowledge of traditional fairy tales, though they are never
   actually narrated. How does Atwood draw on the present and on present knowledge to create a
   rich intertextual relationship with her original material?

   2. Consider the role of language in heightening the effectiveness of the text.

   3. How does Atwood develop a relationship between the speaker and the reader in these
   “monologues”, and how does this relate to the original material she is working from?

   SESSION 11

   REGISTER AND REPRESENTATION

   Preparation – Units 6, 7 and 8 of Ways of Reading

   A. Read “Parallel Text”, by Peter Reading (b. 1946), in which two texts describing the same
   event are juxtaposed.

                                           Parallel Text



                            (A bucolic employee of (The Craven Arms, Strettton                    
                     South Shropshire Farmers Ltd) & Tenbury Advertiser)                          
                                                                                                  
                  You remember that old Boy Marsh? A Stokesay farmer was killed                   
                        – im as lived at Stokesay? when he was struck by a train                  
                         – forever pickin is nose? on a stretch of track near                     
                       Well, this mornin ees takin Craven Arms. He was Mr John                    
                         some cattle over the line Jeremiah Marsh, a 60-year-old                  
                 (course they got underpass, like, bachelor of Stokesay Castle                    
                       but also the level crossing Farm, and the accident occurred                
                             as mostly they uses), just yards from his home, at                   
                             an 7.17 from Stretton Stokeswood – an unmanned level                 
                              runs over the fucker crossing. Mr Marsh is thought                  
                     – course kills im, like never to have been opening the gate.                 
                 you seen such a mess, cows an all The train which struck him                     
                       Still it dunna matter a lot was pulling 39 goods wagons                    
                          – ee were daft as a coot on its way to Carlisle                         

                                                                                             1979

   1. Try to systematically note as many differences as possible in the use of language in the
   two texts. How would you describe the registers of each of these uses of language?

   2. Consider what the poem is attempting to say by juxtaposing these different registers. Why
   can it justifiably be described as a poem, as opposed to two pieces of prose?

   B. Read the personal ads below, noting the terms and phrases which different people use to
   describe themselves or their preferred partner.

   MAD COW (too much roast beef) 32, seeks interesting man, similar age, for intelligent
   conversation, outings or just correspondence.

   GLASGOW MALE 48 5’8”, 12 stone, divorced, seeks adventurous female for fun, frolics and
   companionship. My interests include eating out, cinema, socialising and good conversation. I
   dislike Do-it-yourself, gardening and football.

   POLITICALLY AWARE female academic, late 40s, slim, optimistic, no ties, varied interests,
   seeks intelligent, tolerant and emotionally mature male.

   BISEXUAL MARRIED EAST INDIAN MALE – 30 yr. old professional, well-educated, handsome,
   athletic, seeks professional married male friend 40-65.

   THIS SLENDER gentle and elegant academic/professional woman in her mid-years looks forward to
   the company of a secure, unattached, Caucasian man with similar attributes. He appreciates the
   pleasures inherent in a physically active cultured lifestyle and is under 56, over 5’8” and a
   non-smoker.

   I AM A 35-YEAR-OLD BLACK MAN seeking a partner between the age of 24 to 32. Honest and
   faithful.

   DIVORCED WHITE BUSINESSWOMAN, 50 years old. General interests, theatre, travel. Wishes to meet
   intelligent man, non-smoker, slim, with adventure in his soul.

   ATTRACTIVE, ROOTS CONSCIOUS “UK Black” woman of Jamaican parentage, 30, one child, dark
   complexion, 5’6”, fit not fat, Capricorn (ASHA). Interests: Black history, cinema, theatre,
   reggae, travelling. Seeks similar Black male, 30 plus, 5’8” plus, emotionally stable and
   mature, ambitious, caring, into monogamous relationships.

   TALL, HANDSOME, HUMOROUS honest, smart, stylish, Black, professional guy, 26, 6 ft. Likes
   films, theatre, reading, socialising, “soft” music. Seeks similar pretty lady, non-smoker,
   20-30 for companionship.

   CAMBRIDGE GRADUATE: vaguely academic; likes films, opera, Europe, old things. Lithe, fit, 6’,
   sporty. Still attractive despite thinning hair.

   INCURABLE ROMANTIC, charming, uncomplicated, attractive woman, not slim, not young, feminine,
   wide interests seeks personable caring, retired male, sixty plus, middle brow for commitment.

   LADY, ATTRACTIVE, intelligent, independent mind and means, seeks similar man 40-50.

   SENSITIVE HIPPY, 24, seeks sincere and caring female for loving relationship.

   1. What different types of features are described? Are they described in different ways?
   (Consider in particular the use of adjectives or adjectival phrases.)

   2. How are people “self-represented” in these ads? Do there appear to be any differences
   between the sexes in this?

   3. The advertisements are drawn from three different publications: a weekly magazine for
   readers with left-of-centre views, a main-stream Canadian daily newspaper, and a newspaper for
   Blacks. To what extent do you think it possible to determine which ads would appear in which
   journals?

   C. Here are two texts on gypsies. The first is by Silvester Gordon Boswell (b. 1895), the
   second by D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930).

   Passage A

   My sons are good boys and settled in this business. But I’ve got one, Lewis, you see, one in
   the family who is a real Gypsy man.

   He loves his stick fire, he loves his green grass exactly like me, he will never settle. I
   don’t think so. I can’t see him settling – he’s not that type; he doesn’t want to and his wife
   doesn’t. So I think that’s good.

   He’s married a Romany girl. Yes, a Smith. They’ve got two children, but he wouldn’t, he
   wouldn’t swap his home away for a mansion or any different kind of life. He doesn’t want
   anything further. He gets his daily work and he’s not looking for a fortune you see. He lives
   from day to day – yesterday is gone – forget it, tomorrow never comes – don’t worry, today is
   here – use it!

   And that’s been my motto and that’s his.

   And whenever Lewis meets me with his trailer, or I go and see him if he’s up, say, in
   Yorkshire, I’ll perhaps go and have a weekend with him. I know he says within himself:

   “Father’s coming – we’ll pull in here – Father’s coming to such and such a fair. . .”

   Lewis is the typical Gypsy man. More of a Gypsy man than anyone left in the family, and I
   think he intends to lead the life as much as he can and as much as he dare. Although that’s
   difficult at times, even for him. But he’ll turn his hand to anything. He’ll turn his hand to
   a bit of scrap. He’ll do a bit of tarmac for a garden path, or forecourts or something like
   that. He’s a Jack-of-all-trades, if you understand me. He likes the Gypsy life. The roadside
   and the fairground. He likes a horse, he’s a good horseman. He’s got one or two for his kids,
   but he can’t make it a business – he can’t afford to. It’s a luxury – occasionally. It won’t
   keep you, will it?

   He travels a lot. He’ll perhaps move off to Penrith or Carlisle, he may have a few weeks up
   there until June spraying farm buildings if the weather’s right. Or he may be at Morecambe, or
   the other side of Newcastle. If I feel I want a week or ten days – I’ll go up and meet him,
   but you can bet your life he’s somewhere where a bit of green grass is and he’s got his yog[9]
   beside his wagon whether it’s hot or cold. He’ll wait until the cool of the day and he’ll
   still have his fire.

   He likes that and his children like it. They’re not ashamed. They don’t want to get away from
   the life. Yet they go to school. They wear these little badges, and they get monitors at
   school, and they’re very intelligent. Lewis is like me – he’s giving his children as much
   education as he can and fill it in in the winter months, and then when summertime comes
   they’ve got to move, and if they’re in a place for a fortnight or three weeks they send them
   to the nearest school if they can fit them in.

   Yes, Lewis’s little children will tell you he’s a Gypsy. He’s a Romany, a real Romany man.

                                                                                             1970

   Passage B

   The gypsy woman called something to the man on the steps. He went into the caravan for a
   moment or two, then reappeared, and came down the steps, setting the small child on its
   uncertain feet, and holding it by the hand. A dandy, in his polished black boots, tight black
   trousers and tight dark-green jersey, he walked slowly across with the toddling child to where
   the elderly gypsy was giving the roan horse a feed of oats, in the bough shelter between pits
   of grey rock, with dry bracken upon the stone chip floor. He looked at Yvette as he passed,
   staring her full in the eyes, with his pariah’s bold yet dishonest stare. Something hard
   inside her met his stare. But the surface of her body seemed to turn to water. Nevertheless,
   something hard in her registered the peculiar pure lines of his face, of his straight, pure
   nose, of his cheeks and temples. The curious dark, suave purity of all his body, outlined in
   the green jersey; a purity like a living sneer.

   And as he loped slowly past her, on his flexible hips, it seemed to her still that he was
   stronger than she was. Of all the men she had ever seen, this one was the only one who was
   stronger than she was, in her own kind of strength, her own kind of understanding.

                                                                                             1921

   1. In what ways do the registers of these two passages differ?

   2. How is the “real Romany man” represented in the two texts? How do such things as the use of
   language (vocabulary, syntax) and the point of view contribute to the reader’s impression?

   SESSION 12

   STYLE IN CHANGING SOCIAL AND HISTORICAL CONTEXTS

   A. Read the following two poems, by Ben Jonson (1572-1637) and Edward Thomas (1878-1917)
   respectively, with a view to comparing and contrasting them in various ways.

                      The Triumph of Charis

   SEE the Chariot at hand here of Love,

          Wherein my Lady rideth!

   Each that draws is a swan or a dove,

          And well the car Love guideth.

   As she goes, all hearts do duty                                                       5

                      Unto her beauty;

   And enamoured do wish, so they might

                      But enjoy such a sight,

   That they still were to run by her side,

   Thorough swords, thorough seas, wither she would ride.                10

   Do but look on her eyes, they do light

          All that Love’s world compriseth!

   Do but look on her hair, it is bright

          As Love’s star when it riseth!

   Do but mark, her forehead’s smoother                                          15

                      Than words that soothe her;

   And from her arched brows such a grace

                      Sheds itself through the face,

   As alone there triumphs to the life

   All the gain, all the good, of the elements’ strife.                            20

   Have you seen but a bright lily grow

          Before rude hands have touched it?

   Have you marked but the fall of the snow

          Before the soil hath smutched it?

   Have you felt the wool of the beaver,                                           25

                      Or swan’s down ever?

   Or have smelt of the bud of the brier,

                      Or the nard[10] in the fire?

   Or have tasted the bag of the bee?

                      O so white, O so soft, O so sweet is she!                   30

                             The Unknown

   She is most fair

   And when they see her pass

   The poets’ ladies

   Look no more in the glass.

   But after her.                                                                               
   5

   On a bleak moor

   Running under the moon

   She lures a Poet,

   Once proud or happy, soon

   Far from his door.                                                                        10

   Beside a train,

   Because they saw her go,

   Or failed to see her,

   Travellers and watchers know

   Another pain.                                                                              15

   The simple lack

   Of her is more to me

   Than others’ presence

   Whether life splendid be

   Or utter black.                                                                             20

   I have not seen,

   I have no news of her;

   I can tell only

   She is not here, but there

   She might have been.                                                                   25

   She is to be kissed

   Only perhaps by me;

   She may be seeking

   Me and no other; she

   May not exist.                                                                             30

                                                                                             1917

   1. Both the poems describe a woman, but each does so in a different way. Consider the precise
   nature of the differences in terms of:

   i)   perspective and persona (including setting and the way in which the relationship between
   the speaker, the woman and anyone else is presented, and the argument and narrative
   development of each poem);

   ii)  the use of form and language with regard to register, patterning, deviation, particular
   choice of words, sound-patterning, etc.

   2. What, if anything, do the two poems have in common, other than the fact that they describe
   a woman?

   3. How far can the differences between the two poems be ascribed to the social and historical
   conditions in which they were written? Think of social and political considerations, but also
   of developments in literary and esthetic taste. What differences or similarities between the
   two poems do you think can be ascribed to other considerations, such as the personal outlook
   of the poet or general characteristics of European thought and civilization?

   B. In the text below, several words have been omitted. Read the poem several times, and then
   fill in the gaps with words that appear in the lists of alternatives that follow the poem. In
   making your choice, try to decide which word best fits with the surrounding words. To do this,
   you will have to pay attention to the grammar of the sentence, to the immediate context, and
   to the overall pattern created by the words. In two cases, the first letter of the word is
   given as a clue.

                           Futility

   Move him into the ..........-

   Gently its touch awoke him once,

   At home, whispering of fields unsown.

   Always it woke him, even in France,

   Until this morning and this snow.                                                    5

   If anything might r........ him now

   The .......... ............sun will know.

   Think how it wakes the seeds, –

   ........., once, the clays of a cold star.

   Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides,                                          10

   Full-nerved – still warm – too hard to ........?

   Was it for this the ..........grew tall?

   – O what made f......... sunbeams toil

   To break earth’s sleep at all?

   Possible words for verse 1:

   early shade revive old restore sun morning grave kind rouse bright hospital

   Possible words for verse 2:

   youth soldier warmed grass futile friendly woke move clay stir fatuous

   2. In class we will be looking at your choices, the reasons you made them, their
   appropriateness, and so on. (We will also look at the original choices made by the poet.) We
   will then go on to a wider analysis of the style of the poem, looking at such things as the
   way words are used in the poem (register, semantic fields, associations, etc.), the formal
   patterns of sound and rhythm, the use of contrasts, and the way all of these are related to
   the meaning of the poem.

   3. “Futility” and “The Unknown” were written within a couple of years of each other
   (1916-1918). Can you point to any features that they share?

   SESSION 13

   INTERPRETATION AND CRITICISM

   The following poem is by Ted Hughes (b. 1930).

                           Hawk Roosting

   I sit in the top of the wood, my eyes closed.

   Inaction, no falsifying dream

   Between my hooked head and hooked feet:

   Or in sleep rehearse perfect kills and eat.

   The convenience of the high trees!                                                 5

   The air’s buoyancy and the sun’s ray

   Are of advantage to me;

   And the earth’s face upward for my inspection.

   My feet are locked upon the rough bark.

   It took the whole of Creation                                                        10

   To produce my foot, my each feather:

   Now I hold Creation in my foot

   Or fly up, and revolve it all slowly –

   I kill where I please because it is all mine.

   here is no sophistry in my body:                                                    15

   My manners are tearing off heads –

   The allotment of death.

   For the one path of my flight is direct

   Through the bones of the living.

   No arguments assert my right:                                                      20

   The sun is behind me.

   Nothing has changed since I began.

   My eye has permitted no change.

   I am going to keep things like this.

                                                                                             1960

   1. Be prepared to discuss the poem in class. In order to do so, try to draw on as many of the
   approaches we have learned about this semester as possible. Remember, too, that formal
   analysis should always be linked with function; not just how certain formal features of the
   poem work, but how they contribute to the meaning. In the end, it is the interpretation of the
   poem that is most important – what you feel it is saying, and how this is achieved.

   2. As part of this lesson, suggestions will be made as to how the analysis of a poem such as
   this might best be presented in the form of an essay.

   -------------------------------

   [1]      This quotation is slightly adapted from a Christmas sermon (1622) by the Anglican
   bishop Lancelot Andrewes.

   [2]      Splendid.

   [3]      Perfumes.

   [4]      Musical cadences.

   [5]      Most, at its most intense.

   [6]      Clothing.

   [7]      Encircled.

   [8]      Surpasses.

   [9]      Stick fire.

   [10]    An aromatic plant or substance.