British Literature Fall 2013 Top 5

December is the point at which we tend to pause and consider the past year. Everywhere you look there are top ten lists of 2013, tributes to the ones we have lost and the nation takes on a reflective tone as we ready to launch into a new year. Reviewing for the final exam for this class has fit nicely with this contemplative theme. Rereading key bits of each text brings the characters and themes back into sharp focus, for better or for worse, and I can't stop myself from categorizing them into my own top 5's.

Top 5 Villains: 5)The Grendel - Beowulf 4)The Duke - Measure for Measure 3)Angelo - Measure for Measure 2)Mephistopheles - Dr. Faustus 1)Satan - Paradise Lost Satan earns this dubious distinction because - well he's Satan. Additionally, he is the perfect study of a good man gone bad. He was once an angel, after all. Most importantly, Satan has the most awesome arch enemy of all. Speaking of which...

Top 5 Heroes: 5)Beowulf - Beowulf 4)The Wife of Bath - Canterbury Tales 3)Isabella - Measure for Measure 2)Oroonoko - Oroonoko 1)God - Paradise Lost God is the easy winner because, like Satan, he is of legendary proportion. He is also the only hero without flaws, which skews the playing field a bit. Doesn't a hero need flaws? Regardless, it is my top 5.

Most Interesting Character: The Wife of Bath Honorable Mention: Satan - Paradise Lost This was a difficult decision, because Satan is such a round and, at times, empathetic character. The Wife of Bath takes the honors because she is a kick-butt female character in a time before heroines. Sure, she is a bit of a parody, but I feel her strength overrides any comic factor she has.

Most Pathetic Lead: Tie: Gulliver - Gulliver's Travels & Faustus - Dr. Faustus Equally weak and despicable, these two men lack the backbone to be anything more than a cautionary tale. Gulliver's sense of self is easily compromised,as evidenced in his willingness to identify with horses after his return to England and Faustus, well, Faustus is just a very lonely, weak man. Place I would least like to visit: Utopia No privacy, no thank you. Way too much togetherness, not enough identity and I have the sneaky suspicion I would be stuck as a full time farmer. I humbly submit, my Top 5's of Brit. Lit. Fall 2013 5 of 5 WOOT!

Swift's Utopia?

     I have to say I am admittedly a little miffed with Mother Nature for her role in preventing further discussion on Gulliver's Travels as I have been looking forward to this text all semester! So, I have resolved to continue the discussion in some proportion.

     As I prepare to face this final, I am pondering all the connections and thematic similarities that can be made across the texts we have covered this semester.  And I have been thinking about Swift's potential motives when writing this narrative. We've spent a fair amount of time discussing utopian and dystopian thought and this has made me think more about how Swift may have been engaging in a sort of utopian pun. While we've talked about how he is satirizing England society, it seems he uses the different societies Gulliver encounters, such as that of the Lilliputians and the Houyhnhnms, as conversation starters for his contemporaries to question the way things are done in their own society. Personally, I find these “civilizations” bizarre and unattractive, which brings me to the question: is he intending to open the floor for new ideas to inspire change or does this story serve to repel us from the idea of a utopia (a perfect society) and perhaps even those cultures who are different?

Change of Views

So, In the beginning of the semester, we made an influence map where we found pictures to represent what we thought of when we thought of what it meant to be British. My images were probably pretty generic in what people would think of. I had a picture of the Royal Wedding, tea, the "Keep Calm and Carry on Sign", and images of Shakespeare, but now that the semester is over I feel like many of my ideas have evolved from where they began. This made me think about what I would change from our original assignment based on what I've learned over the semester.

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To begin with, I would still leave my image of Peter Pan flying across London. For whatever reason, when someone says England this is the first things I think of. I think partly because, at a young age, it showed a very physical place that was full of magic and fantasy. I think this representation has been a huge part of what we learned this semester. Magic in the world, for whatever reason, has been represented in the text we read like Sir Gawain and The Green Knight, The Wife of Bath's Tale, Doctor Faustus, and Gulliver's Travels. Each of these tales goes beyond the natural world and exposes the reader to a fantasy one. So yes, after I've rambled, Peter Pan, would stay.

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 The Canterbury Tales would be another image that would have to be added to my map. For one thing, beside reading the tales in this class, I also took the Chaucer class, and we pretty much read the whole thing, so it definitely has influenced my view of medieval and British culture. The Canterbury Tales is an interesting text because it examines, so many different issue like social differences, gender roles, and religious influence. There were some stories like "The Knight's Tale" that showed the nobility, and in a lot of ways, what we expect from British culture, but then there were surprises like "The Miller's Tale" and how they behaved. I also like the storytelling aspect of The Canterbury Tales, and how the tone and style of story changes with each character. The story is filled with different layers between the story of the pilgrimage to each travelers own stories. It has a complex style, but after working through that text all semester it has really influenced my ideas of medieval times.

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An image of an angel and devil would also be added to my map now as well. I had never thought about how mooch of British Literature focused on the characters of God, angels, demons, and the devil. We saw reoccurring ideas of sin and redemption. Multiple texts showed this idea where character went out in search of Hell or supported it's ideas, but questions in discussion were also raised about when is it too late to be redeemed? We saw the ideas of Hell and Sin, and the ideas of redemption in text like Doctor Faustus and Paradise Lost, but the idea of sin and redemption was not one that I had previously associated with the idea of "Britain".

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The last idea that I would add is the idea of the government, and how it has evolved. This was not an area the I thought about. I knew that the Royal family is face of the government, but that parliament was in charge more, but I never thought of the evolution of this system. When I thing of England, I think of Kings and Queens like King Henry VIII and Queen Elizabeth. Many of our texts addressed the idea of government, but it also showed how the perception of government changed over time. In Rule Britania, there was an extreme pride in being British but then by the time we get to Gulliver's Travels the author is mocking the system with satire. Even in Measure for Measure the behavior of government officials in charge is assessed.

Post 5/5

A Growing Struggle and Realisation - Why I Love Literature and What I Learned This Semester (That Had Nothing to do with the Lectures or Readings Themselves)

When I was very young, I lived with my mother and a very sick great aunt, whom my mother was taking care of. We had a dog, a poodle-mix, who quite literally saved my life one morning when a neighbor’s doberman-beast got loose and decided to go on a rampage. Our dog would walk with a limp for the rest of his life. We had a cat, who was as defiant and obstinate as every stereotypical cat that couldn’t co-star in a seedy Japanese cartoon if they were made into a person. The cat would literally live to the age of 26 off of pure anger and spite, and to ensure that my first experience with death that I was sentient for to understand, after years of battling cancer, this cat would be sentenced to a merciful death; that he would proceed to raise two middle fingers at and die on his own in the car on the way to the vet. Though there were men in my life in my extended family, I had no friends in the neighborhood; I didn’t go to the school that I was supposed to, because every morning my mother would need to take me from what is now the Walkersville area to the Linganore area. She did this so that my aunt, her sister, could watch me in the mornings while she went off to work at four. Great Aunt Bett had died before I started school proper.

I made some friends in school, but proceeded to have little to no contact with them outside of school until I was eight, when we moved to be closer to the rest of the family (and partly out of my own inability to lie about my address to the teachers who believed I was living at my aunt’s location). I would play with toys, read, and otherwise distract myself in the time I had alone (which was a large amount of time) by even occasionally reading. My mother was too tired to play when she and I got home each night, my grandfather was in no condition to be able to teach me how to play SportBall, and my uncle was never home early enough to do so either.

I was smart. Smart enough. I certainly didn’t have as much trouble in school as my cousin, who at this point in my life was more like a sister that I didn’t have actually at home with me and my mother. My grades never suffered for my abilities to accomplish a task. Except for Physical Education, which I blame entirely on an illness that had left me unable to walk for the greater part of two months (and at Christmas time!). In fact, my grades were excellent for the amount of work that I was putting into the admittedly simple tasks that were being given to us, once I had mastered the basics. It has always been the things that I simply failed to do which hurt me the most; in both school and in my personal life. To this day, my family has loved to give my mother no end of harassment for her treatment of what we call “the map incident”. A Social Studies project, a major part of that grade at the time, was to create a map. The details of the project itself are lost to time and memory, but she and I had both known about it for weeks and weeks and weeks. I didn’t start on it until the night before, and in the time that she spent calling people to yell and complain about my foolishness and openingly admitting that she wanted to watch me fail, I fulfilled the requirements of the assignment and received an A. She very nearly called up my teacher to tell me that I deserved an F; and looking back, I wouldn’t have blamed her. Everyone else in my family would cite this incident as a way to remind her not to underestimate my capabilities.

But the truth of the matter is, my abilities did not matter. That assignment was not about my ability to create a map, and getting the A, while helpful at the time, the cost may have been my future success after all. The assignment was about using your time wisely. It has become increasingly obvious to me, over the course of the last semester, something that should be fairly obvious to anyone who’s actually bothered to read through this; my thoughts are all over the place, and I’m having difficulty even paying enough attention to write.

Over the last two weeks, I have repeatedly sat down to write something or another for the rapidly approaching Finals and have each and every time “woken up” several hours later on a website that I had read several hundred times before, with absolutely zero progress made on what I’d originally set out to do.

What originally started as me developing an ability to keep myself entertained with books and music and art and television and video games has developed into a serious problem for my productivity, but has alongside it spawned a fascination and a need for literature. Everything that is constantly fighting for my attention with flashing lights or repetitive sounds or whatever completely fades away when I’m able to truly devote my attention to something; anything. Today, I read the back of a bottle of shampoo for twenty minutes.

But this same defense mechanism that’s inadvertently crippled me is also what’s allowed me to be so completely enthralled by stories. When reading Beowulf, there’s only so much of the world we’re being told. Shakespeare’s plays only show us so much of Vienna-London. Even in bigger works that tackle the creations of complete worlds (Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter) there are no distractions. Everything that is being shown is something that is important, and thus deserving of attention. There’s no trying to decide what there is to pay attention to or not. (Incidentally, this makes me a terrible person to watch a movie with, because why are there fighter jets flying so close to the kaiju when this is clearly set in roughly the modern era, in which we have magnetic rail guns mounted on battleships that can, with pinpoint accuracy, launch a minivan at it from more than three miles away.)

Add into this the growing technologies of our media and the increased abilities of video games to create worlds and stories worth considering and deconstructing critically, and it becomes easier to at least rationalize the ease at which I get lost in them. At the risk of damning myself, I very well may have forgotten more about the Warcraft setting than most people will ever learn about their home country’s history.

Utopia, Oroonoko, Gulliver’s Travels; all of these are excruciatingly important because through what they choose to show us, we learn more about the worlds not just in their narratives, but also the worlds that created them. Just like literally any media or literature ever made in the history of humanity.

Much like even sitting down to write this paper, sometimes the hardest part is simply sitting down  and starting; in this case, to talk about things worth considering. The Utopian civilization in Utopia has slaves. Oronooko gives us a conflict between what we consider to be “civilized” and what we consider to be “savage” in the form of an educated, royal general who is both a slave trader, and eventually enslaved. Gulliver’s Travels opens with a long, drawn out masturbation pun, and I may very well have Attention Deficit Disorder and didn’t even realize it until it’s been able to have the tremendous effect that it’s had on my life and my productivity. I should have graduated last spring.

But I can sit. I can read. I can think about what I’ve read. Stories are important, in all of our media. The canon of literature that has come before now will always influence us, as it has helped to shape the culture, and thus society, that creates what we have now. We need stories; as points of reference and as points of focus that we can all look at, because it might be easier to talk about London when your plays are set in Vienna, but it is certainly easier to look at just the one thing you want to look at when that is what the story is about.

Now it’s your turn. What did you learn this semester that had nothing to do with the lectures and the reading? What did you learn about yourself?

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5 of 5

Just a little more on Oroonoko

After reading the first portion of this story, as Oroonoko was on the boat headed for the plantation, I remember thinking that I would be very upset if he didn't find Imoinda over there.  Needless to say, when they found each other and finally got to be together I was pretty happy.  Unfortunately the story just goes downhill from there.  I don't quite get why people thought Oroonoko would simply sit around and let the promises made to him be delayed forever; I was more surprised that he waited as long as he did.  And seriously, "we have to wait until the governor gets back" is a pretty shoddy excuse considering the entire point of a deputy governor is to fill the governor's shoes while he's not around.  There's no reason he couldn't have made the call himself, which means he was just being (as we found out later) a major asshole.  I guess maybe they were used to dealing with slaves who had been captured in battle and felt, culturally, that their fate was deserved.  Whatever the case, things took a sharp turn for the worse after he led the mass escape.

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I was heartened to hear in class that I was not the only one who approved of his killing Imoinda.  At that point it was obvious they were not going to get their freedom, even though they could have given the colony a hundred other slaves as a ransom.  (From a pragmatic point of view, why the people in charge wouldn't trade two troublesome slaves for a hundred more docile ones is something I'll never understand.)  I agree with his determination to live free or die, as did the founders of this country under much less harsh treatment than he suffered.  What's more, the manner of his death justified his choice to me fully; if they would go so far as to cut off his genitals and other parts of his body and burn them in front of him, I cringe to think what they would have done to his wife and unborn child.

Oroonoko's death scene, to me, was the ultimate revelation of who is "civilized" and who is "savage."  Part of why I view Oroonoko and Imoinda as so high on the "civilized" scale is because of where they started in relation to where they ended up, in terms of morality and personal growth and character.  If you are raised in a civilized culture, with an emphasis on right and wrong, a strong moral code, and a high degree of organization, I think it is far worse for you to sink to the barbarous level of Oroonoko's grandfather than it is for someone raised in a less civilized culture.  Basically, I think you should be measured by the culture you were raised in.  Of course, the natives in this story present an interesting dilemma.  They have a strong moral code and a good understanding of right and wrong, but they don't have a lot of organization.  Does this make them more civilized or more savage?  The definition you use has a great effect on how they are categorized.  Personally, I consider morality to be the most important product of culture, so I consider a highly moral society to be a civilized one.  How about you?

(4 out of 5)

Gulliver's Travels (Houyhnhnms and Yahoos)

As I was reading Book IV I had to constantly remind myself that the Houyhnhnms were horses because they have so many human characteristics. I believe Swift wanted his audience to realize how selfish and self-absorbed humans can be. Also, Swift brings attention to the fact that humans(Yahoos) only value their honorable characteristics rather than the characteristics of others. It seems that humans constantly take advantage of things that are major components to their societies.
When Gulliver describes to the Master Houyhnhnm that horses are "creatures" where he comes from. The Master Houyhnhnm is somewhat applaud by his words. Gulliver then explains that horses are used for traveling, racing, and drawing chariots. The Houyhnhnms are in disbelief because they would rather not be weak like Yahoos (humans). This is very ironic because in the Houyhnhms society humans are weak creatures and in the Yahoos society the horses are weak creatures.
The Houyhnhms are very intelligent and concerned more with a collectivist attitude rather than an individualistic attitude.  Also, they breed cleanliness and civility in their young, and exercise them for speed and strength. However, what about the Yahoos? Gulliver states that the Yahoos were unable to learn, cowardly, hostile, and filled with rage. When Gulliver entered the house of the Houyhnhnms, he noticed that the Yahoos were all tied up and they had no way to escape. I know Dr. MB mentioned slavery and that is actually a brilliant point. Although these Houyhnhms are very unique and clever, could they also act as slave masters? I believe this is a strong possibility. The horses label themselves as superior and intelligent-- basically perfect. On the other hand, the Yahoos are weak and insufficient. The Houyhnhms have the ability to delete all Yahoos from their society and treat them as if they are unworthy. This to me sounds somewhat like slavery.
Overall, Gulliver's Travels is a brilliant book! I absolutely enjoyed it because it brings a lot of attention to certain problems different societies and humans have. In addition, Swift makes the content even more interesting because of the satire.

Measure for Measure... and Music!

While I was in the shower, I started to think about how lonely a quiet shower is, especially in the morning, when I'm trying to get energized and ready for the day ahead. I wished that my iPod had better portable speakers so that I could wrap it in a plastic bag and listen to my music in the shower so I wouldn't have to hear the extremely annoying muffled conversations of every other person in the bathroom with me.

Then I thought, "Wouldn't it be cool if the books we read in class had a soundtrack?" This thought was born out of desperation, I'll admit, and the need to talk about other things for this blog. But hey, music!

 Also, I don't remember if anyone else has done this before. If so, thank you so much for inadvertently inspiring me! You are a magical human. If not, then cool, too, because I sort of borrowed the soundtrack idea from Tumblr, as well.

So here's  my music series for "Measure for Measure". I came up with songs that I think say a lot about the three main characters: Angelo, Claudio, and Isabella. They might be songs that have to do with their characters, or songs the characters might listen to, were the play set in modern times.

Angelo (the dirty bastard)
"All These Things That I've Done"-- The Killers
"Ever Fallen in Love (With Someone you Shouldn't?)" -- The Buzzcocks
"Turn Me On" -- Bromheads Jacket
"Arabella" -- Arctic Monkeys

Claudio (ya hecked up big time, buddy)
"Apple Tree" -- Wolfmother
"World Spins Madly On" -- The Weepies
"The Lion and the Wolf" -- Thrice
"Older Brother" -- Pepper Rabbit

Isabella (oh girlie, ya got some decisions to make)
"Almost Pretty" -- The Perishers
"Awake my Soul" -- Mumford&Sons
"Dead Sea" -- The Lumineers
"Mace Spray" -- The Jezabels