Paper #3 due date

Paper #3 will be due on 4/28 5/3  (paper readings may extend to part of class on 5/5).

Paper #4 will be optional:  if you want to try to raise your grade.  Any paper handed in as Paper #4 will not lower your grade.  You can turn it in when we meet for the final exam.

General info for topics for next paper

For those who like to get started early:  You will focus on one of our texts, with a brief reference to a second as part of your argument (the reference to the second text can be either support or counter-example); make sure you address the questions below in the context of your essay.  Please note:  none of these questions are your specific thesis.  Your thesis should be something about the child/childhood or the parent/parental in your chosen text.

1.  What is evil in this story--what does it do?
2.  Where, according to the text, does evil come from--what is its point of origin in the story?
3.  How does the story get you to participate in it (the story, the evil, the argument, etc.)?

Some pithy quotations:

 

Evil is unspectacular and always human

And shares our bed and eats at our own table.   

--W.H. AUDEN, Herman Melville

The whole gamut of good and evil is in every human being, certain notes, from stronger original quality or most frequent use, appearing to form the whole character; but they are only the tones most often heard. The whole scale is in every soul, and the notes most seldom heard will on rare occasions make themselves audible.
--FANNY KEMBLE, Further Records, Feb. 12, 1875

Evil is a point of view.
--ANNE RICE, Interview with the Vampire




 The rules are the same as for the first paper. 

links

YGB
http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-new2?id=HawYoun.sgm&images=images/modeng&data=/texts/english/modeng/parsed&tag=public&part=all

tos
 http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-new2?id=JamTurn.sgm&images=images/modeng&data=/texts/english/modeng/parsed&tag=public&part=all

gmhf
http://notearama.blogspot.com/2010/01/good-man-is-hard-to-find.html

gcp
  http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:0Vu8Sc4jNfQJ:faculty.weber.edu/jyoung/English%25206710/Good%2520Country%2520People.pdf+%22good+country+people%22&hl=en&gl=us&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESgGYu61KSffr4qRrGjALru-vpnil33KFOPchvu0sizlymkIUEF-j0N0GVVR7EsjGDjViOhqh06W7HNfQwB3Laqzt9ayDoAyuBT9SwYA4uzFgSVorTjbceYsftq9H1p-jc_2WBXf&sig=AHIEtbT8CRz08FNhWxAOIgNuhfGUdBGtcg

tl
http://www.americanliterature.com/Jackson/SS/TheLottery.html

rfe
  http://www.eng.fju.edu.tw/English_Literature/Rose/el-text-E-Rose.htm

"Young Goodman Brown" (the instructions given in class Tuesday)

http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-new2?id=HawYoun.sgm&images=images/modeng&data=/texts/english/modeng/parsed&tag=public&part=all

Or go to Google and enter

Young Goodman Brown etext

click on the link to etext.virginia.edu

Then click on "entire work"

T of S quotations

" . . . one of [James's] most cruel effects:  the ambiguity of innocence, of an innocence which is pure of the evil it contains; the art of perfect dissimulation which enables the children to conceal this evil from the honest folk amongst whom they live, an evil which is perhaps an innocence that becomes evil in the proximity of such folk, the incorruptible innocence they oppose to the true evil of adults; or again the riddle of the visions attributed to them, the uncertainty of a story which has perhaps been foisted upon them by the demented imagination of a governess who tortures them to death with her own hallucinations."  --Maurice Blanchot (from The Siren's Song: Selected Essays by Maurice Blanchot; rpt from a 1959 essay)

"There is no question that the young woman sees the ghosts of Peter Quint and of Miss Jessel.  We recognize also that she is making an extraordinary effort to keep calm in the face of the evil she fears.  The evil, however, is in her own mind; when she has the 'certitude' that her ghosts have come for the children, the reader must decide whether she is stating a fact or enunciating a theory.  Looking back over her story, we discover that her circumstantial account of the behavior of the children establishes them as 'normal.'  Little Miles wants to know when he is going back to school; little Flora's escapade with the boar is perfectly in character for an eight-year-old.  Yet the governess makes the behavior of the children seem sinister.  The real 'turn of the screw'--the particular twist of pain in the tale--resides in what the governess is doing to the children.  They, on their side, try constantly to accommodate themselves to her vision."  --Leon Edel, from Henry James: Stories of the Supernatural

"Only make the reader's general vision of evil intense enough . . . and his own experience, his own imagination  . . will supply him quite sufficiently with all the particulars.  Make him think the evil, make him think it for himself, and you are released from weak specifications."  --Henry James

"The Turn of the Screw is the most hopelessly evil story that we have ever read in any literature, ancient of modern.  how Mr. James could, or how any man or woman could, choose to make such a study of infernal human debauchery, for it is nothing else, is unaccountable. . . . The study, while it exhibits Mr. James's genius in a powerful light, affects the reader with a disgust that is not to be expressed.  The feeling after perusal of the horrible story is that one has been assisting in an outrage upon the holiest and sweetest fountain of human innocence, and helping to debauch--at least by helplessly standing by--the pure and trusting nature of children.  Human imagination can go no further into infamy, literary art could not be used with more refined subtlety of spiritual defilement."   --The Independent, 1899

"In 1934, Edmund Wilson for the first time suggests explicitly that The Turn of the Screw is not, in fact, a ghost story but a madness story, a study of a case of neurosis:  the ghosts, accordingly, do not really exist; they are but figments of the governess's sick imagination, mere hallucinations and projections symptomatic of the frustration of her repressed sexual desires.  This psychoanalytic interpretation will hit the critical scene like a bomb.  Making its author into an overnight celebrity by arousing as much interest as James's text itself, Wilson's article will provoke a veritable barrage of indignant refutations, all closely argued and based on 'irrefutable' textual evidence."  --Shoshana Felman, "Madness and the Risks of Practice (Turning the Screw of Interpretation)"

"Henry James's ghosts have nothing in common with the violent old ghosts__the blood-stained sea captains, the white horses, the headless ladies of dark lanes and windy commons.  They have their origin within us.  They are present whenever the significant overflows our powers of expressing it; whenever the ordinary appears ringed by the strange.   The baffling things that are left over, the frightening ones that persist--these are the emotions that he takes, embodies, makes consoling and companionable.  But how can we be afraid? . . . The beautiful urbane spirits are only not of this world because they are too fine for it.  . . . We may feel clumsy in their presence, but we cannot feel afraid.  What doe sit matter, then, if we do pick up 'The Turn of the Screw' an hour or so before bedtime?. . .
   Perhaps it is the silence that first impresses us. . . . 'I can hear again, as I write, the intense hush in which the sounds of evening dropped.  The rooks stopped cawing in the gold sky, and the friendly hour lost for the unspeakable minute all its voice.'  It is unspeakable.  We know that the man who sands on the tower staring down at the governess beneath is evil.  Some unutterable obscenity has come to the surface.  It tries to get i; it tries to get at something.  The exquisite little beings who lie innocently asleep must at all costs be protected.  But the horror grows.  Is it possible that the little girl, as she turns back from the window, has seen the woman outside?  Has she been with Miss Jessel?  Has Quint visited the boy?  It is Quint who hangs about us in the dark; who is there in that corner and again there in that. It is Quint who must be reasoned away, and for all our reasoning returns.  Can it be that we are afraid?  But it is not a man with red hair and a white face whom we fear.  We are afraid of something unnamed, of something, perhaps, in ourselves.  In short, we turn on the light.  If by its beams we examine the story in safety, note how masterly the telling is, how each sentence is stretched, each image filled, how the inner world gains from the robustness of the outer, how beauty and obscenity twined together worm their way to the depths--still we must own that something remains unaccounted for.  We must admit that Henry James has conquered.  That courtly, worldly, sentimental old gentleman can still make us afraid of the dark.  --Virginia Woolf, "Henry James's Ghost Stories," 1921.

Schedule

Feb. 22 "The Turn of the Screw," cont'd.
Feb. 24  Read "Young Goodman Brown, Nathaniel Hawthorne
--discuss, probably with "The Turn of the Screw" as well
Mar. 1, 3   The Bad Seed, Dir. Mervyn LeRoy
Mar. 8, 10 Discuss The Bad Seed
Mar. 15, 17 Spring Break
Mar. 22, 24, 29 The Omen (I think), screen and discuss
Mar. 31 No class. Choose an Arizona Quarterly Symposium paper to attend
Apr. 5  Paper #2  Selected papers read in class.

Paper#1 assignment

 Choose from the following options:

1.  Write an essay agreeing or disagreeing that the adage "Money is the root of all evil" helps us read our stories.  Choose one text as your main text.  Include a second text briefly, perhaps no more than a sentence or part of a sentence, but certainly less than a paragraph, to help make your argument.  (The second text could be a counter-example if you like, rather than a second example.)

2. Write an essay on romantic love / heterosexuality in one of the texts (again, using a second text briefly as well).

3.  Pick a quotation from those on this blog--there are a couple on the syllabus, and others in various posts--as an anchor for an essay in which you argue either that your main and secondary texts exemplify in some way or contradict in some way the gist of the comment.  Do NOT type out the entire quotation--just refer to it, perhaps with a phrase, or with a word or two (or several) of summary.

4.  Form and format directions for this paper are in a previous post.

5.  Email me--before Monday night, please--if you have questions or problems.

Have fun!