Saturday, September 25, 2010

CARMILLA

For next week, read to page 292 of Carmilla. As always, these questions are meant to help inspire and guide your reading. Feel free to develop your own questions or respond to another student’s blog.

Your blogs will be due on Wednesday at 11:59 pm.

Your comments on other student blogs will be due by FRIDAY at 11:59.

In addition to your blogs and comments, you also must post in one or more of the discussion forums on my blog by Friday at 11:59 pm. You do NOT have to post in all of the forums, but I will be assessing you on how well you are able to respond to the various prompts and each others' ideas. Remember that Forum C is an open forum, so if there is something you would like to discuss that hasn't been addressed by me or another student, please post there.

* Do a little research on the author and try to locate the historical, social, and political contexts in which he wrote his dark tales. In his day, Le Fanu was called "The Invisible Prince." How did he achieve this nickname and how did he work to perpetuate this persona? Also, you may want to do some independent research on any of the following terms: The Irish Famine, Young Ireland, or Catholic Emancipation. What could an understanding of these historical events bring to a reading of Carmilla? Make sure to quote from and provide links to your research sources.
* The metaphor of the vampire is certainly a capacious one. In terms of this novel, how might we see the metaphor of the vampire functioning in the Irish context? Who (or what) might Carmilla represent in the social, political, and economic sense? Use examples from the text to support your answer.
* How would you characterize the modes of sexuality in this novel? How do we see identity being “queered” or “troubled” in this novel? Use examples from the text to explain your answer.

Sunday, September 19, 2010

WUTHERING HEIGHTS continued and “Why am I so changed?”: Vampiric Selves and Gothic Doubleness in Wuthering Heights by Lakshmi Krishnan

For next week, read through the rest of Wuthering Heights and Lakshmi Krishnan’s essay “Why am I so changed?”: Vampiric Selves and Gothic Doubleness in Wuthering Heights.”

Your blogs will be due on Wednesday at 11:59 pm.

Your comments on other student blogs will be due by FRIDAY at 11:59.

In addition to your blogs and comments, you also must post in one or more of the discussion forums on my blog by Friday at 11:59 pm. You do NOT have to post in all of the forums, but I will be assessing you on how well you are able to respond to the various prompts and each others' ideas. Remember that Forum C is an open forum, so if there is something you would like to discuss that hasn't been addressed by me or another student, please post there.

1) Krishnan opens her essay with a discussion of the literary gothic. Do some independent research on this term and explain how it might apply to Wuthering Heights using examples from the text to defend your answer. Take some time to also explain how Krishnan uses this term in her essay. In what ways does she frame WH as a gothic novel and do you agree with her assessment?

2) Krishnan writes:

If we conceive of death signifying ultimate understanding, and life as an enigmatic riddle, then vampires stand at the threshold between incomprehension and ultimate knowledge. They serve as a weighty metaphor for the individual self, poised on the brink – either of discovery or dissolution – at a time when internal forces threatened it as much as external ones. The vampire is a poignant symbol for an era obsessed with defining the self, with demarcating boundaries between the “Ich” and “Nicht ich,” while simultaneously realizing that these margins were more indistinct than previously hoped. (4)

What do you think Krishnan means by this statement? Given our reading of Polidori’s The Vampyre and WH, in what ways do we see a pervasive dualism in both texts? How do both of these texts serve as explorations in the nature of the “self”? Can we read Lord Aubrey’s physical and mental deterioration in similar moments in WH?

3) Last week, many student bloggers explored the narrative properties of WH and examined how the novel changed according to who was telling the story. For this blog, rewrite a key scene from WH but tell it from another character’s point of view.

4) Krishnan acts us to read WH as a kind of vampire novel. Do you think her argument is convincing? Why or why not? Does WH belong in a class about the vampire, in your opinion? Use examples from the essay and the novel to support your position.

5) Read through the excerpt below from Sir William Blackstone’s Commentary on the Laws of England:

Book the First : Chapter the Fifteenth : Of Husband and Wife pp 431-432
By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very being or legal
existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and
consolidated into that of the husband: under whose wing, protection, and cover, she performs
everything; and is therefore called in our law-french a feme-covert; is said to be covert-baron, or
under the protection and influence of her husband, her baron, or lord; and her condition during
her marriage is called her coverture. Upon this principle, of a union of person in husband and
wife, depend almost all the legal rights, duties, and disabilities that either of them acquire by the
marriage. I speak not at present of the rights of property, but of such as are merely personal. For
this reason, a man cannot grant anything to his wife, or enter into covenant with her: for the grant
would be to suppose her separate existence; and to covenant with her, would be only to covenant
with himself: and therefore it is also generally true, that all compacts made between husband and
wife, when single, are voided by the intermarriage. A woman indeed may be attorney for her
husband; for that implies no separation from, but is rather a representation of, her lord. And a
husband may also bequeath anything to his wife by will; for that cannot take effect till the
coverture is determined by his death. The husband is bound to provide his wife with necessaries
by law, as much as himself; and if she contracts debts for them, he is obliged to pay them: but for
any thing besides necessaries, he is not chargeable. Also if a wife elopes, and lives with another
man, the husband is not chargeable even for necessaries; at last if the person, who furnishes
them, is sufficiently apprized of her elopement. If the wife be indebted before marriage, the
husband is bound afterwards to pay the debt; for he has adopted her and her circumstances
together.
--Blackstone, Sir William. Commentaries on the Laws of England (1st Ed.). Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1765-1769.

With the reality of English marriage laws in the 19th century in mind, return to the novel and find places where the discussion of “land” and “land inheritance” play a large role in the shaping of characters and events. What role might the transmission of wealth and the shifting of land and inheritance play in the development of the novel in general? What role does it seem to play in the vampire novel?

6) Compare WH with some modern vampire novels, specifically looking at Heathcliff as the “Byronic hero” and comparing him with some contemporary “Byronic” vampires. Use pictures, youtube videos, and fansites to support your comparison.

7) Watch a film version of WH and compare its narrative style to the novel. What sort of licenses does the filmmaker take with the story in his or her adaptation? What changes and why?

8) Finally, for those Twilight fans out there, compare WH to the Bella/Edward obsession. There are many WH references in the Twilight series. Explain what those references are and how we might use a better understanding of WH to "read" the cultural phenomenon that is the Twilight series.

Saturday, September 11, 2010

WUTHERING HEIGHTS

For next week, read up to page 160 (or Chapter 17) of Wuthering Heights.

Your blogs will be due on Wednesday at 11:59 pm.

Your comments on other student blogs will be due by FRIDAY at 11:59.

Given our discussion in
Forum B last week, I thought it would serve students best to have more time to formulate their comments on other students' blogs. I hope this will help with the workload and provide you with greater opportunity to develop strong responses to each others' work.

In addition to your blogs and comments, you also must post in one or more of the discussion forums on my blog by Friday at 11:59 pm. You do NOT have to post in all of the forums, but I will be assessing you on how well you are able to respond to the various prompts and each others' ideas. Remember that Forum C is an open forum, so if there is something you would like to discuss that hasn't been addressed by me or another student, please post there.

Here are some questions to get you started on your blogs. Feel free to use them or develop your own. Remember, you can also write a blog responding to another student's post.

1) Read through Rachel’s blog on the Byronic Hero http://brokebibliophile.blogspot.com/2010/09/polidori-and-byronic-heroes.html

and discuss the ways in which we could characterize Heathcliff as a sort of Byronic hero. In what ways is he similar to Lord Ruthven? Include passages from the text to support your answer. In what ways does Heathcliff’s character inform later vampire characters? Make sure to use examples to support your ideas.

2) Compare the descriptions of Thrushcross Grange and Wuthering Heights. What sort of duality do these two localities represent? Furthermore, how do characters change dependent on their locations in the novel? Draw from specific passages in the novel to support your answer.

3) 1847, the year Bronte wrote her novel, was one of the most calamitous years of the Irish famine or what is now more often called “The Great Hunger.” During this time, England saw an incredible wave of Irish immigration in London, Manchester, and most especially Liverpool. These poor Irish people were most likely sick, emaciated, dirty, spoke Irish Gaelic, and probably seemed to most English people as alien invaders from another planet than human beings and citizens in their so-called “United” Kingdom. During the famine, which killed over a million Irish people, the English government turned a blind eye to Ireland, avoiding the problem rather than working towards providing effective relief. In Heathcliff and the Great Hunger by Terry Eagleton, he explains the way in which Ireland figured as England’s “unconscious” (9), and sees Heathcliff as a “fragment of the famine” (11). He writes:


Part of the horror of the Famine is its atavistic nature—the mind-shaking fact that an event with all the premodern character of a medieval pestilence happened in Ireland with frightening recentness. This deathly origin then shatters space as well as time, unmaking the nation and scattering Irish history across the globe. That history will of course continue; but as in Emily Bronte’s novel there is something recalcitrant at its core which defeats articulation, some ‘real’ which stubbornly refuses to be symbolized. In both cases, this ‘real’ is a voracious desire which was beaten back and defeated, which could find no place in the symbolic order of social time and was expunged from it, but which like the shades of Catherine and Heathcliff will return to haunt a history now in the process of regathering its stalled momentum and moving onwards and upwards. Some primordial trauma has taken place, which fixates your development at one level even as you continue to unfold at another, so that time in Irish history and Wuthering Heights would seem to move backwards and forwards simultaneously. Something anyway, for good or ill, has been irrevocably lost; and in both Ireland and the novel it takes up its home on the alternative side of myth. (14-15)


Explain what you think Eagleton means in the passage above. What do you think of Heathcliff as a “fragment” of the Famine, or as a colonial “Other”? How do he and Catherine “haunt” history? What does that mean? Eagleton says that that time in Irish history and Wuthering Heights “would seem to move backwards and forwards simultaneously.” Where do you see evidence of this in the novel? What does Eagleton mean by the very last statement? How do these characters’ lives become the embodiment of myth? Who (or what?) is lost to “myth”?

4) How do Mr. Lockwood and Nelly Dean influence the story as narrators? Do you think they are completely reliable observers? How do they perceive the events at Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange? Use examples from the text to support your answer.

5) How would you characterize the novel’s female characters? Do you find these female characters sympathetic? Are they victims of the patriarchal forces around them or are they simply the harbingers of their own self-destruction? Use examples to support your answer.

6) Read through these contemporary reviews of Wuthering Heights. http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/novel_19c/wuthering/contemp_rev.html

How would you characterize these reviews? What do these reviews say about the times in which Emily Brontë published her novel and the reading public at large? Do you think we modern readers see this novel differently, or do some of these criticisms still hold true to you today? Explain your answer using the novel for support of your claims.

Friday, September 3, 2010

THE VAMPYRE by John Polidori

The Vampyre Blog Questions

For next week, read Polidori’s The Vampyre” and Nina Auerbach’s “Giving Up the Ghost” from her seminal book Our Vampires, Ourselves (located on D2L).

The following are some discussion questions to get you started. You do NOT have to use them, but feel free to draw from them for inspiration. In addition to using these questions, you could also respond to another student's blog. Make sure to provide links to these blogs and to any outside sources.

Your blogs plus two comments are due on Wednesday at 11:59 pm.

Lord Byron, largely the inspiration behind Polidori’s The Vampyre, was once described by his jilted lover Lady Caroline Lamb as “mad, bad, and dangerous to know.” For this blog, do some background research on Lord Byron and explore how and why his persona became the vampire prototype that still haunts contemporary representations. You should look up the term “Byronic hero” as that concept will come to inform the development of many later vampire characters. You might also want to do some background research on Polidori himself and of the particular nature of the relationship between him and Lord Byron. You could also do some research on that faithful night in Lake Geneva that produced such great gothic masterpieces as The Vampyre and Frankenstein. Polidori, Byron, Shelly, Mary Shelly (then Godwin), and her sister were once dubbed as “The Satanic School.” Do some research on this unique group of literary misfits and share what you find with the class. Were these young writers the original “Goth kids”?

How would you characterize what we might term “high society” in this story? In what ways is Lord Ruthven, and indeed the vampire figure as a whole, a response to this particular culture?

Why might it be significant that Lord Ruthven comes from “The East” and seems grounded in that culture? How is “The East” juxtaposed with what might be termed “The West” in this story?

How does this story imagine femininity and womanhood? Why is the vampire figure significant to this representation?

On page 14 Auerbach quotes from Eve Sedgwick, using her term “paranoid Gothic.” In Epistemology of the Closet Sedgwick uses Frankenstein to define this term, which is also sometimes known as “homosexual panic.” As in Polidori’s The Vampyre, these texts contain

"A residue of two potent male figures locked in an epistemologically indissoluble clench of will and desire—through these means, the paranoid Gothic powerfully signified, at the very moment of crystallization of the modern, capitalism-marked oedipal family, the inextricability from that formation of a strangling double bind in male homosocial constitution. Put another way, the usefulness of Freud’s formulation…that paranoia in men results from the repression of their homosexual desire, has nothing to do with a classification of the paranoid Gothic in terms of ‘latent’ or ‘overt’ ‘homosexual’ ‘types,’ but everything to do with the foregrounding, under the specific, foundational historic conditions of the early Gothic, of intense male homosocial desire as at once the most compulsory and the most prohibited of social bonds." (187)

Unpack this quote for the class and attempt to explain what you think Sedgwick is saying about the paranoid Gothic. Given what Sedgwick and Auerbach are saying about homosexual panic and the nineteenth-century novel, how might we understand Polidori’s story as an example of the paranoid Gothic? How might we understand this all-important “oath”? What might the “oath” be symbolic of in the story?

Wednesday, September 1, 2010

Blog Assignment EDIT

Hi Students,

I forgot to mention on the blog assignment that I would like for you to check out and comment on other students' blogs. You can find links to student blogs on the tab above that says, you guessed it, "links to student blogs." Not everyone has turned in their sheets, so we only have a handful of student blogs so far, but the list will continue to grow in the next couple of days.

Since I dropped the ball on this aspect of the assignment, I will make it optional for THIS week, but please take some time to familiarize yourself with each others' blogs and comment if you have a chance. There's some really funny stuff out there! Also, make sure you're "following" each other as it will make it easier to stay connected on what other students are writing about throughout the course.

I'll be reading your work and commenting on your blogs later this week, so stay tuned.

I hope everyone is managing the new technologies okay. Please email me or utilize the help forum if you get totally lost.

Happy blogging!

Colleen