The Bell Jar -- Chapters 6-10

It can be useful to immerse yourself in the world of Plath to help you better understand why or how she out together her writing.

You can watch the entire film, Sylvia, at this web site:

http://www.bing.com/videos/watch/video/sylvia-plath-part-1-11/01586ff631dca9235a5f01586ff631dca9235a5f-304456991521?q=sylvia%20plath&FORM=VIRE7

You will notice that the first few lines of the film come directly out of today's section of The Bell Jar. And, interestingly, actor Daniel Craig plays her husband, Ted Hughes.

Welcome to THE BELL JAR!

Today's reading: The first 5 chapters of The Bell Jar!

Until the 1970s, American literature did not have too many female heroines in its owrks of fiction, and too few of them had been created by women authors. Basically, few American women were telling their readers what it is/ was like to grow up in this vast and complex culture. It is probably this vacuum in American literature that made The Bell Jar's protagonist, Esther Greenwood, so popular.

So here are some web links to get you started with the book:

Click here for general info about the novel with some good links!

Click here for a great link of basic biographical Plath information!

Click here for information on Olive Higgins Prouty, who is the basis of the character Philomena Guinea (the wealthy novelist who is Esther's patroness)

Alice Walker's "Everday Use"

Today's Discussion Leader: Cassandra

Our story today is a popular one -- there are tons of internet resources:

Click here for the Wikipedia entry!

Click here for an essay from a literary magazine titled "Portals"!

Click here for another academic essay in relation to this short story and personal names!

The title gives us a big hint as to why Walker may have written this story: The phrase "Everyday Use" brings about the question whether or not heritage should be preserved and displayed or integrated into everyday life. "Everyday Use" pertains not only to the quilt, but more so to people's culture and heritage and how they choose to honor it.

If you google this title and author, you should be able to find a ton of sources!

Alice Munro's "The Office"

Today's Discussion Leader: Erica (Munro) and Jon (Oates)

Alice Munro, a well known Canadian writer, is a master (I think!) of psychological drama! In an interview for a Canadian fiction magazine she was quoted as saying, "I don't see that people develop and arrive somewhere. I just see people living in flashes." And I think it is these "flashes" that you see in her short fiction!

One of her earliest collections of short fiction includes "The Office," the story that we are reading. From what I understand this story evolved from a real event from early in her marriage. "The Office" centers on a narrator who has evolved a room-of-one's-own menatality and consciousness (to borrow Woolf's words!). In essence, the first person narrator of "The Office," a writer who finds it hard to work at home with her husband and family in the background, yearns for a room of her own, a private space where she can do her creative work, reflecting a major theme in feminist thinking of this period.

Click here for a link to an article that talks about her winning the Booker Prize, one of the most prestigious awards for folks who write fiction.

Click here for her Wikipedia entry!

Click here for a Canadian encyclopedia entry for Munro!

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Joyce Carol Oates is a prolific American writer, one you should know! She has pubished over fifty novels (which is pretty amazing!). Click here for her Wikipedia entry!

Click here for a great interview with her from the Paris Review!

The short piece we are reading from her, "In the Region of Ice," won a prestigious O.Henry Award in 1967. It shares with some of her earl work a relgious protagonist and a concern for spiritual matters. (this story was even made into a short film in the 1970s, by the way!)

The 1970 collection she put together -- The Wheel of Love -- includes this story and several other of her most famous pieces (including "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?). She has been quoted as saying the unifying theme of these stories is "different forms of love, mainly in family relationships." Many critics have said that she offers a negative portrayal of females (only recently has she been seem as a "feminist" writer, whatever that means!).

Flannery O'Connor's "Revelation"

Tuesday's Discussion Leader: Amanda!

Have any of you ever read Flannery O'Connor before?! I can't hide the fact that she is one of my most favorite writers -- she creates the most brilliant portrayals of "the" human condition (or, at least, that is my opinion!).

In "Revelation," as in all her stories, O'Connor accomplishes her purpose through the linking of opposites -- two levels of meaning, two viewpoints, two irreconcilable conclusions. And out of the collision between these opposites is born a synthesis that illustrates, for O'Connor and her characters, the means of God's grace (however you wish to define "God"). Religion, by the way, is a vivid part of the Southern values and way(s) of life.

Here is a youtube.com link with a pretty good narration of her life and this particular story: CLICK HERE!

Here is a good link in which a critic summarizes and critiques the story: CLICK HERE!

CLICK HERE for the Wikipedia entry for the short story!

CLICK HERE for an interesting article I happened to stumble upon on-line!

I hope you like this piece of her work -- if you do, there are tons more stories by O'Connor!

Doris Lessing's "To Room Nineteen"

Today's Discussion Leader: Kathleen

Our author today won the 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature, so I would argue that she is one of those writers that you should read at least once!

A British writer actually born in Iran, Lessing lived for awhile in Africa. According to Wikipedia, Lessing's work can be "divided into three distinct phases: the Communist theme (1944–1956), when she was writing radically on social issues (to which she returned in The Good Terrorist [1985]), the psychological theme (1956–1969), and after that the Sufi theme, which was explored in the Canopus in Argos sequence of science fiction (or as she preferred to put it "space fiction") novels and novellas."

So this is a writer who is complex and esay to describe in easy terms!

In terms of the short story we are reading, "To Room Nineteen," many critics have notes that Lessing legitimizes the depression that besets many women who work at home. She is critical of Matthew's response to Susan. Like some medical professionals, he does not take the time to understand what she feels, and is unwilling to face anything outside of his experience. Hemmed in by rationality, Susan's emotions cannot be expressed, resulting in her suicide.

FYI: Here is the COMPLETE Dorris Lessing web site (lots of cool stuff here!): Click Here!

See you all in class tomorrow!

"Wunderkind" by Carson McCullers

Discussion Leader: Erica

Tuesday's reading is Carson McCullers's short story, "Wunderkind" -- many folks have said that McCullers herself was a "Wunderkind" since she wrote most of her great literature before the age of 30 (including writing the amazing novel The Heart is a Lonely Hunter at 23!). What made McCullers such a prodigy was her preternatural ability to capture the heart at its frailest.

Written in 1936, when McCullers was 19 years old, ‘‘Wunderkind’’ was McCullers’s first published work. It presents the story of Frances, a teenage girl who has been considered a musical prodigy but who, after years of training and sacrifice, seems suddenly incapable of fulfilling the bright expectations she has always held. In the brief space of a single piano lesson, we see her struggling to recover the confidence and artistry she once knew and trying to navigate a flood of conflicting emotions and desires that threaten to overwhelm her. Often praised as a sensitive, insightful portrayal of the pressures and isolation of adolescence, it is marked by a dramatic tension that increases relentlessly throughout the story—despite the fact that very little ‘‘action’’ occurs. That action takes place in the studio of her music teacher, but the story’s actual setting is the intimate depths of Frances’s troubled mind.

I think this quotation from Wikipedia aptly describes a way of seeing her work in a general way: "Although McCullers's oeuvre is often described as 'Southern Gothic,' she produced her famous works after leaving the South. Her eccentric characters suffer from loneliness that is interpreted with deep empathy. In a discussion with the Irish critic and writer Terence de Vere White she said: 'Writing, for me, is a search for God.'"

Click here for an encyclopedia entry that outlines her life and her work!

Tillie Olsen's "I Stand Here Ironing"

Today's Discussion Leader: Monica

If there is one piece of work that is read in terms of Olsen's work, it's this story! I think I read somewhere that this story is the one short story most anthologized in all student textbooks. So, it's possible that you might encounter this story in another class!

First, here is the Wikipedia entry for the story: Click here! (remember, that there are spoilers in this entry so don't read until you have read the story!)

I was sort of shocked, but there are even online Spark Notes for this story: Click here!
Here is another great link with resources that contextualize the story:
click here!

A few interesting tibits about her life (and why I personally think she is pretty cool): An activist most of her life, Olsen was jailed twice: "First in Kansas City, winter '32." She was distributing leaflets to the meatpackers. The charge was "making loud and unusual noises." There she "languished five or six weeks--no money for bail--and got pleurisy, then incipient TB," she writes in her essay "The '30s: A Vision of Fear and Hope" (Newsweek, 1994).

Her second arrest occurred just after the San Francisco General Strike in 1934. In response to the murders of several striking longshoremen, 100,000 marched down Market Street to protest. "No one spoke," wrote Olsen. "The only sound was the beat of our feet. Then came 'The Terror'--bloody crackdowns by vigilantes who, the police giving them the power to arrest, wrecked encampments and beat strikers and 'sympathizers.'"

At the time of the General Strike, Olsen was a single mother. She met Jack Olsen (a fellow Young Communist League member) that year and had three more children with him, marrying him in 1944 before he went off to war. They lived together until 1989, when he died.

Awesome writer!

Ann Petry's "Like a Winding Sheet"

Discussion Leader: Kathleen!

There have been countless studies that show Stress, Frustration and Anger are related. In Ann Petry's short story "Like a Winding Sheet," you can observe this "complicated" relationship. First check out the title -- "Like a Winding Sheet." The words "Winding Sheet" means "shroud"; could this indicate the characters of the story could have a shroud hanging over them? Also -- the story is told in a third person point of view and takes place in the Ghettos of Harlem. A lot of critics argue that this story focuses on how racism affects people. What do you think?

Click here for a great link about Ann Petry! (lots of background info, esp. about some of her other writing!)

Like I have done for many of the writers we have come across, here is the Wikipedia entry for Ann Petry -- click here!

Katherine Anne Porter's "The Rope" and Eudora Welty's "A Worn Path"

Discussion Leader for Porter: Jon
Discussion Leader for Welty: Monica
Two great writers for Tuesday's class! Our first is the great Katherine Anne Porter. Click here for the Wikipedia entry for Porter!

In her short story the "Rope," Porter considers a torn relationship where a couple is caught in an unhappy marriage and in a sense is hanging on by a “rope.” Through the use of characterization, Porter effectively illustrates an unhappy situation between a married couple with the use of words and the characters’ interactions. Click here for the web site from which I "borrowed" the words above!

Click here for another online essay about "The Rope"

Eudora Welty is a fabulous southern writer (when I lived in Mississippi, I used to drive by her house to catch a glimpse of her but I never had any luck before she died). Click here for her Wikipedia entry.

Click here a web site that has a bunch of information on "A Worn Path," one of her most famous short stories. "A Worn Path" is considered one of Welty's most distinguished and frequently studied works of short fiction. Deceptively simple in tone and scope, the story is structured upon a journey motif that incorporates a rich texture of symbolic meaning. According to Alfred Appel, "'A Worn Path' passes far beyond its regionalism because of its remarkable fusion of various elements of myth and legend, which invest the story with a religious meaning that can be universally felt."

Have fun reading! See you folks in class on Tuesday! :D

Katherine Mansfield's "The Garden Party"

Discussion Leader for Thursday: Amanda
As usual, the Wikipedia entry for Katherine Mansfield is a good way to start -- click here!

Much of the criticism surrounding her short story "The Garden Party" has to do with class consicousness. Laura, one of the daughters in the story, feels a certain sense of kinship with the workers and again with the Scotts. Her mother thinks it would embarrass them to receive flowers. An omniscient narrator also explains that as children Laura, Jose, Meg and Laurie were not allowed to go near the poor's dwellings, which spoil their view. Another issue in the story has to do with Death -- the realization of Laura that life is "simply marvellous" shows the death of a human being in a positive light. Death and life co-exist together and death seems to Laura merely a sound sleep far away from troubles in human life.

So what do you all think?

What do you think about this critique that comes from a web site on socialism (click here!): "The mother in Katherine Mansfield’s famous short story 'The Garden Party,' published in 1921 and printed below, behaves like a child. Throughout this fierce critique of middle-class ruthlessness, the apparently charming retreat into childish insouciance, made by almost all the characters, is portrayed as a grotesque cover for their brutality, though never satirised beyond the bounds of realism."

Gertrude Stein's "Miss Furr and Miss Skeene"

Today's Discussion Leader: Cassandra

I don't think there will be too many stories that you will read that will "confuse" you more than any of Stein's work! So if you want to just get to know who she is a writer, click here for a link to her Wikipedia entry.

Click here for a great web site dedicated to analyzing and understanding Stein's work!

So how did folks, even in her own time, look at her work? Her abstract style was not received well by the general public. Many patrons of the arts called her a "literary cubist"...in her ability of projecting reality beyond reality, and compared her to the "cubist" painters of that time. After WWI everything seemed changed and unsettled in Paris (where she and many other Americans were living). These years would be dubbed "The Lost Generation" ...the world disillusioned by war, it was a time of Hemingway, Fitzgerald and others writers to express this sense of lost direction and idealism. Hemingway said on meeting Gertrude..."It was a vital day for me when I stumbled upon you."

"As long as the outside does not put a value on you it remains outside but when it does put a value on you then it gets inside or rather if the outside puts a value on you then all your inside gets to be outside."

Willa Cather's "A Wagner Matinee"

Today's Discussion Leader: Brian!

The story we are reading today was first published in 1904. In "A Wagner Matinee," the narrator, a young Bostonian named Clark, is notified that his aunt is coming to visit from Nebraska. Clark tells us that his aunt Georgiana once lived in Boston herself, long before Clark’s birth; in her youth she was a music teacher, but she married a farmer and has had a difficult life. The narrator brings his aunt to a concert where she reacts differently than most of the other patrons. When the concert ends, the other members of the audience applaud, murmur appreciatively, start to leave; the musicians rise from their seats, tapping the spit out of their woodwinds and brasses, putting their instruments into cases or slipjackets. Aunt Georgiana, however, does not move. Still sobbing, she tells Clark, "I don't want to go, Clark, I don't want to go!" It isn’t merely that she doesn’t want to leave the concert hall; she doesn’t want to return to a gray and ugly world, where music has no part.

Click here for a link to the story on Wikipedia!

Click here for a general link on Willa Cather! (again, a Wikipedia source!)

I will be curious to know what you all think about this story! How does it connect back to anything else that we have read?!

Edith Wharton's "The Other Two"

Discussion Leader for Tuesday's Class: Brian!

In my experience, students divide sharply on Wharton. Some love her work, responding particularly to the elegance and precision of her prose and the sharpness of her wit; others don't like her at all, finding it hard to "get into" her fiction because she seems so cold, the prose seems so detailed and self-conscious, and the subject matter is so elite (i.e. she often focuses on the "higher classes").

Major themes in Wharton's work include the effects of class on both behavior and consciousness (divorce, for example, often horrifies the established upper class as much for its offense against taste as for its violation of moral standards); the American belief in progress as actual and good (many "advances" Wharton welcomed; others she was contemptuous of); the contrast between European and American customs, morality, and sensibility; the confinement of marriage, especially for women; women's desire for and right to freedom in general, and particularly sexual and economic freedom, and the reality that, usually, the desire and right are thwarted; the preference of powerful, white, usually upper-class men for childish dependent women; the complexity and pain of relationships between women within patriarchal culture, including (and especially) rivalry and animosity among women.

So in terms of "The Other Two," where do Wharton's sympathies lie in this story? On what do you base your opinion?

Tuesday's Class: Edith Wharton

For Tuesday's class, we will be reading a short story by the American Edith Wharton ("The Other Two" on pages 21-44). Click here for the general Wikipedia entry for this writer. In her long career, which stretched over forty years and included the publication of more than forty books, Wharton (1862-1937) portrayed a fascinating segment of the American experience. She was a born storyteller, whose novels are justly celebrated for their vivid settings, satiric wit, ironic style, and moral seriousness. (and there are some film versions of her novels including The Age of Innocence and House of Mirth).

If you wanted to, you could even join the Edith Wharton Society! (Click here for that information!) The cool thing about this link, however, is that it includes many of her works that are available online (and, thus, free!)

Brian will be leading our discussion on Tuesday -- see you there! :D

We Continue with THE AWAKENING!

Welcome to our last week of Kate Chopin! As you all know, we are going to read one of her most well-known short stories as well as continue the novel for Tuesday's Class; the story you need to read before Tuesday is "Desiree's Baby." Click here for a full-text of the story (just in case you have misplaced your own copy).

Written in 1892 (a few years before The Awakening), this story first appeared in Vogue magazine. This story, like The Awakening, also takes place in Louisiana but it is one of the few stories that she wrote which takes place before the Civil War. Interested in more background information? Click here for a fantastic web site (from the Kate Chopin Society) that critically examines her controversial story, "Desiree's Baby."

FYI: Click here for a useful link that explains much of the unfamiliar vocabulary in The Awakening. Personally, I found many of the term useful!

Keep up the great discussion -- I look forward to seeing everyone on Tuesday! :D

Kate Chopin!

OK, so we are finally done with the philosophical musings of Vriginia Woolf -- and now we are jumping into some "real" fiction: Kate Chopin's 1899 novel, The Awakening. This book totally scandalized folks when it was first published (and then forgotten) and it took until the 1970's before this novel was "rescued" and brought back to public attention. Click here for a great web site about this novel! Click here for another great link as well!

One of the earliest novels to focus on a woman's interior thinking, the plot of The Awakening centers around Edna Pontellier and her struggle to reconcile her increasingly unorthodox views on femininity and motherhood with the prevailing social attitudes of the turn-of-the-century South. For Tuesday, you need to read the first nine chapters of the book -- but the chapters are short so this shouldn't take you too long!

See you in class on Tuesday! :D

Some Weekend Reading

More than a century and a half ago, Walt Whitman predicted the coming of a race of "fierce and athletic girls" who ...

"are not one jot less than I am,
They are tann'd in the face by shining suns and blowing winds,
Their flesh has the old divine suppleness and strength,
They know how to swim, row, ride, wrestle, shoot, run, strike, advance, resist, defend themselves,
They are ultimate in their own right -- they are calm, clear, well-possess'd of themselves."

Pretty much everyone thought he was crazy.

PS: If you haven't read Walt Whitman, you really gotta check him out!

Quick Web Link

I stumbled on some interesting thoughts on why we read -- click here for the web site!

Anyway -- I thought there might be something here (in this text) that you all might find interesting! See you in class!

For Thursday Sept 2

If you folks are interested, I stumbled on a pretty interesting biodocumentary of V. Woolf on Youtube.com. I couldn't figure out how to imbede it into this blog entry but I did manage to get it up and running at the bottom of this page. So you should see the first segment here at the bottom -- you would need to click to get to the parts that come after!

How is Chapter Two going?!

So how is A Room of One's Own going?! I hope you are happily reading by now! I know this non-fiction piece can be difficult to get into -- just keep plugging away!

Click here for a great web link that can offer some structured help as you go through this text. You could also do a quick Google search and probably find tons of web sites that offer summaries. I don't mind if you use these resources as help, as long as you continue reading the text of course!

PS: We will start class tomorrow with an article I just saw on npr.org about the definition of "chick lit" -- a label that came up briefly in our last class. What is this genre? Are women oppressing themselves by writing such novels? Is the label misleading?

Welcome to Fall 2010!

Welcome to our honors section of LIT 117: Literature by Women! Our class will run more like a seminar this semster; that is, you will be talking a lot! (about the readings! about questions or comments you have! or even challenging something I said!).

To start our class off, we will be watching a DVD on Thursday called "Behind a Mask: Six Women Finding a Space to Write" -- I am hoping that this will give everyone a contextual background to the readings coming up, including Virginia Woolf's famous book, A Room of One's Own.

So what can you do in the meantime?! Buy Woolf's first book so we can get started with our discussions next week!