ELIT 48C Class #10

Continuous vs. Continual

Continual means "repeated regularly and often." Julia hated the continual negative

political ads.

Continuous means "extended or prolonged without interruption." The alarm bell was jammed and rang continuously; it never stopped and was making Gayle loony!

AGENDA

QuizLectureo The American Dreamo My Antonia Books IV and V

Author Introductions: Pound and Williams

Paraphrasing Poetry

The Answers to the Quiz: Take 10 minutes

A. Gaston Cleric

B. Lewis Hale

C. Frances Harling

D. Mina Loy

E. Mrs. Shimerda

F. Otto Fuchs

G. Samson d'Arnault

H. Wick Cutter

I. Molly Gardener

J. Tiny Soderball

K. Lena Lingard

L. Minnie Foster

M. Anton Cuzak

N. Mr. Marinetti

Lecture

The American Dream

                           What is The American Dream???

James Truslow Adams, who coined the phrase “The American Dream” in 1931, wrote this about it:

[The American Dream is] that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement. It is a difficult dream for the European upper classes to interpret adequately, and too many of us ourselves have grown weary and mistrustful of it. It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position. [The Epic of America, 1931]

The Beginnings of the Dream

Yet, the concept of the American Dream existed before Adams articulated it. Perhaps the first verbalization of the American Dream is Thomas Jefferson’s statement from the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all

men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Benjamin Franklin gave the definitive formulation of the American Dream in his autobiography (begun in 1771, published in 1818). At least five characteristics of the American Dream have been noted in Franklin’s work:1. the rise from rags to riches through industry and

thrift;2. the rise from insignificance to importance, from

helplessness to power;3. a philosophy of individualism; 4. the efficacy of free will and action; 5. and a spirit of hope, even of optimism.

In 1867 when writer, Horatio Alger came out with his book Ragged Dick, the concept of the American Dream became an American Idea. The story is a rags-to-riches tale of a poor orphan boy in New York City who saves his pennies, works hard and eventually becomes rich. This model of honesty, hard work, and strong determination as the keys to success in America became the goal of Americans and the immigrants who would soon come to America.

In time, many Americans became disenchanted with the theme. Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry James, and Mark Twain probed the dark side of the dream.

Twain, writing during the rise of nineteenth century finance capitalism and industrialism, became increasingly disillusioned with social corruption in the Gilded Age. In his classic novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), before Huck “lights out for the territory” to escape being civilized, he struggles with a corrupt world of frauds, desperadoes, and money-grubbing confidence men.

The 20th Century Dream

Twain set the tone for twentieth century versions of the American Dream, many of which have depicted the American Dream turned nightmare. Twain’s legacy is certainly discernible in such a writer as F. Scott Fitzgerald. Wealth and material possessions are shown as the constituents of the American Dream, a theme Fitzgerald develops in The Great Gatsby (1925). Yet in much of 20th C literature, the American Dream is ambiguous; while some deny it, others cling to it. While some ignore it, others insist they will achieve it.

The American Dream: My Antonia

Mrs. Shimerda uprooted her family against her husband's wishes. She

said, "America big country, much money, much land for my boys, much husband for my girls." Pavel and Peter were fugitives. The burgeoning country

and economy provided many opportunities. Tiny Soderball follows the frontier to Seattle and then,

during the gold rush, to Alaska. And, as always, swindlers and loan sharks, like Wick

Cutter, preyed on the weak. Lena is a successful dressmaker in San Francisco. Ántonia and her husband flourish

For all the successes, the novel is riddled with disappointments and failures

Otto and Jake go west, and except for one postcard, they are never heard of again.

"Rooshian" Peter, who proudly told Ántonia that "in his country only rich people had cows, but here any man could have one who would take care of her," loses his partner, and bankruptcy forces him to sell his possessions.

When Jim tells Ántonia that Coronado, who searched the American west for the Seven Golden Cities, died in the wilderness of a broken heart, she sighs, "More than him has done that." The American Dream had also broken her father.

Group Discussion: The American Dream in My Antonia

1. Compare and contrast Tiny Soderball and Lena Lingard’s success with money.2. Discuss the reasons why Willa Cather chose to have Antonia return to the Shimerda farm as an unwed mother.3. Discuss the differences between the Cuzak household and the Shimerda household from many years before.

Compare and contrast Tiny Soderball and Lena Lingard’s success with money.

The difference between the two is that Tiny inherited her money from the young man she took care of ; Lena went out into the world and earned her money, she worked hard for her place as an independent women. Lena quotes to Jim towards the end of the book, “If there’s anything i can’t stand , she said to me in tiny’s presence, it’s a shabby rich woman … and i don’t want to be” (165).

Discuss the reasons why Willa Cather chose to have Antonia return to the Shimerda farm as an unwed mother.

An unwed mother, who has a baby out of wedlock. she feels despair and is determined to return to the land in order to rebuild herself. After this period of momentary shame. Antonia does manage to rebuild herself using the therapeutic properties of the hard work on the land that she experienced as a young girl. She then goes on to become a happily wed mother of a dozen children.

Discuss the differences between the Cuzak household and the Shimerda household from many years before.

1. In the Shimerda household there was always a need for more, whether it was food, helping hands, or money. The Cuzak’s aren’t rich themselves and struggled, as Antonia said, for 10 years before they were finally comfortable, but the difference between them is how the family held themselves through the years. Mrs. Shimerda let the circumstances of her life turn her into a cruel and bitter old woman who is never content with anything. Antonia on the other hand couldn’t be more content with her life.

2. The Cuzak family was built by the hard work of Antonia and her desire to fill the shoes her father vacated. She built the home her father would have spared his life to see. She created a Bohemian community of her own, with a Bohemian husband and Bohemian children. The Cuzak farm is lighter, happier, and familiar; more like home.

QHQs

1. Does Jim consider Black Hawk his home or has he yet to find a place like that for himself?

2. Is Jim afraid of settling down?3. What is the significance between the contrasts of

Antonia’s and Jim’s adult life?4. Is Antonia a strong, independent woman, or has she

always been an ‘object’ to anyone and everybody who has ever talked about or known her? Could she be both independent/strong AND objectified?

5. Did Antonia have control over her life or was she always fated to live the life she did and end up where she ended up?

QHQs

1. Does this relationship between Tiny and Lena symbolize Cather and another women?

2. In terms of what success truly means, did Lena and Tiny end up becoming more successful that Antonia? Emotionally and physically?

3. What’s the significance of Mr. Shimerda’s grave at a crossroad being intact?

Ezra Pound was born October 30, 1885, in Hailey, Idaho.

While in high school, Pound studied Latin, and this study moved him to concentrate on poetry and literaryhistory.

At the University of Pennsylvania, he met William Carlos Williams and Hilda Doolittle (both later to become, with Pound, prominent modernist poets).

Pound received his master’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1906.

He took a job teaching at Wabash College in Indiana. This teaching experience, however, was a disaster for the bohemian Pound, for Indianasociety was deeply conservative. He was fired before the school year ended for having a woman in his room without a chaperone.

Author Introduction: Ezra Pound

Disgusted by America’s conservatism, Pound resolved to go to Europe to become a poet. He ended up on London, where he quickly became a member of a number of literary circles. Within a few years, Pound became the center of a nascent literary movement, imagism, and through the sheer force of his will also became one of London’s most important literary figures. Pound was driven by the dictum “make it new.”

Pound’s life grew significantly more difficult and complicated after his move to Italy, for he stopped seeing himself as a poet and began to feel that he was a public intellectual, a sage, a man who should be consulted by world leaders. He began to study history and economics, attempting to discover a solution for the problems of the world. At this time, he also grew increasingly attracted to Italy’s fascist leader, Benito Mussolini, and began to manifest a deep anti-Semitism. For twenty years, Pound continued to write cantos, but he also spoke more and more loudly against Roosevelt, against capitalism, and in favor of fascism.

When the United States joined World War II in 1941, Pound tried to return to his home country but was not allowed to do so. To support himself and his family during the war, Pound volunteered to do radio broadcasts for Italian state radio. In response, the U.S. government indicted Pound for treason in 1943, and, after Italy fell, Pound was arrested, held in a cage near Pisa, and returned to Washington to face trial.

Pound escaped the execution that could have been his fate when the judge found him mentally unfit to face trial, but he was sentenced to an indefinite period in a mental hospital. He spent thirteen years in St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, D.C., refusing to disavow his beliefs. Even incarcerated, he continued to produce poetry, and even won the prestigious Bollingen Library of Congress Award for his 1949 volume The Pisan Cantos, composed while Pound was held prisoner by the U.S. Army. Finally, in 1958, Pound was released from the hospital and returned to Italy.

Pound lived the remainder of his life quietly. Settling in Venice, Pound initially continued to work and write, but, in the early 1960s, he fell into a deep depression and an unbreakable silence. Young poets such as Allen Ginsberg visited him, but Pound would not speak. Near the end of his life, largely because of the tireless efforts of his publisher James Laughlin, Pound finally began to enjoy the honors that had been denied him for decades and also began earning enough money from his poetry to live on. He died in Venice

Author Introduction

William Carlos Williams

Williams was born in Rutherford, New Jersey, on September 17, 1883, to a mother born in Puerto Rico and an English father. Both parents figure in a number of Williams’s poems. In 1902 Williams began the study of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and while a student formed important friendships with Ezra Pound and the painter Charles Demuth. In 1910 Williams began his forty-year medical practice in Rutherford, marrying Florence Herman in 1912.

Williams’s first book of poems, entitled Poems and privately printed by a local stationer, was replete with the kind of archaic poetic diction and romantic longing typical of much American magazine poetry at the time. As a result of Pound’s directive that he become more aware of avant-garde work in music, painting, prose, and poetry, Williams’s next book, The Tempers, reflected Pound’s pre-Imagist manner—a variety of verse forms, short monologues, and medieval and Latinate allusions.

Williams labored on his writing for the next twenty years, largely unrecognized except by readers of the short-lived small magazines that printed experimental American work. What some critics consider Williams’s finest book, the prose and poetry sequence Spring and All, was printed in Paris in an edition of only three hundred and not reprinted in full until 1970, seven years after his death. This book contains the famous “The Red Wheelbarrow,” later printed by Williams as a separate poem, and often anthologized as the quintessential Imagist expression.

In the 1930’s, Williams’s work took a more overtly political turn, although he had always shared the view of Pound and Eliot that the work of the poet was central to the health and potential of a civilization and that the state of a culture was reflected in its response to its serious artists.

In the 1950’s, Williams became an important figure for poets seeking an alternative to the neoclassical poetics of T. S. Eliot and his followers, and such figures as Robert Lowell, Allen Ginsberg, and Denise Levertov acknowledged a large debt to his example. Since that decade, too, Williams’s career-long achievement has gradually come to be more and more fully recognized. Although still not accorded the status of Eliot and Stevens by some critics of modernism, on the whole these two—along with Williams and Pound—are considered the four major figures of American modernist poetry.

"William Carlos Williams." Cyclopedia of World Authors, Fourth Revised Edition. Ed. Frank Northen Magill. Salem Press, Inc., 1997.

Speaking of Poetry!!

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How to Paraphrase Poetry

• A Paraphrase is a restatement of a passage giving the meaning in another form. This usually involves expanding the original text so as to make it clear.

• A paraphrase will have none of the beauty or effectiveness of the original. It merely aims, in its prosy way, to spell out the literal meaning. It will not substitute for the original, then, but will help us appreciate the compactness and complexity of many poems.

• Write in prose, not verse (in prose the lines go all the way to right margin). The line breaks of the original are irrelevant in paraphrasing.

• Write modern prose, rearranging word order and sentence structure as necessary. As far as possible, within the limits of commonsense, avoid using the words of the original. Finding new words to express the meaning is a test of what you are understanding.

• Write coherent syntax, imitating that of the original if you can do so with ease, otherwise breaking it down into easier sentence forms.

• Write in the same grammatical person and tense as the original. If the original is in the first person, as many poems are, so must the paraphrase be.

• Spell out explicitly what the original implies or conveys by hints. It follows that a paraphrase will normally be longer than the original.

• Spell out explicitly all the possible meanings if the original is ambiguous (saying two or more things at once), as many poems are.

• Use square brackets to mark off any additional elements you find it necessary to insert for the coherence of the meaning. The brackets will show that these bits are editorial -- contributed by you for the sake of clarity but not strictly "said" in the original. An example might be some implied transitional phrase or even an implied thought that occurs to the speaker causing a change in tone or feeling.

Where had I heard this wind beforeChange like this to a deeper roar?What would it take my standing there for,Holding open a restive door,Looking down hill to a frothy shore?Summer was past and the day was past.Sombre clouds in the west were massed.Out on the porch’s sagging floor,Leaves got up in a coil and hissed,Blindly striking at my knee and missed.Something sinister in the toneTold me my secret my be known:Word I was in the house aloneSomehow must have gotten abroad,Word I was in my life alone,Word I had no one left but God.

“Bereft” by Robert Frost

In what place before had this deepening howl of the storm-breezes reached my ears? What would the wind think of my presence just inside, as I grasped the open door which tried to swing back and forth in its gusts, while I gazed beyond the sloping lawn to the waves foaming on the beach? The hottest season was gone; night had come. Solemn thunderheads gathered densely where the sun had set. Beyond me on the slumping boards of the veranda, dried foliage from the trees gathered into a whirlwind and made a sound like a snake, then sightlessly leaped at my legs and fell away without touching me. That snaky sound held something evil that made me realize that the thing I had hoped to keep private must have been broadcast: the fact that I was at home by myself must have gotten out, how I don’t know – the fact that I was by myself in my daily existence, that I had only the Deity with me.

“Bereft” by Robert Frost

Where had I heard this wind beforeChange like this to a deeper roar?What would it take my standing there for,Holding open a restive door,Looking down hill to a frothy shore?Summer was past and the day was past.Sombre clouds in the west were massed.Out on the porch’s sagging floor,Leaves got up in a coil and hissed,Blindly striking at my knee and missed.Something sinister in the toneTold me my secret my be known:Word I was in the house aloneSomehow must have gotten abroad,Word I was in my life alone,Word I had no one left but God.

1. A paraphrase is written in prose form.

2. Every word and phrase of the poem is accounted for in the paraphrase.

3. The paraphrase deals with the literal meaning of the poem’s language. Any clarification is placed in square brackets.

HOMEWORK Read: William Carlos Williams “The Red Wheelbarrow,” and “To Elsie.” Read: Ezra Pound “In a Station of the Metro.”Post #10: Choose one1. QHQ on “In a Station of the Metro” 2. A new critical reading of “In a

Station of the Metro”Post #11: Choose one3. QHQ on either of the William’s

poems for today’s reading.4. Paraphrase “The Red Wheelbarrow”

or 6-9 lines from “To Elsie.”