Identify this! (passage)
"All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it. And even then, on the rare occasions when something open within, and the music enters, what we mainly hear, or hear corroborated, are personal, private, vanishing evocations. But the man who creates the music is hearing something else, is dealing with the roar rising from the void and imposing order on it as it hits the air.
James Baldwin, Sonny's Blues
What is a monologue?
only one character speaks; this is the written form of "Tell-tale heart."
the type of gothic fiction within Jekyll and Hyde, set in late 19th c London
Urban gothic! Jekyll and Hyde is an example
Name one of Emily Dickinson's themes
Death; idiosyncratic religion; nature (birds, flowers, snakes); poetic truth as madness/unreason
Sublimation
diverting an instinctual desire or emotion from its unacceptable or unbearable form (e.g., Bertha, Mr. Hyde) into something productive—such as art.
We see this in Lorde's "transformation"
"He said we came here solely on my account, that I was to have perfect rest and all the air I could get. 'Your exercise depends on your strength, my dear,' said he, 'and your food somewhat on your appetite; but air you can absorb al the time.' So we took the nursery at the top of the big house."
Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
What is Monomania?
“partial insanity” that refers to the fixation on a singular idea, obsession
What is degeneration? How does it relate to criminal psych?
false theory of reverse human evolution --
used Darwin's theory of evolution to argue that criminals were a throwback to "humanity's primitive past," back when humans were "ape-like"
What's the best way to find the title of an Emily Dickinson poem, without fail?
Read the first line of the poem
Name a theme from Sonny's Blues
1. Rage that you can't express
2. Addiction
3. Sublimation (music)
4. Doubling (Inside/outside them) (Music/addiction)
Tell all the truth but tell it slant --
Success in Circuit lies
too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truths superb surprise....
Tell al the truth but tell it slant -- by Emily Dickinson
What is the unreliable narrator?
1st person narrator that misleads the reader and warps the reader’s perception of reality within the story
What is allegory? an example from J&H?
A story that can be interpreted to reveal a hidden, moral meaning
1. Hyde is an allegory for the industrializing city and its modern urban landscape
2. Hyde is an allegory for the id (primal, unconscious desire)
What's a slant rhyme? an example?
rhymes that from words with similar sounds but aren't perfect rhyme.
Girl-still
day-eternity
Name a moral responsibility of speech for Audre Lorde
1. Taking the responsibility for turning one’s own anger into speech and productive work
2. Gaining the maturity to be able to listen to others when they’re angry.
That evening Mr. Utterson came home to his bachelor house in sombre spirits and sat down to dinner without relish. It was his custom of a Sunday, when this meal was over, to sit close by the fire, a volume of some dry divinity on his reading-desk, until the clock of the neighboring church rang out the hour of twelves, when he would go soberly and gratefully to bed... There he opened his safe, took from the most private part of it a document endorsed on the envelope as ------'s Will....
Jekyll and Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson
What is hysteria, and why is it significant within the social/historical context of the yellow wallpaper?
A gendered medical diagnosis given to women for a number of symptoms (largely, the ungovernable, emotional excess that women experience.)
Originates from Greek word for uterus, Hystera.
Women's symptoms were either denied or pathologized; Gilman was treated for hysteria while struggling with postpartum and fictionalized her experiences within the YW.
What is the ambiguity of madness?
Meaning 1: insanity, mental illness
Meaning 2: anger
A character’s “insanity” might also be anger.
What is the mad character mad at?
Name two of Dickinson's defining stylistic traits, and justify why they're significant
em-dashes: incomplete/fragmented lines that connect images
slant rhymes: almost rhyme that "stretch" the poem (how the poem gets at truth)
capitalization of words inside the line: added emphasis/significance of that word within the poem
Name a challenge to using anger, according to Lorde
1. Real differences between people. People experience oppression differently.
2. Other people's anger tends to make us defensive. Must cultivate emotional ability to listen without growing guilty or defensive.
"This hatred and our anger are very different. Hatred is the fury of those who do not share our goals, and its object is death and destruction. Anger is the grief of distortions between peers, and its object is change. But our time is getting shorter..."
Uses of Anger , by Audre Lorde
How does the Yellow Wallpaper challenge our definition of the "unreliable narrator?" Provide an example within your response.
The unreliable narrator "warps" the reader's version of reality, but the narrator in the YW already experiences an insane, or illogical reality. Therefore, YW establishes how someone's social conditions create a madness.
example -- John explains the narrator's suffering to her, takes away her ability to write, narrator is shut up inside her room, etc...
Handwriting! Handwriting determines who the criminal is in J&H.
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How does anger work differently within Jane eyre and Audre Lorde's writing?
Jane eyre grows up and lets go of anger (creates Bertha, destroys Bertha)
Audre Lorde argues that anger is the catalyst for change, not destruction. Within anger is the opportunity for growth