Tim Morris
Writing Assignments for short papers #9-12
All papers are one-page maximum and due in class on the date indicated. To receive credit for the paper, you must pick it up when it's returned on the following class day.
Tues 12 Nov: #9 due: A common criticism of Williams is that his poetry is just prose chopped up into lines. Critic Joan Houlihan writes in Web del Sol that "William Carlos Williams began a new turn in American poetry, a reliance on flat, declarative sentences, the "common speech" of man, and a subsequent eschewing of heightened language and the poetic devices associated with poetry—in short, a turn toward prose—and not even, in many cases, a prose poetic enough to meet the standards of good prose (which includes heightened language and poetic devices to maintain interest)." Do you agree with or reject Houlihan's criticism? As a possible side question, how is Williams's free verse like or unlike Walt Whitman's? Thurs 14 Nov: #9 turned back.
Tues 19 Nov: #10 due: Where Moby-Dick and Lolita had just one narrator apiece, Colson Whitehead's John Henry Days seems to have dozens, or none: it relies on many different "reflector-characters," whom we follow as closely as we would a first-person narrator, with the difference that we don't hear them directly tell their stories (in most cases; Dave Brown's tale of Altamont [87-100] is a notable first-person narrative). How does it affect the story and plot of John Henry Days to hear it told from so many different perspectives? Thurs 21 Nov: #10 turned back.
Tues 26 Nov: #11 due: Another interesting artistic feature of John Henry Days is the way the plot (in terms of the sequence of events presented to us) contrasts to the story (the events of the weekend of July 12, 1996, and the "back-stories" of the participants and many other contributors to those events, not least John Henry himself). What does Whitehead gain (or lose) by presenting frequent jumps forward and backward in time, instead of using a more chronological plot? (By contrast, again, Moby-Dick and Lolita have fairly conventional chronological plots.) Tues 3 Dec: #11 turned back
Tues 3 Dec: #12 due: Many, perhaps most, of Langston Hughes's poems are song lyrics that (as we've heard or will hear on CD) are not intended to be sung, but to be recited or read silently. In particular, Hughes wrote a lot of blues lyrics. What effects does he achieve by taking a form that is usually set to music and making a literary, printed art form from it? How are his "lyrics" different from the lyrics of songs that are sung to music? Thurs 5 Dec: #12 turned back
Your final exam is Thurs 12 Dec 8-1030am in our regular classroom.