EN2112

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EN2112
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EN211226 August 2008

• Attendance and Tutorials
• Approaching Nation and Genre
• First Act americana with criticism
• Second Act hinting at depth
• (followed by brief intermission)
• Third Act the death cure
• Tips for Next Week

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1 Attendance and Tutorials

• Sign-in sheet (pass around)
• Confirm tutorial adjustments (pass out copies)
• Thanks kindly to those who gave up free day to
  so everyone could have balanced groupsit really
  helps.
• Note make-up tuts. Any conflicts?
• Sign-up for presentation/discussion will happen
  in tutorials
• Your job balance taking a stand and setting
  up a discussion.
• Will email you the assessment criteria soon. \
• Make a claim, but make a claim worth arguing
  about rather than a dull/obvious one.
• You are hear to learn Dont think you have to
  start out as a Pro.
• Want to check over your idea? Make appt with JWB
  or Edwina.
• Please have the respect appreciation to come on
  time or a few minutes early.

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2 Approaching Nation and Genre

• All texts in this course are plays by post-WWII
  American writers.
• Large generalizations, eg American are
  problematic
• Can lead to stereotypical thinking
• Can create frustrationyou havent read much
  American lit So how?
• Purpose of EN2112 is to introduce theory and
  practice of national and generic approaches.
• DONT just use one procrustean definition and
  think programmatically.
• DO learn to
• Take large claims with a grain of salt
• Use large generalizations provisionally,
  critically, pragmatically.
• Remember that claims about national identity are
  never fully innocent of power relations
  attempts to steer your thinking.
• But remember also to communicate, we require
  general, contractual shared assumptions. We need
  over-generalizations, at least at the start, but
  real human conversations evolve beyond simplistic
  beginnings.
• To demonstrate, let me go through all three acts
  of Our Town.

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3. 1st Act americana with criticism

• Claim all art requires aesthetic
  tensionperhaps modelled on the tension between
  bodily desire and fulfillmentand Wilder offers a
  tension between national flattery and criticism.
• The first act sets this up by combining
  americana and estrangement.
• Grovers Corners as microcosm of America. All
  life?
• Wilder might say yes to that questionbut we
  might disagree.
• Consider pages 20-21 flattering self-concept is
  gently held up to a questioning light.
• NB this is a thoroughly modernist work, but it
  is NOT avant-garde the modernism of Joyce and
  Eliot was, we see in this 1938 play, to become an
  orthodox approach. Note epic beginning 5-6

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4 Second Act hinting at depth

• Why is depth in quotation marks?
• The Norman Rockwell surface is in place.
• Intellectual respectability demands the
  hermeneutic of suspicion (Ricouer), and there
  are subtle hints that the demons of sexuality,
  mental illness, aggression, daftness compromise
  the cozy self-portrait.
• Note the fundamental confusion on 60, 63, 71,
  and esp. 72
• Act 2 is about adolescent love (and sex)
• working out of sexual desire, but it redeems this
  fundamental childishness by showing how our lives
  depend on juvenile sleepwalking (of the sort the
  spirits will disavow in Act III). See p. 60.
• Modernist works by Joyce, Faulkner, Lawrence,
  Henry Miller challenged taboos vigorously. Wilder
  is a gentler lover of the world.
• Criticial appreciation of the cliché of romantic
  love requires some detachment.
• Note the anthropological transcendence of 77-78.
  We pull ourselves out of the picture and see it
  clinically.

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5 Third Act the death cure

• Claim the play is organized around a tension
  between sentimentality and disillusion, BOTH OF
  WHICH are flattering to readers/viewers.
• Sentimentality offers the Rockwellish vision of
  Americana, of an idyllic identity that more or
  less explains us. Mirror, Mirror on the
  wallyou (Americans) are the fairest.
• Disillusion flatters we intellectuals (for
  example)the selves that define themselves in
  contradistinction to the herd mentality.
  Mirror, mirror you (anti-sentimental critics)
  are the fairest.
• Not to say that the purpose is to protect
  uncritical nationalism only that the mechanism
  allows for constructive reconfiguration Youre
  basically okay, but you could be better.
• Since everyone dies (so far as I know), the
  death cure approach signifies a universalist
  (universalizable?) approach.
• We neednt accept universalist rhetoric, but it
  is a key feature of SMs discourse.
• This approach, in which Art (as personified by
  SM) is a gentle but potentially firm teacher,
  expresses key liberal-humanist values.

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5b liberal humanism

• Humanism is a broad category of ethical
  philosophies that affirm the dignity and worth of
  all people, based on the ability to determine
  right and wrong by appeal to universal human
  qualities  particularly rationality. It is a
  component of a variety of more specific
  philosophical systems and is incorporated into
  several religious schools of thought. Humanism
  can be considered the process by which truth and
  morality is sought through human investigation.
  In focusing on the capacity for
  self-determination, humanism rejects the validity
  of transcendental justifications, such as a
  dependence on belief without reason, the
  supernatural, or texts of allegedly divine
  origin. Humanists endorse universal morality
  based on the commonality of the human condition,
  suggesting that solutions to human social and
  cultural problems cannot be parochial.
• Emilys quest in act 3 is the human
  investigation through which we find out the
  meaning of life.
• wikipedia http//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_
  humanism

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6 Tips for Next Week

• When reading Streetcar Named Desire keep in
  mind that Tennessee Williams was
• A) a gay man
• B) a lyrical poet
• C) a postwar American writer, committed to
  pushing back constrictions on how we should write
  about (or talk about, or think about) sex.
• Pay special attention to class markers. USA
  isnt the UKAmericans deny class difference.
  But that doesnt mean the differences dont exist.