I don’t really have a lot of comments except to say these were all interesting posts—free-for-all day always brings out a range of responses. I’ll just provide links to all of them, here, for anyone who wants to circle back and read later:

• Adam wrote about “The Revolt of ‘Mother’” and used some secondary material by Martha J. Cutter.
• Amy H. wrote about the “coming of age” aspects of “A White Heron”
• Deb wrote about how Mrs. Penn (“Mother”) could very well have been her grandmother (figuratively speaking).
• Greg wrote about “A White Heron” as Bildungsroman.
• Heather wrote about as feminist texts, and also wrote a post about Hawthorne for the heck of it.
• Janel wrote about gender equality, Fuller, and “The Revolt of ‘Mother’”.
• Meredith wrote about Twain, and introduced us to an unpublished work, “The War Prayer”.
• Michael wrote about the expected ending of “The Gossip of Gold Hill”.
• Sara wrote about “A White Heron” and used some secondary material by noted Jewett scholar Elizabeth Ammons.
• Terry wrote about roles in “The Revolt of ‘Mother’”.

This is just a note to confirm that the mid-term revision option deadline has passed. Per the instructions, I will not accept revisions after Friday, March 26th, which was yesterday.

I received one revision; if you think you sent me a revision, and you did not get a “got it” email from me, that means I did not get it. Send it again, and as long as the file properties match (last revision date March 26th), I’ll take it.

We were led into our discussion of New England regionalist fiction by Amy H. and Caitlin who talked about Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman.

We mostly spent the time talking about the stories themselves and the connections between what you see in the stories, women’s voices at the time, and previous intellectual eras. I mentioned that Freeman and Jewett were quite popular (as seen by the number of texts they were able to produce) and were influential as to the next generation of women authors. Among Freeman’s other texts, ones that are discussed quite a bit include “A New England Nun” and “A Church Mouse”. Jewett is also known for Deephaven (1877) and The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896).

Welcome back from break!

Today we started to talk about local color and regionalist fiction. We started with the West, because that’s where we are; Amy J, Meredith, and Sara ably introduced us to Twain and Harte. I gave you the scoop on Mrs. W. W. Macomber and her single piece of published fiction (?).

On Thursday we’ll shift to the East with Jewett and Freeman. On that day we’ll spend some additional time with Mrs. Macomber’s “A Gossip of Gold Hill” and put it side by side with some of the New England texts (although they were written 20+ years later).

We will not leave out the South, as we will talk about Chesnutt on Tuesday (03/31). NOTE! the schedule change below (also reflected on the course calendar):

• NO CLASS on Thursday, April 1 (it’s not a joke…I really won’t be here)
• We will discuss Daisy Miller on Tuesday, April 6 instead of Thursday, April 1
• Since the blog post for Friday, April 2 is on Daisy Miller, you can either: a) keep yourself on schedule and read Daisy Miller for Thursday 04/01 and do your blog post on 04/02 OR b) do your blog post on Daisy Miller on 04/07 (Wednesday). Option B means you’ll be doing two posts that week, and blog post #11 is a pretty big deal. Personally, I’d stay on the original schedule, but that’s just me.
• When we start talking about Hardy on Thursday 04/08 it will be with the assumption that you’ve read up through chapter xxxv

The purpose of blog assignment #8 was two-fold: first, to give you some more interesting background material about the mid-century wars and their media, and second, to give you some practice reading and responding to secondary sources such as this article—for this is exactly the sort of thing you must do in your final essays. I chose this article in particular because it is very clearly written (even if you don’t know anything about sonnets and what not, you can understand the points, and the article is not filled with jargon that makes it unintelligible) and it has long been one of my favorite critical essays (and it’s not even my field!).

I thought those of you who did this assignment did a good job of picking out some arguments; working with them ranged from not-so-good to perfectly fine. So, before moving on to recapping some of the content of your posts, I want to again point you to this handout on working with quotations (the mechanics of it), and also remind you of the analytical portion of these matters: analysis must be there. To reiterate: put the quote in context, introduce the quote, explain what the quote is doing.

Many of you picked up on the minimization of the hardships of the troops. Heather said that she understood that Fenton “couldn’t get a clear shot if people didn’t stand still, but the fact that a good chunk of the people in the photos are in clean, pressed uniforms doesn’t make it seem like there’s a war going on.” Amy H. continues this thread when she says that the lack of “a war scene in the background or any other action mak[es] it seem like nothing important is going on. Of course, war is more than nothing important, but these pictures don’t show this.” Both true; continuing on to discuss the reasons for this—both working with what Houston said as well as additional information you might know (including the interplay of the print media, including the printing of Tennyson’s poem) would have been a natural continuation of this analytical line of thought.

Terry mentioned not having thought about the souvenir aspect before, and Amy J. talked about the souvenir as well. The concept of the souvenir was perhaps the most important part of this article, as this was the first time any sort of collection could really happen in a managable way. Even portrait miniatures weren’t really the same, as they were expensive and took more time than a photograph (bviously!) to produce. But think how people collect baseball cards in the 20th century: as a connection to “an experience that is by definition shared yet individually possessed” (Houston 381). What is the impulse to collect? That’s actually a question based in psychology, sociology, and anthropology, but ther are very real answers. Is it, as Kristi notes, driven from our “naturally perverse sense of curiosity”? Perhaps so.

I would also like to give a shout-out to Terry for reminding us that, 10 years later, “the pictures of the Civil War do in fact show that war is and evil place to be in, and in some instances show that soldiers do die in war.” What is the difference between the Crimean War photography and the Civil War photography, in terms of technology, purpose, use, and the overall cultural context? That’s a good question (that I just asked). Feel free to ponder it.

First, all the midterms have been returned. Those not in class on Thursday can get the mid-term revision information sheet from the course website, and I also recommend re-reading this post and following the links in it (which are also in the handout).

Thursday’s class started with Caitlin’s interesting fact sheet on Louisa May Alcott. We then spent time talking about “My Contraband,” especially what makes it an Abolitionist text. But we also talked about the exaltation of the body, familial ties, and the importance/significance of taking the name “Dane.”

Then we started to talk about poetry (some from Whitman’s Drum Taps and some of Melville’s work about the war as well) and everyone went blank as people do when we start to talk about poetry. Bet you’re glad that’s the last of it, officially, on the syllabus. Sorry, great Victorian poetry like “The Windhover”, “Goblin Market”, “Modern Love” and others!

When we get back from break, it’s Twain, Harte, and Mrs. W. W. Macomber.

Today was day #1 of “War Week,” which is could also be called “hey, now we have multimedia” week: images of war and their effects on culture “back home,” which now had to deal with something that couldn’t be hidden as individual memories faded.

We had two fact sheets: one on Tennyson and one on Kipling. Kipling made it into the mix because of his 40-years-on poem “The Last of the Light Brigade” (synecdoche!) more than for his writings about British Imperialism (which are interesting and important but just didn’t make it into this class). We talked some about Tennyson’s narrative poem “The Charge of the Light Brigade” and what he attempted to do with it (and what he did or did not accomplish) as poet laureate but human being shocked at the ineptitude of the leaders who took their brave and loyal men into battle.

If you recall, “The Charge of the Light Brigade” was from 1854. Tennyson lived until 1892. In 1890 he recorded “The Charge of the Light Brigade” on to wax for Edison. You can listen to it. It’s very interesting to hear how Tennyson himself read the poem. Also, it’s actually Tennyson. That’s just cool.

I thought most of the responses were good attempts to work with the questions asked. Terry apologetically stated his “ignorance in that I didn’t know that it was a Whitman poem.” There’s no need to apologize, because I would reckon the vast majority of people who saw these ads didn’t know it either (and still don’t). The Levi’s Go Forth web site—which is actually part of an ongoing game that trades on the concepts of the ads/the poetry and even includes “clues” spoken and digitized to make them seem like wax recordings—makes no mention of Whitman whatsoever.

I remember the first time I saw the ads. I keep the television on in my house almost 24 hours a day—if I’m there, it’s on as background noise, and I haven’t been able to sleep without a television on since I was ten years old. Anyway, when one of the ads came on—it wasn’t the one with the actual Whitman voice but instead the one with the Whitman impersonator—I looked up and said to myself “is that Whitman? it can’t be Whitman. who is smart enough to use Whitman in their ads?” And then I went back to what I was doing. A couple days later I heard the actual-Whitman ad and knew it was true. When I took a few minutes to really watch and listen to the ads on YouTube later that day, I thought the entire interactive arts project was the best thing I’d seen in American advertising in a long time—but only if a person was actually paying attention to the entire multimedia array—and I dare say that while advertisers want people to stop and watch their multimedia ads, how many people actually do? I should also note that the print-only/static ads didn’t work nearly as well (or any differently than any other print ad) since the power of the ads was felt by putting all the pieces together.

Deb said that she “truly believe[s] taking the arts where non-traditional audiences exist and potentially new ‘fans’ reside, can only be positive.” I agree with this, but did that happen here? No one knows. In other words, can we quantify how many new Whitman fans are out there because of these ads? Unlikely, not just because that’s impossible to count, but because there’s no explicit connection to Whitman unless you already know (or took the time to look it up). The ads did not, unfortunately, say “and when you’re done buying your jeans, go look up ‘Walt Whitman’ on the internets to learn more.”

What I really want to focus on is the question “Do you buy McCracken’s claim that advertisers now play the cultural roles that poets played in earlier eras?” I want to focus on that because several people misunderstood this question. The question is not “are advertisers poets” or “is advertising poetry”. The question is “do advertisers now play the cultural roles that poets played in earlier eras.”

The poet had a job. The job was (in part) to affect culture. That used to be the case. Poets still want to affect culture, but there is question as to whether they do. Quick: name ten contemporary American poets without looking it up. Can you? Can you say what they write about and what their greater poetic purpose is? In the mid c19, students and the reading population could easily name ten contemporary poets and talk about their work, because poetry was part of the household culture. Not only was it in the newspapers and popular magazines, books like The Household Book of Poetry or gift books like The Token and Atlantic Souvenir were also part of personal libraries. How many books of poetry were in your house growing up? In your friends’ houses?

Heather says “advertisement[s] [are] the great influencer[s] of the future” and I would agree with that. Amy J. agrees with that too, and vehemently feels that’s a bad thing. Perhaps so (and probably so), but as Lauren points out, they have all the power: ” Whether it be a one liner on a billboard or a 15 second commercial, they have the ability to not only use words, but images and music to invoke emotion and ideals into their observers. This in itself is far more than simple poetry could do even 100 years ago.” Yes, advertisers have multiple media outlets, and those media outlets are always on; we are bombarded both consciously and subconsciously with media messages—poetry, not so much. We have our musicians-as-poets, as Tanner points out, and that is absolutely true; he mentions “people like Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Bruce Springsteen, Kurt Cobain, and Tupac Shakur are the icons of American spirit”—but the Billboard Hot 100 for this week mentions The Black Eyed Peas, Young Money, Lady Antebellum, Ke$sha, Lady Gaga, Train, Ludacris, Rihanna, Trey Songz, and Jason Derulo. Poets? Speakers of the generation? Is this the culture that advertisers are mirroring? Of course—take a look at a lot of ads. Is this what the Levi’s ad is mirroring? Or is it trying to do something new by doing something old?

These are rhetorical questions.

[For more information on the appearance of Whitman in c20 advertising, see "Twentieth-century Mass Media Appearances" by Andrew Jewell and Kenneth M. Price]

Quick update:

• I will finish getting comments to everyone at some point today.
• I am returning the midterm percentage to 15% of total course grade instead of the 25% I had bumped it up to.
• Everyone will have the opportunity to revise their midterm. I will hand out a sheet about this on Thursday. Here is general information on revising, which is different from editing.
• The vast majority of the problems in the midterms have to do with actual essay-writing—things that should have been learned in English 101/Introductory Writing classes regarding introductions, theses, building arguments, performing analysis and not summary, working with source material, and so on.

For people who will need a refresher of this information—either to revise the midterm or in anticipation of the final paper—here are several links:

• college writing
• arguments
• introductions
• theses
• quotations
• conclusions

Here is a general handout on writing about literature which will be most useful for your final paper, although is also useful at the midterm level.

Today was Dickinson day, led off by Amy H.’s fact sheet about Miss Emily. Let us all keep in mind when doing fact sheets that one portion of the fact sheet is to specifically work with some part of the text. Many have been lacking in that department.

The goal of today was to dispel the notion that Emily Dickinson is some morbid recluse with no zest for life. In the ongoing engagement with life, one must acknowledge and engage with death as the inevitable and natural counterpart to life, which is what Dickinson does with many of her poems, especially the ones you were to read for class as well as the ones read in class.

Students typically approach poetry by giving it one quick glance, if that, and moving on. I believe our work specifically with “I felt a funeral in my brain” shows the extent to which that sort of reading is just a bad idea.

In class, groups worked with additional poems: “It feels a shame to be Alive” [among other things, exemplifying how we struggle to fit the cost of war into our concept of life], “How many Flowers fail in Wood” [including natural imagery and how we struggle to understand death as part of the cycle of life], and “There’s been a Death in the Opposite House” [speaker as observer, again showing death as part of the journey of life but also the extent to which some people are desensitized to death, especially when their livelihoods depend on it].

For Tuesday, be very sure to explore the photography collections listed on the syllabus in addition to just reading the poems. The images provide context not only for the works we will be reading next week but also the blog assignment you will write for next Friday. This Friday’s (today’s) blog assignment is about Whitman.