Joyce's style prepares us for McBride's writing by conditioning us to ignore the grammatical aspects of the text and focus more on the imagery and ideas. The prose, in both "Ulysses" and "A Girl," feels more like poetry than a narrative of characters and events. The narrator that is introduced to us is a little girl that weirdly recounts her own birth and from then on begins explaining her life's events in a child's way of thinking. We are forced to see the world through a child's eyes, and because our childhood is so far behind us, we lack that imagination and that is where the difficulty lies. We must picture a world where we abandon what we know and try to start from the beginning like the girl does. Once again, there's a feeling of cinemation when reading these texts, like the sentences are the camera directing us to focus on certain emotions or events and then quickly diverting to the next (similar to the way kids take in everything, and everthing looks big to them). It's challenging to follow, but once we've read for a little while we start to see in the same way she sees.
Wednesday, February 25, 2015
Bloom and "A Girl"
Joyce's sentences stop as soon as the reader is about to learn something important. He cuts himself off before he fully concludes a thought. The prose of the text (if you can call it that) is another thing that made reading comprehension difficult. It felt like a constant stream of consciousness with no editing, almost frantic and frenzied, like senses being bombarded. At some points, it was like watching a movie, except with a constantly-moving camera. Although his sentences are abrupt, his ideas are not; they linger from one of Bloom's church-going experiences to the next, giving the feel of one huge religious moment with smaller, less distinguishable events within. Bloom was very critical of priests in all his religion endeavors. From John Conmee's sermon , to communion, to the "secret invitation" funeral service, Bloom always critiqued something the church's authority figure did. After communion, Bloom notes, "The priest was rinsing out the chalice...Wine. Makes it more aristocratic..." Father Coffey is described and compared to sick animals and aggressive symbols ( bloated with belly of "poisoned pup", "burst sideways like a sheep in clover", "eyes of a toad", "looks full of bad gas") Later Joyce says, in a slightly authoritative voice, "Mr Bloom glanced about him and then stood up, looking over the risen hats. Stand up at the gospel of course." like Bloom was following some code, rather than being a sincere Christian that internalized and embodied the virtue of respect.
Joyce's style prepares us for McBride's writing by conditioning us to ignore the grammatical aspects of the text and focus more on the imagery and ideas. The prose, in both "Ulysses" and "A Girl," feels more like poetry than a narrative of characters and events. The narrator that is introduced to us is a little girl that weirdly recounts her own birth and from then on begins explaining her life's events in a child's way of thinking. We are forced to see the world through a child's eyes, and because our childhood is so far behind us, we lack that imagination and that is where the difficulty lies. We must picture a world where we abandon what we know and try to start from the beginning like the girl does. Once again, there's a feeling of cinemation when reading these texts, like the sentences are the camera directing us to focus on certain emotions or events and then quickly diverting to the next (similar to the way kids take in everything, and everthing looks big to them). It's challenging to follow, but once we've read for a little while we start to see in the same way she sees.
Joyce's style prepares us for McBride's writing by conditioning us to ignore the grammatical aspects of the text and focus more on the imagery and ideas. The prose, in both "Ulysses" and "A Girl," feels more like poetry than a narrative of characters and events. The narrator that is introduced to us is a little girl that weirdly recounts her own birth and from then on begins explaining her life's events in a child's way of thinking. We are forced to see the world through a child's eyes, and because our childhood is so far behind us, we lack that imagination and that is where the difficulty lies. We must picture a world where we abandon what we know and try to start from the beginning like the girl does. Once again, there's a feeling of cinemation when reading these texts, like the sentences are the camera directing us to focus on certain emotions or events and then quickly diverting to the next (similar to the way kids take in everything, and everthing looks big to them). It's challenging to follow, but once we've read for a little while we start to see in the same way she sees.
Wednesday, February 18, 2015
Araby and Yeats' Irish Airman Foresees His Death
Joyce calls attention to the nation's identity in Araby, especially at the end of the story. His first paragraph uses words that associate with sight or vision when talking about the Christian Brothers' School letting out. Words like "conscious" and "blind" are paradoxically used when the man recounts the neighborhood at night. He also spies on the young woman through the blinds. When he does this he says, "I kept her brown figure always in my eye..." He references "her image" on a couple occasions and there is always a mysterious quality to her. And finally after the man visits the bazaar, we get another "sight" reference: "Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger." As he noted, his eyes were always full of tears. His eyes are burning again by the end of the story, symbolizing his emotional response to venturing out on his own, just as Ireland tried to do away from England.
Yeats' poem is about a pilot that suddenly questions why he is flying thousands of feet in the air, risking his life to guard people he does not love. This is another example of sight and vision being brought up in the years surrounding the Easter Uprising. His eyes are metaphorically opened to the reality of his cause. He realizes, "No likely end could bring them loss/ Or leave them happier than before." There is no point to his actions. He has officially lost hope in his cause, now believing that he will never be able to enact change; his death will be meaningless. "A waste of breath" is all that he sees his efforts as now. In both cases, the vision that both men recieve ultimately leads to their depression and lost hope; hte cause they were fighting for may not have been what they thought it was.
Yeats' poem is about a pilot that suddenly questions why he is flying thousands of feet in the air, risking his life to guard people he does not love. This is another example of sight and vision being brought up in the years surrounding the Easter Uprising. His eyes are metaphorically opened to the reality of his cause. He realizes, "No likely end could bring them loss/ Or leave them happier than before." There is no point to his actions. He has officially lost hope in his cause, now believing that he will never be able to enact change; his death will be meaningless. "A waste of breath" is all that he sees his efforts as now. In both cases, the vision that both men recieve ultimately leads to their depression and lost hope; hte cause they were fighting for may not have been what they thought it was.
Wednesday, February 11, 2015
Playboy of the Western World
Last class we were able to unpack a lot of "Pot of Broth." Through looking at classmates' blogs, we found that the type of literature that was released and circulated during the beginning of the 1920s was meant to stir up the Irish public. The Irish were portrayed as naive to the trickery from the Church of England as demonstrated by the couple's acquiescence to their house visitor. Irish hospitality was cast in an unfavorable light when put along side the local community's religious politics surrounding feeding the priest. They were practicing their religion but had inadvertantly stripped it of its meaning by putting earthly concerns on a higher priority than spiritual ones. In this way, the Irish might as well have been pagans again. And that was how Yeats wanted to portray them: to get the public angry. He needed a piece of literature that everyone would go see and that would ignite the fire of rebellion by calling attention to the negative way the Irish were portrayed.
Originally, I had seen Yeats' work as an example of oral storytelling, purely an example of the culture's artistic tendencies. I ascribed no real, penetrating meaning until we looked closer at the Christian concepts of hospitality which then brought us to the differentiation of earthy and spiritual concerns, comedy and tragedy, low and high order art forms.
Reading "Playboy of the Western World" post-binary discussion allowed me to look for lines of dialogue that said more than just what the characters thought. In this play's case, the Irish were portrayed as a non-unified people. "Slaying his da" is what earns the Playboy fear and respect in his new community and is what allows Pegeen to even consider marrying him (although they just met). This play has another wise widow that helps the younger generation male in his quest to gain respect and affirmation from his generation and his father's. The widow, in her fairy godmother-way, always regarded the boy as better than what he really was. His father was convinced that the boy was a dunce, could not talk to girls, and would therefore die alone with nothing to show for his name. Widow Quin says, "I am your like, and it’s for that I’m taking a fancy to you,..." (Act 2) Oddly enough, the widow tells Christy that he has to handle his daddy issues on his own; she cannot help him with that dispute.
The culture of the play values daring and courageous youth, which makes me believe that it is another nationalistic work, but slightly less than Yeats'. As Michael says in act 2, "A daring fellow is the jewel of the world, and a man did split his father’s middle with a single clout, should have the bravery of ten, so may God andMary and St. Patrick bless you, and increase you from this mortal day." Similarly the widow says, "...isn’t it a great shame when the old and hardened do torment the young?" It is the act of killing his father that makes Christy so attractive to Pegeen. But once she finds out that he indeed failled at his attempt (multiple times), she immediately loses interest and returns to the more earthy concerns of marrying a stable man with money.
Originally, I had seen Yeats' work as an example of oral storytelling, purely an example of the culture's artistic tendencies. I ascribed no real, penetrating meaning until we looked closer at the Christian concepts of hospitality which then brought us to the differentiation of earthy and spiritual concerns, comedy and tragedy, low and high order art forms.
Reading "Playboy of the Western World" post-binary discussion allowed me to look for lines of dialogue that said more than just what the characters thought. In this play's case, the Irish were portrayed as a non-unified people. "Slaying his da" is what earns the Playboy fear and respect in his new community and is what allows Pegeen to even consider marrying him (although they just met). This play has another wise widow that helps the younger generation male in his quest to gain respect and affirmation from his generation and his father's. The widow, in her fairy godmother-way, always regarded the boy as better than what he really was. His father was convinced that the boy was a dunce, could not talk to girls, and would therefore die alone with nothing to show for his name. Widow Quin says, "I am your like, and it’s for that I’m taking a fancy to you,..." (Act 2) Oddly enough, the widow tells Christy that he has to handle his daddy issues on his own; she cannot help him with that dispute.
The culture of the play values daring and courageous youth, which makes me believe that it is another nationalistic work, but slightly less than Yeats'. As Michael says in act 2, "A daring fellow is the jewel of the world, and a man did split his father’s middle with a single clout, should have the bravery of ten, so may God andMary and St. Patrick bless you, and increase you from this mortal day." Similarly the widow says, "...isn’t it a great shame when the old and hardened do torment the young?" It is the act of killing his father that makes Christy so attractive to Pegeen. But once she finds out that he indeed failled at his attempt (multiple times), she immediately loses interest and returns to the more earthy concerns of marrying a stable man with money.
Wednesday, February 4, 2015
Cathleen Ni Houlihan and Pot of Broth
My Irish Lit reading background: almost nothing.
I may have read a few Yeats poems in ENG 196, but other than that I have no experience with specifically Irish literature. Learning about the country's history, I expect the Irish to thrive off pagan folklore and myth. In that folklore, I anticipate characters to be very socially consciousness and that it will provide an avenue for justifying their actions. In other words, I imagined characters using their social status as a excuse for acting immorally. Having read "Pot of Broth," I was not surprised to find one character exploiting another in a similar way that other people have exploited the Irish. It seems like the Irish tradition is to remain resilient through extreme hardship, whether it be exploitation, persecution, or depravity, and to prove one's worth despite various false titles being laid on by others.
This tradition was also seen in "Cathleen Ni Houlihan." The younger generation was cautioned by thier parents to stay safe at home, marry, and collect money. But the old woman represented the ideals of a long lost tradition, to defend one's true love, the Irish country. In both plays, the oral storytelling and script culture are peppered with themes of political persecution and paganism. In both stories we see the generosity of Irish hospitality, but the effects of it are what make the two stories different. Bridget says to her husband, "Shame on you, Peter. Give her the shilling and your blessing wiht it, or our own luck will go from us." But the old woman represents a high order, one that doesn't simply beg for money. So the question is, why is she there then? She is there to inspire the younger generation, to convince them of a worthy cause, one that thier parents would not have approved of. By doing this, she claims it's noble to die for one's country and culture in order to preserve what is rightfully theirs.
I may have read a few Yeats poems in ENG 196, but other than that I have no experience with specifically Irish literature. Learning about the country's history, I expect the Irish to thrive off pagan folklore and myth. In that folklore, I anticipate characters to be very socially consciousness and that it will provide an avenue for justifying their actions. In other words, I imagined characters using their social status as a excuse for acting immorally. Having read "Pot of Broth," I was not surprised to find one character exploiting another in a similar way that other people have exploited the Irish. It seems like the Irish tradition is to remain resilient through extreme hardship, whether it be exploitation, persecution, or depravity, and to prove one's worth despite various false titles being laid on by others.
This tradition was also seen in "Cathleen Ni Houlihan." The younger generation was cautioned by thier parents to stay safe at home, marry, and collect money. But the old woman represented the ideals of a long lost tradition, to defend one's true love, the Irish country. In both plays, the oral storytelling and script culture are peppered with themes of political persecution and paganism. In both stories we see the generosity of Irish hospitality, but the effects of it are what make the two stories different. Bridget says to her husband, "Shame on you, Peter. Give her the shilling and your blessing wiht it, or our own luck will go from us." But the old woman represents a high order, one that doesn't simply beg for money. So the question is, why is she there then? She is there to inspire the younger generation, to convince them of a worthy cause, one that thier parents would not have approved of. By doing this, she claims it's noble to die for one's country and culture in order to preserve what is rightfully theirs.
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