Sixteenth lecture for my students in English 104A, UC Santa Barbara, spring 2012. Course website: http://patrickbrianmooney.nfshost.com/~patrick/ta/s12/index.html

1. Lecture 16: Who’s Speaking, and What
Do They Say?
English 104A
UC Santa Barbara
Spring 2012
23 May 2012
“It is a common sentence that Knowledge is power; but who hath
duly considered or set forth the power of Ignorance? Knowledge
slowly builds up what Ignorance in an hour pulls down. Knowledge,
through patient and frugal centuries, enlarges discovery and makes
record of it; Ignorance, wanting its day’s dinner, lights a fire with the
record, and gives a flavour to its one roast with the burnt souls of
many generations. ”
—George Eliot, Daniel Deronda, ch. 21

2. Some administrative matters
● We have a visitor today! Please ensure that she feels
welcome.
● Lecture slide shows 2-8 have been posted and are
available from the course website. (There is no slide
show for lecture 1.)
● I will post approximately one new slide show each evening,
until all are posted.
● Remember that I am fully enforcing the grade-limiting
factors on paper two – even though I did not on paper
one.
● Remember that you must take at least five quizzes in
order to receive a grade above D+ for the quarter.

3. A few words about the final exam
● Monday, June 11, 4-7 p.m.
● Worth 30% of total grade for the quarter.
● Although I empathize with people who have difficult
handwriting, if I can’t read an answer, I can’t grade it.
● Bring blue books
● Three sections:
1.Term identifications (pick eight, eight points each). Explain
where term occurs (by naming both the text and its author),
what it means, and what its significance is.
2.Quote identifications (pick nine, four points each). Identify
author, text, speaker, and (in 1-2 sentences) what its
significance is.
3.A comparative essay (fifty points), approx. 2-3 pages.

4. Sample term identifications
“Section 1. Name/idea identifications. Pick 8 of the
following terms. Explain, in approximately four to five
sentences, where the term occurs and what its definition is,
as well as what its relevance and/or significance are. (Eight
points each.)”
● Theodore Roosevelt Babbitt
● Signifier/signified

5. Sample quote identifications
“Section 2: Quote identifications. Pick 9 of the following passages.
Identify the name of the work from which the quote comes, the author
of the work, who is speaking in the passage quoted, and, in 1-2
sentences, describe its broader significance to the work from which it
is drawn and/or the larger concerns of the course. (4 points each.)”
“And still he missed it, even set – sitting right there in his
own office and actively watching Flem rid Jefferson of
Montgomery Ward. And still I couldn’t tell him.”
“Loneliness, far from being a rare and curious
circumstance, is and always has been the central and
inevitable experience of every man.”

6. Sample quote identifications
(notes toward answers)
“And still he missed it, even set – sitting right there in
his own office and actively watching Flem rid
Jefferson of Montgomery Ward. And still I couldn’t tell
him.” (This is the whole of chapter 11 of William
Faulkner’s The Town.)
“Loneliness, far from being a rare and curious
circumstance, is and always has been the central and
inevitable experience of every man.” (This is from the
editor’s introduction to book four of Thomas Wolfe’s
You Can’t Go Home Again – it is not from The Heart
Is a Lonely Hunter.)

7. Essay questions
● There will be three or four options. You will pick one (and only
one).
● Essay will be worth one-third of your total grade on the final.
● You will be required to write on at least three texts, including at
least two novels.
● You should be able to construct a high-scoring answer in two
to three pages (if your writing is of average size).
● Be sure to pace yourself in the earlier sections so that you
have enough time to write a strong essay.
● Although I am not explicitly going to penalize you for
spelling/grammar errors, it is often the case that very high-
scoring essays are extremely well written.

8. Sylvia Plath (1932-1963)
● Published first poem,
Boston Herald, age 8.
● First suicide attempt, 1953;
treated with ECT and
psychoanalysis.
● B.A., Smith College, 1955;
received scholarship to
study at Cambridge
University.
● Married poet Ted Hughes,
1956 (two children: Frieda
and Nicholas).

9. ● Plath and Hughes separated in September 1962,
shortly after the revelation of Hughes’s affair.
● Much of Plath’s best-regarded work is written
during the next five months
● Committed suicide, 11 February 1963.
● Major works:
● The Colossus and Other Poems (1960)
● The Bell Jar (1963) – Plath’s only novel
● Ariel (1965) – this is the source of today’s selections.
● Key terms (for our purposes):
● Confessional poetry
● Autobiographical fiction

10. Confessional Poetry
● Term first used by M.L. Rosenthal, 1959.
“in these poems there are depths of the self that in life are not
ordinarily acknowledged and in literature are usually figured in
disguise. Traditionally, between the persona of the creation and
the person of the creator a certain distance exists, and this has
been so even for lyric poets and their utterances, habitually
inclined to the first person as they are.” (writing on poet Robert
Lowell; “Two Poets,” Kenyon Review, 1959)
● Poetry has, for a very long time, sometimes been
written with an intimate, personal tone.
● However, confessional poetry goes further and relates
events that are traditionally seen as shameful and/or that
transgress fundamental boundaries governing what is
acceptable in speech.

11. “to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human
prose and stand before you speechless and
intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet
confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm
of thought in his naked and endless head,
“the madman bum and angel beat in Time,
unknown, yet putting down here what might be
left to say in time come after death.”
– Allan Ginsberg, Howl, sec. I
● Other notable confessional poets:
● Theodore Roethke
● Anne Sexton
● John Berryman

12. On “Daddy”
You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
5 Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.
● Note the direct language consisting of short,
simple words.
● As the title suggests, this is the monologue of a
child – or someone who, in one way or another,
takes the position of a child.

13. Otto Plath
● Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time---
Marble-heavy a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one grey toe (lines 6-9)
● I have always been scared of you,
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
And your neat moustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, o You---
Not God but a swastika (lines 41-6)

14. ● So I never could tell where you
Put your foot, your root,
I never could talk to you.
The tongue stuck in my jaw.
It stuck in a barb wire snare.
Ich, ich, ich, ich. (lines 22-27)
● There's a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through. (lines
76-80)

15. Some of the more controversial bits
● And the language obscene
An engine, an engine
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew. (lines 30-35)
● Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you. (lines 48-50)

16. On Ted Hughes
● And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look
And a love of the rack and the screw.
And I said I do, I do. (lines 63-67)
● If I've killed one man, I've killed two---
The vampire who said he was you
And drank my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to know. (lines 71-74)

17. Ted Hughes, on Sylvia Plath
● “Your exaggerated American
Grin for the cameras, the judges, the strangers, the
frighteners” (“Fulbright Scholars”)
● “Nor did I know I was being auditioned
For the male lead in your drama,
Miming through the first easy movements
As if with eyes closed, feeling for the role.
As if a puppet were being tried on its strings,
Or a dead frog’s legs touched by electrodes.” (“Visit”)
● “the swelling ring-moat of tooth-marks
That was to brand my face for the next month.
The me beneath it for good.” (“St Botolph’s”)

18. Philip Roth (1933-)
● Probably best known for Portnoy’s
Complaint (1967)
● Novels are frequently set in or around
Newark, New Jersey, and often
concerned with questions of Jewish
identity and culture
● The Human Stain (2000) won the
PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction and
the National Jewish Book Award (both
2001)
● Last novel of a loosely connected
trilogy including American Pastoral
(1997) and I Married a Communist
(1998)

19. The Human Stain (2000)
● As in many of Roth’s novels, Nathan Zuckerman is a
primary character.
● Coleman, in class: “Divine Muse, sing of the ruinous
wrath of Achilles . . . Begin where they first quarreled,
Agamemnon the King of men, and great Achilles.” (4)
● This is also a rather difficult novel, although for
reasons other than some of the other novels we’ve
read this quarter.
We also insist that politics demands complex thinking
and that poetry is an arena for such thinking: a place to
explore the constitution of meaning, of self, of groups,
of nations,—of value.
―Charles Bernstein, “Revenge of the Poet-Critic” (1999)

20. “the ecstasy of sanctimony” (Roth 2)
● The (semi-)public secret of Coleman Silk’s affair
with Faunia Farley occurs against the backdrop of
the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, when “life, in all its
shameless impurity, once again confronted
America.” (3)
● “‘Look,’ I [Nathan] said, ‘Delphine Roux—I won’t
pretend I understand why she should care so
passionately who you are screwing in your
retirement, but since we know that other people
don’t do well with somebody who fails at being
conventional, let’s assume that she is one of these
other people.” (40)

21. “I am a seventy-one-year-old man with a thirty-four-
year-old mistress; this disqualifies me, in the
commonwealth of Massachusetts, from enlightening
anyone.” (32)
“He [Coleman, to daughter Lisa] then asked
lightly, ‘Would you care to know how I am?’
“‘I know how you are.’
“‘Do you?’
“No answer.” (59)
“Mark’s doing. It had to be. Could not be anyone else’s.
[…] Coleman had no more idea how Mark could have
found out about Faunia than how Delphine Roux or
anyone else had, but that didn’t matter right now.” (60)

22. The charge of racism
● Coleman:
“Does anyone know these people? Do they exist or
are they spooks?”
“I was using the word in its customary and primary
meaning: ‘spook’ as a specter or a ghost.” (6)
● The public reaction to this comment is also
tinged by what narrator Nathan Zuckerman
calls “the ecstasy of sanctimony.”

23. Looking back at several of Omi & Winant’s
concepts may be helpful here ...
● “Race is a concept which signifies and
symbolizes social conflicts and interests by
referring to different types of human bodies.”
(55)
● “a racial project can be defined as racist if and
only if it creates or reproduces structures of
domination based on essentialist categories of
race.” (71)

24. On education
“What is the major source of black suffering on
this planet? They know the answer without
having to come to class. They know without
having to open a book. Without reading they
know—without thinking they know. Who is
responsible? The same evil Old Testament
monster responsible for the suffering of the
Germans.” (16)
“What do you do with a kid who can’t read?
Think of it—a kid who can’t read. It’s difficult,
Daddy.” (59)

25. A reminder...
Bring blue books to the final!