English 2850: Great Works of Literature II

I decided to chose lines 14 and 15 for my analysis of T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”.

In the room the women come and go

Talking of Michelangelo.

The reason I picked these lines is because not only is it repeated more than once which leads me to believe it has importance to the poem, but it also has a romantic tone to it and the lines create a picture in my head of two lovers in Italy because of the Michelangelo reference. In the literal sense, these lines are talking about a room where women come and go and while they are there, they speak of Michelangelo. This leads me to believe that this room is maybe some sort of art gallery or museum, but also a use of symbolism as a representation for the women who come and go in the narrator’s life. These lines were the first to jump out at me and they make me feel a sense of nostalgia for a different time period or a different life because I’ve always enjoyed tragic love stories and ones based in European countries like France or Italy.

These lines I picked tie together the whole idea of the poem and they are important because of the way the lines are repeated twice. The central idea of the poem is someone who is searching for love but is uncertain and despite knowing what to say and do, they are hesitant. I read that those specific lines were actually borrowed and an allude to Jule’s Laforgue’s work. Also that “Prufrock suffers from a fear of rejection and a fear of finding love. He doesn’t pursue girls as his self-doubt restrains him from making a move. This fear was illustrated using the lines “In the room the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo”. This allusion to Michelangelo shows that the women in the poem are well-cultured. This intimidates Prufrock, as he feels that he’s not suitable enough compared to Michelangelo, a renowned artist.” (Wijanco) https://medium.com/@elleonwei/discuss-the-allusions-used-in-ts-eliots-the-love-song-of-j-64481132c358

As we discussed during our Zoom call today, it’s time to complete the final Reader Response Assignment of the semester.  As you recall, you agreed to do three different responses to three different texts over the course of the semester.  The first was a response to the question “Is this a great work?” addressed to the text of your choice.  The second was about The Death of Ivan Ilyich.

For the third and final installment of this project, please return to our original prompt: Is this a great work?  This time, you may respond to any of the following texts:  “Punishment,” “The Metamophosis,”  “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “In the Wineshop,” “This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen,” or “The Doum Tree of Wad Hamid.”  Using “Is this a great work?” as your jumping off point, craft a 300-500 personal response to the text.  This time, just for fun, try to take off your “English class” hat and just speak back to the text in your own, most natural voice.  What does this text have to say to you?  What would you like to say back to the text?   How did reading this text make you feel?  What thoughts did this text evoke in you?  What associations did it call up?  Does it remind you of anything? If you are a visual thinker, feel free to link to images in your response.   What elements of the text have stayed with you? Why?  Use this response as a chance to flex your creative muscle.

When you have completed your response, please post it to our course blog.  Additionally, please use the link below to submit all three of your Reader Responses to the team coordinating this project.  You can find your first two responses on the blog if you don’t have access to them on your own computer.  Please let me know if you have any questions about this.

 Click here to access the Reader Response Submission Form! (url: https://tinyurl.com/yaup8xg7)

Here is the link to access the recording of our Zoom call on Monday, May 4th.  We discussed Borowski’s “This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen.”

https://baruch.zoom.us/rec/share/5ssoJYHMxHNJS4Wc02-EAaoBMKK4T6a8g3Ab-vsNykqxYF8boNdzaTBr1eT81QFN Password: 0z@^+6k8

Please respond to three of the following questions.  Remember to compose your answers in complete sentences and to ground your ideas in specific details from the text where appropriate.  Your responses should be posted by Wednesday, May 6th.

1.  What did you learn from this story that you did not previously know about life in Nazi concentration camps?

I learned that there were catholics who were sent to the concentration camps. From my previous knowledge I though Jewish people were the only people sent to the concentration camps. But, now thinking about it makes sense that anyone against the government are prosecuted as bad people and being sent to the camps. It made sense because all dictators want the power over the people and even within there own circles they want that infinite power over people, populations and nations. 

2. A tall, grey-haired woman who has just arrived on the “transport” whispers, “My poor boy,” to our narrator.  What does she mean?

She means she feels bad for the treatment has to go through as well as unloading the transports. Seeing the scared people, people being shot, having stayed in the same camp for a year the people being transported just got to camp , the old woman and new transports were just transferred there. 

3. “Are we good people?” asks our narrator.  What is this exchange about? What do you think?

He wants his mind to be in good conscience, not have a weight on him. But throughout the time transporting he sees thing he didn’t think he would be exposed to and yes the camps were terrible but he didn’t see the harsh treatment that he saw of how the officers treated the jews. He starts to analyze if he really is a good person and how this “initiation” has changed him and how being in the camp has changed him.

Link to project by Sumi Paul, Ali Zandani, and Huashan Ji

https://prezi.com/p/_clnf-o1gn_b/?present=1

Tadeusz Borowski’s “This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen”, was a short story written through a first person-narrative to show how Jew and political prisoners faced chaotic and inhumane conditions in the Auschwitz concentration camp. As Tadeusz being a part of those prisoners,  he spoke about his experience as a political prisoner whose job was to unload arriving Jew prisoners and remove all their belongings from clothings to jewelry which they then sent to the crematorium. The dehumanization of the political and Jew prisoners in this short story can be compared to a similar text that I believe shares the same form of inhumane treatments received by the prisoners, “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American slave”. In Frederick Douglass narrative, Douglass narrated the mistreatment of slavery by the white people which ranged from physical to mental abuse.  

In  the short story “ This way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen”, Tadeusz describes how prisoners suffered inside the Auschwitz camp from walking around naked to shortage of food “ still have nothing to wear. But all the same, all of us walk around naked”. Not just that, the same prisoners that were stripped naked and suffered from famine were also assigned duties inside the camp. One of these duties was stripping the incoming Jewish prisoners of everything they wore and left them completely naked and later they were sent to the gas chambers. Similarly, in the short story “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American slave”, Douglass describes the hardships of being a slave and the mistreatments he has seen from the slave owners. For instance, for the first time Douglass experiences a slave owner striping and whipping his aunt Hester because she disobeyed his orders ” he took her into the kitchen, and stripped her from neck to waist, leaving her neck, shoulders, and back, entirely naked. He then told her to cross her hands”. For the slave owners it is a normal thing to do, just a routine they enjoy doing. However, for  Douglass and the other slaves, it was sort of destroying their well being even though they only watched the cruelty of slave owners. As a slave, Douglass was expected to be uneducated and ignorant of everything going around him which makes it easier for the slave owners to mistreat him in any way possible. Both texts showed how dehumanization has been used against Jewish prisoners and the American slaves in order for the rest of the world to see the inhumanity to its fullest. 

Tolstoy’s novella “The Death of Ivan Ilych in a classic among readers everywhere. Ivan is one of the sons in the story who is a quite distant from him family in the story because he is more focused on work. He eventually ends up taking another job because the salary is much higher than the one he is presently making, and he ends up suffering from a injury at work which didn’t seem bad at first but sickness soon followed and the doctors weren’t sure what exactly was causing his illness. As he gets sicker and sicker, he starts to question what was really important in his life because he believes everyone is acting “artificial” and not acknowledging that he is most likely going to die from this sickness and his family and everyone is being ignorant to it. Ivan ends up dying and as he’s thinking back on his life, he realizes that all of his relationships with friends and family and realizes they were all fake in a sense. All throughout his life, he was more concerned about work and success than what was actually important.

With everything that’s going on in the world at this moment in time, I think this reading was, in a sense, an eye opener. Before this pandemic happened, life was normal and most of us, especially living in New York City, were always in a rush. Tolstoy’s writing gave me a new perspective on how sometimes we need to just slow down and enjoy what’s right in front of us. I, myself, think about the possibility of death coming often because I enjoy life and am afraid to die. A lot of times though, I’ll prioritize things that shouldn’t be. There’s many times where instead of spending time with my family I decided to go out, and I think this reading made me realize I don’t want to one day regret picking something small over what was truly important to me.

This time period is strange and as much as I miss “normal” life, it gave me a new perspective on life and the way I have been living. Two family members of mine had COVID-19, which was scary. Luckily, they’re okay now but it made me realize how I need to not take things for granted and slow down because life isn’t a rush and we should appreciate the smaller things. Despite the brutality of this pandemic and the lives that were lost, I think it was a wake up call for a lot of people maybe that we should appreciate the smaller things in life too and make more time for the people we love and care about because they wont always be around. I’m happy that I got to encounter this reading at this time because it made me realize a lot and I feel much more appreciative of what I have now.

Please respond to three of the following questions.  Remember to compose your answers in complete sentences and to ground your ideas in specific details from the text where appropriate.  Your responses should be posted by Wednesday, May 6th.

1.  What did you learn from this story that you did not previously know about life in Nazi concentration camps?
2. This story can be described as a kind of “initiation story” for the narrator.  How is he changed or transformed by the events of the narrative?
3. Describe an example of dehumanization in the text.  What about this moment made a particularly strong impression on you? Why?
4. A tall, grey-haired woman who has just arrived on the “transport” whispers, “My poor boy,” to our narrator.  What does she mean?
5. “Are we good people?” asks our narrator.  What is this exchange about? What do you think?
6. Explain the significance of the story’s title, “This Way to the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen.”  What seems strange about it?

“This Way to the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen” by Tadeusz Borowski is about a man imprisoned in a camp in Auschwitz. His job at the camp was to unload prisoners at the train station and sort through their belongings. In the story, he describes the children being separated from their parents. He described a moment during his shift where a little boy was running after a woman crying out for his mother. This reading of course can have a text to world connection to the Holocaust. However, during the time we are living in now, history is repeating itself. In the United States, undocumented immigrants are sent to detention camps until they are deported back to their mother country. When ICE detains them, they are separated from their family and their children. These children who were born in America but their parents were not, are separated from each other. While their parents are sent to camps to be sent back to their mother country, the children are sent to the foster care system. The conditions in these camp sites can be compared to those in the concentration camps during the holocaust. In the prose, Borowski describes the conditions of the transport. He describes how they were “Monstrously squeezed together, they have fainted from heat, suffocated, crushed one another.” He described how the prisoners were pleading for air and water. These harsh conditions are similar to what the undocumented immigrants are facing at the detention camps today. They are cramped in cages with no access to soap, showers, and even beds to sleep on. They are expected to sleep on concrete floors or stay standing because of lack of space. They are treated with the harshest conditions only because of them being undocumented. They face abuse and question what will happen to them and their family. In the story, Borowski talks about how the Jews from the train ask the guards what is going to happen to them and describes them as anxious and worn-out. The undocumented immigrants are constantly in fear while in these detention camps, just like the Jews during the Holocaust. The fact that America is doing this to other human beings because they are not American shows we have not learned from history.

For me personally, I enjoy seeing pieces of work come to life on screen because it often times gives me a much better understanding of things I may not have picked up on as much while reading it. After reading the written version of Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler and then watching the film by Bergman, I thought the film did a good job of portraying the characters and the different situations that were described within the written version. I enjoyed seeing the way that the characters were brought to life in the film version because it gave me a better understanding of who they are. It’s obvious very early on that both the film and the written version portray Hedda Gabler the same way. Hedda is bad tempered and she is in no way remorseful for the way she acts or for her rudeness. Her disposition remains an obvious theme in both versions. She has a bit of a god-complex and believes that she is superior to other people. Since she is the daughter of a very well known General Gabler, she becomes used to people showing her respect and obeying what she wants, which is one of the reasons she thinks so highly of herself. She not only is disrespectful to other people, she acts the same way towards her husband even though he refuses to acknowledge the issues that they have. Despite the fact that she is married to George Tessman, she is unwilling to take his last name and still goes by Hedda Gabler which is another example of how she treats and views her husband. While her personality was portrayed correctly for the most part, I do believe it was somewhere exaggerated how she treats Aunt Julie. I think it was less drastic in the written version.

Another thing I noticed that the pace of the film was much quicker than the read because some of the scenes and dialogues weren’t included in the film version, which is common when a piece of writing is created into film.