Great Works Fall 2013

I would like to do the timeline option. The potential title is ” Beautiful Burnout” . Inspired by my second paper, I would like to further my discovery how artists create beautiful artworks facing various extreme hardship in life. I want to cover a period of time from 1795 to 2000 by bringing following artists into the timeline: John Keats, W.B. Yeats, Haizi, Van Gosh, Baudelaire , Picaso, etc.

All above artists have sorrow life stories. Because of their different life experiences, they were able to produce something exceptionally beautiful. Through this timeline, I want to show a variety of beautiful artworks from suffering artists and associate their aesthetic artworks with their cruel lives. Honestly, I am still in the middle of searching what my theme is. My theme may help to answer the following questions? What artists desire? Why nature matters? how cruel life help facilitate their great works? What can we learn from those stories?

I think definitely my theme will be somewhat related to the title” beautiful burnout”.

Any suggestion is welcome.:)

The complexities of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis makes it impossible to analyze without spendings hours on imagery alone, but for the sake of sanity on everyone’s behalf, I’m only going to focus on three distinct images: Gregor’s bed, his magazine clipping, and the apple that ends up lodged in his back. At first glance, these three objects seem unrelated – and potential insignificant to the story of Gregor’s transformation – but they do share a commonality in how they showcase the underlying struggle between Gregor and his family.

We first stumble across Gregor on the morning following his change, just waking up from a bad dream in his bed. His covers are darkly noted as being “forever on the point of slipping off entirely” (210). The choice of describing the falling covers as having been so “forever” suggests that they had been in that situation even when Gregor was still “human.” In the analysis of symbols in dreams, a study associated with Freud – who’s mentioned as having had an influence on Kafka’s work – the bed represents something along the lines of security and personality. The bed is a safe haven, a place where Gregor is free to be without family or work, where he is simply Gregor. Not “Gregor the Son,” or “Gregor the Brother,” or “Gregor the Traveling Salesman,” but “Simply Gregor.” To have the covers of his bed be always in a position where they may very well fall off carries the notion that Gregor is edging closer and closer to having no real personality of his own, and instead become an entity with the singular focus on providing for his family.

Once Gregor becomes aware of his new body, and of his impending trouble over being late to work, he begins a series of maneuvers to try and get himself out of his bed. He twists and turns, and it’s several pages before he’s actually able to fall out of bed. His only reasoning for getting out of bed is because he has to get to work, and he doesn’t seem to realize that he can’t exactly do any kind of work because he’s now an insect. There’s no shock and panic from Gregor due to his new form, only for his job. He keeps thinking about the time and what train he’s going to have to catch, and so he does whatever he can to get out of bed, thinking: “that the most sensible solution was to try anything that offered even the smallest chance of getting free of his bed” (213). It’s funny how now that Gregor’s no longer in a condition to provide for his family, he’s having trouble getting out of bed – he’s free from the overpowering motive behind him taking a job he clearly dislikes, and he’s technically now able to define himself as something other than a man working in the shadow of his parents’ debts. Literally. He’s become an insect, and yet all he’s preoccupied with is getting away from the one space where he can be himself.

All this isn’t to say that Gregor has already given up on being his own person, for right after we read about the tottering covers on his bed, we notice a picture of a woman in fur hung on his bedroom wall, something that Gregor “had only recently clipped from a magazine, and set in an attractive gilt frame” (210). We’re given no explanation for why Gregor would clip this particular picture, but it remains as an object that Gregor has apparently liked and wished to retain. The clipping is something Gregor himself enjoys, not something work or family related. What this clipping represents about Gregor’s personality isn’t important, because its presence alone reminds us that there may still be something within Gregor that wants to separate himself from the relationships he’s currently buried in.

Gregor’s lack of personality becomes a more pressing issue for him as he grows accustomed to living in his new body, and while the thoughts of how his parents are going to support themselves now that Gregor’s not able to do so never leave his mind, Gregor’s mind is free to wander. When his sister and mother begin removing furniture from his room because they believe that he’d like all the empty space to crawl around in, Gregor quickly becomes angry and possessive. The removal of his furniture at the hands of his family is representative of how his family’s burdens have stripped Gregor of his own identity, and this act finally allows Gregor to realize this himself. As a response, Gregor becomes determined to save anything of his belongings, and in his mad dash he ends up crawling onto the wall to rest upon the very same magazine clipping from before. His choice to save the picture, whether subconscious or not, highlights the realized struggle to retain a separate identity from his family, for the picture is unique from the other furniture pieces in that it is something that belongs to solely Gregor.

Tensions between Gregor and his family only escalate from this point onward, and reach a depressing high when his own father begins to pelt him with apples in an attempt to scare Gregor back into his room and away from the family. After one apple hits Gregor and rolls off, another ends up stuck in his back:

…it remained embedded in his flesh, as a visible memento–seemed to have reminded even his father that in spite of his current sorry and loathsome form, Gregor remained a member of the family, and not treated like an enemy, but as someone whom–all revulsion to the contrary–family duty compelled one to choke down, and who must be tolerated, simply tolerated (231).

Kafka makes it easy and flat-out tells us what the imagery of this stuck apple means, but turns the idea that the apple would serve as a rejection of Gregor by his family into a beacon of hope for Gregor – because the presence of that apple reminds his family that even though he may have a different appearance, he’s still one of them, and part of the family unit. Since Gregor’s position as family provider has been taken away, Gregor has no other actual relation to his family, but the apple keeps them from taking any action to remove him from the house, because on some level they do still recognize that this giant insect is related to them. They don’t accept him by any means, but they at least “tolerate” him. He may serve no purpose to them in his current state, but by attempting to reject him with the apples, they inadvertently give Gregor the new identity as the “sorry and loathsome form.”

This new identity only lasts for a short while, and the choice of an apple to become stuck to Gregor becomes more obvious towards the end of the story: “The rotten apple in his back and the inflammation all round it … he barely felt any more” (239). The apple has gone rotten, much like his relationship with his family who can hardly bare to acknowledge his existence anymore. They’ve discussed moving to a new apartment, and even his sister has grown wary of entering Gregor’s room to clean. The pain of his old-new relationship with them is hardly felt by Gregor in these last pages, and Gregor is once again found without an identity in relation to anyone or anything other than himself. Sadly, he never comprehends this, and his dutiful existence ends with him dying in what appears to be a final act to make things easier for his family…

But did he have to?

I have to say that the blog project is the most attractive, and most likely option to work on my part. As for what I will discuss on my blog, I am thinking of having a focus on the female characters or authors and their roles. I can use them as case studies to make inferences of society during the time the work was written and how they might help put our own society into perspective. For this topic I will start the blog with posts on Moliere, Akinari, Sor Juana, Saikaku, and Rossetti.

A second topic I might also include in a separate section of the blog might be about revolution of all types. Of course I would use ideas from Medicine to start it off to talk about violent revolution. I can then talk about Moliere, Kafka, and Dickinson to discuss revolutions in thought. This second theme is still a little hazy and vague when I try to imagine it, but I have time to flesh it out, and the main emphasis of my blog will be on the first topic of women.

Considering my work and class schedule, however, I will only have time on weekends to post any real posts. As a result it is likely that many posts will be posted on the same day, or in very close intervals.

For my final project, I will create a personal blog. The focus of my blog will be looking at the role of the mother in the Great Works of literature.  I want to  contrast  the mother’s role and the father’s role. I want to focus on the mother character in terms of her relation with her children and her role in the story. I was inspired by the mothers in “Medicine” by Lu Xun. The ending in the graveyard really stirred something in me as two mothers bond over the death of their son. The mothers’ symbolizes hope and unity that the people are looking for.

My goal is to make a blog post about the reading material before class and making a blog post after the class discussion. The two blog post on the same reading will allow me to show my thoughts on the reading base on my own interpretation as well as connecting it to the themes of the course. The second blog post will allow me to share my thoughts about the class discussion and if the discussion has change my opinion or help me realize something. The second blog will also allow me to share any thoughts I did not have a chance to share in class.  My goal is to have at least three blogs every week for the next six weeks.

For my final project, I am considering to do a blog. One thing that stood out to me in almost every reading we have done thus far, is that authors seem to be critical of the society in which they lived. However, this alone would be too broad of a topic, and so I would like to analyze how the authors in particular seemed to criticize the everyday lives and expectations people had of others and themselves.

This particular topic caught my eye in the last two reading we did (Death of Ivan Iliyich and Metamorphosis). However, I think that it’s something that could be applied to almost all of the works we have read, after a closer inspection and a different analytical approach. I hope that this topic is not too broad for a blog, and I feel like I could do a lot of interesting connections to works from outside of the class, as well.

I am interested in doing a blog post because I have never had much experience with blogging, but would like to learn more about it. I also feel like it will give me a lot of “artistic freedom” and sort of provide me with a lot of choices as far as the design of the blog and the layout go.

I’d like to do the timeline option and title it something along the lines of “Women and their roles.” Inspired by my paper and my museum assignment, I’d like to cover a period of time where women were subjected to play certain roles both in the household and in society and how they responded to that (whether they accepted the roles, ‘pretended’ to accept the roles like Elmire/Manago, or whether they rejected them altogether like Chandara from “Punishment”). The subjected role of women I’d like to analyze is women in marriage as wives. I’d also like to incorporate Jurgenssen’s photos into my time line. I’m still unsure of the scope of my time line but I will narrow this down as I look more into my topic. I know my ending point will be around the 1970’s.

While I used Manago and Elmire as my inspiration for our first essay assignment, for this final project I want to pull inspiration from other texts, definitely incorporating Chandara from “Punishment” (which perhaps may serve as my starting point for this timeline!). I also plan to incorporate art work, media, and fashion into the timeline as these three represent major shifts in societal perceptions of women.

This is what I’ve come up with so far, but all suggestions are welcome!! 🙂

After reading Molière’s “Tartuffe”, I was amazed by how the translation was very true to the original text. I have therefore decided to choose the first option, which is the translation one. To do so, I would like to explore the theme of postwar and postcolonial literature, and especially focus on either Albert Camus or Léopold Sédar Senghor.

I would like to start by reading the texts. Then, I would try to fully understand the meaning of the text, identify the different stylistic tools the author might have used to write his text, and then try to find an equivalent translation to the original text. Consequently, my claim would focus on the way that a translator can keep the original essence of a text, and not get lost in translation.

One thing I am afraid of encountering is French words that cannot be translated in English. If that happens, I would have to try and find a word or expression as close as possible to the original word, so as to keep the meaning intended by the author.

For this project, I think doing a timeline will be interesting and interactive so I’ll pick that (though the idea of translating is tempting but I think translating 5 pages is impossible for my level…). I want to look at how people, particularly through writers and the media, view “happiness.” What does it mean to be blessed or happy and how does the time period or era affect the views? I’m not certain if there is a unifying view of happiness, that somehow what the writers are saying can be broken down into one or two general things. What I imagine so far is that in the past (~1600s), happiness revolves around the family. If the family circle is happy, so is the individual. And as time advances, happiness becomes self-centered. The number of things that could advance a person’s happiness would continue to increase until there are so many options that happiness becomes difficult to find; hence, it leads to our typically depressed culture (of industrialized/developed nations). As you can see, my point or direction isn’t really specific, so I hope in my research it would become clearer.

My time period for this project would be 250 years, starting from probably 1650 to 1900. I might increase the time period by 50 more years to 1950 to include the full effects of industrialization on writers’ attitude but I think to 1900 for now is good. The texts I wanted to start with is Tartuffe, in which sadness/unpleasantness exist because the family is being torn apart. Bewitched, which tells the story where love and happiness revolves around the family (or to have a family), would be nice to include too. I’m also thinking of using one of Charles Baudelaire’s works (probably “Anywhere out of the World”), The Death of Ivan Ilyich, and one of Rabindranth Tagore’s work (probably “Kabuliwala”).

This week I will begin researching in general for what was happening in the world (~200 years span from 1650), typically from an economic and social standpoint. Hopefully, I can find some poster or news article that records something interesting. I believe advertisements reflect a lot on the wants/needs of society. The first week and a half of November would involve more research on advertisements and re-reading the texts. Then the last week before November 20^th would be putting pieces together into a draft timeline.

One of the problems that I might come across due to my topic choice might probably be that it is too general. I’m thinking of focusing this on one gender actually if I need to (women, like my essay 1 but in another direction).

For my final project, I would like to analyze the psychology of certain characters and relationship dynamics from our readings, and relate these things to either real current events, pop-culture, or history. I would like to talk about the characters actions and the motivations behind these actions or the relationships between characters and the dynamics behind them. My basic purpose would be to point out the realistic traits of exaggerated fictional characters, and go on to compare them to similar people or characters. I think most of my comparisons would be to news articles. For example, how you could compare Bartleby’s rebellion and dissatisfaction with the recent news about the fast food workers protesting to raise minimum wage. Another example would be how you could compare Diary of a Madman, where the person is “crazy” but also has more clear insight in some right to “normal people” to John Nash (subject of A Beautiful Mind).

I would like to compare the psychology and relationship dynamics of fictional characters to real examples of people with parallel motivations and relationships from the news and pop-culture and possibly history. I would be using research on related people as well as on technical psychological and sociological terms for the things I was pointing out. I would also like to tie in outside works of fiction that have similar characters because a lot of the works we read remind me very closely of characters I have read about in the past, which I guess is a consequence of the fact that they are realistic.

I am not sure if this is a specific enough subject for a blog but basically to summarize, I would be pointing out real psychological traits or sociological dynamics between characters and comparing these to parallel figures in the news and also in other fictional stories.

For almost every piece of literature we have read and studied in class, the authors’ backgrounds and personal histories have been available to us. I’m interested in reading about the various authors whose works we read in class– and connect how their personal lives have influenced what they write about, how they write, and when they write. I’ve come upon this particular focus because I’ve been reading about the authors for the recent readings, and I’ve noticed that many of the authors write about themes or characters or ideas based on their personal experiences. I’m also interested to see how some other professions (e.g. painter, scholar) of some of the authors have influenced their literary work as well, and vice versa.

Not only will I be reading the works of each author we have assigned, but also be researching and discovering more about the authors’ personal lives (through the small bios that are written before the works in the Norton series, as well as via the Internet). It’ll be interesting to try to find similar themes and ideas sprouting up in the works of authors from different time periods because of familiar experiences, as well as it’s be to really point out the drastic changes among all the authors.

This blog will be updated every week, at least twice on appropriately “wordy” posts (from each week’s current readings to past authors from the beginning of the semester), and at least once on “extra” posts such as links and images that will be shorter.