First Person:
The Thousand and One Nights:
The I is used mostly for narrative and dialogic purposes: Shahrazad uses I to start her story each night & to present the conversations the characters within her stories have with each other.
Wang Wei & translations of “Deer Park”:
The I partially acts as a placeholder/means of translating between languages with different structural rules. I is used not directly to mean a first-person narrator, but as a way to describe the landscape.
Dante’s Inferno:
The I describes the experiences of Dante, the Pilgrim, giving the reader only his point of view. In a way, the reader is perceiving Hell through the eyes/experiences of Dante. However, this gives the reader insight to how Dante, the Pilgrim, is as a person/character.
Hi Fean,
I like your decision to focus on the “I” in the stories we’ve read so far. Maybe you could include the use of I in Dante’s Inferno in terms of the way the sinners use it. Some use the I to evoke pity while others use it as a form of showing off what they’ve done.
Hi Fean,
These are great texts to choose with this topic–the first person works very differently in each of them, which opens the door, so to speak, for some excellent and sensitive close readings (the seeds of which are here, in this outline). I see three major tasks for you, developing this paper. The first two pertain to each section:
1) In each section of the essay, think about how the “I” functions. This is what you’ve started to do, above, which is great. Consider what effect this particular use of the first person has, either in creating a narrative voice, or in playing upon the reader. What is the function of the “I,” in each case?
2) Figuring out HOW the first person works is the first step. The next step is figuring out WHY each author (or group of authors) chooses to use it in this way. Do the multiple first person narrators of the Thousand and One Nights all point back to the ur-narrator, Sharazad? Or do they, perhaps, add up to something else: a kind of racuous polyvocality, a multitude of voices that reflects the multiplicity of the text’s construction? Similarly, does the absent-but-implied “I” of Wang Wei’s poem (in the original and in certain translations) offer the reader an unmediated experience of nature? Or does it, by contrast, locate us more firmly inside this subjective experience, this sensory and spatial “taking-in” of a setting, a sound, a slanted light?
The third task is broader. You should possibly leave it til last. The essay needs a unifying claim–a thesis, an argument–towards which ALL of your analysis points.
Can’t wait to see this develop!
Prof Kolb