The recent Brit Lit exams are evaluated. One of the issues that makes reading exams interesting is to note how students answer questions and what those answers tell me about study habits, note-taking skills, what gets heard, and what needs emphasis in discussion.

As a lit teacher I don’t think that reading poetry for its own sake, unless one likes to read poetry, which I do, benefits “students.” If one one wants to reader Blake by the swimming pool then there’s no need to read Blake for the same reason at school. If a person wants to write poetry, then work in Creative Writing might benefit. For me studying literature serves a purpose: to practice a kind of reasoning and analysis that leads to questions and providing a mean of seeing culture and life in other ways and drawing conclusions about it that may lead to more questions and arguments.

Culture to culture, time to time, people have defined virtuous behavior in various ways. These days we frown on plagiarism, which is a kind of stealing. When plagiarism is caught, we seek a just remedy or punishment. The question is why do we frown on plagiarism, and what makes it what it is? Is student plagiarism different than college president plagiarism?

Here’s one of the short answer questions from the exam going to Barbauld’s “Meditation.”

Contemplation comes from what source in Anna Letitia Barbauld? This source is a potential metaphor for what?”

Contemplation is personified in the poem and thus its position is pretty objective:

‘Tis now the hour
When Contemplation, from her sunless haunts,
The cool damp grotto, or the lonely depth
Of unpierc’d woods, where wrapt in solid shade
She mused away the gaudy hours of noon,
And fed on thoughts unripen’d by the sun,
Moves forward; and with radiant finger points
To yon blue concave swell’d by breath divine,
Where, one by one, the living eyes of heaven
Awake. . .

Contemplation “moves forward” from “haunts,” “the grotto,” the “woods.” These places are given qualities, such as “sunless,” “cool” and “damp,” “unpierc’d.” What was Contemplation doing? Musing, of course. I suppose that’s what Contemplation does if shaped into fleshed concept. I doubt Contemplation would be found playing pool or craps during the day.

To say that Contemplation comes from nature is a vague response since nature has no quality or image value, no specific “place” to define origin. Barbauld, it would seem, really wants the reader to follow the movement, to experience the idea of Contemplation moving once the sun goes down. She wants us to read with precision.

But that’s not even the fun part. In the poem the world and mind is spaced into day and night, light (logic/reason) and lightlessness (musing and wandering thought, thought “unripen’d” by reason or hard logic, deep in the nocturnal mind where things like intuition, creativity, and inspiration may hang around playing unrestrained by the touch of light or restraining influences). Contemplation comes from the “unpierc’d woods,” places untouched by the light, and goes on in the poem to soar just as you’d think it would, as far as it wants until it hits the edge of known space, and can go no further. There are limits even to Contemplation, it would seem.

Barbauld’s a great lead into Blake, Wordsworth, and Wollstonecraft and her play with poetic space is intersting. Moreover, she hints at an internal mental process, not relying on an “external muse” or “cause” as the source for Contemplation, creative expression, inspiration, and musing.

Neuroscience is wrestling with this question, too. What is the physical source of the creative impulse in terms of brain activity.

We had a pretty good discussion of Shelley’s Frankenstein in MBL this evening. People will be coming back with a couple of relevant questions that demand reading the tensions between Frankenstein and his creation, now known as Victor Jr or VJ. Is the bargain they come to reasonable given the context of the agreement? Does this bargain reestablish a legal or natural balance to their affairs: legal in terms of justice; nature in terms of the cycles Frankenstein disrupts through his application of scientific knowledge, if indeed he disrupts anything?

Moreover, what is the nature of VJ? Since he is a human creation, animate in a seeming death/life process, is he life in the classical sense, souled? Upon death, will he go to Shelley’s or Milton’s heaven? As his life get’s closer to being created, it seems that Frankenstein dwindles in stature and behavior.

Outsiders, darkness, questions of the spiritual–it’s all in Shelley.

Also, I’ve added a link to the Rimantic Circles Weblog in the lists at the right of this page.

The ideas of energy, action, and power are going to take different forms in English literature through various voices and imagined worlds, such as Blake’s and Shelley’s. The authors will reflect on permanence, change, and relationships.

We’re always going to be working with a subtext of philosophic and/or emperical materialism and various kinds of spiritualism and their manifestations in forms: science, philiosophy, art, religion and government. But there are loose distinctions between the approaches to the real and the spiritual. Contemporarily, philosophic materialism and empirical materialism (I make a distinction)are at odds. Science is the study of the observable. Science’s mission is not to disprove or prove the existence of deity. To claim an atheistic program to science is a strawman argument. It’s the same as claiming that those who engineer cars are trying to change the nature of horses or prevent peoples’ use of their legs. Neither is the argument that materialism denies a spritual reality something to take to heart. That Hobbes may or may not have been an atheist is a conclusion that leads to wasted time.

We may appeal to the deity for the right answers, but we still need to act. It is people who will bear the consequences.

We need supercolliders; we need to understand the subatomic. We could always explain the birth of children by inferring that children are placed whole into the womb by the gods rather than as the result of biological processes. This is another kind of power negotiation. Maybe life’s difficulties come from the eggs generated by Leda and Zeus or come as a result of Adam and Eve. Maybe those are stories we tell because we have no better answer.

A snippet from Joshua Micah Marshall’s essay Power Rangers in The New Yorker. A worthy read:

In this latest turn of neoconservative thought, the trappings of optimism and the hopeful talk of a liberal-democratic domino effect have been abandoned. Where Ferguson is all cool confidence, Perle and Frum are fire and foreboding. Theirs are not policies that would lead to the end of evil; they might well, in the long run, lead to the end of empire.

Hard-liners like Perle and Frum would do well to remember that America began as an empire, formally and officially. It wasnt our empire, of course; it was Britains. And the story of how Britain lost its first empire may be more instructive for Americans today than how Britain found itself without its second. Americans like to flatter themselves that the seeds of independence were planted with the first spades into the earth of Massachusetts and Virginia. In fact, during the century before the Revolution, Britains North American colonies were, by most measures, becoming more Anglicized, more firmly tied to Britains monarchy and trade. (The archetype of American homespun virtues, Ben Franklin, spent much of his life trying to make a name in London and find a place for himself in the British establishment.) Britain lost its North American empire through a common mistake: it misunderstood the nature of its power. In particular, it confused the power it had on paperits claims to sovereignty and dominionwith the nature of the control it exercised on the coast of North America.

Neocons, empire, I’m more interested in how Marshall frames his argument concerning “vision” behind decisions and action on national scales. Big time important for Blake and others after the dominant revolutions in the late 1700s.Important now, hell yeah. National perception is a tricky issue. Question: How would we respond to another country running a base on our soil? Would we find this odd or wonderful? This is a rhetorical question.

Michael Drout has an interesting post on the subject of Christianity, Tolkien and Beowulf in response to another writer’s critique of this scratch and sniff on Tolkien’s Christianity.

Drout suggests that Tolkien and the Beowulf poet took similar positions in their works about how to deal with religion when telling tales about people who haven’t themselves a knowledge of Christ or Christianity. Drout writes:

Beowulf the poem, as we have it (i.e., in its manuscript form, not some postulated earlier version), is definitely written by a Christian. However, there is not a single reference to Christ, the Trinity, the resurrection, or the New Testament, which is very strange for an Anglo-Saxon Christian poem. The only real proof of a Christian (as opposed to a general monotheistic) poet is the inclusion of Cain and Abel (and, strangely enough, “Cain” is spelled wrong both times the word appears in the manuscript. More on that in some other post).

As Tolkien points out, the references to God aren’t to Christ or specifically the Christian God, but to The Ruler, The Lord, The Measurer, etc. Why would a Christian poet, who knew about Cain and Abel, do this?

Tolkien’s explanation has never been bettered: the poet was a Christian, but he was setting his story back in the pre-Christian past. He knew that the people in his story weren’t Christian, but he also believed that Christian truths explained the way the universe worked. So he can say that The Ruler determined the outcome of a battle even if he knows that Beowulf wasn’t Christian himself.

Now part of the brilliance of this interpretation is that it can’t really be disproved by any one example. Tolkien even notes a few places he thinks that the poet has failed in tone (when pagan Hrethel is said to have “chosen God’s light”, i.e., died, Tolkien says that the phrase has “escaped from Christian poetry). And Tolkien thought that lines 175-188, which sound, to the ear familiar with Anglo-Saxon poetry, much more like a Christian homiletic piece than do any other lines in Beowulf, had been added to the poem at a later date. So the idea of a poet who is deliberately writing a kind of ‘historical fantasy’ is still preserved.

Now I think it’s not a great stretch to suggest that Tolkien was doing much of the same thing in his work. If you look at the Athrabeth na Finrod Andreth, which is in Morgoth’s Ring in the History of Middle-earth, you see Tolkien suggesting that men, back in the First Age, had a kind of prophesy that one day the creator would enter his own creation for the purpose of healing it. That day hadn’t happened yet, so Tolkien was setting his Middle-earth stories before the incarnation. Thus he doesn’t mention Christ, etc. Just like the Beowulf poet.

The question of the position of the Beowulf poet is still up for grabs among Anglo-Saxonists, as Drout reminds. But I’d suggest that while it may be an intriguing textual, historical question (an even clearer understanding of the audience) the works themselves don’t necessarily push the question.

What I’ve always enjoyed about Tolkien is his sense of the dramatic and here he and the beowulf Poet, indeed even Malory, find further similarity. Beowulf can be read as a story about the inevitability of change and the heartrending challenges of living up to a conception of the past. and to ideals. In the epic Beowulf is a great fighter and leader. But his natural time passes. It has to and we have to accept it. Malory pushes the drama further with Lancelot, who weeps over the losses of his own devising: a great period, a great love gone to cupiditas. LOTR is loaded with this kind of narrative force. Aragorn will take the throne at the end but the storyteller won’t let us forget that he’s mortal, limited, ultimately flesh, and that people are going to have to use their heads and fight to keep their hard-earned gains.

In LOTR we follow Frodo through his ordeal, but he’s never the same afterward. For him the world is flipped, never to be the same. Conflict is irrevocable. King Lear ends with heaviness and lightness, the weight of grief and the lightness of things to do to push on.

It’s the stuff of great story.

A Pope writes:

Heavn from all creatures hides the book of fate,
All but the page prescribd, their present state:
From brutes what men, from men what spirits know:
Or who could suffer being here below?
The lamb thy riot dooms to bleed today,
Had he thy reason, would he skip and play?
Pleasd to the last, he crops the flowry food,
And licks the hand just raisd to shed his blood.
Oh blindness to the future! kindly givn,
That each may fill the circle markd by heavn:
Who sees with equal eye, as God of all,
A hero perish, or a sparrow fall,
Atoms or systems into ruin hurld,
And now a bubble burst, and now a world.
The soul, uneasy and confind from home,
Rests and expatiates in a life to come.

Here Pope appears to be drawing an analogy between Man and lamb then leads to the image of a circle. Is this a set of ideas on order and dare I say “limitation”?

For the british liters. We will be covering Locke and Pope on Tuesday so come in prepped and ready. We are going to be focusing on what people have thought about the human sphere and the human condition in a sense in a context way beyond Beowulf.

Here’s a question: is all the knowledge that you could possibly learn already inside you just waiting to be found, uncovered, reasoned out?

We had a nice conversation today in British Literature about the historical situation pertaining to Dryden and on the notion of individuality. We’ve also had some more individual discussions about the exam essay having to do with the idea of the disguise in King Lear. I wanted to emphsize that the disguise or mask has broad implications. Edmund assembles a mask to fool Lear and Edgar. Lear, however, doesn’t assemble a mask. He is blind to his actions, thus he can be fooled by those who would put on the mask, by those who attempt to “fool” him. The disguise, the mask, is a question of “will” and “motive.” So to answer the question about the mask we have to distinguish between “motive” and ignorance, “will” and misconception.

Everyone have a good holiday.

The issue of the nature of an all powerful or all knowing deity keeps coming up in BL, which is, of course, the reason for the Great Lettuce Head: tell me about the deity you might ask and I’ll say: he’s green and has lots of leaves; other than that I’m silent on the issue.

I think we had an incredible discussion about this in brit lit. Honestly, I have no idea how to deal with Milton’s audacity or genius in the face of the nature of the Christian deity, who knows all and for whom, in human conception all paths have yet to be taken, are being taken, and will be taken. Bacon would say, “Do you think you can grasp such an idea with a human metaphor? Go back and read my book and the section on Idols of the Tribe. Then check out my riffs on Cave and Theater: personal bias and perception; and myth and incomplete or indeterminate systems and logic.” In religious conception we could certainly go with Neha and Jenn’s buggy computer program metaphor that God created an imperfect world. We could work with that as a model, but my point in class was that in terms of the conception of God such a metaphor is only useful to a point. If the deity is all knowing and powerful then there would be no bugs. What we see as bugs tells us more about the limitations of the metaphor, as Hugh would claim. That Satan is a part of a plan is also limited (both of these metaphors are insightful thought; I don’t mean to say that they aren’t; nor does the issue of will and choice and determination negate valid questions about human nature) in that plan suggests “incompleteness” or process but God in Milton’s world already knows the answers. Plans are for rodents and humans.

Milton must write a deity within a linear narrative yet is also beyond the moment. Dr. Manhattan is contrained by his knowledge. Nor does he know everything; there’s no indication that he knows anything beyond his own immediate experience past, present, future. In McCarthy the judge is an entirely different animal than Satan. The nature of the judge is part of the problem of Blood Meridian. In a way, the judge is more frightening than the Fiend.