Blog Question #3

Here’s the last question for Mrs Dalloway

“For there she was.”

Building on the last couple of discussion questions, here are a few things that I’ve been trying to get you to think about. It’s possible to follow a street map of the characters’ wanderings in London. You’ve been tracing all the little links and threads connecting the characters. The “web” of images. Big Ben. The hours. The party.

What’s it all about?

Blog Question #2

In your Theory assignment, you are being asked to find out something about deconstruction criticism. One important aspect of deconstruction criticism is something called “binary criticism.” (at this point, all those students who have taken a literature class from me before will be ROFL, having Heard About This Before ad nauseum, but now you know where I got it from). Binaries are basically opposites: black and white, east and west, north and south, rich and poor, male and female… you get the idea. The thing about them is, that they are not neutral. In the constructions of our societies, we tend to palce more value in one or the other – male/female, black/white, reason/passion, science/imagination, fiction/non-fiction … see where we’re going with this? The interesting thing about binary criticism is to look at where an author deconstructs a particular binary, in other words, makes us look twice at our own expectations based on social “norms.” For example, in the passage I’ve highlighted from Mrs D in our course notes, you notice how Clarissa is so enraptured with London. In our own cultural context, the city/country binary tends to value country or wilderness over the city, yet Clarissa loves the city. So the city/country binary deconstructs in interesting and subtle ways – more subtle than I’ve said right here, so think about it. This is also always a good “way in” to any work of literature – to examine the various binaries at play and to see how they are being upset.

That brings me to your question for this week. What are some of the obvious binaries in this novel? List a few of them that you can think of, and then choose one and write in some detail about how you see Woolf “deconstructing” it. By the way, this exercise might be helpful for your theory assignment!

Mrs D Etext

Sorry! I know I promised at the orientation that I’d post the link to this, but I completely forgot. Here’s Mrs Dalloway online. You’ll also see the link in the “News” section in our course homepage and it will appear in the del.icio.us links in the sidebar on the right of this page.

The First Blog Question!

Here we go, everyone! Here’s your first blog question, to do with Mrs Dalloway. Just to recap what you should do for your blog entry for this week. First, obviously, answer the question as fully as you can. Second, write another paragraph or so responding to one of the reading questions for the week (notice that for Mrs D there are two pages of questions, maybe tackle the first one this week and the second next) Third, respond to the way someone else has answered ANOTHER question in his orher blog. Obviously, you may need to do this in two parts, after everyone’s had a chance to answer a question. While you’re at it, put a comment on the blog you are reading. By the way, I’ll publish a full list of student blogs in the “BlogRoll” in the course.

Okay, here’s your question:
On page 10 of Mrs D, Clarissa quotes Shakespeare to herself. No doubt in the learned footnotes at the back of the book it tells you where this quote comes from. You can easily find out – at least one of the pages linked from the course notes also tells you. What I’d like you to do, though, is actually track it down in the original. You can find it online – Google “Shakespeare concordance” and type in key words and you’ll find the speech in context. What is the context and what is the speech as a whole about? What does it have to do with the context in which it appears in the novel? How might it reflect emerging theme(s) of the novel?

By the way, this use of a text from another work is what is known as “intertextuality.” It differs from “allusion” in that allusion is often just a kind of authorial showing off, whereas intertextuality always adds another layer of meaning to the text being read. It depends on the reader knowing something about the other text in order for the extra meaning to be, in a sense, “activated.” It’s not unlike a hypertext link, in a way. Intertextuality is my specialty as an academic, so you can expect it to pop up frequently in this course

Welcome!

Welcome to the course blog for English 286. Look here for your “blog posting questions,” but also for announcements, links of interest etc. Also, don’t forget this blog is interactive, so you can post comments and questions.

There’s not much here just yet, but stay tuned.