Moving onto Gatsby!!!

Dear all,

As you know, We are starting work on The Great Gatsby  this term. You should all have a copy of the novel, and have read it through once. If any of you have had problems in accessing a copy, it can be found on the net at http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/f/fitzgerald/f_scott/gatsby/

This may seem like a big change from dramatic genre, but you will find your work on tragedy is very useful when evaluating the novel.

The novel was published in 1925, and it is important that you understand something of its historical context. Therefore your first task this term will be to produce a short presentation (you may use PowerPoint) that examines the significance of one aspect of the background to the book. I am giving you our first lesson back to work on them (Tuesday 3rd) and we shall see the presentations in next Monday's lesson (January 9th).

You may work in pairs, if you wish, but may not duplicate presentations, so you must come into class to sign off the area of background that you wish to consider (this will also count as your register). The choices of areas include:

• The aftermath of World War 1
• The American dream and its implications
• Poverty in the 1920s
• Prohibition
• Gangster culture and bootlegging in the 1920s
• The significance of a college education in the 1920s
• Attitudes towards women and their role in society
• The importance of marriage in the 1920s
• The environment of Long Island 

Hamlet and Laertes

Some interesting ideas about Hamlet and Laertes can be found in an essay called 'O'ertopping Pelion; Hamlet, Laertes and the Revenge Tradition'' by a critic called Hardin L. Aasand. This is part of his analysis:
 

Hamlet deplores the histrionics of mourning, the performative engagement in a grief that Laertes rightfully possesses. His subsequent hyperbole is equally abusive and painfully intolerant of Laertes' passionate display. Hamlet appears to realize his dramatic relapse when he apologizes to Horatio for "forgetting himself." Indeed, Hamlet's problem is not the "forgetting of himself," a forgetting which allowed him to craft his trenchant eulogy for Yorick, but rather a constant remembering of himself and of his self-conscious language that threatens to conflate him and Laertes into an interlarded plot.

Like Yorick's skull, Laertes's hyperbole presents itself as a rhetorical shape that Hamlet characterizes by its "emphasis": "What is he whose griefe/ Beares such an emphesis, whose phrase of sorrow/ Coniures the wandering starres" (TLN 3449-51). Hamlet's prologue in the graveyard and his acceptance of the fine death to which we all return allows him this initial dismissal of Laertes's grief and its excessive melancholia, for it hauntingly evokes his own progress through the initial four acts of the play. Hamlet's recognition that Laertes is a dramatic counter becomes possible for him only in retrospect: "by the image of my Cause, I see/The Portraiture of his" (F1-only line).

If Shakespeare intended these graveside leaps - Laertes's followed by Hamlet's - it suggests a visual tableau of contrastive avengers rather than redundant mourners. Hamlet's violation of Laertes's physical space within Ophelia's grave serves only to contrast a mourning that, hyperbolic in its classical heaping of images, is inappropriate for a Hamlet whose deferred mourning has found its outlet in the wistful exposition upon Yorick's skull. If critics deplore Hamlet's insensitive leap as a malicious attack on Laertes's private grief, they ignore the historical significance of the motley drama in which comedy and tragedy struggle in a dialectical embrace. Laertes's desire for hatchments and trophes for his deceased family -- even if formed by his own physical and rhetorical efforts -- encounters Hamlet's tenacious acceptance of death's sardonic wit. Each avenger stands waist deep in the grave of the pathetically ignored Ophelia, struggling with the death encorpsed in a shroud, anticipating the imminent duel which will return them both to the same heaping grave.


If you liked this extract, the whole essay is available online--though you may find it difficult to understand at first, as it is very scholarly in its approach. Worth persisting with, though.


On this subject, if you want to find the whole text of 'Poisoned Ears and Parental Advice in Hamlet', where I got those quotations we considered last lesson, you can also find it online here.

Work for Monday and Tuesday

As I am unable to be with you on Monday and Tuesday, I have created some work for you to do. Remember that you need to be familiar with the WHOLE TEXT of Hamlet; this exercise should help you with some parts of this.

Hamlet: Thinking like a critic

Lesson 1 (Monday 31^st October)

Þ   You are going to write an essay about women in Hamlet. As a starting point, read through the essay ‘Hamlet and Ophelia’ http://artsites.ucsc.edu/faculty/bierman/elsinore/women/WomenOandH.html.

Þ   Make notes on the essay and decide how useful it is when responding to ideas about women in Hamlet.

Þ  Make notes on which scenes from the play you think would be most useful when responding to ideas about women in Hamlet.

Lesson 2 (Tuesday 1^st November)

Þ  Look at the following quotations. They discuss Gertrude and Ophelia—the only women in the play. (all quotations taken from Hamlet: Contemporary Critical Essays ed. Martin Coyle, Macmillan 1992)

Þ   Read through each one, and decide if you agree with it or disagree with it as a first step towards writing your essay.

Þ   Highlight or underline those ideas or phrases which most interest you.

1.      “The divided self: in her madness, there is no one there. She is not a person. There is no integral selfhood expressed through her actions or utterances… She has already died. There is now only a vacuum where there once was a person.” (R. D. Laing)

2.      “…there are many voices in Ophelia’s madness speaking through her… none of them her own. She becomes the mirror for a mad-inducing world.” (David Leverenz)

3.      “[Ophelia’s] history is an instance of how someone can be driven mad by having her inner feelings misrepresented, not responded to, or acknowledged only through chastisement and repression. From her entrance on, Ophelia must continually respond to commands which imply distrust even as they compel obedience.” (David Leverenz)

4.      “[Ophelia] has no choice but to say ‘I shall obey, my lord’” (David Leverenz)

5.      “Not allowed to love and unable to be false, Ophelia breaks. She goes mad rather than gets mad. Even in her madness she has no voice of her own, only a discord of other voices and expectations, customs gone awry.” (David Leverenz)

6.      “Hamlet sees Gertrude give way to Claudius, [and] Ophelia give way to Polonius…” (David Leverenz)

7.      “[Ophelia] is a play within a play, or a player trying to respond to several imperious directors at once. Everyone has used her: Polonius, to gain favour; Laertes, to belittle Hamlet; Claudius, to spy on Hamlet; Hamlet to express rage at Gertrude; and Hamlet again, to express his feigned madness with her as a decoy. She is valued only for the roles that further other people’s plots.” (David Leverenz)

8.      “We can imagine Hamlet’s story without Ophelia, but Ophelia literally has no story without Hamlet.” (Lee Edwards)

9.      “For most critics of Shakespeare, Ophelia has been an insignificant minor character in the play, touching in her weakness and madness but chiefly interesting, of course, in what she tells us about Hamlet.” (Elaine Showalter)

10. “Since the 1970s… we have had a feminist discourse which has offered a new perspective on Ophelia’s madness as protest and rebellion. For many feminist theorists, the madwoman is a heroine, a powerful figure who rebels against the family and the social order…” (Elaine Showalter)

11. “Gertrude, in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, has traditionally been played as a sensual, deceitful woman.” (Rebecca Smith)

12. …when one closely examines Gertrude’s actual speech and actions in an attempt to understand the character , one finds little that hints at hypocrisy, suppression, or uncontrolled passion and their implied complexity.” (Rebecca Smith)

13. “Gertrude appears in only ten of the twenty scenes that comprise the play; furthermore she speaks very little, having less dialogue than any other major character in Hamlet… she speaks plainly, directly, and chastely when she does speak… Gertrude’s brief speeches include references to honour, virtue [etc]; neither structure nor content suggests wantonness.” (Rebecca Smith)

14. “Gertrude believes that quiet women best please men, and pleasing men is Gertrude’s main interest.” (Rebecca Smith)

15. “Gertrude has not moved toward independence or a heightened moral stance; only her divided loyalties and her unhappiness intensify.” (Rebecca Smith)

Þ  Using the quotations that you have marked as interesting as a starting point for your ideas, write an essay that discusses the following question:

“Hamlet is a tragedy which is interested in men and the concerns of men: the women in it are peripheral to the main action”. How far do you agree with this view of the importance of women in Hamlet? What is your opinion about the role of women in the play? REMEMBER THAT YOU NEED EVIDENCE FOR YOUR IDEAS IN THE FORM OF QUOTATION AND CLOSE ANALYSIS

This essay is due in for Monday 7^th November

Useful links for Tragedy

...are now in a list on the right of the blog. If you are looking for further information on a topic, do check on the blog before you go wandering into the depths of the internet. Ask me if you want me to add links on a particular topic.

As I said to many of you, watching films of Hamlet is a very good way to consolidate your knowledge of the play. There are plenty out there, and many to borrow from the city library, but also you can find useful clips on Youtube.

Here is the comparison between scenes that we looked at the other week--for a useful exercise over the holiday, consider how you would direct this scene.

Welcome to Violet Prose

So, to start off then...

For those of you who would like a little extra critical reading, here is a select reading list. It is by no means comprehensive, but should give you a helpful start:

Tragedy: Select reading

This is by no means a comprehensive reading list, but it should give you a good starting point to work from.

Bamber, L. Comic Women, Tragic Men: A Study of Gender and Genre in Shakespeare (Stanford, 1982)

Bratchell, D.F. (ed) Shakespearean Tragedy (London and New York, 1990)

Brewer, D Symbolic Stories: Traditional Narratives of the Family Drama in Literature (Cambridge, 1980)

Draper, R.P (ed) Tragedy: Developments in Criticism (London, 1980)

Dutton, R Modern Tragicomedy and the British Tradition (Brighton, 1986)

Dutton, R, and Howard, J.E. A Companion to Shakespeare’s works, Vol :, The Tragedies (Oxford 2003)

Eagleton, T. Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic (Oxford, 2003)

Easterling, P.E (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy (Cambridge, 1997)

Everett, B. Young Hamlet: Essays on Shakespeare’s Tragedies (Oxford, 1989)

Heilman, R. Tragedy and Melodrama: Versions of Experience (Seattle, 1968)

Kahn, C. Roman Shakespeare: Warriors, Wounds and Women (London, 1997)

Kerrigan, J. Revenge Tragedy: Aeschylus to Armageddon (Oxford, 1996)

Macintosh, F. Dying Acts: Death in Ancient Greek and Modern Irish Tragic Drama (Cork, 1994)

Miller, A. Theatre Essays,  2^nd edn, ed, Robert A Martin (London, 1994)

Miola, R.S. Shakespeare and Classical Tragedy: The Influence of Seneca (Oxford, 1992)

Poole, Adrian, Tragedy: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2005)

Steiner, G The Death of Tragedy (London, 1961, repr New York 1980)

Williams, R. Modern Tragedy (London, 1966, revised edn, 1979)