UIL
Capital Conference
2014
Literary Criticism
The Reading List
Flytings, Squirrels Bustling About, and Telling It at a Slant
Beowulf (Seamus Heaney's verse translation)
All this consoles me, / doomed as I am and sickening for death; /
because of my right ways, the Ruler of mankind / need ever blame me
when the breath leaves my body / for murder of kinsmen.
That the epic Beowulf holds well its place both in the canon and in our imaginations serves as an adequate counter to Alvy Singer's response to Annie Hall's search for a college literature course: Singer admonishes, "Just don't take any course where they make you read Beowulf." The narrative poem is a performance piece recounting, at its core, the exploits that showcase the characteristics of a gōd cyning.
Seamus Heaney, our translator, reminds us that this epic is a place of "menaced borders," that liminality
fully informs Beowulf's story; indeed, the narrative is a window onto a culture in transition—a viewing
from what Heaney calls a "certain historical detachment." The narrator himself is of no little interest,
his describing the physical action, his comments on the action and on life in general, and his delving into
the psychology of the individuals that "people" the story offer the twenty-first century audience much to
appreciate. The characters loom large, as Walter J. Ong reminds us, so that they are memorable; the
challenges they face are representative, which is to say they are not unfamiliar; and the immediacy of the
story in Nobel Prize-winner Heaney's hand (remember, "the squat pen rests / Between [his] finger and
[his] thumb")—in his digging deep into the resonating that is the retelling of a retelling of a recounting—
is profound.
Our translator's comment on his translation speaks to the challenge of bringing the epic to the modern audience while retaining the "solemnity of utterance": "the sound and sense of the Anglo-Saxon" original.
Heaney's commentators speak in unison regarding his success. The sound and sense of the poem, along
with but not superseding the story itself, present not so much an additional challenge as a reason to appreciate the poem's importance to our literary heritage.
Importance of Beowulf : http://www.neh.gov/humanities/1999/marchapril/feature/why-read-beowulf
Sutton Hoo: http://www.suttonhoo.org/index.asp
Michael Wood: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1C0sFXU0SLo
Seamus Heaney: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emuYwWT7s4A
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A productive discussion regarding the role of the translator and editor and about the problems inherent
in translating literature across cultures, across time, and across shifts in social conventions, in light of
Seamus Heaney's, Rolf Fjelde's, and Billy Collins's efforts, might constitute, not unlike a visit to one of
the links herein included, a well-earned distraction from the LitCritters' team-specific tasks.
Henrik Ibsen's The Doll's House (The Doll House)
Is it my little squirrel bustling about ?
Yes !
When did my squirrel come home ?
Just now. Come in here, Torvald, and see what I have bought.
Don't disturb me.
Ibsen's Doll's House should not be seen in a historically removed context; the play addresses universal
concerns, and Nora, like Antigone, Rosalind, and Anna Karenina before her, represents not only the
woman but also the individual realizing the truth of her or his situation. The need to learn to be oneself
before one can do well any other role that a person has accepted or has been assigned, as Nora demonstrates at the end of the crescendo that is the play, is not a new thematic concern, but putting on the
boards a housewife, dependent, by social conventions, on a husband whose priorities preclude the
woman's personhood, who actively and decidedly rebels shocked Ibsen's nineteenth-century audience.
Ibsen's 1879 play explores social conventions, especially in terms of duty, and the play as Halvdan Koht
judged nearly a hundred years ago, "pronounced a death sentence on accepted social ethics." The play,
in terms of the audience's reaction, offers, if not a strong woman, a woman who finds strength, and her
decision—a decision acted on—is instantly suggestive that a woman cannot be herself in a society whose
mores find both genesis and judgment in the historical patriarchal. Our own twenty-first-century political-social landscape bespeaks—nay, screams—this reality. Ibsen's nineteenth-century foray into the social complexity of gender roles, marriage its microcosm, must needs remind us that the woman's multifaceted dilemma is indeed the human dilemma; the frequency of the play's production, including adaptations, speaks volumes regarding the expectations placed on women.
Nora : a response to Ibsen's Doll's House : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CY8s2MqPyM
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Emily Dickinson: selected poetry
A word is dead / When it is said, / Some say. / I say it just / Begins to live / That day.
Emily Dickinson continues to be one of the most beloved poets in the language, and like Walt Whitman,
Dickinson eschewed the conventions of nineteenth-century poetic expression, which, along with brevity,
might well be her poetry's most endearing characteristics. Her predilection to travel a "road not made of
man" includes her views on death and religion. Her relationship with the natural world reflects a familiarity with her own cultural roots, which were steeped in Puritanism, a close familiarity with the British
Romantics, and a deep familiarity with the Transcendentalists. We thus encounter the metaphysical and
the physical in her descriptions of the everyday, which themselves are microcosmic moments against a
philosophical macrocosm. Her metaphors and imagery often find purpose in ambiguity, which occasion
both delight and a need to return to the poems, individually and in aggregate.
A narrow fellow in the grass / Occasionally rides; / You may have met him—did you not / His notice sudden is . . .
Billy Collins reading Dickinson: http://www.wbur.org/npr/128272101 WARNING preview first! (minute 16:00)
Bill Murray reading Dickinson: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rj_LYsvGF0E
Thomas H. Johnson's Final Harvest: Poems 1964; The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson 1960
On Johnson: http://archive.emilydickinson.org/classroom/spring99/edition/johnson/j-frame.htm