Assignment one done

I've written 866 words on my close reading of a passage from Defoe's Roxana.  It'll have to suffice although it's 116 words more than requested.  Ho hum.

I received a cheque in the post today from The University of Sydney.  It's my $140 prize linked to the Margaret Cramp award for a part time student in English.  That's the second time I've won.  I previously thought that there must be very few members of the eligible cohort but according to the Federal Government's new web site, My University, more than 40 per cent of the students in the School of Letters and Media study part time.  So maybe there were two of us in the running.

I'll take it in honour of Miss Cramp of whom it was written, you will recall, she danced in blue taffeta.

Daniel Defoe and my Close Reading Epiphany

I am struck again by how little I know or (being generous to myself perhaps) ow much I have forgotten because some of what I mention here I was taught at school.  That was not yesterday.

Our first assignment for the 'Novel Worlds' unit at Sydney University is due on Thursday.  It's a close reading exercise (a form of literary criticism to which I respond badly - foolish and unreasonable as my reaction no doubt is).  I have 750 words to produce on a passage from page 278 of the World's Classics edition of Daniel Defoe's final novel, known as Roxana  or The Fortunate Mistress although its original title was The Fortunate Mistress : Or, A History of the Life and Vast Variety of Fortunes of Mademoiselle de Beleau, Afterwards Called the Countess of Wintelsheim, in Germany, Being the Person Known by the Name of the Lady Roxana, in the Time of King Charless II.

The passage is perhaps the most important scene in the novel.  We're on a moored ship at the moment Roxana meets her abandoned daughter, Susan (named after her mother).  Susan suspects that the woman she knows as the Lady Roxana may be her natural mother.  It's a moment of crises for Roxana.  During the passage her identity collapses entirely.  

I read that collapsed identity into the text.  I surmise that it's there, see that it fits with the structure of the narrative.  But at my usual level of reading I'm guessing (intelligently but guessing all the same).  At that level of analysis, however, my exercise flounders.  I would have struggled to find 750 words of any type, let alone meaningful analysis.  

In an act of desperation I thought, start with the "I".  that's how the passage begins.  So I counted them up.  There are thirty-one.  I circled them with a lime-green highlighter and lo and behold a picture emerged that began to reveal the evidence in the text I needed to support my superficial reading  Defoe has Roxana refer to herself with the subjective pronoun "I" thirty one times in two and a half paragraphs.  When she says (to her 'Relator') "I was to conceal myself" in the middle of the third paragraph she stops using the subjective pronoun and switches to the objective pronoun "me".  Defoe has the character of Susan, Roxana's daughter, make the opposite journey grammatically.  For the first two and a half paragraphs Roxana only uses the objective pronoun (her) for her daughter.  But at the point at which Roxana describes herself with the objective pronoun she starts to use that subjective pronoun, she, to refer to her daughter.

From subjective to objective pronoun and vice versa.  The collapse of subjectivity and identity of the mother coincides with the emergence of the long-abandoned daughter as subject.  Who would have thought I'd end up here, analysis of grammar; nothing more than a structuralist.

Don't get me started on Defoe and the personal adjective!! 

National student prize show 2012

The Wagga Wagga gallery housing the national glass collection filled by excellent student work from around Australia. Into The Woods by Spike looked very good among very good other pieces.  Good show

The road less travelled

Even it needs fuel. Twit!

Student day

Too many ideas compete for space within this adled, ageing brain of mine.  I'm waiting for a ten o'clock tutorial to start; sitting in the lae-summer sun on the balcony of the (allegedly notorious) Manning Building of Sydney University.  It's early (for a university) on a Friday morning.  Whatever it is that gives this place its reputation is, I imagine, still tucked up in bed - oblivious to the hangover waiting in the corners of conscousness to testify to excesses of an undergraduate's Thursday night.

I've read and re-read my tutorial presentation on Thomas Pynchon's The crying of Lot 49.  It's as ready as it's ever going to be; too long but ready.  I killed some time between my student union's breakfast of fried egg, tomato, hash brown (insipid yellow is closer to the mark) and toast and now by reading articles on The Guardian web site; a piece on the short stories of William Trevor, another on The Dead by James Joyce and a review by Peter Bradshaw (a man not easy to satisfy) of the new teen fiction move, The Hunger Games (to which he gave four stars out of five).

These different stimuli fought for territory within me.  Two thoughts emerge or stick.  One is an interest in the idea of paralysis in the short stories of James Joyce.  Critics don't mean spinal cord injury or any othe physiological phenomenon.  And linked to that I suppose was an observation in te Trevor article about the creative paralysis arising from the lack or absence of moral conviction.  Does that ring a bell for me?

I should reflect less perhaps.  It's a warm, sunny morning on my day as a student.  I have a tutorial to lead.  THere are harder ways to go through life.  Pynchon calls ...

Make it Real: How to video

The novel in the age of the Internet

One of the reasons I've been reading The Guardian for nearly 40 years is that I can read articles like Ewan Morrison's which make me re-consider my own understanding / position. One of the beauties of The Guardian in the age of the Internet is that I can sit here in Sydney reading a response from someone going by the name of BookAvatar that makes me re-consider my re-considering.

Read the article here: Factual fiction: writing in an information age

So, like many in the modern world, I'm not quite sure where the novel form now sits or where it may end up (not that I mean to suggest there is a final destination). There's merit in both cases (by which I don't mean to sit on a fence but to allow the possibility that seemingly contradictory conditions can apply at the same time).

There is one point in BookAvatar's critique I'd want to question or have clarified. BookAvatar wrote:

Nothing has profoundly changed us as human beings which is why the same stories played out in Greek theatres 2500 years ago still ring true to us.

I probably agree but I didn't read into Ewan Morrison's article a contrary assertion. I read him as saying that how (possibly timeless) human stories are told may need to / must change in the post-internet age if the story-telling is to ring true. Good writers (apologies for the un-defined values-laden term there) may succeed in doing so in a way that proves not to become dated, fashionable or merely stylistic. We read Dickens today. No one will read Jeffrey Archer in 20 years time. Both were best-selling sensations in their times (bizarrely in the latter case).

I'm half way through reading Roxana by Daniel Defoe (1724), one of the modern novel form's early practitioners. I know this will sound a bit daft but it brought to mind James Joyce's Ulysses (1922) because of the ways in which it mixes forms and methods of telling (there are several narrators, sometimes on the same page; at one point it adopts the form of a play; past, present and future tenses can exist in just one paragraph; the principal narrator often breaks the 'fourth wall' to speak directly to the reader). It's not too fanciful to imagine both novels imprinted with hypertext links to people, places and background that could, if done well, enhance the reading experience. I know that when I was re-reading Ulysses last year I went to Google maps at one point to retrace the steps taken by Leopold Bloom. I think that added something. I'd also add that Faber's wonderful iPad app for The Wasteland adds to one's reading of the work in a fragmented, imagiste, symboliste manner that is entirely and brilliantly consistent with the poem.

My point? I guess it is that we do indeed read in new ways and that all literary forms simultaneously reflect their origins / traditions but also anticipate new ways of telling stories. Oedipus the king will be told and re-told as long as we're story-telling but it's entirely reasonable and rather exciting to imagine that it can be done via a hypertext link to a youtube video of a re-creation using vegetables as well as in the original by Sophocles. I prefer the latter and get more from it but there's a place for Oedipus the potato.