A Journey, by Edith Wharton, 1862–1937

*“Genius is of small use to a woman who does not know how to do her hair.”

*“In spite of illness, in spite even of the archenemy sorrow, one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things, and happy in small ways.”

*“Do you remember what you said to me once? That you could help me only by loving me? Well-you did love me for a moment; and it helped me. It has always helped me.”

*“It was easy enough to despise the world, but decidedly difficult to find any other habitable region.”

*“Life is always either a tightrope or a feather bed. Give me the tightrope.”

*“There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.”

*“If only we'd stop trying to be happy we'd have a pretty good time.”

*“I don't know if I should care for a man who made life easy; I should want someone who made it interesting.”

*“Ah, good conversation - there's nothing like it, is there? The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.”

*“My little dog—a heartbeat at my feet.”

*“Each time you happen to me all over again. ”

*“There is one friend in the life of each of us who seems not a separate person, however dear and beloved, but an expansion, an interpretation, of one's self, the very meaning of one's soul.”

*“If only we'd stop trying to be happy we'd have a pretty good time.”

*Habit is necessary; it is the habit of having habits, of turning a trail into a rut, that must be incessantly fought against if one is to remain alive.

*How much longer are we going to think it necessary to be ''American'' before (or in contradistinction to) being cultivated, being enlightened, being humane, and having the same intellectual discipline as other civilized countries?

*I have never known a novel that was good enough to be good in spite of its being adapted to the author's political views.

American Literature at Faco

Course Description:

This course covers a wide range of American prose and poetry including a study of major themes such as transcendentalism, individualism, romanticism, modernism, realism and the American dream. Through a method of practical criticism students will be familiarised with the necessary skills for making a critical analysis of the texts and appraising their representative importance in the corpus of American literature. Additional material will be introduced to the class to elucidate different trends in the American literary tradition. Students will be evaluated on the basis of: 

1) active participation and meaningful contribution to the critical appreciation of the literary texts

2) seminar presentations (groups of up to three students each week)

3) Diaries

Diaries are notebooks for keeping track of the course and will contain commentaries by each student on all the material covered in the course. Diaries will be evaluated on the basis of: 

1) thoroughness of observation and completeness

2) personal touch and creativity

3) Discernment and understanding of the material they cover

Course Programme: September 2012 to December 2012

1) Introduction to American Literature

2) A Journey, by Edith Wharton, 1862–1937

3) The Strength of God, by Sherwood Anderson, 1876 –1941

4)  New York To Detroit, by Dorothy Parker, 1893 –1967

5) Clean Well-Lighted Place, by Ernest Hemingway, 1899 –1961

6) An Alcoholic Case, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1896-1940

7)  The Girl with a Pimply Face, by William Carlos Williams, 1883 –1963

8) The Whistle, by  Eudora Welty, 1909 – 2001

9) He, by Katherine Anne Porter, 1890 – 1980

10) A Late Encounter with the Enemy, by Mary Flannery O'Connor, 1925 – 1964

11) Sunday Teasing, by John Updike, 1932 – 2009

12) My Son the Murderer, by Bernard Malamud, 1914-1986

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* C. Day Lewis ( 1904 – 1972): Once upon a time poetry and science were one, and its name was magic. Magic, for our earliest ancestors, was the most effective way of understanding nature and their fellow-man, and of gaining power over them. It was not till some three centuries ago that science finally broke away from magic: the scientific revolution of seventeenth century withdrew from the "supernatural" as a field of study....

*A.N. Witehead (1861 – 1947) said:

The soul cries aloud for release into change. It suffers the agonies of claustrophobia. The transitions of humour, wit, irreverence, play, sleep, and ---above all---of art are necessary for it. Great art is the arrangement of the environment so as to provide for the soul vivid, but transient, values, human being's require something which absorbs them for a time, something out of the routine which they can stare at."27 " Accordingly, the great art is more than transient refreshment. It is something that adds to the permanent richness of the soul's self-attainment. It justifies itself both by its immediate enjoyment, and also by its discipline of the inmost being." 

*A poem a day keeps psychiatrist away.

*Language logically and scientifically used cannot describe a landscape or a face.

*I.A. Richards (1893 –1979): "Poetry makes us remember how we felt. It operates in a field which is closed to science.

*T.R. Henn (1901-1974)  has spoken of the moral values of art as the " sensitising of the human mind to the living world and its complexities." The final justification of all poetry" he says, is " hat it seeks to express a peculiar fusion of ideas and emotions which are normally on the edge of consciousness, or even beyond it."

*Coleridge (1772 – 1834):  A poem is an organic growth from within outwards. 

*Francis Bacon (1561 – 1626): Poesy serveth and conferreth to magnanimity, morality, and to delectation.  

* And the idea that poetry is a way of penetrating through appearances to the heart of reality.

* Aristotle (384 BC – 322 BC): Poetry as mimesis, imitation- recording and recreation of experience.

* William Wordsworth (1770 – 1850): “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility”

*Robert Frost (1874 –1963) : A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom. –

*Interior Landscape:

In Man's Search for Meaning, penned by Holocaust survivor and psychiatrist Victor Frankl, his thesis, formed from observations acculmulated during his time in Nazi death camps, was that man has little if any control over circumstances. But—and this is a big but—you do have control over your attitude toward what is happening to you. This observation about one’s attitude became Frankl’s means of survival. Attitude and mindset are a part of one’s interior landscape, safe from intrusion.

Psalms 55:21

[The words] of his mouth were smoother than butter, but war [was] in his heart: his words were softer than oil, yet [were] they drawn swords.

Gunsmoke

It's time for the court to step in and give these infants constant, systematic care.
Constant, systematic and as sterile as a hybrid jenny mule.

Ernest Miller Hemingway 1899 –1961

The age demanded that we sing
And cut away our tongue.

The age demanded that we flow
And hammered in the bung.

The age demanded that we dance
And jammed us into iron pants.

And in the end the age was handed
The sort of shit that it demanded.

William Carlos Williams 1883–1963

The Term

A rumpled sheet
Of brown paper
About the length

And apparent bulk
Of a man was
Rolling with the

Wind slowly over
And over in
The street as

A car drove down
Upon it and
Crushed it to

The ground. Unlike
A man it rose
Again rolling

With the wind over
And over to be as
It was before.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 1807–1882

Oh, there is nothing holier in this life of ours than the first consciousness of love— the first fluttering of its silken wings— the first rising sound and breath of that wind which is so soon to sweep through the soul, to purify or to destroy!

Edward Estlin Cummings 1894 –1962

i thank You God for most this amazing day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees and a blue dream of sky;and for everything which is natural which is infinite which is yes (i who have died am alive again today, and this is the sun's birthday;this is the birth day of life and love and wings;and of the gay great happening ilimitably earth) how should tasting touching hearing seeing breathing any - lifted from the no of all nothing - human merely being doubt unimaginable You? (now the ears of my ears awake and now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

Oh what a tangled web we weave, When first we practise to deceive!

Oh what a tangled web we weave, When first we practise to deceive! Sir Walter Scott