2. Continuous vs. Continual
Continual means "repeated regularly and
often."
Julia hated the continual negative political ads.
Continuous means "extended or prolonged
without interruption."
The alarm bell was jammed and rang
continuously; it never stopped and was making
Gayle loony!
3. AGENDA
Quiz
Lecture
o The American Dream
o My Antonia Books IV and V
Author Introductions:
Pound and Williams
Paraphrasing Poetry
4. The Answers to the Quiz:Take 10 minutes
A. Gaston Cleric
B. Lewis Hale
C. Frances Harling
D. Mina Loy
E. Mrs. Shimerda
F. Otto Fuchs
G. Samson d'Arnault
H. Wick Cutter
I. Molly Gardener
J. Tiny Soderball
K. Lena Lingard
L. Minnie Foster
M. Anton Cuzak
N. Mr. Marinetti
7. JamesTruslow Adams, who coined the phrase “The American
Dream” in 1931, wrote this about it:
[The American Dream is] that dream of a land in which life
should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with
opportunity for each according to ability or achievement. It is
a difficult dream for the European upper classes to interpret
adequately, and too many of us ourselves have grown weary
and mistrustful of it. It is not a dream of motor cars and high
wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each
man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest
stature of which they are innately capable, and be
recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the
fortuitous circumstances of birth or position. [The Epic of
America, 1931]
8. The Beginnings of the Dream
Yet, the concept of the American Dream existed
before Adams articulated it. Perhaps the first
verbalization of the American Dream isThomas
Jefferson’s statement from the Declaration of
Independence:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are
created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with
certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life,
Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”
9. Benjamin Franklin gave the definitive formulation of
the American Dream in his autobiography (begun in
1771, published in 1818). At least five characteristics of
the American Dream have been noted in Franklin’s
work:
1. the rise from rags to riches through industry and thrift;
2. the rise from insignificance to importance, from
helplessness to power;
3. a philosophy of individualism;
4. the efficacy of free will and action;
5. and a spirit of hope, even of optimism.
10. In 1867 when writer, Horatio Alger came out
with his book Ragged Dick, the concept of the
American Dream became an American Idea.The
story is a rags-to-riches tale of a poor orphan
boy in NewYork City who saves his pennies,
works hard and eventually becomes rich.This
model of honesty, hard work, and strong
determination as the keys to success in America
became the goal of Americans and the
immigrants who would soon come to America.
11. In time, many Americans became disenchanted with
the theme. Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville,
Edgar Allan Poe, Henry James, and MarkTwain
probed the dark side of the dream.
Twain, writing during the rise of nineteenth century
finance capitalism and industrialism, became
increasingly disillusioned with social corruption in
the Gilded Age. In his classic novel Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn (1884), before Huck “lights out for
the territory” to escape being civilized, he struggles
with a corrupt world of frauds, desperadoes, and
money-grubbing confidence men.
12. The 20th Century Dream
Twain set the tone for twentieth century versions of the
American Dream, many of which have depicted the
American Dream turned nightmare.Twain’s legacy is
certainly discernible in such a writer as F. Scott
Fitzgerald. Wealth and material possessions are shown
as the constituents of the American Dream, a theme
Fitzgerald develops in The Great Gatsby (1925).Yet in
much of 20th C literature, the American Dream is
ambiguous; while some deny it, others cling to it. While
some ignore it, others insist they will achieve it.
13. The American Dream: My Antonia
Mrs. Shimerda uprooted her family against her husband's wishes. She
said, "America big country, much money, much land for my boys,
much husband for my girls."
Pavel and Peter were fugitives.The burgeoning country and economy
provided many opportunities.
Tiny Soderball follows the frontier to Seattle and then, during the gold
rush, to Alaska.
And, as always, swindlers and loan sharks, like Wick Cutter, preyed on
the weak.
Lena is a successful dressmaker in San Francisco.
Ántonia and her husband flourish
14. For all the successes, the novel is riddled with
disappointments and failures
Otto and Jake go west, and except for one postcard, they are
never heard of again.
"Rooshian" Peter, who proudly told Ántonia that "in his
country only rich people had cows, but here any man could
have one who would take care of her," loses his partner, and
bankruptcy forces him to sell his possessions.
When Jim tells Ántonia that Coronado, who searched the
American west for the Seven Golden Cities, died in the
wilderness of a broken heart, she sighs, "More than him has
done that."The American Dream had also broken her father.
15. Group Discussion:
The American Dream
in My Antonia
1. Compare and contrastTiny Soderball and Lena
Lingard’s success with money.
2. Discuss the reasons whyWilla Cather chose to have
Antonia return to the Shimerda farm as an unwed
mother.
3. Discuss the differences between the Cuzak
household and the Shimerda household from many
years before.
16. Compare and contrast Tiny Soderball and Lena
Lingard’s success with money.
1. BothTiny Soderball and Lena Lingard achieve considerable wealth and success by
the end of their stories.They defy the traditional gender roles set by the
patriarchy and create lives for themselves without marriage, one of the only
available options for women at the time.
2. The approach that each woman takes in pursuit of her own success has everything
to do with the result:Tiny, seeking only monetary gain and security, eventually
“reminded [Jim] of Mrs. Gardener”, and became strict and controlling woman
interested in nothing “but making money.” (143) In contrast, Lena ends up “just
the same as she always was,” carefree, and living out the youth she was denied in
her childhood (143).
3. Lena’s success seems to arise more out of her keen eye for fashion than any
business sense. [Tiny’s] was an adventure story from start to finish, a ten-year
adventure full of risk taking, strategizing, and a little luck.
17. Discuss the reasons why Willa Cather chose to have
Antonia return to the Shimerda farm as an unwed
mother.
1. Cather decided to have Antonia return home as an unwed
mother is because she wanted her to become a strong
independent woman and, as someone mentioned above, to
compare her to Lena andTiny. Right when she returned home
she worked and took over men’s duties until she gave birth to
her daughter.Then she gives birth on her own without making a
sound. She always seems to make the best out of every
circumstance she encounters and keeps on pushing through. [. .
.] She has a connection with nature that makes her a strong
character. Women and nature is usually seen as innocence
and purity, but in this case obviously that didn’t happen since
Antonia returned home heartbroken and pregnant
18. Discuss the reasons whyWilla Cather chose to have
Antonia return to the Shimerda farm as an unwed
mother.
1. Among the women, ‘respectable’ Ántonia was the last person
anyone would have expected to, in the words ofWidow
Steavens, be “disgraced” as opposed to the notoriety of
someone like Lena: “My Ántonia, that had so much good in
her…And that Lena Lingard, that was always a bad one, say
what you will, had turned out so well” (161). [. . .] Cather
wanted to show that the women that most people expected
the least of [Lena Lingard] were able to rise above those
expectations and make a successful living for themselves.
2. Q:Why is Jim disappointed in Antonia after she was taken
advantage of by Larry Donovan?Why does he try to deal with
the situation initially by avoiding seeing or even thinking
about Antonia?
19. Discuss the differences between the Cuzak
household and the Shimerda household from many
years before.
1. Antonia and Cuzak choose to raise their large family with their Bohemian
roots. Mr. Shimerda was eager for Jim Burden to teachAntonia how to speak
English; however, Antonia seems to be in no rush for her children to adapt to
American cultures, the children were to learn English when they went to
school.
2. The Shimerda household, where Antonia and her siblings grew up, appeared
to be detached. A power dynamic in this house seemed evident, with Mr.
Shimerda and his oldest son, Ambrosch, leading the work and the duties
whileAntonia, her sister, and her mother did not get recognized for their
share of the work.WhileAntonia represented the Shimerda household as a
primary translator, she received little acknowledgement for the work she did
from her brother.To contrast,Antonia’s new home with Cuzak has her
running the show with her children, but the household is more egalitarian.
20. Feminist Criticism
How can we connect/applyTyson’s description of
feminist criticism, with consideration to her thoughts on
the “good” versus “bad” roles women are placed into, to
Cather’s story and depiction of women characters?
Q: How are the strong women in the novel depicted in
these sections? What does it say about them?
21. QHQs
1. Q:What type of relationship does Jim have with Gaston Cleric?
1. Q: Does Cather code Lena andTiny as a couple? If not, why not,
and what is the true nature of their relationship? If so, what does
their coupling say about Cather’s views on romantic
relationships?
2. Q:Why does Cather choose to include the story of the Cutters’
gruesome deaths?
3. Why does Antonia’s Papa “interest” Jim?
22. QHQs
1. How have movement and stasis resulted in the characters rise and
fall in My Antonia, and which characters display movement and
which characters remain static?
2. Q:What is the relationship between Jim and Antonia from both of
their perspectives? Can it be defined as romantic, platonic, or is it
indescribable?
3. Q: I believe in destiny, so why didn’t Jim andAntonia end up
marrying each other?
4. Q: Is Jim’s idea of Antonia truly who she is? Is his long absence a
result of him not wanting to shatter his image of her?
23. QHQs:The Ending
1. Q:Why does Jim conclude “My Antonia” with the line “Whatever
we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the
incommunicable past (Cather 181)?
2. Does Jim have a realization at the end of his coming of age
story? Does he view his life as fulfilled?
3. Q:What does Jim mean by “I had the sense of coming home to
myself, and of having found out what a little circle man’s
experience is” (181)?
24. The Great Gatsby and My Ántonia
1. Q: Explain the significance of the song lyric, mentioned
in The Great Gatsby, “the rich get richer and the poor
get – children,” to My Antonia.
2. Q: In what ways are Jim Burden and Jay Gatsby similar
or different in terms of their relationships with women
and the past?
25. Ezra Pound was born October 30, 1885,
in Hailey, Idaho.
While in high school, Pound studied
Latin, and this study moved him to
concentrate on poetry and literary
history.
At the University of Pennsylvania, he
met WilliamCarlosWilliams and Hilda
Doolittle (both later to become, with
Pound, prominent modernist poets).
Pound received his master’s degree
from the University of Pennsylvania in
1906.
He took a job teaching atWabash
College in Indiana.This teaching
experience, however, was a disaster
for the bohemian Pound, for Indiana
society was deeply conservative. He
was fired before the school year
ended for having a woman in his
room without a chaperone.
Author Introduction: Ezra Pound
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KshWho
CaMQ
26. Disgusted by America’s conservatism, Pound resolved to go to Europe to
become a poet. He ended up on London, where he quickly became a
member of a number of literary circles. Within a few years, Pound
became the center of a nascent literary movement, imagism, and
through the sheer force of his will also became one of London’s most
important literary figures. Pound was driven by the dictum “make it
new.”
Pound’s life grew significantly more difficult and complicated after his
move to Italy, for he stopped seeing himself as a poet and began to feel
that he was a public intellectual, a sage, a man who should be
consulted by world leaders. He began to study history and economics,
attempting to discover a solution for the problems of the world. At this
time, he also grew increasingly attracted to Italy’s fascist leader, Benito
Mussolini, and began to manifest a deep anti-Semitism. For twenty years,
Pound continued to write cantos, but he also spoke more and more
loudly against Roosevelt, against capitalism, and in favor of fascism.
27. When the United States joined World War II in 1941, Pound tried to return to his
home country but was not allowed to do so. To support himself and his family during
the war, Pound volunteered to do radio broadcasts for Italian state radio. In response,
the U.S. government indicted Pound for treason in 1943, and, after Italy fell, Pound
was arrested, held in a cage near Pisa, and returned to Washington to face trial.
Pound escaped the execution that could have been his fate when the judge found him
mentally unfit to face trial, but he was sentenced to an indefinite period in a mental
hospital. He spent thirteen years in St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, D.C., refusing
to disavow his beliefs. Even incarcerated, he continued to produce poetry, and even
won the prestigious Bollingen Library of Congress Award for his 1949 volume The Pisan
Cantos, composed while Pound was held prisoner by the U.S. Army. Finally, in 1958,
Pound was released from the hospital and returned to Italy.
Pound lived the remainder of his life quietly. Settling in Venice, Pound initially continued
to work and write, but, in the early 1960s, he fell into a deep depression and an
unbreakable silence. Young poets such as Allen Ginsberg visited him, but Pound would
not speak. Near the end of his life, largely because of the tireless efforts of his publisher
James Laughlin, Pound finally began to enjoy the honors that had been denied him for
decades and also began earning enough money from his poetry to live on. He died in
Venice
29. Williams was born in Rutherford, New Jersey, on September 17, 1883, to a
mother born in Puerto Rico and an English father. Both parents figure in a
number ofWilliams’s poems. In 1902Williams began the study of medicine
at the University of Pennsylvania and while a student formed important
friendships with Ezra Pound and the painterCharles Demuth. In 1910
Williams began his forty-year medical practice in Rutherford, marrying
Florence Herman in 1912.
Williams’s first book of poems, entitled Poems and privately printed by a
local stationer, was replete with the kind of archaic poetic diction and
romantic longing typical of much American magazine poetry at the time.
As a result of Pound’s directive that he become more aware of avant-
garde work in music, painting, prose, and poetry, Williams’s next book,
TheTempers, reflected Pound’s pre-Imagist manner—a variety of verse
forms, short monologues, and medieval and Latinate allusions.
30. Williams labored on his writing for the next twenty years, largely
unrecognized except by readers of the short-lived small magazines that
printed experimental American work.What some critics considerWilliams’s
finest book, the prose and poetry sequence Spring and All, was printed in
Paris in an edition of only three hundred and not reprinted in full until 1970,
seven years after his death.This book contains the famous “The Red
Wheelbarrow,” later printed byWilliams as a separate poem, and often
anthologized as the quintessential Imagist expression.
In the 1930’s,Williams’s work took a more overtly political turn, although he
had always shared the view of Pound and Eliot that the work of the poet
was central to the health and potential of a civilization and that the state
of a culture was reflected in its response to its serious artists.
31. In the 1950’s,Williams became an important figure for poets
seeking an alternative to the neoclassical poetics ofT. S. Eliot and
his followers, and such figures as Robert Lowell, Allen Ginsberg,
and Denise Levertov acknowledged a large debt to his example.
Since that decade, too,Williams’s career-long achievement has
gradually come to be more and more fully recognized. Although
still not accorded the status of Eliot and Stevens by some critics of
modernism, on the whole these two—along with Williams and
Pound—are considered the four major figures of American
modernist poetry.
"WilliamCarlos Williams."Cyclopedia ofWorld Authors, Fourth
Revised Edition. Ed. Frank Northen Magill. Salem Press, Inc., 1997.
33. How to Paraphrase Poetry
• A Paraphrase is a restatement of a passage giving the
meaning in another form.This usually involves expanding
the original text so as to make it clear.
• A paraphrase will have none of the beauty or effectiveness of
the original. It merely aims, in its prosy way, to spell out the
literal meaning. It will not substitute for the original, then,
but will help us appreciate the compactness and complexity
of many poems.
• Write in prose, not verse (in prose the lines go all the way to
right margin).The line breaks of the original are irrelevant in
paraphrasing.
34. • Write modern prose, rearranging word order and
sentence structure as necessary. As far as possible, within
the limits of commonsense, avoid using the words of the
original. Finding new words to express the meaning is a
test of what you are understanding.
• Write coherent syntax, imitating that of the original if you
can do so with ease, otherwise breaking it down into
easier sentence forms.
• Write in the same grammatical person and tense as the
original. If the original is in the first person, as many
poems are, so must the paraphrase be.
35. • Spell out explicitly what the original implies or conveys by
hints. It follows that a paraphrase will normally be longer
than the original.
• Spell out explicitly all the possible meanings if the original is
ambiguous (saying two or more things at once), as many
poems are.
• Use square brackets to mark off any additional elements you
find it necessary to insert for the coherence of the meaning.
The brackets will show that these bits are editorial --
contributed by you for the sake of clarity but not strictly
"said" in the original. An example might be some implied
transitional phrase or even an implied thought that occurs to
the speaker causing a change in tone or feeling.
36. Where had I heard this wind before
Change like this to a deeper roar?
What would it take my standing there for,
Holding open a restive door,
Looking down hill to a frothy shore?
Summer was past and the day was past.
Sombre clouds in the west were massed.
Out on the porch’s sagging floor,
Leaves got up in a coil and hissed,
Blindly striking at my knee and missed.
Something sinister in the tone
Told me my secret my be known:
Word I was in the house alone
Somehow must have gotten abroad,
Word I was in my life alone,
Word I had no one left but God.
“Bereft”
by Robert Frost
37. In what place before had this deepening
howl of the storm-breezes reached my
ears?What would the wind think of my
presence just inside, as I grasped the open
door which tried to swing back and forth in
its gusts, while I gazed beyond the sloping
lawn to the waves foaming on the beach?
The hottest season was gone; night had
come. Solemn thunderheads gathered
densely where the sun had set. Beyond me
on the slumping boards of the veranda,
dried foliage from the trees gathered into a
whirlwind and made a sound like a snake,
then sightlessly leaped at my legs and fell
away without touching me.That snaky
sound held something evil that made me
realize that the thing I had hoped to keep
private must have been broadcast: the fact
that I was at home by myself must have
gotten out, how I don’t know – the fact that
I was by myself in my daily existence, that I
had only the Deity with me.
“Bereft” by Robert Frost
Where had I heard this wind before
Change like this to a deeper roar?
What would it take my standing there
for,
Holding open a restive door,
Looking down hill to a frothy shore?
Summer was past and the day was past.
Sombre clouds in the west were
massed.
Out on the porch’s sagging floor,
Leaves got up in a coil and hissed,
Blindly striking at my knee and missed.
Something sinister in the tone
Told me my secret my be known:
Word I was in the house alone
Somehow must have gotten abroad,
Word I was in my life alone,
Word I had no one left but God.
38. 1. A paraphrase is written in prose form.
1. Every word and phrase of the poem is
accounted for in the paraphrase.
1. The paraphrase deals with the literal
meaning of the poem’s language. Any
clarification is placed in square brackets.
39. HOMEWORK
Read: William Carlos Williams “The
Red Wheelbarrow,” and “To Elsie.”
Read: Ezra Pound “In a Station of the
Metro.”
Post #10: Choose one
1. QHQ on “In a Station of the Metro”
2. A new critical reading of “In a
Station of the Metro”
Post #11: Choose one
1. QHQ on either of the William’s
poems for today’s reading.
2. Paraphrase “The Red Wheelbarrow”
or 6-9 lines from “To Elsie.”
