Final Review: Wuthering Heights. Compulsory Question

DO NOT DEPEND ON THIS REVIEW. YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR DEFINITIONS, POWERPOINT SLIDES, CHAPTERS, AND THE NOVELS!

Final Review: Wuthering Heights. Compulsory Question

• British morality/righteous home. John Ruskin commentary page 339
• Victorian domestic values. Room distribution and space.
• Perfect home and realities of urban life.
• Imperial trade, industrial world, the British Empire
• Victorian saw a great rise in reading. Discuss
• How was India represented for people at home? (345)
• The Empire was a mirror- Britain saw itself as moral, righteous, superior. British mission abroad
• Critical reception of Wuthering Heights (352-353)
• Setting of WH and the landscapes.
• Understand differences between the Grange and WH.
• Narrators and their multiple voices, differences in narration. Unreliability of accounts.
• Understand Genealogy and its significance: race, class, family.
• Heathcliff as Byronic hero (363)
• Romance and Realism, Hybrid genre. Connections with Gothic novels.
• George Henry Lewes’s critical view (373)
• Heathcliff represents abroad, the other, the foreigner. Angel of revenge?
• The uncanny. How it defamilarises, turns home into abroad.
• Heathcliff’s monomania.
• Gilbert and Gubar’s feminist view (395)
• The novel as elemental conflict between nature and civilization.
• Importance of Domestic reading. Give examples, Activity 4 page 403
• WH and hybridity as a genre.
• WH and importance of Bronte’s life. How is it different from other writers?
• How can WH be read as a Gothic tale, as tragedy, as Romance, as Realist novel?
• Catherine’s diaries.
• How Heathcliff himself can be read as the uncanny. Other uncanny elements in the novel?
• Theology, heaven and hell, and Catherine’s view. The idea of the afterlives of the protagonists.

Doyle and Stevenson’s review- available on LMS.

James Joyce, Dubliners:

Our theme is the 20th century City. Since Plato, city has been Inspiration for Western lit. Romanticism was against the city, but Renaissance wasn’t and by 1920 the Western world was more urban. Economic developments generated this, cultural, social and artistic.

Literary period concept: historical events and cultural artifacts relate to one another, we place texts next to each other. Give examples: romantic period, renaissance. Literary period has similar themes, expectations, and styles. But this does not mean that it was set in stone. It just means the majority of authors followed a certain way.

Dubliners is a significant city text, It aided in the development of the genre of the short story

1907- all the stories had been completed. Dublin rich mixture of radicalism and conservatism. WHAT Could the effect of that BE? Dublin’s relationship with modernity- it expanded slowly in comparison to other cities, retaining some aspect of her rural side.

City draws the stories together, and the collection is named after those who live in it. Certain intimacy in the names as titles.

What IS THE POINT OF A FIRST PERSON NARRATOR? The narrator doesn’t know much, the narrator is limited. Point of view.In ‘The sisters’ child narrator, limited point of view.

Modernism/urbanism- new and experimental lit. DUBLIN AS the site of the Modern. George Simmel’s essay, money and how the city can cause conflicts Talk about metropolitan city, psychological effects. The figure of the flaneur = the wanderer, the observer. Space, walking, and the effect of space. Streets- place of financial/social exchange. Affects the individual.

The artist and the city: Critic Richard Lehan. For him these are two major themes, found in the flaneur, in the observer. The setting of the city is urban, but also very alienating for the human subject. (24)

In Dubliners the city is constructed in a way where there is a lot space, wide streets, open location. This places the subject as smaller, distant and alienated.

Structure: Joyce wanted to arrange Dubliners in a certain way: pg 26 childhood, adolescence, maturity, public life.

Joyce’s interest in modernity, because he is a modernist author, always experimenting with technique and style, and taboo subject matter. There is always a mix between REALISM and SYMBOLISM.

SHORT STORY AS A FAVORED GENRE- Reasons?

1) Signaled distance from the 19th century novel, publishers favored it. 2) Because it is short, there is more focus on ANATOMISING the city , to dissect it in order to analyze it.

The stories speak to each other, even though they were written as separate stories originally. Then he decided to put them together. The first two stories, THE SISTERs, and an Encounter, are about childhood perspective, a narrow vision, unclear, the need to escape from adult life and remain a child. It is ALWAYS about INNCER CONCIOUSNESS of characters. There is hardly any PLOT, any ending or conclusion or Resolution.

Women’s role, women’s status in all of the stories.Compare/contrast.

You are responsible for all of the stories and activities except ‘Two Gallants’

Third-person narrator and first-person. Free Indirect Style (44-45)

Epiphany as Joyce’s technique. Consider it in all of the stories.

‘The Dead’ – longest story and the final concluding one. Gabriel Conroy is the main character, everything revolves around him.

Activity 4, setting of the story, and the importance of the party as a micro-image of society. It is an annual event.

The past and present, modernity and traditions, caught between both.

The theme of paralysis is seen in all of the stories, but very strongly in ‘The Dead.’

Dancing at Lughnasa:

Memory: Fluid and individual. History: structured and factual.

Memory: the individual. History: the collective

Activity one: memory, theatrical devices to show the theme of memory. The childhood self of Micheal, not present on stage- the idea of absence-presence.

Narrative monologue of Michael. Different kinds of memories, memory has memories in it.

Each character has their own past.

Jack’s memories of life in Uganda.

History: August 1936, imaginary village of Ballybeg. The historical events are outside of the nation.

Everyday details merge with memories and history. These details have a place in historical narratives.

Memory is more important than history. (pg 248)

Autobiographical element (250)

Allusions to Russian authors, allusions to the ‘memory play’ by Tennessee Williams. The parallel is in the usage of a narrator looking back.

Memory play, a new form. Define

Dealing with reality- domestic setting, but there are distortions of memory and gaps.

Consider the realistic features of the play. Activity three (252)

Nostlagic characters. Memories are unrealistic and untainted at times. Narrator reconstructs the realistic picture of the Mundy household in 1936. MEMORY AS INTERPRETIVE STUCTURE.

Migration deeply rooted in Irish colonial/postcolonial history and collective/individual memory.

Consider how the characters are migrants in the play.

Idea of being torn, loyal to one’s past, but also an obligation to the self and the future.

Jack’s alienation from Ballybeg.Cultural displacement.

Migration definition and understanding of home and allegiance page 256.

Traditional lifestyle and modernity.

Postcolonial dimension of the play, Jack’s involvement in Uganda (257-58).

Women’s roles, gender issues, the sisters’ unmarried state – consider the socio-historical background.

The home of the play is not Ireland in 1936, but specifically the Mundy household.

Home as a migrant memory.

Dance in the play. Expressive of subconscious desires.

The radio, modern mechanical instrument representing modernity.

Stage directions, importance of costumes, set, props. Performance.

Language, colloquial everyday.

Similarities and differences between the sisters’ speech patterns. Pg 265

Use of lighting, delivery of lines to set the mood, tone, and atmosphere.

Michael’s closing monologue. Activity 2, pg 268.

Memory has a kind of agency, very powerful. Poetic speech.Repetitions, hypnotic rhythm. The word ‘dancing’ appears four times. Consider the last line “Dancing as if language no longer existed because words were no longer necessary.”