JC2

• Week 4: Room Chapter 16-17 / Submit CA1 (Poetry)
• Week 5: Room Chapters 16-20
• Week 6: Poetry (Bring marked assignment and 2010 set of poems) / Submit first draft of CA2 (Room)
• Week 7: Poetry / Submit final draft of CA2 (Room)
• Week 8: The Birthday Party Introduction
• Week 9: TBP Act One: Dialogue and Power
• Week 10: TBP Act One: Dialogue and Power
• Week 1: TBP Act One: Comedy and the Absurd
• Week 2: TBP Act One: Comedy and the Absurd

JC1

• Week 7: Introduction to literary analysis
• Week 8: Prose analysis
• Week 9: Prose analysis
• Week 10:  Prose analysis

TS:

Cecil is constructed as a highly ironic character  to reflect the very contradictions of the Edwardian age and its sense of ‘progress’.

How:

(Feature / method)
- The disjunct between Cecil’s first line in the novel and the Honeychurches’ reaction highlights the polarity between Cecil’s self-perception and Forster’s portrayal:
- his Italian reference to a Manzoni novel (where English would suffice) may impress one as a mark of refinement and spirit…

(Effect)
- but it perplexes and distances his ‘anxi[ous]’ audience instead, as it does Forster’s reader.
- Asked to imagine Cecil as a ‘Gothic statue’ and representative of ‘celibacy’ a few lines prior to this, the reader sees him in a reverse light: Cecil’s use of Italian concretises his coldness and disconnection from people.

Why

(Purpose of comparing Cecil to Gothic statue)
The narrator suggests to the reader that it is only when Cecil is direct, speaking in simple English (not unlike George) that that he becomes ‘more human’.

(Link back to Edwardian England and progress)
- Cecil’s pretensions towards ‘Italian-ness’ and passion are his and Edwardian England’s precise failing: it is the true emotion of ‘flush[es]’ and ‘smile[s]’, rather than knowledge of Italian and Italian literature, that we should celebrate as ‘human’ progress.

To recap, we are briefly outlining our ‘What’, ‘How’ and ‘Why’ in our topic sentence. For the body of our paragraph, we are presenting and analysing evidence / features, also taking into account the effect on the reader / audience (HOW). Finally, we can consider the purpose of these effects and elucidate the writer’s concern or.. ‘message’ (WHY).

1. Read, analyse and annotate both poems. I cannot emphasise enough the need to pen down your thoughts on the meaning and effects of the 2 poems. You may wish to use this rather simplistic / obvious Poetry Comparison Guide.

2. You have two options: compare and contrast both poems OR  write about ONLY one poem – the one you find ‘easier’ or more accessible. I would recommend that weaker students still struggling to analyse the poem do the latter: (i) this strategy will allow me to guide your comparison later on; (ii) this also encourages you to analyse one poem with both breadth and depth. Have it TYPEWRITTEN in Arial 11 / Garamond 12 / Times 12. 

3. Title your file YourName.doc / YourName.pages and send it to my email address (marc kenji lim at gmail dot com); the DEADLINE is now 27th January, Fri so you may choose to complete this before, after or during the CNY festivities. Send it to me as soon as you can please.

4. For those completing the single-poem task, some help with regard to the ‘other poem’ will be given to you. Your second deadline for a comparison piece is 10th Feb, Fri.

*

Checklist of features you must analyse

• Title, opening and closing words/lines
• Language / diction
• Tone / mood
• Imagery and motifs
• Form (Repetition, Rhythm, Rhyme, Structure, Sound)

General guiding questions

• Avoid picturing a REALISTIC scenario (oh, the persona is whispering into her lover’s ear) or telling me what might actually be happening. Your job is to analyse and appreciate HOW a hopeful love is presented and in what light.
• What kind of hopeful love is being portrayed in the poem you have selected? What words show this attitude?
• What is the mood created by the imagery? What is the ‘feel’ of the poem?
• Is there any progression in the poem, especially in terms of tone / attitude? (e.g. is the end of the poem more hopeful than the start?)
• In what way does the title/tone/diction/imagery/form suggest about the persona / speaker’s hopeful love?

Pet peeves

• Please use ‘speaker’ and ‘persona’ (pl. personae). Use ‘Clanchy’ or ‘Oswald’ when you are describing the poets’ use of language, style and form.
• Use inverted commas to indicate titles of poems. ‘Ballad of a Shadow’ and ‘Spell’.

(Sometimes barbed) comments and instructions for 2T02 and 2T03 can be downloaded by clicking below:

• 2T02 New View
• 2T03 New View

Relevant readings and notes for your consideration. There’s probably more tucked away in the recesses of this blog:

•  Secondary reading
• Notes on Characters
• Notes on Style / Concerns

I would suggest a first draft or outline be completed by Week 5 or the start of Week 6; this will allow me to provide you feedback – written or face-to-face consultation – and you to improve your piece. The deadline I am setting for your  final draft by 17th Feb, Fri (Week 7). Stay tuned because I will be uploading the final essays. I know I can’t wait. Let’s make it worth our while.

For our first lesson, do have your study copy of A Room with a View with you. We will hopefully get to learn a little about you and me (just a little, rest assured) before recovering what we know about Forster’s novel. We will take it slow, but not too slow either, as some of you do have quite a bit to catch up in terms of literary analysis and a decent enough understanding of Room.

Can I also make the gentle request that everyone have a Google account, so that you can make use of Google Docs for the whole year? This, trust me, will help me help you to the fullest extent. Oh and yes, prepare to give your Lit rep the money (about $30) for a published copy for exams and a CJC study copy of Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party by the first tutorial if you haven’t already. I prepared the latter and it is, at the moment, an ‘exclusive’. After 2 years of teaching the text, I feel confident enough.

See you when the (often cruel) timetable decides!

Looking forward to class (kind of),
Mr Lim

P.S. Access the E-TEXT of A Room with a View to grab your 5 pieces of evidence!

Claude McKay

Since the death of Kim Jong-il, images of weeping North Koreans have filled the western media. But is their grief real? Some have suggested that the hysterical displays of mourning were staged, others have come up with an even shorter answer: brainwashing. But what does that mean? It’s a homecoming of sorts. The word “brainwashing” was coined in the Korean war: it was CIA man Edward Hunter’s attempt to explain alarming footage of captured US personnel supporting communism and denouncing the west. The soldiers had undergone a process of “thought-reform” in Chinese prison camps. Made famous by The Manchurian Candidate, this mysterious process, it seemed, could wipe a mind clean of previous loyalties, achieving total, programmable control.

For westerners raised to believe in strength of mind and individual free will, brainwashing was a nightmare. Zombies and demonic possession have staying power in our cultures for good reason: they represent the terror of mind control. And as possession was all about black magic, so brainwashing reeks of dark and dangerous science. What else could explain those US soldiers’ behaviour but mind-altering technology? A horrifying idea, but also encouraging for the US military, since technologies can be captured and transferred.

Except that, even in secretive North Korea, we can be pretty sure there is no such technology. To date. Neuroscience is developing so fast that brainwashing machines may yet appear, but they are not responsible for the grief in Pyongyang. So what, apart from propaganda, is?

The thought-reform that terrified the west did not use new technology but old psychology, cleverly applied. Chinese culture, less individualistic than its western opponents’, was more aware of how groups can manipulate individuals. They used that social power on American prisoners and in their own societies. We see it now at work in North Korea. In this sense, brainwashing does exist. People can be made to believe things that clearly aren’t good for them.

There’s a trap, of course. Can the west really know what’s best for the North Koreans? If “brainwashing” were some semi-magical mind-wipe, then maybe. But it isn’t. It’s more like psychological abuse, whose victims need careful treatment but haven’t lost their minds. Brainwashing simply pushes to extremes persuasion techniques developed over centuries, using a highly coercive, controlled environment. A prison camp is ideal; an authoritarian dictatorship can come close. The intense social pressures make adopting – or appearing to adopt – new beliefs the easiest course of action. Believers always have reasons, however strange their beliefs may seem to us.

The five basic techniques use isolation, control, uncertainty, repetition and emotions. They work because our brains are not static and self-sufficient, but constantly updating information about our environment (including our bodies), creating minds and generating behaviours. Change the incoming data, control the behaviours, and you can change the minds.

First, move the person somewhere new. Isolation immediately changes the brain’s inputs, weakening old beliefs. This is why cults often stop their members talking to friends and family. North Korea’s population has been remarkably isolated for decades.

Second, control the new environment, especially inputs that might trigger former beliefs. Surround the person with believers, make sure conversations include approved topics only. Ban the media and internet, or govern what they show. Unsettle the body’s inputs too, with pain, a different diet, hard labour or sleep deprivation. And control behaviour. Marching, rote learning, vast public rituals.

Use uncertainty. We humans hate it, especially when we feel threatened. Challenge old beliefs until they seem ridiculous; any idea can seem weird if you push it hard enough. Chinese thought-reform used intensive criticism. People wrote their thoughts in diaries, which were subjected to group analysis: a hunt for signs of ideological deviance, which could be extremely hostile and psychologically devastating. I expect Pyongyang still relies on similar methods.

Use repetition. Brainwashing doesn’t happen fast; it takes time and effort. Chinese dissidents, sent for re-education far from home, could be interned for years. Lectures and criticism sessions lasted for hours, day after day. The pressure builds up.

Finally, use strong emotions. Punish when former beliefs are mentioned; reward support for new ones. Use love and disgust, the most effective of social emotions.

Combined over years, these techniques are immensely powerful. Yet even North Korea’s control is far from total. The more the regime is seen as a source of uncertainty and hardship, rather than a protection, the likelier it is to crumble – and that collapse could be very rapid. Not all the tears are genuine.

But nor are they all fake. Kim Jong-il offered stability. However he abused his long-suffering people, the fear they must now be feeling is surely real.

Both poems initially seem detached from the idea of loss in an abandoned room. The persona in A begins with a seemingly indifferent tone and we are first clued into this by the title, ‘Rooms’, which has a lack of adjectival adornment and sets a very direct, matter-of-fact tone. The persona’s listing of ‘the room at..’ and ‘the.. room’ suggests a lack of interest in each of these rooms she has once inhabited, counting them in an almost dismissive or at least secondary way. The use of the article ‘the’ instead of determiners that would demonstrate her relationship with these nameless rooms (for instance, personal pronouns like ‘my room’) heightens the sense of detachment. This is further emphasised by line 6 – the fixed expression ‘for good or for ill’ and the following simple sentence ‘things died’ is similarly emotionless and direct in expression which betrays an ambivalent attitude on the part of the persona towards the lack of physical life in the abandoned rooms. This detachment is mirrored in Poem B’s first stanza, even though the persona in Poem B is not as blase. The persona portrays himself as an observer in the abandoned room, through the lack of first-person pronouns like in Poem A. Instead, autonomy and expression seems to be given to the abandoned room itself and dynamic verbs such as ‘win them back’ and ‘it withers so’ are used to describe deterioration of the empty house and its physical state. This metaphorical yearning personified room seems to express intensifies the loss of a physical or human presence. This is reinforced by the opposition between ‘it’ and ‘them’ – the physical structure of the room and its lack of inhabitants. Like in  Poem A, the physical emptiness of abandoned rooms is addressed in a somewhat detached way, albeit the lack of personal engagement, unlike in Poem A, serves to emphasise the absence of physical life as something to be bemoaned rather than an expected occurrence in life.

However, there is a shift in tone in both poems from detachment to a more personally involved one, through which the personae demonstrate a response to the aspect of abandoned rooms which affects them. Poem A sees a tonal shift in line 7, with the sudden conjunction ‘but’ and the introduction of a room which is directly related to the persona (‘Where we (two) lie dead’). The parenthetical inclusion of (two) is perhaps a pun relating to the ‘dead things’ as well as highlighting the intimate nature of the persona’s relationship with her partner and this idealised image of two lovers lying dead together is immediately undermined by the next lines, ‘we seem to wake and.. sleep again’, which suggests an emotional disconnect between them, since they ‘might just as well’ be ‘asleep’ to each other. With the persona reference in this part of the poem, the persona seems to progress to a more introspective mood. There is a sense of resignation in her attitude towards the absence of an emotional connection, which is heightened by the helpless comment, ‘just as well’. This sense of resignation turns into wistfulness as she wishes for an end to this emotional absence – a physical absence instead, as alluded in the metaphor of ‘sleep’. There is also a contrast between the ‘ceaseless, maddening.. tide’ of activity and the preferred ‘quieter, dustier bed’. The juxtaposition of active, dynamic life and the sober, peaceful death demonstrates the persona’s preference for physical abandonment rather than the ‘maddening’ emotionless tide of life she is forced to endure in the relationship.

Poem B also sees a change in tone to one of nostalgia in the second stanza, through the conjunction ‘And’. There is a shift in focus from the state of the personified house in the present to the stative image of the past. There is a juxtaposition like in Poem between the ideal and the real – ‘how things ought to be’ and how they are now. The stative images of ‘pictures’ and ‘cutlery’ are significant in their capacity to capture memories of life, as well as their function in social events and the introduction of such images creates nostalgia for the inhabitants who have since ‘abandoned’ the room. ‘The music in the piano stool’ waits to be played and the lost image of ‘That vase’ lingers powerfully as an image of the emptiness of the house – a mere container left unfilled. The persona uses the stative images in contrast to the dynamic first stanza in order to highlight a sense of nostalgia for physical presence, which is contrary to poem A’s use of a similar technique to lament a lack of emotional presence in contrast to the physical.

The rhyme scheme for both poems mirror their tone and their engagement with the room. Poem A has a unique rhyme scheme, with two rhyming couplets in lines 1-2 and 5-6 which deal with death and absence – the ‘slowing down of the heart’ which leads to ‘things (dying’). The rhyme here portrays death as natural and even ideal, not ‘maddening’ but ‘quieter’ and regular. The last four lines where the tonal shift occurs sees an ‘ABAB’ rhyme scheme instead, suggesting a reshuffling of sorts – a disconnect in this idea of death, which is met in its rhyming line. This suggests the poet’s emotional estrangement in conflict with her physical intimacy. In contrast, poem B uses a seemingly regular ‘ABABA’ rhyme scheme in both stanzas. However, in stanza 2 the persona involvement and nostalgia is brought out through the use of half and eye rhymes in place of full rhymes in ‘as’, ‘was’ and ‘vase’. This subtle variation in rhyme scheme indicates a break away from the even more impersonal tone of stanza 1 to the moer personal engagement with her partner, and this idealised image of two lovers lying dead together is immediately undermined by the next line with the abandoned room in stanza 2.

In conclusion, both poems explore the different types of abandonment of a room – the emotional and physical absence of its inhabitants – and responds to each respectively. Poem A contrast death or physical abandonment of the room as a preferable alternative to life without emotional fulfilment and poem B depicts th elack of movement in a room as a death of the room and the familial relationships it represents.

Celine Ong
2T11

What is interesting in both poems is the point of view from which abandoned rooms are portrayed in relation to the moo of both poems. Poem A is written from the first-person perspective, as seen through the use of the first-person pronoun ‘I’ in ‘I remember’ as well as the inclusive ‘we’. Hence, we expect Poem A to be more personal. However, the use of the plural noun ‘Rooms’ as the title is vague and more denotative than connotative, illustrating the lack of attachment to the abandoned rooms in the poem. This is in contrast to Poem B where the third-person perspective is used, yet is mor epersonal than A. Through the use of the noun ‘House’ in the title which is connotative and reminiscent of a place that is close to our hearts, hence showing a greater attachment to the abandoned rooms than in A. The degree of attachment to the ‘House’ in B is further emphasised through the personification of  the abandoned room through emotive words such as ‘sad’ and ‘withers’ which imbue it with a life-like quality. In contrast, the lack of attachment in A is drawn out further from the use if enumeration of ‘the room in.. the room at.. the.. room with’, where the rooms are remembered based on their locations such as ‘Paris’ and ‘Geneva’ which are vast spaces that highlight the abandoned nature of the rooms as nothing more than commonplace and unworthy of further rumination.

The two poems also portray abandoned rooms different with regard to the setting through imagery. Poem A focuses on the location of the rooms such as in ‘Paris’ and ‘Geneva’ as well as the ‘seaweed smell’ and ‘that ceaseless maddening sound of the tide’ which give a strong sense of location. In addition, the alliteration of the sibilant ‘s’ is used to enhance the quality of auditory and olfactory imagery, showing a greater reminiscence of where the room was and detachment from the abandoned, empty room itself. Poem B, on the other hand, focuses on the interrior setting of home, evident in ‘What it started as’ and ‘how it was’. The focus on the interior through the use of visual imagery is in contrast to Poem A as various household items are listed. The ‘pictures.. cutlery.. vase’ are seemingly insignificant but hold great memories in the persona’s mind as the poem ends somewhat abruptly. The references to ‘turn again to’, ‘see how it was’ and ‘Look at the’ reflect a desire to look back and return to the abandoned room in question, reflecting a sense of attachment missing in Poem A.

Both poems portray the abandonment of rooms as a result of death and ageing. This is done through human imagery in Poem A, which says that ‘rooms… had their part in the steady slowing down of the heart’, where the assonance of the ‘o’ vowel further slows down the pace of the line, mimicking the ‘slowing down’ of the room’s ‘heart’.  Accompanied by the use of natural imagery such as ‘the sun’ and ‘rain’, the abandonment of rooms are portrayed as natural as ageing, part of a larger cycle of nature itself. Furthermore, the persona in A speaks of the cyclical nature of waking and sleeping in ‘The room where we (two) lie dead’, which could be a metaphorical death referring to the transient presence of people and by extension, the inevitable abandonment and emptiness of rooms. Here, the figurative ‘deaths’ of intimacy and of the room itself are treated with a lack of attachment, as the many images are once again employed to paint the surroundings and people within these rooms, rather than the abandoned room itself. On the other hand, Poem B focuses on the very stasis within the abandoned room, in the use of the present tense in ‘House is so sad. It stays as it was left.’. The idea that ‘You can see how it was’ highlights the unchanged nature of the abandoned room through the modal verb ‘can’ indicating possibility, even though it has ‘long fallen wide’. The appeal to ‘You’ provides a further sense of closeness to the room itself, where the long-drawn vowels in the line present the abandonment of rooms not just as inevitable as in Poem A, but also a dreaded state not dissimilar to death and ageing.

The mood and tonal shifts in the portrayal of abandoned rooms are reflected in the form and changing rhyme scheme of both poems. Poem A is a single verse has its AAB rhyme scheme changed to that of ABAB from line 7, reflecting the shift in tone from reminiscent to reflective as the poem progresses. However, the single verse poem emphasises the general detachment from abandoned rooms despite the caesuras which underscore a slight reluctance to let go of memories before the tonal shift. In Poem B however, the shift in tone from reflective to reminiscent is seen in the line break between the first and second stanzas. With the rhyme scheme constant, reflecting the unchanging nature of home, the mood intensifies as the sentences in the second verse become shorter.

Rachelle Toh
2T11

Ellen. My wife: someone I feel I understand less well than a foreign writer dead for a hundred years. Is this an aberration, or is it normal? Books say: she did this because. Life says: she did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren’t. I’m not surprised some people prefer books. Books make sense of life. The only problem is that the lives they make sense of are other people’s lives, never your own.

It has become clear to the examiners in recent years that candidates are finding it increasingly difficult to distinguish between Art and Life. Everyone claims to understand the difference, but perceptions vary greatly. For some, Life is rich and creamy, made according to an old peasant recipe from nothing but natural products, whilst Art is a pallid commercial confection, consisting mainly of artificial colourings and flavourings. For others, Art is the truer thing, full, bustling and emotionally satisfying, while Life is worse than the poorest novel: devoid of narrative, people by bores and rogues, short on wit, long on unpleasant incidents and leading a painfully predictable denouement. Adherents of the latter view tend to cite Logan Pearsall Smith: ‘People say that life is the thing; but I prefer reading.’

-

From The Sense of an Ending

We knew from our reading of great literature that Love involved Suffering, and would happily have got in some practice at Suffering if there was an implicit, perhaps even logical, promise that Love might be on its way.

This was another of our fears: that Life wouldn’t turn out to be like Literature. Look at our parents – were they the stuff of Literature? At best, they might aspire to the condition of onlookers and bystanders, part of a social backdrop against which real, true, important things could happen. Like what? The things Literature was all about: love, sex, morality, friendship, happiness, suffering, betrayal, adultery, good and evil, heroes and villains, guilt and innocence, ambition, power, justice, revolution, war, fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, the individual against society, success and failure, murder, suicide, death, gGod. And barn owls. Of course, there were other sorts of literature – theoretical, self-referential, lachrymosely autobiographical – but they were just dry wanks. Real literature was about psychological, emotional and social truth as demonstrated by the actions and reflections of its protagonists; the novel was about character developed over time.

[...]

Does character develop over time? In novels, of course it does: otherwise there wouldn’t be much of a story. But in life? I sometimes wonder. Our attitudes and opinions change, we develop new habits and eccentricities; but that’s something different, more like decoration. Perhaps character resembles intelligence, except that character peaks a little later: between twenty and thirty, say. And after that, we’re just stuck with what we’ve got. We’re on our own. If so, that would explain a lot of lives, wouldn’t it? And also – if this isn’t too grand a word – our tragedy.