Ch 33

What does it say about fiction?/How does it relate to Ch 14?

-fiction=life

it does more than life itself can show

-want something new that still connects with reality

-Fiction as an augmented reality

"It is with fiction as with religion: it should present another world, and yet one to which we feel the tie" pg 218

-people in a fiction- must be different than those in the real world

-inconsistency of characters in the book

-inconsistencies of deception and life.

"...proprieties will not allow people to act themselves with that unreserve permitted to the stage; so in books of fiction, they look not only for more entertainment but, at bottom, even more for reality, more than real life itself can show" pg 217

Ch. 22 (Primarily Pgs. 150-155)

What is Pitch’s problem with the intelligence officer?

- The intelligence officer “talks too much” and is a man of only puns

Pitch says, “Ah, you are a talking man – what I call a wordy man. You talk, talk” (Pg. 151). And “But is analogy argument? You are a punster…you pun with ideas as another man may with words” (Pg. 150).

- Pitch seems to believe that the Intelligence Officer doesn’t really say anything meaningful, but rather dances around with words to sound “intelligent”

“Pun away; but even accepting your analogical pun, what does is amount to” (Pg. 151)

- Pitch believes the Intelligence Officer is more of a bs artist

Pitch says, “This knowledge of yours, which you haven’t enough knowledge to know how to make a right use of, it should be taken from you” (Pg. 152)

-Bottom line: Pitch is revealing the Intelligence Officer as a sophist instead of a rhetorician and insults him saying the Intelligence Officer knows nothing

Ch 33

Ch. 33

What does it say about fiction?

-critics might state characters not realistic but M later justifies with the idea that our appearances do not actually describe our true nature

-free from social boundaries

-appearance vs reality

-hate reality because it is boring

-want reality more real than what it truly is, free from social boundaries

-relatable but abstract to prove a point

-middle of bottom paragraph

-“in real life proprieties will not let them act out as themselves”

-fiction explores reality better than non fiction because people do not actually reflect themselves in nature.

-reality is somewhat unreal --> fiction is real version of reality

- you can only be true to the self in fiction because it seems to have no boundaries due and judgments that are placed upon the self

-Melville needs to justify truthful characters over and over again

-M is complaining that he is not being published

How it relates to chapter 14?

- from the narrator

- have tautology for a title

- address inconsistent nature of character

- used as justifications and not edifications

-people’s actions do not reflect reality of characters

-relates because they are both talking about how characters do not match true “self”

-“DON’T HATE APPRECIATE”

-does not have significance to the story but it tells a great deal about authors opinions

-it is break from the story so people are not inundated with all the ideas presented

-ch 14 address multiple characters

-ch 33 address cosmopolitan

Essay #2 Deadline Extended

Please note: as announced in class yesterday, the Franklin essay is now officially due next Wednesday, Oct.27.

For Monday, continue reading Melville, chpts.23-39. Next class we'll talk about race, character, and whether this book is really a novel or not.

Israel Potter (1855) - Benjamin Franklin as confidence man

[Melville, Herman. Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile. Ed. Harrison Hayford. Northwestern UP, 2000.]

[Benjamin Franklin speaks to the novel's title character, Israel Potter:]

"My good friend," said the man of gravity [Franklin], glancing scrutinizingly upon his guest, "have you not in your time, undergone what they call hard times? Been set upon, and persecuted, and very ill entreated by some of your fellow-creatures?"
[Potter]"That I have, Doctor; yes indeed."
[Franklin] "I thought so. Sad usage has made you sadly suspicious, my honest friend. An indiscriminate distrust of human nature is the worst consequence of a miserable condition, whether brought about by innocence or guilt. And though want of suspicion more than want of sense, sometimes leads a man into harm: yet too much suspicion is as bad as too little sense. The man you met, my friend, most probably, had no artful intention; he knew just nothing about you or your heels; he simply wanted to earn two sous by brushing your boots." (40-41)

Pierre (1852) - The author as swindler

[Melville, Herman. Pierre, or the Ambiguities. Ed. Harison Hayford. Northwestern UP, 1995.]

He tore open the left-hand letter:---

"SIR:---You are a swindler. Upon the pretense of writing a popular novel for us, you have been receiving cash advances from us, while passing through our press the sheets of a blasphemous rhapsody, filched from the vile Atheists, Lucian and Voltaire. Our great press of publications has hitherto prevented our slightest inspection of our reader's proofs of your book. Send not another sheet to us. Our bill for printing thus far, and also for our cash advances, swindled out of us by you, is now in the hands of our lawyer, who is instructed to proceed with instant rigor.
       (Signed)                                               STEEL, FLINT & ASBESTOS." (356)

Opening scene from "Benito Cereno" (1855)

[Melville, Herman. "Benito Cereno." Great Short Works of Herman Melville. HarperCollins, 1969.]

"The morning was one particular to that coast. Everthing was mute and calm; everything gray. The sea, though undulated into long roods of swells, seemed fixed, and was sleeked at the surface like waved lead that has cooled and set in the smelter's mold. The sky seemed a gray surtout. Flights of troubled gray fowl, kith and kin with flights of troubled gray vapors among which they were mixed, skimmed low and fitfully over the waters, as swallows over meadows before storms. Shadows present, foreshadowing deeper shadows to come." (239)

Samuel Otter on Melville's Anatomies

[Otter, Samuel. Melville's Anatomies. U of California P, 1999.]

"My claims about Melville have been shaped by theoretical accounts of the anatomy provided by Frye and by Mikhail Bakhtin: the heterogeneous, omnivorous, encyclopedic, rhetorically experimental, stylistically dense form, in which linguistic features--diction, syntax, metaphor--become the vehicle for intellectual inquiry. According to Bakhtin, these features express orientations toward society, time, nation, and tradition that are laid bare in the literary anatomy. I use the term anatomy to describe the material analysis of consciousness conducted by Melville [...]. The relentless borrowings and turnings in Melville's prose give heft to thought: the incorported passages, incessant allusions, layered symbols, and eerie personifications. The excess in Melville's anatomies derives, in part, from the scope and reach of this task. Melville analyzes what Raymond Williams has called 'structures of feeling,' the complex dynamics through which form and response shape meaning and value." (5) 

Northrop Frye on the "Anatomy" as literary genre

[Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton UP, 1957.]

"[The anatomy or "Menippean satire"] deals less with people as such than with mental attitudes. Pedants, bigots, cranks, parvenus, virtuousi, enthusiasts, rapacious and incompetent professional men of all kinds, are handled in terms of their occupational approach to life as distinct from their social behavior. The Menippean satire [or anatomy] thus resembles the confession in its ability to handle abstract ideas and theories, and differs from the novel in its characterization, which is stylized rather than naturalistic, and presents people as mouthpieces of the ideas they represent." (309)

Sharon Cameron on Melville's characters and equivocation

[Cameron, Sharon. Impersonality: Seven Essays. U of Chicago P, 2007.]

[on character]
In The Confidence Man character is "past finding out" not only because its variations and inconsistencies can't be accommodated by the "fixed principles" of "phrenology" or a "psychology" (equally primitive in Melville's formulation), but also because some element determining character lies outside the conceptual borders by which we understand it to be delimited. Thus in The Confidence Man, one exchange--"Where are you? What am I? Nobody knows who anybody is," which begins as a parody of the initial sentences of Emerson's "Divinity School Address"--concludes in an irresolution that can't be dismissed as parody: "The data which life furnishes, toward forming a true estimate of" character, "are as insufficient to that end as in geometry one side given would be to determining the triangle." Melville's image raises a question of whether what is missing is more data of the same kind (more characterological data) or whether what is missing is data beyond the elements that are specific to characters and persons. While the image of the triangle suggests the former, the radical openness of that triangle, its reduction to a line without the specification of the length of the sides, suggests the latter. For although the sides must be lines, they need not be lines of the same length. And without their specification nothing closes character off from what might lie outside of it. (180-181)

[on the narrator's use of equivocation]
"[Melville's] sentences identify qualities, expressions, and states, while calling into question the states being identified, which cannot be posited outside the negations, but which retain their residue. One point to make about such sentences is that they at once assert and retract assertion, speak and undo speech." (183)

No Office Hours -Monday, Oct. 18

Dear students,

I am rescheduling my office hours for this week so that you all have time to discuss the graded drafts for Essay #2. There will be a sign-up sheet distributed in class on Monday where you will be able to make appointments with me.

Sorry for the inconvenience. -John

Updated Syllabus and Reading Schedule

Week Seven
10/11 passive voice / thesis workshop

10/13 Thesis and Draft of Essay #2 Due / read Melville, Confidence Man chpt.1-3 (pg.7-24) / transitions workshop

Week Eight
10/18 Revision of Essay #1 Due / read Melville chpt.4-18 (pg.25-112) / Writing Analytically 275-294

10/20 read Melville chpt.19-24 (pg.113-167)

Week Nine
10/25 Essay #2 Due / read Melville chpt.25-39 (168-244)

10/27 read Melville chpt.39-45 (pt.245-298)

Week Ten (taught by Amira)
11/1 Style exercises / finish Melville

11/3 Marx, "The Fetishism of Commodities..."

Week Eleven (taught by John)
11/8 Benjamin, "The Work of Art ..."

11/10 Benjamin, cont'd

Week Twelve (taught by Amira)
11/15 Horkheimer and Adorno, "The Culture Industry"
11/17 Horkheimer and Adorno, cont'd / Thesis and Draft of Essay #3 Due

Week Thirteen (taught by Amira)
11/22 Horkheimer and Adorno, cont'd / Style exercises
11/23 film screening of Double Indemnity -room/time tba

*note* if you miss class this week because of Thanksgiving, you will be required to rent Double Indemnity and watch it independently over the break*

Week Fourteen
11/29 Quiz on film - discuss film
12/1 discuss film - course wrap up - party?

Due date of Essay #3 TBA

David Waldstreicher on Franklin and the Crisis of Representation

[from Waldstriecher, David. In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: the Making of American Nationalism, 1776-1820. U of North Carolina P, 1997.]

As Thomas Gustafson has observed, "In America, the pursuit of republican ideals has always been accompanied by attacks against false representation and fears of the people becoming the dupes of artful words and demagogues." The Revolution itself had begun as a protest against certain corruptions of political representation. [...] The most obvious problem of representation is the unruly discourse of unvirtuous men. The second is these men themselves. The wrong people are taken for patriots and represent the people in places of public trust. Finally, emissions of paper money epitomize all personal and rhetorical inflations as the clamor for it becomes the most un-American of activities. The themes of this conspiracy--paper money, inflated rhetoric, patriotic poseurs--add up to a post-Revolutionary crisis of representation. Real disorder and elite fears convereged in a cultural obsession with the representation of wealth and property, representation in spoken and written words, and the self-representation of persons.

The representation crisis was real, and the debate it spawned was thus part of the very phenomenon that critics of misrepresentations sought to address. These problems attending representation may be seen as subtexts of the more familiar strugles over political representation. But, since these comments on money, rhetoric, and identity appear right next to if not within constitutional debates in the press, it is more illuminating to consider each of them as individually important, albeit inseparable, aspects of a larger cultural moment in which the rapid expansion of political culture and the capitalist marketplace stretched many familiar ways of representing things, persons, and ideas to their limits and beyond (61).

---------

[Walstrecher diagnoses crisis of representation as the need] for some agreed-upon signs of value amid the reconstitution of political discourse, proprietary wealth, and public identities. In the late eighteenth century, identity itself had become increasingly unstable. Highly mobile young people, particularly young men in cities, found that they could make and remake themselves by manipulating appearances. We have come to associate this kind of identity work with success stories like Benjamin Franklin's, but for every Franklin there were probably many rogues like Stephen Burroughs and outright failures like William Moraley. Anonymity was simultaneously a resource for some and a problem for the culture as a whole. Some could rebuild their reputations from scratch, but everyone had to wonder: Which appearances could one trust? (78).

T.H. Breen on Franklin's love of Fine China (and Beer)

[from Breen, T.H. The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence. Oxford UP 2004]

No one grasped better how Americans communicated claims to social status through possession of the newest fashions than Benjamin Franklin. In his Autobiography he recounted the manner in which market novelty first entered his own Philadelphia household. The culprit in this consumer confession was Franklin's wife. She was the one who wanted to acquire the fashionable objects she had encountered in the homes of her neighbors. But instead of whining about Franklin's failure to provide the family with the goods that would properly reflect his rising social status--after all, he had become one of the richest men in Pennsylvania--she cleverly manipulated her proud husband. Despite his mild protest, Franklin seems to have been fully complicit in this utual experience of self-fashioning. As Franklin remembered the moment,

[here Breen quotes from the Autobiography, in our text the top paragraph of pg.65]

However developed Mrs. Franklin's sense of fashion may have been, it did not come close to matching her husbands's. He knew that correctly interpreting the cues of this new material culture was a key aspect of social mobility. One had to be self-conscious about one's buying habits; consuming British goods could be hard work. In a marvelous letter that Franklin wrote from London to his wife soon after the "China Bowl" incident had occured, he gave an account of his frantic efforts to keep up with or, in this case perhaps, keep ahead of his provincial neighbors. Describing the contents of two large shipping crates dispatched to America, he explained that since he wanted "to show the Difference of Workmanship[,] there is something from all the China Works in England." An itch for "Fancy" compelled him to purchase a china basin "of an odd Colour" as well as four ladles of the "newest, but ugliest, Fashion." Just think, he seemed to suggest, how friends and rivals in America would react when they saw the "little Instrument to Core Apples" and "another to make little Turnips out of great ones." Franklin admitted that he could not resist picking up "56 yards of Cotton printed curiously from Copper Plates, a new Invention." But the central piece--an example of eighteenth-century schlock--was a china jug for beer. "I fell in Love with it at first Sight," Franklin told his wife, "for I thought it look'd like a fat jolly Dame, clean and tidy, with a neat blue and white Calico Gown on, good natur'd and lovely, and [it] put me in mind of--Somebody." One wonders whether Mrs. Franklin appreciated her husband's consumer joke (Breen 154-155).