Vacation assignment

Read the first story from The Interpreter of Maladies ("A Temporary Matter"). You needn't write anything, but be prepared to discuss, especially in terms of the themes of this course.

Poetry Explication

In 400 - 600 words, write an explication of your assigned poem. What is Walcott saying and how is he saying it? You needn't include all of the elements on your chart, but you do need to discuss:
*occasion for the poem/content genre
*mood, tone, diction --> how do words Walcott uses create feeling and/or meaning
*images, metaphors
*specific lines
*structure --> how does the poem differ from beginning to middle to end?
Link all of these to larger themes of the poem. Meaning includes the complex of feelings and ideas.

Group 4: The Season of Phantasmal Peace

Discuss this poem using terms from the Poetry Primer handout. You needn't write about the entire poem, but choose an image or a rhythm device, et al. that catches your interest. Maybe find a challenging line or stanza and propose interpretations. Look up unfamiliar references and words. Be sure to read other students' responses to avoid repetition.

Group 2: The Sea is History

Discuss this poem using terms from the Poetry Primer handout. You needn't write about the entire poem, but choose an image or a rhythm device, et al. that catches your interest. Maybe find a challenging line or stanza and propose interpretations. Look up unfamiliar references and words. Be sure to read other students' responses to avoid repetition.

Group 3: The Gulf

Discuss this poem using terms from the Poetry Primer handout. You needn't write about the entire poem, but choose an image or a rhythm device, et al. that catches your interest. Maybe find a challenging line or stanza and propose interpretations. Look up unfamiliar references and words. Be sure to read other students' responses to avoid repetition.

Group 1: Ruins of a Great House

Discuss this poem using terms from the Poetry Primer handout. You needn't write about the entire poem, but choose an image or a rhythm device, et al. that catches your interest. Maybe find a challenging line or stanza and propose interpretations. Look up unfamiliar references and words. Be sure to read other students' responses to avoid repetition.

Here is the Donne reference: John Donne, poet 1572 - 1631

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were. Any man's death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee. Neither can we call this begging of misery or a borrowing of misery, as though we were not miserable enough of ourselves but must fetch in more from the next house, in taking upon us the misery of neighbors. Truly it were an excusable covetousness if we did; for affliction is a treasure, and scarce any man hath enough of it. No man hath affliction enough that is not matured and ripened by it and made fit for God by that affliction.

From Donne's Meditations: "Devotion"

Life & Times of Michael K Prompt

In each of the articles you read, a critic develops a specific critical lens through which to examine the novel. In your essay you will use this lens to analyze a specific scene or scenes, and thus develop the idea more fully.

- In your introduction, identify the key ideas of the critical lens. Feel free to modify or challenge the lens, formulate your own version of it. I encourage you to find another critical source to augment or challenge your understanding. Either way, develop your thesis based on a theoretical lens. Check out the links on the right to three essays on Beloved to see how to integrate ideas and establish lenses.
- Choose a scene (or scenes) from the novel not covered (or at least not in depth) by the critic. Analyze it through the lens, fleshing out the theory.

Alternatively, you may write an essay about the novel through the lens of Joseph Campbell’s ideas about mythology. Develop a clear thesis and use ample quotations form Campbell and Coetzee.

Other ideas? See me.

Essays should be 3 to 5 pp. You must cite your sources (check out citation examples in the link on the right). Due 12/8.

Campbell: The Power of Myth

Read below. How might we connect these ideas to Life & Times of Michael K? Write a short piece in response to some aspect that engages you (and/or in response to a classmate). Due 11/29

Joseph Campbell: excerpts from The Power of Myth

CAMPBELL: Myths are clues to the spiritual potentialities of the human life…
MOYERS: You changed the definition of a myth from the search for meaning to the experience of meaning.
CAMPBELL: Experience of life. The mind has to do with meaning. What’s the meaning of a flower? There’s a Zen story about a sermon of the Buddha in which he simply lifted a flower. There was only one man who gave him a sign with his eyes that he understood what was said. Now, the Buddha himself is called “the one thus come.” There’s no meaning. What’s the meaning of the universe? What’s the meaning of a flea? It’s just there. That’s it. And your own meaning is that you’re there. We’re so engaged in doing things to achieve purposes of outer value that we forget that the inner value, the rapture that is associated with being alive, is what it’s all about. (p. 5).


CAMPBELL: The dictionary definition of a myth would be stories about gods. So then you have to ask the next question: what is a god? A god is a personification of a motivating power or a value system that functions in human life and in the universe--the powers of your own body and of nature. The myths are metaphorical of spiritual potentiality in the human being, and the same powers that animate our life animate the life of the world. But also there are myths and gods that have to do with specific societies or the patron deities of the society. In other words, there are two totally different orders of mythology. There is the mythology that relates you to your nature and to the natural world, of which you're a part. And there is the mythology that is strictly sociological, linking you to a particular society. You are not simply a natural man, you are a member of a particular group. In the history of European mythology, you can see the interaction of these two systems. Usually the socially oriented system is of a nomadic people who are moving around, so you learn that's where your center is, in that group. The nature-oriented mythology would be of an earth-cultivating people.
Now the biblical tradition is a socially oriented mythology. Nature is condemned … But when nature is thought of as evil, you don’t put yourself in accord with it, you control it, or try to, and hence the tension, the anxiety, the cutting down of forests, the annihilation of native people. And the accent here separates us from nature. (pp. 22-23)


CAMPBELL: The story that we have in the West, so far as it is based on the Bible, is based on a view of the universe that belongs to the first millennium B.C. It does not accord with our concept either of the universe or of the dignity of man. It belongs entirely somewhere else.
We have today to learn to get back into accord with the wisdom of nature and realize again our brotherhood with the animals and with the water and with the sea…

MOYERS: Don’t you think modern Americans have rejected the ancient idea of nature as a divinity because it would have kept us from achieving dominance over nature? How can you cut down trees and uproot the land and turn the rivers into real estate without killing God?

CAMPBELL; Yes, but that’s not simply a characteristic of modern Americans, that is the biblical condemnation of nature which they inherited from their own religion and brought with them, mainly from England. God is separate from nature, and nature is condemned of God. It’s right there in Genesis: we are to be the masters of the world.

But if you will think of ourselves as coming out of the earth, rather than having been thrown in here from somewhere else, you see that we are the earth, we are the consciousness of the earth. These are the eyes of the earth. And this is the voice of the earth.

You can't predict what a myth is going to be any more than you can predict what you're going to dream tonight. Myths and dreams come from the same place. They come from realizations of some kind that have then to find expression in symbolic form. And the only myth that is going to be worth thinking about in the immediate future is one that is talking about the entire planet, not the city, not these people, but the planet, and everybody on it.

This is the ground of what the myth is to be. It's already here: the eye of reason, not of my nationality; the eye of reason, not of my religious community; the eye of reason, not of my linguistic community. Do you see? And this would be the philosophy for the entire planet, not for this group, that group, or the other group.

When you see the earth from the moon, you don't see any divisions there of nations or states. This might be the symbol, really, for the new mythology to come. That is the country that we are going to be celebrating. And those are the people that we are one with. (pp. 40 -41)

Michael K discussion 2

Why is the doctor so obsessed with Michael? What does he want from him? What does he learn?

Michael K discussion 1

What is the role of hunger in the novel? Of time? How do they connect to Michael's "journey?" See p. 68 - 69, 101 - 102, 115.

Life & Times of Michael K reading schedule

11/10 - to p. 70; draft of essay on The Pickup
11/16 - to p. 126, group one (Batjiaka to McCaffrey + Falyn) respond to blog prompt
11/17 - Final draft essay on The Pickup
11/21 - to p. 167, group two (Meyers to Tonozuka) respond to blog prompt
11/22 - finish book