Identity and History Literary Criticism Identity Trauma and

Identity and History Literary Criticism – Identity, Trauma and Globalization Introduction Spring 2010 Kate Liu

Outline | Identity and History z Q 1 -- What is Identity? z Q 2 -- History – what ] eternity -- “Time in a Bottle” Déjà vu: Somewhere in Time ] catastrophe -- “The Dream Before” ] (male) violence: “Leda and the Swan” ] z Q 3 -- Historiography -- why and how? ] Official history “My Grandmother” ] Facts “Two Villages” | About our Course ★ Next Week

Q 1: Identity | What is Identity? | Does it matter to you? If so, how do you define your identity (or identities)?

Identity : Who am I? Identity explanation = who I am Collective -The World, Nation, Society (its History, Ideology, Racism Culture, and Economy) 包 括 Personal – 影 響 Cultural, Racial, Gender, National, and Others 影 響 Communal: Family and other social units 影 響 Body, Desire, Work, Experience, Memory/Trauma

Identity : Who am I? 1. 2. To talk about our identity, we try to answer the question, "Who am I? " Plural and provisional: The answer has to be plural and made from time to time (identity is a process of identification. )

Identity : Who am I? (2) | We have different kinds of collective identity: z national identity, social identity, cultural/racial identity, class identity, familial identity, gender identity, sexual identity, etc. z All these identities are formed beyond our control (at least partly). (This explains why some contemporary theorists say that our identities are fragmentary and split. )

Identity : Who am I? (3) | | Conscious and unconscious: Out of all of these interrelated kinds of collective identity we form our personal (sense of) identity. But “usually" we do not loudly pronounce (articulte and/or defend) a certain kind of identity unless it is strongly related to our beliefs or unless it is threatened. Written on our bodies and into history: However, our personal senses or, more precisely, our constructions of our identities, consciously or not, are written on our bodies and embodied in our daily actions, which, in turn, become ‘historical’ documents of society’s archive.

Q 2: What is history? | What do you think about the following statements: z z She’s history. // A history-making day. // We should put the past behind us and move forward. History is progressive. // History repeats itself. History is who we are and why we are the way we are. (David Mc. Cullough) “. . . to [the elderly] all the past is not a diminishing road but, instead, a huge meadow which no winter ever quite touches. divided from them now by the narrow bottleneck of the most recent decade of years“ (“A Rose for Emily”). z z History is the present. That's why every generation writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is its end product, myth. (E. L. Doctorow) History is fiction, fiction history.

A 2: History –what Kinds – | z z z Official history [history-making]; grand narrative (for legitimation); “objective” personal histories (biography, memoir, anecdote, diary, etc. ); small narrative; “subjective” Is our daily life part of history? It is when it is selected into a “historical text. ” | History as text, interpretation or myth: ] ] ] “History is the present. That's why every generation writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is its end product, myth” (E. L. Doctorow). History is fiction, history.

A 2: History –what – Different kinds of historical construction | Subjective and personal sense of history with recent memories fading – ] “. . . to [the elderly] all the past is not a diminishing road but, instead, a huge meadow which no winter ever quite touches. divided from them now by the narrow bottleneck of the most recent decade of years “ (“A Rose for Emily”)

A 2: History –what (3) | History as “a progress beyond the past”-- z z | The past = a person rejected [She’s history]. The past = Past event/experience lived beyond. [We should put the past behind us and move forward. ] History repeats itself. progressive Related View of Time: linear or circular; history as a route we take in life. But history has multiple plot, divergences and even gaps. History and Identity: “History is who we are and why we are the way we are. ”

Example 1: “Time in a Bottle” | | | The song Please do a close analysis of the song, both the lyrics and the music. What does it say and how does it say it? Are there contradictions and tensions in this song? How is it similar to or different from the quote from “A Rose for Emily”? Jim Croce, Died: September 20, 1973 Does it matter who writes the song?

Example 1: “Time in a Bottle” The song What – The speaker wants to spend everyday with “you” till eternity, but there is not enough time (mortality). How – slow, rhythmic (3 -beat) and repetitive melody; seemingly unfinished both in meaning and in music, as if the song could be repeated again and again. The elderly in “A Rose for Emily” – remote past frozen in their mind. Two futile attempts to treat history as eternity. | | |

Example 2: History as Loop: Somewhere in Time (1980) | Plot: (preview first) | Chicago playwright Richard Collier goes back in time 60 years to find the love (Elise Mc. Kenna) he’s been missing all his life. Richard -| 1978 1912 | Location: Mackinac Island, Michigan, the Grand Hotel

Example 4: Time Travel: e. g. Somewhere in Time (1980) | Method of “Time Travel” (clip 4) [Sources: Jack Finney, a science fiction writer] -- location – a hotel -- erase the traces of the present -- hypnotize his own mind | how Richard does it (chap 5) first encounter (chap 7)

Example 4: Time Travel: e. g. Somewhere in Time (1980) | Who determines their destiny? z A gold watch, the photo as mementos destiny? Richard’s crisis in life? Elise’s becoming senile? z The producer (chap 13) z What is eternal love? (chap 14 --1: 29)

Example 2: Somewhere in Time (1980) -- a reinterpretation Time travel -- Can we really travel in time? • time travel can get us into 1) a neverending causality loop (grandfather/ontology paradox; see here. ) 2) multiple time line. 2. Isn’t realistic novel or historical romance like this? 3. Another interpretation: another young man in the past (source) 1.

Example 2: Somewhere in Time (1980) -- a reinterpretation (2) 3. History and fixation in history -- Other possibilities: -- There could be two “Richards”; -- It could all be Richard’s fantasy, made with the gold watch and the photo. (It could be another woman that gave Richard the watch. ) In the end, it’s either Richard or Elise, or both, who is fixated by their memory or immobilized by their traumatic experience of losing a lover, and thus seeks to perpetuate it (in life and in death).

Example 3: “The Dream Before” (for Walter Benjamin) | | | The song – Verse 1: Hensel and Gretel as adults “History is a pile of debris And the angel wants to go back and fix things To repair the things that have been broken But there is a storm blowing from Paradise Laurie Anderson And the storm keeps blowing the angel backwards into the future And this storm, this storm is called Note: schnapps - （穀物釀製的）烈酒 Progress. ”

Example 3: “The Dream Before” Q: How does the song deal with the fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel? A: They live in a life not as heroic and adventurous as their life in the fairy tale as illusion; growing up as gradual degradation. | Hansel – contradictory 1) attached to the witch (why? ); 2) Expresses Walter Benjamin’s view of history as progress thru’ desctruction with debris left behind.

Paul Klee's "Angelus Novus“ (新天使)

Benjamin on Paul Klee's "Angelus Novus" | An angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. ”

Benjamin on Paul Klee's "Angelus Novus" | The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. . But a storm is blowing from Paradise; . . . irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, This storm is what we call progress. ” Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” | Do you agree with this view of history?

Example 3: “Leda and the Swan” Yeats’ views: 1. History as cyclical (with interpenetrating cones) and Catastrophic; 2. Leda’s rape initiating the fall of Troy, followed by Roman Empire and then modern civilization. Pay attention to 1) the tropes used, and 2) its sound Arrangements: explosive vs. mellow sounds, Iambic, trochaic, spondaic, and rhyme scheme.

Example 3: “Leda and the Swan” | Note the use of Synecdoche A sudden blow: the great wings beating still Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill, He holds her helpless breast upon his breast. How can those terrified vague fingers push The feathered glory from her loosening thighs? And how can body, laid in that white rush, But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

“Leda and the Swan” (2) | A shudder in the loins engenders there The broken wall, the burning roof and tower And Agamemnon dead. Being so caught up, So mastered by the brute blood of the air Did she put on his knowledge with his power Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

“Leda and the Swan” (3) History as Violent Catastrophe | | 0. Background: “’Leda and the Swan’ in 1923, Ireland was in the midst of a bloody civil war that was the result of the Anglo-Irish conflict as well as the discord between the largely Catholic south and the Protestant north. ” – (source) 1. New Critical (or formalist) Approach: 1. sound and sense: the poem is a sensual presentation of Zeus’ rape of Leda. Sensuality conveyed thru’ the alteration between explosive and mellifluous sounds.

“Leda and the Swan” (4) Formalist Approach (cont’d) 2. Figurative language: the use of synecdoche. The rape is presented in close-up, so is the fall of Troy. Plus the effects of the explosive sounds, the poem uses such language to convey 1) the largeness of the swan, its indifference to Leda as a person, and 2) the powerful impact of both the rape and the Trojan war. 3. Irony and/or contradiction: besides the contrast between power and powerlessness, there is also a contrast between fear (terrified vague fingers) and willingness (loosenging, feel the heart), birth (engendered) and destruction (what is engendered) , passive (caught and mastered) and active (put on his knowledge)

“Leda and the Swan” (5) Formalist & Other Approaches (cont’d) Formalist: 4. structure of surroundedness (in the first two stanzas), development by the parallel between a sudden blow, and a shudder in the loin, questions in the 2 nd quatrain, and the 2 nd part of the sestet. 5. The use of Petrarchan sonnet – z 8 + 6, with a shift in theme in between; z A break in line 11, to shift back to Leda. z Rhyme scheme: ABAB CDCD EFGEFG. (slant rhymes, like "push" and "rush, " or "up" and "drop. “) 6. Other approaches: Feminist (why rape, and why the use of a woman? ); Postcolonial (the poem as an allegory of the rape of Ireland by England). (note)

Q 3: History –why and how? | | Why do we write and read histories? To record events only? What are the functions of history? To serve their functions, how are ‘histories’ told?

Example 1 – Official/National History [the 2004 version] | Exact dates, numbers and ‘facts’ | Only the names of VIP’s; His-story; | General – avoiding and/or erasing sensitive details (of 228) | Partially justifying martial law, and suggesting progress

Example 2: “My Grandmother Ironed the King's Shirts” | 1999 Torill Kove | How is this animation different from an official story of Norway? Pay attention, again, to its form and content.

Example 2: “My Grandmother Ironed the King's Shirts” | | Content: z Characterization – the grandmother a royalist and a professional ‘shirt-presser’ z history – In the 60’s, “She no longer approved. ” Form: z child-like drawing + historical (black-and-white) photos z digressions ice-skating dancer, the ending. z language – humorous: “unemployed” royals. z ending: another family legend after this one.

For your reference | 挪威王國首都奧斯陸（Oslo） | 1905, separated from The Bernadottes the union between Sweden and Norway to be a separate nation. | On 18 November, 1905, the solemn election of Prince Carl as king of Norway took place in the Storting, taking the name of Haakon the seventh. | The Royan family of Norway: http: //www. kongehuset. no/default. asp? lang=eng

For your reference (2) | When the Norwegian forces in Northern Norway capitulated after two months of fighting in June 1940, the king, prime minister and government evacuated to Great Britain. Throughout the war years, Norway retained a operating government in exile. And as the years passed by, the number of Norwegian refugees abroad grew to some 80. 000. | Norway's resistance in World War II included civil disobedience, such as pretending to not know German, and students’ wearing paper clips | (source: http: //home. online. no/~gestrom/history/norartxt. htm ; http: //en. wikipedia. org/wiki/Norwegian_resistance_movement#Civil_disobedience )

Example 3: “Two Villages” | How are numbers used in the two parts of the poem? | How are the two passages with numbers in contrast with the other two about Mr. Tat and Mr. Tuong.

For your reference History—the use of hard facts and photos e. g. Paul Hardcastle '19‘ | In a newscaster’s voice: "In world war two the average of the combat soldier was twenty six. In Vietnam he was nineteen. I-I-In Vietnam he was nineteen. N-n-n-nnineteen. "

For your reference –Vietnam War | History: the country divided in 1954; the U. S. ’s involvement since around 1955; support forces arriving since 1961, intense bombing since 1965, withdrawal since 1969, and the total withdrawal in 1973, a few months after a ceasefire was signed in Jan. The fall of Saigon in May 1975.

For your reference –Vietnam War Atrocities: | A. American side: 58, 148 dead, 270, 000 injured z Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Agent Orange z | Vietnamese side dead: (from both sides) more than 4, 000 civilians and soldiers— 10% of the entire population z displaced: 9, 000 out of 15, 000 villages z destroyed: farmland, forest, farm animals; all six of the industrial cities in the North z affected: 200, 000 prostitutes, 879, 000 orphans, 181, 000 disabled people, 1 million widows z

A 2: History –why and how? Purposes – a memento to keep (and past to immortalize), and to be fixated by, Somewhere in Time -- sense-making, legitimating or empowering . grandmother; -- re-interpretation relating it to our present world and selves. | Cannot be re-presenting the past; histories have to be fictions, or constructions. |

Q 4: History and Identity | History and Identity: How does History/histories shape our identities? | And how do we establish/construct our identities through telling stories?

About our Course 1. 2. 3. 4. Identity History and Literature Identity and (History of) colonialism and racism Historical Representation as influenced by Postmodernism Identity as influenced by Globalization and Trauma

★ Next Week | Read: Literary Criticism 1 -- Chapter Literature and history pp. 93 -111 | "Rip Van Winkle" 3