English 465 Bulletin Board
Friday, Feb. 14, 1997; Arnold & Carlyle
Happy Valentine's day and welcome to this experiment.
From any web-connected computer, bring up this bulletin board and post
your observations or questions about the works we're looking at, just as
you would in class.
Make specific reference to the parts of the work that support your
observations.
Hit the "reload" button if you're waiting to see what
others say in response to you. If you have problems, e-mail me, or call
me at 7877.
I've posted a few starter questions below, and have archived your
questions from previous weeks.
ARNOLD
- Dover Beach
- Compare the landscapes described at the beginning and end of the poem.
Is one more crisp and real than the other? What might this difference
have to do with the speaker's intentions toward his listener and the
author's intentions toward us?
- Buried Life
- Is the speaker more interested in the object of his love, or
what his own eye sees when it "sinks inward"? Does this speaker
recognize the one he loves as different or other than himself?
- Grand Chartreuse -- see below
CARLYLE
In Sartor Resartus, (1831, just about the beginning of the
Victorian period) Carlyle represented the paradigmatic
struggle with belief and disbelief which many Victorians were also to go
through. He does it through a strange medium: he pretends to be reporting
the struggles of this Diogenes Teufelsdrockh. (The name translates as
"God-begotten Devil's dung.") I'll call your attention to 3 spots in the
readings for today:
- In "The Everlasting NO," Teufesdrockh, after an unhappy love
affair, is asking whether or not it is possible to believe in God; doesn't
the world belong to the Devil? (Very bottom of Buckler 88-top of 89). The
"Everlastin NO" is his response to the devil--but what exactly is he
rejecting?
(See the middle paragraph, p. 90).
- But how far does this "NO" take him? only to the "Centre of
Indifference." Look at the bottom of p. 97, near the end of that chapter.
- How does he pass to the "Everlasting Yea," and what exactly is he
affirming? See the last complete paragraph on p.104 and the last two
paragraphs in this chapter, on 105.
- Put this together with what we have learned already about Victorian
religious doubt. Carlyle wrote Sartor Resartus two years before
Newman began Tracts for the Times, at the height of the Evangelical
revival. In anything that you have read so far, do you see reactions to
Carlyle--especially the command to "Do the Duty which lies nearest thee!"
and the command to "work!"
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