GRADO

GUA DE ESTUDIO: COMENTARIO DE TEXTOS LITERARIOS EN LENGUA INGLESA

UNIT 1 | ANSWERS

2012-2013 Comentario de Textos Literarios en Lengua Inglesa (CTLLI)

Elena Bandn, Isabel Castelao, Jess Cora (coordinador suplente), Ddac Llorens, Isabel Soto

GRADO EN ESTUDIOS INGLESES : LENGUA, LITERATURA Y CULTURA

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Self-assessment exercises: Dylan Thomas 1. In the poem, the speaker says he is not going to lament the death of a child in a London fire and then does precisely that. His lament draws on Christian, Jewish and pagan traditions, i.e. Biblical references. However, this poetic "I" conceives human life from an atheist or at least clearly non-religious point of view that denies the survival of individual consciousness after death and contemplates death as the mere natural process of decomposition and the body's components returning to the eternal cycle of the elements in nature, that will nurture new life until the end of the universe. 2. The first punctuation mark comes at the end of line thirteen. There is nothing before that. His voice drops as it is the end of a complete sentence. 3. This is the text written according to standard punctuation and undivided in lines (or verses) or stanzas, written as if were prose (remember that you must discuss the text in its original form, spelling, and punctuation and pay attention to the unorthodox use that authors may resort to): Never until the mankind-making, bird-, beast-, and flower-fathering and allhumbling darkness tells with silence the last light breaking, and the still hour is come of the sea, tumbling in harness, and I must enter again the round Zion of the water bead and the synagogue of the ear of corn, shall I let pray the shadow of a sound or sow my salt seed in the least valley of sackcloth to mourn the majesty and burning of the child's death. As to the syntax, here is some help: [Never until the mankind making bird, beast and flower, fathering and all humbling darkness tells with silence the last light breaking] [and the still hour is come of the sea, tumbling in harness] [and I must enter again the round Zion of the water bead and the synagogue of the ear of corn], shall I let pray the shadow of a sound or sow my salt seed in the least valley of sackcloth to mourn the majesty and burning of the childs death. The three coordinate sentences forming the time adverbial and the two disjunctive verbs and their respective objects have been colour-coded, and there are suggested commas to standardise the punctuation. "Never until" modifies the three sentences beginning with "and" to indicate the time when the actions expressed by the disjunctive main verbs (modified by "shall I let") "pray or sow" will take place. 4. You may find this opening section extremely difficult to follow. The difficulty lies less in the vocabulary (which you can look up in a dictionary!) than the syntax and punctuation, which are non-standard. The main verbs, for example "let pray [] or sow" (modified by Shall I in l. 10 come almost at the very end of the sequence. You may need to read these lines several times before you can begin to understand them. Even though the title helps, all in all, understanding is frustrated and delayed (= aplazada) by the poems complex and unusual syntax and punctuation. Actually, the lack of the usual, standard punctuation and the intentional breaking of the first sentence into three stanzas have a function. They match the breaking down of the language of the poem in correspondence with the subject matter of the poem, the idea of decomposition and the final end of the world the poem expresses as the mark. This unconventional attitude to and use of
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In Understanding Poetry (1976, 4th edition), poets Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren suggest their own prose paraphrase of the opening sentence: Never until the darkness that begets and humbles all tells me that hour of my own death will I utter any prayer or weep any tear to mourn the majesty of this childs death. (Note: the verb to beget is a Biblical term which means to engender, to create, to give life to). 5. mourn infinitive (to mourn); grieve, lament, express sorrow. fathering present participle of verb to father, it functions like an adjective: engendering, creating. humbling present participle of verb to humble functions like an adjective: debasing, humiliating. still adjective; tranquil, calm, silent, hushed (it is not an adverb of time in this context). tumbling gerund of the verb to tumble: falling, tottering; it indicates how the "still hour / Is come out of the sea". harness noun; equipment used to control or restrain a horse, or a person. sackcloth noun; rough fabric, mentioned in the Bible as a sign of mourning together with casting ashes on the mourner's head and gnashing of teeth. grave adjective; serious, important, solemn, somber, but also suggesting grave as a noun, meaning place for burial of a corpse, modifying "truth". elegy noun; a song or poem of lament (especially for someone who has died). robed past participle of verb to robe functioning as an adjective: clothed, clad, covered. 6. my salt seed combines the two processes or events central to the poem: death (and mourning) and rebirth (and engendering). Salt connotes tears shed in grief (tears taste like salt), seed suggests the creation of life and also the voice's (even the poet's) poem as creation as 'seed' in the reader's consciousness that may 'bear the fruit' of making the reader think , reflect on life, death, her/his own personal beliefs, etc. valley of sackcloth suggests the valley of tears (or life) one leaves when one dies and the cloth or garment worn by mourners or penitents. a grave truth takes an adjective, "grave", usually associated with certain collocations or dead metaphors (a grave responsibility, a grave mistake) and literalises the adjective:, a word like grave inevitably evokes a tomb, burial, coffin thus, literally, death, but in the context of this poem, "grave truth" is used ironically: it suggests epitaphs and
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panegyrics, that the good things that are engraved on stone or said in funerals to praise the dead person and to appease the mind of the attendants by offering comfort by stating that the dead person is in a better place and in the care of God, angels, the Saints, his/her ancestors departed before her, etc. are not true. This is also connected with the idea that he will not "murder the mankind of her going", i.e. he will not hide the fact that she died because of mankind, in war (significantly, Dylan Thomas does not use the word 'humanity' for that might suggest a 'humane' death). 7. Poetry is a particular form of language tending, among other things, to repeat patterns of sound, phrases, and words. Some sounds are repeated at the beginning of words. This repetition is connected with the meaning of the verse by the effect that the basic sound has in connection with feelings, natural phenomena, etc. The repetition of nasal sounds in the first lines emphasises the solemnity of the occasion and also suggest the moans of mourning (it is no chance that these words begin with /m/, they relate and reproduce the basic human emotions and their physiological manifestation). Also the repetitive -ing suffix in this poem is just another such example. One of the effects of threading -ing words throughout the poem (there are nine in 24 lines) is to give it internal cohesion. Another effect is to create a sense of unbroken movement and continuity, of unending process. This would in turn support the theme of the eternal life-death cycle. 8. Here are some thoughts: the appearance of the text on the page: it looks like a poem, it is arranged in stanzas, line-breaks, and so on. This is form understood in its most basic sense. A prose paragraph or chapters in a novel look entirely different; repetition of sounds or alliteration (initial sounds of words, -ing endings), themes (life and death); the regular stanzaic form: four stanzas of six lines each; the rhyme scheme is (more or less) a regular abcabc (the rhyme of "friends" and "Thames" can be accepted as a dialectal one); the metre (=mtrica) or rhythm is not that of ordinary spoken language, but it is related with traditional English rhythms, thus the long verses have four beats or stressed syllables while the shorter verses (the second and fifth verses in each stanza) have three. The traditional rhythm in Old English poetry and ballads from the Middle Ages to the 19th-century as well as many songs in 20th-century popmusic is the four-beat verse (characterized by an indeterminate number of syllables per line where four of them bear are stressed, they are the beats of the verse, and the rest are unstressed). 1 there is enjambement (the syntactical continuation of the verse into the next one or following verses in order to form a sentence; be aware that, of course, lines are not to be considered, having a complete meaning in isolation);

AstotheOldEnglishverse,youwillfindmoredetailsabouttheAngloSaxonalliterativeverseinthefirstunit inthesubjectLiteraturaInglesaI:ejesdelaliteraturemedievalyrenacentistainfirstyear.

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the syntax is profoundly non-standard: no-one speaks or writes or communicates like that in normal circumstances. As indicated above, this is language drawing attention to itself. Its saying: look at me, Im different, pay attention to me, think about my particular form and interpret me; the poem is rich in metaphors, some easy to grasp, some others not; the poem is also rich in paradoxes and contradictions (the speaker refuses to mourn, and then spends 24 lines doing just that!).

9.

As noted in the first point of the above question, a poem has nearly always a different shape from that of a piece of prose. It does not have paragraphs, it has (or tends to have) stanzas; the line endings are very important (these will contain the end rhyme) and the words placed here will carry greater emphasis than others. The rest of the points also identify A refusal to mourn as a poem rather than prose.

10. Again we come back to the question of form. It would seem that meaning and the way we receive a text are directly impacted by the form in which they are delivered. The singularity or peculiarity of the shape Dylan Thomas gives to his meditation on the death of a child, at the very least intensifies its meaning in ways in which simply declaring, a child has burnt to death, would not.

SELF-ASSESSMENT EXERCISES: BARRY 1. a) Post-structuralists look for hidden meanings in a text which may contradict the surface or apparent meaning. b) They foreground superficial similarities in words (sound, common etymologies, etc.) and make them central to the texts meaning. c) They look for the fissures and inconsistencies in a text, rather than its supposed cohesion. d) They practice rigorous close reading of an excerpt (=extracto) to the point where multiple meanings emerge and a single, stable meaning is no longer possible. e) They see the fissures and fault-lines (=fallas, this is a geology term used as a metaphor) in a text as evidence of repressed or silenced meanings which the surface meaning of the text ignores. In geology, fault-lines are evidence of previous rock activity. 2. Barrys post-structuralist interpretation: the verbal stage: this can involve a traditional form of close reading. Barry suggests looking for paradoxes and contradictions, such as in the last line: After the first death, there is no other. A first death implies a second, third, fourth, etc., in other words, there will indeed be others. Poststructuralists argue that apparent contradictions like this point to the unreliability and instability of language. Barry reminds us that poststructuralists tend to question and overturn binary oppositions or what Derrida terms violent hierarchies (suggestion: look this up in the Glossary), such as male/female, day/night, light/dark, etc. Poststructuralists thus will
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privilege the second term and Barry notes that in the poem it is darkness (and not light) which appears to create life. The poem gives us a reality we can recognize, even if it inverts the terms by which we normally recognize reality. Again, deconstructionists (an common alternative term for poststructuralists) say that language creates its own reality and is not a reflection of that reality. Another way of explaining how a poststructuralist reading inverts or overturns familiar binary oppositions, is to say that it reads a text against itself, revealing how the signifiers dont match up with expected signifieds. the textual stage: here the reader takes in the text as a whole and tries to identify interruptions or changes in the flow of the poem. At the very least, these breaks and slippages suggest an unstable rather than a fixed position. Barry points to potential inconsistencies of focus, time, tone or point of view, among others. They can be found in grammar (shift from first to third person, changes in verb tenses). The Thomas poem presents significant shifts in time and viewpoint, moving from a geological time scale to the present, then on to a historical vista of the unmourning and riding Thames. Such discontinuities, Barry notes, make the poem extremely unstable and present major difficulties in uncovering meaning. Lastly, he reminds us that what a text does not say its omissions is often as important as what it should say or has led us to expect it to say. the linguistic stage: here the poststructuralist critic will look for moments where language fails to communicate or when the unreliability of language is emphasized, as in actually saying that something is unsayable. The Thomas poem is a good example, in that it says it is not going to do something (mourn) and then proceeds to do just that. Barry gives examples in the poem which illustrate how language can profess one thing and express the opposite. The poems speaker expresses a certain intention (I shall not murder/The mankind of her going/[]with any further/Elegy ll. 14-18) only to find himself betraying that intention: a trap is identified and promptly fallen into. Thus a poststructuralist (or deconstructive) reading will expose disunity within the text, however unified or stable it may appear at first sight. 3. The title already expresses a desire not to do something, which is immediately betrayed by the poem itself. In other words, A refusal to mourn announces its opposition to verbalizing a particular event (the death of a child) and the accompanying emotion and ritual (mourning, elegy). The speaker thus gives us a poem (that is, an object constructed of words and groups of words) about not wanting to give us a poem at all. This contradiction is continued in the tension between the two opening words, Never until a virtual binary opposition, since it juxtaposes a word which means at no time, on no occasion with a word meaning up to the time of. Other examples: Tells with silence (l. 4); I shall not murder/[] her going/[]/with any further/Elegy (ll. 14-18), a refusal to mark the childs death with elegiac statements, followed by the solemn, quasi-liturgical pronouncements of the final stanza [], which sounds very like traditional panegyrical oratory, with the dead person is transformed into some larger than life heroic figure (Barry 73). Part of the effect of the poems strategy is to set up expectations in the reader (we expect the speaker not to mourn, we anticipate perhaps a rejoicing or a celebration
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instead of an elegy or lament) and systematically to frustrate them. This gives the poem
a kind up/down, push/pull movement, paralleling the waves of the sea tumbling in harness swelling first, then tumbling or crashing down and the riding Thames. For one critic, the entire shape of the poem mimics the movement of water, with the up/down (or expectation/frustration) movement in consonance with the death that is in life: "Extraordinary too is the stanzaic form of A Refusal to Mourn []: four rhyming stanzas, abcabc, that is, eight identical abc triples, each of them consisting of a long line, a short line, and a long line. In this metre, it seems to me at least, Thomas imitates the sea tumbling in harness, the unmourning water, and the riding Thames. These three-line abc units are two waves and a trough the crest of a wave, its trough or valley, and then another crest. The poem moves like the sea in its round (Earth-like) bead, rising and falling with the tides, every day the same, every month the same. The music of Refusal to Mourn moves counterpoint to the heart-felt consolation that Dylan Thomas speaks. Death is to life what a trough is to the crest of every wave in the tumbling sea". http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poem/3357.html 4. Possibly the most striking (and difficult!) metaphor comes in the second stanza: And I must enter again the round / Zion of the water bead / And the synagogue of the ear of corn (ll. 7-9). The speaker continues the water imagery and introduces two others Zion and synagogue both associated with the Judeo-Christian tradition. Critics interpret this admittedly very opaque metaphor as an allusion to the speakers own death (see the Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren interpretation in answer 4), but also to the universality of death and, by extension, to the circularity of existence (the round water bead), its constant renewal. Both "Zion" and "synagogue" refer to places or spaces into which the speaker "must enter", and they draw on their traditional Biblical meanings. "Zion" stands for the return to the Promised Land, especially during the Jews' exiles and slavery in Egypt and Babylon as well as during their diaspora. Hence, "Zionism" is the political movement that strove to establish the State of Israel. Here these two words are not used in their religious sense, but only metaphorically. "Zion" is identified with "water bead", and the idea that the speaker must "enter" this "water bead" means that the speaker, some part of him, an infinitesimal part of the water that he contains, must return to being water in nature. The word "bead" in turn adds the Catholic connotations of the beads of the Rosary, connotations that would be lost if the text read the more literal expression "water drop". The word "synagogue" is used very much like the word Church, used allegorically to signify the whole Jewish community; its identification with the "ear of corn" is based on the literal meaning of the word "shibboleth", which is a Hebrew word that in the Bible is used in Judges 12:6 to distinguish and persecute a specific Jewish group because of their incapacity to pronounce the word ("sibboleth"). It also means "stream of water" and connects with the previous image in the poem and it has come to mean quite a number of things in modern English: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/shibboleth. However, in the context of Dylan Thomas's poem, it is used in its literal meaning in Hebrew: the speaker is to return to the community of the elements in the earth that will eventually
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nurture the ears of corn. The idea is that he must die and decompose and return to the earth. It is an image of the cycle of life, but it is devoid of any idea of individual spiritual transcendence and it is circumscribed to the mere physical aspect of life. The mother metaphor is introduced in the last stanza in which the speaker evokes the resting place (the earth) of the child in anthropomorphic terms (i.e. by using personification or allegory): the child is among long friends, those other corpses that were buried there in the past and are now intermingled with the earth and have been 'close' like people who have been 'friends' for 'a long time'; they have also joined and are now the "grains beyond the ages" of the earth, the ground where she is now buried, which is also the dark veins of her mother. The image of the child "robed" in the "veins" of the (mother) earth is a striking one and reiterates the theme of life going back to her origins, it recalls pregnancy, it also has a pagan pre-Christian sound to it, but just like the Judeo-Christian images, these allegories are used paradoxically for the tenor or meaning of the images emphasises the child's death and return to nature denying the survival of her spirit, soul or individual consciousness in the afterlife. It denies the existence of such an afterlife. The images express an atheist, naturalistic attitude to life (the belief in naturalism, that human life and consciousness is just part of nature and the physical world and there is nothing else, no soul, no spiritual plane or reality).

SELF-ASSESSMENT EXERCISES: BARTHES 1. *Capitalist ideology: system of ideas which refers to an economic system, dominant in the Western world since the breakup of feudalism, in which most of the means of production are privately owned and production is guided and income distributed largely through the operation of markets. ("capitalism." Encyclopdia Britannica. Encyclopaedia Britannica 2008 Ultimate Reference Suite. Chicago: Encyclopdia Britannica, 2008). Capitalist ideology emphasizes private initiative and individual effort and enterprise. Barthes selects individualism as a defining feature of capitalism. *Allegory: a story, play, poem, picture, etc., in which the meaning or message is represented symbolically (Concise Oxford Dictionary 1990). It must be also said that in a narrower sense, "allegory" involves personification, i.e. the representation of human ideas, feelings, virtues, vices, experiences, etc. with symbolical human figures dressed or carrying symbolical objects that allow to identify and 'decode' their meaning. *Signified: the Glossary in the curso virtual gives explanations for sign, signified and signifier. Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure noted that every sign (= a basic unit of communication, e.g. a word) has two elements: the signifier (what you can physically perceive through sound or a graphic mark) and the signified (what the sound or graphic mark conceptually refers to). 2. Barthes links the capitalist notion of the individual (the source from which all effort and production spring) to the notion of the individual or person who writes, that is, the author. He says capitalism attaches great importance to the figure of the author.

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3.

Ordinary culture reads and interprets literature through its author (his life, his tastes, his passions), while Mallarm and Valry emphasized writing, linguistic activity and the essentially verbal condition of literature over the person of the author. Author is the term which ordinary culture uses when referring to the person who produces a literary work; ordinary culture considers the author to be solely responsible for the meaning of that literary work and likens the Author to the father of the book, his child, over whom he holds authority. (See the Glossary in the curso virtual). "Modern scriptor" is Barthes term and it differs from the Author in that he (the modern scriptor) is not held to be responsible for a book in the same way. The modern scriptor does not have a comparable authority over what he writes; for Barthes he is just the person who wrote the text, but we must not give him authority over the text by trying to ascertain what the Author meant with his text or try to read his life, ideas and experiences in his text. More importantly, according to Barthes, the modern scriptor is constituted through the act of reading itself: the modern scriptor is born simultaneously with the text. In this respect, since the text is 'played' (in the sense of interpretation as in playing a musical Instrument) every time a reader reads and interprets the text, the modern scriptor is also the reader herself/himself, his/her act of reading. Thus, the modern scriptor is half-way between the text itself and each individual reader's particular reading of the text. Thus, these two terms Author and modern scriptor have important consequences for how we read. Author is distinguished from reader in that the former must die in order for the latter to be born. This is Barthes provocative way of saying that the reader must not look for authority in the Author, must somehow eliminate the Author in order to liberate meaning through the act of reading. For Barthes, the reader interprets the text creatively and this creative reading is far more important than the Author's intentions and ideas, which are no longer relevant or important.

4.

5.

For Barthes, to seek meaning in a text through the person who wrote it (the person of the author) is comparable to the search for a transcendent being God who can confer ultimate, fixed meaning on everything. That is why he uses religious terms such as God, theological, etc. Barthes criticizes the search to interpret a text through the Author because this is to close the writing. Meaning is liberated only if writing is linked to an anti-theological practice; writing must refuse to fix meaning [] and refuse God. The reader must collaborate in this anti-theological practice, indeed, can only be born if the Author dies. Each summary will be slightly different as to its wording, but it must stick to the indication on page 6 in the questions: it must indicate the main points of the text briefly and most importantly, it must be faithful to the ideas expressed in the paragraph. If the summary distorts the information contained in the original, the summary is at fault.

6.

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SELF-ASSESSMENT EXERCISES: DERRIDA 1. Reading means understanding the text, so you had to make an effort involving reading comprehension. If you feel that you missed something or still find the text confusing, then you need to read it again. *Signified, *referent, *transcendental signifier, *signifier see answer to Q. 2 above and the Glossary in the curso virtual. Derrida is using these terms in a classic poststructuralist way. We can understand them more or less thus: signifier/signified = word/meaning, referent is roughly interchangeable with signified, and transcendental signified denotes an ultimate, fixed meaning (Barthes might call this a theological meaning or message of the Author-God). Derrida is critical of the search for a transcendental signified or supreme meaning. Derrida is skeptical of the writers supposed authorial/authoritative command over what he produces. He says that only the reader is able to perceive the tension (relationship) between what a writer thinks he can control and what he cant (what he commands and what he does not command). Thus Derrida questions the validity of a reading which accepts the writers authority over his text and its meaning, and encourages a critical reading instead which perceives the texts discrepancies and contradictions and from which meanings will emerge. Reading cannot simply reproduce a text. Neither can it look for meaning (a referent, a signified) which may be historical, biographical, psychological, etc., outside the text. Reading can only seek meaning inside a text or writing: Our reading must remain within the text. Ultimate meaning or meaning which lies beyond the text (transcendental signified) does not exist according to Derrida and his followers. See the answer above. Your summary must include the main ideas of the text briefly and in simple English and it must not distort the main information of the text. If you find that your summary is not faithful to the text, then rewrite it.

2.

3.

4.

5. 6.

IMPORTANT NOTE: The information contained in this key to the self-assessment work is not supposed to be memorised. You are supposed to develop your capacity to integrate this information into your reading and understanding of the poem and use it in a flexible way to answer the PEC or exam questions using your own writing skills instead of sterile copying in the case of the PEC or wordfor-word memorisation in the case of the exam. This key does not constitute a final reading or an exhaustive commentary of the text. You will of course find further nuances and possibilities in the text and you are expected to produce your own ideas when discussing texts as long as they are cogently expressed and based on the text itself and a cogent critical reading.

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