Candide Option 1

**Assignment note** Pick one of the following three options to respond to.  I'd like a relatively even split, but I won't force it this time.  As always, make sure your name's evident, 200-400 words, due by 10pm Monday, January 31st.

I was going to simply quote William F. Bottiglia, but I like the summary of Bottiglia's contention made by Roy S. Wolper (both awesome names, by the way) in a 1969 article, "Candide, Gull in the Garden?" in Eighteenth Century Studies.

P. 265:

"Too much of the recent criticism of Candide has a magisterial certainty about it.  William F. Bottiglia, whose long analysis is now considered 'fundamental and convincing,' believes that Voltaire 'ends by affirming that social productivity of any kind at any level constitutes the good life, that there are limits within which man must be satisfied to lead the good life, but that within these he has a very real chance of achieving both private contentment and public progress.'  Bottiglia insists there is 'something wrong' with those whose conclusions differ from his own."

What say you?  Agree, or is there "something wrong" with you?  (Note: That's a joke... I really don't want a bunch of responses that simply say, "Bottiglia's right!" or accuse those of differing opinion to have some mental shortcoming.  Disagree away... but convincingly!)

Candide Option 2: Electric Boogaloo

In Chapter 17, Candide travels to Eldorado, a Utopian place literally overflowing with gemstones.  However, Candide voluntarily leaves "this earthly paradise" not long after arriving.

Analyze the role of utopia (and/or dystopia) in Candide and analyze the work with respect to other utopian novels, such as Sir Thomas More's Utopia.

No more guidance is necessary here.

Candide Option 3: Tokyo Drift

From Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism, p.102:

"The Menippean satire deals less with people as such than with mental attitudes.  Pedants, bigots, cranks, parvenus, virtuosi, 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 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."
[...]
"A constant theme in the tradition is the ridicule of philosophus gloriosus."
[...]
"[It] relies on the free play of intellectual fancy and the kind of humorous observation that produces caricature."
[...]
"At its most concentrated, Menippean satire presents us with a vision of the world in terms of a single intellectual pattern."

Flannery O'Connor: "Good Country People"

In a 1968 article in The Sewanee Review, Ruth Vande Kieft stated, "This small but brilliant body of fiction constitutes for many readers a kind of serious and profound moral tease.  They have felt a kind of unwilling fascination, an uneasy blend of attraction to and revulsion from her fiction, which springs from uncertainty about the moral and religious vision concealed in these strangely grotesque and violent flowerings of her imagination."

Many O'Connor critics focus on her Catholocism and the "grace" her fiction evokes.  Others find this problematic.  For your blog post, keep these sentiments (and Vande Kieft's insight) in mind with respect to O'Connor's "Good Country People."

This post is only for people who enrolled late in the course and have yet to write a blog post (though this does not preclude the rest of you from reading their insights).  As always, 200-400 words (and strive to impress us with your intellect).

Due Monday by midnight.

The Role of Tragedy in Kafka

Blog Post #2

Group 2 (Jahnke-White)

Due 1/19 by 10pm.

Most of you should be familiar with the old comedic adage that comedy equals tragedy plus time.  Though this applies largely to satirical barbs borne out of tragic events or semi-autobiographical comic treatments of personal events that certainly weren’t funny at the time (and thus, not these stories, per se), the relationship between comedy and tragedy is so strong that they could be described as two sides of the same coin.  As group one focused on the complex role comedy plays in Kafka, I’d like group two to center their posts on the tragic, traumatic, and elegiac elements in the two stories, and how Kafka treats and presents such elements.

For literary critics such as Cathy Caruth, literature negotiates "the complex relation between knowing and not knowing."  Perhaps it is this knowing/not knowing dichotomy which is compressed so eerily in Kafka, producing the profound uncanny effect seen in his short fiction.  Combine this with the elegiac yearning for the past evident in both the Penal Colony’s Lieutenant and the protagonist in “A Hunger Artist,” and both are decidedly tragic tales, though perhaps not in the traditional sense. 

Examine the role of tragedy and/or elegy within the two Kafka short stories assigned.  Feel free to analyze Caruth’s insight in your posts, as well (note I’m not expecting you to know anything she’s said beyond the simple phrase quoted in the paragraph above).

The Role of Humor in Kafka

Blog Post #1

Group 1 (Arnold-Hudson)

Due 1/19 by 10pm.

Prompt:

In David Foster Wallace’s 1999 essay “Some Remarks on Kafka’s Funniness From Which Probably Not Enough Has Been Removed,” Wallace asserts:

[…]great short stories and great jokes have a lot in common.  Both depend on what communications theorists sometimes call exformation, which is a certain quantity of vital information removed from but evoked by a communication in such a way as to cause a kind of explosion of associative connections within the recipient.  This is probably why the effect of both short stories and jokes often feels sudden and percussive, like the venting of a long-stuck valve.  It’s not for nothing that Kafka spoke of literature as “a hatchet with which we chop at the frozen seas inside us.”  Nor is it an accident that the technical achievement of great short stories is often called compression—for both the pressure and the release are already inside the reader.  What Kafka seems able to do better than just about anyone else is orchestrate the pressure’s increase in such a way that it becomes intolerable at the precise instant it is released (61).

With this in mind, analyze the role humor plays in “In the Penal Colony” and “The Hunger Artist.”  Granted, this is a difficult task I’ve set in front of you, but it should be rewarding.  As Wallace reminds us further, the difficulty of understanding comedy and Kafka might just be that:

[…] the particular kind of funniness Kafka deploys is deeply alien to students whose neural resonances are American.  The fact is that Kafka’s humor has almost none of the particular forms and codes of contemporary US amusement.  There’s no recursive wordplay or verbal stunt-pilotry, little in the way of wisecracks or mordant lampoon.  There is no body-function humor in Kafka, nor sexual entendre, nor stylized attempts to rebel by offending convention […] There are none of the ba-bing-ba-bang reversals of modern sitcoms; nor are there precocious children or profane grandparents or cynically insurgent coworkers.  Perhaps most alien of all, Kafka’s authority figures are never just hollow buffoons to be ridiculed, but are always absurd and scary and sad all at once (62-3).

By the end of this course, you’ll be able to comment quite intelligently on the relation between jokes and short stories on a larger scale, but let’s keep these posts to Kafka.  Oh, and for those of you thinking, “These stories were funny?!” humor is but one aspect of Kafka’s writing, and one that doesn’t get enough attention if you ask me.  We’ll discuss many other aspects of these stories in class.