GDocs

I posted a spreadsheet with the titles and who had volunteered for them on our Google docs based on what I had written down. The spreadsheet comes from one I was working from with my choices, so if you don't see your titles on there, feel free to add. And fill in your title selections so we can make sure everything is covered.


A-Har

Cheat Sheet Storage

Hello All,

Here's to a successful first official (or was it second or third?) meeting, with many thanks to the Queen Mum (i.e. J-Ho) and her bag of English tea tricks. Mr. D's watchful eye and persistent retainment of composure, despite some shocking conversational developments, gave the Austen discussion the decorum it required.

We'll hopefully be developing an arsenal of literary cheat sheets as we work our way through the reading list, and in hopes of staying organized, and saving a few trees, you can upload your documents to GoogleDocs on our community email address, utkma2012@gmail.com, courtesy of Allison. The password is the same as the blog--hit up someone if you don't have it lying about. I uploaded a brief overview of Austen. Feel free to add to it or upload your own version. It might be helpful to have information specifically on Emma and P&P if anyone is game for doing that.

Cheers,

Alisha

Alisha Needs a Gangster Name and Other Business

Here are the texts I think I might have acquired in the frenzy of the literary auction:

Middle English
Chaucer, "The Wife of Bath"

Renaissance and 17th c. 
Marvell
Herbert

Restoration and 18th c. 
Dryden, Mac Flecknoe
Richardson, Pamela
Johnson, Rasselas
Collins, "Ode on the Poetical Character"

Romantics and 19th c.
Wordsworth, Tinturn Abbey, Simon Lee
P. B. Shelley
Keats, odes and sonnets
Lamb, "Old China"
Dickens, Bleak House
Tennyson, In Memoriam 
Arnold, "Sweetness and Light," "The Scholar Gypsy"
Christina Rossetti, "Goblin Market"

Early American
Bradstreet
Crane, Maggie


20th Century
O'Casey
Beckett
Ishiguro
Tennessee Williams
Arthur Miller
Sylvia Plath

I'd be happy to relinquish an 18th century novel or two, Lamb, Crane, O'Casey, Williams and Miller.

I need to watch more TV and read less ... no wait, reverse that.

Sorry I didn't make it last night folks. I am having a sinus infection from hell. (and I was baking cupcakes for like 6 hours)

My list of texts I have read is embarassingly short. Or perhaps it is the department that should be embarrassed, since non-white texts are hideously under-represented and that's all I read apparently.

So here goes:

I can pick up the 20th Century stuff that wasn't taken, namely
Churchill, Cloud Nine
Larsen, Quicksand
and the poetry of Baraka and Jarrell

Also Matt, if you like I can take your
Conrad, Heart of Darkness
and Hemingway, Sun Also Rises

and now to admit why I probably didn't get the GTA:

Old English: none
Middle English: none
Renaissance: none (I think I've read like two Shakespeares in my life.)
Restoration: none

Romantics: I can do the Romantic poets. I took a class on that. So whatever anyone doesn't feel strongly about, I will take. The novels (and Hemans and Lamb and Arnold) I don't know about, but I'd be willing to learn in order to be able to actually participate in this group of well-read citizens.

Early Americans:
Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
Crane, Red Badge of Courage and Maggie
Gilman, "Yellow Wallpaper"
Jewett, "White Heron"
Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Chopin, Awakening
I haven't read The Conjure Woman but I would be willing to. I like Chesnutt. Same with Douglass's Narrative (I've read part but not all.)

20th Century:
Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway and almost everything else
Yeats, random poems (especially "Second Coming" one of my all-time faves)
Churchill, Cloud Nine
Rushdie, Midnight's Children
DuBois, Souls of Black Folk
Larsen, Quicksand and Passing
Fitzgerald, Great Gatsby
Cather, My Antonia
Hemingway, Sun Also Rises and Farewell to Arms
Wright, Native Son
Williams, Streetcar Named Desire
Hwang, M. Butterfly
Morrison, Song of Solomon and a bunch of others
I think I could do the poetry of Pound, Frost, Stevens, and Williams if no one else wants to do it. Also Rich and Giovanni.

I'm sorry guys. Now you're all thinking "why do we want her in our group?" If there was African/Caribbean/American Cultures/anything else random, then I would be your girl. However, I am willing to learn anything new to add to the conversation.

So now that you know, just let me know which texts you want me to do.

Damn you, public school universities.

AH

T-Matt's Texts

The English Renaissance and Seventeenth Century:
Marlowe: Doctor Faustus
Sir Philip Sidney: An Apology for Poesy and Astrophel and Stella (selections)
William Shakespeare: Richard III
John Webster: The Duchess of Malfi
John Milton: "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso"

Restoration and Eighteenth Century:
Wycherley: The Country Wife
Behn: Oroonoko
Gay: The Beggar's Opera
Pope: Moral Epistles 1 and 3, Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, and one poem.
Johnson: "Preface to Shakespeare"

Romantics / Nineteenth Century:
Byron: Don Juan (Cantos I-IV)
Dickens: Bleak House
Browning, R. : "My Last Duchess," "The Bishop Orders His Tomb..." "Caliban Upon Setebos," "Childe Roland from the Dark Tower Came"
Browning, E.B. : "Aurora Leigh" (Books 1, 2, and 5)

American Lit (Pre-1900):
Freneau: Three poems.
Edwards: "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God"
Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter and two tales.
Major poets: Longfellow, Whittier, Holmes, Lowell
Dreiser: Introducing Dreiser's work/style via An American Tragedy (not on list)
Twain: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Twentieth Century:
Conrad: Heart of Darkness
Woolf: Touching briefly on The Waves (not on list)
G.B. Shaw: Man and Superman
Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby
Faulkner: The Sound and the Fury
Hemingway: The Sun Also Rises
Wright: Native Son
Pound: Selected poems.
Stevens: Selected poems.
O'Neill: Long Day's Journey Into Night
T. Williams: Streetcar Named Desire
Robert Lowell: Selected poems.
--------------------------------------------------

So if we're going to turn Communist and redistribute the wealth here, I'm willing to relinquish Hawthorne, Conrad, Faulkner, and Hemingway to any stout-hearted comrade willing to take them (to the streets).

The Great Reading Auction

Texts definitely up for grabs (add to this if some are left off!)

Renaissance
--Sir Thomas Wyatt: selected poetry
--Henry Howard: Earl of Surrey: selected poetry
--Francis Bacon: Essays; either The Advancement of Learning  or The New Atlantis
--Andrew Marvell (did someone take that?)
--17th C. Lyric poets: we still need takers for Herrick, Herbert, Traherne

Restoration
--Addison
--Boswell
--Thomson: Winter

Romantics
--Hemans
--Thackeray Vanity Fair

20th C
--Caryl Churchill
--Nella Larsen
--poems by Jarrel and Baraka

--Post what you are currently signed up for, what you're willing to give up, and for those who are racked at 9-12 novels, let's jump on the redistribution wagon. 



 

The Herd is on the Move

Yes. . .the herd has assembled.

Minute Man minutiae from today's meeting.

• After a raucous initial auctioning off of the reading list, we're all posting our current spoils in hopes of distributing more equally. If you're really passionate about something, a four-way rock, paper, scissors, shooters duel (quadruel?) can be arranged.
• We compiled a list of works to contribute collectively to, and we figured we'd start with those first (rather than individual responsibilities) since we're all busy bees in the hive of teaching philosophizing and, oh, paper-writing.
• Our inaugural trial is. . . Jane's Emma and/or Pride and Prejudice scheduled for 7p.m. at Aba-G's hizzle in da Fort next Monday, April 11. Lo-Ra has magnanimously volunteered to make scones, and J-Ho is bringing teapotz with tea.
• To-Do List: Read an article or bring some kind of supplementary material related to Jane, invite Meghan and Andrew into our herd, scoop up niblets 'n novels to claim for your homestead from the abandoned wagons of everyone's postings/offerings below.

• Other future collaborative efforts include: WHITMAN, the SHAKE, JOYCE, POE, YEATS, AUDEN, T.S. ELIOT, and FROSTy.  

• We thought it best to work thematically rather than chronologically, and to make up for that, have everyone type up a little handout on a time period or genre--nothing monstrous--just mine the ore from our collective classes we've taken to compile nuts 'n bolts about periods.

• Regarding theory, we figured we could do a review of theoretical approaches closer to exam time but not heavily focus on for now.

• Possible *educational* theme parties (so far) include:  "Summer Film Festival"--aka, watching literary films and enacting the long-awaited Jane Austen Drinking Game, "Wooulf Night"--From Beo to Virginia, "Irish Fest"--gettin' jiggy with Yeats, Joyce, and Jameson (to name a few), and Caribbean Carnival (to follow something especially solemn and morose. Bleak House, perhaps).

• Also, we need a name. But not a forced name. An organically-percolated-emerged-cropped up-sort of name. Keep your eyes and ears peeled for one.

(Heretofore humbly submitted initially by jho. Feel free to edit and add as needed. I'll post the items still up for grabs in a new post, and feel free to add your own individual lists and what you'd be willing to give up there, too). 

And now, for a moment of silence to contemplate the fast from pedagogo this week. . .