Jonathan Morse
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English 100, Section 17, Spring 2010
The First-Year Composition Center
For January 13: Kate Galbraith, "Rise of Wind Turbines Is a Boon for Rope Workers"
Nicholas Wade, "Deciphering the Chatter of Monkeys and Chimps"
English 361, Spring 2010
For January 13 and 15: Viktor Shklovsky, "Art as Technique"
English 440F, Fall 2009
James Joyce, by the surrealist photographer Man Ray
In the year 1922, something happened to the English language. By way of evidence, click on the link in the previous sentence and consider the three pages that it should open.
The first is the opening of Sinclair Lewis's novel Babbitt. Published in 1922, this once famous satire survives now, just barely, as an eponym: "He is a Babbitt." The 2001 edition of the Oxford American Dictionary defines that term as "a materialistic, complacent, and conformist businessman" but adds a cautionary usage note: "dated."
The second page may help us understand why. Another cityscape, this is the opening of Dickens's Bleak House. It's the same kind of prose as Sinclair Lewis's, but it's much better -- and it was published in 1852, seventy years earlier. And here's the main historical reason why it's better: the landscape of Babbitt is much more like our world than the landscape of Bleak House, but the rhetorical conventions underlying Lewis's prose are still back in the horse-and-buggy age with Dickens. Horses are integral to the sound of Dickens's universe, but when the same horsy rhythms survive in Lewis's language they're a distracting anachronism. So reading Babbitt now is only a historical experience: fun if you like horses, but not really necessary. The horsepower driving Charles Dickens's 19th-century language is old, yes; but Sinclair Lewis's 20th-century horsepower is obsolete.
But now consider page 3: the view of New York from the harbor that makes up the last page of E. E. Cummings's The Enormous Room. As this page was being written, something in its language was changing, and changing fundamentally.
And the year of the change was 1922: the year of The Waste Land and, most wonderfully and lovably of all, the year of Ulysses.
A short psychohistory of Joyce's Ireland
Image and epiphany: the September 9 transparency
John Millington Synge's play Riders to the Sea
Assignments for A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Stream of consciousness: a definition
Stream of consciousness: Henri Bergson on time and duration
"Instead of narrative method, we may now use the mythical method. It is, I seriously believe, a step toward making the modern world possible for art." Print T. S. Eliot's "Ulysses, Order, and Myth."
"The Holy Roman Catholic Apostolic Church was built on a pun. It ought to be good enough for me": a year after the publication of Ulysses, Joyce begins work on Finnegans Wake. Source: Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (New York : Oxford University Press, 1959)
MP3: Joyce reads the Anna Livia Plurabelle episode from Finnegans Wake
Anna Livia Plurabelle, annotated in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 8th edition
Review for the final: "James Joyce," from The Norton Anthology of English Literature
Links to online archives (click any line to connect)
Link to Representative Poetry Online
Link to New York Public Library Digital Gallery
Link to the photo archive at George Eastman House
Link to books.google.com, a vast downloadable library
Link to Bartleby.com, electronic publisher of free books
Link to PennSound, the University of Pennsylvania's audio and video poetry archive
For Wordsworth: images of the Lake District from Curved Light.net
The Emily Dickinson International Society
The Emily Dickinson Electronic Archives For user ID, enter dickinson. For password, enter ink_on_disc.
The Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst, Massachusetts
Web-based catalogs of other libraries, worldwide
Copyright © Jonathan Morse
Photographs of Lipari
copyright © Leah Morse
Photograph of Apollo from ArtServe at the
Australian National University, http://rubens.anu.edu.au
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The contents of the page reflect only the views of the page's author, Jonathan Morse.
