Dear students,
I am going to post the first exam in Google Classroom on November 6 (Sunday), You are expected to return it to me (via Google Classroom too) in a word document no later than November 7 (Monday).
You should now prepare yourself for the exam!
Best regards,
Rogério
Based on you class notes (sorry, but if you did not attend the class you cannot do this assignment) answer the following questions:
“The Hours,” by Michael Cunningham, is a rewrite {rewriting} of Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway.” When the book by Cunningham was introduced in the class, the first thought that crossed my mind was that it was a case of plagiarism. After some time of reading, it was possible to see that there actually was an intertextuallity, as “The Hours” has as main character the great writer Virginia Woolf (a fictional character, just like Sigmund Freud in the book “White Hotel”). One similarity between the two books is that both are modernist {“The Hours” is a post-modernist story} stories, meaning that they don’t have a very concrete stream of time in the text. This can be explained as both stories happen only during the course of one day.
One difference between “The Hours” and “Mrs. Dalloway” is that they do not use the same characters but have related themes to each other. Both books have themes like social roles and death, but with different characters. In Woolf’s book, we have the character Septimus Warren Smith, a First World War veteran who is suffering from war neurosis, having some cases of alucination.{hallucinations}. He suffers a lot, as he is currently haunted by alucinations {hallucinations} with his old comrade Evans, who died in the war. After being recommended for forced admission to a psychiatric hospital, he committed suicide by jumping out of a window. In Cunningham’s book, we have the character Richard Brown, a man who has contracted the autoimmune AIDS virus. Because of his own illness that was not capable of healing, he started to feel depression. In the scene shown in the class (from the movie), he kills himself by jumping out of the window of his apartment. These two characters from these books show how the theme of death is present in the two stories. We can also see social roles in these two characters, as the first one doesn’t have inner peace since coming back from war, and the second one struggles with the burden of knowing that he is dying more and more every day, and there is nothing that can be done to stop this.
2. What did you learn about “Lolita”, by Vladimir Nabokov?
I learned that the book has an unreliable narrator (such as in Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Tell-Tale Heart”). The book has as its main character the professor Humbert Humbert, a middle-aged man who is obsessed with a 12-year-old girl named Dolores Haze, with whom he becomes sexually involved after he becomes her stepfather. When we saw this story in class, I actually thought its theme was very controversial. First, because it talks about a middle-aged man who engages with a woman just to stay around a 12-year-old girl. For me, this is unacceptable. I know that is a fictional story, but this kind of behavior is very common in third world countries, such as Brazil itself. Last week, I was watching TV and saw a story about a man who was keeping his wife in private prison and abusing his 12-year-old daughter. He was arrested a long time later, as neighbors and the girls had already made numerous complaints about the case and no one did anything about it. This kind of attitude, to me, is disgusting, even in fictional or real stories. I understand that we (as readers) must separate fiction from reality due to the theory of the narrative chain, but as fiction is becoming more and more related to our daily lives, it makes me wonder how the world will be in the future.
Concerning the text’s writing, it is clear that Vladmir Nabokov created a masterpiece of writing. We can see this by the numerous number of awards received and also being included in Time Magazine’s list of the 100 best English-language novels. For me, the thing that made me happy about seeing this story was seeing that the Russian-American author broke boundaries with his writing, bringing a spotlight to the whole world, not just the English axis.
Based on you class notes (sorry, but if you did not attend the class you cannot do this assignment) answer the following questions:
As similarities between the novels “The Hours” and “Mrs. Dalloway” highlight: the two novels deal with issues related to feminism and gender issues; The main characters are female; In both novels there are cases of suicide, and in “Mrs. Dalloway” the war veteran, Septimus, is affected by mental illness resulting from trauma suffered in the war, while in “The Hours” the character Richad is affected by AIDS, Both committed suicide, but under different circumstances. They highlight as differences between the novels: “Mrs Dalloway” was published in 1925, while “The Hours” was published in 1998, making evident the difference in historical context between their publications; In “Mrs Dalloway” there is one main female character, “Clarissa Dalloway” {there are other important female characters too}, while in “The Hours” there are three female characters, each of whom has their story set in a specific historical moment of the 20th century, one in the 1920s, another in the 1940s, and the last in the 1990s.
“Lolita” is a novel that portrays the story of romance between Dolores and her stepfather, Humbert. The character Humbert falls in love with Dolores when she is twelve years old, and to get closer to Dolores he marries her mother, when he gets her wish to live in the same house as Dolores, where he gets closer to the child and starts his loving and sexual relationship with her. In family circles Dolores is called “Lolita,” the name that gave the novel its title. This book presents many contexts of eroticism during Humbert’s relationships with his stepdaughter, but there is no pornographic or explicit description of sex. This book addresses controversial issues and provokes readers to reflect on the subject of rape and sexual abuse. The story is presented and narrated by the character and protagonist Humbert, who is considered an unreliable narrator, demanding from the reader a constant critical reflection during the reading.
1. “The Hours”, by Michael Cunningham, is a rewriting of Virgina Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway”. What are the similarities and differences between these two novels?
The title “The Hours” is the first similarity between Cunningham’s and Woolf’s novels: not only “The Hours” was the working title of “Mrs. Dalloway”, but the passing times of the day (the morning, the afternoon, the evening) are important marks in both novels. From this similarity, we can approach another one: both stories happen in the period of one day, but, from what happens on that day, the characters activate memories of their past, in a way that the narrative moves back and forth in time.
Besides the structure of time, “The Hours” mirrors “Mrs. Dalloway’s” narrative techniques regarding perspective: both novels are structured in a stream of consciousness from their characters. A good example of this connection between the two novels is the episode with the mysterious black car, in “Mrs. Dalloway”, and the episode in which there is a celebrity in a store in New York city, and people wonder about it. In both episodes, it is possible to follow the thoughts of people on the street, wondering about the black car or the celebrity. The episodes puts in evidence several shifts on perspective.
However, in “Mrs. Dalloway”, Clarissa Dalloway is the main character, and the narrative progresses as we follow one day in her life. In “The Hours”, on the other hand, we have three main characters – also female: Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Brown and Clarissa Vaughan. It is important to notice that even in this difference, we can find a point of connection between the two novels because what relates these three characters is Woolf’s novel: they all have their lives touched by “Mrs. Dalloway” somehow, and, of course, one of these characters is Virginia Woolf herself, the author of the novel.
Many parallels can be established between the situations experienced by the characters in “Mrs. Dalloway” and “The Hours”. For example, in the former, we see the encounter between Clarissa Dalloway – who is planning a party for her husband – and Peter, a former lover of hers. In the later, Clarissa Vaughan is also preparing a party, and it is for her former lover, Richard. So, from these simple remarks, there are three threads of connection: the name of the characters, the presence of a former lover, and the situation of planning a party (which is also faced by Mrs. Brown, another character in “The Hours”, who is also planning a party for her husband). Going further on these connections, we notice that just like Septimus Warren struggles with post-war traumas in “Mrs. Dalloway”, Richard struggles with AIDS in “The Hours” – both men are facing illnesses of their times. Still, Warren’s illness is of a mental nature, just like Virginia Woolf’s mental illness in “The Hours”. All of these three characters end up killing themselves, making suicide a common theme between the two novels. {excellent writing and understanding of both novels!}
2. What did you learn about “Lolita”, by Vladimir Nabokov?
In “Lolita”, a hebephile adult man, under the pseudonym of Humbert Humbert, tells the story of his relationship with Lolita, a girl who was only twelve years old when he met her. “Lolita” is what he called her, and the fact that this is the title of the novel may be a hint of what the reader finds in it: Humber’s own perspective and narration of how he met and became involved with this girl, of Lolita as his memory.
In our contemporary and critical vision of this involvement, we know it is a criminal and unethical relationship from many points of view. However, as the novel is narrated in first person, we only have access to Humbert’s perspective, who narrates the story as a romantic and sometimes even erotic pursuit.
Due to the story’s narrative perspective, we can only indirectly envisage Lolita’s behavior, reactions, and speech, always from Humbert’s perspective, who is a typical example of an unreliable narrator, a criminal in the death row, often made an in-patient for psychiatric disorders. Reading Humbert’s memories, we learn that in his childhood he had a physically unfulfilled love with a young girl named Annabel Leigh – in this point, the novel establishes an intertextual relation with Edgar Allan Poe’s poem of the same title, in which the author reminisces a childhood love relationship with a girl named Annabel Leigh. Humbert attributes his obsession with girls from a certain age – usually nine to fourteen – to his frustrated youth love.
The success of the novel is due to how Nabokov was able to build a complex story, mobilizing long-standing issues of narrative building, such as narrative perspective and the reliability of the narrator. {good!}
Based on you class notes (sorry, but if you did not attend the class you cannot do this assignment) answer the following questions:
“The Hours” was the working title Virginia Woolf used for the book “Mrs. Dalloway”, and later on, it became an actual book, by Michael Cunningham. They are both modernist stories {“The hours” is a postmodernist work}, meaning that they don’t have a very traditional beginning, middle, and end, and that is very clear in the two books, as the stories happen only during the course of one day. Intertextuality is apparent in “The Hours”, once one of the characters is reading Virginia Woolf’s cited book.
“The Hours” is a modern {contemporary, not “modern”} re-telling of “Mrs. Dalloway”, it does not use the same characters but has themes that relate to Woolf’s work. Both of them talk about death and social roles, but the characters that die, for example, are different in each story. While in Woolf’s work, Mrs. Dalloway is the one who commits suicide, in Cunningham’s book, it is a person called Richard. One similarity between them is that both have characters called “Clarissa”, while in “Mrs. Dalloway” we have Clarissa Dalloway, in Cunningham’s work we have Clarissa Vaughn, and they both do the action of going out to buy flowers.
Based on what was said in class, among with further knowledge that I already had about this book, some information gathered was that “Lolita” has an unreliable narrator, given the fact that he is a character in the story, and that at the beginning of it, the readers already know that he is in a mental facility, which makes him untrustworthy. The book does not have an omniscient third-person narration, therefore, the readers doubt about the accuracy of what the narrator tells them, once he, Humbert, is obsessed with a young girl, and may not tell them how their story actually happened. Something that I didn’t know, and that I learned in class is that, apparently, for Humbert to become closer to the young girl, he started to invest in a relationship with her mother, because it was the best way for him to be by her side without anyone being suspicious.
Besides this, it was learned that “Lolita” is not a pornographic novel, but in reality, an erotic one, with many sensual descriptions of certain scenes that are not of characters having sex, Nabokov describes how Lolita, the young girl, eats an apple, in a carnal, seductive, sensual way, a scene that is not actually pornographic, but, with the way the author describes it, it becomes an erotic one. I understood that the prestige “Lolita” receives is not mainly because of the story itself, but because of how well the author writes in English, which is not his first language. It is incredible how deeply Nabokov describes some situations in the book in the English language, always knowing the best words to be used even though he was Russian because at the time he was alive, it was not very common to know the English language so fully like it is today. The author even invented a word to describe the young girl which is now often used, which is “nymphet”, a word to describe a young girl who is sexually attractive. {very good!}
1-“The Hours”, by Michael Cunningham, is a rewriting of Virgina Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway”. What are the similarities and differences between these two novels?
“Mrs. Dalloway” is a book written by Virginia Woolf and “The Hours”, by Michael Cunningham, who portrays Woolf as a character.
In both “The Hours” and “Mrs. Dalloway” the theme of “suicide” is present: in “The Hours”, Woolf commits suicide and, in “Mrs. Dalloway”, Septimus commits suicide. {is that all?}
2-What did you learn about “Lolita”, by Vladimir Nabokov?
I learned that this piece is a very controversial one, as it shows a man, Humbert Humbert, obsessed with Dolores (Lolita) Haze, who is just 12 years old. Humbert is Lolita’s stepfather and starts to develop a sexual interest in her.
Moreover, Nabokov’s writing is phenomenal, being able to portray a rather complex narrative with much detail and delligence.
.
1-“The Hours”, by Michael Cunningham, is a rewriting of Virgina Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway”. What are the similarities and differences between these two novels?
The differences between Mrs. Dalloway and The Hours is that in the first the author Virginia Woolf is the writer of the book, in The Hours Virginia Woolf is a character. In Mrs. Dalloway, Clarissa’s friend, Septimus is the one who commits suicide; in The Hours it is Virginia Woolf who commits suicide.
The most recurrent similarity between the two works is the theme of suicide, which is very present in both works. {anything else?}
2-What did you learn about “Lolita”, by Vladimir Nabokov?
Vladimir Nabokov, a Russian-American author, published Lolita in 1955. The controversial subject matter of the book makes it stand out; the unreliable protagonist and narrator is a middle-aged university professor of literature who goes by the alias Humbert Humbert. He is obsessed with 12-year-old Dolores Haze, with whom he develops a sexual relationship after becoming her stepfather. Her personal nick name for Dolores is “Lolita.”
This controversial, humorous, and heartbreaking book tells the story of cynical middle-aged intellectual Humbert Humbert’s obsession with 12-year-old Lolita Dolores Haze, a nymph who feeds his craziest wants.
Nabokov’s masterpiece is more than just a tale of desire and catastrophe. It is an exhibition of narrative art at its height, as well as a journey of rediscovery across America, an investigation of language and its intricacies. {good!}
DATE DUE: OCTOBER 29 (SATURDAY)
Based on you class notes (sorry, but if you did not attend the class you cannot do this assignment) answer the following questions:
………rssf2022……….
Answer the questions below. Refer to the text whenever necessary to support your answers/arguments:
1. How is Margot portrayed? How does this portrayal relate to the gender issue of the period in which the short story was published? Does this work reinforce or undermine patriarchal ideology?
Margot in the story is portrayed as a common person in their early twenties. She works at the concession stand at the cinema, studies at a university, and has a roommate, Tamara. Through the story, Margot shows herself as a very thoughtful person (not in a good manner, sometimes in the story she overthink(s) about situations). For instance, when Robert picked her up to go to the cinema she started to think a lot about what he would make to her “On the drive, he was quieter than she’d expected, and he didn’t look at her very much. Before five minutes had gone by, she became wildly uncomfortable, and, as they got on the highway, it occurred to her that he could take her someplace and rape and murder her; she hardly knew anything about him, after all. “She also behaves like someone that really cares about what people think of her. This can be seen in her relationship with Robert, a middle-aged {Robert is not a middle-aged man. He is older than she is} man whom she met at the cinema and started going out with. It is possible to notice during the story that even though she thought he was strange, she started to get attached to him and even doubted her own appearance due to the “cold” manner in which he treated her :“she was pretty sure that he had changed his mind about liking her. She was wearing leggings and a sweatshirt, and that might have been the problem. “
This story relates to women of this age due to the situation Margot goes through with Robert. She is an independent, free woman who ends up falling for a strange guy in the wrong way.
This necessity {of} “acceptance” shown by the character can be related to her upbringing as a human being or even trauma from past relationships (according to some psychoanalysts, childhood traumas can be carried into the adulthood). I think that her biggest “mistake” (I don’t think that falling in love with another person can be considered a mistake, but I don’t see any word that can describe the situation better due to its ending, and Robert being revealled {revealed} as a asshole with her) was try{ing} something with Robert, a man who was much older and with very different thoughts from hers, and who was not able to understand that she was a free person and was not obligated to stay with him just because they had an affair.
2. How is Robert portrayed? What adjectives best describe him?
Robert, in the beginning, is portrayed as a very mysterious man with a very distinct appearance “Not so cute that she would have, say, gone up to him at a party, but cute enough that she could have drummed up an imaginary crush on him if he’d sat across from her during a dull class.” Furthermore, Robert acts like a real “gentleman”, as on their first date, he did not try to kiss her on the mouth or be rash with her. instead, he “kissed her gently on the forehead, as though she were something precious.” After that encounter, they chatted a lot with text messages. According to the text, “they texted nearly non-stop, not only jokes but little updates about their days.They started saying good morning and good night, and when she asked him a question and he didn’t respond right away she felt a jab of anxious yearning. “
Another adjective that could be used after reading the middle of the text is responsible, as when Margot was acting very strange and said that she was “just a little tired.”, his first reaction was “I can take you home.” He still regards her with responsibility, as he also did after they had sex in his house and “he drove her to the dorm: He didn’t murder her” ,“I had a really nice time tonight,” he said, unbuckling his seat belt.”
At the final act of the short story, the two best adjectives to describe him are jerk and immature. He did not accepted {accept} that she didn’t want to go along with the relationship, and instead of being mature and move on with his life, he started to act like a real idiot with her, texting things like: “Or is he just some guy you are fucking”, and “Are you fucking that guy right now”, and the worst : “Whore.”
3. Would the outcome of their dating relationship be different if texting were not so present in their lives?
I believe that if the relationship between the two were more in the present and less on social media, maybe she would understand that Robert was a totally different person than he was showing through the texts. He tried to look as much as possible like he was a responsible and mature person, but at the end of the story it can be concluded that everything was a lie and that he was just another asshole who didn’t know how to treat a woman the right way. Due to their relationship being guided by a lot by messages, she ended up being deluded by a person who wasn’t worth it and who showed his true form through offensive and depreciative messages, just because he could not accept the fact that Margot broke up with him. {ok!}
ASSIGNMENT#6 – “CAT PERSON” (KRISTEN ROUPENIAN)
1. How is Margot portrayed? How does this portrayal relate to the gender issue of the period in which the short story was published? Does this work reinforce or undermine patriarchal ideology?
Margot is a young adult student who works in a movie theater. She’s portrayed as a naive person sometimes who goes through certain sexist situations during the moments she meets a guy. The story is written in the 21st century and brings a current narrative in which many women find themselves involved when going out with guys they haven’t met.
The moment she is insulted to “whore” by the guy when she was dating another shows how patriarchal ideology is still present in women’s lives. The guy at the beginning of the story seems to be a good guy for Margot and as soon as he’s contradicted he offends her by imputing some kind of right, and she says in the text that he didn’t even know how to kiss right: “It was a terrible kiss, shockingly bad; Margot had trouble believing that a grown man could possibly be so bad at kissing” (p.8)
2. How is Robert portrayed? What adjectives best describe him?
Robert modifies his behavior during the narrative. When he first meets Margot, he’s handsome, tall, smart and sarcastic. Afterwards he’s shown to be insecure and a liar too, as the two cats he said he had don’t appear in the story. He’s described as “a large, skittish animal, like a horse or a bear” (p.10). Besides, he’s also needy and an asshole, because he didn’t know how to hear a no from Margot that soon offended her.
3. Would the outcome of their dating relationship be different if texting were not so present in their lives?
I don’t think the outcome would be any different. I think the whole context follows the personality and character of them. Margot wanted to have new experiences and unfortunately she had them with a bad guy. He would do that in any situation, by message or not. Most messages make cowardly people braver but they only say what is already inside them. {ok!}
Tópicos de Literatura em Língua Inglesa III 