Rue de Fleurus

Leo Stein moved to Paris in 1902, settling in the rue de Fleurus, where his sister Gertrude joined him in 1903.   Their brother Michael came to Paris in 1904 with his wife, and they settled in rue Madame.  Picasso painted Gertrude's portrait in 1906, which she said influenced her writing. The family's interest in avant-garde art led to purchases of Cézanne, Matisse, and Picasso.  From October 5, 2011 to January 16, 2012, their collection is on exhibit at the Grand Palais.

A Conference on Gertrude Stein and the Arts will be held at the Grand Palais in Paris on October 20-21, accompanied by poetry readings at Galérie éof, rue Saint-Fiacre (www.doublechange.org).

Links:
Official site for the exhibit "L'Aventure des Stein," Les Musées Nationaux (http://www.rmn.fr/stein).
German Broadcast about the exhibit (http://youtu.be/QD7NGO-gT94).
"Gertrude Stein and the Arts"Symposium (http://www.terraamericanart.org/calendar/?event=2643).

Writing Tips

Try to develop a literary essay or commentary around a thesis statement, which is a short statement that explains what it is that you wish to demonstrate.

A thesis statement is easier to find and write if you have spent some time studying the texts already. In preparation for a commentary you should plan to read the text four or five times. Relax. Give yourself a quiet space in which to think about what you are reading. Look up the words you don't understand. See how the text breaks down into movements.

Consider that your reader needs to be convinced that what you say is true and important. Use proofs from the literary text to support your assertions.

Before handing anything in: REREAD IT! After every paragraph, ask yourself the question, "so what?"

Punctuation varies from country to country and language to language. Make sure that you are consistent in your use of punctuation, and that it is appropriate for English language texts.

Helpful books and articles to consult on writing, and writing about literature:

Gallet, René. Pratique de l'explication de texte en anglais. Paris: Ellipses, 2007.

Orwell, George. "Politics and the English Language" (1946).

Strunk, William, and White, E.B. The Elements of Style (4th edition), Longman, 1999.

Need a font?

Thanks to Steve Jobs, we managed to get a choice of fonts on our computers, but have you ever considered the history and philosophy of the font you are using?  According to Janet Maslin, Simon Garfield's book Just My Type (2010) is an "excellent gloss" on the history of font culture.  Oh, and there's also some material on Wynkyn de Worde.

Janet Maslin, "Font Pain and Poetry: So Much Depends on a Curve," New York Times (August 21, 2011).
Wynkyn de Worde Society (www.wynkyndeworde.co.uk).

(By the way, this book is available through iBooks, and the first pages can be read there.)

Bibliography Matters for Modernism

Armstrong, Tim.  Modernism: A cultural History.  Cambridge: Polity, 2005.

Asher, Kenneth.  T.S. Eliot and Ideology.  Cambridge: CUP, 1994.

Beasley, Rebecca.  Ezra Pound and the Visual Culture of Modernism.  Cambridge: CUP, 2007.

—. Theorists of Modernist Poetry: T.S. Eliot, T.E. Hulme, Ezra Pound, London: Routledge, 2007.

Bergson, Henri.

Bernstein, Michael André.  The Tale of the Tribe: Ezra Pound and the Modern Verse Epic.  Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1980.

Bloom, Harold.  The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry.  New York: OUP, 1973.

Carpenter, Humphrey.  A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound. London: Faber & Faber, 1988.

Davenport, Guy.  Cities on Hills: A Study of I-XXX of Ezra Pound's Cantos.  Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1983.

Davie, Donald.  Modernist Essays: Yeats, Pound, Eliot.  Ed. Clive Wilmer.  Manchester: Carcanet, 2004.

Eliot, T.S. The Complete Poems and Plays of T.S. Eliot.  London: Faber & Faber, 2004.

—.  Selected Essays. London: Faber & Faber, 1999.

Hulme, T.E.  The Collected Writings of T.E. Hulme, ed. Karen Csengeri, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994.

Jameson, Fredric.  The Political Unconscious. London: Routledge, 2002.

Jones, Peter (ed.).  Imagist Poetry.  London: Penguin, 2001.

Kenner, Hugh.  The Pound Era. Berkeley and Los Anglees: U California Press, 1973.

Levenson, Michael H.  A Geneology of Modernism: A Study in English Literary Doctrine, 1908-1922.  Cambridge: CUP, 1984.

Longenbach, James.  Modernist Poetics of History: Pound, Eliot, and the Sense of the Past.  Princeton: Princeton UP, 1987.

Marsh, Alec.  Money and Modernity: Pound, Williams, and the Spirit of Jefferson.  Tuscaloosa: U Alabama Press, 1998.

McDonald, Gail.  Learning to be Modern: Pound, Eliot, and the American University. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993.

McDonald, Peter.   Serious Poetry.

Nicholls, Peter.  Modernisms.  Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995.

Pondrom, Cyrena N. (ed).  The Road From Paris: French Influence on English Poetry 1900-1920.  Cambridge: CUP, 1974.

Pound, Ezra.  The Cantos.  London:  Faber & Faber, 1994.  

—. Poems and Translations, ed. Richard Sieburth.  New York: Library of America, 2003.

Stead, C.K.  Pound, Yeats, Eliot and the Modernist Movement.  London: Macmillan, 1986.

Tate, Allan (ed).  T.S. Eliot, The Man and His Work.  London:  Chatto & Windus, 1967.

Taupin, René.  L'influence du symbolisme français sur la poésie amériaine (1910-1920).  Paris: Honoré Champion, 1929.

Terrell, Carroll F.  A Companion to the Cantos of Ezra Pound. Berkeley and Los Angeles, U California Press, 1993.

Who's Afraid of a Summer Reading List?

Reading lists are not meant to be a scare tactic by the professor to the student.  The teacher is merely interested in keeping the student focused and guiding their growth in literary culture.  A student should approach reading lists with a certain liberality and freedom.  Usually a teacher is clear about what books are actually required reading (the ones you absolutely must read and understand from cover to cover), and the books that are merely recommended.  Long reading lists without further comment usually fall into the "recommended" category.  So, use your freedom and decide which books interest you and will enrich your knowledge in an area that your curiosity draws you to discover.  A reading list like the one below is intended to be used haphazardly, liberally, by choosing a few bits from several categories, or something from each category—well, just about any way you wish, as long as you use it (just a little bit).  Have a great summer & bonne lecture!

Summer Reading for Students

First Year
American Lit
Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage.
Langston Hughes, Selected Poems or The Panther and the Lash.
Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird.
Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye.
Flannery O'Conner, A Good Man is Hard to Find.
Philip Roth, Goodbye Columbus.
J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye.
Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn.
Daniel Wallace, Big Fish.

British Lit
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice.
Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist.
E.M. Forster, Howard's End.
P.D. James, The Private Patient.
George Orwell, Animal Farm.
William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet.


Second Year
American Lit
Emily Dickinson, Poems.
Paul Laurence Dunbar, Poems or Selected Poems.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night.
Eugene O'Neill, All God's Chillun Got Wings.
Edgar Allen Poe, Tales.
John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath.
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass.
Richard Wright, Black Boy.

British Lit
Martin Amis, Lucky Jim.
W.H. Auden, Selected Poems.
Elizabeth Bowen, The Heat of the Day.
Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory.

Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D'Urbervilles.
James Joyce, Dubliners.
Keats, Selected Poems.
Harold Pinter, The Caretaker.
W.B. Yeats, Selected Poems.


Third Year
American Lit
Willa Cather, O Pioneers!

T.S. Eliot, Selected Poems.
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter.
Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms.
Joseph Heller, Catch-22.
Joyce Carol Oates, Them.
Henry James, The Wings of the Dove.
Robert Lowell, Imitations.
Ezra Pound, Selected Poems.
Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men.

British Lit
Martin Amis, London Fields.

T.S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral.
Geoffrey Hill, Selected Poems.
Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day.
Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia.
V.S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River.
Zadie Smith, On Beauty.
Muriel Spark, The Driver's Seat.

(NB:  this list borrows some works from an ICP list, but is not exactly the same as that list).

Annoted Bibliography of Criticism & Theory

Robert ALTER, The Art of Biblical Narrative (1981), The Art of Biblical Poetry (1987).

A. ALVAREZ, The New Poetry (1962). This is an anthology of British poetry. In the introduction Alvarez rejects the gentility of the Movement and British verse in the 1950s.
Matthew ARNOLD, Essays in Criticism (1865, 1888), Culture and Anarchy, An Essay in Political and Social Criticism(1869).
Erich AUERBACH, Mimesis (1945).

J.L. AUSTIN, How to do Things with Words (1962).
Irving BABBIT, Literature and the American College (1908) emphasized the ethical component of art, and his ideas influenced T.S. Eliot, who studied under him at Harvard.

Roland BARTHES, Mythologies (1957).

F.W. BATESON, English Poetry and the English Language(1934) and English Poetry: A Critical introduction (1950) emphasize historical and linguistic contexts when studying texts. The Scholar-Critic (1972) insisted on high standards of historical and linguistic scholarship. Essays in Critical Dissent (1972).
Walter BENJAMIN, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1935), Illuminations (1955).

Eric BENTLEY, The Playwright as Thinker (1946), In Search of Theater ( ), The Life of Drama (1975).

R.P. BLACKMUR, Language as Gesture (1952).

Allan BLOOM, The Closing of the American Mind (1987) is a conservative assessment that scolds Americans for their renunciation of the traditional life of the mind.
Harold BLOOM, The Anxiety of Influence (1973) discusses how writers react to the weight of literary tradition.  The Western Canon (1994).

David BROMWICH, Skeptical Music: Essays on Modern Poetry (2001).

Cleanth BROOKS, Modern Poetry and the Tradition (1939),The Well-Wrought Urn (1947).
Sterling BROWN, The Negro in American Fiction (1937), Negro Poetry and Drama (1939).
Seymour CHATMAN, Style and Structure in Literature: Essays in the New Stylistics (1975).
Noam CHOMSKY, Language and Problems of Knowledge(1987).

Frederick CREWS, Skeptical Engagements (1986), The Critics Bear it Away (1992).

Jonathan CULLER, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature (1975).
Guy DAVENPORT, The Geography of the Imagination (1997) notes the ways time and cultural setting weigh on the writer.
Jacques DERRIDA, Of Grammatology (tr. 1977): “There is nothing outside the text.”
Michel DE CERTEAU, The Practice of Everyday Life(tr.1984).
Paul DE MAN, Blindness and Insight (2nd ed., 1985).

Denis DONAGHUE, England, Their England (1988).
C.C. ELDRIDGE, The Imperial Experience (1996).

T.S. ELIOT, Selected Essays (1950).
William EMPSON, Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), Using Biography (1984).

Leslie FIELDER, Love and Death in the American Novel (2nd ed., 1992).

Stanley FISH
Michel FOUCAULT, The Archaeology of Knowledge (tr. 1972).

Joseph FRANK, The Widening Gyre (1963).

Northrup FRYE, Anatomy of Criticism (1957) divides literature into four categories/seasons: comedy/spring; romance/summer; tragedy/autumn; irony/winter.
Sandra GILBERT and Susan GUBAR, The Mad Woman in the Attic: 19th Century Literature (1980).
Stephen GREENBLATT, Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980) is a New Historicist approach that sees literature as political expression and discourse.

Elizabeth HARDWICK, Seduction and Betrayal (1974).

Geoffrey HARTMAN, Saving the Text: Literature, Derrida, Philosophy (1981), Psychoanalysis and the Question of the Text (1985),  The Fateful Question of Culture (1997), The Geoffrey Hartman Reader (2004).

William HAZLITT, The Spirit of the Age (1904).

Martin HEIDEGGER

Geoffrey HILL, Collected Critical Writings (2008).

John HOLLANDER, Rhyme's Reason: a guide to English Verse (1981).
Roman JAKOBSON, On Language (1990).
Frederic JAMESON

Randall JARRELL, Poetry and the Age (1955).

Pauline KAEL, I Lost it at the Movies (1994).

Alfred KAZIN, On Native Ground (1942), An American Procession (1984).

Hugh KENNER, A Sinking Island: The Modern English Writers (1988), A Colder Eye: The Modern Irish Writers (1983).

Frank KERMODE, Romantic Image (1957), The Sense of An Ending (1968), Pieces of my Mind (2003).

G. Wilson KNIGHT, The Wheel of Fire (1930) concentrated on the spatial dimension of Shakespeare plays, viewing them as expanded poetic metaphors. Knight’s work influenced F.R. Leavis.

D.H. LAWRENCE, Studies in American Literature (reprint, 1964), Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers (1936).

F.R. LEAVIS, Revaluation (1936), The Great Tradition (1948), The Common Pursuit (1953).

Mary McCARTHY, On the Contrary ( ).

H. L. MENCKEN, The American Language (1919).

J. HILLIS MILLER
John MIDDLETON MURRY
Martha C. NUSSBAUM, Poetic Justice (1966) suggests that reading great works makes readers more critical citizens.

George ORWELL, Collected Essays (1961) The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters (1970).

Camille PAGLIA, Sexual Personae (1990).

Richard POIRIER, The Performing Self (1971), The Renewal of Literature (1987).

Vladimir PROPP, Morphology of the Folktale (tr. 1968).
John Crowe RANSOM, The New Criticism (1941).

I.A. RICHARDS, Practical Criticism (1954).

Christopher RICKS, The Force of Poetry (1984).

Phyllis ROSE, Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages (1984).

Edward SAID, Culture and Imperialism (1993).
George SANTAYANA, Interpretations of Poetry and Religion (1900).

Jean-Paul SARTRE, Situations (1947).

Ferdinand de SAUSSURE, Course in General Linguistics(1915).

Roger SHATTUCK, The Banquet Years: the Origins of the Avant Garde in France (1958, revised 1968), The Innocent Eye: On Modern Literature and the Arts (1984).

Elaine SHOWALTER, A Literature of Their Own (1977) helped to revise the canon to include women.

Alan SINFIELD Faultlines (1992).
Susan SONTAG, Against Interpretation and Other Essays(1966) wants to validate an artistic aesthetic based on concrete experience and pleasure where no intellectual response is needed. Instead of hermeneutics, “we need an erotics of art.”
George STEINER, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (1975), On Difficulty (1978), Martin Heidegger(1978), Antigones (1984), Real Presences (1989).
Arthur SYMONS, The Symbolist Movement in Literature(1899) introduced French Symbolism to English Readers (cf. T.S. Eliot).
Allen TATE, On the Limits of Poetry (1948), The Man of Letters in the Modern World (1957).

Charles TAYLOR, Sources of the Self (1989), The Ethics of Authenticity (1992), A Secular Age (2007).
Lionel TRILLING, The Liberal Imagination (1950), The Opposing Self (1959), Sincerity and Authenticity (The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, 1972), The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent (2008).

Kenneth TYNAN, Curtains, selections from the drama criticism and related writings (1961).

Helen VENDLER, Part of Nature, Part of Us (1980).

WARSHOW, Robert, The Immediate Experience (enlarged edition, 2002) concerns film and popular culture.

René WELLEK and Austin WARREN, Theory of Literature (1949).
Edmond WILSON, Axel’s Castle (1931) about the symbolist movement, analyzing Joyce, Eliot, Yeats, Proust, Stein.  The Shores of Light ( ), The Triple Thinkers ( ), The Wound and the Bow ( ), To the Finland Station ( ), Patriotic Gore (1962), Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1920s and 1930s (Library of America, 2007).

W.K. WIMSATT and Monroe BEARDSLEY, The Verbal Icon(1954) contained the phrase “intentional fallacy” and proposed that the critic’s job was to discern what the text was actually saying, not what the author may have intended.
Yvor WINTERS, In Defense of Reason (1947), Forms of Discovery (1967).

James WOOD, The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief (2000).

Virginia WOOLF, The Common Reader (1929).

Theodore ZIOLKOWSKI, Varieties of Literary Thematics(1983).

" 'Ulysses' is going to make my place famous"

The Letters of Sylvia Beach have just been published by Columbia University Press, edited by Keri Walsh.

Dwight Garner, "Ex-Pat Paris as It Sizzled for One Literary Lioness," New York Times (April 18, 2010).