Steve Mentz

Looking at our syllabus, I see you also have a one-page “provisional topic” due next week.  What I’m looking for here is an early stage of pre-writing, in which you choose an area of inquiry, a primary text or set of texts, and make some early gestures toward a critical methodology.

To be more specific, I’d like each “topic” to include the following things:

1.  A draft title (it should be creative and catchy as well as descriptive & informative)

2.  A 2-3 sentence summary of the area of inquiry: what sorts of questions are you asking/hoping to answer?

3.  Primary texts: at least one, no more than 3, with some suggestion about what features you’ll discuss (ie, not just *The Lusiads*, but the Adamastor episode (for a paper on post-colonialism or imperialism), or the Island ofLove (for a paper on sexuality)…

4.  Methodology:  You can keep this fairly broad at this stage, and you should follow the project’s intellectual lead rather than shoehorning material into a pre-fab critical frame — but as we all should know by now, not having a methodology is never a good idea.  (Or even possible.)

5.  Secondary texts: You don’t have to have read these yet, but it’s a good idea to get started with some possibilities.  I’ll make some suggestions, and also point you toward other things.

You should fit all this on one side of one page, and be prepared to talk (very briefly) about it in class.

Cheers,

Steve

Next week’s reading is Ulrich Kinzel’s great article on maritime orientation in the early modern period, which I first read maybe 4 years ago but to which I keep coming back.  He does a decent close reading of *Merchant of Vencie*, esp the opening exchanges, but I’d like to have us spend some time thinking about the play of identities in *Comedy of Errors* in Kinzel’s oceanic terms.

But the other thing we should consider is that *Errors* is  Mediterranean play, located specifically in the eastern Med, which in Shakespeare’s day was under Turkish control.  Kinzel’s brave new vistas (and mine, really) are on the boundless deeps.  Let’s talk about those differences too.

I’d also like to see you guys posting some comments on this blog.

Thinking about last week’s class & the very detailed, section-by-section oral report makes me want to make a suggestion: as graduate students, you should read a little more self-interestedly.  The idea isn’t necessarily to record or remember everything a given author writes (even if the author is your professor).  The idea is to find things you can use in your own work.

To make this suggestion a little more concrete, I’ll ask all future presenters (starting with Rich next week, on Josiah Blackmore) to focus less on summarizing facts or even analyses and more on the big picture.  That means three things: 1) methodologies (ie, how does the author approach his or her material, what sorts of questions get asked and answered),  2)  conclusions (ie, what’s the next step that the book asks to be taken?), and 3) bibliography (what great new stuff can you find through this book?).

The fastest way to find these things is to look first in the introduction (esp for methodology), second in the conclusion (for the next possible step), and third in the notes.  (Grad students often read back to front, or up from the small print on the bottom of the page.)  Not to pile on Christianne, but she didn’t talk very much about either of those parts of my book — and for grad students those are usually the most important parts.

To clarify quickly in regard to my book, here’s what I mean

1.  Methodology: As I show in the short intro (and also in the article), I’m interested in engaging and combining ecological studies, post-colonial studies, global studies, and technology studies.  For graduate students who might be interested in one (or more) of those, that’s the most important gambit of my book.  (You have to decide for yourselves if I pull off that combo.)

2.  Conclusions: I emphasize a critical stance with regard to certain kinds of ecocrit (in the conclusion) and I also want to correct the tendency I see in both New Historicist first contact narratives and “Atlantic History” of rushing over the sea to focus only on the New World.  Again, you can assess the results as you like — but it’s worth recognizing what the project tries to do.

3.  Bibliography: All the books and articles for this class are in the book’s biblio (plus lost of others), and I characterize them variously as “the new thallossology” (a borrowed term), “blue cultural studies,” and “the new maritime humanities.”

I don’t want to oversell my own book (though I hope you like it), but I do want to tweak the way that you all read.  Graduate students aren’t in it for the details of the readings or even the pleasures of the texts so much as for the intellectual structures that they can use.

See you on Thursday.

Some good news about Theatre for a New Audience’s spring 2010 season: a new production of Measure for Measure, which will fit into the course on Shakespeare and Religious Culture I want to teach, and also a Peter Brooks adaptation of some of the Sonnets, which I think will just be great fun.  Things to look forward to…

Good news from amazon: the new Pynchon novel is on its way to me overnight.  Haven’t looked forward to reading a new novel this much since…1990, reading Vineland after getting back from my post-college Asian wanderings, or 1998 reading Mason & Dixon in grad school, or lugging Against the Day around London in 2007… We’ll see what the next one (another good title) has to offer.

My favorite painting in the world is in Massachusetts at the Peabody Essex Musuem until Sept 7, and it’s also in today’s New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/31/arts/design/31seascapes.html?_r=1

All these 17c seascapes come from the National Maritime Museum’s collection, in Greenwich (London), where I was a fellow in 2007-8.  As the article notes, seeing all these paintings together reminds you that these are generic works, fairly similar each to each.  But as documents of the increasing fascination with the maritime world that was transforming European culture in the 17c, it’s hard to find anything more visually striking.

I remember the first time I saw “The Wreck of the Amsterdam,” the anonymous Flemish painting that’s the lead image in the Times review.  It’s a huge canvas, and I came upon it in an exhibition at the Queen’s House in Greenwich (built in 1605 by Inigo Jones) , and the thing almost knocked me over.  It’s beautiful, powerful, and just overwhelming.  You see the huge ship heeled over almost horizontally by the waves, being driven onto a rocky coast, with an already-wrecked ship on one side and a flaming shipped manned by devils on the other.  A lone sailor clings to the mast.  An allegorical portrait of life at sea?

I’ve been shopping for a play to take my students to this fall, and I think I’ll go with ShakespeareNYC’s Lear, which will play Oct 9 -31.  They’ve done some good shows for us before.

Williamson’s bio reminds me that Borges died in June 1986 in Geneva, where he went with his wife with the intent never to return to Argentina.  Borges had lived in Geneva as a young man, and also seems to have imagined the Swiss ideal — independent neutrality — as a possible model for his troubled nation.  So much of his work seems to be about creating an imaginative space of separation and distance from the pressures of reality, and also about the impossibility of doing so.  Interesting that he may have envisioned Switzerland (which I always think of as a fairly dull place) as part of that project.

I also remember hearing of Borges’s death when I was in college, and thinking, as I almost never think when famous writers die, that I’d lost a chance to see him in person.  A classmate of mine had heard him speak at Andover, I think, and my freshman lit prof had somewhat pompously described his “lunch with Borges” during class that spring.  I can think of very few 20c writers who I’d rather have heard speak.

Just finished Edwin Williamson’s massive bio, Borges: A LIfe (Viking, 2004), which charts the master’s production story by story against his surprisingly stormy love life, which saw him engaged (or nearly so) several times during his adult life, and then finally married twice, the first time disastrously and the second time to a longtime student and assistant who was several decades his junior (and who Williamson interviewed for the biography).    Williamson also makes large claims for the controlling power of Borges’s mother (with whom he lived in a small apartment for most of his adult life until she died in her 90s in 1975) and the failed example of his father, who never succeeded as a novelist.

Most of the reviews took Williamson to task for his over-analytic readings of Borges’s work, but more than anything what struck me was a line from Pierre Menard about the author’s habit of sometimes writing exactly the opposite of what he believed.  Maybe Borges never really wanted to marry?  Williamson takes on faith that Borges idolized each of the women with whom he was connected romantically, and that he imagined each as the “new Beatrice” who would make possible his final literary triumph.  But it’s hard to imagine a more triumphant literary career than Borges’s — and it’s worth remembering that Dante never married his Beatrice.  Might it be just as possible that Borges’s first loyalty was to his work and his imagination, and that the various women and visions of a new domestic life never managed to crowd that out? His mother was a kind of literary secretary for him for much of his adult life, and then his second wife filled that voidfor his final decade.)

I think of Picasso’s remark that everything he did in life, including his various marriages and affairs, was a rehearsal for what happened when he stood in front of the canvas with a brush in his hand.  Borges, too, has always seemed to me an absolute artist, uncompromising and dedicated.  I certainly can imagine why so many women would not, finally, have wanted to marry him.