Journal 9

LIT 4303 Dr. Lillios ________________________________________________________________________ John Fowles’s The Magus Reading Assignment: Read the book by Tuesday, April 19 Schedule: Thursday, April 14: Introduction to Fowles and Lyme Regis, his green world, themes, concept of the magus, the existential hero, Greece as a setting Monday, April 18: Submit Fowles journal entry to http://www.postww2lit.blogspot.com (see below) by midnight. Be sure to sign your entry. Tuesday, April 19: The nature and significance of play, the god game Journal 9 Assignment: Read “Why I Rewrote The Magus” by John Fowles. Write about a page or 200-250 words on Fowles’s world view in the novel. Why did he write (and re-write) the novel? How was he affected by the Greek landscape? What reaction does he hope to elicit from the reader who reads his

Journal 8

LIT 4303 Dr. Lillios ________________________________________________________________________ Lawrence Durrell’s Justine Reading Assignment: Read the book by Thursday, April 7 Schedule: Tuesday, April 5: Videotape of Durrell, Alexandria in history Thursday, April 7: The Book of the Dead and the Eastern journey of the hero Monday, April 11: Submit Durrell journal entry to http://www.postww2lit.blogspot.com (see below) by midnight. Be sure to sign your entry. Journal 8 Assignment: Read the excerpt below from Edward Said’s Orientalism (NY: Vintage, 1979). Unlike the Americans, the French and British—less so the Germans, Russians, Spanish, Portugese, Italians, and Swiss—have had a long tradition of what I shall be calling Orientalism, a way of coming to terms with the Orient that is based on the Orient's special place in European Western Experience. The Orient is not only adjacent to Europe; it is also the place of Europe's greatest and richest and oldest colonies, the source of its civilizations and languages, its cultural contestant, and one of its deepest and most recurring images of the Other. In addition, the Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience. Yet none of this Orient is merely imaginative. The Orient is an integral part of European material civilization and culture. Orientalism expresses and represents that part culturally and even ideologically as a a mode of discourse with supporting institutions, vocabulary, scholarship, imagery, doctrines, even colonial bureaucracies and colonial styles. . . . It will be clear to the reader...that by Orientalism I mean several things, all of them, in my opinion, interdependent. The most readily accepted designation for Orientalism is an academic one, and indeed the label still serves in a number of academic institutions. Anyone who teaches, writes about, or researches the Orient—and this applies whether the persion is an anthropologist, sociologist, historian, or philologist—either in its specific or its general aspects, is an Orientalist, and what he or she says or does is Orientalism. . . . Related to this academic tradition, whose fortunes, transmigrations, specializations, and transmissions are in part the subject of this study, is a more general meaning for Orientalism. Orientalism is a style of thought based upon ontological and epistemological distinction made between "the Orient" and (most of the time) "the Occident." Thus a very large mass of writers, among who are poet, novelists, philosophers, political theorists, economists, and imperial administrators, have accepted the basic distinction between East and West as the starting point for elaborate accounts concerning the Orient, its people, customs, "mind," destiny, and so on. . . . the phenomenon of Orientalism as I study it here deals principally, not with a correspondence between Orientalism and Orient, but with the internal consistency of Orientalism and its ideas about the Orient . . despite or beyond any corrsespondence, or lack thereof, with a "real" Orient. (1-3,5) ** View video of interview with Said at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwCOSkXR_Cw ** Go to JSTOR and search for article by Joseph Boone, “Vacation Cruises; Or, the Homoerotics of Orientalism.” Write about a page or 200-250 words about Orientalism in Justine. Do you detect distortion in the way Durrell describes Egyptian people, culture, or landscape? If so, what do you think is his purpose?

Assignment 7

LIT 4303 Dr. Lillios ________________________________________________________________________ Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate Reading Assignment: Read the book by Tuesday, March 29 Schedule: Tuesday, March 29: Biography of Esquivel, martriarchy vs. patriarchy, woman’s space, food and the novel, female kundslerroman, Magical Realism in the novel. Thursday, March 31: Begin discussion of Durrell’s Justine Monday, April 4: Submit Esquivel journal entry to http://www.postww2lit.blogspot.com (see below) by midnight. Be sure to sign your entry. Journal 7 Assignment: Read the excerpt below from Toril Moi’s Sexual/Textual Politics (London: Routledge, 1985: 167). . . . if patriarchy sees women as occupying a marginal position within the symbolic order, then it can construe them as the limit or borderline of that order. From a phallocentric point of view, women will then come to represent the necessary frontier between man and chaos; but because of their very marginality they will also always seem to recede into and merge with the chaos of the outside. Women seen as the limit of the symbolic order will in other words share in the disconcerting properties of all frontiers: they will be neither inside nor outside, neither known nor unknown. It is this position that has enabled male culture sometimes to vilify women as representing darkness and chaos, to view them as Lilith or the Whore of Babylon, and sometimes to elevate them as the representatives of a higher and purer nature, to venerate them as Virgins and mothers of God. In the first instance the borderline is seen as part of the chaotic wilderness outside, and in the second it is seen as an inherent part of the inside: the part that protects and shields the symbolic order from imaginary chaos. Needless to say, neither position corresponds to an essential truth of woman, much as the patriarchal powers would like us to believe that they did. Write about a page or 200-250 words about gender relations in the novel. What statement is Esquivel making about woman’s chances of creating her own destiny in face of overwhelming patriarchal authority? How can woman create her own space and direct her own destiny in the novel?