htrlap ch.18-20 notes

8/2/2019 Htrlap Ch.18-20 Notes

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HTRLAP Detailed Notes Ch. 18-20Ch. 18- If she comes up, its baptism

In real life if you drown it just means you drowned & if you dont then it means you canswim

Examples of characters who fell in water:o Virginia Wolf, John Berryman, Percy Bysshe Shellev, and Ann Quinn

Tossing characters into the river is:o Wish fulfillmento Exorcism of pimal fearo Exploration of the possibleo A handy solution to messy plot difficulties

Types of freedoms from drowning:o Rescue- passivity, good fortune, indebtednesso Piece of driftwood- raises issues of luck and coincidence, serendipity rather than

planning

Ordinary people-by Judith Guestso Two brothers go out sailing on Lake Michigan and a storm comes up & strong

brother drowns.

o Weak brother came as an insecure, awkward younger brother. Comes back as anonly child, facing a world that knows him as that kids brother.(shows how the

weak brother is reborn a.k.a. transformed)

o one cannot step into the same river twice- parts that were once floating in riverdont float the same way in the river again therefore making it different each flow

o Reborn=Baptism Love Medicine-by Louise Endlich

o Protagonists mom walks across the snow of an Easter blizzard & dies.o Henry- Vietnam veteran fixes a nice red car & while at picnic w/ brother (Lyman)

he goes to a flooded river and dies; brother throws car in with Henry.o Henry elects to drown= showing how he wants to leave the world( the world has

basically already left him anyway sine he is drowning in his PTSD problems)

Song of Solomon- by Toni Morrisono Milkman dead- gets wet 3 times(symbolizes baptism*father, son, holy spirit*)

Rain= restorative and cleansing Baptism= you must be ready to receive/accept it or wont work; death and rebirth as a

new individual

When writers baptize a character they mean death, rebirth, and new identity?o Yes. But baptism can also mean:

Literal rebirth-surviving a deadly situation Baptism= Noahs flood

Does submersion in water always signify baptism?o Not always.

When a character drowns, what does that mean?o They die.o The rebirth/baptisms have a lot of common threads, but every drowning is serving

its own purpose:

Character revelation


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Thematic development of violence/failure/guilt Plot complication/denouement

Beloved- by Morrisono River in novel= middle passage; crossing a river from one existence to another

Drowning is symbolic baptism, IF the character comes back up, symbolically reborn. Butdrowning on purpose can also represent a form of rebirth, a choosing to enter a new,different life, leaving an old one behind.

Traveling on waterrivers, oceanscan symbolically represent baptism.o Young man sails away from a known world, dies out of one existence, and comes

back a new person, hence reborn.

o Rivers can also represent the River Styx, the mythological river separating theworld from the Underworld, another form of transformation, passing from life

into death.

Theres also rebirth/baptism implied when a character is renamed.Ch.19- Geography Matters

In a way, every story or poem is a vacation and every writer has to ask: Where is this onetaking place?

William Faulker set the majority of his work on his little postage stamp of ground (hisfictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi) then he got bored of it because he used it

too much

Thomas Hardy Certain novels and stories couldnt be set anywhere but where they are, those characters

couldnt say the things they say if they were uprooted and planted somewhere else

theyd say different things and do different things

What does geography mean to a literary work?o EVERYTHINGGGGo The Old Man and the Sea can only take place in the Caribbean, around Cuba

The place brings history, interaction between American and Cubanculture, corruption, poverty, fishing, and baseball

o The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Any boy and older man can take a trip down a river on a raft, but for it to

be this story in particular, geography is everything

We know this story by it being on that specific river (the Mississippi),traveling through that particular landscape and communities at a specific

moment in history

In this book, the great threat to a slave was that he might be sold DOWNthe river. The farther south you go, things get worse.

What is geography?o Hills, creeks, deserts, beaches, etco Geography is the reason that napoleon didnt conquer Russiao Napoleon Symphony by Anthony Burgess is a novel about the Russian winter

defeating the French emperor

The author brings to life the vastness of it, the emptiness, the hostility orthe invading troops, the total absence of any possibility of comfort or

safety or solace

o In poetry and fiction, geography is mostly people


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Robert Frost didnt wanna be called a nature poet (only had 3 or 4 poemswithout a person in it)

o Geography is about humans inhabiting spaces and at the same time the spaces thatinhabit humans

o Geography is setting but its also (or can be) psychology, attitude, finance,industry- anything that place can forge in the people who live there

o It can also be more! It can reveal theme, symbol, or ploto The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allen Poe

Opening page describes landscape and a day as bleak as any in literature He prepares us for the story by describing the setting and setting the mood Landscape and architecture and weather merge with mood and tone to set

this story in motion

The description of the house makes us nervous and dismayed This makes it even worse when we meet Roderick Usher (one of creepiest

characters of book)

Geography can define and develop charactero

Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver In Main character grows up in Kentucky and notices she has no options

there so she runs away to Tucson. Changes her name from Marietta to

Taylor Greer.

Renaming=rebirth! Goes from a closed to an open environment and seizes the

opportunities for growth and development

o Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison Milkman Dead goes from Michigan to Pennsylvania and Virginia In the hills and hollows he finds a sense of roots, a sense of responsibility

and justice, a capacity for atonement and a generosity of spirit he never

knew before Only by leaving home and finding his real home can he find his true self

Geography can be charactero Going After Cacciato by Tim OBrian

The land is an enemy to the American soldiers because they dont know it,its hot, and the tunnels

One of the soldiers is killed by a sniper so they order the destruction of anear village. The place is deserted anyway. But they wanted revenge since

the person who shot the sniper was hiding in that village.

They go after the community of people who houses the enemy. The physical village is a center of mystery and threat, as alien

environment, as generic home of potential enemies and uncertain friends. The soldiers pour their fear and anger towards the land into the village

because if they cant overcome the largergeography, they can at leastexpress their rage against the smaller part of it

Geography can play a large role in ploto A Room with A View by EM Forster


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Lucy is in Florence where she falls in love with George Emerson. Its ahuge scandal and a big part is from the passionate, fiery nature of the

Italian city

o A Passage to India by EM Forster Even out best intentions can have disastrous consequences in an alien

environmento The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell

Five genders in Alexandria Tourists in Egypt. You might think that the heat of an Egyptian summer

would make the Englishmen tourists horny but theres little evidence ofthat

o DH Lawrences work opened up the way for more sexual directness He sent his characters south in search of trouble. In the south they usually

find sunshine and curious and sometimes dangerous political and

philosophical ideas

Lawrence employs geography as a metaphor for the psyche

When his characters go south they are really digging deep into theirsubconscious, delving into that region of darkest fears and desires

o WHEN WRITERS SEND CHARACTERS SOUTH ITS SO THEY CAN RUNAMOK

Effects can be tragic or comic but usually flow the same pattern. they runamok because theyre having direct, raw encounters with the subconscious

Its important to understand the geography of the imagination of the writer, especially inpoetry

o In Praise of Limestone by W H Audeno He is directly attacking poetic assumptions of the sublimeo Writing about places we call home unlike the clich vast and sudden mountains

landscapeo Geography becomes not only a way by which the poet expresses his psyche but

also a conveyor of theme

Hills and vallieso Represent ups and downso The Snows of Kilimanjaro by Hemingway

He contrasts a leopard thats dead and preserved in snow with the writerdying of gangrene down on the plain

Leopards death is clean, cold, and pure. Writers death is ugly,unpleasant, and horrible.

CONCLUSION:

What represents wilderness, danger, confusion? i.e. tunnels, labyrinths, jungles Geography can represent the human psyche (Heart of Darkness) Going south=running amok and running amok means having a direct, raw encounter with

the subconscious.

Low places: swamps, crowds, fog, darkness, fields, heat, unpleasantness, people, life,death

High places: snow, ice, purity, thin air, clear views, isolation, life, death


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Shall I compare thee to a summersday? (automatically we know its aboutromance/love)

Seasons can work magic on us, and writers can work magic with seasonsCONCLUSION:

o Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter=youth, adulthood, middle age, old age/death.o Spring=fertility, life, happiness, growth, resurrection (Easter)o Fall=harvest, reaping what we sow, both rewards and punishmentso Winter=hibernation, lack of growth, death, punishmento Christmas=childhood, birth, hope, family

Irony trumps all April is the cruelest month fromThe Wasteland

htrlap ch.18-20 notes

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