QUESTIONS FOR CPLT 325 WORLD LITERATURE SINCE 1650
CSU FULLERTON, FALL 2015
EMAIL | SYLLABUS | POLICIES | QUESTIONS | PRESENTATIONS | JOURNALS | PAPER | FINAL
SOME QUESTIONS ON VARIOUS AUTHORS
*2023 Note: Visitors may download these PDF files: ANCIENT WORLD LIT. | MODERN WORLD LIT.
Basho | Saikaku | Enlightenment | Voltaire | Goethe | the Romantics | Dostoyevsky | Tolstoy | Chekhov | Tagor | Ichiyo | Kafka | Brecht | Garcia Lorca | Neruda | Paz | el Saadawi | T’ien-Hsin | wa Thiong’o | Soyinka
What should go into the individual journal entries that make up a given set? Focus on each text’s specific language, themes, and structure to develop your comments, and on substantive questions or observations that arise about the works themselves as you read and reflect. Do NOT bother with the following: detailed biographical material, ideas gleaned from professional online or hard-copy “notes,” or vague generalisms about life and literature. As the British romantic poet William Blake once wrote, “to generalize is to be an idiot.” (That’s a generalism, but still ….)
Your thinking should be your own, not a copy-and-paste job. It would be unfair to suggest that all of the online notes one finds on the Web are inaccurate or inept, but the truth is that they usually say what “everybody knows.” Retailing what everybody supposedly thinks about a given work won’t encourage you to learn anything from your engagement with literary works. Strike out on your own path. The Impressionist critic Walter Pater said that any critic’s first task is to register accurately his or her own impressions about the object being experienced. Pater was right: if you can’t get clear on your own impressions, and develop your own questions and observations, you’re not likely to say much that interests anybody else. Make such clarity your goal, then, in the journal entries and full sets that you develop.
OPTIONAL QUESTIONS FOR DEVELOPING YOUR JOURNAL ENTRIES
While you will probably want to maintain your journal set by means of free-form entries as noted above, you may find one or more of the following questions useful on occasion as a means of developing your own ideas.
1. For one part of your longer entry on a given author/work, consider a very limited portion of the text — a stanza or two from a poem, a short passage from a longer prose work, or a small section chosen from within a scene in a play. Analyze it in as much detail as you can: what formal, thematic, or other matters are most important to attend to there, and why?
2. What did you find most difficult to understand (or, alternately, to accept or like) while reading the text/s assigned for this author? What did you do to try to get past the difficulty you describe and understand the work better? Explain with reference to some specific quality that you can tie to a specific part of the text, not with general or dismissive remarks.
3. Offer an assessment of what you consider most worth noting about one text assigned for a specific author: in other words, what do you take away from your experience with the work, what realizations or problems, etc. has it brought into focus for you? Explain with reference to specific qualities or issues — don’t respond with vague praise or unqualified dismissal.
4. Why not generate your own specific, substantive question/s and respond, as if you were writing a thoughtful study question or set of them for a particular author/text?