Unit 1 Respuestas

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GRADO

GUADEESTUDIO:COMENTARIODETEXTOSLITERARIOSENLENGUA

INGLESAUNIT 1 | ANSWERS

2012-2013

Comentario de Textos Literarios en Lengua Inglesa (CTLLI)

Elena Bandn, Isabel Castelao, Jess Cora (coordinador suplente), Ddac Llorens, Isabel SotoGRADO EN ESTUDIOS INGLESES : LENGUA, LITERATURA Y CULTURA


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Self-assessment exercises: Dylan Thomas

1. In the poem, the speaker says he is not going to lament the death of a child in a Londonfire and then does precisely that. His lament draws on Christian, Jewish and pagantraditions, i.e. Biblical references. However, this poetic "I" conceives human life from an

atheist or at least clearly non-religious point of view that denies the survival ofindividual consciousness after death and contemplates death as the mere naturalprocess of decomposition and the body's components returning to the eternal cycle ofthe elements in nature, that will nurture new life until the end of the universe.

2. The first punctuation mark comes at the end of line thirteen. There is nothing beforethat. His voice drops as it is the end of a complete sentence.

3. This is the text written according to standard punctuation and undivided in lines (orverses) or stanzas, written as if were prose (remember that you must discuss the text inits original form, spelling, and punctuation and pay attention to the unorthodox use that

authors may resort to):

Never until the mankind-making, bird-, beast-, and flower-fathering and all-humbling darkness tells with silence the last light breaking, and the still hour iscome of the sea, tumbling in harness, and I must enter again the round Zion of thewater bead and the synagogue of the ear of corn, shall I let pray the shadow of asound or sow my salt seed in the least valley of sackcloth to mourn the majesty andburning of the child's death.

As to the syntax, here is some help:

[Never until the mankindmaking bird, beastand flower,fathering and all humblingdarkness tells with silence the last light breaking] [and the still hour is come of thesea, tumbling in harness] [and I must enter again the round Zion of the water beadand the synagogue of the ear of corn], shall I let pray the shadow of a sound or sowmy salt seed in the least valley of sackcloth to mourn the majesty and burning ofthe childs death.

The three coordinate sentences forming the time adverbial and the two disjunctive verbsand their respective objects have been colour-coded, and there are suggested commasto standardise the punctuation. "Never until" modifies the three sentences beginningwith "and" to indicate the time when the actions expressed by the disjunctive main

verbs (modified by "shall I let") "pray or sow" will take place.

4. You may find this opening section extremely difficult to follow. The difficulty lies less inthe vocabulary (which you can look up in a dictionary!) than the syntax and punctuation,which are non-standard. The main verbs, for example "let pray [] or sow" (modifiedby ShallI in l. 10 come almost at the very end of the sequence. You may need to readthese lines several times before you can begin to understand them. Even though thetitle helps, all in all, understanding is frustrated and delayed (= aplazada) by the poemscomplex and unusual syntax and punctuation. Actually, the lack of the usual, standardpunctuation and the intentional breaking of the first sentence into three stanzas have afunction. They match the breaking down of the language of the poem in correspondence

with the subject matter of the poem, the idea of decomposition and the final end of theworld the poem expresses as the mark. This unconventional attitude to and use of

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In Understanding Poetry (1976, 4th edition), poets Cleanth Brooks and Robert PennWarren suggest their own prose paraphrase of the opening sentence:

Never until the darkness that begets and humbles all tells me that hour of my owndeath will I utter any prayer or weep any tear to mourn the majesty of this childsdeath. (Note: the verb to beget is a Biblical term which means to engender, to create,to give life to).

5. mourn infinitive (to mourn); grieve, lament, express sorrow.fathering present participle of verb to father, it functions like an adjective:engendering, creating.

humbling present participle of verb to humble functions like an adjective: debasing,humiliating.

still adjective; tranquil, calm, silent, hushed (it is not an adverb of time in this context).

tumbling gerund of the verb to tumble: falling, tottering; it indicates how the "stillhour / Is come out of the sea".

harness noun; equipment used to control or restrain a horse, or a person.

sackcloth noun; rough fabric, mentioned in the Bible as a sign of mourning togetherwith casting ashes on the mourner's head and gnashing of teeth.

grave adjective; serious, important, solemn, somber, but also suggesting grave as anoun, meaning place for burial of a corpse, modifying "truth".

elegy noun; a song or poem of lament (especially for someone who has died).

robed past participle of verb to robe functioning as an adjective: clothed, clad,covered.

6. my salt seed combines the two processes or events central to the poem: death (andmourning) and rebirth (and engendering). Salt connotes tears shed in grief (tears tastelike salt), seed suggests the creation of life and also the voice's (even the poet's) poemas creation as 'seed' in the reader's consciousness that may 'bear the fruit' of making thereader think , reflect on life, death, her/his own personal beliefs, etc.

valley of sackcloth suggests the valley of tears (or life) one leaves when one dies andthe cloth or garment worn by mourners or penitents.

a grave truth takes an adjective, "grave", usually associated with certain collocations ordead metaphors (a grave responsibility, a grave mistake) and literalises the adjective:,

a word like grave inevitably evokes a tomb, burial, coffin thus, literally, death, but inthe context of this poem, "grave truth" is used ironically: it suggests epitaphs and

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panegyrics, that the good things that are engraved on stone or said in funerals to praisethe dead person and to appease the mind of the attendants by offering comfort bystating that the dead person is in a better place and in the care of God, angels, theSaints, his/her ancestors departed before her, etc. are not true. This is also connectedwith the idea that he will not "murder the mankind of her going", i.e. he will not hide

the fact that she died because of mankind, in war (significantly, Dylan Thomas does notuse the word 'humanity' for that might suggest a 'humane' death).

7. Poetry is a particular form of language tending, among other things, to repeat patternsof sound, phrases, and words. Some sounds are repeated at the beginning of words. Thisrepetition is connected with the meaning of the verse by the effect that the basic soundhas in connection with feelings, natural phenomena, etc. The repetition of nasal soundsin the first lines emphasises the solemnity of the occasion and also suggest the moans ofmourning (it is no chance that these words begin with /m/, they relate and reproduce thebasic human emotions and their physiological manifestation). Also the repetitive -ingsuffix in this poem is just another such example. One of the effects of threading -ingwords throughout the poem (there are nine in 24 lines) is to give it internal cohesion.Another effect is to create a sense of unbroken movement and continuity, of unendingprocess. This would in turn support the theme of the eternal life-death cycle.

8. Here are some thoughts:- the appearance of the text on the page: it looks like a poem, it is arranged in

stanzas, line-breaks, and so on. This is form understood in its most basic sense. Aprose paragraph or chapters in a novel lookentirely different;

- repetition of sounds or alliteration (initial sounds of words, -ing endings), themes(life and death);

- the regular stanzaic form: four stanzas of six lines each;- the rhyme scheme is (more or less) a regular abcabc (the rhyme of "friends" and

"Thames" can be accepted as a dialectal one);

- the metre (=mtrica) or rhythm is not that of ordinary spoken language, but it isrelated with traditional English rhythms, thus the long verses have four beats orstressed syllables while the shorter verses (the second and fifth verses in eachstanza) have three. The traditional rhythm in Old English poetry and ballads from

the Middle Ages to the 19th-century as well as many songs in 20th-century pop-music is the four-beat verse (characterized by an indeterminate number of syllablesper line where four of them bear are stressed, they are the beats of the verse, andthe rest are unstressed).1

- there is enjambement (the syntactical continuation of the verse into the next one orfollowing verses in order to form a sentence; be aware that, of course, lines are notto be considered, having a complete meaning in isolation);

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- the syntax is profoundly non-standard: no-one speaks or writes or communicateslike that in normal circumstances. As indicated above, this is language drawingattention to itself. Its saying: look at me, Im different, pay attention to me, thinkabout my particular form and interpret me;

- the poem is rich in metaphors, some easy to grasp, some others not;- the poem is also rich in paradoxes and contradictions (the speaker refuses to

mourn, and then spends 24 lines doing just that!).

9. As noted in the first point of the above question, a poem has nearly always a differentshape from that of a piece of prose. It does not have paragraphs, it has (or tends tohave) stanzas; the line endings are very important (these will contain the end rhyme)and the words placed here will carry greater emphasis than others. The rest of the pointsalso identify A refusal to mourn as a poem rather than prose.

10.Again we come back to the question of form. It would seem that meaning and the waywe receive a text are directly impacted by the form in which they are delivered. Thesingularity or peculiarity of the shapeDylan Thomas gives to his meditation on the deathof a child, at the very least intensifies its meaning in ways in which simply declaring, achild has burnt to death, would not.

SELF-ASSESSMENT EXERCISES: BARRY

1.

a) Post-structuralists look for hidden meanings in a text which may contradict the surfaceor apparent meaning.b) They foreground superficial similarities in words (sound, common etymologies, etc.) and

make them central to the texts meaning.c) They look for the fissures and inconsistencies in a text, rather than its supposed

cohesion.d) They practice rigorous close reading of an excerpt (=extracto) to the point where

multiple meanings emerge and a single, stable meaning is no longer possible.e) They see the fissures and fault-lines (=fallas, this is a geology term used as a metaphor)

in a text as evidence of repressed or silenced meanings which the surface meaning of

the text ignores. In geology, fault-lines are evidence of previous rock activity.

2. Barrys post-structuralist interpretation:

the verbal stage: this can involve a traditional form of close reading. Barry suggestslooking for paradoxes and contradictions, such as in the last line: After the first death,there is no other. A first death implies a second, third, fourth, etc., in other words, therewill indeed be others. Poststructuralists argue that apparent contradictions like this pointto the unreliability and instability of language.

Barry reminds us that poststructuralists tend to question and overturn binaryoppositions or what Derrida terms violent hierarchies (suggestion: look this up in theGlossary), such as male/female, day/night, light/dark, etc. Poststructuralists thus will

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privilege the second term and Barry notes that in the poem it is darkness (and not light)which appears to create life. The poem gives us a reality we can recognize, even if itinverts the terms by which we normally recognize reality. Again, deconstructionists (ancommon alternative term for poststructuralists) say that language creates itsownrealityand is not a reflectionof that reality. Another way of explaining how a poststructuralist

reading inverts or overturns familiar binary oppositions, is to say that it reads a textagainst itself, revealing how the signifiers dont match up with expected signifieds.

the textual stage: here the reader takes in the text as a whole and tries to identifyinterruptions or changes in the flow of the poem. At the very least, these breaks andslippages suggest an unstable rather than a fixed position. Barry points to potentialinconsistencies of focus, time, tone or point of view, among others. They can be found ingrammar (shift from first to third person, changes in verb tenses). The Thomas poempresents significant shifts in time and viewpoint, moving from a geological time scale tothe present, then on to a historical vista of the unmourning and riding Thames. Suchdiscontinuities, Barry notes, make the poem extremely unstable and present majordifficulties in uncovering meaning. Lastly, he reminds us that what a text does not sayits omissions is often as important as what it should say or has led us to expect it tosay.

the linguistic stage: here the poststructuralist critic will look for moments wherelanguage fails to communicate or when the unreliability of language is emphasized, asin actually sayingthat something is unsayable.The Thomas poem is a good example, inthat it says it is notgoing to do something (mourn) and then proceeds to do just that.Barry gives examples in the poem which illustrate how language canprofessone thingand expressthe opposite. The poems speaker expresses a certain intention (I shall not

murder/The mankind of her going/[]with any further/Elegy ll. 14-18) only to findhimself betraying that intention: a trap is identified and promptly fallen into.

Thus a poststructuralist (or deconstructive) reading will expose disunity within the text,however unified or stable it may appear at first sight.

3. The title already expresses a desire notto do something, which is immediately betrayedby the poem itself. In other words, A refusal to mourn announces its opposition toverbalizing a particular event (the death of a child) and the accompanying emotion andritual (mourning, elegy). The speaker thus gives us a poem (that is, an object constructedof words and groups of words) about not wanting to give us a poem at all.

This contradiction is continued in the tension between the two opening words, Neveruntil a virtual binary opposition, since it juxtaposes a word which means at no time,on no occasion with a word meaning up to the time of.

Other examples: Tells with silence (l. 4); I shall not murder/[] her going/[]/withany further/Elegy (ll. 14-18), a refusal to mark the childs death with elegiac statements,followed by the solemn, quasi-liturgical pronouncements of the final stanza [], whichsounds very like traditional panegyrical oratory, with the dead person is transformedinto some larger than life heroic figure (Barry 73).

Part of the effect of the poems strategy is to set up expectations in the reader (weexpect the speaker not to mourn, we anticipate perhaps a rejoicing or a celebration

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instead ofan elegy or lament) and systematically to frustrate them. This gives the poema kind up/down, push/pull movement, paralleling the waves of the sea tumbling inharness swelling first, then tumbling or crashing down and the riding Thames.

For one critic, the entire shape of the poem mimics the movement of water, with the

up/down (or expectation/frustration) movement in consonance with the death that is inlife:

"Extraordinary too is the stanzaic form of A Refusal to Mourn []: fourrhyming stanzas, abcabc, that is, eight identical abc triples, each of themconsisting of a long line, a short line, and a long line. In this metre, itseems to me at least, Thomas imitates the sea tumbling in harness,the unmourning water, and the riding Thames.These three-line abcunits are two waves and a trough the crest of a wave, its trough orvalley, and then another crest. The poem moves like the sea in its round(Earth-like) bead, rising and falling with the tides, every day the same,

every month the same. The music of Refusal to Mourn movescounterpoint to the heart-felt consolation that Dylan Thomas speaks.Death is to life what a trough is to the crest of every wave in thetumbling sea".http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poem/3357.html

4. Possibly the most striking (and difficult!) metaphor comes in the second stanza: And Imust enter again the round / Zion of the water bead / And the synagogue of the ear ofcorn (ll. 7-9). The speaker continues the water imagery and introduces two others Zion and synagogue both associated with the Judeo-Christian tradition. Critics

interpret this admittedly very opaque metaphor as an allusion to the speakers owndeath (see the Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren interpretation in answer 4), butalso to the universality of death and, by extension, to the circularity of existence (theround water bead), its constant renewal. Both "Zion" and "synagogue" refer to placesor spaces into which the speaker "must enter", and they draw on their traditionalBiblical meanings. "Zion" stands for the return to the Promised Land, especially duringthe Jews' exiles and slavery in Egypt and Babylon as well as during their diaspora.Hence, "Zionism" is the political movement that strove to establish the State of Israel.Here these two words are not used in their religious sense, but only metaphorically."Zion" is identified with "water bead", and the idea that the speaker must "enter" this"water bead" means that the speaker, some part of him, an infinitesimal part of thewater that he contains, must return to being water in nature. The word "bead" in turnadds the Catholic connotations of the beads of the Rosary, connotations that would belost if the text read the more literal expression "water drop". The word "synagogue" isused very much like the word Church, used allegorically to signify the whole Jewishcommunity; its identification with the "ear of corn" is based on the literal meaning ofthe word "shibboleth", which is a Hebrew word that in the Bible is used in Judges 12:6to distinguish and persecute a specific Jewish group because of their incapacity topronounce the word ("sibboleth"). It also means "stream of water" and connects withthe previous image in the poem and it has come to mean quite a number of things inmodern English: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/shibboleth. However, in

the context of Dylan Thomas's poem, it is used in its literal meaning in Hebrew: thespeaker is to return to the community of the elements in the earth that will eventually

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http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poem/3357.htmlhttp://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poem/3357.htmlhttp://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/shibbolethhttp://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/shibbolethhttp://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poem/3357.html


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nurture the ears of corn. The idea is that he must die and decompose and return to theearth. It is an image of the cycle of life, but it is devoid of any idea of individual spiritualtranscendence and it is circumscribed to the mere physical aspect of life.

The mother metaphor is introduced in the last stanza in which the speaker evokes the

resting place (the earth) of the child in anthropomorphic terms (i.e. by usingpersonification or allegory): the child is among long friends, those other corpses thatwere buried there in the past and are now intermingled with the earth and have been'close' like people who have been 'friends' for 'a long time'; they have also joined andare now the "grains beyond the ages" of the earth, the ground where she is now buried,which is also the dark veins of her mother. The image of the child "robed" in the"veins" of the (mother) earth is a striking one and reiterates the theme of life going backto her origins, it recalls pregnancy, it also has a pagan pre-Christian sound to it, but justlike the Judeo-Christian images, these allegories are used paradoxically for the tenor ormeaning of the images emphasises the child's death and return to nature denying thesurvival of her spirit, soul or individual consciousness in the afterlife. It denies theexistence of such an afterlife. The images express an atheist, naturalistic attitude to life(the belief in naturalism, that human life and consciousness is just part of nature and thephysical world and there is nothing else, no soul, no spiritual plane or reality).

SELF-ASSESSMENT EXERCISES: BARTHES

1. *Capitalist ideology: system of ideas which refers to an economic system, dominant inthe Western world since the breakup of feudalism, in which most of the means ofproduction are privately owned and production is guided and income distributed largely

through the operation of markets. ("capitalism." Encyclopdia Britannica.Encyclopaedia Britannica 2008 Ultimate Reference Suite. Chicago: EncyclopdiaBritannica, 2008). Capitalist ideology emphasizes private initiative and individualeffortand enterprise. Barthes selects individualismas a defining feature of capitalism.

*Allegory: a story, play, poem, picture, etc., in which the meaning or message isrepresented symbolically (Concise Oxford Dictionary1990). It must be also said that in anarrower sense, "allegory" involves personification, i.e. the representation of humanideas, feelings, virtues, vices, experiences, etc. with symbolical human figures dressed orcarrying symbolical objects that allow to identify and 'decode' their meaning.

*Signified: the Glossary in the curso virtual gives explanations for sign, signified andsignifier. Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure noted that every sign (= a basic unit ofcommunication, e.g. a word) has two elements: the signifier (what you can physicallyperceive through sound or a graphic mark) and the signified (what the sound or graphicmark conceptually refers to).

2. Barthes links the capitalist notion of the individual (the source from which all effort andproduction spring) to the notion of the individual or person who writes, that is, theauthor. He says capitalism attaches great importance to the figure of the author.

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3. Ordinary culture reads and interprets literature through its author (his life, his tastes, hispassions), while Mallarm and Valry emphasized writing, linguistic activity andthe essentially verbal condition of literature over the person of the author.

4. Author is the term which ordinary culture uses when referring to the person whoproduces a literary work; ordinary culture considers the author to be solely responsiblefor the meaningof that literary work and likens the Author to the father of the book, hischild, over whom he holds authority. (See the Glossary in the curso virtual). "Modernscriptor" is Barthes term and it differs from the Author in that he (the modern scriptor) isnot held to be responsible for a book in the same way. The modern scriptor does nothave a comparable authorityover what he writes; for Barthes he is just the person whowrote the text, but we must not give him authority over the text by trying to ascertainwhat the Author meant with his text or try to read his life, ideas and experiences in histext. More importantly, according to Barthes, the modern scriptor is constituted throughthe act of reading itself: the modern scriptor is born simultaneously with the text. In

this respect, since the text is 'played' (in the sense of interpretation as in playing amusical Instrument) every time a reader reads and interprets the text, the modernscriptor is also the reader herself/himself, his/her act of reading. Thus, the modernscriptor is half-way between the text itself and each individual reader's particularreading of the text.

Thus, these two terms Author and modern scriptor have important consequences forhow we read. Author is distinguished from reader in that the former must die in orderfor the latter to be born. This is Barthes provocative way of saying that the reader mustnot look for authority in the Author, must somehow eliminate the Author in order toliberate meaning through the act of reading. For Barthes, the reader interprets the textcreatively and this creative reading is far more important than the Author's intentionsand ideas, which are no longer relevant or important.

5. For Barthes, to seek meaning in a text through the person who wrote it (the person ofthe author) is comparable to the search for a transcendent being God who canconfer ultimate, fixed meaning on everything. That is why he uses religious terms suchas God, theological, etc. Barthes criticizes the search to interpret a text through theAuthor because this is to close the writing. Meaning is liberated only if writing islinked to an anti-theological practice; writing must refuse to fix meaning [] andrefuse God. The reader must collaborate in this anti-theological practice, indeed, can

only be bornif the Author dies.

6. Each summary will be slightly different as to its wording, but it must stick to theindication on page 6 in the questions: it must indicate the main points of the text brieflyand most importantly, it must be faithful to the ideas expressed in the paragraph. If thesummary distorts the information contained in the original, the summary is at fault.


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SELF-ASSESSMENT EXERCISES: DERRIDA

1. Reading means understanding the text, so you had to make an effort involving readingcomprehension. If you feel that you missed something or still find the text confusing,

then you need to read it again.

2. *Signified, *referent, *transcendental signifier, *signifier see answer to Q. 2 above andthe Glossary in the curso virtual.Derrida is using these terms in a classic poststructuralistway. We can understand them more or less thus: signifier/signified = word/meaning,referent is roughly interchangeable with signified, and transcendental signified denotesan ultimate, fixed meaning (Barthes might call this a theological meaningor message ofthe Author-God). Derrida is critical of the search for a transcendental signified orsupreme meaning.

3. Derrida is skeptical of the writers supposed authorial/authoritativecommand over whathe produces. He says that only the reader is able to perceive the tension (relationship)between what a writer thinks he can control and what he cant (what he commandsand what he does not command). Thus Derrida questions the validity of a readingwhich accepts the writers authority over his text and its meaning, and encourages acritical reading instead which perceives the texts discrepancies and contradictions andfrom which meaningswill emerge.

4. Reading cannot simply reproduce a text. Neither can it look for meaning (a referent, asignified) which may be historical, biographical, psychological, etc., outside the text.Reading can only seek meaning inside a text or writing: Our reading must remain

within the text. Ultimate meaning or meaning which lies beyond the text(transcendental signified) does not exist according to Derrida and his followers.

5. See the answer above.

6. Your summary must include the main ideas of the text briefly and in simple English andit must not distort the main information of the text. If you find that your summary is notfaithful to the text, then rewrite it.

IMPORTANT NOTE:

The information contained in this key to the self-assessment work is not supposed to bememorised. You are supposed to develop your capacity to integrate this information into yourreading and understanding of the poem and use it in a flexible way to answer the PEC or examquestions using your own writing skills instead of sterile copying in the case of the PEC or word-for-word memorisation in the case of the exam. This key does not constitute a final reading oran exhaustive commentary of the text. You will of course find further nuances and possibilitiesin the text and you are expected to produce your own ideas when discussing texts as long asthey are cogently expressed and based on the text itself and a cogent critical reading.

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Unit 1 Respuestas