Lecture 17 - Weaving and Unweaving

Lecture 17: Weaving and UnweavingEnglish 140

UC Santa BarbaraSummer 2012

4 September 2012

“In August 2009, just one month after the state of California cut over a billion dollars from its higher education budget, the University of California (UC) turned around and lent the state $200 million. When journalists asked the UC president, Mark Yudof, how the university could lend millions of dollars to the state, while the school was raising student fees (tuition), furloughing employees, canceling classes, and laying off teachers, Yudof responded that when the university lends money to the state, it turns a profit, but when it spends money on salaries for teachers, the money is lost.”

—Bob Samuels, “How America's Universities Became Hedge Funds” (http://is.gd/eniquc)

A few words about the final exam …

Two sections:● Quote identification/fill in the blank (pick six, ten

points each).● Short essay (pick one option, forty points total).

● I recommend reading the entire exam first before beginning to work on it.

● Pace yourself!

Quote identifications. Pick 6 of the following quotes. In each quote, fill in the blank(s), and then explain, in approximately two to three sentences, the following information about the quote: which text the quote is from, the author of that text, the speaker(s) in the passage, and the relevance the quote has to the broader concerns of the text and/or the course as a whole. (10 points each.)

Everything rested on __________ being alive. Without his life each of theirs fell to pieces. Now ain’t that slavery or what is it?

Sample questions


Everything rested on __Garner__ being alive. Without his life each of theirs fell to pieces. Now ain’t that slavery or what is it? (Beloved, p. 259)


“A man’s ________________ should exceed his ____________,” he muttered, up to his elbows in suds, his dead finger shriveling in the dishwater. “Or what’s a heaven for?”


“A man’s ____reach_______ should exceed his ___grasp____,” he muttered, up to his elbows in suds, his dead finger shriveling in the dishwater. “Or what’s a heaven for?” (The Lecturer’s Tale, p. 73)

Paul Klee, Angelus Novus (1920)

“A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward […]

“[…] His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”

— Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” IX.

Some words on structure in The Time Traveler’s Wife

“Halfway there; if we could fold time in half right now like a Rorschach test, this would be the crease down the middle.” (380; ch. 27)

“this is an unusually high-quality slice of forward time travel.” (385; ch. 28)

Clare: “When I was a child I looked forward to seeing Henry. Every visit was an event. Now every absence is a nonevent, a subtraction, an adventure I will here about when my adventurer materializes at my feet, bleeding or whistling, smiling or shaking.” (285; ch. 15)

Henry: “I try to remember that everything subtracted now will be added later, but I still feel fretful.” (152; ch. 8)

Clare: “The compelling thing about making art – or making anything, I suppose – is the moment when the vaporous, insubstantial idea becomes a solid there, a thing, a substance in the world of substances. Circe, Nimbue, Artemis, Athena, all the old sorceresses: they must have known the feeling as they transformed mere men into fabulous creatures, stole the secrets of the magicians, disposed armies: ah, look, there it is, the new thing. Call it a swine, a war, a laurel tree. Call it art.” (284; ch. 15)

“It occurs to me that the hair is one of many things that must remind Clare I'm not exactly the man she's known from earliest childhood. I'm a close approximation she is guiding surreptitiously toward a me that exists in her mind's eye.” (152-3, ch. 8)

Henry: “I am slowly pulling myself together because I can see that you are a human being and I would like to be one, too. […] But it's a long way from the me you're dealing with in 1991 to me, talking to you right now from 1996. You have to work at me; I can't get there alone.” (161; ch. 8)

Henry: “voilà, I've become the me of my future.” (263; ch. 13)

Clare: “He's sunburned, and his [Henry's] hair stands up every which way. I'm glad he cut it. He looks more like himself to me now, with the short hair.” (296; ch. 15)

Henry: “it is borne in on me that Clare knows everything, our future, our past, everything, and I shiver in the warm room.” (184; ch. 9)

Media Credits

Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus (slide 7) is in the public domain because it was first published before 1923. Original source: http://www.sfu.ca/~andrewf/CONCEPT2.html

Education

Lecture 17 - Weaving and Unweaving