Candide Option 1

Due Thurs Feb 2 by 11:59pm.

**Assignment note** Pick one of the following three options to respond to.  I'd like a relatively even split, but I won't force it this time.  As always, make sure your name's evident, 200-400 words.

I was going to simply quote William F. Bottiglia, but I like the summary of Bottiglia's contention made by Roy S. Wolper (both awesome names, by the way) in a 1969 article, "Candide, Gull in the Garden?" in Eighteenth Century Studies.

P. 265:

"Too much of the recent criticism of Candide has a magisterial certainty about it.  William F. Bottiglia, whose long analysis is now considered 'fundamental and convincing,' believes that Voltaire 'ends by affirming that social productivity of any kind at any level constitutes the good life, that there are limits within which man must be satisfied to lead the good life, but that within these he has a very real chance of achieving both private contentment and public progress.'  Bottiglia insists there is 'something wrong' with those whose conclusions differ from his own."

What say you?  Agree, or is there "something wrong" with you?  (Note: That's a joke... I really don't want a bunch of responses that simply say, "Bottiglia's right!" or accuse those of differing opinion to have some mental shortcoming.  Disagree away... but convincingly!)

Candide Option 2: Electric Boogaloo

Due Thurs Feb 2 by 11:59pm.

In Chapter 17, Candide travels to Eldorado, a Utopian place literally overflowing with gemstones.  However, Candide voluntarily leaves "this earthly paradise" not long after arriving.

Analyze the role of utopia (and/or dystopia) in Candide and analyze the work with respect to other utopian novels, such as Sir Thomas More's Utopia.

No more guidance is necessary here.

Candide Option 3: Tokyo Drift

Due Thurs Feb 2 by 11:59pm.

From Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism, p.102:

"The Menippean satire deals less with people as such than with mental attitudes.  Pedants, bigots, cranks, parvenus, virtuosi, enthusiasts, rapacious and incompetent professional men of all kinds, are handled in terms of their occupational approach to life as distinct from their social behavior.  The Menippean satire thus resembles the confession in its ability to handle abstract ideas and theories, and differs from the novel in its characterization, which is stylized rather than naturalistic, and presents people as mouthpieces of the ideas they represent."
[...]
"A constant theme in the tradition is the ridicule of philosophus gloriosus."
[...]
"[It] relies on the free play of intellectual fancy and the kind of humorous observation that produces caricature."
[...]
"At its most concentrated, Menippean satire presents us with a vision of the world in terms of a single intellectual pattern."

Analyze the novella from this standpoint (the powerpoint on Menippean Satire I put up on Moodle should be helpful, as well).

Compare and Contrast: Woody Allen and Candide

Due Sunday 1/29 by 11:59pm.  200-400 words.  (For the stragglers who joined the class after the first pop quiz.)

1) After having read six Woody Allen pieces (5 humorous essays and a short story) and seen the bulk of his 1969 mockumentary "Take the Money and Run," you should be pretty familiar with Allen's trademark "schlemiel" character--the man who can't do anything right--as well as Allen's particular brand of wit.  Compare and contrast the Allen "schlemiel" with Voltaire's protagonist, Candide.  Is Candide a "schlemiel," or is something else at work here?

2) Compare and contrast how Allen and Voltaire (respectively) deal with death and tragedy.  Candide, the novella you're reading, was famously penned after the great earthquake in Lisbon, and, more specifically, it was a reaction to the sentiment echoed by followers (specifically religious leaders) of Liebniz's "optimistic" philosophy of logical positivism.  (You don't need to know those things to answer the question, but it might help to look into it...)

Woody Allen and the Non-Sequitur

Due Jan. 24th by 11:59pm

Pick one of the two options listed in this prompt, and post a well thought out, contemplative 200-400 word response.  For those who answered last week's blog post, this is worth up to 5 points extra credit.  For those yet to answer, this is a time machine that will wipe that zero from existence.  (This will be the last such time machine.)

“Humor is crafted ambiguity, and ambiguities do not easily yield certainties.”

-Elliott Oring

 “The perils of analyzing Allen should be obvious: academics who play around with him risk being played around with themselves.”

-David Galef

“Here is but a small sample of the main body of intellectual treasure that I leave for posterity, or until the cleaning woman comes.”

-Woody Allen

According to 18^th century poet and essayist James Beattie, “Laughter arises from the view of two or more inconsistent, unsuitable, or incongruous parts or circumstances, considered as united in one complex object or assemblage” (qtd. in Oring 2).  Elliott Oring, in his 1992 work, Jokes and Their Relations, furthers this claim: “The perception of humor depends on the perception of an appropriate incongruity—that is, the perception of an appropriate interrelationship of elements from domains that are generally regarded as incongruous” (2).  This view, often attributed to Sigmund Freud (there is a slight difference, though, as Freud claimed this to be a “forced” juxtaposition) has appeared to reach a critical consensus in one form or other amongst humor theorists.  I shall not disagree with this thesis.  However, when it comes to the forced juxtaposition employed by Woody Allen, the depths of his particular brand of humor need to be plumbed rigorously, as he’s often working on multiple levels.

In his comic essay, “Remembering Needleman,” and short story, "The Shallowest Man," from the 1981 collection Side Effects, Allen employs the conflation of seriousness and silliness/absurdity to deal with the darkest of subject matter—death.  What’s at work here is not just the forced conflation of disparate ideas, but a third element—an element of humor that hints that the structure of the joke is as important as the conflation of disparate ideas.  In effect, Freud (and Beattie) hints at the main driving force behind the line by line witticisms evident in Allen, but neglects the structure.  As Elliott Oring reminds us, “To neglect […] structural elements in conceptualizing the messages of humorous expression is to risk reading into them messages that may not be there, thus increasing rather than reducing levels of ambiguity” (15).  I shall heed this warning, and further, claim that the particular structure that makes Allen’s jokes both wildly hilarious, and perhaps the main element in why we may consider Allen’s jokes as literary, is the comic non sequitur.

           

Maurice Charney, in his 1995 article, “Woody Allen’s Non Sequiturs” identifies this particular logical fallacy as the basis upon which Allen constructs his witticisms.  Charney defines the non sequitur as joke thusly: "In the study of humor, a non sequitur usually refers to a kind of joke in which the punch line seems to have nothing to do with the narrative content of the joke proper.  In other words, a non sequitur joke seems like a shaggy dog story.  I use ‘seems’ advisedly because the hearer always makes some effort to connect the premises and the conclusion, although there is usually an unbridgeable gap between the two" (339).

Option 1) Analyze the structure of Allen’s humor in these two works.  What’s at work here?  What role do comic non sequiturs play? Also, what's the difference between Allen's non-sequitur jokes and the Family Guy-style cut-away?

 

Option 2) In both "Remembering Needleman" and "The Shallowest Man," Allen treats death as absurd, however, while Needleman the philosopher is presented as a Reductio ad Absurdum satire on the academy, "The Shallowest Man" seems to poke more effectively at philosophical dillemas.  Analyze the philosophical dilemmas broached in this short story, as well as what Allen concludes by the ending.

The Role of Tragedy in Kafka

Pick one of the following three prompts (Tragedy, The Uncanny, and Comedy in Kafka).  Post a 200-400 word contemplative and well reasoned response in the comments section.  Make sure your first and last name is evident, as this will count as a homework grade.

Due Thursday Jan 19th by 11:59pm

For literary critics such as Cathy Caruth, literature negotiates "the complex relation between knowing and not knowing." Perhaps it is this knowing/not knowing dichotomy which is compressed so eerily in Kafka, producing the profound uncanny effect seen in his short fiction. Combine this with the elegiac yearning for the past evident in both the Penal Colony’s Lieutenant and the talking ape in “A Report From an Academy,” and both are decidedly tragic tales, though perhaps not in the traditional sense. 

Analyze the elegaic, traumatic, and/or tragic elements of Kafka's tales.  How does Kafka present trauma and tragedy? 

The Uncanny

Due Thursday Jan 19, by 11:59pm

Freud—The Uncanny

An instance where something can be familiar, yet foreign at the same time, resulting in a feeling of it being uncomfortably strange. Because the uncanny is familiar, yet strange, it often creates cognitive dissonance within the experiencing subject due to the paradoxical nature of being attracted to, yet repulsed by an object at the same time.

Etymologically: Un-home-ly.

Kafka's stories have often been described as "uncanny."  In what ways do "In the Penal Colony" and/or "A Report From an Academy" evoke feelings of the "familiar, yet strangely foreign?"

The Role of Humor in Kafka

Due Thursday Jan. 19, by 11:59pm

In David Foster Wallace’s 1999 essay “Some Remarks on Kafka’s Funniness From Which Probably Not Enough Has Been Removed,” Wallace asserts:

[…]great short stories and great jokes have a lot in common. Both depend on what communications theorists sometimes call exformation, which is a certain quantity of vital information removed from but evoked by a communication in such a way as to cause a kind of explosion of associative connections within the recipient. This is probably why the effect of both short stories and jokes often feels sudden and percussive, like the venting of a long-stuck valve. It’s not for nothing that Kafka spoke of literature as “a hatchet with which we chop at the frozen seas inside us.” Nor is it an accident that the technical achievement of great short stories is often called compression—for both the pressure and the release are already inside the reader. What Kafka seems able to do better than just about anyone else is orchestrate the pressure’s increase in such a way that it becomes intolerable at the precise instant it is released (61).

With this in mind, analyze the role humor plays in “In the Penal Colony” and “A Report From an Academy.” Granted, this is a difficult task I’ve set in front of you, but it should be rewarding. As Wallace reminds us further, the difficulty of understanding comedy and Kafka might just be that:

[…] the particular kind of funniness Kafka deploys is deeply alien to students whose neural resonances are American. The fact is that Kafka’s humor has almost none of the particular forms and codes of contemporary US amusement. There’s no recursive wordplay or verbal stunt-pilotry, little in the way of wisecracks or mordant lampoon. There is no body-function humor in Kafka, nor sexual entendre, nor stylized attempts to rebel by offending convention […] There are none of the ba-bing-ba-bang reversals of modern sitcoms; nor are there precocious children or profane grandparents or cynically insurgent coworkers. Perhaps most alien of all, Kafka’s authority figures are never just hollow buffoons to be ridiculed, but are always absurd and scary and sad all at once (62-3).

By the end of this course, you’ll be able to comment quite intelligently on the relation between jokes and short stories on a larger scale, but let’s keep these posts to Kafka. Oh, and for those of you thinking, “These stories were funny?!” humor is but one aspect of Kafka’s writing, and one that doesn’t get enough attention if you ask me. We’ll discuss many other aspects of these stories in class.