1.   There is a story, “The Lagoon” in the Tales of Unrest, which flows out of itself in subtle cadence, in rise and flow and fall of emotion, just as you may hear Ernst’s delicate music rise and sweep and flow from the violin. For occasionally the author’s intense fidelity to the life he has observed seems to melt and fade away in a lyrical impulse, the hard things of actual life die and are lost in a song of beauty, just as the night comes to overwhelm the hard edges of the day.[1]

This, of an early work of Polish-born Joseph Conrad who did not learn English until he was twenty-one.  Written in 1896 and perhaps the shortest story Conrad wrote, it is also the oldest short story in this course, influenced by and engaging with the positivistic philosophy, romantic sensibility, colonial outlook, modernist experimentation, and realistic literary style of its time.  How does Conrad describe people?  What does this reveal about man’s sense of identity?

 

2.   How is nature not only a setting but like a character in the story?  Conrad, who incidentally has been to Bangkok and frequented the Oriental Hotel[2] as well as many cities in our part of the world, is no stranger to the Southeast Asian coastal-scape but the tropical flora and fauna would still seem exotic to him and, he is well aware, to readers in Europe.  How does he portray man’s relationship to nature?  Do you think the quality of this relationship is the same as that between man and nature in England?  What symbolic role or value does he give to nature in this tale of a man’s inner conflict?

 

3.   Conrad was awarded his first and only literary prize for this first collection of short stories.  An excerpt from Ford Madox Ford’s memoir, though it may reveal something of Ford’s own mythmaking, gives insight into the sense-making of prose and the process of writing as witnessed during his sometime collaboration with Conrad.  Similar attention almost certainly goes into the earlier written “The Lagoon” as well.  Read Ford’s discussion of the last paragraph of Heart of Darkness at the back of this weekly and see the consideration that goes into writing such as of meaning conveyed in sentence flow, word form, and punctuation.  There are now several prizes for essays and studies related to Conrad’s life and work.  If you would like to explore this author more seriously and in greater depth and write a potentially worthy final paper, we are happy to work with you to edit it for submission to other academic forums.

 

4.   From a Victorian past with Conrad, we jump to the future.  In the introduction to Feeling Very Strange, editors James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel endeavor to define a genre before its time, although strangely also of its time: “The term slipstream was coined by Bruce Sterling in a column he wrote for a fanzine called SF Eye in 1989.  Sterling was attempting to understand a kind of fiction that he saw increasingly in science fiction publications and elsewhere.”  Stirling’s observation was that

it is a contemporary kind of writing which has set its face against consensus reality […] this is a kind of writing which simply makes you feel very strange; the way that living in the late twentieth century makes you feel, if you are a person of a certain sensibility.  We could call this kind of fiction Novels of a Postmodern Sensibility. . .for the sake of convenience and argument, we will call these books “slipstream.”[3]

Although we are reading a different Aimee Bender story from the one included in Kelly and Kessel’s anthology, do you think “The Rememberer” might be an “expression of the zeitgeist” as well (xii)?  Consider Bender’s description of people.  What kind of order or category of people emerges in the story compared to Conrad’s?  How does the narrator’s distress: “‘Ben,’ I whisper, ‘do you remember me? Do you remember?’” compare to Arsat’s: “‘I hear, I see, I wait.  I remember . . . Tuan, do you remember the old days?  Do you remember my brother?’”

 

5.   This “would-be literary form” (x) is described as “magic realism sliced away from its South American roots” or “a kind of fantasy where nothing is explained, or science fiction where the science doesn’t have to make sense” (vii).  “Where horror is the literature of fear, slipstream is the literature of cognitive dissonance and of strangeness triumphant” (xi), claim Kelly and Kessel and go on to elaborate:

In their commitment to cognitive dissonance, slipstream stories deploy many techniques to estrange us: they may use allegory (“The Little Magic Shop”), borrow forms from nonliterary sources (“Exhibit H: Torn Pages Discovered. . .”), literalize metaphor (“Lieserl”), inject genre elements into decidedly nongenre milieus (“Sea Oak”), play metafictional games (“The Rose in Twelve Petals”), invent faux-autobiography (“Bright Morning”), incorporate pastiche, parody, or collage (“The Lions Are Asleep This Night”), or externalize psychological and ontological distress (“You Have Never Been Here”).  They play with older genre forms: “The God of Dark Laughter” reinvents Lovecraft, “The Specialist’s Hat” the ghost story, and “Biographical Notes to ‘A Discourse on the Nature of Causality, with Air-planes’” the 1930s pulp adventure. (xiii)

What techniques function to “estrange[e] the everyday” and “mak[e] the familiar strange or the strange familiar” in Bender’s “The Rememberer” (xiii)?  How is the story magical? scientific?  Notice the tenses of the narrative and its plot.  What might inspire such structure and storytelling?  Consider the rationality or irrationality of “I…realize, over and over, that he’s gone.”

 

6.   What is the problem that Ben articulates in the sentence “Our brains are just getting bigger and bigger, and the world dries up and dies when there’s too much thought and not enough heart”?  What things or characters are associated with thinking?  Which are aligned with feeling?  Are “to compute” and “to care” presented as mutually exclusive?  In closing the introduction, Kelly and Kessel invite the reader to consider an image very like Le Guin’s offered conception of stories as a house:

Slipstream can take you to a place where you have never been.  An impossible place that cannot exist, and yet a place where you are expected. Your name is at the top of the list and your room is ready.

Have a nice stay. (xv)

How do these container metaphors comment on the narrator’s own last sentence: “I place my hands around the skull to see if it’s growing, and wonder what, of any use, would fill it if it did”?

 

7.   The NYC Urbana team won the 11^th National Poetry Slam in 2000.  The word “revolution” in the title of the collection suggests newness, but as Donna Seaman mentions in her review of the book,[4] poetry performed is nothing new.  Neither is poetry for entertainment and neither is poetry as political commentary.  Listen to the audio track of the winning poem “Running a Race (No One Knows)” at the Arts Library and think about how the performers bring together qualities of two age-old genres, drama and poetry, and forge a form for the younger generation.  Keep in mind your reading and performance of Ives’s play when you consider the layering of voices, rhythm, and meanings in this poem.