Seminar Practice 8 December 8, 2016
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Activity 1: Age of Ignorance Charles Simic The author is a Serbian-American poet and was co-poetry editor of the Paris Review. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1990 for The World Doesn't End, and was a finalist of the Pulitzer Prize in 1986 for Selected Poems, 1963-1983 and in 1987 for Unending Blues. He was appointed the fifteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 2007. Also a professor of English Lit.
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Introductory discussion
What is the main topic of the text? What is the purpose of the opening sentence? What is the dominant tone of the discussion?
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Vocabullary
gullible dolt led by the nose vested interests amok lobbyists gasbags to grasp shrift
old New England mill towns the perpetrators scot-free gross injustice pernicious pollsters the hucksters bigoted bravado 4
What are the most pertinent cause-effect links discussed in the text? What are the most important arguments the author promotes? How does he back up his argumentation?
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What kinds of ignorance are described in the text? What causes them? How can they be “cured”? What is the role of education? Family? The Internet?
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“Stupidity is sometimes the greatest of historical forces“ How do you understand this statement?
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Activity 2 Stevie Smith’s poem ‘Not Waving But Drowning’ (1957) uses a range of pronouns to refer to a number of different people, and to create specific effects. Map out how these pronouns work, thinking particularly about the following: Who are the various people in this poem? Why did Stevie Smith choose to use pronouns to refer to people rather than their names? 8
Text: ‘Not Waving But Drowning’ Nobody heard him, the dead man, But still he lay moaning: I was much further out than you thought And not waving but drowning Poor chap, he always loved larking And now he’s dead It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way, They said Oh no, no, no, it was too cold always (Still the dead one lay moaning) I was much too far out all my life And not waving but drowning.
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Stevie Smith poem The poem concerns a tragi-comic misunderstanding—a drowning man was ignored because onlookers thought he was cheerily waving at them, when he was really calling for help. This is taken beyond the literal level of a physical drowning to suggest another reading: that we explain away other people’s difficulties in rather simplistic ways because we can’t face the implications—our own responsibilities, for example. The misunderstanding is presented by the use of two sets of voices: the ‘I’ of the dead man, and the ‘they’ of the onlookers; these voices are presented by a third voice—that of the narrator, who, unlike the onlookers, can hear the dead man speaking.
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Activity 3
"The city was rancid, pregnant with squalor behind its immortal veil. From his room on Kurzbauergasse, Egon looked onto the boulevards for hours on end, watching the carriages roll up and back, listening to the horses’ hooves rattling off the cobblestones and onto the gravel paths, to the piercing clicks of ladies’ clicks. He looked down on the tall hats of the landed gentry and the stubby caps of workers, learning to differentiate the confident strides of the doctors from the sedate strolling of lawyers. Clerks, valets and housekeepers would rush down the street, reach for their master’s elbow, pose a question and then scurry away with the answer. In the slice of Vienna below his window, Egon learnt to know mankind in all its colours and classes." 11
Write a similar description of a place of your own choice. Focus on sound and colour in your description. Use specific vocabulary to make the description as “visual” as possible.
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