English
xixi
Unit1.pptA Literary and Cultural Study of the American Pastime
*
Lesson : Course Objectives
To understand the unique character of the game of baseball as a cultural phenomenon of the American experience.
To become adept at reading important works of literature; to learn how to read a text.
To ascertain why the game of baseball has fascinated so many great American poets, essayists and novelists.
To think critically about important social, economic and political issues that are reflected in the game of baseball.
To distinguish between the myth of baseball and its reality as it is played by more than 6,000 professional ballplayers in the Major and minor leagues every year.
To understand why, despite its warts and idiosyncrasies, baseball is and always been the American pastime.
*
Baseball: The Sublime
*
Baseball: The Mundane
*
The American Game
“…there is nothing now heard of, in our leisure hours, but ball-ball-ball.”
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (from a letter to his father written at Bowdoin College in 1824)
*
The American Game
“…it’s our game: that’s the chief fact in connection with it: America’s game: has the snap, go, fling of the American atmosphere-belongs as much to our institutions, fits into them as significantly as our constitutions, laws: is just as important in the sum total of our historic life.”
Walt Whitman as quoted in Horace Traubel’s “With Walt Whitman in Camden”
*
The American Game
“Baseball’s time is seamless and invisible, a bubble within which most players move at exactly the same pace and rhythms as all their predecessors. This is the way the game was played in our youth and in our fathers’ youth, and even back then-back in the country days-there must have been that same feeling that time could be stopped.”
Roger Angell from “The Interior Stadium”
*
The American Game
The Language of baseball in everyday talk:
He’s way out in left field!
He’s a major leaguer!
I tried to score but struck out!
She threw me a real curve ball!
I hit a home run with that one!
He’s really bush league!
Step up to the plate.
*
Baseball is Different
Baseball differs from other sports because:
There is no clock.
The playing field is irregular.
The game isn’t over till it’s over (to quote Yogi Berra).
The baseball season follows the seasons.
The objective of the game is to get home.
By in large and with some notable exceptions, baseball is played in parks and fields while football is played in stadiums and basketball on courts.
Consider team nicknames – what other sport has mascots like angels and priests?
Baseball has been around seventy-five or so years longer than the professional basketball and football.
*
Bart Giamatti
“It [baseball] breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone.” Giamatti, by the way, was the president of Yale University before becoming Commissioner of Baseball. He died only a few months after assuming the job.
*
Reading Literature
It is sad but true that too many Americans are reading less and less real literature. Whether this is attributable to the increased emphasis on preparing for the workplace or whether it simply represents a breakdown in our educational system – or both – it nonetheless is a fact. This is not to say that we don’t read. Indeed, we are quite proficient in reading news analyses, instructions for using computers or for assembling toys or electronic equipment, using social media, and reports about sporting events. But it is curious that in a society that places such a great value on sheer pleasure as worthy end in itself, we rarely read for our own enjoyment.
*
Reading literature for its own sake
Whether we are reading a poem or an essay, a novel or a work of dramatic literature, those of us who teach literature tend to define the works of art as products of deliberate, artful construction in language, designed to stand in permanent form, with the capacity to bring pleasure to those who read or hear them. What this means is that our chief concern is with the body of the text alone and that the questions we ask about it should be directed to increasing our own pleasure in encounters with the particular products of literary art.
*
Reading literature for its own sake
We tend to take the position that the pleasure to be derived from a poem by Wordsworth, a play by Shakespeare, an essay by Coleridge, or a novel by Hawthorne is provided by the work itself; that it is an aesthetic experience for us only as it exists in the here and now and so affects our living, twenty-first century selves.
*
Literature in context
At the same time, a work of art is, in a literal sense, an historical fact. A novel that was written a hundred years ago and that we read today lived in specific circumstances that inevitably accounted for much of quality of his or her art. And the fact is that historic changes from one age to another potentially impede communication between an author or another age and we who read him or her today. We must often, therefore, work to recover historic meaning in order to provide a fully satisfactory response to a literary work written in the past.
*
Literature in context
Let’s look at examples from two great works of the past. First, we can read Homer’s Iliad with more meaning if we know something about the history of Greek civilization. If we do, then, we can respond more effectively and more sympathetically to moral values that seem outdated today since the great struggles that take place in Homer’s work are the direct consequence of the facts of life in that great but long gone civilization.
Even more to to the point is Shakespeare in which we can grasp the essential character of Hamlet’s dilemma knowing little about Elizabethan England, but that a full understanding of the play requires that we know that in Shakespeare’s time the marriage between Gertrude and her brother-in-law would regarded as incestuous.
*
Literature and History
But recovering history – closing the gaps produced by cultural and temporal distance, while important, is only part of the equation. We must remember that a novel or a poem is what the novelist or poet chose to make it. And that choice was inevitably conditioned by influences to which he or she was exposed throughout his or her life. Even if the writer rejects those influences, the act of rejection often becomes conspicuous. Therefore, the real measure of a writer’s individuality and of his or her achievement comes into view when we set in balance what in his writing he/she shares with others and what is a unique reflection of his or her individual talent.
*
Tradition and the Indvidual Talent
Consider the following excerpt from an essay entitled “Tradition and the Individual Talent” by T. S Eliot, arguably the greatest and most influential poet of the twentieth century.
“ No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of æsthetic, not merely historical, criticism. The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not one-sided; what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it.
*
Tradition and the Individual Talent
The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new. Whoever has approved this idea of order, of the form of European, of English literature, will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past. And the poet who is aware of this will be aware of great difficulties and responsibilities.”
from Thomas Stearns Eliot, The Sacred Wood, 1922
*
Literature, History and Baseball
In reading the novels of Kinsella and Malamud, therefore, it is critically important that we understand the known facts of the fixing of the 1919 World Series by the Chicago White Sox and that we know something about the times in which that fix took place – times that were at once very different and yet similar to our own. By so doing, we shall be able to appreciate the genius that each writer brings to his novel, since while the novels deal with many of the same events (that is, the “big fix”), the two authors respond to that historical moment with their own distinctive voices.
*
What Happens in Literature
More than forty years ago, Edward W. Rosenheim of the University of Chicago wrote a short but masterful book that is designed to help us read great works of literature with greater understanding and enjoyment; that provides us with a source of genuine satisfaction and an opportunity for intellectual growth. His book, entitled What Happens in Literature, helps us appreciate literary works as unique creations, born in a particular time and place, but powerful enough to speak to us across decades and even centuries. I refer everyone in this class to Professor Rosenheim’s wonderful volume.
*
The Elements of Fiction
As we read the novels in this course, I would suggest that you consider the following elements of fiction to help guide you to a more complete understanding of each text we will be discussing.
Point of view and narrative technique
Plot and narrative structure
Setting
Characterization
Theme and subject
Image, Myth and Symbol
*
Point of View and Narrative Technique
- One useful way to approach a novel or short story involves asking yourself as you read, "Who's telling the story?" Is it (like The Natural) some unidentified person or voice, who always uses the gramatical third person -- "he," "she," "they" -- or is it a first-person narrative (like Bang the Drum Slowly) in which the identified speaker relates everything from his or her point of view?
- Once you've determined that the novel seems to be told by either a first- or third-person narrator, next decide if this narrator knows absolutely everything about the story and its characters or only some of the things we want (and need) to know. Is the narrator, in other words, an omniscient or a limited narrator? One characteristic of an omniscient narrator is that such a story-teller, unlike any human being who has ever lived, knows what's going on inside the mind of other people (or at least other characters).
- Readers almost always identify with the fictional character who relates stories in the first person, but can you tell whether this speaker is reliable or not? Most first-personal narrators are reliable, but a good many are not. Some clearly do not represent the author's views and may even be the butt of satire or other forms of criticism. How can you tell?
*
Plot and Narrative Structure
- Plot is what happens in a story, and structure is the order in which the novel presents the plot. Plot and structure converge almost completely in most novels, like The Natural that start at the chronological beginning and progress to the end. Other works begin in medias res [in the middle of things] and then use flashbacks to explain what is happening, plot and structure diverge a great deal.
- Although it might seem easy to merge plot and structure completely, it is virtually impossible to do so, for even books that at first seem to start at the "very beginning," often pause late in the action to provide what in cinema is termed "back-story." Such delayed exposition is particularly common in stories in which an undiscovered passed plays an important part.
- Every plot and every story has an end as well as a beginning. What effects does the ending have on the way we read a novel or other story?
*
Setting
- Where does the action take place? In reading a novel, one almost always learns pretty quickly in what place and time the story unfolds -- in other words, where in time and space the story "is set."
- Chronological setting: What does setting a novel several decades earlier than the time of its writing and publication imply? Why did Harris place the events of Bang the Drum Slowly Henry Wiggen’s past?
- Place: Although placement in time is obviously very important, many discussions of setting tend to focus on place and on those techniques, such as description and allusion to verifiable facts, that create setting. As you read a work of fiction consider if the author just informs us that the action happens in a specific real place, a fictional one, or merely a general place. Does the text describe landscape, cities, and interiors in great detail? What does each approach imply about the writer's attitude toward reality (or "the world")? What is the relation of a particular setting to a novel's main characters, and can you imagine them in a different setting.
*
Characterization
- When you think of it, one of the strangest things about fiction is that authors can make us react to a bunch of words as if they were a real person. These assemblages of language can make us laugh or cry, get us angry or indignant, and even occasionally treat them as more important to us than people we know. The various techniques that create this powerful illusion of a person make up what we call characterization. Here are some of the more important of these literary devices:
- physical description -- telling us what the character looks like
- dialogue -- what the character says
- physical actions -- what the character does (particularly in relation to what he or she says or thinks.)
- thoughts, or metal actions -- the character's inner life, what the character thinks
- judgment by others -- what other characters say and think about this fictional person
- the narrator's judgement -- what narrator tells us about the character
- the author's judgement -- what the author thinks of the character (sometines difficult to determine until late in the narrative)
*
Theme and Subject
We frequently use the terms theme and subject interchangably, but we must really distinguish between the two as a useful means of discussing works of fiction: subject is the general topic or topics the book implicitly discusses, such as, for example, the relationship between ballplayers on a given team or a fan’s reaction to a baseball strike. In contrast, theme is what the novel implies we should think about such subjects; it's what the book means. How Roy Hobbs (in The Natural) finally reacts to the demands made up on him – how he reacts to the tawdry and corrupt world in which he plays the game he loves.
*
Image, Myth, and Symbol
- Images are visual descriptions that may be used to construct character or setting, but which also may be repeated in "themes," or repeated sequences, often associated with the same person, place, action, or idea. The word "image" also is used figuratively for any sensory detail (e.g., sound, taste, touch, smell) and those details also may occur in "image patterns" or "themes."
- The use of myth connects one work of literature to another and sometimes to experiences in literature are assumed to represent immutable facts about human experience itself. Malamud, for example, uses Arthurian myth extensively in The Natural, for example, and readers familiar with the work of Sir Thomas Malory are likely to understand the meaning of Wonderboy and Roy Hobbs’ quest more completely than those unfamiliar with the Morte D’Arthur.
- Literary symbols are like allusions concentrated in a single image, action, thing, or person. Like allusions, symbols are hard for beginning readers to discover and to use in analysis, but with practice it becomes easier to spot them and to argue for their existence.
*
Summary
The appreciation of literature requires above all a kind of worldliness by the reader…the capacity to bring to a work of art the sum of one’s experience, learning and the powers of inference and imagination. At its best, literature challenges our ingenuity and our erudition. And, to quote Edward Rosenheim, “at its heart is the ageless power of all poetry – the appeal to the eternal human gifts and sympathy, wisdom, and imagination.”
From Rosenheim, What Happens in Literature
*
A Need to Differentiate
There is no greater challenge for readers of literature than the ability to differentiate between real literature and popular writing. This is the case whether we’re talking about fiction, poetry, drama or even film. Some artists would argue that art imitates and thus gives meaning to life. Others would argue that art transcends life. Consider, for example, the following:
“The artist must train not only his eye, but his soul.”
Wassily Kandinsky
A Need to Differentiate
“Great art can communicate before it is understood.” - T.S. Eliot
“Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing” – Salvador Dali
“It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance…and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.” - Henry James
“Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.” - Oscar Wilde
“Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible.” - Paul Klee
No Audio This Slide
A Need to Differentiate
To reproduce the visible is to tell us what we already know; and to do it in a way that satisfies us, that simply makes us feel good, is to play to the commonplace, the mundane, the superficial. Most popular novels, poems, films are formulaic – they tell us what we want to see and how we want to feel. Art challenges us to see more deeply, to understand more completely. It can make us laugh or cry. It can frighten, even terrify. But at its core is its ability to convey real meaning, real understanding. The famous painter, Henri Matisse wrote that for the artist, “creativity takes courage.” That is as true for us as we seek to understand and appreciate the works of artistic creation.
No Audio This Slide
Conclusion
I began with this introduction to literature since the majority of you in this class are not English majors and, for all I know, may have never taken a college literature class at Drexel or anywhere else. For those few English majors in the class, I hope I’ve been able to reinforce what you already know. For everyone else, my objective has been to “set the table” – to prepare you not just to skim through the novels we’ll read, but to take the time and exert the effort to see them clearly, to understand them fully. At the risk of oversimplifying things, I believe that what distinguishes real literature from popular writing is that the latter simply tells a story while the former does that and much more. And it’s the much more that you need to seek out and from which come the real rewards of literature.
