Email Ettiquette: Many students use email addresses that give no indication of their names. If your email address does not indicate your name, please be sure to give your name, and please indicate that you are taking English 339 (unless the subject heading of your message makes this clear) in all of your email messagess to me (I teach other courses as well).
To sign up to reserve a time to see a video in the Reserve Department of the Du Bois library (on the third floor), click here. After you have signed up through the email for this course, I suggest you call the library at 545-2358 to reserve your time officially --you need to do this twenty four hours or more in advance.
When I ask you to summarize a critical essay, I mean give the argument and the main points. The summary should typically be at least a half page typed. It should be useful to someone who has not read the essay.
March 5 and March 7. No assignments for these classes. We will watch Marquise in class (it is a French film, and we'll watch it in class because it doesn't have English subtitles. I will stop the film and summarize what is going on every now and then--as frequently as necessary). Pay attention to the way the film, by Vera Belmont, links women, pee, and performance, on the one hand, and men, poop, and playwriting, on the other. What can I say? It's a French film!
For Tuesday, February 26, see Marshall Herskovitz, dir. Dangerous Beauty (1998) (a tape is on reserve in Du Bois) and read Ann Jones and Margaret Rosenthal, eds. Veronica Franco: Poems and Selected Letters pp. 1-21; Letter 22; Capitolo 2 and capiltolo 16 and Margaret Rosenthal, The Honest Courtesan pp.1-24; 51-75; 120-35; 187-97. Write a one page response to the following question and email your completed assignment to me before class meets at [email protected].
1. In light of the readings (of Franco and Rosenthal), do a feminist critique of the film.
2. In light of the film, do a critique of the feminist account of Franco and her poems and letters.
For Thursday, February 22, read Anna Banti, Artemisia. Write a 1-2 page response considering the following aspects of the novel. Remember to back up your points with concrete references to the text and quotations from it.
Artemisia is a modernist novel. The narrator often intervenes and breaks up the narrative flow to question how truthful her account is an d to call our attention to the fact that we are reading a fictional reconstruction. The beginning of the novel (pp. 1-42) is often confusing as we don't know who is speaking, Artemisia or the narrator. (Banti moves back and forth between first and third person so that It is sometimes initially unclear whether or not the pronoun "I" refers to the narrator or Artemisia.) The narrative also lacks closure (it ends abruptly). Why does Banti do this? What are the effects of this self-consciousness?
Banti frequently focuses on the lack of solidarity between women. Examples are Artemisia and the women who come to watch Artemisia paint, Artemisia's relationship with the painter Annella De Rosa, Artemisia and Donna Virginia, Artemisia and Lady Arabella, Artemisia and Queen Henrietta, and Artemisia's relationship with her daughters. What is the point of this focus? (Consider that Artemisia's realtionship with many women centers on painting their portraits--with unhappy results--and also that Artemisia's lesbian desire is as disappointed as her heterosexual desire.)
Banti focuses most of the novel on Artemisia's life after the rape and rape trial (unlike Merlet) and often brings up Artemisia's (old) age and isolation and also Artemisia's interst in her own (self-)image as a woman artist and the loss of (her control over) that image.
Aftermath and defeat. The novel takes place after various disasters (WWII, Artemisia's rape and relocation to another city). Banti acknolwedges her own defeat in trying to remember and reanimate Artemisia. Memory itself fails. Artemisia's marriage fails (largely because of her), she fails to learn to write until late in life, and she ends up thinking about her own death. Freedom is at points equated with a release from memory, with forgetting.
How do the points and questions raised above, especially the novel's focus on failure, defeat, loss (of linear narrative structure, memory, and relatives, among other things) challenge feminist criticism that would try to appropriate the novel as a model of feminist resistance to patriarchy? (These models typically involve non-modernist assumptions narratives of heroic triumph, transparency of meaning, total visibility, complete narrative structure, and accurate and complete memory.)
Email your completed assignment to
me before class meets at [email protected]
For Tuesday, Feb 20, no class. (Use this time to finish reading the novel.)
For Thursday, February 14, no assignment.
For Tuesday, February 12, watch Agnes Merlet, dir. Artemisia, 1997 (now also on DVD) (the tape of Merlet's Artemisia is on reserve in Du Bois).
Read Guerrilla Girls, Guerrilla Girls' Bedside Companion to the History of Western Art, pp. 6-9; 31-37.
Review "On the Real Artemisia," an attack on the film's "distortions" of history by 70s feminists Gloria Steinem and Mary Garrard at http://www.efn.org/~acd/Artemisia.html.
Read Merlet's defense of her film in the article at Salon.com.
Read Griselda Pollock, "A Hungry Eye" (copies distributed in class).
As you will see, Merlet's film sparked a major controversy and was savaged by a number of feminist art historians.
Write a 1-2 page response on the film in light of this criticism and agree or disagree with it by engaging the following questions: (1) does the film illustrate Laura Mulvey's view of the male gaze or contest it? Is Artemisia just another woman there, in Mulvey's terms, "to be looked at?" (Note particularly the close ups of Artemisia's (Cervi's) eyeballs as wel as the use of jump cuts (a jump cut is a movement of less than 45 degrees from one camera shot to another) near the beginning of the film and later after Artemisia is in bed at home after being raped / having had sex with Tassi--look at this sequence very carefully, especially the blood on Artemisia's fingers and her facial expression, breathing, and the sound of the ocean.) In combining eroticism and art with the Artemisia's gaze, does Merlet do anything different here? Des she have a female gaze that is different from the male gaze? Does she complciate Mulvey's acount of themale gaze? Or is the film just another sexist biopic, as Pollock claims, another example of the male gaze at work, even if the director is a woman? (You might consider the porn drawings at the orgy with Tassi as well as the use of female and male models as well as the perspective device [a kind of grid called a velo] and images that echo it.) What does the film gain, if anything, by departing from strict historical chronology? (Is historical fidelity here an unquestioned virtue, as Garrard and Steinem assume it is?)
For a website on film criticism terms, go to http://shea.mit.edu/ramparts2000/commentaryguides/glossary/index2.htm.
For Artemisia's paintings as well as paintings of Judith and Holofernes by her precursors, go to the February schedule page at http://www-unix.oit.umass.edu/~everaft/page2b.html and click on the relevant links.
For Thursday, February 7, read the two essays by Laura Mulvey and Edward Snow handed out in class, summarize each essay, and raise two questions about each essay (4 questions total). Email your completed assignment to me before class meets at [email protected]
For Tuesday, February 5, watch Ever After (one copy is on reserve in Du Bois) and read Freud's "family romance" essay and Andrew Parker's "Unthinking Sex" essay. Write a brief summary of the argument of both essays and, for each essay, state two questions they raise. Write a one page response on Ever After to one of the following questions and email all three things (the two essay summaries and questions (total of our questions) and the Ever After response to me at [email protected]
1. The opening and closing frame with Jeanne Moreau as the grandmother. What is it doing in the film? Why the assertion that the story actually happened? What difference does it make that a woman rather than a man is telling the "true" story?
2. Drew Barrymore as the star. How do her life story and Cinderella's intersect? Ditto for Angelica Houston as the evil stepmother.
3. Cinderella as androgynous, trans-gendered (tom boy, fencer, etc.). Why?
4. Leonardo da Vinci. What role does he (and science, art, and magic) play in the film?
5. Cinderella's shoe and portrait. How do they matter?
6. Sir Thomas More's Utopia. ("Utopia" actually means "nowhere.") How does it relate to the play's romance politics? (Utopia projects a communist society where private property has been abolished). Consider the role of the gypsies in the film in this regard as well. Does the ascendancy of the Prince and Cinderella at the end involve significant social transformation? Or not?
7. Cinderella as loser. The themes of (female) loss, nostalgia, and mourning.
January 29 and 31: Queen Christina Biography:
Christina Vasa, Protestant Swedish Queen born in 1626, abdicated in 1654, died in 1689. She dressed in men's clothing, sometimes men and women's; converted to Catholicism after abdicating. She may have been lesbian-certainly wrote lovingly to her lady-in-waiting Ebba Spare, but her reputation as a lesbian came mainly from French enemies who wanted to discredit her intellectual and political standing. Forged letters were published as Christina's secret letters in 1761. Much earlier, in the 1660s, various slanderous pamphlets appeared in Paris attacking Christina for her lesbianism. But they may have been correct. 19th century biographers left out this aspect of her personality. But by the early 20th century, her lesbianism again became part of her story (in 1906 with the publication of Edward Carpenter's Love's Coming of Age). This renewed interest in Christina and in other queens has been interpreted as a response to the emergence of the New Woman, and in the 1920s, to the political enfranchisement of women.
Critical questions and issues to examine while viewing the Robert Mamoulian 1933 film, Queen Christina. Write a one page response to one of the following questions:
1: Consider the use of space in the film (inside as constrained versus outside as free) and Christina's behavior inside versus outside (consider, for example, the moment when she's outside and rubs snow on her face ecstatically). Consider also the use of music and the use of silence.
2: Does the film affirm romance genre at the expense of women by focusing on the woman in the queen, the person who cares more about personal fulfillment than politics which are basically seen as a distraction and imposition? Does it thereby effectively deny women political agency?
3: Or does the film subvert a romantic affirmation of femininity and heterosexuality (marriage, love) by making sexuality matter of performance, costume, and disguise rather than identity? Does gender matter more than sexuality, or vice versa? Does camp triumph over heterosexuality? The film does not itself do much with Christina's lesbianism (though notice Christina's kiss of Ebba) but a star like Garbo brings a resonance of lesbianism and bi-sexuality.
4: Consider Garbo's costumes in relation to power (symbolic and personal), sexuality (heterosexual and homosexual) and gender (male and female dress). How do Christina's costumes suggest she is either free or restrained?
5: Consider Don Antonio's (John Gilbert) role, especially in the bedroom scene after He has met her in drag. Why would he want to sleep with him / her? Does anything sexually transpire during the night? How do we know? Not know? Note that Gilbert gets much less screen time than does Garbo and that his acting is generally either bland or overdone.
6: Consider Garbo as a star. What
effect do her close ups have?
7: How we read the ending of the film is crucial. Consider Garbos's placement in the final shot on board ship. Does the film affirm a clearcut closure? or is it openended?
8. How does the film depart from history (itself not an homogenous set of interpretations, but conflicting accounts) and why?
9. Notice how the film links memory (often through Garbo's gaze), freedom, independence,
nostalgia and loss (of Christina's father, of her lover, of her throne, of the
present). Consider Christina / Garbo as diva, suffering victim.
Your first assignment before we meet Tuesday, January 29 at 11:15 in Barlett 203 is to read all of the Required Texts, Assignments, and Policies page (click on the blue links and read the linked pages as well). Also, familarize yourself with the main pages of this website. (Click on each of the following links): Schedule | Class Handouts | Internet Resources | Paper Topics| Research | Course Rating | Professor Burt's Bio. There'll be a quiz on the website in class on Thursday.
Your second assignment before we meet is check out the websites for Vatel and The Affair of the Necklace (click on the titles to go to the websites), films we'll see later in the term, and click on the costumes link for Vatel and click on "Behind the Curtains" and then on "costumes" on the flash website (wait until after the intro plays or skip the intro) of The Affair of the Necklace . Write a one page response on each website.