Monday, October 27, 2008

Hemingway and Modernism

Ernest Hemingway, writing about his creative process in his autobiographical novel A Moveable Feast, says, “I was learning something from the painting of Cézanne that made writing simple true sentences far from enough to make the stories have the dimensions that I was trying to put in them” (13). I find this a rather astonishing statement, considering that Hemingway, as an ambulance driver, had just witnessed the horrors of trench warfare and yet was turning to Impressionist painting to find something missing in the act of simple observation, but there must have been something in Cézanne's work that hinted at more than simple “representation.”

Consider this Cezanne work. Obviously it isn't realistic in the purely representational sense. You could take a much more "accurate" photograph of a plate of apples and oranges. So if "Realism" is not the goal, then what is? And considering "Hills Like White Elephants" and "A Clean Well-Lighted Place," which are almost painfully realistic, in what ways are these texts similar to the Cezanne? If Hemingway had viewed these Henry Moore sculptures, which are contemporary with the Modernist period Hemingway was writing in, I think he would have found a great affinity with these works, and a closer aesthetic to his own. How so?

Monday, October 6, 2008

Moliere and Candide

Post a 5-6 paragraph analysis comparing any character in Candide and any character in Tartuffe. You must utilize at least three quotes from each work. For the play, quote Act, Scene, and Line number (e.g. Act II, Scene 3, Line 1-5). For Candide, quote chapter and paragraph (e.g. Chapter 12, Paragraph 4).

Saturday, October 4, 2008

Moliere

Tartuffe is all about class, religion, hypocrisy, and politics. As a comedy, it ends on a positive note, but the issues it tackles are serious and in fact landed the playwright in trouble. Tartuffe had to fight in order to be seen, having been censured by Louis XIV after its original debut in 1664. Read these petitions to find out more about what Moliere had to go through to get his play onto the stage. Can you imagine any contemporary analogs in terms of the play's themes or in terms of the issue of censorship?

The version that we are reading by Richard Wilbur utilizes rhyming couplets and a ten-syllable line or pentameter. The original French is a rhyming couplet in a twelve-syllable line or alexandrine. It's of course extremely difficult to translate rhyme out of another language, and not every translator of Tartuffe has made the attempt. Some have chosen other forms. Consider this translation by Curtis Hidden Page from 1907. Which do you prefer?