2018 National Seminar Proposal: Paul H. Fry

Good morning again. I've made the spur-of-the-moment decision to read my proposals for the simple reason that I'm so impressed by what I've heard so far that I don't think my usual weakness for just, you know, a licking of prayer is going to do the job. So I am going to read the proposals as quickly as I can and maybe add something or other to what I say. You all have — you've already heard the plural — yes, I have two proposals. I've done this in the past and there isn't as simple what I love to teach more than anything else is Shakespeare. What you love to study more than anything else is usually something else. So, as usual, I offer two proposals. One of them to do with Shakespeare. In the past I have done both of the seminars in question. I had a terrific time and I do think enough time has passed in each case so that there's a certain freshness of novelty that has crept back into the picture despite the element of repetition. So 'Reading Character in Shakespeare' is my first proposal. I changed the word 'explaining' to the word 'reading' — needn't pause over that — but in any case this is what I say. We're in the classroom and we tell our students that Othello is jealous. What do we mean? That he's jealous by nature? That he isn't jealous by nature but that Iago can therefore take him by surprise and create an obsession? That's something in his status as an outsider, a racial outsider in particular, makes him prone to jealousy? And above all, whichever position we wish to defend, how do we make it stick? How do we find evidence in the text or in an imagined or real performance to support our opinion? And how do we teach our students to do likewise? In this seminar we shall work on the problem of how to defend our interpretations of Shakespeare, drawing primarily on textual evidence while becoming aware of conflicting textual evidence and learning to what extent in a given situation we can rely on gut feelings. Much of our attention will be devoted to leading characters, and to that end I have chosen plays in which the main character's identity, including racial and gender identity where appropriate, is both a central issue and a puzzle. For example, at the end of Taming of the Shrew, when Kate is clearly no longer a shrew, has she become submissive or now chosen to be subversive, and why? For that matter, was she a shrew in the first place? Is Romeo in love with Juliet or is he in love with love? Is that our own political instincts that make us take sides between Brutus and Caesar and shape our opinion of Mark Antony? Now, by the way, because Brigitta has suggested Macbeth as one of her texts, I'm thinking of substituting Macbeth for Julius Caesar in what I'm proposing here, because we had a great time a few years ago getting our two seminars together for a day and discussing, in that case, Romeo and Juliet, and it would be fun to do something similar this time, at least for a day. So maybe Julius Caesar will fall, you know, then you'll get a nice real dollop of deep, heavy-duty Shakespeare tragedy, and we'll send you all away weeping. How can we explain the behavior of anyone in Merchant of Venice? Not just Shylock's behavior, but Portia's or Antonio's. And what can we possibly make of Hamlet? Is he crazy? What are his feelings toward his mother? Does he love Ophelia? Is he religious or is he an existentialist? Does he think too much to act? Etc. But we'll also ask questions about other things, the sorts of questions our students are likely to ask us. Does Iago have a motive, and if so, which one? After Caesar is killed, why does the play go on so long? Why is Mercutio killed? What does Portia mean when she says 'the quality of mercy is not strained'? Is it a good thing when Jessica elopes with her father's money? Would Ophelia have been a suitable match for Hamlet? Gertrude thinks so, but Polonius and Laertes thought not. Is Petruchio a wife-beater? Our whole emphasis will be on finding evidence to defend viewpoints. For the May weekend we'll discuss Romeo and Juliet, then in July we'll study Julius Caesar or Macbeth, Hamlet, Othello, The Merchant of Venice, and The Taming of the Shrew. This choice of plays does reflect the preferences of teachers in my past three seminars on Shakespeare. It's actually subject to negotiation. If everybody rises up and says no, no, no, we want to do A Midsummer Night's Dream, well okay, we'll think about it. A Midsummer Night's Dream, so that's all fine. We'll also be talking about other things because any seminar always involves just a question of how do you interpret something, and we'll be talking about language, structure, genre, all these factors interacting as they do in understanding Shakespeare. There will be an important emphasis for teachers at the elementary level. We have often worked in the past with graphic novels of Shakespeare plays. There are many graphic novels of most, if not all, of the plays, and I'm always delighted to work with that material. And teachers, often elementary teachers, often enjoy working with short passages or even tag lines and adjusting their students by that means both to a comfort level in responding to the language of Shakespeare, but also to the possibility of absorbing wisdom from Shakespeare. And all of this, I think, is an important facet of what we can do as a seminar in reading Shakespeare. So probably enough said about that, and I'll turn to the other proposal.

This is a shorter proposal. It's called 'Poems about Works of Art Featuring Women and Other Marginalized Writers.' Now, Jim always prints the full title of these seminars, and so I'm going to try to shrink it so that we don't have to be constantly repeating that mouthful. But for our purposes today, that is the title. And I will attempt to do three things. First, will familiarize teachers with an amazingly rich tradition that goes back to Homer and seems especially attractive for women poets. Perhaps the most famous poems in this tradition, which is called ekphrasis, are Keats's 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' and W.H. Auden's 'Musée des Beaux Arts' of 1939, just before the coming of the second war. But there are dozens and dozens of poems just as interesting, and the 20th and 21st centuries have been an important period for such poems. And getting to know this tradition, we'll also have a chance to brush up on the vocabulary for teaching poetry as a literary form. Second, we shall all, including art teachers, discuss ways in which students can be motivated to describe works of art using examples and techniques everyone suggests, but also involving books about getting children to write poems by Kenneth Koch, Georgia Heard, and others. This is an exercise that's often worked with, usually as an in-class prompt, and I think it would be extremely worthwhile to try for a whole curriculum unit using poems and prose descriptions of art as models. Visual artists also respond to poetry. We'll pay some attention to such responses, considering paintings that comment on or even illustrate poems. Finally, we shall move through African American and other culturally diverse examples of poems about art: Phyllis Wheatley, Henry Ossawa Tanner, Robert Hayden, Gwendolyn Brooks, Rita Dove, Natasha Trethewey, and a number of women not of color participate, and will move through poems of that kind toward poems that participants wish to share, especially those connected with their own curriculum units. All of the above is subject to modification obviously according to teachers' interests. Now, what's my own thesis about pictures? About poems? I think that when men write a poem about a picture — sorry, that's what I meant to say — that's why I should have read that. When men write a poem about a picture, I think that there's an element of picture... they see in pictures a frozenness, a sense of indifference to meaning, even to suffering. I mean, Auden's famous poem begins 'About suffering they were never wrong, the old masters,' and it goes on to suggest that there's an element of indifference in the phenomenal world surrounding suffering, that painting is somehow privileged, unlike poetry, to focus on... poetry needs a form of apologetic representation that it believes painting can do without. Now, this is absolute total nonsense, because painting has its own ways of confronting suffering with enormous pathos, and I only use suffering as an example of emotion — obviously there are all the rest of the emotions to consider as well. Women know that this approach to writing poems about pictures is absolute total nonsense, and their poems about pictures are fully engaged in the pathos of representation. And it's absolutely fascinating to essentialize a gender distinction in the way that I make so bold as to do, looking at the extraordinary way that men's poems about pictures and women's poems about pictures differ in this regard. So perhaps I should stop there. I've gone on too long already. The choice is yours, and I've expressed my own covert preference. But I love — not so covert — but I love both topics, and I look forward to discussing either with you next summer. Thanks.

I can't give you a list offhand because I have various forms of the syllabus. Typically, poems are about a particular work of art. Until the later 19th century, most poems are about works of art from the 14th through the 16th and 17th centuries. More recently, they become largely about more contemporary works of art. There are some surprising conjunctions. The African American poet Robert Hayden, for example, wrote an extraordinary poem called 'The Peacock Room' about an interior designed by the decadent late 19th century artist Whistler. And the simple conjunction of this room covered in gold leaf of sort of exotic peacocks stalking around and the situation of Robert Hayden, who wrote for example 'Those Winter Sundays' and poems that most of you probably know as English teachers, isn't itself extraordinary. I should also say that sometimes poems about works of art are about imaginary works of art. We call this notional ekphrasis. And the first famous poem about a work of art, the long passage in Homer's Iliad about the shield of Achilles, is not about a real shield but an imagined shield, and that generates a tradition which actually has gone down to this day. Yet other poems are called galleries, traditionally called galleries, and they're about whole groups of works of art. Auden's 'Musée des Beaux Arts' is covertly a poem of that kind because it seems only to be about 'Landscape with the Fall of Icarus,' the famous painting by now thought perhaps not to be Bruegel, but it's also about two other paintings: 'The Census at Bethlehem' and 'Massacre of the Innocents.' And so it is as much a gallery or a poem about a group of paintings as it is about an individual painting. It hovers between those two things. So those are the possibilities for poems about works of art. And by the way, they're not all paintings. There are also famous poems that are about sculptures or parts of sculptures. There's a famous poem by Rilke called 'Archaic Torso of Apollo,' an object that has no head, no limbs, no private parts — it's just a big rock. And so there are all sorts of classic poems of that sort as well. But that's all I can tell you offhand. There's a quite significant trove of poetry by Native Americans which has been anthologized, in which some of my fellows in the past have written about, and it's poetry for all ages. Poetry about Native Americans. It's an interesting question because there's a great deal of visual art of the imagination of Native Americans, particularly by Swiss and German artists who came to the United States and were fascinated by Native American culture during the course of the nineteenth century. I think I would have to agree that apart from passing marks, remarks of inclusiveness liked by poets like Walt Whitman and others, there isn't a great deal of poetry about Native American culture by poets other than such people as Sherman Alexie and Native Americans who themselves have written so eloquently and to such wonderful extent about it. It's a good question, especially because as one reflects on it, as I say, there has been more interest among visual artists than there has been among poets, and I'm very far from having an explanation for that. It's a very interesting question.