LRP9: Post WWII 20th Century Literature–The Nobels

LRP9: Post WWII 20th Century Literature–The Nobels

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Overview: We are made and molded by the world, for we are born into an always already dynamic context of other lives, trans-generational traditions, and overlapping social, political, and economic processes. Like a symphony at a carnival, society is a grand cacophony of noises with brilliant threads of music—so it seems. But, once we acclimate to such an experience (is there really another choice?!), and once we devote our head, heart, and hands to some craft or art (in order to build harmony into our living and also meet the needs of being-in-the-world), it is possible for us to model, mold again, and even re-make the world…a little. One thing that seems to motivate ma)ny, many writers—ancient ones as well as utterly modern ones—is the desire to re-do the world, and life—to do it again differently, or right, or more accurate, or truer…the various sub-themes of re-inventing the world fill books of literary criticism. When a poet or novelist, playwright or scriptwriter, memoirist, biographer, essayist, historian creates a ‘palace of words’ with the most exact craft and lavishes finely nuanced attention on the ideas and images of life behind those words, then any reader can become a partner in such a curious and stunning re-visioning of things. The writers who have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature by the Swedish Academy can be argued to be just such a set of human beings. Their work stunningly reveals and subtly extends what and how we see and understand human experience, efforts, striving, dreams, accomplishments, failures, fate, and freedoms.
To see how you might connect to such rich and important work, and come to see more deeply into the world that made its writer and her or his many pages, let’s play a little game. Using the year of your birth (1985), go to the list of Nobel laureates in literature and pick the person who received the award that year. Do a brief bit of research on them, as is now usual for your RP scholarship. Then select one critical article on that writer. In your personal response section, give some attention to who that writer’s ideas related specifically to you and your times: does that writer eerily capture dimensions of your inner life? Is the work of that person a stark contrast to how you’ve experienced being human? Does that writer explain life in a way that reveals some important things to you, things which can now help you live better, deeper, truer? Or does that writer deepen the mystery and dreamscape of being alive among both the living and the historical dead, and maybe even the not-yet-born.
You should do a brief orienting survey of the writer to become familiar with her or his life, works, cultures, timeframes—this will help you see similarities and differences in the works and aesthetics over the range of artists. Then, with the writer’s name and the title of one significant work, find a contemporary critical article discussing aspects of that writer, and the work. The purpose of this assignment is to point you to a range of important modern literary artists (whose works have deeply patterned later writer’s works), to help you seek research focused on particular, pattern-setting works of complex poetry, and also to give you additional experience with professional critical assessments of literature. The work of the contemporary literary critics can serve you as a model of critically thinking through a literary work and also a model for writing on such works. As you work through these various Research Profile projects, you are not only sampling rich literature created over long centuries of effort, but you are also learning the intricate system of knowledge which historians and careful analysts and critics of literature have produced to help any reader comprehend and appreciate the efforts of artists and worlds long fallen into time’s infinite well.
Thus, for this assignment, you’ll need to locate and read a significant contemporary critical article assessing the history, form, style, literary tradition, historical reception, and/or cultural importance of the writer. The heart of this assignment is investigating how literary historians and critics examine and discuss particular key literary artists, so most of the assignment will entail profiling the specific critical article that you find. But such articles remain somewhat opaque and mysterious until you have some sustained experience with the artistic source of their analysis, so becoming acquainted with the original writer is a must. The literary work itself you’ll document in one of the later sub-sections of the profile template.

Topic: Using one or more of the following archives of the SCC Library’s digital collection, locate one significant article on the Nobel-prize-awarded writer from the year of your birth (1985). You may need to find a representative work by that writer to gain a sense of how her or his style and subject matter work, so that you can more fully appreciate the critical article.
Profile that article using the profile template provided in class. Additionally, include both the full MLA citation for the actual literary work that you consult, as well as a brief excerpt of the language (to illustrate its style), and a brief explanation of its subject matter (as an annotation to your reading of the narrative).

Format: Use the Research Profile template described in the current SPB. This template is available as an editable MS Word document (in .doc format) on the class website. Fill out each information-field of the template completely, clearly, and in your best formal language. All sentence structure, editing conventions, and punctuation in your response should conform with the rule-sets and models provided in the SPB>Academic Document Presentation Guidelines document (see pages 344-351). Also, please observe the file-naming syntax below:

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