Author Archives: chendric

Mirrors, reflections in Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber

In Arts One this week we read Angela Carter’s collection of short stories entitled The Bloody Chamber. I really enjoyed this collection, though I found it challenging because we could have spent at least an hour on each story rather than talking about the whole book in two 80-minute seminar discussions. Each story has so much going on in it, so much complexity and symbolism, that I found myself thinking each one was as full as an entire novel itself.

One thing I wanted to talk about in seminar but didn’t get the chance to is the many references to mirrors and reflections. And, since our theme this year is Seeing and Knowing, I really wanted to at least write a blog post about this theme. Here are some of my fairly fragmented thoughts, fragmented partly because I don’t think mirrors and reflections necessarily have the same meaning across all stories.

Beauty is truth's smile ...", Flickr photo shared by Beverley Goodwin, licensed CC BY 2.0

Beauty is truth’s smile …”, Flickr photo shared by Beverley Goodwin, licensed CC BY 2.0

 

Seeing in mirrors others’ images of oneself

I got the sense in at least a couple of the stories that mirrors showed women seeing themselves through how they are seen by others: the reflection showed not the woman’s own view of herself, but how others view her.

The Bloody Chamber

I saw this first in “The Bloody Chamber,” the first story in the collection. On p. 11 the narrator explicitly says as much: after noticing that her husband-to-be is looking at her with lust, she saw herself in a mirror and says, “And I saw myself, suddenly, as he saw me, my pale face, the way the muscles in my neck stuck out like thin wire.” But more significantly, she sees in herself “a potentiality for corruption” (11), which he also sees in her (20).

Later, she sees herself in the mirror after he undresses her, and sees the image of a pornographic etching that he had shown her (15). Given his penchant for pornography, it makes sense to say that there, too, she is seeing herself as he sees her: he is the “purchaser unwrapp[ing] his bargain,” and she a tender “lamb-chop” as in the etching.

What about the fact that their bedroom is covered with mirrors? She saw that she had “become the multitude of girls [she] saw in the mirrors, identical in their chic navy blue tailor-mades …” (14). For me, this brings up how she is one in a string of women he has treated similarly, women he has seen in the same way as he sees her. To him, the women may be somewhat identical: his ring, he says when he demands it back from her, “will serve [him] for a dozen more fiancées” (38). But I’m not sure it’s just his problem (though he is definitely a problem); Carter might be pointing to a more systemic issue, that too often this is how women are viewed and treated, as objects to be seen (he has a “gallery of beautiful women” (10)) and lusted over, and to be used, and used up. The narrator “watched a dozen husbands approach her in a dozen mirrors” (15), and as they have sex, “a dozen husbands impaled a dozen brides” (17). This suggests, I think, a more systemic problem–this happens to many husbands and wives.

Erl-King

I saw this theme again in “Erl-King,” even though there aren’t any literal mirrors in the story so far as I remember. But the narrator speaks of her reflection in the Erl-King’s eyes (both of the following are from p. 90):

The gelid green of your eyes fixes my reflective face. It is a preservative, like a green liquid amber; it catches me. I am afraid I will be trapped in it forever ….

Your green eye is a reducing chamber. If I look into it long enough, I will become as small as my own reflection. I will diminish to a point and vanish. … I shall become so small you can keep me in one of your osier cages and mock my loss of liberty.

Of course, much of this story is about being enclosed, being caged: “The woods enclose” (84 and also 85); she felts she was “in a house of nets” in the woods (85); he takes girls and cages them as birds. What I find interesting here is that part of the caging is through his eyes:

I know the birds don’t sing, they only cry because they can’t find their way out of the wood, have lost their flesh when they were dipped in the corrosive pools of his regard and now must live in cages (90).

Connecting this with what I said above about “The Bloody Chamber,” I thought of the narrator speaking of her reflection in his eyes as a kind of entrapment. Then I considered that perhaps, again, the reflection could be symbolic of the view of these women from the perspective of the male figure, which holds them in a particular image that they have trouble finding their way out of. The narrator, at the end, plans to find her way out, though; still, she has to ask him to turn his gaze away first before she can do so.

 

Seeing only oneself, one’s own reflection, when seeing others

This is related to the above–it’s more from seer’s standpoint than what I talked about above, which is more from the standpoint of the seen (being trapped in the regard of the seer).

I saw this in “The Courtship of Mr. Lyon,” though a similar theme can probably be found elsewhere too. There is an emphasis early on with the “Beauty” character on how she sees the lion as so very different from her:

She found his bewildering difference from herself almost intolerable; its presence choked her (45).

It was in her heart to drop a kiss upon his shaggy mane but, though she stretched out her hand towards him, she could not bring herself to touch him of her own free will, he was so different from herself (48).

This makes sense on a literal level of the difference between a lion and a human; she thinks, after all, “a lion is a lion and a man is a man and, though lions are more beautiful by far than we are, yet they belong to a different order of beauty …” (45). But I think that as we read further into the story, another meaning can emerge.

When she looked into his eyes, “she saw her face repeated twice,” which can suggest that when she looks in his eyes all she sees is herself (47). This idea is amplified later when she goes to London and lives a life of luxury: “she smiled at herself in mirrors a little too often, these days …” (49). The “beauty” she sees is when she looks at herself in the mirror: “she took off her earrings in front of the mirror; Beauty” (48).

But then when the spaniel comes to her at the end of winter, “[h]er trance before the mirror broke” as she remembered her promise and that she had broken it (49). And when she goes to him she sees that he has eyelids:

How was it she had never noticed before that his agate eyes were equipped with lids, like those of a man? Was it because she had only looked at her own face, reflected there? (50)

That is the quote that sent me thinking in this direction in the first place! And the ending of the story could suggest that after all him seeming to be a lion could have been because she didn’t really see him as he was: she noticed that “he had always kept his fists clenched but now, painfully, tentatively, at last began to stretch his fingers”; and she saw that his nose gave him a look of a lion (51)–perhaps he just had that resemblance and it was she who thought of him as a lion? And perhaps that is because somehow he was different from her, and she wanted, at first, only sameness, only the sort of being she saw reflected in a mirror?

The view she had that “a lion is a lion and a man is a man” is questioned in numerous stories, I think, given the transformations between humans and non-human animals that happen in many of them. And this connects back to something that was said in the lecture on this book that we had on Monday: Carter may have been trying to get beyond the binary of predator and prey, master and slave, aggressor and victim that is often apparent in fairy tales and in some depictions of sexual relations (such as with the Marquis de Sade). The “Beauty” character in this story at first thinks of Mr. Lyon as a lion and herself as “Miss Lamb, spotless, sacrificial” (45).

  • Actually…is this supposed to be her name, as in Mr. Lyon and Miss Lamb? Don’t know…just thought of this.

So she at first has that sort of binary view of their relationship–he will “gobble her up” as the nursemaid of the “Beauty” character in “The Tiger’s Bride” says of the tiger-man (56). But perhaps the “Beauty” of the “Mr. Lyon” story gets past this binary view to some degree when she sees that he is not a lion after all (or perhaps he really turns from a lion to a human when she pulls away from her mirror…it’s hard to tell).

“Wolf-Alice”

 

Reflecting Bullmation, Flickr photo shared by 6SN7, licensed CC BY 2.0. Okay, I know a dog isn't a wolf, but you get the picture.

Reflecting Bullmation, Flickr photo shared by 6SN7, licensed CC BY 2.0. Okay, I know a dog isn’t a wolf, but you get the picture.

 

I am bringing up this story as a separate section because, frankly, I’m having trouble figuring out what to do with the mirrors in it.

The Duke, who appears to be a werewolf, also doesn’t have a reflection in a mirror at first (120), which, as someone pointed out in small groups in class today, suggests he also is like a vampire character. This seems partly because “he passed through the mirror and now, henceforward, lives as if upon the other side of things” (121)–you can’t have a reflection if you’ve passed through a mirror.

  • This reminds me of Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass: Alice goes through a looking glass one winter night and finds herself in a garden full of talking flowers and a chess queen, as well as humpty dumpty and others. But I haven’t really thought this through.

I wondered if maybe this crossing over to the other side could be related to him going over quite strongly to the “beast” side. He is an undeveloped character in the story, who is focused only on eating:

At night, those huge, inconsolable, rapacious eyes of his are eaten up by swollen, gleaming pupil. His eyes see only appetite. These eyes open to devour the world in which he sees, nowhere, a reflection of himself (120).

He doesn’t see himself in the mirror or in anyone else in the world—-the narrator says that Wolf-Alice has “as little in common with the rest of us as he does” (120). His vision is limited to devouring.

But then by the end the mirror shows the Duke’s reflection, after he has been shot and lies wounded, and Wolf-Alice licks his wounds. She brings him back through the mirror, back from the other side. Perhaps at this point there is a connection between the two so that in a way, he now has a reflection in the world, someone similar to him in some sense, namely her? Or at least, she has sympathy for him, and he can see something more in the world than just what he wants to eat? The narrator says that as he lies wounded he is “locked half-and-half between such strange states, an aborted transformation,” and that he is like “a woman in labour” (126). To me this suggests he is somewhere on the border of whatever it is that the mirror represents, the border he had crossed through and of which now he is sitting in the middle until she pulls him back over.

By this point in the story Wolf-Alice has moved from mostly animal to more human-like. And “two-legs looks, four-legs sniffs”–there is something about vision in this story that seems connected to humanity. As Alice bumps against the mirror the Duke has passed through (123) and eventually comes to see it as providing her an image of herself, she comes to be more human. She wears clothes and thereby has “put on the visible sign of her difference from them” (125). So one might think that here at the end the Duke passes back over into humanity.

And yet, with this story and this last scene ending the book, I wonder if things aren’t a bit more complex than that. By the end of the story she is still sniffing and prowling like a wolf; she has moved into the territory of humanity, but still retains some of her wolflike aspects. She is “Wolf-Alice,” a kind of in-between being, and perhaps we are to think that the Duke becomes and remains such an amalgamation as well. I see something of a progression in the three stories at the end:

  • In “The Werewolf” the people think of wolves as dangerous and the people who turn into them as evil witches who must be stoned.
  • In “In the Company of Wolves,” as discussed today in class, the Red Riding Hood character has sympathy for the wolves howling outside, because they are cold (117), and she doesn’t fear the wolf but instead has sex with him. There is some kind of closer rapport happening here, though the girl and the wolf are still clearly separate in the last line: “See! sweet and sound she sleeps in granny’s bed, between the paws of the tender wolf” (118)
  • Then in “Wolf-Alice” we might see an overcoming of the binary of beast and human, with a human raised by wolves who takes on some aspects of the human, and the man who became a beast but can then move back into a middle space. But then again, I may be making that up, really; I think I just want to see that, as was questioned in lecture, she may actually have some evidence of moving beyond this binary!

 

That was quite a pile of thoughts, and I hope they were coherent, and that at least some might be, if not fully convincing, then at least thought-provoking!

Countess Told in Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler

In Arts One this past week we were talking about Weimar cinema:

We had great discussions on all of them, but one thing we didn’t get to, and that still puzzles me, is Countess Told’s character in Dr. Mabuse. I don’t have clear ideas on her role in the film, which is why I’m writing a blog post–sometimes I can write my way through to some ideas (and sometimes not…but I have to try in order to find out!).

Spieler, Spielerei

According to the Wikipedia entry on the movie, “der Spieler” can refer to “gambler, puppeteer, or actor.” Clearly all three meanings fit with Mabuse’s character, who manipulates others to his will, who puts on disguises as an actor, and who also gambles–but really, he is less a gambler in the traditional sense than someone who fixes games to make them come out his way. As the Count accuses him at the end of Part II, he plays falsely (cheats); this is of course ironic because Mabuse has forced the Count to cheat against the Count’s will.

According to Mabuse, everything is “Spielerei,” which the English subtitles render as “pastime” but clearly the root is the same as “Spieler” (Part 1, 2:28:26). So perhaps everything is a game, a matter of playing or gambling, according to Mabuse (see also the Collins dictionary translation of “Spielerei”).

But Countess Told is portrayed explicitly as someone who doesn’t play.

Screen shot of Countess Told at 1:01:05 of Part I

Screen shot of Countess Told at 1:01:05 of Part I

The Countess as passive observer who needs “strong sensations”

Countess Told is introduced to us in Part I of Dr. Mabuse as the “passive lady” at Schramm’s club, because she only watches and never plays. She is simply an observer, and frequently bored with what she sees: she says to Mabuse that everything you can see from a car, a window, an opera box is “partly disgusting, partly uninteresting, always boring” (Part 1, 2:02:48). While others involve themselves in gambling and séances, while her husband involves himself in collecting expressionist art, she simply watches from the sidelines.

The Countess describes herself to Wenk as having become “sluggish,” and says “to rise to life, I require strong sensations” (Part 1, 1:02:42). She claims to need “relief from the dead atmosphere” of her house with the Count, and seeks it in “night-spots and gambling dens” (Part 1, 1:17:02). But while others who play, who are directly involved in gambling, might get some degree of strong sensations from it (a sense of risk, a desire for wealth), it’s not clear how watching others could provide her with the “strong sensations” she craves. She tells Wenk that she needs “life, the strong breath of the unusual–sensations–adventures–but [she is] afraid they are extinct” (Part 1, 1:17:35).

She does seem to find something of what she seeks when she agrees to go to the jail to try to get information out of Carozza. When she discovers the depth of Carozza’s love for Mabuse, she writes to Wenk that she thought she would find “the paid tout of a notorious criminal,” but instead found “a woman full of love, before whose simple and unconditional feelings [she is] not suitable to be [Wenk’s] ally” (Part 1, 2:25:45). Later she tells Mabuse, “I have encountered something which until recently I did not believe existed–something of greater value and more deeply stirring than even the strongest sensation,” namely love (Part 1, 2:31:29). To me, this suggests that while she used to seek surface sensations, she was struck even more strongly by a deeper, somehow more real and authentic feeling than what she can get by watching others in their “night-spots and gambling-dens.” It’s clearly something she doesn’t experience with her husband, and the only other portrayal of a romantic relationship in the movie is clearly a false, surface one: Carozza and Hull. I think we are supposed to take it that Carozza really loves Mabuse, that she hasn’t just been influenced by him to love him (or he would have stopped her later, since by the time during which the narrative takes place he is clearly tired of her). This sort of deep feeling seems missing in the lives of the rest of the characters in the film, who spend their lives seeking spectacle, stuffing themselves with food and drink (the scene introducing Schramm’s has a lovely montage of food and drink, with a great image of a man sitting by himself at a table, stuffing himself greedily: Part 1, 56:00).

Mabuse lives off of the more superficial desires of people in the city: he gets rich through their greed (the stock market, gambling). He himself succumbs to those superficial desires–he himself is clearly greedy for money, he is shown frequently drinking, and though we don’t know exactly when he cast off Carozza, it could have been when she started to actually fall in love with him. He tells the Countess: “There is no love–there is only desire!” (Part 1, 2:31). And when, during the séance scene in Part 1 the Countess tells Mabuse that nothing can keep her interest for long, he says only one thing can do so: “playing with people and their destinies” (2:03:36). But she doesn’t play.

Perhaps the Countess can’t be drawn in by Mabuse because she doesn’t indulge in the more superficial pleasures he draws people in with, and she doesn’t engage in playing with them and their destinies–as noted above, she doesn’t play, she only watches. She is one of the few in the film who who resists him. Wenk resists him during his card game with Mabuse in the disguise of the old man, but later falls prey to him during the Weltmann show in Part 2. The Countess is influenced to invite him over to a party in Part 1, which we know because later she says to her husband that she’s not sure why she invited him, nor why she wants to withdraw the invitation. But in Part 2 the Countess doesn’t fall under his influence, resisting him the whole time she is captivity. It’s possible that Mabuse doesn’t try to influence her through his psychological means, because he asks her if she will come with him of her own free will or if he’ll have to force her, so perhaps he wants her to join him by choice.

Conclusions?

I’m not sure I’ve come to much in the way of a reading of the Countess’ character in the film. I have ventured some thoughts, but I have not been able to put it all together into a coherent interpretation of her role. But sometimes that happens, and I do think I’ve gotten a bit further in my own interpretation of her character than I was when I began!

The power of film

In Arts One this week we discussed Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. It was really challenging trying to talk about everything we wanted to discuss about both works, in two seminars (1 hr 20 minutes each, but still…). One thing I asked towards the end of class yesterday was something like:

What can film do that a book with just words can’t do, or can’t do as well? And how can we see that in Apocalypse Now?

I had a few ideas, and I heard some of the small groups in class yesterday giving a few others. The more I think about it, the more I wonder if the things I thought of couldn’t be done in text alone (some of them could, in ingenious ways), but here are some things I thought film does especially well in comparison to written texts without images.

Visuals

Obviously, film has the benefit of visual images different from just the visuals of words. One thing that stood out to me in Coppola’s film is how we can get meaning just from the way the images are and work together.

For example, we can get a sense that Willard and Kurtz are in some ways the same, or at least similar, by:

  • In the scene in which the water buffalo is killed, and Kurtz is killed, towards the beginning we see Kurtz standing in the doorway looking out over the sacrificial ceremony, then going inside. Then after Willard kills him we see Willard standing in the doorway, looking out over the people who were conducting the ceremony. The shots aren’t exactly the same, as Kurtz is in shadow, backlit, and Willard is lit by the front, but he’s in the same place, facing the same people–who then bow down to him as they did to Kurtz. My point is that putting them in pretty much the same position in a shot can communicate a lot, even if nothing else were to happen to make us see them as similar.
Ruins--Apocalypse Now, Flickr photo by Ian Burt, licensed CC BY 2.0.

Ruins–Apocalypse Now, Flickr photo by Ian Burt, licensed CC BY 2.0.

  • At the very end, after Willard and Lance leave Kurtz’s compound, we get a juxtaposed shot of Willard’s face and the image of the statue in Kurtz’s compound. That statue was associated with Kurtz–it was being shown while Kurtz was reading Eliot’s “The Hollow Men.” At the end, Willard’s eye moves to be superimposed onto the statue’s eye, which to me suggests a melding of Willard and Kurtz.
  • Also, at the beginning, we get a shot of Willard’s face while he is in the hotel room, on the left of the screen while there are various things on the right, one of which is that statue again. In the beginning, Willard’s face is upside down, but at the end his face is right-side-up next to the statue before his eye becomes superimposed onto it. This might suggest a kind of disconnect between Willard and Kurtz at the beginning, but more of a connection at the end.

Lighting

A great deal can be shown by particular choices of lighting in an image or a film. One thing that really struck me in this regard was the Do Lung Bridge scene, where the light comes only in flashes, so you see a little bit and then you’re back in darkness; then there’s a little light, then darkness. A number of meanings might be connected with this, such as that at that point, they are on the border between order and chaos. That’s the last army outpost on the river, if I remember correctly (“beyond it was only Kurtz,” or something like that), and there is a very tenuous grasp on order and military activity. There is no clear commanding officer, but people are still fighting. There’s a veneer of doing what they’re supposed to do–they keep blowing up the bridge but the army keeps rebuilding it so they can say the road is open. The flashing of light and mostly darkness can express this borderline between things happening as they should and utter chaos.

 

Music

One thing that can really stand out in a film as providing another layer of meaning or evoking feeling is the background music. I didn’t pay as great of attention to this as to other things, but one thing that stands out is the silence after Willard kills Kurtz and comes out of the building to face the rest of the people. It’s completely silent except for the crickets, even though there was loud music before that (The Doors’ “The End”). Then we just get the rain as Willard and Lance move away in the boat. Willard even turns off the radio when “Almight” is calling for them on it. For me, this suggests perhaps that this is “the end” for Willard. There is nothing left for him–no military, no Kurtz, no Kurtz’s voice (in the book he is nothing but a voice, so silence would make sense), no nothing. But I don’t feel strongly about this interpretation; there are likely other interesting things to say about this silence!

I also wanted to say something about the song “The End,” as was discussed in the lecture on this film. The thing that struck me about it is that we get it both at the end of the film and at the beginning. That seems rather paradoxical–the end at the beginning? Or better, it’s circular. This is not actually the end; not the end of the war in the context of the storyline in the film, of course, nor the end of people like Kurtz, nor the end of insane wars altogether. It will just start again. Which, yes, goes a bit against my point in the previous paragraph about this being the end for Willard, which is partly why I’m not that thrilled about that interpretation!

 

These are the things I came up with on first thinking of this question…curious if others have other ideas!

Presentation on SoTL research re: peer feedback

In mid-November I gave a presentation at the SoTL Symposium in Banff, Alberta, Canada, sponsored by Mount Royal University.

It’s a little difficult to describe this complex research, so I’ll let my (long) abstract for the presentation tell at least part of the story.

750-word abstract

Title: Tracking a dose-response curve for peer feedback on writing

There is a good deal of research showing that peer feedback can contribute to improvements in student writing (Cho & MacArthur, 2010; Crossman & Kite, 2012). Though intuitively one might think that students would benefit most from receiving peer comments on their written work, several studies have shown that student writing benefits both from comments given as well as comments received–indeed, sometimes the former more than the latter (Li, Liu & Steckelberg, 2010; Cho & MacArthur, 2011).

There are, however, some gaps in the literature on the impact of peer feedback on improving student writing. First, most studies published on this topic consider the effect of peer feedback on revisions to a single essay, rather than on whether students use peer comments on one essay when writing another essay. Cho and MacArthur (2011) is an exception: the authors found that students who wrote reviews of writing samples by students in a past course produced better writing on a different topic than those who either only read those samples or who read something else. In addition, there is little research on what one might call a “dose-response” curve for the impact of peer feedback on student writing—how are the “doses” of peer feedback related to the “response” of improvement in writing? It could be that peer feedback is more effective in improving writing after a certain number of feedback sessions, and/or that there are diminishing returns after quite a few sessions.

To address these gaps in the literature, we designed a research study focusing on peer feedback in a first-year, writing intensive course at a large university in North America. In this course students write an essay every two weeks, and they meet every week for a full year in groups of four plus their professor to give comments on each others’ essays (the same group stays together for half or the full year, depending on the instructor). With between 20 and 22 such meetings per year, students get a heavy dose of peer feedback sessions, and this is a good opportunity to measure the dose-response curve mentioned above. We can also test the difference in the dose-response curve for the peer feedback groups that change halfway through the year versus those who remain the same over the year. Further, we can evaluate the degree to which students use comments given by others, as well as comments they give to others, on later essays.

While at times researchers try to gauge improvement in student work on the basis of peer feedback by looking at coarse evaluations of quality before and after peer feedback (e.g., Sullivan & Pratt, 1996; Braine, 2001), because many things besides peer feedback could go into improving the quality of student work, more specific links between what is said in peer feedback and changes in student work are preferable. Thus, we will compare each student’s later essays with comments given to them (and those they gave to others) on previous ones, to see if the comments are reflected in the later essays, using a process similar to that described in Hewett (2000).

During the 2013-2014 academic year we ran a pilot study with just one of those sections (sixteen students, out of whom thirteen agreed to participate), to refine our data collection and analysis methods. For the pilot program we collected ten essays from each of the students who agreed to participate, comments they received from their peers on those essays, as well as comments they gave to their peers. For each essay, students received comments from three other students plus the instructor. We will use the instructor comments to, first, see whether student comments begin to approach instructor comments over time, and to isolate those things that only students commented on (not the instructor) to see if students use those in their essays (or if they mainly focus on those things that the instructor said also).

In this session, the Principal Investigator will report on the results of this pilot study and what we have learned about dealing with such a large data set, whether we can see any patterns from this pilot group of thirteen students, and how we will design a larger study on the basis of these results.

 

It turned out that we were still in the process of coding all the data when I gave the presentation, so we don’t yet have full results. We have coded all the comments on all the essays (10 essays from 13 participants), but are still coding the essays themselves (had finished 10 essays each from 6 participants, so a total of 60 essays).

I’m not sure the slides themselves tell the whole story very clearly, but I’m happy to answer questions if anyone has any. I’m saving up writing a narrative about the results until we have the full results in (hopefully in a couple of months!).

We’re also putting in a grant proposal to run the study with a larger sample (didn’t get a grant last year we were trying to get…will try again this year).

Here are the slides!

Post on renewable assignments

Earlier this term I wrote a post for a blog on UBC’s “Flexible Learning” site, about “renewable assignments”: assignments that add value to the world beyond just earning students a mark, and that can be revised and remixed later by others (thus the “renewable” part).

I wanted to link to it here because this is the place where I keep track of a lot of my professional work and thoughts, and if I don’t have a link here I might forget where the other post is!

Here is it: “Renewable Assignments: Student Work Adding Value to the World“

E.T.A. Hoffmann, “The Sandman”

In Arts One last week, we read a number of texts by Freud, including “The Uncanny,” in which he discusses a short story by E.T.A. Hoffmann called “The Sandman.” Here’s a version of this short story, though it’s not the translation we read: http://germanstories.vcu.edu/hoffmann/sand_e.html

E.T.A. Hoffmann Self-portrait, public domain on Wikimedia Commons

E.T.A. Hoffmann Self-portrait, public domain on Wikimedia Commons

We used the version of the story in this book: Five Great German Short Stories, ed. Stanley Appelbaum. Dover, 1993.

We didn’t get a chance to talk about this story much at all in our seminar meetings last week, having spent all of our time on the assigned texts by Freud. And I am so intrigued by Hoffmann’s story (and yet still pretty confused) that I thought I’d try to write my way through to possibly feeling like I have a better handle on an interpretation.

Our Arts One theme this year is “Seeing and Knowing,” and “The Sandman” fits into this theme quite well with its emphasis on eyes and vision. I can’t give a short synopsis here without more or less explaining the whole story, so I’ll just refer anyone who wants an overview of the plot to the Wikipedia page.

This post will be less a worked-out interpretation of the story than a series of observations that might be useful for others working out an interpretation (or me doing so later).

Clara and Olimpia

There are interesting parallels and contrasts between these two, I think.

Clara

Clara is presented in her letter, and by the narrator, as having “a very bright mind capable of subtle distinctions” (65). Her name suggests clarity as well. The narrator speaks of her eyes in glowing terms, saying that poets and musicians said of them, “Can we look at the girl without having miraculous heavenly voices and instruments beam at us from her eyes and penetrate our inmost recesses, awakening and stirring everything there?” (65).

  • Not sure what to make of this, but this reminds me of how in Nathanael’s poem, Coppelius takes Clara’s eyes and throws them at his breast … (71).

Nathanael reacts badly to her “good common sense” (61), and accuses her brother Lothar of teaching her logic because he can’t imagine that she could be capable of such clear thinking otherwise; he tells Lothar to “let that go” (57)–yikes. What’s up with that? Nathanael doesn’t want an intelligent fiancée, perhaps?

Nathanael used to write stories that Clara would listen to and appreciate, but after the experience of Coppola coming into his life and reminding him of Coppelius, Nathanael’s stories become “gloomy, incomprehensible and formless,” as well as “boring,” and Clara no longer enjoyed listening. Nathanael starts to accuse her of being “cold” and “prosaic” (69), and then, after she tells him to throw his poem about they two and Coppelius into the first, he calls her a “damned lifeless automaton.”

Nathanael seems to think he is somehow expressing some deep poetic sensibility, seeing some real truths unavailable to “cold, prosaic people” (67, 69, 89). But to Clara his works have become prosaic themselves.

Olimpia

Jacquet-Droz Automata, by Wikimedia Commons user Rama, licensed CC BY-SA 2.0 France

Jacquet-Droz Automata, by Wikimedia Commons user Rama, licensed CC BY-SA 2.0 France

It becomes clear pretty early on that Olimpia is an automaton. Hoffmann doesn’t try to hide this for very long, I think. Unlike Clara, she is described by others as “taxed with total mindlessness”; even Spalanzani calls her “witless” (87). Though Nathanael calls Clara a “lifeless automaton,” it is of course truly Olimpia who is such.

Yet Olimpia, unlike Clara, appears to list attentively to Nathanael’s creative works. Where Clara finds them “boring,” Olimpia is the best listener Nathanael has ever had (91). Where Nathanael thinks Clara is cold and unfeeling, he sees Olimpia as expressing deep and powerful feelings of love and longing.

Of course, Olimpia is not really feeling anything; these feelings are being projected onto her by Nathanael.

So we have:

Clara Olimpia
intelligent, bright, capable of subtle distinctions witless
really loves N incapable of love, but N thinks loves him
N thinks cold, unfeeling, prosaic actually cold, unfeeling, but N thinks passionate
thinks N’s artworks dull, boring doesn’t think anything about N’s art, but N thinks she loves it as much as he does

Nathanael and Olimpia

There are hints throughout the text that Nathanael is or feels like an automaton:

  • In his first letter, when he is recounting the frightening encounter with Coppelius in his father’s room, he says that after Coppelius threatens to steal his eyes, he started unscrewing his hands and feet and trying to put them in different places, speaking about the “mechanism” of these appendages.  Coppelius puts them back where they were, saying,”The old man knew what he was doing!” (47). I’m still puzzling over who the “old man” here is (Spalanzani?)
  • When Nathanael comes home to visit his family and friends (after the letters in the beginning of the story), he is gripped by the conviction that free will is an illusion, that “every person, under the delusion of acting freely, was merely being used in a cruel game by dark powers …” (67). To me, this suggests that he feels he is not in control, that someone else is controlling him as if he were an automaton.
    • He even feels pulled to look at Olimpia through Coppola’s spyglass as if by “an irresistible force” (81)

 

It’s also pretty clear that when Nathanael falls in love with Olimpia, he is falling in love with a reflection of himself:

  • When he looks at her for the first time through Coppola’s telescope, at first her eyes seem “strangely rigid and dead. But as he looked through the glass more and more keenly, moist moonbeams appeared to radiate from Olimpia’s eyes. It seemed that her power of vision had only now been ignited; her eyes shone with an ever livelier flame” (79).
    • This sounds to me like it is only Nathanael’s looking at her that brings Olimpia’s eyes to life. She seems to be capable of vision only through the fact that he is looking at her and imputing that to her.
  • Later there are some statements that make it obvious that Nathanael is seeing himself in Olimpia:
    • N to O: “you profound spirit in which my entire being is reflected!” (85).
    • N to Siegmund: “It was only for me that her loving looks grew bright, filling my mind and thoughts with radiance; only in Olimpia’s love do I find my own self again” (89).
    • Then there is the very telling passage on p. 91, that makes it clear that when Nathanael thinks Olimpia is saying just what he would have said about his art, it must only be Nathanael’s own voice.

 

Finally, I find it interesting that when Nathanael touches Olimpia, she is at first ice cold, but then as he looks into her eyes she seems to warm up (83). There may be something here about Nathanael looking into her eyes, seeing himself, and then her skin seeming to pulse with life. He is bringing her to life with his looks and with his touches.

Some thoughts from all this so far:

  • Nathanael doesn’t want Clara to be intelligent, doesn’t want her to see rationally and clearly into what is going on with him. She says that his fears are due to him allowing them to come to life, and he doesn’t want to hear it.
  • Nathanael really loves a woman who has no mind at all, who sees nothing (literally), and who can therefore serve as a perfect mirror to Nathanael himself, reflecting himself back to him as his object of love.

 

Nathanael and the narrator

The narrator speaks of having an experience that you want desperately to communicate to others, but when you try, “[e]very word, … everything that human speech is capable of, seem[s] to you colourless, glacial and dead. You try and try, you stutter and stammer, and your friends’ sober questions blow upon your inward flame like icy blasts of wind until it almost goes out” (61). This struck me as descriptive of what Nathanael was trying to communicate to Lothar and Clara about Coppelius and Coppola, and his response to Clara’s “good sense” as thinking of it as cold and unfeeling. Nathanael struggles to express what he wants to express to Clara, and finally hits on the poem about he and Clara and Coppelius, which she eventually tells him to throw into the fire.

Similarly, the narrator him/herself says that Nathanael’s story had been so gripping that s/he struggled with how to begin. So, the narrator says, “I decided not to begin at all. Gentle reader, accept the three letters (which my friend Lothar kindly made available to me) as the outline of the picture, to which I shall now, while narrating, strive to add more and more color” (63). This is similar to how the narrator describes trying to tell others of a profound experience by first providing an outline and then later shading it in with colour. The letters are the outline that the narrator begins with, but Nathanael’s first letter is also the outline he begins with in telling his friends of his experience, and he tries to fill in the colour later.

So there is some kind of parallel being drawn here between Nathanael and the narrator of the story, I think, though I’m not sure what significance that might have.

 

Eyes!

Really, this whole story centres around eyes. And we have an essay topic students could write about, asking them to discuss the significance of eyes and vision in the story. I hope someone takes this up, because I’m still unsure myself. Here are some random thoughts.

  • When Coppola/Coppelius takes Olimpia away and leaves her eyes, Spalanazani says to Nathanael that the eyes were “stolen from you” (95).
    • This makes sense to me insofar as her eyes only came alive, only had the power to see, when he looks at her and sees her as having the power of vision. Her eyes are his eyes, in that sense.
    • This also brings up the experience Nathanael had when he is spying on Coppelius and his father, and Coppelius catches him and threatens to take his eyes because they need some eyes (for some reason). He was going to steal Nathanael’s eyes, until his father begged Coppelius to let N keep them. What to make of this, though, I don’t yet know.
  • In Nathanael’s poem, Coppelius takes Clara’s eyes and throws them at N’s chest, and they enter his chest “like bloody sparks, singeing and burning” (71). To me, this could suggest a fear of Clara really looking into his heart, that he doesn’t want that?
    • Clara later says that Coppelius fooled him and she still had her eyes, that what entered his breast was drops of his own blood. But when he looks at Clara’s eyes it is death looking back (Olimpia’s eyes?). Perhaps it’s that he fears that if he really were to “belong to her” (71), and she were to really see into his heart, he would die.
    • Notice that when Coppola/Coppelius takes Olimpia away, Spalanzani picks up her eyes from the floor and throws them at Nathanael’s chest, at which point he becomes mad: “Then madness seized Nathanael with red-hot claws and penetrated him, lacerating his mind and thoughts” (95). So the scene in N’s poem gets repeated here.
    • In addition, Coppola’s spectacles scattered over the desk are “shooting their bloodred rays into [Nathanael’s] breast” (77)–another similar image.
    • Finally, when Nathanael looks at Olimpia through the telescope at the party, her “loving look … pierced and inflamed his heart” (83).
  • There is some connection between fire, heat and eyes that I can’t yet make sense of:
    • There is the childhood scene where Coppelius and N’s father are working over the fire, and Coppelius calls for eyes; then Coppelius grabs N and threatens to put “red-hot grains” into his eyes (47).
    • In N’s poem, Clara’s eyes singe and burn his breast when Coppelius throws them at him; similarly, when this scene is repeated and Spalanzani throw’s Olimpia’s eyes at N’s chest, then madness seized him “with red-hot claws” (95).
    • When Olimpia’s eyes seem to come to life when N is looking at them through Coppola’s telescope, the power of vision is connected to fire: “It seemed that her power of vision had only now been ignited; her eyes shone with an ever livelier flame” (79).
    • As noted above, Olimpia’s loving look “pierced and inflamed his heart” (83).

 

Well, that’s about as much rambling as I can do for today, and I really haven’t come to much in the way of conclusion yet. But perhaps these thoughts might be helpful for others in their own interpretations.

Report on my time as a BCcampus Open Textbooks Faculty Fellow

 

Screen Shot 2015-10-30 at 11.33.52 PM

 

 

For the past year I have served as a Faculty Fellow with the BCcampus Open Textbook program. The provincial government of British Columbia provided funding for BCcampus to find, adapt, review, and develop open textbooks for the 40 highest enrolled subjects in BC postsecondary educational, and then providing more funding for open textbooks for skills and trades. You can see the amazing success of the program so far in these stats.

Last year BCcampus started a program of having “Faculty Fellows” who would do three things:

  • increase awareness of and promote Open Textbooks on their campuses and beyond
  • engage in research on Open Textbooks and other OER
  • provide feedback to BCcampus on their Open Textbooks program

I, along with Rajiv Jhangiani from Kwantlen Polytechni University and Jessie Key from Vancouver Island University, were the first three BCcampus Open Textbook Faculty Fellows (you can see a post about this from BCcampus here).

Now that we are coming to the end of our terms, we have been asked to write a report on the time spent as Faculty Fellows. I thought I’d make that report public here on my blog. I am organizing it according to the questions we were asked to address (not quite in the same order they were asked, but they’re all here).

 

Coming into the Faculty Fellows (FF) program, what were your expectations about the FF program? How did you envision the year unfolding? Did the FF program meet those expectations and match the vision you had of the year? Why or why not?

I must admit that I wasn’t sure exactly what to expect coming into the program. I felt a little under-prepared, as my two colleagues Rajiv and Jessie had both done much more work with open textbooks than I had, when we started. I had never been involved in adapting an open textbook like they both had, and had never used one either. I felt somewhat worried that I would be called upon to be an advocate for open textbooks without having enough knowledge. Those fears were quickly allayed as I began to learn about the BCcampus Open Textbook program, how it worked, what was involved in adopting and adapting an open textbook, and as I began to read research into open textbooks (kindly provided by Clint Lalonde and Amanda Coolidge from BCcampus). I was also happy to hear that I could review slides from presentations others had already given on open textbooks, to help me prepare for any presentations I might give.

I was also concerned about doing research on open textbooks, in the sense that I not only didn’t know a lot about open textbooks but I am also not well versed in empirical research methods (having been trained in philosophy, where we don’t learn much if anything at all about social science research methods). Fortunately, there was a research project with the OER Research Hub that was already begun but still in early enough stages that those of us not already involved (Jessie and I) could contribute to its design.

 

Is there something you were hoping to do more of with the FF program that you were not able to do? Why?

There are two things that didn’t quite meet my original vision of the year.

1. I had hoped to do more in the way of spreading awareness and advocacy on my campus. I did several presentations on open education and OER at UBC during my year as a Faculty Fellow, and in each one I managed to talk about OT (open textbooks) even where this wasn’t the focus. I also spoke to two student groups about OT. One thing that I wanted to try to do was to contact departments for which there are a number of good open textbooks and make a short presentation at department meetings about the availability of these textbooks. I honestly just ran out of time to do this. I only briefly spoke to my own department, to ask for a volunteer to review an OT on modern philosophy, and to point out that OT in philosophy exist. There wasn’t much (in fact any) interest expressed, but partially the issue there is that there aren’t very many open textbooks in philosophy (and the ones that exist are fairly specialized: logic and modern philosophy; if there were a good one on Introduction to Philosophy, things might be different).

2. I also didn’t do as much research on open textbooks or OER as I would have liked. Partly that was up to me; if I had come up with a research project separate from the one we were all working on, I expect I would have been able to get help in designing and implementing it from people at BCcampus and from Jessie and Rajiv. But my lack of knowledge about open textbooks at the beginning of the program, plus lack of connections to people using them, meant I wasn’t sure quite where to start in thinking about researching them. Now, at the end of the year, I feel much more ready to begin my own research project(s). This is in large part due to the chance to participate in the research project on faculty attitudes towards OER and Open Textbooks that all of us were a part of. I learned a great deal through that process.

 

What resources did you need to do your FF that you did not have?

I think to do the research portion of the role I would have needed more time and more training in just what sort of research would be good to do and how to do it. As there was a research project already in progress, I just helped with that one; but I didn’t have enough knowledge to have been able to run my own research project well, I think (as noted above). However, again, if I had really pushed myself to run my own project I expect I would have found help from BCcampus and my colleagues in the FF program, who would have been able to fill in my knowledge gaps or help with data analysis (as that is something I feel particularly unprepared to engage in).

Please provide a synopsis of your activities in 3 areas: Advocacy, Research, Support.

Advocacy

  • Rajiv Jhangiani and I spoke at the 2015 meeting of the Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (STLHE), on “Enhancing Pedagogy with Open Textbooks and Other OER,” Vancouver, BC, June 2015. In this workshop we spoke about benefits of OT and OER beyond simply cost savings, and asked participants to brainstorm other benefits as well as possible drawbacks and how to address them.
  • I spoke about OER and open textbooks at several faculty professional development events at UBC:
    • I participated in a debate about the value of MOOCs for higher education during Open Access Week at UBC, Oct. 29, 2014. During my presentation I also spoke briefly about open textbooks. Slides from this presentation, and a description of the event, can be found here: https://blogs.ubc.ca/chendricks/2014/11/03/the-open-in-moocs/
    • I co-presented with others from UBC on “Increasing Student Engagement with Open Educational Resources,” once in May 2015 and once in August 2015. The two presentations were actually fairly different, because they were with different groups of people, but both focused on the value of OER and open textbooks beyond simply saving students money. The slides for one of these presentations can be found here: https://blogs.ubc.ca/chendricks/2015/06/13/engaging-students-with-oer/
  • I spoke to two student groups at UBC about open textbooks: the Arts Undergraduate Society and the Science Undergraduate Society (both in Spring 2015). I talked about what open textbooks are and told them about the BCcampus Open Textbook program. I also asked for suggestions on how to get the word out more widely about open textbooks. Slides for both of these presentations can be found here: http://www.slideshare.net/clhendricksbc/open-textbooks-presentation-at-ubc
  • I connected with student leaders at UBC and at Simon Fraser University, which, over the course of the year, has led to some very fruitful activities by students at UBC. When I first contacted a student leader in the Alma Mater Society at UBC, though he was very interested, he couldn’t get the rest of the AMS terribly interested in open textbooks and OER. But after their subsequent election, there were more people interested, and that initial meeting plus subsequent meetings have led to:
    • UBC and SFU students working together on a #textbookbrokeBC campaign on social media (some information about that campaign can be found here: http://www.ams.ubc.ca/leadership/executive/key-projects/open-educational-resources-oers/)
    • UBC students working with our Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology to get discussions of OER and OT into more professional development workshops for faculty.
    • UBC students pushing to get mention of the creation of OER and OT into a document that explains various examples of “educational leadership” that teaching-focused faculty at UBC can engage in to help them achieve tenure and promotion.
    • UBC students working with me to develop a “sprint” to create an OER resource on environmental ethics, that will have case studies that cross disciplinary boundaries. We are in the process right now of putting together a grant proposal to try to fund this project. We envision that the sprint will provide a beginning point for the resource, but that students in various classes at UBC will work across disciplinary boundaries to continue to add to it.

Research

I worked with Jessie, Rajiv, Clint Lalonde and Amanda Coolidge (BCcampus) and Beck Pitt (OER Research Hub) on a survey of faculty in BC and beyond, asking about their attitudes towards, use, adaptation and creation of OER and open textbooks. We had One thing that is particularly valuable about this survey, I think, is that we were able to break down the results according to: amount of teaching experience, full-time vs. part-time employment status, what sort of institution the faculty teach at (research, teaching-focused, community college), and more. We had data from 78 participants from 17 institutions in BC in the survey.

  • Jessie Key, Rajiv Jhangiani, Beck Pitt and I presented some of our findings on this survey at the BCcampus Open Textbook Summit in May, 2015. The slides from this presentation can be found here: http://www.slideshare.net/BCcampus/faculty-attitudes-towards-and-experiences-with-oer-open-textbooks
  • Rajiv Jhangiani and I will also present on this research at the Open Education Conference in Vancouver in November, 2015.
  • Jessie, Rajiv, Beck, Amanda Coolidge (BCcampus) and I are also currently writing a white paper based on the results of this survey.

Support

  • We faculty fellows met monthly with BCcampus to talk about our activities in advocacy and research, and also provided feedback to BCcampus on the open textbook program during those meetings whenever advice was solicited.

Other activities related to my role as a faculty fellow

  • I engaged in an extensive review of an open textbook under development, Ethics in Law Enforcement, by Steve McCartney and Rick Parent. As the book was being written, I provided a great deal of feedback on draft chapters.
  • Jessie Key and I spoke about our experiences with open textbooks at the BCcampus Open Textbook Summit in May, 2015. I spoke about reviewing an open textbook (Ethics in Law Enforcement), and Jessie spoke about adapting an open textbook in chemistry.

 

How much time did you devote to FF? Did we ask too much, not enough of your time? Was the amount of money provided adequate compensation for your work?

It’s difficult for me to quantify the amount of time I spent on the FF program. It came in fits and starts, with some periods being very busy with the research or preparing presentations on the research, or with the advocacy activities, and some periods during which things were much less hectic. I felt very satisfied with the amount of time that was asked of me–not too much, not too little. I appreciated the monthly meetings because they allowed us to keep up with each others’ activities (and some of those activities then provided new ideas for me on what could be done on my campus). Meetings once a month was just right, I thought. I also feel the compensation provided was definitely adequate for the amount of time spent. At no time did I feel I was doing more than I was being compensated for.

 

What kind of orientation do you think is needed for future incoming FF?

Meeting in person at the beginning of the year was very, very important. Since most of the rest of the year we met on Skype, it was crucial to feel like you had already gotten to know others a bit before working together in this more “distanced” fashion. So the first meeting being an face-to-face orientation was very important.

I particularly appreciated learning about the Open Textbook Program generally, how to adopt and adapt textbooks, and about resources for those who want to look into the literature on OT and OER. Knowing that there were slide decks already available for consulting before one creates one’s own for advocacy purposes was also really useful (maybe having those available in a shared cloud folder, for example, would be good).

I suppose the only thing I would add that I didn’t feel I had at the orientation was help in designing a research project if one doesn’t already have one in mind. I’m not sure how this would work, but if at least there was someone who would be the designated person to talk to if one has questions about how to design and carry out a research project, that would help. Or maybe some sample ideas for research projects to get people thinking. Now, honestly, I can’t remember all that happened at our orientation, so there may have been more of this sort of thing than I remember! But it’s the one thing I felt I wasn’t fully prepared for.

 

What advice do you have for future FF?

One thing that comes to mind is to take advantage of all the help and support provided by BCcampus and your fellow faculty fellows as much as you can. It’s such a great opportunity to learn and collaborate closely with a fantastic group of people. Don’t be afraid to ask for help or advice, as in my experience, it was willingly and enthusiastically given.

Also, I think it would be good for each fellow to be clear for themselves about their goals for the year. I had a vague sense of goals rather than setting out clear goals for myself to begin with. Of course, those can change as time goes on, but if you start with a good set of reasonable, achievable goals you might be more likely to keep yourself on task for all of them. I might have done more research on my own if I had done this!

 

Has the FF program been a worthwhile program for you to participate in? Why or why not?

It has definitely been a worthwhile program to participate in. Besides the fact that my knowledge of how to do research on OER and OT (open textbooks) has expanded greatly, I have been able to do many other very valuable things. One is to connect with more people working on OER and OT through my work as a faculty fellow. My connections with Jessie, Rajiv, Beck Pitt at the OER Research Hub, and Clint Lalonde, Amanda Coolidge and Laurie Aesoph at BCcampus been invaluable for learning about OER, OT, and research on these as well as for the possibility of collaborations I would not otherwise have had. In addition, through them and through my role as a faculty fellow and my participation in events such as the Open Textbook Summit, I have meet numerous other people involved with open education, OER and OT. These connections are continuing to prove fruitful for my own learning and for, hopefully, future collaborations.

I have also had the privilege to help with a new movement on my campus, led by students, for OT and OER advocacy. I am particularly excited about that; of all the advocacy work I’ve done through the FF program, I feel like the work with students has had the most rewards. They have had the energy and the drive to push for things I had only thought of but hadn’t followed through on by myself. Their excitement and their perseverance is contagious and inspiring.

Honestly, I have been so inspired by my colleagues in the FF program, by my colleagues at BCcampus, by the students I have worked with, and the others I have met through my FF role, that I can’t imagine the work I have done as an FF this year really ending. I have become one of the main leaders on my campus in regards to open education, OER, and open textbooks, and my leadership work in those areas will most certainly continue. Being a BCcampus Faculty Fellow has been (and will continue to be) an invaluable experience.

 

Drowning Prospero’s Books

Books Destroyed, Flickr photo shared by darkday, licensed CC BY 2.0

Books Destroyed, Flickr photo shared by darkday, licensed CC BY 2.0

 

In our seminar group for Arts One this week we puzzled over several things in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, including why Prospero drowns his books at the end. In the play he says he is going to do so:

But this rough magic
I here abjure; and when I have required
Some heavenly music–which even now I do–
To work mine end upon their senses that
This airy charm is for, I’ll break my staff,
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
And deeper than did ever plummet sound
I’ll drown my book. (5.1.50, p. 190)

In Peter Greenaway’s film Prospero’s Books we see the books actually being drowned: he and Ariel throw them in the water. Though as an aside, I think it’s Ariel who throws the books in the water except the last two books: Ariel gives The Works of William Shakespeare to Prospero, along with the “missing play” from it, according to the film, which is The Tempest. Then Prospero throws those books away. I think Ariel does all the others, and Prospero does those. I haven’t yet figured out what to make of that (thus it’s an aside).

In this post I want to suggest a couple of interpreations of Prospero giving up his “art,” drowning his books, at the end of the play. Along the way, I’ll also give my ideas about what interpretations we might give to his magic in the first place.

Prospero as Shakespeare, or a playwright generally, or a filmmaker

As one of our seminar members pointed out, Prospero getting rid of his books makes sense if we take him as a representative of Shakespeare himself, and if we take this play as a kind of farewell to the theatre on Shakespeare’s part.

Title Page of the First Folio, 1623, public domain on Wikimedia Commons

Title Page of the First Folio, 1623, public domain on Wikimedia Commons

And there is good reason why we might think Prospero is Shakespeare: he does act like a playwright, insofar as he puts on a show for others that is a false reality, created through music, actors (the spirits) and what the spirits say (such as in the harpy scene). He also literally puts on a kind of theatre performance in the form of a masque for Ferdinand and Miranda. And his speech right before the bit quoted above about how he’ll give up his “rough magic” certainly sounds like the “magic” could refer to the power of theatre, or of fiction generally:

… I have bedimmed
The noontide sun, called forth the mutinous winds,
And ‘twixt the green sea and the azured vault
Set roaring war; …
.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .
… Graves at my command
Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let ’em forth
By my so potent art. … (5.1.41-49, p. 190)

These certainly sound like the sorts of things one can do in fiction, and also in fictional plays of course.

Thus one interpretation of Prospero’s “art” or magic is the power of the playwright to create entire worlds, to make (almost) anything happen as they wish, to create an apparent reality that others might believe to the degree that they allow themselves to be immersed in the play.

Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books takes up this idea as well, interpreting the play in such a way that Prospero is clearly the playwright of the whole story, as well as a character in it. Though of course, as the film is not a theatre production, and doesn’t look like one until the very end (as noted in lecture), we might say that Prospero is a filmmaker, that his magic is the power of filmmaking. (In both of these cases, plays and films, I’m combining the work of the writer and director, the latter being the person who decides what everything is going to look and sound like…so the magic would be that of the person writing and the person directing.)

 

Why he would give up his books under this interpretation

If we take something like this to be a valid interpretation of Prospero’s magic, and Prospero as, therefore, a playwright like Shakespeare, then it makes sense he would give up his magic at the end. Not only insofar as we think of this play as Shakespeare’s “goodbye,” but also in the sense that the play/film comes to an end. The magic of immersing the audience in a story is ending, the magic of creating a fake reality that we might get lost in and forget ourselves and our reality for some time (remember Gonzalo towards the end saying that Ferdinand found a wife “where he himself was lost,” Prospero found his dukedom in the isle, “and all of us ourselves/ When no man was his own” (5.1. 210, p. 199)). Just as Alonso, Gonzalo, Antonio, Sebastian and the others come to see the “real” reality at the end, after having Prospero’s charms wear off, so the audience of the play/film will soon be emerging from the false reality into the more “real.”

I noticed how in the film Alonso, etc., had cloth over their eyes during the whole film until towards the end, after Prospero has Ariel take off his magic cloak and presents himself “As [he] was sometime Milan” (5.1.86, p. 192). When Prospero has taken off his cloak (or right before it…I can’t remember), Ariel takes off those blindfolds and the nobles can now see the “true” reality. This is also when they are able to speak in their own voices, when they and Ferdinand and Miranda move their lips rather than having Prospero speak for them as during the earlier part of the film. These elements of the film really show well, I think, how Prospero is no longer using his magic to put on a show for them, that they are themselves at this point (including Ferdinand and Miranda, who were being “written” by Prospero earlier).

So I think we can interpret Prospero giving up his books as the ending to the false reality that he has created.

 

 

Another way of thinking about Prospero’s art and why he gives it up

As I mentioned in class, we can also add a political element to the power of the playwright/director/filmmaker, given the purpose of court masques at the time. According to an article entitled “Prospero’s Dream: The Tempest and the Court Masque Inverted,” by Jan Frans van Dijkhuizen,

The court masque played a crucial role in the way Renaissance monarchs chose to think about themselves. Masques served essentially as images of the order, peace and harmony brought about by the monarch’s mere presence, and expressed didactic truths about the monarchy. . . .  Under James 1, the form of the masque developed into two contrasting parts. The first section, or antimasque, offered an image of vice and disorder, which, in the second section, the masque proper, was superseded by the workings of royal power, and an ordered, harmonious world, with the king at its centre, was established.

James I of England, c. 1620. Public domain on Wikimedia Commons.

James I of England, c. 1620. Public domain on Wikimedia Commons.

The way I understand this is that court masques showed a visual and auditory spectacle of the monarch’s power, and portrayed that power as able to create “an ordered, harmonious world” out of chaos. As van Dijkhuizen goes on to say, “The court masque, then, manifested an important theatrical image of kingship; royalty’s prime mode of expression was fundamentally histrionic,” where “histrionic” means related to theatre, acting, drama–especially insofar as one is overly dramatic, affected, over-playing a part.

I’m thinking, then, that Prospero’s magic could be related to how royal power at the time may have been propped up in part by something like an idealistic image of that power, something portrayed through court masques but also through other trappings of royalty such as rituals and ceremonies, lavish clothes and properties, even extreme exhibitions of power through grisly executions meant to show how great the “ordering” power of the monarch is against “disorder” (this last bit comes from Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, which we’ll read some of later in the year). And this, ultimately, is all show, a fake reality meant to manipulate what the populace thinks of the monarch.

 

So why would Prospero give this up?

If this makes sense as an interpretation of his magic, why give that up at the end? He is, after all, going back to Milan to rule at least for some time, during which “every third thought shall be [his] grave” (5.1.311, p. 204). Once he has gotten his political power back, wouldn’t this sort of spectacle of power be useful?

There are probably several ways to think about this, but here’s one.

Prospero may be said to realize that there could be problems with focusing too much on providing the “show” of power and not enough on ruling in actuality. He of course found out what happens when you don’t pay attention to the state, when he more or less gave control of Milan to Antonio. But during the play itself he also could be said to realize that putting on a show is not enough. During the masque he has Ariel and the other spirits perform for Ferdinand and Miranda, he suddenly interrupts it and says:

I had forgot that foul conspiracy
Of the beast Caliban and his confederates
Against my life …. (4.1.139-140)

While paying too much attention to the show of power, and trying to convince Ferdinand and Miranda to keep chaste through this masque that counters the disorder of Venus and Cupid trying to entice the two lovers to give into their lust before marriage, Prospero forgets what is actually going on in his “kingdom” on the isle. One can get so lost in the show of power that one fails to pay enough attention to what is necessary to keep it.

We might then connect this to what Professor Crawford said about James I not being a very politically savvy monarch, but someone who loved books and also the theatre. But I don’t know enough about him to take this very far.

As for Prospero, and maybe a Shakespearian comment on royal power, perhaps he gives up his magic because he realizes that the practicalities of ruling are more important than the show of power? Or at least, that focusing too much on the latter can be a dangerous distraction from the former. And further, Prospero then follows this interruption of his masque with his famous speech about how the “vision” he has produced is “baseless,” and so is our lives:

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air,
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep. … (4.1.148-158, pp. 180-181)

Prospero seems to realize that there is a problem with “The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces …” that are part of the trappings of royalty. It is all “baseless,” false, unreal. So perhaps he is ready to give that up?

 

Still, there’s a problem

But that doesn’t mean we can go from this false reality of the show of power to some more substantial reality, according to this speech. Indeed, everything is in some sense “insubstantial,” destined to “dissolve”; our lives are like dreams.

Public domain from Pixabay

Public domain from Pixabay

This idea is exhibited elsewhere in the play and film as well. When Prospero gives up his magic and Alonso, Antonio, Sebastian, Gonzalo and the others come back to their senses, the “reality” they then inhabit is still within the play and the film, of course. They emerge out of one false reality into another false reality within the play and the film. So too, when we as audience members leave the theatre, it is not perhaps to some substantial reality that is significantly different from a play or a film.

The fact that the film starts to look more like a filming of a stage play after Prospero gives up his magic (which I hadn’t noticed until Professor Mota pointed it out) also pointed me in this direction. The film is over, but then we are still in a fictional story. At the end of the film, after the Epilogue, the characters applaud as Ariel runs down the stage, towards the camera, and the last image in the film looks like the page of a book that is being written on. Ariel then jumps out of the frame of that book (perhaps being free from the author, Prospero?), but we are left with the page on which writing is still happening.

Ultimately, this complicates the reading I was giving earlier about Prospero giving up his magic because it is insubstantial, baseless, fake, and he wants something more “real” in terms of being a ruler.

But then again, as one of the members of our seminar said in class, he is nearing death after all; so maybe he is just pondering the end of his own life!

 

 

Collaborative doc on class guidelines

I participated in a #digped Twitter chat today (run by Hybrid Pedagogy), about class policies on use of electronic devices during class. As always, this chat was very helpful for pushing me to be honest with myself, my motivations, and my desires, as well as to consider new alternatives.

I don’t have a policy against the use of electronic devices in class. I feel it would be hypocritical of me to do so because I rely so heavily on them myself during meetings and conferences–I take all notes electronically, and I frequently engage in Tweeting during conferences to promote interesting ideas or facts I’m learning and let others know what’s happening at that session in case they couldn’t make it. But I do get annoyed, and mostly sad, when I spend SO MUCH TIME preparing for courses (those of you who are teachers know how much time that is) and then feel like all that work is going to very little if many students aren’t paying attention.

The #digped Tweet chat helped remind me that there are different ways of paying attention, and even when you think someone is not engaged, they may very well be engaged in a way that you don’t recognize as such. Plus, people need to be human beings, after all, and have breaks where they just zone out for a little bit and then come back. And I need to get over it when I think there is too much non-engagement (because what I think is non-engagement may not actually be such).
This is a lesson I have to keep reminding myself.

 

But on another note; there was a good deal of discussion about having the class guidelines be set collaboratively, with the students. I have 150 students in my Introduction to Philosophy course. I thought such a thing would be impossible. But in a separate discussion on Twitter yesterday, some colleagues suggested breaking students up into groups and having the groups write on a collaborative doc like in Google docs.

I already had a collaborative doc on suggestions for respectful discussions, so I turned that one into a document about other guidelines for the class too.

 

Here is what I have so far. It’s not currently open to editing, but just to commenting; next week it will be open to editing, but please just let the students in class edit, okay? :)

Click here for the doc; there is an embedded version below if you just want to look at it on this blog post.

 

I’d love to hear your comments on:

1. Are these good questions to ask? Are the questions phrased well?

2. What do I do with the answers? I was going to compile them all into a list of suggested guidelines, but not everyone will agree with all of them. Do I just have a vote on the whole list? Having 150 students makes this challenging…

 

Non-disposable assignments in Intro to Philosophy

NoDisposableAssignments

Remixed from two CC0 images on Pixabay: trash can and No symbol

Disposable assignments

In the past couple of years I’ve really been grabbed by the issue of “disposable assignments,” as discussed by David Wiley here:

These are assignments that students complain about doing and faculty complain about grading. They’re assignments that add no value to the world – after a student spends three hours creating it, a teacher spends 30 minutes grading it, and then the student throws it away. Not only do these assignments add no value to the world, they actually suck value out of the world.

A non-disposable assignment, then, is one that adds value to the world beyond simply being something the students have to do to get a grade. A similar idea is expressed by Derek Bruff in a post on the idea of “students as producers”–treating students as producers of knowledge, rather than only as consumers: Bruff talks about students creating work for “authentic audiences,” beyond just the teacher.

Wiley gives an example of a non-disposable assignment: students taking instructional materials in the course (which are openly licensed) and revising/remixing them to create tutorials for future students in the course. Other examples can be found in this growing list of examples of open pedagogy. One that I often hear about is asking students to edit or create Wikipedia articles. Or students could post their work more locally, but still have it be publicly visible, such as what Judy Chan does with her students’ research projects at UBC (click on “team projects” in the various years). Simon Bates has his physics students create learning objects to help their peers (see this story for more).

Students as producers in philosophy courses

I have already started to ask students to do some activities that could add value to the world, whether to their fellow students and/or beyond.

  • In a second-year moral theory course I asked them to sign up for 1-2 days on which to do “reading notes” on the class wiki page: they had to outline one of the main arguments in the text assigned for that day and write down questions for their small group to discuss. You can see those here (organized by group number).
  • In a first-year, introduction to philosophy course I have asked students to:
    • blog about what they think philosophy is, both at the beginning and end of the course–this, I thought, could provide some interesting information to others about what our students think “philosophy” is. I don’t have those blog posts visible anymore because I didn’t ask students if I could keep them posted after the course was finished (d’oh!!).
    • write a blog post describing how they see philosophical activity going on in the world around them, beyond the class–I thought this could be useful to show the range of what can count as philosophical activity. I do still have those posts up (but not for long, because again I forgot to ask for permission to keep the posts up after the course is finished…I will do that this term!): https://blogs.ubc.ca/phil102 (click on “philosophy in the world”)

 

But now that I’m working on my Intro to Philosophy course for Fall 2015 (see planning doc here), I’m trying to think through some other options for assignments with authentic audiences and that add value to the world. Here are some ideas (not that I’m going to implement all of these; I’m just brainstorming).

  • Editing Wikipedia articles on philosophy
    • This is a big task; it requires that students learn how to do so (not just technologically, but in terms of the rules and practices of Wikipedia), plus determining which articles need editing, etc.
    • I would prefer to start with students creating Wikipedia-style articles on philosophers or texts on the UBC Wiki first. Then other students (in future classes) could edit those, and then maybe eventually we could move to doing something on Wikipedia itself (the content would be good, and maybe students would be motivated to move some of it over to Wikipedia at that point).
  • Creating tutorials or other “learning objects” for their fellow students and for the public
    • As noted above, Simon Bates does this in his Physics 101 course, and I can pretty easily see how one might ask students to do so for basic physics concepts. But why not do so for some basic philosophy concepts too?
      • e.g., find something you find difficult in the course, and once you feel you have a handle on it, create something to help other students
    • could be done in groups (probably best, with a large class like Intro to Phil (150 students))
    • could be text based, but better if also incorporates some other kinds of visual or auditory elements (e.g., a video, or incorporating images, or slides or something)
  • Creating study questions or suggestions of “what to focus on” for the readings
    • students often get lost in reading primary philosophical texts, and I haven’t yet managed to write up study questions or suggestions for what to focus on for each reading. This would definitely be useful to other students.
    • But wouldn’t it be cruel to ask students to do this for later students when I haven’t done it for them myself? and do I have time to do this before the Fall term this year? Unfortunately not.
  • Creating lists of “common problems” or advice for writing, after doing peer review of each others’ work and self-reflecting on their own
    • I do provide quite a lot of writing advice to students, but I wonder if advice coming from students’ direct experience in my courses might be helpful to later students?
  • Creating possible exam questions
    • I ask students to do this informally, in groups, as part of the review for the final exam. But why not formalize this somehow so their suggestions are posted publicly? The course page on the UBC Wiki seems like a good place, at least to start. Then students could see them from year to year.
    • A number of instructors at UBC use PeerWise as a tool for students to ask and answer questions. It seems like an interesting thing, but:
      • It’s not public; but it could be used to generate questions and then the best ones could be made public somewhere
      • It’s limited to multiple choice questions, which I hardly ever use (and never on exams)

 

Those are my ideas for now. Have any others? Or comments on any of this? Please comment, below!