ENG252Y1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 14: Emily Dickinson, Aestheticism, Shorthand
Tuesday, January 26, 2016
ENG252 - Lecture 14
A.J.M. Smith, To H o l d i n a P o e m
-Reflects modernism’s tendency to respond to, engage with the immediate landscape/
localism
-Aesthetics responds to/is engendered by the local
-Dialogue between place and poetry
-Lonely landscape
-The poem as a vehicle for his ideas
P.K. Page - The Stenographers
-Stenographer - someone who takes shorthand (e.g. secretary)
•new economic phenomenon
-Most men were engaged in war-related activities and much of the labour force
consisted in women
•This was threat to the patriarchal order
•Put women into a monotonous and male-managed work environment
•Didn’t allow them to express their feelings or creativity
-Cosmopolitanism (Smith)
-Poetical report on the daily lives of these women
-Modernity/urbanism/technology
-Modern alienated self - daily life without much change, both modern and monotonous
-Motion/pace of urban life
-New economies: business
Poem’s speaker
-Not one of the stenographers yet sympathetic
!1
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Tuesday, January 26, 2016
-Third person delivery until the last stanza
-Distance/proximity
•point of ambivalence
•not just the speaker and the stenographers
•it’s about her voice connecting with the readers
-Militaristic rhetoric
•captures war conditions
-conveys the war between machine and human
-routinisation subduing personality
•images of snow: modernists’ preoccupation with the North
-Semicolon at the end of the second stanza
•aesthetic moment with synthetic ambivalence
-Language becomes much more direct when she talks about their anguish
-At line 23, she moves into their private lives
-Reduced to being machine-like themselves
-Pressure to win the war conveyed through the spors image at the end
•slow, dragging marathon
-Patriarchal managerial control conveyed in the last stanza
•main ideological frame that shapes the kind of work they do
•“pin men of madness” - as a militaristic metaphor, fighting a war on two fronts
-Shows direct engagement with society
!2
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
Re ects modernism"s tendency to respond to, engage with the immediate landscape/ localism. Aesthetics responds to/is engendered by the local. The poem as a vehicle for his ideas. Stenographer - someone who takes shorthand (e. g. secretary: new economic phenomenon. Poetical report on the daily lives of these women. Modern alienated self - daily life without much change, both modern and monotonous. Not one of the stenographers yet sympathetic. Third person delivery until the last stanza. Distance/proximity: point of ambivalence, not just the speaker and the stenographers, it"s about her voice connecting with the readers. Conveys the war between machine and human. Routinisation subduing personality: images of snow: modernists" preoccupation with the north. Semicolon at the end of the second stanza: aesthetic moment with synthetic ambivalence. Language becomes much more direct when she talks about their anguish. At line 23, she moves into their private lives.
