The Red Shoes, by Hans Christian Andersen

Hans Christian Andersen at the Wikipedia: click here

The Red Shoes at the Wikipedia: click here

Bibliography (enormous): click here

Some Youtube versions: click here

Presentation, by Tamara Martín

Biography

He was born in Odense, Denmark, in 1805. When he was 14 years old he travelled to Copenhagen because he wanted to be a singer or an actor (but he did not succeed).
While he was there, he met a famous theatre director names Jonas Collin. He recognized his talent and he paid for his studies.
In 1822, he attended Slagelse School. He stayed there for 3 years, and he wrote the poem The Dying Child while he was there.
Between 1828 and 1829 he wrote his short story A Walk from Holmen’s Canal to the East Point of the Island of Amager in the Years 1828 and 1829, and in 1840 he wrote his autobiography, The Adventure of my Life, 1855.
In the next 10 years he visited different countries.
In 1835, he began to become famous for his children’s books, for example The Little Mermaid in 1837 and The Ugly Duckling in 1843.
In Odense there is a museum dedicated to the memory of the life and works of this wonderful storyteller.

 The Red Shoes

The story tells us about a little poor girl. The girl goes barefoot because she doesn’t have any money to buy a pair of shoes. An old rich woman adopts her and takes care of her. One day the rich old lady buys her a new pair of red shoes. An old soldier puts a spell on them that makes them dance. She goes to church with the red shoes, but this is highly improper. Out of the church the girl starts dancing, and she cannot stop her feet. One day, there is a ball; the girl goes there and her feet cannot stop dancing anymore. The woman is sick and dies; the girl goes to the funeral with her red shoes, and she goes on dancing. She goes on dancing along the streets and fields until she finds an executioner; she asks him to cut her feet off. She walks with crutches, but her amputated feet go on dancing before her. Finally, when she feels sorry for dancing in the church and in the funeral, a beam of light takes her to heaven.

QUESTIONS

Karen has three different pairs of shores along the story. Can you describe them?
Talk about the different characters
Karen
Old Mother Shoemaker
The old lady
The queen
The old soldier
The executioner
What does the mirror say to Karen?
The mirror is a very important object in a lot of stories. Do you remember another story where there was a mirror and it had a capital role?
The first time Karen goes to the church, what does she go for?
And the second time?
What kind of shoes do people has to wear at church? Why?
The old soldier casts a magical spell to the shoes. What are the words and the actions?
Talk about the ball.
What was the angel’s curse?
What was the girl’s sin?
What happened to Karen after she had her feet cut off?
Who helped her at last?
Did she go to the church at the end of the story? What happened?

VOCABULARY

barefoot, clumsy, well meant, mourning, parson, sew /sóu/, flocked, train, thriving (thrive), patent leather, aisle, bygone, starched (starch), covenant, choir /kuàia/, knelt (kneel), unfenced (fence), graveyard, sword /sòd/, shrivel down, thorn, window pane, quiver, crutches (crutch), hobble, roll (organ), pew

The Tell-Tale Heart, by Edgar Allan Poe

Illustration by Harry Clarke, 1919

Edgar Allan Poe at he the Wikipedia: click here

The Tell-Tale Heart at the Wikipedia: click here

The Tell-Tale Heart: video materials on Youtube: click here

Movie based freely on the story: Tell-Tale

Movie based on the story The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether: Stonehearst Asylum

Deathwatch beetle

Deathwatch beetle sound

Presentation, by Àngels Gallardo

Edgar Allan Poe

He was born in 1809 in Boston (USA) and he died when he was 40 years old in 1849.
He was a writer, poet, crític reviewer and journalist, and he has been recognized as one of the best authors of short horror stories. 

The Tell-Tale Heart:

This is a horror story that has been written by Edgar Allan Poe and published in 1843.
The history relates the obsession of a man for an old man who has a pale blue eye.
We don't know the man who explains what happened, which was the relation between two men and what their names were, but we know that they were living together in an old house.
He was so obsessed with the pale blue eye of the old man that he thought he would kill him.
Every night at twelve o'clock, he went to the bedroom of the old man to watch him sleeping to see if he had his pale blue eye open.
After eight nights, he saw that his eye was open and decided to kill him.
The old man shrieked when the man wanted to kill him, and a neighbour who heard it called the police.
The man had a guilty conscience, and, at the end, he confessed the crime to the police officers.

QUESTIONS

“The disease had sharpened my senses”. Do you know a case where an illness can sharpen the senses? They used to say that tuberculosis sharpened the sexual appetite.

Say something about the narrator. Could the narrator be a woman? Why?

Who was the old man?

What was the relationship between the narrator and the victim?

What is the “evil eye”? What are your superstitions?

There is a saying “Better the devil you know (than the devil you don't).” What do you prefer: something /somebody new (unknown) or something /somebody old (known)? Why?

“The beating of a drum stimulates the soldier into courage”. Do you think this is true? What stimulates you into courage?

Who were the three men, and why did they come to the house?

How long did the murder and the hiding of the body last?

Why didn’t the murderer kill the man one of the seven first nights?

What do you think is the noise of “a watch when enveloped in cotton”?

VOCABULARY

dark lantern, chuckle, awe, well up, marrow, tattoo, yell, stone dead, wan, tub, foam, dissemble

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (fragment):

A scene of the most horrible butchery ensued. The bound seamen were dragged to the gangway. Here the cook stood with an axe, striking each victim on the head as he was forced over the side of the vessel by the other mutineers. In this manner twenty-two perished, and Augustus had given himself up for lost, expecting every moment his own turn to come next. But it seemed that the villains were now either weary, or in some measure disgusted with their bloody labour; for the four remaining prisoners, together with my friend, who had been thrown on the deck with the rest, were respited while the mate sent below for rum, and the whole murderous party held a drunken carouse, which lasted until sunset. They now fell to disputing in regard to the fate of the survivers, who lay not more than four paces off, and could distinguish every word said. Upon some of the mutineers the liquor appeared to have a softening effect, for several voices were heard in favour of releasing the captives altogether, on condition of joining the mutiny and sharing the profits. The black cook, however (who in all respects was a perfect demon, and who seemed to exert as much influence, if not more, than the mate himself), would listen to no proposition of the kind, and rose repeatedly for the purpose of resuming his work at the gangway. Fortunately, he was so far overcome by intoxication as to be easily restrained by the less bloodthirsty of the party, among whom was a line-manager, who went by the name of Dirk Peters. This man was the son of an Indian squaw of the tribe of Upsarokas, who live among the fastnesses of the Black Hills near the source of the Missouri. His father was a fur-trader, I believe, or at least connected in some manner with the Indian trading-posts on Lewis river. Peters himself was one of the most purely ferocious-looking men I ever beheld. He was short in stature—not more than four feet eight inches high—but his limbs were of the most Herculean mould. His hands, especially, were so enormously thick and broad as hardly to retain a human shape. His arms, as well as legs, were bowed in the most singular manner, and appeared to possess no flexibility whatever. His head was equally deformed, being of immense size, with an indentation on the crown (like that on the head of most negroes), and entirely bald. To conceal this latter deficiency, which did not proceed from old age, he usually wore a wig formed of any hair-like material which presented itself—occasionally the skin of a Spanish dog or American grizzly bear. At the time spoken of he had on a portion of one of these bearskins; and it added no little to the natural ferocity of his countenance, which betook of the Upsaroka character. The mouth extended nearly from ear to ear; the lips were thin, and seemed, like some other portions of his frame, to be devoid of natural pliancy, so that the ruling expression never varied under the influence of any emotion whatever. This ruling expression may be conceived when it is considered that the teeth were exceedingly long and protruding, and never even partially covered, in any instance, by the lips. To pass this man with a casual glance, one might imagine him to be convulsed with laughter—but a second look would induce a shuddering acknowledgment, that if such an expression were indicative of merriment, the merriment must be that of a demon. Of this singular being many anecdotes were prevalent among the seafaring men of Nantucket. These anecdotes went to prove his prodigious strength when under excitement, and some of them had given rise to a doubt of his sanity. But on board the Grampus, it seems, he was regarded at the time of the mutiny with feelings more of derision than of anything else. I have been thus particular in speaking of Dirk Peters, because, ferocious as he appeared, he proved the main instrument in preserving the life of Augustus, and because I shall have frequent occasion to mention him hereafter in the course of my narrative—a narrative, let me here say, which, in its latter portions, will be found to include incidents of a nature so entirely out of the range of human experience, and for this reason so far beyond the limits of human credulity, that I proceed in utter hopelessness of obtaining credence for all that I shall tell, yet confidently trusting in time and progressing science to verify some of the most important and most improbable of my statements.

Fleet-Footed Hester, by George Gissing

George Gissing at the Wikipedia: click here

George Gissing, The Guardian: click here

Fleet-Footed Hester: review

Fleet-Footed Hester: summary

George Gissing on feminism: click here

Presentation, by Argemir Gonzàlez

Biography

George Robert Gissing was born on 22nd November 1857 in Wakefield, Yorkshire. He died on 28th December 1903 in Saint-Jean-de-Luz (France). He was the eldest of five children of Thomas Waller Gissing, who ran a chemist's shop, and Margaret.

Gissing was educated at Back Lane School in Wakefield, where he was a diligent and enthusiastic student. His serious interest in books began at the age of ten when he read The Old Curiosity Shop by Charles Dickens. Gissing's father died when he was 12 years old, and he and his brothers were sent to the Lindow Grove School at Alderley Edge in Cheshire, where he was a solitary student who studied hard. In 1872, after an exceptional performance in the Oxford Local Examinations, Gissing won a scholarship to Owens College, forerunner of the University of Manchester. There he continued his intense studies, and won many prizes, including the Poem Prize in 1873 and the Shakespeare scholarship in 1875.

His academic career ended in disgrace when he ran short of money and stole from his fellow students. The college hired a detective to investigate the thefts and Gissing was prosecuted, found guilty, expelled and sentenced to a month's hard labour in Belle Vue Gaol, Manchester, in 1876.

In Manchester, he also began a relationship with Marianne "Nell" Harrison, a prostitute, afterwards his wife.

He travelled to the USA with Marianne Harrison in 1876 but lived in poverty and returned the following year then he worked as a teacher. He began to publish in 1880 but without success until 1891 when he published New Grub Street, a novel about literary bohemian life. That novel and The Odd Women are considered his best works.

His style follows the style of Dickens and Gaskell on social content. In 1898 published his study Charles Dickens: A Critical Study.

Critical review

Fleet-Footed Hester, by George Gissing, is the story of a young woman, immature and capricious, and of a not so young man, of weak character and jealous despite being physically strong.

Fleet-Footed Hester is a story, in my opinion, lineal, plain and not credible, halfway between Victorian morals and a reflection about the female condition.

The end is disappointing. The young and free Hester saves her lover John Rayner doing what she can do best (that is, running), but only to deliver herself to a jealous, impoverished, alcoholised man with whom she never will have what she likes most: running races.

The message of George Gissing is clear: the woman must sacrifice her freedom because it is the reason for the disgrace and misery of a man. 

QUESTIONS

What is Private Eye?
What is Grub Street?
 
Talk about the characters: appearance, personality, job...
John
Hester
Albert
Mrs Heffron
Hester’s father. (He was “married without leave”. What does it mean?)
 
What was John’s opinion about Hester’s first job? What kind of occupation did he want for her?
What was John’s opinion about Hester running races?
John and Hester’s different kind of love: what are these two kinds?
Tell us John and Hester first quarrel.
Tell us John and Hester second quarrel.
How did Hester change after the second quarrel?
How did John change along the two years when didn’t see Hester?
Explain Albert and Hester’s courtship and their breaking up.
Last but one Hester’s race.
Mrs Heffron and Hester’s last meeting.
What was Hester’s proposal when she met John at the station?
What does the last sentence (“the red rift of the eastern sky broadened into day”) mean? What does it symbolize?

 

THEME TO DEBATE

I think that Gissing’s story is useful to debate some topics about feminism, moreover when he wrote a novel about the situation of the women in Victorian (or puritan and traditionalist) society.

So, what do you thing about woman and hobbies (sports, DIY, etc.). Don’t you think that there is a vindication, from women, to do “men” hobbies, but not the other way round?

For the only reason of being a woman, you are discriminated? (E.g. I’m thinking about Mrs Thatcher)

What is your opinion about positive discrimination (that is: in equal conditions, to give preference to a member of a minority or to a member of an unfavoured group)?

Do you think men can /must be involved in the debate about women issues?

VOCABULARY

wiry, foreman, stay, paper-chase, woo, plight one’s troth, stinted, bearing, ploughboy, wages, wrath, pickles, fit of temper, comely, shun, lithe, thew, measure one’s length on the pavement, toss, copper, stich, bale, traps

CLERIHEWS

As you could see on the brief introduction before the story, they mention a kind of poem called clerihew. It was invented by Edmund Clerihew Bentley (1875-1956), who was a humorous English writer. It's a comical biographical poem very easy to create.The first line has to contain the name of the person you're telling something about. It has to have four lines of any meter you like, and with the rhyme structure AABB, so they are useful to learn how to pronounce some words, though sometimes the rhymes can be forced. Here you have some exemples:

Edmund Clerihew Bentley

Sir Christopher Wren
Said, “I’m going to dine with some men.
If anyone calls,
Say I’m designing St. Paul’s.”

***

It was a weakness of Voltaire’s
To forget to say his prayers,
And one which to his shame
He never overcame.

***

Dante Alighieri
Seldom troubled a dairy.
He wrote the Inferno
On a bottle of Pernod.

***

Daniel Defoe
Lived a long time ago.
He had nothing to do, so
He wrote Robinson Crusoe.

***

Edgar Allan Poe
Was passionately fond of roe.
He always liked to chew some,
When writing something gruesome.

***

John Stuart Mill,
By a mighty effort of will,
Overcame his natural bonhomie
And wrote ‘Principles of Economy.’

***

The art of Biography
Is different from Geography.
Geography is about maps,
But Biography is about chaps.

G. K. Chesterton

The novels of Jane Austen
Are the ones to get lost in.
I wonder if Labby
Has read Northanger Abbey

(Labby was an English journalist.)

***

Richard Brinsley Sheridan
Is now a buried one.
He was not a Goth, much less a Vandal,
As he proved by writing The School for Scandal.

***

Solomon
You can scarcely write less than a column on.
His very song
Was long.

***

The Spanish people think Cervantes
Equal to half a dozen Dantes;
An opinion resented most bitterly
By the people of Italy.

W. H. Auden

Sir Henry Rider Haggard
Was completely staggered
When his bride-to-be
Announced, “I am She!”

***

John Milton
Never stayed in a Hilton
Hotel,
Which was just as well.

***

When Karl Marx
Found the phrase ‘financial sharks,’
He sang a Te Deum
In the British Museum.

***

When the young Kant
Was told to kiss his aunt,
He obeyed the Categorical Must
But only just.

***

Lord Byron
Once succumbed to a Siren:
His flesh was weak,
Hers Greek.

***

Oscar Wilde
Was greatly beguiled,
When into the Café Royal walked Bosie
Wearing a tea-cosy.

***

Thomas Hardy
Was never tardy
When summoned to fulfill
The Immanent Will.

***

William Blake
Found Newton hard to take,
And was not enormously taken
With Francis Bacon.

***

Henry Taylor

Alexander Graham Bell
has shuffled off this mobile cell.
He’s not talking any more
But he has a lot to answer for.

***

John Dryden
wasn’t the sort you’d confide in;
there was no limit to the secrets he’d tell
in lyrics set to music by Henry Purcell.

***

William Wordsworth
considered four-and-twenty birds worth
a walk as far as the banks of the Wye.
There are some things money just can’t buy. 

 George Szirtes

e e cummings’
unpublished hummings
will shortly be published in a book –
just l(oo)k

***
Rene Magritte
liked his rum neat
and would never think of adding Cola.
He’d sooner eat his bowler.

***

Pierre-August Renoir
simply adored Film Noir
and kept nagging at Jean
“Make your old dad a Film Noir! Aw, go on!”

***

Claude Monet
resisted all forms of donné.
When someone suggested he should paint the cathedral at Rheims,
he replied, “In your dreams!”

***

George Braque
decided to pickle a shark
as a kind of tableau,
but then left it to Pablo.

***

J M W Turner
liked a nice little earner
and was untroubled by greed,
painting Rain, Steam AND Speed.

Mark Granier 

Trump
was always at home on the stump,
while the White House, unfortunately,
is more of a tree.

Derek Mahon

The Picture of Dorian Gray
Is still read today;
While other Victorian novels degenerate in the attic,
Its reputation remains static.

***

“Strange Meeting”

Wilfred Owen
And Elizabeth Bowen
Never met;
And yet… 

Sex Lives of Poets by Dick Davis

Did Shakespeare get more joy
From a boy as a girl or a girl as a boy?
Whatever: he liked the nice surprises
Engendered by disguises.

***

Alexander Pope
Hadn’t a hope
With Lady Mary Wortley Montague:
“When it comes to inches,” she said, “you certainly want a few.”

***

When it comes to Christina Rossetti
And a sex life  . . . well, not to get petty
There wasn’t any, or at least none that was visible.
This clerihew’s sad, not risible.

Michael Curl

There’s no disputin’
that Grigori Rasputin
had more will to power
than Schopenhauer.

Dean W. Zimmerman

Jesus Christ
Was sliced and diced,
And punched with holes
To save our souls.

Paul Ingram

Ludwig Wittgenstein
Hardly ever went out to dine.
Be the menu never so abundant,
He found “green leafy lettuce salad” tautological and redundant.

Paul Horgan

Luchino Visconti
Saw ‘The Full Monty’
Which he thought was vile,
Bar Robert Carlyle.

Ian Duhig

 ‘Ingmar’,
said his wife, ‘I wish you would sing more,
not just sit there playing chess against Death and being glum’.
But Ingmar kept shtum.

Katy Evans-Bush

Cary Grant
loved his aunt.
When he was alone,
He would try her eau de cologne.

The Executor, by Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark at the Wikipedia: click here

The Executor: review

Interview: click here

Some summaries of her works: click here

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie:

The driver's seat

MURIEL SPARK

Muriel Spark was born in 1918 in Edinburgh.

She had some education but she didn’t go to university. She worked as a secretary in a department store.

When she was 19 she got engaged to Sidney Spark, 13 years older than herself and together they went to Zimbabwe (then Southern Rhodesia), where they got married.

When she was 20 she had a son and soon after she discovered her husband was maniac depressive. They put their son in a convent school, and she left her husband and went back to Great Britain, where she worked for the secret service during the WWII. She only took care of her son sending him some money regularly, so when he went to England he was brought up by his grandparents in Scotland.

Muriel lived in London, New York and finally, when she was 50, near Rome, where she met the artist and sculptor Penelope Jardine. Together they settled in Tuscany, where they lived ever after. Some people believe they were lesbians, but all their friends and themselves always denied it.

Muriel died in 2006, when she was 88, and she left all her properties to Penelope, and nothing to her son. She had a strained relationship with him, because he decided to be a practicing orthodox Jewish, as his grandfather was a Jewish. But Muriel, who was brought up in the Presbyterian religion, converted to Catholicism when she began to write: she said religion was important to understand the human nature, and so for her writings.

She started to write during the WWII and she published her first novel, The Comforters, when she was 39. The novel dealt with the conversion to another religion.

Her most wellknown novel is The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, published when she was 43. The star of the novel is a young teacher with different and new ideas about pedagogy, but working in a traditional school. There she has a group of six or seven girls that are her faithful pupils. The style is innovating because the narrative has a lot of flashbacks and flashforwards, and doesn’t follow a straight time line.

Other novels of hers are Robinson, Mememto Mori and Mandelbaum Gate. As you can imagine from the title, Robinson deals with three people stranded in a desert island after a plane accident. Mememto Mori is a kind of thriller where a circle of old people got recurrently an anonymous call with the mysterious message “remember you must die”; the question is to discover who phones these people and why. Mandelbaun Gate is situated in Israel at the moment of Adolf Eichmann's trial in Jerusalem and in an almost war situation between the Arabic world and Israel; the protagonist is a woman who’s looking for her boyfriend, an archaeologist working in Qumran.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and The driver's seat were made into films.

Muriel Spark also wrote several short stories and essays.

THE EXECUTOR

The Executor has something of autobiographic, as Muriel Spark left all her literary material (like manuscripts and diaries) to a Scottish university at her death. In our story, a famous writer does a similar thing (and he’s also Scottish, like Muriel Spark).  There always has been a debate about using the life of one’s own to produce a literary artefact; some people are all the time looking for autobiographic elements in a work in a kind of morbid curiosity, and some other people can despise a work only for having these elements. I think that nobody can get rid of their own life, so it is almost impossible that it doesn’t impregnate all we do, all we make. I think the question is another one: is the writer’s life useful to make literary their work, or does the writer only want to tell us their life (which can be interesting or not)? In our case, our authoress makes profit of a life purpose of hers to create a short story, but with so much art that, although we know there is something of her life in there, we forget it almost immediately because the story takes us beyond the anecdote and very far away from it.

Susan Kyle is appointed executor of the literary work of a famous Scottish author. According to his last orders, she gives everything to an institution. But not exactly everything, because she cheats the institution keeping a manuscript of an unfinished novel (in order to finish it herself?, in order to sell it afterwards at a very high price?, for mere whim?). But somebody (or a ghost) knows about her doings and send intimidating messages to her on the manuscript about the novel and even about her private life. Is she going to finish the story herself? Is she going to destroy the manuscript and thus to get free from her persecutor or the spirit? Is she going to give it to the institution, at last? Are we going to know the end of the manuscript narrative? So read the story: I’m not going to be a spoiler!

QUESTIONS
 
What is Librium?
Explain the proverb “Still waters run deep” in the context.
Tell us something about Brueghel the Elder.
According to the writer himself, he was “a speck in the horizon” in the painting of modern literature. What did he want to mean?
 
Talk about the characters:
 

The writer

The narrator

The people from university

Elaine

Mrs Donalson

Jamie

Greta

 
Who are these and why are they mentioned?
 

Angus Wilson

Saul Bellow

Mary Whitelaw

Jonathan Brown

Mrs Thatcher

 
Where are the Pentland Hills?
What is the meaning of this expression: “I’m not the one to let the grass grow under my feet”?
What is the meaning of this phrase in context: “even though is only Nature”?
In the context, what is the problem with the words “lunch” and “dinner”?
What happens with the unfinished manuscript?
Summarize the unfinished novel.
How does the unfinished novel end?
What do you think is the meaning of the last inscription by the uncle’s handwriting?
 
VOCABULARY

die out, heading (n), shroud, filing (v), sheaf, sideboard, snoot, have somebody on, stoke, manse

The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky, by Stephen Crane

Stephen Crane at the Wikipedia: click here

The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky at the Wikipedia: click here

The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky: summary

The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky: audiobook

Movie

Presentation, by Josep Guiteres

STEPHEN CRANE

Crane was one of America's leading realist writers who influenced most modern American naturalism.

Biography

He was born in 1871 in Newark (New Jersey). He was the fourteenth and last child of a married couple belonging to the Methodist church. He married Cora Taylor, owner of the so-called Hotel de Dream, a combination of a hotel and a nightclub brothel.

 In 1890, he worked as a reporter of the slums in New York. In 1893, he wrote his first novel, Maggie, where he describes the life of a girl of the streets.

In1895, he wrote a classic of American literature, The Red Badge of Courage, where he describes realistically the psychological complexity of fear and courage on the battlefield in the context of the American Civil War. This novel was made into a film by John Huston.

In 1897, he was hired as a correspondent for the Greco-Turkish war, and in 1898, for the Spanish-American War.

He wrote The Open Boat and Other Tales which narrates his experience in a shipwreck for four days. In 1900, before his death from tuberculosis in Badenweiler (Germany), he wrote his possibly most popular book, Whilomville Stories.

The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky

Jack Potter, sheriff of Yellow Sky, married his girlfriend in San Antonio in the morning. They are happy but nervous about their new status as a couple and uncomfortable with their clothes that attract the attention of people, but they are so in love that don't even realize it.

Now they travel in a luxurious Pullman train from San Antonio passing through the plains of Texas to Yellow Sky. Potter worries that the inhabitants of Yellow Sky will be offended because he didn't inform them of his decision to marry, therefore he wishes to get home without attracting attention.

Meanwhile, in the "Weary Gentleman" saloon, a young man enters announcing that Scratchy Wilson, the last member of a gang of criminals, is drunk and prowling around town with two loaded pistols, and the barkeeper closes the doors and windows.

Wilson walks through the town playing with his guns, but, as nobody pays attention to him, he decides to go to Potter's house, but he finds him on the street.

Wilson challenges Potter, who tells him that he is unarmed because he’s just got married. When Wilson sees the bride, changes his mood, forgets the challenge, holsters his pistols, and he leaves in a huff.

 OPINION

In my opinion this short story defines the writer as realistic and modern: When people look at them in a strange way because of their appearance they don't even realize it; when Wilson is on the street giving war and the others are calm in their houses and in the bar; when everything seems to end in a great tragedy…

No way, don't worry, nothing happens here and in the end everything is settled easily.

QUESTIONS

Say something about these characters:
 
Jack Potter
The bride
Scratchy Wilson
The barkeeper
The drummer
 
Tell us something about San Antonio.
What is a Pullman?
Describe the train.
Talk about the train workers’ behaviour.
Describe the atmosphere inside the saloon.
How do the couple feel about Yellow Sky people?
How do the couple love each other?
 
Can you find any good descriptive images?
There are some actions that nowadays are clichés in a Western. Can you find some?

VOCABULARY

frame house, keening, leaden, heinous, parade, bliss, hangdog (glance), drummer, tear, pen, galoot, starboard

Eveline, by James Joyce

James Joyce at the Wikipedia: click here 

Dubliners at the Wikipedia: click here

Eveline (with audiobook): click here

Eveline: study guide

Eveline: quiz

Eveline: analysis

Eveline: symbolism

Eveline: power point

Eveline: Animation

Eveline: Italian free version by Roberto Rosselini

Presentation, by Glòria Torner

JAMES JOYCE

James Joyce is one of the most influential and important writers of the 20th century. He is known for his experimental use of language and exploration of new literary methods, including interior monologue, use of complex network of symbolic parallels and invented words and allusions in his novels, especially in his main novel Ulysses.

BIOGRAPHY

James Joyce, James Augustine Aloysius Joyce, was born in 1882, in Dublin (Ireland) into a middle-class family.

He was the eldest of ten children. At the age of six he went to a Jesuit boarding school called Clongowes Wood College. But, as his father was not the man to be affluent for long; he drank, neglected his affairs and borrowed money from his office, and his family sank deeper and deeper into poverty, Joyce didn't return to Clongowes College in 1891; instead, he stayed at home for the next two years and tried to educate himself. In 1893 he and his brother Stanislaus were admitted to Belvedere College, a Jesuit grammar school in Dublin. Joyce was a brilliant student and there did well academically.

He entered the Trinity College Dublin in 1898. There he studied modern languages, English, French and Italian, and read widely, particularly in books not recommended by the Jesuits. He began to write verses and experimented with short prose passages that he called Epiphanies. To support himself while writing, after graduation in 1902, he went to Paris to become a doctor, but he soon abandoned this idea.

He went back home in April 1903 because his mother was dying. He tried several occupations including teaching; he also began to write his first novel, Stephen Hero, based on the events of his own life, and he also began to write the short stories published as Dubliners in 1914.

Joyce had met Nora Barnacle in June 1904, and they began a relationship until his death; they probably had their first date, and their first sexual encounter, the day that is now known as “Bloomsday”, the day of his novel Ulysses. The couple left Dublin and emigrated together to continental Europe where he taught languages in Pola (Croatia) and Trieste (Italy), where their son Giorgio was born. He also lived for a year in Rome, where he worked in a bank and where their daughter Lucia was born.

Joyce visited Ireland in 1909 and again in 1912, this time with his family. In 1914 he rewrote and completed the novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, published in 1916, and he began to write Ulysses.

In 1915 the Joyce’s couple moved to Zürich and in 1916 he published his play Exiles. It was also the year that chapters from Ulysses, his novel in progress, began to appear in the American journal, “The Little Review”. The completed book would not appear until 1922. Ernest Hemingway and Winston Churchill were two of the first to buy the ready famous new book.

Ulysses, the most notable novel of the twentieth century, his main novel, is a gigantic work. All the action takes place in and around Dublin in a single day. The novel is the chronicle of the Dublin journey of the main character, Leopold Bloom, on an ordinary day. The three central characters: Stephen Dedalus, (Telemacus) the same hero of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Leopold Bloom (Ulysses) a Jewish advertising canvasser, and his wife Molly (Penelope), the unfaithful woman. The events of the novel loosely parallel the events in Odysseus’s journey home after the Trojan War. Joyce employs interior monologue, stream of consciousness, parody and almost every other literary technique to present his characters.

Finding out that he was gradually gaining fame as an avant-garde writer, Joyce set himself in Paris to finish his Ulysses. His last book was Finnegan's Wake, published in 1939. Joyce's eyes began to give him more and more problems, and he travelled to Switzerland for eyes surgery.

Joyce died at the age of 59 in January 1941, in Zurich for a perforated duodenal ulcer.

EVELINE

Eveline is one of the fifteen short stories published in 1904 by the journal “Irish Homestead” and later in a collection in 1914, called Dubliners. Joyce himself offers a general plan for the book, revelling that he wants to present Dublin under four of its aspects: childhood, adolescence, maturity and public life. Eveline opens the section dealing with adolescence.

The story begins “in medias res”, at the middle of the plot.

Eveline, a young Irish woman about nineteen years old, sits by her window. The short first paragraph reveals Eveline’s state of mind: the verb “invade” suggests the dullness and tiredness of her life, her lack of energy. She is thinking about the aspects of her life. Her mother is dead and her older brother Ernest too. Her remaining brother, Harry, is busy working, and he is away on business. She works very hard at home and at work. She muses on Miss Gavan, from the Stores: she always takes advantage of any occasion to humiliate her in front of other people.

She plans to leave home, to leave her abusive and violent father and her existence of poverty in Ireland and to seek out a new and better life. She has already consented to it, but then she says “Was that wise?” and she begins to question the decision she has made, she sees both sides of the question “Was it worth it?”

She thinks she has had shelter and food at home and also the security of the known things. But her thoughts are driving her away because she has decided to elope with Frank, a sailor who is her secret lover, and start with him a new better life in Argentina. But before leaving home to meet Frank, she hears an organ grinder outside (it's the same melancholy air from Italy played by the street musician the day her mother died), and, remembering the promise she made to her mother to look after her home, she begins to change her decision.

Another important word at the end of the story is the noun “gate”. At the dock where she and Frank are ready to embark on a ship together, she will not take this way out; at the very last moment, she takes the painful decision of not leaving with him. She will remain at home.

Themes

The description is a portrait of an unhappy woman of the lower social class in provincial Dublin.

The conflict between staying at home or leaving with her love with the promise of a new start in a new country.

The triumph of the sense of duty and responsibility.

Eveline’s anguish, frustration and pessimism.

Style

I want to emphasize some literary style traits used in this short story:

Joyce choice his favourite narrative technique: the free indirect style. The verbs are mainly in past tense, 3rd person. He changes from time to time to present tense.

Most of the long descriptions in nearly every paragraph begin with the same syntactic structures: She sat at the window, she looked round, she had consented to go away…

He uses many abstracts words (substantives and adjectives) meaning thoughts: to be free; feelings: being tired, and senses, hearing: she could hear a street organ playing, her mother voice saying constantly “Derevaun Seraun”…”, smell: the odour of dusty cretonne, and also the same sounds in one sentence: She looked round the room, reviewing all its...

CONCLUSION

In my opinion, I have read a wonderful pessimist and realistic story. The sensibility of the person, Eveline, is described by the language.

QUESTIONS

Say something about these characters:

Eveline Hill

Ernest Hill

Harry Hill

The father

The mother

Miss Gavan

Frank

Keogh

Tizzi Dunn

The man who’s in Melbourne now

 
Describe the place where Eveline lives.
Eveline has two letters. Who were they for, and what do you think they say?
What good things did her father do for her?
What gave her palpitations?
What used to happen on Saturday at Hill’s?
Describe Eveline everyday’s work.
How did Eveline love Frank?
What was her father’s opinion about the affair?
What was the effect of the melancholy air from Italy played by the street musician?
Why do you think she didn’t go at the end?

VOCABULARY

concrete, cinder path, have an edge on somebody, squander, strut, elate, maze, mist

SOME NOTES ABOUT EVELINE

A man from Belfast: he had to be Protestant (Irish people are Catholics) and Unionist.

Brown houses: for Joyce brown was the colour of the paralysis of Ireland

Blackthorn stick: according to Celtic folklore, blackthorn carries bad luck. Jesus thorns crown was made of blackthorn.

“To keep nix” means “to keep watch”.

Blessed Margaret Mary Alacoque (1647-90) was a French nun, enthusiastic of self-mortification; she was some years paralysed, and she had visions of Christ. She was canonized in 1920.

Melbourne: lots of Irish people went there because of the famines.

“They had come to know each other”: it’s a very ambiguous sentence, because it can be in the Biblical sense.

The Bohemian Girl: it was a light opera (1843). The count’s daughter is abducted by some gypsies. She grows up with the gypsies until a Polish count disguised as a gypsy marries her. She discovers who she is and goes to his father, who, at the end, forgives her for getting married.

Italian organ player: at the time a lot of Italians who lived in Ireland were musicians, actors, artisans, pedlars…

Patagonians: in the 19^th century they believe Patagonians were giants.

Deveraun Seraun!: perhaps a Gaelic expression that means “death is very near”.