Prompt
For this paper you will think about the concept that we have variously defined as the “suspended instant,” the “decisive moment,” the “epiphany,” etc.
Your basic prompt is to analyze one of decisive moments in relationship to another in order to tease out how a particular argument about subjectivity is developed through the suspended moment.
Please restrict your evidence to the materials in our class: lectures, texts, and images.
The following constitute possible approaches to the prompt. You are not required to follow these specific prompts; indeed, you can develop your own approaches to the assignment by putting texts/images in new combinations.
- Consider one of the objects that Woolf observes in great detail in A Room of One’s Own: the fish, the Manx cat, the British Museum library, the grass lawns at “Oxbridge,” a particular meal she eats, etc. What kind of argument does she make about the way that a female writer’s subjectivity has been shaped by the circumstances of her material conditions? Does this argument about subjectivity emerge in Mrs. Dalloway? Where, specifically? Why does this matter?
- Compare and contrast the “decisive moment” in one of Cartier-Bresson’s photographs to the moment of falling in Bishop’s poem “In the Waiting Room.” Think about how formal elements of the image and the poem structure a moment in time. What kind of philosophy of subjectivity emerges from Bishop’s poem, and does Cartier-Bresson suggest a similar philosophy in his photograph? How do you know and why does it matter?
- Compare and contrast Mrs. Dalloway’s contemplation of Septimus’ suicide with the speaker’s contemplation of the family who lives about the gas station in “The Filling Station.” How does meditating on another person’s suffering help these characters to think about their own sense of self? What kind of philosophy of subjectivity does that suggest?
- Compare and contrast the moose in Bishop’s “The Moose” to something that Oedipa finds during her quest in The Crying of Lot 49. Do these textual moments subvert the “modernist sublimity” that Dr. Rzepka defines in his lecture “models of a suspended instant”? Why or why not?
- Consider one of the suspended instants in Mrs. Dalloway that we’ve talked about in relation to the “thusness” of a thing and compare it to a comparable moment in The Crying of Lot 49. For example, Oedipa ponders several kinds of objects such as stamps, obscure textual variants of the fictional Jacobean tragedy The Courier’s Tragedy, and pseudoscientific objects related to entropy and demons, etc. What different kinds of philosophies about subjectivity emerge in the modern and the post-modern texts as a result of a character’s meditation on these material objects?
- Compare and contrast the madness of Septimus with the madness of Oedipa. What constitutes madness in these texts, and does it matter if the reader is unsure if Septimus or Oedipa is “really” mad? What are “signs” of madness in either text, and do these discussions comment on what signs are and how we read them as a culture? Consider, for example, the way that The Crying of Lot 49 talks about figurative language and “plots” as “a metaphor of God knew how many parts.”
- Compare and contrast one of the images from Warhol, Koons, or Rauschenberg to a moment of your own choosing in The Crying of Lot 49. Pay attention to the artist’s commentary on depth/surface, chaos/coherence, play/sincerity, celebration/satire, etc. Choose a particular paradox apparent in the postmodernist painting or statue and consider if this paradox is similarly apparent in Pynchon’s novel. What kind of postmodernist subjectivity emerges when you compare and contrast the visual and the verbal art from these respective masters?