course guidelines path one calendar class discussion path two calendar essay prompts reference pages


ornamental line

Extraordinary Bodies & Minds

"Only the prism's obstruction shows aright
The secret of a sunbeam [. . .] (ll.1-2).
Robert Browning's "Deaf and Dumb: A Group by Woolnder" (1864)

Points for Reflection

R. Browning's "Deaf and Dumb: A Group by Woolner" (1864)

  1. pay close attention to the adjectives (incl. past participles) that Browning uses throughout this poem.
  2. do you applaud Browning's choice to use a scientific analogy (l.1-3) to make his point about the beauty that can arise from irregularity?
  3. whose love is first "vexed," then successful at "wreak[ing] its insuppressive sense" (ll.5-6) across the face?
  4. do you agree that the eyes can communicate as much as--even more than--the lips?
  5. examine online some photos of the sculpture referenced in Browning's poem. Is the tone of the poem similar to the tone established by the sculpture?


Walt Whitman's "I Sing the Body Electric" (1855)

  1. what value does Whitman accord the body, relative to the soul (ll.1-8)?
  2. does Whitman divide his attention equally between male and female bodies?
  3. what qualities does Whitman apply to the common farmer of line thirty-three to explain why he is loved by all who know him?
  4. how important are vision and touch for Whitman, relative to other forms of interpersonal communication?
  5. what might Whitman mean by the claim that "All things please the soul" (l.51, emphasis added)? Does this seem a nonsensical statement?
  6. how does Whitman's appreciation of the female body affect his appreciation of the Arts, of religion, and of the intangible (l.56)?
  7. do you find Whitman's description of sex beautiful or offensive (ll.58-63)? Does this description, set amidst a celebration of women, focus more on female sexuality than male sexuality?
  8. Whitman declares in section #6 that man, like woman, is "all qualities" (l.75). How similar are the qualities he lists here to those he assigns women in section #5?
  9. where does Whitman's poem fall on that political battlefield in which the war of sexual rights is being waged across the nineteenth century (ll. 66-84)?
  10. what of the related arenas which concern slavery and immigration (ll.85-124). Where does Whitman stand?
  11. how does Whitman “help” the slave auctioneer who “does not half know his business” (l.95)?
  12. what touchy topic does Whitman obliquely point towards in lines 115-16?
  13. why might Whitman include the phrase "the Body" in lines 120 and 121? How does this phrase modify the meaning of these sentences?
  14. how might one "corrupt" their own bodies (ll.5, 128), from Whitman's perspective?
  15. a couple times, Whitman moves beyond the skin into the recesses of the body's innermost cavities (ll.41, 100-108, 149-50, 162). Does this strike you as a kind of clinical dissection of the body, or something else?
  16. does Whitman leave out anything important in his exhaustive listing of the body's various parts?
  17. Does he include body parts that propriety might prefer unlisted?
  18. how many of the human actions listed by Whitman require an able body in order to be performed (ll.153-57, 163)?
  19. is sympathy, for Whitman, primarily a cerebral experience (l.159)?
  20. does Whitman explicitly (or implicitly) include disabled or extraordinary bodies in his celebration of the human form?


E. Dickinson's "320" [258]

  1. does the phrase "Slant of light" (l.1) and the given season (winter) suggest an outdoor or indoor experience?
  2. does the synaesthetic simile comparing light with sound (ll.1-4) suggest that church is a physically or spiritually uncomfortable place?
  3. does "heavenly" in l.5 denote the agent of the described hurt, or the nature/character of the hurt?
  4. what might the "Slant of light" (l.1) represent, and what type of pain is it causing in the narrator? What is Dickinson attempting to express?
  5. compare the narrator's attitude towards despair with that found in STC’s “Dejection: An Ode,” Keats’s “Ode on Melancholy,” and Hopkins’s “Carrion Comfort."
  6. is the departure of Despair a good thing?


E. Dickinson's "620" [435]

  1. does this poem echo or interrogate the core theses of the following works?
  2. be ready to explain the apparent paradoxes in lines one and three.
  3. what is Dickinson suggesting about the popular majority?


 C. P. Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper" (1892)

  1. what evidence do we find that the narrator's medical husband, John, values only what can be empirically verified or "rationally" explained?
  2. in what ways does John regulate the environment and behavior of his wife?
  3. does John succeed in his attempts to restrict his wife's artistic impulse?
  4. what evidence do we find that not only the narrator's physical but also her mental mobility is regulated by her husband? Identify moments where her thoughts and conclusions seem to mold themselves to what John expects/wants her to think.
  5. what about the design of the wallpaper so distracts the narrator?
  6. at what point do the narrator's imaginative observations about her surroundings transition from playful fantasy into problematic paranoia?
  7. why do the narrator's imaginative powers begin to work against her?
  8. does the narrator's perceptiveness concerning her husband and sister-in-law increase or decrease with the growth of her delusions?
  9. why does the narrator consider throwing herself out the window?
  10. what is the primary cause of the narrator's growing psychosis (what contemporaries would have likely termed "hysteria")?

 

a portrait of a woman with an abstract gold gown which blends in with the gold background of the rest of the painting. The woman has dark brown hair in an updo, and her hands are clasped in front of her chest.
Adele Bloch-Bauer 1 (1907)
Gustav Klimt


Dr. Paul Marchbanks
pmarchba@calpoly.edu