Notes for 11 February 2016

LITCS 114
Teaching Associate: Patrick Mooney
Bldg. 494, room 160B
Winter 2016

• on Sexton ...
  • Precarity and biology
    • First: what's the confession in confessional poetry?
    • Unknown Girl in the Maternity Ward (24–25)
    • Menstruation at Forty (137–38)
      • (and its ambivalence toward motherhood)
      • (and perverse desire, cf. Frankie Addams)
    • For My Lover, Returning to His Wife (188–190)
      • and reproductive labor: done this with her legs spread out [...] the children are there (189)
  • Sex and sexuality:
    • Sylvia's Death, esp. at bottom of p. 126: the death that talked of analysts and cures / the death that talked like bridges with plots
  • Alterity, being non-self-identical:
    • Old Dwarf Heart (54–55)
  • Writing:
    • The Black Art (88-89)
      • Note the feels / knows distinction in the first lines of the first two stanzas
    • Consorting with Angels (111–112)
      • poetry is also an attempt to imbue βίος with ζωή: each one like a poem obeying itself (111)
  • Valuing lives:
    • Others have traded life before / and could not speak. (25)
  • Critiques of femininity:
    • the end of Snow White
    • Angels of the Love Affair 1: he bit me in the buttocks and took over my soul (332)
• Do we want to spend time on The Left Hand of Darkness, or defer it to next week?
  • Sex vs. gender
  • What is sci-fi / speculative fiction? How does it operate?
    • There are of course notes here and here.
  • What's weird about this novel? Why does it make us uncomfortable?
  • What is Le Guin doing here that makes SF an appropriate approach?
  • Open question: Is this a feminist novel?