Aliki Caloyeras

Presentation: American Graffiti and Jaws

I. American Graffiti

a. The Making of AG:

~ Universal Pictures/ Ned Tanen:
After films like Easy Rider and The Graduate became hits in the late ‘60s, studio executives mortified . . . scrambled to tap into youth market.
Lew Wasserman made Ned Tanen the head of Universal’s new “youth devision.”
Tanen (used to be a music executive at MCA, Universal’s parent company) wanted to make inexpensive films ($750,000) where actors would be paid scale (i.e. no stars). American Graffiti was such a film.

~ Coppola
Wanted to produce AG independently, tried to get a loan for $700,000, but was dissuaded by his wife and others, because if AG was a flop, it could mean financial ruin for the family.

~ George Lucas:
After the failure of THX, Lucas was disappointed that there wasn’t a market for the American “art film.” So, he responded to the challenge to make something “more human,” a commercial film that would appeal to wide audiences. Lucas recognized that the films of New Hollywood were negative and depressing–all about “sex, violence, and pessimism:”

“We all know, as every movie in the last ten years has pointed out, how terrible we are, how wrong we were in Vietnam, how we have ruined the world, what schmucks we are and how rotten everything is. It had become depressing to go to the movies. I decided it was time to make a movie where people felt better coming out of the theater than when they went in. I became really aware of the fact that kids were really lost, the sort of heritage we built up since the war [World War II] had been wiped out by the ‘60s. and it wasn’t groovy to act that way anymore, now you just sort of sat there and got stoned. I wanted to preserve what a certain generation of Americans thought being a teenager was really about–from about 1945 to 1962” (Lucas qtd. in Biskind 235).

So, they made AG with Universal for abuout $750,000, spent about ½ mil. or so on promotion and distribution, and the film was a huge hit–broke house records, made over 50 mil in rentls–became one of the most successful films of all time. (Nominated for Best Pic. Oscar.)

b. Nostalgia Film
i. Jameson calls AG a “nostalgia film,” a film about a certain generational moment in the past. When we can’t deal with the current culture, can’t represent current experience we return to the past.
ii. Ad, “Where were you in ’62?,” Lucas wanted to reach a wide audience, so the ad was meant to key into audience’s individual personal memories. . . “remember a happier time??”
[Show scene where Milner and Carol get pulled over by the cop.]
Discussion Questions:
1. Following Jameson, how does American Graffiti deal or not deal with current experience by being about 1962?
2. If we are condemned to see the past only through our images of the past, and the past is really a representation of the present, that what does AG tell us about the present of 1973/ New Hollywood era?
Some observations about scene:
~ Milner is “rebel character” a type from 50s films, but he’s totally nice guy; scene is totally innocent. When carol threatens to tell cop that he tried to rape her, audience knows how ridiculous it is, that there’s no threat. That’s another movie.
~ Milner tells cop that they were at the movies and staying out of trouble–this is a time when movies were innocent fun.
~ Discussion of death of Buddy Holly, elegiac moment death of rock n roll rebels. Carol and Milner often talk about death–junkyard scene, M talks about death of “good drivers” in drag racing accidents–foreshadows his own death by a drunk driver two years after setting of film (which we are told at end of film).
~ What do you make of Beach boy’s music? Milner hates the beach boys, they continue to play throughout scene.

iii. Music: Compilation Score: Music is so important to the film (and MCA was about to market and make even more money off the soundtrack after film.) In The Sounds of Commerce Jeff Smith calls AG the paradigmatic example of the compilation score:
Compilation Score:
~ Achieves dramatic aims through association and allusion
~ Relies on the audience’s familiarity with the music to fill in the gaps of character motivations or to comment on characters’ actions
~ Commercially self-aware alternative to neo-Romantic orchestral scores of Hollywood’s Golden Age
Oldies Soundtrack of AG:
~ Serves overall narrative structure
o Music was part of concept of film from the beginning (Lucas’ pitch included playing songs that would go with specific scenes in film). Opening song is “Rock around the Clock,” which suggests structure of film–that it will talk place in one night, the music will carry us through. Last song at Curt’s departure, “Goodnight, It’s Time to Go,” is fitting end.
o Each scene is roughly the length of one song
~ Informs film’s visual design:
o Jukebox lighting; also “radio lighting” (dark except for car radio lights–think about scene we just saw with Milner and Carol)
o Film is reminiscent of 50s beach movies, teen movies (i.e. Rock Around the Clock)
~ Offers convenient interpretive schema–connects to personal memories.
[Show Curt watching TV scene–Tell class to pay attention to music and visual design]

Questions and Observations:
~ What do you make of music and visual design of this scene?
~ How is this scene related to the film’s larger themes?
~ How is this scene a comment on New Hollywood? TV anyone? (The film’s TV spin-off’s)
~ Gang is again a type from 50s movies, but also from exploitation films. Here they pose no real threat, even though they say they’re going to drag Curt from their car.
~ Curt meets the Pharaohs and is eventually initiated into the gang–parallel’s the film’s theme of coming of age–leaving Modesto behind and going off to college.

. . . And the Richard Dreyfus goes off to college and becomes an oceanographer in Jaws.

II. Jaws
a. The Making of Jaws
~ Steven Spielberg, director
Spielberg, unlike Coppola and Lucas, had no intention of being an “auteur” or making art films. He was a studio man, a part of the establishment. He was nurtured by Universal–was really interested in the business of film.

The making of Jaws was a complete and total disaster: A lot of infighting among cast and crew members; Spielberg didn’t like Benchley’s script, so they improvised as they went along; Spielberg insisted on shooting on the ocean rather than in a tank, so none of the shots matched because of changing weather; Spielberg had anxieties about movie being another Duel or a cheap exploitation version of Moby-Dick.

When they finished shooting in Sept. 1974, they were 104 days over schedule and 300% over budget (final budget was $10 million).

~ Verna Fields, editor (Mother Cutter)
Fields was also the co-editor of AG (with Marcia Lucas). A lot of the footage was really bad and unusable–the shark looked terrible on camera. Fields realized pretty soon that, “what you could imagine was worse than what you could see” (277). (Spielberg later claimed that he realized this during shooting: “I threw out my storyboards and just suggested the shark” (277).

~ Promotion/Distribution [They weren’t expecting Jaws to be a hit, so they focused on promotion, which you read about in the Cook]
~ Released timed for summer due to subject matter
~ TV ads
~ Wide release (opened in 409 theaters; made $129 million in rentals)

“Special Event Film” Schatz talks about how this changes the film industry in the article we read for today. Cook, too, talks about how this is a turning point for the film industry: spend money to make money.
Schatz also calls Jaws a genre film (and Spielberg was worried it would be a bad genre film)

b. Genre Film (Action/Thriller)
~ Thomas Schatz says Jaws effectively melds various genres/ story types: “revenge of nature”; supernatural/Satanic; high-gore slasher; seagoing chase; buddy film; initiation film (Schatz 18).
Set up scene:
~ Slasher-type opening, where naked girl gets eaten by shark
~ Brody wants to close down beach, mayor (post-Watergate stereotype of corrupted authority figure) won’t let him because they’ll lose money on the summer season.
~ Think about use of sound in and pacing of this scene

[Show first beach scene]

Spielberg claims that during first screening an audience member got up and ran out during this scene–he threw up in the theater lobby, went to the restroom to clean himself up, and then returned to his seat to watch the rest of the film. This is when Spielberg knew he had a hit.

Discussion Questions:

What’s good about this scene? What do we like about it?
Schatz discusses changing nature of film narrative with films like Jaws: “we see films that are increasingly plot-driven, increasingly visceral, kinetic, and fast-paced, increasingly reliant on special effects, increasingly ‘fantastic’ (and thus apolitical), and increasingly targeted to younger audiences” (23).
Return to cinema of attractions (Cook 43).

How does story of Jaws’ making and marketing as well as audience response relate to Jameson’s concept of postmodernism and consumer society?
“. . . at some point following World War II a new kind of society began to emerge (variously described as postindustrial society, multinational capitalism, consumer society, media society, and so forth). New types of consumption; planned obsolescence; an even more rapid rhythm of fashion and styling changes; penetration of advertising, television, and the media generally to a hitherto unparalleled degree throughout society. . .” (Jameson 201).

Last Thoughts:
Benchley, author of Jaws the novel and screenplay said in LA Times: Spielberg “has no knowledge of reality but the movies. He is B-movie literate. . . [He] will one day be known as the greatest second unit director in America” (Peter Benchley qtd. in Biskind 278).

Biskind’s commentary: “In one obvious way, Benchley was completely wrong, Spielberg having become probably the most celebrated director in America. But in another way, he was right: Spileberg is the greatest second unit director in America. What he could not have foreseen, however, was that such was Spielberg’s (and Lucas’s) influence, that every studio movie became a B movie, and at least for the big action blockbusters that dominate the studios’ slates, second unit has replaced first unit” (278).

Sources:
Biskind, Peter. Easy Riders and Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock ‘n’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998.

Smith, Jeff. The Sounds of Commerce: Marketing Popular Film Music. New York: Columbia UP, 1998.

Oral Presentation: Cheryl Clarke, “After Mecca:” Women Poets and the Black Arts Movement (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers UP, 2005).

Cheryl Clarke:
~ Undergraduate at Howard University 1965-1969
~ Practicing poet, essayist, and teacher in 1970s and 1980s
~ Returned to graduate school in 1991 for PhD

~ Writes “After Mecca” as a cultural insider, as a part of the community she is studying and analyzing
~ “After Mecca” fills a void in African American scholarship (especially of the Black Arts Movement), which has tended to neglect the work of black women and gay and lesbian poets

Thesis: In the “brief but generative period” from 1968 to 1978, “black women exercised much artistic and writing agency,” and although black women poets have not traditionally been credited with a central position in the Black Arts Movement, they responded to it and influenced its development through their participation.

Discursive Period: 1968-1978
~ After tumultuous and violent period of the1960s which saw the assassinations and murders of Medgar Evers; Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley (4 little girls killed in the Birmingham Baptist church bombing); James Chaney, Michaels Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman (Civil Rights foot soldiers); Jimmy Lee Jackson (protester); Viola Liuzzo; Malcolm X; MLK; as well as Watts Riots (1965).
~ Rise in publication of works by black authors: 1945-1975 about 1000 books published by black poets (almost twice as many as in all preceding years); Of these, about 695 were published after 1968, with about 200 by black women.

Black Arts Poetry: “The new poetry spoke to black Americans’ righteous anger at white Americans, yes! And much of it spoke to new anxieties, interior energies and soul quests enabled by the new consciousness. . .” (20).
~ Re-education/ “Negro to Black” conversion: what does it mean to be black?
~ Fear and anxiety: what does it mean to be authentic?
~ Assumption of subject position: does subject mean (heterosexual) man?

Mecca (apartment building in Chicago & center of Muslim world) as Trope:
~ turning away from the (white) West
~ struggle to imagine a world where blacks are not relegated to the margins
~ deliverance from oppression
~ site of many deaths
~ requires mourning

Black Women Poets: Clarke analyzes individual poems throughout the book by various poets including Jayne Cortez, Carolyn Rodgers, Elouise Loftin, Lucille Clifton, Sonia Sanchez and Nikki Giovanni. Also compares poetry to fiction of Alice Walker and Toni Morrison.

Key Themes and Tactics:
~ Connection between black music and black poetry, which works to destabilize the ‘lyric I’
~ Humor and parody
~ Black vernacular speech
~ Black women’s sexuality and feminist liberation (often heterosexual)
~ Critique and correction of male counterparts for being too closed and exclusive.
~ Call for more inclusive practices moving away from gender and (hetero)sexuality toward androgynous “Blackhood”

Key Figures:

Gwendolyn Brooks’ “In the Mecca”:

~ 1960s poetry theorizes state of ‘the race’ and ‘the revolution’ and clears the way for writers to transform the literary canon in the 1970s.
~ Loss of lyric space
o R&B as space where lyric is reinvented, where “unrequited love stands for the pain of racial exclusion and destruction” as with Aretha Franklin’s “The Thrill is Gone” (24). Tradition of transforming lyric space.
o “In the Mecca” as postmodern epic elegy. The narrative of the poem finds a mother on a quest to find her daughter, who has disappeared. She encounters various figures in the community who are given voice in the poem, but their voices are seldom reliable. Subjectivity shifts drastically in poem; thus, no singular lyric ‘I’
o Poem parodies multiple traditions and modes both European and African American. Parody both pays homage to and critiques its source.
o Themes of corrupted sexuality in poem–both hetero- and homo-
o Loss of lyric space enacts erasure of black community and loss of daughter. Death of daughter signifies loss of female power in the space of Black Arts Movement.
o The reader becomes a witness and is pulled into act of mourning with mother figure.
~ Poem (and community) requires collective mourning. Mourning allows for regeneration.

Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls:
~ Claimed allegiance to West Coast feminist-lesbian community
~ Although influenced by Black Arts Movement rejects heterosexism of the movement.
o Both black and white feminist-lesbian writers were influenced by Black Arts poetics, use of vernacular, connection to popular music, performance and militancy.
~ Anti-commercial (anti-Broadway) but pro-community (all-inclusive female community)–challenged male-centered Black Theater.
~ Reclamation of “colored” and “girls”
~ Performative: Symbolic making of “choreopoem” builds a new community committed to imagination; psychic liberation; sexual liberation; sacred/secular music (jazz); the eradication of violence against women (rape); and celebration of women’s endurance

Audre Lorde:
~ “Theory of simultaneity of oppression”: Lorde rejects the sexism and homophobia of black nationalism and classism an racism of mainstream white feminism
~ Revisionist motherhood: separate sex from procreation
~ “Loss of political faith and recuperation of black matrilineal and diasporic literacy” (131)
~ “Unicorn” as lesbian sign (traced back to West African mythology)
~ Lamentation and recuperation (hope for progressive future)

Written for My African American Poetry Class.

Beginning with a recollection of my first encounter with Gwendolyn Brooks–I remember reading “We Real Cool” in an anthology in my high school English class. This is probably how many people first encounter Brooks. But what is striking to me now is how we read the poem in my private, all-girls, mostly-white, high school in the late ’80s. I don’t remember discussing the “We” of the poem as black youths in particular, and I think I imagined the pool players of the poem as white kids–a West Side Story street gang of sorts. The message I received as a teenager reading the poem was a general, “stay in school.” But there is, of course, so much more to “We Real Cool.” As Professor Alexander states so well in her introduction to this edition, “the missing ‘we’ that the poem’s pattern has led us to anticipate is a yawning chasm, the absence of the we, these young black boys, from the poem and from the earth once they have frittered their lives away” (xxi-xxii). Specificity here is important–the loss here is specific.

In other words, the universal can be problematic. I am thinking about the current discussion of Brokeback Mountain as a “universal love story.” This is a phrase I keep hearing over and over again in relation to the film–both in advertisements and from friends and relatives recommending the film. While I don’t disagree that most anybody can relate to the love story presented in the film, I think there’s a tendency in playing up the universal to forget the fact that not everybody will know what it’s like to live in fear of being mutilated, tortured, and beaten to death because of who they love. I don’t mean this response to be about Brokeback Mountain. My point is simply that the term “universal” has the potential to erase difference and politics and often works as a homogenizing force.

I think Brooks, however, works counter to that homogenizing force. The figures in her poems are specific, local, and Black. I am thinking about this, too, in relation to Langston Hughes’s “Racial Mountain.” Brooks is anything but the black poets who want to write like white poets that Hughes describes in his 1926(?) essay. We might read Brooks’ “Primer for Blacks” (118-120) as a kind of continuation of or response to Hughes’ groundbreaking essay–a call to take pride in one’s Black identity, which is not monolithic (universal?), but multifaceted. A “meaningful metamorphosis” occurs in the poem, where the racist symbolism of “black as negative, impure, morally corrupt, etc.” that has been put in place by white writers for hundreds of years is turned on its head so that “Black” comes to stand for “Glory” and “power.” “It’s Great to be white” is transformed into we can “Love the fact that we are Black.” The poem, furthermore, enacts what it describes in its third stanza: “The word Black/ has geographic power,/ pulls everyone in. . .”; by the end of the poem, the “You” is not only the “All of you,” which is given specificity by the list in the previous stanza,” but also the reader.

The “You,” that is given its own line at the end of the poem pulls the reader in and also points us back to the poem’s central strophe: “remember your Education:/ ‘one Drop–one Drop/ maketh a brand new Black.’/ One mighty Drop.” Brooks is in a sense re-educating readers through her poem (which is, after all, a “primer”) so that “Blackness/ stretches over the land” not as a shadow but as a powerful force worth celebrating. Given my original general premise, I’m not sure I want to say that this “you” at the end of the poem is “universal”; rather, I think it is all-inclusive–the difference being that there is difference in the all-inclusive. There is multiplicity here.

There’s a lot happening in this poem, and I doubt I’ve done it justice. We could productively look “Primer for Blacks” with others in our collection. “I Am A Black” on p.128 immediately comes to mind–I’m thinking about how the term “African American” doesn’t quite cut it for Brooks. There are also a few other poems that I really love, and I wonder if others have anything to say about them. They include: “The Anniad” (36), “The Egg Boiler (82), “To Don at Salaam” (112), “Paul Robeson” (113), and “Shorthand Possible” (124).

Responses to my classmates:

Antonio, I really appreciate your deftly drawn characterization of the arc of Brooks’ oeuvre, which moves from a Modernist “reworking [of] traditional [European?] forms” towards a poetry of social protest (which is still formally rich). You said it so well: it “is not to say that her earlier work has no social content, or that her later poems are less carefully crafted; but there is certainly a shift in intensities there as Brooks got involved with the Black Arts movement.” We can characterize Brooks’ work as both formally intricate and socially relevant. It is never simply art for arts sake–Brooks’ formal (whatever the form), shapely poems are a call to action but also enact protest and change.

I think an example of this is “Primer for Blacks,” which GerShun and I have already begun to explicate. Along those lines, I wonder if we can think of “re-education” as both a theme/motif that runs through Brooks’ poetry and an actuality, something that happens as we read the work. Jackie, for example, has described her own re-education as she reads Brooks. And my anecdote of my first encounter with Brooks’ “We Real Cool” was meant to call up images of a “problematic education” that asks for revision. (I want to, as an aside, refer to a poem by Natasha Trethewey from her new collection, Native Guard, which has to do with what I am calling “problematic educations.” Because my e-mail program cannot indicate italics, I am attaching a (Word file) copy of the poem, “Southern History.” I am only attaching the poem for your reference, since it reminds me of Brooks/ seems influenced by Brooks. I read it as a call for revision and re-education. (It is also a sonnet.) But I do want to stay with Brooks.)

Jackie, a quick response to your initial post, where you refer to Brooks’ “simple language,” and suggest that her poems function on a straightforward narrative level. I think I experienced Brooks’ poems differently– I mean, while I see that Brooks uses narrative quite a bit (ballads traditionally are, indeed, narrative poems), I also see that her language is really rich, nuanced, and varied. . . and anything but straight forward. In trying to come up with a written response to Brooks for our “e-class” today, I’ve found that I’ve needed to read the poems again and again in order to figure out what they’re doing–and with many, the jury is still out. That is, for me, Brooks’ language (although she uses the vernacular) is often really complicated–”The Egg Boiler” comes to mind as an example of what I meant. Seems like there is a metaphor at work hear–this sonnet is not simply about boiling eggs, is it?

GerShun has pointed to the motif of childhood that runs through the poems. I agree that Brooks is very protective of black childhood, and I think this also accounts for the tone of celebration and hope that runs through the poems. Reading GerShun’s post, I thought again of “Young Heroes II: To Don at Salaam,” one of my favorite poems in the collection. Am I correct that “Don” is Don L. Lee/ Haki Madhubuti? I know that Madhubuti and Brooks had a kind of literary mother-son relationship, and I am struck my the tone of love and care that underlies this poem. The image in the opening stanza of this loved boy-poet leaning back, reaching beyond almost to the point of falling–but not quite falling–is really lovely and moving. His “fine hands” in “print pockets” is, I think, symbolic of his writerly abilities–This is the young poet sitting at his desk, a virtuoso creating something that seems like it should fail or fall apart (as he should fall from his chair) but succeeds nonetheless. (Jazz can be like this, too, I believe.) He is “Beautiful” and “Impudent,” bold and alive. And his work is a tribute to his ancestors (literary and otherwise). This poem reads, to me, like the flip side of “We Real Cool” where the black boys are absent in the end. Here, instead, the black boy–a poet–has found his voice, “the listened-for music” and is “living in the world.” Such care for “black youth” here; such love.

*All references come from Elizabeth Alexander, ed., The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks, Library of America/American Poets Project, 2005.

Translating Anne Spencer’s “Translation”

We encounter, on the last page of James Weldon Johnson’s selection of Anne Spencer’s poems in The Book of American Negro Poetry, two brief poems. On the page, “Translation” sits, left-justified atop the centered “Dunbar,” a five-line poem, which asserts a poetic lineage that includes the Romantics, “Chatterton, Shelley, Keats,” along with the titular Paul Lawrence Dunbar (218). I will defer a close reading of “Dunbar” in favor of “Translation,” but I would like to note the importance of the placement of the poems on the page, which came about as the result of Johnson’s editorial choices to include these poems in this way in his anthology. “Translation,” in other words, might be thought of as built–though built askew; that is, a little to the left– upon the metaphorical foundation of a Romantic tradition that includes Dunbar as the most recent predecessor.

Dunbar may in fact be the “friend” to which the speaker refers in the first sentence of the poem: “We trekked into a far country,/ My friend and I.” The word “friend” indicates that the speaker’s relationship with the “he” of the poem is platonic; however, upon reading the poem for the first time, it is striking how many references to romantic love pop up as the poem unfolds. The “wooing” bird’s “mating-note” in line 7 recalls the love lyrics of the Romantic tradition. And the enjambment of “We laid tired bodies ‘gainst/ The loose warm sands” places the emphasis on “bodies ‘gainst,” suggesting sexual imagery before the next line indicates that the bodies are laid against “warm sands.” In the antepenultimate line, the stars watch over “lovers in oblivion,” which may directly refer to the “we” of the poem (ll. 13-4). But then, the object of the lovers’ love is not clear–if we take “lovers” by itself, the object of love could be one another; however, the word is modified by the possessive pronoun, “their,” suggesting the possibility that the lovers love the stars. The meaning is ambiguous. Do the stars possess the lovers simply because they guard them “in oblivion,” offering starlight in darkness? Or do the lovers both direct their love to the stars rather than toward each other? Whatever the relationship, it is clear that the “he” and “I” of the poem are kindred spirits, perhaps two poets, who understand each other despite the fact that their “deeper content” is “never spoken” (l. 3). One possibility, is that this friend represents Dunbar.

Whether or not the friend is Dunbar (or a Dunbar-figure), we must wonder what this “far country” is into which they trek. A metaphor, surely, but for what? The title of the poem offers rich clues. How are we to read the trope of translation? “Translation” might refer to language. “Our deeper content was never spoken/ But each knew all the other said” suggests that the impossibility of total translation, total communication between the two figures of the poem–there is always something lost in translation. Yet, it also suggests an ease of understanding and knowing between the two. In one sense, the “far country” may be the poem itself, which must be translated from a thought or idea into language or writing. And the two friends seem to share a writerly sensibility. But, “translation” also has religious and supernatural undertones.

According to the OED, translation specifically refers to the “removal of [a bishop or minister] from one charge to another; also, the removal of the body or relics of a saint to another place of interment,” and more generally to the “removal from earth to heaven, orig. without death, as the translation of Enoch; but in later use also said fig. of the death of the righteous.” The far country, then, might be thought of as death. And, within the space of the poem, the speaker communes with the “friend” as he is translated to the “far country.” The friend, indeed, tells the speaker, “how calm his soul was laid/ By the lack of anvil and strife” suggesting that he is at peace a difficult life full of toil and conflict. Such a reading might also refer specifically to Dunbar, an exalted and saint-like poetic peer and predecessor. Finally, “Anvil and strife” suggest physical labor and continuous antagonism, which alongside the image of “trek[ing] into a far country” recalls a northward escape from slavery. I want to suggest that vehicle of this metaphor carries multiple parallel tenors: The trek into a far country, is a march towards freedom, towards death and salvation, towards poetry.

The making of the poem, in other words, is connected to freedom and salvation. In fact, as the poem develops, poetry and salvation become more and more intricately linked. As previously noted, the kestrel “wooing” in line 7 might, at first glance, remind us of a romantic songbird. But kestrel, according to the OED, is really a bird of prey, a small hawk. Who would this bird of prey be wooing? And if he “mutes his mating-note,” is he getting ready for the hunt? And then, according to another line of thinking, wooing and hunting might be considered parallel endeavors if not the same thing. The kestrel is then wooing death. These lines draw attention to the tension between strife and harmony as connected through lyric poetry.

It is tempting to say so that the speaker of the poem is a woman since the poet is a woman, but there aren’t really any clues. The Romantic love poetry undertones suggest a heterosexual love relationship according to romantic convention, but in the end this is not a love poem. Or if it is a love poem, it is one of mourning. The harmony attained in the poem is the “harmony of this sweet silence” (l. 8 ). And we notice that there is a prevalence of “silence” in the poem: the “deeper content was never spoken” and the kestrel “mutes his mating-note,” which both lead up to the silencing of the speaker’s own song. The last lines of the poem: “my evening prayer/ Stole my morning song.” As prayer replaces poetry, we must wonder if the morning song is not a specific kind of lover’s lyric (an aubade?) but a mourning song. Note that the poem breaks free of form. Thus, “Translation” might be read as a kind of free verse prayer, an elegy for Dunbar–the tragic death of whom has translated him to saint-like status.

If the far country is death, and Dunbar’s soul is calm and at peace, then how are we to read the speaker? The space of the poem seems to be a kind of dream space where the speaker encounters the dead poet. The “I” encounters the “he” and is struck silent, unable to make poetry, by the loss. Yet, the poem is made. There is one other definition of translation that may prove relevant here, and that is the legal definition: “A transfer of property; spec. alteration of a bequest by transferring the legacy to another person.” Thus, if we read the speaker as the female poet who writes the poem and her friend as Dunbar, then the poem enacts a legal translation of Dunbar’s poetic legacy to his kindred spirit, Anne Spencer.

Last of the Mohicans
Author: James Fenimore Cooper
Date Written & Published: 1826 (Carey & Lea of Philadelphia)

Genre(s): sentimental novel, frontier novel, romance

Setting: American wilderness/frontier/upstate NY, Lake George area

Main Characters:

Natty Bumppo, aka Hawkeye (scout): Hawkeye is his nickname/adopted name; his given name is Natty Bumppo. His special “long rifle” is named Killdeer, La Longue Carabine, or The Long Rifle. He is very close with Chingachgook and Uncas, but he frequently asserts that he is “a man without a cross,” meaning that he has no Indian blood. He’s a hybrid character with connections to both White and Red worlds and cultures.

Chingachgook, aka Le Gros Serpent or The Great Snake: One of the two remaining Mohicans, and Natty’s close friend.

Uncas: Chingachgook’s son, the “last of the Mohicans.” Uncas is Cora’s love interest and Natty’s surrogate son. He’s noble and honorable.

Cora Munro: The eldest daughter of the commander of the British troops at Fort William Henry and a part-Black West Indian woman. She is physically dark and emotionally solemn and noble. Cora falls in love with Uncas and “suffers the tragic fate of the sentimental heroine” [s].

Alice Munro: Cora’s younger half-sister, who is blonde and fair, feminine and more weakly constituted than Cora. She faints frequently and falls in love with Heyward

Major Duncan Heyword: “A young American colonist from the South who has risen to the rank of major in the English army. Courageous, well-meaning, and noble, Heyward often finds himself out of place in the forest, thwarted by his lack of knowledge about the frontier and Indian relations. Heyward’s unfamiliarity with the land sometimes creates problems for Hawkeye, the dexterous woodsman and leader.” [s]

Magua, aka Le Renard Subtil, or the Subtle Fox: the novel’s villain, a Huron Indian, who was once a chief but was driven from his tribe for drunkenness, etc. He wants revenge on Colonel Munro for enforcing his rejection from his tribe, so he tries to kidnap and marry Alice.

David Gamut: A psalmist and Calvinist who wants to spread Christianity throughout the frontier. He is awkward and out of place in the wilderness, but he eventually becomes very valuable and helpful to Natty.

General Montcalm - Marquis Louis Joseph de Saint-Veran, known as Montcalm, is the commander of the French forces fighting against England during the French and Indian War. He enlists the aid and knowledge of Indian tribes to help his French forces navigate the unfamiliar forest combat setting. After capturing Fort William Henry, though, he is powerless to prevent the Indian massacre of the English troops. [s]
Tamenund - An ancient, wise, and revered Delaware Indian sage who has outlived three generations of warriors. [s]
General Webb - The commander of the British forces at Fort Edward. [s]

Themes: founding of nation; war; hybridity; family; wilderness. . .

Key Facts from [s]
narrator • Anonymous
point of view • Third person. The narrator follows the actions of several characters at once, especially during combat scenes. He describes characters objectively but periodically makes reference to his own writing.
tone • Ornate, solemn, sentimental, occasionally poetic
tense • Past
setting (time) • Several days from late July to mid-August 1757, during the French and Indian War
setting (place) • The American wilderness frontier in what will become New York State.
protagonist • Hawkeye
major conflict • The English battle the French and their Indian allies; Uncas helps his English friends resist Magua and the Hurons.
rising action • Magua captures Cora and Alice, beginning a series of adventures for the English characters, who try to rescue the women.
climax • Uncas triumphs over Magua in the Delaware council of Tamenund in Chapter XXX.
falling action • Magua dies; Cora and Uncas are torn apart.
themes • The consequences of interracial love and friendship; literal and metaphorical nature; the role of religion in the wilderness; the changing idea of family
motifs • Hybridity; disguise; inheritance
symbols • Hawkeye; “the last of the Mohicans”
foreshadowing • Cora’s unexpected attraction to Magua in Chapter I; Magua’s deceit in Chapter I; Chingachgook’s reference to Uncas as the “last of the Mohicans” in Chapter II.

Note: all passages marked with [s] are from sparknotes.com