'Isn't that  - isn't that remarkable? Biff   - he likes me!'

1) Consider your impressions of Willy Loman as interpreted by Dustin Hoffman. How does Hoffman create 'Loman' and are there any aspects of his interpretation that you found enlightening or limiting? Is his physicality essential to your understanding of his character? Did he irritate with his perpetual motion and was that the point of Hoffman's interpretation? What of his 'tics'?  How far does he dominate the film? Or does Malkovich's delivery of Biff challenge the authority of Hoffman?

2) Why is Loman so preococcupied with being 'liked' in film and play and how far is this realisation above the tragic summary of the entire play? Why is Uncle Charley so awkwardly treated by Loman in the play/film('He is liked, but he's not - well liked...' )  and how far does  the film  allow us to comprehend Loman's ambivalence? Think about Charley's  relationship with Bernard.

3) How is the past rendered in the film? Does this device work for you in terms of guiding your reading of the 'nostalgia' of Loman's recollections? Does it destabilise the relationship of past to present or even of present to past? Are they always clearly separated or is there great ambiguity and fluidity between past and present? Why?

4) Why does Ben always wear white? What is he to Loman and how does the film make this explicit? Does he encourage Willy's suicide? How is this rendered in the final scene?  Why is Linda more ambivalent?

5) Is Biff violent? And why does he steal? Are these flaws largely ignored in the film? Why?

6) No one listens to Happy. His name ironises his entire life which seems based on ignoring his personal redundancy within the family. How does the film highlight his extraneousness? How is he framed?

7) List your own 'revelations'in the film. Did the film help your understanding of the play? How? Did you enjoy the music or did you find it forced the emotional meanings/resonances of certain scenes?

8) Can you think of anything you missed in the film? Or did you enjoy the compression of the play?

Watching the film with the class yesterday, I was aware of my son's repeated frown and bemusement. What he seemed to be communicating was going on with Willy Loman? What  more importantly, was going wrong?

Afterwards in the car home, Edward remarked on the confusion surrounding Loman's existence in the present and his over-reliance for reassurance and dialogue upon the mysterious visitor in the white suit. Of course Loman's brother 'Ben' is dead and his haunting revisitations denote the ambivalent relationship endured by Willy Loman both to the past(nostalgia as Edenic) and to male authority figures specifically. '

The past is only ever finished in Miller, never finished with.'

Willy Loman feels the absence of a paternal advisory figure in his life and so reinvents the cliched Ben as mythical adventurer and explorer- even saviour. This messianic figure is of course less attractive to Linda, the besotted yet pragmatic wife of Willy Loman. She rightly recognises the destabilising presence of Ben where Willy's family life is concerned. 'Alaska' with its promise of diamonds and riches seems Loman's Eden, even his Xanadu. Of course the audience is also aware that such yearning involves the 'fall' of hope and Willy Loman's insatiable need for a language of material success is pathologised, so that reality seems elusive and illusory. The American Dream is contaminating and distorting. It offers the individual a straitjacketing linguistic register which constrains and debilitates, finally suffocating naturalness and care. When Willy wonders at Biff's tender need of his love, he has almost lost the capacity to recognise tenderness and connection. Self has become other, and other....? Intimacy has been lost in the tidal wave of meaningless material promises.

Everyone was aware of Happy's repetitious promise to marry someone, anyone in order to gain attention and one wonders why Linda colluded with the redundancy of Happy within the family unit! How ironically he is named! And little surprise that he spends all his time bedding women in an empty attempt to gain attention from someone.

I enjoyed the  shuffling gait of Hoffman's Loman with the physical 'ticks and twitches' that could not be healed. Any momentary lapses of understanding were abruptly squashed by his desperate need for llusion. Nothing so angry as the deep seated guilt of the fallen father.

Affluenza indeed!

Northanger Abbey Three: Chapter XXII

'....to make sense of our lives where we are, as it were, stranded in the middle, we need fictions of beginnings and fictions of ends, fictions which unite beginning and end and endow the interval between them with meaning...; ( Frank Kermode,The Sense of an Ending)

1) Think about your own experience of your life 'story' and how carefully or closely you endeavour to give your life story significance and order through organised story telling. Do you feel 'stranded' in the middle of your life?

2) How far would you agree that the artist endeavours through a 'geometry of his own' ( Henry James) to make sense of the chaos of life. Could you view the narrative structure of Northanger Abbey in terms of 'geometry'perhaps?

2b) Spontaneously draw a picture/doodle of your experience/interpretation of the novel. Does this doodle in anyway lend sense or interpretation to the novel? Does it disentangle your feelings about the novel?

3) Catherine Morland dreams of a different novel. She constructs different beginings and endings and finds them reshaped by the 'sensible' narratives of Henry Tilney. However it could be said that the presence of the General almost contradicts the pragmatic solutions of Henry. Novels may fight to justify their endings. Indeed Adam phillips in his essay 'Two talks on needing to know when it's over' that endings may be a form of tyranny in the novel:

'How would we read a novel we knew to be without an ending?' How would you respond to this question then?

4) Consider the extract from Chapter XXII.

a) What do we learn about geographical and social limitation in this extract and how does this relate to gender? ( See opening paragraph).

b) How does we read the character of the General in this passage and why? USE EVIDENCE to support your viewpoint.

c) What is the effect of the heavily interrogative aspect of this extract? Why?

d) What is Catherine choosing to listen to here?  Give evidence once again to support your findings.

d) Find a short passage in the novel that interests you and note down the questions it raises and its impact upon you as a reader. the shorter perhaps the better! Share it with your group.

FINALLY!!

Imagine filming the novel in a contemporary setting. How would you characterise the protagonists  and what habits would they enjoy? What songs would capture their personalities? Or careers? What would you do with the novel's plot?

'What have you been judging from? Remember the country and the age in which we live. ...Does our education prepare us for such atrocities? ...Could they be perpetrated without being known in a country like this, where social and literary intercourse is on such a footing, where everyman is surrounded by a neighbourhood of voluntary spies, and where roads and newspapers lay everything open? Dear Miss Morland, what ideas have you been admitting? ( Chapter XXIV)

1) Consider the quotation  above and evaluate what is communicated to you about the speaker ( Henry Tilney) and his view of society. Think also about his relationship with Catherine. Is it hierarchical and knowing? How far are his observations almost those of an author?  Even omniscient? Can Tilney ever be wrong? Why?

2) Ian Watt argues that Jane Austen uses conversation in her texts as a means of revealing that:

' ...our conversations to and about other people are actually unvelings of a more consequential relaity, the self; that the ultimate purport of all our pronouncemnets is unwitting self-definition, an unconscious revelation of our manners, our passions, our intellectual capacities, and our operative moral values.'

Consider the value of this discussion with reference to the following brief extracts from the novel:

a) ' Poor Thorpe is in town: I dread the sight of him; his honest heart would feel so much.' ( James Morland, Chapter XXV)

b)  'I never was so deceived in anyone's character in my life before.'

'Among all the great variety that you have known and studied.' ( Catherine and Henry, Chapter XXV)

c) ' ...he is the only man I ever did love or could love, and I trust you will convince him of it. The spring fashions are partly down, and the hats the most frightful you ca imagine. I hope you spend your time pleasantly, but am afraid you never think of of me.' ( Isabella, Chapter XXVII)

3) How far do we find Austen's view of romance uncomfortable and yet all too psychologically astute? Do we like those who are literally like us or LIKE us? How far is Henry a most pragmatic hero? Is he very 'masterful' in his relationships with women?

' ...though Henry was now sincerely attached to her - though he felt and delighted in all the excellencies of her character, and truly loved her society - I must confess that his affection originated in nothing better than gratitude; or in other words, that a  persuasion of her partiality for him had been the only cause of giving her a serious thought.' ( Chapter XXX)

4) Re-read your essay and identify your favourite line or insight in the piece. Think about why you enjoy this aspect of your writing and your reflection with those in your group. Then note down a promise to yourself in terms of what you will do next time still better. Reflect upon your writing process.

5) Write down as many ideas as you can in connection with the essay titles in your course book. Which ideas are most appealing? Look at links and development.

• Jane Austen: Northanger Abbey Two

'Classic Realism tends to offer as the 'obvious' basis of its intelligibility the assumption that character, unified and coherent , is the source of action.Subjectivity is a major - perhaps the major - theme of classic realism. Insight into character and psychological processes is declared to be one of the marks of serious literature...' ( Catherine Belsey, Critical Practice)

1)  Examine the pasage (A) and ascertain how far Belsey's ideas about realism and character are justified by the description of John Thorpe. Is his 'character' straightforward to read and if so is this transparency helpful in the text? What questions occur to you as you read this description of Thorpe? Are quetsions essential to reading? Why?

2) Why is Thorpe actually in the novel and how does his presence help us read others? Do we ever enjoy the 'inside' of Thorpe? Why should a character be granted the 'luxury' of interiority? Whose viewpoint do we enjoy and why does Austen deploy such focalisations?

3) Look at the short extract concerning Isabella's reaction to James Morland's marriage settlement. (B)How far is Isabella 'intelligible' to the reader and Catherine here and how do  we know this? Think about hierarachies of meaning and the way in which realism might process itself so that the reader may 'judge' correctly.

4) Consider the way in which Austen moves her heroine around geographically in the novel. Are these movements significant in the progressive evolution of Catherine's 'character'? Why? What type of allure is created from Catherines' version of Northanger Abbey and how far is the patriachal figure of general Tulney essential to Catherine's reading of the text? ( Passage C)

5) Reread the exchange between Tilney and Catherine concerning Isabella and Frederick. Are these two characters actively listening to each other and if so how do we know that they are in rapport? What is the dramatic signficance of good listening in the text? Can you think of any uses of bad listening ?

6) How do we know when we are in rapport with another? Make a list of the ways in which we can create rapport.  Can we be in rapport with our self? Is this perhaps reflected by Austen's narrative,  as Catherine progresses through the novel?

How does this poem compare to Carol Ann Duffy's Prayer?

The Time Machine: H G Wells (1895) fficeffice" />

‘And I have by me, for my own comfort, two strange white flowers – shrivelled now, and brown and flat and brittle – to witness that even when mind and strength had gone, gratitude and a mutual tenderness still lived on in the heart of man’   (Epilogue)

1)      Consider the implications of Wells’ narrator’s final words in the story. What final message is left for the reader to decipher and bear?

2)      How do you feel about ‘time’? What does ‘time’ mean to you? Make spontaneous notes as to your thoughts and feelings about time. In small groups share your ideas about time and compare your notes on ‘time’ with those of your colleagues.

3)      What is a ‘utopia’ and why do writers and artists often concern themselves with the explorations of such a concept? Why do utopias frequently degenerate into ‘dystopias’?

4)      Look again at the opening paragraph of Wells’ novella and consider why such a setting is used for our first encounter with the ‘Time-Traveller’. Is this a world of privilege? A world of the comfortable Victorian bourgeoisie? How do you react to the first description of the time machine? Can you ‘see’ it, or does it remain an abstract ‘unreal’ or ‘fantastical concept?

5)      Read the extract describing the traveller’s first encounter with the Eloi. How do you as readers and ‘travellers’ view these characters? What is their function in this futuristic world?

6)      Now consider the extract describing the Morlocks. Once again consider their representation and ‘meaning.’ Why is Wells attempting to construct this ‘Utopia/Dystopia’ on such a model of duality?

7)      ffice:smarttags" />Victoria’s epic reign coincided with Darwin’s theories of Evolution, (1859) Marx’s Das Kapital (1867), the height of Imperialism and massive growth in the Industrialisation of the UK.’ I think it is important.....that the world at large should not have the impression that we will not let anyone but ourselves have anything.’ (  Queen Victoria 1898, Niall Ferguson, Empire, p. 167) How far would you argue that Wells’ the Time machine’ is a product of its time?

'NOW, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!'

The scene was a plain, bare, monotonous vault of a school-room, and the speaker's square forefinger emphasized his observations by underscoring every sentence with a line on the schoolmaster's sleeve. The emphasis was helped by the speaker's square wall of a forehead, which had his eyebrows for its base, while his eyes found commodious cellarage in two dark caves, overshadowed by the wall. The emphasis was helped by the speaker's mouth, which was wide, thin, and hard set. The emphasis was helped by the speaker's voice, which was inflexible, dry, and dictatorial. The emphasis was helped by the speaker's hair, which bristled on the skirts of his bald head, a plantation of firs to keep the wind from its shining surface, all covered with knobs, like the crust of a plum pie, as if the head had scarcely warehouse-room for the hard facts stored inside. The speaker's obstinate carriage, square coat, square legs, square shoulders, - nay, his very neckcloth, trained to take him by the throat with an unaccommodating grasp, like a stubborn fact, as it was, - all helped the emphasis.

'In this life, we want nothing but Facts, sir; nothing but Facts!'

The speaker, and the schoolmaster, and the third grown person present, all backed a little, and swept with their eyes the inclined plane of little vessels then and there arranged in order, ready to have imperial gallons of facts poured into them until they were full to the brim.