EN115—Examples of Research Integrated Into Essay—Body Paragraph
Spring 2007
William Wordsworth expresses similar thoughts and feelings about written language in his poem “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.” As the title suggests, the speaker begins his journey alone—“float”[ing]—and without much purpose. The fact that he is “lonely” emphasizes a separation of the speaker from the mass of common speakers, suggested by the “golden daffodils” that exist as a “crowd” in the poem (4-5). In fact, “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” was written in 1804, during Wordsworth’s most fruitful years as a poet, as if isolation from average people were the problem he was confronting in this poem (Norton 220). In the first two lines, Wordsworth uses high language, suggesting that the clouds the narrator compares to himself are like antiquated, airy form of speech that have lost their substance. Words such as “o’er” and “vales” sound nice, but are not practical for everyday usage, since they are stale and haven’t changed with the times. As a result, the narrator finds himself isolated, both from other people and the happiness that comes from listening to the new forms their words may provide. It is not until he discovers the daffodils, and the common language they represent, that the narrator’s “[heart fills with pleasure“ (23). According to Frederick Pottle, these “daffodils stand for men in society…and for humanity (par. 11-12). They also stand for the kind of vivid, everyday kind of loose talk that everyone is able to understand and use to communicate with one another other. They are simple, joyous, and “flutter and dance in the breeze” (Wordsworth 5)
Research Used to Establish Thesis Terms
In his Introduction to Reading Kafka: Prague, Politics, and the Fin de Siecle, , Mark Anderson writes: “Kafkaa has been read to an overwhelming extent in isolation from the material context in which he lived and wrote. Most readers know that Kafka wrote in German, but few could say his how German relates to High German; few know much about Prague itself, and while most know that Kafka was Jewish, few are familiar with the complex issues that formed his perceptions of Judaism” (4). Unfortunately for these readers, ignoring the “material context” in which Kafka lived and wrote limits interpretation, because it disregards the influence of his life circumstances on his work. Kafka grew up in Prague in the late 19th century in a period of constant conflict between Czechs, Germans and Jews, both Western and Eastern European. As a result of this turmoil, Kafka, a German Jew, experience ambivalence about his own cultural position: sometimes wanted to assimilate into the German high culture of Prague, and other times looking to identify with a Yiddish-speaking Jewish culture that was stigmatized as different, but lively and creative to its core.
Kafka’s ambivalence is evident in his fiction: specifically, images of food, eating, and obesity in his writing are reflections of or marks of culture, tradition, and language. Some kinds of food and eating, particularly fatness, represent an attraction to, and identification with, a high culture that is powerful and stifling. Other forms of food and modes and bodily styles stand for a competing desire to identify with low culture, common folk traditions, and what were considered unacceptable by the mainstream high cultures of his period. Still other kinds of food and forms of nourishment, especially music and sounds are, like Kafka himself, ambivalent combinations of the classical and the Yiddish-based forms of expression that Kafka knew. In exploring Kafka’s novel Amerka, and his short stories “The Metamorphosis,” “A Country Doctor,” and “Jackals and Arabs,” I will argue that his writing moves from a discovery of the meaning of low culture through food, a period of ambivalence about its redemptive meaning for his German writing, to a deeper acceptance of “dirt” (Baioni 28) and illicit food that signifies an acceptance of low culture as an open, creative, and critical voice in high culture.