Georgia Southern University guidelines direct students to spend at least twice as much time doing homework for a class as they spend in the class itself.
In other words: if your class session is 100 minutes long, you should devote three hours and ten minutes to homework. Professors report that one of the biggest problems in World Literature 2 courses is students' failure to read the mandated texts. These
"Write Now" exercises are a smart way to deal with the challenge. As you're completing this assignment, bear in mind that our lectures and examinations take the exercises as their starting point.
At the top of the page, write your first and last names; your Eagle ID number; and the phrase
Failure to follow the following directions may result in a grade of zero for the exercise. • Use single spacing. • Number each answer according to the system below (Question 1, Question 2, etc.). • Use 1" margins top, bottom, right, and left. • Use either
Cambria or Times New Roman size 11 font. • If you use more than one sheet of paper, staple all your sheets together. • There's no need to include the questions, but you can if you wish. • I can't deal with your printer problems; get the homework printed and ready to hand in before the 8:00 AM deadline. •
NO hand‐written homework exercises. • Answer using properly formed, complete sentences.
Born in Sacramento, California, in 1934, Joan Didion is sometimes called the voice of 1960s America.
We're reading a series of short essays collected in her
1968 book Slouching towards Bethlehem , which takes its title from a line in the poem "The Second Coming" by the Irish Nobel laureate William Butler Yeats. (In fact, most of the works first appeared in the Saturday
Evening Post , a popular magazine.) In his 1968 New
York Times review, Dan Wakefield called Slouching towards Bethlehem "a rich display of some of the best prose written today in this country." The assigned
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texts are meditations on seven locales: Sacramento
(pages 131‐141); Hawaii (142‐153); Alcatraz (154‐
156); Newport, Rhode Island (157‐159); Guaymas,
Mexico (160‐161); Los Angeles (162‐167); and New
York City (168‐177). Each piece mixes the genre sometimes called literature of place with autobiography and sociopolitical commentary.
Wakefield notes that Didion "writes about the contemporary world—quite often the Western
United States where she grew up and where she has returned after the writer's almost obligatory boot‐ camp training in New York City—and though her own personality does not self‐indulgently intrude itself on her subjects, it informs and illuminates them." When awarding her its 2007 Medal for
Distinguished Contributions to American Letters, the
National Book Foundation praised Didion's
"distinctive blend of spare, elegant prose and fierce intelligence." To make your work more straightforward, the question portions of your homework exercise are presented in blue font below.
Terms in bold font are in my sights for your final exam!
Question 1
Focal text: "Notes from a Native Daughter" • Dated
1965, this essay concerns Didion's natal Sacramento, the State Capital of California. The city lies at the confluence of the Sacramento and American Rivers in the Sacramento Valley, the northern portion of the huge, fertile region called the Central Valley. (The southern portion is the San Joaquin Valley.) The essay assesses changes in the Sacramento Valley between the end of World War II and the 1960s—a time of economic expansion in much of America. However, it also contemplates the abstract idea of California, a place that enjoys special status in the American imagination as the final frontier, the apex of Manifest
Destiny , and the Golden State . The narrator highlights the ancient Greek word that California uses as its motto. What's the word; and what's its meaning?
Often, California is associated with optimism and a sense of promise. With what
"conviction" was the narrator's childhood "suffused" or filled (page 131)?
As her choice of the verb suffused demonstrates, Didion has and uses a superior vocabulary. Consulting and citing a reliable source, such as the Oxford English Dictionary , explain the meaning of the highlighted words in the following phrases (in each case, points are available only when you ensure that the definition accords with the context): the real California is a "destination [that] flickers chimerically on the horizon, ever receding"
(page 131); "California is a place in which a boom
mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension" (page 131); "the tule fog began rising off the low [Sacramento Valley] ground at night" (page 133). To what federal government agency (founded in 1934) does the acronym FHA refer? It's invoked on page 134: "EXECUTIVE LIVING
ON LOW FHA!"
Question 2
Focal text: "Notes from a Native Daughter" •
According to the narrator, Sacramento in the late
1840s was an "adobe enclosure" called Sutter's Fort amid a high‐grass prairie. What happened during
"Phase Two" (page 132) of Sacramento's history?
Characterize developments in the region between
Phase Two and 1950 or thereabouts. The latter date saw "the real world"—particularly the aerospace industry —"mov[e] in, fast and hard" (page 132), reshaping Sacramento and its environs yet again.
That radical change doesn't constitute the narrator's first memories; instead, she recalls a rural upbringing animated by rivers and their floods, the State Fair, and fields of hops, cotton, tomatoes, and Rainbird‐ brand sprinklers. What were Sacramento Valley children told about parallels between their home and the Biblical Holy Land (page 133)? To which part of
America were Valley "girls" sent if they didn't manage to get into the University of Arizona, the
University of Oregon, or the all‐female Stephens
College in Columbia, Missouri (page 133)?
Question 3
Focal text: "Notes from a Native Daughter" • In what respect does "the California we are talking about" resemble the Biblical Garden of Eden (page 134)?
Consult and cite a reliable source (such as
Encyclopedia Britannica) to explain the narrator's reference to "the Donner‐Reed Party" (page 134).
Be sure to use your own words.
Question 4
Focal text: "Notes from a Native Daughter" •
Beginning after the white space near the bottom of page 135, the narrator discusses the aerospace manufacturer called Aerojet‐General, which was founded in 1942 and, among other things, built the rockets for (a) such intercontinental ballistic missiles as Titan and Minuteman and (b) the Apollo project that put Americans on the moon. How many employees, "almost all of them imported" (page 135), work at Aerojet's Sacarmento Valley facility?
There, the "big vendors' lobby" amazes the narrator, who offers the description "very •••, very much •••" (page
136). Supply the missing three words.
In attempting to figure out what constitutes "the true California"
(page 136), the narrator draws a contrast between
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the ultra‐modern Aerojet plant and another, older way of life. Describe the latter in your own words and then say whether a similar gap exists in the case of present‐day Georgia. What place do Angelenos see as
"the Valley," and does the narrator agree with that convention?
Question 5
Focal text: "Notes from a Native Daughter" • In our country, certain roads have gained iconic stature. The
Chicago‐to‐LA Route 66, for example, is often called the Mother Road; and it's celebrated in the 1946 R&B standard "(Get Your Kicks on) Route 66." What US highway does the narrator highlight as "pass[ing] through the richest and most intensely cultivated agricultural region in the world" (page 138)? What kind of welcome do strangers receive inside area homes?
Republican‐Democratic tensions receive mention vis‐à‐vis the Union and Bee newspapers; such leading California politicians as the Progressive and Republican Hiram Johnson (the State's twenty‐ third Governor); and "the John Birch Society" or JBS
(page 139). Using and citing Encyclopedia Britannia or a similarly reliable source, explain the JBS's origins and views. As we've seen in other texts this semester
(for example, Trollope's "The O'Conors of Castle
Conor, Co. Mayo), land often excites political action.
What fate befell "the Whitney ranch" (page 139); and why does "a house trailer…stand alone on seven thousand acres outside town [i.e. Sacramento]" (page
141)?
Question 6
Focal text: "Letter from Paradise" • With some irony, the narrator posits Hawaii, which became a State in
1959, as a "fantasy" (page 143) locale where mainland Americans can remake themselves. The first paragraph mentions "Doris Duke and Henry
Kaiser." The woman, an heiress, chose Hawaii to construct (from 1937) a winter mansion called
Shangri La; the man, a shipbuilding magnate, spent many of his final years in Honolulu, where he influenced the city's design and development (such as the building of the Hawaiian Village Hotel. On page
143, the narrator identifies "three distinct Hawaiis": summarize the nature of each in your own words.
Your answer must extend to at least three full sentences. Always when reading Didion, one encounters lexical richness. Unfortunately, many students prefer to skip over unfamiliar words than to look up their meanings. Being sure to cite a reliable source, such as the Oxford English Dictionary , provide definitions for the following four highlighted terms, found in "Letter from Paradise" : "a recalcitrant thirty‐one‐year‐old child" (page 142); "the
calabashes" (page 144); "Christ on the cross with the stigmata in red" (page 147); "from Honolulu but a little arriviste " (page 153).
Question 7
Focal text: "Letter from Paradise" • According to the narrator, one "aura" or "mood" is "inescapably" present in Hawaii (page 144). Identify it.
Also of concern is middle‐class tourism, facilitated by
"hundred‐dollar thrift flights" (page 144). Many tourists visit Pearl Harbor in "bright pink tour boats"
(page 145). What's the connection between such excursions and "cheeks stuffed with money" (page
141)? How does the Navy view the wrecked vessel
Arizona at the time Didion is writing "Letter from
Paradise" (i.e. 1966)? 1,177 members of that ship's crew were killed during the Japanese bombing of
Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, which included four direct hits. The USS Arizona memorial was dedicated in 1961, but the narrator finds another
Hawaiian site to be "quieter still than the Arizona "
(page 146). What's that site, and who is Samuel
Foster Harmon?
Question 8
Focal text: "Letter from Paradise" • Having read pages
146 to 148, identify three observations by the narrator concerning America's war in Vietnam. In addition, suggest (in one or two full sentences) what the narrator feels about that conflict, then at around the midpoint of its twenty‐year span.
On page 149, the narrator identifies three enterprises as central to the Hawaiian economy. First among them is the military, and second is tourism. What's the third; and how do the "Big Five families" (page 149) fit into that industry? The text acknowledges changes in Hawaii, such as the 1962 election of Daniel Inouye as a United
States Senator (page 150). Inouye is a Nisei or
American‐born offspring of Japanese parents; and he still represents the Aloha State as a Senator in
Washington, DC. Another important character invoked on page 150 is "Jack Hall, the tough ILWU leader." Cite a reliable source to explain what the initials ILWU stand for; also, please summarize what
Jack Wayne Hall did in Hawaii. The University of
Hawaii maintains a website devoted to Hall's achievements, which you're welcome to use as your outside source. The address is http://www.hawaii.edu/uhwo/clear/JackHall/JackH all.html
As you can see from "Letter from Paradise," Joan
Didion thoroughly researched her topic. Page 151 examines the increasing access to education, wealth, and power among Hawaiians of Asian origin—
Chinese, Japanese, and so on. As well as sharing an
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image of "small Chinese boys [in Honolulu] with their
[school] books in Pan American [Airlines] flight bags," page 151 mentions Chinn Ho , upon whose death in 1987 the New York Times remarked, "His story was studded with symbols of the successful climb of immigrant peoples….His grandfather, who arrived in Honolulu from China in 1875, planted rice in the swamp then behind Waikiki Beach. In 1974, the investment company headed by Mr. Ho sold its
Ilikai Hotel at Waikiki for $35 million, a profit of
$11.4 million over 1959 development costs....After
World War II, Mr. Ho became the patron of Daniel K.
Inouye, a young Japanese‐American soldier who lost an arm in military action in Italy [before becoming a
US Senator]....Almost half of Hawaii's 1 million people are descended from Chinese and Japanese who came to the islands as agricultural laborers on plantations owned by Caucasians who gained title to the land from the Polynesian monarchs that had ruled until the 1890s." According to the narrator, the Punahou
School (a private establishment in Honolulu) had a
10% "Oriental" enrollment in 1944; what's the percentage in 1966? Race remained a touchy issue in the Hawaii Didion explored. How does "one Honolulu woman" develop her statement, "I wouldn't exactly say we had discrimination here" (page 152)? How does another compare "Orientals" to Jewish
Americans and African Americans (page 152)?
Question 9
Focal text: "Rock of Ages" • Alcatraz (aka "The Rock") is an island in San Francisco Bay that the federal government used as a prison for 29 years, beginning in 1933. How many people—and how many dogs— live on Alcatraz in 1967, according to the narrator
(page 154)?
Describe the fresh water supply on
Alcatraz (page 155).
The narrator invokes Al Capone of the Chicago Outfit, arguably the prison's most famous inmate; but she also mentions "Snail Mitchel"
(page 156). How did Mitchel obtain his nickname?
What causes the narrator to conclude, "I liked it out there" (page 156)?
Question 10
Focal text: "The Seacoast of Despair" • This essay interrogates the legacy of Gilded Age building in
Newport, Rhode Island. One of the most famous
Newport summer "cottages" is "The Breakers" (seen below in a 1968 photo), whose construction the railroad heir Cornelius Vanderbilt II commissioned in
1893.
Among several literary depictions of upper‐class life
in Newport is resident Edith Warton's The Age of
Innocence (1920). In her autobiography A Backward
Glance (1934), Warton recalls, "The regular afternoon diversion at Newport was a drive. Every day all the elderly ladies…drove down the whole length of Bellevue Avenue, where the most fashionable villas then stood." In our assigned essay—"The Seacoast of Desire"—Didion's narrator describes the mansions on Bellevue Avenue as
"products of the metastasis of capital, the Industrial
Revolution carried to its logical extreme" (page 157).
Use and cite a reliable source (such as the Oxford
English Dictionary ) to explain the meaning of the phrase "the metastasis of capital." While you have a good dictionary to hand, supply in addition definitions of the following three highlighted words:
"topiary gardening" (page 158); "sybaritic air" (page
158); "made a neurasthenic of Edith Warton" (page
159). What does the narrator characterize as "a consumption ethic" (page 157)?
While the narrator sees William Randolph Hearst's California mansion
(on a property called La Cuesta Encantada
["Enchanted Hill"]) as "a deeply romantic place"
(page 158), she judges the Newport mansions negatively. What do they convey instead of "a sense of how prettily money can be spent" (page 158)?
Question 11
Focal text: "The Seacoast of Despair" • In your own words, explain the factors that cause the narrator to deem Newport more like the frontier West of the
United States than the settled East—"closer in spirit…to Denver than to Boston" (page 158). What aspects of the design and functioning of the Newport houses precipitate the narrator's conclusion that
"[t]he very houses are men's houses" (page 159)?
By the way, Brook Farm, mentioned on page 159, was an experimental cooperative farm that operated in
Massachusetts during much of the 1840s.
Question 12
Focal text: "Guaymas, Sonora" • While present‐day
Mexico is all too often associated with drug violence, the country's profile was more benign in 1965, when
Didion wrote this short mood piece about a drive she and her husband (the novelist, screenwriter, and journalist John Gregory Dunne ) took to the port
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settlement of Guaymas in the State of Sonora. The town's traditional shrimp enterprises were joined in
1961 by a pier for PEMEX , Mexico's national oil company, and the Guaymas Tracking Station, which
NASA used in its manned‐space‐flight program until
1970. Didion's prose often alludes to important literary and cultural touchstones. The narrator invokes the 1964 movie Circus World (page 161), in which a character played by John Wayne must reconstruct his circus after most of it perishes en route to Europe by sea. In a way the narrator's
Mexican sojourn is an attempt to reconstruct the self compromised by day‐to‐day living in fast‐paced
California. She describes the desert that leads to
Guaymas as "the valley of the shadow of death," a direct quotation from the King James Bible version of the twenty‐third psalm. She also asserts that "you feel like Alcestis" having "come back from the desert"
(page 160). Using and citing a quality source (such as
Encyclopedia Britannica ), explain why returning after a spell in a desert might be compared to the Classical
Greek tale of the princess called Alcestis. The narrator insists that "to fly [to Guaymas] is to miss the point" (page 160). What is the point? Her reference to the author Graham Greene (page 160) needs fleshing out: an Englishman, Greene became a major force in travel writing. His 1939 account of journeying in Mexico The Lawless Roads led to his novel The Power and the Glory (1940), which you should make time to read sooner rather than later!
Question 14
Focal text: "Los Angeles Notebook" • This homage to
Los Angeles begins by refuting the Easterner's common observation that "there is no 'weather' at all in Southern California" (page 163). What weather phenomenon does the narrator address, comparing it to the foehn , hamsin , mistral , and sirocco ? Identify three major effects of this climatological happening, which, in the opinion of detective‐fiction writer
Raymond Chandler, causes "every booze party [to end] in a fight" (page 162). In the final paragraph of
Section 1 of the essay, what qualities of "life in Los
Angeles" (page 164) does the narrator highlight?
Question 15
Focal text: "Los Angeles Notebook" • Much of Section 2 of the essay concerns Sex and the Office , a book released by Helen Gurley Brown in 1965, the year she became editor of Cosmopolitan magazine. The text was a follow‐up to Brown's Sex and the Single Girl
(1962), which would later inspire the HBO television series Sex and the City . Our narrator also mentions
Hugh Hefner (page 165), who founded Playboy magazine in 1953. Clearly, Didion is engaging with
the sexual revolution. What messages do you think she wants to send by combing the discussion of
Brown and Hefner with a discourse on snakes— specifically, "whether or not a rattlesnake can swim"
(page 165)?
You don’t have to provide an answer in this homework, but be sure to understand the meaning of the following four words (found on page
165): "truculent"; "leitmotiv"; "insomniac";
" provocateur ."
Question 16
Focal text: "Los Angeles Notebook" • The American way of life preoccupies Sections 3, 4, and 5 of "Los
Angeles Notebook." In Section 3, who pointedly exclaims " What a thing to wear to Ralph's " (page
166); and what is the " thing " in question? In no fewer than two carefully thought‐out sentences, offer your opinion as to why, in Section 4, the narrator addresses homosexuality in the way she does.
Section
5 uses the noun "Putrescence" and the related adjective "putrescent" (page 167); what greater point is being made here, do you think?
Write at least one detailed sentence when responding.
Question 17
Focal text: "Goodbye to All That" • Unsurprisingly, there exist several extraordinary literary explorations of New York City. Consider, for example, E.B. White's "Here is New York," an essay written in 1949 that contains the observation, "The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions. The intimation of mortality is part of
New York now; in the sounds of jets overhead, in the black headlines of the latest editions." While short,
Didion's "Goodbye to All That" is powerful—a negotiation between her personal experiences of
"be[ing] young in New York" over eight years and media images and notions of the city ("all the movies…all the songs…all the stories…about New
York") (pages 168‐169). What mistake does the narrator make as regards identifying bridges (page
169), and what's the significance of that muddle? The narrator acknowledges the conventional wisdom that
New York is for "the very rich and the very poor"
(page 169). What third group does she add to the list?
Question 18
Focal text: "Goodbye to All That" • On page 170, what does the narrator wish to convey by sharing (a) her peach‐eating episode and (b) her "Bloomingdale's gourmet shop" experiences? Why, as a relative stranger in New York, was the narrator "most
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comfortable in the company of Southerners" (page
171)? For the narrator and others like her, in what ways was "New York…no mere city" (page 172)?
The essay contains a measure of nostalgia for New York.
In addition to Fleurs de Rocaille (launched in 1934 by the French company Caron), what other perfume reminds the narrator of her years in New York City
(page 173)?
The answer to this question is an important element in a short story we'll read near the end of the semester! Identify three matters that caused the narrator to realize that New York wasn't going to work for her in the long term.
Question 19
Focal text: "Goodbye to All That" • Another dictionary exercise! Citing the source of your data, give definitions for the words highlighted in the following phrases (as always, make sure your explanations fit the context in which the words appear): " engagé only about our most private lives" (page 173); "the lambent air" (page 174); "some Veblenesque gorge would rise up in my throat" (page 176). Hint:
Veblenesque refers to the Wisconsin native Thorstein
Veblen, especially his 1899 book The Theory of the
Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions .