ELECTIVE C

REPRESENTATION AND TEXT

The Lowell Factor

Elective C – Representation and Text

Elective C Rubric

This elective requires students to explore representations of events, personalities or situations. They evaluate how medium of production, textual form, perspective and choice of language influence meaning.

The study develops students’ understanding of the relationships between representation and meaning.

  This elective requires students to study four prescribed poems

offering a representation(s) of an event, personality or situation.

Students develop a range of imaginative, interpretive and analytical compositions that relate to different forms and media of representation. These compositions may be realised in a variety of forms and media.

 

Elective C – Representation and TextElective C Assessment Task

The assessment for this elective has the following % weightings:

~ Reading 5%

~ Writing 5%

~ Viewing/Representing 10%

The assessment is a hand-in task due for submission in Week 10. It will require students to write a 1000 word feature article that explores the representation of a significant theme in Robert Lowell’s poetry.

Students will be required to provide an original visual representation of their own as the key image in the feature article.

Elective C – Representation and Text

Feature ArticlesShould have: a relevant headline; lead paragraph by-line appropriate image can be written in columns

They are informative and can be entertaining...they SHOULD NOT be an essay.

Elective C Representation and Text

The Lowell Factor

Elective C – Representation and Text

Robert Lowell was born 1st March 1917 in Boston, the son of Robert Traill Spence Lowell and Charlotte (Winslow) Lowell.

Lowell descended from a distinguished New England family that included significant literary figures.

His turbulent childhood, dominated by tension between his parents, left deep emotional scars.

Broke from his family due to his parents rejecting the women he wanted to marry.

Served five months gaol in 1943 for being a conscientious objector and refusing the draft

Elective C – Representation and Text

Some of Lowell’s works included: Land of Unlikeness (1944) Lowell used Christian symbols to juxtapose

the world of grace to urban life. Lord Weary’s Castle (1946) won the Pulitzer Prize and saw Lowell

return to the New England milieu. Life Studies (1959) won the National Book Award in 1960 and saw a

major turning point in Lowell’s writing style. This anthology contained three of the poems set for study: ‘Walking in the Blue’, ‘Commander Lowell’ and ‘Skunk Hour’.

For the Union Dead (1964) best know for the title poem.

Lowell, who suffered bipolar disorder, was hospitialised for mania in 1949 and treated with electroshock therapy.

Lowell died of heart failure in a taxi on September 12th, 1977

Elective C – Representation and Text

Robert LowellA foremost contributor to the

development of confessional poetry, Robert Lowell is widely regarded as one of the most gifted and influential American poets of the post-war period. While his early verse is distinguished for its complex formalism and technical perfection, during the 1960s Lowell emerged as a leading innovator of the confessional mode. This highly-charged, self-revelatory style of writing, heralded by his collection Life Studies featured a new emphasis on intense, uninhibited discussion on personal, family, and psychological struggles.

Elective C – Representation and Text

Confessional PoetryConfessional poetry is the poetry of the personal or “I”. This

style of writing emerged in the late 1950s and early 1960s and is associated with poets such as Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath. Lowell’s book Life Studies was a highly personal account of his life and family ties, and had a significant impact on American poetry. Plath was a student of Lowell and noted his work influenced her own writing.

The confessional poetry of the mid-twentieth century dealt with subject matter that previously had not been openly discussed in American poetry. Private experiences with and feelings about death, trauma, depression and relationships were addressed in this type of poetry, often in an autobiographical manner.

Elective C – Representation and Text

The confessional poets were not merely recording their emotions on paper; craft and construction were extremely important to their work. While their treatment of the poetic self may have been groundbreaking and shocking to some readers, these poets maintained a high level of craftsmanship through their careful attention to the use of prosody (the rhythm, stress and intonation of speech).

The confessional poets of the 1950s and 1960s pioneered a type of writing that forever changed the landscape of

American poetry. The tradition of confessional poetry has been a major influence on generations of writers and continues to this day.

Elective C – Representation and Text

Poems Set for StudyThe four poems set for study contain elements of the

‘confessional mode’ of writing poetry. Walking in the Blue

autobiographic account of Lowell’s time in a mental institution Significant themes:

wrestling with insanity and potential suicide; and His critique of New England’s aristocracy

Commander Lowell Lowell’s acidic character study of his weak-willed, unworldly father Significant themes:

Family history and dysfunction

Elective C – Representation and Text Skunk Hour

Articulates a ground of values that make it possible to endure, if not to overcome, the anxieties of contemporary life and the loss of traditional values.

Significant themes: Humankind’s inability to live within its own history; addresses the human race as "aliens" in the own world; and   It also deals with how our own personal histories blend with the historical

context of our world.

For the Union Dead Reflects on the context of the individual experience of loss Significant themes:

Idealism and Despair Public vs Private Life Devolution of Humankind