In preparation for class tomorrow, feel free to address any one of the questions below on the Sterne excerpts. Be sure to specify which question you are answering, and use quotes from the text as necessary to illustrate and support your claims. You can also disagree--kindly and collegially, please--with a classmate's response, so long as you offer evidence for your alternate view.
1. Based on the information available to you, what is "True Shandeism"? Offer a speculative response to the question.
2. The "Obadiah and the Cow" excerpt (Vol. IX.xxxiii) begins with three paragraphs in which Sir Walter Shandy starts to expound a new idea he has. What is the argument he is making?
3. In "Obadiah and the Cow," what is Obadiah's complaint?
4. At the core of the "Uncle Toby and the Fly" excerpt is an episode that the narrator recollects, when Toby shooed a fly out the window rather than squash it. This memory is sandwiched inside the depiction if a mild conflict between Uncle Toby and Sir Walter Shandy (the narrator's brother). How does the narrator/Shandy/Sterne use this conflict to convey the characters of these two brothers? Choose one or two key features that emerge.
5. Northrop Frye has told us that Sterne exemplifies "the literature of process" to perfection. How do you see that being the case in these excerpts? Pick a sentence or two to illustrate your reflections.
Deadline: Monday (2/9), 10am.
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I'm actually reading Tristram Shandy in my English 300 class, so forgive me if the scope of this reply is more than what the in-class readings were.
Through a great deal of the book Tristram seems to equate authorship and procreation. The difficulties of his birth and the way he protracts it over so many chapters seem to almost conflate the two. Tristram also suffers a few accidents that Walter worries will inhibit the creation of heirs, which is parallel to his inability to advance the plot of his book.
In the discussed text, it looks like Walter is bemoaning the fact that real procreation requires such debasing and unseemly behavior. He is making the point that it makes well read men such as himself no better than fools, and like all his other points, cites ancient philosophers for proof. He contrasts this with the way war, the antithesis of procreation, is glamorized with fancy weapons.
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