HARDY FORUM ARCHIVE H32/98  4/27/98  "KEEN SEMINAR" FFMC QUESTION  
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From: keens@wlu.edu
keens.users.academic.wlu@madison.acad.wlu.edu
To: HARDY-L@coyote.csusm.edu
Date:          Mon, 27 Apr 1998 15:35:09 +0000
Subject:       discussion question

_Far From the Madding Crowd_ question

This week's discussion question draws upon a paradigm proposed by Elaine 
Scarry, in her article, "Work and the Body in Hardy and Other 
Nineteenth-Century Novelists," _Representations_ 3 (1983) 90-123.

Scarry writes, "Hardy's world is made up of women and men in intense 
interaction with the realm of animate and inaminate objects" (93). These 
interactions mark the world: "the material record of the interaction 
between man and world often survives the interaction itself" (92). 
Scarry is particularly interested in the material record of work, made 
on the bodies of characters, but we can try out her four-tier paradigm 
of signs without limiting our focus to work.  

To paraphrase Scarry's four-tier paragdigm:

1. material signs that accompany the ongoing activity

2. signs that outlive the activity that produced them

3. absent signs (no mark is left; sometimes character feels compelled to 
fill in, as when Tess writes the letter to Angel)

4. erased, falsified, or substituted signs

If the word "signs" seems too abstract to you, think of "marks" instead.  
The "marks" could be made on human bodies, land, houses, tools and other 
objects, animals, writing surfaces, etc.

(I propose that we begin with _Far From the Madding Crowd_, but 
encourage suggestions from the poetry and from _Tess_.)

Let the game begin!


Suzanne Keen
Associate Professor
Dept. of English
Washington and Lee University
Lexington, VA 24450

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