You'll notice that this week, all our readings come from authors and poets who are still alive.

Nadine Gordimer (b. 1923)
p. 2573: "The Moment before the Gun Went Off" (1991)

1. This story is set in South Africa in the waning days of the Apartheid regime. Using the footnotes, see if you can figure out what is meant by the following terms, and why these are important for the final paragraph of the story:
--Afrikaner; Immorality Act; black boy
2.Virginia Woolf argues that each of us has a blindspot that we can never see for ourselves but an author, writing from a special perspective, can see and point out to us. As you get to the end of this narrative, do you discover a blindspot that Gordimer has pointed out to you? Do you think that Marais Van der Vyver and his father before him had blindspots that they later discovered?

J. M. Coetzee (b. 1940)
Waiting for the Barbarians (1980)

Here we are given a short extract from a novel which is actually nearly 200 pages in length. I strongly recommend that you read the full-length novel.

1. Where and when do you think this novel is set? On what grounds do you base this assumption?
2. How would you describe the political affiliations of the magistrate as it emerges in this extract? Would you, for instance, describe him as a radical activist, a political conservative, a bleeding-heart liberal and so forth?
3. Look carefully at Coetzee's prose style. He is a great admirer of T. S. Eliot's poetry. Do you find any connection between the two?

Eavan Boland (b. 1944)

Before reading Boland's poems, go back to Yeats, and read both "Easter 1916" and "The Second Coming." Do you notice the authoritative tone he uses when he writes lines such as "I write it out in verse" and "All changed, changed utterly:/A terrible beauty is born" or "I know/That twenty centuries of stony sleep/Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle..."

Next read "The Doll's Museum in Dublin" (1994)
1. Boland begins by describing the dolls, damaged, and rather pathetic. Then she orders us to "Recall the Quadrille." As we do so, we conjure up visions of the past. What does she invite us to imagine? What sort of world? Where did the dolls fit in here?

2. In the fifth stanza, we move to church. If this is "Easter in Dublin" what do all these details mean? The linen, lilies, candles etc. If the celebration is Christ's resurrection from the dead, who or what else is rising from "the dead"? Does this resonate with "The Dead" of James Joyce's short story--remember the last line of that narrative.

3. Look at the way sunlight, shadow and twilight are used in stanzas 3, 6, 7, and 8. What does this description of light suggest?

Turn now to "That the Science of Cartography is Limited"
1. What is wonderful about maps and the art of mapping? How are they useful, and when do we turn to maps?
2. What does Boland's map leave out that poetry must say?
3. How might poetry be more effective than history at describing what has been left out of a map?

Paul Muldoon (b. 1951)
"Milkweed and Monarch" (1994)
1. Work through this poem making a list of pairs joined by "and" and pairs joined by "or". Would you say that the poet and the woman he remembers fit into an "and" pairing or an "or" pairing? Was their association perhaps random and meaningless, or was it perhaps mutually defining as in "Milkwood and Monarch 'invented' each other."
2. Taking your pencil, make a link in the margin of the poem joining all lines that repeat each other. For instance, look at "As he knelt by the grave..." and "he could barely tell..." What effect do these repetitions have? Do you find them reassuring? Unsettling? Playful?
3. If Yeats writes from a clear bardic or seer's position of "I," and Boland, avoiding that position, writes more evocatively, conjuring up the past, where does Muldoon fit in? Does one get a clear sense of him as a voice, as one does with Wordsworth or Shelley or Keats?