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[Assistant] This creates air friction. The sound comes from the air friction and should be pretty loud.


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[Assistant] Keep your tongue flat and maintain an even steady flow of air. Now I'm not just saying stick it out a little bit, I'm saying stick it way out, at least while you're practicing to get used to the feeling. The TH sound comes from the air and the friction. You have got to hear it and it should be somewhat loud.


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[Assistant] If you're like most people, you may need to work on this a little bit. But trust me, I know you can do it. Hundreds of my clients who have never produced a TH sound in their lives are speaking English clearly and beautifully because they've learned how to do this. It may help if you look in a mirror and watch your mouth and your tongue. See if you can maintain the airflow for three seconds.


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[Assistant] I know this may feel very strange and uncomfortable to do possibly, but soon you'll get used to it and this small change in your speech is going to really improve how your English sounds.


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[Assistant] Now the TH sound is a friction sound and it's not as loud as other speech sounds. Therefore, American speakers stretch them out a little bit. We don't even realize we do this. But this makes the sound come out clearer. Let me show you what I mean. Let's look again at the word thump.


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[Assistant] For practicing purposes, think of the word in two beats. One, two.


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[Assistant] Thumb, like that. You see that? Notice how long I'm holding the TH sound.


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[Assistant] It's not good enough just to put your tongue between your teeth and say a th word like this.


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[Assistant] Thumb. You see that? My tongue came out, but there was never any air friction. That's not good. You must stretch out the TH sound and hear the air friction. Thumb, like that.


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[Assistant] Let's practice some words with th sounds first at the beginning of words. Here we go. Thanks. Thick. Thunder. Thursday. Think. Now in the middle of words.


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[Assistant] Athletic. Mouthwash. Now with the ends of words. Bath. North. Beneath. Forth. South. Very good.


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[Assistant] Okay, now let's talk about voiced TH sounds. To make a voiced TH sound, all you have to do is take the TH sound that I just showed you and just add voicing. That's the voiced TH. You should be able to feel a strong vibration in your throat and on your tongue.


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[Assistant] Let's go over some of these voiced TH sounds. This first set of words are some of the most commonly used words in English, and yes, they should all be voiced and all made with your tongue coming through your teeth. First, at the beginning of words. The, like the book.


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[Assistant] That, that house.


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[Assistant] They, they came over.


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[Assistant] Them. Give them water.


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[Assistant] There. There it is.


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[Assistant] This. This is my nose.


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[Assistant] Those, those boys are good.


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[Assistant] These, these are my parents.


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[Assistant] You know, another good way to practice these words is by going around your room and naming everything you see using a th word. For example, the chair, that window, those books, this door, like that. Then go around and name your body parts and some clothing.


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[Assistant] That shoe, this watch, these feet, okay, that may be helpful.


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[Assistant] Let's look at these voiced TH sounds in the middle of words.


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[Assistant] Leather. Same thing, stick out your tongue and make a strong vibration. Leather. Mother.


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[Assistant] Another. Weather. Northern. And now at the ends of words.


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[Assistant] Smooth. Believe it or not, the th sound in smooth is voiced. Most foreign speakers say this word incorrectly. They say smooth with an unvoiced th, but it's voiced. Smooth.


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[Assistant] Bathe. The word bath is a noun with an unvoiced th. Bath.


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[Assistant] But when you change it into a verb, to bathe, the vowel changes to an a sound and the th is voiced. Bathe, like in bathing suit.


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[Assistant] Breathe. Same thing. Breath is a noun. Take a breath unvoiced, but when you change it into a verb, the vowel changes and it becomes breathe. I am breathing with a voiced th.


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[Assistant] Now let's do some practice phrases. These all have voiced and unvoiced th sounds. Repeat after me.


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[Assistant] This and that. A tablecloth. Winter clothing. Athens, Greece. That's the one.


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[Assistant] Her skin is smooth. 30 days notice. A famous author.


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[Assistant] Here and there. False teeth.


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[Assistant] Thread the needle. A thoughtful gift.


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[Assistant] Thunder and lightning. Thumbs up. Repeat these sentences. Thelma arrived in town last Thursday. I'm having trouble threading this needle.


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[Assistant] I need 33 thick thermometers.


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[Assistant] The thing they like best about Athens is the weather.


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[Assistant] This thrilling novel was written by a famous author.


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[Assistant] He will be through with his work at 3.30.


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[Assistant] Now and then, she likes to buy new clothing.


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[Assistant] They thought they were going to northern Spain.


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[Assistant] Which tablecloth shall we use for the party?


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[Assistant] That was the 33rd theater to open.


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[Assistant] Now, I'd like to talk about THR blends, which is a combination of a TH sound and an R sound, like in the word thrill or throw.


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[Assistant] When producing these blends, I want you to be aware that the R is the strongest sound of the blend and is louder than the TH. Just like what we talked about in the first session. So when you see a word which begins with THR, first make the TH sound and then strongly push out the R. Let's practice a few of these. Thread. Thread the needle.


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[Assistant] Throw, throw the ball.


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[Assistant] Throat. My throat is sore.


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[Assistant] Thrill. A thrilling ride.


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[Assistant] Three. Three more days.


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[Assistant] Threw. Yesterday he threw the ball.


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[Assistant] Throne. The king sits on a throne.


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[Assistant] Okay, now let's go over this reading paragraph. It has many th sounds and it might be difficult, but it is a very good paragraph to practice on. You may want to watch me do this a number of times. Keep your eyes on my mouth and notice how often my tongue comes out. Try to do the same thing. Here we go.


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[Assistant] Nurse Thatcher was thankful it was Thursday. She knew that on Thursday she had to deliver 33 boxes of thermometers to the North American Athletic Club.


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[Assistant] They thought that thermometers were necessary for testing the hydrotherapy baths.


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[Assistant] This was thought to benefit the athletes with arthritis.


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[Assistant] The athletic trainers required authorization to provide hydrotherapy to the youthful athletes on the three bulletin boards with thumbtacks throughout the athletic club.


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[Assistant] Rather than risk the health of the athletes, they thoroughly checked the thousands of thermometers to ensure their worthiness.


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[Assistant] Otherwise, they needed to be thrown away.


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[Assistant] Very good. I hope that wasn't too bad. As I said, that is an excellent paragraph to practice on. You should review it a few times if you can.


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[Assistant] Okay now, as I've always said, English is a crazy language and there always seems to be exceptions.


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[Assistant] Here are a few TH exceptions that I'd like to point out. Although these next words and names are spelled with a TH, they are pronounced as if they were spelled with a normal T. Like that. And these words are Thomas, Thompson, Theresa, Thailand, Thames, like the river, Esther, and Time, which is a spice.


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[Assistant] Okay, now let's take a moment and talk about T sounds.


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[Assistant] The T sound is an unvoiced sound like in the name Tom or the word TV. If you add voicing to a T, what do you get?


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[Assistant] Duh. A D. Remember? We went over this in the first session.


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[Assistant] What I want to tell you is in American pronunciation we like to make things easy. So if a letter T


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[Assistant] So if it falls in the middle of vowels, then the T is pronounced as a D and the whole word is voiced.


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[Assistant] This is very easy and you may already be doing this correctly. Here are three examples. Water is pronounced as water. The T turns into a D and the whole word is voiced. Water. I want water. Better becomes better. She's feeling better.


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[Assistant] And butter becomes butter. Please pass the butter.


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[Assistant] This should be simple. So now that you know that, practice saying this poem with me. Remember all the T's are pronounced as D's because they fall between vowels.


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[Assistant] But, said she, this butter's bitter. If I put it in my batter, it'll make my batter bitter.


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[Assistant] Again, notice that you do not hear any T sound.


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[Assistant] There are only Ds, dd, dd, which are voiced. Go over this poem a few times. It's also printed in your manual. Once you get good at it, try speeding it up. I'll do it one more time for you, a little bit faster.


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[Assistant] Betty bought a bit of better butter. But said she, this butter's bitter. If I put it in my batter, it'll make my batter bitter.


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[Assistant] Well that was a mouthful. Okay, start by practicing it slow and then later get faster. Try to let the words just roll out of your mouth.


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[Assistant] That's it for today's session. Try spending some time in front of a mirror and practicing those TH sounds like thumb and throw.


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[Assistant] This small change will really improve your English and make you a lot more understandable. I'm Paul Gruber with the Pronunciation Workshop and I'll see you at our next session. Goodbye.


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[Assistant] Carl, what are you doing here? I asked you to come tomorrow. Carl, what are you doing here? I asked you to come tomorrow.


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[Assistant] So she's going to have the speech. Let's listen to the whole part first.


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[Assistant] Blah, blah, blah. I was thinking if two of us can have this nice blah, blah, blah. Yeah, what does she want? Yes, apology. Apology. Okay, listen again.


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[Assistant] I don't want to go back to that ugly place. That, that ugly, that ugly place.


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[Assistant] Talk to, eh, talk to someone who can help you with your issue, but don't hurt.


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[Assistant] I can walk down the street and hold my head high. Okay, you're the one who's being humiliated. Carl, why don't you sit? Okay.


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[Assistant] What she's gonna do. Let's find out next lesson. Love you. Muah.


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[Assistant] Alright, uh, the thing in Susan's hand is photo album. I don't know if you have a photo album, but I think newborn babies of this generation, they don't really have photo album.


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[Assistant] They, because they're mothers and fathers, they're using phones to take pictures, and then no need for them to take, to have a photo album, to print the, uh, the pictures, you know, photo album. Let's look at.


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[Assistant] Was it flattering? The picture wasn't flattering. If you say something or somebody is flattering, something somebody is good at making you happy, you know?


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[Assistant] Flattering. Uh, like Mike and Susan, they are together. Mike is very humorous. So Susan would say, hey, uh, you're flattering. No? Yes, you made me happy. The pictures, the picture wasn't flattering.


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[Assistant] I used to have the worst time with, my mother used to have the worst time with me in the car.


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[Assistant] Left somebody on the side of the road, or left somebody, uh, let somebody get out of the car, and drop somebody off. Drop off. Drop off. Drop Julie off. Listen again.


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[Assistant] So maybe when you drop Julie off tomorrow, we could have a moment, we could have a moment, we could have a moment to talk.


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[Assistant] It's a horrible experience, uhm, to watch your children die.


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[Assistant] We are going to be very, very, very ambitious here. We're going to take our light chicken stock that we've reduced and make a volute.


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[Assistant] We're going to turn that veloute into a sauce, supreme. We're going to take that sauce, supreme, and turn it into Alam- Alamon.


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[Assistant] And then we're going to take Salsa Prem and turn it into Albufera as well. But before we get to those parts, we need to.


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[Assistant] Make a roux or bourbonier. Uh, this is flour, all purpose flour.


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[Assistant] Uhm, which is going to act as our hydrocolloid. A hydrocolloid is anything that thickens water. Uhm, the most common one is flour. We've used arrowroot as well that thickens water.


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[Assistant] Uh, cornstarch, uh, kuzu, we've used in our matignon. So when you hear the word hydrocolloid, don't be afraid, because it's just something that makes water thick.


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[Assistant] So, we're going to make a classic roux, which is a bit different than a beurre manier, but they do the same thing, almost. In a classic roux, we're going to


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[Assistant] Mix our equal amounts of butter and flour together and then we're going to top it with our cartouche and bake it in the oven until it gets very dry.


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[Assistant] And the purpose of doing it, baking it in the oven to get it dry is it cooks.


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[Assistant] The flour, the more we bake it or the drier that it becomes, the more we cook it in the oven at a very even temperature, the less flour flavor that we're going to have. That's a very easy thing to do. We'll just take our butter.


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[Assistant] And just gently mix that until it's totally incorporated and smooth like a paste.


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[Assistant] We only use roux, we didn't use beurre manier in that period of time. We bake our roux in large rondeauxs in the oven for literally hours.


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[Assistant] We'd pull them out and the chef would always say, that's not dry enough. More, more, more. So we'd always have to bake them.


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[Assistant] And then that'll go right in the oven. It's a low oven because we want it to cook nice and slowly.


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[Assistant] But one that we are cooking in the sauce. So we don't have to precook it. It'll take a little longer for it to activate.


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[Assistant] It's not shelf stable, but you can keep in the refrigerator for some period of time.


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[Assistant] But you also have to cook it longer in your stock to make your sauce.


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[Assistant] We have our chicken stock here starting to get to temperature. We're going to add some of our beurre manier to it and continue whisking it until it totally incorporates. And we can.


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[Assistant] Be adjusting the degree of thickness that we want this blute to be.


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[Assistant] We're gonna be adding some other ingredients to it as we progress through our sauce making, which may thin it out or thicken it up.


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[Assistant] Where the butter acts as a vehicle for you to be able to get it into a liquid.


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[Assistant] You can see the viscosity is starting to change. Certainly the transparency is gone. More opaque.


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[Assistant] This is considered one of the original mother sauces in French cuisine. Being one of the bases of French cuisine.


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[Assistant] We want to let that cook. We want to remove as much flour flavor as possible. The difference between a beurre maignan and a roux.


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[Assistant] At the same time, there's some impurities in the flour. So we want to continue to offset our pot from our flame. So any of the impurities will be driven to the one side. We can skim off.


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[Assistant] And we can make a veloute out of a brown chicken stock as well. We can make a fish veloute.


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[Assistant] Stock with the addition of a roux or beurre manier to thicken it.


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[Assistant] If you think about blanquette de veau, which is a very famous veal dish, the cuisson or the cooking liquid from blanching the veal breast is then cleaned by reduction and skimming and then added


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[Assistant] Okay, just a wonderful texture. We're going to go ahead and bring in our first sauce, Suprem. And sauce Suprem is veloute with the addition of heavy cream. Escafe, who was the great chef at the turn of the 20th century,


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[Assistant] Are, are the sauces that he actually defined for us to give us all of the different preparations, not just sauces, but technique as well.


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[Assistant] Of course we're gonna season this with salt as we move on. Sometimes a little bit of lemon juice because we like the way that acid picks up the flavor of things.


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[Assistant] And you could add a little bit of creme fraiche if you like. Again, expanding.


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[Assistant] The pure definition of something is okay as long as you, as long as you understand the fundamental of it. So, where we understand that Suprem is made with cream,


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[Assistant] If we want to add creme fraiche, which is made from creme, but has that acid kick to it, as in sour creme, then it's okay. We can do that.


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[Assistant] For vegetables, this could be the base for


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[Assistant] A macaroni and cheese for example, if you wanted to use it for macaroni and cheese.


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[Assistant] Texture is very smooth and velvety. Very rich. Again, very luxurious in the way it feels.


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[Assistant] Okay, so there's a, a second sauce all made from our chicken stock. Chicken stock going to Volute, going to Sauce Suprême. Let's do an Allemand, which is also called a Sauce Parisienne. Another one of our sauces from Escafier.


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[Assistant] In the hot sauce immediately it would obviously it would cook and curdle or appear to curdle. By tempering it we can raise the temperature of the egg yolk and also reduce the temperature


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[Assistant] Remember, your egg yolk is going to also thicken your sauce.


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[Assistant] In much the same way that you make a creme anglaise, or a base for ice cream or custards.


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[Assistant] You can see the color of that sauce, how it changed with the addition of the yellow egg.


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[Assistant] This we want to be, be careful not to bring into a hard boil.


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[Assistant] Just heat it back up to sauce temperature.


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[Assistant] Our favorite flavor enhancer, salt. So you can see we have three really beautiful distinctively different sauces here.


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[Assistant] Finally, we're going to make a sauce, Albufera. This sauce was, was defined by Marie-Antoine Carême, who preceded, uh, Scauffier.


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[Assistant] As one of the greatest chefs in France. Uh, and he named this after, uhm,


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[Assistant] Our great friend Alan Dukas, a great French chef, uhm, does a famous dish in his restaurant with albufera and black truffles.


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[Assistant] This morning. Hey, empty the dishwasher so I can go in, okay?


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[Assistant] Do I better or not better? Or do you want the beard back? You want the beard back? Feel it?


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[Assistant] Hello, forest friends. Are you ready for our forest games of skill?


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[Assistant] Hard but fun, Mopi. Who would like to go first?


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[Assistant] Up to the stage please. It's a simple game. Spin round and round on the spot. And the one who can stay standing the longest is the winner. Ready? Steady? Spin!


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[Assistant] Good idea. Everyone write a poem and bring it to me.


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[Assistant] This is Buck Mouse's poem. Cheesy Weezy. Eating cheese is very easy. Very good little mouse. Mophie, now I'll read your poem.


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[Assistant] Good luck, Mofie. When my forest friends come to play, I know it will be a special day. With Kerry, Mogu, Lee, and Sue. Wise old Al, and little Mouse too.


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[Assistant] Mophie, what a pretty poem. You win the poem game.


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[Assistant] I'm Ashley and I'm a junior here at the University of Notre Dame. I began swimming when I was about 10 years old.


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[Assistant] I've always loved the water and when I die I just get the feeling that I'm in a completely different world.


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[Assistant] I was born with optic nerve hypoplasia which is an under development of the optic nerve. I'm classified as totally blind.


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[Assistant] So a few years ago, I did something really brave. Or some would say, really stupid. I ran for Congress.


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[Assistant] For years, I had existed safely behind the scenes in politics, as a fundraiser, as an organizer, but in my heart, I always wanted to run.


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[Assistant] The sitting congresswoman had been in my district since 1992. She had never lost a race. And no one had really even run against her in a Democratic primary. But in my mind, this was my way to make a difference, to disrupt the status quo.


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[Assistant] The polls, however, told a very different story. My pollsters told me that I was crazy to run, that there was no way that I could win. But I ran anyway, and in 2012, I became an upstart in a New York City congressional race. I swore I was going to win. I had the endorsement from the New York Daily News, the Wall Street Journal snapped pictures of me on election day,


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[Assistant] Including Indian aunties that were just so happy an Indian girl was running. But on election day, the polls were right, and I only got 19 percent of the vote.


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[Assistant] Now, before you get the wrong idea, this is not a talk about the importance of failure, nor is it about leaning in. I tell you the story of how I ran for Congress because I was 33 years old, and it was the first time in my entire life that I had done something that was truly brave, where I didn't worry about being perfect. And I'm not alone.


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[Assistant] So many women I talk to tell me that they gravitate towards careers and professions that they know they're going to be great in, that they know they're going to be perfect in. And it's no wonder why. Most girls are taught to avoid risk and failure. They're taught to smile pretty, play it safe and get all A's.


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[Assistant] Boys, on the other hand, are taught to play rough, swing high, crawl to the top of the monkey bars and then just jump off head first. And by the time they're adults, and whether they're negotiating a raise or even asking someone out on a date, they're habituated to take risk after risk. They're rewarded for it. It's often said in Silicon Valley, no one even takes you seriously unless you've had two failed start-ups.


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[Assistant] In other words, we're raising our girls to be perfect, and we're raising our boys to be brave.


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[Assistant] Looked at how bright fifth graders handled an assignment that was too difficult for them. She found that bright girls were quick to give up. The higher the IQ, the more likely they were to give up.


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[Assistant] Bright boys, on the other hand, found the difficult material to be a challenge. They found it energizing. They were more likely to redouble their efforts. What's going on?


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[Assistant] The difference is in how boys and girls approach a challenge. And it doesn't just end in fifth grade. An HP report found that men will apply for a job if they meet only 60 percent of the qualifications. But women?


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[Assistant] And even when we're ambitious, even when we're leaning in, that socialization of perfection has caused us to take less risks than our careers.


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[Assistant] And so those 600,000 jobs that are open right now in computing and tech, women are being left behind. And it means our economy is being left behind on all the innovation and problems women would solve if they were socialized to be brave instead of socialized to be perfect.


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[Assistant] So in 2012, I started a company to teach girls to code. And what I found is that by teaching them to code, I had socialized them to be brave. Coding, it's an endless process of trial and error, of trying to get the right command in the right place, with sometimes just a semicolon, making the difference between success and failure. Code breaks and then it falls apart, and it often takes many, many tries


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[Assistant] She didn't know any better, she'll think that her student spent the past 20 minutes just staring at the screen. But if she presses undo a few times, she'll see that her student wrote code and then deleted it. She tried, she came close, but she didn't get it exactly right.


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[Assistant] My friend Lev Brie, who's a professor at the University of Columbia and teaches intro to Java, tells me about his office hours with computer science students.


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[Assistant] When the guys are struggling with an assignment, they'll come in and they'll say, Professor, there's something wrong with my code. The girls will come in and say, Professor, there's something wrong with me.


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[Assistant] We have to begin to undo the socialization of perfection, but we've got to combine it with building a sisterhood that lets girls know that they are not alone. Because trying harder is not going to fix a broken system. I can't tell you how many women tell me I'm afraid to raise my hand. I'm afraid to ask a question. Because I don't want to be the only one who doesn't understand. The only one who's struggling.


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[Assistant] Three examples of thousands, thousands of girls


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[Assistant] Who've been socialized to be imperfect, who've learned to keep trying, who've learned perseverance. And whether they become coders or the next Hillary Clinton or Beyonce, they will not defer their dreams. And those dreams have never been more important for our country.


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[Assistant] For the American economy, for any economy to grow, to truly innovate, we cannot leave behind half our population.


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[Assistant] My mother says you're chatty. My mother says you're chatty. My mother says you're chatty.


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[Assistant] Still, I'm not very popular out there, am I? The nobles are rising up and rebelling everywhere, isn't that true?


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[Assistant] Benevolent. Benevolent. He decided to become a benevolent king.


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[Assistant] The goal of our research is to be able to restore sight to those individuals who have lost their vision.


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[Assistant] Have the natural capacity to regenerate specific tissues and organs, unlike humans and other mammals.


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[Assistant] I'm, I'm grateful for what you did. I know if it weren't for you, I'd have ended my life back in the Shinjuku ghetto. The Black Knights would never have existed at all. I was glad.


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[Assistant] Do you want personal power? To be above everyone else? Or is this just a game to you? During the black rebellion, Ogi told me to guard you with my life. He told me that you could make my brother's dream come true.


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[Assistant] This is it then. Bye, Nanush. The Supreme Council will be meeting in the gymnasium.


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[Assistant] Begin with a few slow, controlled breaths.


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[Assistant] As the weight of your body sinks into bed.


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[Assistant] Notice the areas of contact between your body and the bed.


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[Assistant] With your eyes closed, just visualize the space around you.


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[Assistant] The objects you are familiar with. The shape of the room.


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[Assistant] And the colors of the walls and ceiling.


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[Assistant] And then smoothly release the air back out.


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[Assistant] Now that you're relaxed and on your way to a good night's rest, let your mind wander to an oldie-woldie place.


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[Assistant] A magical city. Like one out of a fairy tale.


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[Assistant] Lots of houses are joined together in long rows, with little yards and gardens behind them.


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[Assistant] Built with sand colored stone and topped with golden roof tiles.


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[Assistant] It's a beautiful day, and at the time we see it in late afternoon.


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[Assistant] Walks home from school with books in hand.


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[Assistant] One man sells flowers, and his cart is bursting with color.


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[Assistant] Trails behind him, everywhere he goes.


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[Assistant] It travels with him past the golden houses where parents and children are beginning to return home and into the high streets


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[Assistant] Where the town's best shops are clustered together.


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[Assistant] Except for a bouquet of bright red roses that he will take home for his wife.


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[Assistant] She too is out at the shop front, readying her horses and cart for her final delivery before heading home.


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[Assistant] Her last stop of the day is where she'll take her largest order. It's a request from the palace for three boxes of freshly baked bread.


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[Assistant] As she sits down upon the open, cushioned bench.


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[Assistant] Behind two magnificent chestnut brown horses.


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[Assistant] With her wooden cart filled with mouthwatering delights, she pulls gently at the reins and starts on her way.


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[Assistant] As she travels, the rows of crowded shop fronts fade into the distance, and the land around her becomes green and alive.


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[Assistant] The countryside surrounding the town is rich and verdant. Aside from the occasional farmhouse or shepherd herding their flock of sheep, there are very few people here.


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[Assistant] It's wonderfully peaceful, and the air smells fresh and clean.


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[Assistant] Apart from the clopping of hooves and wheels upon the Rome,


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[Assistant] The only sounds come from the trees swaying in the breeze and the gentle twittering of birds returning to their woodland nests.


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[Assistant] Eventually, the road straightens out, and the forest opens up.


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[Assistant] A colossal fortress of white walls and pinkish grey roofs with a huge silver gate at its front.


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[Assistant] They look very official and a little bit serious until they see the familiar face of the baker approaching.


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[Assistant] Immediately, their expressions change, and they wave to her cheerfully.


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[Assistant] Then they open the gate and allow her through.


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[Assistant] Once inside, the horses follow a neat pathway, surrounded by the beautiful royal gardens.


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[Assistant] There are plants and flowers of every color.


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[Assistant] At the front of the castle is a handsome white fountain with water spraying from the mouth of an elegant marble statue.


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[Assistant] Two staircases rise towards each other, meeting in the middle on a balcony.


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[Assistant] Where the massive front doors stand open.


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[Assistant] Bringing the horses to a stop between the fountain and the steps.


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[Assistant] The baker hops off her seat and greets the kitchen maids who are waiting there.


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[Assistant] And their hair is hidden beneath lacy white hats.


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[Assistant] They are delighted to see the baker and her boxes of sweet treats.


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[Assistant] And then they wave goodbye as the baker takes up the reins once more and heads back out through the palace gates.


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[Assistant] Though the baker and her horses are returning home for the day, the staff of the palace kitchen still have work to do.


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[Assistant] And so, they carry the boxes of baked goods inside.


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[Assistant] Then, they help the cook unpack everything.


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[Assistant] Rolls of fresh golden bread sit upon silver trays beside bowls of hot creamy soup.


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[Assistant] This is the first of many courses to be served tonight.


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[Assistant] Walking gracefully across a panel of purple carpet into the main hall of the palace.


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[Assistant] Here, the soup and bread are served to the royal family, who are already seated at a long marble table against a backdrop of huge arched windows.


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[Assistant] This is where we meet the prince, his mother the queen, and his father the king.


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[Assistant] The queen is resplendent in a gown of ruby red velvet.


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[Assistant] And the men wear stylish suits of blue and silver.


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[Assistant] They each wear a crown, decorated in jewels in every color of the rainbow.


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[Assistant] In fact, though it's not really proper table etiquette, all three of them like to dip the buttered crispy bread into their soup.


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[Assistant] Naturally, it isn't long before the topic of marriage comes up.


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[Assistant] The king and queen ask their son if he's found a suitable bride yet.


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[Assistant] And, just like always, he tells them that no, he hasn't.


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[Assistant] The prince has searched far and wide, traveling all across the land to find a worthy princess.


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[Assistant] But so far, he hasn't succeeded.


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[Assistant] He's met lots of very nice ladies, to be sure.


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[Assistant] Seeing his unhappiness, his mother tells him not to worry. The right person will come along, probably when he least expects it.


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[Assistant] A moment after the Queen has spoken, the sound of thunder rumbles outside the castle.


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[Assistant] The family can see a darkened sky filled with deep silver clouds.


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[Assistant] And so, there is little conversation as the next few courses are written.


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[Assistant] All the while, enjoying the sounds of the wild and chaotic weather.


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[Assistant] Not far from the table, a huge fire roars to life in the large stone hearth.


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[Assistant] Golden flames fill the large hall with warmth and light.


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[Assistant] And the sound of logs crackling amplifies the contrast between the cold, wet outdoors and the blissfully comfortable indoors.


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[Assistant] By the time dessert arrives, a treacle sponge pudding soaked in hot yellow custard, their spirits are high.


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[Assistant] It taps at the palace walls and rooftops, trickling down the hall's great windows in an assortment of shapes and patterns.


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[Assistant] The king, having finished his pudding, stands beside the window, looking through the rivulets of water.


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[Assistant] As he does most nights, he is admiring his vast, beautiful city down below.


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[Assistant] Only tonight, the king's quiet thoughts are interrupted by the approach of a guardsman.


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[Assistant] He hears damp footsteps move across the thin carpet panel, and then the marble floor tiles in his direction.


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[Assistant] When she comes in, he offers her his own seat, nearest the fireplace.


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[Assistant] The woman that enters the hall is drenched from head to toe.


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[Assistant] Her hair is a mess of wet tangles, and raindrops drip from her nose to her cloak.


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[Assistant] She looks very little like a princess, though all are impressed by her manners.


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[Assistant] And to gush about how beautiful the storm was. Though it's clear, she would rather have seen it from inside the palace.


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[Assistant] As she sits drying by the fireplace, she seems to become more lovely and princess-like with each passing minute.


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[Assistant] Have seemed as kind and genuine as this one.


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[Assistant] His mother, however, isn't so sure.


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[Assistant] She is accustomed to meeting princesses at balls and dinners, you see, when they're dressed in their finest gowns.


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[Assistant] And a gaggle of royal relatives by their sides.


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[Assistant] With no tiara or crown on her wet messy hair.


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[Assistant] And dripping water all over the palace floors and carpets.


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[Assistant] In order to test whether the princess is really who she claims to be, the queen concocts a plan.


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[Assistant] Before bedtime, when everyone else is sipping hot cocoa with marshmallows around the fireplace, she sets her plan into motion.


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[Assistant] From 19 of the other guest rooms.


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[Assistant] Holding in her hand a single green pea.


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[Assistant] Watch now as she places the pea in the middle of the mattress and then steps back


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[Assistant] As the 19 other mattresses are placed on top.


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[Assistant] Followed by 20 duvets and several fluffy pillows.


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[Assistant] What a sight this is. A bed so high, it almost touches the ceiling of this grand bedroom.


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[Assistant] That before her plan is complete, the Queen asks for a ladder to be placed beside it.


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[Assistant] With everything now in place, the king, queen and prince all go to their rooms, looking forward to a long and restful sleep.


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[Assistant] Their visitor is escorted to the beautiful guest room where her mouth drops open at the sight of the incredible bed.


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[Assistant] And counts up the number of mattresses and duvets that rise above her.


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[Assistant] Then she climbs up the ladder beside the bed and crawls in at the very top, snuggling into the warm, cozy blankets and closing her eyes.


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[Assistant] And woke up at different times throughout the night.


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[Assistant] She's not the kind of woman to dwell on complaints or grumbles, so she climbs down the ladder, ready to greet a new day with a smile on her face.


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[Assistant] This is made much easier by a lovely warm bubble bath in a tub the size of a small swimming pool.


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[Assistant] She floats about in the soapy water, washing away the tiredness with a velvet soft sponge and a range of luxurious soaps.


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[Assistant] With a creamy pink shampoo that smells of delicious strawberries.


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[Assistant] By the time she steps out of the bath and into a fluffy robe, her sleepless night is all but forgotten.


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[Assistant] It's a lovely dress, reaching just above the floor, and sea blue in colour. A perfect match for its owner's eyes.


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[Assistant] It puffs out at the sleeves and a silver thread decorates the edges in a wave-like pattern.


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[Assistant] The princess feels much more like herself.


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[Assistant] And once a maid has kindly dried and styled her hair, pinning it up with pearl-tipped clips.


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[Assistant] She looks every bit the princess that she is.


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[Assistant] She carries the fragrance of soap and strawberries upon her hair and skin.


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[Assistant] It wafts over the table like a blanket of sweetness. Even the queen is impressed.


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[Assistant] She has to be sure that this stranger, as lovely as she might be, is actually a real princess.


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[Assistant] So, as the family are tucking in to their morning croissants, buttery and golden as the baker always makes them, the queen begins to inquire as to how the girl slept.


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[Assistant] The princess wishes to be honest, without seeming impolite.


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[Assistant] She sips on her freshly squeezed orange juice as she thinks of what to say.


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[Assistant] I have never slept in a bed so tall and grand as that one.


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[Assistant] Then she clears her throat a little nervously and adds,


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[Assistant] I can't begin to think of what was in that bed.


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[Assistant] And with these words, the queen laughs heartily, joined soon after by the king, who already knows of his wife's clever plan.


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[Assistant] Only a real royal princess would be so sensitive that she might detect the presence of a solitary pea between 20 mattresses and 20 duvets.


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[Assistant] At this, the table erupts into laughter.


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[Assistant] Followed by many heartfelt apologies from the Queen, forever doubting the Princess's sincerity.


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[Assistant] I suppose it might help if I were to wear my crown, the princess says. But alas, it's so heavy.


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[Assistant] That I only bring it out for special occasions.


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[Assistant] Around her at the breakfast table, the king, queen, and prince each wear crowns on their heads. And it's true, they are as heavy as they are beautiful.


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[Assistant] And with that, the king lifts his hands to his head.


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[Assistant] And takes off his golden jewel encrusted crown.


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[Assistant] Grinning from ear to ear, delighted to be free of the extra weight.


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[Assistant] Seeing his relief, the queen and prince follow suit, taking off their crowns, and placing them down on the marble table.


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[Assistant] This is the first of many breakfasts that the merry foursome will share together. Even without his mother's help, the prince had already decided that this girl was a princess.


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[Assistant] And that she is the one he's meant to marry.


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[Assistant] He knew it last night with her hair dripping wet as she dipped bread rolls into her soup and as her eyes lit up as she talked about the storm.


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[Assistant] Just as his mother had suggested, the right girl had turned up when he least expected it.


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[Assistant] Though it's only the beginning for the young prince and princess.


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[Assistant] Over the next few months, they will spend a great deal of time together, growing to love each other more with each passing day.


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[Assistant] Eventually, they will marry in the main hall of the royal palace.


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[Assistant] Its floors scattered with red roses, provided by the florist we met earlier.


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[Assistant] It will feature the most spectacular towering wedding cake, designed by the baker herself.


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[Assistant] How people will gasp when they see its twenty tiers of cake and twenty more of icing.


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[Assistant] It remained, somehow unsquished, despite the many mattresses and duvets that sat upon it.


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[Assistant] And it will find a new home in the city's royal museum.


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[Assistant] There, the pea will rest on a pillow of purple velvet.


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[Assistant] I know I'm talking about a baby here, but I just get that impression.


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[Assistant] He's just like my buddy. He's just the coolest guy. Like I admire him in a lot of ways because he is just someone who go with the flow. I'm happy.


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[Assistant] I can see little bits of both of us in each of the kids.


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[Assistant] It's through other people's movements that we are able to understand how other people feel, what they intend to do and what they are doing at this moment. And that really opens up the social world.


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[Assistant] So how do babies learn to interact and anticipate the movements of others? How is that possible?


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[Assistant] There is a point early on when they really start to get captivated by other people's movements and what other people do.


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[Assistant] I've always been interested in movement and how movement is being controlled by the body and the brain. But even so, I think what's more important for my work and my interests is how it comes about that we're able to understand the movements of others.


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[Assistant] Imagine if adults had no way of anticipating the movements of others. We would constantly bump into each other and all social interactions would be just impossible to perform.


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[Assistant] The child knows that the stick will continue to move. They know that the stick continues to exist, even though they can't see it.


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[Assistant] For older kids, maybe it has a lot to do with anticipating when the steak will appear and how it will look when it appears.


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[Assistant] But even for younger children, this is a challenge that they need to handle. Uh, the ability to sort of represent things even though they're not present and try to calculate where things will be in the future. This could be a child's mother or a ball rolling on a, on a plane or


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[Assistant] Really any other type of activity that you need to pay attention to and track.


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[Assistant] In 2006, we recorded a movie where an adult picks up balls and puts them in a bucket. And then we showed this to babies and adults.


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[Assistant] What we could see is that the adults looked at the ball in the hand that held the ball and then looked at the bucket before the ball arrived. So they weren't able to anticipate what was going to happen.


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[Assistant] But what really sort of shook us all up was the fact that the babies were doing the same. So one year old babies performed almost identical to the adults.


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[Assistant] They looked at the ball, the hand, and then they made a saccade, and I moved it over to the bucket before the ball arrived. Uh, foreseeing the future. How is that possible? That was, to me, shocking. And really, really exciting.


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[Assistant] So it turned out that the 12-month-olds could anticipate this action, and 6-month-olds did not.


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[Assistant] So our hypothesis at the time was that young babies' understanding of other people's actions is very much based on their own experiences.


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[Assistant] Uh, there's going to be two girls feeding each other with bananas.


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[Assistant] In one case it would be a typical kind of feeding situation where one adult would feed another with bananas.


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[Assistant] The other situation was, uh, weird. One of the actors would take banana on their spoon, but not put the spoon in the mouth of the other person. But rather put it on the back of their hands. And they would lean forward and eat from the back of their hand. The whole idea being that this would be an action that the babies had not seen before. No one should be able to anticipate this. Can you turn right? All the way down the corridor.


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[Assistant] So we started off with one year olds and six month olds and later added four month olds, which would give us some kids with very limited experience and others with a lot of experience being fed with this. Welcome into the lab.


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[Assistant] So what's going to happen now is that pair first will calibrate the system. So this is an eye tracker.


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[Assistant] And in here you have several cameras that are recording Maxwell's eyes. But for the system to calculate where he's looking, Per needs to sort of get his attention to certain points, and then the camera records.


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[Assistant] So what's really nice about the eye tracking is that we can get a very good and detailed understanding of how a baby views the world, millisecond to millisecond.


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[Assistant] We can see if the baby does have an expectation about what is to come, because then their eye movements will look ahead in time to future events.


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[Assistant] What happens is that they start to look across the table to the other person before the spoon arrives. They start to stay a little bit ahead of time, looking at it at places where things will happen in the future.


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[Assistant] We can see this in some instances at 9 and 10 months, but it's really at 12 months that this becomes a very clear pattern.


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[Assistant] So in our control condition there's strange or weird feeding.


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[Assistant] Everything they've experienced in their life suggests that the food should go to the mouth.


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[Assistant] The story for Anticipation is very simple. It seems to be an experience dependent process.


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[Assistant] And there was this strange column in the data that I've never paid attention to, which measures the diameter of the pupil.


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[Assistant] So I started to go into the library and pick up books from the 70s and 80s. And in those books there was a lot of studies suggesting the idea that the pupil is not just a way to control the amount of light that goes into the eye. It seems like the pupil is also responding to changes in attention.


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[Assistant] So if you're very much attending to something, your pupils dilate. That made me very intrigued. There was something going on here that I did not expect and, uh, did not understand.


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[Assistant] But there was this really interesting pattern in the change in the size of the pupil.


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[Assistant] But when we presented this odd or a bit strange, uh, feeding situation, every time...


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[Assistant] Uh, the spoon was being brought over the table. The pupil dilated. It's like a straight line going just...


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[Assistant] Regardless of age and pretty much all of the kids, we got this spike in the pupil. I just had no way of explaining. It was really intriguing.


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[Assistant] In a way that the children were not expecting, they became surprised.


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[Assistant] The pupil dilation comes when you get really, really surprised. So it was like the children every time were going,


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[Assistant] And then they calmed down again. The next time the spoon went across the table, it was a very powerful reaction from the babies.


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[Assistant] Now the interesting thing is that surprise requires that you have an idea.


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[Assistant] That you have a notion about what's going to happen. So even the four-month-olds.


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[Assistant] Did have an idea, an expectation. It wasn't as explicit, so they made an eye movement, but it was in their mind and we were able to capture that.


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[Assistant] As adults, we constantly anticipate all aspects of the world.


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[Assistant] Being able to read other people and understand their movements is really foundational. And we take it for granted. But for a baby, this is something they have to learn.


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[Assistant] So as parents, we really need to provide the opportunities for young babies to explore their world, to act and to move.


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[Assistant] And it's the way they learn about other people. So through movement, they build the world.


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[Assistant] Being around these curious, exciting, uh, young individuals that are growing up and learning about the world, that's inspiring.


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[Assistant] But it also allows us to ask these very fundamental questions about what we have with us from the beginning and how we are shaped by the experiences we have.


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[Assistant] I do think that the key to understanding these questions lie early in infancy.


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[Assistant] In the second half of class, I will introduce to you and start telling the first story of the term. And that's about Richard Wright's Black Boy, which is our first reading of the term.


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[Assistant] In between those two parts, I will ask that anyone who is shopping the class


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[Assistant] And would like to leave at that time, do so then. I would be grateful if you would wait until that point if at all you possibly can. It just makes the whole thing work a little easier. And it prevents that drop in the pit of my stomach when I see half of a class leaf.


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[Assistant] My goal in this course is to allow you or to invite you to read some of the most compelling novels written in the last little over half century.


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[Assistant] This includes a whole range of thematic concerns. So when I look down at my list of novels, which I have not brought with me, I trust you can find it on the web, uhm, I didn't want to...


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[Assistant] Uh, kill trees by making enough of these for all of you. When I look down at my list of books and I think about what these books are about


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[Assistant] Uh, sort of ideational, romantic, John Barth.


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[Assistant] Be they campus love, that's the human stain, Philip Roth.


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[Assistant] All kinds and forms of sex and love. And then there's politics. Interweaving with all those things. There are questions of identity and race.


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[Assistant] There is a nervous breakdown that actually happens right here in New Haven in one of these novels. That's in Franny and Zoe.


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[Assistant] I see women who give up on housekeeping altogether and let their house go to ruin and become vagrants. I see suicide. I see slavery.


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[Assistant] All these things you can read about in these novels. But reading these novels is not just about reading about those things.


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[Assistant] It's also going to be the process of watching an artistic form unfold over a very exciting period of time.


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[Assistant] In the second half of the 20th century and up now into the 21st century, writers were thinking very hard about what to do stylistically with all the innovations that come in that powerful period known as modernism.


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[Assistant] What happens to those resources that the great modernist writers endowed language with so powerfully earlier in the century?


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[Assistant] So, there are formal questions that we will take up time and again. There are questions that intersect between the form and the content in every single novel that we read.


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[Assistant] Now, perhaps those of you who like to read fiction, especially who like to read fiction from this period, will look down at that syllabus and you'll say, well where is, where is your favorite writer? Where is Don DeLillo? Where is John Updike?


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[Assistant] It's an answer that unfolds over these 14 weeks of the term. 13? 13.


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[Assistant] The short answer is that I think these writers best represent all the different threads, all the different forces in American novel since 1945. There are lots of other writers we could include.


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[Assistant] Uh, including those two that I named that would equally illustrate some of the threads that I've got, uh, on the syllabus now. But these are the ones for various practical and, uh, and more substantive, uh, reasons that I have chosen.


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[Assistant] Now, you do have an opportunity, this class does, that my class has never had before. And that is to nominate your own novel.


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[Assistant] For the last one that we read. One of your choice. Now I have done this in, I did it in a sophomore seminar and I did it in a graduate seminar. I invited my students to


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[Assistant] Uh, present some choices to the class and then the class voted on them.


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[Assistant] Uh, it was incredibly successful. In the, in the undergraduate course it was a small seminar. I had groups of students proposing two novels actually for the end of the syllabus. And the exercise gets you to think very hard about what you think this period is all about.


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[Assistant] It's not just about what's fun to read, although it is that too.


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[Assistant] Uhm, but I will tell you, the students I had in that seminar did amazing things to push their choice of novel. One group, uhm, nominated Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex. There was a huge art installation.


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[Assistant] That I walked into on that day of class. It covered the ceiling and the walls and the floors. It had, they had done original photography for it. It was really spectacular. There was a theatrical skit for Dave Eggers' How We Are Hungry. There was campaign literature.


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[Assistant] Uhm, pamphlets and so on. So people were very creative with it and it was really lots of fun.


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[Assistant] And for me it's, it's fun because I may not know the novel that you end up picking. And so it is a kind of challenge for me to take a novel that you've chosen and come to grips with it myself.


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[Assistant] It may be one that I know. Now, let me just say in a, in a technical way, if you decide to volunteer to nominate a novel, you'll get no extra credit. It'll do nothing for your grade.


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[Assistant] Maybe it's gonna be fun for you, uh, especially if you have a sort of theatrical bent or if you like getting up in front of people, uh, or if you're just really, really passionate about a novel that you want everyone to read.


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[Assistant] So that's something that we will do and I will tell you more about at mid-semester. So that's the piece of the syllabus that I can't tell you about. I don't know what that, what that, uh, dream, we're gonna dream together is when we read that novel. I don't know what that'll be. Uhm.


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[Assistant] I wanna just go over the requirements of the course, uh, that, that really are required, not the optional piece, uhm, just so that you understand what my purpose is, uhm, pedagogically. This course is very much open to English majors and to non-English majors.


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[Assistant] Uh, it's essentially a reading course that's, what I want you to take away from this is the knowledge of these novels. I want you to read them. I want you to think about them. I want you to talk about them.


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[Assistant] If you're not already one. However, if you do happen to be an English or a literature major or someone who's just very serious about reading at that level, you will find plenty to chew on here.


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[Assistant] Not all of the novels aspire to or have as their purpose that kind of difficulty that sometimes English majors really want. They want to, they want to have to work incredibly hard at the formal level. Some of the novels have that. But not all of them.


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[Assistant] The challenge for you is to figure out, well, what do we do with those novels? What is the aim of a novel that isn't all about formal innovation?


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[Assistant] How should we integrate that kind of novel with novels that have more formal ambitions?


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[Assistant] So, the paper length, there are two papers required and there's a final exam. The paper length is designed to be quite large. It's a five, two five to eight page papers. Now, a five page paper is very different from an eight page paper if you're actually thinking about the words you choose and how you write it.


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[Assistant] If you just sort of, you know, the night before, scribble, scribble, scribble until you're done, maybe there's not that much difference between a five and an eight page paper except like editing.


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[Assistant] But substantively, if you're using every sentence in that paper, you can write


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[Assistant] A lot more in an eight page paper if you've used every sentence to say something substantive to move an argument along than you can in the five page. That's for those people who really want to push themselves and want to advance a really uh, significant piece of thinking about a novel. Now, I will also say


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[Assistant] And if you come to lecture, and if you attend section.


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[Assistant] The process of doing those three things will have allowed you to already have thought quite a bit about these novels. You should remember them. I think they're quite memorable. They're quite distinct from each other. Uh, and you should be able to manage with that final exam, uhm, without, uh, undue difficulty.


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[Assistant] I will say that the reading load is heavy. I've made some adjustments every year. I'm trying to deal with the fact that there are so many novels I love written between say 1985 and the present.


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[Assistant] That are over 400 pages apiece. So what do you do with those on a syllabus? Well, I guess it's the problem that the people who teach the 18th century novel always have, or the Victorian novel.


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[Assistant] Victoria Novel, like the triple-decker, you know, the three-volume novel. At least I don't have those. But what I've done is to excerpt some of the texts earlier in the term, and actually there's a slightly heavier reading before break.


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[Assistant] This course, uh, as you may have noticed from our, uh, our friends behind us, uh, is being filmed as part of Yale, the Open Yale courses, uh, initiative.


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[Assistant] It is an initiative funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. This is one of eight courses being offered this year that are, uhm, that are being videotaped. They will be made available free to the public via the internet. So this is a way of allowing the world to benefit from what we all do at Yale. Uhm, that said,


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[Assistant] What we try to do, what I will try to do, and what I hope you will try to do, is to forget about them.


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[Assistant] It's sometimes hard for me, but I trust that you will be able to do that. Uhm, so forget about that.


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[Assistant] The point is not to cater to that camera, but to do what we do.


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[Assistant] So I will ask you questions. The only annoying thing I will have to do is to repeat your answers. So I hope you will not, uhm,


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[Assistant] Object to that because you don't have microphones on you and it's very cumbersome to get them back to you. So we're not gonna, uh, mic you so that your, your answers can be heard.


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[Assistant] Alright, uh, any questions so far about what I've said? Okay?


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[Assistant] Now I want to talk about the handout. Uhm, those of you who don't have it, there are a couple more up front here.


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[Assistant] And together I think they give you the sort of snapshot I want you to have of where literature stands, where reading stands at the beginning, at the middle of the 20th century.


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[Assistant] The first one is an advertisement for the Random House edition of James Joyce's Ulysses and this appeared in the Saturday Review of Literature in 1934.


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[Assistant] For those who are already engrossed in the reading of Ulysses, as well as for those who hesitate to begin it because they fear that it is obscure,


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[Assistant] Do not let the critics confuse you. Ulysses is not difficult to read, and it richly rewards each reader in wisdom and pleasure.


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[Assistant] So thrilling an adventure into the soul and mind and heart of man has never before been charted. This is your opportunity to begin the exploration of one of the greatest novels of our time. What I want you to notice first of all


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[Assistant] Now, if you, if you read down, if you sort of skim down, you'll see that kind of language, uh, applied to critics. They, uh, they seem fretful, they seem interested in obscure knowledge. That's how this advertisement represents critics. Even though,


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[Assistant] Even though it also invokes critics to describe what's powerful about the novel.


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[Assistant] So there's a sort of two-faced representation of the critic. But the important one I think is that dismissal of the critic.


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[Assistant] The point of this advertisement is to make you feel like you don't have to know what the critic knows in order to read this novel.


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[Assistant] What you need is something like strength or bravery. Listen to that language. For those who are already engrossed in the reading of Ulysses, as well as for those who hesitate to begin it, the people already engrossed are the strong ones.


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[Assistant] And you can be that, this advertisement wants to say. You can be the strong reader. That hesitation.


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[Assistant] Those who hesitate to begin it. It's a kind of feminized, mincing approach to the novel. It's sort of like those fussy critics.


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[Assistant] So this, uh, this advertisement tells you that the great classic of modernism is something you stride into like a man. But, but.


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[Assistant] About 20 hours in the life of an average man can be read and appreciated like any other great novel once its framework and form are visualized. Just as we can enjoy Hamlet without solving all the problems which agitate the critics and scholars. There's that agitation that I was talking about.


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[Assistant] The average man. This advertisement wants you to see Lissy's as a story about a man you can identify with.


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[Assistant] So, you don't have to be a critic, you have to be strong, but you know what? You can be the average man.


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[Assistant] Because this is a story about the average man.


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[Assistant] With a plot furnished by Homer against a setting by Dante and with characters motivated by Shakespeare, Ulysses is really not as difficult to comprehend as critics like to pretend.


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[Assistant] This is like saying, dress by Prada, shoes by Ferragamo. It's as if there are brands, Dante, Shakespeare, Homer, that are identifiable, they're familiar, and what's more, they carry with it that sense of cultural capital.


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[Assistant] Well what do I mean by cultural capital? It's that knowledge that makes you one of the elite of your world.


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[Assistant] It's also that knowledge that an educated sort of belatristic reader of the Saturday Review of Literature would be very, very familiar with. So in a sense it tells you


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[Assistant] This work of art is of a piece with what you already know. It's familiar in those ways. And you shouldn't be afraid of it. At the same time, it's part and parcel of that elite body of knowledge. So again, there's this kind of two-facedness.


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[Assistant] To, uh, some college students when he was giving a lecture. So this is what he asked them to do.


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[Assistant] Select four answers to the question, what should a reader be to be a good reader? The reader should belong to a book club.


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[Assistant] The reader should identify himself or herself with the hero or heroine.


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[Assistant] The reader should concentrate on the social economic angle. The reader should prefer a story with action and dialogue to one with none. The reader should have seen the book in a movie. The reader should be a budding author. The reader should have imagination. The reader should have memory. The reader should have a dictionary. The reader should have some artistic sense.


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[Assistant] The students leaned heavily on emotional identification, action and the social, economic and historical angle.


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[Assistant] Of course, as you have guessed, the good reader is the one who has imagination, memory, a dictionary, and some artistic sense, which sense I propose to develop in myself and others whenever I have the chance.


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[Assistant] There are at least two varieties of imagination in the reader's case, so let us see which of the two is the right one to use in reading a book.


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[Assistant] First, there's the comparatively lowly kind, which turns for support to the simple emotions and is of a definitely personal nature.


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[Assistant] A situation in a book is intensely felt because it reminds us of something that happened to us or to someone we know or knew. Or again,


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[Assistant] The reader treasures a book mainly because it evokes a country, a landscape, a mode of living, which he nostalgically recalls as part of his own past, or, and this is the worst thing a reader can do,


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[Assistant] He identifies himself with a character in the book. This lowly variety is not the kind of imagination I would like readers to use.


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[Assistant] He wants you to think about reading on his terms. His terms are very much informed by a modernist sensibility of what literature is all about. And I'm going to say more about what that is when I lecture on Lolita.


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[Assistant] What should be established, I think, is an artistic, harmonious balance between the reader's mind and the author's mind. We ought to remain a little aloof and take pleasure in this aloofness while at the same time we keenly enjoy, enjoy with tears and shivers the inner weave of a given masterpiece.


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[Assistant] To be quite objective in this matter is of course impossible. Every thing that is worthwhile is to some extent subjective. For instance, you sitting there may be merely my dream and I may be your nightmare.


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[Assistant] Some of you might think that after Lolita. But what I mean is that the reader must know when and where to contribute his imagination. And this he does by trying to get clear the specific world the author places at his disposal.


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[Assistant] If there's a balance of power between the writer and the reader in this little vignette,


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[Assistant] The power really, I think, finally resides with the writer.


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[Assistant] It is the writer whose world the reader is here asked to get clear.


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[Assistant] You are asked to use your imagination to enter a world made by the writer. A world of imagination.


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[Assistant] And so it's the writer who directs you in that way.


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[Assistant] You are not asked to imagine a place you knew, something from your history, something from your knowledge of yourself. It is not about finding the average man which you are, also in the novel, there staring back at you.


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[Assistant] It's about finding some other dream world. Maybe it's a nightmare world.


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[Assistant] So, for Nabokov, he wants to imagine a kind of literary encounter that's very much separate from those other things he talks about, uhm, other media, the movies, having seen the book in the movie.


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[Assistant] Those have to be the tears and shivers of impersonality. That word, impersonality, made famous by T.S. Eliot who advocated impersonality as the ultimate stance of the artist.


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[Assistant] That is the stance from which all great art should proceed.


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[Assistant] So Nabokov imbues that state of impersonality with certain kinds of emotion and then asks the reader to be as impersonal as that modernist artist also must be.


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[Assistant] Literature finds itself at a kind of crossroads. What kind of reader are writers in this period looking for? And what do they want from that reader?


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[Assistant] To what context do they address themselves? Is it a social context? Is it a literary one? Is it a psychological one? Is it a philosophical one? Is it a political one?


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[Assistant] What should the novel strive to do? What can novels do in the world?


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[Assistant] What is the role of the imagination? How does that factor in to what the reader lives in, in daily reality?


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[Assistant] These are some of the questions that these two readings raise. And they're questions that we will return to over and over throughout the term. Now I'm going to stop there. I've gone on longer than I expected. I'm going to let shoppers leave and then I'm going to


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[Assistant] In a very short time I'm going to, uh, pick up again and talk about Richard Wright. So anyone who wants to leave now, please do so.


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[Assistant] You're at a very happy time in your life.


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[Assistant] You just wrote a really successful novel. Everyone loved it.


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[Assistant] That hard life you think is really what made you into the writer you are. It's what allowed you to speak so powerfully to people.


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[Assistant] In your first novel. And you've always wanted to write an autobiography. So, so that's what you do. That's what you take up as your next project. So you write the story of your life. It's, uh, nearly 400 pages long.


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[Assistant] It's in page proofs, everything's going great, you're thrilled. And then someone says to you, you know,


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[Assistant] Imagine this is Oprah. Oprah gets page proofs of your novel. She's thinking about putting it on her book club.


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[Assistant] Getting on Oprah's Book Club is like, it makes your sales for the next 20 years. It's huge! It's huge. There is no more powerful marketing force in contemporary fiction than Oprah's Book Club.


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[Assistant] She takes them, she says, this is great, but you know what? I think that last hundred pages, you should just get rid of it.


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[Assistant] And there you are. And for the next forty years no one ever sees.


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[Assistant] The novel that you wrote, or the autobiography that you wrote originally. It's still only two thirds of what you ever wrote it to be.


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[Assistant] Well, this is what happened to Richard Wright. This is pretty much exactly what happened to Richard Wright in 1944. So he had published Native Son in 1940 to great acclaim. Very successful novel. In 1944,


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[Assistant] He completed Black Boy, then called American Hunger. And he had placed it with Harper and Brothers Publishing Company in New York. And they were very happy with it. It had a first part called Southern Night.


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[Assistant] And a second part called The Horror and the Glory. Southern Night was about his experience growing up in Mississippi. So he was born in 1908 in Mississippi.


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[Assistant] And in 1927, I think it's 27, let me get my date right.


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[Assistant] In 1927, he moved to Chicago, moved north.


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[Assistant] And, uh, in the 1940s he moved to Paris and he died there in 1960.


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[Assistant] So his was a progression out of a very poor southern childhood from a black family led by a single mother.


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[Assistant] To the circles in which Gertrude Stein moved in Paris. So this was a long trajectory. Well, Black Boy, or American Hunger as it was then called, covered the part in Mississippi and then the beginnings of his life in Chicago.


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[Assistant] Now, the part about his life in Chicago was the part that was finally cut from the novel, from the, I'm gonna keep doing this, call it the novel versus the autobiography, and I'll explain why I make that mistake a little later. Uhm, it was cut from the autobiography.


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[Assistant] Now, he had this in page proofs with Harper and Brothers.


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[Assistant] And Harper and Brothers sent the page proofs out to various writers for blurbs. And also sent it to the Book of the Month Club editorial board. The Book of the Month Club was a mail order book club.


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[Assistant] That started in 1926 and it became an incredibly powerful engine for selling books just as Oprah's Book Club is today.


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[Assistant] In 1926 it had about 4,700 members. Just three years later it had 110,000 members.


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[Assistant] So they take it up and the board decides that they only like the southern night part. They don't want any of the part of the story of his life in Chicago. And that's what he finally agrees to.


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[Assistant] He embarks on this correspondence with a woman named Dorothy Canfield Fisher who was one of the editorial board of the Book of the Month Club. And they go back and forth trying to figure out how he will revise the ending to Southern Nights so that it sounds like the end of a book rather than the end of a section of a longer book.


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[Assistant] To the Beinecke Digital Archive and read those letters. We hold them here.


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[Assistant] They are not published anywhere, so this is kind of fun. This is one of the special things about being at Yale. We have those letters, you can go and touch them.


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[Assistant] You can read them online. And I want you to read those in addition to reading the sections that I've indicated. You can see what happens when Wright starts coming up against these demands on his manuscript.


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[Assistant] And I will project them during class too so that we can, we can talk about them.


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[Assistant] Wright's manuscript was therefore very much under pressure.


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[Assistant] But in fact, it's very literary and part of what makes it literary is the fact that you have to choose what scenes go into that narrative. You can't just write every single thing that happened in your life. You have to choose. Well, critics took it fairly straightforwardly as the account of a life.


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[Assistant] And in that sense, taking it that way, some of them were a little disappointed with what they held in their hands.


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[Assistant] For one thing, it seemed exaggerated to some people. So the first scene, as you'll discover in Black Boy, is when Richard, young Richard, I think he's like six, burns down the family house.


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[Assistant] Playing with matches underneath the curtains. And his mother finds him where he has hidden, under the burning house, and flogs him until he's unconscious. And he's sick for a good long time after that.


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[Assistant] Okay, critics were like, mmm, I don't think so. That doesn't seem right. A mother flogs her son till he's unconscious. Didn't seem too credible.


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[Assistant] So for instance, his mother in the book is represented as being uneducated.


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[Assistant] Who is the valedictorian of his high school class, writes his valedictory speech.


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[Assistant] Gives it as required to the principal beforehand.


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[Assistant] The principal demands certain kinds of changes, and Richard refuses.


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[Assistant] Well apparently Richard in real life did not refuse to make those changes. And imagine in a book


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[Assistant] That then undergoes this publishing history that I've described. This is kind of a symbolic scene.


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[Assistant] This is a scene of whether you as a writer compromise yourself.


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[Assistant] In the face of authority that resists what you want to say.


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[Assistant] So in the book, it's a very important scene. It's the moment when Richard really finds his voice. And it gives him the strength eventually to leave the self.


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[Assistant] But, uh, in real life apparently, uhm, he did cave.


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[Assistant] Then there came to be questions about whether the scenes, the stories in the book actually did happen to him.


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[Assistant] So there's this story about his Uncle Hoskins who takes his horse and cart with Richard at the back and drives it into the middle of the Mississippi River as a kind of practical joke on Richard.


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[Assistant] Where these stories come from began to be a problem. So what is autobiography? What is this genre that Wright is working with?


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[Assistant] Uhm, it raised these kinds of questions on the one hand, but then there was another kind of question.


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[Assistant] And uh, that was coming from the other side. This is what


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[Assistant] It comes out of one's individual imagination and sensitivity to and comprehension of the sufferings of every man.


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[Assistant] Any man, not out of the memory of one's own grief. I hope you will keep on saying it, but I hope you will say it as an artist, as a native son.


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[Assistant] So Faulkner's objection is on the other side. It's not fictional enough to write about your life and to pretend that you're


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[Assistant] Communicating the memory of what happened to you, your grief, your private grief doesn't contain that universalizing move that fiction by its very essence contains. And you see that


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[Assistant] You know, you can remember back to that conception of literature we see in the advertisement for Ulysses, that it's about every man, that greatness in literature


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[Assistant] Well, Wright himself described that difficulty of writing his autobiography, and this is, these are the terms he used.


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[Assistant] I found that to tell the truth is the hardest thing on earth.


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[Assistant] Harder than fighting in a war, harder than taking part in a revolution. If you try it, you will find that a time's sweat will break upon you. You will find that even if you succeed in discounting the attitudes of others to you and your life, you must wrestle with yourself most of all. Fight with yourself.


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[Assistant] For there will surge up in you a strong desire to alter facts, to dress up your feelings. You'll find that there are many things you don't want to admit about yourself and others. As your record shapes itself, an odd wonder haunts you and yet there is no more exciting an adventure.


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[Assistant] He suggests that it's a struggle to be truthful, a struggle to be accurate, a struggle not to dress up your feelings with some sort of embellishment. He at other times says that


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[Assistant] Well, some of the stories did come from other people.


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[Assistant] Some of the stories he included did come from other people's experiences, not from his own life.


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[Assistant] And that this is allowed and allowable because what he aimed to do was produce a generic life of a black boy living in the south. And from the titles we know he considered for this book,


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[Assistant] None of them make that claim. The life of Richard Wright. None of them say that. It's always black boy. American hunger.


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[Assistant] These are not person specific. These implicitly make a claim to the generality at the national scale or in the racial sense, the representativeness of this life.


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[Assistant] To the power of narration is there. The power of a story. To say that you heard a story and it became as if part of your experience.


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[Assistant] That you heard Ralph Ellison tell that story and somehow you began to live it yourself.


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[Assistant] So what we see in the publishing history of Black Boy and also in its reception.


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[Assistant] Brings us back to those questions that I was raising at the beginning of class.


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[Assistant] What is the relationship between writing and the world? What's the relationship between the writer and the reader? What's the relationship between fiction and what we all experience as the real world?


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[Assistant] Our course over the term will come back to this question over and over again. And it will also come back to the generic question of autobiography.


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[Assistant] Uh, even so, experimental, uh, book as, uh, John Barth's Lost in the Fun House is totally absorbed in the problem of what it would mean to write about yourself.


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[Assistant] It's a persistent problem partly because it always raises these issues of fictionality versus truthfulness, of honesty versus embellishment. It also raises the question of how a self is made. If we look forward to the end of the term when we read the human stain,


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[Assistant] Which is about a man, Coleman Silk, who tries to, well, tries to and succeeds in passing as Jewish. He's a black man.


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[Assistant] In a way, what Coleman does is write his autobiography, a fictional autobiography, in the very process of living it. So Roth imagines lived life


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[Assistant] As fictional in the same register as a novel or as truthful.


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[Assistant] Dubiously so, perhaps, in the same register as an autobiography.


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[Assistant] So these are questions that will come back to us. This is part of what I find so compelling about fiction and literature in general in this period. And this is why I study it, this is why I teach it. Because that interface between the imagination,


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[Assistant] And the world between literary art and trying to tell the truth about something.


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[Assistant] And I think in part because other media are so powerfully on the rise in this period.


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[Assistant] Literature has to figure out where to stake its claim. What can literature say that nothing else can? How can it address us in a way that is compelling in a way that nothing else is? Can we make those kinds of claims for literature?


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[Assistant] Make those claims for the primacy and the importance of what they do. And I think that in addition to being able simply to understand the literature of your moment, to understand the literary world in which writers, probably among you, sitting right here, that world in which you will bring forth your next novel,


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[Assistant] What that world looks like, you can understand that world, but also you can understand how art confronts the world in a much more general sense. That's what's exciting and that's what I invite you to think about with me in the course. Uhm, so I'll stop there and hopefully I'll see some of you on Wednesday.


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[Assistant] You could stay with me, but I think you should be brave and go home.