Reznikoff and "concentration"

Since we didn't get to share our inter-group thoughts with the class as a whole I thought I would post some of the highlights here. Many of you noted a strong connection between measure and "concentration," which shows up on a number of levels:

1) Reznikoff plays on a pun at work in the word "concentration" (here, the word is used for the process by which we often "concentrate" certain elements of one thing, like fruit, to make it into something else, like juice) by embodying in the physical form of his text, the way in which the Nazis wore down and stripped the bodies of Jewish people to it's barest elements, and ultimately, to one's horror, into bars of soap. Reznikoff performs a similar concentration on his source material.He wants us to feel and be aware of that concentrating process, to see how subjects often use language to transform and subdue objects in subtle ways. In other words, he uses the relative form of the poem to raise an ethical question about how writers and historians treat the objects of their study.

2) At the same time, Reznikoff uses the syntax of his lines (both stretching and conmpressing what grammatically make up singular units) as a means of controlling the reader's "concentration." He bookends the poem with shorter, simpler units, while in the middle, when the content embodies the peak of the Nazi's cruelty, he tests the limits of a reader's ability to concentrate on each isolated thing by increasing the line-length while keeping the fundamental unit-of-focus similar to the earlier and later sections. We constantly want to look away in both horror at the content and exhaustion at the sustained gaze.

3) Many of you also saw this element of concentration connected to classical forms of storytelling, and indeed Reznikoff is alluding, constantly, to the linguistic tropes of ancient Hebrew histories, particularly those of the Old Testament. His constant stripping the trial testimonies of particular contextual details (names, dates, etc), use of brevity/speed and dead-pan delivery of the story to divorce it from morals and subjectlive judgement, and his concentration of individual stories into motif-related vingettes, are all innate qualities of books like Genesis , Exedus, and Judges, all of which are, in the form we read them, hybrids of various written transcripts of oral stories, which of course is also what Reznikoff's text is in the end.

These were all really great observations, and should serve as an indicator of what you might do in your papers. In other words, instead of writing about your basic emotional response to a text (i.e. whether you though it was good, bad, entertaining, whether or not it simply "made sense," etc), take something intrinsic to the text -- like how you might see a concept like "concentration" popping up in different ways in the text -- and use that intrinsic element to make sense of what's happening in the passage you are interpreting. Obviously, that's not the only way to write an interpretive paper, but it might give you an idea to work with.