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Showing posts from April, 2024

A Key to Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar and more

For the Arvon course on Sylvia Plath's Prose that I co-taught with Heather Clark in June 2023 in Yorkshire , I re-read The Bell Jar  making note of the events Esther Greenwood experiences that source back to something lived by Sylvia Plath. For example, we know Plath resided at the Barbizon, which she morphed into the Amazon in the novel. The aim here was to develop, as it was, a "key" to The Bell Jar .  This key as structured right now has three columns. The first column is the scene from the novel--a word, a phrase, a sentence, etc. The second column is the chapter and page number for reference, using the first Heinemann edition (a photocopy of it!). The third column, then, is information about the source: a reference to a letter, a journal, or some other "thing" (that's a technical term) that came out of a direct experience Sylvia Plath had.  This project is something that I had long wanted to do and it helped me develop how I would present the novel to t