immoveable feast

In Foucault’s “The body of the condemned”, he writes about how punishment has for centuries been a spectacle. These two pictures depict two public punishments, being stake burning and drawing and quartering. He notes that public punishments for crimes gradually declined in numerous countries, with a clear focus on Europe and the United States.

I attempted through this visualization to track the emotional development of Delia Jones, the protagonist of Zora Neale Hurston’s “Sweat”. In the visualization, I included, in chronological order, every key plot point having to deal with Delia in relation to her abusive husband, Sykes, eventually culminating to the latter’s demise. I chose to omit Sykes bringing home the rattlesnake because I believe Delia’s reaction to it was not one of Sykes’ actions ultimately contributing to her indifference toward his death -- Hurston had already made it clear that Delia had an unsympathetic disposition through her and Sykes’ prior encounters (events 1-3 all occurred before the snake was brought home). 

Through the Voyant visualizations of Hahn’s “the line”, one immediately notices how much of the poem’s content is connected to the initial mention of the child living in the second line. Mousing over the word "child" in the Links window reveals the word's direct connection to "spinning", "twirls", "hysteric", "resides" and "knows", and it is true that Hahn's idea of the child is very much connected to these things. Because the poem is so short, not much can be taken from the windows on the bottom right, but the words present in the Links and Trends raised an interesting concern to me. For some reason, the visualizations place much more emphasis on the words in the poem's first five lines than all others. The system pays virtually no attention to the impressive lyricism of "a delightful lake of sandwich and milk." I should think that the critics we've recently discussed would find a lot to comment on with this poem, as it is one of complexity, lyrical and technical ability, and (at least I believe) can have its substance extracted without biographical examination.