Ichabod Crane Research Articles

THE GOTHIC ELEMENTS IN TIM BURTON�S (1999) SLEEPY HOLLOW THE HEADLESS HORSEMAN: A LITERARY AND CINEMATIC ASPECT ANALYSIS

Sleepy Hollow is a film directed by Tim Burton. The story tells about a young policeman Ichabod Crane, who is sent to a village called Sleepy Hollow to investigate a murder case there. At first, he was a person who never believed in supernatural things especially ghost, but after facing the reality of the ghost itself, he becomes very scared, but all he has to do is to find the villain behind the ghost of Headless Horseman. This thesis analyzes the gothic elements that are shown in this film. The theories that are used in this thesis are from film studies, literary and cinematic aspect. In this paper, the pictures from the scenes are also shown to show the evidence of the gothic elements. The theories that are used will also show how they can advocate the gothicness of this film.

Le système des couleurs dans Sleepy Hollow de Tim Burton : hommage et signature d'auteur

This paper aims at showing the importance of colours in the work of Tim Burton through the example of Sleepy Hollow, adapted from Washington Irving’s classic tale. Indeed, colours enable Burton to highlight the main narrative and formal features of his film. Colours help define and dramatize space, express the contrast between reality and fancy or dream. They are part of the characterization of the main protagonists, in particular Ichabod Crane, and they also partake of the symbolic network of the film. Colours are also referential in a different way as they are a sign, among others, of the rich intertextuality that pervades the film.

Troubling Our Heads about Ichabod: "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," Classic American Literature, and the Sexual Politics of Homosocial Brotherhood

Troubling Our Heads About Ichabod: "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," Classic American Literature, and the Sexual Politics of Homosocial Brotherhood offers a close reading of Washington Irving's story "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" that considers its treatment of the figure of the solitary Ichabod in light of recent treatments of the story as representative of powerful bonds between men. This essay considers Irving's construction of Woman as an uncannily mysterious force that traps Ichabod Crane into compulsory heterosexuality; it also considers the ways in which the story pits isolate, inviolate manhood against fraternity. In addition, the recent film version of Irving's story and two other film adaptations of classic American literature are treated in order to broaden and support the central claim that a highly diversified and ongoing fetishization of fraternity dominates American thought. Given the commonplace nature of the critical position that reproductive heterosexualityÑwhen considered as, in Michael Warner's view, " repronarrative"Ñis a compulsory demand of capitalist citizenship, one might also imagine that, with their widely documented sheer social pervasiveness, same-sex intimacies would now be taken as a given in studies of the nineteenth century. Surprisingly, however, a diverse array of critics, commentators, and theorists continue to treat nineteenth century (and current forms of) homosociality as transgressive. Despite the multiple critiques from feminist and queer scholars, fraternalist fantasies continue to proliferate not only in treatments of nineteenth century American literature but also in certain men's studies and queer theory texts, which would otherwise certainly seem like unlikely allies. Hollywood film adaptations of classic American literature also reinforce fraternalist biases. This essay primarily critiques the willingness in literary criticism, men's studies, queer theory, and mainstream film to celebrate homoaffectional bonds at the expense of ignoring the evidence of the compulsory nature of homosocial ties, the recurring literary interest in treating the homosocial as a field of competitive cruelty, and the abject status of the isolate outsider who has not been assimilated into male collectives.

Gut Reaction: The Enteric Terrors of Washington Irving

Every school child has read Washington Irving's Legend of Sleepy Hollow, the story of an itinerant schoolteacher, poetaster, and rejected suitor named Ichabod Crane who witnesses the apparition of a headless horseman, that terrifying spectre whose detached cranium is in fact nothing but a pumpkin. Over the years this country's most famous ghost story has been interpreted in many waysas political allegory, archetypal comedy, forerunner of the American gothic traditionbut never specifically as a piece about food. Gut Reaction: The Enteric Terrors of Washington Irving will examine the role of squash and other edibles in Irving's work and seek to define a relationship between the early American food story and the early American ghost story, the link between what Irving once called America's "eating mania" and gut terror.

John Quidor and the Demonic Imagination: Ichabod Crane Flying from the Headless Horseman (c.1828)

John Quidor and the Demonic Imagination: Ichabod Crane Flying from the Headless Horseman (c.1828) Rebecca Bedell (bio) John Quidor’s (1801–1881) works are closely linked to the writings of Washington Irving. Nearly two-thirds of his extant canvasses depict scenes drawn from Irving’s tales of old Dutch New York. Such marked allegiance to a single author would seem to suggest that Quidor found in Irving’s work plots, characters, and themes which admirably suited his own artistic ends. As many scholars have noted, however, Quidor was rarely content merely to illustrate Irving’s tales or echo his themes. 1 He rather used the stories as a base from which to explore ideas more distinctively his own. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. John Quidor (1800–1881), Ichabod Crane Flying from the Headless Horseman. Oil on canvas; 225/9” x 30 1/6”. Yale University Art Gallery; Mabel Brady Garvan Collection. This is certainly the case with Ichabod Crane Flying from the Headless Horseman of about 1828, a painting inspired by Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (figure 1). In none of Quidor’s other works does he distance himself so far from his literary source; in none of his other literary paintings does he suppress the narrative or subvert the themes of the text to the extent that he does in this, his earliest extant treatment of an Irving subject. In transferring the tale from printed page to canvas, Quidor altered both its mood and its message. Although both Irving and Quidor take the imagination as a central theme of their work, the painter offers a far bleaker, more frightening vision of this cerebral faculty. In the early nineteenth century, suspicion and hostility tinged American attitudes towards the imagination. 2 In a nation founded on Enlightenment principles, adhering to the doctrines of Scottish Common Sense philosophy, and committed to progress, rationality, and practicality, indulgence in imaginative endeavors was widely regarded as an avoidance of responsibility, as an activity that could render one incapable of distinguishing fact from fiction, and, hence, as a significant threat to the social order. Such attitudes deeply affected the way American artists and writers felt about their calling, evoking responses that ranged from defensive defiance to guilt and anxiety. Since their feelings about imaginative activities were central to their sense of their own self-worth and the value of their productions, it is hardly surprising that many explored them in their works—as Irving and Quidor did in their differing ways. Bryan Wolf, in his brilliant comparison of Quidor and Irving in Romantic Revision, has drawn out Quidor’s conservative attitude towards the imagination; the painter seems to have internalized his pragmatic society’s fear and distrust of it. Irving, on the other hand, while sharing some of Quidor’s trepidation, also saw positive uses for the imagination, deploying it to combat, in his own rather mild way, [End Page 111] what he saw as the relentlessly rationalist and materialist tenor of his times. 3 A comparison of Quidor’s Ichabod with Irving’s “Legend of Sleepy Hollow” brings the distance between the two men into sharp focus. “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” is one of the tales from Irving’s The Sketch Book (1819–20). Set a decade or so after the Revolutionary War, the story takes place in a drowsy Dutch village on the eastern shore of the Hudson River. The slim plot revolves around a rivalry between the Yankee schoolmaster Ichabod Crane and the burly local hero Brom Bones, both of whom are set upon winning the hand of the plump Dutch coquette Katrina van Tassel. Through his delineation of the hapless Ichabod, whose name means “inglorious” or “without honor,” 4 Irving lampooned contemporary Yankee American culture—its restlessness, its instability, and, above all, its crass materialism. 5 Ichabod’s desire for Katrina, for example, was less an affair of the heart than a passion of the pocketbook. Her rosy cheeks and dainty feet, though appealing, roused him less than the thought of her paternal domain. This, he imagined, could “be readily turned into cash, and the money invested in immense tracts of wild land, and...

A Single Good Mind: Collaboration, Cooperation, and the Writing Self

Professor Johnson's paper: a critical review of David Copperfield. Don't talk about what you liked, don't talk about how you felt reading it, don't talk about how it's like other novels you've read. Just don't talk: the honor code prohibits that. All of which means:figure out what my Ichabod Crane wants, read the text his way, write his paper, type it, submit. I don't talk to anyone, although potential discussants abound. Down the hall, there's Terri, who has already aced the course; Jeanne, not an English major, but a good writer; Karen, usually stoned but smart, always seeing things a little cock-eyed (maybe it's the drugs, maybe not). I like the novel. I want to talk about it-about how it's like Great Expectations in surprising ways, about how Dickens doesn't seem to like women much, about how these novels seem to end in a mighty convenient way. Still, I'm dutifully silent-except for asking Jeanne the date of Dickens's birth and the number of novels he wrote.

Low Body Weight and Psychiatric Disorders in Adolescent Males

Stereotypes often portray eccentric introverted males as lean and lanky ectomorphs, or leptosomes, like Ichabod Crane. These two studies examined the

Is There a FOAF in Your Future? Urban Folk Legends in Room 112

At first glance, a group of stories about a parcel of land on Indianapolis's northeast side may seem to have little to do with the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf. Upon closer examination, however, a connection can be established: both are examples of folk legends, oral narratives which are transmitted primarily by word of mouth and which exist in many versions, varying from geographic region to region. The stories told today about the House of Blue Lights rival those woven by scops a thousand years ago. Folk legends belong to the larger genre of folklore; other categories are fables, fairy tales, myths, ballads, riddles, and jokes. Long before humans were literate, they told folk tales, with each retelling shaping, changing, and adding something new, each storyteller revising to taste. Just as Paul Bunyan, Babe, Ichabod Crane, and Sleepy Hollow derive from the American experience, the passing decades have generated a new crop of tall tales: the urban folk legend. These are stories whispered at slumber parties or around a campfire; they are captivating, plausible even, but fictional-yet their tellers and listeners swear they are truth.

Recruitment, Selection, and Retention: The Shape of the Teaching Force

Ichabod Crane was more than a pathetic figure who spent classroom time trimming the quill pens of his students. He also conveyed an image many thought to be typical of male teachers at the time. In 1932, Willard Waller (1932/1965) characterized what he took to be the prevailing stereotypes of teaching as an occupation composed of unmarriageable women and unmarketable men. Koerner's Miseducation

'Moby-Dick' and the Problem of a Democratic Literature

It is no less true for being a commonplace that the American literary artist of the first half of the nineteenth-century suffered from the cultural sterility of his surroundings. Washington Irving achieved the status of America's first internationally recognized man of letters by fastening upon a time and place, seventeenth-century Dutch New York, in which the Americans were but transplanted Europeans with a lore and ways rooted in the misty regions of the folk history of the old continent. His initial task, executed very well indeed, was, as he saw it, to bring a sense of the legendary to the American landscape. Our observation that his Rip Van Winkle or Ichabod Crane descend from German folk tales is slight in the face of his extraordinary success in giving them a complete home in the lower reaches of the Hudson River Valley, and fixing them irrevocably in the imagination as the presiding spirits of their American locales. Fenimore Cooper, who sought to mythologize native materials, was also acutely conscious of the want of conventional fictional paraphernalia in his native land. His lament is a famous document of American literary history: There is scarcely an ore which contributes to the wealth of the author, that is found, here, in veins as rich as in Europe. There are no annals for the historian; no follies (beyond the most vulgar and commonplace) for the satirist; no manners for the dramatist; no obscure fictions for the writer of romance; no gross and hardy offences against decorum for the moralist; nor any of the rich artificial auxiliaries of poetry.... The effect of a promiscuous assemblage anywhere is to create a standard of deportment; and great liberty permits every one to aim at its attainment. I have never seen a nation so much alike in my life, as the people of the United States, and what is more, they are not only like each other, but they are remarkably like that which common sense tells them they ought to resemble .... There is no costume for the peasant (there is scarcely a peasant at all), no wig for the judge, no baton for the general, no diadem for the chief magistrate. The darkest ages of their history are illuminated by the light of truth; the utmost efforts of their chivalry are limited by the laws of God; and even the deeds of their sages and heroes are to be sung in a language that would differ but little from a version of the ten commandments. However useful and respectable all this may be in actual life, it indicates but one direction to the man of genius.'

New York and New England: Irving's Criticism of American Society

A LTHOUGH WASHINGTON IRVING's best-known tales, Rip Van and Legend of Sleepy Hollow, have been interpreted from a number of points of view, critics have missed a significant dimension in the stories by failing to take into account a fundamental regional conflict-the mutual hostility between New York and New England-that appears not only in these two tales, but in other of works as well.' That the New York-New England conflict is basic to Legend of Sleepy Hollow is obvious enough: Ichabod Crane is clearly a Connecticut Yankee invading-and threatening-a New York Dutch society. Less easily recognized, however, is that the same invasion seems to have occurred by the end of Rip Van Winkle. The inn of Nicholas Vedder has been supplanted by the Union Hotel of one Jonathan Doolittle, a name identified elsewhere in works as that of a Yankee;2 Bunker's Hill is one of the rallying cries of the lean, bilious-looking fellow who harangues the crowd; and Dame Van Winkle has been defeated at last by the one type of person, presumably, that she cannot overcome, the Yankee peddler (XIX, 6667, 70) 1 Although Daniel G. Hoffman treats Ichabod Crane as a typical Yankee, he does not discuss the specific regional conflict. See Irving's Use of American Folklore in 'The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,' PMLA, LXVIII, 425-435 (June, I953), reprinted with minor alterations in Form and Fable in American Fiction (New York, I96I), pp. 83-96. Sara Puryear Rodes, in Washington Use of Traditional Folklore, Newv York Folklore QuarterIYJ XIII, 3-15 (Spring, 1957), mentions the conflict in passing (p. 8). 2The name appears in a list of Yankees in the first three editions of Knickerbocker's History of New York (New York, I809), I, 220; (New York, I812), I, 227; (Philadelphia, I8I9), I, 253. It may conveniently be found in the modern reprint of the I809 edition edited by Stanley T. Williams and Tremaine McDowell (New York, 1927), P. i99; or in that of the I8I2 edition edited by Edwin T. Bowden (New York, I964), P. I8I. The name is omitted in the corresponding list of Yankees in the I848 revision as reprinted in the Hudson edition of Works (New York, 1902). See XI, 260. All subsequent citations of works are to volume and page numbers in the Hudson edition. (I am indebted to Mr. Lewis M. Stark, Rare Book Division, New York Public Library, for information concerning the third edition, and to Professor Bowden for information concerning his edition of the book.)

Dante's Provençal Gallery

IN chapter two of second book of his De Vulgari Eloquentia Dante defines capital matters that ought to be treated supremely by poets; they are three: safety, love, and virtue, which are spelled out in specific language as prowess in arms, fire of love, and direction of will. He adds that the illustrious writers have written poetry in tongue on these subjects exclusively, namely Bertran de Born on Arms, Arnaut Daniel on Love, Giraut de Borneil on Righteousness, Cino of Pistoja on Love, his friend on Righteousness ... I do not find however that any Italian has as yet written poetry on subject of arms.' The passage well exemplifies Dante's fondness for categories and where possible, symmetry: three subjects, three poets (at least when gallery is complete as Provengal is and Italian not yet). Knowing Dante's attachment to his authorities and his cult of three, one could almost predict that if he were to write great poem it would have three divisions and each would contain representative of vulgar tongue which had been such an inspiration to him and other writers in his own vernacular. And so, in fact, it comes out; of all Dante's triads Provengal poets are most obviously and architectonically disposed, one for each cantica, each one clearly identified and prominently placed, varying only, I would say, in their degree of integration with their milieu. But before venturing any further statement on group as whole, I would like to pass chosen troubadours in review. Bertran de Born's dramatic and macabre appearance in bolgia of sowers of discord (Inferno XXVIII, 112 ff.) will not easily be forgotten. He appears carrying his own severed head in his hand a guisa di lanterna. Approaching Dante, he raises his arm con tutta la testa, gesture of spaventosa naturalezza;2 movement of line, as Crescini remarks,3 underlines painful effort required. Frightful scene is, to be sure, although grotesque here all but verges on comic. Where Dante got notion of portable head scholars have been unable to find out with any certainty; roots are probably in folklore and myth and most American readers of my generation at least are prepared for weird spectacle by stratagem of Brom Van Brunt, in Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Washington Irving, as has been pointed out by various critics,4 owed much to German folklore; probably even before Orpheus' head rolled down Hebrus pathetically calling on Eurydice as memorialized in Georgics, sight that terrified Ichabod Crane was familiar to our fanciful ancestors. Joyce's Virag illustrates that image continues to have an appeal. Cases have been cited from old literatures, Indian,

Explaining away Singular Non-existence Statements

Nowhere in philosophy is there a more persistent kind of nuisance statement than the singular negative existential. Examples of this sort of statement are the descriptional statement(1) The teacher at Sleepy Hollow doesn't exist,and the referential statement(2) Ichabod Crane doesn't exist.Statements denying existence to a specific object have bothered philosophers from Parmenides to Ryle and Quine. Their high nuisance value rests in a simple paradox they generate. The paradox may be phrased as follows.

Irving's Use of American Folklore in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”

In this essay I hope to restore to Washington Irving a small measure of his fame as the first significant author of American fiction. Irving has been acclaimed as our literary mediator with England, where he was the first American to win critical praise. He is valued, too, as a pioneer, introducing Continental romanticism and the Gothic mode into American writing. But I wish to praise him on other grounds: as the first important American author to put to literary use the comic mythology and popular traditions of American character which, by the early nineteenth century, bad proliferated widely in oral tradition. The case for Irving's achievement in this direction rests primarily upon the personalities of Ichabod Crane and Brom Bones in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” There he gave our literature its first important statement of the clash of regional characters—the Yankee vs. the backwoodsman— who had already emerged as the dominant types in our regional folk traditions. The conflict between them was soon to become a major theme in our literature, as well as a continuing motif in a century and a half of folktales, and in our national history.

English literature in the rural high school

Samuel Johnson averred to his friend, Bennet Langton, that his prodigious knowledge of Latin was the fortunate result of the merciless whippings inflicted Mr. Hunter, a schoolmaster who did not distinguish between ignorance and negligence, but whose punishment, nevertheless, was purposeful: he whipped the unprepared student to save him from the gallows. Ichabod Crane, a much-maligned educator, had his own reasons for sparing your mere puny stripling, that winced at the least flourish of the rod, and for appeasing justice by inflicting a double portion on some little tough, wrong-headed, broad-skirted Dutch urchin, who sulked and swelled and grew dogged and sullen beneath the birch. This preceptor, likewise, thought only of the efficacy of his punishment: All this he called 'doing his duty their parents.' Now, though it is conceded that a David Copperfield may suffer complete amnesia in the presence of a stern tutor, it is, nevertheless, a fact that the Mr. Murdstones, the Mr. Hunters, and the Mr. Cranes have their place in the field of education: a healthy, intelligent, and lazy student can be completely trained in certain subjects physical punishment, intimidation, or other varieties of third-degree pedagogy. Latin is a subject which can be rather effectively transmitted, reclaimed, and retransmitted this process. Mathematics, to some extent, can be taught in this fashion, most of the modern foreign languages, the formulae of science, certain aspects of history, and English grammar. But English literature (unless the instructor is so dauntless as to announce himself the authority in the field) cannot be taught thus featly and conclusively in the high school. In the university there is no problem. The assiduous student captures the protessor's winged words, identifies them, and, having permitted them to die, shelves them with his permanent collection. When he encounters novelty, he is properly respectful. The dull student captures them if he can, cages, and nurtures them until the semester's end. The gifted student reverences the scholar; the dull student tolerates him. The gifted student tolerates the purveyor; the dull student reverences him. The classroom is, indeed, a happy place. Nor is the teaching of English literature in the city high school the most formidable task imaginable. The city lad has a score of interests, a score of diversions, a limitless variety of ways in which to express himself outside of school. Liking his English instructors, he prepares his work. Disliking them,