NOTE: There will be a pop quiz on Monday. Please review the five types of ethics, the empathy handout, “Assimilation,” and “The Interpreter of Maladies.” If students read the stories with care and know the ethics and empathy handout, they should get 100% on this quiz. This quiz is not mean to punish or trick; it is meant to encourage everyone to keep up.

Agenda:

 

—Empathy handout

—Discuss “Assimilation”

—Discuss vocabulary:

Five-part reading tool (1-5)

6-symbol

7-metaphor

8-style

9-structure

10-focalizer: the person or entity who is seeing or visualizing the scene; this person or entity is not always the narrator–it is often a character.

11-focal distance (1. distance between focalizer and action, or 2. distance between the narrator and the focalizer)

12-horizon of expectations

                     The “continuous establishing and altering of horizons,” urges the literary critic Jans Robert Jauss in Theory of Aesthetic Reception (1982):

determines the relationship of the individual text to the succession of texts that forms the genre. The new text evokes for the reader (listener) the horizon of expectations and rules familiar from earlier texts, which are then varied, corrected, altered, or even just reproduced . . . the question of the subjectivity of the interpretation and of the taste of different readers or levels of readers can be asked meaningfully only when one has first clarified which trans-subjective horizon of understanding conditions the influence of the text. (23)

 

Homework for Monday, Nov 25: Read “The Interpreter of Maladies” by Jhumpa Lahiri, and in your notes, write down how ethics and empathy work.