Category: Uncategorized (Page 4 of 4)

Hi Students,

Welcome to Introduction to Fiction–ENG2001, Section O535.

We will spend much of our time on this OpenLab site as it will be the place where we will find general information about the class…as well as readings,  homework, and major assignments. Right now, the site is in its infancy, but it will grow throughout the first few weeks of class. Take a few minutes to familiarize yourself with the menu headings.

Agenda for Wednesday, August 25:

1–Introduction and how are we doing these days?

2–Attendance

3–OpenLab tour

https://openlab.citytech.cuny.edu/blog/help/signing-up-on-the-openlab/

https://openlab.citytech.cuny.edu/blog/help/joining-a-course/

4–Course Policy and Weekly Schedule

5–About this course

6–Short Stories:

Discussion: What is a story? What are its defining characteristics?

Let’s read this short story by Jose Luis Borges:

The Captive

by Jose Luis Borges, published 1960

 

The story is told in Junín or in Tapalquén. A boy disappeared after an Indian attack. People said the Indians had kidnapped him. His parents searched for him in vain. Then, long years later, a soldier who came from the interior told them about an Indian with blue eyes who might well be their son. At length they found him (the chronicle has lost the circumstances and I will not invent what I do not know) and thought they recognized him. The man, buffeted by the wilderness and by barbaric life, no longer knew how to understand the words of his mother tongue, but indifferent and docile, he let himself be led home. There he stopped, perhaps because the others stopped. He looked at the door as if he did not know what it was for. Then suddenly he lowered his head, let out a shout, ran across the entrance way and the two long patios, and plunged into the kitchen. Without hesitating, he sank his arm into the blackened chimney and pulled out the little horn-handled knife he had hidden there as a boy. His eyes shone with joy and his parents wept because they had found their son.

Perhaps this recollection was followed by others, but the Indian could not live within walls, and one day he went in search of his wilderness. I wonder what he felt in that dizzying moment when past and present became one. I wonder whether the lost son was reborn and died in that instant of ecstasy; and whether he ever managed to recognize, if only as an infant or a dog does, his parents and his home.

[Source: Borges, Jorge Luis. Collected Fictions. Translated by Andrew Hurley. Penguin, 1998, p 300.]

Question: How should we read this? Let’s explore our five-part short story reading tool (Readings menu tab)

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Homework due Monday, August 30 — before class

1–Sign up for OpenLab if you have not already done so. Register for my class.

2–Read two short stories: Lydia Davis’s “A Story Told to Me by a Friend” and Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Black Cat” –find these stories in the Readings menu tab…scroll to the bottom. And in your notes (either a physical notebook or on your digital device) write down: Author’s name, story title, date of publication, setting, narration style (first, second, or third person), basic plot (what happens in the beginning, middle, and end of the story), and…did you like the story?–Why or why not?

3–Fill out the Questionnaire below and remember to submit: