Two notes:

1–For homework, read “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson

2–I have to cancel Tuesday’s office hours. If you have questions, please see me before class, after class, or email me.

Agenda:

—Finish up presentations

—Discuss what went well and not so well in terms of the PSA project

—Begin our third unit: Ethics and the Short Story

— Important definitions: short story, novella, novel, narrative, story, narrator

*5-Part-Reading-Tool-Scanlan-Updated

 

Getting started: One of the most important questions in this unit will be: what is a story and what is a narrative? How can we define it? What does Wikipedia say?

A short story is an invented prose narrative shorter than a novel usually dealing with a few characters and aiming at unity of effect and often concentrating on the creation of mood rather than plot (Merriam-Webster online dictionary)

Let’s read this very 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.

 

Homework due Wednesday, Nov 13: Read “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson [find this story in the “Readings” menu tab] and in your notes, write down the relevant five parts of this story: character, setting, plot, narration/narrator, style/structure/symbols/metaphors