Dear ENG2001 Students:

Greetings, and welcome to ENG2001: Introduction to Literature: Fiction at City Tech. I am your professor, Sean Scanlan, and I look forward to working with you this semester.

As the Fall 2020 semester begins on Wednesday, August 26, I wanted to let you know some important information about our online course.

Our class is synchronous. This which means that we have set meeting days and times, and I am obligated to take attendance. We meet Mondays and Wednesdays from 9:00 to 9:45 on Zoom. The schedule says we meet from 8:30 – 9:45, but that time was for in-class meetings before the pandemic. The administration has said that online synchronous classes need to meet for at least half of the stated three hours per week, and we are meeting for more than that. Know that I am available to help support your work in this course, through weekly office hours, which will not be in person, but will be through Zoom, phone, or email appointments (see details on our site).

 

 

If you have trouble getting onto Zoom, please email me: sscanlan@citytech.cuny.edu.

HOMEWORK: These two tasks are due before class on Monday, August 31:

1–Please fill out the questionnaire located under the Vital Information on the right sidebar.  This form will help me to see where everybody is in terms of tech, access, and feelings.

2–Read Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Black Cat” –find this story in the “Readings” menu tab…it is the fifth item from 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?

Sincerely,

Sean Scanlan

If time allows, let’s ask discuss the concept of the story. What is a story? Can we define it?

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 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.

 

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