Monthly Archives: February 2018

Remit

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Remit: (verb): to refrain from exacting.

Source: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/remit

From “A Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner:

“Alive, Miss Emily … dating from that day in 1894 when Colonel Sartoris, the mayor … remitted her taxes … Colonel Sartoris invented an involved tale to the effect that Miss Emily’s father had loaned money to the town, which the town, as a matter of business, preferred this way of repaying.”

This sentence states that Colonel Sartoris had stopped collecting taxes from Emily because of a (supposed) loan that her father gave the town.

 

 

The narrator in “A Rose for Emily”

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“The narrator in “A Rose for Emily” is different than others we have encountered. What term would you use to identify the narrator? is it a reliable narrator? Use evidence from the story to show why you say reliable or not.”

So in the story “A rose for Emily” I was mislead by who was actually telling/narrating the story. We don’t really get who is the narrator unless we look deeply in what kind of words are used through the passage. Depending on whose eyes we are looking through, the point of view can actually be a bit different. So before we get into that, lets take a look at “The Story of An Hour”, it is told in third person. It can also been seen as Third Person omniscient, but the narrator only knows how Mrs. Mallard is feeling and no one else, due to the fact that all other characters are “flat characters”. Now going back to “A rose for Emily”, it would seem that the story is definitely not told from Emily’s perspective. It is mostly told from other people’s point of view, and how the saw the situation unfold.  For Example

“When we saw her again, her hair was cut short, making her look like a girl, with a vague resemblance to those angels in colored church windows–sort of tragic and serene.”

“We were a little disappointed that there was not a public blowing-off, but we believed that he had gone on to prepare for Miss Emily’s coming, or to give her a chance to get rid of the cousins.”

“Then we noticed that in the second pillow was the indentation of a head. One of us lifted something from it, and leaning forward, that faint and invisible dust dry and acrid in the nostrils, we saw a long strand of iron-gray hair.”

All of these quotes mentions the words “we” as in the people who either worked with her or saw her very frequently. We see the story through their eyes and through their thoughts. So due to that I kinda feel like the narrator is not that reliable. In the end of the story even after Emily’s death, we were told how “they” knew about there being “a room above the stairs which no one had seen in forty years” and that they saw a strand of gray hair. So after reading these quotes I am more inclined on saying that people who knew her quiet well and have been close to her were telling the story. The most reliable narrator would be First Person, or someone who is telling the story about themselves.

Posting for Tuesday’s class

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If you need to remind yourself of what we’re doing, re-read this semester’s blogging assignment.

If you want to remind yourself of this week’s questions, re-read the last homework instruction post.

We agreed that even though our next class is on Tuesday instead of Monday (it’s a CUNY Conversion Day, meaning that CUNY pretends that Tuesday is Monday to have equal number of days of the week in the semester), posters would still post by end-of-day Friday, but that commenters have until Tuesday morning to finish commenting.

Here are some starting points. Choose one if you’re writing a post, or go in a different direction. Try to choose a different topic for your post than the other posters have written about, if for no other reason than to expand the conversation. To further develop our discussion about ” A Rose for Emily”:

Think about power in the story. Choose (and include in your post) a passage or a few related passages that highlight some aspect of the power dynamics at play in the story. Who has power, who doesn’t, how do they interact, how to they negotiate their positions of powerfulness or lack of power? Is there another topic or theme that relates to or intersects with power that you want to write about for Tuesday’s class?

Other factors to consider: how does narration style, point of view, setting, characterization or other elements of fiction play a role in the power dynamic you’re analyzing?

We started looking at the effects of the non-linear order of time in “A Rose for Emily,” but you might take the opportunity to consider what effect the sequencing has. How does the order affect your understanding of the story and your experience with it? What would be gained or lost if it were linear? What do I mean by linear? Are there other texts–written, filmic, graphic, etc–that do this that you want to call attention to?

What does gothic mean?  What is Southern Gothic, specifically? Wikipedia might be a good place to get a definition and explanation of what Southern Gothic is. How is “A Rose for Emily” an example of this? You might add that as your vocabulary word as well.

In what ways is “A Rose for Emily” similar to other texts we have read? different? What do you think about those similarities and differences?

The narrator in “A Rose for Emily” is different than others we have encountered. What term would you use to identify the narrator? is it a reliable narrator? Use evidence from the story to show why you say reliable or not.

What do you want to know more about when reading “A Rose for Emily”? What information or ideas do you have that you want to share with a larger community? What about sharing ideas on the page devoted to “A Rose for Emily” on Genius.com would be appealing, and what would you be more likely to save for our smaller community? What do you learn reading the annotations added to that version with crowd-sourced annotations?

Forestall

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In “The Story of An Hour,” by Kate Chopin, the author uses this word in the following sentence.

“He had only taken the time to assure himself of its truth by a second telegram, and had hastened to forestall any less careful, less tender friend in bearing the sad message.”

According to the merriam-webster dictionary, it means:

“to exclude, hinder, or prevent by prior occupation or measures”

This would mean that he quickly prevented any other friends from deliver the message of the death of her husband.

Reading all kinds of love on Valentine’s Day

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To accommodate more discussion, we will continue discussing “A Rose for Emily” on Tuesday, 2/20. Please keep up with the two Charlotte Perkins Gilman readings, “The Yellow Wallpaper” and “The Cottagette” so you finish them for Wednesday, 2/21.

When we think about “The Story of an Hour” and “A Jury of Her Peers,” what do we think about? what points of intersection are there?

oppressed wife

  • in “A Jury of Her Peers” we understand the ways that the men speak to the women as insulting

oppressive husband

husband’s death (?)

freedom: finding it, losing it

demographics and social status: class, age, gender

narration style

sympathy and empathy: within the stories and the reader’s empathy for characters

small event

pent up emotion and anger specifically

facilitated vs present character

*people outside never really know other than what they can see on the surface*

Minnie Foster vs Mrs. Wright–can this parallel Mrs. Mallard vs Louise. Loss of a first name in marriage.

 

Reading “A Rose for Emily”

First-person plural narrator: represents the whole town

Chronology: this is difficult to piece together, but all told from the point of Emily’s funeral

Short quiz on chronology: what happened when?

Elusive

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  • Elusive (Adjective) – tending to evade grasp or pursuit /hard to comprehend or define

Taken from Kate Chopin’s “The Story of An Hour”

“The was something coming to her and she was waiting for, fearfully. What was it? She did not know; it was too subtle and elusive to name.”

Chopin used the word elusive to describe the unknown feeling that Mrs. Mallard is experiencing. It was use to fully show that Mrs. Mallard is at the point of thinking something unpleasant and complicated after her husband’s death, which is actually the sense of being glad that she’s finally free despite of a bad event.

source: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/elusive

Bespoke

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Bespoke (Verb)

Bespoke means to ask for in advance or reserve beforehand or engage in advance or make arrangement for.

https://www/merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bespoke

“The Story of An Hour” By Kate Chopin

“She was young, with a fair, calm face, whose lines bespoke repression and even a certain strength. But now there was a dull stare in her eyes, whose gaze was fixed away off yonder on one of those patches of blue sky.”

I now understand this sentence after finding out the definition of the word. It is saying that her face was basically making arrangements to show strength and repression.

 

Afflicted

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Afflicted (Verb)

Afflicted means to cause pain or suffering or distress greatly.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/afflicted

“The Story of An Hour” by Kate Chopin

“Knowing that Mrs. Mallard was afflicted with a heart trouble, great care was taken to break to her as gently as possible the news of her husbands death.”

I understand the way Mrs. Mallard was feeling due to the fact of finding the definition of this word. She felt pain and distress in finding out about her husbands death.

 

Repression

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Repression (noun) – a mental process by which distressing thoughts, memories, or impulses that may give rise to anxiety are excluded from consciousness and left to operate in the unconscious

Source: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/repression

From “The Story of An Hour” by Kate Chopin (1894)

I came across this word while reading “The Story of An Hour” by Kate Chopin (1894). It appears around the middle of the reading when the author describes the way the girl expresses herself, it caught my interest because I had an idea of what it meant but didn’t know it’s exact definition so it made me curious to find out what the writer was trying to get at.

“She was young, with a fair, calm face, whose lines bespoke repression and even a certain strength.”

After reading the definition of the word I better understand the context of how the author was using it in that part of the text. As seen in the quote, it’s used to describe how the girl is expressing herself and give insight of what’s going on inside her head, as if she’s trying to suppress something and not think about it even though it’s there. It’s similar to bottling up emotions as a way to cope with issues.

Eradicate

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  • Eradicate (transitive verb): to do away with as completely as if by pulling up by the roots
    • Source: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/eradicate
    • Taken from: Introduction by: Martha Johnson-Olin (Author)
      • “Some versions position this competition between the mothers. The stepmother tries to eradicate the influence of the first wife, and the stepsisters serve as extensions of her will.”
    • As the author broke down the article in sections to simplify and explain the components of a Cinderella story, she mentioned rivalry between the female’s in the story. She utilized the word eradicate, or completely destroy, to emphasize the intense level of discord and hatred between the mothers and stepmothers. The word eradicate was the instrument used to stress the battle for dominance.