Utopia/Dystopia
Marriage/ marital relationships
non-romantic relationships
power in these relationships
Genre: horror, gothic vs naturalism, idyllic
think about feminism vs patriarchy
Who are our next volunteers for posting by Friday end-of-day for Monday’s class?
In class today, we began our discussion of “The Yellow Wall-Paper” and “The Cottagette,” both by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. I also gave everyone a copy of “Why I Wrote the The Yellow Wallpaper” so we can consider how Gilman describes her rationale.
If you need to remind yourself of what blogging for homework entails, what your responsibilities are, or when posts and comments are due, re-read this semester’s blogging assignment.
If you want to know more about what I’ve asked you to think about, read all previous homework assignment posts, or your classmates’ homework posts.
Here are some thoughts to get our conversations started:
http://blogs.setonhill.edu/taydornin/files/2014/10/yellow-wallpaper.jpg
Think about narrator reliability, about who the reader is (implied reader, ideal reader, narrate) (read about these terms in a comment on this post)
“Cottagette”: man and woman, where he isn’t in control of her, wants her to be who she is rather than expecting something from her; This is the case for Malda and Ford, but not for everyone
Striking sense of equality that Ford brings into the story
“The Yellow Wall-Paper”: man in control of the woman
John treats her as…through his actions he laughs at her, tells her she isn’t sick, how he regulates her treatment based on not believing she’s sick.
Narrator writing to rebel; to keep sane
Time that they’re living in: turn of the 20th century, late 1800s: context
Question:
who is the woman in the wallpaper? what is the relationship between the woman and the narrator
Patterns:
john always controls her
fancies
YW-P harder to understand:Â patterns,
Three of you have volunteered to post for Monday’s class (meaning post by end-of-day on Friday). Are there two or three more volunteers to post as well? If so, please respond here with a comment letting me know you intend to be one of our posters. Everyone should respond to your classmates’ posts by Monday at 10am. Try to generate a conversation, rather than just a series of agreements!
If you need to remind yourself of what we’re doing, re-read this semester’s blogging assignment.
If you want to know more about what I’ve asked you to think about, read all previous homework assignment posts, or your classmates’ homework posts.
Here are some thoughts to get our conversations started:
An unreliable narrator is a narrator that the reader cannot trust to be truthful or fully depicting the story. Use that term to consider any of the narrators we have encountered so far, using quotations from texts to support your argument.
Choose three quotations from Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper” that convince you that the protagonist is an unreliable narrator and explain why for each.
Choose three quotations from “The Yellow Wall-Paper” that present the married couple’s relationship, and explain what you understand about John as a character, and about the protagonist as a narrator for the way she depicts John.
We might use the words utopia and dystopia to describe the two short stories by Charlotte Perkins Gilman that we read. What do those words mean? Which story is utopian and which is dystopian? Why?
How do the different settings come into play in these two short stories by Gilman? In what ways might we read the settings as similar but the inhabitants of those worlds as different?
Is Malda a reliable narrator in “The Cottagette”? why or why not? Incorporate quotations into your answer to support your argument.
What unfinished business do we have about “A Rose for Emily”? Use this opportunity to focus our attention on a particular passage or series of passages that you want to insist we get to before we move on to focus more on other texts.
What unfinished business do we have about any of our texts from this semester? Use this opportunity to focus our attention on a particular passage or series of passages that you want to insist we get to before we move on to focus more on other texts.
I’m very interested in reading about your thoughts on these two stories next week!
In “A Rose for Emily”:
How do we know what we know?
Why are we told what we’re told?
Who is the narrator? 1st person, “our”–a collective of the townspeople
Focalization: who is the focalizer: whose focus do we see? this is the point-of-view character
different kinds of first-person narrators: homodiegetic (first-person character narrator) and autodiegetic (first-person protagonist narrator)
do we know more than the narrator? is that possible?
When/where does Emily exercise her power?
What do we find at the end of the story?
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?
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
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?
If you volunteered to post by end-of-day on Friday so that everyone can comment on your posts by 10:00am Monday, here are some ideas to get you started (choose one, or get inspired by one or two):
These are just a few ideas that you might consider, and certainly not all of them will be addressed. I hope my suggesting them gives everyone ideas about other topics for discussion and other ways to read the short stories we have begun to cover in class. For your post, choose one of these topics, or venture off on your own topic, using any of these as a guide to make sure your topic is as focused. Use the texts to guide you, consider that your audience (mostly your classmates and me) will have read the same materials but might not have thought about them as much as you have or in the same way that you did, and enjoy sharing your ideas. On the nitty-gritty end of things, remember to include a title that reflects what you’re writing (it shouldn’t be able to apply to everyone’s post!), choose appropriate categories and tags (or add if you want a tag that isn’t there already), write at least 300 words, proofread, and publish! If there are links or media you want to include, please do.
Commenters: get ready! Everyone who isn’t writing a blog post will need to comment by 10:00am Monday, so make sure you’re ready with 100-150 words of insights and reactions to share with the class.
Feel free to comment on this post to ask questions or get clarification to understand this assignment better. I will answer, but feel free to answer questions for your classmates if you have the answer!
Throughout the semester, we will use our course site to develop and share our ideas about and analyses of the materials for this course. For each class, you will need to share something, whether it be a blog post or comments, in addition to your weekly glossary entries. You are always welcome to do more than the schedule requires, and I hope we will develop a lively online community that becomes integral to our in-person discussions.
For each class session, I will suggest topics, or contributors can choose their own topics. Blog posts should be focused, using direct quotations from the text to drive the responses or reflections in the post. A post should be about something we are about to read or something we have just read, but it might also bring in materials we have read earlier in the semester or materials that interest you from outside of class (as long as they are relevant and add something overall). Authors of these posts should think critically about the reading material, and should consider how a particular element of fiction or term relating to narrative functions in the material—it might amplify the text, or it could be complicated or problematic, but any of these would be interesting opportunities to explore. Blog posts should be approximately 300 words, and should be proofread before posting. Please include links, images, etc, as appropriate.
Those who are not responsible for contributing a blog post on a given day will be responsible for commenting. Commenting shouldn’t just be “I agree” or “Good point.” These might be the start of a comment. Use the space to offer a counterpoint, to bring together different ideas, or to direct us to a particular point the post didn’t include. Comments should be approximately 100-150 words. If you want to add additional comments that are shorter, feel free to. Commenting can get heated or contentious, but we will maintain decency and respect for one another even while exchanging different ideas and views.
As a class, we decided that for Monday classes, posts will go up by the end of day on Friday, and that comments will be complete by 10am Monday; for Wednesday classes, posts will go up by noon on Tuesday, and comments will be complete by 10am Wednesday. We can revisit these expectations after we complete the first round, so everyone can weigh in on the experience. We’ll go through a few rounds of posting, so you’ll each have a few turns to direct the conversation in addition to contributing to and shaping the conversation via commenting.
I’ll post my suggested topics after class using the category Homework Instructions and also categories relating to the readings. When you post, please do not use the category Homework Instructions unless you are actually writing instructions for the class to complete for homework. Instead, use the categories that correspond to the author or unit that we’re reading.
Stay tuned for the first set of suggested topics, to be published this evening.
Brainstorm:
When I think about Cinderella as a story, I expect it to include:
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