Now that you have had the opportunity to read Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” and Susan Glaspell’s “A Jury of Her Peers” and to discuss them with classmates via our course blog, your homework is to think further about them in your own blog post. This post should follow our course’s blogging guidelines, and should draw on one or two quotations as the main focus of your post to convey an argument about some aspect of the texts. The post can touch on points that you or others made in the discussion, provided you cite them AND that you take any of those ideas further. Your goal is to provide analysis of the specific passage or passages you have chosen to focus on, and to show how it exemplifies a larger argument about the text or texts.
This is going to be the format for our homework blog posts for the next few weeks, so you will begin developing these skills here.
Some things you might want to think about:
- How do you judge the protagonists for their thoughts about/actions against their husbands? Do you judge them differently?
- How do other characters and the narrators influence our understanding of the protagonists?
- To what extent does setting play a role in the women’s stories?
- To what extent are these stories dated, or are they as relevant as if they were written today? What difference does that make for you reading them now, in 2015?
Remember to categorize your post with Week 1, and to use any tags you think are relevant (except Homework Assignment, which I’m using for these weekly instruction posts)–or add your own tags. If you neglect to categorize your post, I will not find it and will not be able to count it.
These posts will guide our discussion on Wednesday. Please post them by the end of Tuesday night so we have the chance to read them and come to class prepared.
Hopefully you’ve gotten to know me a little bit just from our first class and from the syllabus and other materials on this site–our writing style says a lot about us–but allow me to introduce myself more fully. I’m a native New Yorker, and have lived in three of the five boroughs. I’m an assistant professor in the English Department at City Tech, with a Ph.D. in English and a certificate in Women’s Studies from the CUNY Graduate Center in midtown Manhattan. My undergraduate degree from Brown University is in both English and Biology. As a college student, this combination often confused people, and they would ask “What are you going to do, write science textbooks?” No, that was never an interest of mine. I do use a lot of science terminology and metaphors in my writing, both in my creative writing and in my scholarly work.
Here at City Tech, I’m involved in a number of interesting projects. I won’t list them all, but I’m currently one of the OpenLab co-directors, and am conducting research on interactive technology use in education. My scholarly work also focuses on narrative theory, gender and sexuality studies, and literature of the 20th century. Some of the stories we will read this semester are texts that I study in my own work. I’m active on the Undergraduate Research Committee, so let’s talk if you’re interested in conducting research. I tweet for the Literary Arts Festival, @CityTechLitFest, not only about our even each spring, but also other interesting things related to writing, reading, Brooklyn, and college. Follow me there!
Outside of work–if we can ever really separate the things we do into work and non-work categories–I’m an avid knitter and crocheter. I’ve been known to quilt. I love to cook. I want to learn how to use a letterpress. As you can see, I like to make things! It’s so satisfying to see a project through from start to finish, and to have a tangible object to show for it. I like to bring my love of making things into the classroom, creating projects that don’t just ask students to do what they’re used to doing but to make things, too.
I love to look at old maps and photographs of New York, and often incorporate them into my courses. Although I’m an amateur and don’t have fancy equipment, I love to take photographs when I travel, whether it’s to Iceland (a great trip I took this summer), to Chicago (where I’ll be visiting this spring for the annual conference of the International Society for the Study of Narrative, and hopefully to eat a Chicago-style hot dog for some good Chicago tourism but not Chicago-style pizza), or even just for a ride on the Staten Island Ferry (which I’ve done countless times) or a walk on the Brooklyn Bridge (which I often do on my way to or from work).
Now that you’ve gotten to know me a bit better, I look forward to getting to know all of you!