In addition to reading William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” this week, please also read David Streitfeld’s New York Times blog post, “As I Lay Dying: The Web Fixes Faulkner” and think about the life of the text after the author writes it. In Streitfeld’s discussion of Faulkner’s story, he notices how the Genius.com incarnation of “A Rose for Emily” mistakenly switched a controversial word for a similar-looking word with an entirely different meaning. Commenters on that blog post engaged with what they thought should have been done differently, or critiqued Streitfeld’s argument.
One way to engage in our discussion this week would be to add an annotation about “A Rose for Emily”–some detail that you think elucidates readers’ understanding of the story–on Genius.com, and then link us there in your discussion comment and explain why you think this is important to add to the understanding of the short story.
Another way might be to write a comment on Streitfeld’s blog post in response to his argument.
Those are both very high-stakes! Lower-stakes versions could be to draft those comments on our site in this discussion and get feedback from your classmates before (or instead of?) posting them in those higher-stakes places. Or to react via a comment in our discussion to someone else’s comment on Streitfeld’s post, or to someone’s annotation on Genius.com.
But what does discussing the substitution of an r for an n in that word do to help us engage with the story? It shows that it’s relevant–Streitfeld’s blog post was recent, from last month–and introduces us to the world of online annotations, in the form of Genius.com. To move our discussion deeper into the story, I ask you to engage in a discussion here with a second comment, about some other aspect of the story. Maybe you want to think about the effect of this different style of narration, how it’s told, or who the characters are, or what genre you think it belongs to (if “The Story of an Hour” had certain leanings into horror, would you say “A Rose for Emily does, too?), or again, thinking of the significance of a detail in our understanding of a story.
Feel free to respond directly to any of these questions by writing in the reply box below, or reply directly to a classmate by clicking Reply below their comment.
And as always, feel free to also ask questions below.
