English 224- FINAL

Invisible Man & Chapter 1

Ralph Ellison

What does Beto give the narrator as a gift before he (Beto) leaves for college?

A book

What symbolism is found in Manley Pointer's carrying case?

A carrying case usually symbols something of a common, working man. Manley Pointer is so willingly trying to appear as a just another working man (bible salesperson in this case) to gain the trust and discreditation by those he is selling to. This is just a trick though as he knows how capable he is of undermining these people to take advantage of them.

"A Rose for Emily" William Faulkner What was found on the pillow?

A gray hair

Diving into the Wreck

Adrienne Rich

Coal

Audre Lorde

Stubborn Girls and Mean Stories

Dorothy Allison

What does Fitzgerald mean by the phrase "winter dreams" that he uses as the title of the story? The phrase appears at three different points of the story: at the end of the first section; at the beginning of the second section; and at the end of the story itself. How does the placement of this phrase throughout the story contribute to the themes with which Fitzgerald is concerned?

Dreaming in the winter about the spring. Desires are the future and then the future turns to shit. More in love with the idea of these things rather than the ideas itself. Not what he thought it would be. He would like to back in winter imagining the stuff he didn't have. Throughout he dreams about better life status. Occurs in a season of loneliness and never accomplished.

Consider themes in the story: ▪ appearance v. reality; what does it mean to be a "good person"; gendered power dynamics

Education and intelligence, insecurities

One Art

Elizabeth Bishop

A Rose for Emily What does death symbolize

Emily, Homer, and Emily's father dies

What are the story's (A Rose For Emily) major emotional themes?

Emotional ◦ When Emily's father died, she refused to believe he was actually gone for three days ◦ She has been alone her entire life--her father drove her suitors away

Winter Dreams

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Good Country People

Flannery O'Connor

What are the story's (A Rose For Emily) major geospatial themes?

Geospatial ◦ Faulkner personifies her house ▪ The house has been one of the only constants in her life. If people take it, she is left with no one (taxes) ▪ 2nd paragraph: Faulkner personifies the house ▪ Memory: is unreliable??-- important because how story is told ▪ Insanity and respectability

When the narrator is finally allowed to give his speech in the chapter, he quotes extensively from a controversial address by Booker T. Washington, a turn of the century civil rights leader who encouraged African Americans to stay in the South, endure racism, and work for the greater good of society. Ellison has his narrator repeat the rallying cry of "Cast down your bucket where you are." What is the effect of this in the text? Do you consider it an ironic critique of Washington or a sincere appreciation of his efforts?

He is agreeing with Washington; work in this area/plant your roots

What is a red-haired southerner doing in the narrator's neighborhood?

He was an army recruiter

"Stubborn Girls and Mean Stories: Dorothy Allison Who dies between the house and Uncle Bo's house?

Her grandmother

How is Faulkner a pioneer of high modernism? Contrast with T.S. Eliot, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature one year before Faulkner. (Faulkner's concerns: rural themes, race relations, family legacies v. Eliot's urban/cosmopolitan treatment of modern alienation)

High modernism: unfaltering confidence in science and technology as means to reorder the social and natural world • Faulkner creates his own county based on Lafayette county--Yoknapatawpha .. ▪ Faulkner is more straightforward and embedded in a single culture. ▪ Elliot is more metaphorical and pulls from different, more urban cultures (London, which is a huge and highly populated city; He is still very alone though) ▪ Faulkner describes Emily as a discrete alienation, excluding her from something small as the community; whereas, Eliot excludes Prufrock from something larger, the world in which he lives.

When Dexter says, at the very end of "Winter Dreams," "That thing will come back no more," does he believe that wholeheartedly? Has Dexter stopped looking for the glamorous and impossible dream? Will he ever be capable of loving a woman for what she is, not what she represents as a status symbol?

I think he wants to believe it with all of his heart, but he doesn't. I believe he's stopped looking at Judy for his dream, but he hasn't stopped looking entirely. I'm not sure if he will ever change entirely. From his past and track record it doesn't seem he is actually capable of loving a woman for whom she is, as opposed to how much money she has. It seems he looks for wealthier women (people in general) to help ease his own anxieties about never being good enough in terms of money. His own insecurities are reflected in these actions of his.

Kingston: The Woman Warrior Where were the bodies found?

In the bottom of the well

How might this story be considered a work of the Southern gothic genre?

Insanity, Family troubles ▪ The story has underlying themes of death, horror and isolation ▪ Focused on the cruel isolation due to strict southern society standards; Living in old mansion

Sexy

Jhumpa Lahiri

The Year of Magical Thinking

Joan Didion

Drown

Junot Diaz

Good Country People "That is ________"

Life

A Rose for Emily What do taxes symbolize

Links to her father's death. His death signals the family's financial decline, which is public.

Wishes for Sons and Homage to my Hips

Lucille Clifton

The Woman Warrior

Maxine Hong Kingston

Kingston: The Woman Warrior Who is the narrator

Mother

How accurately do Mrs. Hopewell's homilies capture the reality of her life?

Mrs. Hopewell attempts make herself appear as a good christian southern lady as she hires workers from lower economic classes out of her "good heart" while really this is just another form of her judgemental nature.

"Had he been as calm inwardly as he was in appearance, Dexter would have had time to examine his surroundings in detail. He received, however, an enduring impression that the house was the most elaborate he had ever seen. He had known for a long time that it was the finest on Lake Ermine, with a Pompeian swimming pool and twelve acres of lawn and garden . . ."

Ominous, pitiful, reflective

Good Country People "Everyone has their own _________"

Opinions

Good Country People "Nothing is _________"

Perfect

What are the story's (A Rose For Emily) major physical themes?

Physical ◦ Emily is all alone except for her African American servant, however he is so quiet that it's like she's all alone

"A Rose for Emily" William Faulkner Why did the sheriff absolve her taxes?

Pity, the house is the only thing she had left

What are the 6 narrative elements?

Plot, theme, character, setting, point of view, style

The form of this poem is free verse; each stanza celebrates her true self through various themes. What are they?

Race, Career, and Love

Woman Hollering Creek

Sandra Cisneros

What crime did Beto and the protagonist commit regularly?

Shoplifting

"A Rose For Emily" William Faulkner Why did she buy the poison?

To kill the rats

A Rose For Emily's Point of View

Told by the ladies in the town

"Stubborn Girls and Mean Stories" Dorothy Allison What word did she identify with?

Trash

How do you interpret the significance of Joy/Hulga's name/change?

Well to start, she is most certainly not joyful in anyway so the name change was a foreshadowing event. She also picked a name that her mother would never except clearly trying to further belittle Mrs. Hopewell's expectations for Hulga and southern women in general. Hulga does not appear to be a dainty and respectable southern name.

A Rose For Emily

William Faulkner

Kingston: The Woman Warrior Did this story involve rape?

Yes

How does a religious worldview permeate this story? Would you characterize O'Connor's narrative fiction as "the Christ-Haunted South"?

Yes, people "must believe in Christ or else" Mrs. Hopewell acts like she is a Godly woman when in fact she is not. She gossips about everyone. Hulga is openly a nonbeliever and it extremely reserved, and Mr. Manley is manipulative in pretending he is a follower of Christ.

"One Art" Elizabeth Bishop What were the things she lost?

her keys, an hour badly spent, her mothers watch, two cities

A Rose for Emily's Setting

post civil war, pre civil -rights, roughly 1860s-1930s

What is stream of consciousness?

▪ - a writing style that is fluid as it comes; not overly structured or broken down; a ramble association with no care for unity ▪ Continuous flow objected by dialogue

What is a villanelle? What refrain is repeated in the poem?

▪ A villanelle is a 19 line poetic form with 5 tercets followed by a quatrain. There are two refrains and two repeated lines. ▪ The refrain is "the art of losing isn't hard to master," and the word "disaster"

Much of Kingston's work as a writer deals with the challenges of being Asian in America; how does "No Name Woman" provide you an opportunity to think about the relationship between personal identity and family history?

▪ Asian immigrants dealt with being an outsider as well as xenophobia. Maxine wanted to understand her personal identity through her family history. Her mother did not want her to tell anyone the stories, yet she attempts to fill in the gaps her mother left out in order to order her aunt and reverse the direction of the shame in her family. She incorporates her family history into her new one. • In trying to discover more about her own personal identity she learned about a family member who was never able to express her own personal self.

What is "creative nonfiction"?

▪ Creative nonfiction is a hybrid of writing involving facts, research, and information while using the resources and strategies of fiction, poetry, biography and autobiography in shaping its material.

Many of Bishop's poems concern themselves with loss and exile, yet the tone of her poems is often one of reserve, of detached observation. Is such a tone appropriate to Bishop's themes in "One Art"? Where do you see tone and theme combining (or contrasting) most effectively in this poem?

▪ Detached observation- limited interaction ▪ I think that these themes are contrasting. If she were reserved and had limited interactions with these losses, she wouldn't be so attached to them. She thinks she is mastering the art of losing, when in reality she isn't. She is still very attached to these things, which is the opposite of what she's trying to say. She seems very caught up on these things she has lost.

How is the novel structured?

▪ Each chapter focuses on a different woman from Kingston's family and cultural heritage; • five chapters; • five family stories; • five ancestral women. ▪ Each of the five chapters focuses on a different woman in her family.

What does the space of the Mapparium symbolize?

▪ Fantasy of human connection, extremely personal and intimate inhabiting each other even over all this distance; intimacy across cultures.

How does her aunt "haunt her"? Why does Kingston foreground the act of disobedience in the opening lines of the story? "'You must not tell anyone, my mother said, 'what I am about to tell you.'"

▪ Her aunt haunts her because her story was untold. Maxine told her story because she felt her aunt was silenced. Maxine begins her story with the line of disobedience "you must not tell anyone" to show that she is directly challenging her culture that silenced her aunt.

At the end of the story, Cleofilas is crossing the bridge over the arroyo. Has she changed? Will she change? What are her prospects as the narrative leaves her?

▪ I think it is worth arguing that she will change because she is with this new, free woman who can inspire her, instead of the telenovelas.

Be able to summarize the plot from "No Name Woman"

▪ No Name Woman: Maxine learns of her aunt who killed herself and her newborn baby by jumping into the family's well. Her husband was away when she became pregnant. The villagers knew that the baby was illegitimate and they raided her house. She brought shame to her family and they now pretend that she was never born.

What is the effect of depicting self- transformation as a process, journey, or even adventure?

▪ Not a journey of loss, but a journey of discovery of self. ▪ Self transformation does not just happen overnight. Its a long process.

How does Faulkner employ that style (stream of consciousness) in his work?

▪ Only need to know for Rose for Emily ▪ Faulkner uses the stream of consciousness as an appearance of memory, not how it would actually happen. Pay attention to the way he writes in Rose for Emily

Which two cities inspire most of Junot Diaz's fiction?

▪ Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic and Palin, NJ

How are telenovelas influencing the hopes and expectations of people in this town?

▪ She bases her expectations of life on the telenovelas; she does not find it odd how dramatic her life is because the telenovelas are similar. She bases what she wants to look like from them, and she believes that her relationship with her husband is okay because she has seen similar relationships on the telenovelas.

What epiphany does Miranda undergo at the conclusion of the story?

▪ She realizes the amount of grief that affairs cause and how it is not fair to her or the wife that is involved and they both deserve better.

Be able to offer interpretations of how Lorde understands and articulates words in the second stanza of "Coal".

▪ Some words do not come easily to her. Other words come from her soul and cannot wait to get out. These words give her life. Other words confuse her and don't make sense.

What body of water is important to the story, and why?

▪ The pool and the river--- the story is almost like a reverse baptism, as Rachel described in class. Instead of becoming pure in the story, he is becoming the opposite

Where is most of his fiction set? Yes, be able to correctly spell the fictional locale.

▪ Yoknapatawpha

Rich's "Diving into the Wreck" is about change, about the transformation of the self. This poem identifies the layers or stages in the process of transformation. What are those stages?

▪ a. At first you "dive into" the problem after you have prepared yourself with what you think you need (flippers, oxygen mask, etc.). After you dive in and get deeper, you start to realize you are not actually prepared for the changes you are seeing, and no one is there to help you. Then, you have to learn to be independent because you have no one to rely on for the answers. You start to forget what you are looking for because you are so overwhelmed by what you are seeing. Suddenly you are where you needed to be, but you don't know who you are anymore. Something has changed, and you can't figure it out. Eventually you begin to really see what you came for. You now know what you need to do and what needs to be done. You collect your ideas into a "book of myths," but you are never credited for your findings.

Consider character in "Good Country People"

▪ domineering mother, daughter at crossroads in her life, manipulative and deceptive man