Week #15

Toni Morrison

For a senior English project, I read and presented the novel Beloved to my classmates. Between the novel and the Oprah Winfrey movie, I did not enjoy the story at all. It was not that Morrison had a bad or not enjoyable way of writing, but I did not feel comfortable with the storyline and the mystical elements of the novel. Therefore, I went into reading Morrison's Recitatif cautiously, hoping that it was not at all like Beloved. Thankfully, this short story had little resemblance to the novel, other than the issues of race. I felt that I could relate to this short story much better than the novel because it takes place in a more current time period and references things that I have learned in school, such as busing. I was also very interested to learn things about the East Coast that I hadn't know, cities and suburbs and situations with IBM, etc. The story of Twyla and Roberta could have been relatable to many pairs of friends with differences, whether they be a different race or sexual preference or have another difference between them.

Thomas Pynchon

Pynchon's short story Entrophy is unlike any of the other short stories in the assignment for this week. Out of all of the stories, this was the story in which I had the most trouble understanding. There were a great number of references that I did not know and could not relate to, and I was very confused by the number of characters and the relationships between them. I get the feeling that there are government references, probably negative, but I do not understand them.

Raymond Carver

I enjoyed the short story Cathedral very much. I felt that I could really relate to the main character in his unfamiliarity with the blind man. People often come into contact with people that they are unfamiliar with, whether they are a different race or have a disability or something else. I liked how Carver conveyed how uncomfortable the main character felt upon meeting the blind man and how just one night of talking cathedrals made them sort of kindred. It gives a sort of hope for the human race, in my opinion.

Leslie Marmon Silko

To me, there were a few elements of this story that made it hard for me to follow. One was the issues involving the Native Americans. I am not exactly cultured in Native American life and history, so I was confused as to what was happening. Another element that made the story hard to understand and follow was the fact that it seemed to jump around a lot and not follow a steady timeline. I was confused as to when the children were taken away and when Jimmy had died, etc etc. It was very well written, but at times hard to understand even the basic ideas that Silko was trying to convey.

Sandra Cisneros

If in fact there is a Woman Hollering Creek, I've definitely passed it. When I saw the title of the story, I immediately thought of the bridge that I would often cross on my way to San Antonio, seeing a small sign baring the name of the creek we were driving over. I always thought it was odd. This story was also quite odd. Because I grew up in a Hispanic-oriented town, I often feel like I can relate to stories with Spanish themes, and this story was no exception. As Cisneros described the way Cleofilas' relationship was formed and how her husband acted in public and in private, I could picture these people and their lives very clearly. There was a great amount of description and emotion within the short story.

Jhumpa Lahiri

Out of all the assigned stories for the week, I enjoyed this story the most. It felt, to me, the most real, the most current, and the most relatable. The main character was young, and although Lahiri was referencing a different culture during all of the adultery issues, it still felt as though I could understand the situation, since it happens so much in today's society, unlike some of the issues that we've read in other stories covering other time periods. Miranda was enjoyable as a clearly naive, inexperienced girl who, by the end, becomes wiser. I personally liked the scenes with Rohin, because it shows how children, in their simplicity, are often very wise.

Week 14

Adrienne Rich represents the faction of feminism within poetry and literature. Her poems largely focus on the lives of women; their thoughts, experiences, etc. In Snapshots of a Daughter-In-Law, she highlights many issues within a normal woman's life, from dealing with menstruation pain and shaving legs to relationships with men, romantic and otherwise. She focuses on a side of female life that many females aren't able to read in poetry and literature. However, her other poems do not exactly have the element of femininity, but they seem to have an intenseness and sincerity that male poets might not be able to convey.

Louise Erdrich: Erdich is known for writing Native American literature and poetry. Native American history is interesting because it is a subset of the American Literature oral tradition. In the poem “Dear John Wayne…”, Erdich writes about what John Wayne represents to American culture as opposed to what he represented literally, and how he represented something good in the eyes of most Americans but something bad in the eyes of Native Americans. In Erdich’s poems, there are the themes of exile/alienation as well as nostalgia and memory.

Li-Young Lee: Lee’s poems are greatly influenced by his father and his father’s death. Almost all of his poems have his father appearing in one way or another.

Sherman Alexie: Alexie is another Native American poet. His poems represented the Native American community. A difference in Alexie’s poetry is that he is often comedic.

Week #13 - Alice McDermott

Alice McDermott's novel, After This, was written recently, but takes place largely in the turbulent sixties. The arrangement of the novel was very interesting to me; there was not one set storyline, following a concrete timeline. Rather, the time jumps around at times, and the point of view changes from character to character within each section. These little vignettes, an “overarching narrative”, give the novel a broken feeling, but not to the point where the story is not understandable, not enjoyable, or possible to follow. A part of this novel that I enjoyed was that the novel carries an adult perspective: good and bad things will happen to you in your life, but you’ll get over it and you’ll be a bigger person because of it. The tone of the novel is bittersweet, melancholy, sweet and sad; but throughout the novel, there is still the small bit of tone that is hopeful, knowledgeable of the possibilities for the future. There is also the point of nostalgia throughout the piece, based on the cultural references within the novel.

April Fools!

Elizabeth Bishop:

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All of her poems in this anthology apply to nature, such as fish or native peoples of Africa or an armadillo. They all also encompass of part of her life, thus reflecting on the meaning of nature in human life. However, Bishop’s use of nature is not the same as Thoreau’s or Emerson – all of her poems are fairly cut and dry. The aspects of nature are all observed from a distance standpoint, such as her analytical observations of the large fish she had caught. Her poems have an equal amount of both interesting description and bare facts of life, so that readers can more easily relate to the topics she discusses.

S Saul Bellow:

fir In the first chapter of Bellow’s novel The Adventures of Augie March, the reader is introduced to the main characters and plot through a mixture of enlightening facts, curious characterizations, and foreshadowing. This piece is obviously modernism because while Bellow’s descriptions of people and places are quite colorful and thorough, they are also realistic and easily relatable. The many allusions to different parts of Chicago both give the reader a clear picture of where the story is taking place.

I thought that the piece was interesting, but that is jumped around a little too much for my taste. I would rather have Bellow inform me a little more of the situation with Augie’s father. Even though this is only the first chapter, I really didn’t understand the purpose of Grandma Lausch out of being a better mother figure to Augie than his own mother.

Robert Lowell:

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Lowell’s poems follow a specific trend: they all mirror or take the place of a part of history already established. He uses Moby Dick, Jonathan Edwards and his speech Sinners in the Hand of an Angry God, a life that can be assumed is like the life of Elizabeth Bishop, and the experiences of Robert Gould Shaw. Although he borrows the bare bones facts from these novels or life experiences, he creates his own unique word within the lines of the poems. He gives the readers of his poems his own interpretations of situations and emotions. Lowell mostly writes poems which reflect Northern parts of the country, probably because this is where he lived. There is little to no romanticism in the poems, even though there is an element of fantasy within them.

Jack Kerouac:

- Although he is arguably one of the most important writers of the twentieth century, I cannot bear to read Jack Kerouac. As a writer I admittedly try out his style at times, but as a reader it is nearly impossible to slog through the muck of run-on sentences and obscure references and beatnik vocabulary. Big Sur is even worse than On the Road, the earlier novel that I have completed exactly half of, unable to go on. Half a page long paragraphs, most of them without a single period but rather with numerous dashes to combine the thoughts and make them halfway coherent do effectively tell a story, but rather the reader really wants to know or really cares is the question. To me, Kerouac’s works are his own sort of genius – perhaps you have to be a fellow beatnik (stoner) to truly appreciate them.

Assignment for March 25th

Katherine Anne Porter - Flowering Judas:

Porter grew up and lived in Texas, where there was/is a great Hispanic influence. This piece is about a young woman in Mexico who is the object of desire for several men because she is physically mature and attractive. She is conflicted through the entire piece, and at the end, there is a biblical allusion of Eve and the forbidden fruit. I think that this piece was very well written, and very intricate. I was confused at times but I think I got the general idea of what was happening.

Zora Neale Hurston

I have read 'How It Feels to be Colored Me' before, but it is always enjoyable to read again. Hurston allows the reader into her own mind without being estranged just because they may not be African American. She successfully represents the wave of strong female writers and creates her own strain as an African American female.
In her fiction piece, it was slightly hard for me to follow the African American vernacular that she uses, but it also serves to realistically represent conversation in that time period.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Fitzgerald does a very good job of representing society in the time period in which he is writing. In Winter Dreams, he shows that he is also very good at writing younger people that are in need of going through some sort of change, such as growing up. This is the same theme seen in The Great Gatsby and Babylon Revisited. Fitzgerald is successful at showing situations in which young people must mature faster than usual.

William Faulkner

Faulkner, the genius who wrote the great chapter with the line "My mother is a horse" in his novel As I Lay Dying, uses the same types of themes in his short story A Rose for Emily. He sets the story in a small rural town, the characters not as mature and intelligent as perhaps other characters written within the same time period. These pieces focus on race.



I enjoyed all of these pieces very much, because although they were all written around the same time period, they each represented a different part of the country as well as different groups of people, different classes and races, etc.

Week #9

T.S. Eliot: T.S. Eliot is a very good representative of Modernism in American Poetry because while he effectively writes everything that he wants to convey, he still comes across as a purely impersonal poet, using a “masque” through a “persona”; everything is always indiscreet. Nothing in Eliot’s poetry is direct; a reader has to read between Eliot’s lines to understand what he’s trying to say and what he’s trying to mean. For me personally, I have trouble with Eliot’s poetry because of the large number of allusions that he uses. I’m sure it was easier to a well-read individual early in the twentieth century to understand and get the references Eliot uses, but as time goes by the references will become more and more obscure and new generations of students will be baffled.

Week #8 - The Awakening

The Awakening caused a commotion when it was released a year before 1900, and it has continued to be both an influential and controversial novel here in the early 2000s. I really enjoyed reading the Awakening; I think it’s my favorite book of any book I’ve had to read in my college career. I had heard from a friend that it was an interesting novel, and I was eager to find out for myself (even though she had given away the ending so I knew what was going to happen). It was a quick read, which is always nice, but it wasn’t that it was not a book of substance. Between the back of the book and what my friend had told me about the novel, I knew that it was something different than what was coming out of the time period at the time, but I couldn’t really understand why it was so controversial. But after finishing the novel, I understood completely. It would have been very scandalous for a married woman of the time period to move out of the home where her husband and their children resided, and to conduct affairs with younger men. While now it would be considered just another interesting novel, perhaps even a sort of cliché romance novel, back then this was a serious crime against society. What I find most interesting about the novel is the way it can be applied to many different types of criticism, such as feminism criticism, new historicism, reader-response, and more.

Week #7

Henry James: Henry James’s piece Daisy Miller: A Study chronicles class and how class effects different issues. In the short story, the main character Winterbourne is the complete opposite of Daisy – he is the stereotypical cold European male; he’s proper and uptight, and most importantly, he is socially proper. Daisy is warm and bubbly and fun to be around, but she is not socially proper like Winterbourne; she is not really presentably in society. She dies in the end because of a sort of ‘hubris’ – she is socially reckless and isn’t concerned with the consequences of her actions. Daisy does not do what the other Americans do, aka “do as the Romans do”, she makes her own rules and that inevitably causes her downfall.

Sarah Orne Jewett: Jewett’s work represents the idea of Regionalism because her story A White Huron takes place in New England where she herself resided. The story A White Huron represents Jewett’s ideas of feminism, writing about a girl who is coming of age in New England. Jewett explores the ideas of childhood by writing about the loss of innocence – the main character loses her innocence when she gets sort of a crush on a male character. The story is an “anti-initiation” story – it takes a different path than would be expected.

Jack London: Jack London’s piece To Build a Fire has two different versions, which is important because each of the versions represents different things. London can write and influence his audience in different ways by writing different versions of his pieces.

Week #6 - Race and Gender in Antebellum America

Thomas Jefferson

David Walker

William Lloyd Garrison

Angelina Grimke

Sojourner Truth

Martin R. Delany

Margaret Fuller

Harriet Beecher Stowe

Fanny Fern

Harriet Jacobs

Frederick Douglass

Elizabeth Drew Stoddard

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper

Week 5 Thoughts:

Herman Melville's Confidence Man


Honestly, I have never read a harder novel. As I moved (glacially) slow through the book, I just kept thinking to myself that if this had been an 'Accelerated Reader' book in school, it would had to have been a 20+ age level and about 56 points or something. If I've figured this novel out at least a little, I'll consider myself successful. The other Melville short stories I've read, such as Bartleby the Scrivener, were easier to figure out than this one.

I have to say, though, that it was quite intriguing, all in all. There is a large group on a Mississippi steamboat, and they are introduced Canterbury-style, with each member getting at least a part of the novel to tell their personal story or present their personalities. All of these characters are tested by a mysterious passenger who has snuck aboard, questioning their confidence. The questioning of confidence often includes handing over money, or, in certain cases, receiving it.

According to the notes, this changeling man is, in fact, Satan. However, this novel isn't dark; it's more of a satire, seen most importantly in when the novel is set - April Fools Day. Apparently the novel was even released on April Fools Day. Therefore, while this novel seems really deep, Melville obviously meant for it to be a more playful novel than I thought it was. Funny, Herman.

I enjoyed certain parts and characters of the novels, and disliked others. Sometimes it was confusing to figure out which person was the victim of the Confidence Man and who the Confidence Man actually was. And sometimes the Confidence Man stayed in the same form for multiple chapters, as when he was the herb-doctor (yes?).

All in all, I found this novel an interesting character study, and an intense teacher of the time period. The footnotes were, at times, interesting and at other times a big pain and a waste of time. Also, many of the religious references were completely lost on me, which made it quite difficult to understand the first chapters of the novel, because they were so littered with biblical allusions.

I wouldn't recommend this novel, but I feel like a bigger person for reading it.

Week 3 Thoughts:

Again, Dr. Labor's course helped greatly for this reading assignment. I went into the reading much more knowledgeable about certain topics such as deism and transcendentalism as I would have been otherwise.

Nathaniel Hawthorne - Honestly, I enjoy everything that Hawthorne writes, INCLUDING The Scarlet Letter (even though my appreciation was not present my sophomore year in high school, the first year I read it). The Birthmark, I think, is my favorite of his writings. Its purpose is to teach mankind the kind of point that I wish everyone knew inherently: not to change a good thing. It frustrates me the way society feels that nothing is perfect the way it is and that it must be changed, even though it may function completely fine, as the wife did for her husband. But the story serves to show that no one knows just what they have until they've lost it.

Edgar Allen Poe - While I enjoy reading Poe, I rarely truly understand it. I find his rhyme schemes and clever word usage great and fun to read, but a lot of his deeper meanings is often lost on me. I think my favorite Poe was the one we did not read, but I can't even remember what that one is...only that we didn't read it. I do like Annabel Lee, though, largely because of the way Annabel Lee rolls off the tongue...

Thoreau/Emerson - In high school, I read 'The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail' and I keep hoping that I'll be able to read it again in college, but no such luck yet. However, because of this book, I always find Thoreau and Emerson both amusing and interesting at the same time. I think that their outlook on how important nature is to everyone is something new and different and might be something that people should adopt nowadays. While I often find Thoreau's writing a little dry, Emerson's writing is deep and rich and more enjoyable, to me.

Whitman/Dickinson - To me, you can't really find two poets more opposite than Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. They both write about things that the common man would be familiar with, but Whitman focuses largely on himself (especially in Song of Myself), while Dickinson focuses on things in the outside world. My favorite Dickinson poem goes 'I'm Nobody, who are you?' It really strikes a chord with me, and should with others as well, because I'm sure we all feel like we are nobodies sometime or another, and might need to work on figuring out who we are.

Week 2 Thoughts:

Anne Bradstreet - Having read Anne Bradstreet last semester really helped understanding it this semester. Because she is writing in Puritan times, her poetry greatly revolves around the family and religion, which were the most important things going on in the time period. However, it's still rich in meanings and writing, despite the fact that the poems are over 300 years old.

Mary Rowlandson - Mary Rowlandson's story always makes me nervous, because I, of course, can't put myself into the same situation that she was in. She had prejudices against the Indians, so of course her experience was going to be filled with reluctance and hesitation with them. It troubles me how she treats her children through the ordeal, but again, I can't put myself into her position.

Jonathan Edwards - I have to say that reading something other than "Sinners in the Eyes..." by Jon Edwards was very refreshing. He is undoubtedly an amazing writer, and it shows clearly in his Personal Narrative. Although the religious discussions make me uncomfortable at times, it's a large part of his life and it's so obvious that he takes it all very seriously and personally that it's hard not to be very interested in the topic.

Many of the other works I read last semester in Dr. Labor's American Literature part 1. However, I did not read any Phyllis Wheatley. I found her works very intriguing as well as very informative. I learned some things about African American culture that I did not know before.