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.