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.