Final, Optional Blog

If you choose to write the final, optional blog, please allow your general reactions and feelings about Bret Harte's "The Luck of Roaring Camp" to guide your composition. You should, of course, still adhere to the blogging guidelines (always using the text to support your ideas!), but the topic is up to you!

Happy (final) Blogging!!

Way to Go!

If you've looked at our course schedule recently, you probably already know that you are DONE BLOGGING! Hooray!!!

I'd like to say, again, that you've all produced excellent work this semester. Well done!

The Yellow Wallpaper Prompt

In class we discussed the possibility that writers may create texts to affect change in a tumultuous society. In this week's posting, I'd like you to answer 2 main questions: how do we see Perkins Gilman writing to affect change? And what other writers may have been doing the same? In other words, can you think of other texts we've read this semester that also might work to change things?

You're welcome to think broadly (the treatment of children, the treatment of women, the way we consider fatherhood, or relations between the north and south), always using the text to support your ideas.

Happy Blogging!

Tom Sawyer Prompt

We had an excellent discussion today, and in light of that productive conversation, I'd like to invite you to continue it here. We addressed issues of boyhood, and city vs. country, and North vs. South. We also talked about national parenting, which can transcend just Twain's text to include others from this semester.

Please address one of these ideas (or another, if you wish) in this week's posting, always using the text as support for your thoughts.

Happy Blogging!

The Yares of Black Mountain Prompt

In an effort to allow your free responses to our last domestic novel of the semester, I will leave this week's prompt intentionally open-ended. Please select an aspect of the short story you found particularly interesting and make some meaning. You should approach this posting just like any other-- using the text as support, letting the text guide your interpretations, etc.-- only this time you will choose your own lens.

If you're looking for inspiration, you might go back and review the first two postings of the semester: theories of childhood and depictions of children in literature. Mac Leod and Sanchez-Eppler might help you form and focus your responses to the text.

Good luck and happy blogging!!

Ragged Dick Prompt

We ended class last Thursday with a discussion of the different roles young girls and young boys seem to play in American literature. In this week's blog posting, I'd like you to extend the discussion. What other comparisons can we make between young girls and young boys in American literature? And now that we're reading about Ragged Dick, what more can we infer about rhetorical functions of young boys in the text? In other words, what are you noticing about these fictional representations of young boys and what do you think these representations could mean? Thinking beyond gender relations, what kinds of comments could these fictionalized young boys make about a 19th century American society?

I've left this blog posting intentionally open-ended for free response, but I'd like to remind you to always use the text as support in your postings. Concrete examples and quoted textual material are two of the keys to a successful blog posting.

Happy blogging!

"A Whisper in the Dark" Prompt

If you haven't finished reading Alcott's "A Whisper in the Dark," stop reading here and go finish the text. My prompt will ruin the ending, and I would hate to rob you of the excitement.

Ok, if you have finished, please continue reading below.

Alcott's "A Whisper in the Dark" plays with the gothic tradition that "things are not what they seem." We see this in interpersonal relationships at the beginning of the text. We have an uncle and niece with an admittedly inappropriate relationship. Two cousins, Sybil and Guy, who seem to share a strange, unspoken connection. And, of course, there's Sybil: we're not quite sure what to make of Sybil.

The second half of the text, though, introduces the concept of insanity. At this point, not only are things "not what they seem," but we also learn that our narrator might be unreliable. She's is in an insane asylum, after all. How does the introduction of concepts of insanity (especially on the part of our narrator and her mother) change the text? How does the concept of insanity alter our reader reception of the message? How does it change our previous ideas about the all important mother/daughter relationship in nineteenth-century society/fiction?

Remember to use the text in your posting, always drawing on the narrative to draw your own conclusions.

Happy blogging!