Reading prompts for the class of December 20

 1. James, by Percival Everett, is contemporary a remake of Huckleberry Finn, where Jim would rather be called "James" instead of "n- Jim", and it follows Twain's plot only up to a point. Most relevantly, James is bought by Daniel Decatur Emmett, a historical figure who had a minstrel show. Emmett claims to be James' employer but he reflects that:

Slaves didn’t have the luxury of anger toward a white man, but I had felt anger. The anger was a good bad feeling. (...) He bought me, yes, but reportedly not to own me, though he expected something from me—my voice, he claimed. I wondered what he would do if I tried to leave. In my head I could hear him shouting, “But I paid two hundred dollars for you.” A man who refused to own slaves but was not opposed to others owning slaves was still a slaver, to my thinking.  (p. 155, chap. 30)

How can this reflection be a commentary on the complicated plan of Jim's "release" from chapters 35 to 40.

2. Comment on the following disclosure dialogue of chapter 42, p. 328-329

3. Do you think there is any symbolism in Tom Sawyer using his wound bullet in a watch, and checking it regularly, as portrayed also in the picture of p. 333, chapter 43?

Reading prompts for the class of December 13 - Emily Dickinson

 Choose either of these prompts and use the comment box to answer:

1. "'Hope' is the thing with feathers" (anthology p. 210-11) and "It feels a shame to be alive" (p.210) were both composed during the Civil War, but the 1st is from 1861 and the 2nd from 1863. Do you feel a different tone from one to the other that might correspond to a change of feeling due to the war's development?

2. Can you establish intertextual relations (especially pertaining to an oblique look on the Civil War) between either of these poems and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn?

Reading prompts for the class of December 6

 Here are two questions that can prepare you for the upcoming test. The latter one follows the phrasing of the second question in the test:

1. At the end of Huck Finn’s chapter 33, we have an episode of “mob behaviour”. Do you remember any previous one? Can you establish a contrast between this kind of behaviour and that of the (self-)reliant (wo)man

2. Consider the following quote by the American Studies scholar Richard Slotkin. Produce an argumentative text commenting on the sentence, and relating it with at least two texts belonging to this subject.. You can write either in Portuguese or in English:

“The evolution of the American myth was a synthetic process of reconciling the romantic-conventional myths of Europe to American experience – a process which, by an almost revolutionary turn, became an analytical attempt to (...) get back to the primary source of blood-knowledge of the wilderness, (...) the basic (...) myth-generating psychology of man.”

 

Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence: the Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860 (Wesleyan UP, 1973), 17.

 

Reading prompts for the class of December 4 - Walt Whitman (anthology, pp. 176-187)

 1. Write a text analysis of the initial excerpt of “Song of Myself” from the beginning until “the song / of me rising from bed and meeting the sun."

2. Consider the interpretative hesitation of the part that begins, “A child said, ‘What is the Grass?’ and consider if this “poetics of doubt and speculation” has similar instances in Huck’s narration or if, on the contrary, there is a pragmatism that forebears more far-fetched comparison.

Walt Whitman, retouched picture for the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass.

Reading prompts for the class of November 29

 1. Consider the quotation below from Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Self-Reliance" (anthology, p. 164 [38 of the source text]) aand reflect on how it might relate to the econunter of Huck and Jim with the Duke and the King, or of the latter two with the Wilks' family in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

"Our reading is mendicant and sycophantic. (anthology In history, our imagination plays us false. Kingdom and lordship, power and estate, are a gaudier vocabulary than private John and Edward in a small house and common day's work; but the things of life are the same to both; the sum total of both is the same. Why all this deference to Alfred, and Scanderbeg, and Gustavus? Suppose they were virtuous; did they wear out virtue? As great a stake depends on your private act to-day, as followed their public and renowned steps. When private men shall act with original views, the lustre will be transferred from the actions of kings to those of gentlemen."

2. Is Huck Finn self-reliant? In what ways / when?

Reading prompts for the class of Nov. 22 - 2 questions about Huck Finn (chapters 22 and 28)

 1 Write a literaty text analysis of the following excertpt from chapter 22 of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn:

Suggested topics: importance of the text within the context of the author’s work and time; subject of the enunciation; point of view and effect upon the reader/addressee; rhetoric and linguistic devices and language tropes (descrptive or lyric manner, figures of speech, symbolism, innovation / surprising markers or pattern traces within the author’s work); intertextuality with texts studied in this class (at least 2) or others. 

"Do I know you? I know you clear through was born and raised in the South, and I’ve lived in the North; so I know the average all around. The average man’s a coward. (...) Why don’t your juries hang murderers? Because they’re afraid the man’s friends will shoot them in the back, in the dark – and it’s just what they WOULD do.

(...)

"... The average man don’t like trouble and danger. YOU don’t like trouble and danger. But if only HALF a man – like Buck Harkness, there – shouts ‘Lynch him! lynch him!’ you’re afraid to back down – afraid you’ll be found out to be what you are – COWARDS – and so you raise a yell, and hang yourselves on to that half-a-man’s coat-tail, and come raging up here, swearing what big things you’re going to do. The pitifulest thing out is a mob; that’s what an army is – a mob; they don’t fight with courage that’s born in them, but with courage that’s borrowed from their mass, and from their officers. But a mob without any MAN at the head of it is BENEATH pitifulness. Now the thing for YOU to do is to droop your tails and go home and crawl in a hole. If any real lynching’s going to be done it will be done in the dark, Southern fashion; and when they come they’ll bring their masks, and fetch a MAN along. Now LEAVE – and take your half-a-man with you” – tossing his gun up across his left arm and cocking it when he says this."

2. In chapter 28, Huck makes the following reflection about saying the truth or lying: " I reckon a body that ups and tells the truth when he is in a tight place is taking considerable many resks, though I ain’t had no experience, and can’t say for certain; but it looks so to me, anyway; and yet here’s a case where I’m blest if it don’t look to me like the truth is better and actuly SAFER than a lie. I must lay it by in my mind, and think it over some time or other, it’s so kind of strange and unregular. " - Can you extrapolate from this reflection and think about other cases where the fiction you have read in this course problematized the pragmatic value of lying vs. telling the truth?

HW for the class of November 20th - E. A. Poe 's "The Raven" and "The Philosophy of Composition"

 As always, answer to one or more;

1. In "The Philosophy of Composition" (anthology, p. 143-139), E. Allan Poe purports to explain "step by step" how he wrote "The Raven". While at it, he inserts some comments on types of compostion and the difference between prose and poetry. Taking as example texts read in this class, would you agree with the distinction he makes in the following passage

"I designate Beauty as the province of the poem, merely because it is an obvious rule of Art that effects should be made to spring from direct causes — that objects should be attained through means best adapted for their attainment — no one as yet having been weak enough to deny that the peculiar elevation alluded to, is most readily attained in the poem. Now the object, Truth, or the satisfaction of the intellect, and the object Passion, or the excitement of the heart, are, although attainable, to a certain extent, in poetry, far more readily attainable in prose. Truth, in fact, demands a precision, and Passion, a homeliness (the truly passionate will comprehend me) which are absolutely antagonistic to that Beauty which, I maintain, is the excitement, or pleasurable elevation, of the soul. It by no means follows from any thing here said, that passion, or even truth, may not be introduced, and even profitably introduced, into a poem — for they may serve in elucidation, or aid the general effect, as do discords in music, by contrast — but the true artist will always contrive, first, to tone them into proper subservience to the predominant aim, and, secondly, to enveil them, as far as possible, in that Beauty which is the atmosphere and the essence of the poem." (anthology, p 145)

2. Another argument of "The Philosophy of Composition" is that "close circumscription of space is absolutely necessary to the effect of insulated accident -- it has the force of a frame to a picture" (anthology, p, 147). Comment on how Poe applied this constraint to "The Cask of Amontillado" (anthology, pp. 130-135), "The Raven" (pp. 140-142) and/or "The Oval Portrait" (pp.151-152)

3. Write a short creative piece where "the bust of Pallas" in the poem "The Raven" is brought to life - given that Pallas is Athena, the goddess of reason/science as well as of "warfare", you can have her address the incoherences of phantasy in at least two texts from our course.

                                                         illustration by Edouard Manet