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.