"A Rose for Emily"

Everyone needs to be familiar with "A Rose For Emily." Because it appears in so many anthologies and textbooks, most people who have been to college should have read it, and it has something to offer everyone - including social criticism and commentary on: race, gender, perverted and/or abusive intimate relationships and more. E-notes tells us:

“A Rose for Emily” is a story that stands by itself. Faulkner himself modestly referred to it as a “ghost story,” but many critics recognize it as an extraordinarily versatile work. As Frank A. Littler writes in Notes on Mississippi Writers, ‘‘A Rose for Emily’’ has been ‘‘read variously as a Gothic horror tale, a study in abnormal psychology, an allegory of the relations between North and South, a meditation on the nature of time, and a tragedy with Emily as a sort of tragic heroine.’’

See also Spark notes.

Questions I have for myself before class:

• Do I want students to look at the conclusions and ideas from past classes - or come up with an interpretation on their own - unbiased by previous readers?
• Should I have students compare the tale to a CSI or Law & Order episode? We've previously compared the meaning of the rose to a Bachelor / Bachelorette reality TV meaning. How would they react to a role play?
  
• Why did our text book place the student example of a literary analysis in front of the story itself?
• Did I warn them in advance of the inappropriate language (by today's standards)? Can or should we discuss it? They could see the same term in the middle stall of the 3rd floor LIB men's bathroom.
  

Questions I want readers to think about today:

1. When was the story set? Where? Describe the social context.
2. Is it believable?
   
3. What do we know about the narrator?
4. What do we know or suspect about Homer Barron? anyone look it up? Here, or here(?)? What're your gut feelings about him?
   
5. Was the writer intentionally using symbols and multiple layers of meaning?
6. Do Homer and Emily seem like a good match?
   
7. How do the town's people feel about Emily? How do you feel about her?
8. What does Emily's reaction to the death of her father tell us about the way her mind works?
9. What does the hair in the last sentence mean?
   

See more questions courtesy of Web English Teacher. Find full text online here - until the text book thugs take it down.

A Rose for Emily

In addition to traditional discussions of race, gender and sexual orientation, classes today broached the topic of domestic abuse and potential incest. The 11 am class also speculated that today Emily would be diagnosed agoraphobic.

The 12:30 class discussed race more in depth and decided that despite the dated language, the text should not be bowdlerized.


Link to summary and study guide
Link to wikipedia on the story
link to cliff notes analysis
Essays online to facilitate plagiarism, see also http://www.echeat.com/essay.php?t=30552

Inspiration from Animation

The Venture Brothers series has long been a favorite because of its wit, deft skills with parody, and impressive ability to work on several levels at once. It decided the subject of this semester's Natural Narrative.

Episode 45 (?) entitled "Self-Medication" has perhaps 2 plots - the main being:

Dr. Venture attends a group therapy session for former boy adventurers, but a strange death causes the patients to fall back into their old mystery-solving habits.

The boy adventurers are clever parodies of classic action cartoon syndications from a golden age of animation prior to the 80's - when art, story and character development in cartoons were scrapped in favor of extended toy marketing campaigns and banal politically correct bore-a-thons.

But it was the murder weapon that triggered a flash-back and inspired my next Natural Narrative. The name, description, and dialogue about the "Vietnamese 2-step viper" showed an amazing insight and knowledge about southeast Asia (as did the reference to Thailand, boy-girls and the modern sex-tourist/slave trade - but that's in the sub-plot. That kinda thing happens here too). The viper is, like the boy adventurers, real but/and legendary.

Just as "Lance Hale" the mockery of the assertive Hardy Boy series (written by another Dixon) ridicules and disputes the existence of the snake that just killed their therapist - as western experts who haven't lived in southeast Asia denigrate the Bamboo Viper. My knowledge of the snake came from lurid fiction, the legends of the locals who lived on my mountain in JuDong, and some close and physical contact.

The story of evil amah (wikipedia may have it wrong - I like "Grandmother" as an honorific as a better translation) who demanded I kill the viper pictured may be a better story than either the 7.6 Richter-scale 921 earth quake story (powerful - tho perhaps a downer) or the time I posed as a roadie to sneak into a sold out psychobilly show and hung out with The Reverend Horton Heat. Good fun - but questionably relevant; both stories I've told students in the past. I haven't written or told this story yet.

Will post outline of Viper story soon - but it will require an intense amount of orientation (pardon the puns) - and digressions into the intense ethnicity of my jungle neighborhood (Hakka and Aboriginal), other venomous encounters (krait, cobra and an insect that may not have an English name - but it's nasty) and perhaps unpopular history of the occupation and abuse of Taiwan by Japan.

FYI: Venture Bros. aired at 11pm Sunday Jan. 17th on Adult Swim - on the Cartoon Network. Gotta look up MLA for documentation.

Story of an Hour

Just before break we read/and or listed to audio of "story of an hour" by Kate Chopin. It's part of an interactive online activity available through ANGEL. I like the story because:

1. it's really short
2. it has a wicked ironic ending - it surprised me.
3. it opens up discussions of women's issues.

Here are discussion questions. I also found a text where you can read the story and clicking on highlighted portions of text reveals some insightful questions - many of which would make a good thesis for a paper. I also recommend checking out the official international Kate Chopin web page.

Librivox, a free public domain digital library of audio books, has audio of this story - so you can listen to it while you read, or download it and listen at your convenience.

If you enjoyed the story, check out "Desiree's Baby". It has that same wicked twist and throws race into the mix.

SP 2010 students ask

1. is this a pro-woman (feminist) story? how and or why?
2. is it normal to imagine the death of a spouse?