_Heart is a Lonely Hunter_ Day Five

Please post your (possibly) character-based questions and comments below. In the spirit of Thursday's close reading exercises, I encourage you to isolate a passage for deeper analysis by the class.

_Heart is a Lonely Hunter_ Day Four

As we go farther in the novel and observe lone characters' perspectives bleed into one another's, try cross-directing your questions at one of the characters whose diary you're _not_ keeping. What links your character to another? Conversely, what prevents them from connecting?

Post below.

_Heart is a Lonely Hunter_ Day Three

Post your discussion questions below. Feel free to gear them toward your character groups.

_The Heart is a Lonely Hunter_ Day Two

Post your discussion questions below. Feel free to gear them toward your character groups. Or not!

_The Heart is a Lonely Hunter_ Day One

On Tuesday we'll dig into Carson McCullers's novel, _The Heart is a Lonely Hunter_. This is the first longer work we're reading, and it will require a different approach attuned to the generic specificities of the novel versus the short stories that have thus far been our fare. We'll be spending the next three weeks with the book, so pay attention to how the story is set up, who its characters are, how they're introduced, and other important things that happen at the beginning of a novel.

Post your discussion questions below!

Discussion Questions for Gorky's "26 Men and 1 Girl"

Post your questions below. You may want to experiment with crafting an essay prompt about the text (as we will continue to do in class), but you are by no means required to.

Discussion Questions for Gogol's "Overcoat"

Post your questions below!

Discussion Questions for "The Blank Page"

You're on your own already!

Please post original questions below that will facilitate a class discussion of Isak Dinesen's short story, "The Blank Page." Note that this is the first work on our syllabus dealing with silence as neither deafness nor muteness in their physiological manifestations.

Discussion Questions for “Chickamauga” and “Breaking the News”

N.B. We've cut the Nabokov piece, so pose these questions to Bierce alone. Please post your own question about Turgenev or Bierce in the comment thread.

The two short stories for next Tuesday’s class are remarkably different in setting and style, yet, because of their protagonists, have interesting points of similarity. If we pursue a comparative analysis, how would you describe the main characters? What are their relationships to the outside world? To the “news” that frames their narratives? How do they respond to the violence and torture around them?

How would you characterize the narrator and the style of narration in these stories? What does the narrator tell the reader—in accordance with or in excess of the main character’s knowledge? What kinds of clues does the author leave for the reader’s collection alone? In what does the reader’s surplus (or shortage) of knowledge consist? How does that affect the way we experience the text? As with Turgenev’s text, we should ask what narratorial mode the muteness of a main character elicits or compels.

Both of these texts can be read through the prism of history: for Bierce, the Battle of Chickamauga in the American Civil War; for Nabokov, the Weimar period in Berlin (when the Nuremberg statues were introduced) preceding the Holocaust and WWII. With this background in mind, how would you pursue an allegorical interpretation?

Useful URLs:
Ambrose Bierce Site: http://donswaim.com/bierce.resources.html
Battle of Chickamauga: http://ngeorgia.com/history/chickam.html
Vladimir Nabokov in Berlin: http://www.standpointmag.co.uk/node/3157/full