Speak, Maria!

Your turn to speak about Maria for tomorrow's class.

Children of a Lesser God + Silences

We'll be watching "Children of a Lesser God" over the next couple of classes. Feel free to post your 'provocations' to the blog on a rolling basis. Consider connecting this movie to the other works -- cinematic and otherwise -- we've consumed this semester. You are also welcome to engage the Tillie Olsen essays on silence and its varieties scheduled for discussion on Tuesday.

"Mute Phone Calls"

Post your questions on Zernova's story here!

"Pkhentz" by Andrei Sinyavsky

Post questions below. Try to connect this reading to the more recent critical pieces we've read by Shklovsky and Sontag, if you can.

"Art as Device"

Post your questions below.

Susan Sontag's "Aesthetics of Silence"

You will encounter many unfamiliar names in Sontag's essay, but these shouldn't deter you from grasping the main points of her argument. Over the next few readings we will be exploring some of the issues called up in this piece, namely, the relationship between speech, silence and (re) estrangement or alienation. Particularly in _Deaf_ and in Sinyavsky's short story, "Pkhentz," we will consider how silence and broken speech butt up against the dead or tone-deaf language of the modern state and its bureaucratese.

As we figure out what exactly Sontag means by an "aesthetics of silence," we should think about both of these terms. What are the forms and purpose of art /and/ silence per Sontag? In order to put our composition exercises on clarity and concision into practice, I have assigned each of you one section for which you must provide a one-sentence distillation of the main argument. Be sure to get these up by 1 pm, since I will be making a masterlist for the class, which will form the basis of our discussion.

_Deaf_

Post your discussion question about Liang Xiaosheng's novella _Deaf_ below.

Tennessee Williams Week

Please post a discussion question for one or both of the Tennessee Williams texts we've prepared for Thursday's class.

_Heart is a Lonely Hunter_ Last Day

Post your final discussion questions on the novel below. Try to ask about something that requires you to have read the book in its entirety to answer (in other words, a possible essay question).

_Heart is a Lonely Hunter_ Day Six

Apropos of today's class, start thinking of potential prompts for paper 2, and vet those questions here with your peers!

_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

Discussion Questions for Ivan Turgenev's "Mumu"

Consider some of the themes broached by the works we’ve encountered in the first couple days of class, namely the binaries embedded in speech as a cultural act: animal/human; slavery/freedom; nature (country)/civilization (city).

How does Turgenev reckon with these binaries? In general, what is the status of speech in “Mumu”? How does the story depart from and coincide with Aristotelean attitudes and Enlightenment philosophies of language/speech, as conceived in _The Politics_ and embodied in Truffaut’s “wild boy” of Aveyron?

What is the significance of Gerasim’s muteness? How does it impact on his interactions with other characters, including the human and animal objects of his affection, Tatiana and Mumu?

How does the protagonist’s silence shape the story itself, both in terms of plot and narration? What position does it structure for the reader? How might we read his silence allegorically, given the context of serfdom in Russia?

What do you make of the surprise ending? (How) does it resolve the ethical issues posed throughout the story? What are those issues?