1/10 – Close Reading Exercise

Close Reading Guidelines

- Reread shorter texts twice or thrice following basic comprehension of plot and characters
- Consider context of author and intended audience of work, sometimes unclear
- What information does the author provide about what time and place the story is set, if any?
(ambiguity can generalize message)
- Consider significance of contradictions and inconsistency (even if unintentional)

Barry Yourgrau, “Grass”

- Title: life from death; graveyard as her garden

- POV: 1st per makes it more personal
- Characterization: nonchalance suggests frequent visits, care for parents
- Chronology/Place: graveyard at night, yet no horror atmosphere
- Present tense, no past, is current, life continues

1/12 –

Ghosts/Hauntings

- Unreality
- Visible/noise
- Indirect contact (mediums)
- Unfinished business, requires help of living
- Certain location
- Liminality of past and present (still alive, ageless, beyond time)

Avery F. Gordon, “Introduction,” Ghostly Matters xvi

- Haunting as unfinished business, remnants of forgotten oppression

- Disrupts comfort zone, straddles separation between past and present
- Ghost demand attention, notify of repressed events
- “Ghosts hate new things”:

11/17 – The Legend of Sleepy Hallow

Washing Irving (1783-1859)

- Used pseudonyms: Dietrich Knickerbocker, Geoffrey Crayon

“The Legend of Sleepy Hallow” (1820)

- “Legend”: implies passed down over time and significant because of it; greatness and legendary;
fact/fiction blur (exaggeration with element of truth)
- Attributed to Dietrich Knickerbocker, “found among [his] papers” after his death; mystery to its
origins, can’t be authenticated with Knickerbocker
 - Multiple explanations for origins of supernatural phenomenon, horror of the unexplained
- Set during 1790s, ghost of Hessian soldier from Revolutionary War; villagers create legend in less
than a decade
- Ichabod’s imagination, consuming scary tales and deliberately imagining mundane events as
supernatural
- All villagers engage in gossip: women with ghost stories, men with aggrandized war stories; town
identity built on seeming supernatural and militarily significant
- Knickerbocker doesn’t know the contents of Ichabod’s meeting with Katrina; contributes to
authenticity by expressing limits of his knowledge, invites reader to fill in the blanks themselves
- Townspeople favor supernatural explanation, ignoring evidence that Brom Bones ran Icabod out
of town and other claims of him living in New York; adopted as new ghost of Sleepy Hallow,
continues legacy of town
- Postscript: story spreads to New York, discussed by two men, neither the lister and storyteller
believes it, but continue to spread it regardless

1/19 – Howe’s Masquerade

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-64)

- Historical interest, focused on Puritan period

“Howe’s Masquerade” (1838)

- “Masquerade”: hidden identity (masks, costumes), freedom of anonymity; class element

(purview of elite, temporarily cross class lines through disguise)
- Masquerade takes place during Siege of Boston (1776), framing story set in present day;
development of legend over 60 years (puts reliability in doubt but highlights importance of
event)
o Story passes through telephone game before being related by drunken old man in a bar

1/22 – The Giant Wisteria

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935)

“The Giant Wisteria” (1891)

- Two time periods, distinguished by language (1700s? vs contemporary) and attitudes towards
women (oppressive in 1st part; belittling in 2nd part)
- 1st part: only father named (Samuel), mother, daughter, and child (it) nameless (belong to father,
only matter in relation to him
o Mother plays along with father’s bidding in treatment of daughter, sides with patriarchy
but tries to soften the blow
o Connection of wisteria vine and daughter’s shame
o Child unnamed and ungendered: object considered disposable by father
nd
- 2 part: Jenny and George (married), Jenny’s sister Kate and Jack (engaged), George’s sister Susy
and Jim (married)
 o Wisteria is one living connection between periods, grown even larger; brought as gift to
mother by Samuel, entrapped daughter, uprooted house (patriarchy out of control)
o Distinction between women who want to find ghosts and “practical” men who mock
them (cf. physician husband in “The Yellow Wallpaper”)
o Jack and George who encounter ghost, but are keen to discount it; ghost daughter
rummaging through drawers holding child (gathering supplies for escape), thinks worst
of her (kleptomaniac chambermaid); only shows herself to the men
o Jokingly explore cellar, but become increasingly serious
o Baby in well, placed by daughter?; immediate description and reaction skipped for later
reflection upstairs (unnamed, ungendered, undescribed)

1/24 –

1/26 – Essay Prep

Writing Problems

- CLEAR: Don’t overuse pronouns (it, this, that, there, them, they, he, she, etc.), especially in short
space; inherently vaguer than words they refer to
o “Beck flirts with both Huck and Tom, but he finds ways to make him look foolish and win
her for himself. It suggest that he will stop at nothing to get what he wants regardless of
what they think.”
 Unclear whether “he” applies to Huck and Tom; what does subject “it” refer to
(the flirting?), who are “they” (Becky & Huck or Becky & Tom)
- CONCISE: avoid cluttering writing with excess words that lessen impact of your ideas and don’t
add anything special:
o “in the event that…”: replace “when, but”
o “by the name of…”: replace “named”
o “due to the fact that…”: replace “because”
- CONCRETE: keep writing vivid by not relying too much on forms of flat verb “to be” (is, are, was,
were, be, being, been), which dull impact of your ideas; spread out through writing:
o “Huck is worried (worries: more direct) that Tom is going (will/wants to) to pursue
Becky.”
o Passive voice useful in writing for other disciplines, but flatten English essay
- QUOTATIONS need to be INTEGRATED (part of sentence you’ve written, rather than on their own
as separate sentence) and CONTEXTUALIZED (provide reader with any info needed to
understand what’s happening, who’s involved, etc.); you can start and stop a quotation wherever
you want to, as long as you’re not changing original passages meaning in process
o Use bracketed ellipsis […] to remove, don’t overuse (can cast suspicion of misquote)
o Can explain references in text by replacing words in brackets, but keep as much of
original text as possible
o Don’t replace tenses in brackets, use present tense when referring to events in story;
keep original tense even if quote is in past tense
Essay 1

- Outside Source
o Introduce Avery Gordon (need to establish authority, use background information from
website or your own research into her scholarship)
o Only bring up for sentence or two to support argument, don’t devote paragraph
(distracts from discussion of article)
o Don’t even need to quote a full sentence, integrate it seamlessly with your own
arguments
- Chosen Story
o Give fair coverage of entire story, don’t focus and quote specifically one section
o INTRODUCTION: Give information of author and title of story, historical context (if
necessary to argument), briefly summarize important characters to argument (note
when details of characters aren’t provided, like daughter’s name in “Giant Wisteria”)
o Indicate when portions of quote are omitted
o PUNCTUATION: if quote ends with period or comma, place after citations in parentheses;
if quote ends in special punctuation (exclamation point, question marks), keep those in
quote, but still end citation with period or comma
o First sentence of new paragraph from transition from idea of previous paragraph

1/29 – Spunk/Black Death

Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960)

- Born in Eatonville, FL; organized as first all-black township

- Wrote fiction, essays, novels (Their Eyes are Watching God); studied anthropology, recorded
black folktales
o Controversy over focus on superstition and phonetic spelling of dialects
- “Spunk” and “Black Death” (1925) were originally submitted to magazine contest, set in
Eatonville, replicating speech of Hurston’s home

Spunk

- Juxtaposition between narration (standard English) and dialogue (dialect)

- Telephone game of Spunk’s stories
- Elijah’s hero worship of Spunk vs Walter’s cautiousness
- Lena’s silence: only dialogue related by Elijah, no perspective on Spunk and Joe’s quarrel; used as
object by men
- Despite Leo and Spunk’s deaths, gossip continues unabated

Black Death

- Hurston treats hoodoo and people’s beliefs respectfully, before beginning her anthropological
field work

1/31 – The Piano Lesson Act I

August Wilson (1945-2005)

- Born in Hill District, Pittsburgh

- “The American Century Cycle”

The Piano Lesson (1987)

- Set in 1930s
- Sutter’s ghost: James Sutter, grandson of Robert Sutter (enslaver)

Film Adaption

- Written by Wilson, dropped some language for Halmark Channel

- Ghost never shown on screen, like play; reaction more effective than showing

2/2 – The Piano Lesson Act II

2/9 – Sing Unburied Sing Ch. 3-6

- Ward’s pattern of expectation, standard rotation of chapter narrators broken up by ghost Richie
o Opportunity for reliable testimony on Pop’s stories about Richie (only in Jojo chapters,
Pop never tells Kayla, perhaps stories framed as moral instruction for Jojo)
- Richie’s timelessness, unaware of 60 years between present (2010s) and time in Parchment,
mistakes Jojo for Pop’s son instead of grandson, hopes Jojo will help him make sense
o “I’m going home”: in a loop, phrase which Pop’s stories about Richie always end with
o
2/19 – Brenda Marie Osbey’s Poems and Essay

- “Marie Osbey Broadband” Interview (YouTube: Lawrence Rouss-)

- WED: PRINT 4 COPIES OF INTRODUCTORY PARAGRAPH

- FRI: MEET HILLMAN LIBRARY 340 ON 3RD FLOOR—AUGUST WILSON GALLERY
- NEXT WEEK: REVISED SCHEDULE STARTS

2/21 –

2/26 – Isaac Bashevis Singer, “A Wedding in Brownsville” and “The Cafeteria”

Isaac Bashevis Singer (1902-91)

- Born in Poland, emigrated to USA in 1935 before takeover by Third Reich

- Wrote in Yiddish (German dialect written in Hebrew, used by Eastern European Jews), later
translated
o Deliberately chose his “mother language” instead of English, appealed to different
audience from later translation
o American Literature—immigrant community in New York
- Nobel Prize for Literature (1978)
o “A Wedding in Brownsville” (1964)
o “The Cafeteria” (1968)

2/28 – Term Paper

Term Paper

- Can expand original introduction to 2 paragraphs

- Have to decide which author to begin with (set up for next story), don’t just start with author
focused on in previous essay (avoid shortchanging second author by retaining too much of
original essay)

1st Stage

- Develop question which original thesis will answer;