1. From the list below, please select one element and show the development of that element from three different literary works we’ve studied in this course up to Cather. One of the literary works you pick MUST be My Antonia. Discuss each literary work in chronological order, beginning with the oldest and ending with My Antonia.
a. the TELLING OF STORIES BY INDIVIDUAL CHARACTERS, within the larger work
b. the usefulness and worth of COMMUNITIES OF PEOPLE.
c. the POSSIBILITY OF WOMEN’S POWER
d. the straightforwardness, or the complexity, of POINT OF VIEW (who’s telling the story and how)
For example, I might be really interested in the question of point of view. I’d select two works in addition to Cather that I think might work well. . . .say, Clemens and Jewett. I’d look closely at who’s telling the story and HOW, and I’d notice as much as I could. First-person, for instance. Plus, lots of words “from the horse’s mouth,” meaning the “actual” speech of “real” people. There are some changes, though. . . I’d notice those too. My thesis might ultimately be something like the following:
“From Clemens’s focus on ________________ in point of view to Jewett’s reinterpretation of that quality into _________________, we see an overall progression to the variation of these ideas that Cather does, by having Jim Burden __________________.”
(A nice, meaty thesis, in other words, that will really set up my essay, AFTER I’ve done all my thinking. . . .)
A hint on this assignment: use the mini-lecture notes on the changes in literary movements to help direct your thinking. . . in other words, don’t just fly in the dark according to your personal tastes and opinions; used the course material as well.
NOTE: I WILL INCLUDE THE LECTURES TO FUTHER HELP ALONG WITH ALL THE READING ASSIGNED. YOU CHOOSE WHICH ONES TO USE IN ADDITION TO My Antonia
READINGS (in chronological order as there were assigned):
Walt Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”
Samuel Clemens’s (Mark Twain’s) “The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County”
Brete Harte’s “The Outcasts of Poker Flat”
Ambrose Bierce’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”
Henry James’s “Daisy Miller”
and “The Beast in the Jungle”
Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs
Kate Chopin’s “The Awakening”
Stephen Crane’s “The Open Boat”
Booker T. Washington’s Chapter II, “Boyhood Days,”
W.E.B. Dubois’s selections from The Souls of Black Folk, chapters 1, 3 and 14
Baym, et al. The Norton Anthology of American Literature 7th edition. VOLUME “D”.
IN VOLUME D :
1)Robert Frost, “After Apple Picking” “Birches,” and “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening”
2) Willa Cather, My Antonia (novel)
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