Your essay and reading schedule

Just some reminders regarding our schedule and the essay:

1. The midterm essay is now due March 9 -- we've moved it back a week to give you time to make it extra special.

2. We've dropped Moore and Millay from the this week's reading. You're still responsible for Stevens, H.D., and Hughes.

3. There are not any blog posts due this week. Please use that time to work on you essays.

4. Just because there aren't any blog posts due doesn't mean you can skip the reading. There will be a quiz -- fair warning.

Questions? Just let me know.

Week 6 Blog assignment

Post 1: Close Reading
Due: Thursday, February 23, 11pm

1. Please pick one of the following poems, and read it as you’d normally would. Write a short description of your understanding of the poem.

Poems:

Frost: “The Road Not Taken” or “After Apple Picking”

Williams: “Spring and All” or “The Red Wheelbarrow”

Johnson: “Black Woman”

McKay: “The Lynching” or “America”

2. Using the handout How to Close Read a Poem, do a close reading. You’ll need to answer all 10 questions on your blog.

3. Once you’ve answered those questions, write a paragraph about how your understanding of the poem changed/expanded/etc.

You can find a copy of the How to Close Read a Poem after the jump.

Week 5 blog prompt

Post 1: Weighing the Arguments
Due: Thursday, February 16, 11pm

Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois offer competing arguments as to how African-Americans—many of whom were former slaves—should go about obtaining first-class citizenship in the United States. After reading both arguments, which one is more conservative, and which is more militant? Which argument do you find yourself agreeing with more?

And finally, consider these facts: Washington himself is a former slave; Du Bois was born free in New England. How might these two men’s radically different pasts have influenced their arguments?

Week 4 Blog assignment

Post 1: The use of Irony
Due: Thursday, February 9, 11pm

There are many types of irony, but we’ll focus on two here: “Situational Irony” and “Verbal Irony.” Situational irony is when a the outcome of a narrative (or situation) is the opposite of the expected result. Verbal irony occurs when the actual meaning of speech contradicts the expressed meaning (“Nice shirt,” you might say to someone wearing a particularly hideous shirt).

Both types of irony are deployed throughout Chestnutt’s “The Passing of Grandison.” Write a post that points out at least two specific instances of verbal irony and situational irony, quoting the appropriate texts, and then explain why you think each fits the definition of irony.

Week 4 Check In

This Friday marks our fourth meeting for English 278, which means we'll be a quarter of the way through the semester. Even though it's still fairly early, I'm interested to know what you think of the course so far, how it's set up, what we do with classtime, how grades work, blogs, etc.

So ... I'm going to ask you to think about these questions for a minute. I'll open up some time at the beginning of class on Friday for any thoughts, but feel free to leave them in the comments here (anonymously, if you'd like). They can be:

• What you've liked so far
• What you'd like to see more of
• What you'd like to see less of
• Complaints
• Suggestions
• Etc.

I really do want to make sure that this course is as good as I (and you) can make it. So if there's something you'd like to discuss, let's do it!

"... and the Wilmington tragedy began."

Via the UNC library

There's a curious line on page 248 of Hopkins' "As the Lord Lives ...". As Stone/Jim is explaining himself to the Reverend Stevens, he says:

I came out West from Wilmington, North Carolina, Jones and I were together. We were both college men and chums from childhood. All our savings were in the business we had at home when the leading mean of the town conceived the idea of driving the Negroes out, and the Wilmington tragedy began.

This small mention probably doesn't mean a lot to us as modern-day readers. But Hopkins' contemporaries, especially black readers, would have gotten the import of this passage immediately.

The "tragedy" that Stone/Jim speaks of is actually known as an "insurrection" among historians. I'll try to provide a brief outline of what this Wilmington tragedy was and meant below, but I encourage you to follow some of the links and learn a little more for yourselves.

"Honest White Man" v. "Negro Rule"
News and Observer (Raleigh, N.C.), 30 August 1898.
See more cartoons at UNC library.

In the election of 1894, Southern Democrats, the party of Jim Crow and white supremacy, last their control of the state to what was known as a "Fusion" Republican party, one composed of white and black Republicans. Campaigning on a platform of white supremacy and anti-miscegenation, Democrats planned on wresting power back from the Fusionists in the election of 1898.

They did this through violence. No one knows for certain how many black citizens died in the race riot that followed, but the Wilmington tragedy still stands today as the only time a coup d'état was successful in the United States.


According to the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources:

In elections on Nov. 8, Democrats won easily by stuffing ballot boxes and intimidating black
voters. A Committee of Twenty-Five was formed, and on Nov. 9 prepared resolutions called the White Declaration of Independence. They presented the demands that day to leading black political and business leaders, known as the Committee of Colored Citizens (CCC).

A pivotal demand to the CCC was that the community oust newspaper editor Alex Manly, who had published an article in the Record, the city's only African American newspaper, that challenged claims by whites regarding interracial sexual relationships. The CCC was to respond by 7:30 a.m. on Nov. 10. No response was received from the CCC at that time, and by 9 a.m. a group of men marched to the Record printing office and destroyed the newspaper building.

Before the day ended, a mob of up to 2,000 whites roamed the streets, armed with rifles and
fueled by weeks of propaganda in newspapers and rhetoric-filled meetings. Rifles and rapid fire machine guns were fired, and black men were killed or wounded throughout the day. Estimates of deaths range from six to 100, but records from the coroner's office, hospitals or churches are incomplete, so the total remains unknown. There were no white fatalities. By4p.m., the Republican mayor, board of aldermen, and chief of police were forced to resign and were replaced by men selected by the Committee of Twenty-Five. All black municipal employees subsequently were fired.

This NRP story provides a good overview of the insurrection:

Their leader, Col. Alfred Moore Waddell, had publicly threatened in a pre-election speech to "choke the current of the Cape Fear River" with black bodies, according to a 2006 report chronicling the events by the 1898 Wilmington Race Riot Commission. After the coup, Waddell was elected mayor of Wilmington.

Follow-up post due Tuesday

Just a reminder: your follow-up post in which you comment on the blogs in your small group is due Tuesday by 11pm. We went over how to link text of another website, and I'd like to see everyone give that a shot in this post.

There's a certain art to using other people's writing as springboards to our own ideas, especially on the Internet. It's very similar to the way that you were taught to use quote in ENGL 102. Here's the three parts of a good post responding to another person's writing.

1. Signal phrase
2. Quote or Block Quote -- the original source text
3. Commentary -- your ideas regarding the source text

One of my favorite bloggers, Ta-Nehisi Coates, does a nice job in this post. Here's a visual of these three elements. Take a minute or two to see how he sets up his quote, block quotes it, then offers his take. Notice how he links the name of the writer to the source text--no wasted words or space. (Click on the picture below to see it in full size.)

 

Questions? Just post 'em in the comments.

Friday highlights

Chopin's "The Storm" drew a lot of attention, the ending in particular. Like a lot of writers who use techniques associated with Realism, Chopin seemed to raise more questions than she answered at the end of the story.

Kassie asks:

The story does not go on to say that she live the rest of her life with guilt. Maybe she did and maybe she didn’t. Who knows?

 GW weighs in one how much stock we should put in the sincerity of the last line:

I think it’s a great ending because it really leaves the door wide open for the reader. Was everyone really happy? Were Calixta and Alcee just happy that no one found out about the affair? Is this a sarcastic ending in which by “happy,” they actually mean horribly miserable?

Bree argues that Chopin's story actually celebrates the affair. Do you agree?

Chopin celebrates their affair and doesn’t condemn it because Calixta doesn’t get caught up in Alcee and have emotional attachments, she doesn’t want to up and leave with him, and it’s rather the opposite because she accepts Bobinot and Bibi when they come trudging in through the back door with a renewed sense of commitment. 

Weston isn't so sure:

No one in this story seems to be truly satisfied. They are content, in a way, to be fake, to put forward a version of themselves that appeases their spouse. No one is faithful, except maybe Bobinôt, but who knows what he would have done if not trapped inside of the store with his son. The author doesn't show us remorse from any of the characters.

Week 3 Blog post

Battle of Chickamauga

Don't forget, the first Week 3 post is due by 11pm tonight. Here's the prompt:


Post 1: Good guys & bad guys
Due: Thursday, February 2, 11pm

On first glance, the way in which war is depicted in Bierce’s “Chickamauga” and Twain’s “A Private History” seem to be very different. But a closer reading of both might reveal some important if subtle places of overlap. What are some ways in which the depiction of war is similar in these two stories?

-or-

The last line of “The Storm”—“So the storm passed an every one was happy.”—is a surprising one, especially given all that happens in the (very) short story. How do you think a reader should think about this ending (what does it “mean?”), and what does the ending have to say about the story’s portrayal of marriage, love, and infidelity?