Favorite and not so favorite

I would have to say my most favorite story of the semester was "The Yellow Wallpaper." I'll have to admit it feels more like a guilty pleasure than a genuine "like." I like how the story was able to draw the reader into the mind of our main character. I really began to feel the dementia that she felt, and the descriptions were so vivid and clear. Growing up I loved horror movies and ghost stories, I do not much enjoy that stuff anymore, but there was a part of me that felt almost nostalgic as I read the story and began to feel creeped out. It truly was odd and morbid, but gave an accurate depiction of how mental illness was viewed in that era.

My least favorite story would undoubtedly be "Hills like white elephants." I really just felt bad for the girl in the story, and I thought that it was a good representation of a real conversation, a conversation that in my life I've actually had. Hemmingway no doubt was a great artist, but his sentiments toward women were ever present in his work. But, the story in and of itself is not necessarily "bad," in fact, if it has evoked emotion in someone to this degree, for all practical reasons, it is in that sense a "good" story.

Conscience of the Court

The testimony of the defendant was very real and matter of fact. I like how she did not hesitate to own up to the situation and clearly explained her side of the story. I guess what I found to be so moving was being able to read about a degree of justice that given the time and setting of the story, one would think was typically unheard of. For an African American woman of this time period to be facing charges, and to actually be able to represent herself in a court of law, and actually be found not guilty, is out of the ordinary.

I really liked this story because it was against the grain of this era. I really enjoyed the dialogue. The way Hurston used the phonetic sound of the dialect of that time period is fun. The testimony of Laura Lee was riveting and made the entire story. I found myself sympathizing with her very easily and the way Hurston described her in the beginning set us up to not really know one way or another if we were dealing with a real criminal, or someone who would be found unfairly guilty, or any number of things that were possible.

Spinster

I think this was an interesting story. There was a lot of building up to the final scene of Mr. Speed's collapse. The conflict seemed to be mostly Elizabeth and Mr. Speed's conflict. But its interesting, because it leads us to wonder if there can actually be conflict in the sense that I don't think that Mr. Speed had a real conflict with our main character. Clearly she had conflict with him, but if you really dig deeper, it is almost as if the entire conflict is Man vs Man, meaning, Elizabeth's conflict within herself. She practically demonized this man, who for whatever reason, walked around in a drunken daze. Essentially harmless was the old man, but potentially dangerous in the eyes and imagination of our main character. The idea of Mr. Speed representing a scapegoat comes to mind. The way that she projected her feelings toward her father and brother upon Mr. Speed, almost as if to cast her sin upon him, and then to fianlly see him die or nearly die in the end, it relieved an anxiety within Elizabeth. She was relieved to see that tension fall upon a sacraficial victim and all her problems be hurried away in the back of the wagon. If there was a conflict of Mr. Speed, I would say more than anything it was man vs society, he was an outcast, a social reject, a man with no one and nothing to offer society other than fear and anxiety. I liked this story, I feel most sympathetic for Mr. Speed, and I found the little girl to be most obnoxious and obsessive about insignificant things.

Chekhov

Although Chekhov uses a third person narration, how does he seem more involved with Dmitry’s character?

A good deal of attention is focused on Dimitry. being that he is the main character, the narrator really delves into his mind, thoughts and emotions. A lot of description is used to describe him and his view toward women, even right down to his mysogony and inflated ego when it comes to women. This is interesting because we do not have as much omniscience into the lady's mind, background, immediate thoughts and such, at least not near what we are given for Dimitry. I really liked the descriptive words, and the amount of words used to describe. It was not lacking in painting a solid picture of the events, and the characters.

Julian and Joy...and analogous too.

There definitely was a striking similarity between Julian and Joy (Hulga). We see the educated, less conscious of outdated social graces, young people, driven by their circumstances into being stuck with a mother that they seem to loathe. I feel that the two characters carried themselves as if they were enlightened with all understanding. I really relate to these stories, because I have a mother that, I honestly felt was being described in both these stories (respectivley). Just about the only things that seemed ultimately different between the two seemed to be the setting. I even found the mothers to be very similar. It seems to fit the style of the author to deal with these parent child relationships. Makes us wonder what Oconnor's relationship was like with her family, or if there is a simiarity. I like the use of her roman catholicism in the story...the martyr, the references to Rome and the imagery.

Good Country People?? Hardly....

In the story "Good country people," we are confronted with this notion that these "good" southern people, highly esteem themselves as upstanding citizens. But as we delve into the story we discover that those who hold this high opinion of themselves actually are anything but good. I like how the concept of false conversion, or this southern goodness will save us type mentality is exposed. It was courageous on the part of the author to work this angle, but the characters were accurate depictions of the bible belt.

I liked how the only genuine character that we feel the most sympathy for was the atheist girl, who was educated, had a wooden leg, and the more layers than an onion. She was the most out of place in her environment, but she was sincere, even in her awkwardness. Her disgust for false Christianity was from a pure place, and rightly so. I liked this story, but I found it hard to read. One of the first sentences in the story was a huge run-on sentence. It was good, with a weird twist, but I likely would not read it again.

The Girls In Their Summer Dresses - Facebook Style

We chose to do "girls in their summer dresses," which is a short story about a man named Michael and his "wandering eyes." We decided to do our project using the Facebook format. Being that the whole story deals with the couple spending time in New York going from place to place deciding what to do, and eventually ending up at a bar where the wife Frances confronts the husband's eyes for other women, we thought it would be fun to explain this via Facebook. We will start by adding them as friends on facebook and selecting that they are married, and with status updates we will explain their dialouge. We also thought it would be interesting to have them become "fans" of some of the things they mention, like The NY Giants, Courvosier, and Washington Square. We also have created some different types of fan pages for different ethnic groups of women that we will work Michael into becoming fans of theirs. We have also considered creating events that that will officially appear in the news feed, explaing the two's events together, possibly even the event of them spending the day together in NY City.