Homework for Tuesday

Give your assessment of Chapter 3. Create a brief summary. Then choose the moment that you find either most important or most striking and explain the significance of the scene, and why you believe it's important. (This doesn't have to be the most dramatic scene or the most important from the standpoint of plot.)

Times articles

Choose one of the following articles and write a response in which you a) briefly explain what the article is about and briefly state your opinion or view in response to it (first paragraph); b) detail the articles main points (second paragraph); and c) elaborate on your opinion in response, using evidence from the article to back up your point (third paragraph). One page minimum. Due Monday, October 31.

Use turnitin.com to file your work.

Articles: horses, Murakami, homework, bike trip, end of Nazism in Germany

Hurrah! More vocabulary!

disparities, contortions, solicitations, obstinately subdued

irrepressible, lamentable, whimsical, nebulous aspirations

rambling, milieu, tumult, credulity, inclination

deluded, idiosyncrasies, foreboding, antagonistic, prosperity

What are stories supposed to do?

Remember when we talked about Junot Diaz on our first day of class? In addition to being a novelist and short story writer, he's the editor of a literary magazine, the Boston Review. Here's how he describes what he's looking for in a good short story. (I'd like you to consider how this could apply to your own writing)

“I’m looking for fiction that resembles the Thirty-Mile Woman from Toni Morrison’s Beloved: ‘She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order.’ Or as Takashi Murakami puts it: ‘We want to see the newest things. That is because we want to see the future, even if only momentarily. It is the moment in which, even if we don’t completely understand what we have glimpsed, we are nonetheless touched by it. This is what we have come to call art.’ I’m looking for fiction in which a heart struggles against itself, in which the messy unmanageable complexity of the world is revealed. Sentences that are so sharp they cut the eye."