Blog for Friday, November 18th

With Frederick Douglass and Harriet Beecher Stowe, we have two of the most significant American literary figures writing the way out of slavery. Yet, these two texts are very different in their literary mode, authors’ life experiences of slavery, and intended audience. For this blog, I want you to focus just on how the texts work and not discuss biography. Please write 250-300 words to make two comparisons. Each comparison should have one passage from Douglass and one from Stowe. Each comparison will do close reading work on both passages involved. This is not a preference exercise of one over the other, but an articulation of divergent approaches to the same issue. (As an example, you might pick passages that engage with gender, family/children/parents, Christianity and slavery, and, yes, animals…)

Post the blog by 10am Friday.

Frederick Douglass, retold

Here's the Funny or Die video of Frederick Douglass

Drunk History Vol. 5 w/ Will Ferrell, Don Cheadle & Zooey Deschanel from Will Ferrell

Yelping with Cormac McCarthy

Cormac McCarthy is one of the most important living American novelists, and really one of the most important American novelists of all time. More subjectively, I recommend Blood Meridian as his best. The Road was popular, but cannibals roasting babies isn't really my deal. And his novel Child of God was recommended to me by a female scholar from the Czech Republic--she told me she reads it every Christmas day. Now, I would not recommend that...

Follow this link to a humorous writer imagining if Cormac McCarthy wrote Yelp reviews.

Nimble, lithe fingers

I also wanted to draw attention to Harding Davis as part of a tradition of social reform literature and thought that focuses on industrialization's marks on women, children, and the family structure. We noted the absence of a functioning family, and in this story Hugh and the other men do have work, but in different areas than the women. Note how the men work on the fires, but the women work on the production side of the mills. As industrial machinery became increasingly self-governing and alternately powered, men disappeared from many industrial scenes. We'll take this up more on Friday.

Knickknackery

I really do like the book-ending of these objects--the soot-coated angel and the korl woman kept behind a curtain--and had hoped also to attend to the bit at the story's end where Harding Davis writes, "The gas-light wakens from the shadows here and there the objects which lie scattered through the room...homely fragments, in which lie secrets of all eternal truth and beauty. Prophetic all!"

Quaker ex Machina

Your responses to the end of Harding Davis's story have stuck with me this afternoon.
I wonder if another way to think about the abruptness and lack of details when the Quaker woman intervenes is that these factors contribute to the stunning ease with which she does something. She decides to act on behalf of someone and acts--granted, as some of you pointed out, too late for Hugh.
Any more thoughts?

Was Thoreau a cat-person?

In response to Dyani's query, you might want to check out this nifty book called Bonds of Affection: Thoreau on Dogs and Cats. Some editors combed his works and assembled the excerpts in which he talks about dogs or cats.

Perhaps we should inquire with the experts at Writers and Kitties.