Category: Reading

Posted in English 1103, Reading, Teaching

ENG 1103: Looking Ahead to Your Revision

Posted on by janemlucas
Rosenwaser, David and Jill Stephen. Chapter 7: “Finding an Evolving a Thesis.” Writing Analytically, 9th edition. Wadsworth/Cengage, 2024. pp. 234-78.

As you prepare to begin revising your analysis, read the section of Writing Analytically devoted to composing thesis statements (247-52). Also review the opening paragraph of my analysis of Art Spiegelman’s Maus and my sample opening for a possible analysis of Donald Bartheleme’s “The School,” both of which follow.

In Chapter 4 of Art Spiegelman’s graphic memoir Maus, he depicts his father Vladek’s account of the hangings of four Jewish merchants in Sosnowiec, Poland. Vladek and his wife, Anja, learn from Anja’s father, Mr. Zylberberg, that the Nazis have arrested his friend Nahum Cohn and his son. With his head bowed in sorrow, Mr. Zylberberg says to Anja and Vladek, “The Germans intend to make an example of them!” (83). That image of Mr. Zylberberg speaking with Vladek and Anja overlays the larger panel that dominates the page, one that depicts the horror that Mr. Zylberberg anticipates: the murder of his friend Nahum Cohn, Cohn’s son, and two other Jewish merchants. That haunting panel and the smaller ones that frame it illustrate the complexity of Spiegelman’s seemingly simple composition. His rendering of the panels of the living in conjunction with the fragmented panels of the hanged merchants simultaneously conveys connection and separation: both the grieving survivors’ ties to the dead and the hanged men’s objectification at the hands of the Nazis.

The authors of Writing Analytically note that “a productive thesis statement usually contains tension, the balance of this against that” (Rosenwasser and Stephen 248). Reread the thesis above (in bold) and consider the instances of “this against that”: larger panel and smaller one, complexity and simplicity, connection and separation.

Now consider the “this against that” in the sample opening for a possible analysis of Donald Bartheleme’s “The School,”

Donald Barthelme’s short story “The School” recounts a series of classroom lessons that end with the death of plants and animals–deaths that serve as a prelude to the death of a Korean orphan, followed by the deaths of classmates and family members. With conversational narration, accumulation of detail, and a shift in fictional mode, Barthelme deftly depicts the reality of the fleeting nature of life, even as the story itself veers from reality.

The sample opening paragraph above lacks the detail of the first paragraph of my Maus analysis because it’s the draft of an introduction for a paper I haven’t written. Completing a draft would enable me to develop the introduction and refine my thesis statement. That said, the introduction already has an instance of “this against that”: the reality of life depicted and the veering from reality with the shift in fictional mode.

Citing Others’ Ideas

If your analysis includes any ideas drawn from my remarks, which I subsequently posted as class notes on my blog, you should cite the blog post as you would any other online source.

Example: Dr. Lucas notes, “For Junod, choosing not to divide the first paragraph creates an unbroken movement that parallels the unbroken flight of his subject” (par. 3).

Sample Works Cited Entries

Lucas, Jane. “ENG 1103: David Sedaris’s ‘Me Talk Pretty One Day.’” Jane Lucas, 26 Aug. 2024. https://janelucas.com/2024/08/26/eng-1103-david-sedariss-me-talk-pretty-one-day/.

Lucas, Jane. “ENG 1103: Donald Bartheleme’s ‘The School.’” Jane Lucas, 18 Sept. 2024. https://janelucas.com/2024/09/18/eng-1103-donald-barthelemes-the-school-2/. 

Lucas, Jane. “ENG 1103: Field Notes and Peer Responses.” Jane Lucas, 16 Sept. 2024. https://janelucas.com/2024/09/16/eng-1103-field-notes-and-peer-responses-2/.

Lucas, Jane. “ENG 1103: “A Second Look at Sedaris and a First Glimpse of Heller.” Jane Lucas, 2 Sept. 2024. https://janelucas.com/2024/09/02/eng-1103-a-second-look-at-sedaris-a-first-glimpse-of-heller-and/.

Lucas, Jane. “ENG 1103: “Tom Junod’s ‘The Falling Man.’” Jane Lucas, 12 Sept. 2024. https://janelucas.com/2024/09/12/eng-1103-tom-junods-the-falling-man-2/.

Next Up

Tomorrow I will return your drafts with my notes, and you will have the class period to begin revising on your laptops. Because next week is fall break, you will have two additional weeks to continue your revision work. The due date is Wednesday, October 16 (before class). The hard deadline is Friday, October 18.

Posted in English 1103, Reading, Teaching, Writing

ENG 1103: Donald Bartheleme’s “The School”

Posted on by janemlucas

Today in class, after I collect your worksheets for lesson four of Check, Please! we will examine Donald Barthelme’s short story “The School,” and in groups of three or four you will address in writing some of the elements of the story that you might explore in an analysis. Among the elements of Barthelme’s story that you will considered are these:

  • the narrator and the narrative voice
  • conflict
  • narrative shift (Where does “The School” make an unexpected turn?)

Whether the subject of your analysis is Bartheleme’s story or one of our earlier readings, you will begin your first paragraph with a summary of the text. Remember that a summary is an objective synopsis of a text’s key points. It should be written in third person and present tense. For example, if you choose to analyze “The School,” you might summarize it this way:

Donald Barthelme’s short story “The School” recounts a series of classroom lessons that end with the deaths of plants and animals–deaths that serve as a prelude to the unexplained death of a Korean orphan, followed by the senseless deaths of classmates and family members.

Notice that the summary above does not comment on the story in any way. What follows the summary will be the beginning of your commentary, or analysis, the thesis statement that offers your particular close reading, or interpretation, of the story. The passage below is the same as the one above, but at the end of it I have added a thesis statement in bold.

Donald Barthelme’s short story “The School” recounts a series of classroom lessons that end with the death of plants and animals–deaths that serve as a prelude to the death of a Korean orphan, followed by the deaths of classmates and family members. With conversational narration, accumulation of detail, and a shift in fictional mode, Barthelme deftly depicts the reality of the fleeting nature of life, even as the story itself veers from reality.

If I were to continue to write the analysis that I began in the previous paragraph, I would follow that opening paragraph with body paragraphs that address each of the three story elements that I include in my thesis: (1) “conversational narration,” (2) “accumulation of detail,” and (3) “shift in fictional mode.”

Next Up

Wordplay Day! To prepare for class, revisit the Dictionary and World Builder pages on the Scrabble website, and review the blog posts devoted to Scrabble tips.

Posted in English 1103, Reading, Teaching, Writing

ENG 1103: Field Notes and Peer Responses

Posted on by janemlucas

Today’s class will be devoted primarily to reading and responding to the blog post of one of your classmates’ literacy narratives. Elements you will consider in your response included these:

  • the title
  • vivid details
  • dialogue, the use of scene and/or summary

You should also identify one or more of the “Nine Basic Writing Errors” (see Writing Analytically, 423-44), and address that error in your response. If you cannot identify one, include a sentence in your response that quotes a sentence of your peer’s and explains what makes it effective.

Before you begin that assignment, we will examine the opening pages of “Back Story,” the first chapter of Michael Lewis‘s The Blind Side, which dramatizes the moments in the November 1985 Redskins-Giants football game leading up to the injury that ended quarterback Joe Theismann’s career:

“From the snap of the ball to the snap of the first bone is closer to four seconds than to five. One Mississippi: The quarterback of the Washington Redskins, Joe Theismann, turns and hands the ball to running back John Riggins. He watches Riggins run two steps forward, turn, and flip the ball back to him. It’s what most people know as a ‘flea-flicker,’ but the Redskins call it a ‘throw-back special.’ Two Mississippi: Theismann searches for a receiver but instead sees Harry Carson coming straight at him. It’s a running down—the start of the second quarter, first and 10 at midfield, with the score tied 7–7—and the New York Giants’ linebacker has been so completely suckered by the fake that he’s deep in the Redskins’ backfield. Carson thinks he’s come to tackle Riggins but Riggins is long gone, so Carson just keeps running, toward Theismann. Three Mississippi: Carson now sees that Theismann has the ball. Theismann notices Carson coming straight at him, and so he has time to avoid him. He steps up and to the side and Carson flies right on by and out of the play. The play is now 3.5 seconds old. Until this moment it has been defined by what the quarterback can see. Now it–and he–is at the mercy of what he can’t see” (15).

What Theismann cannot see is Lawrence Taylor. A second later, as Taylor sacks Theismann, Taylor’s knee drives straight into Theismann’s lower right leg, leading to the “snap of the first bone” that Lewis mentions in the first line of the chapter. He hooks the reader by linking the beginning of the play, “the snap of the ball” to the gruesome “snap of the first bone” that will follow. Lewis develops the opening paragraph using the common one-Mississippi, two-Mississippi method of marking seconds to present the events leading up to the compound fracture that ends Theisman’s career.

Lewis doesn’t dramatize the injury itself because his interest lies instead in the blind side that led to it and subsequently elevated the status and salary of the left tackle, the player who protects the quarterback’s blind side.

When you’re struggling to develop a piece of writing, reread the opening paragraph of The Blind Side. Observe how Lewis dramatizes 3.5 seconds–yes, only 3.5 seconds–with about two-hundred words.

Next Up

In class on Wednesday, after you submit your worksheets for the fourth lesson of Check, Please!, we will examine Donald Barthelme’s short story “The School.” You do not need to print a copy of “The School”; you will receive a copy in class.

Posted in English 1103, Reading, Teaching

ENG 1103: Tom Junod’s “The Falling Man”

Posted on by janemlucas
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a48031/the-falling-man-tom-junod/

Yesterday in class, before you composed your reflective essays on your literacy narratives, we examined the beginning of Tom Junod‘s essay “The Falling Man,” published in Esquire magazine two years after 9-11. After we read the first paragraph, I asked you to consider these questions:

  • The long first paragraph of Junod’s essay could be two or more paragraphs. If you were Junod, where might you have divided the paragraph?
  • Why do think he chose not to divide it?

Junod might have started a second paragraph with the words “[i]n all the other pictures,” because there he shifts the focus from the Falling Man to the photographs of other people who jumped from the Twin Towers. An opportunity for a third paragraph comes with the words “[t]he man in the picture, by contrast,” where Junod turns his attention back to the Falling Man. And he might have begun a fourth paragraph with “[s]ome people who look at the picture,” because there he shifts to viewers’ perceptions of the Falling Man.

The first paragraph is over four-hundred words long, a length I advise you to avoid in your own paragraphs. Generally, one-hundred to one-hundred-and-fifty words is a suitable length. As a rule, you should begin a new paragraph when you present a new idea or point. If you have an extended idea that spans multiple paragraphs, each new point within that idea should have its own paragraph. But the first paragraph of “The Falling Man” is an exception. For Junod, choosing not to divide the first paragraph creates an unbroken movement that parallels the unbroken downward flight of his subject, the Falling Man. Outside of the photograph, “he drops and keeps dropping until he disappears.” With “disappears,” the last word of the paragraph,” the Falling Man disappears from the page, and Tom Junod turns to the photographer, whom we learn later in the essay is Richard Drew.

Unless you subscribe to Esquire, the magazine’s paywall will deny you access to the full text of “The Falling Man”; but if you’re interested in reading it in full, you can access it through the HPU Library site by following these steps:

  • Go to the HPU Library site.
  • Under the heading “Search HPU Libraries . . . ,” click on the “Articles” tab.
  • Under the “Articles” tab, type Tom Junod “Falling Man” Esquire in the search box and click “search.”
  • On the next screen, you will see a brief summary of the article. Click “Access Online” to view the full article.
https://checkpleasecc.notion.site/Check-Please-Starter-Course-ae34d043575e42828dc2964437ea4eed

Check, Please! Lesson Three

The second half of this blog post features my version of the third Check, Please! assignment, which you submitted at the beginning of class on Wednesday. In preparation for submitting your worksheet for lesson four, review this post as well as the assignment notes that I posted on September 3.

Sample Assignment

In the third lesson of the Check, Please!, Starter Course, Mike Caulfield, author of the course and a research scientist at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, continues his instruction on the second step in four-step SIFT approach to determining the reliability of a source. Lesson three, “Further Investigation” covers these topics: (1) Just add Wikipedia for names and organizations, (2) Google Scholar searches for verifying expertise, (3) Google News searches for information about organizations and individuals, (4) the nature of state media and how to identify it, and (5) the difference between bias and agenda.

One of the most instructive parts of lesson three focuses on two news stories about MH17, Malyasia Airlines Flight 17, a passenger flight scheduled to land in Kuala Lumpur that was shot down over eastern Ukraine on July 17, 2014. While the second story, a television news segment, appears to present detailed investigative reporting challenging the conclusion of the Dutch Safety Board and Dutch-led joint investigation team–the conclusion that Russia was to blame–a quick just-add-Wikipedia check reveals that RT (formerly Russia Today) is a Russian state-controlled international TV network, a government propaganda tool rather than a source of fair and balanced news. The first video, the one produced by Business Insider, a financial and business news site, delivers accurate coverage of MH17.

Another notable segment of “Further Investigation” addresses the important distinction between “bias” and “agenda.” There, Caulfield observes that “[p]ersonal bias has real impacts. But bias isn’t agenda, and it’s agenda that should be your primary concern for quick checks,” adding that “[b]ias is about how people see things; agenda is about what a news or research organization is set up to do.”

Work Cited

Caulfield, Mike. Check, Please! Starter Course, 2021, https://webliteracy.pressbooks.com/front-matter/updated-resources-for-2021/.

Next Up

Wordplay Day! To prepare for class, revisit the Dictionary and World Builder pages on the Scrabble website, and review the blog posts devoted to Scrabble tips.

Posted in English 1103, Reading, Teaching

ENG 1103: Model Literacy Narrative, “A Bridge to Words”

Posted on by janemlucas
Hillaire Belloc’s “Rebecca,” illustrated by Alice and Martin Provensen

Today in class, after our virtual class visit with Roy Peter Clark, we will examine the model literacy narrative “A Bridge to Words,” which appears below, and you and two or three of your classmates will collaboratively compose a piece of writing that addresses one of these elements of the essay:

  • concrete details
  • figurative language
  • scene (see paragraphs two through five)
  • the adult retrospective narrator
  • the writer as a child

As you continue to revise, consider the role of those elements your own literacy narrative, and ask yourself what changes may enhance them.

A Bridge to Words

To a small child, the pages of a newspaper are enormous. Looking far back through the years, I see myself, not yet school age, trying to hold up those long, thin sheets of newsprint, only to find myself draped in them, as if covered by a shroud. But of course, back then, my inability to hold a newspaper properly was of little consequence. Even if I could have turned the pages as gracefully as my parents did, I couldn’t decipher the black marks on the page; thus, my family’s ritual reading of the newspaper separated them from me. As the youngest and the only one who couldn’t read, I was left alone on the perimeter to observe. My family’s world of written words was impenetrable; I could only look over their shoulders and try to imagine the places where all those black marks on the page had carried them—these people, my kin, who had clearly forgotten that I was in the room.

My sister, who was three years older, had her very own news source: The Mini Page, a four-page miniature paper that arrived at our house as an insert in the Sunday edition. While our parents sat in their easy chairs poring over the state and local news, my sister, Jo, perched at the drop-front desk and occupied herself with articles, puzzles, and connect-the-dots.

Finally, one Sunday, someone noticed me on the margin and led me into our family’s reading circle. Whether it was one of my parents or my sister, I don’t know. I remember only the gesture and the words: someone handing me the Sunday comics and saying, “You can read part of the funny pages, too. You can read Henry.”

I took the giant page and laid it flat in the middle of the oval, braided rug on the floor of the den. Once I situated the page, I lay on top of it with my eyes just inches above the panels of the comic strip. To my parents, my prone position was a source of amusement, but for me it was simply a practical solution. How else was someone so small supposed to manage such a large piece of paper?

As I lay on the floor and looked at the comic strip’s panels, I realized what the voice had meant. I could “read” Henry, the comic with the bald boy in a red shirt, because it consisted entirely of pictures. In between panels of Henry walking, there were panels of him standing still, scratching his hairless head. I didn’t find Henry funny at all. I wondered how that pale forerunner of Charlie Brown had earned a prime spot in the funnies. Still, I was glad he was there. He was the bridge that led me to the written word.

Reading the wordless comic strip Henry for the first time was the beginning of a years-long habit of stretching out on the floor with newspapers and large books—not thick ones but ones that were tall and wide, among them one of my childhood favorites: The Golden Book of Fun and Nonsense. My sister and I spent hours lying on our bedroom floor, the pink shag carpet tickling our legs as we delighted in the antics of Rebecca, the mischievous title character of one of the poems.

Carl Thomas Anderson’s comic strip character Henry

“Rebecca”—which my sister read to me before I could read it myself—introduced me to the word “abhors,” the very sound of which appealed to me. Sometimes before Jo had finished reading the opening lines, my uncontrollable giggles collided with her perfect mock-serious delivery. As the last word in the first line, “abhors” serves as a lead-in to an enjambment: the continuation of a sentence or clause in a line break. It would be years before I learned the term “enjambment,” but I was immediately swept away by its effect in the opening lines: “A trick that everyone abhors/ In Little Girls is Slamming Doors” (Belloc 61). The first line lured me into the second one, and so on and so on. I was drawn both to the individual word “abhors”—with its side-by-side “b” and “h,” rare in English—and the way the words joined, like links in a chain, to yank me giggling through Rebecca’s cautionary tale:

It happened that a marble bust
Of Abraham was standing just
Above the door this little lamb
Had carefully prepared to slam,
And down it came! It knocked her flat!
It laid her out! She looked like that.

Her funeral sermon (which was long
And followed by a sacred song)
Mentioned her virtues, it is true,
But dwelt upon her vices too,
And showed the dreadful end of one
Who goes and slams the door for fun. (61)

Why these particular early memories visit me now, I don’t know. Perhaps rereading Art Spiegelman’s graphic memoir Maus with my students has roused the wordless Henry and the word-filled Golden Book of Fun and Nonsense from the corner of my brain where they’ve slumbered. The former wakes and stretches out in my mind as a bridge to the latter: a spot in the world of words I’ve inhabited ever since.

Work Cited

Belloc, Hilaire. “Rebecca.” The Golden Book of Fun and Nonsense, edited by Louis Untermeyer, illustrated by Alice and Martin Provenson, Golden Press, 1970, p. 61.

Next Up

At the beginning of class on Wednesday, you will submit your worksheet for the third lesson in the Check, Please! course. After that, you will compose a reflective essay on your literacy narrative.

Your reflective essay assignment requires you to include a minimum of one relevant quotation from our textbook, Writing Analytically. To prepare for that portion of the assignment, read the sections titled “Keeping a Writer’s Notebook” (157-58) and “Writing from the Life: The Personal Essay” (161-68). Make note in your journal of any phrases or sentences that speak to your experience of planning, drafting, and/or revising your literacy narrative. Remember to bring your textbook to class.

Posted in English 1103, Reading, Teaching, Writing

ENG 1103: A Second Look at Sedaris, a First Glimpse of Heller, and . . .

Posted on by janemlucas
Author David Sedaris in New York on August 3, 2018 / Robert Deutsch USA Today, https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/books/2018/08/03/david-sedaris-hates-word-awesome-but-loves-sequined-culottes-calypso-bookmark/900667002/

Today, along with returning to our study of Sedaris’s “Me Talk Pretty One Day,” we will examine “The Day Language Came into My Life,” the first pages of Chapter Four of Helen Keller’s autobiography, The Story of My Life.

One of the aspects of Sedaris’s essay that you examined last Wednesday was his movement from summary to scene. The first of those occurs with these words of his teacher’s: “If you have not meimslsxp or lpgpdmurct by this time, then you should not be in this room” (167).

You also identified Sedaris’s hyperbole “front teeth the size of tombstones” (168), and his use of metaphors and similes, including these:

  • “not unlike Pa Kettle trapped backstage at a fashion show” (167).
  • “everybody into the language pool, sink or swim” (167).
  • “like a translation of one of those Playmate of the Month data sheets” (168).
Helen Keller, https://www.biography.com/activists/helen-keller

Together, Sedaris’s essay and Keller’s chapter excerpt demonstrate two vastly different ways to present a literacy narrative. “Me Talk Pretty One Day” offers a quirky look at the challenges of learning French from a sarcastic, soul-crushing instructor. Keller’s story poignantly recounts learning to make meaning through the sign language of her teacher, Annie Sullivan, learning that certain finger positions mean “water” for those who cannot hear it, and for others, like her, who can neither see nor hear it.

Works Cited

Keller, Helen. “The Day that Language Came into My Life.” The Story of My Life. https://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/keller/life/life.html.

Sedaris, David. “Me Talk Pretty One Day.” Me Talk Pretty One Day. Little Brown, 2000. pp. 166-73.

. . . Sample Student Essays

Today in class we will examine two literacy narratives written in a previous semester. After you read and annotate the essays, you and two or three of your classmates will collaboratively compose a short assessment of each narrative.

In each assessement, consider whether the essay focuses on one of the following options for topics:

  • a memory of a reading or writing assignment that you recall vividly  
  • someone who helped you learn to read or write
  • a writing-related school event that you found humorous or embarrassing
  • a particular type of writing that you found (or still find) especially difficult or challenging
  • a memento that represents an important moment in your development as a reader or writer

Also determine whether each essay fulfills the requirements listed below.

  • a well-told story
  • vivid detail
  • some indication of the narrative’s significance
  • a minimum of 600 words

After you have composed your assessment, you will review the grade criteria listed below, and assign a letter grade to each narrative.

  • An A literacy narrative complies with all of the assignment guidelines: it presents a well-told story, includes vivid details, and conveys the story’s significance in a way that demonstrates a depth of understanding. An A literacy narrative is also well organized and relatively free of surface errors.
  • A B literacy narrative complies with all of the assignment guidelines but may convey the significance of the story in a superficial way, may have issues with organization, or may be flawed by surface errors.
  • A C literacy narrative complies with most but not all of the assignment guidelines and may also be flawed by issues of organization and/or surface errors.
  • A D literacy narrative complies with only a few of the assignment guidelines and may also be flawed by issues of organization and/or surface errors.
  • An F literacy narrative fails to comply with most or all of the assignment guidelines and may also be flawed by substantial issues of organization and/or surface errors.

Next Up

On Wednesday you will continue work on your own literacy narratives. At the beginning of class, after I collect your second Check, Please! worksheets, I will return your rough drafts with my notes, and you will have the remainder of the class period to revise on your laptops. You will have an additional week to continue revising before posting your literacy narrative to Blackboard and to your WordPress blog. The due date is Wednesday, September 11 (before class); the hard deadline is Friday, September 13 (before class).

Posted in English 1103, Reading, Teaching, Writing

ENG 1103: Beginning Your Literacy Narrative

Posted on by janemlucas

Today in class, you will begin planning and drafting your first essay assignment, a literacy narrative, which is an account of a learning experience involving reading, writing, or learning to speak a language.

Begin by asking yourself some of these questions: How have you come to think about yourself as a reader or writer? What were some of your most formative experiences as a reader or writer? What are some of the do’s and don’ts you have learned about writing? How has what you have learned about reading or writing enhanced your confidence and skill in that role? You don’t need to respond to all of those questions. Try picking one or two as a starting point, then begin bringing one of those experiences to life.

Your aim is to recreate your experience on the page and then to reflect on its significance. Your focus may be any one of the following:

  • a memory of a reading or writing assignment that you recall vividly  
  • someone who helped you learn to read or write
  • a writing-related school event that you found humorous or embarrassing
  • a particular type of writing that you found (or still find) especially difficult or challenging
  • a memento that represents an important moment in your development as a reader or writer
  • learning to speak a second langauage

Detailed instructions are included in the assignment handout that you will receive in class today. An additional copy of the handout is posted on Blackboard in the essay assignments folder.

Next Up

Wordplay Day! To prepare for class, review the Dictionary and World Builder pages on the Scrabble website. Also review tomorrow’s Scrabble post.

Posted in Reading, Writing

Reconstructing Jim: Percival Everett’s James

Posted on by janemlucas

When readers of Percival Everett’s James first encounter the title character’s daughter, James is teaching her and the other six children in his cabin how to speak the crude dialect that whites expect to hear from the mouths of slaves. Is Lizzie reading her father’s lips? That’s a question some readers may ask, remembering how in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Jim tells Huck that his daughter lost her hearing to scarlet fever.

Maybe Lizzie—called Lizbeth in Mark Twain’s novel—recovered her hearing. Otherwise, what accounts for the discrepancy? Whatever the answer may be, the variances in James’ and Huck’s stories don’t end there. In Huckleberry Finn, Jim is bitten on the leg by a rattlesnake; in James, he is bitten on the hand. In Huckleberry Finn, Huck keeps two men from discovering Jim by telling the men that the hidden man with whom he is travelling is his father, who has smallpox. Perhaps to assuage their guilt for abandoning a boy whose father lies ill with a contagious disease, the two men each give Huck twenty dollars, half of which he gives to Jim. In James, it’s Huck’s uncle whom he says has smallpox, and one of the men gives Huck ten dollars.

Those inconsistencies are secondary to the grave dangers faced by the runaway slave, but they demonstrate the primary role of point of view in fiction and prompt readers to meditate on the nature of narrative itself. Though published eighty-five years before William H. Gass coined the term metafiction, Huckleberry Finn (1885)—like Don Quixote, Part II (1615) and Tristram Shandy (1759)—departs from novelistic convention, identifying its central figure as a character in a book. In conventional fiction, characters don’t know they are characters, but in Huckleberry Finn, Huck identifies himself as a character in the first sentence and credits Twain in the second:

“You don’t know about me, without you have read a book by the name of  ‘The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,’ but that ain’t no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly” (32).

In contrast, Everett’s Jim doesn’t refer to his character-turned-writer status initially. Instead, one-third of the way into the novel, readers learn that the words Jim has penned—or, more accurately, penciled—are the words they are reading. In Chapter 15, Jim recounts how reading—which he taught himself to do by studying the books in Judge Thatcher’s library—leaves him dissatisfied; the words that he needs to see on the page are the ones he will put there himself:

I read and I read, but I found what I needed was to write. I needed that pencil. I could not keep track of my thoughts. I could not follow my own reasoning after a while. This was perhaps because I couldn’t stop reading long enough to make space in my head. I was like a man who had not eaten for a season and then gorged himself until sick. And my books, once read, were not what I wanted, not what I needed. The so-called self-related story of Venture Smith became infuriating the more I examined the work, wondering how a five-year-old could have remembered so much detail that made such neat sense. I had already come to understand the tidiness of lies, the lesson learned from the stories told by white people seeking to justify my circumstance. (89-90)

Jim receives the pencil he needs from a slave called Young George, who is brutally whipped for stealing the pencil from his master. When Young George hands Jim the pencil, he says to him, “Tell your story” (91).

But with pencil finally in hand, Jim still lacks paper. How he acquires the pages he needs requires some backstory:

After the King and the Duke discover that the blacksmith-slave, Easter, has unlocked the shackle on Jim’s leg, the Duke whips Easter, rendering him unable to work. When Wiley, Easter’s owner, sees that the Duke has damaged his property, he confiscates Jim from the King and the Duke and forces him to forge the horseshoes that Easter is too weak to make. As the wounded Easter guides Jim through the process of pumping the bellows, he tells Jim that there’s been a lynching up the river: A slave was hanged for stealing a pencil.

While Jim is still forging his first horseshoe, his new owner, Wiley, returns and asks him to sing while he works. Jim’s singing is overheard by the members of a travelling minstrel show, the Virginia Minstrels, whose owner, Daniel Decatur Emmett, buys Jim to serve as the group’s replacement tenor. Fearing that an audience member will realize that he is a runaway slave rather than a white man in blackface, Jim sneaks away from the minstrel show, taking Emmett’s leather journal with him.

Jim’s reason for stealing the journal is practical: he needs paper. But taking Emmett’s pages into his own hands is also a vital act of revision. What was once a collection of compositions born of blackface minstrelsy will become an account of escaping the slave-holding South, a region whose moral failing was enabled and perpetuated in part by the grotesquerie of the blackface tradition. Notably, the epigraph for James consists of lyrics penned by Daniel Decatur Emmett, who is not merely a character in the novel but the real-life leader of the first blackface minstrel troupe and the composer of “Dixie.” By composing his story on the pages that follow the lyrics of “Old Zip Coon,” Everett’s Jim is both literally and figuratively rewriting the book.  

In the journal, Jim writes of himself as “a man who will not let his story be self-related, but self-written” (93). That distinction may account for the recollections of his that differ from Huck’s; Jim’s primary interest isn’t writing his own story but reclaiming the story of thousands of other fugitive slaves. And perhaps he restored Lizzie’s hearing so she could hear that story, one that he could finally tell in his own words.

Works Cited

Everett, Percival. James. Doubleday, 2024.

Twain, Mark. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: A Case Study in Critical Controversy. 2nd ed. ,edited by Gerald Graff and James Phelan, Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2004.

Posted in Reading, Writing

The Poetry of “There is Always Light” and the Prose of “What Came to Me”

Posted on by janemlucas

When an author follows a collection of personal essays, or columns, with one of autobiographical poetry, or vice versa, she leads readers of both volumes to consider how she depicts some of the same people and themes in a different genre. Such was the case with Arlene Neal’s book of poems There is Always Light (2023), the follow-up to her first book, What Came to Me (2020), a collection of her weekly columns from The News-Topic.

The poem “God help me not to hate” echoes the column “New Shoes and Self Esteem,” in which a thoughtless classmate observes that the writer’s loafers are “not Bass Weejuns” (48). The girl who speaks those words could easily be one of the girls who “wear / pink pearl nail polish and wear / pleated skirts and new shoes” (lines 4-6). But those girls in the Sunday school class are not the antagonists of the poem; rather, it’s the Sunday school teacher, herself, who treats the speaker of the poem as an object of scorn. The speaker—what we call the narrator of a poem—does not actually speak. She refrains from answering the teacher’s questions, sitting, in her words, “on both hands / so she [the teacher] won’t see my black nails / and fingers stained yellow / from working in tobacco” (lines 7-10).

That girl who hides her tobacco-stained fingers is the girl on the bus in “New Shoes . . . ,” but the silent speaker of the poem is not the adult retrospective narrator of the column. At the end of the poem, she still sits in Sunday school, while the girl who was humiliated on the bus has grown up “to understand the value of [her] personhood” (48). Yet even though the speaker in the poem lacks the adult perspective of the writer of “New Shoes . . . ,” she gains insight—not from the lesson that the teacher attempts to impart but from her own epiphany: her recognition of the teacher’s hypocrisy.

Just as “God teach me not to hate” recollects “New Shoes and Self Esteem,” “A Baseball Poem,” “End of the Season,” and “World Series 1966” all recall the column “The Longest Game and Life Lessons.” The baseball-playing father and daughter of the column figure in all three poems, but it isn’t the bat and ball of “The Longest Game,” the first half of the column’s title, but instead the “Life Lessons” of the latter half of the title that resonate in the trilogy. At the end of the third poem, the speaker notes, “I really / cannot remember what the movie / was about, or who won that game” (38-40). She doesn’t remember because the events unfolding on the TV screen that her father watches intermittently and the action on the drive-in movie screen that her date aggressively prevents her from watching are not what she has carried with her from that night—and subsequently brought to the poem.

In a sense, the destination of none of the three baseball poems is the ballpark: the first leads us to post-traumatic stress disorder; the second, to the twilight of childhood; the third, to unwanted sexual advances. As the writer notes in “A Baseball Poem,” “To write baseball poems / is really the yearning to see” (lines 1-2). The products of Arlene Neal’s “yearning to see” shine through the lines of her poems and the sentences of her columns. This reader hopes—as do others, I’m sure—that more volumes of her poetry and columns will follow.

Works Cited

Neal, Arlene. There is Always Light. Redhawk Publications, 2023.

—. What Came to Me. Third Lung Press, 2020.

Posted in Reading, Theatre

Through a Glass Darkly: “Girl at Mirror” and Grover’s Corners

Posted on by janemlucas
Rockwell, Norman. “Girl at Mirror.” The Saturday Evening Post. 6 March 1954.

Seven years ago, when my students at Lenoir-Rhyne University were studying Thorton Wilder’s Our Town, I wrote this essay as a model for their own analyses. Before we opened tonight, I gave copies of it to my castmates and the production team. In the letter that accompanied the essay, I noted, “When I wrote ‘Through a Glass Darkly: Girl at Mirror and Grover’s Corners,’ I was an adjunct professor writing about Mrs. Webb, among other characters, with no inkling that seven years later I’d find myself playing Professor Willard and Mrs. Webb. As George says, ‘What do you know!'”

Through a Glass Darkly: Girl at Mirror and Grover’s Corners

In Norman Rockwell’s painting Girl at Mirror, the face that viewers see is the girl’s reflection—not her face itself, but the one she sees in the glass. What does she see in herself, and what do the painting’s observers see, as we witness this private moment? Does her lace-trimmed petticoat evoke in her, or in us, thoughts of the wedding gown that she may wear one day? For Rockwell’s detractors—and for those who consider him a guilty pleasure—Girl at the Mirror and his other covers for The Saturday Evening Post present a sentimentalized depiction of American life, the same picket-fenced cliché that many who find fault with Our Town perceive as the prevailing image of the play. As theatre scholar Donald Margulies writes in his foreword to Our Town, many people who dislike it have “dismissed [it] as a corny relic of Americana and relegated Thornton Wilder to the kitsch bin along with Norman Rockwell and Frank Capra” (xi). Yet a close look at Our Town and Girl at Mirror reveals portraits of American life that are far from idyllic.

As she gazes pensively in the mirror, the girl in Rockwell’s painting might be asking herself the same question that Emily Webb asks her mother: “[A]m I pretty?” (31). Though Mrs. Webb tries to reassure her daughter, Emily seeks an answer that her mother’s words fail to provide.

Both Emily and the subject of Girl at Mirror occupy that awkward space between childhood and adulthood—a notion that Rockwell emphasizes with the composition of his painting, placing the girl between her childhood toy, the doll that she has cast aside, and her new grown-up object of interest, movie star Jane Russell, who gazes up at her from the page of a magazine. Will I ever be beautiful and desirable, the way you are? the girl might be asking of Russell. Or, as Emily asks her mother: “Am I pretty enough . . . to get anybody . . . to get people interested in me? (32). Though Mrs. Webb answers Emily, she doesn’t provide the answer that her daughter seeks. Telling Emily, instead, that she has “a nice pretty young face” (31) and that she’s “pretty enough for all normal purposes” (32), she avoids the subject of adult desire that underlies Emily’s questions.

Though the audience feels the frustration in Emily’s voice as she says, “Oh, Mama, you’re no help at all” (32), only later in the play do we feel the full weight of those words when Mrs. Webb confesses in the wedding scene that she has never talked to Emily about sex: “It’s cruel, I know, but I couldn’t bring myself to say anything” (76). Mrs. Webb’s monologue turns the scene of her daughter’s wedding into a reminder of the vulnerability and pain that will come as a consequence. That same darkness at the edge of a seemingly quaint picture appears in Girl at Mirror. Consider the doll, just beyond the mirror—and the viewer’s focus—innocently cast aside, perhaps, but backed up to the edge of the mirror’s frame. To the adult eye, the doll’s posture is one of sexual submissiveness.

Both Wilder’s and Rockwell’s visions are more complex than what many of their critics give them credit for—or more accurately deny them—rendering the trouble that lurks below the surfaces of our daily encounters. And while the sexual innocence of Emily Webb and Rockwell’s Girl at Mirror may seem distant to us, the silence that endangers their innocence pervades our lives. Now as revelations of celebrities’ and politicians’ transgressions saturate our news streams, the silences of Wilder’s characters seem eerily prescient. Can anyone now hear Mrs. Webb say, “I couldn’t bring myself to say anything” (76), without thinking of our own culture of silence—and of Roy Moore and Louis C.K. and Kevin Spacey and Harvey Weinstein—and of all the predators in our own towns, places supposedly so far removed Grover’s Corners?

Meanwhile, back in Our Town, Mrs. Gibbs says of Simon Stimson’s alcoholism that “the only thing the rest of us can do is just not to notice it” (40). And Constable Warren says, “‘Twant much” (104), of a Polish immigrant nearly freezing to death, another way of saying that some lives don’t matter as much as others, a prejudice that we know all too well as no mere relic of the past. Those moments in Our Town not only belie the notion of Grover’s Corners as a saccharine portrait of America but also demonstrate that the play critiques the very parochialism that its detractors denounce as its stock-in-trade.

In his reassessment of Rockwell’s paintings, Richard Halpern observes that “[a] false belief in our own sophistication or knowingness is just another form of innocence” (par. 17). The same innocence may prevent us from seeing Our Town with real clarity, the way that Emily only truly sees her twelfth birthday when she revisits it after death. As she says to the Stage Manager, “I can’t look at everything hard enough” (105). Perhaps in our own innocence, neither can we.

Works Cited

Halpern, Richard. “Manufacturing Innocence,” excerpt from Norman Rockwell: The Underside of Innocence, U. of Chicago P., http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/N/bo3750655.html, Accessed 16 Nov. 2017.

Margulies, Donald. Foreword. Our Town by Thornton Wilder. 1938. Harper Perennial, 2003, xi-xx.

Rockwell, Norman. “Girl at Mirror.” The Saturday Evening Post, 6 Mar. 1954. Norman Rockwell Museum, 2016, http://www.nrm.org/MT/text/GirlMirror.html, Accessed 16 Nov. 2017.

Wilder, Thornton. Our Town. 1938. Harper Perennial, 2003.