Clemente Week 4 & 5 Prose: Tim Winton and Kate Chopin

This week our focus is the African American author Alice Walker and her story “Everyday Use” and Henry Lawson’s comic story “The Loaded Dog”. Read these before class if possible. Click on the author’s names to find out more about these two amazing writers.

 

Last week we began to turn our attention to Prose Fiction and the way this differs as an expressive and artistic medium from poetry. The two authors we focussed on were Tim Winton and Kate Chopin (click on their names to learn more about them).

Chose ONE question from either the Tim Winton or the Kate Chopin questions.

Discussion and Blog Questions for Tim Winton’s “Sand”:

1/ Write a paragraph in the style of Tim Winton that is the opening paragraph of a story about an aspect of your own experience.

2/ Name the characters in the story and say how they are different.

3/ What is the story “Sand” essentially about?

Discussion and Blog Questions on Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour”:

4/ Write a paragraph in the style of Kate Chopin  that is the opening paragraph of a story about an aspect of your own experience.

5/ What is the joy that kills? Describe how you understand this key idea in the story.

6/ Did you find this story surprising? Why?

Here are the audio files from the class in Week 4:

Here are the white-board images that accompanied our discussion:

Here are the David Malouf essay questions (students can begin thinking about these now):

Chose one of the following topics for your essay (NOT for your blogs).

1/ Gemmy Fairley seems to have a positive effect on some of the characters in the novel. These include Jock McIvor and his daughter Janet.

Chose one of these characters (Jock or Janet) and describe the effect that Gemmy’s presence has on them.

2/ Excluding the McIvors describe how Gemmy Fairley, as an outsider, is received by the rest of the local community. What is David Malouf’s attitude to the way Gemmy is received?

3/ “Gemmy as she saw him, once for all, up there on the stripped and shiny rail, never to fall, and Flash slicing the air with his yelps in clear dog-language, and his arms flung out, never to life him clear; overbalancing now, drawn by the power, all unconscious in them, of their gaze, their need to draw him into their lives- love, again love – overbalanced but not yet falling.”

This passage is from the last page and half of the book. Malouf is a poet and chooses here to finish his book through powerful poetic imagery. What is this imagery trying to tell the reader at the end of this story?