"Wunderkind" by Carson McCullers

Discussion Leader: Erica

Tuesday's reading is Carson McCullers's short story, "Wunderkind" -- many folks have said that McCullers herself was a "Wunderkind" since she wrote most of her great literature before the age of 30 (including writing the amazing novel The Heart is a Lonely Hunter at 23!). What made McCullers such a prodigy was her preternatural ability to capture the heart at its frailest.

Written in 1936, when McCullers was 19 years old, ‘‘Wunderkind’’ was McCullers’s first published work. It presents the story of Frances, a teenage girl who has been considered a musical prodigy but who, after years of training and sacrifice, seems suddenly incapable of fulfilling the bright expectations she has always held. In the brief space of a single piano lesson, we see her struggling to recover the confidence and artistry she once knew and trying to navigate a flood of conflicting emotions and desires that threaten to overwhelm her. Often praised as a sensitive, insightful portrayal of the pressures and isolation of adolescence, it is marked by a dramatic tension that increases relentlessly throughout the story—despite the fact that very little ‘‘action’’ occurs. That action takes place in the studio of her music teacher, but the story’s actual setting is the intimate depths of Frances’s troubled mind.

I think this quotation from Wikipedia aptly describes a way of seeing her work in a general way: "Although McCullers's oeuvre is often described as 'Southern Gothic,' she produced her famous works after leaving the South. Her eccentric characters suffer from loneliness that is interpreted with deep empathy. In a discussion with the Irish critic and writer Terence de Vere White she said: 'Writing, for me, is a search for God.'"

Click here for an encyclopedia entry that outlines her life and her work!

Tillie Olsen's "I Stand Here Ironing"

Today's Discussion Leader: Monica

If there is one piece of work that is read in terms of Olsen's work, it's this story! I think I read somewhere that this story is the one short story most anthologized in all student textbooks. So, it's possible that you might encounter this story in another class!

First, here is the Wikipedia entry for the story: Click here! (remember, that there are spoilers in this entry so don't read until you have read the story!)

I was sort of shocked, but there are even online Spark Notes for this story: Click here!
Here is another great link with resources that contextualize the story:
click here!

A few interesting tibits about her life (and why I personally think she is pretty cool): An activist most of her life, Olsen was jailed twice: "First in Kansas City, winter '32." She was distributing leaflets to the meatpackers. The charge was "making loud and unusual noises." There she "languished five or six weeks--no money for bail--and got pleurisy, then incipient TB," she writes in her essay "The '30s: A Vision of Fear and Hope" (Newsweek, 1994).

Her second arrest occurred just after the San Francisco General Strike in 1934. In response to the murders of several striking longshoremen, 100,000 marched down Market Street to protest. "No one spoke," wrote Olsen. "The only sound was the beat of our feet. Then came 'The Terror'--bloody crackdowns by vigilantes who, the police giving them the power to arrest, wrecked encampments and beat strikers and 'sympathizers.'"

At the time of the General Strike, Olsen was a single mother. She met Jack Olsen (a fellow Young Communist League member) that year and had three more children with him, marrying him in 1944 before he went off to war. They lived together until 1989, when he died.

Awesome writer!

Ann Petry's "Like a Winding Sheet"

Discussion Leader: Kathleen!

There have been countless studies that show Stress, Frustration and Anger are related. In Ann Petry's short story "Like a Winding Sheet," you can observe this "complicated" relationship. First check out the title -- "Like a Winding Sheet." The words "Winding Sheet" means "shroud"; could this indicate the characters of the story could have a shroud hanging over them? Also -- the story is told in a third person point of view and takes place in the Ghettos of Harlem. A lot of critics argue that this story focuses on how racism affects people. What do you think?

Click here for a great link about Ann Petry! (lots of background info, esp. about some of her other writing!)

Like I have done for many of the writers we have come across, here is the Wikipedia entry for Ann Petry -- click here!

Katherine Anne Porter's "The Rope" and Eudora Welty's "A Worn Path"

Discussion Leader for Porter: Jon
Discussion Leader for Welty: Monica
Two great writers for Tuesday's class! Our first is the great Katherine Anne Porter. Click here for the Wikipedia entry for Porter!

In her short story the "Rope," Porter considers a torn relationship where a couple is caught in an unhappy marriage and in a sense is hanging on by a “rope.” Through the use of characterization, Porter effectively illustrates an unhappy situation between a married couple with the use of words and the characters’ interactions. Click here for the web site from which I "borrowed" the words above!

Click here for another online essay about "The Rope"

Eudora Welty is a fabulous southern writer (when I lived in Mississippi, I used to drive by her house to catch a glimpse of her but I never had any luck before she died). Click here for her Wikipedia entry.

Click here a web site that has a bunch of information on "A Worn Path," one of her most famous short stories. "A Worn Path" is considered one of Welty's most distinguished and frequently studied works of short fiction. Deceptively simple in tone and scope, the story is structured upon a journey motif that incorporates a rich texture of symbolic meaning. According to Alfred Appel, "'A Worn Path' passes far beyond its regionalism because of its remarkable fusion of various elements of myth and legend, which invest the story with a religious meaning that can be universally felt."

Have fun reading! See you folks in class on Tuesday! :D

Katherine Mansfield's "The Garden Party"

Discussion Leader for Thursday: Amanda
As usual, the Wikipedia entry for Katherine Mansfield is a good way to start -- click here!

Much of the criticism surrounding her short story "The Garden Party" has to do with class consicousness. Laura, one of the daughters in the story, feels a certain sense of kinship with the workers and again with the Scotts. Her mother thinks it would embarrass them to receive flowers. An omniscient narrator also explains that as children Laura, Jose, Meg and Laurie were not allowed to go near the poor's dwellings, which spoil their view. Another issue in the story has to do with Death -- the realization of Laura that life is "simply marvellous" shows the death of a human being in a positive light. Death and life co-exist together and death seems to Laura merely a sound sleep far away from troubles in human life.

So what do you all think?

What do you think about this critique that comes from a web site on socialism (click here!): "The mother in Katherine Mansfield’s famous short story 'The Garden Party,' published in 1921 and printed below, behaves like a child. Throughout this fierce critique of middle-class ruthlessness, the apparently charming retreat into childish insouciance, made by almost all the characters, is portrayed as a grotesque cover for their brutality, though never satirised beyond the bounds of realism."

Gertrude Stein's "Miss Furr and Miss Skeene"

Today's Discussion Leader: Cassandra

I don't think there will be too many stories that you will read that will "confuse" you more than any of Stein's work! So if you want to just get to know who she is a writer, click here for a link to her Wikipedia entry.

Click here for a great web site dedicated to analyzing and understanding Stein's work!

So how did folks, even in her own time, look at her work? Her abstract style was not received well by the general public. Many patrons of the arts called her a "literary cubist"...in her ability of projecting reality beyond reality, and compared her to the "cubist" painters of that time. After WWI everything seemed changed and unsettled in Paris (where she and many other Americans were living). These years would be dubbed "The Lost Generation" ...the world disillusioned by war, it was a time of Hemingway, Fitzgerald and others writers to express this sense of lost direction and idealism. Hemingway said on meeting Gertrude..."It was a vital day for me when I stumbled upon you."

"As long as the outside does not put a value on you it remains outside but when it does put a value on you then it gets inside or rather if the outside puts a value on you then all your inside gets to be outside."

Willa Cather's "A Wagner Matinee"

Today's Discussion Leader: Brian!

The story we are reading today was first published in 1904. In "A Wagner Matinee," the narrator, a young Bostonian named Clark, is notified that his aunt is coming to visit from Nebraska. Clark tells us that his aunt Georgiana once lived in Boston herself, long before Clark’s birth; in her youth she was a music teacher, but she married a farmer and has had a difficult life. The narrator brings his aunt to a concert where she reacts differently than most of the other patrons. When the concert ends, the other members of the audience applaud, murmur appreciatively, start to leave; the musicians rise from their seats, tapping the spit out of their woodwinds and brasses, putting their instruments into cases or slipjackets. Aunt Georgiana, however, does not move. Still sobbing, she tells Clark, "I don't want to go, Clark, I don't want to go!" It isn’t merely that she doesn’t want to leave the concert hall; she doesn’t want to return to a gray and ugly world, where music has no part.

Click here for a link to the story on Wikipedia!

Click here for a general link on Willa Cather! (again, a Wikipedia source!)

I will be curious to know what you all think about this story! How does it connect back to anything else that we have read?!

Edith Wharton's "The Other Two"

Discussion Leader for Tuesday's Class: Brian!

In my experience, students divide sharply on Wharton. Some love her work, responding particularly to the elegance and precision of her prose and the sharpness of her wit; others don't like her at all, finding it hard to "get into" her fiction because she seems so cold, the prose seems so detailed and self-conscious, and the subject matter is so elite (i.e. she often focuses on the "higher classes").

Major themes in Wharton's work include the effects of class on both behavior and consciousness (divorce, for example, often horrifies the established upper class as much for its offense against taste as for its violation of moral standards); the American belief in progress as actual and good (many "advances" Wharton welcomed; others she was contemptuous of); the contrast between European and American customs, morality, and sensibility; the confinement of marriage, especially for women; women's desire for and right to freedom in general, and particularly sexual and economic freedom, and the reality that, usually, the desire and right are thwarted; the preference of powerful, white, usually upper-class men for childish dependent women; the complexity and pain of relationships between women within patriarchal culture, including (and especially) rivalry and animosity among women.

So in terms of "The Other Two," where do Wharton's sympathies lie in this story? On what do you base your opinion?