Notes for 31 March 2016
LITCS 111
Teaching Associate: Patrick Mooney
Bldg. 494, room 160B
Spring 2016
- Admin things?
- Questions? Concerns? Problems? Add codes?
- (At end of class:) I will ask you on Tuesday to read from your reading journals.
- OK, so where to start with Sanctuary?
- Write in your reading journal: What interpretive difficulties does the novel pose? What kinds of experiences do you have overcoming these difficulties? How do you encounter the novel?
- Initial impressions? What do you think of the novel so far? How does it strike you? What do you notice about it?
- Look at the blurb on the back of the novel. Do you agree with the sales pitch that the publicists use? Is this
a powerful novel examining the nature of evil, informed by the works of T.S. Eliot and Freud
?
- OK, so it's a horrifying book in a lot of ways. How do we approach horrifying novels?
- The Standard Discussion on Horror
- Having had that, how does the Southern Gothic fit into the Gothic—horror continuum?
- Parody is often a good way to understand genre conventions: Mallory Ortberg's Every Southern Gothic Novel Ever.
- Being able to appreciate the parody means that you've been exposed to that set of generic expectations, even if you've never formulated it as such.
- Today's whiteboard snapshots