1.23.08 Hawthorne day 6

1
1.23.08 Hawthorne (day 6)

• Business
• Wrap-up
• Pearl
• The Black Man / Mistress Hibbins
• Pillory, crappy ending, final sermon?
• The A
• Stakes.
• HW
• Read Melville in your Reader.
• Melville folks need to post claim paragraphs in
  the Melville discussion area by 130 tomorrow.
• Everyones response paragraphs due by 5 on Fri.
  You can respond to any of the conversations,
  Sontag, Hawthorne, or Melville.
• Remember, you will have to post on Melville
  sometime, if not this week then some week in the
  future.

2
Yesterday

• We concluded by trying to make sense of the
  Brookside scene, offering many possibilities. As
  we move closer to our first major writing
  assignment, this seems a perfect opportunity to
  ask, how do you decide between these
  possibilities?
• 1. Does the text support my reading?
• 2. What does my reading get us? (who cares?)

3
Example

• Reading Pearl reacts the way she does because
  she sees the A as a significant aspect of her
  relationship to her mother and does not want to
  see that relationship broken up.
• Does the text support this?
• Yeah, probably.
• What do we get out of it? Who cares?
• Much harder to answer, but asking this question
  could allow us to frame the reading in more
  interesting ways.

4
The Final Pillory Scene

• What happens?
• Why is it significant?

5
Epilogue

• Hester?
• Pearl?
• Chillingworth?
• The letter A?
• "The reader may choose among these theories. We
  have thrown all the light we could acquire upon
  the portent, and would gladly, now that it has
  done its office, erase its deep print out of our
  own brain where long meditation has fixed it in
  very undesirable distinctness" 237

6
Stakes

• We opened by reading the Custom House chapter as
  a discussion of the stakes for this text. Now
  that we finished the book, lets return to that
  question to ask how it faired.
• Write a short essay of about a page that answers
  the following questions
• What was at stake?
• How did this text address those stakes?
• Did it succeed?