What exactly is Poe’s philosophy of composition as detailed in his eponymously titled essay? How do we see ideas about the “unity of effect” at work in poems like “The Raven” and in stories like “The Tell-Tale Heart”? 

There is an element of meta-fiction to Poe’s fiction. In other words, stories like “The Fall of the House of Usher” are as much about the events in the story as they are about the craft of fiction itself. (Think of the scene where the narrator reads fiction to Usher as the storm rages outside before the Usher manor collapses.) How does “The Fall of the House of Usher” entertain ideas/arguments/questions about fiction itself? You may also think of these questions in relation to David Reynold’s discussion about Poe’s adaptation of popular sensationalist fiction. 

How does color function in “The Masque of the Red Death”? How does it signify?

A broader question to think about might be: How do the emotions and affect function in the works of Poe that we have read? How does feeling, emotion, embodiment, and perception stand in relation to rationality, reason, concepts, and representations?       

For those of you who read the Katherine Schultz essay, “The Moral Judgments of Henry David Thoreau,” how do you think Schultz’s characterizations of Thoreau compare to your actual experience of reading him in “Civil Disobedience”? Please try to use some examples from both texts. 

What do you think Thoreau means by the terms “government” and “expedient” in the essay? As multivalent terms, what do they connote and what are their shifting valences throughout the text? 

What similarities  and continuities inhere between Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” and Emerson’s “Self-Reliance”? What might be the transcendentalist theory of democracy and how do we see it playing out in Thoreau?  

On page 380, when Thoreau exits the Concord jail, in a queer passage he writes: “When I was let out the next morning, I proceeded to finish my errand, and, having put on my mended shoe, joined a huckleberry party, who were impatient to put themselves under my conduct; and in half an hour,–for the horse was soon tackled,–was in the midst of a huckleberry field, on one of our highest hills, two miles off, and then the State was nowhere to be seen.” In the context of both the section of the essay in which it appears and in the essay as a whole, how do you interpret this passage?

What passage stood out to you and why? Please quote from it and give analysis/explication that shows its relation to some of the work’s broader themes.   

The Norton’s introduction to Franklin states that to “a remarkable extent, the writings of Benjamin Franklin represent the metamorphosis of New England literary culture from ‘Puritan’ to ‘Yankee.'” How might this be true? That is, what are some key differences in the worldview of Franklin from that of Puritans like Jonathan Edwards and Anne Bradstreet?

At its etymological root, the word “economy” means “good house keeping.” To keep good house in a metaphorical sense is to exhibit a certain self-mastery vis-a-vis industry. This is a core value and theme of Franklin’s text, one which reflects what is sometimes called “the liberal subject,” which we see on display in Franklin’s text. Liberal subjectivity refers in general to a technology of the self that fits into and in turn promotes the values and behaviors of capitalism: independence, profit-making, self-interest as a common good, etc. How is this value-system on display in Franklin’s narrative and what about it is problematic? How does the article “The Vanishing Mother” speak directly to the problematics of the liberal subject?

Reading Discussion and Paper Draft

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