Elit 48 c class 8 post qhq new teams racked vs wracked

ELIT 4

8C

C L A S S #6

Racked or Wracked?

SPELLING ERROR:CONFUSING “RACKED” WITH “WRACKED.”

If you are racked with nerves, you are feeling as if you are being stretched on the torture device, the rack. You rack your brain when you try to write difficult stories.

Wrack, on the other hand, has to do with ruinous accidents. With luck, this won’t apply to your writing, but it might just apply to the stock market, which has been wracked by recession.

AGENDANew TeamsLecture:

oMy Antonia Book IoHistorical Context

Discussion oQHQso Prompts

CHOOSE NEW TEAMS

1. You must change at least 50% of your team after each project is completed.

2. You may never be on a team with the same person more than twice.

3. You may never have a new team composed of more than 50% of any prior team.

LECTURE

MY AN TON I A

: HI S

TOR I CA L C

ON T E XT

HISTORICAL CONTEXT: IMMIGRATIONUp until 1825, fewer than 10,000 new immigrants came to the United States each year. By the late 1840s, revolutions in Europe and the devastating potato famine in Ireland sent people to this country by the hundreds of thousands. By 1860, one-eighth of America's 32 million people were foreign born. While many of these immigrants settled in the east, the promotional activities of the railroads brought many immigrants straight to the prairies. The railroad companies even sent scouts abroad to encourage people to come and settle the plains and prairies. Another flood of immigrants came in the 1860s and 1870s, just after the Homestead Act of 1862. This legislation granted, for a small fee, 160 acres of Western public land to citizens or prospective citizens who would stay and settle it for five years. These settlers were predominantly from western and northern Europe.

By the time Cather was writing My Ántonia, immigration to the Great Plains had slowed. Urban immigration, however, continued to cause miserable situations in the cities.

As a journalist in Pittsburgh and New York City and as a newspaperwoman and editor for a radical magazine, Cather was exposed to the conditions in which many urban immigrants lived. She also saw the mounting fear that the arrival of cheap foreign labor was not only undesirable competition but a contribution to the widening and hardening gap between rich and poor.

During World War I, German-Americans were definitely suspect and stories of their victimization can be found in almost any Midwestern state histories. Even the Czechs, who were eager to help free their homeland from the domination of Austria-Hungary, suffered during the war years. The country's anxiety over the role immigrants were to play in our society did not ease, even though the "tide" of immigration was stemmed briefly by World War I.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT:THEORIES OF AMERICANIZATION

Reaction to the massive European immigration of the nineteenth century had fostered opposing theories of Americanization: These models have come to be called the "melting pot" theory and the "salad bowl" theory and still define the debate on difference even today, almost a century later.

In the 1890s, Frederick Jackson Turner popularized the image of the American West as a crucible (a vat or vessel) where European immigrants would be "Americanized, liberated, and fused into a mixed race."

My Ántonia can be read as a tribute to this view and Ántonia herself can be appreciated as "the rich mine of life, like the founders of early races" that produces the American people from the raw material that has been gathered on its shores.

Carl Degler coined the expression "salad bowl."

DISCUSSION

Questions a

nd QHQs

Spend 10 minutes in your groups, discussing your answers to prompts or your QHQs

THE FRAME STORY"I can't see,” [Jim] said impetuously, "why you have never written anything

about Antonia." I told him I had always felt that other people—he himself, for one knew her

much better than I. I was ready, however, to make an agreement with him; I would set down on paper all that I remembered of Antonia if he would do the same. We might, in this way, get a picture of her.

He rumpled his hair with a quick, excited gesture, which with him often announces a new determination, and I could see that my suggestion took hold of him. "Maybe I will, maybe I will!" he declared. He stared out of the window for a few moments, and when he turned to me again his eyes had the sudden clearness that comes from something the mind itself sees. "Of course," he said, "I should have to do it in a direct way, and say a great deal about myself. It's through myself that I knew and felt her, and I've had no practice in any other form of presentation."

I told him that how he knew her and felt her was exactly what I most wanted to know about Antonia. He had had opportunities that I, as a little girl who watched her come and go, had not. Months afterward Jim Burden arrived at my apartment one stormy winter

afternoon, with a bulging legal portfolio sheltered under his fur overcoat. He brought it into the sitting-room with him and tapped it with some pride as he stood warming his hands. "I finished it last night—the thing about Antonia," he said. "Now, what about

yours?"

DISCUSSION QUESTIONSDiscuss why Willa Cather chose a male narrator and why women dominate the novel.

a. Why does Willa Cather put a man in a woman dominated story ?

b. Q1 Why are we introduced to Jim first before we are introduced to Antonia?

c. Q: How does Antonia represent a form of a “new woman”?

DISCUSSION QUESTIONSCompare and contrast the lives of Jim Burden and Antonia. Explain what drew them together and enabled them to become close friends.

a. Q: What is the important of Jim killing the snake? How does it alter the relationship between Ántonia and him?

Compare and contrast the relationship between Antonia and Jim in Section 1 (Chapters 1-10) and Section 2 (Chapters 11-19)

A. Q: Why does Jim feel so uncomfortable with Antonia trying to emulate Ambrosch?

Discussion Questions

Explore the story or relationship of Pavel and Peter. a.Q: If Pavel wanted to lighten the load of the sledge,

why then did he want to sacrifice the bride and not the groom (assuming the groom was heavier than the bride), and why did Peter take responsibility for the crime when he was simply the one driving the sledge and was unaware of Pavel’s actions, thus making himself a cast out?

b.When these two men were described in the story, I immediately thought of them as being a couple. [Are there] signs of Pavel and Peter being lovers? Were they not lovers at all, but instead just really close friends?

QHQ: CHAPTERS 1-19 QUEER THEORY?

1.Q: Is Jim supposed to be Cather?a. Q: So can Cather be both Jim and

Antonia?2.Q: Should Willa Cather’s refusal

to conform to a traditional gender role influence our reading of My Antonia?

3.Q: Does Jim Burden play a feminine identity in the novel?

6. Discuss the importance of the narrator leaving Black Hawk for college life.

7. Discuss My Antonia in terms of one or more of the Manifestos.

8. Write your own QHQ

Read My Antonia (1918) Book II and Book III Post #8: Choose One1. Discuss the contrasts that are developing between the

characters in this section.2. Discuss the importance of independent women in

section II.3. Discuss the differences between the country and town

girls.4. Explain the importance of the dance pavilion to both

Jim and Antonia. 5. Explain why Willa Cather has chosen to devote one of

the books of her novel to Lena Lingard.