Yellow Wallpaper, Gilman

Perkin-Gilman published "The Yellow Wallpaper" in 1892, a few years before I thought. But a lot of current issues run under the narrative. Some have to do with gender issues, but many also have to do with self-determination in general.

The narrator's condition at the start of "Yellow Wallpaper" reminds some people of what's now called post-partum depression. In a way, it's interesting we should even have a separate term for that. Why would women become depressed after childbirth? It happens very frequently, and to women in many different circumstances.

What has made narrator so unhappy before she's even shut up in the room, before the story proper even gets started?

Some might say she has everything she can want. Lots of people were poor; she was fed. Lots of people died of disease with little or no medical treatment; she was healthy and had doctors on call to take care of her. Lots of women were and are abandoned by husbands and significant others; her husband is still there, providing. Lots of people, particularly women, are exhausted by the demands of work and childcare; she has little worries about either.

I could go on.

How does this situation relate to these situations:

• Women with post-partum depression today


• Dooce


• The narrator's needs


• Her husband's needs


• Her child's needs


• Her servants' needs


• The needs of child laborers at the time


• The needs of poor mothers who had to work and send their young children to work


• The needs of single mothers today


• The needs of mothers who wish to have professionally satisfying careers and rich social lives, including rich family lives with their children


• The needs of young couples or singles trying to get the education society demands of them while they raise young families, and the needs of those families.

What should be done about all this? Who should do it? How?

Wikis

I notice a lot of people like to use Wikipedia. Besides the obvious convenience, why?

The Real News

The Real News is getting more material. They report differently than I anticipated they would. For one thing, I thought of it as a leftist production, mostly because Jeff Cohen recommended it. But some of the commentators bill themselves as conservatives and voice conservative liberatarian ideas that I did not expect.

All the Real News reports have faces and voices attached, and the way this happens seems very different than Fox or CNN's kind of presentation. Most news items seem to start with a report that sounds built around the traditional journalistic questions "who, what, where, why, and how." But they include or link quickly to commentary by one or another person billed as an expert. Some of these experts are known to me and are people I recognize as experts; others I have never heard of, though perhaps they are known elsewhere or to a different community.

They had a pretty startling report yesterday. One of their reporters had apparently slipped a cell phone with a camara to a Palestinian prisoner in an Israeli prison on the Sinai Peninsula. The prisoner called out commentary and shots of limp bodies strewn over each other in a pile in the prison yard, bodies that may have been shot.

The bodies and other prison scenes went by pretty fast, and I have to say I found it hard to be certain what I was looking at or what the prisoner referred to, even in translation.

I can't recall when I ever had this kind of less mediated or differently mediates information from a news article. But I wonder how you-all feel about this kind of reporting. Does it need more mediation or different mediation? Is it actually mediated more, in a sense, because commentary is available?

To what extent and in what way should this information be edited or mediated?

Kate Chopin, "The Storm"

Those who like Kate Chopin's "The Storm" might want to get her novel, The Awakening, about a woman who leaves her wife and family "to find herself," as we used to say in bygone ages.

Kate Chopin wrote The Awakening and her short stories for money while she raised her kids. I'm a bit nervous about saying so, but she claimed she barely proofred her work.

Chopin wrote in the 1800's, but her stories can still raise a bit of a scandal in class discussions. I don't want to give away too much, since most students will not have read "The Storm," yet, but here are a few things that to me seem worth your comments.

• Why are or aren't things OK at the end of "The Storm"?


• If this kind of thing goes against the morés of the 1800's, why was Chopin so popular. What, if anything, does that tell us about the general practice of censorship?


• Kate Chopin's works became less known in the early 20th Century, but they have undergone fresh popularity after the 1970's.


• Are Chopin's writings useful in the way they would have been when they were written?

Franz Kafka

When Franz Kafka died, he ordered a friend to burn all his manuscripts, including "The Metamorphosis." Should his friend have burned them?

"The Metamorphosis" belongs to a genre that has since come to be known as "magical realism." Some other artists in this genre include Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the author of One Hundred Days of Solitude; Juan Rulfo, who wrote the short novel Pedro Paramo; José Donoso, who wrote of strange sexual liasons in works like The Obscene Bird of Night; the ever-dignified and amusing Jorge Luis Borges, who wrote "The Garden of Forking Paths;" and Julio Cortazar's wild novel Hopscotch, Rayuelas for you Spanish readers, which can be read in various orders.

In what ways is "The Metamorphosis" realistic?

Other than Gregor's surprising change, what's bugging him and his family?

Walden, by Henry David Thoreau

Walden is one of the key works of the Transcendentalist movement of the American 1800's, but it probably never hit its peak popularity until the 1960's, roughly a century later. During his short life, Thoreau was known mostly for his radical opposition to slavery and to the American invasion of Mexico. He wrote in favor of John Brown, who was hung for killing slaveholders. And he wrote "On Resistance to Civil Government," the essay often known as "Civil Disobedience," while in jail for refusing to fund the invasion of Mexico by paying a tax.

In Walden, Thoreau describes a year of his life in a homemade cabin at Walden Pond, just outside of Concord, Massachussetts. A lot of MtSAC students are putting together households, or will. What's the difference? What principles still apply?

On "The Gambler," by Dostoyevsky

What sense does gambling make?

How is gambling similar to work? What if the work is done on commission? How is it similar to owning stocks or commodities trading?

How is or or isn't the main character's personality characteristic of gamblers or gambling in general?

If we say a thing is valuable or has value, what does that mean?

How does this reading relate to the poem by Sappho that we looked at in class way back towards the start of the semester?