Reading Groups

Here is a very good link for critical approaches:

www1.assumption.edu/users/ady/hhgateway/gateway/approaches.html#New Criticism/Formalism

More reading group work today!

The Story of an Hour

Thank you for all your comments from yesterday! It was great reading!

Today we're going to read and discuss Kate Chopin's The Story of an Hour. Continue doing your group readings and keep thinking about your "paper" for presentation to your group.

Here is the link for the story:


http://www.vcu.edu/engweb/webtexts/hour/storyofhour.html

Group Discussions and Literary Approaches

Please POST a summary of your group's discussion today. Group leader gets credit for the post.

*****Please post for credit a short response about the literary approach you can most identify with. Why do you like this approach? What is interesting about this way of looking at fiction, poetry, and prose?

I will use these posts to provide you with daily participation credit and more grades this marking period.

Wallwisher and Prezi presentation

Please post the title of your presentation, group members, and a brief reflection about your project here.

Today we will finish presentations.

Tomorrow, be prepared to write a synthesis essay in class.

The Progressive Era: 1900-1914

August 01, 2006 by
Justin Erickson



Americans Worked Together to Form What They Saw as a Better Society
After 1900, Americans became fixated on reforming everything that could be reformed. This common strive for a better society was deemed progressivism and became popular with people of all different agendas. Progressivism was characterized by interest in intellectual pursuits and
efficiency. In the end, this broad effort was responsible for empowering women, reforming the government, renewing the fight for black rights, and producing presidents who reformed corporate business and social services.

Progressivism commonly used scientific investigation to gather information about things that required reform. This methodical approach was also applied to the workplace through scientific management. Even the media picked up on the popularity of progressivism with the new type of journalism: mudraking. Mudraking publications exposed problems and injustices in America.

Another important group of people to join in the progressive movement were American women. Seeing an opportunity to increase their value to society, they began heading charitable programs like settlement houses. Empowered by the impact they made, women began gravitating towards feminism, a movement focused on equal rights and freedoms for women.

Meanwhile, politicians like Robert M. La Follette started realizing how corrupt the government had become and began the struggle to reform the government and political machines. Progressive politicians wanted a more democratic government and, therefore, put importance on initiatives and recalls. However, progressives made little progress with municipal reforms.

Working-class Americans also began to take up the progressive cause. Workers tried to unionize and solve problems without government aid, but could not make much progress. Courts rarely favored unions and did not hesitate to put court orders in place to prevent workers from striking or boycotting. Furthermore, workers could not make much progress in accident liability or other types of compensation.



* The Progressive Era: Reform in America
* Women in the Progressive Era
* Labor and the War: Definitions of Success in Early 20th Century America
* Progressive Politics: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft and Woodrow Wilson
* The Supreme Court Versus Reformers' Approach to Social Reform During the Progressive Era

Takeaways Did You Know

* Scientific management used trends and statistics to maximize worker efficiency.
* Theodore Roosevelt was America's first progressive president.
* Congress passed laws like the Meat Inspection Act to improve food processing conditions.

Mudraking is a type of journalism developed in the Progressive Era based on exposing controversy and injustices in America.

Ragtime E.L. Doctorow

Look over handouts for RAGTIME

Wallwisher topics:

historical Events

Historical figures

Race

Gender

Class

Culture

Technology

Please post your wallwisher/Prezi pages as comments here!

Doctorow on the making of Ragtime

Doctorow on the Making of Ragtime


How I Made It: E.L. Doctorow on 'Ragtime'

* By Boris Kachka
* Published Apr 7, 2008 (New York magazine)


(Photo: Jerry Bauer/Courtesy of E.L. Doctorow)

R agtime is a sprawling work that began with … your own old house in New Rochelle?
My previous book, The Book of Daniel, had been published the year before, and I had been emotionally depleted by it. So I sat around for a year. And I was staring at the wall, and had arranged my desk so that the only way out was through the sentences. I began to write about the wall, and I realized that this house was the first house on the hill built at that time. And then I imagined what things looked like from the bottom of the hill. From one image to another, I was off the wall and in a book.


And then you did some research?
When you’re working well, you don’t do research. Whatever you need comes to you. Walking around town was very much a part of it. I wrote a scene where Tateh and the little girl take trolleys up through Westchester, but I didn’t know if it was possible to take streetcars all the way up to Massachusetts. I was walking through the Public Library in midtown and banged my knee on a book and looked down, and I picked it up. It was a corporate history of trolley-car companies. This is the way the book was assembled.

You grew up in New York in the thirties, so there must be memories of long-gone places in there, too.
I know that I set off for college in Ohio from the old Penn Station, which is why I was able to describe it. And when I was a college student, a friend of mine was graduating and he sold me his Model T Ford. Even then [in the fifties], it was an antique. Fifteen dollars, and he totally overcharged me.

You’ve spoken a lot about nineteenth-century inspirations. What about your contemporaries?
I can’t think of any. There are two books that impressed me when I was very young. One was The Adventures of Augie March—the idea of having something so generous, and so adventurous and improvisatory. The other was the U.S.A. trilogy, by John Dos Passos. It’s interesting that of those thirties writers, he was the most self-effacing, and he had the most ambitious project of all, more ambitious than anything Hemingway or Faulkner did. I think I picked that up from him.

Right down to the modesty? You weren’t exactly shouting from the rooftops like Mailer.
Mailer made a terrible mistake. He often stood between his readers and his work. That kind of assiduous pursuit of celebrity, that’s not me.

You were praised and criticized for using historical figures—Ford, Morgan, Houdini—in fiction, as if it were a brand-new thing.
I did have a feeling then that the culture of factuality was so dominating that storytelling had lost all its authority. I thought, If they want fact, I’ll give them facts that will leave their heads spinning.

It’s hard to think there was a time when this kind of thing was controversial.
I heard secondhand that the editor of The New Yorker, William Shawn, was very critical of the book, that someone prepared a major review and he said no. I had transgressed in making up words and thoughts that people had never said. Now it happens almost every day. I think that opened the gates.

What else did the book do?
Well, after the book was published, I got a letter from the then-director of the Morgan Library, and he said he wanted to thank me, because as a result of my book [in which a black militant threatens to blow up the building], they were able to persuade the trustees to spring for the money to install a state-of-the-art security system.