Heart of Darkness is always an interesting experience. Conrad’s dense prose is an interesting challenge, and I find myself forced to pay much more attention to detail than I often do with other texts. 🙂 I’m always most drawn to the argument that Marlow advances at the outset of his tale: that the power of […]
Conrad’s Manuscript If you are working through Heart of Darkness, you might find some of the material in the notes section useful in your study. If nothing else, you can read about Babar and Curious George as distractions.
I thought I'd offer a few more detailed comments/concerns about the essays than the often cryptic things I write on them. While these are mostly negative, there are a number of positive signs: the quality of the writing is improving, a number of papers offered some very unique insight, and you did well, despite a […]
It's a Christmas miracle for the AP classes. Following some high level discussion, the following changes are going to take place over the next four days. Today's quiz and the essay for next week are the test for Love in the Time of Cholera.There is no test next week over Love in the Time of […]
Select one of the following essay prompts, and answer it in a well-developed, grammatically flawless essay:
DUE DATE: DEC 27th, 11:59 p.m.
1. Love in the Time of Cholera opens with a suicide. Jeremiah de St.
Amour kills himself in order to escape the humiliations of aging. As he
explains to his lover, “he had made the irrevocable decision to take
his own life when he was sixty years old.” Most of the characters fear
aging. Age seems to threaten both the dignity and memories of the
characters. How does the novel both counter and exacerbate such fears?
2. Garcia-Marquez prefers to describe himself as a realist writer. Yet,
he novel is clearly not realism in the sense that Tolstoy’s work was.
As Gene H. Bell-Villada explains, “ ‘reality’ for GGM consists not only
of everyday events and economic hardships, but also of such things as
popular myths, beliefs, and home remedies—not just the facts, but what
ordinary people say or think about the facts.” What do you make of the
more hyperbolic moments in Love in the Time of Cholera, such as the
number of Florentino’s affairs and his visit to Olimpia Zuleta’s grave?
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