Assignments 10/12 - 10/14

for Monday: "Stranger in the Village." Baldwin publishes this in 1955 - in a less hospitable political environment than that enjoyed by later African-American writers. He tells a personal story with a political point and must handle voice and emotion carefully in his writing. There is a fair amount of anger here, and also a comment on the notion of "blackness" and "whiteness" in America. In your post consider how Baldwin, a skilled stylist, uses writerly techniques to navigate the treacherous political waters of his time - and still effectively make his point.

Also: read the post on suspensiveness. Write a nonfiction paragraph in which you manipulate the action of various sentences to create an effective progression of sentence types. You may wish to refer to the sentence book. Just about any part of a "standard" sentence, including adverbial clauses and direct objects, can be rephrased as the subject. This is an exercise, not a test of beautiful writing. It's meant to build awareness of the many options for crafting your next sentence.

10/14: With Faulkner's "Dry September" we come to a work that consciously uses shifting points of view, the manipulation of information revealed to the reader, the emphasis on key words that define both the plot and the meaning, the manipulation of time, and extravagantly crafted sentences. Comment on the whole and pick passages to read closely.