Tying it all Together

I think we have talked out The Moonstone. So, use this space this week to post your thesis for your analysis essay and the works you will use to prove it. This is a good time to test your ideas on yourself and bounce them off a sympathetic audience.

The novel I was trying to think about in class, and had so clearly repressed, is The Way of all Flesh by Samuel Butler. Big Downer!!!

Robert Browning--Take Two

The book tells us that Browning was interested in psychological motivation. How do the poems we have read explore the workings of the mind? How is Browning able to reveal the characters of his characters in the dramatic monologues that exposes their psyches?

Gosh, I'm sorry that not more of you like Browning, but, as a professor of mine in graduate school told me when I complained about reading an author I hated, "He is important, so read it." I realize that your comments are simply comments and not complaints, but I think this still holds.

Narrative Strategy and The Moonstone

How reliable is the narrator Gabriel Betteredge in his portion of The Moonstone? How objective does he want to be, and how objective is he actually?

Robert Browning--Take One

What strikes you as distinctive about the poems by Robert Browning that we have read so far? How are they like or unlike the rest of the Victorian poetry--take your pick here--that we have read thus far? In this response you can refer to things like subject, tone, poetic feeling, etc.

Purpose of Fiction

After our discussion of the narrator in Barchester Towers--both in this blog and in class--what do you think the narrator--and perhaps by extension, Trollope--believes is the purpose of fiction? Because the novel is so self-consciously fiction, does it undermine or emphasize that purpose?