Guidelines for creating your Discussion Blog

Everyone will belong to a group of (3–4) students.  Throughout the semester you will create a simple blog for posting reflections twice a week about the course readings.  Here's how we will set these up:

• one person will volunteer in each group to be the Administrator and to set up the Discussion Blog
• the Admin will add the other two students and me to the blog as Contributors
• each student will contribute (2) new "interpretive posts" every week
• each student will also comment (2x) times to interpretive posts from other students every week
• postings go up on Mondays and Weds. by 2 pm (your group may want to post earlier)

How to create an "interpretive post":

• in the "title" box, indicate the "title of work: interpretive topic" (e.g. "Dessa Rose:  changing point of view")
• compose 1–2 paragraphs of interpretive comments about that topic (see sample entry below)
• focus on a specific chapter or page, and try to include one very brief quotation (only a sentence or two), indicate the page #
• each entry should be about the length of the sample entry below on Dessa Rose (a bit shorter or longer is ok)
• offer a combination of analysis on your topic, and questions for other readers, perhaps things that you found confusing
• try to make a direct connection to another work we have studied, or one of the recent essay readings
• compose in complete sentences as you would for a formal paper, and proofread your response for proper spelling and grammar.
• if you go back to edit your original post, add date at the end of the paragraph ("updated:  Sun. Jan. 22")

Dessa Rose: changing points of view

At first the constantly shifting points of view (pov) are a bit confusing.  At one moment we are in Dessa's mind (which is in italics), then the point of view shifts to someone being quoted (this also turns out to be Dessa) who speaks in an older, regional dialect.  This is followed by what looks like "normal" narrative text, written in the third person, but clearly written from Adam Nehemiah's point of view as he writes down his observations about Dessa.  This is an unconventional and rather confusing way to begin the novel, and also gives us a very fragmented sense of who Dessa is as a person.  The opening segment in italics turns out to be her dream or memory, so we start the story in her head.  This creates a very startling contrast to the quoted passages in dialect, as well as Nehemiah's observations about her, which depict her as some kind of object: part animal, part human.

I find it interesting how Williams combines changing pov with flashback scenes (most of these, I think, have been marked in italics, to make it easier to have some sense of what time frame you are supposed to be in).  This creates significant tension in the narrative right at the moment when Dessa escapes from her captors at the end of Chapter 2 into Chapter 3 (pp. 67–80).  I think we're supposed to be as anxious as Nehemiah to know where she has actually gone, but then the narrative moves into an extended flashback -- which is actually a bit frustrating!  But that puts the reader in the frame of mind of the characters, which is a clever narrative technique.

An interesting connection with our essay reading from Angela Davis is about how gender roles and identity are transformed under the conditions of slavery, in many ways that make (or allow?) women to be as powerful and capable of men in terms of the labor they can perform and the suffering they are forced to endure.  The simple fact that Dessa is capable of murder makes her more masculine from the perspective of Nehemiah: "Truly, the female of this species is as deadly as the male" (p. 43).
(updated:  Thu. Dec. 1)