1.) While extremely morbid, The Penal Colony by Kafka. In the day and age of CSI many people want to know what is going through murderers heads, especially Nazi murderers that think nothing of thier torture devices.
2.) Let America be America Again by Langston Hughes. Hughes wrote this poem 70 years ago during a great upheval in the way people looked at life. 70 years later we as Americans are facing another social upheval. It would behoove us to remember what those before us were thinking during turbulent times.
3.) A Dream Deffered a.k.a. Harlem by Hughes. Talk about one of the most influential poems in American history! The imagery and metaphors used in this poem go far beyond surface level.
4.) I promise I'm not trying to be morbid here but The Cask of Amontillado by Edgar Allan Poe. I read it in high school ten years ago, but that was before I learned to read a piece in various ways. It would be interesting to write a critisism it from a Marxist or phsycological point of view.
5.) Man almost all of these are negative, they must be written by writers haha. Thinking Ahead to Possible Options and a Worst-Case Scenario, mainly because it is short. Short gives us the student a little break from the litany of reading and it also makes us focus all the more intently on what we're reading.
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Coincidentally you and I have several of the same choices. As a reader I'm interested to know more about life as something real and it seems these poems/stories reveal the nature of life as at times truly scary. Being a realist can be a helping tool at times and these stories as well as this class depicts life in ways where people experience loss, breakings occur, death can happen, and things that sound morbid but are ultimately true. Happiness and joy can be very real in a person's life, but so can episodes of struggles, discrimination, fights, battles, sweat, blood, tears, which are all augmented in many stories you chose. I think it is a very good list of reading materials and I look forward to possibly reading some of them in the near future.
ReplyDeleteI think you picked some really good choices. The short story "The Penal Colony," by Kafka was very good I read it after I saw what you wrote, because my major is Criminal Justice as a juvenile counselor. I would love to know whas going on in peoples mind when they commit such a horrifying criminal act. Its so disturbing to know that they could take another life. I hope she picks this for everyone to discuss, and read. Its ok that most of your choices are morbid, because most of the time those are the ones that bring out the most emotions in people. I am going to read the other passages as well that you picked.I also thing shorter stories, or plays are better it gives you a better foundation to observe more information,without getting to sidetracked. I say the less is better for my knowledge. Great post!
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