Week 10

The author I might choose for my author study is Kate Chopin. The reason I might choose this author is because I enjoyed the two short stories I read from her during week 4. I'm also interested in reading the only two novels,"The Awakening" and "At Fault", that she wrote because it seems she mostly wrote short stories.

Response to Leigh Welch (Week 9)

I agree with Leigh when she said that she could actually see this situation happen in real life. But instead of seeing the story just as a funny or awkward situation, I saw it more as a regular occurrence for that time period. In today's world we usually marry for love. In the time when this story takes place it was more commonplace to marry for status and wealth.

Response to Carla Gagliardo (Week 9)

I also read the poem "Annabel Lee" and enjoyed it. I too saw the emotion packed in each line. Usually I don't enjoy reading poetry because I have a hard time trying to decipher lines or the authors intent, but I found the meaning in this poem quite easily. I see it as a memory of a childhood sweetheart who passed on earlier in his life.

Week 9

The “ism” I enjoyed most was Realism. The author I read from was Kate Chopin and I read both “The Kiss” and “A Respectable Women”. I enjoyed her work the most because the short stories were easy to follow and contained a full formed plot and point. I also enjoyed the historical aspect of her stories. In Literary realism the author writes about things as they appear in real life; so through a writer's work you can learn about that time period as it really was. In both the stories I read I found them very realistic and could see them happening as they were described. In “The Kiss” the main character, a women, marries a man for his money while expecting her other lover to continue their affair. The point of the story being you can't have everything in life. In “A Respectable Women” the main character, also a women, finds her self strangely attracted to one of her husbands friends. She keeps her self at bay by saying she is a respectable women. Then later on in time she decides if her husbands friend visits again it wouldn't be so bad if she gave in to a little temptation. I find this so realistic because adultery is a theme we see throughout time. Another reason why I liked Chopin's works were because she chose to write about strong female characters. Not the timid, average women, one might see from another author of the same time period. I do think I will enjoy reading the rest of Kate Chopin's work.