ENGL 1020: English Composition II, Dr. McDonald

By Mark A.R. Facknitz
Discusses the measure of roundness achieved by the characters in the short stories of Raymond Carver. Observation that Carver's characters rarely achieve a transcendent acceptance of their condition; Carver's propensity to reveal characters as bigots and dunces; Carver's description of Grace.

By Robert C. Clark
American Literary Minimalism is an important yet largely misunderstood movement. Even though a number of scholars have attempted to describe the mode, it remains poorly defined. Part of the problem is that the roots of the tradition have not been thoroughly explored. The aim of this essay is to examine how Literary Impressionism, a style practiced by authors such as Anton Chekhov and Stephen Crane near the turn of the century, shaped the aesthetic of one of the most prominent practitioners of American Minimalism, Raymond Carver. "Cathedral, "perhaps Carver's most important short story, illustrates the nexus between the modes. The unnamed narrator objectively reports past sensory experiences, an action common in Impressionistic works, but like many Minimalist protagonists is ultimately unable to articulate the significance of the events he describes.

By H. Collin Messer
The article analyzes the wasteland created by alcoholism in the collection of personal stories in "Cathedral," by Raymond Carver. It explores the narrative of alcoholism depicted in "Cathedral," including addiction, alienation and bitter self-awareness, and hope of recovery and redemption. It examines four personal stories about alcoholic men, "Vitamins," "Careful," "Chef's House" and "Where I'm Calling From," to reveal the truth about prospect of being freed from their misery.

by Robert C. Clark
David Foster Wallace is best known for writing what has in recent years been theorized as Maximalist, but he also produced several Minimalistic works that, perhaps surprisingly, reflect his admiration for Ernest Hemingway and Raymond Carver. Wallace's view of Minimalism was rather complex, and based on his fiction, reading, essays, and statements in interviews, his perception of the tendency changed over time. While he in many ways mastered the techniques central to the mode, he did not ultimately embrace the model of the self-effacing, amoral narrator. Even in his most elliptical stories, the speaker maintains a firm, subjective presence. In "Good People," Wallace's protagonist Lane Dean, Jr., a character closely attuned to the speaker, embodies the tension between Wallace's appreciation for the movement and his sense that it lacked ethical boldness, a characteristic he advocates for in his non-fiction. "Good People" includes a number of overt parallels to Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants," a tale that is an exemplar of a style that Wallace seems to both admire and reject.

By Lyudmila Parts
Discusses the intertextual link between the work of several Russian authors. Way for an author to announce intertextual intent and direct the readers toward the source-text or texts; Examples of authors having intertextual work including Liudmila Petrushevskaia and Anton Chekhov; Similarities between the texts of Chekhov's "The Lady with a Dog" and Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina" such as adulterous love and travel.

by Lewis E. Weeks, Jr.
Discusses the symbolism implicit in the short story 'Hills Like White Elephants,' by Ernest Hemingway. The assumption on the comparison to the color and the rounded contour of the hills

By Jess Libow
The article posits Flannery O’Connor’s writing as an articulation of prosthesis’s subversive potential. A crutch user, O’Connor wrote in the wake of World War II, as rehabilitation professionals sought not only to supply disabled people with sophisticated prostheses but also to train them in their use. While the prescriptive instruction of the rehabilitation industry worked to reinstate normative productivity along gender lines, O’Connor’s work illuminates technology’s potential as a site for reimagining and reframing disabled embodiment. O’Connor’s texts and characters attempt this repurposing through individual and subversive prosthesis use. Drawing primarily on her stories “Good Country People” and “The Lame Shall Enter First,” the article considers how the use of prostheses to communicate unique predilections and desires challenges the standardizing impulse that undergirded postwar rehabilitation.

By Tracy M. Caldwell
A literary analysis of the short story "A & P" by American author John Updike is presented. After providing a brief synopsis of the plot, the author goes on to explore the historical, societal, and biographical context of the story. Particular attention is given to the representation of class differences.

By Jennie Stearns, et al
In this article, we examine John Updike's short story "A&P" and its depiction of the grocery store as a curricular space re/presenting consumption and resistance to it. We position Updike's fictional A&P as space where the "big curriculum" (Schubert, 2006a) of consumption is enacted in everyday life and explore both how the curriculum of consumption works and how resistance to consumerism might operate. We argue that this story provides insight into how consumption works as educational practice—one that teaches us how to be consumers, how to operate within consumer capitalism, and how to accept consumerism as natural—and also raises more specific questions about consumptive resistance by pointing toward the ways in which our particular positions within cultural narratives determine our individual perceptions of consumption-focused counterhegemonic action. Through an analysis of the fictional A& P in Updike's story, we examine how physical spaces of consumption such as grocery stores embody particular consumer-capitalist ideologies and how shoppers are socialized into behaving in particular ways in such stores.