This is a place to post questions about the English 245 “Group Projects.”  Check here regularly for answers.

Now that you are familiar with the Olaudah Equiano controversy, I would like you to weigh in.  If Equiano was born in South Carolina and not Africa (as he claims in his 1789 narrative), does it detract from his account of the Middle Passage, slave markets, and other details?  To what extent?  Is it possible to render a collective “truth” while “lying” as an individual author?  In other words, are there different types of “lies”?  Or, should we discount Equiano’s narrative based upon ethical standards?  In short, how should we (as contemporary readers of his “autobiography” ) understand Olaudah Equiano?

Chapter 110 (“Queequeg in His Coffin”) allows us to trace the development of a central character in Moby-Dick.  Consider what Queegueg meant in earlier chapters and link it to his reappearance here.  Has Melville been consistent in depicting this Pacific Island harpooner?  Has Queequeg transformed in any way?  Finally, can you predict (without cheating!) what may become of Queequeg by the end of the novel?

Watch one other David Lynch film (either Lost Highway or Mulholland Dr.).  You’ll find that, once again, we can boil down Lynch’s plots to one liners: the first may be “a man deals with his jealous feelings for his wife” and the second something like “a young woman dreams of making it in Hollywood.”  How do these films (as well as Eraserhead and Blue Velvet) constitute Lynch’s artistic thematic obsessions and signature style?

We’ve read about the emergence of three colonial societies from the Americas: New Spain, New France, and New England.  Let’s consider the last of these, the Puritan origins of America.  What parts of the unit connect most closely to the United States of America today?    Give one example from one of the texts we’ve read in the “New England” unit alongside some detail of contemporary U.S. culture that appears to stem from it.

Let’s compare one text from the New Spain unit with that of the New France unit.  What do you see in terms of similar/different concerns between the two European nations, and/or their depictions of indigenous nations?

Let’s try to place ourselves back at the dawn of the Spanish colonial era.  You are a subject within the Aztec Empire.  Your nation has lost a war, and the victors are changing society.  What was called Tenochtitlan (“place of the prickly pear cactus”) is now called “New Spain” to indicate a “new” holding of the Spanish crown.

Among the changes are language (from Nahuatl into Spanish) and religion (Christianity).  What do you suppose some of the adaptive challenges would be for the native people?  How might they approach the new spheres of culture, religion, intermarriage, social privilege, and their general place inside the new Mexico?

For this week’s post, you are required to watch a contemporary romantic comedy (anything after 2000).  Share with the class what you saw and how it relates to the other two films we’ve seen for class, It Happened One Night and Annie Hall.  Does it update those films (DYNAMIC)?  In what does it remain part of the formula (STATIC)?

One person needs to hit reply to this message, and then we’ll start a cascade of responses.  Let’s get those in on time and in 100 words as indicated by your syllabus.

This is your opportunity to respond to the first third of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick.   You must have had expectations before starting to read.  Have they been met?  Are there difficulties you are dealing with as a twenty-first century reader of a nineteenth century text?  What have you found surprising in the book?  In sharing your experience, You may choose to focus in on a particular chapter, passage, or character.

Now that we’ve read Bernal Díaz Del Castillo’s The True History of the Conquest of New Spain, we shall take up a contentious issue in the study of Europe’s encounter with Native America.  In this case, Bernal Díaz, a soldier under Hernan Cortés, narrates the conquest of the Aztecs.  One of the strategies that the author uses is evident in the description of Tlatelolco marketplace in Mexico City (chapter 91).  The author resorts to a preexisting frame of knowledge, most of all when describing idols as “satanic” and “hellish.”  (The Aztecs, of course, would have no knowledge of the Christian Bible at this time.)  The author references the similar market stalls in “Medina del Campo” (48) in Spain as one example of commonality.  He also remarks: “They [the Aztecs] bring as many slaves to be sold in that market as the Portuguese bring Negroes from Guinea” (48).  Here, too, there is a reference to a preexisting example of African slavery in the Iberian Peninsula (where Portugal and Spain are located).  The point in such examples is that there is something in common with Europe.  It breaks down the radical newness of the “New World” and makes it digestible for his European readers.

Perhaps this is really the only way to do this as a writer-explorer.  If we were to land on the moon and find unknown inhabitants we would likely compare them (favorable and/or unfavorably) to people on earth.  There is something similar going on here.  But let’s also consider how the reality of “America” here gets lost in translation.  What, if anything, would constitute an act of seeing with eyes better attuned to the diversity and specificity of this place?  It may help to imagine yourself seeing this part of the world for the first time, and trying to make sense of it.