Week 8:  Point of View II. - 

Point of View - Part II.

1.  Online Lecture for Week 8

2.  Assigned Reading: From the Hudson Book of Fiction (Online) -

                 There are two assignments for the weekly reading here so that you can contrast two different examples of First Person.  

                Edgar Allen Poe:  The Cask of Amontillado. 

                Charlotte Perkins Gillman, in The Yellow Wallpaper

There are two assignments for the weekly reading here so that you can contrast two different examples of First Person.  One is  Edgar Allen Poe's The Cask of Amontillado.  Here we have a narrator determined on revenge.  He is surely reliable: we believe that he does all of these things.  On the other hand, his obsession is so extreme that we can detect the hand of an author persona behind the "I" suggesting to us that there is not all good in this character!  The other assignment is a terrific example of an unreliable narrator.  Charlotte Perkins Gillman, in The Yellow Wallpaper, gives us a woman who seems, at the beginning, to be telling us about a simple vacation - and only as the story progresses do we find out that the narrator "I" is actually in an asylum.  Her insanity may seem perfectly sane and understandable to us, but we know that she is considered by her contemporaries, or at least her husband, as one who needs to be confined.  A terrific and scary story.  They are both scary, come to think of it.  Note the POV which is NOT the opinion of the author!!!!!

3.  Weekly Writing Exercise  -- Class Exercises #8

We are moving along with Point of View to First Person!  Your second Point of View Assignment is to write a short piece in which you construct a First Person persona who IS NOT you.  You can see the sample exercise to get an idea of how this might work in Exercises8.  It would be great if you could experiment with an unreliable narrator, a naive narrator, or a narrator who has a limited view of some kind!  Again, here, the story content is not as important as the exercise with POV control!  

4.  Workshop Critique

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Marjorie Coverley Luesebrink, your Instructor, is a Professor of English in the School of Humanities and Languages

Irvine Valley College, Irvine, California