Course Guidelines Path 1 Calendar Class Discussion Path 2 Groups & Texts Writing Assignments Reference Texts

 


ornamental line

Out of Sight

"His face seemed to reflect the entire distance across the clearing and on beyond,
the entire distance that extended from his eyes to the blank gray sky
that went on, depth after depth, into space" (118).
Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood (1952)


Points for Reflection

The Bible: Mark 8:22-25

  1. in Mark 8:22-25, why does the man gifted with new vision initially fail to recognize the humans around him as . . . humans? Has Jesus made an error?


The Bible: Acts 9:1-19

  1. who speaks to Saul on the road to Damascus (v.5), and why does he target Saul, of all people (v.13-16)?
  2. why might Saul not eat or drink for three days following this encounter?
  3. why a loss of sight, as opposed to some other temporary disability? Conceivably, Saul could have been made deaf or mobility impaired, instead of blind . . .
  4. what else is gained along with Saul's sight, when Ananias places his hands on Saul?


Salvador Dalí's The Endless Enigma (1938)

  1. how many object configurations can you identify in this painting?
  2. do these various images seem thematically interrelated, or random and unconnected?
  3. does a painting like this make you trust your sight more, or less?


Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood (1952), chp. 14 (119-31)

  1. why is Hazel's landlady so uncomfortable thinking about blindness?
  2. what is Hazel's landlady after--why does she stick so closely to Haze? Does her motivation change over time?
  3. by what kind of life philosophy does Hazel's landlady live?
  4. what act of penance does Haze take, an act which resembles what he did as a kid after attending a carnival peep show?
  5. what does Hazel Motes mean when he maintains that the barbed wire's current location is "natural" (127)?
  6. the landlady imagines the inside of Hazel’s head as radically different from her own, and laughs at what she is able to conjure concerning his cranium’s interior (123). Why?
  7. why does Hazel wish to be blind once he’s dead, and what does he mean by the cryptic observation that, “‘If there’s no bottom in your eyes, they hold more’” (125-26).
  8. what does Hazel mean when he tells his landlady that she’s “better” than those who believe in Jesus (124-25)?


P. D. James' Children of Men, chps. 1-8

  1. does the narration provide any likely suspects for why humanity loses its sexual fertility?
  2. how does the epistolary, letter-writing form of narration (here, diary entries), shape our understanding of Theo’s character? Why might P. D. James switch back and forth between an omniscient narrator and a first-person narrator?
  3. Julian notes (38) that whereas G. Eliot (Marianne Evans) sympathizes with her heroine, Dorothea (of Middlemarch), H. James despises his own heroine, Isabel Archer (of Portrait of a Lady) What of P. D. James’s attitude towards her own protagonist?  Does our author sympathize with or despise Theo Faron?
  4. trace those moments when Theo self-consciously refers to: 1) a scenario concocted by his imagination, or 2) notes that he “tells” or “convinces” himself of something.  What is P. D. James doing?
  5. why does Theo begin a diary on his fiftieth birthday?
  6. why does Theo not “want anyone to look to me, not for protection, not for happiness, not for love, not for anything” (26)?
  7. can we deduce why Theo became a professor specializing in Victorian history?
  8. what evidence does Theo summon to back up his assertion that he is emotionally stunted?
  9. do Theo’s many failings make him less or more sympathetic as this novel’s protagonist?
  10. can we deduce why Theo became a professor specializing in Victorian history?
  11. do the Arts retain their power in the new world order?
  12. does religious belief and practice make a resurgence, remain steady, or steadily decline in the face of humanity's extinction?
  13. do Theo’s comments about Christianity’s changing, post-Omega significance constitute a complete rejection of a disproven superstition, or something else?
  14. what spaces and places have been retasked in this dystopia?
  15. what has happened to Britain’s education system?
  16. as the population slowly dwindles, do the survivors occupy more, or less, domestic space?
  17. do our survivors consciously gravitate towards isolation or community?
  18. does the post-Omega world create new interpersonal problems concerning sexual intimacy, or does it merely uncover and/or magnify already existing problems?
  19. is Theo’s sex life healthy prior to Omega?
  20. does the text provide an answer as to why the male and female Omegas are beautiful and have difficulty sympathizing with others?
  21. are physical and intellectual pleasure outmoded artifacts of the distant past, or do our characters still find ways to obtain them?
  22. which better characterizes society in this novel, chaos or order?
  23. how capable do scientists prove in tackling society’s new problems?
  24. what do the various concerns of the Five Fish—those issues they’d each like raised with the Warden—reveal about their individual characters (57-59)?
  25. why might the author give Julian (the former student of Theo’s who asks for his help in convincing the Warden to change his policies) a disability, a swollen hand with middle and forefinger fused together (39)?
  26. in a well-written novel, no character is extraneous. What purpose is served by the introduction in chapter seven of Jasper Palmer-Smith? Does this fellow professor mirror Theo in every particular? Do his perspectives on the cataclysm, women, Christianity, and marriage echo or deviate from those of Theo himself?
  27. what mysteries surround Xan’s character, from his cousin’s, Theo’s, perspective?


A landscape with a decrepit old car becomeing part of it. Brown tones with a light blue, cloud-filled sky
Paranoic Critical Solitude (1935)
Salvador Dalí



Dr. Paul Marchbanks
pmarchba@calpoly.edu