This document provides potential discussion topics related to the short story "Barn Burning" by William Faulkner, poetry, and works by Zora Neale Hurston. For "Barn Burning," topics include analyzing it through feminist or Marxist criticism and discussing a character or symbol. For poetry, topics focus on analyzing poems using different literary lenses like feminism, modernism, cultural context, literary devices, or themes. For Zora Neale Hurston's works, topics include discussing her use of diction and point of view, analyzing pieces through a modernist lens, why her works pushed her from the Harlem Renaissance, and whether her work "How it Feels to be Colored Me" plays to stere

1. Barn Burning
1. Discuss “Barn Burning” through the lens of feminist or Marxist criticism. Use the questions
critics use in each theory to begin your interrogation of the text.
2. Write a character sketch of a character in “Barn Burning.” Discuss what the character brings to
the story.
3. Discuss a major symbol in the story “Barn Burning.” Discuss how the symbol is important to the
story.
Poetry
1. Discuss one poem using feminist, or Marxist Criticism.
2. Discuss one poem, focusing on modernism. Consider using one or more modern manifestos to
support your ideas.
3. Discuss one poem in terms of its cultural context. That is, how does the poem reflect the beliefs,
tensions, or trends of the time?
4. Discuss one poem via literary devices and form. How do they affect the meaning of the poem?
5. Discuss a significant theme that emerges in the poetry. Does the poetry deal with themes related
to love, death, war, or peace? Are there particular historical events that are mentioned in the
poem? What are the most important concepts that are addressed in the poem?
Zora Neale Hurston
“The Eatonville Anthology”
1. Analyze how Zora Neale Hurston enriches our sense of her community through diction and point
of view.
2. Discuss either or both of the pieces we read by Zora Neale Hurston through a modernist lens. Or
use any critical perspective we have covered so far. You may combine to complicate your ideas.
“How It Feels to be Colored Me”
3. Discuss why the pieces we have read by Zora Neale Hurston pushed her away from the heart of
the Harlem Renaissance movement. Be sure to offer textual support for your argument.
4. Hurston purports to be debunking stereotypes, but are there instances in “How it Feels to be
Colored Me,” which she might be criticized for playing to stereotypical notions of African
Americans? Consider the evidence for both sides and make your argument.
Modernism
1. In the Introduction to Volume D of the Norton Anthology of American Literature the editor Mary
Loeffelholz identifies the following formal and aesthetic characteristics of modernist literature:
Compared with earlier writing, modernist literature is notable for what it omits--the explanations,
interpretations, connections, summaries, and distancing that provide continuity, perspective and
security in traditional literature (1078).

2. Identify and analyze these characteristic features of modernist aesthetic in one work that we have read so
far.
2. In the Introduction to Volume D of the Norton Anthology of American Literature, Mary Loeffelholtz
identifies three characteristic issues of literary modernism: (a) "the question of how engaged in
political and social struggle a work of literature ought to be"; (b) "the place of the popular in serious
literature"; and (c) the role of tradition versus the quality of authenticity in the work of literature
(Norton 1072). Consider one or two of the works we have read this semester in relation to these
issues. Describe and discuss to what extent one or more of these characteristic issues of literary
modernism is relevant to understanding the work or works you are considering.