Dear Seminar Members:
As promised, here are some questions in advance of Tuesday's "Literary Depictions of/Literature as Archive" discussion. Eggleston's novel is somewhat long and may seem tangential to the themes of our class thus far, so these questions are intended to help you focus (and not to spoil your unadulterated enjoyment of the book).
1) Select one scene from the novel that you think is the most "historically rich" or "critically insightful." Be prepared to unpack it for us in class on Tuesday, to justify your selection, and to bring it into conversation with something we have already read in class.
2) The Hoosier School-Master is fiction, not documentary, but Eggleston considered himself to be a competent historian of rural education. How does he (seem to) rely on history in his novel to document the Hoosier teacher? As you read, do you see evidence of what could be archival discoveries, or can you envision how he might have used archival information to craft the story?
3) Where should we be skeptical of the "history" he narrates? In other words, in what ways do you think "Hoosier education" represents a construct of specific social or institutional beliefs?
See you next week,
-Professor Graban
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