Art of Reading - The Crying of Lot 49 - Reading Response

1) Snigger - "He took his tie out of the gasoline and started to snigger."
Snigger is an alteration of the word "snicker" and means the same. Snigger dates back to 1706. (93)

Eschatology - "Having been since age 7 rigidly instructed in an eschatology that pointed nowhere but to a presidency and death, trained to do nothing but sign his name to specialized memorandum he could not begin to understand and to take blame for the running-amok of the specialized programs that failed for specialized reasons he had to have explained to him, the executive's first thoughts were naturally of suicide."

Eschatology is a belief concerning death, the end of the world, or the ultimate destiny of humankind.

2) In trying to apply the theory of signification to my reading of The Crying of Lot 49 I was able to further question the meaning of the words of the text in the sense that I perceived the text as having an underlying meaning able to be opened by a careful examination of the diction of the work. This allowed me to open my perspective of symbolism, character, metaphor, and point-of-view so I could dig deeper into the story.

3) The Crying of Lot 49 is about one woman's pointless search of a pointless secret organization. Lot 49 deals deeply with the eschatology of modern society in that it portrays a woman who is seeking something that is never really found while executing the will of a dead man whom she never really loved and thus she is never really fulfilled. It is a sad satire cataloging an brief period of a characters life while she is searching for something that really is insignificant.

Art of Reading - Black Boy - Reading Response

1) Reveled "I had once tried to write, had once reveled in feeling, had let my crude imagination roam, but the impulse to dream had been slowly beaten out of me by experience."
Revel means to take intense pleasure or satisfaction. Revel, in this quote, is significant because of the contrast it creates when compared to the last clause of the sentence.

Endowed "As her words fell upon my new ears, I endowed them with a reality that welled up from somewhere within me."
Endowed, in this case, means provided with something freely or naturally.

2) What helped me enjoy this novel most, but not necessarily understand the full context, was reading the novel as a new journalism bildungsroman. This brought more questions than it answered about the classification of the novel, but at the same time I was able to think more deeply about what defines reliable first-person narration. I am still sculpting what is and is not necessary for a narrator to be reliable, and am discovering that strict objectivity is not what makes for a reliable narrator so much as honest emotional and intellectual responses.

3) Black Boy is a bildungsroman, a novel which focuses on the development of a character from childhood through adolescence to adulthood, whose main character is the author: Richard Wright. Wright uses his own autobiography in this new-journalism novel to bring awareness to the Jim Crow South of the early twentieth Century America. This novel is about growing out of racism in a time when race roles were virtually unbreakable.

Works Cited
Wright, Richard. Black Boy. New York, New York: Perenial Classics, 1998