I’ve just finished commenting on all the posts I’ve received and wanted to share a few thoughts and props:

• I’m impressed with the quality of your reading and writing over all: this is a challenging text, and many of your are reading/writing/thinking with great sophistication already, often pioneering into areas we left unexplored in our Zooms.
• Many of you are playing it too safe in how you frame your responses. As those who have taken classes with me before know, I like to urge students to say something a little bit weird in critical writing. Here, we all know that Masie’s dad is a cad, that Masie is stuck in an unappealing situation, and so on. Your job is to move right past basic points of plot and character and summary that casual readers will have under their belts and to drill down into something we casual readers will have missed, something that, once we’ve seen it, will seem so obvious and compelling and central.
• Similarly, you’ll want to leave most of the text out in your response. Rather than feeling pressure to cover all the bases, you should hone in a single episode or motif or even word (I think we talked about “muddled” and “mixed up” yesterday, for example) and leverage this small sample into a larger argument.

All of you achieved some measure of success here, but a few students’ responses were especially keen, so I recommend that you check them out:

• Eileen frames the beginning of the novel with a discussion of Henry’s brother, the pioneering psychologist William James, and the questions of the distinctive psychology of the child: https://387sp21.commons.gc.cuny.edu/author/eileen04
• Rebecca dug into Sir Claude’s reference to Shakespeare’s As You Like It in the scene in Kensington Gardens. This is a great example of “intertextuality” at work, whereby one author activates linkages with another: https://387sp21.commons.gc.cuny.edu/author/rchachkes/
• Danny did a nice riff on the “six protections” that Masie enjoys, speculating on how this exploded version of the nuclear family works in the novel: https://387sp21.commons.gc.cuny.edu/author/dannyjiang/

I’m not proposing these three as cookie cutters for anyone, but I do think they make for valuable reading that we can learn from both in terms of sharper readings of the novel and rhetorical examples to draw from. Thanks, you three!