Short Story Choices, Extra Credit Blog

Discussion Questions Week of 11/02

Choose one of the following to address. Write a short essay exploring the question(s) raised; this should have a recognizable thesis and attending paragraphs. It does not need to be as long or developed as a formal essay, but it should be more developed than the typical blog entry and have a clear main point around which the rest of the ideas are developed. You should quote from the attending articles and/or lectures offered on the text. As there have been multiple extra credit opportunities in the course, this last one (aside from your Writing Center visits, if indeed you are completing these) requires a bit more of you. Please do not feel compelled to complete these, but if you want to, well then, full steam ahead!

1.Consider “The Hunger Artist” using the short article “The Hunger Artist” in Course Materials. The story can be difficult to make sense of upon a first reading, but it’s enormously rich culturally, biographically, and historically. The story was published posthumously and counter to Kafka’s directions to “burn” the manuscript. You may recognize his name as he is the author of the acclaimed and widely known Metamorphosis.

Can such a performance/exercise be considered art? In our day, this may seem quite strange, but, in contemporary society, it wasn’t so much. Think about the characteristics we assign things we call “art” – which do we use today to decide something is of merit enough to be called “art”? Who decides this – the artist or his or her public? Which standards of definition do you think might be different now than then? By which definition or including which characteristics can we say the hunger artist truly is a “artist”?

2. Read the attending article for “The Penal Colony”, then explore the following idea: “Kafka's fiction examines the fate of individual characters put in humiliating, embarrassing, bewildering or sinister situations. The explorer is the quintessentially Kafkaesque character in “In the Penal Colony.” What, then, is the fate of this/these characters?