Metaphor by Metaphor

Contrast writing the last two assignments. How did differences in the assignments change the way you worked on each of them? Which was more difficult? Why? Which of the classroom activities gave you the greatest understanding of the assignment? Was the textbook more or less useful in understanding the assignment than our discussions in class? Why?

• Describe the process of writing this paper. What worked well? What would you do differently if you could?
• While the specifics of an assignment are a factor, what generalizations can you make about your writing process? What sorts of things do you do each time you write? Why?
• In what ways might revising this process be useful? Or, if you are perfectly satisfied with your current practices, offer a defense of them.

Given what you know about Anne Hutchinson from Winthrop’s journal and given what you know about Anne Bradstreet from today’s reading, why did one woman’s atypical behavior lead to praise and the other’s lead to exile?

Bruce Michelson and Marjorie Pryse argue that there are two voices in Bradstreet’s poems: “The poet-voice who speaks as she ought, in full accord with religious doctrine, public duty, and conventional belief” and another who “loves, grieves, fears, feels pride, and experience the full range of emotions and curiosities that the teachings of her faith were supposed to put to rest.” Michelson and Pryse suggest that in the poems, sometimes one side  seems to win and sometimes the other; sometimes a reassuring harmony between voices is reached and sometimes not.

Pick one of Greenblatt’s questions and answer it with Winthrop’s writing in mind.

• What kinds of behavior, what models of practice, does this work seem to enforce?
• Why might readers at a particular time and place find this work compelling?
• Are there differences between my values and the values implicit in the work I am reading? What accounts for these differences?
• Upon what social understanding does the work depend?
• Whose freedom of though or movement might be constrained implicitly by this work?
• What are the larger social structures with which these particular acts of praise or blame might be connected?

Provide examples from “A Model of Christian Charity” to support any assertions you make about it.

Assuming that, as the book suggests, origin stories “posit a general cultural outlook and offer perspectives on what life is and how to understand it” (17), what is the best way to understand life according to John Smith’s narrative of America’s origin? What is life like according to it? What “general cultural outlook[s]” might it imply? Record at least three and include examples.