AENG240 disscuion question and repley 2 students questions | Coursehero Helper

Need help with my History question – I’m studying for my class.

Select one of the questions and answer for your Daily Post.

1) Perkins briefly mentions that it is significant Chesnutt chooses Miller’s hospital, instead of the newspaper office, to be burned down in the novel, as he “emphasizes the viciousness of the attack by whites on an essentially helpless people” (44). The following paragraph explains why Perkins regards the hospital as a symbol of “helplessness,” while it also embodies “an important achievement within the African-American community.” Is her explanation convincing? As you yourself have read the climactic scene at the hospital as well as the narrative leading up to the moment, respond to Perkins’s ideas with your own claim about what makes Chesnutt’s change important for our understanding of the incident.

2) Perkins describes the suppression of voices by newspaper accounts as “metaphorical lynching” and regard creative telling of the incident as “de-lynching” that collects the dismembered bodies of those who were “lynched” to restore history (46). Yet this image of a dead body dismembered and then “re-membered” also provides an ominous image of distortion and lifelessness in what to be recovered. Do you agree that this image aptly reflects what Chesnutt is doing in the novel? How would you characterize what Chesnutt’s novel does for our attempt to understand the past incident, even after the fact bodies went through “metaphorical lynching”?

3) The article concludes that Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition “does engage in resistance to a more dominant social mode of communication” (47). How exactly does his novel “resist” such a mode according to Perkins? How do you analyze the ways in which the novel affects our concept of history or the mode of its writing?