1. 1.23.08 | Hawthorne (day 6) Business Wrap-up – Pearl – The Black Man / Mistress Hibbins – Pillory, crappy ending, final sermon? – The A – Stakes. HW – Read Melville in your Reader. – Melville folks need to post claim paragraphs in the “Melville” discussion area by 1:30 tomorrow. – Everyone’s response paragraphs due by 5 on Fri. You can respond to any of the conversations, Sontag, Hawthorne, or Melville. – Remember, you will have to post on Melville sometime, if not this week then some week in the future.

2. Yesterday… We concluded by trying to make sense of the Brookside scene, offering many possibilities. As we move closer to our first major writing assignment, this seems a perfect opportunity to ask, how do you decide between these possibilities? 1. Does the text support my reading? 2. What does my reading get us? (who cares?)

3. Example Reading: Pearl reacts the way she does because she sees the A as a significant aspect of her relationship to her mother and does not want to see that relationship broken up. 1.Does the text support this? – Yeah, probably. 2.What do we get out of it? Who cares? – Much harder to answer, but asking this question could allow us to frame the reading in more interesting ways.

4. The Final Pillory Scene What happens? Why is it significant?

5. Epilogue Hester? Pearl? Chillingworth? The letter A? – "The reader may choose among these theories. We have thrown all the light we could acquire upon the portent, and would gladly, now that it has done its office, erase its deep print out of our own brain; where long meditation has fixed it in very undesirable distinctness" [237]

6. Stakes We opened by reading the Custom House chapter as a discussion of the stakes for this text. Now that we finished the book, let’s return to that question to ask how it faired. Write a short essay of about a page that answers the following questions: What was at stake? How did this text address those stakes? Did it succeed?