You must post twice before this Thursday, November 12th. The first time you post it should be in response to one of the prompts below. The second time you post it should be in response to another student.

1. Choose a particular character to evaluate. Determine whether the character traits you have noted are ultimately positive or negative, or both. Explain your reasoning. For example Jose Arcadio Buendia: He is inventive and spends many hours alone on his alchemy experiments trying to discover already known science. This is ultimately negative, because he isolates himself from his family and eventually goes mad.

2. Identify, support and evaluate the evidence of one of the following leitmotifs: cyclical patterns, prophecy, illegitimacy, or fantasy. (A leitmotif is a frequently repeated phase, image, symbol or situation in a literary work, the recurrence of which usually indicates or supports a theme.)

Freud and Symbolism

You must post twice by next Thursday, November 19th. The first time you comment, it should be in response to one of the prompts below. The second time you comment it should be in reaction to the post of one of your peers. Please begin your second post with something along the lines of "To add to what student said..."

Option 1: Again, identify connections between what Freud says about human motivation and our dreams and the way Gabriel Garcia Marquez has chosen to write this text and the experiences of the characters? Note any parallels between the two. Give specific examples including passages from the text.


Option 2: One Hundred Years of Solitude is seeped in symbolism, allegory, hyperbole and parable. (These literary terms are defined below.) Why do you think Gabriel Garcia Marquez chooses to write his narrative in this way? Choose an aspect of the novel that makes use of one of the aforementioned literary devices then attempt to give meaning to it.

Symbolism: a word or phrase referring to a concrete object, scene, or action which also has some further significance associated with it

Allegory: a story or visual image with a second distinct meaning partially hidden behind its literal or visible meaning. The principal technique of allegory is personification. In written narrative, allegory involves a continuous parallel between two or more levels of meaning in the story. An allegory may be conceived as a metaphor that is extended into a structured system.

Hyperbole: Exaggeration for the sake of emphasis

Parable: A brief tale intended to be understood as an allegory illustrating some moral or lesson.

Magic Realism and the Freudian Revolution

• Where in this text do you see the connections between what Freud says about human motivation and our dreams and the way Gabriel Garcia Marquez has chosen to write this text? Give specific examples including passages from the text.

• Find a piece of art which you feel represents a passage or portion of the text. Explain your choice. (Do not simply Google One Hundred Years of Solitude art, do a little more of an in-depth searching on your own.)

• Identify elements of the story that you find particularly confusing, interesting, or worthy of discussion. Pose your own questions and respond to those of others.

• You must post 2 times before next Tuesday, November 17th. The second time you post, it must be in response to or in reaction to the post of another student.