Just wanted to share a brief overview of “local color” writing and its relationship to the South: I think it helps grasp the broader context Chesnutt was writing his “conjure tales” within.
I’d also like to direct you to the site we’ll use to host our “game” of Chesnutt’s writing. Feel free to peruse the site: you can see some old games from last year, a list of possible characters to play, and more.
To focus your reflection on our gameplay of Chesnutt’s “conjure tales,” I would like you to write a post of 500-1000 words that reckons with the following four questions (you can either write three responses or weave the four questions into a single mini-essay):
**Henry James famous likened the novel genre to a “house of fiction” that “has in short not one window, but a million — a number of possible windows not to be reckoned, rather; every one of which has been pierced, or is still pierceable, in its vast front, by the need of the individual vision and by the pressure of the individual will.”
The Chronicle of Higher Education, which is basically the main trade publication for us academics, has a wonderful ProfHacker blog that features pieces on teaching. They just featured games in the classroom, so I thought I’d share. I’ve never used Twine or Harlowe 2, but if anyone’s interested in exploring this topic, you might build a final project out of a) writing about games, race, and inscription in theory or b) building your own game using Ivanhoe or one of these platforms.
