Class notes fro Death in the Woods - if you missed class, check this:

Sherwood Anderson, (1876-1941)  novelist, regional writer - Winesburg, Ohio chronicles changes in the Midwest at the turn of the century as a result of industrialization – first American example of modernism- not a novel and not a short story – a story cycle – a young man growing up in a small town and he thinks the place is limiting and leaves it- a community story) and excels in the short story.

Winesburg, Ohio & Death in the Woods - a collection of stories, not isolated, they form a cycle =  collections of stories with common themes, imagery, tone, setting and characters; other short story  cycle = Homer's Odyssey ; Chaucer's Canterbury Tales;  Joyce's Dubliners (theme of the ordinary turned exceptional). Anderson encouraged Faulkner to move back to his hometown & that changed lit. Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and William Faulkner John Steinbeck, John Updike influenced by Anderson

Cycle: stories linked to one another & the reading of one modifies the others & there is a unity, a structure underlying them; the similarity and compelmentarity in theme, setting,

"Death in the Woods" – characteristics:

1)    direct authorial address to the reader;

2)   a circular, not linear, narrative structure;

3)   plot subordinated to characterization;

4)    simple style and vocabulary;

5)   and images drawn from elemental aspects of nature.

loneliness, fragmentation, and the search for beauty and wholeness.

importance of the narrator - the tradition of oral story-tellers. the central character is not Ma Grimes but the mature narrator who looks back on earlier experiences: the sight of an old, oppressed woman trudging from her farm into town in order to obtain the necessary food for her men and animals; the time he worked for a German farmer who hired a "bound girl"; the moonlit winter night he saw half-wild dogs almost revert to wolves in the presence of the near-death of a human.

the role of the mature narrator - struggles to weld his diverse experiences and images into a whole that will bring order out of their diffuseness and beauty out of their ugliness.

Ma Grimes "fed animal life." But also Ma Grimes fed was the creative life of the narrator: the story demonstrates, as Anderson explains in its final sentence, "why I have been impelled to try to tell the simple story over again." The reader feels, as the story comes to a close, that now, after perhaps ten or twelve years, Anderson has been able to create a beautifully unified work of art.

Note in "Death in the Woods":

(a) The various levels of the story: story of Ma Grimes, her relationship to the men and animals in the story, her role as "feeder" of life.

(b) The function played by the dogs, both literal and symbolic.

(c) Growth of the narrator from a young boy to a mature artist.

(d) The difficulty the narrator has in telling the story.

(e) The many images in the story, both from nature and from art.