Dot in the Sky (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
dotinthesky) wrote2008-07-05 01:09 pm
dotinthesky) wrote2008-07-05 01:09 pm
Entry tags:
Mary Swann
Although these questions are for K., feel free to answer them too if you have also read Carol Shields' Mary Swann:
1. Of the four main characters, which one was your favourite? Which one was your least favourite? Which one would you enjoy hanging out with?
2. Of the fragments we read from Mary Swann's poetry, together with the final poem, what do you make of her as a poet? (perhaps you can imagine here that you were also attending the symposium.)
3. What do you think of Mary Swann the person, and of her murder?
4. Sarah Maloney says at one point that women carry all their lives the "full freight of their mother's words." Can this be applied to Frances Swann?
5. Rose says, with relation to the Swann museum exhibition, that "the charm of falsehood is not that it distorts reality, but that it creates reality afresh." How do you think this statement fits in with the characters, Mary Swann's poetry, the book itself?
1. Of the four main characters, which one was your favourite? Which one was your least favourite? Which one would you enjoy hanging out with?
2. Of the fragments we read from Mary Swann's poetry, together with the final poem, what do you make of her as a poet? (perhaps you can imagine here that you were also attending the symposium.)
3. What do you think of Mary Swann the person, and of her murder?
4. Sarah Maloney says at one point that women carry all their lives the "full freight of their mother's words." Can this be applied to Frances Swann?
5. Rose says, with relation to the Swann museum exhibition, that "the charm of falsehood is not that it distorts reality, but that it creates reality afresh." How do you think this statement fits in with the characters, Mary Swann's poetry, the book itself?
no subject
The symposeum was really troubled by Swann's lack of "intellectual" books in her reading list, which is quite elitest and reductive of them. Why can't a smart person reading something that is not T.S. Elliot or Joyce? I agree with you that they made a lot of assumptions about her intellect based on very scant items that belonged to her. They forgot that the poems themselves were proof of her intelligence (if that proof was required) and that they should satisfy themselves with that and nothing more.