Tuesday, May 11, 2010

The Code Duello


From Sam Milligan (section 001), here are a couple of PBS sites (here and here) explaining the rules for dueling. I should add that, if I've incorrectly calculated your quiz point total, I prefer a less dangerous way of resolving the dispute.

Tuesday, May 4, 2010

Those Extraordinary Twins

Via Maegan Cary (section 002), here is a link to Those Extraordinary Twins.

Monday, May 3, 2010

Quiz 12 (take-home; due in class 5-5-10)

Pudd’nhead Wilson may or may not be your favorite text of the semester. Even if it isn’t, though, I think we can all acknowledge that it works perfectly well as a novel in and of itself. It can be said even to resemble an episode of the TV series Law and Order, since what we get in the first chapters is the commission of several crimes, in the middle chapters an investigation of those crimes, and in the final chapters a dramatic courtroom scene in which those crimes are revealed.

So why Those Extraordinary Twins? Why in the world might Twain have taken a perfectly good novel in Pudd’nhead Wilson and appended to it the strange “do-over” that Those Extraordinary Twins represents? For Wednesday, read all of the novella that concludes Twain’s text and think about its relationship to the main text. Then, as best you can, explain in ~500 words why you think Twain decided to rewrite the novel with the one significant variation involving Antonio and Luigi.