For this week’s forum, respond to one of the following questions:

1. Discuss the use of descriptive detail to convey a child’s perception of family relationships in Roethke’s poem.  Look particularly at the boy and his mother.

2. What role does the freak show play in the plot of Eudora Welty’s “Petrified Man” and in its thematic structure? How does the freakshow shape or change the reader’s understanding of the beauty shop, gossip, and Mrs. Feltcher’s worry over her pregnancy?

3. Flannery O’Connor maintained that her perspective as a writer was that of a Christian and that her stories were to be read as expressions of Christian beliefs. Discuss the appearance in “A Good Man is Hard to Find” and “Good Country People” of a fusion of the religious and secular, of the divine and the profane, in everyday life.

4. Jarrell is noted for his poetry that deals with war and with the alienation of the individual from sensibility, due to war and a confrontation with technology. Explicate “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” with this idea in mind.