Gloucester Narratives: Ways of Looking at Gloucester

Over the next two weeks you will read a narrative in which depictions of Gloucester -- or parts of Gloucester -- play a significant role.

While you read you will maintain a double-entry journal, which will be collected on Friday, April 30.

Read the directions carefully.

On the left side of your journal you will record quotations from throughout the book -- at least ten.

Select quotations in which some aspect of Gloucester -- people in or from Gloucester, places in Gloucester, the history of Gloucester, etc. -- is depicted or in which a direct statement about Gloucester is offered. Choose passages that seem significant in presenting a particular perspective on Gloucester and set of perceptions about Gloucester. (Note: If your book has sections that do not deal with Gloucester you may select up to five quotations that are not directly related to Gloucester people, places, history, etc. These quotations should still be significant in some way to the book as a whole.) Also, make sure you choose passages from the beginning, middle, and end of the book. You will write down each quotation and the page on which you found it.

On the right side of your journal you will respond to the quotation.

Make inferences. What does the depiction of Gloucester suggest? How is it significant? What does it seem to mean?

Respond. Do you agree or disagree with the depiction? Are you skeptical? Are you surprised? Do you have a personal or family connection to the way Gloucester is depicted in the quotation? (Show me that you are reading with your head and your heart.)

Remember some guiding questions:
How do writers depict Gloucester? How are the differing depictions significant? What's at stake in differing projections of the polis? (How is Gloucester used by the writer? What does the writer suggest about Gloucester? Does Gloucester seem to represent something -- an ideal, an alternative, a warning, a trap, a set of values -- in the work?)

Here are some of the books. In the comment box post your name (first name, last initial) and the book you plan to read.

Captains Courageous by Rudyard Kipling

The Maximus Poems by Charles Olson

Know Fish by Vincent Ferrini

The Perfect Storm by Sebastian Junger

The Last Days of Dogtown by Anita Diamant

Dogtown: Death and Enchantment in a New England Ghost Town by Elyssa East

The Last Fish Tale by Mark Kurlansky

At the Cut by Peter Anastas

Broken Trip by Peter Anastas

The Finest Kind: the Fishermen of Gloucester by Kim Bartlett

Cape Ann, Cape America by Herbert Kenny

Hammers on Stone and A Village at Lane's Cove by Barbara Erkkila

Voices by Richard M. Swiderski

When Gloucester Was Gloucester (a series of oral histories about Gloucester in the mid and early twentieth century) edited by Peter Anastas and Peter Parsons

New England Blue: 6 Plays of Working-Class Life by Israel Horowitz

Prologos and Gloucesterbook and Gloucestertide by Jonathan Bayliss

The Lone Voyager (about Howard Blackburn) and The Fish and the Falcon (about Gloucester's involvement in the War of 1812) (formerly called Guns Off Gloucester) and many more by Joseph Garland

Out of Gloucester and several other books (not all books on the linked page deal with Gloucester) by James B. Connolly

History of Gloucester by John Babson

History of the Town and City of Gloucester, Cape Ann, Massachusetts by James Robert Pringle