ENG 380

Guideline for reading presentations

THE AUTHOR:
• Relevant biographical elements
• Career and influences
• Timeline of main works

CONTENT
• what’s the theme of each of the short-stories?
• general idea about it (what the short-stories say about the topic)
• relationship with other Latin American writers we have studied in class

PLOT
• how is the story organized?
• Time: flashbacks, ellipsis, duration.

SETTINGS AND CHARACTERS

• Describe the setting/s of each story and their role in the plot.
• Which are the main characters? How are they characterized?
• What purpose/s (if any) serves the dialogue in the story?

POINT OF VIEW
• Who tells the story?
• What’s his/her relation to the story?
• How this point of view affects the theme and main ideas of the story?

MOOD/TONE
• how would you describe the general tone of the stories (humorous, grave, serious,
tragic, grieving, absurd, naïve)?
• is it always the same or it changes at some point or another?
• which expressions and ideas the author uses to convey this mood/these moods?

LANGUAGE AND IMAGERY

• identify rhetorical devices (such as metaphor, simile, personification, antithesis)
• references/allusions; are they obvious or obscure?
• lexicon: what kind/families of words appear in the poem? Is this constant? Is just one
or more than one? How this relates to the theme and the tone/mood?