We only read four of the stories:
- "Araby"
- "Eveline"
- "The Boarding House"
- "The Dead"
The selection was chosen because of common threads running across those particular texts, relative ease of reading and lack of background knowledge required to understand even the nuances, and because they represent something of a life arc, beginning with childhood in "Araby," late adolescence in "Eveline," early adulthood in "The Boarding House," and mature adulthood and old age in "The Dead."
After creating literary 3x3s for each of the stories, we put them on index cards to build Joyce decks. (We used letters in the corners of each to indicate which cards belong to which story.)
We did a variety of activities with them including:
- Finding common threads across the four stories by "tapping" (a la Magic: The Gathering) related cards.
- Shuffling the deck, laying out nine cards, and trying to determine which story emerges from the deal.
- Swapping decks and trying to determine the original creators' intended 3x3s layouts.
- Partners dealing out nine cards each and finding common threads across two different decks.
We will be keeping these decks and coming back to them using other author's works as we try to identify common threads across the other literature we read this year.
Here are some pics of the work we've done.
