What is the relationship between the difficulty of a performance and its quality or capacity to impress people?

The reading for this week, Franz Kafka’s “A Hunger Artist,” raises several questions about artistic accomplishment, such as:
• What is the relationship between the difficulty of a performance and its quality or capacity to impress people?
• What does it mean for a performance to be authentic? What does it mean for a performance to be artificial?
• Does it matter if a performance looks difficult to the audience, but is easy for the performer?
• What does it mean to be impressed by a performance, as opposed to enjoying it?
• What is the role of the marketplace and advertising in performing art? What sort of role does the impresario play, and why does the artist resent him?
• What does it mean to “cheat” at a performance?
• How does commercial success or failure affect an artist’s or the public’s sense of an artwork’s quality?
There are also some questions to be raised about the characters, such as:
• What else does the hunger artist deprive himself of, other than food? How are these other deprivations important to his performance and to his story?
• What are the religious parallels to the story?
• In what ways are the hunger artist and the panther different?
• Suppose we think of the artist, impresario, and panther as being representative of different human drives habits. What do they represent?
• How is Marina Abramović’s performance similar and different to Kafka’s story?
• What is your own subjective response to Abramović’s performance? Do you find it fascinating, pretentious, thoughtful, provocative, annoying? Why?
Respond to any number of these questions you like (Kafka, Abramović, or both), or approach this week’s material in a different way.
Week5)

The assignment this week is Chapter 22 of the textbook, on William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience, which includes illustrations.
As you can see, (most of) Blake’s poems are in pairs: an “innocent” version, and an “experienced” version. Choose two pairs, and offer an account of what the “innocence” or “experience” in each poem consists of: what changes about the content of the poems, and what changes about the form or style of the poems? (See meter, rhyme, stanza and related terms in the Glossary/Index of Literary Terms in the textbook).
You can also look closely at Blake’s illustration for one of the poems, and suggest what sort of symbolism or significance his choices might have.
(For what it’s worth, I acknowledge here that Arabic literature has a rich tradition of illustrating texts, which makes this part of the European tradition look downright clumsy and primitive! If anyone wants to suggest an illustrated Arabic text for which an English translation exists, I would be delighted!)

Week10)

Hello, we’ve all now had extra time to read The Great Gatsby in its entirety. There’s a lot to discuss, and while I’ve read this novel several times, I’m always more interested in how it strikes students who are reading it for the first time.
We’ve had several weeks now where I’ve posed particular questions, asking you to focus on one or two aspects of the work—aspects which may have been interesting to you, or maybe not, or which you think may have missed the point or didn’t capture what you found most interesting.
So, this week, I’d like for you to ask and answer your own question—something analytical, that can only be answered through close attention to particular passages or patterns in the novel. Avoid describing the novel in general, global terms. Identify different parts of the novel that seem to contrast in some way.