Directions:
There are fifteen questions connected to this assignment. Questions 1-10 are worth one point each and should be answered briefly. Questions 11-15 are also worth one point and should have a short well-developed response.
In the first part, each question’s answer should be brief but descriiptive and analytical. Use quotes from the book to support your thoughts when possible.
Make sure you explain why you thought the in-text citations you chose were important.
In the second part, explain the quote as applied to the book, Outside the Bones by Lyn Di Iorio as completely as possible.
After a careful look at your assignment for any grammatical, structural, or stylistic errors,
Part 1
1. After having read the novel, what was your opinion about Fina?
2. How were historical elements blended with fictional ones in this story?
3. How did Afro-Caribbean witchcraft and belief systems add another layer to the book’s narrative development?
4. Do you think Fina was truly a “spirit worker”?
5. What were your thoughts about Chico?
6. Was Palo Monte a spiritual metaphor, magical journey, and/or literary quest strategy?
7. How does this novel show different levels of ghostly occurrences?
8. How can this novel be categorized as a mystery or detective novel?
9. If you had been Fina’s friend, what advice or help would you have given her?
10. What was your favorite part of the novel?
Part 2
11. “Our dead want to be part of our conversation, they do not allow us to forget, they tell us that the communities that are no longer present are also part of the communities we create in life.” (Cristina Rivera Garza)
12. Spectral texts reveal “a series of interconnected topics related to the past, ranging from colonial violence to more recent times. [They] gesture to an
ethics of memory counteracting the politics of closure and the silencing of the past.” (Jean Franco)
13. “Sinister narratives are populated by characters who have crossed the line between absences and shadows…they haunt the consciousness” (Albert Ribas Casasayas)
14. “Conditions in the past banished certain individuals, things, ideas…circumstances rendered them marginal, excluded or repressed.” (Avery Gordon)
15. “Everyday life is haunted by implicit others, who supposedly live outside the ordinary, the everyday…whether the ordinary is haunted by what is outside it or by what used to be part of it, it is represented as a haunting, haunted structure, where what you see is never quite what you get.” (Esther Peeren)
