Literature: Text and context

As you can realize, the course changed from language to literature, and the first subject was the context. We made an activity from the course companion with two different texts: The Leopard, by Tomasi di Lampedusa; and Notable American Woman, by Ben Marcus. The objective of this activity was to make ourselves some questions about the text considering the contexts. 

My reflections from the first text were; "why there are mythical passages?", "Which is the relationship between the mythological characters with the text?", "Which is the importance of this characters.?" from the second text, I concluded the following questions: "Why the author talks about himself, but being another character?", "Is he trying to give a message to the audience?", "From where is the narrator talking?".