Today’s Agenda
1) Standards for ALL BLOG POSTS and JOURNAL entries:
- All of the writing you produce for this class should follow some basic guidelines.
- Writing should ALWAYS meet the minimum length requirement. If you are asked to write a page or a page-and-a-half, then you are to produce that amount of writing. Failure to produce that amount of writing will result in you not receiving credit for the assignment. I will be enforcing this rule starting today.
Remember out grade breakdown:
20% Explication Essay (3 pages)
30% Literary Argument Essay (6 pages, two secondary sources)
20% Genre Tests
20% Final Exam
20% Participation < — Blog Posts and Journal entries, as well as in-class discussion. If you are a B student, you will be a LOW C OR D student in this class if you do not receive this credit, and if you are a C student, you will probably not receive credit or FAIL this course if you do not get this credit.
- All writing needs to be CAREFULLY proofread. It is NOT ACCEPTABLE to be writing without proper punctuation at the college level. For many people, it would be EMBARASSING to write this way. You MUST, for example, use apostrophes in your contractions, use the comma correctly, and capitalize the correct words in your sentences. You also need to be writing in COMPLETE sentences and must avoid RUN-ON sentences. You also need to be using SPECIFIC DETAILS in your writing. These are all BASIC grammatical features of writing that you learned in Eh 111, no matter how long ago you took it or a simialr course. If you need help with these issues, you should talk to me. If you do not, I will simply assume that you are being lazy, and will mark you as such.
Certainly, I understand that when you are writing in class you will make mistakes that you would not otherwise make. However, if you go home to write something, I expect polished writing! It is expected of adults in the business world, and it is expected here. Nothing less will be accepted.
Today’s Blog Post Assignment:
For the next five to seven minutes, I want you to write on the following topic: You have probably had the experience of not liking something that is popular with people from other generations. For example, your parents probably like movies or sports that you do not like, and if you have younger brothers or sisters, they probably like things that you do not like. For the next five to seven minutes, I want you to describe something that someone from another generation likes that you do not like, and explain why you do not like it.
Group Assignment:
In your small groups, I want you to talk about a specific experience you have had in an audience. Think about a time that you have been in an audience and were bored (you can’t use this class as an example!) Identify 1) why you were in that audience and 2) why you were bored.
For today you were to read:
Alfred, Lord Tenneyson ‘s “Ulysses”
William Butler Yeats’ “The Second Coming“
How did we deal with this poem?
What was our EXPERIENCE?
Let’s get out our writing and think about the kinds of audiences that we may have been dealing with.
1) Underline the most important points that you made.
2) Let’s get into our groups and discuss who these audiences may have been, based on the questions we came up with.
Class Discussion
Let’s take these poems on!
Speaker: What can we say?
Situation: What can we say?
But we are still a little at sea if we do not think about the SITUATION.
What is the situation?
The situation is what is going on in the poem.
What is being described?
What is happening?
Before we think about the situations of the above poems, let’s think about the situation in a different poem.
Let’s look at Robert Frosts’ Mending Wall
Where are the specific details that tell us what the situation of the poem is?
We should never simply IMAGINE we know what the situation is. We need to be able to describe what is happening and HOW WE KNOW IT by discussing the specific details that relate to the poem’s SITUATION.
Writing assignment: For the next 10 -15 min, I want you to describe the situation being described in the poem Mending Wall. What is going on, and how do you know that it is going on?
START BY LOOKING FOR CULTURAL REFERENCES
What kinds of cultural references are being made in this poem?
Why would he write this way?
What is the point?
Now — before we go back to Ulysses and The Second Coming, let’s take on one more, slightly more difficult poem:
Andrew Marvell’s To His Coy Mistress
How can an understanding of situation help us figure out a poem that is written in archaic (old) language?
Notice that even with the language is unfamiliar, you can figure out what is going on by paying attention specific CULTRIAL REFERENCES
Optional Lecture Videos
Video One
Video Two
Video Three
Video Four
Will be posted soon
Video Five
Will be posted soon
Read For Next Class:
Elizabeth Bishop: First Death in Nova Scotia
Margaret Atwood: The Is A Photograph of Me
Listen to these Podcasts For Next Class:
Elizabeth Bishop: First Death in Nova Scotia
Margaret Atwood: The Is A Photograph of Me
John Donne: The Flea
Wriite:
You are to write a two page paper on ONE of the poems you are reading for homework. In your paper, I want you to interperet the poem by focusing on TWO of these THREE subjects: Speaker, Audience, or Situation. You are to use SPECIFIC EXAMPLES and DIRECT QUOTES. I also want you to have a CLEAR THESIS STATEMENT in the OPENING PARAGRAPH of your writing.
[...] Tuesday, September 16 [...]
Pingback by Your Syllabus « Approaches to Literature, Fall 2008 — August 13, 2008 @ 2:28 pm |
Something that comes to mind when i think of what another generation likes and i do not like is food. My grandmother grew up in a era when they ate home cooked meals every night and they had the traditional backed bean supper on Saturday nights. i have lived in a house that my whole life, eats bean every Saturday ngiht for supper. After 21 years of that being the choice for dinner, i still don’t care for them. When i grew up i had a working mother and father that most of the time cooked fast meals, such as macaroni and cheese, burgers and so on. I was never forced to eat something i did not like or did not want to try. Now when my grandmother was growing up they ate their meal when they were served and no toher time, and they ate wa was for dinner or they didnt eat. In that era they didn’t have the money to allow each child to eat something different, they barely got the one choice on the table. Something that i also grew up with was fast food, in which my grandmother didn’t, she had to walk miles just to go to a grocercy store, school, or even a neighbors house, and for me it was 3 miles down the road. So now you can see why my taste for food is different than hers, because we grew up in different times and with very different soucres of food.
Comment by Jen Campbell — September 16, 2008 @ 4:48 pm |
My parents used to be a big fan of the T.V. show “Dark Shadows” and still proclaim it’s greatness. They used to watch it when they were younger. I have seen this show a couple of time and have no idea why they like it so much. Due to how old of a program it is, the camera work is grainy and the acting is pretty sub-standard. Probably the only reason why they like it is because it connects them to their youth. I, on the other hand, have no attachment to it and don’t really care for it at all.
Comment by Gabe Cheney — September 16, 2008 @ 4:49 pm |
Some of the things that the younger generation do that I don’t like is the fact that they think that they should have everything just handed to them. I don’t know where they picked this up but I think it is wrong for them to do. The other thing is that they are very disrespectful to the older generations. They say things to their elders that I wouldn’t have thought of saying because it was not very nice. I was always brought up to respect the people that were older than me because they know more and they are the ones that control my life till I’m out on my own. It makes me sick when I see a little kid disrespecting his grandparents, I don’t know if society is bringing them up to be like this or the world is think that the younger generation is just out of control and there’s nothing that we can do about it that’s just how they are. For example I was helping out at a football camp and a child about nine or ten was talking back to the coaches and I was thinking wow this would never have happened when I was that age and then I realized that he was doing the same thing to his parents and they just kind of shrugged it off.
Comment by Michael Austin — September 16, 2008 @ 4:50 pm |
The situation is plainly stated many times. The Second Coming. This person is watching what is happening when Christ comes back. As depicted in the poem, the earth is in shambles. Anarchy is the word used to describe it. There’s some kind of monster that is feared and will cause distress amongst all people. All the descriptive words used are bleak and have a negative connotation. There’s blood shed, confusion, and intensity all around.
Comment by Gabe Cheney — September 16, 2008 @ 5:29 pm |
i feel in ‘The Second Coming’ the situation that is taking place is something fatal has happened. Things are starting to fall apart and there is nothing that the speaker can do about it. I think that was is being desrcibed is a warning to others about what is going on and what can be taking place.
Comment by Jen Campbell — September 16, 2008 @ 5:30 pm |
The situation in the Mending Wall could be literally or figuratively. Literally, the speaker and his neighbor are going along this stone wall that separates their property and mending it in the spring time. The speaker doesn’t see a reason for the wall but his neighbor is very adamant about having one up. Figuratively it could be that the speaker is trying to mend a a relationship with his neighbor that might have been damaged due to a wall not being up.
Comment by Gabe Cheney — September 16, 2008 @ 5:42 pm |
i think the situation in the poem is that one neighbor would like to break the wall that they have for their land. I think that everytime the neighbor turns around, soemthing has happened to the wall, and he is thinking the other neighbor breaks is down. So i think that the speaker is saying how the one neighbor doesnt see reason for the wall, and possibly there is a good reason for the wall.
Comment by Jen Campbell — September 17, 2008 @ 5:25 pm |
This poem I believe is serving the purpose as a metaphor. When you first read the poem you try and think about how can this person have a picture taken of her she had died the day before? It really gets your mind going and you start to think of all the possibilities and ways this wording is true. I think that there are many answers to these metaphors that this poem has.
I think that there could be 2 situations in this poem. I believe that this poem is a way to show that the speaker, or author of this story has drowned, not in water, but in life. She states, “but if you look long enough eventually you will see me.” She has put on the back burned because a new and talented artist came along and took her spotlight away. So this is her way of saying that if you look closely beyond the spotlight, or big picture, she is still there. She even has the clue in the poem of, “I am in the lake, in the center of the picture, just under the surface.” But on the other hand, I think that this poem could be used for a way to say that yes, she drowned in the lake the day before the photo was taken, and that she is now apart of the lake in which she died in. One of my assumptions is that the person who died in the lake was the person who created the picture, but nowhere in the poem does it state that she actually did produce the photo. It just simply says , “It was taken some time ago…” So my assumption after taking another look is that this photo could have been in a news paper article and the smudges had came from rain that had hit the paper and the ink smudged. That yes this photo was taken the day after her death because it was for a new report in the local paper the next day. So the poem was a way to say that the photo was taken, and it was taken of me because I have now become the lake. The situations were hard to figure out, because there could be so many possibilities the author is trying to get across, but those two are the ones that took me right away and got me thinking, and I just couldn’t figure out which one I was more the situation than the other.
I think that the audience in this poem is harder to figure out than the others that we have read. I think that that the audience is a variety of people. I think that it could be for young actors, athletes, painters, writers, anyone that currently has fame. I think that they are part of the audience because I think that it is a way of saying that one day you will have all the fame and the next you are gone, but in the background or under the water because a new someone has taken over the spotlight and that is where you have landed. The poem states, “The photograph was taken the day after I drowned.” So that could be a clue to the young or old people who are in the spot light. I think that the audience could be the general public, warning them that a person had drowned in the lake and that swimming alone is not a safe choice, because drowning does happen and people do die from it. I don’t think that is necessarily was a way of scaring people off from the lake or swimming, I think that the poem could have been just a heads up that hey, shit happens so you better be careful.
This poem was really neat to try and figure out. I thought that there was many possibilities that could have come about by this poem. The authors of such writing have so many ways of putting metaphors into their writing that are clues to what the piece is actually about. The only thing about that is that we don’t know what the poems are about, we only have our predictions. I would love to know what a writer is actually thinking about when they write poems, and how they come up with the metaphors and their choice of words. I think in the particular poem the metaphors the author used were fantastic and suspicious, because you never knew what was coming next!
Comment by Jen Campbell — September 18, 2008 @ 1:17 am |
Gabe Cheney
Adam Crowley
EH 112
17 September 2008
“First Death in Nova Scotia”
Elizabeth Bishop
When a poem is written , it is written for a certain group of people. Similarly, this group of people, the audience, should be able to relate to the person who is telling the story, the speaker, and what is going on, the situation. How well all three of these connect to each other determines how successful the writer was with the poem. The chances that a stay at home mom in the 21st century would be able to relate to a poem about a coal miner in 1910 is pretty slim. However, if that stay at home mom looks deeper into the poem, realizing the who the speaker and audience is, and what the situation is, she will then be able to have a better appreciation for that piece of writing. The poem that I read was “First Death in Nova Scotia” by Elizabeth Bishop. This piece of writing is no different. The speaker is a young child at his/her cousin Arthur’s funeral. There are specific details and quotes from the story that support that.
The details that the child uses shows how young they are. Generally speaking a child will look at things and describe them differently. The stuffed loon was a big part of the poem and the way that Bishop described it seemed to be the same way that a child would, looking very much at the colors and texture of the feathers. These tactile characteristics are exactly what a child would first notice. Later on the child similarly talks about how Arthur looks in his coffin.
The child is also small enough to be lifted up by it’s mother and to be told what to do. When it is time to go, the mother says “Come say goodbye to your little cousin Arthur.” The speaker is then lifted up to the coffin and places a flower in the hand of the deceased. Along the same lines as my first point, in the last paragraph, the child talks about two paintings with the royal couples in them. He/she sees the deceased getting asked by the couple to be the youngest page at court all the while holding the tiny lilly. The last couple of lines are very child-like as well. The child wonders how could Arthur leave with his eyes shut so tight and the snow being so deep on the roads.
The whole poem is set at a funeral. There are many references towards it. In the first stanza there is reference to a cold parlor which is usually a place where a funeral would be held at a funeral home. There is mention of the chromographs of Edward the Prince of Wales with Princess Alexandra, and King George with Queen Mary. Both of these things are details that date the situation. A ‘chromograph’ was a copy of a painting that was used introduced in the 1900’s. Also since the paintings were of those two particular couples, we know that it took place a while ago. Edward was a small child so the mood was very subdued as most funerals are.
Figuring out what the situation was and who the speaker is of this poem helped me understand the poem much better. When I first read it my reaction was that is was trivial and pretty basic. When I read it with a more critical eye, I soon realized that the poem was being told through a young child which made things much more clear.
Comment by Gabe Cheney — September 18, 2008 @ 11:03 am |
Selina Staples
September 18, 2008
Adam Crowley
Eh 112
“This Is A Photograph of Me”
Margaret Atwood
When reading a piece of poetry most people over look the actual meaning of the piece and merely read the words that are written. To avoid just reading the words the reader should focus on three things. One is the audience the writer has intended the poem for, who the speaker of the poem is, and last what the situation is. The poem that I read was “This Is a Photograph of Me” written by Margaret Atwood. The speaker of this poem is someone who had drowned, in a lake where she explains a photo that was taken on the day after. The situation is the explanation of what the photo shows immediately and what is under the surface.
The speaker of this poem is an individual who has died the day before. They seem to have been a lonely person or thought little about them self. “It is difficult to say where
precisely, or to say how large or small I am:” This part of the poem tells you that the speaker thought low of themselves and that they felt they were no very important, and maybe easy to miss. Also the closing statement “if you look long enough, eventually you will be able to see me.)” shows that the speaker feels as if people tend to look past them and maybe don’t notice them. This individual explains the photo and the scenery as if it is beautiful and almost admires how the broken branch and house seem to work together as one slope. When the reader talks about the body in the lake they talk as if it were undiscovered and no one seemed to notice or care.
The situation of this poem is a seemingly old but beautiful photograph being explained of a hill with a house on a hill and a branch that is broken off a tree. There is also in the distance a lake with hills that follow. As you read this you can visualize each aspect of the scenery and maybe appreciate it as the speaker is seeing it. Once the reader has visualized this image you learn that in the lake there is the speaker’s body from the day before. The situation quickly changes to looking at a photograph of a hill with a house and a lake to focusing on the lake and trying to see a body. This makes the situation of the poem about how this individual died the day before and there was a photograph taken and no one had even noticed that it was there.
When reading this poem and just looking at the words you don’t really think about what the situation or who is actually telling the story. When a reader stops and slows down to look at these details they realize maybe there is more to the story than there seems to be. When the speaker talks about being able to see them if you look hard enough, readers may think that because it is in the distance they wouldn’t be able to see the body or that because it is in the water it would be covered. When focusing on who the speaker is and how they use the words you may find that they were lonely or not well known, maybe you can come to the conclusion that they person had deliberately done this because of reasons unknown.
When focusing on more that just the words written you can conclude many different answers for just one short poem.
Comment by Selina Staples — September 18, 2008 @ 4:25 pm |