“Stallings wants us to find articles? From where?”

 

Anywhere. But, I know that’s a big place, so:

• Arts & Letters Daily—Brilliant site bringing together articles from all over the Interwebs. Mostly scholarly, but all well-written.
• In These Times—Began as an “Independent Socialist Newspaper,” but is primarily progressive (left of center) in its leanings today. Kurt Vonnegut was a frequent contributor until 2005.
• Slate.com—Online-only news magazine. Gotta love the Explainer (not argumentative, but interesting nonetheless).
• The New Republic—Often insightful, this magazine focuses on politics and the arts.
• Time Magazine
• Bad Idea—A British magazine that publishes “young journalism.” Definitely worth checking out, as it brings a fresh face to opinion and editorials. Check out the Butcher’s Shop for an overview of the editing process articles go through before publication.
• AdBusters—Popular amongst my students for the past two years. Worth checking out.
• National Review—Very well-written conservative magazine.
• The New Yorker
• Popmatters—Articles on popular culture; music, video games, the Interwebs, and movies are all topics. Great place to find an article and a new favorite band.

In no particular order. You may now be asking, “How do I find the time to read all of this? I found three that I like, but I can’t go to all of these sites just to find an article.”

My philosophical response: “That’s not the point. While it is important that you are able to find and analyze arguments, it is even more important that you begin a habit of consuming thoughts and opinions about the world around you. If you don’t use the skills you learn, you’re just going through the motions.”

My practical response: “Use an RSS reader, like Google Reader. You can subscribe to the sites you like (even My Life is Average, if you must), and even take a peek at what I’ve been reading. Check out the Feeds page for more information.”

 

And no, I won’t stop talking about RSS readers until all have signed up. 🙂

1. Pull your devices from the list below (I’ll give you the handout tomorrow).
2. Find an example “in the wild” (song lyrics are okay, but see if you can’t find an example outside of literature)
3. Think about your explanation. The objective here is to figure out why something is the way it is, rather than just pointing it out. If your explanation is “This picture of a car wash sign has a bubble that is popping, and it says, ‘Pop!’ That’s onomatopoeia!” you might want to re-think your example.
4. You don’t need to write your explanation down at this point, but you should be ready to defend and explain your choice in class.
5. Bring it to class tomorrow. If it is online, you can post a link below. If it is in your camera/phone, email it to me.

Example explanation from class:

Stewie’s sarcastic retort to the girl’s insult highlights (and draws out) the fact that it is an old reference (allusion!). By re-stating what she said in a sarcastic tone, he turns her own words against her.

 

• Allegory—(usually) simple story that portrays some moral through the actions of characters.
• Alliteration—repeating consonant (letters that aren’t vowels) sounds at the beginning of words. (See  consonance)
• Allusion—reference to something outside the work being read
• Analogy—comparison between two things using “like” or “as,” often used to make a logical point
• Climax—the point of highest action or development of the plot; the succession of increasingly important words, phrases, or clauses.
• One equal temper of heroic hearts,/Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will/To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.—Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Ulysses
• Conflict—opposition of forces in a work
• [Who is the main character? Who opposes him or her? Are there other forces working against the characters? Types of Conflict: person vs. person, person vs. nature, person vs. fate, person vs. self, person vs. society]
• Connotation—the meaning of a word within the context of a written work
• Consonance—repetition of consonant sounds in the middle or at the end of words. (See alliteration)
• Couplet—a pair of lines in a poem; if they rhyme, it’s a rhyming couplet
• Ex: I beg to dream and differ from the hollow lies/This is the dawning of the rest of our lives (Green Day, American Idiot, “Holiday”)
• Denotation—the literal, dictionary definition of a word
• Diction—the author’s word choice
• Ex: The sentence “Adam walked quickly across the yard” seems okay, but if the author changed walked quickly to lurched, hurried, or quick-stepped, it would be a much more precise sentence.
• Flashback—device utilizing a shift in time during a narrative. Usually in order to expose the back story of a character in a way that sheds light on a current situation. We are doing a similar thing in Brit Lit—by “folding” the chronology of or books in half, we can compare current works with older ones.
• Ex: J.D. in Scrubs has a flashback almost every episode. Family Guy also contains many flashbacks, but almost always for absurd comedic effect.
• Foreshadowing—Symbol or reference in a narrative that hints at a future event. Authors use this in a way similar to flashbacks, but it is often less obvious.
• Hyperbole—dramatic overstatement. Allows us to add emotional weight to a statement.
• Ex: Chris knew the whole school laughed at him when he tripped on the first day.
• Imagery—verbal representation of sensory information; can be visual (sight), auditory (sound), tactile (touch), olfactory (smell), or gustatory (taste)
• Irony—usually humorous device in which a character says the opposite of what is intended, or an event’s outcome is the opposite of what is expected. We use irony to highlight the difference between things as they are and the things that could be.
• Metaphor—using one kind of thing to represent another without express indication of the representation
• Meter—poetic rhythm pattern; can be iambic (unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable), trochaic (stressed then unstressed), dactylic (stressed then two unstressed), or anapestic (two unstressed then stressed). As poetry was originally performed for an audience, rhythm allowed the speaker to involve the listeners—think about clapping or dancing at a concert.
• Personification—a figure of speech in which non-human things are given human characteristics.
• Ex: The television stared into the empty living room searching for attention.
• Simile—comparison of two things using “like” or “as”
• Symbol—something concrete that stands for something abstract outside the work, or recalls something else inside the work; something that means more than what it is physically used for.

Post questions or links below.

In our continuing quest to better understand the essential elements of any argument, each of you will be writing a more extended analysis of an advertisement. It can be a commercial, a print ad, or even an infomercial. (I’ve never had anyone analyze an infomercial before, but I don’t see why it wouldn’t work…)

The format for these analyses is in your syllabus.

Post questions or good commercials you come across (as long as you aren’t using them) below. Your response should be typed, and in this format.

 

Update: It seems that I neglected online advertisements. While we will focus primarily on the form and content of individual arguments, it is always interesting to take a look at the bigger picture. The video below illustrates the scope and possible impact of online media and advertisements. It is aimed at businesses (especially around the 3:00 mark), I thought it worth sharing.

Read through chapter five this weekend. Be sure to journal as you go, as we will be using them in our discussion on Monday. It might be a good idea to read chapter three twice, as Huxley plays with the narrative a bit and it’s easy to get the conversation jumbled.

Yesterday I called poetry a “misunderstood creature.” This stemmed from the fact that few people read poetry, and even fewer consume it. ((This is based on a completely un-scientific sampling of people I’ve known. In fact, I can count on one hand the number of people I know who read poetry on a regular basis.)) The question that arises, then, is “why do we need to learn about it?”

Here was my answer: ((I know that there have been hundreds of defenses of poetry written—a colleague recently recommended Edmond Spenser’s “the pleasure of poetry . . . inculcates forms of profitable pleasure,” which, I just Googlearned, comes from Horace.))

Poetry : absurd thinking : : Math equations : logic. To put it a different way, poetry helps us define our associative muscles, helps us better make metaphorical connections within our world. I’ve been saying for years that we think and communicate in metaphor. In order to explain something to someone else, we usually compare the unknown to something known. The example I gave in class is that a plantain is like a banana, but brown or green, less sweet, and more starchy. I relied on your understanding of what a banana looks like, then modified it to help you imagine an unknown fruit.

Poetry works the same way. When Wilfred Owen ((Who, I just learned, was killed in battle one week before the end of the war…)) tosses image after image at his readers in “Dulce et Decorum Est,” he is setting a scene that contrasts greatly with the common understanding of war. By comparing soldiers to “hags,” he undermines his audience’s image of the great and proud British soldier, and delivers the final blow by following a painfully descriptive account of the death of a soldier with “the old lie” that “it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.”

There is a psychological term for our image of “war” and “bananas”; it is called a schema. While mathematical thinking helps us to better think on the literal, logical level by manipulating variables and such, poetry and literature allow us to improve our metaphorical thinking. We are building schemata by vicariously experiencing new events and ideas, then breaking them down and rebuilding them as we analyze.

So what’s the point? I recently read Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath, and they gave a solid explanation of what they call “generative analogies”:

Some analogies are so useful that they don’t merely shed light on a concept, they actually become platforms for novel thinking. For example, the metaphor of the brain as a computer has been central to the insights generated by cognitive psychologists during the past fifty years. It’s easier to define how a computer works than to define how the brain works. For this reason it can be fruitful for psychologists to use various, well-understood aspects of a computer—such as memory, buffers, or processors —as inspiration to locate similar functions in the brain.

Good metaphors are "generative." The psychologist Donald Schon introduced this term to describe metaphors that generate "new perceptions, explanations, and inventions." ((Heath, Chip. Made to Stick. New York: Random House, 2007. 60. Print.))

Thinking metaphorically, even absurdly, allows us to come up with novel ideas, with new ways of thinking. ((See John von Neumann’s The Computer and the Brain)) Mathematical equations allow us to better comprehend the world as we know it within the boundaries of logic. Poetry and literature help us better understand ideas an concepts that aren’t logical—emotions, relationships, inventions “that just shouldn’t work” (think DaVinci or Escher, as much artists as they were mathematicians), innovative ways of looking at the world—that, my friends, is why we read poetry.

The Assignment

Find two words with nearly identical definitions in two separate contexts (or write two different contexts around similar words) that emphasize two different connotations.

For example:

Today I told the story of Joe from Johnny Got His Gun, which presented a terrifying vision of what it means to be isolated. The connotation comes from the main character’s terror, helplessness, and inability to communicate.

In Pablo Neruda “Unity,” however, gives us a very different view of what it means to be isolated:

I work quietly, wheeling over myself,
a crow over death, a crow in mourning.
I mediate, isolated in the spread of seasons,
centric, encircled by a silent geometry:
a partial temperature drifts down from the sky,
a distant empire of confused unities
reunites encircling me. ((Neruda, Pablo. “Unity.” Poets.org. 2005. Web.))

Better example

From Shelby:

She chose the color blue. Colors are not something I considered for this project, but would work very well. If you are having trouble finding a word that works for this project, try a color, an emotion, an element (earth, fire, water, wind).

I found “Goodbye Blue Sky” from Pink Floyd and I think it works. When it refers to "blue sky," I think it means goodbye to peace and normality not necessarily a pretty blue sky.

Did you see the frightened ones
Did you hear the falling bombs
Did you ever wonder
Why we had to run for shelter
When the promise of a brave new world
Unfurled beneath a clear blue sky
Oooooooo ooo ooooo oooh
Did you see the frightened ones
Did you hear the falling bombs
The flames are all long gone
But the pain lingers on
Goodbye blue sky
Goodbye blue sky
Goodbye
Goodbye

 

Alright, my second one is Elvis’ “Blue Christmas.” In this case the word blue is used as a synonym for sad or down. Elvis does an interesting thing in this song, when he uses the colors red, green and white he means the actual color but when blue is used it could be removed and replaced with sad or depressing.

Ill have a blue Christmas without you
Ill be so blue just thinking about you
Decorations of red on a green Christmas tree
Wont be the same dear, if youre not here with me
And when those blue snowflakes start falling
Thats when those blue memories start calling
Youll be doin all right, with your Christmas of white
But Ill have a blue, blue blue blue Christmas
Youll be doin all right, with your Christmas of white,
But Ill have a blue, blue Christmas.

Post your examples below. If you have any questions, post them below as well or email me.